Reborn, page 20
On the contrary, she wanted to do this with zero casualties, if she could. Still, she had a pistol, as did everyone else. It might be necessary.
Sifu insisted on being called Cōng Mǎ now. By everyone. And dressing in a gi and baggy pants, all black with white trim. Perfectly normal for a Wuxia movie. Completely wrong here.
And she would not be moved. Joie had just shrugged and run with it.
Middle-aged, overweight, Cantonese woman? Most soldiers would scratch their heads in confusion.
Briefly.
Tanerhald, Yormevs, and Bandi were behind the control console that would send everyone where they were going.
Mitch and Kehoe were off to one side.
“Comm check,” Joie said.
Thumbs up from everyone.
She tapped her chest between her original equipment breasts, just to confirm the plate that would stop most bullets at short range. She wasn’t bullet-proof anymore. Others did the same. Old habits were the ones that kept you alive in bad situations.
She’d considered leaving her hair down for this, but that was just asking for trouble, so Ernesta had braided it, then her own. Romana kept her hair high and tight like the Army days. Carter was going for the scruffy lumberjack look.
And Cōng Mǎ was dressed like she was going to teach a class.
Joie shrugged and nodded. She led her team to the platform and turned to look out over everything, wondering if she’d ever see everyone again.
Or anyone.
Yormevs smiled and did something. Light, and they were standing in the back of the truck she and Stone had brought up from California yesterday. Inside a standard shipping container with a few oil stains and a solid wall of boxes at that end suggesting that the whole thing was cases of MRE. Meal, Ready to Eat. Three lies in one, as the old saying went, though nowhere near as bad as the oldtimers liked to bitch about.
They might also be full of shit, but Joie never called them on it. Every generation liked to complain about how soft kids were these days.
The five of them settled in for a two-hour drive from a truckstop in western Kansas.
“Team One, in place,” she said simply.
“Team Two, in place,” Freya replied a moment later.
The truck started to rumble and vibrate as they rolled. Electric motors on every wheel, with a central generator burning biodiesel to keep them powered and solar skin on the roof. Not quite sufficient to drive coast to coast, but close.
Joie settled in patiently.
Bouchard was down there waiting.
And if she failed today, Humanity probably started dying tomorrow.
CHAPTER 52
Stone was driving. Pakhet didn’t have the rating for a beast this size. Granted, not much more complicated than driving a car, but all that mass made his calculations a bit tricksy.
Plus, most of TRC wouldn’t recognize him on sight, like the important players might with her.
“How much longer, Stone?” she asked. Then paused. “Do you even have a first name?”
He laughed. Everybody in Kehoe’s office had either been officers above him in the food chain or enlistees answering to him, so nobody had addressed him by such a name in…years? Something.
“Does it matter?” he answered.
The only people who probably knew it were the ones who handled payroll. Kehoe and Mitch both knew, but Kehoe hadn’t been on first name basis with anybody until recently, and Graydon had his own issues to face.
Three beautiful exes in a single room? Either heaven or hell.
“Nobody ever calls you anything but Stone,” she continued. “Occasionally Sergeant Stone. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anything else.”
“I would be surprised if you did,” Stone laughed some more. “Unless it was Hey, shithead. Again, does it matter?”
“Maybe, if you’re going to be a grumpy asshole about it,” she grinned. “I do outrank you, you know.”
“Doesn’t matter much if we’re all pirates, Pakhet,” he countered.
“Freya, Stone,” she snapped. “Call me Freya.”
“Freya,” he nodded as he drove. Endless grass horizons, with a threat of mountains in the distance. “I’m Kevin, not that anybody would know it.”
“Any reason?” Freya asked.
Stone shrugged. He’d been a paratrooper for as long as that had been a career option. Then a desk jockey once he was too broken to do anything else. Pretty good at filing paperwork. Came of giving accurate map coordinates for some young punk with an artillery battery behind him.
“So why did you go rogue with Kehoe?” Freya asked now. “Back at Hanoi.”
“It was that or pretend I didn’t know a damned thing about what Joie was doing,” Stone replied. “And I’m a lousy liar. Easier to become an outlaw. Especially when I knew the kind of shit I’d get from assholes like Bouchard.”
“Personal issues?”
“You know what he’s like, Lieutenant,” Stone groused. “Three times as bad as Kehoe on his worst day. Roll that up with Joie and Kehoe vanishing and I’d probably be sitting in a concrete room at Fort Leavenworth right now contemplating all the rest of my sins.”
“And driving a truck right into their base without any backup?” Freya asked.
He laughed and pointed a thumb aft.
“You think Joie and her friends can’t kick his ass?” Stone queried. “You need to get out more.”
“I remember when Kehoe first took me to meet her at her old apartment,” Freya replied. “She was broken. Then she showed up in La Plata twice and each time she’s raised the bar a whole level.”
“Yeah,” he nodded. “That’s Captain Daring. She was even worse in the old days.”
Freya fell silent at that point and he watched the road. Morning, but not all that early. Two hours driving from dawn, with one pit stop about twenty minutes back to potty and grab a couple cans of soda for later.
