by Kyle Noe
“Boom! Told ya,” Eli said, before separating the two and reinserting them into the robot. Then he dropped down and smacked his hands together.
“You know your drones,” Milo said.
“Are you an expert with tech?” Cody asked.
Eli shook his head. “I have not been blessed with a lot of formal education, unless you count the school of hard knocks. I do believe I’ve received a master’s degree from there while I was towing trucks.”
“What are you looking to do, Eli?” Milo asked.
“I reckon I should come along with you guys. I can fly, or work on anything that has an engine in it.”
Renner walked over and shook his head. “No way.”
Eli squared up on Renner. “Why not?”
“Because we’re got certain minimum standards,” Renner said. “You’ve got to be able to run a certain speed and lift a certain amount just to hang with us.”
“I been doing twelve ounce curls for most of my life,” Eli replied, with a grin. “My body’ll snap back into shape once we get airborne. Haven’t you ever heard of muscle memory?”
Renner nodded. “But you had to have muscle in the first place to remember.”
Eli peered down at Renner. “Are you body shaming me?”
“Just stating the obvious.”
Renner planted a finger in Eli’s generous midsection. “What the hell do you call that?”
“Relaxed muscle,” Eli said.
Milo and Cody burst out laughing, as did Renner, who slapped Eli on the shoulder before looking to Milo and shrugging. “We could always use an extra bullet stopper.”
Eli strolled off with Renner as Hayden sidled over. Hayden angled his head at Eli. “Who the hell is that?”
“Eli,” Milo replied. “He’s gonna be our new drone expert.”
“Coolness. He used to work at NASA or something?”
Milo shook his head. “He used to tow cars, Gunny.”
Hayden chewed on his lips, registering this. “So basically, we’re entrusting our safety and possibly the future of the entire planet to an out of shape tow-truck driver?”
Milo smiled. “Yep. Pretty much.”
An hour later, the drones, weapons, gear, and enough supplies for two days were loaded into the glider. Cody stayed inside with Hayden, poring over the controls, doing a final systems check while the Marines and resistance fighters mingled outside, saying their goodbyes to friends and loved ones.
The assault force would consist of Quinn, Hayden, Milo, and Renner, alongside resistance fighters Hawkins, Mackie, Mira, and seven additional fighters who’d seen combat with the aliens. Eli and Cody would be going along as well, but would remain behind on the glider to maintain communications and orchestrate the exfiltration once the mission had been completed.
Rucksack over one shoulder, Quinn moved across the hangar to where Samantha stood, clad in a hand-me-down T-shirt with a cartoonish vegetable character emblazoned on the front, and jeans that were worn at the knees. She had the loop of string on one wrist and a plastic bracelet on the other.
“I’ve got something for you,” Quinn said, throwing open the rucksack. She removed a compression shirt, much like the kind she sported in combat, and handed it to Samantha.
“You shouldn’t have,” Samantha replied, admiring the shirt.
She quickly shrugged it on. It looked huge on her at first, but then she wriggled around and tugged on the arms and somehow made it conform to her small frame.
“How’s it looking?” Samantha asked, vamping a little.
“Perfect. I hear it’s what everyone’s wearing this year.”
“Combat chic,” Samantha replied with a smile.
“I gave you that shirt so I’ll always stay close to your heart.”
Samantha took this in and Quinn thought a tender moment might follow, but instead, Samantha giggled.
“That was so cheesy, mom.”
Quinn stood back and studied her daughter and that’s when she noticed it. She hadn’t really noticed it before, but Samantha was getting bigger. She’d grown, what? Two or three inches in the months since the invasion? Her face was fuller too and her fingers seemed longer. There was a tightness in Quinn’s throat because she knew Sam wouldn’t be her little girl for much longer.
This feeling naturally fed into Quinn’s anxiety about going on the mission. The notion of being robbed of more time with her daughter ate at her, but she knew the others were counting on her and besides, if they didn’t stop the Syndicate, there might not be any future at all for Samantha or anyone else on Earth. In a sense, saving the world was Quinn’s way of making amends for her absences. She just hoped that Samantha would one day see it that way.
“I want you to stay here and listen to Comerford and the others, you hear me?” Quinn said, glancing at Comerford, Xan, and the rest of the resistance fighters who were staying behind. “And when Luke gets here, Gio said you can count on him for anything, so stay close to him.”
Samantha nodded. “You gonna be okay out there?”
Quinn smiled. “Relax, we’ve got the best fighters the Universe has ever seen.” She looked over her shoulder to see Eli, smoking, scratching his buttocks. He noticed them looking and did a little wave. “Except for him,” Quinn added.
Quinn reached down and hugged Samantha who whispered, “I love you, mom,” before placing the plastic bracelet she had around Quinn’s wrist. Quinn whispered the same in return. They were jolted from their conversation by the rumble of the glider as it powered to life. It was time to go. Quinn stood back and waved to Samantha and the others, before moving back toward her fellow fighters. Samantha followed her, grinning as Eli raised his arm.
“Remember to keep that string on you,” he said.
She smiled and held up her wrist, the string he’d given her dangling from it. He patted her on the head as she unexpectedly gave him a hug.
