by Rick Partlow
McKay turned back to the Marines who’d followed him down the stairs.
“Where are the others?” he asked.
The autogunner from Second, Corporal Simmons, answered him. “Englehart’s seeing to the wounded, sir,” he said, his gravelly voice subdued and quiet. “One of them, Private Conklin, is all right---just a flashburn. He’ll be down in a minute. The others…” He trailed off. “Captain Muniz and both the squad leaders are dead. If this,” he nodded at the surviving members of Kennedy’s team, “is all that’s left of First, then we have seven effectives not counting you.”
“Shit.” The word slipped out of McKay’s mouth of its own accord.
“Sir,” one of the other men said tentatively---McKay saw on the IFF that it was PFC Stanhope, “what are those things?”
McKay walked over to the closest of the fallen defenders. It had been ripped apart by 12mm slugs and he could see the stark white of bone inside its torso burned black and grey and cracking near the ends. Red blood stained very human-looking organs…but nothing else about the things looked human at all.
“Something Yuri got from Novoye Rodina,” he answered, sounding much more definitive than he actually was.
“Sgt. Preston,” he said, finally addressing the squad leader. The man looked up from the two wounded Marines and McKay could see his eyes blinking back tears behind his faceplate.
“They’re gone, sir,” he said, voice cracking. “I…they…they weren’t going to make it out of here, and they were both in so much pain, sir…”
McKay felt a chill creep through him as he understood what the NCO was trying to say: Preston had overdosed both of them with painkillers. Under other circumstances, he would have been filled with rage and ready to have the NCO arrested for murder. But here…
“There was nothing else you could have done,” McKay told him, putting a hand on the man’s shoulder. “We still have a mission, though, and I need your help.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Preston said, standing straight. His voice was still a bit unsteady, but it was the best they were going to get. Hell, he wasn’t feeling very stable himself at the moment.
“Get someone to scavenge all the ammo and especially anti-armor grenades off the dead,” McKay told him. “Then get the survivors organized into two fire teams, each with an autogun. We have to get to that control room.”
Suddenly a tingle went up McKay’s spine and he realized that he had forgotten something. He sprinted back to the stairs and ran back up to the next level, into the carnage that he hadn’t noticed when he’d charged heedless into the fight. Bodies and body parts were scattered around the corridor surrounding the stairwell entrance, most of them burned unrecognizable, but he forced himself to look at each one carefully.
“What is it, sir?” Corporal Englehart asked, stepping over from where he was tending to three wounded Marines. The one who was on his feet had a burn-through on his right leg that had been treated with a smart bandage, while the other two were down with serious burns to their legs and torso.
“Where’s PFC Savitch?” McKay demanded, still looking at each corpse.
“He didn’t make it, sir,” Englehart told him heavily. “There…there isn’t much left of him.”
He motioned to the other side of the room and McKay followed his gesture to where the remains lay. The man had taken one of the energy blasts in the torso and all that was left of him was his extremities. His gear was a melted and reformed pile that resembled nothing coherent.
“Son of a bitch,” McKay hissed.
Savitch had been carrying the Special Munition pack. They’d lost their nuke.
* * *
Commander Sergio Cahn looked at his reflection in the silvery surface of the elevator door and frowned more deeply. His dark eyes were hooded and baggy and there were lines around his mouth. He looked like he’d gone more than twenty four hours without sleep…because he had. He’d just come off a sixteen hour shift and had been getting ready for bed when the broadcast had come over the nets. The base communications people had tried to shut it down, but all that meant was that everyone had to switch to a channel from the civilian satellites to finish watching it.
Then, of course, Captain Fox had come on to say that it was all treasonous lies and that the Lunar Defense Base would continue to take orders from the elected Republic government…until the announcement an hour later that both the President and Vice President had been assassinated. He hadn’t said anything since then…but then he didn’t have to. Everyone knew what was going on; the question was, what would they do about it?