Purchased this time, rather than stolen by aliens out of the back of a truck somewhere.
Now was not the time to discuss ethics with a man holding a gun to your head, however.
“Will we know it when we see it?” Freya asked. “The jammer?”
Again. They’d gone over it a couple of times.
“You’ve got sixteen discs, Freya,” he reminded her. “If we haven’t managed to blow it up by then, we’re in a lot worse trouble.”
She laughed with him at that. The Army liked to reinforce your juvenile delinquency tendencies when it came time to destroy something.
He had an M31A2 Starbolt Squad Energy Weapon tucked in beside him. Not enough boom to take out armored vehicles, but sufficient for anything lesser. Freya could take a tank if she got close enough.
Of course, if Bouchard ended up sending heavy armor against them while they were in the base, they were right proper fucked from the get-go.
“Operations, this is Team Two,” he said, getting everyone’s attention. Hopefully, they’d been ignoring the banter and he wouldn’t have people calling him anything but Stone after this, but he’d deal with it when he got there. “I have eyes on the base. Approaching the main gate now. Contact in two minutes.”
“What do we do if they recognize us and call Bouchard?” Freya asked.
“Start blowing shit up and hope somebody can rescue our asses,” Stone replied. “Anybody ever promise you that you would die in bed, soldier?”
CHAPTER 53
Joie listened as Stone and Freya jabbered. Nothing important. Just a pair of veterans locked in tight against things about to happen. All of them had been there many, many times. Even Ernesta in her own way.
So Joie focused on her calmness. Borrowing it from Cōng Mǎ, maybe
The truck turned off asphalt and onto gravel from the change in sound and the sudden roughness of the ride. Joie rose and stretched. Considered the pistol by her side, but ignored it for now. People opening the back end to inspect would see several rows deep of pallets of MREs there. If they didn’t go ahead and dig all the way to the front of the trailer, they would be none the wiser.
If they did, they already knew what to expect and would be too heavily armed to be surprised.
The others rose as well, taking their cues from her.
Around them, the truck wound down to a stop, air brakes hissing and squeaking.
“What’s this?” some soldier asked, picked up on Stone’s microphone and transmitted across the open channel.
“Delivery for the CO,” Stone groused rudely. “Something about extra mouths to feed so Operations ordered an extra truck of MREs and food for you punks.”
“Not that many extra,” the soldier replied. “Or were they planning on living here permanently and nobody told us lowly types?”
“They ever tell you anything, Corporal?” Stone laughed.
“Damned straight, Sergeant,” the other man said. “Let’s check your paperwork.”
Joie waited, poised. It should be as good as Kehoe and Mitch could make it, working with exact copies that Stone had acquired. No reason whatsoever to doubt it.
At the same time, she had no idea what new technologies Bouchard might have been able to come up with that would see through this trailer and notice them. Only cyberware to give off electronic signatures was up front with Freya and should be masked by the truck gadgets, and their comm gear used a technology Bouchard shouldn’t have ever even heard of.
Paranoia kept you alive.
Joie drew her pistol and confirmed that it had one up the spout before setting the safety and holding it low at her side. The others did the same, like a posse come to arrest a horse thief at the bar.
She wondered if she should add a hat and a badge to her outfit in the future. Not like she’d probably be able to retire, once they got wherever it was that Tanerhald would take them. Joie might end up the sheriff there, at least until everyone got over themselves.
“Looks good, Sergeant,” the soldier up front said. “Should I tell the boss?”
“What are your standing orders?” Stone asked in an off-hand way.
“To pretend him and his aides don’t even exist when talking to outsiders,” the man replied. “Don’t figure you count as an outsider, since you were qualified to deliver stuff off-cycle.”
“Damned straight, kid,” Stone snapped. “So don’t even think about him now. We’ll get in, drop this crap off as soon as some lazy E-4 can be located to handle the forklift, and then get gone.”
“Sounds like a plan, Sarge.”
The truck rumbled into motion again.
Joie let go a deep breath and focused on the next stage of things.
She’d never been to this one specific base, but she’d spent time at other, similar places. Secure and private, so you could train without even the eyes of other soldiers around to see what you were doing. Some years, TRC’s ammunition budget rivaled the larger Army one. Every week, a lot of bullets fired from a variety of weapons.
At the same time, the Army didn’t react to sudden logistical surprises quickly. The odds were that the truck would sit on a loading dock for some time until the right person could be located.
That gave her time.
Uno had made some calls for her. The trailer they’d picked up in Arizona had been modified to carry folks back and forth across the border. She moved to the trapdoor that was near the front and unlocked the bolt holding it shut.
Stone spun the beast around and started backing into a loading dock with an expert touch, almost idling backwards until the rear thumped against the rubber, jarring everyone just enough to spill a martini, but not much more.
Joie lifted the trapdoor open and got down to stick her head out the bottom.
They were back under a roof from what she remembered of Mitch’s pictures of the base, so all this would have been invisible from a satellite photo, even if the government hadn’t threatened everyone doing that to significantly blur certain locations for reasons of national security.
