Eathfall (Novella 1): The Last Run Read online

  Peter and CJ Lopez were waiting by the rig when Mulligan stepped into the prep area. He checked his watch and found he was two minutes late. Judging by CJ and Peter’s smiles, they knew he was late, as well.

  “You making a class one download?” Peter asked, using some Army slang for making a visit to the latrine for a long, delicate moment alone. What made it funny to Mulligan was that Peter Lopez was a civilian employee of the base, who made his living fixing SCEVs and, if a part couldn’t be replaced, would design a new one to be fabricated from the copious stock of raw materials stored in any number of warehouses inside the installation.

  “No, I was busy filling out a form ID 10 T,” Mulligan said. Of course, there was no official Department of the Army or Department of Defense Form ID10T—it was a fake designation usually employed only when embarrassing new soldiers, by sending them to their headquarters to secure said form, which would doubtless cause much mirth and merriment at the HQ level. When a mild expression of confusion crossed Peter’s handsome face, Mulligan realized he had just missed an opportunity at playing the gag on the senior maintainer.

  CJ laughed. Unlike her husband, she was Army, a sergeant first class who was also a wheelhead with the SCEV detachment. Unlike Peter, she would be prime-time field personnel should the world come to a screeching halt, and she had been the primary candidate for vehicle training. And since every rig needed a crew chief aboard when it departed Harmony Base, Peter had been filling that role, as well. Even though he was an instructor himself, Mulligan had been very careful to explain to him that CJ was not his student, and his job was to just maintain the rig. Peter had gotten the message right away, and he had assured Mulligan that he would keep his opinions to himself as long as they were in the vehicle. As far as he was concerned, CJ might be his wife, but she was Mulligan’s to mold.

  “I don’t get it,” Peter said, confused.

  “ID ten T…write it out, and it spells ‘idiot,’” CJ told him, brushing back a strand of dark hair from her face. Her features were a bit sharp and severe, and at first glance, one might think CJ Lopez was a hundred percent ball-buster, all day, every day. The reality was quite different. Mulligan found her to have an arch sense of humor, something he enjoyed tremendously during their off-hours. The Lopez and the Mulligan clans had become friends, and even though Tess and the girls lived off-post, they still socialized with Peter and CJ and their daughter Rachel regularly.

  No slouch in the wit department himself, Peter turned to Mulligan and glared at him sternly. “And just why the hell were you looking for my personnel file, Sergeant Major?”

  Mulligan chuckled. “All right, enough of the small talk. CJ, you ready for this?” Today would be her final qualification run, and if she passed it—which Mulligan had no doubt she would—she would be eligible to serve as senior NCO aboard one of the Self-Contained Exploration Vehicles. Like her husband, the majority of her duties would revolve around maintenance, but she would also log time as pilot-in-command. In Big Army, she had the skills to command a main battle tank, but Harmony’s mission was different; the SCEVs were viewed more as strategic assets as opposed to tactical ones, so only officers commanded them, but CJ would have more than enough time to grow into a command role if the shit hit the fan and the base went into its ten-year lockup cycle.

  “You know I am, Sergeant Major,” she said, her dark eyes blazing with that peculiar ferocity they always seemed to contain. When they had first met, Mulligan had mistakenly identified her as one of those female troopers who had something to prove. He’d been way wrong about that, she didn’t have to prove a damn thing. She was more capable than many, many male soldiers Mulligan had served with over his career. He almost—almost—would have been happy to have had her serve on any Special Forces alpha detachment he had been assigned to.

  Just the same, Mulligan screwed on his No Nonsense Instructor face. “Then let’s get the walk-around started.”

