World of Hurt Read online

  Simeon whistled at this and Fincher continued. “The warheads also contain individualized A.I.-infused CLUs, command launch units that can function in any conditions. Once the CLU engages and acquires a target, it will automatically eject the warhead in a soft launch at which point you are free to forget about it. The warhead will then shoot forward horizontally for two seconds before climbing 200 meters into the air in a ‘curveball’ shot. The warhead will adjust on the fly and is designed to come down and strike the top of the target.”

  “What about that one?” I asked, pointing to a single, red rocket lying on the ground.

  “That’s a hafnium-tipped warhead,” Fincher answered. “To the extent you come upon an alien device or other structure, that is the device you will use to destroy it.”

  Fincher then pointed to the turrets of our mechs which were covered in clusters of olive-colored bricks.

  “EAR. Explosive-reactive armor,” Fincher said, standing between some of the other mechs, pointing at the bricks. “Taken directly from a store of M1A3 Abrams tanks. The bricks are kinetic energy disruptors, explosives sandwiched between two metal plates.”

  “Hold up—” Billy said.

  “You are putting explosives on our mechs?” an incredulous Sato asked, cutting him off.

  “Goddamn right we are,” Fincher replied. “They’re countermeasures that will prematurely detonate any shaped charge fired against you by the enemy.”

  “What happens if the aliens have the same thing?” I asked. “What happens if they’ve got the reactive armor. Won’t that stop our missiles?” I asked, pointing at the tubes.

  Fincher smiled. “Excellent question. Lucky for you, the geniuses who designed this stuff were thinking ahead. The Mjolnir warhead has tandem charges. The front one’s designed to defeat any reactive armor, and the rear one’s designed to destroy the target.”

  “God bless the Department of Defense,” Billy said drawing a round of nervous laughs from me and the other operators.

  Fincher spun on his heels and continued to gesture at the mechs. “In addition, your machines have been equipped with multi-spectral grenades, flares, and a form of adaptive camouflage to obscure you from any infrared seekers. You’ve also been provided with short-barreled Fusion rifles in your cockpits, with under mounted munitions launchers, and we’ve even added a feature in your head-up display that allows you to keep track of your kills.”

  “High score wins!” Billy shouted, slapping palms with Simeon.

  “Are we getting any training on this stuff?” Jezzy asked.

  Fincher looked to Richter who smiled. “Best kind of training there is,” Richter said. “On the job.”

  I snorted and Richter dead-eyed me. “You need to remember that the thing that makes you and the others effective is your lack of precision, your unpredictability. Training would negate your ability to muck up your opponent’s decision cycle. Besides, a very general tutorial on everything has been added to your machines. It’s downloadable and available for viewing on your neural glasses,” Richter added. “Feel free to review it on your own time.”

  Baila raised a hand. “Why are we even worried about our capabilities? The aliens are on the run aren’t they?”

  Richter nodded. “That’s largely true, but they’ve been picking up weapons along the way,” he said. One of his men held up a portable tablet that showed images of an attack on a series of buildings. “The bastards attacked what was left of Pope Field in North Carolina a few hours ago. Apparently, they were looking for fuel.”

  I studied the images, watching the aliens (some on the ground, others in a glider) exchange fire with people on the ground before BOOM! there was a flash of light and the people on the ground just … vanished.

  “As you can see, the enemy appears to be equipped with all manner of high-explosive and incendiary munitions,” Richter said as the tablet was powered down. “It’s impossible to say precisely what kind of gear they’ve acquired, but if I were you, I’d hope for the best and expect the worst.”

  Hope for the best and expect the worst.

  That, in a nutshell, had been my guiding philosophy every day since the aliens first arrived. I stood there in the shadow of the Spence mech, surrounded by the other operators who carried the same expression as me. Everyone looked simultaneously terrified and excited. I had no idea what the day would bring, but I felt secure in the belief that if the aliens wanted to mess with us, they were going to regret it. I gulped a few breaths. I was ready to do it. I was ready to do battle and finish off the aliens once and for all.

