Cold War 2395, page 9
I take a deep breath as Sierra Squad and an on-edge Wesley strap in for story time.
“Years ago, the Department of Energy was quietly using Earth-068 to test a new fuel, one that utilized concentrated, liquified dark matter. They were kids playing with fire, but no one at the top stopped them. After all, the fuel was supposed to be a bigger breakthrough than electricity. ‘The strongest and cleanest power in the known universe,’ they’d said. With it, we’d all travel faster, farther, and kill pollution in the process.” Faust seems wistful. A weak smile inches across her face. She lets out a chuckle and continues her tale.
“Mind you, all that top-secret research was underway well before I got elected. As was President Cox’s desire to take the project in a new direction. In response to Soviet aggression, Cox thought it wise to focus on the fuel’s military applications. Naturally, that led to his men developing dark-matter-powered weapons of all sorts . . . including bombs. They weren’t testing them on the planet, just constructing them. But that was all it took. One slipup later and half of Earth-068 ceased to exist.”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing, and I’m sure no one else can either, but we don’t stop listening. She has us hook, line, and sinker—not that Wesley seems to notice. His paranoia has given way to utter befuddlement.
“On that day, Cox had private task forces go in while planetary evacuation teams yanked everyone else out. His guys collected everything: samples, formulas, you name it. That’s the gift I inherited from his administration, the classified leftovers hidden in the back of our country’s fridge.
“He wasn’t the brightest man, if I’m being honest. At the time, there was a mole. Cox knew it. Yet he and his men still tinkered with the Grenada findings instead of locking that stuff up and throwing away the key. He was confident the impostor would be weeded out before anything could happen. That gaping hole in national security was outside of the public’s radar, of course. Off-limits knowledge to everyone but a few select politicians, and later, yours truly when I came aboard.”
“So . . . they never got him?” Gourd interrupts.
“You mean ‘her.’ And they caught her all right, but none of her exchange records. No one knew what she’d leaked. There wasn’t a smidge of concrete evidence against her, and the woman didn’t crack once during interrogation. Broken bones, insect torture, rectal rehydration; those logs were something else,” Faust says, a bit too casually. “The kicker? She’s rotting in the Federal Prison Zone’s dark sector right now, probably still getting hosed each day, refusing to talk.”
Every detail divulged is shocking news, and Faust must be able to tell by our wide-eyed faces that we’ve already gotten more info than we bargained for. Still, she goes on, refocusing the conversation on her role in the current madness.
“But I digress. Point is, considering how fast they nabbed her, everyone went with the pipe dream that she hadn’t found anything big. Cox’s guys all chose to believe that, and up until a year ago, my people did too. Then we discovered something big, bad, and ugly. You’re inside it.
“Of course, twelve months ago when we found the colony, it wasn’t . . . as much of a threat,” she says, clenching her jaw in pain. It looks like her headache is making a comeback.
“When Cox was busy playing whack-a-mole and analyzing the Grenada files, he had his best scientists reverse engineering the remaining fuel samples in order to figure out how to undo the dimensional fallout that’d eaten up half of Earth-068. In the years since, we’ve started to understand how to repair the damage. Our enemies, however, have focused almost exclusively on the fuel’s destructive capabilities.” She gestures toward the walls of the station we’re trapped inside. “The station exists for many reasons, the biggest of which is to test every strand of fuel the Russians cook up. Fuel for fighters, for machines, for cannons capable of tearing apart space itself at the seams. It’s all here.”
The gravity of the situation finally reveals itself. Everything here is running on a different flavor of the most lethal dimensional poison known to man.
“Unlike us, they don’t know how to handle the fallout. That’s the only thing holding them back from blackmailing our entire country. That’s why they’ve been testing it on planets. They’ve been trying to replicate our counter-reaction formula, and they can’t do it. That’s where I came in,” she says, hurrying up her speech. She’d better get to it fast; her face is turning a deathly shade of red, and whatever’s wrong with her is flaring up again, big-time.
