As it turned out, what I could do to help was stay out of everyone's fucking way.
The Marines were damn efficient. They moved fast, coordinated, barely speaking as they moved. Meg was one of them as she helped find and drain the chopper's fuel. Three other soldiers methodically took apart the hydration systems from their uniforms, filling the reservoirs with aviation fuel. We were lucky again to have such an old vehicle that ran on volatile chemicals -- most modern skimmers were solar or rechargeable. If we'd had one of those instead, we'd be stuck burning uniform jackets on some sticks as our only defense.
Marines improvise. I'd heard that saying somewhere before, I think from my grandfather. He was an American citizen in his youth, and in the military. Army, I think. I know he served in the China War. Regardless, even after he moved to The Netherlands, he told us his war stories. And he had huge respect for the Marines, and their talent to do more with less.
And these Marines were improvisational geniuses. In just about five minutes, they used three hydration systems, two rifles, and some fuel to improvise some fucking flamethrowers.
"Wong and her team are still working on the skimmer," Keppler eventually told me. Good. At least he still remembered I was there. "We're going to move to them, cover them while they work. Hope you're right about this fire thing, Phoenix."
I hoped so, too.
Then, we were moving. Sanchez took point, and I just sort of fell in next to Meg as we walked.
"How do they know where to go?" I asked. Everyone just started moving -- neither Sanchez nor Keppler gave any order, any directions.
"I had to guess?" Meg said. "BattleNet, or something like it. They're connected via audio and video to all of their guys on the ground. It's those cool goggles."
"So they all see what the other soldiers see?"
"They can. Or the goggles can just pop up signposts," Meg explained. "Turn. Stop. 300 feet that way. That kind of thing."
"And how do they process that information and keep a lookout for worms and stuff?"
"Specialized training. Your brain would go nuts if you tried it. Hell, mine too, probably. We had a version of this back home. But I'd imagine it's primitive compared to what these guys have."
"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask --"
But Sanchez cut me off. He held up a hand, and everyone stopped.
"Movement. 500 meters west," he said.
"I see it," Keppler said.
"Civilians?" The question came from me.
"Negative. Ground level. Crawling, moving fast," Sanchez reported.
"Your worms," Keppler told me. "And it looks like they wanna say hello."
I was sweating already, but I think I started to sweat more. My jaw clamped tightly. It looked as though we were about to find out if my logic leap had been sound, or if I'd had a stupid idea that would kill us all.
"'Chez, fire that thing up," Keppler said to Sanchez.
"Rog. Say a prayer that I don't burst into flames, boss," Sanchez said.
Sanchez twisted open the valve at the barrel of his rifle. It had originally been a drinking spout, but Marines were resourceful. I'd seen them fit the valve with an atomizer, a thing that would make the fuel come out in a spray rather than a hot, volatile mess. After taking a deep breath, Sanchez flicked open his lighter near the end of the spout, and flames immediately shot straight up.
"You got any attitude control on that thing?" Masters, the injured Marine, yelled from behind me.
"Yeah. Isn't working, though. This is what we got," Sanchez said.
The flames were shooting a good eight feet out of the barrel -- not much of a kill radius. Still, better than nothing.
"I got 'em," Keppler said, pointing just downrange. "Goddamn, they're fast. Be here in seconds."
"I'm locked on," Sanchez said.
The Marines sounded so fucking *calm.* I was doing my best not to shit myself. Yes, I'm very brave. And that was when they came into view, like a quick, slithering black carpet. There had to be hundreds of them. Maybe thousands. More pods must have fallen, or these things could breed really quickly -- neither possibility was comforting.
"Anytime, 'Chez." Keppler's voice was calm, just loud enough to be heard.
"Lightin' em' up, sir."
Sanchez turned the barrel to the creeping mass. It looked for a second like they were just going to plow right through the stream of flames Sanchez was pouring into them, but no. They stopped, moved back a bit, then split into two masses, trying to go around the column of fire.
"Use a hand up here, Leo."
"On it," the Marine at the back of the formation said, rushing forward with his makeshift flamethrower and opening the valve. Leo moved fast, lighting his weapon off of the flames Sanchez was already shooting. Together, they managed to scatter the mass more. I even saw several of the worms... well not really explode. More like... pop. When the flames hit them, they just burst into pieces.
"How much time do we have with those things?" Meg asked.
"Couple-few minutes," Keppler replied. He sounded almost... bored?
I couldn't understand how these Marines could be so cool under fire. I mean, sure, they're more used to life and death scenarios. Being a reporter rarely puts my life in danger, so they've got the advantage there. But Keppler basically told me we'd be dead soon. In a few minutes, even -- but that didn't seem to bother him at all.
It bothered the hell out of me. And I was going to do...
OK, to be honest, I didn't know what I was going to do. I just started running back to the wrecked helicopter as fast as I could go. No one bothered to stop me. They probably thought I was running away, if they noticed I was gone. I couldn't blame them for that. I hadn't been a paragon of bravery up to that point.
As it turned out, though, I wasn't. My brain was working ahead of me then. I had a plan before I realized I had a plan, which was an odd sensation when said plan finally crystallized in my conscious mind.
Meg and the Marines hadn't drained even a fraction of the chopper's fuel. It carried some pretty volatile stuff in its mixture -- diesel, benzine, alcohol. In the age of solar and hydrogen power, you had to get special government dispensation to use the stuff. That meant it was somewhat rare, and I wasnt sure if the polycarbonate water jugs I'd seen in the back of the chopper could hold it. I planned to find out, though.
The hoses Meg has used to drain the chopper fuel were still in place and working, so I used them. I did a better job of getting it all over my hands than I did into the four-liter jug, but I still managed to fill up pretty fast. I'd dropped the cap somewhere, but I didn't have time to look for it. Open jug in my left hand, I started to rub back into the chaos.
The Marines were pretty much as I left them, calmly shooting flames into the masses of black worms, still keeping them at bay. I charged up in between Sanchez and Leo, throwing the jug as hard as I could underhand into the crawling dark horde in front of them. Fuel spilled out of the bottle as it tumbled end over end. It flew further than I thought it would, landing dead-center of the mass.
Sanchez turned to me and raised an eyebrow. I think he laughed a little.
"Shoot the damn bottle!" I yelled at him.
"Boss?"
"Eh. Sure, Chez. Why not?" Keppler said, shrugging.
Sanchez turned his flamethrower on the jug, and it went up immediately. The jug itself, now a quarter empty, exploded at ground level. I could feel the sudden rush of heat a it blew -- it was intense. The quarter or so of the liquid that had spilled out sent tendrils of flame through the rest of the mass of worms, popping a bunch.
I turned around to look at the Marines -- let's be honest, I turned around to see and hear them praise my brilliant idea, really. But that didn't happen. They still looked damnably calm, bored almost to the point of falling asleep on their combat-booted feet. I was understandably a bit on the confused side.
"Well, that certainly was an impressive explosion," Keppler said. He sounded...
You know when you want to show a kid how impressed you are by some mundane shit he did? Tying his shoes, not pissing himself? That's the tone Keppler had. And a second later, I saw why.
Behind him, the tour skimmer came in for a silent, soft landing. Those fucking Marines had known the thing was on its way for probably the last five minutes. They just hadn't bothered to share. That's why they'd been so fucking calm. Why they hadn't worried that the flamethrowers would run out on us. Fucking assholes.
They'd let me run off and possibly get myself killed for nothing more than... what? Cheap entertainment value? My vision turned red. Before I could fully realize what I was doing, I lunged at the Major. That action surprised even me -- I've never reacted that way. And even as I dove at him, some part of me realized how incredibly stupid the move was -- Major Keppler was easily twice my size.
Keppler wasn't in any danger of getting hit, though. He'd already figured out what was coming, and he reacted at light speed. In one quick motion, he twisted his body to the left and stuck out his right hand, driving two fingers into my solar plexus.
Now, I want to be very clear about this. Keppler didn't hit me -- he merely reacted, stopped me from hitting him without injuring me. Essentially, I ran into his hand and knocked the wind out of *myself.*
I completely understand how nonviolent he was toward me. Well, I understand it *now.* Back then, all I really understood was that I was on the pavement, struggling to draw in a breath.
Keppler motioned to his Marines, who picked me up as if I weighed nothing, loaded me into the waiting skimmer, and strapped me in. The rest of the group loaded up in seconds, and we took off. Slowly, the shooting pain in my torso subsided, and I could breathe. Keppler walked to the back of the skimmer and crouched down next to my chair.
"Calmed down now, Mr. Phoenix?" he asked, smiling.
I wasn't sure I had regained the ability to speak yet, so I just nodded once -- a short, quick bob of my head. Affirmative, sir.
"Good. Now, I'm sorry I had to put you on the ground back there. There wasn't time, and I couldn't risk a freakout. We good?"
I answered this with another quick nod.
"Good. I should have let you and the girl know that we were in no danger. My fault." I answered this with another quick nod.
"Good. I should have let you and the girl know that we were in no danger. My fault." Keppler bounced a bit on his toes, stretching his legs. "I'm just not used to working with civilians. I tend to forget you're..."
"Disconnected?" I said. The word was barely identifiable as language -- it was more of a polysyllabic croak.
"Exactly. Right. We're in constant contact with each other, and I end up forgetting that you folks aren't. My apologies."
It was a weird situation. This Marine, slightly smaller than the skimmer we were in, was apologizing to me -- and the thing was, he sounded totally sincere. I realized that I couldn't be mad at him -- he could've knocked the shit out of me and no one would have called him on it. He didn't.
"'S OK," I managed to mutter.
"That thing with the IED -- the makeshift bomb. That was pretty impressive, Mr. Phoenix."
"Unnecessary," I said. My voice was coming back.
"But inventive. And you didn't know it was unnecessary. Share a secret?"
I nodded.
"General feeling among my people was you'd go to pieces on us at the first sign of trouble. You didn't. You took action."
I couldn't say I was flattered that the Marines had a running bet on how long it would take me to fall apart, and it wasn't long.
I couldn't say I was flattered that the Marines had a running bet on how long it would take me to fall apart, and it wasn't long. But I understood it, and, truth be told, probably would have thought the same thing in their situation.
"So what now?" I asked. "Seems like your mission out here was a bit of a... well, I don't want to say failure, but..."
"Quite the opposite," Keppler said. "We needed to do a flyover to determine the situation inside the city of Honolulu. The situation is, politely, fucked. Back to base. We get on DefNet, make our report, and wait for orders."
"Base is the airport?"
"That's affirmative."
"Is that smart?" I asked. "We saw how fast those things could move. How long is the airport going to be safe?"
"Thanks to you, we know what to do. Fortify. Put up walls of fire, and we'll be fine. For an alien invasion, this ain't shit," Keppler said.
"Boss!" It was Wong. Fortify. Put up walls of fire, and we'll be fine. For an alien invasion, this ain't shit," Keppler said.
"Boss!" It was Wong.
"What's up, LT?" Keppler yelled back. These Marines sure were loud.
"We got a proximity alarm. Check that -- multiple alarms."
"Where?"
"Above us, about three miles up and closing fast."
"More pods?" I asked, unstrapping myself and standing up. I walked over to the nearest window -- as this was a sightseeing skimmer, they were huge, and gave a good view of the blue sky above.
"If they are, they ain't the same type," Wong said. "They're measuring five meters in diameter. Each."
"How many?" Meg said.
"Many many," Wong replied. From her face, I could guess she didn't like answering civilian questions, but she did it anyway.
"I count at least 40," Jeb told me, looking up from his controls and tapping the large screen between the two front seats.
"Can we evade?" Keppler said.
"Sure. I can make sure we don't get hit by one," Jeb said. "That's easy. Not what worries me."
"Well? Talk, kid," Wong said after a minute, blowing out an exasperated breath.
"Anyone else wonder what the toy surprise is?"
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Sanchez asked, frowning.
"The Kinder Surprise," Jeb said. I knew I'd nailed his accent. South Africa. We called them Kindereier in Holland when I was growing up, but I knew what he meant -- little hollow chocolate eggs.When you broke them open, there was a shitty toy inside -- kind of like when those littler pods had broken open to reveal the worms.
"I get it," Keppler said. "If there were those bug things in the smaller vehicles, what's in these things?"
"We'll find out. Soon," Wong said, pointing again to the monitor. "Looks like we got about 20 seconds before the first one hits."
"Where?" I asked.
"That's the bad news. The airport."
Thursday, March 8, 2012
Sunday, February 19, 2012
E/B:H -- Chapter Five
U.S. Military forces are pretty damned easy to pick out of a crowd these days -- full body armor, tech uniforms. But easiest by far -- and the sure way to tell they're American forces -- is the small black tattoo below each soldier's right eye. There are two parts to the tattoo-- a rank insignia and a 3D barcode. Scan a soldier's face, and you have his entire military record. Well, the unclassified stuff, anyway.
The guy who was standing outside the helicopter door when we opened it was a Sergeant. Of some kind, I guess. I know there are a lot of them, but he had four stripes and a chevron tattooed under his eye, so... Sergeant.
"I'm going to have to ask that you shut your rotors down, step out of the vehicle, and come with us, please," the Sergeant said. His voice was polite, level. I didn't doubt, though, if we refused to do as he said, his tone would suddenly change significantly.
I stepped out first, holding my hand out to the young Sergeant. Well, kind of young, anyway. He was about my age.
"Hiya. Dane Phoenix, Global News. How can I help you, Sergeant?" I said. A smile was pasted on my face -- it usually was in cases like this. It usually worked, too, but not on the Marine in front of me. He simply blinked, looked to see if the rotors were powering down. When they stopped moving, he looked at me again and repeated himself.
"If you would all come with me, please."
Still polite. I figured it would be in our best interests to do what he said, and to not test the limits of his calm, emotionless courtesy.
I haven't dealt with the American military too much before. Used to be a time when reporters and the DoD were tight, but no more. Around the beginning of the China War, support for stuff like imbedded reporters died out completely. It was a total media shutout. Nowadays, even getting a press release out of those guys was like pulling teeth barehanded.
Also, they were scary as fuck. Especially the Marines that met us at the airport. Every one of them was as muscled-up as Andrevich, if not more, and they had guns. Not those crappy, non-lethal guns, either -- real, honest-to-crap automatic weapons that could shred a person from 500 yards away. Even if it had just been one of those guys, not about 20 like there were, I probably would have done what he said. Yeah... I know. I'm not exactly a model of bravery and manliness, but you've no doubt noticed that already.
The Marines herded us into a hangar. Inside were more Marines, and a ton of tech equipment. It looked like they had taken over the hangar and set up a sort of home base.
"Wait here, please," the Sergeant said.
As he walked away, I looked behind me at Andrevich. I didn't want a repeat of earlier. I mean, he'd kicked the *shit* out of the Coal Creek guys, but we were extremely outnumbered here, and more than a little outgunned. Andrevich still looked calm for the moment, though, but he did flag down a passing Marine.
"We have injured with us," he said. I'd forgotten about the surfer kid. "Do you have a medic in your unit?"
The Marine nodded slowly.
"Corpsman!" he yelled.
Another Marine came over, and he and Andrevich tended to the surfer kid, who was still out cold.
"Mr. Phoenix," I heard. I turned around.
Standing in front of me was a bigger, scarier version of the Sergeant from before, but with a different tattoo. I wasn't too up on Marine ranks, but I guessed he was an officer.
"Call me Dane," I said, holding out my hand and smiling wide. That smile had gotten me out of hundreds of scrapes before, and in this type of situation, it was the only move I had in my arsenal. He ignored me completely.
"Mr. Phoenix," he repeated, "Major Keppler, commanding, 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit."
I nodded. I guessed from his body language all of that was supposed to mean something to me, and that I was supposed to be impressed by it. I played along. Satisfied that I was showing respect, Keppler continued.
"I'm going to need to debrief you. All of your footage. Your data. I'm going to need copies of all of it."
I didn't see the harm in it, not logically. But I still bristled at the order. Maybe it was something about the way he said it, or maybe it was some throwback to the whole outdated freedom of the press thing.
"I don't think you can legally take that," Jeb piped up behind me. I almost told him to shut up, but... well, he was kinda right. And what he'd just said wasn't so far off from what I'd been thinking.
"Under normal circumstances, you would be correct, sir. But I'm going to let you in on a little secret," Keppler said, the faintest grin creeping to his face. "Breaking news, as it happens. Within the hour, the President will declare martial law. I'll be able to take the data regardless of your perceived legal rights."
I don't know where the next words came from, but I certainly didn't think the whole thing out. If I had, this story would end. Right there, in the hangar. For me, anyway, because I would have just handed over everything I had and gotten the hell out of Hawaii. But that's not what happened.
Some part of me, probably inherited from my father, went into salesman mode. The smile appeared. The voice dropped to a near whisper. And I found myself leaning in closer to the hulking, terrifying Marine officer in front of me.
"Tell you what," I said quietly. "I'll make you a deal. You feed me some info here, and I'll hand over everything. The data. The video footage. Put you in touch with the scientists who made the discovery. All of it. Just keep me hooked up on the story."
I could see Keppler didn't like the idea, but he didn't give me an immediate "no." He motioned for me to follow him, so I did. He led me away from my crew, away from the Marines huddled over machines.
"I'm going to level with you," he said. "I dislike... No, let's be honest. I despise journalists."
So, that conversation wasn't getting off to the start I'd hoped. Keppler continued.
"Here's the situation, though. My men and I were on our way back from training in Japan when we got the order to land in Hawaii. Your broadcast had put all American forces on alert, and we were ordered to secure the airport and get data on the situation."
That tracked. He wasn't telling me much that was new, except that he wasn't originally supposed to be here. I knew when to be quiet. That was one of those times, so I shut up and let the Major talk.
"We can get your data, but we really need to get on the ground. The equipment you see here is all we had on the plane. What we really need is a helicopter, and a pilot."
"And I've got both."
"Correct. Now, I could commandeer the chopper, but we have no one who can fly it -- at least not well. Who's your pilot?"