“Promise me you and my mom will come back.”
He nodded. “I swear it, Samantha.”
Samantha watched Eli strike out after the Marines and the resistance fighters, all of them ascending the ramp into the glider which was thrumming, rising a few inches off of the ground. The onlookers all rushed back, having been briefed by Cody about the engine that propelled the glider up into the air.
Samantha was amazed to hear that the craft used what Cody described as a kind of magneto-inertial fusion drive, a futuristic engine that revolved around a series of powerful magnetic fields that somehow collapsed upon each other to create pulses of energy that would sling-shot the glider up into space. Surprisingly, the base did not have a formal runway, and so the glider would have to maneuver out of the hangar and hook a right before accelerating through the gap that lay between the outer buildings.
Samantha trekked outside, following the glider from a distance. She watched it pick up speed, maneuvering into the gap. The vessel hung for a moment, like a leaf kept aloft by a stiff breeze, and then the propulsion engines kicked on and—
BOOM!
There was a tremendous sound, like a million hammers slamming against a block of granite all at once and then the glider was gone, shotgunned up into the air as those watching raised their hands, cheering. Samantha stared at the loop of string on her wrist and then closed her eyes and said a prayer for her mother and the others, that there would be a happy ending to what she knew would be a very difficult mission.
Cody and Hayden were near the flight controls as the glider rocketed up into space. Hayden explained that while the craft could be manually flown, particularly when it came time to land, the vessel’s in-house, artificial-intelligence-like operating system essentially made it idiot proof. All Cody had to do was oversee the ship while it hovered above the asteroid. He was less a pilot and more like a monitor, Hayden explained.
At the time this was occurring, Quinn and the others were readying for battle. They donned their battle armor and did a final weapons check, taking the time to detail everything, once again, to the res
istance fighters again who caught on quickly. Milo, worried about how the resistance fighters would perform in battle, did a final rundown on the helmet’s HUD, detailing its features again, explaining how it created an immersive environment for the user. Questions were asked and answers given, and Milo, along with Renner, demonstrated how to harness the integrated eye tracking features. They kept it as simple as they could so as to prevent confusion and everyone was pleased that the fighters seemed to understand everything.
Next, Quinn gave a final run-through on their exo-tech alien armor, including reminding them about the unique feature in their boots, the canisters of compressed nitrogen-like gas which would act like thrusters, depending on the conditions. This went on for more than an hour and then everyone took up their respective positions near the areas with the harnesses that would eventually position and fire them out into space.
Quinn steeled herself for what was to come. She eased back against one of the glider’s metal walls. She watched Hayden seated on the flight deck with Eli, powering the glider up into space. She listened to chatter on Renner’s HUD, taking in reports of various Syndicate sweeping operations back on the ground.
She wondered again how it was that the aliens hadn’t come for them or weren’t heading to confront them. Sure, there was the issue of the nuclear weapons back at Shiloh, but they’d be targets in space wouldn’t they?
“And you guys just stole a glider and walked right out of their ship?” she’d heard Samantha say. It had all been so easy … so goddamned easy. This, coupled with Milo’s questions about whether the whole thing might be a trap, a set-up, created a knot in Quinn’s stomach that would not go away.
She tried to let these thoughts drift, but a vague sense of familiarity washed over her. Her eyes locked on Hayden’s right hand. He was about to reach over and touch his left ear, she just knew it. One second passed, then two, and then Hayden reached over and scratched his left ear and Quinn closed her eyes.
How the hell had she known that was going to happen? This was more than déjà vu. The sudden realization that maybe, just maybe, she’d lived through this very moment at some point in the past smacked her in the face. Maybe Samantha was right. Maybe something beyond their comprehension had happened when the aliens invaded. Was that too farfetched to believe?
She plucked her right ear and the feelings of familiarity faded away. Her eyes roamed the interior of the glider and hopped between Milo and Cody who were discussing some of the mission’s finer points. The two men were so different she thought. There was a sureness in Milo that Cody didn’t possess, a quality that would be attractive to most people, but not to her. She knew that now. There was an entirely different air about Cody. What was it? An intuition that he was slightly off, operating in a state of controlled chaos, a somewhat exotic quality that made him sexy in a distinctive way.
Having finished his talk with Milo, Cody approached Quinn.
“I need some meds, doc,” Quinn said.
Cody fished in his pocket and pulled out a small case that held several Black Sunshine pills. “You need to make this last,” he said.
“Worst doctor ever,” she replied, grinning, popping four of the pills. She needed them now, but had to be sure she played it smart going forward.
She leaned her head back, feeling the pills work their way down her throat. It was a pleasant sensation, like slipping into a warm bath. Originally, she’d been told that the pills allowed the user to operate in a heightened state for up to thirty-six hours, but that wasn’t the case anymore. She had to keep taking more of the pills and was lucky if the effect lasted more than six or seven hours.
“Do they know we’re coming?” she whispered.
“We don’t have any direct intel of course, but it’s likely that something’s going to spot us once we get near,” said Cody. “Still, like I said before, I think we’ll have some element of surprise.”
