Eradication, p.4
Eradication, page 4
Dad was baiting me; I knew by now he knew exactly where I was. “Next time I get leave, Pops.” It was a familiar lie; we both knew it.
“You don’t need to go to Gateway, you need to stay in orbit.”
The jarring shift in the conversation threw me mentally. “Why’s that?”
“If you go to Luna, you will lose command of the starship. One of those old, idiotic, desk jockeys they have at Gateway base will assume command and start giving orders like they know what the hell is going on. You and Banshee need to stay fiercely independent.”
The Luna bases were indeed thought of as a retirement home for old Space Force officers, that was true. I was less sure why we needed to be calling our own shots. “But we…”
He cut me off. “Hush, boy, grown-ups are speaking.”
“Assholes are squeaking,” I said under my breath.
“This war,” he continued unabated, “will not be decided up there. The battle for our species will be right down here on terra-firma, and you fucking know it.”
“Colonel, we have the high ground.”
“At the moment, Master Sergeant.” Okay, now we were moving into the tactical part of the conversation.
“You need trigger-pullers. Good ones, not the Alliance irregulars.”
It was slightly offensive, but I knew he was talking about the regular Army of the Alliance nations. We’d been at peace too long, and the regular Army was practically useless against normal combatants much less the mutated monsters and robot hordes loose down there now.
“You were never much of a spacer, Pops. Not every war is decided by ground-pounders like you. If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”
I heard the disgust in his reply.
“You read that off a sign in your therapist office? Look, kid, the fact is, life sucks. Sometimes you’re the hammer, sometimes you’re the nail. I am telling you it’s time to be the goddamn hammer. You read me?”
I nodded despite myself. “I read you, sir.”
“Good, look, I gotta go, Ms. Henderson next door wants to play pickleball, if you know what I mean.”
Pickleball, I knew what he meant, and the mental image made me cringe. “One thing, Dad.”
“Yeah, hurry up, kid, my ‘only tool’ is starting to look like that damn hammer you mentioned.”
Carol was slipping out of the bunkroom. She gave me a quick silent peck on the lips before heading in the washroom's direction. “Something happened to me.”
“Aghh… got it,” he said. “It’s called puberty, Son, and we knew it would happen one day. It’s perfectly natural. You will start getting hair in pla…”
“Dad!”
“Yes?”
“Be serious. Doctor Reichert lied to me, didn’t he? He did more enhancements than he was supposed to.”
“Everybody lies, Son. The late doctor had a lot of secrets. Now you do, too. I would try to keep them to yourself for now. You don’t need a bigger target on your back.”
How did he know the doctor was dead? I wondered. “I get it, so you don’t know why it happened.”
“It happened because someone wanted it to happen, just like always.” The music was getting louder, and I knew he was signaling the conversation was over. I felt the mental disconnect as the connection ended, and the music faded away.
“I have a set of coordinates presumably from your father,” Ada said.
“Great.” Where was he suggesting we go instead of the moon? “Florida, South America. Where?”
She displayed the coordinates directly onto my optical nerve.
“Those coordinates aren’t terrestrial.” Too many digits, and my newly upgraded brain had a good idea where it was before Ada confirmed it. “Do you have maneuvering worked out with the ship’s AI yet?”
“I do.”
Grabbing my shirt from the cabin, I headed back to the bridge. “Bayou.”
“Yes,” she answered immediately.
I gave her the coordinates with instructions to scan it and lay in a course at best speed.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Red-7 was still holding it mostly together, but the captain knew that wouldn’t last forever. The sounds of gunfire were almost continuous now. It echoed across the beach like thunder as two crewed K8 Disruptors unleashed full auto hell on the beasts. Those rounds inflicted sufficient damage to bring the things down. Huge chunks of scaly flesh were torn away in gouts of purplish blood. The things dropped where they were hit in the sand or in the surf, but Jesus…more of them just kept on coming.
