by Kyle Noe
Cody was in shock, as was Milo whose hands were over his ears. She stared at them, still in a daze. Her head rang, and tiny dots were in her eyes for a moment. Her hand went to her upper chest and, while her compression shirt was still torn, she could feel the outline of the wound, still warm and pulsing, as it closed up. Her body was healing itself at an incredible rate.
“Oh, my God,” Cody whispered. “My… God.”
“You’re alive, Quinn!” Milo shouted.
She pointed at the approaching drone. “Not for long!”
Quinn rolled forward and rose before promptly falling again. She didn’t have her feet under her yet. Trying it again, she was able to lurch-step forward. The more she moved, the easier it felt, and in seconds, she was dashing sideways. She grabbed the Syndicate rifle she’d dropped earlier and brought it around. She’d died and been resurrected, but now came the true test. Whether Cody had been able to interrupt the implant placed inside of her by the Syndicate.
The drone steamrolled toward her, and Quinn sighted down the bubble top on its turret. Making sure that she was out of sight of the remaining Syndicate soldiers, Quinn closed her eyes and squeezed a shot. She was shocked when the gun didn’t explode. They’d done it! They’d found a way around the alien implants!
The shot from her gun quicksilvered off the drone’s turret as Quinn swung into action. She dove to her left, barely avoiding being crushed by the machine’s metal foot. The drone twisted back around, bringing its other foot down in a smashing movement. Quinn rolled once again, nearly flattened by the machine’s metal pad.
Crabbing back and coming up in a crouch, Quinn fired at the hydraulic cables on the drone’s right leg, partially disabling it. The drone wheezed and sputtered, liquid spewing from the severed cables. Quickly and efficiently, Quinn stood and emptied her rifle into the bubble top on the apex of the drone, the energized rounds shredding the soldiers housed inside.
This finished, she tossed her rifle aside and ran toward Cody and Milo. The three slipped outside and took cover near the edge of a nearby stairwell. Milo grabbed Quinn and hugged her.
“Are you fucking insane?!”
“I had to know,” Quinn whispered, looking to Cody who stood at a distance. “All of us could be free… we had to know whether it would work.”
Cody smiled, wiping tears from his eyes. “This is big time, Quinn,” he said.
She nodded. “This changes everything.”
QUINN, Cody, and Milo moved in silence through the command ship. Quinn had her hand over her torn compression shirt, trying to avoid eye contact from any Syndicate passersby. The trio shuffled into a dormant exercise room where Cody slapped something in the palm of Quinn’s hand. It was a charred piece of metal that weighed half a pound and was shaped like a cigar.
“Meant to give this to you earlier,” he said.
“What is it?”
“That’s what killed you.”
Quinn pocketed the hunk of metal and then looked over at Milo.
“We have to tell them, Quinn,” Milo said, under his breath. “We have to tell the others that we’ve found a way around it.”
“It’s too soon,” whispered Cody.
Milo shot him a nasty look. “We have to move now!”
Cody held his look. “And do what? Start a revolution?”
“Wouldn’t be a bad idea.”
“We don’t have enough people to take over this ship,” Cody argued.
“So, we’ll steal some of those gliders,” Milo said.
Quinn glanced at Cody. “Is that possible?”
“Are you asking whether I’ve been spending my time devising a way to bypass the normal authentication codes that control most of the Syndicate flight software? Is that what you’re asking?”
“I was?”
“There may be a way. But there’s a problem. We don’t even know what the final message is. We can’t do anything until we get that message from the final temporal totem.”
“That’s the easy part,” Quinn replied breathlessly. “We found the last object. I stashed it in a glider.”
QUINN PEEKED her head around the corner and glanced down into the loading dock. Her eyes roamed over a dozen Syndicate soldiers and technicians who were attending to a cluster of gliders and other small assault crafts.
“There it is,” Quinn whispered, pointing to one of the gliders. “That’s the one.”
“We need a distraction,” offered Milo.
