Syndicate Wars: Fault Line (Seppukarian Book 3)

by Kyle Noe

  “Right … cause they’re kids.”

  Samantha looked up and Quinn knelt beside her. “Remember how much fun we used to have barbecuing in the backyard? Remember all the good times?”

  “I remember the mosquitoes,” Samantha said, nodding. “I remember sweating and stinking like charcoal, and you burning the corn on the cob. I mean, how can somebody screw up cooking corn?”

  “All right!” Quinn said, throwing up her hands. “So maybe the times weren’t as good as I remember ‘em, but we were together weren’t we? We were a family … we were normal.”

  “I was never normal, Mom, and I’m cool with that now.”

  “That’s not true.”

  Yes, it is. You were just too busy to notice.”

  Quinn paused here, struggling for how to respond. She read what she thought was confusion and a hint of anger in her daughter’s eyes. “You don’t know what you are, Sam. Nobody does when they’re twelve. And that’s where we’re gonna leave it.”

  “How come you get to decide that?”

  “Cause I’m your mother and there are rules.”

  “I brought down an entire Syndicate glider all by myself!”

  “And we’re all super proud of you, sweetie, but you’ve still got a bed time, so let’s call it a night.”

  Most of the others were still partying outside as Quinn and Samantha headed back into the silo. They were halfway to their quarters when Milo appeared.

  “Minute of your time?”

  Quinn nodded, kissed Samantha goodnight, and followed Milo down the hallway and across a catwalk to another corridor that ended at a metal blast door. The door heaved open to reveal a circular chamber which was completely empty aside from Giovanni and Cody.

  “Was she followed?” Giovanni asked.

  “What’s with the cloak and dagger, boys?” Quinn asked.

  Cody moved over and closed and locked the door.

  “We just didn’t want to upset anybody,” Cody said.

  “Right, like they weren’t already upset after the whole alien invasion thing.”

  “We want to talk about the temporal totems, Quinn,” Giovanni said.

  “Are you guys drunk?”

  Giovanni shook his head.

  “Okay, so talk,” she replied, hands on her hips.

  “Well, I’m gonna go first, since I convened this whole thing,” Milo said. “I was walking around this morning and it struck me. Who the fuck is sending back messages from the future and why?”

  “You waited this long to ask that question?” Quinn stated.

  “Takes me longer than you to process stuff,” Milo snapped.

  “Well it’s an excellent question,” Cody replied, holding up a hand. “May I?”

  The others nodded. “The people from the future are the ones who are sending back the messages,” Cody added, with a self-satisfied grin.

  Quinn shook her head. “Seriously? You guys pulled me down here for this crap?”

  Giovanni waved off Cody. “Milo has a point. What if it’s all bullshit? I mean what if the whole thing’s a trap? Something orchestrated by the aliens to lure us all to our deaths and defeat the resistance? Maybe it’s a kind of false flag operation.”

  Quinn considered this. “So what if it is?”

  “So maybe attacking the asteroid is the wrong move,” Milo said.

  Cody shook his head violently and Milo glared at him. “You’re not the one who’s gonna be doing the fighting and dying, doc.”

  “I’ve still got skin in the game,” Cody replied.

  “So then we do nothing,” Quinn said. “We sit here and we wait to be attacked or we crawl out every now and again and take a few potshots at the aliens. That sound like a better plan?”

  Milo fumed. “See, you’re not even listening to me.”

  Quinn glared hard at him. “You do know that I’m a woman right, Milo?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That unlike you, I can multi-task. I can simultaneously listen to what you’ve said and offer a critique.”

  “Screw you, Quinn,” Milo replied, smacking his hands together in disgust. “You’re not even planning on going. I heard about it. You’re bailing on us. What you say doesn’t cut any ice on this one.”

  Quinn didn’t respond.

  “Why would they go to these lengths to fool us?” Giovanni said, standing. “I mean, if Milo’s right, why they hell would they let us escape if they were just trying to set us up?”