Jordan Hauk was proud of his men but knew this was not a winnable fight. The enemy had the numbers and no need of ammo, which was a very finite resource for his assaulters. He fired at one creature clambering up onto shore, shifted to the next, only to see it dive beneath the waves. There were just so many, he couldn’t be sure what shots had found their mark. After the last encounter, he’d passed the word to aim for the thighs, but that was easier said than done. As the things emerged from the ocean, the legs appeared nearly the same color of murky green as the gulf waters.
Hauk gave the command to pull back. He hated giving up the beach, but they were minutes away from being overrun. The two men were kneeling and shooting at something a few yards behind him. He had no time to think about it as he dove for the scant concealment of the saw grass-covered dune. He rolled back up and was firing again in one fluid motion as the two men who covered him now moved past in a precise dance of life or death. The leapfrogging only worked if you could make kill shots on the approaching force. Even Hauk admitted most of his weren’t.
Something caught the captain’s eye. He shifted the scope deeper into the surf line, then froze. There, at the rear, was another creature… something different. Something more menacing even than the monsters. Shit. It also looked to be directing the fight, he saw limbs that looked more like tentacles and a flattened head. A slap on his shoulder let him know his men were now behind him. In that second, he’d lost sight of the new threat, but his racing heart hadn’t forgotten the panic it had inspired.
Breathe, Hauk. Assess, think, act! It had been his mantra since basic, and it had always served him well. Instead of getting up and falling back, he stopped behind a fallen log and got down on a knee, then opened up again as several of the strange, reptilian shapes raced toward him. One went down as a Disruptor round tore away its left leg. The body cartwheeled across the sand like a rag doll.
The others never slowed, never looked at their fallen comrade. These ugly things might be the ultimate fighting force. Good tactics, effective armor and weapons, and… no genuine sense of self-preservation or fear.
One of the largest ones Hauk had seen was shoving its way through scrub trees, leaping forward on its strange backward-looking legs. The thing bellowed, blowing a mist out of its gaping mouth. It wanted them dead, and that signal seemed to rally the others around it. If the other thing in the water was the commander, this had to be the first sergeant. Hauk shot it in the face. It wasn’t where he should have shot it, but the thing’s lower half was hidden in the tangle of mangroves and sawgrass.
His shot was more luck than skill, but the thing gave a satisfying lurch as it crashed face-first to the ground.
Day after day of this had taken its toll on all of them. Again, Hauk forced himself to calm and keep picking up threats and putting them down. That sense of panic never went away, and at one point, when he realized one of his targets was stopping to feed on a fallen soldier, it threatened to consume him totally. He squeezed the trigger blocking out the details, the horror even of the agonizing screams of pain from his own men. Fear would end this battle in seconds and probably just get them all eaten. They had already fought too hard for that. Make these lives mean something.
Hauk signaled another retreat as he again told himself this was just another battle. Assess, think, act!
But while he kept repeating his mantra over and over, the more primitive part of his brain was screaming at him to get the fuck out of there.
“Sir!”
Hauk reluctantly shifted his focus from the targeting reticle to his senior chief.
“Talk, Grayson.”
“We’re losing them, sir. Our men...I mean. They were okay for a while, but you know… seeing what those things are doing to the bodies and all…”
Shit. Yeah, Captain Hauk understood fully. Battles were won or lost in the head long before they were decided on the ground. Seeing their friends and squad mates not just being killed but partially consumed by the enemy was too much. Many of these guys were just kids, and they were beyond the breaking point already. That was the only reason a hard ass like the senior chief would speak up for them now. He knew they were minutes away from total defeat. Hauk wanted to ask about the HVI, her and the other civilians they’d acquired but—fuck ‘em. They were not his priority right now. In fact, the high value asset was why there were all here. Here fighting—and dying.
Hauk nodded, “Okay, Senior, strategic full retreat. Send two men back to find us some cover, something defensible. Leave your best trigger-pullers on the line as long as you can.”
