by J. F. Holmes
Drummond whistled in relief. He hadn’t actually known even how to get to the Main Force unit in Scranton, and said so to the officer.
“Son,” Padilla said, “I don’t know either. Nobody does, except those who are stationed there. AS far as the CEF HQ, it’s not actually AT Raven Rock; that’s just a blind for the Invy. You go to a certain place, and people meet you there.”
They rode on for a while in silence, each thinking about what had just happened. To Padilla, it was just another senseless death; if he could have done something to prevent it, he would have, but it would have blown his cover. He hadn’t expected the woman to come out with the knife; maybe she had just gotten harassed one too many times. In a lot of ways, this world was much harder for women than the old world. At best, they had to live a daily struggle for food and shelter, like everyone else. At worst, they became someone’s property.
The younger man was in shock. Growing up in the ruins of Scranton, he had seen plenty of people killed; mostly by Invy patrols, but sometimes humans fighting over resources. Never had he had someone that close to him die so unexpectedly, except his parents, and he didn’t witness that. A sense of shame slowly grew in him, the feeling that he should have done something to prevent it. He kept seeing her body convulse, feet drumming on the floor and then falling still as the knife went into her heart. To be honest, he’d had a bit of a crush on her, and as they rode, he blamed himself more and more.
Padilla watched him as the darkness settled, seeing his shoulders slope in grief. Time to get his mind on something else. “Hombre, time to make camp while there’s still some light.” Off to one side of the road was a ruined convenience store, the gas pumps burned stumps and all the windows shattered. There was a long line of rusted out cars stretching into the station, and hundreds of bones scattered about, some in the cars, others on the ground.
They made their way into the woods behind the station, avoiding the actual building. In the decade since the war, animals had lost their fear of man and started moving back into the devastated areas. Dogs had formed packs and now had territories, reverting back to their wolf roots. Other predators, those on two legs, camped out in the buildings, waiting for unwary travelers. The officer doubted that anyone would try anything on two men, both obviously armed. Still, though, it paid to take no chances. They didn’t light a fire, just divided up watch so they each got six hours sleep.
Drummond watched the stars pass overhead, and thought deeply about death, and how quickly it could happen. Those four people, three men and one woman, had woken up that morning without any idea that today would be their last day on earth. As he watched, every half an hour one of the Invy orbital stations passed overhead, and his feelings grew even more confused.
“Captain,” he finally asked, “where are you from?”
There was no answer for a minute, then he said, “The Philippines, originally. I joined the Army to get away from a shithole little village, and then became a US citizen, and got commissioned. That was just before the Invy came.”
“Uh, sorry I brought it up.” That was the problem, everyone had a sad story. He himself had lost all his family, but it must have been worse for Padilla. His entire nation was gone.
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The next few days of riding passed slowly, with Padilla not giving up much more about himself, or his position in the military. All that Drummond knew was that he had been commander of the local A-Team. He revealed nothing about his unit, or anything else to do with the military, and when Drummond started to talk about his Scout Team, Padilla quickly silenced him.
“Listen, kid. Although the Invy don’t take an active interest in us, and the Greens are a bunch of retarded idiots, that doesn’t mean that you go blabbing to everyone about yourself, your unit, or anything else. Got it?”
Drummond did get it; he was just trying to cope with losing Griffin, and, truth be told, he felt a bit lost. Yes, he had an extremely important message to carry back to CEFHQ. Other than that, he had no idea what else would be required of him. He longed to be back with the scouts, who had become like family to him. He had yet to realize, like so many others had before him, that he was a cog in the machine, with only one purpose, to serve the machine.
Padilla knew it, but he also knew that their cause was just. He hated the Invy, though he was well aware of the environmental damage the planet had suffered. His own beloved village in the PI had been devastated by overfishing, and his brothers had grown up using dynamite to catch fish. Still, what right did the Dragons have to slaughter six billion people? Or more?
Instead they talked of where they were from. “I grew up in the ruins of Scranton,” said Drummond. “I was, I think, eight when the Invy came. I don’t remember much, just the chaos. Mom, dad and me, we lived in a refugee camp for the first two years, then they hit us again. You know how that went.” Padilla said nothing, just let him talk it out.
“So, I joined a gang, I guess you’d call it, and then I was approached by someone, I guess from Main Force. I didn’t really learn about the CEF until I got to the scouts, less than a week ago.”
“So you weren’t on that job outside Boston, the one that went bad?” asked Padilla, testing him.
Drummond looked at him from the corner of his eye, and said, “I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you.”
The Captain actually laughed out loud, the first laugh from either of them in what seemed like forever. He stopped when their horses shied at something unseen on the road ahead. Two humans appeared as if from thin air, and Padilla knew that there were others within shooting range.
He held up his hand and said, as calmly as he possibly could, “Captain Jesse Padilla, Commander, Team 349, CEF Special Forces,” and motioned to Drummond to do the same. Before the younger man could speak, both felt pinpricks on their skin, and the world faded and turned to black.
Chapter 18
Rachel Singh had seen many men and women break in her time, and she felt sympathy for them all. She was having a hard time, however, generating any for the man who rode next to her, and David Warren was a broken man.
