Fear the Survivors (31 page)

But then Neal shook his head, “No, without more information on what we are facing, I simply cannot risk you two in there.” The room looked disconcerted by what this implied, and Quavoce made to make his and John’s willingness to help out clearer, but Neal waved him down, and the general stepped in to reinforce the point.

“I agree, Neal.” said Barrett, “With Mikhail Kovalenko and Pei Leong-Lam still at large, we must assume that they are at the core of whatever dysfunctional power base has developed in Russia. That said, of course, I can also see a way in which that fact works to our advantage as well.”

Ayala looked puzzled, and Neal quirked his head in curiosity, then sat back, leaving Barrett to explain further. “Well, if we assume that the remaining Agents are at the heart of this, then the danger of equipping an incursion team with our latest equipment is mitigated, as the Russians could not realistically learn anything from our people or their equipment that Mikhail or Pei could not already teach them.”

“Yes, Barrett, you are absolutely right,” said Neal with a deeper satisfaction than even he had expected, “Which means we can … and
should
send in an advance party armed with the tools necessary to get the job done properly.”

“Gentlemen,” he said now to the most senior men in the room, “if you would pass this offer, actually this request, up your chains of command, I would greatly appreciate it.”

They nodded, and they would indeed pass it on, even if they both harbored reservations about the wisdom of such action without proper military oversight.

“Meanwhile,” continued Neal, “Ayala, if you haven’t already, can you please draft plans for the missions should they be approved and submit them to this group for review. Please include recommendations on incursion points and sortie routes.”

She nodded. She already had just such a plan in its infancy, and was busy picking out the best operatives to lead it in her mind.

“Now, to the next point.” Neal took a breath, and then pressed on, the room waiting to hear his next thoughts. “It seems wise in the face of such events to start escalating efforts to equip all our forces as fully as possible. I know Amadeu and his team have been making good progress on the spinal interface, and we have been waiting to build some of the more complex machines John and Quavoce have provided us the designs for until we had the software we would need to use them. Well, I fear we can wait no longer to start pushing here. I will talk to Amadeu and see what can be done to up the tempo of our efforts with Minnie and her development of the AI progeny we are going to need. I will also order my other teams to prioritize completion of the Resonance Dome.”

The room was particularly intrigued by Neal’s offhand reference to the Resonance Dome. He was referring to the massive resonance chamber that was going to be used to build such huge devices as the Skalms, already infamous among those few people who had seen the designs. Admiral Hamilton brought voice to this curiosity, “The Resonance Dome,” he said, treading carefully in the face of Neal’s instantly wary look. “I cannot say I do not appreciate the need to keep its location secret, even from the bulk of the taskforce here at Rolas, but maybe it is time that those of us in this room knew where the first Dome is being constructed?”

Neal stared at him. With support from America beginning to dwindle under the duress of its internal injuries, and Europe ever more fearful and distracted by Russia’s posturing, it had taken everything he had to maintain the force strength around Rolas necessary to ward off any attack by Pei, Mikhail, and whoever’s strings they were pulling.

But the Dome could not be built here as well. It was simply too big. The operations already in place at Rolas were already too all encompassing and widespread. To add to that the massive, acre-sized dome and its ancillary power sources would have been all but prohibitive.

But that had not been all. Even with all the defenses they had put in place around Rolas, it was still not impregnable. Nothing was. They had built a mesh of gunpowder and lead that would tear any attacking force to shreds, and they’d had to. You could not hide a cable into space. The entire ground site had a 50,000-mile-high arrow pointing straight at it.

But, if the impossible happened, if an attack succeeded, they could, in theory, rebuild the elevator. But Neal knew that given what he had been forced to promise, beg, and cajole in order to get this far that they could not rebuild the Dome. Not in his lifetime anyway.

For the Dome represented the biggest investment the combined allied nations had made to date, by a massive factor. So much, in fact, that Neal had been forced to hide its true expense from even his closest friends and allies. No one but he knew what he had done in order to secure the hundreds of tons of gold required. India alone, the world’s biggest single consumer of gold and one of Neal’s biggest contributors, believed itself the presumptive owner and controller of the Dome once it was complete, as did America, Europe, Japan, Brazil, and South Africa.

It had been, at its heart, a con, one that would eventually be discovered. A loan mortgaged on the back of the space elevators spectacular success, and on countless promises of power, influence, and technological supremacy. They had given much in return, believing they were each the majority contributor, but even India’s massive contribution had, in fact, been only a fraction of the whole. And the negotiations had been moot anyway. Neal never intended to give over control of the Dome, not under any circumstances short of an improbable victory over the coming Armada, maybe not even then.

