by J. F. Holmes
“Rachel isn’t going to go for that,” Doc shot back.
“She can fire me when this is done. I’m here, so I’m calling the shots. Where is she, anyway?”
Reynolds and Hamilton both looked at each other, but said nothing.
“Out with it,” said their commander, angrily.
“She’s going in with us, and will be here early this morning.”
Agostine groaned, and muttered, “Ahhhh shit. Is Major Hollister awake?”
Hamilton watched the wheels spin in his friend’s head, and knew that, no matter what he said, Nick Agostine was on a suicide mission.
Chapter 40
Deep inside the former CEF Space Command, General David Warren was feeling despair, and hunger. His rations had given out three days ago, and his water earlier today. The darkness and remnant of death pressed down heavily on him, and his frustration grew deeper and deeper.
It was H – 23:00; in little less than a day Red Dawn would kick off, and he sat alone in the deep dark, useless. The hopes that he had, that something still remained here that they could use against the Invy, lay locked behind one last door, warped and stuck shut. The drones had disappeared under the sill, and still occasionally came out, looked at him imploringly, and went back in.
He sat there, squeezing the recharge handle on the flashlight, and ventured out into the open space one more time, looking for something to pry the door open with. As he walked, he desperately scanned the database he’d updated at Raven Rock, trying to come up with something, anything that might spark an idea.
Finding nothing, he went back to the doorway, which was hidden inside an old supply room. He thought it led down to a sub-basement, almost a thousand feet deep into the core of the mountain, and provided access to the ansible communications, as well as servers for the base computer systems. It made sense that the drones would come from there. A random shot from a heavy weapons system, fired from outside the room, had punched a hole in the wall and jarred the door - not enough to reveal it, but enough to throw it off balance. The past two weeks had been spent trying everything he could to pry it open.
Now, he looked down at the collection of weapons he had picked up. Several M-6 carbines, all rusted past use. A half dozen grenades; he had already tried one on the door, and got nothing but a cut from ricocheting shrapnel.
The last weapon was an Invy plasma pistol, which he hadn’t thought to look at too closely, figuring that it would be in the same condition as the rifles. In desperation, he picked it up and wiped the dirt and dried blood off of it, stood back behind the entrance to the room, pointed it at the door, and pulled the trigger.
To his surprise, plasma ripped out of the barrel and hit the door squarely, burning a hole through the hardened steel. Waiting for it to cool, he finally approached and shone the flashlight on the mark it made. A tiny stream of steel had melted its way down, and there was a needle thin hole through the door. Warren noticed a small amber light glowing on the top of the pistol, only visible while looking down the sights, and cursed, then stopped. From the hole shone a steady beam of light, and he put his eye up to it. Beyond was another corridor, the electric light was blinding after so long in the darkness with only the weak flashlight.
His implant provided, unbidden, a set of specs for the weapon in his hand. Eighty shot capacity, and the low energy light came on with ten shots left. At five, it turned to red. He groaned; less than ten shots would do nothing except put a few little holes in the door. Then he had a thought, and raced his way through the information the Raven Rock R & D people had provided on captured weapons.
The energy for the plasma weapons was stored in a crystalline structure that held hydrogen and anti-hydrogen suspended. Firing the weapon broke the matrix, and the energy involved was used to create a directional beam of plasma. Earth scientists still had no idea how it worked, even how the resultant energy was transferred to the plasma, but Warren didn’t need that now. What he needed was an explosion. A big one. If he could destroy the structure that held the remaining shots in place, it could, in theory, cause them to detonate all at once, and not transfer their energy into a directional beam.
Hurriedly ransacking the supply room, he found an old, dried up roll of 100 MPH tape, and said a silent prayer to the gods of logistics. Removing the magazine, he taped one of the grenades to it. Then, using the old formula of p=plenty, he said screw it and taped together the rest of them. Then, very carefully, he set the bundle at the base of the door, taped it to the steel, and hooked his last grenade onto the tape. A length of 550 cord barely fell twenty feet short of the doorway to the outside, but he would have to chance it. If only one of these M-6s had worked, but they were junk, and he didn’t trust his own shooting with a pistol from far enough away.
