by J. F. Holmes
“You’re shitting me,” he exclaimed. “That knucklehead? He just got himself shot today!”
“Give him a break, he’s got a lot on his mind, pun intended, and he was never trained for what WE do. There’s a huge difference between thinking up a plan in an instant to maneuver your platoon, company, fleet, whatever, and knowing how to react when you’re staring down the barrel of a gun. Hell,” she said, “half the shooting we do is based on muscle memory more than anything.”
He knew that; it was why they trained so hard. He didn’t have to think to know that Doc would go right when he went left, or that Ziv could nail a running man at a thousand meters.
“I can see that, I guess. Still…”
“You will have complete tactical control on the ground, Captain Agostine.”
He made a low laugh in the starlight. “I’m not taking your promotion, Rachel. I’m an NCO, I’ll stay an NCO, thanks.”
“Someday.”
“Someday I’ll be sitting pretty on a farm on the shore of Lake Champlain and won’t hear nothing but the corn growing.”
Neither had much to say for a while, just sat there and watched the stars. Eventually the Master Sergeant brought up the immediate future.
“I think you should head back east, as fast as possible. Take the rest of the team with you, I’ll keep O’Neill with me.”
“I bet you will.”
“Ugh, no. She’s Combat Lifesaver trained, has some medical knowledge, she can keep an eye on Warren, watch for infection. Doc is my second in command, he needs to take the team on reconnaissance to DC. We’ll get boy wonder where he needs to go, and send word back through pigeon from the Main Force unit in Denver. Who is the commander there?”
“Lieutenant Colonel Peckham. Good man. Tell him I send my regards.”
Agostine was still troubled. He sat and thought hard about what was to happen in the next couple of months. Warren was an enigma, outside his experience. He thought in terms of tactics, not strategy. All of his experience was in direct action, putting steel on target, letting others deal with the big picture, and the why. He cared about his people, but he was tired.
“What do you want me to do with Warren?”
“It’s General Warren. He’s our commander now. You don’t do anything with him, except what he tells you to do, and you keep him alive. And you don’t have to like him, either.”
“Can do, Ma’am.” She could hear the hardness in his voice.
“Oh, it’s Ma’am now, is it? Nick, we don’t have to like what we do, we just have to do it.”
He grunted, and said, “I didn’t like it when the Wolverines ate my leg, either, but I did what I had to do.”
“We all pay our price and soldier on,” she answered.
“Well, endgame is in sight. If we fail, the Invy are going to scorch the Earth with that virus. We’re taking the lives of the entire human race in our hands, Rachel.”
“The alternative is what? Endless slavery? You know what it’s like, being their slave, don’t you?”
“Time to change the subject. I wish Drummond had been able to make it through. He wasn’t a bad kid, just misguided. I can’t but think that we could have saved him.”
Singh shrugged, and said, “The A Team in his village had him pegged as soon as he started talking to that asshole, the Greenie leader there. We had to let it play through, to get Curtis to come out in the open.”
Agostine spit on the ground, an indication of how much the political stuff disgusted him. It was why he stayed away from headquarters as much as he could. “Do you think that guy is actually a threat? The Greenie, Carlyle.”
“As soon as he gets too big for his britches, the Invy will slap him down. Especially when they somehow find out that he used to be high ranking military.”
“He was?”
Singh laughed. “Of course not, Nick. I swear, you’re so naïve sometimes. Of course not, but convincing documents will just happen to appear in the wrong place. The Greens will never be organized. Neither us nor the Invy will let them.”
“Too much bullshit for me. I’m going to see how things are with Warren.”
“Nick,” the Colonel said, “I know you don’t like him, but wherever he’s going, it’s important. Make sure he gets there.”
“It’s always important, and it’s always the guys like us who pay the price,” he answered, bitterness in his voice. She had nothing to say in answer to that.
_____________________________________________________
He met Doc Hamilton coming out of the tent, and asked how Warren was.
