by Rick Partlow
Villanueva straightened, running a uniform sleeve across her face. “It’ll take you hours to get the bridge clear enough for their vehicles,” she pointed out. She gestured at the shuttle. “I can have you there in five minutes.”
Franks glanced between the two women, bemusement in his expression. “All right,” he assented, nodding. “Let’s mount up. Time to get this shit over with.”
* * *
Shannon Stark lay on the cot, her eyes focusing on nothing, her jaw slack, and drool pooling beneath her chin. The cell wall was transparent, but her gaze didn’t waver when Philip Ayrock moved in front of it, his jacket stripped off and his dull grey dress shirt plastered to his armpits and the small of his back with sweat. A heavy 10mm service pistol hung in his right hand down by his side, his fingers clasping the gun like a totem as he stared at Shannon with eyes wide, pupils dilated.
“Bitch thinks she has me,” he said, a strange, canned quality to his voice as it came over the cell’s audio pickups. There was no one else in the detention block. The watch desk was deserted and the guards had left an hour ago, after the reports had come in that Luna base had deactivated its defenses and the Farragut was closing in. “Thinks she can walk in here with Riordan and his evidence and put me away…” He laughed, and it had an insane edge to it. “Won’t be that fucking easy! I still have people out there, people who owe me…” He smiled. “And I still have you.”
Ayrock slapped his left palm on the ID pad affixed to the adjoining wall, and the door slid aside. He raised the gun to cover the unmoving woman as he stepped into her cell.
“They won’t be able to shoot me down if I have you with me,” he continued, obviously trying to convince himself as he slowly approached the cot. “I’ll take the President’s flitter to my shuttle, then my shuttle to the freighter Yuri planted for me at McAuliffe.” He was nodding to himself as he grabbed her by the wrist, hauling her to her feet.
Shannon went with the pull, as he expected her to, given the drugs the med-techs had been dosing her with, stumbling and off-balance.
“Can’t count on anyone but me,” Ayrock rambled, grabbing Shannon by the back of her neck to guide her out of the cell. “Kage got himself killed. Fox is an incompetent fuck, Yuri was a lunatic…even Riordan betrayed me.”
Shannon mumbled something and he frowned, looking at her in confusion.
“What?” he snapped.
“I said,” she repeated with startling clarity, her eyes snapping into focus, “don’t forget the medic who was supposed to drug me.”
Ayrock tried to jerk away from her, tried to bring up the gun in his right hand, but Shannon was already in motion. Faster than he’d ever seen anyone move, she grabbed the arm that had been holding her neck and locked it at the elbow, putting her slightly behind him and to his left and making it impossible for him to aim the pistol at her. Her right heel slammed down on the back of his knee and he screamed as his kneecap shattered against the hard floor with a clearly audible crunch.
He desperately tried to lunge around with his right hand, firing a wild shot that punched into the wall harmlessly. Shannon lashed out with a round kick that took him in his right wrist, snapping the bone there and sending the handgun flying across the room. It clattered against the far wall and bounced underneath the watch desk, and she let it go. Rather than letting her right leg touch back after the kick, she wrapped it around Ayrock’s neck, trapping his throat in-between her thigh and calf and forcing his head back at a painful angle, bringing his eyes back to meet her emerald gaze.
His left arm was trapped helplessly in a joint lock, his left knee and right wrist were broken and his air was close to being cut off by her right leg. Ayrock’s eyes were wide, his face a mask of sheer terror and agony as he stared up at her.
“You know what your problem is, Ayrock?” Shannon asked him, her voice raspy, her green eyes bloodshot and masked with dark circles. “It isn’t just that you’re an evil son of a bitch…you could still have succeeded if you were just evil.” She sneered. “And it isn’t that you’re a narcissist. Lots of successful dictators have been narcissists. It’s almost a requirement.” She shook her head, the sweat-matted tangles of her hair whipping in and out of her eyes.