  “The messages have been spot on thus far,” Quinn said. “They’ve helped us. There are always things like these in battle, guys. Known unknowns. It doesn’t make sense that they’d use them to trap us.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Quinn said. “

  “They’re aliens,” Milo replied. “For Crissakes, they bomb certain cities and don’t touch other ones, they’ve supposedly got things that look like people that are filled with explosives, and your kid said they even send gliders around to destroy towns with metal darts. They’ve even got other totems scattered around. The bottom line is, very little of what those bastards do makes sense.

  Quinn turned to Cody and Giovanni, and asked, “Who here believes the totems are an outright setup?”

  Only Milo raised his hand.

  “So that settles it,” Giovanni muttered. “We’ve only really got one viable option here. The asteroid. I’d rather be proactive than reactive. It’s go big or go home, folks.”

  6

  Don’t Leave

  Night had come and the base was silent. The party was over and the hangar was pitch black. Samantha stood in the shadows, groggy, wondering where everyone had gone. Where the hell were they? How had they just left her there? She edged through the gloom and out a rear door on the hangar.

  The moon was hidden behind a bank of thunderheads, the only illumination coming from a few errant solar lamps that had been bolted onto the hangar’s roof. Samantha stopped and surveyed her surroundings, gripped by a powerful sense of abandonment. She wondered whether she’d somehow fallen asleep, and the aliens had somehow slipped into camp and taken everyone back up into space.

  “Mom!” she shouted.

  Silence greeted her, aside from the faint humming of the wind and the creak of the awnings on some of the outbuildings.

  “Eli!”

  Still no response. “Not cool you guys!”

  She darted forward, running, moving between the buildings like a hunter, seeking cover, looking for any hint of movement.

  And that’s when she saw him. Saw … it.

  A figure standing between two warehouses, maybe fifty yards away.

  The figure was tall and thin, Samantha could discern that even in the murkiness. The thing’s frame wavered in and out of focus and Samantha instantly thought back on a monster she’d heard about as a child in Ohio. “The Harvester,” a demon that lived in the fields that wreaked havoc on naughty boys and girls at the end of the growing season. Her grandfather had whispered about it, told her about the wraith-like thing that lived amongst the rotting vegetation, trying to use the image of the monster to frighten her into doing chores on the farm.

  “Who are you?” Samantha asked.

  The figure didn’t respond, nor did it cease its staggered forward movements. The clouds parted for an instant and Samantha saw what she thought might be its horrible features: a ruined mouth, two eyes like black buttons. Then the visage seemed to contort, change, the wreckage of a face somehow reconstructing itself into something pleasing. What was it? A beautiful woman? A child close to her age. The visage continued to change, adopting the features of people she’d seen in the past: Katarina, the poor girl she’d been unable to save from the aliens, then Arnel, Blake, and Carter, the boys from back near the river.

  “Please stop,” she said, falling to her knees.

  The thing rose up over her and its mouth opened impossibly wide like a flower blooming, like a snake readying to devour a mouse. Samantha peered into its maw and th
en the mouth converged on her as the world went dark …

  Only to burst forth in a rush of scattered light.

  She screamed and pushed herself up, slicked with nightmare sweat. Gasping, she looked around to see that she was back down in her room in the silo. Quinn was visible, standing over her.

  “You okay?” Quinn asked.

  “I had a n-nightmare,” Samantha stammered.

  “Just one?”

  Quinn sat next to Samantha, rubbing her back, just as she’d done when she was an infant.

  “I was all alone, mom. Everyone had left and I was the last one at the base. There was this thing, this … man I guess.”

  “What kind of man?”

  Samantha looked up into her mom’s eyes. “I’ve seen him before.”

  “When?”

  Samantha lowered herself back on the cot and rubbed her eyes. “Do you ever get the feeling that you’re reliving the same day over and over?”

  “Doesn’t everyone?”

