Authors: Rob Ziegler
“My kids are a little jumpy. We don’t get a lot of traffic out this way.” Lewis’ overfed cheeks broadened in an avuncular smile
Doss said nothing. For uncomfortable seconds she took in Lewis’ sharply pressed uniform. The three polished stars on his shoulder. The orders from Rippert—handing Fort Riley over to Doss—which Lewis had folded with furtive hands into a tiny paper brick and now worried with his fingertips. The schoolmarm spectacles that clouded his eyes as he watched Doss. The tension trembling at the edges of his smile.
“The Designer,” Doss prompted.
“Yes.” Lewis inclined his head agreeably. “My orders were to get her to D.C. once she arrived here.”
“She didn’t make it.”
“Chen, our radio operator, had her on radar. Her GPS beacon was pinging us every five minutes. Then it stopped. She veered south and disappeared.”
“Where?”
“East of Garden City. That’s how we know she defected. Intentionally, I mean. Garden City’s far south. Way off her flight plan. There was no weather, so no reason for such a wild deviation from her course.”
“You sent out recon parties?”
Lewis’ expression turned troubled. “No.”
Doss let out a long breath, heavy with contempt: typical fucking Army. Watching her, Lewis seemed to wither a little. He leaned his thick torso back on the cafeteria bench as though he were afraid she might reach out and strike him.
“Why not?” she demanded.
“We lack the capability—”
“To send out a recon party two hundred miles into territory you control?”
“We…I…” Lewis glanced around the room. His gaze settled on Gomez and Fiorivani, who sat a discrete but vigilant distance down the row, wolfing down rehydrated vegetables, turkey and gravy. Heaped so high it had breached the corrals of their molded plastic trays and coalesced into a watery stew. They gazed flatly back at Lewis as they ate. Lewis looked at Doss and held up a plump, pink hand, at loss. “D.C. didn’t brief you?”
Doss pulled the flexpad Rippert had given her from a hip pocket and tossed it, still folded, onto the table. She leveled an accusing finger at it.
“D.C. seems to know fuck all about what’s going on out here, General. They thought Riley would be prepped and waiting for me. They thought you’d have a bead on where the Designer might be. They seemed to think you’d have troops primed and ready to jump.” She pinned Lewis with a violent look. “What they did not think, General, was that you’d light up my zep with double A’s on the way in.”
“Yes. I see.” Lewis peeled off his specs, laid them on the table. He seemed to deflate. “Jingo,” he said, looking at the middle space between him and Doss. The unwavering young aide stiffened a touch.
“Sir.”
“Would you please go and ready some quarters for Colonel Doss and her men?”
“Sir.” The boy turned crisply on a heel and strode out of the cafeteria.
Lewis peered at Doss, eyes vulnerable now without his specs. A little too intent. Made Doss think of reclaimed POWs who hadn’t yet come right in their heads, of downed pilots lost too long in the blinding heat of the Saud deserts.
“I’m a scientist, Colonel,” he said, and gave Doss a small, hurt smile. “I used to be. Agrigenetics. I was doing field research here when…” He held his palms towards Doss, like the only way to convey what had happened was to physically hand it over. “Zeps just stopped coming. I got stuck here. I waited an entire winter for a chance to get back east. One day in the spring a zep came, and I thought I had a ride home. I was wrong. Instead I got orders,
informing me I’d been promoted to major.” Sad humor filled Lewis’ face. “I wasn’t even in the Army. That was over ten years ago. Now D.C. sends one zep a year, for resupply. That’s it. I brief them quarterly on the sat link. And I have the distinct impression they don’t care whether I do or not.” He canted his head, gave Doss a look that begged for understanding. “We no longer factor into D.C.’s sphere of influence out here, Colonel. I’m afraid we’ve been written off.”
Doss leaned back on her bench, laced fingers behind her head. Her eyes absently scanned ancient recruiting posters, faded by time and torn at the edges, that lined the cafeteria’s walls. Square-jawed commandos glowered, faces streaked with photo-perfect camo paint. Tank operators squinted winningly into the targeted distance. A drop-suited pilot, goggled helmet tucked under his arm, glanced over his shoulder at an attack chopper backlit by an explosive sunset.
The Russians Need Company
.
Iran
:
Vacationland
.
Be All You Can Be
. Captions so familiar that Doss no longer rendered any meaning from them.
“What’s Riley’s status, General?” she asked.
“In terms of?”
“Combat readiness.”
“My kids…” Lewis smiled again, exuding the fond resignation of a parent who knew his children lacked potential. “My little soldiers. They’re orphans. Their parents died, or deserted them because they couldn’t feed them. They sneak onto the base at night and we give them uniforms. They drill. They keep order. They get fed. That’s it. They’re good kids.” He looked at Doss. “All Riley’s real soldiers deserted a long time ago, Colonel.”