"Name's Meg. Former Israeli Army. I've seen her fly that chopper like you wouldn't believe," I said, the reporter smile returning.
"You talk her into flying a couple of observation runs with my men, and give us any data you have, and I'll keep you in the loop."
That was an offer that was too good to pass up. I nodded and went over to convince Meg to step back into the role of combat pilot.
Convincing Meg took less time than I would have thought. I only had to mention the Major's proposal, and she agreed instantly. She wasn't surprised at all that they needed her to fly the helicopter, either.
"Think about it, boss. Most of these kids are 18. Even the Major can't be much older than 35. None of them have probably even ridden in one of these old buckets before," she told me. "Whereas we're still using them back home. Much better than those damn patrol skimmers for watching the borders."
It made sense. What didn't make sense was why a former Israeli chopper pilot was doing hair and makeup for the Network, but I didn't ask about that. Probably should have.
Major Keppler's deal was pretty clear-cut. Me, Meg, and one other could go on the chopper with the Marines. The rest would have to stay back at the hangar -- I had an idea about that. As the Marines were loading up, I pulled Andrevich aside.
"You've done some broadcast work, right?" I asked him. I knew he had -- I'd learned that in my earlier research.
"A little. Hosted a show for a Network years ago during the off season. 'Asia's Next World Champion.' It only lasted the one year," he said.
"I know it would be asking a lot, and you've been great so far... but if anything happens here, anything significant, could you --"
"Cover it for your Network?"
I could swear that big New Soviet knew how to read minds. It wasn't the last time I'd think that.
So Andrevich was set. I decided to leave Jeremy and the "A" crew with him -- they'd be able to walk him through any problems. Hair and makeup weren't a problem -- Andrevich had a shaved head, and I dare anyone to try to convince a guy like him to wear makeup. Jeb would be my ridealong, as he was accustomed to being a one-man show. I had him steal the "A" unit's backup camera and uplink.
We were ready, and we left immediately. With Meg at the controls and the the Major next to her to provide direction, we took off. I expected a fair amount of chaos in the the city we'd just fled, but I wasn't prepared for the scope of it. Not even a little bit.
The first thing I noticed were the fires. They were hard to miss -- I could see the black smoke the second we got some altitude. I nudged Jeb to start filming, but that turned out to be unnecessary -- he'd seen the plumes of smoke as well, and had the camera up.
"Head for downtown," Keppler said. It was easy to hear him -- it was fully, deathly quiet inside the chopper. No one was talking. I could hear the Marine next to me breathing, and it's not like he was loud.
"Lance Corporal May! Open up the doors back there! Let's get a good picture of what we're looking at!" Keppler yelled from the front of the chopper.
A Marine reached for the door. The air, finally getting hot as we moved into the midmorning sun, blew into the chopper in a gust. I fell back into my seat a bit. Jeb didn't move -- he was steady, shooting out of the now-open door as we hovered over the highway into town at two hundred feet.
The highway, was, of course, jammed. And as happened when everyone was trying to go one place at one time, nothing was moving. Instead of waiting in their cars, though, we could see that most of the drivers had abandoned them and were running down the street. I think they were heading for the airport -- the very same one we had just left -- and all of a sudden I felt monumentally stupid. These people were making the smart move -- getting the fuck out of the city -- and I was leaving a safe area to go into the chaos. And I hadn't remembered to call Ryan and tell him what was up.
That didn't turn out to be a problem. My phone chimed just then. Ryan was on the line, and in all the time I'd known him, I'd never heard him sound worried -- until that call.
"Dane! Jesus, man! Is everyone OK? What's going on?"
That's when I remembered Jeb crashing through his equipment and cutting us off in a live feed.
"All alive for the moment. I'm with --"
"Two-six MEU. Jeremy called me. Can you go live in one minute?"
I asked Jeb. He gave me a thumbs-up and a wink.
"We're good to go over here," I told Ryan.
"Free reign, Dane. Tell us everything you see. No delay, no censoring. Other objects have been sighted in Asia -- we're putting you on all the Networks. People need to know wh--"
I thought the call had gone dead, but Ryan had just stopped talking in mid-syllable. I could hear him breathing.
"Ryan?"
"Live in ten seconds. Make it count -- the Feds just said they're shutting us down. I'll keep you on the air as long as I can."
The line really did go dead this time, but I didn't have time to process what he'd said. Jeb tapped me on the shoulder -- go time.
Jeb was shooting out the window, so I just started talking. "Dane Phoenix from Global News reporting from Honolulu," I said. "The city is in chaos. Less than an hour ago, a... projectile slammed into the Big Island Mall, collapsing much of the structure. The projectile contained... life forms of some sort."
Jeb focused in on one of the downtown skyscrapers -- Lungshan's, I think. There were fires raging on a few of the upper floors, spitting flames out what was left of the window frames.
"These... beings. They resemble worms -- short, black worms," I continued. "They're extremely dangerous. Contact with them is fatal. If you see them --"
I was interrupted by an explosion -- a large one. It was the nearby Lungshan Building -- the fires had hit something really volatile. We were close enough that I could feel the heat, was blinded by the flash. As I blinked to clear my vision, the chopper bucked hard.
"We're hit!" Meg yelled.
"How bad?" Major Keppler asked.
"Shit! It ain't good," she said.
The chopper bucked again.
"Bet you we're gonna crash," Jeb said, his voice even, a small, flat grin widening his features.
"Oh, Christ. I hope not."
"Think he might be right," the Lance Corporal next to me said. "You might wanna hold on to something, guys. This is gonna suck."
Closest I'd ever been to a crash before that moment was two years before, when a patrol skimmer I was riding in lost all power. We were only about fifty feet up at the time, and the cop driving (it was for a story on prototype Federal Police forces) was a pro. He deployed the emergency glider wings immediately and guided us to a safe, soft water landing.
This wasn't like that. At all. The chopper shuddered one final time, and all of a sudden, we were spinning. Fast. The city outside whipped by in a nauseating blur. I had a firm hold on one of the handles by the doorway, but not everyone was so lucky. A Marine flew by me, sliding toward the door. Jeb reached out and caught his body armor under one shoulder harness, but he only managed to work two fingers into the neoprene strap. I couldn't reach the Marine -- at least, not with my arms. I hooked one boot under the armor strap near the guy's ribcage.
"Pull!" I heard Jeb yell, but that was easier said than done. The chopper was spinning even faster now, and I'm not a real strong guy anyway. Fighting the centrifugal force was beyond my capabilities -- the best I could do was hold on, keep my foot jammed in his ribcage.
Fortunately, it was enough. The Lance Corporal who had spoken to me earlier was finally able to make his way over to us to help. Working at odd angles and against the still-spinning helicopter, we managed to pull the Marine back inside and hold him to the deck.
It seemed like we were up there, spinning, for a really long time. It felt like we would never hit the ground -- and then we did. The avenue in front of the Lungshan Building was almost wide enough for the chopper to set down -- almost. We hit at a slight angle. It didn't sound like much, but Meg had wrestled the controls to make it happen that way -- otherwise, we would have hit the building. This, she assured me later, would have been a Very Bad Thing -- we would have no doubt ruptured the fuel lines and caught fire. At the least, we would have had a lot more shrapnel to deal with when the blades sliced into the first couple floors of the building.
I say "a lot more shrapnel," because there was still plenty when we hit. The rotors on the right side of the chopper hit first. It was the side opposite our door, and we could see the rotors gouge into the street before breaking off and flying four stories up. They sliced through the windows of the Lungshan Building, showering tons of broken glass in through the open door. I covered my eyes. When I didn't feel chunks of glass hitting my face anymore, I moved my arm away from my eyes.
The helicopter was on its side. Apart from the rotors breaking off and the tail cracking in half, it was still mostly intact. I was at the top of a pile of bodies. Jeb was next to me, and there was a leg sticking out of the pile between us.
"Sound off, 2-6!" the Major bellowed from my left.
"Sanchez, good to go!" I heard from under me. The other Marines called out in turn -- it seemed we hadn't lost anyone. Not yet.
It took a little doing for all of us to get untangled. Masters, the one who'd almost fallen out, had a dislocated shoulder. Otherwise, we were in remarkably good shape -- a few cuts and bruises here and there. I had a bit of a headache, but that was it.
"Archer, Henderson. Find us some transport," Keppler ordered. As the two Marines set off at a run, he turned to face me. "Phoenix. I need a no-bullshit answer here. What are we dealing with?"
"Worms," I told him. "They're small, and they're really fucking fast. From what I've seen, if one of them latches on to you, you're dead in a few seconds."
Keppler thought for a second, then nodded.
"Understood. How do we kill them?"
Good question. And one I realized I didn't have any kind of answer for. I thought hard. All I'd seen was the worms chowing down on citizens. They'd seemed unstoppable at the time.
"No idea. Your guns, maybe. But..."
"They'd be really hard to hit," Jeb piped up. "Unless every one of your guys can shoot a bullet out of the air, that is."
"My guys are good, but not that good," Keppler said to Jeb. The two of them kept talking, strategizing. But not me. I tuned out.
It wasn't so much an idea that was forming in my head, not yet. It started more simply than that, as a rather big observation. One that, in the chaos of the crash, I hadn't really realized.
It had been perhaps an hour since the first pod fell, maybe less. Even in that short time, Honolulu had gone into full-scale meltdown. That couldn't just be from the worms, I remember thinking. Even if multiple pods had fallen, the things were only a couple inches long -- they shouldn't be able to cause this much destruction.
*That's because the worms didn't do all this,* I thought. *People did.*
I suppose some of the destruction could be accidental. A candle left burning knocked over in the haste of escape, a crashed car burning out of control. But not this level of devestation. This was intentional. [P] "Fire," I blurted, interrupting the Major in the middle of a word.
"What's that, Phoenix?" Keppler said.
"Fire, Major. Look around -- we haven't been out of the city that long," I said, "and nearly everything in sight is burning.
"Yeah? So?" Sanchez said.
"So civilians set them on purpose. Maybe it kills them, or slows them down," Keppler said. "Nice work."
Keppler might have smiled at me -- it was so quick I couldn't be sure. He pressed the left side of his helmet, and I heard a chirp.
"Arch, Hendo, where are we on transport?" he asked. He listened for a short moment, then: "Copy that. See what you can do. Out."
"They find something?" Meg asked.
"Tour skimmer. Big enough for everyone, but there's some damage. They're not sure it'll fly. Don't suppose skimmer repair is in your bag of tricks?"
"No luck there, sir. Israeli Police has a few skimmers, but not the Army. Brass hated them," Meg said.
"I've done some skimmer work, back in college," Jeb piped up.
"You're on, then. Lt. Wong?"
"On it, boss. Follow me, Chief," a short, female Marine said, shouldering her rifle. "Try and keep up. I move fast."
"Dane?" Jeb asked, cocking an eyebrow at me.
"Do whatever you can," I said, frankly surprised he even asked me. I was his boss, kind of. But I guess we'd all just taken to following the Major's orders as if we were his troops. Well, most of us.
"All right, people. Let's see what we can do about producing some fire for Mr. Phoenix, here," the Major said. I definitely saw him smile that time. It took me a second to get it -- fire, Phoenix. In another situation, I'd have laughed, as horrible and unfunny as the pun had been. Now, though, I didn't.
"Tell me what I can do to help," I said. "I very much doubt we have a lot of time."
The guy who was standing outside the helicopter door when we opened it was a Sergeant. Of some kind, I guess. I know there are a lot of them, but he had four stripes and a chevron tattooed under his eye, so... Sergeant.
"I'm going to have to ask that you shut your rotors down, step out of the vehicle, and come with us, please," the Sergeant said. His voice was polite, level. I didn't doubt, though, if we refused to do as he said, his tone would suddenly change significantly.
I stepped out first, holding my hand out to the young Sergeant. Well, kind of young, anyway. He was about my age.
"Hiya. Dane Phoenix, Global News. How can I help you, Sergeant?" I said. A smile was pasted on my face -- it usually was in cases like this. It usually worked, too, but not on the Marine in front of me. He simply blinked, looked to see if the rotors were powering down. When they stopped moving, he looked at me again and repeated himself.
"If you would all come with me, please."
Still polite. I figured it would be in our best interests to do what he said, and to not test the limits of his calm, emotionless courtesy.
I haven't dealt with the American military too much before. Used to be a time when reporters and the DoD were tight, but no more. Around the beginning of the China War, support for stuff like imbedded reporters died out completely. It was a total media shutout. Nowadays, even getting a press release out of those guys was like pulling teeth barehanded.
Also, they were scary as fuck. Especially the Marines that met us at the airport. Every one of them was as muscled-up as Andrevich, if not more, and they had guns. Not those crappy, non-lethal guns, either -- real, honest-to-crap automatic weapons that could shred a person from 500 yards away. Even if it had just been one of those guys, not about 20 like there were, I probably would have done what he said. Yeah... I know. I'm not exactly a model of bravery and manliness, but you've no doubt noticed that already.
The Marines herded us into a hangar. Inside were more Marines, and a ton of tech equipment. It looked like they had taken over the hangar and set up a sort of home base.
"Wait here, please," the Sergeant said.
As he walked away, I looked behind me at Andrevich. I didn't want a repeat of earlier. I mean, he'd kicked the *shit* out of the Coal Creek guys, but we were extremely outnumbered here, and more than a little outgunned. Andrevich still looked calm for the moment, though, but he did flag down a passing Marine.
"We have injured with us," he said. I'd forgotten about the surfer kid. "Do you have a medic in your unit?"
The Marine nodded slowly.
"Corpsman!" he yelled.
Another Marine came over, and he and Andrevich tended to the surfer kid, who was still out cold.
"Mr. Phoenix," I heard. I turned around.
Standing in front of me was a bigger, scarier version of the Sergeant from before, but with a different tattoo. I wasn't too up on Marine ranks, but I guessed he was an officer.
"Call me Dane," I said, holding out my hand and smiling wide. That smile had gotten me out of hundreds of scrapes before, and in this type of situation, it was the only move I had in my arsenal. He ignored me completely.
"Mr. Phoenix," he repeated, "Major Keppler, commanding, 26th Marine Expeditionary Unit."
I nodded. I guessed from his body language all of that was supposed to mean something to me, and that I was supposed to be impressed by it. I played along. Satisfied that I was showing respect, Keppler continued.
"I'm going to need to debrief you. All of your footage. Your data. I'm going to need copies of all of it."
I didn't see the harm in it, not logically. But I still bristled at the order. Maybe it was something about the way he said it, or maybe it was some throwback to the whole outdated freedom of the press thing.
"I don't think you can legally take that," Jeb piped up behind me. I almost told him to shut up, but... well, he was kinda right. And what he'd just said wasn't so far off from what I'd been thinking.
"Under normal circumstances, you would be correct, sir. But I'm going to let you in on a little secret," Keppler said, the faintest grin creeping to his face. "Breaking news, as it happens. Within the hour, the President will declare martial law. I'll be able to take the data regardless of your perceived legal rights."
I don't know where the next words came from, but I certainly didn't think the whole thing out. If I had, this story would end. Right there, in the hangar. For me, anyway, because I would have just handed over everything I had and gotten the hell out of Hawaii. But that's not what happened.
Some part of me, probably inherited from my father, went into salesman mode. The smile appeared. The voice dropped to a near whisper. And I found myself leaning in closer to the hulking, terrifying Marine officer in front of me.
"Tell you what," I said quietly. "I'll make you a deal. You feed me some info here, and I'll hand over everything. The data. The video footage. Put you in touch with the scientists who made the discovery. All of it. Just keep me hooked up on the story."
I could see Keppler didn't like the idea, but he didn't give me an immediate "no." He motioned for me to follow him, so I did. He led me away from my crew, away from the Marines huddled over machines.
"I'm going to level with you," he said. "I dislike... No, let's be honest. I despise journalists."
So, that conversation wasn't getting off to the start I'd hoped. Keppler continued.
"Here's the situation, though. My men and I were on our way back from training in Japan when we got the order to land in Hawaii. Your broadcast had put all American forces on alert, and we were ordered to secure the airport and get data on the situation."
That tracked. He wasn't telling me much that was new, except that he wasn't originally supposed to be here. I knew when to be quiet. That was one of those times, so I shut up and let the Major talk.
"We can get your data, but we really need to get on the ground. The equipment you see here is all we had on the plane. What we really need is a helicopter, and a pilot."
"And I've got both."
"Correct. Now, I could commandeer the chopper, but we have no one who can fly it -- at least not well. Who's your pilot?"
"Name's Meg. Former Israeli Army. I've seen her fly that chopper like you wouldn't believe," I said, the reporter smile returning.
"You talk her into flying a couple of observation runs with my men, and give us any data you have, and I'll keep you in the loop."
That was an offer that was too good to pass up. I nodded and went over to convince Meg to step back into the role of combat pilot.
Convincing Meg took less time than I would have thought. I only had to mention the Major's proposal, and she agreed instantly. She wasn't surprised at all that they needed her to fly the helicopter, either.
"Think about it, boss. Most of these kids are 18. Even the Major can't be much older than 35. None of them have probably even ridden in one of these old buckets before," she told me. "Whereas we're still using them back home. Much better than those damn patrol skimmers for watching the borders."
It made sense. What didn't make sense was why a former Israeli chopper pilot was doing hair and makeup for the Network, but I didn't ask about that. Probably should have.
Major Keppler's deal was pretty clear-cut. Me, Meg, and one other could go on the chopper with the Marines. The rest would have to stay back at the hangar -- I had an idea about that. As the Marines were loading up, I pulled Andrevich aside.
"You've done some broadcast work, right?" I asked him. I knew he had -- I'd learned that in my earlier research.
"A little. Hosted a show for a Network years ago during the off season. 'Asia's Next World Champion.' It only lasted the one year," he said.
"I know it would be asking a lot, and you've been great so far... but if anything happens here, anything significant, could you --"
"Cover it for your Network?"
I could swear that big New Soviet knew how to read minds. It wasn't the last time I'd think that.