The elevator door opened and Sergio stepped out onto the Administrative level, striding down the sterile corridor with the practiced ease of someone grown used to Lunar gravity. A few officers and enlisted passed him in the halls and most nodded a greeting. There was no small-talk or chatter tonight: everyone had too much on their minds.
Everything down here had an unfinished air to it, with most of the offices lacking interior doors and the walls bare and impersonal. But his destination was the exception. Large, sturdy double-doors of five-centimeter-thick transplas guarded its interior and the word “Security” was emblazoned across those doors in letters bigger than his hand. One didn’t have to look too hard to figure out where Captain Fox’ priorities lay.
Sergio pressed a palm to the door’s ID plate and the door opened to admit him.
“Commander Cahn,” the clerk at the front desk said politely with cheerfulness feigned from long practice. “You hear to see Commander James?”
Lt. Commander Martin James was the Executive Office of the Lunar Security section and he’d been Sergio’s liaison for getting access to the restricted sections of the base where he’d been needed to oversee construction.
“Yeah,” Sergio confirmed, his voice subdued. “I need to go over some schedules with him.”
“You can go on back, sir,” the young man told him with a negligent wave. “He told me you might be by.”
Sergio stepped by the desk and past a pair of thick, secured doors that housed the armory, back to a T-junction. To the left was the office of the head of Security, Commander Koenig, but the door was shut and the room was dark. Koenig was on his sleep cycle. Sergio turned right and headed for the open door at the end of the small hallway.
Inside, he could already see Martin seated behind his desk, arms resting on its surface, eyes fixed on nothing. The two men were of about the same age, but Martin was shorter than he, and leaner, with skin a shade lighter than Sergio’s and a head depilated clean and almost shining. He was usually a cheerful, good-natured type with an easy smile; but tonight, his expression was serious and brooding. He looked up as Sergio entered, nodding to him.
“Hey,” he said quietly. “I guess I don’t need to ask why you’re here.”
Sergio fell into a seat in the chair across the desk from Martin, sighing in exhaustion.
“Martin,” he said, “can we talk here?”
The other man frowned. “I thought that was why you were here,” he said in confusion.
Sergio leaned across the desk and eyed the Security XO significantly. “No, Martin…I mean, can we talk here?”
Realization lit up behind Martin’s dark eyes and his mouth nearly fell open before he shut it purposefully. He looked around with a furtive, paranoid movement, then hit a control on his desktop. The door slid shut, but before Sergio could say a word, Martin held up a hand. He rose from his chair and stepped over to a storage cabinet against the far wall, opening it with a biometric ID plate and taking out a solid-looking metal device. He set it on his desk and touched a control that set it to humming gently.
He let out a heavy breath, then looked back to Sergio.
“Okay, what the hell?” he said, his palms held up. “What’s going on?”
“You know what’s going on,” Sergio returned. “We all do.”
“Yeah,” Martin said, shrugging. “But why the cloak and dagger shit?” He nodded at the device on his desk.
“I bought that jammer in a fit of paranoia when I took this assignment, but I’ve never actually used it.” His eyes widened. “Jesus, I hope to hell it works.”
“Martin,” Sergio interrupted, “we have to do something. Fox is going to use the Lunar defenses to make sure that Admiral Minishimi can’t support McKay or Franks.”
“And what the hell do you think the two of us can do about that?” Martin demanded, sounding as if he were getting angry.
“Just the two of us? Not much,” Sergio admitted. “But I know my people and I know who’ll be mad enough about this to act. I have to think you know your people as well.”
“You’re talking about committing treason,” Martin said. His tone wasn’t accusatory, just a statement of fact. “They’ll execute us…if we live long enough for a trial.”
“Who the fuck is ‘they,’ buddy?” he demanded, pounding a hand down on the man’s desk. “Who is controlling the government? Who do we owe loyalty to?”