….
Insertion planes sat parked along the underground hangar’s length, tails to the wall, aggressive raptor lines muted by heavy grey storage tarps coated with dust. Flylights, big enough to carry a solid platoon, small, agile and heavily armed enough to chew a battlefield into mulch. They seemed limitless, disappearing into a far darkness where a bank of fluorescents had failed.
“That,” Gomez noted, twirling the string of bones around a finger, “is a shitload of resource.” He’d changed from his stockade jumpsuit into fatigues so new Doss could smell the sour odor of the vacuum pack in which they’d been sealed. Gomez whistled into the hangar’s vastness. There was no echo. “You can’t tell me no one in D.C.’s keeping track of this shit.”
“Drop suits look okay,” Doss said. The suits, lining the cinderblock wall opposite the Flylights, hung upright in racks. Kevlar, ceramic, titanium. Matte black, sucking up light like holes in the air. The scars on Gomez’s cheek twisted with hard mirth.
“Fills me with an acute need to buttfuck a small dictatorship.”
“Roger that,” Doss told him.
They wandered the hangar’s length, came to a Flylight where a fatigued rump and long legs extended from beneath a tarp to the top of a maintenance ladder. Somewhere under the tarp, a battery-powered socket wrench whined.
“Lieutenant,” Doss called. The wrench ceased. The tarp fluttered. Fiorivani emerged from beneath, smiled, ran a hand over the Nazi glow of his crew cut.
“Colonel. Sergeant.”
“Got an inventory for me?” Doss asked.
“Most of it.” He set the socket wrench atop the Flylight and pulled a sheaf of papers from a cargo pocket on his pants. “Not finished yet, but…” He flipped through the papers until he found his page, ran an index finger down it as he read.
“We got four medium zeps, not counting our own. Forty-two of these babies.” He lovingly touched the titanium lip of the Flylight’s delta wing. “I’ve only been able to check a few of them over, but so far they seem mechanically solid. Haven’t had a chance to really dig into them. Been tarped up for god knows how long. Gaskets and lines tend to crack in this dry heat. What’s very good news…” White eyebrows gained sudden altitude as Fiorivani held up an eager finger. “Reactors all show green lights. We got plenty of fuel rods in storage beneath Hangar Two. Also good, we got a whole warehouse full of M-8s. Seventeen Barrette railers. Haven’t found ammo for those yet, but where there’s a rail gun, there’s fire. A fuckload of P-40s, both frag and incendiary. A bunch of old LAWs. Total garbage. Probably just pop in their tubes. Enough ordinance for the Flylights to carry on an air war. Everything you want. Sonics, bunker-busters, air-to-air.” His eyes stayed on the page while one finger pointed at the blunt beak of a Gatling gun protruding from the Flylight’s nose. “Days’ worth of 30-mil for the rattle guns.” He grinned, folded the papers and stuffed them back into his pocket. “We are good on fuckpower,” he concluded.
“Alright.” Doss gave Gomez a cruel look. “Find me some soldiers, Sergeant, and I’ll let you build me some chalks.” Gomez didn’t flinch.
“Might need some pilots, too, Boss.”
….
Riley had been crowded once. Too crowded. Doss’ sergeant yelling into her face like they did in flex vids. Thrusting his chest against her tits, spit flying from lips wounded by overly aggressive shaving. Word was, he’d never seen combat. And he was short. A seriously bad mix for a drill sergeant. But at least then Fort Riley had been alive.
Now Doss wandered the haunted silence of its underground. A labyrinth of hallways, meeting rooms, barracks, all empty. Fluorescents flickered every fifty yards or so. She felt herself disappear in the darkness between, kept extant only by the hollow scuff of her boots on concrete.
Her first deployment, she’d stood on the plastiform deck of a submersible troop ship, watching a destroyer, half a mile long, slide grey and predatory as a shark across the Persian Gulf’s slate surface. A hundred sat-guided missiles a minute had shrieked from its ballistic tubes. Up into the stratosphere and out to the Birjand plain, where they’d hammered down on Chinese positions six hundred miles distant. Doss had been seventeen, and it had been like watching Jesus himself breathe fire. It had filled her with rapture. “God bless the US of motherfucking A,” she’d yelled at a nearby soldier.
And now…Now Kansas was barely even on the fucking map. Her footsteps echoed back at her. Nothing here but time.
Emerson would’ve made it seem okay, would’ve joked about it. Pushed that button that made reality go all rubbery, made Doss laugh. These past days Emerson had come to Doss’ sleep, eidetic visitations at the edges of dreams. His rough palm lightly running the muscled length of her hip. How his switch could flip, the scary laser calm that came over him when he drew the Steg from the small of his back and brought its sights in line with his eye.