“No,” she went on, “your problem is that you don’t know what makes a good soldier. It isn’t money, Ayrock. It isn’t the promise of power. Those only buy people temporarily, like that med-tech. He saw the writing on the wall and I was able to convince him that all the money you’d give him wouldn’t be of any use once my people got hold of him.”
She put her face closer to his. “People will kill for money, but they won’t die for money. They’ll die for love, for faith, for belief. And you don’t believe in anything but yourself.”
“Why…are you…telling me?” Ayrock choked out. She could feel his Adam’s apple moving slightly against her hamstring through the thin material of the white coveralls they’d made her wear.
She ran her tongue over her teeth, feeling the coating there from days of confinement.
“I don’t talk much about my religion,” she said, “but I was raised a reformed Wiccan. We’ve all been here before, and we’re all riding the wheel back someday.”
She let loose of Ayrock’s arm and grabbed her right ankle, squeezing her leg tighter around his throat. He tried to claw at her leg with his one working arm, but she pushed off with her left leg and fell to the side, taking his head with her as she slammed back to the floor.
There was a sickening green-stick crack as his neck snapped, and suddenly his struggles ceased and he went limp, face forever frozen in a rictus of fear. Shannon let loose of his throat and pushed him away from her as she staggered to her feet, the adrenaline-fueled energy draining as quickly as it had come, leaving her unsteady. She looked down at Ayrock’s doughy face and spat in it.
“Better luck next time.”
* * *
Tom Crossman squinted against the rising sun as he scanned the trackless wastes to either side of the barely-existent road. The clouds above them were unnatural swirls of red and purple, dark and full of debris from the earlier explosion. Those clouds and the electromagnetic interference they were creating were part of the reason he hadn’t been able to access any satellite feeds for hours. You didn’t get much more isolated than this.
He could see Corporal Andersen glancing nervously at the radiation sensor built into the wrist computer of his combat armor as he drove the truck, but he ignored him just as he ignored the steadily climbing readings. The Special Munitions had been clean, as fusion bombs went, but that didn’t mean they were totally free of radiation; that wasn’t possible.
“Take it easy,” Tom finally told the Corporal after watching him fidget for another ten minutes. “We’re good as long as we don’t stay too long.”
He wasn’t sure if that was true or not, but there was no use alarming the younger man. They’d either survive or not, but he wasn’t leaving till he found the General.
“What’s that over there?” Andersen was pointing out the driver’s side window off to their left.
Tom’s eyes followed the Corporal’s gesture and he caught sight of a faint splash of white in the barren brown and tan, about a kilometer off the road. He quickly pulled on his helmet and used the built-in telescopic feature to zoom in on the object. It was some sort of small, dome-shaped building, made of grey concrete but half-buried under dirt and sand, with a rusted metal door barely visible beneath a layer of soil. He could just make out a faint cloud of dust raising from the door…
“Get us over there,” Tom instructed Andersen.
The Corporal slowed and down-shifted, turning the truck off the dirt road and onto the bare soil with a bone-jarring bump that rattled the frame of the old vehicle and sent Tom slamming into the door frame. Tom wanted to yell at Andersen to speed up, despite the roughness of the ride; but he also didn’t want to break an axle and find himself stranded out here for days, so he kept silent as the Corporal slowed down
to barely twenty kilometers an hour.
As they got closer, he could see another puff of dust come off the metal hatch. The puffs were rhythmic, like someone was pounding on it from the inside…
At fifty meters, Tom Crossman threw his door open and jumped out, ignoring Andersen’s alarmed cry and the metallic screech of the old truck’s brakes. He felt a twinge in his knees as his boots dug into the sandy soil but paid it no mind, using his momentum to break into a sprint. He reached the door and began scraping dirt away from it with his gloved hands, clearing a space about the size of a dinner plate. Then he yanked his carbine off his chest and pounded the butt into the rusted metal three times before he put his helmet against the hatch and keyed his external speakers, setting them for their highest volume.
“Sir!” he yelled. “Is that you?”