“As I said before, my people believed Cox’s people when they claimed the mole didn’t get anything big. But I didn’t buy that for a second, so I formed a new covert operations unit that reports directly to me. You mention their name to anyone else and you’ll be laughed out of the military.
“They are Tenth Echelon, the best of the best, plucked from every branch of our armed forces. Handpicked by me. As soon as I was sworn in and briefed on everything you all just heard, I decided that, unlike Cox, I wasn’t going to leave our national security to chance. I founded Tenth Echelon solely to carry out one mission that would last months, if not years. They were sent to track down anything related to the mole’s intel breach. A year ago when they found the station, it became clear the Russians had stolen quite a bit of our initial research.
“My men managed to scout every inch of the place during the blueprinting phase, but the Russians were too fast. With the help of the dark matter fuel, they managed to take a decade’s worth of construction and compress it into eight months. Things got too sticky for the Tenth to do reconnaissance, and sending in the military would be suicide. You’ve seen what that cannon can do. And it’s sharing that power with thousands of defense turrets, all ready to disintegrate anything that gets too close. We’re inside a fortress, the kind you can’t crack from the outside.”
“But you’ve been in here before,” Wesley weakly interrupts, not entirely convinced by the yarn Faust is spinning.
After a brief fit of violent coughs, she explains. “When things got too tight for my own team to get eyes on the target, there was only one option left. I had to take the plunge. Around six months ago, I extended my hand to the New Union of the Red Star, explaining that we knew of their cannon’s capabilities and had no way to combat it. As such, I would covertly share what we knew about a dark matter treatment formula in exchange for permanent asylum aboard the station when they handed their research off to the Russian Alliance and the Reds took over our country.”
“Wait, so she is a traitor—” Gourd starts, but Faust cuts him off.
“It was a fucking ruse! I’m the single American citizen valuable enough to show my face to these people and not get shot on sight.”
“But you told them we don’t have a countermeasure. What stopped them from firing on us half a year ago?” I ask.
“Haven’t you been listening?” she hisses, holding her forehead with one hand while using the other to decrease the room’s temperature even further by twisting the dial almost as far as it can go.
For a second, I swear I see steam coming off her, though I can’t tell if it’s just a fresh influx of mist from the worsening cold.
“They don’t know how to stop the fallout. These are state-funded terrorists, people. Wake up. NURS is just a front, a false flag, so Russia can play with shit beyond its jurisdiction, all right? No major government is going to risk firing on another superpower with a weapon it doesn’t have the instruction manual for. You remember what caused the US to lead the space colonization race centuries ago?”
“World War Three . . .” Gourd says hesitantly, fully aware there’s probably a more detailed answer. Naturally, there is.
“Bingo. And what was it fought with? Nukes. Lots of them. At a time when humanity didn’t have the technology to heal its only planet. Ozone layer ripped wide open, natural resources obliterated, almost every species rendered extinct, you name it. All because of nukes. What those weapons were to our forefathers is what the dark matter fuel is to us. The Russians aren’t going to make the same mistake twice. They’re not whipping out their new toy until they know how to stop it from spreading to unwanted areas and can control and counteract every bit of damage it may cause. After all, we’ve reached the final frontier. One Earth? Not the end of the world. But the entire universe? Then we’re literally out of space, and it’s game over.”
Well, shit, I never thought a history textbook recap would get my balls hiding faster than they are right now. She doesn’t stop there, though; the story goes on even further. The brief glimpse I catch of Wesley’s eyes as he shakes his head in disbelief tells me he lacks even an iota of the anger he’d held just minutes ago. When he demanded the truth, I don’t think he knew he’d get it quite so bluntly.
“Back to the point,” she yells, rushing to deliver the last of her story before her condition becomes critical. “I signed on so I could be our country’s eyes and ears inside here. Obviously, the Russkies didn’t trust me to be a good little camper while away from the station, so they put something . . .”
