Shadow Ops: Control Point

Britton shuddered. You knew this would happen. This is your fault. His eyes swept the fetid pools that had once been people, his mind already stretching to accept their deaths on his conscience. The only thing he could do was put a stop to it. Did the rest of the FOB yet know what had happened here? Would they set off the ATTD? At this point, would it be more than he deserved? How many dead because of him? He couldn’t permit himself to think about it.

He gathered his magic and threw it out toward her, Suppressing the flow that flooded into the major. He felt for the string of magic, Scylla’s outward flowing current, where it connected to Major Salamander’s weakly stirring form, and directed his own current there, trying to override it. For a brief moment, he felt Scylla’s magic roll back, then her tide surged through his, gripping the major ever more tightly. Her head whipped toward Britton, and she snarled.

“I told you to wait until I was finished.”

“No way,” he said. “I can’t let you kill him.”

“You can’t stop me either, you idiot,” she said. “You don’t fucking get it, do you? I am not in the habit of sparing cockroaches, Oscar. Nor do I take kindly to those who interfere with my efforts at extermination.”

“If you kill him, I’ll never gate you out of here.”

Scylla threw back her head and laughed. “I don’t need you to gate me out of here, Oscar. I never did. All I needed was for you to get me free of the Suppression, and in that capacity, you have performed admirably.”

Britton gasped as his own gut clenched. He was overcome with nausea so intense that he felt his stomach was lurching inside him, kicking, expanding, struggling to escape. His throat hitched, trying to expel the burning bile that was rising within, but nothing would come out. He struggled to breathe, his knees going out from under him, and he fell on his side, the frozen mud blessedly cool against his cheek. A few feet away, Major Salamander was curled in the same posture, his eyes staring into Britton’s own, seeing nothing.

“I understand,” Scylla’s voice was untroubled, as if nothing had happened. “It’s Stockholm syndrome, or something similar. You’re identifying with your captors, sympathizing with them. You just need a moment to see reason. You just need a reminder of what you are.”

She reached toward him, clenching her fist. He hadn’t thought his stomach could get any worse, but he was wrong. His body locked, the nausea so powerful that it coursed through him until it felt as if the pores of his skin would vomit blood in an effort to vent the illness. He made no sound. Through his graying vision, he saw Major Salamander’s head slumped in the mud, a thin trickle of bloody drool sliding down his chin.

“Feel that? That’s your reminder. That’s what you are, what I am. It’s what’s in us both. Can you feel that?” She paused, seeming to wait for an answer, but Britton could barely hear her, suffused as he was by a nausea that far transcended pain.

“That’s power, Oscar. That’s your birthright. Now, you understand what it is. You think the SOC has taught you anything? That Dampener has castrated you, Oscar. You have no idea what you’re truly capable of. And now that you have a sample of it, can we kindly dispense with the moralizing and get the hell out of here?”

Just as quickly as her magic had gripped him, it was gone, and Britton sigh-retched his relief, shuddering with the taste of the fresh air, feeling his muscles slowly unclench. Major Salamander lay opposite him, perfectly still.

“We’re wasting time, Oscar.” All kindness was gone from Scylla’s voice. “Let’s go. I can still take the ATTD out once we’re quit of this place. Show me that you’ve broken through their efforts to brainwash you. All you have to do is move us.”

Britton reached out a trembling hand toward Salamander, brushed his nose with his fingertips. No reaction. The major was dead.

“Come, Oscar,” she said, kneeling, “let me help you up.”

Britton looked around him, leaning briefly into her hand under his upper arm. The SASS was completely laid waste. Only the Quonset huts where the enrollees lived stood untouched. Beyond them, the rotted wreckage was strewn around in the eerie silence, buildings, equipment, people.

Everywhere, puddles of vaguely man-shaped purple-and-black sludge. Those used to be people.

He shook off her arm. “Fuck off. Kill me if you want to. I’m not opening shit.” He was still too weak to open a gate or try to Suppress her again. He could do little more than rise shakily to his knees.