  ***

  The training ground was located four miles to the east of Harmony’s vehicle elevators. CJ had the right seat, while Mulligan sat in the left—as CJ was qualifying as a pilot, she would spend most of her time in the right seat, so Mulligan assumed the role of Pilot in Command. Peter was in the rig’s second compartment, seated at the engineering station, watching over the vehicle’s various systems as CJ drove it across the gently rolling grasslands that surrounded the subterranean base. Ahead, a clump of cattle could be seen, watching the SCEV’s passage with a communal, disinterested gaze as they chewed their cuds. The Army had purchased the land from a cattle rancher in the 1980s, and the remaining parcels still under civilian ownership continued to function as an honest to God ranch, albeit a small one of only two thousand head or so. When the rig made its first waypoint, CJ steered it away from the long fence that separated the cattle from the base’s territory. The cows were quickly left behind as the rig bounced over the terrain at thirty miles an hour, its big tires clawing up the dry earth as they rolled along.

  Finally, they came to the training area, located out in the middle of nothing. A series of obstacles had been set up, nothing too terribly dangerous—Quonset huts, old junked cars and trucks, a rough representation of a city block, and a quarter-mile area that had been dug up and made generally impassable…except for one section that only a trained eye could detect. Mulligan had overseen the backhoes that had ripped up the earth personally, for he wanted this part of the test to be as close to reality as possible. If a catastrophic event did befall the nation, the last thing a rig commander could want was for the vehicle to get stuck a hundred miles or more away from Harmony, and that was a point Mulligan strove to drive home with each of his trainees. The terrain might not be your friend, but it would never be more than a wannabe enemy if you knew how to read it.

  Mulligan gave CJ her training missions. Some of them she would accomplish herself; others would be undertaken by Mulligan, only he would do dumb things, like attempt to close on a building without first surveilling it for hostile activity, or pretend to drive straight across terrain that the rig couldn’t possibly mount. The goal here was to get CJ to speak up, to be part of the cockpit team and point out potential dangers before they became the real McCoy. To her credit, she did just that. Mulligan remained impressed.

  “Okay, last one, and this one’s all on you,” Mulligan said, two hours later. He gave her a set of coordinates. “Steer to that point. You’ll find a large patch of broken terrain. There’s only one safe way across it, and you have to figure it out. You can use every tool the rig has to help you, but the area has been substantially altered from what you’ll find on the moving map display. Remember, your crew is depending on you not to do anything dumb and get the rig stuck.”

  “Roger that, Sarmajor,” CJ said.

  “Prove it,” Mulligan answered.

  CJ steered to the coordinates Mulligan gave her, and ten minutes later, she brought SCEV One to a halt. She regarded the massacred earth outside the viewports for a long moment. There was a stirring from the second compartment, and Peter stuck his head inside the cockpit for a moment. He made a discouraging noise in his throat, then returned to his station without saying anything. CJ finally turned and looked at Mulligan.

  “How long do I have?” she asked.

  “You have as long as it takes, so long as it’s not more than one hour,” Mulligan said.

  CJ turned to the multifunction display before her and reviewed the millimeter-wave radar returns. “That’s over a quarter mile across,” she said.

  “And how deep?”

  “Another quarter mile. How long did it take to dig up that much real estate?”

  “Sergeant Lopez, you are wasting a lot of time, here.”

  “Understood.” With that, CJ faced forward again and scanned the instruments and the broken ground before the rig’s slanted nose. Mulligan leaned back in his seat and reached into a pocket on his tactical rig. He pulled out a cigar and stuck it in his mouth, content to chew on it while watching CJ work
her way through the problem.

  ***

  “Ah, command, this is early warning,” a voice said over the headset Benchley wore. “Harmony Six, you need to take a look at this, sir.”

  Benchley looked up from his console at the rear of the base’s command center. The center was the brain of Harmony Base, where all operations were overseen. A fairly large room, it consisted of a main situation display at the front, which in turn was surrounded by several smaller screens that were readable even from Benchley’s position. Three rows of computer workstations separated him from the display bank, and the center was currently fully staffed with thirteen section operators and the major players on the command staff—essentially, himself and Corinne Baxter, who sat at a second station to Benchley’s left. He cut his eyes toward the main display, which bore a computer-generated Mercator map. It was one of the constants at Harmony Base, for there was no better way to get an idea of what crisis might be brewing than to look at the map that was transmitted to them straight from NORAD, itself located deep in the bowels of Cheyenne Mountain. What he saw made him frown. Reaching out from Russian territory were two—no, three, then five!—fingers of light. And as he watched, more fingers rose from inside Russian borders, like great serpents rearing back to strike. But even this wasn’t a great shock; Benchley had seen it multiple times in the past, during training exercises. Which weren’t always announced.