So Andrevich was set. I decided to leave Jeremy and the "A" crew with him -- they'd be able to walk him through any problems. Hair and makeup weren't a problem -- Andrevich had a shaved head, and I dare anyone to try to convince a guy like him to wear makeup. Jeb would be my ridealong, as he was accustomed to being a one-man show. I had him steal the "A" unit's backup camera and uplink.
We were ready, and we left immediately. With Meg at the controls and the the Major next to her to provide direction, we took off. I expected a fair amount of chaos in the the city we'd just fled, but I wasn't prepared for the scope of it. Not even a little bit.
The first thing I noticed were the fires. They were hard to miss -- I could see the black smoke the second we got some altitude. I nudged Jeb to start filming, but that turned out to be unnecessary -- he'd seen the plumes of smoke as well, and had the camera up.
"Head for downtown," Keppler said. It was easy to hear him -- it was fully, deathly quiet inside the chopper. No one was talking. I could hear the Marine next to me breathing, and it's not like he was loud.
"Lance Corporal May! Open up the doors back there! Let's get a good picture of what we're looking at!" Keppler yelled from the front of the chopper.
A Marine reached for the door. The air, finally getting hot as we moved into the midmorning sun, blew into the chopper in a gust. I fell back into my seat a bit. Jeb didn't move -- he was steady, shooting out of the now-open door as we hovered over the highway into town at two hundred feet.
The highway, was, of course, jammed. And as happened when everyone was trying to go one place at one time, nothing was moving. Instead of waiting in their cars, though, we could see that most of the drivers had abandoned them and were running down the street. I think they were heading for the airport -- the very same one we had just left -- and all of a sudden I felt monumentally stupid. These people were making the smart move -- getting the fuck out of the city -- and I was leaving a safe area to go into the chaos. And I hadn't remembered to call Ryan and tell him what was up.
That didn't turn out to be a problem. My phone chimed just then. Ryan was on the line, and in all the time I'd known him, I'd never heard him sound worried -- until that call.
"Dane! Jesus, man! Is everyone OK? What's going on?"
That's when I remembered Jeb crashing through his equipment and cutting us off in a live feed.
"All alive for the moment. I'm with --"
"Two-six MEU. Jeremy called me. Can you go live in one minute?"
I asked Jeb. He gave me a thumbs-up and a wink.
"We're good to go over here," I told Ryan.
"Free reign, Dane. Tell us everything you see. No delay, no censoring. Other objects have been sighted in Asia -- we're putting you on all the Networks. People need to know wh--"
I thought the call had gone dead, but Ryan had just stopped talking in mid-syllable. I could hear him breathing.
"Ryan?"
"Live in ten seconds. Make it count -- the Feds just said they're shutting us down. I'll keep you on the air as long as I can."
The line really did go dead this time, but I didn't have time to process what he'd said. Jeb tapped me on the shoulder -- go time.
Jeb was shooting out the window, so I just started talking. "Dane Phoenix from Global News reporting from Honolulu," I said. "The city is in chaos. Less than an hour ago, a... projectile slammed into the Big Island Mall, collapsing much of the structure. The projectile contained... life forms of some sort."
Jeb focused in on one of the downtown skyscrapers -- Lungshan's, I think. There were fires raging on a few of the upper floors, spitting flames out what was left of the window frames.
"These... beings. They resemble worms -- short, black worms," I continued. "They're extremely dangerous. Contact with them is fatal. If you see them --"
I was interrupted by an explosion -- a large one. It was the nearby Lungshan Building -- the fires had hit something really volatile. We were close enough that I could feel the heat, was blinded by the flash. As I blinked to clear my vision, the chopper bucked hard.
"We're hit!" Meg yelled.
"How bad?" Major Keppler asked.
"Shit! It ain't good," she said.
The chopper bucked again.
"Bet you we're gonna crash," Jeb said, his voice even, a small, flat grin widening his features.
"Oh, Christ. I hope not."
"Think he might be right," the Lance Corporal next to me said. "You might wanna hold on to something, guys. This is gonna suck."
Closest I'd ever been to a crash before that moment was two years before, when a patrol skimmer I was riding in lost all power. We were only about fifty feet up at the time, and the cop driving (it was for a story on prototype Federal Police forces) was a pro. He deployed the emergency glider wings immediately and guided us to a safe, soft water landing.
This wasn't like that. At all. The chopper shuddered one final time, and all of a sudden, we were spinning. Fast. The city outside whipped by in a nauseating blur. I had a firm hold on one of the handles by the doorway, but not everyone was so lucky. A Marine flew by me, sliding toward the door. Jeb reached out and caught his body armor under one shoulder harness, but he only managed to work two fingers into the neoprene strap. I couldn't reach the Marine -- at least, not with my arms. I hooked one boot under the armor strap near the guy's ribcage.
"Pull!" I heard Jeb yell, but that was easier said than done. The chopper was spinning even faster now, and I'm not a real strong guy anyway. Fighting the centrifugal force was beyond my capabilities -- the best I could do was hold on, keep my foot jammed in his ribcage.
Fortunately, it was enough. The Lance Corporal who had spoken to me earlier was finally able to make his way over to us to help. Working at odd angles and against the still-spinning helicopter, we managed to pull the Marine back inside and hold him to the deck.
It seemed like we were up there, spinning, for a really long time. It felt like we would never hit the ground -- and then we did. The avenue in front of the Lungshan Building was almost wide enough for the chopper to set down -- almost. We hit at a slight angle. It didn't sound like much, but Meg had wrestled the controls to make it happen that way -- otherwise, we would have hit the building. This, she assured me later, would have been a Very Bad Thing -- we would have no doubt ruptured the fuel lines and caught fire. At the least, we would have had a lot more shrapnel to deal with when the blades sliced into the first couple floors of the building.
I say "a lot more shrapnel," because there was still plenty when we hit. The rotors on the right side of the chopper hit first. It was the side opposite our door, and we could see the rotors gouge into the street before breaking off and flying four stories up. They sliced through the windows of the Lungshan Building, showering tons of broken glass in through the open door. I covered my eyes. When I didn't feel chunks of glass hitting my face anymore, I moved my arm away from my eyes.
The helicopter was on its side. Apart from the rotors breaking off and the tail cracking in half, it was still mostly intact. I was at the top of a pile of bodies. Jeb was next to me, and there was a leg sticking out of the pile between us.
"Sound off, 2-6!" the Major bellowed from my left.
"Sanchez, good to go!" I heard from under me. The other Marines called out in turn -- it seemed we hadn't lost anyone. Not yet.
It took a little doing for all of us to get untangled. Masters, the one who'd almost fallen out, had a dislocated shoulder. Otherwise, we were in remarkably good shape -- a few cuts and bruises here and there. I had a bit of a headache, but that was it.
"Archer, Henderson. Find us some transport," Keppler ordered. As the two Marines set off at a run, he turned to face me. "Phoenix. I need a no-bullshit answer here. What are we dealing with?"
"Worms," I told him. "They're small, and they're really fucking fast. From what I've seen, if one of them latches on to you, you're dead in a few seconds."
Keppler thought for a second, then nodded.
"Understood. How do we kill them?"
Good question. And one I realized I didn't have any kind of answer for. I thought hard. All I'd seen was the worms chowing down on citizens. They'd seemed unstoppable at the time.
"No idea. Your guns, maybe. But..."
"They'd be really hard to hit," Jeb piped up. "Unless every one of your guys can shoot a bullet out of the air, that is."
"My guys are good, but not that good," Keppler said to Jeb. The two of them kept talking, strategizing. But not me. I tuned out.
It wasn't so much an idea that was forming in my head, not yet. It started more simply than that, as a rather big observation. One that, in the chaos of the crash, I hadn't really realized.
It had been perhaps an hour since the first pod fell, maybe less. Even in that short time, Honolulu had gone into full-scale meltdown. That couldn't just be from the worms, I remember thinking. Even if multiple pods had fallen, the things were only a couple inches long -- they shouldn't be able to cause this much destruction.
*That's because the worms didn't do all this,* I thought. *People did.*
I suppose some of the destruction could be accidental. A candle left burning knocked over in the haste of escape, a crashed car burning out of control. But not this level of devestation. This was intentional. [P] "Fire," I blurted, interrupting the Major in the middle of a word.
"What's that, Phoenix?" Keppler said.
"Fire, Major. Look around -- we haven't been out of the city that long," I said, "and nearly everything in sight is burning.
"Yeah? So?" Sanchez said.
"So civilians set them on purpose. Maybe it kills them, or slows them down," Keppler said. "Nice work."
Keppler might have smiled at me -- it was so quick I couldn't be sure. He pressed the left side of his helmet, and I heard a chirp.
"Arch, Hendo, where are we on transport?" he asked. He listened for a short moment, then: "Copy that. See what you can do. Out."
"They find something?" Meg asked.
"Tour skimmer. Big enough for everyone, but there's some damage. They're not sure it'll fly. Don't suppose skimmer repair is in your bag of tricks?"
"No luck there, sir. Israeli Police has a few skimmers, but not the Army. Brass hated them," Meg said.
"I've done some skimmer work, back in college," Jeb piped up.
"You're on, then. Lt. Wong?"
"On it, boss. Follow me, Chief," a short, female Marine said, shouldering her rifle. "Try and keep up. I move fast."
"Dane?" Jeb asked, cocking an eyebrow at me.
"Do whatever you can," I said, frankly surprised he even asked me. I was his boss, kind of. But I guess we'd all just taken to following the Major's orders as if we were his troops. Well, most of us.
"All right, people. Let's see what we can do about producing some fire for Mr. Phoenix, here," the Major said. I definitely saw him smile that time. It took me a second to get it -- fire, Phoenix. In another situation, I'd have laughed, as horrible and unfunny as the pun had been. Now, though, I didn't.
"Tell me what I can do to help," I said. "I very much doubt we have a lot of time."
Monday, January 30, 2012
E/B:H -- Chapter Four
The car could drive itself, of course. But in case some Coal Creek APCs popped up, I wanted a human on the wheel. Andrevich had grown up in an area with old cars kept running mostly with prayer, so he was quite a good driver. Unlike me, that is. I'd never bothered to learn, and the Networks had arranged for transport all my adult life.
We found the Tidal Motel pretty easy. Calling it a shithole would be insulting to legitimate shitholes -- this place had to be a hundred years old, and looked like it. The white and teal paint was fading, cracked, and gone altogether in some areas, exposing the bare, rotten wood underneath. Ugly.
I checked with the thin, greasy guy behind the bulletproof glass in a shed at the top of the parking lot with an "Office" sign. I asked for the Global News backup crew -- he stared at me blankly for a long moment.
"You must mean Jeb," he finally drawled. "Boy always told me he was a freelance Network guy. Never did believe him. Hey, you're that dude from the news program, ain't you?"
"Dane Phoenix," I said, shooting him the old charming smile. "Where can I find -- Jeb, you said?"
"Hey! Hey, Helen!" he yelled. "Come on out here, woman! You gotta see who's at the window!"
I shook hands and signed autographs for The Thing Called Helen. She was the manager's wife, and she was 250 if she was a pound. Finally, though, we got a room number out of The Power Couple -- 407.
You'd expect room number 407 to be on the fourth floor, right? I know I did, and the Tidal Motel did, indeed, have four levels. Andrevich and I would have climbed the rickety staircase all the way up, had he not noticed room 401 from the second-floor landing.
"That... Well, that makes no kind of sense," I said, heading down the dark hallway. Room 407 was between 406 and 409. Of course. I was starting to think this entire hotel was designed as an elaborate, unfunny practical joke.
I knocked on the door. Nothing. Andrevich then pounded on the door, and he's much stronger than I am, so that got an immediate response. We heard shuffling, cursing. A few seconds later, the door opened, and I was sure we had the wrong room.
The guy in 407 looked like a full-on train wreck. He was younger than me -- maybe 28 -- but in much worse shape. He looked like he hadn't slept or showered in at least four days. His brown hair was longish, greasy, and plastered to his skull with what I hope was just sweat. He wore an old bathrobe, no shoes. Just as I was about to ask if we had the right guy, he looked me in the eyes and smiled. He still had all of his teeth, at least.
"Mr. Phoenix," he said. "Pleasure to meet you. Sorry for my appearance -- wasn't really expecting anyone to come by today."
The guy looked like shit, sure. But when he spoke -- I don't know. He came across as intelligent. Not like how he looked at all.
"You weren't told to be on standby?" I asked. I was feeling more than a little odd standing outside in the hallway.
"Oh, sure. But you gotta understand, Chief, being told to be on standby ain't shit. 99 times out of 100, that means sit back and collect pay. Last time I actually had to do standby work was... well, back when you were still fighting, big guy," Jeb said, nodding to Andrevich.
"Well, we need you now. How soon can you have your equipment ready?"
"Give me a few minutes to get cleaned up. Like, fifteen. I'll meet you over at the cafe across the street, yeah?"
I was just grateful to be out of the hall and away from the Tidal Motel. The Surf Shack Cafe wasn't much better -- definitely wasn't cleaner -- but at least I didn't feel like the building was collapsing. Andrevich and I took a table in the back, and I ordered the only thing on the menu I was pretty sure wouldn't kill me, black coffee. I never considered coffee a monumental request, but it still hadn't arrived when Jeb strolled into the cafe fifteen minutes later.
He was cleaned up considerably now, wearing jeans and a shiny, synthetic button-up shirt. He had a black bag over one shoulder. As soon as he sat down at the table, three mugs of coffee suddenly appeared.
"You gotta understand, they like locals," he said. "You and your buddy are making them nervous."
"Because of who we are?" Andrevich asked.
"What, celebrities? Nah, man," he said. "I doubt the folks who run this place have watched a network feed in 30 years. They don't like outsiders, is all."
He wasn't joking. The entire time we were in the cafe -- 20 minutes or so -- the guy behind the counter never stopped staring. It was more than a little creepy.
As we talked about the job, I noticed a few things about Jeb, the redneck one-man backup crew. First, he wasn't really a hick or a local, just tried to pass as a bit of both. I detected a hint of an accent whenever he spoke. South Africa? Accents tend to get a bit muddled these days. Everyone sounds like they're from Omaha or Kansas City or something. You'd never really guess I grew up in Holland unless I told you -- I sound like I grew up in a cornfield, like everyone else does.
Another thing I noticed about our new crew member -- he *really* wasn't a Network guy. Not a bit. At heart, he was a total ICP. Or at least he would have been, if the corporation-backed Networks hadn't wiped out the Independent Content Producers years ago. Before Jeb was even born.
It had come down to money, and the Networks realizing that while they had more of it, they wouldn't for long. So they'd thrown what they had at lobbyists in dozens of countries, and essentially made broadcasting non-Network content a felony. The US government got the Federal Entertainment Commission out of the deal, a steady flow of license revenue right to the Treasury. License fees were too high for independents to afford, so competition from the smaller guys died off extremely quickly. All history.
Of course Jeb would be an ICP. They were still around, they were just way underground and had tiny audiences. Freelance work? That was the perfect cover to have high-def cameras and a transmitter around your crappy hotel room if the Federal cops came calling.
But one thing about ICPs -- at least, from the few underground broadcasts I'd seen, they were competent and good under fire. I'd seen one of them report on a riot outside Umbra's Kyoto office years back, and I have to admit, the camera work was outstanding. So I knew Jeb would have the equipment and skills to get my transmission to the Network servers in Dallas, and that was all I needed.
I tasked Jeb with finding a place to shoot incognito, where Umbra's thugs wouldn't come looking, but that didn't look like shit. He said he'd work on it and call when he had a spot -- we'd meet there at first light.
I called Ryan in Dallas and woke him up. He was pissed off at first, but when I told him that breaking this story would really fuck Umbra over a barrel, he brightened up. Probably helped that I'd done the story the Network wanted me to do, and this one didn't mean I wouldn't cover Andrevich's award. This story was in the A.M., the ceremony was in the P.M.
Of course -- and this bit you know -- I never made it to the ceremony. The ceremony didn't actually happen. I'm not sure they cancelled it, but I am sure that no one showed up -- the reason being obvious.
As we really didn't have anywhere else to go, and the neighborhood was low-rent enough Umbra wouldn't drop by, we stayed put. Jeb, of course, left to do his prep work, but just him coming by to talk to us seemed to give Andrevich and I enough cred to order. Not that the waiter was happy about it, but he did let us put in an order for breakfast, and eventually even brought us the food. After that, we drank a metric fuckton of coffee and waited around for Jeb to call us. The coffee was, surprisingly, pretty damn good.
According to my screen, sunrise was scheduled for 6:18 a.m. At 6:10, my phone chimed in my ear, and I took the call. It was Jeb. He gave us an address, which I scrawled down on a napkin and gave to Andrevich -- I still wanted him on the wheel. Paranoia, I guess.
The big New Soviet was being an amazingly good sport about all of this, and I was thankful. I'd seen what happened when he got angry. He'd put quite a hurt on those Coal Creek bastards, and I wasn't in any real hurry to find out what that beat-down had felt like. But looking at him now, across the table as we paid the ridiculously low breakfast check, he looked calm, happy, -- amused, even.
As you know from the broadcast, Jeb picked a shopping mall that was just opening for breakfast. I thought it was a stupid choice. At first, anyway.
"You mentioned you had some Umbra PMC problems, right?" Jeb said, catching the look on my face when I arrived.
"Yeah."
"Trust me, this is what you want. Plenty of people milling around. Makes for good shot composition, but it's also --"
"Safer," I said, catching on. "Coal Creek is less likely to try something to stop us in a crowded, public area like this."
So Jeb set up the shot, and I have to admit it looked pretty good -- even as those... things... started falling from the skies.
You remember how it went from the original broadcast. I'd already dropped the bombshell -- that something huge was up there. I'd shown the pictures from the lab, told everyone I was pretty sure it was an alien spaceship. Yeah, sure, I didn't know that yet. Fuck it, I'm a reporter. You want facts, go to a damn schoolteacher. Speculation is part of my job, has been since I can remember.
