Alien-Nation Chapter 24: Fire and Brimstone
Fire & Brimstone
“Don’t be ridiculous, I trust you as much as anyone.” -Sullivan
Occasional instructions called out to Grouper had gotten us out of the wooded Appalachian mountains and toward Bethlehem. We’d made a couple wrong turns, but we were still on time in our borrowed old maroon minivan.
The haul from the armory had been disappointing, but we had accomplished the dual goals of getting answers for what had happened to my chosen Field Officers, and equipping the Brotherhood.
I’d even netted a few rather notable personal upgrades in the process.
My newest outfit was a welcome surprise, and one I’d read nothing about in our files. There had only been one of them, draped over a weapon rack in a dark corner.
I’d been getting by with an old prototype made of stitched together undermeshes, cut, hemmed, and tailored from fallen Marines, which was said to have ‘hopefully’ been able to absorb a laspistol’s shot, and ‘almost certainly’ able to stop a human pistol round. The parts of it that had absorbed rifle rounds ‘in the process of acquisition’ didn’t bend flexibly. Questionable protection aside, I’d also grown until the material had ridden up over my ankles and wrists. That had made the decision for me as much as anything.
I, a hermit crab, have happily found a new shell.
Thoughtfully, it even had little armored pads on the joints.
Gavin had seemingly been flustered by what little he knew about it. Even the lead engineer didn’t seem to know much about it ‘on its own,’ and insisted it was meant to go to ‘something else,’ which Gavin then supplied as belonging to the new ‘Gravity Harness’ I’d seen flinging the soldier around the previous room’s obstacle course.
‘Just in case you find the new gravity harness a bit much to work with,’ Gavin had said, after I’d demanded to give it a try, too.
There were even little boosters on it for ‘maneuver testing,’ little charges that had a tendency to disorient the wearer, and possibly even wrench joints out of socket if engaged too quickly. They’d accordingly earned the monikers ‘vomit comet,’ ‘bonebreaker’ and ‘pinball,’ though I’d managed to avoid the worst sort of thing Gavin apparently feared. I was warned a dozen times to ‘not use the maneuvering thrust above the lockout threshold, under any circumstance, ever.’
No one could answer why they hadn’t just shrunk down the maneuvering output thrusters to a more manageable output, but looking back I supposed that was what prototypes were for.
I had avoided embarrassing myself since the controls were designed not too distantly to the mag-boot sim training module Morsh had borrowed from the Delaware Marine Garrison. Between that and some parkour skills I’d been honing, I felt I’d put in something of a good showing.
In defense of Gavin’s lapse in forgetting the suit had even existed, the whole facility had felt rather disjointed and disorganized, with arrows promising ‘research’ or ‘weapons range’ leading instead to empty storage closets or collapsed rooms.
Keeping an eye on the facility, its researchers, their progress on who was developing what, and where development stood with each project and where within sounded like a tall order. They needed someone who understood both the technology and insurgency’s needs. In other words, they’d genuinely needed G-Man and Radio reassigned and to get the whole place back-on-track.
I left orders for them to make the reorganization his new top priority when he was back on-duty, along with ‘expansion of production,’ which I knew he’d take to heart. Then I’d taken all the things I’d tested, for myself to keep.
So another birthday had come and gone mostly unremarked upon, with my father working late again. What of it?
This would be a test on every level. Could I lead outside of Delaware? Just how much havoc could we wreak in a half-hour? Could the Brothers’ tender hearts tolerate the screams, the pain, the possibility of loss?
I had the feeling that some, or even most of the leadership were individuals such as Brother Thomas. Men who occupied high positions in the clergy before the invasion, and were taken aback by the shocking bloodthirst of their congregations. They found themselves at the head of a hungry and ferocious beast with no way to control it except to meekly go along, objecting to the violence wherever they could. Attrition or abandonment would see them replaced by troops who didn’t trust them, and that was if they were lucky.
I wondered if I’d done the same with G-Man and Radio- positioning non-fighters at the heads of armies.