“How many scuds are on the asteroid?”
His face fell. “I imagine enough of them to make things interesting.”
“If this turns out badly, I’m going to come back and hit you,” she said. “Just wanted to leave you with that.”
“Why do most of our conversations involve you striking me?”
“That’s called foreplay,” she replied.
“God help me if we ever go beyond second base.”
“We will. And you won’t be able to walk the next day,” she said, with a wink.
The glider jolted forward and klaxons sounded. Cody moved back up next to Hayden as Quinn donned her battle helmet. She took up a position below her harness and listened to chatter, the other fighters conversing, and finally some classical music that Renner had somehow been able to locate and stream.
There was, for that brief moment, something hopeful in the air. As if they were all on the verge of doing something important, something that might be looked back on, many years in the future, as the beginning of the end for the Syndicate. A girl could dream.
8
False Hope
Luke, Calee, and nine additional resistance fighters headed out at night from Las Vegas. They drove across a series of man-made channels that had once diverted water from a reservoir built a few years before the invasion. Now, the three armored SUVs swept past a bombed-out reservoir with bone dry channels.
The resistance fighters drove at high speeds over the highway that ran through St. George, Utah. They shot through the beautiful, rugged landscape, passing mesas and red sandstone bluffs and little outposts of civilization. Luke peered up and took in the mansions behind the gates at Stone Cliff, an exclusive St. George community, a cluster of multimillion-dollar homes that still sparkled, illuminated by banks of solar panels.
He’d had a friend, a mentor named Sam Snow who lived there once upon a time. That was several years back, in the days after he binned out of military intelligence. He’d been a good soldier, but things had changed in the years running up to the invasion. His old unit had begun cross training with several elements from a number of soldiers who weren’t all that comfortable with Luke’s personal lifestyle.
Luke eventually left the service and transitioned to the Utah Data Center down near Camp Williams in Bluffdale. The site was actually a massive, billion-dollar NSA data collection center. The NSA didn’t have qualms about his personal inclinations, and they didn’t give a damn what he did in his private life as long as he stayed loyal and hardworking and had no issues with eavesdropping on the conversations of neighbors. That was something that Luke always struggled with, the fact that he demanded privacy in his own life, yet was willing to breach it when it came to others.
Sam Snow had been an executive there, a former Air Force pilot and investment banker who’d done stints at the CIA and the TSA and Goldman Sachs, helping to create a matrix that tracked domestic and international terrorists and which was eventually licensed to private business for commercial purposes.
Snow was a man of many secrets, and was the first to whisper about the aliens. Sam whispered to him one night that he’d been “read into” a program while at the CIA, a Special Access Program called “Stalking Horse” that was so secretive that the matters which it pertained to could only be discussed orally. Nothing was permitted to be written down. Sam said that while in this program, evidence was discussed about the likelihood that there would be some contact with an alien presence in the not too distant future. Apparently satellites and space receivers had picked up unusual chatter which was growing louder, growing closer by the day. Sam has dismissed the evidence as bullshit, but after piecing together clues from other operations and programs, he started to believe that something was going to happen. Something big, something important. The last time they’d chatted, Sam told Luke that he was going to unplug for a while and see what happened. That was more than fourteen months before the invasion occurred. Christ, how right he was, Luke thought to himself.
The population was small enough in St. George that the Syndicate likely overlooked it and
left it untouched. Luke watched the lights from the mansion fade in the distance and he wondered whether Snow was still up there, perched on his leather couch, cigar in hand, waiting for the country to reboot itself.
The resistance fighters headed due north, making for the relief camps in Salt Lake City that were overseen by what was left of the National Guard. The Guard had been called out in the weeks after the initial invasion and had done an admirable job keeping the burgeoning packs of countryside bandits at bay, maintaining a modicum of security in some of the larger cities. Indeed, the Guard patrolled most of the major cities along with elements of what was left of the still-functioning military. They did their best to care for refugees and dispense water, food and medicine, but the fighting, the wetwork, was left up to the resistance. Out of necessity, there was an uneasy alliance between the Guard and the resistance, one that Luke hoped would hold in the coming months.
Luke and the others arrived early in the morning at the outskirts of Salt Lake City, their SUVs stopped by three National Guardsmen at a roadblock. The three Guardsmen looked agitated. One of the Guardsman, an old salt with a thick beard and haunted eyes, was clad in a thick flak jacket and Kevlar helmet and waved a penlight. He clicked it on and a rope of eerie red light appeared. “Eyes,” he said. “I need to see eyes.”
Windows were powered down and the bearded Guardsmen inspected the eyes of the resistance fighters with the penlight as the other two Guardsmen stood at a distance, weapons at the ready.
“What the hell is going on?” Luke asked.
The bearded Guardsman inspected Luke’s eyes. “There’s been a shit ton of homicide bombings in the camps last three weeks. They took out twelve of my buddies two days ago.”
“Copies?” Luke asked?
The bearded Guardsman nodded. “Fuckers are using women and old people now.” He held up the penlight. “They got a special kind of light in this. If you’re synthetic it burns out the retina. If you’re one of ‘em, I’m gonna find out.”
