Machinations (18 page)

He nods, and only a little haltingly answers, “Of course.”

I take him at his word. I can't entertain the alternative.

When the day of the attack comes, just shy of a week later, McKinley swells with anticipation. The entire base collectively holds its breath and waits.

In the meantime, the war room has finally made good on its name, and is all geared up for the offensive. The walls are powered on, cluttered with live images from both teams. Adding to the feeling of chaos, anyone with even a small claim to authority is here, pushing the occupancy limit. It's the fullest I've seen the room since I crashed the debriefing, what seems forever ago now.

I'm in the center of activity, flanked by Clarence, who's the real expert here. A few feet away, Camus coordinates with Meir, who now appears only as a pretty face on a screen, miles and miles away, having returned with her delegation before the conclusion of our investigation. Convenient timing at best; a sign of guilt at worst. But she's moved her people into position as promised, and now isn't the time to foster dissension among the ranks. I might be little more than a glorified rallying point, true, but at the very least I hope to create a feeling of community. The machines are going to present a united front; so will we.

It's hard enough keeping my thoughts clear amidst the half dozen different conversations going on, so when Clarence addresses me, I don't hear him at first. “Commander?” he repeats, a little louder. “The Prudhoe teams are active and ready.”

“Right,” I say. “Camus, how's Fairbanks coming along?”

He holds up a finger in the universal sign for “One second,” and covers an ear with a hand, listening to his earpiece. “Their assault teams are on location now.”

“Okay. Good.”

I'm watching the screens with the live feed of the area. The footage is shaky and partially obscured by a scratchy static from time to time, but it's as close to being there as any of us in the war room are going to get. I feel a little nauseated, although I'm not sure whether it's nerves or the shakiness of the camera feed. I close my eyes for a moment, trying to imagine a serene place like a beach to calm myself. Instead, I remember the dreams I had while in the Alaskan forest, and it has just the opposite effect. I feel like I'm back on that cliff, poised above a frozen shore, ready to jump.

Except this time, Camus isn't holding me back; he's watching to see if I'll fly.

“Give the order,” he tells me, although the words themselves get lost in the noise. I'm forced to read his lips instead. Not that it's necessary. I already know what needs to happen next.

“Teams Sasquatch and Barbados, you've got the green light. Commence with Operation Pigs in a Blanket,” I say into my headset, somehow managing to make it sound serious.

The mission's code name was Hanna's idea, joking, although I was given the credit after proposing it in council. I can just see the history books now. If anyone asks, I'm going with the time-honored excuse: you had to be there.

“Repeat. Sasquatch and Barbados, you have the green light.” I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to add anything else, but I remember people wishing each other Godspeed, so I grant the same encouragement over the radio to my teams in Prudhoe. It's a little awkward, given that I'm no British general, but I think I spy a smile from Camus's direction.
Worth it.

Meir likewise gives her own teams the go-ahead at Fairbanks.

And now the hard part begins.

There's very little we can do on this end, apart from provide instruction when needed. And since the teams have already been thoroughly briefed, they don't really need any advice on how to do their jobs. Besides, the mission is pretty straightforward. In both locales, they'll strike first from the air and move in for cleanup with the ground forces. Hopefully, the two-pronged attack will confuse the machines long enough to keep them from assembling any significant response. Once that's done, the teams in the air will disappear, while the teams in the tanks will lure any trackers into the trees of the nearby forests, destroy them there, and then vacate with the assistance of extraction teams. We may be forced to abandon the tanks in the woods if they're too hot with the machines on them, but I hope those will be the only casualties suffered today.

I keep my chin up, trying to appear cool and calm, but I can't help picking at my fingernails beneath the table.

I need everything to go right today if I'm to prove myself as a commander. The title is mostly honorary in this day and age, no longer requiring the same military distinction it used to, but it's still only given to the best humanity has to offer. I intend to become that again.