When the dust cleared, his ears were still ringing from the combined blasts, and he could barely breathe from the impact on his lungs. Warren stood up and walked forward to where the door still stood. Now though, it was buckled and bent, and the lights still flickered on the other side. He stripped off his body armor and, barely able to make it, squeezed his way inside.
The corridor beyond swept downward in a steep spiral, making him lean forward as he walked. The drones reappeared, almost comforting, and led him further and further into the depths.
H- 4:52
Chapter 41
Outside Loch Brea Invy Spaceport, Scotland.
“For it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an ‘Chuck him out, the brute!’ But it's ‘Saviour of 'is country’ when the guns begin to shoot!” muttered Private Thomas Adkins as he looked through his rifle scope. He wasn’t watching any of the enemy; instead he was gauging wind speed and direction between himself and the sensor pod mounted on a tower high above the base. In his hands he held a .50 caliber rifle with high explosive rounds.
“That’s why your mother named you Tommy, my lad. So you can die for your King and Country!” said Corporal Vlonski as he lay next to him. The polish immigrant still spoke with a heavy accent, but was as laconic as his native English counterparts.
“I bloody hope not, but if I do, the girls in Inverness will burn down the Invy town all on their own,” he replied with a grin.
Private Fiona McClellan watched the rear approach. Like them, she was under an IR blanket, heat being converted into electricity and discharging slowly into the ground via a lead to a stake. She looked again at her watch; H-Hour minus three. In two hours and fifty-nine minutes, Adkins would put several rounds into the sensor pod. If the submarines had done their job, the orbital approaching would be blinded, giving them a half hour or more window to attack, and destroying the sensor would blind the base defenses.
McClellan thought again about how she had wound up here, sweating her ass off in the cool October sun, rifle in her hands. She had been finishing college, almost ready to become an accountant, when the Invy came, and now she was the mother of one child, with her husband in the actual assault force. Never would have met him if the Invy hadn’t come, she mused. Probably never going to see him again if this doesn’t work, either.
Adkins was a perpetual complainer, but knew his job well. Though he’d never actually fired on the Invy before, his team regularly hunted the bandits who preyed on small homesteads, in the social anarchy that was once the United Kingdom. Twenty now, he’d known nothing but the occupation, but still resented the life that had been denied him, one that he could barely remember.
Vlonski, well, the Pole hated the Invy with a passion. He had had no communication with his homeland in more than ten years, and didn’t know if his wife and children were still alive. What had been a month-long job working on the London docks had turned into eleven years of fighting and killing, and soon, he promised, it would be all over.
“Do you see anything?” he asked Adkins. The younger man had shifted his scope to follow the path of the scout team that was positioning to seize the assault shuttle.
The sniper waited a moment before answering, “I THINK I saw a bit of moveme
nt by the port perimeter fence, but I can’t be sure. Between those bloody chameleon suits and their skill, I doubt I’d catch anything that might give me a shot. And they’re under the blackout cone of the sensor pod tower.”
For all his bravery, Vlonski knew that what the scouts were doing took a kind of courage that he didn’t have. Each member of the infiltration team was former Special Air Service, Royal Marine Commando, or Special Boat Service. Even more, the two pilots that accompanied them, well, they must have had a serious set of brass balls. To steal an aircraft they had only flown in simulators, with alien controls, fly it nap of the earth, probably under fire, pick up an assault team, and hurtle themselves into space! And yet the CEF commanders and soldiers around him acted as if it were just, as the Americans used to say on TV, a walk in the park.
He looked again at his watch.
H-1:34.
Chapter 42
Warren followed the drones down the corridor, steadily dropping, until they reached the server room. He had no idea what to expect there, but he certainly didn’t expect what he did find. Maybe some computers still running, but there was no hum of power, no heat from the banks of machines that filled the room.