  “Are you ready?!” a voice thundered from somewhere behind us.

  We turned as one to see Vidmark approaching. Gone was the suit I’d seen him in at the National Cathedral, replaced by a pearl-colored compression outfit that outlined the muscles in his upper body.

  “Are you ready?” he asked again, this time softer. We nodded and Vidmark drew near. He stabbed a finger at Baila. “Do you know why you’re here?

  “You brought me,” she replied.

  “Do you know why you came?”

  She was silent and Vidmark added, “You came because your mother was killed in Chicago, wasn’t she?”

  Baila nodded slowly and Vidmark pointed at Simeon. “Your father died in the firebombing in Raleigh.” Then he pointed at Billy and Dru, “your entire extended family fell in the siege of Boston,” then he pointed at Ren and Sato, “yours in the mech attacks in Nagoya and Osaka,” and finally Vidmark pointed at me. “And your mother and young brother in Maryland. I lost eight members of my immediate family, some during the first day of the invasion and others on the last day of the occupation. Why do I make mention of these terrible things? I do so to remind us what we have in common. We have lost those we cared most deeply about, believe me. In point of fact, our very souls have suffered because of the things done by the monsters you go to meet tomorrow morning. Blood, once spilled, can never be unspilled.”

  I’d heard Vidmark speak so many times that I’d begun to anticipate some of the words he used. He was unlike most other people I’d heard communicate in that he used what I remember someone calling “emphatic verbs” and “qualifiers,” the phrase “believe me” for instance, which made it seem as if he knew exactly what he was talking about. The others didn’t seem to notice, but for some reason I did. It made me think that nothing he said was spontaneous, but rather, the result of some very careful planning that was masked as spontaneity.

  Vidmark glanced at the ground as if deep in thought, then back up to us. “What will you do when you confront the aliens?”

  “Kill them,” Simeon said.

  “WHAT WILL YOU DO?!” Vidmark screamed.

  “KILL THEM ALL!” Billy seconded.

  Vidmark raised his hands as if offering a benediction. “Trust me, I have lived long enough to realize that in order to win, in order to triumph over your adversaries, you have to use pain instead of pain using you. Harness the anger tomorrow, use the memories all of you have lost as fuel for your victory.”

  The others nodded and cheered and for a moment it felt like I was back in my mom’s old church, waiting for Vidmark to lay his healing hands on us. He winked at me and then spun on his metal heels and exited the room to the sound of applause. If we were going down tomorrow, I had no doubt that at the very least we would do so boldly.

  11

  It was a little after midnight before we finished prepping the mechs and inspecting the new additions to the weapons system. I found that a green button had been added to my controls that would allow me to use the Sump’n Sump’n weapon if the situation called for it. I continued to ask what the weapon actually did, but none of Fincher’s people seemed to know. After checking the mechs a final time, we gathered up our gear and stood in a circle between our fighting machines alongside Richter.

  I asked who would be bringing the mechs to the airport and Richter said, with a twinkle in his eyes, not to worry about it. Apparently, plans had been made to transport the m
echs to what Richter called the “rally point.”

  We climbed into three armored SUVs that were soon driving us across D.C. Jezzy and I sat with Richter and one of Fincher’s younger assistants, staring out the windows as we cruised down South Capitol Street and past the Southwest Waterfront area, an area tucked between the Washington Channel and the Anacostia River that had been revitalized in the years before the invasion. The aliens had bombed most of the buildings and an upscale area once known as “The Wharf” (“Where D.C. Meets The Water!” signs on the road still read) that now lay in ruins, the channel snarled with hundreds of metal freight containers that had been blasted loose from the ships that had been carrying them.

  The containers, many of which were stacked on top of each other, resembled a mini-city built from a madman’s blueprint. I could see the refugees inside of the containers, cooking food over small pucks of canned heat.

