He flipped the image back on and rewound it until it showed the twisting cloud made up of thousands of these things.
“For now we’re calling these things drones.”
“Fucking bad
ass
,” a guy standing next to me said.
Mr. Pink brightened. “My sentiments exactly.” He walked up to the drone and knocked on its head. “This, of course is not a real one. As far as I know we haven’t killed any. This is a three-dimensional representation based on the footage we’ve been able to gather. I want everyone to study this. I want you to make yourselves very familiar with it. If you get close enough to see one in the flesh, it might be the last thing you see.”
Then he nodded at the assembled mass and walked away.
A hulking man in TF OMBRA fatigues and a red beret strode to the center of the stage. His tanned skin looked like a hundred miles of bad road. His nose lay against his face above a handlebar mustache.
“All right, you grunts. I’m your regimental sergeant major for the next however the fuck long it takes you to figure out how to work together so we can save this sorry globe. Everyone gets a speech, even at the end of the world, and you sad lot are no different. You all come from all corners of the world, from countries I can’t pronounce, and places I’d never want to go. Some of you were born rich, others poor. We have men and women and everything in between. We have people who were once soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines. We have active military and reserves. We have paramilitary police, paramilitary snipers and parachutists. We have men who’ve lived aboard submarines, women who’ve flown jets, and some who played in the can-you-believe-it marching band. We have people from all races, creeds, religions, nationalities, and social affectations. All of you were different when you stumbled your pathetic frozen selves into this place at the asshole end of the world. But that difference stops now. As of this moment, you all are the same. You are no longer any of those things you were before. All of those labels cease to exist. From now on you’ll be one thing—
grunts
. This is what you call yourself, this is what you will be called, and this is what you do. Do you understand me, grunts? Do you understand your new role in life?” His voice rose to a bellow. “
Do you understand me, grunts?
”
After a moment of stunned silence, the pride that had been welling up within us escaped into thunderous applause. The RSM grinned before striding towards the drone and stared at it with all the drama of Dr. Charles Darwin seeing the Galapagos for the first time, hands on hips, eyes wide, mouth twisted into a sneer.
“Pretty big fucker, isn’t it? Looks like it could mow down half of you before you were able to get your dicks out of your hands and around the stock of a rifle.”
In one smooth move, he jerked a knife from his web belt and sunk it to the hilt in the center of the beast’s head.
“He ain’t so tough. I think I can take him. But then again, I’m the RSM in charge of a brigade filled with grunts, so I know how badass I am.”
He glowered at us. From this distance it looked almost like a smile, if you missed his feral lean and predatory look.
“Now get your asses in gear and head to your teams. I want every team sergeant to give me an inventory of all equipment and a list of what’s missing by 0400. Breakfast is at 0430. Training begins at 0515 sharp.”
Everyone looked at each other. Like me, they didn’t even know what time it was.
“I said MOVE!” he shouted, and his bellow set our feet in motion.
Before a war military science seems a real science, like astronomy; but after a war it seems more like astrology.
Rebecca West
CHAPTER NINETEEN
T
IME WASN’T ON
our side. It never was. Local time was 0430 and since we were finished with our inventory, it was chow time. We bumped and elbowed each other as we prepared ourselves, then scrambled down our ladders to powdered eggs, powdered potatoes, and reconstituted sausage patties. We drank coffee like it was a drug before making our way to the main hall.
TF OMBRA was going to be used to form the infantry portion of an infantry brigade combat team, or BCT OMBRA. A BCT was a recent phenomenon for the U.S. Army, which had been organized around the brigade structure since World War II. After spending decades with a constant need for a task-organized, quickly deployable force, the U.S. Army had finally created one. Replacing the brigade element is the brigade combat team, which had been streamlined to provide more combat forces and less administration and logistics. A regular BCT numbers between thirty-three and thirty-four hundred soldiers and is meant to be moved from one place to another within seventy-two hours.