Speaking of results, I had one last slight problem to solve: The final scouting report had come in just a few minutes before we’d left, and it was as I’d feared- our Local Intelligence Source was somehow incorrect. They’d said that the neighboring ‘West Side’ was destroyed, ‘gone’.
In truth, most of the adjoining town not only still stood with ‘most’ of its original structures intact, but it was populated near-entirely by Shil’vati civilians, hidden from Bethlehem’s view by the considerable reforestation efforts that ringed each side, further isolating the city of horrors.
Now in-transit, I’d tried to modify my plan and communicate the changes through code, and it took every ounce of restraint to not keep modifying and tweaking the plan to accommodate the unexpected. Frantic, rapid missives would come across as muddled, confused, and prove counterproductive.
This gave me time to wonder:
The ‘West Side’ of Bethlehem as a landmass was physically still there, buildings and all, but it wasn’t really the same place now that its components had been changed, was it? I had to be missing something about this Town of Theseus’s purpose to the state’s governess.
This settlement’s continued existence likely wasn’t an accident or oversight. A whole town of Shil’vati was far from the norm. Perhaps it was a beachhead meant to test large numbers of Shil’vati in time, to force familiarity and eventually enjoin the two species side-by-side until they were indistinguishable? A growing population on one side, a shrinking population on the other, creating a more ‘natural’ way to prevent insurgencies from forming? At least the human school-age children were all shipped offworld as a matter of policy, ensuring further arrivals from the age-related turnover.
The Shil’vati authorities had unknowingly given some small mercy to our task, taking away any reason for us to hold back.
A few squads led by Binary, pulled from one of the prongs of our attack on Bethlehem had been ordered to make sure West Side’s new denizens fled, and force them to accept that this land was not their own no matter who had sold it to them or what lies they’d been told otherwise.
I closed my tired eyes behind my mask for a moment and let my other senses sharpen.
The fate of those here now and our unborn billions will now depend on my courage to end this here. Our cruel and unrelenting enemy leaves us only this course of action, or total submission to their depraved whims. We must resolve to conquer, or die.
This is pure, simple retribution. Don’t overthink it, don’t let yourself get caught up in the act, and don’t spend a moment questioning yourself on the moment before a strike when you need your focus, nor blinded by your righteous anger.
Once again certain of my orders as our car crested the final ridge and descended toward the city. The reforestation efforts had been extreme here, leveling entire towns to fill the downtown’s new alien structures, making the city stand out like the red center of a bullseye. Even the abandoned Steel Stacks had been levelled.
The mind-wipers’ work had grown more refined since we’d seen Senator Bouchard stumbling through Warehouse Base. Now the victims almost passed for complete, ordinary people. I tried to imagine what life was like there, just for a moment. The denizens flicked lights off and on, and clung on to what passed for life in a system that had turned them from people into lab rats. I hoped they were unaware of what had been done to them, as the patient notes suggested if you read between the lines on the researchers’ notes.
That somehow seemed better than their true selves being trapped in their own minds, unable to scream as their bodies went through the motions of normalcy.
Release them all from this hell. Leave no stone of it standing upon another.
To the Monitoring System, the day had been like any other. A few people hadn’t come in to work on time. Hardly surprising; The weekend was a holiday. Most of the expected vehicles with the expected number of occupants within had still rolled right past the checkpoints with a wave. The bored Shil’vati staffing them were more interested in monitoring what left than what entered.
The town square had reported an internal water leak, and an apartment block issued a complaint from a building manager about illegal parking in a fire lane. Neither was a critical issue.
A few more areas around the city had similar issues crop up, though most of it was waved away with vague work papers and hurriedly drafted contracts detailing urgent works, sudden updates bringing equipment to a new job site, to be left in place overnight.
If this had been done all at once in the course of an hour or two, it would have and should have raised flags on such a tightly wound surveillance system.