Anyway, I was just about to talk about where it would likely make planetfall -- China or Japan's airspace. That wasn't my idea. The little scientist, Jeff -- he'd done the math on that one. As we found out seconds later, he was close. Well, kind of close.
Thinking back on it now, I might have it figured out. They must have seen my network feed -- and I do mean *them*. Up there. I don't claim to know anything about how they think, but I'd wager they saw their ship on the feed and traced it right back to me. That makes sense, because a few seconds later was when the first shell hit.
Here's a little confession from me to all of you. When the hit came, I didn't connect the dots right away. Taiwan had been making angry noises of late -- my first thought was of them. Hawaii was well within their conventional missile range -- you know, the big systems we'd sold them during the China War? Yeah. Seems dumb now, but I was sure they'd decided to go Pearl Harbor on our collective asses. When that mall crumbled, I hit the ground.
'Course, they weren't missiles at all. They were pods. Carriers of some indeterminate material, strong enough to laugh at heat. Pressure. Impact. Any of those niggling little problems of being shot into our atmosphere.
The network feed cut out right then. It wasn't interference, as many have since speculated -- no, Jed plowed into his setup when he dove for cover. Smashed it right up. So you didn't see the size of the projectile that had just leveled a shopping mall. You might have seen one in your town that day. If you didn't, let me fill you in -- it was only about a foot around, a perfect sphere. And it wasn't a weapon. It was a transport.
Of course, I wouldn't have seen the pod to describe it to you, had I not still been hanging out with Vladimir Piotr Andrevich. Remember, the thing was buried in what was left of the front quarter of a shopping mall -- one that had certainly had people in it. Most of them were probably dead, but there was at least one guy still breathing. And shouting for help, as the situation turned out.
As soon as he heard the man yelling, Andrevich was on it like Action Man. Jeb was right behind him, sprinting over piles of junk. I would have been more than happy to stay where I was, in a tiny ball on the pavement, but Andrevich yelled at me to help them out. I dragged myself to my feet and joined them, helped them pull what was left of a coffee bar off some poor 18-year-old surfer kid.
He was pretty banged up, and we were helping him away from the wreckage when I saw it. I didn't know what it was at first, of course. I figured it must have just been some piece of crap for sale in the mall -- people will buy anything. But it pulsed, a bright flash. And just after the light from that first pulse faded, the thing opened neatly at the center of the sphere, the top half falling away.
Nothing happened for a second after it opened. Then, as I watched, those... *things* started slithering madly out of the ball. The best I can think to call them was worms, though that's not exactly accurate. They were each a couple, maybe three inches long. They were black, so they stood out against the white remains of the coffee bar. There seemed to be hundreds, and they were fast.
Andrevich saw them at the same time I did; neither of us said anything. He just grabbed the kid as if he weighed nothing, not 150 pounds. He chucked the surfer kid over his shoulder and was off like a sprinter, me and Jeb on his heels.
"What the fuck are those?"
I think it was Jeb who yelled that, though I'm not sure. Could have been anyone -- I was just focused on getting my ass out of there. I chanced a look over my shoulder as I ran for the street, and immediately wished I hadn't.
The worms went after the weak first. The poor fucks stuck in the wreckage couldn't get away, couldn't run. The worms didn't swarm -- a single worm picked each target. One second, they'd latched onto a poor, helpless person -- the next, that unfortunate motherfucker was twitching and bleeding out. I wasn't sure if it was because the initial targets were already injured, but it only took each of them couple of seconds to die.
We were moving fast -- adrenaline -- but the worms were already swarming out from the wreckage, and they were a fuckton faster. I tried to think of some way to escape -- maybe get into the car and lock the doors, slam on the power and get the fuck out of there.
Even as I had the thought, I saw it wasn't going to work. A car near ours had its windows up, doors locked, and it didn't matter. Worms had gotten inside somehow anyway, and the two occupants of the car were spraying blood all over the inside of the vehicle.
"Keep running!" I yelled, though that was probably unnecessary. Andrevich and Jeb were ahead of me, and weren't slowing down. Even with the 150-pound teenager on his shoulder, Andrevich was really eating up the distance, and Jeb was keeping right up with him. I was the slow one, the liability -- and it looked like I was going to be the one bitten and killed by those... whatever they were.
The thought didn't make me stop running, though. If anything, it gave me a burst of power like I'd never felt, not even on speed. I was almost about to catch up with Jeb when it happened.
Helicopters went silent before they became obsolete a few decades ago. I think it was a People's Liberation Army design from the China War, but after that, the rest of the world's militaries got them. I had seen them float over my granddad's house as a kid -- Dutch Army training flights, I think. They were fast, sleek, and silent. One of those helicopters -- a massive cargo model -- dropped down right in front of Andrevich and Jeb, and the side doors flew open. I could see Jeremy and Mischa inside, waving us toward them. The helicopter didn't land, just hovered a few feet off the pavement. I poured on the last bit of speed I had, then jumped. I felt hard, metal deck slam into my chest, felt hands grab me and pull me in.
In less than a second, we were climbing, the chaos below us getting smaller by the second. I pulled myself into a sitting position. As I looked around, I could see Andrevich, the kid, Jeb. The rest of our crew was there -- it was the chopper they'd used earlier. The one I had felt bad for saddling them with rather than springing for hoppers for all of them. Turned out that saved our asses.
"We're heading to Honolulu Airport," Jeremy said as he and Mischa slid the door closed. I looked up -- Meg was flying the chopper.
"Where did you learn to fly one of these things?" I shouted up to her.
"Israeli Army," she yelled back, throwing me a grin.
"It was in her file, if you'd bothered to read it," Jeremy said.
Ah, same old Jeremy. Always the producer. I smiled a little.
"What's at the airport?"
"Flight for all of us to Dallas. We'll figure this shit out there," Jeremy told me.
"Andrevich? Jeb? You good with that?" I asked.
"I'll go along for the ride. And our young friend here is unconscious," Andrevich told me.
"Should we take him to a hospital or something?" Jeb asked.
"Entire island's chaos," Reg said. "Better chance of that in Dallas."
We did make it to Dallas, eventually. But not right away.
When we landed at the airport, the Marines were waiting for us.
We found the Tidal Motel pretty easy. Calling it a shithole would be insulting to legitimate shitholes -- this place had to be a hundred years old, and looked like it. The white and teal paint was fading, cracked, and gone altogether in some areas, exposing the bare, rotten wood underneath. Ugly.
I checked with the thin, greasy guy behind the bulletproof glass in a shed at the top of the parking lot with an "Office" sign. I asked for the Global News backup crew -- he stared at me blankly for a long moment.
"You must mean Jeb," he finally drawled. "Boy always told me he was a freelance Network guy. Never did believe him. Hey, you're that dude from the news program, ain't you?"
"Dane Phoenix," I said, shooting him the old charming smile. "Where can I find -- Jeb, you said?"
"Hey! Hey, Helen!" he yelled. "Come on out here, woman! You gotta see who's at the window!"
I shook hands and signed autographs for The Thing Called Helen. She was the manager's wife, and she was 250 if she was a pound. Finally, though, we got a room number out of The Power Couple -- 407.
You'd expect room number 407 to be on the fourth floor, right? I know I did, and the Tidal Motel did, indeed, have four levels. Andrevich and I would have climbed the rickety staircase all the way up, had he not noticed room 401 from the second-floor landing.
"That... Well, that makes no kind of sense," I said, heading down the dark hallway. Room 407 was between 406 and 409. Of course. I was starting to think this entire hotel was designed as an elaborate, unfunny practical joke.
I knocked on the door. Nothing. Andrevich then pounded on the door, and he's much stronger than I am, so that got an immediate response. We heard shuffling, cursing. A few seconds later, the door opened, and I was sure we had the wrong room.
The guy in 407 looked like a full-on train wreck. He was younger than me -- maybe 28 -- but in much worse shape. He looked like he hadn't slept or showered in at least four days. His brown hair was longish, greasy, and plastered to his skull with what I hope was just sweat. He wore an old bathrobe, no shoes. Just as I was about to ask if we had the right guy, he looked me in the eyes and smiled. He still had all of his teeth, at least.
"Mr. Phoenix," he said. "Pleasure to meet you. Sorry for my appearance -- wasn't really expecting anyone to come by today."
The guy looked like shit, sure. But when he spoke -- I don't know. He came across as intelligent. Not like how he looked at all.
"You weren't told to be on standby?" I asked. I was feeling more than a little odd standing outside in the hallway.
"Oh, sure. But you gotta understand, Chief, being told to be on standby ain't shit. 99 times out of 100, that means sit back and collect pay. Last time I actually had to do standby work was... well, back when you were still fighting, big guy," Jeb said, nodding to Andrevich.
"Well, we need you now. How soon can you have your equipment ready?"
"Give me a few minutes to get cleaned up. Like, fifteen. I'll meet you over at the cafe across the street, yeah?"
I was just grateful to be out of the hall and away from the Tidal Motel. The Surf Shack Cafe wasn't much better -- definitely wasn't cleaner -- but at least I didn't feel like the building was collapsing. Andrevich and I took a table in the back, and I ordered the only thing on the menu I was pretty sure wouldn't kill me, black coffee. I never considered coffee a monumental request, but it still hadn't arrived when Jeb strolled into the cafe fifteen minutes later.
He was cleaned up considerably now, wearing jeans and a shiny, synthetic button-up shirt. He had a black bag over one shoulder. As soon as he sat down at the table, three mugs of coffee suddenly appeared.
"You gotta understand, they like locals," he said. "You and your buddy are making them nervous."
"Because of who we are?" Andrevich asked.
"What, celebrities? Nah, man," he said. "I doubt the folks who run this place have watched a network feed in 30 years. They don't like outsiders, is all."
He wasn't joking. The entire time we were in the cafe -- 20 minutes or so -- the guy behind the counter never stopped staring. It was more than a little creepy.
As we talked about the job, I noticed a few things about Jeb, the redneck one-man backup crew. First, he wasn't really a hick or a local, just tried to pass as a bit of both. I detected a hint of an accent whenever he spoke. South Africa? Accents tend to get a bit muddled these days. Everyone sounds like they're from Omaha or Kansas City or something. You'd never really guess I grew up in Holland unless I told you -- I sound like I grew up in a cornfield, like everyone else does.
Another thing I noticed about our new crew member -- he *really* wasn't a Network guy. Not a bit. At heart, he was a total ICP. Or at least he would have been, if the corporation-backed Networks hadn't wiped out the Independent Content Producers years ago. Before Jeb was even born.
It had come down to money, and the Networks realizing that while they had more of it, they wouldn't for long. So they'd thrown what they had at lobbyists in dozens of countries, and essentially made broadcasting non-Network content a felony. The US government got the Federal Entertainment Commission out of the deal, a steady flow of license revenue right to the Treasury. License fees were too high for independents to afford, so competition from the smaller guys died off extremely quickly. All history.
Of course Jeb would be an ICP. They were still around, they were just way underground and had tiny audiences. Freelance work? That was the perfect cover to have high-def cameras and a transmitter around your crappy hotel room if the Federal cops came calling.
But one thing about ICPs -- at least, from the few underground broadcasts I'd seen, they were competent and good under fire. I'd seen one of them report on a riot outside Umbra's Kyoto office years back, and I have to admit, the camera work was outstanding. So I knew Jeb would have the equipment and skills to get my transmission to the Network servers in Dallas, and that was all I needed.
I tasked Jeb with finding a place to shoot incognito, where Umbra's thugs wouldn't come looking, but that didn't look like shit. He said he'd work on it and call when he had a spot -- we'd meet there at first light.
I called Ryan in Dallas and woke him up. He was pissed off at first, but when I told him that breaking this story would really fuck Umbra over a barrel, he brightened up. Probably helped that I'd done the story the Network wanted me to do, and this one didn't mean I wouldn't cover Andrevich's award. This story was in the A.M., the ceremony was in the P.M.
Of course -- and this bit you know -- I never made it to the ceremony. The ceremony didn't actually happen. I'm not sure they cancelled it, but I am sure that no one showed up -- the reason being obvious.
As we really didn't have anywhere else to go, and the neighborhood was low-rent enough Umbra wouldn't drop by, we stayed put. Jeb, of course, left to do his prep work, but just him coming by to talk to us seemed to give Andrevich and I enough cred to order. Not that the waiter was happy about it, but he did let us put in an order for breakfast, and eventually even brought us the food. After that, we drank a metric fuckton of coffee and waited around for Jeb to call us. The coffee was, surprisingly, pretty damn good.
According to my screen, sunrise was scheduled for 6:18 a.m. At 6:10, my phone chimed in my ear, and I took the call. It was Jeb. He gave us an address, which I scrawled down on a napkin and gave to Andrevich -- I still wanted him on the wheel. Paranoia, I guess.
The big New Soviet was being an amazingly good sport about all of this, and I was thankful. I'd seen what happened when he got angry. He'd put quite a hurt on those Coal Creek bastards, and I wasn't in any real hurry to find out what that beat-down had felt like. But looking at him now, across the table as we paid the ridiculously low breakfast check, he looked calm, happy, -- amused, even.
As you know from the broadcast, Jeb picked a shopping mall that was just opening for breakfast. I thought it was a stupid choice. At first, anyway.
"You mentioned you had some Umbra PMC problems, right?" Jeb said, catching the look on my face when I arrived.
"Yeah."
"Trust me, this is what you want. Plenty of people milling around. Makes for good shot composition, but it's also --"
"Safer," I said, catching on. "Coal Creek is less likely to try something to stop us in a crowded, public area like this."
So Jeb set up the shot, and I have to admit it looked pretty good -- even as those... things... started falling from the skies.
You remember how it went from the original broadcast. I'd already dropped the bombshell -- that something huge was up there. I'd shown the pictures from the lab, told everyone I was pretty sure it was an alien spaceship. Yeah, sure, I didn't know that yet. Fuck it, I'm a reporter. You want facts, go to a damn schoolteacher. Speculation is part of my job, has been since I can remember.
Anyway, I was just about to talk about where it would likely make planetfall -- China or Japan's airspace. That wasn't my idea. The little scientist, Jeff -- he'd done the math on that one. As we found out seconds later, he was close. Well, kind of close.
Thinking back on it now, I might have it figured out. They must have seen my network feed -- and I do mean *them*. Up there. I don't claim to know anything about how they think, but I'd wager they saw their ship on the feed and traced it right back to me. That makes sense, because a few seconds later was when the first shell hit.
Here's a little confession from me to all of you. When the hit came, I didn't connect the dots right away. Taiwan had been making angry noises of late -- my first thought was of them. Hawaii was well within their conventional missile range -- you know, the big systems we'd sold them during the China War? Yeah. Seems dumb now, but I was sure they'd decided to go Pearl Harbor on our collective asses. When that mall crumbled, I hit the ground.
'Course, they weren't missiles at all. They were pods. Carriers of some indeterminate material, strong enough to laugh at heat. Pressure. Impact. Any of those niggling little problems of being shot into our atmosphere.
The network feed cut out right then. It wasn't interference, as many have since speculated -- no, Jed plowed into his setup when he dove for cover. Smashed it right up. So you didn't see the size of the projectile that had just leveled a shopping mall. You might have seen one in your town that day. If you didn't, let me fill you in -- it was only about a foot around, a perfect sphere. And it wasn't a weapon. It was a transport.
Of course, I wouldn't have seen the pod to describe it to you, had I not still been hanging out with Vladimir Piotr Andrevich. Remember, the thing was buried in what was left of the front quarter of a shopping mall -- one that had certainly had people in it. Most of them were probably dead, but there was at least one guy still breathing. And shouting for help, as the situation turned out.
As soon as he heard the man yelling, Andrevich was on it like Action Man. Jeb was right behind him, sprinting over piles of junk. I would have been more than happy to stay where I was, in a tiny ball on the pavement, but Andrevich yelled at me to help them out. I dragged myself to my feet and joined them, helped them pull what was left of a coffee bar off some poor 18-year-old surfer kid.
He was pretty banged up, and we were helping him away from the wreckage when I saw it. I didn't know what it was at first, of course. I figured it must have just been some piece of crap for sale in the mall -- people will buy anything. But it pulsed, a bright flash. And just after the light from that first pulse faded, the thing opened neatly at the center of the sphere, the top half falling away.
Nothing happened for a second after it opened. Then, as I watched, those... *things* started slithering madly out of the ball. The best I can think to call them was worms, though that's not exactly accurate. They were each a couple, maybe three inches long. They were black, so they stood out against the white remains of the coffee bar. There seemed to be hundreds, and they were fast.
Andrevich saw them at the same time I did; neither of us said anything. He just grabbed the kid as if he weighed nothing, not 150 pounds. He chucked the surfer kid over his shoulder and was off like a sprinter, me and Jeb on his heels.
"What the fuck are those?"
I think it was Jeb who yelled that, though I'm not sure. Could have been anyone -- I was just focused on getting my ass out of there. I chanced a look over my shoulder as I ran for the street, and immediately wished I hadn't.
The worms went after the weak first. The poor fucks stuck in the wreckage couldn't get away, couldn't run. The worms didn't swarm -- a single worm picked each target. One second, they'd latched onto a poor, helpless person -- the next, that unfortunate motherfucker was twitching and bleeding out. I wasn't sure if it was because the initial targets were already injured, but it only took each of them couple of seconds to die.
We were moving fast -- adrenaline -- but the worms were already swarming out from the wreckage, and they were a fuckton faster. I tried to think of some way to escape -- maybe get into the car and lock the doors, slam on the power and get the fuck out of there.
Even as I had the thought, I saw it wasn't going to work. A car near ours had its windows up, doors locked, and it didn't matter. Worms had gotten inside somehow anyway, and the two occupants of the car were spraying blood all over the inside of the vehicle.
"Keep running!" I yelled, though that was probably unnecessary. Andrevich and Jeb were ahead of me, and weren't slowing down. Even with the 150-pound teenager on his shoulder, Andrevich was really eating up the distance, and Jeb was keeping right up with him. I was the slow one, the liability -- and it looked like I was going to be the one bitten and killed by those... whatever they were.
