Nightmare Factory, page 14
“It should be just ahead, Prowler. Two clicks.”
Ada always went into battle mode when she expected me to also go into it. I was tired and grumpy and had been sitting in my own radiation saturated juices all day. Combat mode was the farthest thing from my mind, but I was ready to see something other than trees. As the GMC struggled to clear the next rise, the scene below took my breath away. It was a base or a town. Hundreds of buildings spread out along a once lush valley. The complex was massive, but it had not been ignored by the attack. Most of the facility appeared to have been destroyed as well.
“Shit, they nuked the place!”
CHAPTER
THIRTY
“Not nukes, Kovach.” Ada said. “Standard radiation levels are near normal.”
“Standard…?” I asked warily. “What about the other?”
“My standard sensors are not equipped to detect gamma radiation directly, but I believe I can assess from tangential evidence that possible bio warhead missile systems detonated here.”
I had left the truck, and Sumo and I had picked our way carefully down into the valley and just crossed over the remnants of a barrier fence. “The place looks like it took a direct hit,” I said, staring in awe at the obvious overpressure destruction.
“Agreed!” Ada offered. “There was an airburst nearby, but again, it was not nuclear.”
“This place was obviously targeted; someone knew it existed. If they didn’t want a nuke, that meant they wanted to leave it somewhat intact.”
“That is one possibility. I am also getting readings consistent with something else.”
Lovely, I thought. “Any clue as to what?”
“I’d rather not say. The residual signature of the weapon is very confusing.”
The outpost was the size of a small city. In fact, other than the fencing and abandoned guard towers, it looked like a small town. One that had been through an F5 tornado, maybe.
“Over one hundred separate buildings,” Ada said, as if she were reading my mind. She wasn’t… well they assured me she couldn’t, but… well.
“Where are the people?” We’d seen some bodies and some parts of bodies, but so far, no sign of any survivors.
“Unknown. The population may all live off base. Chances are, anyone left alive tried to go home.”
That made sense. No one would want to stay here long. I saw what appeared to be an old hotel. One large section of rooms pancaked down into the lower floors. It had probably been for visitors or guest workers. I tuned up my helmet mics and listened. Dripping water, a groan of metal, a distant electrical discharge, and occasionally, a very faint mechanical tapping. No sounds of life.
I did not see any of the typical base housing or suburban neighborhoods a facility like this would normally have. This was more like looking at the industrial park instead of a secret military base.
I dialed my battle suit’s sensors back to normal just as Ada informed me she had an outgoing connection. Thank God, something here still worked.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
BANSHEE
“Any chance you can help us unfuck this mission, Sarge?”
The voice of Sergeant Joe Kovach came back in waves of static. “Trying to get you guys a ride out. Give me a sitrep.”
This was not one of his missions, but in the absence of a clear chain of command, Sergeant Prowler Kovach was the boss. Bishop gave him the rundown including the original mission objectives.
“Well, shit,” came Joe’s cold reply. “You guys were a recon team.”
“Yeah, Boss, we got pea shooters against these freakin’ rhino beasties they have guarding the place. No telling what else we’ll come up against.”
“Roger that,” Kovach said. “Send me medical telemetry on Bayou.”
Halo triggered the data patch on his sleeve to send the files directly into Kovach’s AI. “She’s stable, sedated. Mission ineffective for now. She’ll need a few days with a Regenerax IV to harden up those cracked ribs.”
“I’ll have Ada go over the data, and we’ll keep trying to get you some help. I put in the request earlier, but no one had your actual location, then comms went out again. Milcrypt comms seems out completely, but I have the colonel working on it. This lab you’re looking for. Did CIC give you any information on its target value?”
“We’re just the grunts, man. CIC doesn’t talk to us. Hell, even the TOC is quiet. We checked the place the rhino beast was guarding, though. It had been cleaned out, probably weeks ago by the looks of it.”
“That’s a hard copy,” Kovach answered. The connection made it sound distant and small to the team awaiting orders. Truthfully, how important could this mission be now that half the world was burning? “Set-up poppers and bugs. Exfil to the backup LZ. I’m calling this mission a bust. If you run into unfriendliness, try hard not to get dead.”
“Hey, Prowler, what about Darkman?”
Kovach knew what he was asking. Hauling a fallen brother out of the shit was the standing order. It was also a good way to get the rest of them killed. “Negative on retrieval. Sorry, man, but the playbook has changed. He’s gone, Priest.”
Bishop ‘Priest’ Taggert tapped his tactical comm and nodded to his teammate. “Guess that’s it.”
“Suits the shit out of me,” Halo answered. “Chances are, whatever is going on down here doesn’t even matter anymore. Someone just nuked half the planet.”
Priest, who nominally outranked Halo, took charge. “Set us up a route to the LZ, not the same track we came in on.” Carrying Bayou would make that route nearly impossible. The earlier route had been for stealth. This one was not. He got busy prepping the poppers, which were tiny autonomous mines. They would automatically deploy from a rack on his battle suit every hundred yards and lay in wait for anyone who might try to come up from behind.