But these ‘contractors’ had deliberately been sourced from other townships, and were spread throughout the course of the day. The system’s tendrils were there to prevent people with home addresses within the bounds of their authority from leaving without cause, or ‘acting outside of expected behavior patterns.’ The monitor turned a blind eye to those from the outside. At this stage, there were still people outside its constant surveillance. Enormous blind spots, really, a design flaw for a system meant to be far larger than this test prototype.
If the surveillance system had expanded farther, communicated better with the state’s broader security apparatus, it might have connected stolen truck reports that matched the descriptions of the vehicles left abandoned. Two, for example, in front of a power substation right in plain view of one of the very many cameras spread through the city. If the system had had either a brain, or a human at the helm, it would have realized the danger and dispatched something to move or investigate it. The system should have summoned a gravitic picker to gently lift the van high above the city, until it could be safely hurled clear over the mountains, shortly followed by the dozen or so others just like it spread at strategic positions.
A man came with an army to make an example, and the system barely took notice.
The girls in their lightly defended garrisons, eyes vigilantly and always inward, did not know what lurked and descended around them.
But I knew.
I knew because it was not just any army.
It was my army.
These were my men, standing in their ones and twos, forming columns and huddled circles as the sun set.
And we were here to turn this place’s hopes to bitter ash, for the harsh truth is we don’t all dream the same.
Bethlehem’s internal surveillance equipment and system did not extend to our rendezvous point, and no curiosity was extended to affairs beyond Bethlehem’s new, greatly reduced perimeter.
Our van with the flowery Be Kind bumper sticker still attached stopped just short of where the nearest Shil’vati garrison unknowingly awaited its destruction.
The guards were content with their lives, often a mix of commoner semi-irregular Militiawomen to round out the number of Marines, easily distracted by the locals who they regularly predated upon when they got an itch, which usually happened on weekends and holidays.
I stared at the tall, nondescript brutalist office building which had condemned Bethlehem to its impending fate. The building had been emptied, staff rounded up in a ‘fire drill inspection,’ with assigned ‘fire wardens’ directing the staff to the basement. I’d been tempted by a suggestion to drop the building on top of them, but couldn’t figure out a way to make the timing work. Instead, they were herded into waiting ‘emergency vehicles’ for the emergency drill,’ to be ‘taken to a nearby hospital for evaluation,’ and now were locked inside, waiting to drive out when the moment was right.
I’d been told they had all been ‘compliant with instructions,’ and overly-trusting until our trap had finished springing shut.
It shouldn’t have been surprising, but I’d spent enough time living a life of justified paranoia, terrified of people like them and the power they wielded. While they enjoyed the blessings of state power.
A Heretic siding with those who believed in God, pitched against True Believers, who don’t. What a thoroughly confusing world we live in.
So far, the system that few denizens knew of and fewer spoke about, one ostensibly meant to ‘keep everyone safe’, had done nothing to stop us.
It seemed Outsiders could do anything, even kidnap the denizens with a half-plausible cover story, while those unfortunate souls trapped within the boundaries had to mind their language, or else be dragged into the building and remade in their jailors’ idealized image of what man should be.
Had we known this from the start, we would have bothered with even fewer subtleties.
Grouper put our van in ‘park’ and wordlessly handed the keys and a flare gun to a ‘Marshal,’ along with rendezvous coordinates and the atlas I’d been reviewing. The Marshal would be tasked with leading the vehicles to the South side of Bethlehem, opposite here, around the far edge of the city. His job would be to find Hex and park there, where they would wait as our ride out of there, also ensuring none of the city’s denizens managed to escape via that way.
I saw Brother Gregory give a gentle and encouraging push to a young man in robes, who approached me hesitatingly. He kept looking intermittently at the ground, then up at my eyes, and then away before addressing me.
“My Emperor. Your letter has been collected. I personally saw the mail truck collect it.”
He held out his hand, and I was handed a primed detonator, its green LED mirroring my own night vision lenses.
“Good work.” I answered, and he beamed from under his balaclava until his eyes were almost squinted shut. He was of a slighter build than most of the others, his sword’s carved decorations fresh and bright, indicating it was new. An initiate of some sort. “What’s your name?”