He faced the room and they sat in silence, waiting for his reply. They wanted to know. How could they not? So much depended on the Dome. And it was not even going to be the only one. But it would be the first. And it would be the only one on Earth using earthbound resources. The second would be built using the materials they hoped to glean from Asteroid 1979 va, and as such was more than a year away, at least.

“Yes,” he said, with a deep inhale, “the Resonance Dome. You know why I have kept its location a secret. Even the team working on it doesn’t know what they are involved in, and has been sequestered until its completion anyway. It has …” he paused a moment, looking for the words, “… posed some problems in getting it completed, but it has been worth it, of that I have no doubt.”

He looked at them. It was difficult for him to trust them, even them, such was the depth of his vulnerability here. He was so close. Once it was done, and once the first Skalm was complete, he would have the ability to truly defend the secret site.

“I can tell you it is nearly done. And I can tell you that once it is, I will reveal its location to this group. But other than that, I am afraid I cannot go further, not yet.”

He looked from one to the other, dwelling perhaps a moment too long on Ayala. He was no fool. It was hard for him to believe that, even with all of his precautions, he had managed to evade Ayala’s curiosity on this. But her skill was also her promise. If she could be relied upon to have cracked his network somehow, then she could be relied upon to keep it quiet as well, for the very same reason.

They talked further. They discussed the secret of the Dome’s location as a matter of course, politely courting Neal to concede it, and perhaps occasionally calling on their governments’ contributions as reason for their need to know. But Neal had refused requests to oversee or at least visit the site from far more important people than these men. No. He must remain absolute. Nothing else was more important.

As they eventually filtered out, hands shaken, confirmations of action items exchanged, Ayala turned to Neal and locked eyes with him. They did not speak. She was telling him that she knew, that she knew his secret, and had for some time; and that she knew what he wanted her to do. They could, indeed, wait no longer to move on Mikhail and Pei. It was time to go to Russia. They nodded and parted.

Chapter 28: Nick at Night

The predawn air was cool and in
vigorating. Nick and Malcolm had started moving again not long after midnight. They had left the remote spot where they had parked to get some sporadic sleep, and cautiously driven the last few miles to the coast.

They had kept their headlights off, the nationwide curfew that had been imposed being both a curse and a blessing. For it allowed them to pass unbidden through sleeping towns, but left them hopelessly exposed if they were spotted from above.

They were close now, so close that it was better to risk a bit more driving at night rather than delay their escape another day. After the first couple of days spent carefully navigating the area surrounding the capital, they had begun their long, dangerous journey toward the Caspian Sea.

They had been flooded by mixed emotions at the sight of the first small fishing towns that dotted the shore of the Turkmenbasy estuary. For it was a long, shallow waterway, and none of the tiny boats that fed these tiny towns would be able to make it across the great sea that lay ahead.

So they had been forced to bypass these small communities and their barely seaworthy fishing boats, continuing on in constant fear, on toward the large town of Turkmenbasy itself. To the first town that truly sat on the coast of the vast Caspian Sea.

The great sea had once been the stuff of legend, indistinguishable to the burgeoning kingdoms that bordered it from an ocean, such was its breadth. It would be thousands of years until the first great empires had grown large enough to see that it was, unlike its oceanic counterparts, entirely landlocked. But even without link to the world’s great oceans, the Caspian remained a sea that divided the continent, from Russia to Iran in the north and south, and from Azerbaijan to the former Stannic nations in the west and east.

It was the largest lake in the world, but the wars and political intrigue that still plagued its bordering nations made it as fraught with international tension as any patch of water short of the Mediterranean. Now it was the fishing boats, plying their trade on the salty waters, which were at the heart of that conflict. They sought sturgeon and its famous unborn progeny for consumption and export. Russia and Iran may have cornered the international market for caviar, but their neighbors caught and consumed it as much as any Caspian fisherman did, and Nick and Malcolm had driven long and hard to get to the capital of Turkmenistan’s fishing trade.

Now, with the first light of dawn penetrating the night’s blackness, they clambered across a muddy bank to a small, wooden rowboat, the mud chilling their shins and filling their boots. Racing against the night’s dissipation, they helped each other into the tiny boat and shoved off into the night, grabbing oars and paddling for one of the large fishing boats anchored in the small harbor.