Grayson nodded, relaying the signal to his troops via comms and hand signals. “Sir, you need to go, too.”
Hauk looked at the man with fury in his eyes. He couldn’t retreat, he was not that kind of commander. He led from the front.
“Not all of us are going to make it off this beach, sir,” the senior chief said. “For us to have a chance, one of them must be you.”
The next monster popped up, surprising them both. Hauk stitched a line of shots across its midsection, and Grayson leveled his rifle directly into the thing’s oversized eyes. It was pissed but didn’t go down. Both men had to hammer five more rounds into the thing before one round clipped the thigh sending it backward, where it fell heavily and writhed like a fish out of water. Some of these are much tougher than the others, why? Hauk wondered.
The firing line pulled back a few dozen yards, the stationary men in back shooting over the heads of the front line, who would fire, scuttle back, and fire again. As the two lines merged, alternating soldiers would rise and move farther back in a mostly synchronized movement that kept rounds going downrange in a near-constant barrage. The men couldn’t take it for long, hell, the rifles and ammo wouldn’t take it. They needed time to cool down, go through a mandatory maintenance cycle every thousand rounds. That usually took less than a minute, but those were minutes none of them had right now.
Hauk moved up beside Howell, who was using the body of another soldier for cover. The kid had been one of the late additions from San Antonio, and Hauk wasn’t sure about him yet. He popped up, seemed to shoot without aiming, then ducked back down. Clearly, he was using the ‘spray and pray’ battlefield technique. Still, one of the reptilian things spun sideways crashing into a tree and taking out a section of fencing in the process. There were just so many targets. He tapped the kid on the shoulder and motioned him to follow.
Hauk turned and began an awkward, stumbling run; he realized just how ragged the line was. It was a miracle they hadn’t been overrun. It was incomplete, staggered, and nearly useless as anything defensible. Like him, his men were bone-tired, scared, and beginning to run low on ammo. As the captain watched, he saw their right flank begin to dissolve under the brutally relentless enemy attack.
They managed to reform another ragged skirmish line, then retreated through the scant trees, thinning out the line even more but staying ahead of the monstrous horde. Hauk estimated several hundred of the things were actively hunting his men. They’d already had running skirmishes with the things for several days, and he’d foolishly thought the water would slow them down. Of course, he’d also assumed his fucking extraction boat would be here. Now he knew the damn things were even better equipped for marine fighting than on land. Hell, everything about them looked aquatic, now that he thought about it.
He and the lieutenant were stopping and firing every few yards. They used a technique they called talking rifles to alternate fire, so both were never changing a magazine pack at the same time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t slowing the monsters down. It seemed to the captain that each time they stopped to lay down covering fire, the things just got closer.
The senior chief soon figured this out as well. “Cease fire, men. Conserve ammo. Just fucking run!”
Hauk had a brief second of irritation at the man’s order, but Grayson was right. They were accomplishing nothing here except delaying a bloody end to Red-7. Turning back inland, Hauk quickly spotted the advance team, the ones he was supposed to be with, huddled between the CML transport bots heading toward a group of squat buildings with solid polycrete block walls. Just then, the last of the K8s fell silent.
“Hadroop?”
“He’s up there!” Grayson paused just long enough to yell the words back to the captain.
With one more glance at the monsters quickly closing in, Hauk turned and ran for his life.
Each man shrugged out of their heavy packs and slumped to the floor. Senior had them call out ammo and status. Hauk could see they’d somehow made it to the shelter with more than half of his unit intact. The readout on his sleeve gave him the running KIA and MIA counts. The situation was grim, they all understood that. Some were still just getting past the denial stage. This was the first face-to-face encounter with large numbers of the creatures. The hit-and-run tactics the things had used crossing the east Texas hellscape had only offered them glimpses and usually in the dark of night through the NVGs. Now they had all seen them fully, up close and very personal. It forced each man to confront the grotesque strangeness of this new world and the brutality it required to survive.
“Fire Squad Leaders!” Senior Chief Grayson was yelling.