“Oscar, sir.”
“That’s your callsign?”
“N-no. It’s my name.”
I laughed. He was so innocent and new to this that it was genuinely refreshing. He was actually older than me. “You’re the one who blew the cover off this.” I evaluated him, and sensed a certain anxiety. “Do you know how you dodged the mind-wiper?”
His blink and sag of the shoulders told me he hadn’t known that for certain. That he’d been holding onto some doubt on the subject. The young man straightened back up, his monk’s robes so new they still had their creases. “Sir?”
“You were too old for the offplanet exchange, too young to be medically cleared for ‘behavioral modification’ at the time. Your first entry in the file is from last week, a remark on the fact that you were one of the few who hadn’t been behaviorally modified. Those others, all four of them, have already been extracted to a safe zone.” An old shelter, hastily built during the invasion, filled with the pitifully few still-sane men who were de-facto kidnapped.
“I’m not…”
“You just barely talked your way out of a same-day ‘mandatory medical intervention’. So tell me, as The Last Good Man of Bethlehem, what do you think of the city before us?”
I swept a hand over the townscape in an exaggerated motion.
“If you’d asked me a month ago, I’d have said it was dying in a thousand ways I wouldn’t know how to really fix. No real jobs, a social system that never made any sense to me, and makes even less sense now, and my family has- well, had lived here for a hundred years. We just got by, keeping our heads down, fighting the battles we knew how to handle. I just didn’t know how it was supposed to keep working, keep going, you know?”
“And if I asked you now?”
“I’d say it can’t be fixed. I…saw my parents change,” he muttered. “They weren’t always like they are now. They twitch when they talk, like their words aren’t even their own. I hear someone else’s voice when their mouths move. I saw more and more people doing that, too. I’d never given it any thought, assumed it was the stress of the war, or the move downtown, something in the water, I don’t know. When almost everyone’s acting that way, it stops feeling so weird, until you meet people who don’t. But you don’t see outsiders so much here, and you don’t think about that either, since no one else does.”
“And then?”
“Then you realize, they’ve been hollowed out. Everyone you know’s been replaced. They died a long time ago. And people don’t notice, or at least seem not to. Probably for their own safety. I don’t know how many close calls I must have had, and I’ll try to not spend the rest of my days reflecting on what might have been.” He knew he was babbling, but couldn’t seem to stop himself. I was intrigued, this was a unique perspective, one I wish I had more time to hear. “You’d think we should have, but…” he hung his head. “Dad always said ‘if it was real the TV’d have said so’. I don’t think he thought it was real even as it was being done to him. Until he was gone.”
“Don’t be ashamed,” I reassured him. “We all miss details, don’t see the things we aren’t prepared for and have no sensible explanation to give. This usually lasts until we’re picking through the wreckage of our lives, putting the pieces together to try and understand what happened. What has transpired here is mad. Mad and terrible. We will take our revenge for your family and neighbors tonight. We will burn this place to the ground. The ones responsible are…” I smiled at the sight of the vehicles lining up to leave the city, whose monitoring system might have started to take notice of the unusual number of vans from beyond the city lining up toward one of the few roads out of town. We wouldn’t even have to cross a state border to get them where the prisoners inside were going. “...Well, you’ll soon see. All I can promise you is retribution in blood, scorched earth, and the shattered dreams of our enemies. That we turn all this to ash.”
When he didn’t speak, Grouper gave him another thump. “That is more than most who are wronged ever receive.”
He bowed his head low. “My thanks,” was all he managed.
I turned my eye from him to the parked vehicles filled with our victims, and then to the men gathered and began my headcount, my stomach sinking with the uncertainty of what I saw. Changing orders at the last minute always incurred a risk, and the men likely knew that.
Our prong was the nearest to ‘West Side’, and it was from here I’d ordered men to be pulled away and around. I would personally help fill in the depleted numbers and lead from the weakened flank, where I could also try and use the gravity harness to get across to West Side, should something go awry. It would stretch me thin, but it seemed like a worthwhile gambit.