The thought didn't make me stop running, though. If anything, it gave me a burst of power like I'd never felt, not even on speed. I was almost about to catch up with Jeb when it happened.
Helicopters went silent before they became obsolete a few decades ago. I think it was a People's Liberation Army design from the China War, but after that, the rest of the world's militaries got them. I had seen them float over my granddad's house as a kid -- Dutch Army training flights, I think. They were fast, sleek, and silent. One of those helicopters -- a massive cargo model -- dropped down right in front of Andrevich and Jeb, and the side doors flew open. I could see Jeremy and Mischa inside, waving us toward them. The helicopter didn't land, just hovered a few feet off the pavement. I poured on the last bit of speed I had, then jumped. I felt hard, metal deck slam into my chest, felt hands grab me and pull me in.
In less than a second, we were climbing, the chaos below us getting smaller by the second. I pulled myself into a sitting position. As I looked around, I could see Andrevich, the kid, Jeb. The rest of our crew was there -- it was the chopper they'd used earlier. The one I had felt bad for saddling them with rather than springing for hoppers for all of them. Turned out that saved our asses.
"We're heading to Honolulu Airport," Jeremy said as he and Mischa slid the door closed. I looked up -- Meg was flying the chopper.
"Where did you learn to fly one of these things?" I shouted up to her.
"Israeli Army," she yelled back, throwing me a grin.
"It was in her file, if you'd bothered to read it," Jeremy said.
Ah, same old Jeremy. Always the producer. I smiled a little.
"What's at the airport?"
"Flight for all of us to Dallas. We'll figure this shit out there," Jeremy told me.
"Andrevich? Jeb? You good with that?" I asked.
"I'll go along for the ride. And our young friend here is unconscious," Andrevich told me.
"Should we take him to a hospital or something?" Jeb asked.
"Entire island's chaos," Reg said. "Better chance of that in Dallas."
We did make it to Dallas, eventually. But not right away.
When we landed at the airport, the Marines were waiting for us.
Sunday, January 15, 2012
E/B:H -- Chapter Three
OK, I thought I knew how to drink, but that New Soviet fucking took me to drinking school and left me there. I assumed we'd get hammered -- at least a bit -- but I didn't expect to wake up in the fountain in the hotel lobby.
So, yeah. We drank quite a bit that night, and there's a certain point where I stop remembering what actually happened, but my plan worked. I remember that much, because it worked pretty early on in the evening. So I should have quit while I was ahead, but...
Anyway. Andrevich. He was smaller than I thought he would be. I mean, dude was massive, but he was shorter than me. I didn't see that coming. Still, for a guy nearing 50, he was in outstanding shape. He almost crushed my hand when he shook it, and I noticed he was sweating. Like, a lot.
"The heat," he apologized, waving one of his hands around to indicate... well, everything, I guess. "Not used to it. Where I'm from, it's much colder."
I just nodded. It was July in Honolulu -- of course that wouldn't be comfortable to Andrevich. Not with him being from Siberia, and all.
He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts -- likely to combat the oppressive heat. I could see his fight tattoos glowing blue on his arms, legs, and neck. He wasn't sick or injured, then. That meant I'd lost a bet. A colleague and I at Global had once figured he'd quit the fight game not because he'd killed that other guy, but because he was ill. Couldn't fight anymore. When I met him, though, I knew that wasn't the case. He looked like he could tear me in half with one hand.
"I just wanted to say, it's an honor to meet you, Comrade Vladimir. I've been a fan since I was a little kid," I said, smiling. The smile was an attempt to hide a wince at the crazy handshake, but thankfully, he let go of my hand.
"I, too, am a fan of yours. Your report on the Atlantic Rail scandal was fascinating," Andrevich told me. "Well, shall we get something to drink?"
I nodded. The bartender could smell the blood in the water, and he was at my elbow when I turned around.
"What'll you have?" I asked. I expected the answer to be vodka.
"Hmm. A Scotch, I think. Laprohaig if you have it."
I ordered a vodka tonic, and it was on. The first drinks only lasted a few seconds -- Andrevich's was gone before he even sat down.
"So, I hear you requested me?" I said.
"Indeed. As I didn't want to come to this thing anyway, I might as well use it as an excuse to meet someone I admire," he said. "I much prefer my retirement, staying at home and writing. I'm working on a book, you know."
I hadn't known that, of course. Books were a tough sell these days, but I was sure he'd do well with it.
"I was thinking about where we could do the interview. I know the heat down here is uncomfortable, and sweating like that won't look good on camera. But I was just up at Manua Kea --"
"The volcano?"
Was it? I thought it was a mountain.
"Yeah. It's much cooler up there. Not as cold as you're used to, but..."
"I like to train in the mountains, in the Urals. Good for the blood," he said, downing another Laprohaig. "And cooler weather...Well, that definitely helps. The interview is tomorrow night?"
I nodded.
"We can go up early, do all the prep work," I said.
Like I said, it didn't take me long to convince him. And then we started talking politics, something he was whip-smart about. In fact, the more we talked, I realized that Andrevich was a smart man. Possibly even a genius, but that could have been the booze.
Anyway, I don't remember much about that night, and I certainly don't remember how I wound up in the fountain. Hangover -- brutal. I didn't dare start up with the speed again, though, as I knew I was headed back up to the insane elevation at the Manua Kea site. My granddaddy's old hangover cure would have to work today -- greasy breakfast, lots of coffee, and mild painkillers. Smart plan. I was feeling quite a bit better when I met Jeremy and crew for the day's planning session. Apparently, granddad knew how to drink.
"OK, folks, let's get this knocked out quickly," Jeremy said to the four people in front of us. Two camera, one sound, I knew. I figured the good-looking 30-year-old woman who looked like she didn't belong around the others was on hair, makeup, and wardrobe.
"We're filming today at the top of Manua Kea, highest spot in the islands," Jeremy said. "I know you were all planning for warmth. That's not going to happen today -- weather says about 28 degrees for the high up there. Might want to find yourselves some coats."
I heard the crew grumbling, all but the wardrobe person. She just nodded, a short, curt little bob of her head. Her element, I guess.
"Good news, though, is that at that elevation, our link to Global will be instant. I plan to do the interview live," I told them. "So you'll have plenty of downtime."
No grumbling at that one, but no mumbled words of praise, either. Tough room, I guess.
Jeremy and I took another hopper up to the Observatory, but the crew was stuck with a helicopter that had to be 60 years old. I wouldn't have been surprised if the thing had seen action in the China War.
Andrevich and his people would also take a hopper. I'd paid for both of them, and you don't even want to know how much two round-trip hoppers ran. I could afford it, and all, but... I don't know. Maybe I could get the Network to reimburse me later.
Meg, the girl in wardrobe, was pretty good. My sizes weren't hard -- I knew she could pull them up on her screen. But even when I've had wardrobe people get the sizes right, they've messed up styles. Not so with this girl --classic-cut black leather jacket, neoprene combat-style shirt, dark gray pants, heavy black boots. Excellent. I'd have to figure out who she was and ask to have her work with me again -- good wardrobe people were tough to find, inexplicably.
Up on the mountain, Andrevich seemed to be comfortable in the below-freezing temperatures. He also seemed to not be hung over. Not in the slightest. That was annoying-- while I was feeling better than I had, I could still feel the damage from the night before.
"Dane!" he boomed, slapping a massive hand on my back. I managed to keep my feet, but I'm not entirely sure how. "How are you?"
"Feeling pretty good," I lied, trying to keep from coughing. That playful slap on the back had acted like a Heimlich maneuver.
What followed next was what you'd expect. Meetings. Those were about as interesting to sit through as they would be to recount. Jeremy and I met with Andrevich's PR person, then with the camera and lighting folks when they arrived. Upshot -- we'd film outside. The observatory had a small garden, and Meg was confident she and the camera guys could make it look good. The PR meeting was fine.Mischa, Andrevich's PR guy, asked that we didn't spend much time on what Vladimir had been doing the last four years. Fair enough. Mischa assured me it was boring anyway, and I didn't doubt it.
Andrevich and I ran through some old fight highlights after lunch. We picked out a few moments to use in the piece -- his first World Championship in 2072, his last title defense in early 2094. Easy. The interview was looking like a walk.
Tim tracked me down between meetings. He was red-faced and out of breath, which I expected. The guy wasn't in what I would call stellar shape, but he was running to catch up with me. Obesity and thin air didn't mix too well. I was surprised he didn't have a heart attack and drop dead at my feet, but he caught his breath back and started talking eventually.
"It's really close now," he panted, finally uncapping a bottle of water and drinking. "Near Mars."
"How soon will it be here?"
"I don't know for sure. Its speed isn't constant. It stopped near Jupiter for several hours. But we finally have measurements. It's bigger than we thought." [P] "How big?" I asked.
"Really fucking big. Surface area is about 270,000 square miles."
Shit. That did sound big, but I had no idea how big that was. Tim apparently saw my confusion.
"About the size of Texas. Little bigger. And it's at least twenty miles high."
"Are you sure about that?"
"Reasonably sure, yeah."
"What does that mean?" I asked. "I mean, what would happen if it hit the Earth?"
"Uh... that would mean no more Earth. Something that big traveling at speed? It would crack the planet in half, if we were lucky."
I thought he must be fucking with me. No way he could sound so calm, right? I mean, not if that was true. But even crimson-faced and panting, he didn't sound like he was in the mortal terror he should've been.
"You don't sound worried," I said.
"It's not going to hit. Neptune, Europa, Jupiter were all in its path. It went around."
"And you think it'll go around us?"
"I really don't think it would avoid all of those other bodies, plus asteroids, and not us. If we go under the theory that it's being intelligently piloted -- which I'm leaning towards -- that wouldn't make any sort of sense."
Of course, as you well know, he was right. The Object didn't hit us. But it didn't pass us by like Tim then theorized it might.
Anyway, the appointed time finally came -- 7 p.m. Central, which was only 3 in the afternoon in Hawaii. We were all set to go. Andrevich and I were sitting across from each other, the view down the mountain in the background. Reg, the lead camera, was set up. At precisely 3, he gave us the signal, and the interview went live.
I said this would be about what you didn't see, and it will. So I won't go into the interview, as you probably saw it -- especially if the ratings I saw later were any indication. It was smooth. Well, except for one small bit, about an hour into the program.
We were discussing the final title defense. I remember that well. My earpiece suddenly went live, and Jeremy was on the other end. It was way out of bounds to call a personality on-air. This was big.
"Dane. Keep talking. We've got a situation out here," Jeremy's voice buzzed in my ear. "Three patrol vehicles just landed outside. Not Honolulu PD or Hawaii State Police. Markings look like Coal Creek."
Coal Creek was a PMC -- a Private Military Contractor. I had no idea what they were doing there, but Jeremy provided updates on their movements throughout the last hour of the interview.
"They've locked off the perimeter. Guns are out, but fingers aren't on triggers."
Then, a bit later: "I just talked to them. The guy in charge says this place is in total lockdown. They're going to let you finish the interview, so keep going."
Finally: "As soon as you're off the air -- three minutes left, by the way-- they're going to escort you and Andrevich inside for questioning."
And, soon enough, they did. Reg signaled me as soon as we were off the network feed, and the doors leading into the garden opened. Six men in black combat suits -- body armor, tactical goggles, tech boots -- poured out of the doors and headed straight for us. In seconds, they had Meg, Reg, and Jackson and Celio (the second camera and sound guys) surrounded and headed back into the building. That left Andrevich and me in the garden with two of the PMCs.
They carried nonlethal weapons -- large-field tasers, foam guns. Federal law stated that only police and federals could carry lethal weapons in the U.S., but I noticed they had some of those, too. They both had pistols, old ones, probably relics from the China War or before. Probably used antique collection laws to carry them.
"You're filming here without permission," one of them, the taller one, finally said.
"We have permission," I said, smiling. "Dr. Timothy Miller --"
"Dr. Miller does not have the authority to authorize anything," tall guy said. "Mr. Andrevich. An honor. I've been a fan of yours for years. I apologize for this, gentlemen, but Umbra Dynamics has ordered the facility closed. Immediately. We will need to detain you for questioning, but we will make it as quick as possible."
*Don't rock the boat.*
I nodded to him.
"I understand," I said. "Can I contact my network? Let them know I'm going to be late?
"In time, after we've questioned you."
They led Andrevich and me to a small room somewhere deep inside the Observatory complex. Tim and another scientist were there, along with Jeremy. This second scientist was as thin as Tim was fat, and I guessed he made the fatal mistake of getting to the food machines after Tim. Without another word, the two PMCs closed us in the room, and I heard the door lock.
"So, Tim, want to tell me what's going on?" I asked, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. I doubt I succeeded.
"I'm not entirely sure," he started. "Umbra sent them. They must have read about the Object in my weekly report. I didn't even know they were paying attention to us up here."
"And me? Do they know I know?" I asked.
Tim shook his head.
"I don't think so. I never mentioned you or Jeremy."
"Anyone want to --" Andrevich started, then trailed off, waving his hand around the room to indicate "all this."
"Oh, sure. Sorry," I said, smiling. I'd have to be very careful about how I told him -- it wouldn't do to have the former Cage Champion of the World ripping my arms off. I suspected he wouldn't be too happy that I'd used his big comeback interview as an excuse to keep an eye on the Object situation.
"My buddy Tim here and his colleague -- sorry, I don't know your name -- have been monitoring something damn interesting," I said.
"Jake Cross," the thin scientist said. I did my best not to shoot him a poisonous look for interrupting me.
"Right," I said. "They picked up an Object coming toward Earth, what... three days ago, Tim?"
Tim nodded. He knew not to interrupt. Good man.
"I see," Andrevich said, nodding. "And my guess is that your superiors wanted you to cover my story more than this one?"
He had it dead to rights, but he didn't seem angry. His voice was calm, measured, as was his expression. I nodded, and he went on. "So you figured you'd talk me into coming up here, keep an eye on the story anyway? Smart. That's why I requested you. You're..."
"Not an idiot?" I guessed.
"So you've met the sports reporter Global wanted to assign to me, then," he said with a laugh.
Andrevich seemed cool, so I turned back to Tim.
"So what's the progress on the... you know..."
"Earthfall in six hours."
Christ. That was much sooner than I expected. I didn't think we were going to be out of there that soon, but I was wrong, apparently. I'm sure the PMCs would have liked to have kept us there all night, but that's not how it worked out for them. We left minutes later.
In the space of two minutes, Andrevich went from jovial, even-tempered, to agitated. I started to get worried, so I asked him.
"Vladimir? You OK?"
"Vladimir Piotr Andrevich does not get locked up," he said, snarling. "Does not like to be told what to do."
He was standing now, pacing the room. I wondered idly if he had claustrophobia.
The room we were in wasn't in any way secure. It wasn't a jail cell, or a holding area-- just a regular-ass room with a regular door. Before I could try to get him to calm down... Before I could even say another word, really, Andrevich was through the door. I mean, he charged himself right the fuck through it. One second he was standing back against the wall -- the next, he rammed through the locked door, turning it into effing kindling.
There were guards just outside the door, and seeing Andrevich tear through them was an insane blur of violent heraldic poetry. There were two of them, one on each side of the door, and before I could make it out of the room, I had to dodge one flying at me. He slammed into the opposite wall hard enough to knock him out, even through his helmet. Then I got into the hall and saw carnage.
The other guard was trying to raise a gun to Andrevich, who was having none of it. A quick, savage right uppercut was all it took. His knuckles connected with the guard's chin, snapping his bulletproof visor and knocking his helmet clean off, chin strap be damned. With his left hand, Andrevich caught the helmet by the broken strap, then swung it in front of him. I hadn't seen the third PMC yet. But Andrevich had. The newly liberated helmet collided with the oncoming PMC's skull, knocking him into a nearby open door.
Madness. In the space of the time it had taken me to get out the door, Andrevich had neutralized three much younger men, and done so easily. Other Coal Creek guys came at us, but it was all a blur. A blur of a pissed-off, older New Soviet, tearing through them like nothing. I lost count of the PMCs he knocked out (or possibly killed) before we made it outside, but it was a lot. He wasn't even sweating.
We fought our way outside -- OK, to be correct, Andrevich fought our way outside. Tim, Jake, Jeremy, and I just followed his wake. The New Soviet left bodies all along the observatory to the spot where our two hoppers were surrounded by the three patrol vehicles. When he finally stopped moving, Andrevich turned to us.
"I think it is time we should leave," he said, his voice a flat monotone.
"What about our crew? Your people?" Jeremy asked.
"Hmm. Suppose I should have thought to leave one of these guys conscious."
"I'm sure they're around here somewhere. We can look --" I said.
"We don't have time," Jeremy said. "The second these guys wake up --"
"They'll drop in on this place in force," Tim said, nodding. "I know this company. That's exactly what they'd do. You need to go. Get this story out."
That was something I knew I could do, especially now. Ryan would have no problem going to air with this one. Umbra Dynamics ran National News Network, Global's only real competitor in the States. A chance to royally fuck Umbra Dynamics? Ryan would be falling all over himself to jump at that one.
"I'll stay behind. Find our people. There's a backup crew in Honolulu. They're at the Tidal Motel. Find them and get this story out there," Jeremy said.
"I'll need data," I said. "Video. Something."
"I can do that," Jake said, bringing his screen online and tapping away. My own screen chirped -- a data transfer was in progress. In a few seconds, I had everything I needed.
"Umbra's soldiers will be looking for you," Andrevich said. "I will come along. Not to be insulting, my friend, but I don't think you could handle them in a fight."
"You're 100% correct," I told him. "Let's go."
I normally hated that the hoppers were on a programmed flight plan, but not that day. The control freak in me took a back seat. Jeremy and the scientists had us in our pressure suits and helmets in a minute flat, and as soon as we were in, the hopper took off. The flight was short, and there was nothing we had to do to make it safely to ground. I expected Coal Creek guys at the landing site.