Hauk knew he would get a perimeter guard rotation up and running. “Everyone else grab some calories, check mags, and two hours of sleep.”
That wouldn’t be enough, not by a long shot, they couldn’t keep going like this. Hauk couldn’t keep going. Already he felt the adrenaline leaving his body like a junkie coming off a high. It would leave them all desperate for sleep within minutes.
“Are we good here, Senior?” Hauk whispered, his parched voice sounding like sandpaper.
“From those things? Shit, Captain, I have no idea. Buildings good, have the civies near the rear, no exit back there. Got camels out doing recovery, hopefully they can get us a K8. Those damn Decimator rounds are the only thing that saved us out there.”
Hauk nodded, “Lock it down and get some shut eye yourself. We have more fighting before this day is over.”
“Where’s McNeil?”
No response; they all knew what that meant. Corporal McNeil was the platoon’s radioman. At roll call tomorrow his name would be called three times. If there was a tomorrow. Hauk had to think about who his backup was. “Kid, I need you to get comms up, like yesterday?” Hauk’s voice was close to breaking now. He didn’t want to sound panicked, but he was struggling to keep it from coming through. Gomez was already pulling the spare comms unit out of its case. “We need emergency extract now. Any available force, any means available.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” Pfc. Joseph Gomez said as confidently as he could manage. Normally, he was a spotter for one of the snipers. He liked those assignments, away from the front lines. But then, his technical skills had gotten the attention of the old man, and now it was his job to get them out of this fucking beach trip from hell. Like the rest, Gomez was clueless on how this simple escort op had gone so fucking pear-shaped. Land on friendly soil, roll over to Lackland Space Base and pick up a friendly, then hustle back to the extract point. He read the display, and his voice sounded close to panic. “Unable to establish Satlink!”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
TWO MONTHS AGO - TEMPORARY U.S. CAPITAL
She threw up her hands in exasperation. She hated… no detested, dealing with most people. They were all stupid, and this insipid bureaucrat was more so than most. She adopted a tone of a teacher talking to a kindergartener. Okay, maybe a drunk teacher. “Look, fuckwad, here’s a thought, why don’t you sit and listen to the facts before attempting to tell me what your opinion of my report is.” The undersecretary of whatever bullshit department looked at her like she was something he might scrape off the bottom of his shoe. He was not so inclined as to hear her out and proceeded to tell her so very loudly.
Xero left the conference room, looking for the man’s boss, the one who had set up this meeting. The government, like the rest of the country, was in shambles. Still, the bureaucratic machine tried its best to rise once again and find someone else to blame.
On Last Day, or Eradication Day, the term that was now gaining popularity with the survivors, the missiles, the micro EMPs, hell, even some of the more bizarre things that happened like the biogenetic sapphire detonations, were merely cover. She’d been ass-deep in tracking down a series of blockchain proxy server violations that had been leaking funds away from one of her client’s accounts. Then she started seeing unusual patterns in cyberspace, major routers going dark and legitimate websites on the red or blue web replaced by black web mirror sites. Deep fakes designed to alarm and upset the normal routines. It was a coordinated cyberwar attack, and it had been masterfully done.
All of the major stock exchanges had been hit, not crippling blows, but alterations to the automated trading AIs. Alterations that cost major investors billions of dollars in lost income. The pre-programmed stop-loss commands that executed automatically in case of erratic trading did something else. Instead of shifting allocations to more conservative accounts, it doubled-downed the portfolios on even riskier stocks. Hundreds of billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires were effectively broke by the end of that day, many of whom had no clue as they trusted the automated trading bots completely.
The stock market failures had been compounded by text alerts also from black web, fake sites showing individual banks were also failing, payroll checks were bouncing, and credit cards were being cancelled because of nonpayment. Even though many of these were obvious scams, the effect was just as real. Xero knew a lot about social engineering. People had a tendency to believe falsehoods over facts, especially if they were dramatic and personal.