“They are the people who’ll fucking kill us,” the other man nearly yelled but then caught himself and brought his volume down. “It doesn’t matter if it’s Ayrock or Cumberland or your fucking Aunt Matilda. They are the ones with the guns.”
“No, Martin,” Sergio corrected him, smiling thinly. “You are the one with the guns.”
Martin blinked, looking as if he’d just run into a wall. Then, slowly, his expression changed and a smile spread across his face.
“You know,” he said, “you’re right. There are no Republic Guard troops on base. No Marines either.” He looked up sharply. “But you know Koenig will never go along with this.”
“He’s asleep,” Sergio said with a shrug. “Lock down his room and jam his ‘link and he might not even wake up until it’s all over.”
“This is going to get messy,” Martin James said, shaking his head sadly. “I know I can count on a lot of my people, but not all are going to go along with it. Some might come out shooting.”
“It’s a damn revolution,” Sergio reminded him. “They always get messy. Are we doing this or not?”
Martin thought about it for a long moment, eyes flickering towards a small photo viewer that was cycling through shots of his family…and one of him with Admiral Patel. Sergio knew that Martin James had been the chief security officer on the Sheridan during the last war with the Protectorate. He remembered Martin telling him over too many drinks after a long shift how he’d been there with Vinnie Mahoney when they discovered that Patel had been chemically conditioned by the Protectorate to obey their commands if given the correct code word. He’d barely made it off the Sheridan alive when Patel had evacuated it and used it to ram the Protectorate cruiser and prevent it from launching nuclear missiles at Capital City.
“Come on,” Martin said, getting to his feet with a look of resolve on his face. “Let’s go get some guns.”
Chapter Forty Three
Yuri clenched at the grip of his handgun and waited impatiently. He had come too close for things to fall apart now…but too much was out of his hands. The damn Americans had forced his hand: he could hear the sounds of battle from the floors above. He saw the technicians seated at their duty stations in the launch control room glancing back nervously at each crack of an exploding grenade or the discharge of a plasma gun.
His eyes, though, were drawn to the monitors that lined the front wall of the command bunker, where the old flat-screen OLEDs showed the technicians in the silo laboring feverishly to seal the warhead of the ICBM. He wanted to hit the intercom button and yell at them to hurry, but he knew that would accomplish nothing. They were true believers, like Antonov…
He frowned. Where the hell was Antonov anyway? He had to have been woken up by the gunfire and explosions… Perhaps he’d been killed. That would be a shame. He should have lived to see this.
“Sir!” Gennady said over the intercom, his sweating, flushed face appearing suddenly on the communications screen to the left of the primary launch status display. “The Americans are just outside! We just need a few more minutes to finish sealing the warhead, but…”
“Gennady,” Yuri said with strained calm, “the Americans are in this building as well. I am going to set the countdown for ten minutes. Whether or not you have the warhead prepared, that missile will launch.”
“But sir,” the engineer protested, alarm in his eyes, “we won’t be able to clear the silo before…” He stopped, realization hitting him, and a fatalistic acceptance crept into his visage. “Yes, sir, I understand. But if the warhead is not properly sealed, it won’t survive reentry.”
“Then make sure it is,” Yuri snapped, cutting the connection. He turned to a harried and frightened technician seated at the station to his left. She was a matronly woman in her fifties, and her clothes were bedraggled and stained from too many hours worked and not enough time for self-maintenance. “Do it,” he told her. “Start the launch sequence.”
An explosion shook the walls and then all was silence around them, a light layer of dust raising from the floor. Yuri swallowed hard, tasting fear for the first time. Not fear of death, no…but a nearly crippling fear of failure.
“Hurry.”