Nope. Just the same bored local who had been there the day before, and earlier that morning. I wondered if he ever left the area.
"Other hopper?" he asked in a slow, monotone voice.
"Coming down soon," I said.
"K. Gonna have to charge an extra day. Don't have it back by midnight, that is."
"That's fine," I said. "You have my account info on file."
"Yep. Back by midnight."
I nodded and headed for the cars we'd taken from the hotel to the launch site.
"Shit," I mumbled.
"Problem?"
Uh, yeah. There was a problem, and if I already wasn't feeling emasculated by watching this guy knock out several soldiers while I cowered...
"Um... Vladimir... I don't suppose you know how to drive, do you?"
So, yeah. We drank quite a bit that night, and there's a certain point where I stop remembering what actually happened, but my plan worked. I remember that much, because it worked pretty early on in the evening. So I should have quit while I was ahead, but...
Anyway. Andrevich. He was smaller than I thought he would be. I mean, dude was massive, but he was shorter than me. I didn't see that coming. Still, for a guy nearing 50, he was in outstanding shape. He almost crushed my hand when he shook it, and I noticed he was sweating. Like, a lot.
"The heat," he apologized, waving one of his hands around to indicate... well, everything, I guess. "Not used to it. Where I'm from, it's much colder."
I just nodded. It was July in Honolulu -- of course that wouldn't be comfortable to Andrevich. Not with him being from Siberia, and all.
He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt and shorts -- likely to combat the oppressive heat. I could see his fight tattoos glowing blue on his arms, legs, and neck. He wasn't sick or injured, then. That meant I'd lost a bet. A colleague and I at Global had once figured he'd quit the fight game not because he'd killed that other guy, but because he was ill. Couldn't fight anymore. When I met him, though, I knew that wasn't the case. He looked like he could tear me in half with one hand.
"I just wanted to say, it's an honor to meet you, Comrade Vladimir. I've been a fan since I was a little kid," I said, smiling. The smile was an attempt to hide a wince at the crazy handshake, but thankfully, he let go of my hand.
"I, too, am a fan of yours. Your report on the Atlantic Rail scandal was fascinating," Andrevich told me. "Well, shall we get something to drink?"
I nodded. The bartender could smell the blood in the water, and he was at my elbow when I turned around.
"What'll you have?" I asked. I expected the answer to be vodka.
"Hmm. A Scotch, I think. Laprohaig if you have it."
I ordered a vodka tonic, and it was on. The first drinks only lasted a few seconds -- Andrevich's was gone before he even sat down.
"So, I hear you requested me?" I said.
"Indeed. As I didn't want to come to this thing anyway, I might as well use it as an excuse to meet someone I admire," he said. "I much prefer my retirement, staying at home and writing. I'm working on a book, you know."
I hadn't known that, of course. Books were a tough sell these days, but I was sure he'd do well with it.
"I was thinking about where we could do the interview. I know the heat down here is uncomfortable, and sweating like that won't look good on camera. But I was just up at Manua Kea --"
"The volcano?"
Was it? I thought it was a mountain.
"Yeah. It's much cooler up there. Not as cold as you're used to, but..."
"I like to train in the mountains, in the Urals. Good for the blood," he said, downing another Laprohaig. "And cooler weather...Well, that definitely helps. The interview is tomorrow night?"
I nodded.
"We can go up early, do all the prep work," I said.
Like I said, it didn't take me long to convince him. And then we started talking politics, something he was whip-smart about. In fact, the more we talked, I realized that Andrevich was a smart man. Possibly even a genius, but that could have been the booze.
Anyway, I don't remember much about that night, and I certainly don't remember how I wound up in the fountain. Hangover -- brutal. I didn't dare start up with the speed again, though, as I knew I was headed back up to the insane elevation at the Manua Kea site. My granddaddy's old hangover cure would have to work today -- greasy breakfast, lots of coffee, and mild painkillers. Smart plan. I was feeling quite a bit better when I met Jeremy and crew for the day's planning session. Apparently, granddad knew how to drink.
"OK, folks, let's get this knocked out quickly," Jeremy said to the four people in front of us. Two camera, one sound, I knew. I figured the good-looking 30-year-old woman who looked like she didn't belong around the others was on hair, makeup, and wardrobe.
"We're filming today at the top of Manua Kea, highest spot in the islands," Jeremy said. "I know you were all planning for warmth. That's not going to happen today -- weather says about 28 degrees for the high up there. Might want to find yourselves some coats."
I heard the crew grumbling, all but the wardrobe person. She just nodded, a short, curt little bob of her head. Her element, I guess.
"Good news, though, is that at that elevation, our link to Global will be instant. I plan to do the interview live," I told them. "So you'll have plenty of downtime."
No grumbling at that one, but no mumbled words of praise, either. Tough room, I guess.
Jeremy and I took another hopper up to the Observatory, but the crew was stuck with a helicopter that had to be 60 years old. I wouldn't have been surprised if the thing had seen action in the China War.
Andrevich and his people would also take a hopper. I'd paid for both of them, and you don't even want to know how much two round-trip hoppers ran. I could afford it, and all, but... I don't know. Maybe I could get the Network to reimburse me later.
Meg, the girl in wardrobe, was pretty good. My sizes weren't hard -- I knew she could pull them up on her screen. But even when I've had wardrobe people get the sizes right, they've messed up styles. Not so with this girl --classic-cut black leather jacket, neoprene combat-style shirt, dark gray pants, heavy black boots. Excellent. I'd have to figure out who she was and ask to have her work with me again -- good wardrobe people were tough to find, inexplicably.
Up on the mountain, Andrevich seemed to be comfortable in the below-freezing temperatures. He also seemed to not be hung over. Not in the slightest. That was annoying-- while I was feeling better than I had, I could still feel the damage from the night before.
"Dane!" he boomed, slapping a massive hand on my back. I managed to keep my feet, but I'm not entirely sure how. "How are you?"
"Feeling pretty good," I lied, trying to keep from coughing. That playful slap on the back had acted like a Heimlich maneuver.
What followed next was what you'd expect. Meetings. Those were about as interesting to sit through as they would be to recount. Jeremy and I met with Andrevich's PR person, then with the camera and lighting folks when they arrived. Upshot -- we'd film outside. The observatory had a small garden, and Meg was confident she and the camera guys could make it look good. The PR meeting was fine.Mischa, Andrevich's PR guy, asked that we didn't spend much time on what Vladimir had been doing the last four years. Fair enough. Mischa assured me it was boring anyway, and I didn't doubt it.
Andrevich and I ran through some old fight highlights after lunch. We picked out a few moments to use in the piece -- his first World Championship in 2072, his last title defense in early 2094. Easy. The interview was looking like a walk.
Tim tracked me down between meetings. He was red-faced and out of breath, which I expected. The guy wasn't in what I would call stellar shape, but he was running to catch up with me. Obesity and thin air didn't mix too well. I was surprised he didn't have a heart attack and drop dead at my feet, but he caught his breath back and started talking eventually.
"It's really close now," he panted, finally uncapping a bottle of water and drinking. "Near Mars."
"How soon will it be here?"
"I don't know for sure. Its speed isn't constant. It stopped near Jupiter for several hours. But we finally have measurements. It's bigger than we thought." [P] "How big?" I asked.
"Really fucking big. Surface area is about 270,000 square miles."
Shit. That did sound big, but I had no idea how big that was. Tim apparently saw my confusion.
"About the size of Texas. Little bigger. And it's at least twenty miles high."
"Are you sure about that?"
"Reasonably sure, yeah."
"What does that mean?" I asked. "I mean, what would happen if it hit the Earth?"
"Uh... that would mean no more Earth. Something that big traveling at speed? It would crack the planet in half, if we were lucky."
I thought he must be fucking with me. No way he could sound so calm, right? I mean, not if that was true. But even crimson-faced and panting, he didn't sound like he was in the mortal terror he should've been.
"You don't sound worried," I said.
"It's not going to hit. Neptune, Europa, Jupiter were all in its path. It went around."
"And you think it'll go around us?"
"I really don't think it would avoid all of those other bodies, plus asteroids, and not us. If we go under the theory that it's being intelligently piloted -- which I'm leaning towards -- that wouldn't make any sort of sense."
Of course, as you well know, he was right. The Object didn't hit us. But it didn't pass us by like Tim then theorized it might.
Anyway, the appointed time finally came -- 7 p.m. Central, which was only 3 in the afternoon in Hawaii. We were all set to go. Andrevich and I were sitting across from each other, the view down the mountain in the background. Reg, the lead camera, was set up. At precisely 3, he gave us the signal, and the interview went live.
I said this would be about what you didn't see, and it will. So I won't go into the interview, as you probably saw it -- especially if the ratings I saw later were any indication. It was smooth. Well, except for one small bit, about an hour into the program.
We were discussing the final title defense. I remember that well. My earpiece suddenly went live, and Jeremy was on the other end. It was way out of bounds to call a personality on-air. This was big.
"Dane. Keep talking. We've got a situation out here," Jeremy's voice buzzed in my ear. "Three patrol vehicles just landed outside. Not Honolulu PD or Hawaii State Police. Markings look like Coal Creek."
Coal Creek was a PMC -- a Private Military Contractor. I had no idea what they were doing there, but Jeremy provided updates on their movements throughout the last hour of the interview.
"They've locked off the perimeter. Guns are out, but fingers aren't on triggers."
Then, a bit later: "I just talked to them. The guy in charge says this place is in total lockdown. They're going to let you finish the interview, so keep going."
Finally: "As soon as you're off the air -- three minutes left, by the way-- they're going to escort you and Andrevich inside for questioning."
And, soon enough, they did. Reg signaled me as soon as we were off the network feed, and the doors leading into the garden opened. Six men in black combat suits -- body armor, tactical goggles, tech boots -- poured out of the doors and headed straight for us. In seconds, they had Meg, Reg, and Jackson and Celio (the second camera and sound guys) surrounded and headed back into the building. That left Andrevich and me in the garden with two of the PMCs.
They carried nonlethal weapons -- large-field tasers, foam guns. Federal law stated that only police and federals could carry lethal weapons in the U.S., but I noticed they had some of those, too. They both had pistols, old ones, probably relics from the China War or before. Probably used antique collection laws to carry them.
"You're filming here without permission," one of them, the taller one, finally said.
"We have permission," I said, smiling. "Dr. Timothy Miller --"
"Dr. Miller does not have the authority to authorize anything," tall guy said. "Mr. Andrevich. An honor. I've been a fan of yours for years. I apologize for this, gentlemen, but Umbra Dynamics has ordered the facility closed. Immediately. We will need to detain you for questioning, but we will make it as quick as possible."
*Don't rock the boat.*
I nodded to him.
"I understand," I said. "Can I contact my network? Let them know I'm going to be late?
"In time, after we've questioned you."
They led Andrevich and me to a small room somewhere deep inside the Observatory complex. Tim and another scientist were there, along with Jeremy. This second scientist was as thin as Tim was fat, and I guessed he made the fatal mistake of getting to the food machines after Tim. Without another word, the two PMCs closed us in the room, and I heard the door lock.
"So, Tim, want to tell me what's going on?" I asked, trying to keep the anger out of my voice. I doubt I succeeded.
"I'm not entirely sure," he started. "Umbra sent them. They must have read about the Object in my weekly report. I didn't even know they were paying attention to us up here."
"And me? Do they know I know?" I asked.
Tim shook his head.
"I don't think so. I never mentioned you or Jeremy."
"Anyone want to --" Andrevich started, then trailed off, waving his hand around the room to indicate "all this."
"Oh, sure. Sorry," I said, smiling. I'd have to be very careful about how I told him -- it wouldn't do to have the former Cage Champion of the World ripping my arms off. I suspected he wouldn't be too happy that I'd used his big comeback interview as an excuse to keep an eye on the Object situation.
"My buddy Tim here and his colleague -- sorry, I don't know your name -- have been monitoring something damn interesting," I said.
"Jake Cross," the thin scientist said. I did my best not to shoot him a poisonous look for interrupting me.
"Right," I said. "They picked up an Object coming toward Earth, what... three days ago, Tim?"
Tim nodded. He knew not to interrupt. Good man.
"I see," Andrevich said, nodding. "And my guess is that your superiors wanted you to cover my story more than this one?"
He had it dead to rights, but he didn't seem angry. His voice was calm, measured, as was his expression. I nodded, and he went on. "So you figured you'd talk me into coming up here, keep an eye on the story anyway? Smart. That's why I requested you. You're..."
"Not an idiot?" I guessed.
"So you've met the sports reporter Global wanted to assign to me, then," he said with a laugh.
Andrevich seemed cool, so I turned back to Tim.
"So what's the progress on the... you know..."
"Earthfall in six hours."
Christ. That was much sooner than I expected. I didn't think we were going to be out of there that soon, but I was wrong, apparently. I'm sure the PMCs would have liked to have kept us there all night, but that's not how it worked out for them. We left minutes later.
In the space of two minutes, Andrevich went from jovial, even-tempered, to agitated. I started to get worried, so I asked him.
"Vladimir? You OK?"
"Vladimir Piotr Andrevich does not get locked up," he said, snarling. "Does not like to be told what to do."
He was standing now, pacing the room. I wondered idly if he had claustrophobia.
The room we were in wasn't in any way secure. It wasn't a jail cell, or a holding area-- just a regular-ass room with a regular door. Before I could try to get him to calm down... Before I could even say another word, really, Andrevich was through the door. I mean, he charged himself right the fuck through it. One second he was standing back against the wall -- the next, he rammed through the locked door, turning it into effing kindling.
There were guards just outside the door, and seeing Andrevich tear through them was an insane blur of violent heraldic poetry. There were two of them, one on each side of the door, and before I could make it out of the room, I had to dodge one flying at me. He slammed into the opposite wall hard enough to knock him out, even through his helmet. Then I got into the hall and saw carnage.
The other guard was trying to raise a gun to Andrevich, who was having none of it. A quick, savage right uppercut was all it took. His knuckles connected with the guard's chin, snapping his bulletproof visor and knocking his helmet clean off, chin strap be damned. With his left hand, Andrevich caught the helmet by the broken strap, then swung it in front of him. I hadn't seen the third PMC yet. But Andrevich had. The newly liberated helmet collided with the oncoming PMC's skull, knocking him into a nearby open door.
Madness. In the space of the time it had taken me to get out the door, Andrevich had neutralized three much younger men, and done so easily. Other Coal Creek guys came at us, but it was all a blur. A blur of a pissed-off, older New Soviet, tearing through them like nothing. I lost count of the PMCs he knocked out (or possibly killed) before we made it outside, but it was a lot. He wasn't even sweating.
We fought our way outside -- OK, to be correct, Andrevich fought our way outside. Tim, Jake, Jeremy, and I just followed his wake. The New Soviet left bodies all along the observatory to the spot where our two hoppers were surrounded by the three patrol vehicles. When he finally stopped moving, Andrevich turned to us.
"I think it is time we should leave," he said, his voice a flat monotone.
"What about our crew? Your people?" Jeremy asked.
"Hmm. Suppose I should have thought to leave one of these guys conscious."
"I'm sure they're around here somewhere. We can look --" I said.
"We don't have time," Jeremy said. "The second these guys wake up --"
"They'll drop in on this place in force," Tim said, nodding. "I know this company. That's exactly what they'd do. You need to go. Get this story out."
That was something I knew I could do, especially now. Ryan would have no problem going to air with this one. Umbra Dynamics ran National News Network, Global's only real competitor in the States. A chance to royally fuck Umbra Dynamics? Ryan would be falling all over himself to jump at that one.
"I'll stay behind. Find our people. There's a backup crew in Honolulu. They're at the Tidal Motel. Find them and get this story out there," Jeremy said.
"I'll need data," I said. "Video. Something."
"I can do that," Jake said, bringing his screen online and tapping away. My own screen chirped -- a data transfer was in progress. In a few seconds, I had everything I needed.
"Umbra's soldiers will be looking for you," Andrevich said. "I will come along. Not to be insulting, my friend, but I don't think you could handle them in a fight."
"You're 100% correct," I told him. "Let's go."
I normally hated that the hoppers were on a programmed flight plan, but not that day. The control freak in me took a back seat. Jeremy and the scientists had us in our pressure suits and helmets in a minute flat, and as soon as we were in, the hopper took off. The flight was short, and there was nothing we had to do to make it safely to ground. I expected Coal Creek guys at the landing site.
Nope. Just the same bored local who had been there the day before, and earlier that morning. I wondered if he ever left the area.
"Other hopper?" he asked in a slow, monotone voice.
"Coming down soon," I said.
"K. Gonna have to charge an extra day. Don't have it back by midnight, that is."
"That's fine," I said. "You have my account info on file."
"Yep. Back by midnight."
I nodded and headed for the cars we'd taken from the hotel to the launch site.
"Shit," I mumbled.
"Problem?"
Uh, yeah. There was a problem, and if I already wasn't feeling emasculated by watching this guy knock out several soldiers while I cowered...
"Um... Vladimir... I don't suppose you know how to drive, do you?"
Monday, December 26, 2011
E/B:H -- Chapter Two
I can't say for certain, of course, that you've never taken a ride in a hopper. But I'm pretty sure you haven't. Not unless you're one of the miners they've been sending to Luna City on the moon lately, or unless you're extremely wealthy. Shit, I'm a network personality, and I make boatloads of cash, and I'd never been on one until that night. They're not inexpensive.
The fact that Jeremy must have paid for it himself -- Network wasn't going to cover it -- made me think he had a serious story. I made a mental note to throw some cash his way when we got back -- I know what he makes, and it's less than a quarter of my salary.
The hopper essentially looked like a big metal ball on three legs. A short, burly local handed us pressure suits. Mine was red. As we suited up, I finally thought to ask the obvious.
"So, where are we going?" I asked, hoping he wouldn't say "the moon." I mean, I trusted the guy, but come *on.*
"Mauna Kea," he said.