“You don’t need to go to Gateway, you need to stay in orbit.”
The jarring shift in the conversation threw me mentally. “Why’s that?”
“If you go to Luna, you will lose command of the starship. One of those old, idiotic, desk jockeys they have at Gateway base will assume command and start giving orders like they know what the hell is going on. You and Banshee need to stay fiercely independent.”
The Luna bases were indeed thought of as a retirement home for old Space Force officers, that was true. I was less sure why we needed to be calling our own shots. “But we…”
He cut me off. “Hush, boy, grown-ups are speaking.”
“Assholes are squeaking,” I said under my breath.
“This war,” he continued unabated, “will not be decided up there. The battle for our species will be right down here on terra-firma, and you fucking know it.”
“Colonel, we have the high ground.”
“At the moment, Master Sergeant.” Okay, now we were moving into the tactical part of the conversation.
“You need trigger-pullers. Good ones, not the Alliance irregulars.”
It was slightly offensive, but I knew he was talking about the regular Army of the Alliance nations. We’d been at peace too long, and the regular Army was practically useless against normal combatants much less the mutated monsters and robot hordes loose down there now.
“You were never much of a spacer, Pops. Not every war is decided by ground-pounders like you. If your only tool is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail.”
I heard the disgust in his reply.
“You read that off a sign in your therapist office? Look, kid, the fact is, life sucks. Sometimes you’re the hammer, sometimes you’re the nail. I am telling you it’s time to be the goddamn hammer. You read me?”
I nodded despite myself. “I read you, sir.”
“Good, look, I gotta go, Ms. Henderson next door wants to play pickleball, if you know what I mean.”
Pickleball, I knew what he meant, and the mental image made me cringe. “One thing, Dad.”
“Yeah, hurry up, kid, my ‘only tool’ is starting to look like that damn hammer you mentioned.”
Carol was slipping out of the bunkroom. She gave me a quick silent peck on the lips before heading in the washroom's direction. “Something happened to me.”
“Aghh… got it,” he said. “It’s called puberty, Son, and we knew it would happen one day. It’s perfectly natural. You will start getting hair in pla…”
“Dad!”
“Yes?”
“Be serious. Doctor Reichert lied to me, didn’t he? He did more enhancements than he was supposed to.”
“Everybody lies, Son. The late doctor had a lot of secrets. Now you do, too. I would try to keep them to yourself for now. You don’t need a bigger target on your back.”
How did he know the doctor was dead? I wondered. “I get it, so you don’t know why it happened.”
“It happened because someone wanted it to happen, just like always.” The music was getting louder, and I knew he was signaling the conversation was over. I felt the mental disconnect as the connection ended, and the music faded away.
“I have a set of coordinates presumably from your father,” Ada said.
“Great.” Where was he suggesting we go instead of the moon? “Florida, South America. Where?”
She displayed the coordinates directly onto my optical nerve.
“Those coordinates aren’t terrestrial.” Too many digits, and my newly upgraded brain had a good idea where it was before Ada confirmed it. “Do you have maneuvering worked out with the ship’s AI yet?”
“I do.”
Grabbing my shirt from the cabin, I headed back to the bridge. “Bayou.”
“Yes,” she answered immediately.
I gave her the coordinates with instructions to scan it and lay in a course at best speed.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
Red-7 was still holding it mostly together, but the captain knew that wouldn’t last forever. The sounds of gunfire were almost continuous now. It echoed across the beach like thunder as two crewed K8 Disruptors unleashed full auto hell on the beasts. Those rounds inflicted sufficient damage to bring the things down. Huge chunks of scaly flesh were torn away in gouts of purplish blood. The things dropped where they were hit in the sand or in the surf, but Jesus…more of them just kept on coming.