The first ten minutes of the mission pass successfully, without incident. I'm standing now, with many of the others, watching the many screens, trying to interpret the footage in combination with the soldiers' running commentary.

Fifteen minutes in is when the trouble starts.

“Reports indicate a medium-size force approaching Fairbanks from the south,” Clarence relays to me between his rapid communications with Churchill base.

“Medium?” I say. “Define medium.”

“Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, Commander,” I hear a soldier onsite reply. “Not too big, not too small, but just right to throw a wrench into this operation.”

The Texan accent reminds me of—
no!

“Rankin?” I blurt out, completely unprofessionally. “Is that you?”

“Yes, ma'am,” comes the response. He pops into the view of one of his fellow soldiers' cameras. With all his equipment, including a face mask, there's no way I would have recognized him. He would've just been another soldier. And less of a concern—as terrible as that sounds—because I would have assumed he was from Churchill. Rankin gives me a friendly little wave, like he's on vacation, not assaulting machine-controlled land.

My head is spinning. “What the hell are you doing in Fairbanks?” Fairbanks is supposed to be Churchill's people—
only
Churchill's, but apparently
someone
didn't get the memo. “Does Hanna know you're there?”

“Oh, yeah, she knows. She wasn't too happy about it. But Camus told me Churchill needed someone who knew the area, so here I am.” I doubt that was the only reason why Camus volunteered him for the job. He probably didn't trust our allies, wanted some insurance, under the guise of a liaison and navigator.
Damn it.
“Not to rush you, base, but how do you want us to handle these party crashers?”

“The station is out of commission, correct?” Clarence asks.

“Yes, sir,” Rankin replies, voice crusty with static. “The machines aren't going to be launching or receiving from Fairbanks any time soon. The air team saw to that. We're still tidying up after them, but there's only a few stragglers giving us trouble. And they won't be any use to reparations. They're just some half-frozen predators.”

Camus has joined us by this time. “Do not engage the enemy if it is at all possible to avoid them, Lieutenant,” he says. “Finish the cleanup and meet at the rendezvous point.”

“Understood, Commander.”

What was nerve-racking before is now almost unbearable, with the knowledge that I've got a close friend out there, risking life and limb on my orders. Before, most of the soldiers were faceless, nameless. Now I can't stop imagining all of them as Rankin, or Ortega, or Lefevre. I've put these brave men and women in the line of fire. Me.

The stress begins to leak through my nose in the form of blood. I curse under my breath, trying to casually hide it with a hand. I thought I'd finished with this. But I do find it oddly symbolic, given the blood that might be shed today. Symbolic and extremely inconvenient.

Camus appears with a tissue a few minutes later, unasked. His eyes are kind, kinder than usual, and worried. He's asking me if I'm all right without putting it into words that would raise doubts about me. “I'm fine,” I answer quietly, and mumble a thanks for the tissue. Camus nods and returns to what he was doing.

My nose stops hemorrhaging, although my hands are shaking now.

I can't worry about it. My allotment of worry is all being used up by the Fairbanks ground teams. They haven't vacated the area yet.

“Rankin, what's going on?” I ask, unable to interpret the scene via visuals.

“Uh, well,” he says, clearly distracted by the task at hand. “The strike missed one of the pig supply houses. Just a small one, on the border. Nothing to worry about. We're setting explosives now.”

“The machines are less than a klick away,” Clarence tells me.

“You can't stay there,” I tell Rankin firmly. “The machines are almost on top of you. You need to leave right now.”

“We have another problem,” Camus announces, pulling some images into view, layered atop Rankin's unit. It makes me even more uneasy, not being able to see my friend or his team. But unlike the Fairbanks footage, these have no sound accompanying them. “We just lost complete audio with Prudhoe. Some kind of interference or jamming, maybe.”

“Great. Can they still hear us?”

“No. I don't think so. They haven't responded visually to any of our dispatches.”

I'm getting a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Can you fix it?”