Vinnie examined the door to the blockhouse’s auxiliary control room with a critical eye. It was thin, flimsy plastic meant more as a dust barrier than a security measure. Not worth wasting a breaching charge. He nodded to Sgt. LeClerc, who was on point, and the burly NCO kicked the door in with one blow, then ducked into the room with Sgt. Mawae close behind. Vinnie waited for a moment with the rest of the team guarding the rear, the chatter of gunfire and the occasional deep-throated booming of an explosion echoing from up the stairs to the ground floor.
“Boss,” he heard LeClerc call hesitantly, “you might wanna’ see this.”
The room inside was dark but for the glow of displays and instruments so long obsolete that Vinnie felt as if he were walking through some museum. His helmet’s night vision filters were working again, further away now from the interference the enemy’s armor created, and despite the gloom he could see clearly the bodies of three men and a woman sprawled next to their work stations. They all showed the signs of premature aging that were common to those who’d spent most of their life in remote areas, they all wore clothing that looked hand-made and not well kept and they all showed the extra weight of people who had spent too many hours in sedentary work and not enough time exercising. They also shared nearly identical gunshot wounds to the head. A pool of blood spilled out from where they lay, already spreading beneath the plastic sheeting that separated the auxiliary control room from the catwalk surrounding the missile’s warhead.
A man stood out on that catwalk, hands behind his head, a pistol at his feet while LeClerc and Mawae covered him. Closer and Vinnie could see that he was tall and powerfully built, wearing a khaki field jacket, olive drab utility pants and hiking boots, a checkered shemagh wrapped around his neck. Closer still and Vinnie felt a jolt of surprise go through him as he realized that the man was Sergei Antonov.
“Are you in command here?” Antonov asked, looking at Vinnie with a face devoid of the manic obsession that had been manifest in the broadcasts the General had made during the bratva’s terror campaign.
“I’m Colonel Mahoney,” Vinnie said, feeling strange introducing himself to something he knew to be a copy of Antonov. “Did you kill those people?”
“Colonel,” Antonov said, “we don’t have much time. The payload in that missile’s warhead,” he waved a hand at the ICBM in front of them, “will bring an end to your civilization.”
Vinnie wanted to ask so many things at once that he was literally speechless for a moment. Finally he managed to sputter, “Why the fuck should I believe anything you say?”
“I’ve heard that you were part of the recent task force sent to the world you know as Novoye Rodina,” Antonov told him. “While you were there, did you become aware of the existence of a being called Misha?”
“Yeah,” Vinnie answered, the stat
ement more of a question.
“When Yuri came to Novoye Rodina,” Antonov explained, “he asked Misha for a duplicate of General Antonov. This made Misha suspicious, so when he provided the duplicate---me---he programmed it with a subroutine that would activate under certain specific circumstances. Those circumstances were met. I am that subroutine.” His mouth twisted into what might have been a smile. “As near as I can make you understand, I am Misha.”
“Great,” Vinnie moaned, careful not to activate the audio pickup. They’d already killed that damn computer once… He turned on the external speaker again before he said: “So, how is that nanovirus going to bring down our civilization? It’ll kill thousands of people, but…”
Antonov was already shaking his head. “That warhead does not contain the weaponized virus, though they,” he nodded back towards the dead technicians, “believed that lie as well. Instead, Yuri substituted something else he discovered, something I didn’t even know existed. You have seen the creatures that Yuri created to defend this place?”
“Yeah,” Vinnie said, voice raspy as his mouth went dry. He had a bad feeling about where this was going.
“Those are the same Destroyers that brought down my people, manufactured by self-replicating nanites from human hosts merged with inorganic raw materials into a cyborg war machine. In that warhead is the means to do the same to every single human on this planet.” Antonov shook his head. “You can’t let it launch.”
“Boss!” Vinnie heard the call and saw on his HUD that it came from one of the junior NCOs back in the auxiliary control room. He stepped back through the plastic sheeting, noting droplets of blood spatter from the headshots that stained the clear plastic here and there. Sgt. Mendoza was standing at one of the control stations, trying not to step on the body of the man who’d formerly occupied it.