There was a relatively modern passenger and train ferry between Turkmenbasy and the far port of Baku, in Azerbaijan. Ordinarily lacking any stringent security, this would have been Nick’s first choice to get out of the country, but Ayala’s orders had expressly marked this as one of the ‘known’ routes, and all things known had become anathema since given Russia’s newfound and bloody efficiency.

So they rowed out to the huddle of fishing boats in the bay and climbed aboard one, kicking the small boat away into the last of the night. Someone would no doubt be heartbroken to find their small but precious rowboat gone from the shore in the morning, but that was not high on Nick and Malcolm’s list of concerns.

They were dirty, three days’ sweat trapped within their thick bulletproof vests, their shoes filled with tidal mud and all the stench of a long flight across a once friendly nation, now suddenly filled with enmity. And now they were in the last, but by no means least dangerous part of a journey, with more than enough opportunities to die still ahead of them.

Despite the terrifying trek they had undertaken, though, they had also been faced with a host of wonders as well, for they had glimpsed the beasts that hunted them, and it had shaken them to the very core.

Lying in silence in their car during the seemingly endless nights of their three-day flight, they had seen the strangely shaped fighters as they flew over the towns. They had seen the speed with which some sliced across the sky. Then they had watched in fear and amazement as others moved slowly and deliberately over various towns the two men had hidden in along the way, like circling hawks hovering over cowering prey.

The strange planes had been mostly dismissed by the locals as yet another example of the potent technology of the world’s superpowers, most notably the resurgent Russian Federation that had so recently subsumed their ex-democratic nation. But to the educated eyes of Nick and Malcolm they had been something far more disturbing.

This was nothing that any armed force they knew of had access to. This was something wholly new. It went some way toward accounting for the speed with which the new People’s Republic had spread its influence over the Stannic world, and to the urgency with which Nick had been ordered to get Malcolm out of the country. Taking liberal notes as the planes passed overhead, Nick had tried to document what he was seeing, and then they had tried to ignore the rising feeling of panic the deadly looking craft instilled in them both.

Now, days later, lying in the hold of a forty-year-old fishing junker with an equally old, nine-horsepower diesel engine, they waited for the ship’s crew to come aboard and take her out to sea. When the crew arrived, Nick and Malcolm would wait until they had steered their ship out onto the Caspian’s vast waters before emerging from their hiding spots.

Hopefully they would be able to overpower the crew and coerce the ship’s skipper to steer a new course for the sea’s far coast. Hopefully, the ever-expanding Russian empire would not have extended its reach to Azerbaijan before they got there. They lay in wait as they heard the telltale thud of a boat pulling alongside and boots clambering expertly aboard with their equipment and supplies, their loud voices brimming with ignorance of the coming confrontation.

- - -

As Nick and Malcolm tried so desperately to escape Russia’s grasp, there were those that were trying to get into it. Hektor Gruler, formerly of the German elite Spezialkrafte, stood in the center of a large, empty hangar, waiting for his team to arrive. They were scheduled to deploy the following morning. He was wearing his battleskin, as he nearly always did these days, getting used to the way it moved, teaching his muscles to accept the battle armor as part of him, becoming one with the abilities it gave him.

He had been working on his balance, fine-tuning his muscle memory to account for his augmented limbs’ vastly increased strength. Bending, he pressed his fists against the floor of the hangar and hoisted his weight onto them, not in a swift movement, but pushing his feet into the air in a smooth extension, as though stretching, focusing on maintaining tight control on his limbs as his weight shifted. Upright, he moved his weight to just his right arm, and extended his left arm out to the side, feeling the massive power of his suited body as he easily absorbed his mass on one balled fist.

“Vie gehen sie, Hektor?” the other German member of their team asked as he approached. Niels was not quite as practiced in the new suits as Hektor, having only joined Ayala’s shock troops after their base of operations had moved to SpacePort One. He was no slouch, no, he was an incredibly skilled martial artist, as they all were, but he was still unlearning long practiced training; reprogramming his reflexive responses to accommodate and complement his battleskin’s capabilities.

Hektor had been one of the first to use the most recent evolution of the suits, including the spinal interfaces being refined by Amadeu’s team that allowed them to control their sensors and onboard weapons systems directly. This left his arms and legs free to maximize the potential of the suit’s potent limbs: carrying heavier weapons and moving faster and with even more agility than before.

Hektor had helped Amadeu and Birgit test these new suits when their teams relocated to SpacePort One for the final stages of the elevator’s construction, making him one of a short list of candidates to lead one of the three Russian infiltration teams being put together.

