EMP Retaliation (Dark New World, Book 6) - An EMP Survival Story

by J. J. Holden

  Then he had met with two Clanhold envoys embroiled in a dispute. A young man from one hold had knocked up his girlfriend from the other, and then he had bailed out on the relationship. Her Clanhold leader wanted him to marry her, or at least cover every resource she and her baby would require. The young man’s Clanhold wanted to either pay nothing or take custody of the child when it was born.

  Frank had ruled that the young man’s Clanhold must cover half the supplies needed to raise the child to age thirteen. He could raise the child every other year, if he wanted to, but they would pay regardless. Frank figured the man’s Clanhold would insist on taking the child on their years, since they were paying for it anyway, and so the baby would have some kind of relationship with both parents and hopefully bond the two holds more tightly together.

  It was messy, but apparently, life went on even in the middle of a war for survival.

  Then the guard tower air horn sounded. Non-hostiles coming in from the south. Frank hobbled in that direction. A couple minutes later, two riders came trotting up. They dismounted and saluted Frank, who awkwardly saluted back.

  Frank decided they had to be from the Gap. No one else saluted higher-ranking people from other settlements, if they saluted anyone at all.

  “The Clan welcomes you,” Frank said when they were close enough. “What brings you here today?” He smiled, and patted one of the horses on its neck.

  “Nothing good,” one man said. “The Gap fell, and now the Mountain King holds it. Only some of us escaped. The majority are still back there, though whether they’re dead or enslaved, I couldn’t tell you.”

  Frank stood stunned. His mind raced. He blurted, “Why didn’t we hear of it on the radio?”

  The man shrugged and frowned. “The Mountain had special forces or something. A small unit infiltrated our HQ and wiped everyone out, right before they began their attack. We hadn’t even heard they were coming, so we were caught with our pants down. Complete surprise. Houle’s soldiers must have killed or captured anyone they saw on their approach so they couldn’t flee and warn us.”

  A worm of fear began to wiggle in his mind. SpecOps. Michael must be told. The Clan would have to take precautions to avoid either Frank or Cassy getting taken out by surprise. At least the Bunker was safe, as few people knew where it was or how to get into it.

  A few Clanners, including a woman on guard duty, had joined them by now. Visitors always drew curious onlookers. Frank told her, “Find Cassy. Tell her, ‘Bravo Oscar Bravo.’ She’ll know what that means. Tell her I’ll fill her in later, but that this is no drill.”

  The guard nodded once and she ran toward the Clan’s HQ.

  Frank said, “Alright, Gappers. You are both welcome here with open arms. Where are the survivors who escaped? You said most remained behind. What of the others?”

  The poor guy, who looked like he could fall asleep standing up right now, said, “They’re coming, but they’re on foot. Men, women, children. Two hundred in all. An hour behind us.”

  “Shit. That’s too many for us to handle without preparations. Alright, go back and split them into four even groups. Send one group here, another to each of Ephrata, Lititz, and Brickerville. We’ll get them taken care of, friend.”

  Frank gave instructions to several Clanners to make the arrangements for their fifty or so guests. Now Cassy’s supply commitments to the FreeRep refugees were looking less and less like a good idea. It would be a hungry winter, if they survived that long, unless the ’vaders miraculously agreed to give them supplies.

  Frank saw Michael jogging toward them. When he arrived, he wasn’t even breathing hard. Frank saluted back to the outgoing Gappers returning to their horde of survivors, then turned to Michael.

  “No estimates on enemy size, I imagine?” When Frank shook his head, Michael said, “Give me authorization to talk to the chancellor about diverting Taggart’s two battalions back to Clan territory. We’re next in line from the Gap, if Houle’s troops are going to keep rolling forward northward, maintaining the offensive.”

  “Yes, good idea. Cassy will be confined to the bunker for her safety, by the way. Apparently, Houle’s troops that hit the Gap included some special forces, and they took out the Gap HQ and radio before anyone in town knew they were under attack.”