This batch was eager to see the Shil’vati bleed: Members from a pair of Roman Catholic monasteries. One somewhat local to here, and another on the far end of the state. Both had been raided and sacked by Governess Nohvyrka’s Militia. They’d nominally sought information connected to refusal to pay taxes and examining extremist sympathies. The church had tried claiming exemptions that had lapsed since the surrender was signed. In the process of the raid, the monastery was looted of all Nohvyrka’s Militiawomen had wanted ‘to make up for the missed payments.’ Books, art, and flesh.
The humiliation had been to make a point. Unfortunately for them, Grouper and the Brotherhood came knocking at the ruined gate, with a tempting offer while the wounds were still fresh.
Their vows and virtues broken, the wronged sought vengeance, a restoration of their wounded honor, a tithe paid in blood. They’d learned the hard way that there was no coexistence. Now I intended to turn dozens of them loose on West Side.
How was I at full strength on this arm, even after the redeployment orders? Had the Brothers refused their order to redeploy to West Side? Changing orders at the last minute always incurred a risk, and the men likely knew that, but I hadn’t counted them for cowards or unwilling to go kill Shil’vati after what they’d been through. Yet the original full count of them were gathered here in the foundational footprint of the old college, where a stately old building had once proudly stood.
“Grouper,” I said under my breath once he was done. “There are too many men here.”
At least none of them snapped a rifle in my direction, even if conversation was dying down as the Brotherhood took me in, almost all of them for the first time. Not everyone had a mask, not even those plain and unadorned ones that had been handed out fresh from the armory’s stock.
I spotted Binary pushing her way through the crowd toward us, her red symbol glowing against the white of her mask in the low light. She was supposed to lead the assault on West Side.
“You made it,” Binary sounded cheerful, but when she took in my body posture, she went quite still, apparent even through the loose dark hoodie. “What’s wrong?”
“We can’t risk the Shil’vati in West Side near Bethlehem alerting the Governess, or arming themselves and interfering with our nearby operation by blocking our escape route. I decided that the best option was to engage them. I ordered the men to be dispersed across both halves of Bethlehem, and for you to lead them, but you’re here.” I summarized, just to see if any of my messages hadn’t made it through, or if she had an explanation where she might jump in and correct me. “I received confirmations on these messages. You did receive them, right?”
She only offered an apologetic shrug that tugged at her dark hoodie, dragging it over her curves and rode up. I blinked and tore my night vision away from where the pale skin around her waist glowed. It seemed I wasn’t the only one who was growing. “There was a non-local Field Officer present,” Binary answered. “That’s what my scout here was told, and he fell back to warn me.”
I finally took notice of a man who’d followed in her wake. He was as tall as I, albeit a few pounds less, and with suntanned bare skin under a tactical vest. He wore a dark mask that integrated night vision goggles of a make I’d never seen- three green lenses of varying size over his right eye, plus one large one over his left. “Nighthawk. I’m the assigned scout from the Octoraro Raiders,” his voice was the raspy hiss, some kind of new or self-made vocoder. He didn’t offer his hand, though he did nod his head slightly.
“You scout with that mask on?” I asked. I’d written a guide that insisted scouts should be inconspicuous, in case a Marine squad or loyalist saw them lurking- which in and of itself was not a crime.
“I also do recon. I was tasked to find good sniping positions for the initial assault on West Side’s perimeter. Instead, I found several unknown Squads preparing for an assault, near to where I was going to deploy. They didn’t seem as surprised to see me as I was to see them, and they said they were on orders to destroy West Side.”
What?
“Did you, or any of the other prongs send any squads out?” I asked Binary, who shook her head. “Did you recognize them?” I asked the Scout.
“No. They weren’t from the Brotherhood, nor any of Pennsylvania’s squads.”
“You’re certain of this?”