Halfway through her sentence, she buckles and falls to the floor. I look over to Captain for instruction, but he’s already dropped his gun and dashed over to help the president back onto her feet. Wesley just stands there, dumbstruck. Gourd’s profoundly confused as well, though it seems like he’s still piecing together the puzzle rather than reacting to the finished picture.
After a few seconds, Grimm has the president standing again. One of her arms is propped over his shoulder, the only thing preventing her from slipping back to the floor. Taking a minute to let the mist of the room wash over her, she finds the strength to continue.
“It’s in there . . . right now. It’s been in there, for months,” Faust mumbles, tapping her temples.
“What’s is it?” I ask, as gently as I can.
“The chip. Monitors what I say, what I see. Entirely offline . . . impossible to disrupt with network interference. Rigged to . . . if I say anything too specific about the fu . . . the fuel.”
Oh my God.
“Medical staff back home . . . couldn’t extract. Too deep in, they said. Pulling it out would kill me. They implanted a second chip to counter the first. Nowhere near perfect, but . . . best they could do. Works most of the time, but can’t defend against the big trigger switches in the first one . . . Yesterday in the shuttle . . . got too close to saying . . . passed out. Water . . . vapor, cold, all jam the first chip, help the second.” She gulps down more mist from the surrounding air as her veins threaten to pop out of her skin. Then, as though she isn’t on the brink of implosion, she keeps orating for us.
“Those damn Reds thought they could control me with it. They didn’t realize . . . they gave me the one tool I needed to take down . . . their whole . . . fucking . . . operation.”
Her head’s gone from its original pale white complexion to something resembling the crimson of yesterday’s shuttle. Now I realize what she’s planning.
“Now you see . . . why I couldn’t blow the lid on the place when I first started exploring it . . . months ago. It would require a sacrifice . . . I wasn’t sure our country was ready for. But over the past week . . . it came to my attention that our time was up. I’d only slipped them a little info, the least I could get by on . . . but it was enough. Out of alternatives, I made the call. Made sure . . . the current trip would be my last. Wes, you were right . . . the White House was my fault. But I never meant for you to get swept up in it. You were supposed to be out the door by then. I staged my kidnapping . . . to explain my permanent disappearance to the public. The Russians cooperated . . . thought it was my way of . . . requesting the start of my asylum and . . . leaving the country exposed. They didn’t know . . . my plan.”
“B-but why d-did you . . . the Nebulus . . .” Wesley sputters, mortified.
“Those planets . . . could’ve bought me a few more weeks. Taken away . . . their last testing resources . . . don’t feel bad. I was trying . . . to postpone the inevitable,” Faust whispers, losing the fight against her body’s internal meltdown.
“You can’t be telling the truth! You . . . you were in their systems,” Wesley says, driving himself insane as he grasps at any possible straw that could help him maintain his crumbling conspiracy theory.
“Not my blood . . . not my retina . . . all synthetic. Fingerprint blood capsules and micro-contacts . . . stored on my body, impossible to confiscate . . . the perfect skeleton keys. Fashioned from the DNA . . . in the stray hairs and skin cells of my NURS escorts . . . that I gathered and brought to the labs after my trips here. I’m wearing their identities . . . using their clearance levels. No more questions, Wes.” She squeezes her temples with enough force that I’m amazed her skull isn’t cracking.
“Captain Grimm?”
“Yes, Madam President,” he responds, his tone filled with the utmost respect as he continues to prop her up.
“My final briefing for you begins now. I started a timer . . . around fifteen hours ago. Tenth Echelon set off a distress beacon to these coordinates. Signals every auxiliary fleet we have. They’ll have been . . . traveling here since last night. By the time they arrive, I will have taken out the cooling, so the Reds can’t use the cannon or outer defenses. That leaves a window open . . . gives our boys a fighting chance to board the station.”
So that’s why she didn’t want any of us here. The whole time, I thought without us she’d be screwed, but no . . . she had a plan mapped out from start to finish. One president and her secret team were going to stage the biggest, most elaborate operation in military history. Boy, did we ever fuck it up.
