Home of the brave, p.1
Home of the Brave, page 1
Copyrighted Material
Home of the Brave Copyright © 2024 by Variant Publications
Book design and layout copyright © 2024 by JN Chaney
This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved
No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing.
1st Edition
CONTENTS
Don’t Miss Out
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
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1
Snow whipped at the cockpit viewscreen as the north wind wrestled with me for control of the lander, and I wondered if this was such a good idea.
“Isn’t this thing supposed to have anti-gravity or something?” I asked through clenched teeth, pushing the controls downward despite the stomach-dropping feeling of going over the first dip of a rollercoaster.
“You’ve been flying landers for two years now,” Valentine McKee reminded from the copilot’s seat beside me, “and you still don’t know how they work? It’s not anti-gravity, it’s gravity-resist. There’s a difference.”
“And the difference is, this snowstorm is kicking our ass.”
I checked the altimeter, which now looked a lot more like the ones on airplanes since I’d reconfigured the controls to suit me. The reading there was the only indication I had that we were less than a thousand feet up. Everything on the optical cameras was flat black, and even the sensors that worked on principles I wouldn’t have understood if my major in college had been physics and not history showed nothing within miles of us.
“You could have let me fly the lander,” Giblet commented, arms crossed, his expression sullen. Well, as sullen as his bird-like face got.
When I’d first met Gib and was absorbed with the alienness of everything around me, I’d put a little too much emphasis on his avian features. And they were there, to be sure. His hair was feathery and a fine down of it covered his whole body, and put together with his narrow face, aquiline nose, and the vertical pupils of his eyes, it painted a clear picture of the bird DNA mixed with his human genes. Maybe that DNA was what made him our best pilot or maybe it was just his innate confidence. But that confidence could also make him a huge pain in the ass.
“How are we even gonna find the LZ in this storm?” Dani Campling asked, sounding even tenser than I was.
I don’t know, maybe I would have been tense, too, if I was sitting in the second row, helpless and at the mercy of someone else’s piloting skills in a mess like this. But Dani wasn’t the nervous type. She’d been a deputy sheriff in rural Ohio before she’d joined our merry little band and while I’d been shanghaied into this whole thing by a scheming robot, she’d volunteered, eager for the sort of adventure that got her shot at. I wondered if her discomfort was because of the flight or the company. Her relationship with Giblet had been…tricky…ever since Tamura’s death.
Giblet had fallen head over heels for her, but she’d chosen the Kamerian pilot over him. Gib hadn’t taken that well and while he’d backed off after Tamura had died, which was a lot more sensitive than I’d given him credit for, Dani still seemed uncomfortable around him. And it was a small cockpit.
“There’s still a big red dot on the navigation screen showing us where we have to go,” I explained as patiently as I could muster under the current stress. “And the altimeter will tell me when we’re about to land. The only trick is not letting this damned wind push us too far off course.”
“Why doesn’t it have an autopilot?” Dani snapped, shaking her head. “Most commercial airplanes on Earth have autopilot systems that can land by themselves and they don’t even have this gravity-resist stuff.” She threw up her hands in exasperation. “I mean, our boss is a damned AI, for God’s sake!”
“Lenny isn’t our boss,” Val said, an edge to his voice that demonstrated what a sore spot that was for him.
And maybe for me, too. Lenny had engineered all this, his plans going back over two centuries, had snatched Val, Laranna, Giblet, and me out of our lives and away from our friends and families and thrown us at the wall to see if we stuck. He’d owned up to it and put everything in our hands from now on, but that couldn’t quite undo all that had been done.
Anyway, I knew the answer to this one.
“We don’t have auto-landing systems for the same reason that we don’t have robots like Lenny running around with guns like the…what did you call them from that TV show you like?”
“Toasters,” Dani supplied.
“Yeah.” The controls bucked and tossed again, and my knuckles went white as I gripped the steering yoke for dear life. “They don’t trust thinking machines much out here and after what happened to us, I don’t know that I blame them. Anyway, it’s computer-assisted…you know. Fly-by-wire, sort of.”
Not enough. And as the turbulence grew worse the closer we got to the ground, I found myself wishing for a galaxy that wasn’t so damned paranoid.
“Two hundred feet,” Val told me. I nodded sharply and throttled down the landing jets.
One last gust of wind battered the lander and then the details of our landing site rushed up at me, finally revealed through the blowing snow. A flat, inviting field, brown and dead where it wasn’t already covered with snow, the grass of summer long gone. Netting flapped in the wind in front of the metal stands, empty parking lots, the whole thing surrounded by tall trees, some evergreen, some having dropped their leaves a couple months ago.