“They were Not Keystoners, Minutemen, Susquehanna Rangers, Allegheny Watch, Iron Valley Battalion, Liberty Ridgers, Pennsmen, Pittsmen, or any of the others I know. Most of those guys have a banner.” That tracked with our training, something about unit morale. Not many people could recite a dozen squads in their state. The name ‘Nighthawk’ had come up in a few briefings, but it was clear I’d finally found someone in Pennsylvania who was dedicated to learning the structure and capable of reporting adequately, if the new local Pennsylvanian Field Officer Gavin and Sullivan and installed proved insufficiently motivated to succeed. “These only had shoulder patches, some kind of canine theme. Fancy equipment, too. Lots of it, some of it heavy-duty looking, some of it seems fancier than what we’ve been given. Some really esoteric stuff.”
That was alarming. We just stole the best the armory had, didn’t we?
“And they said they were here to help?”
“They only told me to not remain in the ‘strike area’ even a moment longer, and to not bring anyone over. After I asked who they were, they started getting a bit irritated and said I should leave. It was just a trio of them.”
“And you backed off?” I asked Nighthawk. “You’re operating on her orders, right?” I pointed at Binary. The Twins, and all the Inner Circle operated in my name.
“Delivering the information of their presence mattered more than exchanging fire. Before I did leave, the patrol I bumped into also added a personal message to you, Emperor.”
“When I went over to investigate, their head told me to back off, and was claiming to act with your direct authority. The one I met had a top-level code, and it was valid, designed just before this operation,” Binary jumped in. “She wouldn’t even give me her code name.”
Binary hadn’t screwed up- they’d both had good reason for backing off to deliver this information.
“I didn’t give the order to mobilize on West Side to anyone else,” I confirmed for them. Binary and Hex were the only ones here with top-level codes, but Hex was accounted for at the Rendezvous with the Marshals to the South, and Grouper had been with me. Of our active inner circle, only Gavin, Sullivan, Radio and G-Man might have had the codes, but this didn’t strike me as any of their MOs. None of them had a particular issue with Binary, Hex or I.
Even a new Field Officer like Pennsylvania’s should have only have codes three tiers below the top-level.
Did we have a leak?
“What was the message?” I asked a lot more quietly, suddenly feeling a knot in my stomach.
“‘Carthagenium Delenda Est’. West Side is ours to handle.”
That had me rock back on my heels.
Correctly identifying Binary as the commander I’d have tapped might be a lucky guess, or some observer scouting us as we’d scouted them. Salesmen hawked posable figurines of her and her sister, usually as a matched set, sold to the Marines at the stalls up and down Market Street with the usual somewhat exaggerated or altered proportions.
Using the Latin phrase was another matter. Though not quite managing the correct phrasing of a famous quote, even the attempt showed they knew either I or the Brotherhood would be on-hand to understand their meaning. Not even Gavin had known about the Brotherhood, it was why they were the bulk of the force I was using tonight. Yet these people knew we were coming, and had something prepared to greet us on friendly terms.
Now I just had to consider whether they actually could help us, or if they’d just trigger an alarm prematurely, operating on their own timing. Or, more probably, they were waiting on us to move first.
“What did you see? Did you recognize their equipment, uniforms, or armaments?”
“They have a jammer- I lost signal on approach, though they’re probably keeping its range low until the strike. I saw some kind of fabric tarp on the back of a truck- not the usual kind, some sort of strange fabric. There were some canisters being prepared with Miskatonic’s logo on it right next to flatbed trailers.”
“So it’s Miskatonic?”
He shook his head. “Not unless Miskatonic has at least four whole squads of men, complete with strange, heavy duty equipment. Railguns, too.” At least that ruled out some kind of loyalist outfit he’d caught preparing to flank us before they were ready. That worst case scenario was avoided, at least.
“What kind of equipment?”
“You know, like, gas tanks. Scuba sort of stuff. A few had gravity belts, like hers.” He waved at Binary. “These guys were huge, too. Broad, I mean. Anyway, they said to ‘report back to Binary that we are in position,’ and I backed off.”
What?
I turned to her to see if she had any insights, and she shrank up like a day lily at sunset before I could even say anything.