He rode slumped over, barely holding the reins, and said nothing to her as the time passed. They stopped for the night, some thirty miles south of where his home had been, and he went through the motions of setting up camp and eating mechanically.
She told herself that he needed time to accept the death of his sister and nephew, but then an anger began to mount inside of her. She had already lost everything, her entire family gone during the war. Tough crap on him, that he had had another decade to be with the people he loved. With a start, her anger rose to the fore, and she halted her horse in the middle of the cracked pavement of State Route 11, then slid out of the saddle.
Warren’s horse also stopped, well trained to follow the movements of its partner, and he actually looked up and glanced around. Singh, though not a tall woman, was strong from her days in the field, and she walked over, set her hands on Warren’s boot, and shoved, throwing him off the horse and painfully to the concrete.
“What the hell!” he exclaimed, trying to get to his feet. He was met by her foot, a snap kick that it him just under the shoulder, numbing his arm. Then a flurry of strikes and blows that seemed to hit everywhere on his body, sending pain lancing through his body.
“GET UP AND FIGHT YOU GODDAMNED COWARD!” she yelled at him, kicking him one last time and stepping back.
He lay on the ground and moaned, “Why are you doing this to me?” She didn’t answer, merely kicked him again in the balls, not hard, but a stinging blow that made him cry out in pain, and drove the breath out of his body. She stepped back again and waited, resting on the balls of her feet, ready to lash out again.
Warren slowly struggled to his feet, and painfully stood before her. “Fight, you piece of shit,” she said, and launched herself at him, leg raised.
Half remembered training kicked in, and he grabbed her foot as it came at him, reflexively
shoving it to one side, and hammering at her knee with the striking edge of his hand. She rolled with the motion, even though his strike hurt, and used her momentum to sweep his legs out from under him. Both landed on the concrete with a crash, and Warren saw stars when his head hit the pavement.
She stood again, and stepped back, waiting. Warren staggered to his feet, all his rage and anger boiling over, and he charged at her, no technique. She stepped aside and hammered her elbow on his neck as he rushed past, slamming him into the ground.
As he lay there, she bent down and said to him, “Your nephew was a better man than you. He died fighting, like you should have, coward,” and spit on him. Then she mounted her horse and started riding forward, not looking back to see if he followed her. Warren lay on the concrete, sobbing, curled into a small ball, tears running uncontrollably down his face, great wracking heaves running through his body.
The former General caught up with Singh a mile later, and they rode in silence for a while. He finally broke it by asking, “Colonel, have you ever loved someone so desperately that you would do anything, give your own life, to see that they lived?”
“Yes,” she answered quietly, “my husband. He was a fighter pilot assigned to the Midway. He died covering the Lexington’s retreat after the Midway was destroyed.”
“I’m sorry,” he said simply.
“Don’t be,” she answered. “He died a warrior, and sacrificed himself to destroy an Invy cruiser. That allowed the,” and she stopped short. After a minute she continued, “That allowed us time to give the order for Operation Moria to proceed.”
Warren was sure she had been going to say something else, but he didn’t push it. Instead, they kept riding, maneuvering their horses through a pileup of tractor trailers and cars. When they were through, Warren picked up the conversation again.
“I loved Captain Kira Arkady, commander of the Lexington. I couldn’t do it, order her to die, when it was obvious we had lost.”
She turned to look at him, and asked, “What do you mean, obvious we had lost?”
“Colonel, you may think I’m a coward, but I’m not. We lost that battle from the opening shot, and the people I was answerable to didn’t want to hear it. I protested, even as I watched them all die, and did my best to fight with what we had. What do you know of space combat?”
“Not much,” she answered honestly. “It’s like naval warfare, isn’t it?”
“In a way, yes, with some of the same limitations to maneuver, such as distance and speed. Some we overcame with reverse engineering from the captured Invy scout, but it was like designing a Ferrari with the blueprints of a go-cart.”
She said nothing, merely let him talk, and he continued, warming to the subject. “We designed and built gunships and carriers using those go-cart plans and matching them up to existing technology. Fusion plants, yeah, we got the answer to that, heavy railguns for battleships, smaller ones for fighters, missiles armed with nukes. Thing was, it didn’t MATTER!” he exclaimed, pounding on the pommel of the saddle and startling his horse.
“What do you mean, it didn’t matter? We destroyed some of their ships,” she said.
“I mean that, as soon as their fleet showed up, we were done for. They had shields, both magnetic and gravitic, that sent our rail gun rounds around them, effortlessly. The only thing that damaged them were nukes, setting off x-ray lasers, and they had shielding for that too.”
She saw that tears were running down his face again, but there was a hardness that had not been there before. “I told them, when the ansible reports started to come in. I told them to surrender, to attempt to negotiate some kind of compromise with the Invy. Or to run to deep space, give me time to come up with new tactics. And the bastards didn’t listen to me. Ordered me to go all in, and I couldn’t do it, there was no point. Maybe if I had given the order to retreat earlier, we might have saved thousands of lives in the fleet. Saved even Kira’s life. Maybe even your husband’s. And maybe all those billions might not have died. We could have worked out something.”