I had know idea what those words meant. Something Hawaiian. So at least we weren't leaving the atmosphere.
"And that is?"
"Observatory. Up in the mountains. Used to be a college thing. Funded by corporations now, I think. Anyway, an old buddy of mine works there. Got me the scent of something that..." he trailed off.
I simply nodded. I didn't know much about hoppers, but I knew they were mind-blowingly fast. We'd be back before we were missed. That was the hope, anyway.
I'd never taken a hopper ride before, but I knew the concept. The little ball would shoot up -- fast. Faster than any humans inside would be able to withstand without becoming a permanent part of the vehicle's floor. Exact speed? No clue. But the news report I'd seen on them mentioned that, without the hopper's safety system, occupants would be liquified.
The pressure suits were only a part of the system, and were mainly there to keep the riders... well, clean. We also got helmets. Once the helmets were on, the suits were air- and water-tight. Well, liquid-tight, anyway.
Then came the second safety feature. The entirety of the hopper -- the ball -- filled with a sort of... goo. It was a thick gel that took the shock of the acceleration. The passengers floated in the center of the ball, surrounded by this crud, as the hopper rocketed directly up.
We were alone. There was no pilot on board the hopper -- its course was pre-programmed into its computers. There was, however, an operator of sorts. One guy at the hopper's takeoff point monitored the flight via a link to the hopper's flight computers. In an emergency, he could...
OK, in an emergency, we were probably fucked. The most the operator could do was come up with a convincing story about our deaths. Our flight was too short to make any corrections -- it would be over in less than 30 seconds.
Jeremy and I were lowered into the gel. As we cleared the frame of the sphere's hatch, mechanical clamps grabbed our ankles and pulled us into position at the ball's center. The clamps let go, and I was floating in the center of the sphere. I tried to turn and look at Jeremy, but the clear gel was thick. Moving my head wasn't going to happen without more effort than I wanted to put in, so I did my best to relax my body for the flight.
There was no countdown, no red light turning on inside the sphere to let us know we were taking off. But there didn't need to be. We definitely knew it when it happened. Even with the gel, even with the pressure suits, I felt like I was being curb-stomped. By an elephant. With an overeating disorder.
I know the flight only took 30 seconds -- 28, really -- but it seemed much longer. I could swear I felt the heavy metal boots attached to my pressure suit touching the hard bottom deck of the sphere at one point. Just as the pressure started to get unbearable, though, it stopped in an instant. We had landed without so much as a tiny jolt. We floated in the sphere -- in the center, I noticed, so my boots probably hadn't reached the floor -- for a couple of minutes. I guessed we were there for about three minutes, maybe three and a half -- so 6 or 7 times longer than the actual flight had been.
Finally, the hatch at the top of the sphere slid open, and the clamps grabbed us around the ankles again and pushed us upwards. When we were halfway out of the hatch, Jeremy and I could pull ourselves out onto the ladders on either side. The clamps let go. There was no one outside to meet us, to help us out of our suits. I pulled off my helmet, first twisting to the left, then the right. The first thing I noticed after the seals unlocked and I pulled the helmet off was that it was cold outside. Really cold, actually.
"The fuck, Jeremy. I thought this was Hawaii," I grumbled as Jeremy took off his own helmet.
"It's the altitude," he told me. "More than 14,000 feet. Like, three miles up."
I nodded. That made sense, I guess. I'd been up in the Nevada mountains in summer. That time, I'd been able to see my breath, and I don't think those mountains were anywhere near this high. And I had another thought. "What about air?" I asked.
"Thinner up here. Don't try to run any marathons," he said, pulling off his gloves.
Well, shit. That was bad news. I'd taken another couple doses of speed on the flight over, which meant my heart rate was somewhere north of 130. Higher heart rate meant I needed to pull in more oxygen. It would be very easy for me to pass out up here. I'd have to be careful.
"Turn around so I can get you out of your suit," Jeremy said, holding up his now-ungloved hands.
"Thought you had a pal here. Why isn't he out here helping us?" I grumbled as I turned.
"He's working. This place only has a couple of employees these days. Back when it was government funded, huge staff. Now that it's basically a corporate tax writeoff, it's got a skeleton crew," he said.
And as you'll see in a few minutes, everyone's pretty busy."
Getting us both out of the suits took another ten or fifteen minutes. Upside of that, though, was that all of the goop stayed on the suits, and my clothes were still clean and pressed. Gotta look good. Apart from being a talker, it's one of the main parts of my job.
I checked the screen on my wrist as we headed to the observatory. Despite the darkening sky, the screen was dimming. I didn't remember the last time I'd eaten -- lunch in Dallas hadn't happened. As the screen used my body's electrical impulses for power, the dimness was a bit worrying.
Worrying, too, were my vital signs. My pulse was 138, and my blood pressure was 150 over 95. I was already feeling dizzy, a combination of malnutrition and amphetamines.
"Anything to eat up here? A snack bar or something?" I asked as I trudged after Jeremy through the observatory's front door.
"Shit, that was rude of me. Didn't even ask when you ate last. I was just so on about this story --"
"It's fine. I'm just a bit--"
"No, totally. I understand. I'll try to track you down something. The scientists live up here, so they must have food around."
That was good news. Food would help -- not as much as if I didn't have five doses of speed kicking around my bloodstream, but...
Even inside the observatory, no one came to meet us. Didn't seem to matter, though, as Jeremy seemed to know where he was going. Our route took us through what looked like a small kitchen. Though all of the lights were off, we could see a food machine blinking. I hated the food from these machines -- soy and tofu mechanically formed into foodlike shapes, sprayed with taste chemicals. Yech. But if I wanted to stay vertical, I couldn't afford to be picky.
I chose the least evil-looking option -- braised "beef" and rice. The food machine was old -- it rattled and bubbled -- but it produced a small, trapezoidal container with Chinese characters on it. There were some chopsticks and plastic forks in a small bin next to the machine. I learned to eat with chopsticks when I was two. I tried the faux-Chinese faux-food. It was authentically terrible, but I ate it as Jeremy and I continued through the huge complex.I didn't vomit, anyway. I'm counting that as a win.
Finally, we saw another human being. It was after I'd finished my sad "meal." We were walking, of all places, past a men's room. Just after we passed it, the door opened, and a big man in a black coat came out.
When I say big, I don't mean muscular; I mean fat. I couldn't help staring for a second -- you never see overweight people. Not these days. Especially when being trim, with the ubiquity of soy and tofu and the easy availability of metabo-boosters, is easy. Easier than letting yourself get heavy, anyway. I don't even know how one would go about gaining 50 or 60 extra pounds anymore.
"Tim," Jeremy said to the heavy man.
"Jeremy!" Tim said, his pudgy face breaking into a wide grin.
"Hi, I'm --" I started.
"Oh, I know. Watch you on Global all the time," Tim said. I didn't think it was possible, but his grin got wider. A bit scary. The big man looked like he was about to unhinge his jaw and swallow both Jeremy and me.
"Want to show Dane what you showed me?"
"Of course, of course," Tim said, his grin shrinking back to a usual size. He waved a massive hand in the air and started walking. Jeremy and I just followed him.
I was starting to feel a little less shaky, but Tim was walking fast, especially for a fat man. I dropped back a bit -- I figured if I could keep Jeremy and the big scientist in sight, I would be OK, and I was gasping for breath. At least my screen wasn't as dim anymore. That was definitely something.
"It's just through here," Tim called back, turning. He led us into a small room with screens covering three of the walls. The lights were off, but they really didn't need to be on. Even in suspend mode, the screens threw enough light to illuminate the room. Tim rolled up his sleeve and tapped his screen twice. The screens jumped to life, but the room got darker -- we were looking now at black screens with only pinpoints of background light.
"Think your screens are broken, boss," I said, leaning against the doorframe and trying like hell to calm my heart rate.
"No, they're functional. You're looking at a bit of space between Jupiter and Saturn. Lemme just..." Tim mumbled, tapping his screen.
The screen's image shifted, and that's when I first saw it. The... object. I couldn't say what it was, but I wasn't the only one.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I try not to ask those questions," Tim said, magnifying the image. It was massive, whatever it was. The shape was... well, not quite symmetrical, but not asymmetrical, either. I'd say it was roughly squareish, but it had odd angles. Protrusions. Ridges and valleys.
"Asteroid?" I asked.
"They don't think so," Jeremy said.
"We don't want to rush to --"
"Fine. No conclusions. But what do you think it is?" I asked, sighing. Scientists could certainly be fucking frustrating.
"Well, I can tell you what we've observed," Tim started carefully. "It's moving. Fast."
"It was near Neptune yesterday," Tim said.
"That doesn't seem that fast," I said.
"Trust me, it's faster than you think. It's gaining speed," Tim told us. "There's more. It's heading this way."
Well, yeah. I'd guessed that, otherwise they wouldn't have dragged my tired ass all the way up there.
"I can see that doesn't mean much to you. Let me restate -- it's coming for Earth. That means it's changed direction. More than once. It's had to make course corrections to keep headed towards us."
"You mean it's being... flown? Intelligently?" I said, blinking.
"Like I said, we don't like to make those kinds of conclusions..." Tim said, trailing off.
They couldn't make conclusions. But I could. And this was shaping up to be a much, much bigger story than some has-been cage fighter popping up to get a shit award.
* * *
When I got off the phone with Ryan, it would be an understatement to say I was shocked. Dumbstruck would be accurate.
"This is the same bullshit Jeremy told me the day before I sent you," Ryan had said, sighing heavily on the other end of the line. "It sounds just as weak and fictional as when he said it."
"I don't think you understand, Ryan. There are scientists here who --"
"Scientists," Ryan scoffed. "Right. If they were any kind of real scientists, they'd be working for Umbra or The Lungshan."
OK, so pure research under corporate grants didn't hold much weight with my boss. Good to know, I guess.
"They have data, Ryan. Real-time imagery of the object. It could be the first contact with alien life. Don't you think Global News needs to be there first?"
That shut him up for a minute. But only a minute.
"Look, they said this thing is moving pretty slowly, right?" he asked.
"Well, they said it was picking up speed."
"It's still at least two days before we have to worry about it. Do the Andrevich story. "We'll revisit this conversation after that."
Ryan didn't wait for an answer. He just terminated the connection. And I was...
Well, I was furious. There was no doubt of that. But more than anything, I was confused. This was a huge story. Gigantic, in fact. Why couldn't Ryan see that? Why was this Vladimir Andrevich story so important to him, but a potential alien ship was back-burnered?
In any event, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot I could do. Ryan wanted the Andrevich story, and that was what I'd have to give. It's not like I could just do the Object story on my own --Global News would never air it. And I couldn't even go to another Network. If the story was too hard-news for Global, then none of the other Networks would touch it for anything. Not in this country, anyway. Probably not even in Old Blighty, though I'd pretty much burned my bridges with Royal when I left four years ago. I was stuck.
Taking another ride down in the hopper wasn't something I was looking forward to -- it wouldn't be a powered flight, after all. It would more just be a straight gravity-drop until a couple of hundred feet before the landing site. Then, a controlled landing. But there was really no other way to get back to where I was supposed to be, where I guess I *had* to be, now. So we suited up again. A few minutes later, we were back on the ground, almost exactly in the same spot where we'd started. The burly local guy was back. He helped us out of our suits, and Jeremy drove me to the hotel where we would meet Andrevich and his people early in the morning.
"Have they landed yet?" I asked as we rolled down the long, slick highway into the center of Honolulu.
"Hang on. Let me check."
Jeremy let the car's computer take over the driving and tapped a few commands into his screen. After a second, he nodded to me.
"Looks like they landed 20 minutes ago. They should be... well, right behind us on this road," he told me.
"Staying in our hotel?"
"I think so, yes."
A plan was forming. Maybe I'd be able to do the story I wanted to do, after all.
"Kick up the speed. Make sure we get to the hotel before they do," I told Jeremy.
"Why?"
"Because, my friend... I have an idea." I said, grinning.
There's a skillset required for every job. For Andrevich's job, you had to be a big, mean motherfucker who could hit really hard. But there are those of us out there who aren't big, aren't fighters. My job has two requirements --that I look good and talk well. And thanks to those two skills, I've never had to fight anyone in my life.
Growing up, I got myself into plenty of trouble, sure. I don't think you've been a teenager unless you've pissed off most of the people you know. I got close to some fights a few times. But I never had to throw a punch. I could always smile or talk my way out of pretty much everything, which is why I became what I am.
So you'd think there was nothing Andrevich and me would have in common, right? Well, there's one skill in my set that helps. Even when dealing with a guy who could disassemble me without his fight tattoos even changing colors. It's a skill I'm proud of.
See, Andrevich was New Soviet, but New Soviets shared more similarities to their Russian neighbors than either wanted to admit. Apart from the common language and history, both Russians and New Soviets liked to drink. And I could hold a masterclass on drinking. So when I arranged to meet Andrevich in the hotel bar, I knew I had my work cut out for me -- but I knew my plan would work.
The fact that Jeremy must have paid for it himself -- Network wasn't going to cover it -- made me think he had a serious story. I made a mental note to throw some cash his way when we got back -- I know what he makes, and it's less than a quarter of my salary.
The hopper essentially looked like a big metal ball on three legs. A short, burly local handed us pressure suits. Mine was red. As we suited up, I finally thought to ask the obvious.
"So, where are we going?" I asked, hoping he wouldn't say "the moon." I mean, I trusted the guy, but come *on.*
"Mauna Kea," he said.
I had know idea what those words meant. Something Hawaiian. So at least we weren't leaving the atmosphere.
"And that is?"
"Observatory. Up in the mountains. Used to be a college thing. Funded by corporations now, I think. Anyway, an old buddy of mine works there. Got me the scent of something that..." he trailed off.
I simply nodded. I didn't know much about hoppers, but I knew they were mind-blowingly fast. We'd be back before we were missed. That was the hope, anyway.
I'd never taken a hopper ride before, but I knew the concept. The little ball would shoot up -- fast. Faster than any humans inside would be able to withstand without becoming a permanent part of the vehicle's floor. Exact speed? No clue. But the news report I'd seen on them mentioned that, without the hopper's safety system, occupants would be liquified.
The pressure suits were only a part of the system, and were mainly there to keep the riders... well, clean. We also got helmets. Once the helmets were on, the suits were air- and water-tight. Well, liquid-tight, anyway.
Then came the second safety feature. The entirety of the hopper -- the ball -- filled with a sort of... goo. It was a thick gel that took the shock of the acceleration. The passengers floated in the center of the ball, surrounded by this crud, as the hopper rocketed directly up.
We were alone. There was no pilot on board the hopper -- its course was pre-programmed into its computers. There was, however, an operator of sorts. One guy at the hopper's takeoff point monitored the flight via a link to the hopper's flight computers. In an emergency, he could...
OK, in an emergency, we were probably fucked. The most the operator could do was come up with a convincing story about our deaths. Our flight was too short to make any corrections -- it would be over in less than 30 seconds.
Jeremy and I were lowered into the gel. As we cleared the frame of the sphere's hatch, mechanical clamps grabbed our ankles and pulled us into position at the ball's center. The clamps let go, and I was floating in the center of the sphere. I tried to turn and look at Jeremy, but the clear gel was thick. Moving my head wasn't going to happen without more effort than I wanted to put in, so I did my best to relax my body for the flight.
There was no countdown, no red light turning on inside the sphere to let us know we were taking off. But there didn't need to be. We definitely knew it when it happened. Even with the gel, even with the pressure suits, I felt like I was being curb-stomped. By an elephant. With an overeating disorder.
I know the flight only took 30 seconds -- 28, really -- but it seemed much longer. I could swear I felt the heavy metal boots attached to my pressure suit touching the hard bottom deck of the sphere at one point. Just as the pressure started to get unbearable, though, it stopped in an instant. We had landed without so much as a tiny jolt. We floated in the sphere -- in the center, I noticed, so my boots probably hadn't reached the floor -- for a couple of minutes. I guessed we were there for about three minutes, maybe three and a half -- so 6 or 7 times longer than the actual flight had been.
Finally, the hatch at the top of the sphere slid open, and the clamps grabbed us around the ankles again and pushed us upwards. When we were halfway out of the hatch, Jeremy and I could pull ourselves out onto the ladders on either side. The clamps let go. There was no one outside to meet us, to help us out of our suits. I pulled off my helmet, first twisting to the left, then the right. The first thing I noticed after the seals unlocked and I pulled the helmet off was that it was cold outside. Really cold, actually.
"The fuck, Jeremy. I thought this was Hawaii," I grumbled as Jeremy took off his own helmet.
"It's the altitude," he told me. "More than 14,000 feet. Like, three miles up."
I nodded. That made sense, I guess. I'd been up in the Nevada mountains in summer. That time, I'd been able to see my breath, and I don't think those mountains were anywhere near this high. And I had another thought. "What about air?" I asked.
"Thinner up here. Don't try to run any marathons," he said, pulling off his gloves.
Well, shit. That was bad news. I'd taken another couple doses of speed on the flight over, which meant my heart rate was somewhere north of 130. Higher heart rate meant I needed to pull in more oxygen. It would be very easy for me to pass out up here. I'd have to be careful.
"Turn around so I can get you out of your suit," Jeremy said, holding up his now-ungloved hands.
"Thought you had a pal here. Why isn't he out here helping us?" I grumbled as I turned.
"He's working. This place only has a couple of employees these days. Back when it was government funded, huge staff. Now that it's basically a corporate tax writeoff, it's got a skeleton crew," he said.
And as you'll see in a few minutes, everyone's pretty busy."
Getting us both out of the suits took another ten or fifteen minutes. Upside of that, though, was that all of the goop stayed on the suits, and my clothes were still clean and pressed. Gotta look good. Apart from being a talker, it's one of the main parts of my job.
I checked the screen on my wrist as we headed to the observatory. Despite the darkening sky, the screen was dimming. I didn't remember the last time I'd eaten -- lunch in Dallas hadn't happened. As the screen used my body's electrical impulses for power, the dimness was a bit worrying.