Jordan Hauk was proud of his men but knew this was not a winnable fight. The enemy had the numbers and no need of ammo, which was a very finite resource for his assaulters. He fired at one creature clambering up onto shore, shifted to the next, only to see it dive beneath the waves. There were just so many, he couldn’t be sure what shots had found their mark. After the last encounter, he’d passed the word to aim for the thighs, but that was easier said than done. As the things emerged from the ocean, the legs appeared nearly the same color of murky green as the gulf waters.
Hauk gave the command to pull back. He hated giving up the beach, but they were minutes away from being overrun. The two men were kneeling and shooting at something a few yards behind him. He had no time to think about it as he dove for the scant concealment of the saw grass-covered dune. He rolled back up and was firing again in one fluid motion as the two men who covered him now moved past in a precise dance of life or death. The leapfrogging only worked if you could make kill shots on the approaching force. Even Hauk admitted most of his weren’t.
Something caught the captain’s eye. He shifted the scope deeper into the surf line, then froze. There, at the rear, was another creature… something different. Something more menacing even than the monsters. Shit. It also looked to be directing the fight, he saw limbs that looked more like tentacles and a flattened head. A slap on his shoulder let him know his men were now behind him. In that second, he’d lost sight of the new threat, but his racing heart hadn’t forgotten the panic it had inspired.
Breathe, Hauk. Assess, think, act! It had been his mantra since basic, and it had always served him well. Instead of getting up and falling back, he stopped behind a fallen log and got down on a knee, then opened up again as several of the strange, reptilian shapes raced toward him. One went down as a Disruptor round tore away its left leg. The body cartwheeled across the sand like a rag doll.
The others never slowed, never looked at their fallen comrade. These ugly things might be the ultimate fighting force. Good tactics, effective armor and weapons, and… no genuine sense of self-preservation or fear.
One of the largest ones Hauk had seen was shoving its way through scrub trees, leaping forward on its strange backward-looking legs. The thing bellowed, blowing a mist out of its gaping mouth. It wanted them dead, and that signal seemed to rally the others around it. If the other thing in the water was the commander, this had to be the first sergeant. Hauk shot it in the face. It wasn’t where he should have shot it, but the thing’s lower half was hidden in the tangle of mangroves and sawgrass.
His shot was more luck than skill, but the thing gave a satisfying lurch as it crashed face-first to the ground.
Day after day of this had taken its toll on all of them. Again, Hauk forced himself to calm and keep picking up threats and putting them down. That sense of panic never went away, and at one point, when he realized one of his targets was stopping to feed on a fallen soldier, it threatened to consume him totally. He squeezed the trigger blocking out the details, the horror even of the agonizing screams of pain from his own men. Fear would end this battle in seconds and probably just get them all eaten. They had already fought too hard for that. Make these lives mean something.
Hauk signaled another retreat as he again told himself this was just another battle. Assess, think, act!
But while he kept repeating his mantra over and over, the more primitive part of his brain was screaming at him to get the fuck out of there.
“Sir!”
Hauk reluctantly shifted his focus from the targeting reticle to his senior chief.
“Talk, Grayson.”
“We’re losing them, sir. Our men...I mean. They were okay for a while, but you know… seeing what those things are doing to the bodies and all…”
Shit. Yeah, Captain Hauk understood fully. Battles were won or lost in the head long before they were decided on the ground. Seeing their friends and squad mates not just being killed but partially consumed by the enemy was too much. Many of these guys were just kids, and they were beyond the breaking point already. That was the only reason a hard ass like the senior chief would speak up for them now. He knew they were minutes away from total defeat. Hauk wanted to ask about the HVI, her and the other civilians they’d acquired but—fuck ‘em. They were not his priority right now. In fact, the high value asset was why there were all here. Here fighting—and dying.
Hauk nodded, “Okay, Senior, strategic full retreat. Send two men back to find us some cover, something defensible. Leave your best trigger-pullers on the line as long as you can.”
Grayson nodded, relaying the signal to his troops via comms and hand signals. “Sir, you need to go, too.”
Hauk looked at the man with fury in his eyes. He couldn’t retreat, he was not that kind of commander. He led from the front.