Then the landing gear touched and we lurched forward as the treads sank to the limits of their hydraulics before springing back up.
“We’re down,” I sighed, yanking the quick-release for my seat restraints.
“Crappy landing,” Giblet murmured, rising from his seat. “I could have done better.”
“Yeah, we all know what a great pilot you are, Gib,” Dani said, glaring at the Varnell. “You don’t have to keep reminding us of it every single time someone else is at the controls.”
He sniffed, then zipped up the jacket we’d fabricated for him back on the Liberator and pulled the hood up, disguising his features.
“By the way, these clothes are ridiculous.”
“You’d rather advertise to everyone what you are?” Dani wondered, fists on her hips. “We picked out our clothes because they fit in, not so you could feel fashionable.”
Val ignored the two of them and I wished I could so easily. I felt for Gib, knowing what unrequited love was like, though mine had been requited a little sooner rather than later, and since he was my best friend, it hurt even more. But we had a job to do and my immediate concern was that he’d let his feelings get in the way of it.
Val squeezed out of the cockpit to the utility bay, slapping the control to open the hatch. I squinted in anticipation of the wind-blown snow, but it wasn’t as bad down here as it had been in the air and only a few wisps of white wafted in past the overpressure of the cockpit.
“What did you call this place again?” Giblet asked, pushing past Val to stick his head out the door.
“A little league baseball field,” I supplied. “Kids play ball here in the summer, but it’s closed for the season.”
Giblet cocked an eyebrow at me and sneered.
“No, dumbass, the name of the city.”
“Oh. Arlington. Arlington, Virginia. It’s just outside the capital city of my country, Washington, D.C. Most people who work in the government live out here.”
“The ones who can afford it,” Dani added, grabbing a jacket out of the equipment locker and pulling it on over her shoulder holster.
The guns worried me, though I carried one myself beneath my fur-lined bomber jacket. If we got caught with them, we’d be up shit creek…but then, if we got stopped by the cops and they found Giblet, illegally carrying a concealed weapon would be the least of our worries.
“Even if this baseball fi eld is closed,” Gib said skeptically, hesitating over the unfamiliar words, “are you sure the camouflage will be enough to keep them from finding the lander?”
I hopped down the short set of steps from the hatch to the ground, my boots sinking an inch into the snow cover. No lights glowed from the metal poles at the edge of the baseball field, the only illumination coming from the streetlights a few hundred yards away. No danger anyone would see the lander tonight. Hell, I wasn’t sure we could find it again. But the storm wouldn’t last forever and in daylight…
“Let’s turn it on and find out,” I said. “Everyone come on out so we can button this thing up.”
Giblet hung back, gazing at the snow with obvious distaste, but eventually, he followed the others and touched the control on the fuselage to close the hatch behind them. It folded up into the silver of the lander, snow fountaining off the edges before the door disappeared into the polished surface.
“Activate the camo,” I told him. Gib nodded and traced a line down a strip beside the hatch control.
The edges of the lander crackled as if with a static charge from the storm and then…the entire thing disappeared. Well, not really. As advanced as the technology Lenny had brought with him was, even it couldn’t manage true invisibility. Instead, as I understood it, cameras all over the surface projected the images from the opposite sides, creating the illusion that the craft wasn’t there. Incredibly effective at night, it remained to be seen how well it would work in broad daylight, but we couldn’t stick around to find out.
I grunted in satisfaction, then shuddered as snow went down my collar, reminding me to pull out the knit cap Dani had commissioned from the fabricators back on the ship and put it on. It wasn’t incredibly cold, maybe thirty degrees, but the dampness and the wind cut through me, and Giblet already shivered beneath his jacket, used to warmer climes. Val, the old cowboy, faced the north wind with an equanimity I strived to match.
“That’ll have to do,” I decided. “Dani, is your…cellular phone working?”
I always wanted to call the thing a car phone, because those were the only mobile phones I’d seen before I left Earth back in 1987. The idea that they were half the width of a deck of cards now was mind-boggling in ways that hyperspace travel and pulse guns weren’t. Those were alien gadgets, but these science-fiction hand computer things were something that had happened back home while I was in stasis.
“Should be,” she confirmed, pulling the device out and powering it up. “I mean, as long as no one’s closed my checking account, my phone bill is set up for auto-pay and I sure haven’t been spending money on anything else.” Dani snorted. “Thank God I didn’t have a shared account with anyone, at least not since I broke up with Randy.”
The screen lit up with the image of a kitten rolling around in a basket of yarn and Dani pumped a fist in triumph.
“Yes! Got four bars even! Hold on, let me get us an Uber.”
“What the hell’s an Uber again?” Val mumbled, eyes scanning the end of the parking lot like a hawk looking for voles in the grass.