“I’d love to have kids someday,” he’d told her once. They’d lain, pressed close together, in his cot, barely wide enough for one. Doss cupping him in her palm, Emerson’s arm pillowing her head, his strangely spicy scent warm around her. He’d said it like he was just some guy, and she was just some girl, and the world was just turning. Said it like he couldn’t sense her terror—or if he could it didn’t worry him. She’d watched him, staring up at the fiberboard ceiling of his quarters, musing, and known. He was the right kind of stupid.
Doss worked her flexpad as she walked. Tabbed through cabinet personnel files, old society profiles, scanned old journo feeds.
She found only a single pic of the anachronistic woman from Rippert’s office. A young version of her. A smile, lush with vanity, beamed into the paparazzi shine of some black-tie cabinet function. Porcelain shoulders rose from a sleeveless black gown. A hand clad in a black opera glove lightly held the tuxedoed arm of a broad middle-aged white man whose jaw thrust forth, exuding authority. President Logan. Doss squinted at the pic’s caption.
“Ellen Vokle,” she intoned aloud. The hand on Rippert’s leash. Doss kept searching. Found no records of the woman, either government or civilian. The phrase “plausible deniability” came to mind.
A crease of light emanated from beneath a doorway ahead. Doss folded the flexpad, in the darkness put her nose close to the door’s stenciling. INFIRMARY #3. She palmed the latch and pushed it open. Saw cots with clean paper sheets, stainless IV stands gleaming under fluorescents.
A Latino boy sat at a long table side-on to Doss, chin propped on fists as he stared at the flat screen of a data port. After a moment his head slowly turned. His eyes landed on Doss.
“Oh!” he blurted, and leapt to his feet. He stared, frozen, his arms out to either side like an insect pinned to a board. “Who are you?” He blinked at Doss for a second, then his eyes settled on the silver bird pinned to her chest. Meticulously shined boots clicked together as he saluted. “Ma’am!” Doss waved the salute away.
“At ease. I’m Colonel Doss. Who are you?”
“Corporal Henderson, ma’am.”
“Why so jumpy, Corporal?”
Corporal Henderson’s eyes shifted from side to side. His cheeks reddened.
“It’s dark down here.”
“I was noticing that myself. It didn’t used to be. Things do change though, don’t they?” The kid’s brow creased along the path of a long scar the shape of saw teeth. He said nothing. Doss ran a finger along the edge of the stainless table. “What do you do, Corporal?”
“I’m the base doctor, ma’am.”
She looked him up and down. Guessed him to be no older than twelve.
“You’re shitting me. Been to med school have you?” The kid’s face darkened. He glanced defensively at the data port.
“I read a lot.”
….
“Why Denver?” The question came from the flexpad Doss had unfolded across one knee. She’d taken typical officer’s quarters. Blank concrete walls. A metal desk and chair, a metal footlocker. A toilet and sink, open as a prison cell. The cot, upon which she now sat cross-legged.
She pinched the bridge of her nose, squinted at the translucent screen: an aerial view through the eyes of some amateur newsfly peering out through a chopper’s passenger window. A jumble of old monoliths below, skyscrapers whose empty black windows exuded the same vacancy as dead termite mounds.
“You can see its
bones
!” The view grew jittery—an early model iris cam embedded in untrained eyes—then gradually focused on a stretch of crumbling freeway between downtown and the remnants of an enormous stadium. A series of megalithic bones slanted forth, each a tower of Pisa, implying a long curve. What looked like spider webs stretched between them. Sinew. The first stage of Satori’s dome.
“Well, first things first,” another voice said. Male, a lilting Indian accent. The view blurred past a helmeted pilot, settled on a man sitting in the back seat. He wore a plush blue suit. Doss recognized the round face from the Satori files Rippert had provided. Prekash Gupta, Satori Corp’s lead geneticist. “Denver was cheap. It gets incredibly cold here now in the winter. Most people had already left when we moved on it. It’s close to the Rocky Mountain snowpack, and therefore close to water. But even more importantly, Denver is incredibly sunny, even in the winter. Satori’s dome will be a composite, meaning her DNA is built from many different sources, some of them plants. She will derive a significant percentage of her energy from photosynthesis. So you see, sunshine is vital.” Gupta stroked a vermillion tie, beaming. “This was Sumedha’s idea.” He placed his hand on the dark skin of a bare shoulder beside him. The view blurred, refocused on a smooth caramel face, features balanced as easy math. A face identical to Pihadassa’s, only male. Black eyes watched the newsfly with spectral calm. The view blurred, settled once more on Gupta.