“Don’t be silly, Oscar,” she said, her voice matronly, chiding. “Even now they’re coming. What do you think they’ll do if they find you here?”

“Fucking kill me, I hope,” he said. Her magic had released its grip on him, but his stomach still writhed with horror and guilt. Escape was only her secondary motive, he thought. Revenge was the first. “I’m the idiot who freed you, who let you do this. Here’s hoping they kill you, too.”

Scylla threw back her head and laughed. “Pretty, but not too smart. They’re not going to kill me, Oscar. If they were going to kill me, don’t you think they would have done it already? They put a bit of explosive in your chest, and you quail and beg and do whatever they tell you. You never got it, did you Oscar? I explained it plain and simple. They’re not going to kill you unless they absolutely have to, unless you give them no choice at all. Only the tiniest fraction of the human population comes up Latent. We’re too precious to kill. The corpses I left behind are all lost in the cost-benefit analysis.”

Britton got shakily to his feet but found he couldn’t support his own weight, and crashed down again. “They were going to carve up your brain,” he said. “They figured they weren’t getting enough for the cost of keeping you. They were going to make you like Billy. If I’d just waited a little while longer, they would have done it.”

Scylla turned to face the perimeter fence, with its open view of the plain beyond. The guard towers stacked just behind it were gone, reduced to piles of flaking crumbs, as if the wood had been ravaged by termites. She laughed, long and low.

“Well, I suppose I should thank you, then, shouldn’t I? Because their return on investment is about to go way into the red.” She turned, bent down, placed her cool fingertips under his chin. Her face was serene, beautiful in the weird light of the Source’s giant moon.

“One more chance, Oscar. Are you helping me? Or am I not going to get killed by the SOC on my own?”

For a moment, Britton’s stomach fell. Her eyes, huge and welcoming, her mouth so steady, her voice so even. She knew something he didn’t. It all made sense to her, there was no confusion, no doubt. Could she be right while the rest of the world was wrong?

But a stench curled in his nostrils, tendrils of stink, rotten, fetid. God knew how many bodies, the remains of people slowly dripping back into the earth. “Fuck you,” he said, jerking his chin away from her.

“A pity,” she said. Britton could hear shouting, boots pounding in the distance, the whine of an electric motor. “Well, I’m not going to kill you, Oscar Britton. Instead, I’m going to leave you to reap the rewards of your position. You’re of no use to me if you’re not going to open a gate, so you can keep that bomb in your chest. You clearly prefer it to freedom. I don’t have the time to give you the education you so clearly need. I’m done mothering you, Oscar. If you live, if any of you live, perhaps you’ll come to learn in time. When you do, I’d be much obliged of your company. Bye now.”

She turned back to the fence line and spread her arms. The strength of her gathering current overwhelmed him, and his stomach clenched anticipatorily, but Scylla was as good as her word, and the magic billowed outward instead.

The fence collapsed, rotting back to the mud like everything else inside the SASS. Scylla began to walk forward, her shoulders lightly dusted by swirling motes of rusted metal, disintegrating in the gentle breeze, as farther down the line, shouts erupted. Britton craned his head to one side, and his eyes widened. All along the FOB’s perimeter, outside the SASS’s boundaries, the concrete barricade walls were crumbling, the skeletal stubs of their rebar supports stuck out into the sky, briefly silhouetted against the moon before they, too, flashed into flaking rust and blew away in the wind. Machine-gun emplacements collapsed, antiair systems fell to pieces with light pops. Hundreds of men and women wailed and collapsed, before dripping into the earth, their bones laid bare in fetid clouds of what used to be their bodies.

It went on as far as Britton could see in both directions. An Apache, circling on patrol, highlighted Scylla within a bright halo of its searchlight before suddenly breaking apart, its component pieces wafting away on the breeze before they could even hit the ground, the pilots nowhere to be seen.

Britton saw a tank park off to his right vaporize, the neat rows of main battle tanks reduced to stinking hulks