She didn’t answer him, and felt ashamed of how she had treated him. He was as decent man, a boy really, put in a difficult situation, ruled by men who were no better than the leaders who had sent millions to die, going over the top in World War One.
“General,” she finally said, “I must apologize. I didn’t know. After the fleet was defeated, the news blamed everything on you, for what little time we had.”
“Of course they did, needed a scape goat. Did you know I was actually set to be executed after a quick trial for cowardice? The Invy put a stop to that, when they started trans-atmospheric bombardment. Some of my friends who knew the real story got me out of my cell, and helped me get away.”
“Well, just to let you know,” she said tightly, “the Invy never negotiate. They would have done exactly what they did.”
“Then what’s the point?” he asked. “We should just go along with them.”
“The point,” she answered, “is that, were we to do that, we would forever be their slaves. Do you really believe the Green bullshit that they are healing the planet for us and the Uplifted?” She shook her head and continued, “We’ve had years to study the database that we got from the scout ship. The Invy, or more like the Dragons, rule eleven systems, and each and every race on them have been reduced to abject slavery, unless they serve in such capacity as the wolverines, dying in their service.”
Her green eyes flashed with anger at the thought, and she said, “And we are going to kick their asses so hard they won’t dare to come back to this system for a thousand years.”
Chapter 19
“So,” Warren asked Singh the next day, as the rode around the ruins of another town, weaving their way through the Pennsylvania uplands, “tell me about the Invy. From a strategic, not a tactical view. I know what they’re like, but how are they set up?”
It couldn’t hurt to tell him, she thought. He’d either come on board, or be shot. “Well, I’m sure you know about the towns, five thousand people each, a company of Wolverines to keep the populace in check, Greenie sympathizers, a couple of Dragons in each town to educate the populace. To rule, really.”
“Yes, I’ve been to Syracuse, or more properly Mattydale. They use the runway at the old airbase for their sub-orbital shuttles.”
“And you know about the 30-degree virus that wiped out everything in the tropics.”
“Yes, we heard about it. That bad?”
She nodded, and continued. “The Dragons have set themselves up in the Amazon basin, in the Congo, and in the lowlands of Vietnam; apparently it’s more comfortable there. Each contains a city of about five to ten thousand mixed Dragons, Wolverines and other races.”
“How do you know that?”
She just looked at him, remembering her hours of sweating in the camouflaged biohazard suit two years ago, the terror of being inside the SEAL delivery vehicle as it moved upriver with the tide into what used to be Ho Chi Minh City, and before that, Saigon. Her heart in her throat as they launched the pre-programed, air powered drone to snap pictures with a mechanical camera. Watching as Lt. Jonas convulsed, blood erupting from every orifice, the virus having invaded the tiny tear in his suit. That stone-cold psychopath Doctor Morano demanding they bring the body back to the sub’s labs for analysis.
“I went there,” she answered, “and saw it.” Her tone was final, so he moved the subject along.
“What about us?” She raised her eyebrow at his use of the word ‘us’, but he continued with his questioning. “What about our forces? Obviously you’re somewhat organized, but who is in charge? What’s your plan?”
“I don’t know if I’m going to shoot you, or if you’re going to get shot when we get to Headquarters, so I guess there’s no harm in telling you,” she answered.
“Gee, thanks.”
“You’re welcome. Operation Moria was conducted at the same time as Project Brightstar. Basically, the military went underground. While all those
resources were being diverted to your pretty starships, the CEF ground forces dug in, deep. Alternate command centers, stockpiles of fuel, food, weapons, ammunition. Research labs, limited production facilities. Buried communications lines with cutoffs. Fusion reactors shielded and buried so deep no Invy sensor could find them. Five submarine bases underground, with access to the sea.”
“I… I was the commanding General of CEF forces. I never heard of this.”
“Of course you didn’t. You weren’t really in charge of anything, as you just told me, General. Thank God the United States Secretary of Defense was as smart as he was.”
“So you have a secret army hiding out someplace?”
“Hardly. Our troop strength is around eleven thousand or so, worldwide. Only about twenty percent of our facilities are still operational. Some were casualties of orbital bombardment, whether though bad luck or intentional targeting when someone slipped up, or something else. Others have fallen to internal revolt, infighting, or whatever.”
He rode on further, taking it all in, then said, “You can’t have eleven thousand troops in hidden facilities. They would be noticed.”
“Of course they would. Many of them are scattered around the country as A- Teams, embedded in Invy towns. They watch, they wait, and conduct a very secret campaign of recruitment and assassination against select Greens, to keep them from getting too organized. Every now and then they take out targets of opportunity against the Invy.”
“That’s it? I know about your scout team, but that’s all you’ve got?”
“No, of course not. Many of the ruined cities have Main Force Companies, up to fifty men and women who train in actual ground combat, as best they can, while hiding from the Invy. That’s easier to do, the farther you get away from their towns. They rotate in and out of the A-Teams and the Scouts. There are other assets which I’m not going to tell you about.”
