So It Begins (7 page)

  Brad shivered in the river of cold air, “Dad, what happens to you?”

  “This bunker was made to stand up to a Megaderm stampede during the hunts. Those things are fifty tons of fur and tusks,” I wanted to smile and pal around with him, comfort him, lie to him. He deserved better. I used the autohammer to spike the tripod to the floor and then sat on the minimal ass-tray the sadistic designer called a seat. I grasped the firing yolk and the crouched gun tensed. It swung back and forth, casing the valley and looking for heat, for light, for shape. It purred like a cat as gears whined like sharpening claws. “It should be some protection.”

  “You aren’t going to make it, are you, Dad?”

  I got up off of the low slung turret and hugged my boy closely. “This isn’t about survival. It’s about buying my family time.”

  “Will your mercenary crew come to help, Dad?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ll try to hold out as long as I can.” I took a deep, shuddering breath and clamped down on the wobbling within my throat. “Your sister is very young, so it’s up to you to remember me to her. It will be your job to protect her.”

  He nodded, tears and snot running freely down his face. “I will. I promise.”

  “Then get back to the crawler. Drive it back to the emergency bunker and stay with your mother and sister. Take it slow.” He dove into my chest and bounced off the hard, armored plates. He hugged me so fiercely, but I couldn’t feel it at all. There was a sad thought there, somewhere, but I didn’t go digging for it. I had plenty already.

  I pulled him away. He stood there; bathing in what he thought was cowardice. I sighed and smiled sadly. “You are too young for this. I’m proud of you for realizing that. Now go, son. I have to get ready.”

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you too, son.”

  And then he was gone.

  The next few minutes were empty, indeed. I started up the radio. “Eight to Base. Eight in position. Over.”

  A crackling voice came back to me like the narrator of all my nightmares. “Roger, Eight. Stay sharp, Mr. Prophet. Trouble at Ten and Four. Standard protocol, no surprises. Over.”

  “Roger. Staying on position. No contact yet. Over. ”

  “Roger. Out.”

  I grabbed a bag of mine grenades and exited into the cutting wind. One by one I pulled the pins and heaved them in high arcs. I had no idea if the cold would diffuse them. I had no idea if the snow would absorb them and keep them from detonating with full force. I couldn’t say if they would do enough damage. Hope was a kissing cousin to panic. I had to find a place inside myself that only remembered from second to second, it had to forget the past, forget the future. The minutes washed around me, unnoticed and uncounted. They had to be. Otherwise I would be hoping my son was still running, still escaping, getting far enough, fast enough.

  Please be fast enough.

  I went back into the bunker, sat down, and breathed deeply. Their ships were massive, boxy, and clumsy. The only flat piece of ground large enough for them to land on up here was in the valley below, and now I had it blocked.

  They wouldn’t just destroy the bunker. That’s not how they worked. They’d announce themselves; they’d approach slowly, loudly. They would use fear. They fed on fear. Fear is weakness and weakness eases Conversion. They needed living people. That was their mission.

  They had no other purpose.

  I grabbed my old, dented helmet. I took off my warm hat, cap, and muffs and slipped the icy metal mask on like an old friend. I felt the Warrior inside of me wake up, the demons milling about in the back of my head and giving me advice. I patched the helmet comm into the militia frequency and sat back on the turret, relishing the power and precision of the war machine.

  Another roar began, louder than any of the others. It descended upon me like a judgment. Snow leapt from the exposed tops of trees and vibrated into a mist of microscopic crystals. Billions of unique snowflakes were rendered into carbon copy shards that spiraled into the sky on columns of sound. Down in the valley, lights flared and cyclones of snow became pillars of salt. The engines sounded like God screaming in pain. The helmet shielded my ears directly, but the sound reached into my very bones and traveled up to my ears in painful waves. Only once the lights winked out and the snow began to steam into thick fog did my ears stop ringing.

  I tried to call out, “Eight to Base: Contact. Over.”

  The voice that answered was not of my controller. It strove for goodness and light, but held a razor edge where emotion and understanding were beheaded before a crowd, “Humans, rejoice! The One True God has sent us to show you His Divine Light. Know that we are your servants, and we only seek to bring you to perfect understand of the Lord Our God. . .”

  And there they were.

  I checked, but they were on every frequency, blacking out all other transmissions with the weight of their own. The voice was still going when the first few reached the furthest mine grenades, sending parts flying with the sound of two vehicles mating at high speed. Their dark shapes cut holes in the translucent air, shunning the silvery moons as they began to lope faster and faster. “. . . You should not rebel against your God, frail men . . .”

  This was the worst part, the apocrypha I kept from my son. The robots knew they were not alive, that they could not sin. Because they were not alive, they could not murder or be murdered. They would come in waves, from now until they were all destroyed, sacrificing as many as were needed to convert as many as could be reached. They had all of history and science to draw from when designing their bodies. They were shaped like the dead, like priests, like chromium angels and obsidian reapers. Golden christs, leaden monks, and ivory priests bearing instruments of pain and torture, but never death.

  At least not yet.

  I fingered the turret controls and the gun jumped to obey. The holographic sight lit up and highlighted my enemies as I let them get closer, closer. “. . . Know that we have studied the words of God for longer than most of you have been alive, and we know the true price of rebellion . . . .”