Cody seemed to be considering this, and then he did something unexpected. He stood and shoved Milo roughly to the ground.
“What the hell was that?” Milo replied.
Cody held up his fists as if ready to box. “C’mon, man, you think you can take me?”
Milo looked at Quinn and then he pushed himself up. He ran forward like a tailback, lowering his shoulder, ramming into Cody. The men hit the ground and began wrestling and shouting. Quinn saw that the Syndicate soldiers had heard the commotion. They began moving up a metal catwalk to investigate, and Quinn backtracked. She shot down a side corridor and entered a stairwell before sliding down the banister that curled down to the lower floor.
She slinked toward the loading bay from another angle and took off running across the decking. Her eyes followed the Syndicate soldiers as they advanced on Cody and Milo who were still loudly fighting, shouting, and cursing each other. It was working, the sounds were drawing away all the enemies, except for a single technician who remained behind.
Quinn ducked behind the landing gear on a glider and watched the technician, servicing another glider. The technician was about sixty feet away, which was ten feet closer than the glider she had to reach. She looked down and pulled out the piece of metal, the round from the Syndicate drone that had taken her life. She palmed it and then tossed it as far as she could. The metal soared over the head of the technician and clattered off a faraway wall, pinging a collection of metal equipment.
The technician moved toward the sound, and Quinn vaulted forward and grabbed onto the metal ladder that drooped from the underside of the glider. She shimmied up into the machine and ran toward the back and rummaged around. She reached into the compartment where she’d hidden the silver object, the final temporal totem, and was overjoyed to see it again.
Grabbing the object, she looked out a window to see the technician returning, piece of metal in his hand. Dammit! She was trapped! Now, she’d have to figure another way out of the glider. Quinn retreated to the glider’s command deck and surveyed the long strip of translucent glass-like material that presumably contained the vessel’s flight controls. Below this, was a cube of metal festooned with a joystick and several switches, including a red one housed under a small bubble top.
Quinn pressed her hand to the glass-like material, and nothing happened. Recognizing that it probably worked on biometrics, she cursed and popped open the bubble top and depressed the red button.
WONK!
The glider’s engine roared to life, and the craft began thrumming.
Quinn flipped several of the switches and air-handlers began shaking along with an internal siren of some sort.
Retracing her steps, Quinn crouched in the back of the glider and watched as the Syndicate technician crawled into the craft. As soon as the technician had entered the command deck, Quinn dropped back down the ladder. She could see the Syndicate soldiers breaking up Milo and Cody, pulling the two to their feet. Cradling the silver object like a baby, Quinn rushed back across the loading dock, barely able to avoid the prying eyes of the Syndicate soldiers who’d just looked in her direction. Secure in the stairwell, Quinn glided up the steps and then moved down into another hallway, making for the lab.
MILO AND CODY arrived at the lab ten minutes later, red-faced and disheveled. Cody sported a bruise on his cheek, but was smiling from ear-to-ear.
“I can tell everyone now,” he said, jabbing a thumb at Milo. “I went toe-to-toe with the Universe’s Finest, and lived to tell about it!”
Quinn smiled at Milo. “You guys were awesome. I totally bought the act.”
Milo held her look. “Who said it was an act?”
Quinn pointed to the silver object nestled under the scanner. Cody ambled over and held up the object, examining its exterior.
He grinned. “This is it, ladies and gentlemen. This is the final piece to the puzzle.”
He slid the object into the scanner and powered it up. Quinn and Milo watched a series of lights flash across the scanner and then the machine abruptly stopped. Cody stared, bewildered, and then he powered the scanner down.
“Okay, so there’s good news and bad news,” he said, looking back.
“The good,” Quinn replied.
“It contains another message.”
She smiled. “So, what’s the bad?”
“Um, well, there’s also a bomb hidden inside.”
“Excuse me?”
Cody nodded. “Somebody attached a bomb inside with a twelve-minute timer. Half a pound of Hafnium inserted into a block of old-school plastic explosive. A little old-school, but pretty nice work. Enough to take a bite out of this ship.”