The noise vibrated back at him through the metal, feedback screeching in his ear for a moment as the external helmet pickups reverberated with his own words. He cursed silently, hoping he hadn’t missed a reply.
“Tom?” When he heard the word, faint and soft as it was, he let go of the breath he’d been holding. “Can’t open the door…”
He turned back to Andersen, who was hesitantly walking towards him, helmet on and carbine in his hands. He almost didn’t remember to turn down his external public address speakers before he spoke. “Andersen!” he barked. “Get me a kilo of HpE and a detonator from our packs!” He saw the Corporal standing there, looking at him uncomprehending. “Do it now!”
Andersen scrambled to obey, nearly tripping in a soft patch of sand as he ran back to the truck. Tom put his helmet back against the metal and turned the speakers up again.
“Back away as far as you can, sir!” he told McKay. “We’re going to get you out of there!”
Tom slumped against the door as he waited for Andersen to return, the tension and exhaustion catching up with him. He rested his head against the padding in the back of his helmet and closed his eyes for a moment, feeling a shudder of relief. When he opened them, he saw that his HUD was picking up the IFF transponder signals from the other side of the hatch.
There were eight of them: General McKay and seven Marine NCOs and enlisted. Nothing from Vinnie or Jock or either of the Special Operations teams. Tom felt a kick in his stomach and sat up abruptly, tasting bile in his throat as he forced himself not to think about what those readings meant. Vinnie was the rock, the Group’s foundation; and Jock was immortal…
He shook his head clear. Andersen was running back from the truck with a handful of explosives and one of them needed to be able to concentrate.
“Sergeant-Major!” The Corporal was panting, out of breath as he handed Tom the kilo block of HpE and a pair of detonators. “I got a transmission on the radio we rigged up in the truck.”
“With all this shit?” Tom asked, disbelieving as he nodded upward at the electromagnetically charged clouds above them.
“It’s from a shuttle!” Andersen exclaimed. “From the Farragut! It’s on its way here!”
“They got a shuttle down?” Tom said, head snapping around sharply. “What about the orbital defenses? Fleet HQ? Lunar base?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Sgt.-Major!” Andersen’s eyes were wide and he was grinning from ear to ear. “It’s all over! Colonel Stark is free and our people have control of Capital City!”
Tom shook his head in bemusement.
That cocky little shit Franks actually did it.
His hands placed the charge on the door automatically, sticking it in place with the adhesive affixed to one side of the block, then implanting the detonators.
“Isn’t that incredible, Sgt.-Major?” Andersen was still giddy, looking like he wanted to start dancing from one foot to another. “It’s over! We can all go home!”
“Not all of us, Andersen,” Tom corrected him, voice bleak as he stood and began stepping clear of the hatch. “Not all of us.”
Epilogue:
The statue was four meters tall and carved out of solid granite, shaped by high-powered lasers. It depicted a soldier in combat armor with his weapon raised, standing guard over another wounded troop. There’d been talk of simply emplacing a hologram generator, but Jason McKay had rejected it…and given the current state of the government, there was no one with enough pull to contradict him and make it stick. The fact that it had been commissioned and put in place only two months after the end of what had come to be known as the Insurrection was a testament to how much political power Jason McKay, Shannon Stark and Fleet Intelligence wielded at the moment. He wasn’t entirely comfortable with that.
He shoved his hands in his jacket pockets, shivering slightly in the chill of the winter night. It had been Shannon’s suggestion that they place the statue out here, at the edge of the City, just across the bridge where Franks and the others had made their stand. Out here, it symbolized not only those who’d lost their lives defending freedom against tyranny but also those who’d been deceived into fighting and dying for that tyranny. Inscribed on the massive base, partially hidden by snow, were the names of the men and women who’d died fighting at the bridge, in Kazakhstan and off Earth from the beginning of the conflict.
Other monuments would be set up in Capital City, Houston ‘plex and elsewhere for the civilians who’d been killed, monument easier to access and closer to the eye of the average man. This one was for those who would seek it out…for those who needed it.
Like me, he thought, not without irony.