BCT OMBRA was to be comprised of two infantry battalions, a reconnaissance squadron, fires battalion, a special troops battalion and a brigade support battalion.
Each infantry battalion had a headquarters company, three rifle companies, and a heavy weapons company. The headquarters company was assigned a medical platoon, reconnaissance platoon, fire support platoon, anti-aircraft defense platoon, signal section, sniper section, and staff section. The rifle companies had three rifle platoons and an anti-aircraft defense section. The heavy weapons company had four weapons platoons assigned.
The special troops battalion had the signal and military intelligence companies I expected. But they also had an electrical engineer section, a mass propulsion section, and a xenobiological section. These new sections were clearly to address the Cray.
The fires battalion had two batteries of 8-inch Howitzers, equipment which hadn’t been used in the U. S. inventory for more than two decades, and a fires acquisition battery. Two Howitzers had been brought into the training area and were to be used to retrain the artillery men and women how to use the older, slower, but much more powerful artillery pieces.
The reconnaissance battalion had a headquarters company, two reconnaissance companies, and a special reconnaissance company. The SRC was comprised of twelve infantry squads, a sniper section and a communications section. No longer Team 19 or Tin 22, we were now known as 3rd Recon Squad, Special Reconnaissance Battalion, Brigade Combat Team OMBRA.
Once the unit organization was laid out, we separated into our battalions, then our units. One problem I saw right away was that we didn’t have any weapons or body armor. And it wasn’t just recon. The infantry units didn’t have any weapons either. But after a hurried conversation with the RSM, our non-commissioned officers returned and told us not to worry about it. The equipment was on the way.
We immediately began to go over basic infantry maneuvers by squad. We’d practice later, but for now our instructors, more black-fatigued TF OMBRA men and women, wanted us to be able to learn and regurgitate basic infantry maneuvers such as traveling, bounding, overwatch and combinations therein. Olivares and I knew them, but neither Ohirra, Aquino nor Thompson had ever practiced them. MacKenzie knew them, but he called them by different names. Once he grasped the concepts, he was able to spit it all back to the instructors, and soon we were all speaking the same grunt language.
But something was missing. Not only didn’t we have the right equipment, but we didn’t have a target. These maneuvers were meant to attack something on land. Moving from one piece of cover to another didn’t mean a thing with a hundred thousand Cray flying overhead who could see your every move.
“Do you ever wonder how many species there might be?” Thompson asked one day after training.
“All the time.” We all wondered, usually pushing the overwhelming ideas into the farthest, darkest corners of our minds, back to where the creatures in our closets flourished and the beasts under our beds lived.
Thompson stared at the palm of his hand. “What if there are some we can’t see?”
“You mean like invisible?”
“No. Not really invisible. But what if there are aliens so small we don’t even recognize them?”
I stared at the smallest member of 3rd Recon. The idea of something so small never crossed my mind, but now that it was there, I felt the impossibility of combating it.
“I remember when I was a kid living in Iowa,” Thompson began, his forefinger of his right hand brushing away something invisible in the palm of his left. “I used to chase the white cotton that flew from dying dandelions. I’d capture it and stare until the ball disintegrated, and I wondered if I was seeing a universe in microcosm. I always thought, what if this is a colony and they were suddenly removed from life as they knew it, carried by winds they had no control over?”
He glanced quickly in my direction, but I merely smiled. I was entranced by what he was saying. I wanted to hear more.
“Remember that movie awhile back where the plants on Earth turned against us? They let off some sort of pheromone that set us to killing each other, sort of a way for our planet to weed us out.” He turned back to his hand. “Remember that, Mason?”
“Yeah. I remember.”
“What if the aliens were like that? What if they were so small you couldn’t see them? What if even now I’m like the finger of some retarded god poking into a universe I didn’t even know existed?”
“Where would these microscopic aliens live?” I asked after a few moments.
“Everywhere. Anywhere. In here,” he said, pointing at his head. “We already know that there’s a species of Cray that can invade our bodies and control us, or make us kill ourselves, or just make us die. What would we do?”