  There were many . . . just too many. “. . . Come to us, and we shall bring you peace . . .”

  The targeting system lit one of my targets up in red, showing it had entered optimal range. I hit the button for just an instant—

  —The world went hot and white. My visor darkened, but not before my eyes drank in far too much light. I blinked, and blinked, blue ghosts blocking out the world beyond my skull. Then a hand lifted me, threw me into the corner like a boneless doll. Again the ground trembled and sound resonated in my lungs, so loud it was a primal force. The whole world shook as if in palsy, lights inside the bunker shattered and debris flooded in though the firing port. It seemed like forever until the snow and dust stopped swirling and began to settle. It was three breaths more before I found the heart to move.

  I crawled back to the turret, but there was nothing except an expanding cloud of smoke and steam in the valley. Shrapnel glittered in the sky like falling stars over the far-off shape of the Inquisitor ship. It lay on the blackened earth, a flaming shell of a city visited by one molecule of God’s wrath. Trees were toppled, burnt and nude, exposing flash-fried dirt and charred vegetation. Above it, like a raptor with wings of fire, a small, agile warship circled. Only when I heard my comm crackle in my ear, did I realize that the Inquisitors were no longer talking.

  “Still alive, Prophet?” The voice was human. It was expected, yet strange, familiar, yet out of place.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Actually, I’m captain, now. Captain Arthur isn’t around anymore.” The voice sounded confident, but a little ashamed. “I’ll explain later. Can you handle this end? Some of your countrymen are having a bad time of it and they need us immediately.”

  I glanced out of the firing port, counting twenty-odd moving shapes in the haze, “Yes, sir.”

  “Good man. Hold firm and we’ll be back for you,
Angel
.” And there was a kick of far-off engines as the dropship lit up and pushed it toward site four or ten, leaving me on my own.

  Beyond my concrete cathedral, dark shapes dug themselves from tombs of ice and began advancing on me.

  That may not be my captain, but it is my team.

  My wife and kids are going to be OK.

  I jammed down the buttons and showed the Inquisition the fullness of my Rebellion.

CLEAN SWEEPS

Jonathan Maberry

Cloaking devices are science fiction. Relics of old Star Trek shows from the last century. We don’t have cloaks, we never had cloaks. And we don’t have any chameleon circuits or shit retroengineered from alien craft.

  What we got is stealth technology. We got LOT—Low Observability Technology. It doesn’t make our birds invisible, but it pretty much makes the radar and motion scanners look in the wrong place, or misunderstand what they’re seeing. We can look like a big black hole in the middle of the sky. We can look like space junk. Or, we can look like feedback and sensor static. I always liked LOT that makes us look like static because most of the stations have been out here so long that their systems are older than dinosaur shit. Most of what they see nine to five is static.

  That works for me. It keeps us from getting shot out of the black before we can put boots on the deck.

  We tune our LOT systems to read the static backwash from the sensor arrays of any ship or base we approach, and then the computers work out some kind of math wizard fluctuating algorithm that matches the normal radio wave crap the universe has been kicking out since the big balloon popped.

  Surprise always helps, but we didn’t know how much of that was on our side. We were hoping to surprise the shit out of
them
. I’m a big fan of catching the bad guys with their dicks in their hands. Makes for a better raid.

  Yeah, I know what the press says. WorldNews and SolarAP both have this thing for firefights—which they insist on called ‘shoot-outs’, like we’re the O.K.-fucking Corral. Army PR sends them maybe six to eight mission video files a month, but do the clean sweeps ever make the Net? Nope. Not a one unless it’s a god damn slow news day in the middle of August, where they’ll report on crop growth or dig up some old celeb for a ‘where are they now?’ space filler.

  But somebody pulls a trigger and it’s a breaking story. And these news fucks don’t give a red-hot flying shit if it’s a bad guy, a Federal Ranger, or one of our boys in Free-Ops that either fires the shot or takes the hit. Bullets and blood, man, that’s all they care about; and the bigger the body-count the bigger the ratings.

  We Free-Ops guys only ever get press if something goes wrong, so we’ve been on the news…what, maybe five times in four years? And of those, the first three were during the mine riots following the cluster-fuck with the unions. That whole thing took less than a week. Since then the only time Free-Ops made the news was back in ’93 when Captain Lisa Stanley got killed while her team was running down some pirates running the alley between Phobos and Deimos. I mean, come on, Stanley was killed when a stray shot hit an O
₂
tank in the airlock. I saw the official reports, and the conclusion I drew from it was that she probably tripped on one of the landing sleds the pirates used when they breeched the cargo ship. She tripped and popped off a round that bounced all over the airlock until it punched into the O
₂
tank. It was her bad luck that it was after they’d re-pressurized. Twenty seconds earlier there’d have been no spark, and no death, and no story.

  The news jackasses made her a hero across half the Network. My guess? If Stanley hadn’t been a California blonde with yabos out to there, the news people wouldn’t have run with it as long as they did. That and they’re always starved for action stories. There’s only so much mileage you can get from politicians making assholes of themselves, or celebrities getting caught fucking the wrong wife.