“Not all of us are going to make it off this beach, sir,” the senior chief said. “For us to have a chance, one of them must be you.”
The next monster popped up, surprising them both. Hauk stitched a line of shots across its midsection, and Grayson leveled his rifle directly into the thing’s oversized eyes. It was pissed but didn’t go down. Both men had to hammer five more rounds into the thing before one round clipped the thigh sending it backward, where it fell heavily and writhed like a fish out of water. Some of these are much tougher than the others, why? Hauk wondered.
The firing line pulled back a few dozen yards, the stationary men in back shooting over the heads of the front line, who would fire, scuttle back, and fire again. As the two lines merged, alternating soldiers would rise and move farther back in a mostly synchronized movement that kept rounds going downrange in a near-constant barrage. The men couldn’t take it for long, hell, the rifles and ammo wouldn’t take it. They needed time to cool down, go through a mandatory maintenance cycle every thousand rounds. That usually took less than a minute, but those were minutes none of them had right now.
Hauk moved up beside Howell, who was using the body of another soldier for cover. The kid had been one of the late additions from San Antonio, and Hauk wasn’t sure about him yet. He popped up, seemed to shoot without aiming, then ducked back down. Clearly, he was using the ‘spray and pray’ battlefield technique. Still, one of the reptilian things spun sideways crashing into a tree and taking out a section of fencing in the process. There were just so many targets. He tapped the kid on the shoulder and motioned him to follow.
Hauk turned and began an awkward, stumbling run; he realized just how ragged the line was. It was a miracle they hadn’t been overrun. It was incomplete, staggered, and nearly useless as anything defensible. Like him, his men were bone-tired, scared, and beginning to run low on ammo. As the captain watched, he saw their right flank begin to dissolve under the brutally relentless enemy attack.
They managed to reform another ragged skirmish line, then retreated through the scant trees, thinning out the line even more but staying ahead of the monstrous horde. Hauk estimated several hundred of the things were actively hunting his men. They’d already had running skirmishes with the things for several days, and he’d foolishly thought the water would slow them down. Of course, he’d also assumed his fucking extraction boat would be here. Now he knew the damn things were even better equipped for marine fighting than on land. Hell, everything about them looked aquatic, now that he thought about it.
He and the lieutenant were stopping and firing every few yards. They used a technique they called talking rifles to alternate fire, so both were never changing a magazine pack at the same time. Unfortunately, it wasn’t slowing the monsters down. It seemed to the captain that each time they stopped to lay down covering fire, the things just got closer.
The senior chief soon figured this out as well. “Cease fire, men. Conserve ammo. Just fucking run!”
Hauk had a brief second of irritation at the man’s order, but Grayson was right. They were accomplishing nothing here except delaying a bloody end to Red-7. Turning back inland, Hauk quickly spotted the advance team, the ones he was supposed to be with, huddled between the CML transport bots heading toward a group of squat buildings with solid polycrete block walls. Just then, the last of the K8s fell silent.
“Hadroop?”
“He’s up there!” Grayson paused just long enough to yell the words back to the captain.
With one more glance at the monsters quickly closing in, Hauk turned and ran for his life.
Each man shrugged out of their heavy packs and slumped to the floor. Senior had them call out ammo and status. Hauk could see they’d somehow made it to the shelter with more than half of his unit intact. The readout on his sleeve gave him the running KIA and MIA counts. The situation was grim, they all understood that. Some were still just getting past the denial stage. This was the first face-to-face encounter with large numbers of the creatures. The hit-and-run tactics the things had used crossing the east Texas hellscape had only offered them glimpses and usually in the dark of night through the NVGs. Now they had all seen them fully, up close and very personal. It forced each man to confront the grotesque strangeness of this new world and the brutality it required to survive.
“Fire Squad Leaders!” Senior Chief Grayson was yelling.
Hauk knew he would get a perimeter guard rotation up and running. “Everyone else grab some calories, check mags, and two hours of sleep.”