“You only need to hold out . . . an hour or so . . . until the rest of them get here. But . . . there’s a complic—”
A surge of blood pours out of her mouth, dripping all over the floor. We’re looking at the last few minutes of the 117th President of the United States.
“—complication,” she continues after wiping off the dribble of blood still dangling from her lower lip.
“The blue tower . . . heart of the station. When reinforcements . . . arrive, and the Reds see they’re outnumbered, they’ll start the . . . data purge. All the research . . . lost.”
“Surely the Russian government has backups somewhere,” I interject, not meaning to interrupt a dying woman but wanting clarification as to why we specifically should put our necks on the line like I sense she’s about to suggest.
“They have nothing recent . . . don’t want to messy their fingerprints . . . risk leaks . . . until the research is complete. That tower . . . the Spire . . . has all the dozens of zettabytes’ worth of data the station holds . . . all the relevant data the Russians hold,” she says before taking a massive breath and continuing her pained instructions. “So much data . . . takes time to destroy. Six hours to wipe it all . . . Grimm, if you and your Marines can stop it before it finishes . . . the remaining research can defragment the rest.
“I would’ve settled for capture of the station . . . but with you here, I have a new primary objective . . .” she trails off.
The typically stoic and calm Captain Grimm is on the verge of tears as he shakes her frail body. The jolt summons her back for just a bit longer.
“Captain Grimm, your final mission . . . under my command. Get to the top of the Spire. Save that research. Get it in the right hands . . . American hands.”
Gourd’s barely maintaining his “I’m too tough for crying and other pussy shit” look, Wesley’s dangerously close to having a panic attack, and Grimm . . . I’m almost certain I saw the glint of a tear in his eye, but I can’t be sure.
“Now . . . let me down,” she requests.
The captain gently lowers her to the floor.
“No more time to waste . . . need to get . . . those defenses down. Get your men . . . out of here,” she says, blood seeping from her mouth again, boiling and steaming as it makes contact with the floor, too hot to freeze. Her head looks like a cherry on the verge of popping, and God knows the three of us do not have the iron guts to watch our president go out in such a morbid manner, not after what she’s been through.
Grimm gives her one final salute before picking up his rifle and ordering us to get going. As we start to move out, it becomes apparent Wesley’s going to need some assistance. He’s petrified, completely frozen in place.
Without a word, Captain grabs Wesley like a football and hauls him along at the pace Gourd and I set. We press forward until we’ve reached the chamber’s entrance, where the massive entry doors slide open and let us pass. They slam shut the second we’re on the other side, leaving just enough time for us to hear the detonation and subsequent explosions echoing from the tank-stacked halls behind us. An orange glow shines through the cracks in the room’s entranceway, drenching our backs in hues of destruction. While none of us see it firsthand, our shared thought goes unspoken. We know that sound wasn’t just the shriek of a station being crippled from the inside or the roar of Russians realizing they’ve been bested. It was the sound of Roseanne Faust’s final act of service to her country.
CHAPTER 10
Wesley
Various gurgles and gasps are the only noises I can muster after I rip off my face mask and puke my brains out, the umpteenth time my body has forcibly emptied itself during the unending, nightmarish journey I’m trapped in. The mess in front of me is disgusting, and once again, I feel nothing but shame and embarrassment in front of the Americans. I’m amazed I even have anything left to spew, given that it takes me a few seconds to reach the point of empty, dry heaves. The veins on my neck actually ache from the strain, as do the rest of the muscles in my body. I lose control of my legs and fall to my knees beside the puddle I’ve created.
“Get it together, man!” Beecher grabs my shoulders, steadying my heaving body.
I’m grateful that he’s still standing by my side to help. After all, if he’d put me through what I’ve put him and his fellow men through, I’d never be so supportive. Or maybe they understand, or . . . or I don’t know. The whole situation’s a crock of shite and I just don’t know anymore. I can’t block it out of my mind. It just happened and the memory isn’t going away any time soon. Her face keeps popping back up, and it’s just so awful, and I . . . I . . .