  “I’ll put our people on alert until we know more,” Michael said, “and send out scouts to screen our southern borders.”

  Frank nodded, and Michael walked back toward Clanholme while talking quietly into his walkie-talkie.

  * * *

  Taggart looked up at the scorching afternoon sun and wiped his brow with his sleeve. Part of him wished he was back in his headquarters, where they had rigged up a simple old generator and bypassed the central A/C’s fried controller unit. They had finagled the A/C into working, despite the fact that temperature control had been reduced to manually turning the unit on and off with a switch that interrupted the power supply. Crude, but it worked.

  Another part of him hated that place, however. Not because the HQ’s original owners had been found in the cellar, decomposed almost to skeletons, but because he wasn’t used to being a general. Much less, the president! The opulence that showed in that house’s every detail was alien to him, and discomforting. He had grown up in a two-bedroom house with five kids and three adults, where “luxury” had been to take a dump without people banging on the one bathroom’s door the whole time.

  It was time to stop letting himself get distracted. He’d think about the “palace” later. Right now, he was being flooded with reports from his resistance cells all over western New York City and adjacent New Jersey. Ree’s territory, or rather his underlings—he had implemented honest-to-god feudalism, and still called it communism with a straight face. Taggart grinned to think of the verbal acrobatics it must have taken to justify that little decision.

  Eagan cursed as he almost knocked over his coffee cup. Then he said, “So, have we figured out what the hell is happening, yet?”

  Taggart looked at the huge wall map of Ree’s territory, which had been laminated and spray-glued to plywood, then into a table. He had little wooden blocks of many kinds and colors all over the map, and notes written in grease pen. Many of the largest blocks, green, had showed rebel cells’ operational areas but were now swapped for red blocks. “Yes, some info. It appears that most of our friendly neighborhood resistance cells have activated.”

  Eagan snorted. “No shit, sir. I mean, do we know why? Do we even know what their operational objectives are? We can’t support them effectively if we don’t know what the darn heck they’re doing.”

  “Why would you say shit and then darn heck? That’s a buck in the jar, by the way.”

  “Because I only have one buck on me, sir.”

  Taggart shook his head. “But no, we don’t know what our resistance friends are up to. We’re getting lots of reports and the desk-jockey spooks are putting together projections.”

  “I’m sure they will be one-hundred percent accurate and factual, sir. Intel is an exact science.”

  “Shut up, shitbird. Those people put their carpal tunnels on the line every day in the fight for freedom.”

  Eagan smiled and said, “Do you got enough data for a gut check on it, though? You’re usually right, and I’d like to start coordinating supporting efforts as quickly as we can, even if we need to make adjustments when Intel finishes massaging the data.”

  Taggart nodded. Eagan had a good point. “Fine. Anyway, the info we’re getting from the few with radios suggests that this is a response to Ree cutting everyone’s rations. There is plenty of food for his civilian survivors, now, between planting in every bit of dirt they could find and a fleet of fishing boats. And yet, Ree still cut their rations. We don’t know if that was a punitive measure or some other cause.”

  “So we can expect them to focus on securing the harvest substations, I imagine.”

  “Yes… But if you look at the map closely, you’ll see that most of the ce
lls’ activity isn’t actually in Ree’s personal territory, but that of his vassals. Which is—”

  “Brilliant,” Eagan interrupted. Taggart nodded, and Eagan continued, “By focusing in his lackey turf, they pretty much ensure Ree won’t make more than a token effort to help them unless it looks like those territories will actually fall. It cuts the forces they have to fight in half.”

  “Divide and conquer,” Taggart muttered.

  “If they intend to take over, which is a big damn if, then they wouldn’t have to face Ree’s reinforcements until later.”

  “That’s how I read the situation,” Taggart said. “Alright. Activate our own SpecOps people and send them in to coordinate intel and support. Remember the rough plan we had outlined for such a scenario?”

  “Yes, sir. We load them up with as much supply as they want to carry, and then insert them into the situation. For this mission, are we using that contingency plan’s HQ and fallback?”