He then brought up the surveillance menu on his suit and readied a swarm of the insect size drones. These would deploy up and down the nav route, cycling from high above to landing on trees to monitor things. Each was no larger than a yellow jacket, totally silent, and almost undetectable. The images and data they provided were fantastic. They should have had them out earlier, but the squad had a limited supply, and battery life wasn’t the best, so they tended to conserve their usage.
Hauling an injured soldier in full battle rattle was difficult, no matter the terrain. A hilly tropical jungle full of mutant monsters…well, yeah, they never taught this in basic. After thirty minutes, they had only made it about two kilometers. The landing zone was nine more. Priest stopped and popped the visor on his helmet to wipe sweat from his eyes. The suits had built-in thermal regulation, but the helmets did not. Instead, it had a small circulation fan, which today just blew hot air around his head.
“You think Kovach can get us a ride out of this dump?”
Bishop looked at Halo, who was suffering as badly as himself. “I don’t know, Jenkins. If anyone could, he can.”
They both knew that Master Sergeant Kovach had as many enemies as he did friends in Space Corp and here dirt side with the Rangers. Despite that, he was the most capable soldier either of them had ever served with. That was even before all the enhancements. Combine that with the pull his father still had with the corps, and well, Joe was a good man to have on your side.
“He said the coastal regions of the country are hot. Looks like they dropped some old tactical nukes, good number of Blackout 88s, as well as whatever those Sapphire’s were hauling,” Bishop said, buttoning his helmet back up and standing.
“Shit,” Halo said, softly falling in behind his partner. “Full bio payloads?”
“That’s an unknown, but my working assumption is yes. What else could the damn things be used for?”
The actual armaments system in question had come at the end of the last major war. Even though only a few were ever used, like the early atom bomb, it scared the shit even out of its creators. It was the culmination of everything that was wrong with global warfare. While the superpowers had the military might backed up by tons of armaments, threats of nuclear strikes, and ballistic drop teams, the enemy had hackers, teams, and teams of hackers. Not just computers, either, although those were some of the most talented. Biohacking was what they really excelled at.
From the first puppies that glowed in the dark back in the early twenty-first century, now you could literally program genetic code to make any creature you could imagine. Designer pets, miniature giraffes, and a popular line of multi-colored leopards. The domestic stuff was kind of cool. They had houseplants that could move to find sunlight and water. Flowers that filtered and perfumed the air. With every innocent creation, though, someone in some covert lab was creating hundreds of less desirable and total lethal life-forms. Vines that could wrap around you like a snake and choke you out before you even realized you were trapped. Trees that fired lethal dart shaped seed pods with deadly accuracy. Many of the missions they had been sent on had involved people developing shit just like this, or pharmaceuticals that were even worse.
At the halfway point, Jenkins relieved Bishop of carrying the lieutenant. Both men took a pull from the hydration tubes, then verified they were still on course and wordlessly began again. Ten minutes later, their suits’ speakers picked up the first detonation by the poppers. First one, then several in rapid succession.
“We are about to have company, friend,” Priest said, shouldering his rifle as he checked the bug cams for any sign of whatever was heading their way.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
KOVACH
Getting the confirmation that one of my team was gone, and Bayou… Debra… was injured, bothered me more than anything else that had happened. We were the brotherhood; these guys had my back, and I wasn’t there for them. I couldn’t identify, though, with the countless injured or dead I’d passed the last few days. Maybe that was just part of who I am. Maybe it’s just human nature.
SpecOps programs from all the branches no longer take applicants with close family ties. No husbands, wives, or small children. Deb is a rarity with a sister; many of us were an only child. The military life is hard on family, special operations divisions even more so. You had no control over your duty station or missions. Deployment time varied, but with the UDT, at least up to six months of the year could be either off planet or in recovery.
As my DI in basic told us, “If the Army felt like you needed a loving family member, you would have been assigned one.” Ultimately, family became your fellow soldiers, your squad. And yes, if you are wondering, Pops doesn’t count. He is a non-standard ancient piece of military hardware that just so happens to be assigned to me.
A red beacon began flashing in my visor’s readout. Earlier, I’d signaled Sumo to leave the truck and go on a search pattern. Now he was onto something. I activated my targeting system and raised the gun up from a low-ready position. Moving through the wrecked buildings was creepy. Not the ruins. That was no different from countless bombed out places my career had taken me to. No, this was something different, like someone was watching me, yet I’d seen no one living and only a few bodies so far. “Coming to you, boy.”
The dog was a combat animal and had his own enhancements, including a tiny comms unit implanted deep inside one of his ears. Some of the rest of what he had was top-secret, even to me. Officially, I was his handler, not his owner. Sumo was 100% U.S. Government property. Just like all the shit I was looking at right now.
I heard a bark coming from the far side of the building I was circling. Some drone coverages or additional personnel would be nice right now, but this wasn’t combat. It looked the same, though, and increasingly, it felt the same. I extended my rifle out past the edge of the building. The optical sensors on the end of the barrel would feed into the scope long before I had to expose myself to whatever was on the other side. The outer ring of the scope stayed green, indicating no hostiles detected.