“Now what?” he asked out loud, and the drones formed up in front of him, facing the wall. He ran his hand along it, feeling for seams, but there was nothing, until he chanced on a slightly warmer spot on the cool rock face. Closing his eyes, he placed his hand there, and said, as clearly as he could, “Mellon”, the elvish word for ‘friend’ from that old movie, then stepped back.
What had seemed to be a solid rock face slowly slid back in the shape a doorway, moving silently, and he stepped forward into the brightly lit room. Inside were banks of monitors, all dark, except for two. One showed a view of the solar system, with several orbital tracks tracing though it, one looping far out towards Persephone and then back inward. The other was a view of Earth, with the Invy orbitals slowly tracing their path around the globe.
He sat in the command chair, a duplicate of the one far above him in the CEF Space Command Center, placed his head into the neural cradle, and waited. Jacking in wasn’t always the most pleasant feeling, but now, it seemed almost, well, empty. The entirety of cyberspace, the world within a world, was gone, with its trillion voices all calling to be heard.
After what seemed like an eternity, a figure materialized in front of him. He knew that it wasn’t there, merely playing in his optic nerve paths, but still, he wanted to cry. A deep welling of emotion that came from his seventeen-year-old self, the one who had last sat in a chair like this, and talked to his best friend.
“Hal,” he whispered.
“David,” the projection answered. Like the General, the figure seemed to have aged, to match him. Instead of the teenaged face he had always projected, a near mirror of Warren’s own, now there was a mature man, with deep lines of worry and prematurely graying hair. The smile that the AI wore, though, was genuine, an expression of welcome and happiness.
Beside Hal, another figure materialized, less well defined, scratchy, and a bit blurred. It seemed to mirror Kira as Hal mirrored him, as if a fraternal twin. This woman, though, was whole and healthy, not carrying the scars and wasting from the cancer. She was stunningly beautiful, fully grown from the teenager Kira Arkady had been when she went into battle. “Forgive me, General,” the AI said, “but I don’t have the processing power that I once did, and there hasn’t been much light out here in the black.”
“Lady Lex. My God,” he said, and the tears did come, a great, wracking sob that tore from him. There was hope, after all.
___________________________________________________
Deep inside Raven Rock, Lieutenant General Dalpe reviewed the plans one more time, knowing that there was nothing he could do to change them. His Main Force units had stealthily converged on the base outside the ruins of Washington, a total of almost a thousand men and women gathered from small units all along the east coast. At H- 00:10, they would attack across cleared fields of fire, aiming to make it to the base operations center. Along with that would come dozens of mortars and heavy machine guns, with some Invy plasma weapons thrown in to boot. For thirty minutes, an eternity in combat, they would attack as hard and as furiously as they could. At H + 00:20, their commander was authorized to withdraw and scatter, or press the attack, as he saw fit.
Major Padilla sat next to him, fingers idly tapping on the table top. Whereas Dalpe was visibly eaten alive by frustration, the Filipino was calm. His role over the last month had been to fine tune the uprising being conducted by the A-Teams. He knew, as did Dalpe, that many of them had no chance of success. A population that was neutral, at best, and a platoon size garrison of Wolverines in each town. Their aim, though, was to cause as much confusion and distraction as possible. If some of them succeeded in defeating the garrisons, well, they would cross that bridge if it was still standing.
The Air Wing CO, Colonel Jameson, had the laid-back attitude of a seasoned fighter pilot, but Dalpe could see the telltale signs of nerves. He wanted to be there, in the cockpit of a Raptor, providing air cover for the two submarines that were sure to come under attack from Invy fighters. His withered legs, though, smashed by the ejection seat of his F-15 during the initial attack, sat strapped to his chair. No, his role had been to train up the pilots on any tactics they could glean from holos of the battles. At H-00:15, the giant hidden steel doors would drop, allowing the air wing to taxi onto the deserted stretch of highway that seemed to end at the mountain, light up their afterburners, and take to the air.