That wouldn’t be enough, not by a long shot, they couldn’t keep going like this. Hauk couldn’t keep going. Already he felt the adrenaline leaving his body like a junkie coming off a high. It would leave them all desperate for sleep within minutes.
“Are we good here, Senior?” Hauk whispered, his parched voice sounding like sandpaper.
“From those things? Shit, Captain, I have no idea. Buildings good, have the civies near the rear, no exit back there. Got camels out doing recovery, hopefully they can get us a K8. Those damn Decimator rounds are the only thing that saved us out there.”
Hauk nodded, “Lock it down and get some shut eye yourself. We have more fighting before this day is over.”
“Where’s McNeil?”
No response; they all knew what that meant. Corporal McNeil was the platoon’s radioman. At roll call tomorrow his name would be called three times. If there was a tomorrow. Hauk had to think about who his backup was. “Kid, I need you to get comms up, like yesterday?” Hauk’s voice was close to breaking now. He didn’t want to sound panicked, but he was struggling to keep it from coming through. Gomez was already pulling the spare comms unit out of its case. “We need emergency extract now. Any available force, any means available.”
“Sir, yes, sir!” Pfc. Joseph Gomez said as confidently as he could manage. Normally, he was a spotter for one of the snipers. He liked those assignments, away from the front lines. But then, his technical skills had gotten the attention of the old man, and now it was his job to get them out of this fucking beach trip from hell. Like the rest, Gomez was clueless on how this simple escort op had gone so fucking pear-shaped. Land on friendly soil, roll over to Lackland Space Base and pick up a friendly, then hustle back to the extract point. He read the display, and his voice sounded close to panic. “Unable to establish Satlink!”
CHAPTER
EIGHT
TWO MONTHS AGO - TEMPORARY U.S. CAPITAL
She threw up her hands in exasperation. She hated… no detested, dealing with most people. They were all stupid, and this insipid bureaucrat was more so than most. She adopted a tone of a teacher talking to a kindergartener. Okay, maybe a drunk teacher. “Look, fuckwad, here’s a thought, why don’t you sit and listen to the facts before attempting to tell me what your opinion of my report is.” The undersecretary of whatever bullshit department looked at her like she was something he might scrape off the bottom of his shoe. He was not so inclined as to hear her out and proceeded to tell her so very loudly.
Xero left the conference room, looking for the man’s boss, the one who had set up this meeting. The government, like the rest of the country, was in shambles. Still, the bureaucratic machine tried its best to rise once again and find someone else to blame.
On Last Day, or Eradication Day, the term that was now gaining popularity with the survivors, the missiles, the micro EMPs, hell, even some of the more bizarre things that happened like the biogenetic sapphire detonations, were merely cover. She’d been ass-deep in tracking down a series of blockchain proxy server violations that had been leaking funds away from one of her client’s accounts. Then she started seeing unusual patterns in cyberspace, major routers going dark and legitimate websites on the red or blue web replaced by black web mirror sites. Deep fakes designed to alarm and upset the normal routines. It was a coordinated cyberwar attack, and it had been masterfully done.
All of the major stock exchanges had been hit, not crippling blows, but alterations to the automated trading AIs. Alterations that cost major investors billions of dollars in lost income. The pre-programmed stop-loss commands that executed automatically in case of erratic trading did something else. Instead of shifting allocations to more conservative accounts, it doubled-downed the portfolios on even riskier stocks. Hundreds of billionaires and tens of thousands of millionaires were effectively broke by the end of that day, many of whom had no clue as they trusted the automated trading bots completely.
The stock market failures had been compounded by text alerts also from black web, fake sites showing individual banks were also failing, payroll checks were bouncing, and credit cards were being cancelled because of nonpayment. Even though many of these were obvious scams, the effect was just as real. Xero knew a lot about social engineering. People had a tendency to believe falsehoods over facts, especially if they were dramatic and personal.