“Left shoulder is going to be useless for the foreseeable future. He’s going to be OK, but he’ll need physical therapy, maybe reconstructive surgery for the tendons. You know it ain’t like the movies, bullets fuck you up.”
“Can he travel?”
“Ain’t nothing wrong with his legs or his ass.”
Agostine took that as an affirmative, and ducked past him into the tent. The General sat there as O’Neill finished bandaging his shoulder.
“Brit, we roll first light. You, me and Boy Wonder here.”
Warren glared at him, and the veteran NCO stared right back. “General, or whatever you are, I’ll get you to where you’re going, and I’ll put my life on the line to do it. But when we get there, so help me, I will put a bullet in your head if what you’re after isn’t worth it.”
“Fair enough. I’m not going to pretend that I’m some kind of hardcore grunt like you, or Sergeant O’Neill here, but trust me, I know what I’m doing.”
Chapter 35
Colorado Springs
The brilliant dawn painted the mountains in a blaze of red, then pink, then gold. Even more than a decade later, dust in the atmosphere gave rise to beautiful sunrises and sunsets. Brittany O’Neill knelt to face the sun, and let her red hair flow down unbound to her waist. She started chanting slowly, hands clasped in front of her.
“What the hell is she doing, some kind of Wiccan shit?” asked Warren. In the two weeks it had taken them to get close to Cheyenne Mountain, his shoulder had healed enough that he could move around without a sling.
“She’s a devout Roman Catholic. Just her morning prayers,” answered Agostine.
The woman stopped chanting, stood up, and yelled out to the mountain side, “Hot damn, it’s great to be alive!”
In front of them stood a mountain that was covered with impact craters. Across the valley were the rusted remnants of both Human and Invy armored vehicles; scattered across the plain were perfectly round lakes, craters filled with rain water over the last eleven years.
“I didn’t see the battle, you know. I was in a cell,” said Warren, a lost look on his face.
Agostine stood next to him, looking outward also, and said quietly, “I was there. See that line of trenches over there, right up by the entrance? That’s where my men died. I was a Staff Sergeant, Fourth Infantry Division. My Bradley took a hit from a plasma cannon, went through it like the armor was made of tinfoil. We were dismounted at that point, heavy weapons team.”
Warren said nothing, just let him talk. “See that wrecked Invy Tank? Third from the left? About two hundred meters out. I took that out. Two more, but I can’t remember where.”
“You know it was hopeless, right? We were way overmatched.”
The anger coming off the older man was unmistakable; he seemed to be fighting hard to hold himself in check. “Not on the ground, we weren’t, man for man. Our weapons hurt them, pretty damn badly. If we had had air cover, if you had done your fucking job…”
“Yeah, I know. I tried, Sergeant, I really did, but there wasn’t any way. Maybe it was hubris, I don’t know. But once we lost the high ground, it was over.”
Agostine pointed at the craters in the mountain. “Do you know why they finally did an orbital bombardment? Because we stopped them cold. Fought tooth and nail, killed thousands of them, and finally they pulled back and let us have it. Over three hundred and seventy-fi
ve thousand men and women died here that week, General, and you bastards in that mountain shut the doors on us when the orbital strikes started.” For a while, he seemed to be back there, reliving it, and Warren said nothing. What could he say?
O’Neill came up and put her arms around Agostine, hugging him tightly. He shrugged her off and said, “Well, let’s get this over with. There’s an Invy garrison directly across from the main entrance, and they still use the airfield sometimes. It’s going to be a very long and slow process to infiltrate there. If that’s where we’re going, since you haven’t told us yet.”
“We aren’t going anywhere, Master Sergeant,” said Warren. “I’m going down there, and you’re not going to stop me. I don’t want to put any more lives at risk, so I’m giving you two a direct order to let me go.”
O’Neill started to move her hand towards her gun, but Agostine waved her off, and she merely folded her arms across her chest.
