by SD Tanner
Being able to carry anything heavy for any distance was always a combination of strength, endurance and compensating body weight. A fit man could carry that weight over a reasonable distance without too much trouble, but he wondered how the female Navigators would fare. Thanks to the cardio demands of the gear, anyone who was trained to use the hydraulics tended to have lean muscle and not a lot of body weight.
“What’s its range?” Ark asked.
“Not too shabby. You can set the range using this,” Candy replied, while pointing to a slide on the side of the gun. “But we set the default to be fifty yards.”
“What does it do to the target?” Leon asked.
She gave him a wide smile. “It cuts it like butter. It kinda works like a surgeon’s scalpel. Basically, you can use it to carve up anything you don’t like. If you use continuous fire set to the exact distance of the target, it’ll burn it to ash. It makes no sound, so it won’t give away your position. You can target by pointing at the enemy or adjust the beam emitter using the control panel. The beam travels at the speed of light and has an instantaneous effect, which means you don’t need to compensate for the target moving. No need to worry about adjusting for weather conditions and wind either. Plus there’s no recoil.”
“How do we know when it’s running low on power?” Tank asked.
She pointed to a two-inch square panel on the gun. “This is the control panel. It’ll tell you everything you need to know about the status of the weapon. If it’s in good working order. When it’s charged and ready to fire. How much power it has left. If it’s faulting and how.”
Tank stepped forward with Leon and they both eyed the weapon curiously. “Is it connected to our on board computers?”
“Hell, no,” she replied decisively. “It would be better if it had auto targeting, but that’ll take the software engineers quite a while to get working.”
Back when he’d joined the army they hadn’t had such sophisticated weapons. He wasn’t quite old enough to remember the first time they’d managed to get communications working with squads in combat, but he did remember when their best friend was an M16 and a full belt of ammo. The computerized guns worried him. The more complex their weapons became, the more chance they had of failing when they were needed.
Ark nodded. “Nice work, Candy. Before we try it out, what else have you got for us?”
Almost dropping the bulky gun on the table, Candy picked up another even stranger looking weapon. “This gun uses sound waves to blow shit up. The laser slices, dices and burns, but this baby explodes anything at a molecular level.”
Eyeing the barrel-shaped weapon skeptically, Leon asked, “How does it work?”
“Point and shoot. Like the Hellfire laser, this one will put a handy red dot on whatever you’ve targeted. It’s part of the ultrasonic weapons family. It can be used to disrupt anything at a molecular level to either destroy or disable the target.”
Leon raised his eyebrows. “Disable?”
“Yeah, if you were aiming it at a human, you could use less power and blow out their eardrums or make them nauseous.”
“We need the critters to die, not upchuck,” Leon replied dourly.
To his surprise, Candy giggled like a schoolgirl, making him wonder if anyone in Dunk’s weapons division was sane.
“We call this one Mario the sonic blaster,” she replied with a cheeky smile. Pointing to a panel on the side of the gun, she added, “This is the control panel where you adjust the frequency.”
“How will we know what to adjust it to?” Tank asked.
Shrugging, she replied, “I suggest you leave it alone. We’ve set the default to what we believe will cause the most damage to the critters. We haven’t had time to add many sound patterns or frequencies, plus we don’t know what you’ll need it for out there.”
Once they’d moved to the firing range, he watched Leon and Tank while they tested the weapons on the targets set up at the end of the room. Both were wearing their hydraulics and he noted they handled the heavy guns with ease. Just as Candy had promised, the Hellfire laser carved up the target, leaving it in pieces. Providing the operator could lug the weapon around, he doubted any critter would survive that level of damage. Mario the sonic blaster wasn’t as successful. It took a minute for the weapon to warm up and, although effective, he doubted anyone would have time to get the gun ready to fire. In his experience, combat was filled with long periods of boredom and fatigue, but once the fight began, there was no time to waste.
Tank lowered Mario the sonic blaster and turned to Ark. “It might be useful to clear the smaller critters, but I don’t see how this’ll work against the bigger guys. It’s just not responsive enough.”
Ark was strumming his remaining fingers against the arm of his chair. “I hear you.” Looking across at Candy, he added, “We’ll test it, but I don’t think it’s viable. It does make me wonder about an electromagnetic pulse weapon. Dayton and One-of-One believe the critters are receiving a signal. Can this weapon be adapted to disrupt the messages?”
“If we don’t know the frequency to use then no.”
“Dayton has a hybrid in the medical center who they believe is receiving messages from whatever is controlling the critters. Can you use that?”
He hadn’t heard they had a hybrid and asked, “What do you mean we have a hybrid?”
“Leon’s squad brought her back from the city. She was infected by the goo and she has a critter arm. More importantly, she’s talking, but they don’t think they’re her words. They believe she’s receiving messages and simply repeating what she’s hearing.”
Candy shook her head. “She’s not a machine so it’s impossible to isolate the frequency. The medical team have a better chance of doing that than we do.”