Sumo was tense and staring directly at a metal service door. He glanced my way as I cleared the building, then returned his total focus to that door.
“Ada, what do you have? Is this my lab?”
“Not the right one, zero life signs, zero energy output, zero threats detected.”
I knew her sensors coverage was limited; with the local grid down, she was relying primarily on Sumo’s and my organic eyes and ears, as well as a few other goodies embedded in our gear. She had the advanced software, though, to make the most out of limited information. Still, she wasn’t human, nor did I trust her the same way I did Sumo.
“Suggest you follow the dog’s lead, Prowler.”
Whenever Ada switched to my combat call sign, all my warrior senses went active. Sumo and I had worked on missions countless times. We knew each other’s behavior and preferences in combat situations. I knew he didn’t like me touching him when he was in game mode, or getting between him and a target. That was a lesson it only took once for me to learn. I posted up against the side of the door and made eye contact with my canine partner.
“Position your left ear to the door, please,” Ada whispered. I did as instructed.
One good thing about having an AI system in your head is she can do some pretty nifty tricks, like amplifying what my ears picked up even if it was below the normal range of humans. She was now playing back for me in real time noises from the interior of the structure. I sensed a whirring, like maybe a cooling fan on a computer. Breathing, but not a pace or rhythm that sounded remotely human. Then the tapping again, very faint and distant.
I tuned in to the tapping. If it was code, it was not in any sequence I could quickly identify. Apparently, Ada couldn’t either, or she would have let me know. I put my hand on the door. Sumo’s hair bristled, and he began a low growl. My dog has a way of letting me know the level of danger better than any human soldier I’ve ever worked with. Despite the fact that this should be friendly soil, something behind these doors was eliciting a major reaction from him. Realizing discretion might be smarter, I removed my hand from the door. Sumo visibly eased several degrees.
I backed slowly away from the door and then away from the building entirely. “Let’s recon this for a while before we do something stupid,” I whispered. Sumo looked at me questioningly. “Yes, by we… I mean me, Dipshit.” The four-legged little shit wagged his tail and smiled. And yes, don’t tell me dogs don’t smile. I am looking at him right now, not you.
Three hours later, the sun was dipping toward the far hills, and I was positioned under a window in a building across the street from the building I was watching. I’d attached several motion and sound sensors aimed at the door, but so far, nothing. Earlier, I’d circled the building and only found two other ways in. Both were loading dock doors, and each was secured with padlocks from the outside. Each time we neared the entrance, Sumo went on high-guard and got himself a good case of the willies. He currently was sleeping in a puddle of sunshine streaming in through the cracked windows.
“Not sure I can afford to wait out whatever is in there.”
My ever-present AI responded, “That is not the address you told me to look for. What makes you think it’s important?”
That was the real difference between AI and humans, or even dogs. Intuition, randomness… the ability to make leaps of faith based on nothing more than a feeling. I trusted Ada, but I would always rely on Sumo in a crisis.
“I dunno. It’s probably nothing,” I admitted.
“But you are intent on making sure,” she answered.
I nodded. “Something about it seemed… almost familiar.” I had her replay the sounds we’d heard, and here in the fading daylight they creeped me out even more. For some reason, I kept seeing an animal’s claw tapping down as it waited for its next victim to open the door.
That might not be too far from the truth; biogenetic developers had been turning out designer creatures for decades. There were a few dinosaur prototypes, all in miniature, most coming out of China or Taiwan labs. They didn’t have real dinosaur DNA, of course, but their PR stated they started with a fragmented base of actual DNA. From what the news reports implied, gene editors could literally build any creature you wanted from the ground up. Why not a mini velociraptor?
I signaled Ada to stand watch as I was going to get some rack time. She would let me know if any of the sensors went off, and Sumo would make his own rounds shortly. I lay back using my rucksack as a pillow and tried to get comfortable.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
There is a point between sleeping and waking that can be perfection or absolute torture. The damp, cool air clung to my body like soiled linen. It was still dark; my internal clock put the time at an hour before dawn. Ada had let me sleep. Something in this place felt wrong. Something beyond the obvious facts of what had transpired here. Outside was unearthly silent. My eyes reluctantly opened to see a room cast in shadows of black and gray. Without moving, I scanned the room, looking for any threats, anything that didn’t belong.
Sumo’s reaction to the door yesterday had clearly put me on guard. And, I felt eyes on me. It’s something soldiers learn to pay attention to, just don’t ask us to explain it. It just is. Be it spidey sense or hyper-situational awareness, it can give you a second’s head start and possibly the edge you need to stay alive.
It took a moment for my eyes to stop scanning and center on the thing. A darker shadow in a sea of black plastered into one corner of the room’s ceiling. It wasn’t there when I went to sleep. What would be hanging from the ceiling, though?
I used a series of eye movements to alert Ada, who came out of sentry mode and began filling in details in my visual overlay.
