Beyond Armageddon V: Fusion (20 page)

“I have to go,” he said, reluctantly. “I have to—I have to go visit an old friend. Something I have to do. That’s sort of been the story in all this,” he tried to send another message. “There have been things I’ve had to do. And things I have been forced to give up.”

She figured that whatever wrong she had done to him had been beyond the point of forgiveness. She had been one of those things he had been forced to give up because she had done something to deserve abandonment. She could not blame him; not if she had betrayed him.

“I—I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” he corrected but lightheartedly. “Maybe someday you will. Maybe someday—when all this is over—it will be clear. I don’t know if that will make things better or worse. I guess we’ll see. In any case, let me say it again: thank you, for saving me.”

Nina closed her eyes and conjured that feeling of warmth and being wanted. No matter what The Order had taken from her, at some point in the past she had been a complete person.

No, Trevor, thank you for saving me.

“Mother,” Jorgie Benjamin Stone stood at the doorway to his room with his grandfather at his side and looked in at Ashley, “I won’t need all of that. Father said we’ll be traveling light.”

Ashley had already stacked a small suitcase full of underwear, socks, and t-shirts. The second suitcase—for pants, sweatshirts, and jeans—would come next.

Her frustration boiled over.

“Well maybe your father is wrong, did you ever think of that? Did that ever cross your mind? Father isn’t always right, you know. He—he makes mistakes. He’s been known to be wrong. Maybe just once
mother
knows what’s best.”

Benjamin Trump—elderly and thinning—tried to intercede, “Oh, now Ashley the boy didn’t mean anything by that.”

JB’s reply came not in words but in a bear hug against his mother’s legs. She silenced her tirade and returned his hug. A lump grew in her throat. A big hole opened in her chest.

Grandpa, who had already said his goodbyes to JB over a game of catch, bowed his head and walked away.

“I’m—I’m sorry,” she apologized.

She realized her son cried. Honest-to-god tears. Deep sobs. His shoulders raised and lowered. His arms clutched tight around her legs.

For a moment he shed the trappings of the mysterious child with the evolved brain chemistry and the supernatural insights. For a moment there stood nothing more than a nine-year-old boy about to leave his mother, possibly forever.

“Mommy,” he pleaded, “I love you, Mommy. I love you!”

“I know, I know,” she stroked his hair. “Listen, JB, I won’t let Trevor take you. You don’t have to go.”

The child answered through sobs, “Yes, I do have to go. Father is right. It is the only way. But I love you, Mommy. I hope you know that. I love you so much!”

He buried his head into her again and cried. She felt damp streaks from his eyes run along her pant leg.

“I love you too, honey. I always have. You’re my son.”

“Yes,” he agreed as if it might be a revelation. “I’m your son. I came from you, too.”

Ashley grabbed his hands and knelt in front of her boy. She searched his red eyes and spoke strongly to her son. Her words held a mother’s power; a power gentle enough to sculpt the heart of a child and strong enough to change the universe.

“That’s right, Jorgie, you remember that. You are a very special boy, but you’re also my son.” She held his hands up in her own, pressing her flesh to his. “A
human
boy. No matter what happens—no matter what else you may be—remember that. Remember our time together. Remember what it is like to be happy and sad; to love your parents, to play catch with grandpa. Don’t you ever forget, do you hear me?”

“I won’t, Mommy.”

“Promise me.”

Jorgie—tears still flowing—stepped to the bed, grabbed his stuffed bunny wrapped in its tiny blanked, and answered his mother.

“I promise.”

Clouds rolled in over the horizon and spoiled another brilliant May sunset. The cover overhead draped the hillside graveyard in early shadows. A gust signaling an approaching thunderstorm—still far off—blew between the rows of stone markers carrying dried leaves and tiny buds in a mix of old and new.

Hauser managed to land Eagle One with his usual skill across one of the cemetery roads with the landing gear touching down between headstones. The pilot waited behind as Trevor strolled among the tombs searching each name one after another until he found his old friend.