  We drove on, passing a number of the city’s once-famous monuments that had been pulverized during the occupation. The piles of rubble were illuminated by banks of spotlights overseen by hundreds of city workers, laboring to clear and rebuild everything. The Jefferson Memorial was visible, lying partially in ruins, and the Tidal Basin which the aliens had completely filled in with debris and earth along with most of the lowlands near the edges of the Potomac River.

  “The scuds accomplished what no politician ever could,” Richter said softly. “They literally drained the swamp.”

  A sound filled the SUV. Fincher’s assistant retrieved what looked like a retro cellphone from a pocket that was ringing to the tune of “Rudolph the Rednosed Reindeer.”

  “Could you please turn that off,” Jezzy said, making a face.

  Richter looked up. “You got something against Rudolph, young lady?”

  I saw Jezzy’s eyes close, just like they always did when she was pissed. Before I could stop her from saying something she (but mostly I) would regret, she blurted out: “Absolutely, I’ve got something against Rudolph.”

  “You’re against holiday cheer?” the young assistant asked.

  “You really want to know what I’m against?” she asked.

  “Nope,” I answered, but Richter was nodding.

  “Okay, so I’m against the way the song, the story, and the cartoons that came from both of those, reinforced the stereotypes of a harsh, patriarchal society.”

  I groaned. “She doesn’t know what she’s talking about.”

  “Oh, I know exactly what I’m talking about,” Jezzy said. “Think about that ancient Christmas cartoon, the one with the little stop-motion characters. Rudolph’s father, Donner, and even Santa Claus gang up on Rudolph because he won’t conform to their ideal of what a reindeer ought to be. And don’t even get me started on Hermey the elf, Yukon Cornelius, and the unequal power structure in the North Pole that enables the discrimination against all of them.”

  Richter glanced at me. “Are you hearing this, Deus?”

  “I’m really trying not to,” I replied with a forced smile.

  Richter folded his hands in his lap and swapped looks with Jezzy. “I apologize if I’ve invaded your ‘safe space,’ my dear,” he said, placing air quotes around “safe space. “Even though I’m pretty sure you don’t have a right not to be offended, I am sorry you feel that way about a beloved character.”

  “Me too, but I’m a feminist, Mister Richter,” Jezzy said. “So I’ve got to stick to my guns.”

  “And those guns would be aimed at?”

  “All manner of stereotypes, discrimination, and violence against women,” Jezzy replied.

  “Isn’t feminism focused on the rights of females?”

  Jezzy paused. “Yeah. So?”

  “So how can you get equality when you raise up one of the sexes and put the other one down?”

  Jezzy snorted and Richter continued. “Besides, didn’t you know that nearly seventy percent of unprovoked violence in the world was caused by women? What do you say about that?”

  Jezzy’s eyes squeezed to dots. “I say … care to make it seventy-one percent?”

  For a moment, a dark cloud drifted over Richter. The veins in his neck and forehead throbbed and he looked capable of almost anything. And then his head tipped back and he laughed and held up a hand that Jezzy hesitatingly high-fived. “You’re alright, girl,” Richter said. “You might only have one oar in the water, but you got something that is in short supply these days. Fire in the belly. And sometimes that is the only thing that separates the living from the dead.”

  I breathed a sigh of relief and prayed Jezzy wouldn’t say anything else as our motorcade continued out of the city. Soon, we were shooting down over what remained of the Dulles Toll Road, swerving past craters in the blacktop and beyond the rusted hulks of cars and other machines that had been destroyed during the occupation. We zipped by what was left of the Dulles Technology Corridor, a cluster of defense and tech companies on either side of the road that Richter said had once been home to more telecommunications and satellite companies than any place in the world. The aliens had targeted the entire area of course, and most of the buildings had been reduced to ash.

  Fifteen minutes later, we cruised into what remained of the Washington Dulles International Airport. Jezzy remarked that before the scuds came upwards of sixty-thousand people a day had used the place to jet all around the globe. There wasn’t a soul in sight as we did a slow circuit around the outside of the complex. I was shocked to see that whole sections of the airport remained untouched and Richter said this was because the aliens had used some of the runways for their own purposes.