  Except to Benchley. And he’d received no notification regarding any pending training drills.

  “What’s the confidence here?” Benchley asked.

  “Uh, waiting for verification, but confidence seems high, sir,” said the technician manning the early warning console in the first row. “We’re getting this straight from NORAD.”

  Benchley reached for one of three telephone handsets in the console’s desk area before him. One was red, the other two were black. He picked up the red one. A tone sounded when he put the handset to his ear. “This is Harmony Six Actual. Over.” With those words, he was immediately connected to the commander’s desk at North American Defense Command.

  “Harmony Six Actual, stand by for Hawkeye Six Actual. Over.”

  “Roger that.” Benchley waited as patiently as he could, his gaze locked on the main display. As he watched, several more indications of intercontinental missile launches bloomed from inside the Russian border. So far, there was no response from the U.S.-based missile silos. He didn’t know what to make of that; in previous drills, the response had always been swift, and so far, the mission clock had churned out thirty seconds.

  If this isn’t an unannounced drill, we are majorly fucked.

  “Harmony Six, this is Hawkeye Six Actual. Marty, you there?”

  “Here, sir,” Benchley said to the Commanding General of North American Defense Command, a four-star Air Force officer named Hank Hulse. Benchley had met Hulse only a few times, and he found the senior officer to be one of those commanders who treasured the casual approach when it came to dealing with his subordinates. Even now, Hulse still referred to him as “Marty,” a name Benchley had not answered to since he was ten years old. “We’re seeing multiple launch detections from Russia, but I didn’t receive any notification of any exercises.”

  “That’s correct, Harmony. This is not a drill, this is a real-world event. Expect a response in kind as soon as the NCA gives authorization. Ahead of that, I’d advise you to button up, Marty—I’d be mighty surprised if missile defense was going to be able to save the day. This is going to be a real kick in the pants. Over.”

  “Hawkeye, this is Harmony Six Actual. I understand that this is a real world event, and Harmony is to activate isolation operations. How’s our copy on that? Over.”

  “Harmony, this is Hawkeye Six Actual. You have good copy. Execute your operation plan. Take care, Marty. Hawkeye Six Actual, out.”

  For an instant, Benchley just stood there, the red handset pressed against his ear. He stared dumbly at the main display, watching as more missile tracks were added, each one of them climbing in an arcing parabola that would terminate inside the United States. And more tracks popped up, this time from the Pacific Ocean, as the Russian ballistic missile submarines and cruisers there released their own payloads.

  It can’t be for real…

  And then, launch detections from the United States finally registered. Blossoming upward from Colorado, Montana, and New Mexico, bright tentacles rose from the computer-generated North American landmass. Benchley slowly hung up the phone, then turned to Baxter. She looked at him with a blank face, but her eyes were windows through which her fear showed in unvarnished brilliance.

  “Lock down the base,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, as of this time, Harmony Base is going operational. Let’s recall all our people from the surface, and send alerts to our personnel who are off-post. They need to get back here as soon as the possibly can.” His legs felt suddenly weak, and he half-sat, half-collapsed into his chair as alarms began to wail.

  ***

  “One Truck, this is Harmony. Over.”

  Mulligan was surprised by the voice over the radio, not because Harmony had the audacity to communicate with the rig during a training exam, but because the transmission was coming across the emergency channels that were heavily encrypted and reserved for high priority traffic. CJ had just started picking her path across the broken landscape, and the SCEV rocked slightly as it slowly trundled across the leading edge of the rough terrain.

  “Harmony, this is One Truck. Go ahead. Over,” Mulligan answered.

  “One Truck, you need to return to the base ASAP. Lockdown is underway. This is no drill. Over.”