“I assumed you’d found someone else to take command of the West Side operation,” Binary managed, looking antsy. “We’ve got runners going back and forth in the small jamming zone here, bringing me the messages in code, and I worried that either I or they had either missed or misheard something. I still have the three squads ready and waiting to redeploy, on your orders.”
The decision was now mine, and mine alone to make: Did I decide to gather our troops up and go pick a fight with a flank of unidentified, well-armed, ostensibly allied humans who already knew I was here? Or did we just do our part, and accept that whatever was going on, we were now just a part of something larger?
Put that way, the choice was clear, although falling into such obvious paths was a surefire way to find oneself trapped and eliminated by their enemies. A cunning Governess would be able to know the mind-wiper was a sore spot for us, and use this as bait. And like any tempting bait, there was a mystery element to all this:
Who are they? Who sent that message? How did they know we would be here?
Still, I was troubled. I had not informed Pennsylvania’s new Field Officer of our operation, and instead instructed him to commit his cells to launching simultaneous mini-strikes all through the state, from Pittsburgh to Philly. In just a few minutes, each of those would make some minor attack and disperse before a response could be mustered. I’d told him it was for him to test the operational reliability of his squads, and unaware that each action was only meant as a distraction, fitting neatly within our operation’s time window.
I’d meant the distraction strikes to have a secret second use, in case an alert from Bethlehem did sneak out: The Shil’vati would likely imagine I was repeating my feint at Rehoboth, and would stay hunkered in their garrisons at all the major cities and the state capital, rather than spread themselves thin by protecting this relative backwater. No, they’d stay put, ready to absorb a hit that would never arrive. That would delay any response, assuming a signal even got out at all.
But if it was Pennsylvania’s Field Officer’s gathered forces the scout and Binary had seen, were the Shil’vati now going to be able to respond in full force just because he decided he didn’t want to be the distraction? Was I about to enter a standing battle like I had at Camp Death, but this time without entrenchments?
It might take time for Governess Nohvyrka to override or convince the General to try and salvage her pet project here. The division in the local command structure was such a useful thing to have to exploit again after the nightmare of Governess-General Azraea, but now our own structural hierarchy and its necessity of secrets was causing me headaches.
I was forgetting someone, but it couldn’t be Vaughn, could it? Maize hated Vaughn, and she was effectively our liaison with Miskatonic, and Gavin and Sullivan had assured me that he would never be made a Field Officer.
Who else could it be, though? Who else could have arrived here in time, and so confidently deployed on the territory? Anyone else would have to have informed a team from within several hours of when we’d left the armory. Then they’d have to have learned the terrain, become aware of West Side, mobilized, marched here, and then deployed to be stumbled across by Nighthawk.
Unless we had an information leak. And a leak would mean the Shil’vati might know about this, too.
Binary shuffled anxiously. We were in the final countdown moments. It was nearly too late to reposition the squads, and I risked a firefight between potential friendlies if I committed to that.
I found myself with an unknown force of humans to my flank, armed with our weapons.
Was this a prepared ambush of our forces? If so, why bother packing slow-firing railguns? Why not just mow our men down with human rifles or machine guns? And why warn us to stay out of the zone instead of letting the three squads get wiped out and exposing our flank to their attack?
I couldn’t make sense of the situation from the perspective of a betrayal or a trap. Besides, Pennsylvania didn’t have a dedicated Human Security Forces detachment the way Delaware had briefly possessed.
Yes, all this troubled me.
The seconds to Op Start ticked away.
Though I knew it was selfish, it rankled me to see my operation enjoined to another like this, even if the results were going to be even more spectacular. This had been meant to demonstrate something, a test. Now I felt like I’d failed before I’d even begun. I soothed my own ego by reminding myself that I could have still succeeded by splitting off the squads I’d picked. That this addition was welcome, but not truly necessary.