  We parked at the edge of one of the runways which was illuminated by a series of spotlights positioned aside five titanic forklifts. We offloaded our gear and I noticed an aircraft boneyard out beyond a line of fencing, an immense collection of old military and civilian planes.

  Before I could go and explore the boneyard, Jezzy whistled and I hustled after the others, moving toward the largest military plane I’d ever seen up close, the C-130 craft that Fincher had mentioned before. The plane was long and thick with an oversized nose, four giant engines under its wings, and a rear that was tall and wide.

  “Baby has some serious back,” Dru said, admiring the plane.

  The closer I got to the plane, however, the more concerned I grew. The plane’s exterior was dented and fire-blackened, and the paint was peeling off like old wallpaper.

  “You sure we’re gonna make it in that thing?” I asked, pointing at the plane.

  Richter smiled. “Most of our supply planes were destroyed during the invasion. This old gal was a survivor. She doesn’t look like much, but she’s a beast. A C-130, a ‘Hercules.’”

  “Why do they call it that?” Sato asked, looking over.

  “Because the ‘Herc’ can lift and do almost anything. It’s a hog, used by us back in the Air Force, the Marines, hell, even NASA, for air refueling, hunting hurricanes, search-and rescue—”

  “And air drops,” Simeon said.

  Richter nodded. “This one’s been modified. It’s got enough room in its belly to hold all of you.”

  The rear of the plane opened and a ramp lowered. There were a number of personnel that descended the ramp as we moved past them going in the other direction. Some of the personnel I’d seen before with Fincher, but others were new. “Welcome aboard, ladies!” Fincher shouted from an area near the top of the ramp.

  Simeon squinted along the way, glancing up at the plane’s dimensions. “There’s no way,” he said, shaking his head. “The roof looks like it’s only fifteen feet high. My machine’s almost twenty-feet tall.”

  “That’s why we’re loading your machines in sideways,” Fincher shouted. I looked up to see him staring at down at us. He trudged down the ramp and pointed, and that’s when we pivoted to see, in the light from the spotlights, the silhouettes of what appeared to be several strange helicopters moving over the runway toward the C-130.

  “Aerial cranes,” Fincher said.
r />   I raised a hand to my eyes and did a double-take. The aerial cranes had left the vicinity of the tractor trailers and were carrying our mechs which dangled in the air beneath them like puppets.

  “They’ve got the mechs secured with leg slings,” Fincher said. “You can’t imagine how difficult it is to move things like that. One false move and you’re gonzo.”

  The aerial cranes choppered over and deposited our mechs on the tarmac. The personnel from the plane climbed into the titanic forklifts and positioned them under our mechs. We scrambled up the auxiliary ramp and into the heart of the plane, watching the personnel load our gear (which was contained inside cargo nets) in first, followed by the mechs which were slotted onto the ramp one by one, fitted into the plane like bullets in the chamber of a handgun. I was amazed at the precision shown by the personnel, the way they were able to expertly handle and secure the machines and equipment in such a tight space.“Gonna be fun backing that stuff out,” I said.

  “That’s what the cannons are for,” Fincher said.

  Baila looked over. “Excuse me?”

  Fincher smiled. “Oh, did they forget to mention that? Yeah, so you guys are gonna be shot out of the plane using cannons.”

  He pointed to a series of tracks on the plane’s decking that led up to what looked like a large piston tethered to an enormous motor of some kind. The mechs had been slotted onto the tracks so that they were facing, feet-first, the rear of the plane.

  “Electromagnetic launch system,” Fincher said, gesturing to the tracks and motor. “Same thing they used to use to catapult planes off aircraft carriers.”

  I traded a terrified look with the other operators, several of whom had closed their eyes and appeared to be whispering prayers while making the sign of the cross. Fincher opened his rucksack and pulled out some tiny metal cases. He handed each one of us a case. I flipped mine open to reveal three syringes filled with amber fluid, secured in a small strip of Styrofoam.

  “I just want ya’ll to know that I make it a practice of just saying no to drugs,” Billy said, holding the case up. “At least most of the time.”