Listening to Ark, he realized he was becoming the focal point for the team, but that led him to wonder who made up their team. Leon had his Navigator squad with Tank, Lexie, Tuck and Trigger. Jenna had a small squad in training, but they weren’t adapting anywhere near as fast as Leon’s people were. He worked with Dunk and Jo trying to keep them ahead of the game with new weapons. Boris had stayed at NORAD, but he didn’t have the support of the people there. It was Boris who’d ordered them to bomb their own cities and it had only added to their problems. He and Ark had tried to explain to Boris that the critters had adapted, and now those cities were full of millions of tiny monsters destroying all human life. Despite knowing the radiation hadn’t kill the critters, Boris was still angling to bomb more cities. He and Boris might share the rank of Colonel, but that was where their similarities ended.
Watching Ark calmly discussing the test run they would undertake with the new weapons, he felt a spike of frustration. He hadn’t become a Colonel without being ambitious and he was a little jealous. He had the best education the army had to offer him to become a good leader, yet this was the man everyone trusted. One of his trainers had once told him that the mission rules the leader. In other words, he had to do whatever was right for the mission, even if that meant standing down and letting someone else take command. He wanted to be the man Ark clearly was and he didn’t understand why he wasn’t.
Ark turned to him. “Good work, Bill. We’ll get these weapons tested and give you and Candy the feedback. In the meantime, I need you to work with Dunk to get the baby bots up and running.”
Still feeling a little resentful, he swallowed his irritation and nodded curtly.
CHAPTER FIVE: Off message (Boris)
A steady voice came through the squat speaker in the middle of the conference table in NORAD. “How many nests have you found now?”
Although he didn’t have to, he leaned closer to the speaker. “We’re not sure, Ark, but it looks like a hundred or so.”
Ark’s scarred face filled the screen at one end of the conference room. With his head five times its normal size, every minor blemish on the oddly smooth and puckered skin was exaggerated. Despite the destruction to his face, Ark’s brilliant
blue eyes sparked with an intensity he rarely saw in anyone else.
“Why aren’t you sure?” Ark asked.
The satellite specialist named Mike held up his hand. “The mounds and pyramids are built using the earth around them. It means they blend into the background and it makes them hard to isolate.”
“Have you got a list of their locations?”
“Yeah, we’re sending them to you now.”
“Do you have an update on the satellites?”
“Yeah, situation normal.”
“What about the degradation in the orbits?”
“Nothing to worry about.”
He’d spoken to Bill about nuking the nest in Pueblo Pintado, but he’d been unwilling to commit to the action. It frustrated him and he wondered why everyone was being so spineless. All Ark wanted them to do was survey the country and world looking for the main nests. The satellite specialists had shown him the one in Pueblo Pintado, and it was by the far the largest they’d found, making him sure it contained something very important to the critters. They needed to send a clear message to whatever it was that had invaded them. He figured a nuclear bomb would clear any language barrier and he didn’t understand why Bill and Ark were hesitating. Bill was a Colonel in the army, and although that made him a dogface, he should know they needed to take swift and decisive action.
“What’s it looking like globally?”
Mike gave Ark a worried look. “Not good. We’re still analyzing the images we’ve managed to capture. So far, we haven’t seen a single aircraft and not much is moving on the ground in any country.”
“Have any other cities been bombed?”
“Not that we’ve seen, but there’s plenty of damage to London, Paris, Tokyo, Berlin, Moscow, Rome and Rio.”
“Caused by what?”
“It’s hard to say, but large sections of London have burned down entirely. Moscow is pretty much gone, north of the river in Paris is a wasteland, and the other major cities aren’t in much better shape.”
Ark harrumphed. “Knowing Russia, they probably burned down their own city. They ripped up their railroads to stop the Germans, so I suspect they’ve taken a scorched earth policy towards the critters.”
“We’re still analyzing areas outside of the main cities, looking for the smaller mounds you say are fences around heavily populated areas.”
“Are you finding any?”
This was another point he didn’t agree with. CaliTech had some half-assed idea they could free the people being held captive in the cities and were unwilling to bomb them. Given there were even more prisons than there were nests, he couldn’t see how they could free them all. The critters needed to know they wouldn’t tolerate their prison camps, and that they would kill their own rather than concede to an enemy that was refusing to name their terms.
“We need to use our arsenal against these prisons as well as the cities,” he said dourly.
Ark leaned away from the camera, making his face smaller on the screen. “No, Boris. We’ve talked about this already. The nukes just made the critters happy. Now we have cities with millions of the little fuckers and that makes them harder to kill.”
“We could test other types of missile on the other countries.”
“What? Are you suggesting we drop bombs on other countries just to see what the critters do about it?”
“We need to send a clear message. The critters need to know we won’t tolerate what they’re doing.”
Shaking his head, Ark leaned into the camera and his face became oversized again. “No way. We already know how fast they learn. We only get to do anything once before they’re onto it. Even if a missile worked there’s no guarantee we could ever use it again.”