Each was watching the clock, which now displayed H-00:32. Thirty-two minutes until the roll of the dice. If it failed, no one had any illusion that Raven Rock would survive the Invy retaliation.
“Well, I had some hope when Warren showed up, but it died when he disappeared and Kira passed. Really, what do you think our chances are?” asked Jameson.
“Slim to none,” answered Dalpe. “The Wolverines are damn good warriors, and for all we know, they might be ready and waiting. It’s almost impossible to move a thousand people in twos and threes, and not figure something is up. The Dragons aren’t stupid.”
All three started when the Ansible console lit up, and a figure started to materialize on the flat projection console. “What the hell?” muttered Dalpe, when the incoming transmission flashed “CEF-SC” instead of “CEF-VL” or “CEF-TD”, the two remaining bases with the quantum communication sets.
A miniature representation of General David Warren stood in front of them, with a grin on his face. Behind him were two more figures, one of which Dalpe instantly recognized as Kira Arkady. But she had passed. That meant it was … an AI. The AI of her ship, the carrier Lexington. But how?
“Madre de Dios!” breathed Padilla. He had instantly figured it out also.
Jameson was more blunt and to the point, exclaiming, “Holy Shit, that’s Hal!”
“Gentlemen, there is little time,” said Warren. “Hal has been monitoring Invy communications. In five minutes, the Invy High Command is going to order their forces to high alert. Someone spilled the beans, and we’re potentially fucked.”
“But …” The normally talkative Dalpe was at a loss for words. His heart sank down, further than ever before.
Padilla, however, started laughing, and gave a great whoop of joy. “That command isn’t going out, is it?”
“No, it’s not. Hal has spent the last eleven years infiltrating and decrypting the Invy ansible communications. We still have to deal with the orbitals, but there will be no comms between the Invy cities and their bases. We’re going to be on an almost even footing, for as long as Hal can hold them off.”
“How long is that going to be?” asked Dalpe, mind running through options. As soon as things kicked off, long hidden radio sets were going to be brought into use, and he would have a battle to fight.
“A half an hour, at most,” answered the Artificial Intelligence. “The alien AI are very … strange, and in m
any ways do not operate along the same logic lines that I do. I don’t expect to survive the encounter, because once I open the pathways of attack, they will be following them back to me.”
There was silence for a moment; under the Los Alamos protocol of 2047, Hal and his brothers and sisters had been recognized as fully sentient, living beings. Earth’s only other true intelligence, mankind’s child, was going willingly to his death to protect them.
“The problem is, General Dalpe,” said Warren, “that there are three Invy cruisers in orbit around Titan, where they have a mining operation going. Once the word goes out, those three are going to come screaming in with enough orbital weapons to turn the planet into a cinder. Our ace in the hole is the Lexington. If we can catch them with their shields down, damaged as she is, her rail guns might be able to take them out, or disable them. I’m going to need Kira here at the ansible, and Hal has also managed to crack the Invy medical database. There are treatments in there that will have her back …” The excitement in his voice petered out as he saw the looks they gave each other.
“When?” he asked. He was too late.
“A week ago.”
Warren’s face seemed to crumble in on itself, but then he straightened and let out a long breath. “I can fight the ship from here, with the Lady,” he said. Glancing down at his wrist, he finally said, “Gentlemen, in about ten minutes, it’s going to be all or nothing. I wish you Godspeed. I’ll be here if you need me, but I have a fleet engagement to win.”
He saluted, and then the holo flickered out.
Chapter 43
“Colonel, we need those planes up NOW!” said the Raptor pilot.
“Am I talking to Captain Ichijou, or Empress Kiyomi?”
“Both!” she answered, “And it is MY ass, and my pilots, and my subjects, that are depending on you, my Chief of Maintenance. Now I need ten planes, fully armed and fueled in ten minutes!”