“So, detach the bomb,” Milo said.
Cody shook his head. “No can do, boss. And here’s the kicker. In order to download the message, I have to trip the timer, which means we’d have a finite amount of time to process the message and take action before we’re all turned into bone confetti.”
Milo slapped his hands together, then looked to Quinn. She knew what he was going to say before he said it. They were the only ones who could have done it. The only ones with access to explosives and the silver object.
“He did it, Quinn,” Milo said.
She shook her head. “No, he wouldn’t—”
“Goddammit, Giovanni fucking set us up!” Milo replied, throwing punches in the air. “It’s the only thing that makes sense!”
Quinn stepped to Cody. “What the hell do we do?”
Before Cody could respond, sirens started blaring.
“Christ,” she said, wheeling, making for the door. “They’re onto us!”
Quinn opened the front door and saw Syndicate soldiers. Dozens of them. Heart in her throat, she stepped forward to see that they were running. Running away from the lab toward the middle of the command ship. She glanced up to see Renner dashing past them, waving his arms.
“It’s Harlan and some of the other Marines! They’ve stolen a ship!”
17
A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE
For what seemed like hundreds of miles, there was little beyond Vegas aside from cracked dirt roads and washed out strips of blacktop angling off into the low desert. Giovanni sat silently in the front seat, mesmerized by the darkness outside. Without the lights from the cities and the machines, an entirely different kind of blackness, pure, unadulterated, had gripped the land. He thought this is what it must have been like when the first people settled the area thousands of years ago.
“We’re gonna need to refuel, hoss,” Mackie said. “You used up some of our stores torching that tin can back there.”
Giovanni pointed to a road sign fast approaching. It said, Next Gas Station 85 Miles.
The Gurkha turned off the highway and motored onto a stretch of pitted blacktop that soon gave way to a wind of gravel-topped earth that twisted through ranch land and sweeping vistas that spooled beneath stretches of limestone cliffs. This was rugged country, no lights, no cellphone towers to power communications and equipment. Just a sloping mass of serrated hills filled with things all too eager to strike, sting, or bite.
Continuing on, they drove another seven miles through wilderness marked with No Trespassing, No Hunting, and Bureau of Land Management signs before rumbling across a shallow creek and up an incline to an area that had been hacked into the bush. In the middle of a valley, bordered on all sides by hills of scrub, were four metal trailers and steel structures situated near pods of propane tanks, gas generators, solar panels, and wind turbines. The entire compound gave off the vibe of a commune by way of a frontier outpost.
The Gurkha came to a stop and Giovanni squinted, looking for any sign of movement.
“What is this place?”
Mackie slid the truck into park and withdrew the keys. “It’s the closest place with fuel. The man calls it Numantia.”
“Who calls it that?” Xan asked, rousing awake on the back bench.
“An old salt named Hugo. Used to be an engineer back in the world. Sucker was one of the first to recognize how bad things were gonna get. When the aliens came, he packed up a shit-ton of firepower and headed up here. He’s been doing wrong to the bad guys ever since.”
Giovanni exited the truck, stepping down onto a pile of charred metal. He knelt to see a piece of what looked like a Syndicate drone. Eyes acclimating to the pitch, he saw lots of things he hadn’t been able to see from the truck. The field was blackened and spotted with huge depressions, the kind left by bombs, and here and there was the wreckage of what looked like gliders and airborne drones that had either crashed or been shot down. In fact, it looked as if a great battle had been fought there not too long ago.
The trio walked across the field, past small fires that continued to burn. They advanced on the steel buildings, and Giovanni noticed a section of raised earth off to the right. Mounds of earth marked by boulders that he assumed might be some kind of crude cemetery. Boulders lined the ground, dozens and dozens of them.