  Samantha peered at the ceiling. “Back before, the first time I was with the resistance fighters, there was a guy named Hodges. He used to be some kind of school teacher. He said there was a writer once that said this world must be another planet’s hell. Maybe he’s right.”

  “You just had a bad dream, sweetie.”

  “Maybe we died, mom. I mean, maybe we died during the invasion and this is where we went. This place. And we’re forced to relive the same things, the same days, over and over again.”

  Quinn brushed back a lock of hair from Samantha’s sweat-roped forehead.

  “That’s impossible, Sam.”

  “Then tell me why I know what you’re going to say.”

  Samantha levered herself up out of the cot and paced the room. “Tell me how I know that you’re going to tell me about the others leaving on the mission to the asteroid, but that you can’t go. Tell me you weren’t going to say that today.”

  The color seemed to drain from Quinn’s face and Samantha continued, “And I was going to tell you not to go. I was going to beg you to stay because I was scared even though I really wasn’t. Mom, I swear I think I’ve said that to you in the past, like dozens of times, over and over.”

  “You’re scaring me, Samantha.”

  “Maybe we should be scared. Maybe there’s something else going on, something we don’t even know about.”

  Quinn had, without question, experienced the same feelings before. A kind of frenetic déjà vu. But she didn’t want to feed into Samantha’s fears, and so she moved over and hugged her daughter, tightly. Her immediate thought was that both of them must have broken in some fashion.

  She’d seen it before in her old unit. Men and women who’d tripped a fuse as a result of combat. PTSD, shell-shock, or whatever you called it, the results were the same. Confusion. Paranoia. And sometimes things that were much, much worse. Maybe both of them, maybe everyone in the group, Milo, Renner, all the others were suffering from the same thing, the lingering effects of constant combat.

  Samantha pulled back from her mother. “You think I’m nuts, but I’m not. I know you’re thinking that and I swear that there’s nothing wrong with me. It’s all so clear now. You’ve gotta go with the others.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You have to! You have to go because it’s the opposite of what you’ve done so many times in the past! And it couldn’t have worked because we’re still here!”

  “If someone else heard this conversation…”

  “They’re not on our frequency, mom. You don’t want to admit it, but you’ve felt the same things I have.”

  Quinn would never admit the truth to Samantha. At least, not yet.

  “Give me one good reason I should leave you here aside from this whole déjà vu on steroids thing.”

  Samantha considered this for a few seconds. “The others are a bunch of badass hive-kickers for sure, but they’re all dudes. They need someone like you to guide them. I mean, they’d be helpless without a woman, we both know that.”

  Samantha smiled, her nose burning, her eyes red-rimmed.

  “Do you have any idea what I’m about to say now?” she asked Samantha.

  “I’m drawing a blank,” Samantha replied.

  “Well, I lied before when you asked me whether I’d ever wanted another kid.”

  “So what’s the real answer?” Samantha asked.

  “The truth is I never would’ve wanted anyone else because I know I’d never be able to love them as much as I love you.”

  Tears coasted down Samantha’s cheeks as she wrapped her arms around Quinn. The two just stood there silently, holding each other.

  7

  The Departure

  Quinn exited the silo in the morning light and jogged across the base toward the hangar that held the glider. Preparations for the mission were already well underway. Hayden prowled the space, barking out orders to a group of twenty resistance fighters

  “Who here has used a parachute before?” he thundered.

  A few hands went up, including Mackie’s, Hawkins’s, and Mira’s.

  “How about me?!” Quinn shouted.

  Everyone looked back as she entered the space.

  “Well, well, well,” Milo shouted.

  “The word was, you’d decided to dry-dock it, devil dog,” Hayden said.

  “You need better snoops,” Quinn said.

  Cody grinned, and the other Marines slapped palms with her, even the reluctant Milo. Renner heaved Quinn a set of body armor.

  Hayden clapped his hands together and smiled. “Getting the band back together. I love it. Time to get to work!”

