“Now, I hate to embarrass the acting commander of the Republic forces in front of all his loyal minions,” she went on, a glint in her sparkling green eyes, “but there’s one more thing I forgot to tell you last time we talked, and I want to make sure I pass this bit of information along, just in case.” She gazed into the screen, and Jason felt as if he could reach out and touch her, like she was only meters away instead of millions of kilometers.
“I love you,” she said, blinking at something in her eye. Shaking her head, she looked behind her and then back to the camera. “Well, got to go. Stark out.” The screen blackened, and, for a moment, all Jason heard was the sound of his own breathing.
Only when his face began to ache did he realize that he was wearing a huge, blithering-idiot grin.
Chapter Twenty
“Darkling they went under the lonely night.”
Shannon tried not to hold her breath as she watched the Protectorate patrol roll by, the independent axles of their personnel carriers bouncing rhythmically with the ruts of the road. She lay sprawled over the frame of her battery-powered cycle, her heavy backpack—laden with ammo and a pair of missile launchers—in the brush beside her, where it had fallen when she’d ditched the bike.
Finally, the last vehicle passed by, its transceiver dish spinning slowly, and Shannon scrambled to a crouch, unslinging her rifle as she listened for any other threats. The night was silent, but for the gentle whisper of the north wind and the distant, mournful hooting of an owl. Satisfied that the Protectorates had gone, she stood and whistled softly. From the brush further along the side of the old Interstate, another figure emerged, walking a motorcycle back toward her.
“That was pretty close, ma’am,” Corporal Lee commented, reshouldering his pack.
“Get used to it,” she said, kickstanding her bike. “We’ll be seeing a lot more of them the closer we get to Capital City.” She waded into a stand of tall grass to grab her backpack.
“That was a good idea you had,” Lee went on, reminding her of a puppy dog with its tongue hanging out. “I mean, about all of us heading out separately and meeting outside the city. If we’d all been together, that patrol would have spotted us for sure.”
She grunted, not wanting to encourage the youth. He apparently had the idea that being paired with her meant he was the “teacher’s pet,” and he’d been talking nonstop ever since they’d left the base, excepting the two times they’d run across Protectorate patrols—one airborne and this one on the road. Of civilians and police, they had seen not a soul in the last fifteen hours. She hadn’t realized till lately just how few people lived outside the megalopolises anymore.
Things had moved quickly since they’d received Jason’s reply. They’d gathered together a hundred police officers and RSC troopers in the woodlands surrounding the base and used the few days they had for intensive training. It seemed only hours ago that she was briefing the assembled RSC and police officers in the base’s tactical center, using interactive video maps drawn off the central computer system.
“Since we’re dealing with such a diverse and inexperienced force,” she’d told them, “I’m going to keep this as simple as possible. I don’t want any of this information disseminated until we all reach the rally point outside Capital City—if any of your men are captured and interrogated, I don’t want them to know enough to kill the operation.” She’d looked each of them in the eye in turn. “Because this operation has to go on, ladies and gentlemen, no matter what.”
She’d used a laser pointer to indicate the map on the room’s main screen. “This is Capital City, which is built on what used to be called Long Island, and over to the west are the Ruins,” she’d told them, using the slang term for the huge stretch of abandoned buildings that had been New York City, Jersey City and Newark. “In-between is No Man’s Land—the security zone around the defense satellite control base and the civil communications center. It’s a full kilometer of thermal and sonic sensors, motion detectors and nonlethal traps. Thanks to Agent Klesko,” she said with a nod toward the big man, who was now able to walk with a cane, “we know the override codes to disable the traps, but once we use them, they’re going to know we’re coming. What we have to do is send in a small group on foot along the one path where the sensors don’t overlap—along the inlet between the coast and Fire Island—to sneak in and secure the President during the attack on the control center. I’ll be leading that team, which will consist of ten troopers hand-picked by Lieutenant Kristopolis, while the Lieutenant will lead the main strike force.”
“How’re you going to find the President?” Cleveland P.D. Lieutenant Melissa Sanchez had asked her. Sanchez was a powerfully-built woman with the body of a weightlifter but a surprisingly gentle face. Kristy had brought her in, along with twenty of her officers and almost the entire Cleveland ’plex Emergency Reaction Team. “After all, he could be anywhere in there.”
“We have to try,” Shannon had answered with a pensive shrug. “Kristy, you give us half an hour to get into place, then go ahead with the attack—we have to take out the satellite controls, no matter what. You’ll have to use the missiles we mounted on the police riot vehicles to take out the Protectorate hoppers and APC’s first, then hit the transmission antennae. After that, we’ll try to extricate the President. It may be necessary to abandon the vehicles and retreat on foot if they use orbital bombardment.” She’d paused thoughtfully. “Of course, if they use orbital bombardment, it means the attack on their ships has failed and we’re all dead anyway, so I guess retreat isn’t that big a priority.”
“Was that why we did it this way, ma’am?” Lee asked, still rambling on, apparently not getting the idea. “’Cause it’d be harder for them to find us?”
“That’s one reason,” she said, swinging a leg over her cycle. A flick of her wrist brought the motor humming to life, the vibrations travelling through her utility fatigues and into her legs.
“What’s the other reason, ma’am?” he asked, starting his own bike.
“Someone’s got to get through. If we go in small groups,” she explained with a cold smile, “then they can’t kill us all before we get there.”
With that, she pushed off from the aged, cracked pavement and accelerated down the road. Lee followed somewhat hesitantly, the perpetual grin on his face blanching into something less confident.
“Tell me how this is supposed to work again,” Tom Crossman said, staring at the less-than-imposing bulk of Colonel Podbyrin’s courier—or rather, what had been his courier.
The little spacecraft had been pulled into Pallas’ pressurized drydock several days ago, and three teams of technicians had been working on it nonstop since then. The ship still retained its outward appearance, but an ungainly antiproton-drive booster pod had been grafted to its ass-end, meant to make up for the loss of two of its four fuel tanks. The bulbous hydrogen containers had been replaced with Marine boarding pods—heavily-armored capsules meant to be launched through the skin of a spaceship and insert troops. Rounded shells camouflaged the true nature of the pods, but any close examination would pierce that disguise—just as a thorough scan would reveal that the two-passenger control capsule that was formerly mounted on the nose of the modular craft had been replaced by a jury-rigged lookalike three times the size of the original and designed to shelter twenty people.
“Stop complaining,” Vinnie admonished Crossman, cinching the man’s armored chestplate tighter, jerking him backwards. “It’s simple—we get close enough to the Russian flagship, then we take the boarding pods right through the hull. After that, all we gotta do is reach the weapons control center and take it over until the
“Actually,” Crossman muttered with a grimace, “I was only
Before either of them could comment further, Jason McKay and Jock Mahoney came through the drydock’s safety lock with Ari Shamir, Gunny Lambert and the rest of the Marine Reaction Force in tow, decked in full body armor and bristling with weapons.