Dante Thomas Jones.

Trevor removed the baseball cap from his head and knelt first to one knee, then to both. He stared at the letters etched in stone.

He could not forget that Dante Jones had played a pivotal role in the plot against him. Nor could he forget, however, that Dante Jones had been his friend for many years going back to the days before the old world ended.

Forgiveness? No. Not possible. Dante had known as much when he purposely aimed his pistol to miss Trevor during their confrontation atop the White House. He had known as much when he had turned that pistol to his own temple, an act of responsibility as much as escape.

“I miss you, my old friend,” and his hand touched the cold marker. “I thought I’d come and see you before I go. I may not be back. Ah, hell, I probably won’t be back. I guess I should be honest with you. I guess…” Trevor’s thoughts trailed off to memories of the last decade.

“I guess I wasn’t always honest with you. Not completely. Maybe that’s part of the reason you listened to Evan. I made you my Internal Security Director because I wanted you close, because I trusted your instincts. That’s what I told you, wasn’t it? Part of that is true, I think. But if I’m going to confess, part of the reason is just because you were my friend and I wanted to give you something to do and I could keep an eye on you if I kept you close. Maybe I didn’t think you capable of succeeding in this new world without me around to keep watch over you. But I didn’t, did I? The bigger we grew the more I expected from you and I wasn’t around to help out when it got tough.”

An early evening bat whizzed overhead in search of prey. Trevor watched it fly off until its shadowy body blended with the darkening sky.

“I’ll bet that was tough for you. Well, not in the beginning. Early on it was all easy. All black and white. You had a bunch of guys and started doing your patrols and watching out for any criminals that might have been among the ranks of the survivors. Easy stuff early on. Then as we grew—well, that’s when things got hard. I wasn’t much of a help either, was I?”

Trevor recalled chewing out Dante on more than one occasion. He remembered the creation of the Senate and how that body held influence over I.S. Legal influence that Trevor had sanctioned.

“You were caught in the middle sometimes. Okay, a lot of times. Maybe all the time, right? But I didn’t have the time to worry about it, Dante. Too much to do. Too many big things to pay attention to. That’s why I always told you how much I hated all the politicians, the procedures, the bullshit. It clouds things. Evan knew that. He played it well. He played you well.”

Trevor removed his hand from the gravestone and stood.

“I can’t forgive you, Dante, even if I do miss you. I’m sorry. Maybe I am a bit of a monster. Sometimes I feel trapped, kind of like you must’ve felt. I have to do what I have to do. I mean,” Trevor gripped his hands into fists and looked at them, “I have nothing other than this war. Over the years, I’ve come to learn something. It’s not nice. It’s not heroic. It’s actually something to be ashamed of, I think. What I’ve come to learn, Dante, is that maybe when the existence of your entire race is at stake, then maybe the ends do justify the means. Because I’ll tell you something, Dante, I will do anything to finish this.
Anything.”

That thought stung.

“Even sacrifice my son. Do you know how scary that is? To know that I’m capable of anything if I think it serves the cause? Does that make me a fanatic? A dictator? That’s what the Old Man warned me about when he said my soul was damned. I can do these things but they haunt me all the same. If JB dies, it will rip my heart apart. But if I think it could save our people, then I’ll do it. I hope that doesn’t happen. I pray it doesn’t. But damn if I won’t do it.”

The tombstone did not answer.

“Hell, I don’t even know exactly what I’m doing. I just have a feeling, you know? A feeling that I have to shake things up and that he can do it.”

Another breeze blew through. Far away a soft rumble of thunder carried over the hillside cemetery.

“I have to get going. I think if you were here you’d wish me luck. I believe that. On some level you thought you were doing something that was right. You thought I had gone too far or become too powerful.”