“I appreciate the sentiment, General, but I have my orders. If we let anything happen to you, Colonel Singh is going to have our hides.”
Warren didn’t waver, just looked at them stolidly. “Be that as it may, Sergeant, this is something I have to do myself.”
“Why?” asked O’Neill, her one good eye gazing at him steadily.
“Because … it’s too complicated to explain.”
“We have all day,” said Agostine, and he sat down on a tree stump, taking up a listening pose. “This should be good.”
Warren started forward, and the redhead whipped her pistol out, pointing it directly at Warren’s face from ten feet away. He flinched backwards, expecting the shot, but the SIG just stayed there, rock solid in her grip.
“Nick, what do you want me to do?” she said, “Think he’s going to talk to his Invy friends down there in the valley?”
“I doubt it,” he answered. “Probably just running away again to some hidey hole he knew from before the war. Probably doesn’t think we have a shot in hell of beating them. Isn’t that right, General? Going to sit it out while we get slaughtered?”
“We don’t, honestly. Those orbitals are going to knock those missiles right out of the sky before they can impact,” answered Warren. “I wish I could take both of you with me, but the person I’m going to meet won’t talk to me if you’re there.”
“And what does this person have to do with winning the war?” asked O’Neill. “Can I shoot him now, Nick?”
“No. Let him talk.”
“He’s a … a hacker, I guess you could say. The only way we can beat them is to somehow get into their networks and disable them. If anyone can do it, it’s him. If he’s still alive.”
O’Neill lowered her gun and said, “The Invy networks are quantum based, use a different coding language, and are encrypted. There’s no way.”
“Well, I have to try. Even if it means getting killed going through there, and I don’t want your deaths on my conscience.”
Agostine stood up, looked at his fellow scout, and said, “So be it. Let him go, Brit. Pack it up, we can catch the sub in three weeks if we haul ass. It’s only a month until D-Day.”
He watched them go, following their progress until they disappeared into the forest, taking his horse with them. Warren looked ruefully at his own feet, missing the horse already, and started down into the valley.
The road he followed hadn’t seen a maintenance crew in more than a decade, and he tried hard to stay in the center of the pavement, avoiding the crumbling edges. Around the first switchback, though, evidence of the battle started to appear. A skull here, a rusting weapon there, smashed vehicles with holes drilled through by plasma bolts. With grim satisfaction, he noted that some of the skulls weren’t human, and that several of the wrecks were of Invy manufacture.
By the end of the day, he had made it down to the main battlefield, twice having to take cover from Invy aircraft flying overhead. He ignored the various signs in English and Spanish warning that the area was forbidden, backtracking the route he had taken when he escaped his cell, heading east to return home. It seemed like a journey back in time, and he moved forward almost eagerly.
Too eagerly, it turned out. Lost in his musings, he walked directly into sight of an Invy patrol, settling down for the night. The first he knew of it was the plasma bolt that shattered the ground at his feet, and the harsh, amplified electronic voice ordering him to stop.
Chapter 36
“Well, he didn’t make it very far, did he? Dumbass.”
Agostine watched from behind the tree stump, five hundred meters away. “Brit, you know what we’re going to have to do.”
“Yes,” she answered. “Nick, if anything happens to you, I’m going to kill him.”
“We’ll be fine. Hit them hard and fast, there’s only four of them.”
She checked the loads on her pistols, two SIG P250 .357 automatics with ceramic sabot rounds, for penetrating Invy armor.
“I’d kill for my shotgun right now,” she muttered.
The Master Sergeant offered her his P-90, but she turned it down. “I’ll stick to what I know. Any chance we can just let him die?”
“No. He needs to get where he’s going. They’re bedding down for the night; one sentry. Thank God they’re on foot, an APC AI would nail us from two hundred meters out. Hand me that scent masker.”
The both doused each other liberally, even though they would approach from downwind. The movement would be excruciatingly slow, because the one sentry would be wearing thermal NVGs.