He hadn’t been out here since the dedication ceremony. It hadn’t been huge, as these ceremonies went. Just the Special Operations troops and Marines on-planet that weren’t needed for duty elsewhere…and the families of the fallen. Not Vinnie’s family, though: there was bad blood there, though the man had never spoken of it. Jock’s father was a big, blond Aussie that could have been his twin. It had been hard watching that burly, gruff man break down into sobs. The hardest for Shannon, though, had been Caitlyn Carr’s mother. Dr. Sobukwe still blamed Shannon for the death of her daughter and had refused to speak with her at the ceremony.
Bitter, harsh winds had cleared the skies of the morning’s snow clouds and he could see the stars clearly shining above the ruins of the Old City. Humanity had climbed out of those ruins to the stars, and he used to think that nothing could stop them after that. The Builders had probably thought the same thing, he thought with a cynical bite colder than the wind.
Look how they ended up.
“You’re not an easy man to find,” the voice would have startled him if he hadn’t noticed the footsteps behind him seconds before…and seen the lights of the flitter minutes before that.
“That wasn’t an accident, Ms. Sanchez,” he told the woman, glancing back at her in annoyance. She was dressed for the weather, if much more fashionably than he was, in a long cape and a dark-colored suit. “I’ve already said everything I intend to say to the press for the time being.”
“I’m not just ‘the press,’ General McKay,” Sanchez reminded him, stepping up beside him to regard the memorial. Her demeanor was subdued, he thought. Respectful, even. “I was here for the dedication,” she told him. “I didn’t talk to you then because it would have been inappropriate, but I do need to talk to you.” She smiled thinly. “I’ve been useful to you and Senator O’Keefe more than once these last few years. Surely that will buy me a few minutes of your time.”
McKay sighed in resignation. “Okay, Ms. Sanchez,” he acquiesced. “What can I do for you?”
“It’s not what you can do for me, General,” Sanchez corrected him, a glint of humor in her dark eyes, “it’s what you can do for the Republic.”
“I think I’ve done enough for the fucking Republic,” McKay said darkly, turning away from her and the memorial to look at the arc of Capital City. “I think we all have.”
“You may feel that way, General,” Sanchez allowed, “but there’s a sizeable faction of the Senate power brokers…”
“The ones not u
nder indictment you mean,” he interrupted, mouth twisting into a grin. Cumberland and a number of other Senators had wound up in custody…once they’d been able to scrounge up anyone to arrest them with most of the CIS administrators on the run.
“Quite,” she acknowledged with a snort. “Anyway, many of the remaining Senators are in a tizzy about the upcoming emergency elections.”
“At some point we’re actually going to have a President that lasts the whole ten year term,” McKay commented drily.
“And they’re hoping that President is going to be Jason McKay,” she informed him.
He stared at her for a moment, face blank, and then slowly began chuckling. It grew into a full-throated laugh that seemed to echo through the silence of the winter night as his shoulders shook with it.
“What?” Sanchez asked him, confusion in the set of her eyes.
He waved it off, letting the laughter die away. “Just a thought I had back before all this started,” he explained. He regarded her with humor in his eyes. “So, that’s why you’re here: you want to know if I’m running for President?”
“You’d be elected in a landslide,” she assured him. “You’re about as close to untouchable as anyone is these days. You could have raped a goat in college and no one would care.”
“You watched the footage from my helmet cam inside the alien ruins on Novoye Rodina, didn’t you?” At her nod, he went on. “Misha offered me his backing to become military dictator. My response was to set off four fusion warheads in his lap.”
“You wouldn’t be a dictator,” she protested. “You’d be democratically elected, like any other President. There’ve been Generals who became President in American history: Washington, Eisenhower, Grant…”
“Eisenhower was a politician in a General’s uniform,” McKay sniffed dismissively. “Washington…” He shook his head. “I am no George Washington, Ms. Sanchez. Maybe a Grant…but I’d have to start drinking a lot more.” He glanced at the memorial again. That might not be a problem.