  Taggart looked at the map to double check that he was right about the insurgents focusing primarily on Ree’s vassals. Nothing else made much sense of the intel he had received so far, though it could change quickly as more data got evaluated by the spooks. He didn’t really think it would change, though. Going after the vassals first just made sense.

  “Affirm. Use the listed insurgent cell for that. Now get going.”

  Taggart watched Eagan leave. This was an unexpected development, and it was happening prematurely, but things were what they were. Sometimes, events didn’t give him the luxury of following The Plan. He’d have to make the best of it. Despite the problems created by the premature uprising, however, Taggart still felt a perverse glee at the thought of those invading bastards waking up to a popular uprising.

  “Hope you hate it,” he said to his far-away enemy.

  * * *

  Ethan nibbled at a late-night snack of ice cream and berries. The ice cream was a super-rare treat, pretty much restricted to Cassy, Frank, and the Council because it used the limited ice from Cassy’s small refrigerator/freezer. There was no way to make enough to go around, certainly not with the hand-cranked ice cream maker.

  Abruptly, an alert popped up on his laptop. Ethan leaned forward and clicked the alert window. One of his firewall applications opened and he saw a known I.P. entering his VM’s artificial intranet. It was an older I.P. address that he had associated with Watcher One a long time ago, but it was almost never used.

  Ethan observed as Watcher One attempted to install a small program, which he guessed to be a combination of worm and data packet sniffer. He enveloped it in a fake, static environment; it would never find any useful data.

  Then he saw that his main firewall—again, the Virtual Machine’s mirror image of it—came down hard and fast. Watcher One must have had programs loading, waiting to strike, because as soon as the firewall crashed, half a dozen installation alerts popped up along with another half-dozen file alteration alerts. This was no infiltration, Ethan realized. It was an assault.

  Then his satellite connection froze up, causing his system to buffer. An application installed itself in the brief time it took his system resume letting him click anything.

  Ethan cursed when he realized that the install had been an autonomous packet sniffer. As Ethan’s system attempted to re-connect to the weather satellite he had used to connect to a server in France, and from there out to other servers, that data went through the enemy packet sniffer. In two seconds, his system caught up to what was going on and became responsive again, but at just that point, the attack stopped. No new installs or file changes popped up, and the connection from Watcher One’s I.P. address terminated.

  Ethan spat another curse, then shut down his VM. He wouldn’t be able to back-track Watcher One because this had left the laptop completely isolated, not connected even to his intranet—he was paranoid beyond belief about his computer security, but it would be a lifesaver if his network were ever fully compromised.

  Ethan rolled his chair to his other active laptop, feet pawing at the ground for traction. He moved his USB-attached mouse and the screen lit up. He opened several monitoring and defensive tools, admin tools, system monitors, and others. When they had loaded, he clicked his internet connection and told it to connect to Bird2, his weather satellite. He wanted to grab its log files, if they were still there, and install some other defensive software on the bird’s controlling computers. The connection listing was grayed out on his screen. He clicked it anyway, but again, nothing happened.

  Then another app popped up. It listed a different satellite—ostensibly a weather satellite, but actually a military bird for monitoring missile launches—with an alert. He clicked it to open the alert window.

  “Possible launch detected,” it said, the words blinking in red.

  Several clicks later, he had visual on the supposed launch. He froze in his seat and watched helplessly as, with a five-second delay, something in mid-orbit glowed red as it re-entered over the Atlantic Ocean. Ethan felt like a ship with the wind knocked out of its sails. His stomach sunk. There, in full color, he watched as one of his precious few controlled satellites cremated itself in Earth’s upper atmosphere.

  And because of that, Ethan would now be without internet connection for a couple hours every evening while other birds drifted into useful positions during their orbit cycles. He clenched his fists and imagined himself with his fingers around the bastard’s throat. Watcher One had retaliated, alright, and had killed a priceless satellite to do so.

  Ethan swore aloud, “I promise you, Watcher One, I’m going to burn you down for this.” He didn’t yet know how, but one way or another, this game was going to end, and soon.