Several truck bays, side-by-side both directions. Artificial lights overhead. Not a lot of noise.
Joie looked up at the others, nodded, and swung her feet out, dropping below the trailer and squatting on the asphalt underneath.
They were inside, sort of. Stone must have backed it farther than she’d expected. No foot traffic.
Joie slipped to the short side, up against the nearby wall, and peeked.
Closed garage doors with a standard door nearby.
The plan called for Freya to stay inside the cab as much as possible, on the assumption that she might be recognized. Stone was just another senior enlisted until you got close and looked at him. That anonymity would work in his favor here.
She watched his legs under the trailer as he walked back to the dock and hopped up, moving around the back and catching sight of her. Just enough shadows that she could remain perfectly still if nobody was looking. Carter might be too white to hide here, but he and the others were ready to move as soon as she gave the signal.
After a few seconds, Stone obviously got impatient, stepping to the side door and pulling it open before vanishing inside. A few moments later, he was running the chain to roll the door up.
Then he walked out and opened the trailer door, stepping inside just enough to speak.
“Move,” he said sharply, though quietly. “Nobody in immediate sight. Through the door and left. The one marked storage.”
Joie got there as quickly as the other four, vaulting up onto the dock and leading.
She walked normal, even as armed as she was. Someone watching from a distance would only see her shape and style. If she looked nervous, they would become nervous.
If she looked like an officer doing officer things, most enlisted soldiers would hang back, on the wise assumption that the brass might be looking for volunteers to drag into manual labor or something.
Inside, she found the door Stone had mentioned, heading back to surface-level storage. Presumably, elevators and stairwell shafts back there as well, so that things could be moved below easily.
She stepped through.
CHAPTER 54
Taylor hated this part of any operation. The waiting, while you had troops penetrating somebody’s place. Before violence had broken out, but right on that ledge where you just knew it was coming.
“Anything?” he asked, turning to look at Yormevs on his left.
“The truck has been driven into the facility by Stone,” he said, monitoring some sort of gyro-stabilized video system that showed the ground in real time.
Not quite good enough to make out faces or license plates, but damned impressive stuff.
“And?” Taylor pressed.
“At present, you know more than I do how to interpret the sounds from the two teams in operation,” Yormevs volleyed back.
Taylor grunted.
Yormevs was probably right. Mitch, on his right, was monitoring all manner of emergency channels for notice that the base had woken up, but the place was practically air-gapped itself right now. Probably saved all their email on a local server and didn’t send it out until Sunday after midnight.
“What do we expect?” Tanerhald asked, seated next to Yormevs on the far side.
“Captain Daring?” Bandi laughed, beyond Tanerhald. “She will appear as if by magic, with a gun in your ear and in complete control of the situation.”
“That’s Ernesta,” Taylor growled at the man, uncomfortable with that memory.
He’d honestly been expecting her to splatter his brains all over the wall. And she’d mentioned later in passing how close she’d been to killing him that day.
“Ah, but Joie brought Ernesta,” Bandi laughed. “And Mithras. Plus the other two. Supremely dangerous woman. Women. Plus Carter, but he’s not a slouch, most of the time.”
Taylor grunted again.
“No news is good news at present,” Taylor told the room, aware that he was surrounded by aliens who had no idea how dangerous Humans were in general, let alone those five. Or seven.
Shit, he could overthrow entire civilizations with that team. Best not to say that out loud, though.
Not a thing he wanted to be explaining to the aliens.
“If we hear anything, we will judge accordingly,” Taylor continued. “But right now everybody is inside the cloak, so there is precious little we can do. I don’t even have backups that I could send, other than Stone and Malik are Joie’s backup. If this goes wrong, it is out of my hands.”
He said that last part while looking significantly at Tanerhald. He held the trump cards here, however he wanted to play them.
Tanerhald nodded. They all understood each other right now.
All the money on one roll of the dice.
At least he had Captain Daring on the game board again.
If she couldn’t do this, nobody Taylor knew could.
CHAPTER 55
Ernesta didn’t have the background in the military that three of her friends did. And Cōng Mǎ had spent a significant amount of time around such people as well.
To Ernesta, this looked more like a picture of Carter’s raid in Hanoi where he’d set the warehouse on fire to send a message for that old man. Industrial everything, done in concrete with a dull green paint over that, roughly the color of the old Yanqui uniforms that so many Central American armies had adopted over the years.
Oil stains on the floor spoke to decades of hydraulic leaks and hazardous chemical spills mostly swept up but not treated correctly. The smell in here was old dust, old vegetable oil, old food fried in too much grease, such that it stuck to the walls.
It almost seemed to come out of the concrete like pores of your skin when you had too much garlic on your pizza. If there was such a thing.
Joie led. The rest of them followed, looking, as she had instructed, like a bunch of badass killers who just set the new high score on the range.
Ernesta understood swagger. Back home, the Federales had been all about it, but they wouldn’t have been able to back it up. Just look at what Joie had done with one arm against four of them that first day.