If it wasn’t a betrayal, I’d once again have the number of men I’d originally planned for, able to close the net fully as we swept through. It would also mean a faster operation and clear-out from the theater. I’d have to trust the other team, whoever they were, and hope that it wasn’t the local Field Officer, and that word hadn’t gotten out, because if it did…
…For all I knew this was the General and Governess’s joint pet project and they would bring the entire state down on our heads the moment a whiff of trouble was detected. Especially if anything had leaked about a large troop movement, which with the other team present I could no longer be so sure wasn’t the case.
This was most likely a risk. Not a betrayal. Nor a trap.
No, backing down now wasn’t an option anymore. Everyone was gathered here for blood. After months of stalling out in all the states we’d deployed, this was our opportunity to make some real headway, a statement that we had not lost our strength, we’d just been a bit ambitious in spreading to several states at once without coordination and leadership. This would set the entire revolution back-on-track. Hell, if we scrambled for our lives and it was a trap, the gunships might just pick us apart in-transit. At least if we deployed we’d make a fight of it. And if we pulled through?
I tried to guess for any other possibilities, and came up short.
A savvy Governess could have set a trap, and leaked the mind-wiper to bait exactly this response. A monstrous Governess would have just done it for its own sake.
“My Emperor, what are your orders?”
It was time to see which Governess Nohvyrka was. Savvy? Monstrous? Both?
“Final checks on our readiness per the original plan?” Plenty of operations had failed by indecisive commanders chewing into mission time and then launching too late. I wouldn’t join that list today.
“Final preparations made. The detachment is here and ready. AAA atop Blue Mountain is ready.” The missile battery was a major haul, and one I hadn’t expected to be freely gifted from Gavin, but it was excellent to have. “Jammer tested and ready. Distraction Jammer ready. Radio decoys ready. Ride-outs ready.”
If all went to plan, tonight would be mayhem for the Shil’vati to sort out for hours, even days afterward.
“Then it is time to act. We stick to what we rehearsed. You have your orders. Full strength deployed. Twenty minutes of Hell on Earth. Are there any last-second uncertainties on your teams’ roles? Any doubt in the men?”
“They will follow you.”
I gave the signal to take final positions, then turned around. I couldn’t take my eyes off the doomed city until Binary gave me a solid ‘thump’ from behind.
“I’ll be watching your back.”
“And I yours. Hex would kill me if anything happened.”
“Then let none survive.”
She gave a hand-on-heart and started running down the line, the scout hot on her heels.
At the signal and hushed commands, men hunkered in the ruined foundations as the officers and squad leaders marched up and deployed to their squads. One of the squads was waiting. They were intended to be our spearhead.
I stepped up on a makeshift stage- a few concrete steps that stuck out from the grass that led to a hollowed out foundation. From here I could address the men gathered in the footprint of the old building. I was about to speak, only to have a bandoleer laid over me by Grouper, and a rifle pressed into my hand. A wordless warning that we were out of time.
No time for a long speech.
I reached up to my mask and flicked a switch on a microphone, holding the detonator out theatrically.
“It is time we remind them which of us is made in God’s image,” I growled into the vocoder, watching Grouper wade in to where dozens of men stood waiting, watching how even the furthest edges craned their heads to see. “Only man should stand upon the Earth and call it their own.”
“What of those humans, who reside within? The innocents?” One brave soul challenged. Probably Brother Thomas, who seemed to be making it his mission in life to undermine me. He’d probably been waiting to ask that, hoping to hear the Biblical ‘one good man’ refrain and use that to demand I’d release them all to go home. No one answered.
“Those within have been twisted to no longer be of God’s design. There are no innocents within!” I snapped. My nice-sounding lie almost certainly couldn’t be repeated just a little West of here. Within West Side, there were certainly innocent Shil’vati about to have the last night of their lives. Ones totally uninvolved, as far as I could tell. I briefly thought of them, missing a beat and giving a window for someone else to call out something I didn’t hear.
“For ours is the heaven,” a chorus rose in rejoinder to whatever was said. “And while the heavens will be ours, for now we walk the earth, scouring it of all who besmirch its holy surface!”
I had chills and felt an expectant pause. What could I say that would be suitable? It came to me a moment later.
“Amen.”