  - 15 -

  0600 HOURS - ZERO DAY +382

  “SHIT.” FRANK LEFT the outhouse and crutched carefully down the two steps. Oh man, someone’s head was going to roll for this one. All the worms must have died, because the outlet pipe was clogged and that just didn’t happen with the worms doing their thing.

  He crutched out behind the outhouse and saw that nothing flowed out through the perforated pipes into the constructed wetlands, either.

  “Sonovabitch,” Frank muttered to himself. The “wetlands” was made of trenches behind the outhouses, in which swampy plants had been growing. They filtered the drainage, cleaning it to the point of looking crystal clear before it flowed out into the two retainer ponds.

  Frank went to the closest guard he could find and said, “Go find Amber. She’s on shit detail today. Someone dumped something into the damn toilet that killed the worms. Now it has to be dug out, the material burned, and the pipe diverted so we can flush it clear.”

  “Yes, sir. Maybe bleach? One of the idiot teens could have dumped a mop bucket in there after cleaning up the outdoor kitchen.”

  “No way to tell which shift crew did this. It might have taken awhile for all the worms to die off. Amber manages maintenance, so tell her I want it managed. Make sure none of that crap gets into our ponds, either. The pit has to be burned out, and that outhouse has to be taped off so no one else uses it.”

  The guard nodded and left.

  Frank let out a long frustrated breath. Even in the middle of a war, someone still had to take care of the damn toilets. At least they had put in a bunch of new outhouses that spring.

  He went to the guard tower to get the night’s report, and found that a scout team had radioed in on a short range hand-held. They’d be riding up in a few minutes, and had a report to make.

  He crutched off in the direction they’d be coming in from, but then his metal-and-wood foot got caught in some grass. After yanking on it a few times, he had to unsnap the straps, take his stump out, and then yank back and forth on the fake foot until it tore free.

  This morning was not going well, and he hoped it wouldn’t turn into “one of those days.”

  Just as he got the prosthetic back on and the straps snapped, the scout team rode up. One dismounted and walked up to Frank.

&n
bsp; “Good morning, boss. I figured you’d be here waiting for us and I’m glad you are, because we found something you need to know.” He had to swallow hard a few times to get that out.

  “Go ahead,” Frank said and braced himself for bad news. On a morning like this, it could only be bad. Maybe he had done something to piss off Karma…

  The scout took a swig of water from his canteen. Putting that away, he said, “It’s the Gap—we knew it fell, but there’s more. There’s new construction going on there.”

  “Construction, already? What are they building?”

  “Hard to say. We could see that they’re using the captured survivors to do the labor. They were feeding the workers but no one else, so it’s probably a food-for-work program.”

  “Anything else?” Frank ran his fingers through his hair. So far, it was bad news but not anything he could fix immediately. Just more intel for Cassy and Michael.

  “Yeah.” The scout shifted his weight from one foot to the other and scratched his neck. “Frank, they got stacks and stacks of supplies. The whole market area was fenced off with chainlink, and inside are pallets stuffed with boxes and crates. They had flatbed cargo trucks. No gasifiers. Soldiers in camouflage. Two real live tanks, but small ones. A bulldozer and a backhoe. They’re building up the town wall, and putting some wall up on our side of the bridge, too.”

  Frank frowned. Castellation in action, it just had to be. “Alright, thanks. Go write up your report and then get some chow.” Frank patted him on the arm and waved to the other, and watched them walk their horses into Clanholme proper.

  Frank was left alone with his thoughts. It was a good thing he had already put the word out to gather Taggart’s two battalions. The Gap’s occupiers couldn’t be allowed to finish building their defenses. Having a Mountain fortification and supply point on the Confederation’s southern flank was like having a knife poised at one’s exposed throat. They could hit the Clan from two directions, west and south, splitting Confederation defenses and creating an exponential number of possible threats to deal with. Of course, he’d need to tell Cassy. She had to know about the enemy activity and plan accordingly for the Confederation as a whole…