In the fading light, they confirmed that Warren was cuffed and stretched out on the ground, alongside two other prisoners. As they watched, one of the Wolverines grabbed a prisoner by her long hair, extended his ripping claw, and cut her throat. Another one held a cup under the gash and collected her blood, and then they started skinning her while a third lit a fire.
It wasn’t anything they hadn’t seen before, but O’Neill dug her nails into Agostine’s arm to stop him from charging forward. “Slow is steady, steady is fast, Nick,” she whispered in his ear. She reached over in the growing darkness and wiped the anger from his face, then kissed him gently.
“In another world, Nick, we’re going to live a long and happy life, and it’s going to be soon. Don’t forget that. Now let’s go, old man.” He relaxed under her grip, and she let go, but not right away. Her touch said more than any words between them ever could.
They first circled wide of the encampment, swinging far off the road to the south, almost crawling from fallen tree to sunken ditch, timing their movement to when the lone guard turned away. Their chameleon suits would have hid them, but they also generated tremendous amounts of sweat and body heat, and weren’t ideal for avoiding an IR capable sentry. Instead, they took advantage of every bit of terrain possible, getting to within fifty meters.
The fire backlit the sentry as he turned towards them, four-foot-high silhouette showing darkly, except for the red glowing eyes of the alien night vision tech. Agostine slid a flash bang grenade out of his pocket and worked the retaining pin out, then laid his free hand on O’Neill’s arm. He pressed downward, counting, one, two, and then threw the grenade into the center of the camp.
It detonated with a deafening CRACK and a blinding flash of light; both rose off the ground and charged forward, each firing at the sentry.
The wolverine went down with a howl, plasma rifle discharging into the sky, and they switched aim to the others, who had instantly rolled to different positions and returned fire into the night. First one, then another caught successive rounds from the two humans as they ran closer, but the third shifted his fire in the direction of their shots. The needle thin bolts of plasma whipped past them, and Agostine heard his partner grunt and gasp.
He ignored her and turned his P-90 to the last remaining Invy, emptying the magazine, and then quickly dropping it in its sling and drawing his pistol. He got up and ran through the campsite, putting two rounds in the head of each alien corpse, then ran back to where O’Neill sp
rawled on the ground.
She lay there, holding her hands to her stomach, just under her body armor, face turned up to the sky. Agostine knew the damage the wound had done, the jet of plasma burning its way through vital organs, superheating the fluids inside her abdomen, causing massive tissue damage, exiting out the other side.
“Oh, f-f-f-fuck me, Nick, this f-f-fucking hurts!” she moaned. He quickly dug into her med kit and pulled out a morphine injector, and jabbed into her rib cage. The needle slid under her skin, and after what seemed like an eternity, the pain seemed to leave her face.
She reached up and touched the stubble on his cheek, staring with her one crystal blue eye, as if trying to memorize his features, and wiped at his tears. Her other hand squeezed his gently, and she whispered, “I was going to go to the stars, Nick. They’re so beautiful. And kids, we were going to have a lot of kids…”
“Hush,” he whispered, and held her tightly, bitter, salty tears running down his face and mixing with the blood that had trickled out of the corner of her mouth. After a time, the hand holding his fell limply away.
Master Sergeant Nicholas Agostine sat there, cradling the still body, and wept in harsh, wracking sobs. Eventually he laid her gently down on the ground, and stood up, walking towards where Warren sat, back against a tree. The other prisoner had caught a round in the face, and was slumped over next to him.
His first kick caught the handcuffed man in the face, knocking him over, and it was followed by a flurry of punches and kicks that turned the General’s face into a bloody mask. He made no effort to defend himself, merely curled into a ball and took it. The scout rained blows and kicks on his body, cursing him over and over.
Finally, energy spent, Agostine drew his pistol and held it against the man’s head. “Tell me to do it. Please, order me. You stupid piece of shit.” His words were ice cold, and his eyes, red and raw from weeping, held no emotion now.