  Mulligan frowned, and he slowly pressed down on the SCEV’s brakes, bringing the rig to a gentle halt. CJ looked over at him from the right seat, a questioning expression on her face. From the second compartment, Mulligan heard metallic clicks as Peter hit his harness’s quick release. An instant later, he was standing in the cockpit doorway, looking down at them.

  “Harmony, One Truck. Say again. Over.”

  “One Truck, Harmony. Don’t know how to make it any clearer, Sergeant Major—you’re ordered to RTB immediately. This is not a drill, this is a real world event. Over.”

  “Motherfucker,” Mulligan said gently. He then seized a hold of the control column on his side of the cockpit. “Okay, my rig,” he said.

  “Your rig,” CJ said, releasing the copilot’s controls.

  Mulligan backed the SCEV away from the broken terrain ahead, and Peter grabbed for one of the padded handholds bolted to the bulkhead. Mulligan kept his eyes rooted to a display that showed where the rig was headed, and once he was far enough away from the destroyed earth to make a safe turn, he did so.

  “Harmony, One Truck. We’re rolling—can you tell me exactly what’s going down? Over.”

  “One Truck, this is Harmony. Looks like the Russians have finally decided to escalate. We’re tracking multiple inbound warheads, including sub-launched MRVs. It’s Judgment Day, Sergeant Major. Over.”

  Mulligan’s heart skipped a beat. A nuclear attack? Are the Russkies fucking crazy?

  “Roger that, Harmony,” was all he could say as he started the rig rolling forward. The vehicle elevators were over six miles away. That would take ten minutes overland, even if he went balls to the wall. The SCEVs had a top end of around sixty-five miles per hour, but the local topography was rough enough to deny them much in the way of excess speed. And then there was his family to worry about…

  “CJ, your rig,” he said.

  “My rig,” CJ said, taking a hold of the copilot’s controls. Once she had positive control, Mulligan reached into one of the cargo pockets on his duty uniform trousers and pulled out his smart phone. He hit the speed dial for the house, but all he got was a fast busy signal. He checked the phone’s display, and there were three bars of signal, even out here in the middle of nowhere. He redialed, and got a computerized message informing him that all circuits were busy, and that he should try his call
later.

  “Pete, do me a favor?”

  “Name it,” Peter said. He was wearing a radio headset as well, and he had heard the radio conversation. He knew what was headed toward them, and his voice was very small.

  Mulligan handed him his phone. “Keep dialing my family. I can’t get through.”

  “You got it.” From the corner of his eye, Mulligan saw Peter immediately redial. He held the phone to his ear, then redialed again.

  “I have the rig,” Mulligan told CJ. He took the control column in his left hand and pushed it forward, urging the SCEV onward. Its twin, variable-speed turboshaft engines roared, and the vehicle bounded across the grassy plain. At the same time, he reached out and tapped the face of the multifunction display before him. The nav chart came up, and the GPS told him all he needed to know. At their present speed, they would make it back to the rig lift in just over ten minutes.

  Ten minutes. It would be a fucking eternity, and Mulligan already felt his guts begin to tighten. Ten minutes to get back to Harmony. He could bail out of the rig at the elevator, and sprint to the parking lot where his truck was parked, over five hundred meters away. Though Mulligan was in great shape, he was no Olympic sprinter, so it would take at least two minutes to cover that distance. Then he would have to get out the base’s main gate; if it was still open, that was doable. If it had been closed in accordance with lockdown procedure, that made things quite difficult. It was much more than just a chain-link fence, it was a reinforced ingress point that had been designed to keep the goblins out if the balloon ever went up. That meant Mulligan would have to drive through the parking lot and across about two miles of open fields until he could get to a portion of the base where the perimeter fencing was in fact only a double barrier of chain link topped with concertina wire. He felt he could crash through it in his F-250, but he had no idea if the truck would be damaged in the attempt. If he blew a tire, that would definitely make a fucked-up situation considerably worse. And even though his truck was hardy with a four inch lift, a Rancho suspension, and thirty-six inch tires, driving two miles overland would be slow going, even in four wheel drive. He figured it would take him at least twenty minutes to get through the fence, then another five to get to the nearest road. And then, the house outside of Scott City was almost thirty minutes away.