Trevor thought about his rage-filled purges of Internal Security and the Senate upon his return. He thought about arrests and executions and instant justice dispensed in the name of exposing the guilty, punishing traitors, and streamlining The Empire to face the invasion in the West.

“Maybe you had a point after all, right? Well it won’t matter if I fail. If somehow we survive all this, then I’ll ask for forgiveness. Until then, I have to do this. I don’t think I have any choice.”

A new dawn came. The sun reached skyward from behind a horizon of ocean water. Seagulls cawed and cackled around the docks, the buildings, and the artificial reefs of overturned ships.

Most of the Naval Yard at Norfolk served as little more than a museum in the years since Armageddon. With ground wars in the south against the Hivvans and then west against California, Trevor and The Empire held little need for naval vessels. A cruel irony considering the U.S. Navy weathered the Armageddon storm better than the other military branches.

Parts of the Norfolk docks did come back on line to support and supply coastal patrols as well as long range reconnaissance and intelligence ships. The former group included The Empire’s new Barracuda-class attack subs: small, fast, and deadly. The latter group comprised a handful of nuclear powered submarines and a few surface ships used to deliver spies and arms to points around the globe.

Activity at Norfolk peaked prior to the California invasion. Gordon Knox’s intelligence apparatus kept ships coming and going constantly, particularly to Europe to support organized survivors there as well as the Caribbean where Hivvan remnants held sway over several islands.

The Order’s invasion changed Norfolk once more. As Trevor and his son Jorgie exited Eagle One on the open pavement between warehouses near a line of impressive docks, they thought the place deserted.

To the north Trevor saw dead sea warriors listing in their berths, victims in the first year of Armageddon left to rust and wither.

The bow of the cruiser
USS Leyte Golf
sat crumbled against its moorings as if some great force had knocked it sideways. The Destroyer
USS Porter
suffered a similar fate Most of its stern had been torn away land its lower decks flooded.

A brilliant white Snowy Egret perched on the tilted deck like an arrogant Admiral stubbornly refusing the loss of his ship. As Trevor stepped across the pavement the bird found The Emperor and watched him with a gaze Trevor imagined to be judgmental.

Further away the scene appeared even grimmer. Rusted hulls spoke of capsized behemoths, at least one an aircraft carrier. Trevor wondered how many brave souls lay entombed inside.

But the docks in front of Trevor and JB differed from the rest of the base. One of the southern berths hosted the frigate
USS Nicholas
with a crew onboard.

Two Barracuda subs stood ready at the docks, their black and gray hulls gave them an eerie, predatory appearance complimented by the hammerhead bow where two portals—like eyes—sat half in and half out of the water. A lethal-looking spine ran the length of the ship much like Jules Verne’s
Nautilus
from
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.

However, Trevor and his son were not there to ride aboard either the
Nicholas
or the Barracudas. Their journey required something with greater range than the attack subs and a lower profile than a frigate.

The vessel that fit the bill waited in the harbor waters at the end of the main pier. In comparison to the much smaller barracudas, the
USS Newport News
Los Angeles-class submarine played the part of the seasoned warrior, a capable and deadly monster sporting an intimidating conning tower above a cylinder-like hull.

Not only had the
Newport News
won accolades in the old world, but it had already achieved legendary status as the vessel that conveyed Jon Brewer and his strike team to the arctic north to secure the ruins and turn the war to humanity’s favor. It was an elder statesman of the sea that had found fresh purpose in a new world.

Trevor and his son stopped at the edge of the pier and gazed at their waiting ride. He held a leather duffle bag in one hand. Jorgie dressed in khaki shorts and a navy blue shirt and hauled a pre-end-of-the-world
The Transformers
backpack complete with cartoon robots morphing into cars and planes. He also held bunny—wrapped in his protective blanket—tight to his chest.

Behind them came Rick Hauser—Trevor’s personal pilot—a blond haired man with glasses who still looked young despite being in his mid-thirties. He carried two more bags and another backpack, all heavily loaded.