Thinking about videos we’d seen, from Japan, of people ripping into each other, I wondered. Was it as simple as that? Were the Cray making us kill ourselves? If they were capable of that, then why send drones? Why not just send in their microscopic army to make us fight each other?
“Maybe it doesn’t work on every species,” I said. “They’d have to have an expectation of certain brain activity. They probably knew how our brains were constructed through their reconnaissance. They could have even tailored the other species to attack us more successfully.” I remembered seeing footage of one man holding his daughter, right before another woman came and bashed his head in. “But it doesn’t work on everyone.”
Thompson smiled broadly. “No, it doesn’t.” He smacked his hands together so loud I jumped. “It works on most, but not everyone. I wonder if TF OMBRA knew something about that. I wonder if they chose us exactly for that reason. You know there are some scientists who believe that suicides have different brain chemistry.”
I regarded him. I’d been humoring him at first, but the drummer boy might be onto something. “That would suggest they know more than they’ve let on.”
“They’ve been sharing knowledge as we need to know it.”
“Are you saying they’re working
with
the aliens?”
“No, not at all,” Thompson said. “Although I wouldn’t put it past them. What I’m saying is that they’ve known for some time. They knew enough to choose us because they know that our brains are the only ones that can’t be affected by the Cray.”
I laughed. “This is supposition, wrapped in conspiracies, stuffed with a suicidal filling. You don’t really believe this, do you? Don’t forget, that thing in the basement in Alabama was all over the inside of my mind.”
“That might be something only the Sirens can do.” Thompson shrugged and resumed picking at an invisible universe in the palm of his hand. Then he looked up. “Why not a conspiracy? I have a lot of time to think. I spend my life trying to figure out the
what-ifs
. This is no less logical than that TF OMBRA just figured they’d go to all this trouble just because it’s a no-return mission. I mean, heck, it’d be a lot simpler just emptying the prisons or asking random soldiers from around the world if they wanted to either save the universe or be killed by an alien invasion.”
And then he was silent.
I wanted to laugh at him. I wanted to scoff at his theory, but like most good theories, it had enough logic to make me wonder if he didn’t really have a better idea about what was going on than the rest of us.
I got up and headed back to our tin with a new respect for our little drummer boy. He might be crazy, but he was
our
crazy, and who knew, he might just hold the secret to beating these damned aliens between the beats of the drum in his mind.
You, you, and you... panic. The rest of you, come with me.
Anonymous U.S. Marine Corps
Gunnery Sgt.
CHAPTER TWENTY
T
HREE MONTHS PASSED.
We gathered for briefings at regular intervals as footage of the world’s decimation was shown to us from cameras found outside of Cray-occupied areas. With all aboveground communications arrays compromised, only subsurface and subsea communications methods were working. Project Unity, which was completed in 2008, had created a ten-thousand-kilometer undersea fiber optic cable system linking North America with Asia. Multiple cables tapped into this network, creating an electronic pipeline capable of transmitting almost eight terabytes of data per second. At the time of its creation, Project Unity had added twenty percent to the world’s data capability, but after the invasion, it became a hundred percent. Without it, BCT OMBRA would be living in the black, surviving on supposition, rumor, and conspiracies.
By day we saw the destruction of Los Angeles, Moscow, Beijing, London, Prague and a hundred other cities. When Tokyo went down, we all began shouting for Godzilla, half-joking and half-wishing.
By night, we talked about it all. With no booze, no drugs, no music and no movies, we had nothing but stories across the proverbial camp fire. But what do you talk about when the most terrifying thing has already happened? You talk about what could be worse, such as the possible nefarious purposes behind the formation of OMBRA.
We talked about Thompson’s idea about our brain chemistry, and the more we spoke about it, the more it seemed to be a possibility. Our conversations sparked a wildfire within the tins. Our little drummer boy, honoring his profession in the best of ways, had laid down a beat to which everyone had begun marching.