  Under the watchful eyes of Quinn and Hayden, the Marines and resistance fighters planned and plotted over the next several hours. Cody powered up the screens inside the glider, able to sift through the alien technology to create a highly-detailed order of battle. He explained in detail the route they’d take to the asteroid, the surface conditions, and the path across what he called the “Empty Quarter,” a rugged section of the asteroid that would likely be frozen solid. The conditions were such that the group would have to space dive down onto the asteroid’s surface and find a way across to the area where the temporal totem was located. The reason for this was that while the totem was located directly between the infiltration and exfiltration areas, it was hidden in a remote, mountainous area on the asteroid upon which a glider could not land.

  Renner watched the presentation and raised his hand. “How come we can’t just land where the friggin’ totem is?”

  Cody fixed his glasses. “Have you been listening to anything I’ve said?”

  “Nope.”

  “The location of the totem is equidistant to the infiltration and exfiltration points.”

  “I don’t understand that,” Renner said.

  Cody took a moment, then said, “It’s right between them in an area that’s’ inaccessible to the glider.”

  Renner frowned. “Nope. Still don’t.”

  Cody removed his glasses, using hand gestures to signal to Renner. “Place where you’re going is bad. Can’t land there. Have to land in a good place.”

  Renner smiled and nodded. “That makes more sense.”

  Hawkins raised a hand. “What can we expect from the enemy?”

  “They’ve got the numbers,” Cody said. “But we’ve likely got the element of surprise.”

  “We’re going to just sky surf right past them?” Hawkins asked.

  Milo nodded. “Just like the Germans at the Battle of Fort Eben-Emael in Belgium. They used gliders to surprise the Belgians.”

  Once the planning was over, the group commenced organizing and field-stripping their weapons. Renner revealed some of the intricacies of the alien Parallax rifle, several of which had been stolen from the command ship. Next came an explanation of the pros and cons of their battle helmets. Whereas the Marines had previously benefited from the alien’s A.I. autonomous network (which was embedded in the battle helmets but synched to the
command ship’s biomechanical hive), they wouldn’t have that crutch to fall back on going forward. Still, the helmets provided an array of technological applications that would enhance their abilities to fight while on the asteroid. Hawkins in particular was a quick learner, offering that the Syndicate helmet was not unlike a Gen-V helmet used by a buddy he served with in the Texas Rangers who’d once flown the old Joint Strike Fighter while serving in the Air Force.

  Cody and Milo had maneuvered the aging battle drones out of the glider and onto the hangar floor. Cody powered the drones up, the machines whirring to life. Several of the larger ones stopped functioning and Cody tried jiggering their internal circuitry, but to no avail.

  “You gotta reroute that bad boy’s thermometer!” someone shouted.

  Cody and Milo looked back to see Eli staring at them from a side door.

  Cody squinted at him. “Come again?”

  Eli ambled forward and gestured at one of the larger drones. “Experience tells me that sucker has a thermometer inside that’s probably positioned too close to a circuit board. The board heats up, the thermometer goes crazy and the whole thing shuts down.”

  Milo smiled. “Eli, right?”

  Eli nodded. “At your service.”

  “What can we do for you, Eli?” Cody asked.

  “It’s more along the lines of what I can do for you,” Eli replied. He walked to the back of the drone and spotted a few metal rungs that led to the top of the machine. Jumping up, Eli grabbed the rungs and pulled himself near the drone’s bubbletop.

  Opening the top he perused the control devices, power gauges in alien script, a command console, and several joysticks and maneuvering knobs. He reached down and loosened a few metal clasps on a side panel. Then he slipped his fingers inside, steady as a surgeon entering a chest cavity. He pulled down a translucent tube the size of a pinky finger that contained a blue liquid and which was hanging, by a metal cord, to what appeared to be an internal circuit board. Eli moved the tube next to the circuit board and the blue liquid turned red and the drone hummed to life.