Mackie rapped on a door pinned to one of the metal buildings. Giovanni heard shouts on the other side, then footfall. The door was wrenched open and a bearded, wild-eyed man in his fifties peered out from behind the barrel of a bulldog pistol. He was dressed in camouflage pants with an old-school flack jacket and had a wedge of something, Giovanni surmised dipping tobacco, wedged under his lip.
With his wide eyes and crazed mass of salt and pepper hair, Giovanni immediately thought the man looked like an Old Testament prophet. Someone who had just come in from the desert after receiving a revelation. The gun slowly came down, a look of recognition on the older man’s face.
“You look sickly,” the older man said to Mackie.
Mackie grinned. “And you look like hell.”
“That’s what happens when you been in a constant state of battle for three months.”
“Ain’t that what the Bible says, Hugo?”
Hugo nodded. “Job, chapter seven, verse one. The life of man upon the Earth is a warfare.”
“Hells yes,” Mackie replied with a nod. “Truer words were never spoken.”
Hugo’s eyes hopped to Giovanni and Xan. “Who are your friends?”
“Giovanni and Xan. They’re with the resistance now. Giovanni used to be a Marine.”
“Ain’t no more Marines,” Hugo replied, spitting a mouthful of tobacco juice.
Giovanni mustered a smile. “There are more Marines left than you think, sir.”
“Okay. So, where the hell are they?”
Giovanni’s eyes wandered to the sky. “They’re waiting to join us.”
THE INSIDE of the steel building was expansive, but sparsely furnished. There were bunks and a few tables, around which were seated a dozen men and a few women. Weapons and food were piled here and there, and at the rear of the space was a bank of equipment and communications devices.
Introductions were made between everyone, Giovanni scanning the faces of Hugo’s battle-hardened troops. Several of them were disfigured, and a few more were missing fingers or sporting prosthetic limbs.
“Looks like you could use some new blood,” Mackie said.
Hugo chewed on his lips. “We get by on what we got. Our way of fighting out here in the badlands is very particular, Mackie.”
Mackie threw several mock punches at Hugo. “Hit ‘em hard, hit ‘em fast, and keep hitting ‘em until everyone is dead. Am I right?”
Hugo grinned. “That’s the only thing the Scuds understand,” Hugo said, referencing the Syndicate. “You can’t reason with the bastards. On
ly thing you can do is dirt nap ‘em.”
“Fucking-A right,” Xan replied, nodding at Hugo.
“So, you prefer to be a hammer versus a scalpel?” Giovanni asked.
“No, I prefer to take the fight to the goddamn enemy,” Hugo replied, some heat in his voice. “Would you like to see what I mean?”
“We really just came for some fuel,” Giovanni said.
Mackie pointed to a faraway door. “How ‘bout we do both?”
HUGO and three of his men led Giovanni and the others into the field. They stopped in the middle of it, a stiff breeze blowing the scrub. Giovanni looked over at a section of ground that was cluttered with three or four-dozen large stones that had been laid in a pattern like a grid.
“We got a lot of good people buried over there,” Hugo said.
HUGO WAVED a penlight at the ground. Giovanni saw a metal ring in the dirt. One of Hugo’s men grabbed the ring and grunted, pulling back.
The ring tugged open a section of plywood that concealed an immense storage bunker hidden underground. Wooden steps led down twelve feet into the earth. The man who opened the bunker tugged on a bare bulb that splashed the bunker with cold light.
Giovanni smelled the odor of decay and mold as he descended into the bunker. Through the hazy light, he spotted shelves laden with canned and freeze-dried food and water, barrels of fuel, and all manner of weapons, including some that resembled what he’d seen the Syndicate soldiers carrying.
Hugo pointed to a few bladders of gasoline. “Take what you need, but if you wanna see the star at the top of the tree, come with me.”
Hugo headed down with his men and Xan. Giovanni grabbed Mackie by the arm and mimed “what the fuck is going on?!”
“I don’t know what you just did there,” Mackie said.
“That was me saying that your boy Hugo’s a little – how do I describe him?”