He’d seen the critters in NORAD and they hadn’t struck him as being overly bright. They’d locked themselves inside of the bunker, and had been slowly starving to death when Leon and his Navigator team had shown up. Ark had said they believed the critters were only the weapon of something else. They suspected the creatures controlling the critters were buried inside of the nests they’d found across the world. If that were true, then all they had to do was destroy the hundred or so nests. The missile specialists in NORAD told him they had a bomb that drilled into the earth before exploding. It had been specifically designed to collapse any tunnels their enemies might be using. He did agree that whatever was inside of the nest could be buried so far underground they couldn’t penetrate deeply enough, but they needed to test it to know for sure.
“We have missiles that can take out tunnels.”
Ark replied, “We don’t know how deeply whatever’s in there is buried.”
“That’s why we should test it on the nests in the other countries.”
Pulling his mouth downward, Ark narrowed his eyes. “I’m not using other countries that way. The human race is under attack. What chance have we got of winning if we’re willing to use one another as human guinea pigs?”
One of the women at the table gave him a disgusted look. “Together we’re stronger than we are apart. Now is the time for the world to team up, not to use one another as cannon fodder.”
Rolling his eyes, he replied, “Thank you for your sappy, happy, motivational poster talk, but that won’t get the job done.” Eyeing Ark’s large face, he added dourly, “Since when were you in command of this mission? I thought Bill was the most senior officer on the ground in CaliTech.”
Answering him in an even tone, Ark replied, “Yes, he is, but CaliTech is not a military outfit so it doesn’t mean anything.”
Pushing down a flare of irritation, he reminded himself that there was no military command left. CaliTech had all the technology they needed, but none of the manpower. Without an army, he considered them useless. NORAD was a military facility and he should be in command of the site, but he wasn’t. From the moment they’d been freed from the critters, Ark had taken control of the few remaining resources by offering to help them find their families. At the time he’d been too busy working with Bill to understand their situation to notice what Ark was doing. Now the survivors inside of the bunker wanted news about their families badly enough to side with Ark and not with him. He’d been outplayed by a junior and he knew it.
As for his own family, he didn’t really have one. He’d never married, but he did have a girlfriend. To be fair, he had a couple of them and they didn’t live anywhere near one another. It wouldn’t be easy to find either of them, plus he’d have to hike across the country to find one and then the other. Add to that the fact they didn’t know one another, and he figured he was dodging a bullet by not looking for either of them. Bill had offered to send out a search party, but he’d quickly taken the hint not to bother when he’d merely shrugged by way of reply. He was married to the Corps and that didn’t leave him much time for a real wife. It was one of the reasons he’d been chosen to work in NORAD. He had so few ties he could be trusted to take the hard decisions. Of course, no one had thought the entire command structure could collapse and leave him in charge of nothing.
Fixing Ark with a cold stare, he said, “It does matter and you know it. We’ve been invaded and the last orders we had were for Martial Law. This country is now under military control.”
“You’re quoting orders given by people who are probably dead.”
“It doesn’t matter whether they’re dead or not. They were the last orders of a President who might still be alive somewhere.”
“And if he shows up then I’ll listen to what he has to say. In the meantime, you don’t speak for him, dead or otherwise.” Ark had clearly finished with him and directed his next question to the team sitting quietly at the conference table. “We’ve estimated only twenty five percent of the people in the country are still alive. How does that tally with what you’re finding?”
Mike cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Umm, it’s hard to tell, but based on the infrared readings and the last known population of regions, we estimate a similar number.”
&nbs
p; “Does anywhere look like its untouched?”
“Again, it’s hard to tell. The critters don’t give off much heat so we have to rely on visuals. We have noticed there’s not as many in the less populated regions, but that stands to reason.”
“Yes, it does. The critters were derived from people, so the smaller the population the less critters there should be. Can you see what they’re doing to the people they’re holding captive?”
Mike shook his head. “It doesn’t look like they’re doing anything to them. People seem to have moved into shared buildings and they’re taking boxes of stuff into them.”
“Are they supplies?”
“Quite probably.”
It was more news he wasn’t happy to hear. If the people were moving into shared facilities and pulling supplies together then they were settling in. It meant they were becoming institutionalized and that wasn’t good. Eventually they’d become so comfortable with their captors they’d forget how to fight. He and Bill agreed they needed to build a viable army. Bill was sorting out the weapons and they were both trying to figure out how to find and train soldiers. They needed fighters and institutionalized prisoners were of no use to them. He wanted people who were prepared to die rather than surrender. He and Bill knew it was boots on the ground that won wars.
He’d seen firsthand what a small squad of Navigators could do and he had to admit he was impressed. Having never heard of the program, it explained where their six hundred billion-dollar defense budget had gone. In his view, the Pentagon wasted far too much money on pie-in-the-sky schemes. Ark was still compiling information about their situation, but he thought the kid was wasting their time. In war, intel helped and fancy technology could give them an edge, but all battles were won through hardcore combat, and that meant they needed manpower. At least he and Bill agreed on that point, even if no one else seemed to understand it.
Giving Ark a stern look, he said, “We can’t let them settle in this way. They need to fight.”
“How are they supposed to do that from behind enemy lines?”