“If it was a technical problem on our end, yes. But it's not.” He sighs, attempts to rub the stress out of his face. “Until we figure out the source of the disruption, they're on their own out there. There's nothing we can do.”

“Well. This just keeps getting better and better, doesn't it?” Camus fixes me with a testy look that says my sarcasm is unwelcome right now. “All right. Let's focus on what we can control.”

I mimic Camus's earlier gesture, throwing the silent pictures out of the way and onto another part of the wall to be analyzed by some of our technicians. Beneath them, back in Fairbanks, it looks like Rankin's team is finally on the move.

“Lieutenant, report.”

“The machines…they cut off our exit route,” Rankin says, breathing heavily between the words. The jerky movement of the camera puts his breathlessness into context. They're running. “We're rerouting toward—”

A burst of static cuts him off.

“What was that, Lieutenant? You're breaking up. Repeat,” Camus orders.

The Fairbanks ground team is now climbing into vehicles, most piling into tanks, while two others including Rankin jump on a pair of high-speed snowmobiles.

“We're rerouting toward the city,” Rankin repeats.

Much of the room has quieted down to listen to the situation, and this news is met with looks of apprehension. The tension is palpable. To his credit, Camus shows no outward reaction. “Roger that, Lieutenant,” he says. “Keep your heads down until we get to you. I want no cowboy antics, is that understood?”

“Yes, sir. No antics.”

“Can you bring up a map?” I ask Clarence quietly while Camus and Rankin continue to converse.

The head engineer acquires a satellite image of the once-fair city of Fairbanks on the table's holographic display. I don't claim to be an expert on cartography, but I notice the river bisecting the map right off the bat. The black snake is kind of hard to miss amidst the meringue of whitish-gray pixels, some representing a former house or business, the people all gone now, although the structures remain, skeletal testaments to their lives. I stare and stare, trying to make sense of what is there and devise some sort of plan for the extraction team, but all I see is a death trap. “They're driving them toward the river,” I blurt out the moment the realization comes. “Camus, the machines are boxing them in.”

Clarence leans over to look at the map and agrees with my conclusion. “The bridges are still there, but it wouldn't take much to blow them. They're likely weak from disrepair already, never mind the weather damage.”

“Lieutenant, did you get all that?” Camus asks, surprisingly calm.

There's a period of silence, and then, “Yes, sir.” More silence follows, with only the noise from a snowmobile galloping over crunching snow. After a few more seconds, Rankin comes back with, “Don't suppose you have any other ideas? With all due respect, Commanders, I think we're gonna need more than a few Hail Marys out here. The machines are closing in on our six.”

“We have to send in the extraction team now,” I tell Camus. He says nothing, which I take to mean he didn't hear me. “Camus. The extraction team. Why not?”

He's shaking his head. “We can't,” he says to me privately.

To Rankin, he says, “As soon as you reach the city, find a defensible location and hunker down. We'll get word to you when we can.”

“Understood,” Rankin says, sounding none too happy.

“Why not send the extraction team in?” I ask again.

I'm getting upset despite my efforts to remain cool and levelheaded. Camus must pick up on this because he draws me aside to an empty corner of the room, using a hand to cover the mouthpiece of my headset. “They're too hot right now. The extraction team isn't meant for combat, Rhona. We send them in prematurely, everyone dies.”

“Yeah, and if we don't send them in now, Rankin and his team are going to be slaughtered.”

His jaw sets in that way of his. “I'm sorry. They knew the risks going in.”

“No,” I say, gritting my teeth and digging my heels in for a fight. “
No.
I don't accept that.” This feels too similar to the moments before Ulrich's death. I feel as helpless now as I did then. Difference is, I can still do something this time around. “What are our options? Come on, Camus. I know you. I know you don't give up this easily. So, what are our options? We have to have some sort of contingency plan for this, right? What did we do near Anchorage?”

“I shouldn't have to remind you, people died near Anchorage. I wouldn't say that spells a successful operation.”

“We're already up a creek, Camus. Might as well draw on experience.”