“It’s like a taxi, right?” I asked Dani, still not a hundred percent sure about that.
“What’s a taxi?” Val asked, glaring at me.
“A car’s on its way,” Dani told us, grinning as she read from the screen. “It’s a white Honda CRV,” she added. “He’s less than five minutes away.”
“I’m just gonna assume anyone who pulls up here during this storm is gonna be for us,” I told her, heading for the parking lot, hoping the movement would warm me up enough that I wouldn’t catch pneumonia before the Honda got here.
It didn’t even take five minutes, as it turned out, and a Honda CRV turned out to be something like a station wagon that had been put through a trash compactor. Or maybe I’m being unfair just because a lot of what Dani’s generation call an SUV look just like ugly station wagons to me. The guy driving the car matched it perfectly as far as I was concerned, just as short and compacted and stuffed-looking, though that might have been the impossibly puffy coat he wore, like the temperatures were thirty degrees colder and this was the freaking Arctic circle. Between the Michelin-Man jacket, the trapper hat, and his ridiculous, bushy beard, the guy could have stepped out of some commercial for frozen dinners.
“Hi,” he said with a smile, his passenger’s side window opening just a few inches, as if he was afraid rolling it all the way down would cause his car to freeze over. “I’m Darrell. Are you Dani Campling?”
“That’s me,” Dani said, smiling brightly enough to keep the guy distracted.
Dani got into the front seat with Darrell, making small talk while us three piled into the back. Gib scooted all the way behind the driver so he wouldn’t be visible in the rear-view mirror.
“So, that’s a fancy area you guys want to go to,” Darrell continued his spiel as he pulled away from the curb. These new cars were quiet, at least, though that meant the driver seemed to feel the need to fill the gap with his voice. “Lotsa rich DC fat cats live there.”
“That’s the idea,” I murmured, not caring if he heard me.
“How’d you all wind up in the parking lot of the ball field anyways?” Darrell went on. He shook his head and the flaps of his overly warm hat waggled like a hound dog’s ears. “It’s some nasty weather out here to be walking around! I almost didn’t work today, but I like, need the money, y’know?”
“It’s where our ride dropped us,” Dani told him, honest but not completely so. “It couldn’t go any farther.”
Well, it could have. If I’d had my way, it would have. But no commander ignores the recommendations of his experts and Dani was as much of an expert as we had on modern-day Earth. What I knew about it was nearly as useless as Val’s experiences back in the 1870s, and the only reason he’d come instead of Laranna was that he was human…and that had been a near thing.
“So, you a Commanders fan?” Darrell asked, changing gears. I frowned, not knowing what a commander was in this context but also not willing to reveal my ignorance of everything past the release of Predator.
“Bengals fan,” Dani corrected him, and I intuited that the Commanders was a football team. Maybe Virginia had their own team now? I thought everyone from northern Virginia was a Redskins fan.
“Aw, man, I feel bad for Joe Burrow. He keeps getting hurt just when it looks like it’s going to be his year.”
“I feel worse for us,” she shot back. “At least he gets paid millions of dollars. All we get is the shaft.”
Millions of dollars? Jeez, NFL salaries had gone up a lot since I left.
The two of them kept chattering about football players whose names I didn’t recognize and I pretty much tuned them out, staring at the snow and trying to see something of the buildings beyond it. I’d never been to Virginia, though I’d visited DC once with my parents. Hell, we might have come through Arlington, but I didn’t remember a thing about the trip other than seeing the Washington Monument and the Lincoln Memorial. The part of Arlington we were in was definitely upscale, full of large houses and small yards, and every one of them looked a lot like the rest, as if the cookie-cutter subdivisions I hated as a kid had suddenly become the in thing.
I don’t know how the driver told one of them from another in this storm, but it might have been his phone. He had it mounted on a plastic holder attached by a suction cup to the window and it looked as if it was mapping the way. I didn’t know they could do that, too, but hell, there didn’t seem to be much they couldn’t do. I didn’t like much of what I’d seen of the 2020s the last time we’d visited, but I really wanted a cell phone, and I was pissed they didn’t work in space.
“Your destination is on the right,” the phone’s mapping system advised and Darrell pulled over to the sidewalk in front of a two-story house, its slate-gray paint nearly lost in the snow.
“Here you go!” he said, grinning at Dani like a man who’d come to believe in love at first sight. “Hope you have a nice stay in Arlington!”
“Thanks, Darrell,” she said, keeping his eyes on her while Gib slid out the side and turned away, his hood still low over his face. “Drive safe.”
“You certainly had him eating out of your hand,” Giblet commented dryly as the Honda pulled away from the curb. “You seem to have that effect on men.”