“Gutt, und sie?” replied Hektor to Niels’s greeting, bending his right arm, and then pushing down into his fist with all of its massive power, punching himself upward and flipping gracefully upright in a smooth backward twisting turn that left him facing his friend a moment later.

Niels smiled, watching the acrobatic maneuver, but then felt his system suddenly get pinged directly by Hektor’s.

As only he could, Hektor had just engaged Training Mode on his team member’s suit, and without warning the team CO swung a low tight blow to Niels’ midriff. The Training Mode restricted impact strength during practice sessions, for as defensive as the suits were, they were primarily built to be offensive machines, and if anything could damage one of the expensive suits, it was another, well-trained user of the deadly armor.

It was a low blow, quite literally, and Niels was caught off guard and flung backward, his systems helping to give realistic weight to Hektor’s punch even though its full power had been automatically withheld. He recovered quickly though, tucking and rolling backward to come to rest on his knees some ten feet away, a scraping line left in the concrete. His arms came up to protect his face as he recovered, his sensors rushing to alert him to his opponent’s movements.

As he rolled backward, his visor also engaged, a three-part mesh of plate panels locking in front of his face and completing one of the only inflexible parts of the suit. The helmet contained controls and interface systems, part of the suit’s sensor suite, and even some weaponry, but mostly it was a thick, shock proof buttress, hard as a diamond on the outside, and soft as gel on the inside, to insulate its wearer’s fragile skull from some measure of the shock that came from full-on contact battle. Vision and hearing were supplied from external sensors directly in the spinal port, and supplemented with radar and external feeds to form a detailed picture of the wearer’s surroundings.

And as the visor closed, another system engaged. A small dose of psychomotor stimulants suddenly glanded into his brain, his onboard AI prompting his adrenal and pituitary glands the moment battle was commenced. Dopamine and adrenalin suddenly flooded his system, bringing his mind and body into vivid focus. It was one of the many tricks Amadeu employed to amp up the Spezialists’ reaction times.

Niels came to his senses after the initial blow and scanned for Hektor. His vision melded as his helmet closed, allowing him to see not only ahead, but to the side and behind him, a sensation he was still getting used to. As a relative novice, he still used the option in his suit where he viewed himself in the third person. Staring down upon himself as though he were a character in a computer game. His suddenly alert mind saw his surroundings from above and behind, giving him some approximation of his full surroundings without straining his ability to process the now panoramic information being supplied to his optic nerves.

It was a good tool for a beginner, but Hektor was more advanced, and he had learned, with long practice, to overcome the sensory overload of multiple views being supplied to his visual cortex at once.

It gave Hektor, and the few others who had mastered this, a fundamental advantage. For while Niels could see far more of his surroundings than the average human, his view was still unidirectional. Hektor, on the other hand, used the pure feed from his systems to see in all directions at once.

And unfortunately for Niels, Hektor knew his blind spot. After knocking Niels over, he had leapt upward, grasping a part of the hangar’s ceiling frame forty feet above them. Hanging here, effectively above Niels’ point of view, he waited a moment, and then engaged his sonic punch, sending a single targeted smack to the back of Niels’ helmet. The hit registered as a resounding thump to the other man’s systems, and he was flung forward again, losing the footing he had regained only a moment ago. But he was not slow. Sensing where Hektor must be lurking he spun as he fell, zeroing his weapons and raising them to the maximum power allowed by the training parameters.

Hektor knew that Niels wouldn’t take long to figure out his ruse, and was already falling toward him. As Niels spun, Hektor fell, right into Niels’ weapons arc. Seeing the coming repost, Hektor flexed in midair, extending his hand downward to grab Niels’ arm just as the other man fired his own pulse. The pulse hit Hektor in midair above Niels, just as he grasped Niels’ flailing left arm, and the two suits strained as momentum pushed them both apart even as iron-like muscles held them together.

Across the hangar floor, their four teammates approached, also suited, and saw their CO grappling with their sergeant. They watched as the lieutenant came in from above, saw him react to the coming fire from Sergeant Osten, and then watched as the two black-coated figures swung apart, still attached at the arm, spinning in a vertical arc, like superhuman ballet dancers.

Niels’s teammates figured out quickly what was happening, their own systems also receiving the training signal from Hektor’s master link, and they grinned. Hektor was a master at combat in the suits, he had shamed them all a hundred times during training. Which side they were going to join in the test was clear. As one, they all dropped their equipment and surged forward to come to the defense of their brother Niels.