Worrying, too, were my vital signs. My pulse was 138, and my blood pressure was 150 over 95. I was already feeling dizzy, a combination of malnutrition and amphetamines.
"Anything to eat up here? A snack bar or something?" I asked as I trudged after Jeremy through the observatory's front door.
"Shit, that was rude of me. Didn't even ask when you ate last. I was just so on about this story --"
"It's fine. I'm just a bit--"
"No, totally. I understand. I'll try to track you down something. The scientists live up here, so they must have food around."
That was good news. Food would help -- not as much as if I didn't have five doses of speed kicking around my bloodstream, but...
Even inside the observatory, no one came to meet us. Didn't seem to matter, though, as Jeremy seemed to know where he was going. Our route took us through what looked like a small kitchen. Though all of the lights were off, we could see a food machine blinking. I hated the food from these machines -- soy and tofu mechanically formed into foodlike shapes, sprayed with taste chemicals. Yech. But if I wanted to stay vertical, I couldn't afford to be picky.
I chose the least evil-looking option -- braised "beef" and rice. The food machine was old -- it rattled and bubbled -- but it produced a small, trapezoidal container with Chinese characters on it. There were some chopsticks and plastic forks in a small bin next to the machine. I learned to eat with chopsticks when I was two. I tried the faux-Chinese faux-food. It was authentically terrible, but I ate it as Jeremy and I continued through the huge complex.I didn't vomit, anyway. I'm counting that as a win.
Finally, we saw another human being. It was after I'd finished my sad "meal." We were walking, of all places, past a men's room. Just after we passed it, the door opened, and a big man in a black coat came out.
When I say big, I don't mean muscular; I mean fat. I couldn't help staring for a second -- you never see overweight people. Not these days. Especially when being trim, with the ubiquity of soy and tofu and the easy availability of metabo-boosters, is easy. Easier than letting yourself get heavy, anyway. I don't even know how one would go about gaining 50 or 60 extra pounds anymore.
"Tim," Jeremy said to the heavy man.
"Jeremy!" Tim said, his pudgy face breaking into a wide grin.
"Hi, I'm --" I started.
"Oh, I know. Watch you on Global all the time," Tim said. I didn't think it was possible, but his grin got wider. A bit scary. The big man looked like he was about to unhinge his jaw and swallow both Jeremy and me.
"Want to show Dane what you showed me?"
"Of course, of course," Tim said, his grin shrinking back to a usual size. He waved a massive hand in the air and started walking. Jeremy and I just followed him.
I was starting to feel a little less shaky, but Tim was walking fast, especially for a fat man. I dropped back a bit -- I figured if I could keep Jeremy and the big scientist in sight, I would be OK, and I was gasping for breath. At least my screen wasn't as dim anymore. That was definitely something.
"It's just through here," Tim called back, turning. He led us into a small room with screens covering three of the walls. The lights were off, but they really didn't need to be on. Even in suspend mode, the screens threw enough light to illuminate the room. Tim rolled up his sleeve and tapped his screen twice. The screens jumped to life, but the room got darker -- we were looking now at black screens with only pinpoints of background light.
"Think your screens are broken, boss," I said, leaning against the doorframe and trying like hell to calm my heart rate.
"No, they're functional. You're looking at a bit of space between Jupiter and Saturn. Lemme just..." Tim mumbled, tapping his screen.
The screen's image shifted, and that's when I first saw it. The... object. I couldn't say what it was, but I wasn't the only one.
"What is it?" I asked.
"I try not to ask those questions," Tim said, magnifying the image. It was massive, whatever it was. The shape was... well, not quite symmetrical, but not asymmetrical, either. I'd say it was roughly squareish, but it had odd angles. Protrusions. Ridges and valleys.
"Asteroid?" I asked.
"They don't think so," Jeremy said.
"We don't want to rush to --"
"Fine. No conclusions. But what do you think it is?" I asked, sighing. Scientists could certainly be fucking frustrating.
"Well, I can tell you what we've observed," Tim started carefully. "It's moving. Fast."
"It was near Neptune yesterday," Tim said.
"That doesn't seem that fast," I said.
"Trust me, it's faster than you think. It's gaining speed," Tim told us. "There's more. It's heading this way."
Well, yeah. I'd guessed that, otherwise they wouldn't have dragged my tired ass all the way up there.
"I can see that doesn't mean much to you. Let me restate -- it's coming for Earth. That means it's changed direction. More than once. It's had to make course corrections to keep headed towards us."
"You mean it's being... flown? Intelligently?" I said, blinking.
"Like I said, we don't like to make those kinds of conclusions..." Tim said, trailing off.
They couldn't make conclusions. But I could. And this was shaping up to be a much, much bigger story than some has-been cage fighter popping up to get a shit award.
* * *
When I got off the phone with Ryan, it would be an understatement to say I was shocked. Dumbstruck would be accurate.
"This is the same bullshit Jeremy told me the day before I sent you," Ryan had said, sighing heavily on the other end of the line. "It sounds just as weak and fictional as when he said it."
"I don't think you understand, Ryan. There are scientists here who --"
"Scientists," Ryan scoffed. "Right. If they were any kind of real scientists, they'd be working for Umbra or The Lungshan."
OK, so pure research under corporate grants didn't hold much weight with my boss. Good to know, I guess.
"They have data, Ryan. Real-time imagery of the object. It could be the first contact with alien life. Don't you think Global News needs to be there first?"
That shut him up for a minute. But only a minute.
"Look, they said this thing is moving pretty slowly, right?" he asked.
"Well, they said it was picking up speed."
"It's still at least two days before we have to worry about it. Do the Andrevich story. "We'll revisit this conversation after that."
Ryan didn't wait for an answer. He just terminated the connection. And I was...
Well, I was furious. There was no doubt of that. But more than anything, I was confused. This was a huge story. Gigantic, in fact. Why couldn't Ryan see that? Why was this Vladimir Andrevich story so important to him, but a potential alien ship was back-burnered?
In any event, there wasn't a whole hell of a lot I could do. Ryan wanted the Andrevich story, and that was what I'd have to give. It's not like I could just do the Object story on my own --Global News would never air it. And I couldn't even go to another Network. If the story was too hard-news for Global, then none of the other Networks would touch it for anything. Not in this country, anyway. Probably not even in Old Blighty, though I'd pretty much burned my bridges with Royal when I left four years ago. I was stuck.
Taking another ride down in the hopper wasn't something I was looking forward to -- it wouldn't be a powered flight, after all. It would more just be a straight gravity-drop until a couple of hundred feet before the landing site. Then, a controlled landing. But there was really no other way to get back to where I was supposed to be, where I guess I *had* to be, now. So we suited up again. A few minutes later, we were back on the ground, almost exactly in the same spot where we'd started. The burly local guy was back. He helped us out of our suits, and Jeremy drove me to the hotel where we would meet Andrevich and his people early in the morning.
"Have they landed yet?" I asked as we rolled down the long, slick highway into the center of Honolulu.
"Hang on. Let me check."
Jeremy let the car's computer take over the driving and tapped a few commands into his screen. After a second, he nodded to me.
"Looks like they landed 20 minutes ago. They should be... well, right behind us on this road," he told me.
"Staying in our hotel?"
"I think so, yes."
A plan was forming. Maybe I'd be able to do the story I wanted to do, after all.
"Kick up the speed. Make sure we get to the hotel before they do," I told Jeremy.
"Why?"
"Because, my friend... I have an idea." I said, grinning.
There's a skillset required for every job. For Andrevich's job, you had to be a big, mean motherfucker who could hit really hard. But there are those of us out there who aren't big, aren't fighters. My job has two requirements --that I look good and talk well. And thanks to those two skills, I've never had to fight anyone in my life.
Growing up, I got myself into plenty of trouble, sure. I don't think you've been a teenager unless you've pissed off most of the people you know. I got close to some fights a few times. But I never had to throw a punch. I could always smile or talk my way out of pretty much everything, which is why I became what I am.
So you'd think there was nothing Andrevich and me would have in common, right? Well, there's one skill in my set that helps. Even when dealing with a guy who could disassemble me without his fight tattoos even changing colors. It's a skill I'm proud of.
See, Andrevich was New Soviet, but New Soviets shared more similarities to their Russian neighbors than either wanted to admit. Apart from the common language and history, both Russians and New Soviets liked to drink. And I could hold a masterclass on drinking. So when I arranged to meet Andrevich in the hotel bar, I knew I had my work cut out for me -- but I knew my plan would work.
Monday, December 12, 2011
E/B:H -- Chapter One
You know what I've noticed? No matter where you go these days, you got some motherfucker telling you he was there. And it's always a guy, too, telling you that shit.
"You know," he'll say, thinking he's being all smooth and casual and shit. "You know, I'm one of the few people in the world who was actually there. On Day One."
It doesn't matter where you are, either. Could be at work, showing the new guy to a desk where he'll spend his day plugged into the system, doing monkey-easy tasks for years. Could be at a party for your Great-Grandma's 132nd. Someone will do it, even though we all know by now 99% of them are full of shit.
But, of course, you're going to believe me when I tell you that I *was* actually one of the people there on Day One. Why, you ask? Well, I can prove it, unlike everyone else. And most times, I don't even have to break out said proof. People know when they see me. Because while other guys point to a flesh-colored blob in the network feed and claim it was them, all I have to do is smile at you. Sometimes, I even introduce myself.
"Hi," I'll say. "Dane Phoenix, Global News Network."
Not my real name, of course. Phoenix is a stage name, but all the network reporters have them. Dane is what my mother named me, though, so call me that.
So, you know for a fact I was there. Most likely, you first heard about the events of Day One from me, or at least someone like me. I'll tell you the stuff they didn't show you on the network feed, the stuff they only told us in the media/entertainment complex. And I'm telling you that stuff now, because, seriously, what can it hurt at this point?
It doesn't start on Day One, of course. My involvement with the story starts a couple of days before -- Day Minus One, if you like. It was one of those days. Errand days. I had a lot of crap to take care of, not the least of which was re-registering my entertainment license. That meant a trip to Dallas.
I could have been driven there, of course. The Network would have been more than happy to hire me a vehicle and a driver. I mean, they kind of bend over backwards to do stuff for me -- I bring them ratings, after all, so they want to make sure I'm happy. Wouldn't do to have one of their most popular personalities jump ship, though, between you and me, that's something I wouldn't do. Global News is one of the few with any journalistic cred these days, though I could bitch about the pay if I wanted. But nah. Not me. My mother always told me not to rock the boat, and she was right. I was on top right *then*, but that didn't mean it would always be. I tried to be as easy as possible to work with, unlike some of my co-personalities... but I'll get to that later.
Anyway, Dallas. I decided to take the train, mainly because I was still nursing a hangover from the night before and could use the time to sleep. Network personalities always get the private cars on the train, so that meant two hours from my house in L.A. of undisturbed time.
Yeah, I know. No one actually *lives* in Los Angeles anymore, right? It's almost passé at this point, but I don't really care. I like the weather, and the old-school "we used to be the home of the entertainment industry" vibe. And Dallas is... well ... It's fucking Dallas, isn't it? Mega-City One. Too many damn laws in Texas. Too many people watching your every goddamn move.
I know. Coming from a network personality, that might almost seem funny. We all have the *hey, look at me!* disease, don't we? But the insane level of surveillance in Texas made me avoid it unless absolutely necessary -- usually once a year, like today.
So, the nap on the train didn't wipe out the hangover like I hoped it would. I might have dropped some perfectly legal amphetamines. OK, so I was pretty much flying on speed when I switched trains at Arlington for downtown Dallas. Judge if you want, I suppose. Pretend you don't take some Umbra Dynamics uppers after a rough night out. I only mention it because it becomes pertinent later.
Downtown Dallas is like time travel, man. There's this part of it called Dealey Plaza that they've kept as it was in the 1960s. When... something... happened. Can't remember what off the top of my head. But it's like walking through an old movie. Kinda cool. The train to downtown lets you off right at Dealey, and there's a pleasant five-block walk through Past-Ville to the FEC building. The FEC -- Federal Entertainment Commission-- used to be the FCC. They once regulated what we could do on Network, before I was born. Nowadays they had no regulatory power -- the Networks just paid them a yearly fee to license its personalities, like me.
Extortion, really, but the Network always paid my fee for me. All I had to do was show up, submit to a DNA scan, and sign a screen. Boom, done. But I had to do it in person, which sucked.
It took me all of five minutes to get that done, and it was almost noon. I was thinking of tracking down some lunch when the chime sounded in my ear.
A lot of the personalities have the implants. It's a simple operation in the middle ear, where their phones are implanted just above the jawline. I don't, at least not anymore. I used to, but retro is coming back in, so I had the implant taken out and replaced it with an old-school earpiece. It looked tight. Still, it was Network property, and it was always on. The chime meant it was Global News calling, and that I couldn't ignore it. I knew I had five seconds to clear my throat and get ready to start talking to whoever was on the other end.
It wasn't a person. It was one of the computers at Global News Headquarters, about a mile and a half from where I was standing in Downtown Dallas.
"Dane Phoenix," the computer's voice, deep and male, said. "You have a mandatory appointment at Global News Network Headquarters. Appointment date, 27 July 2098. Appointment time, 1315 Central. Please check in with Ryan Jackson, News Department Head. Confirm."
"Confirmed," I sighed. I'd hoped to get in and out of Dallas without having to go into the office, but they knew I was in town. Probably knew the second I stepped off the train. Fucking Texas.
I'd never met Ryan before, though he was my boss. He'd hired me. But he picked me up out of the London market, back when I'd been working for the Royal News Network. That was in, what, 2094. We interviewed entirely over video chat, and I moved to Los Angeles as soon as he gave me the job. I'd managed to avoid him so far. Him wanting to talk to me in person... well, I had no clue what that meant, but suffice it to say it was a highly irregular request.
I had just over an hour before the meeting, and the speed was starting to rob me of my appetite. I could have called for a lift. Again, the Network would only be too happy to send a driver to me. But it was a nice day, and I was suddenly bursting with energy. That was probably the speed, too. So I decided to leg it, and covered the mile and a half in just under ten minutes.
Yeah. I walk fast. Something odd I've noticed since moving here is that Americans walk painfully slowly. I grew up in Europe, though. Amsterdam, specifically. There, everyone walks like there's a shadow person tailing them, ready to pounce and attack at any second. Here, everyone walks like they've got nowhere in particular to be, even if it's patently obvious that they do. It's weird.
So, of course, I made it to the office early. Had to ask a receptionist -- tall, blond guy with impossible good looks -- where to go. He directed me to the 23rd floor, told me to check in with the receptionist there.
I suspect the Network is doing secret cloning. The guy behind the desk on the 23rd floor looked exactly like the one in the lobby, or so I thought. Could have been the speed again. It's safe and legal, and everything, but it can throw your brain a curve ball or six if you overuse it... which I really had lately.
Anyway, the clone pointed me to Ryan's office, down at the end of the hall, with instructions to have a seat outside. I didn't. Only because I didn't have a chance, though. The door was open, and Ryan was inside. Without a word, he waved me into the office.
"You're early. I like your initiative," he said. He was wearing workout clothes, black athletic pants and a black tank top. There was a cross-training machine in his office, I saw as I stepped inside and he closed the door behind me. He'd been working out. I could tell by the sweat he was still toweling off his brow. I didn't know people still really worked out, with machines and stuff. I take the pharmaceutical route, and so does everyone else I know. Not Ryan Jackson, apparently.
"Vladimir Andrevich," Ryan said. He sat behind his desk and tossed the towel onto the machine. "You know him?"
"Know *of* him," I said. "Everyone kind of does."
"Well, everyone over the age of 15. He's been off the grid for years."
"But not anymore?" I asked. I was sweating now, too. Damn speed.
"Apparently not. His press agent contacted the Network this morning."
Andrevich was a legend when I was a kid. Best cage fighter the world had ever seen. Nowadays, it was a rare thing to be considered a global celebrity, but Andrevich sure was.
"He returning to the cage?"
"No. But the IFAA is planning a ceremony to honor him, day after tomorrow. And he's attending."
Now, that was interesting. Andrevich had been undefeated until 2094, when he'd killed a man in the cage. Accidentally, he said. And though I already suspected the answer to this question, I asked anyway.
"And this has something to do with me?" I asked.
"We're sending you out on assignment. You meet with him tonight, interview him tomorrow, cover the ceremony after."
Yep. Pretty much what I thought.
"I don't cover sports, Ryan. Celebrity beat, hard news. Wouldn't someone like Jagger Cash --"
"Jagger Cash is an idiot," Ryan said, cutting me off. "And Andrevich's people said he specifically requested you. So that's the job."
And that was it. That was all he said to me. He looked at me, then at the office door. I'm not brilliant, but I got the hint. I stood up, managed a quick half-wave, and I left. The 23rd floor clone was waiting outside, and he motioned for me to follow him.
"Your flight leaves DFW in two hours," he said, heading for the elevator.
"Where am I going?"
"Hawaii. Honolulu," he said.
"Hear that used to be pretty nice."
"Parts of the island are. The part you're heading to might as well be Chicago," he said.
"Beautiful. Background info?"
"Already downloading to your screen," he said, nodding at the thin-film screen on my forearm. I checked, and there was, indeed, a progress bar just finishing up.
"Private flight?" I asked.
"Goes without saying."
"Good man. Hey, is the guy downstairs -- "
"My brother. Yeah."
"Twins?"
"No, just born on the same day."
I smirked. I thought I saw Clone-23 smirk, as well, as the elevator doors closed and I descended quickly down into the lobby to see his brother. I was sure Clone-1 would have my ride to the airport ready, as well as the list of the crew I'd be working with. Locals, I'd guess. Hopefully, they weren't as bad as the last local crew I'd used -- the wardrobe person was shit. Shirts too small, pants too big. I'd had to go shopping myself with half an hour until I went live. Didn't want a repeat of that one -- not with a story this big.
* * *
Yeah, I know. You're saying, "What the hell, Dane? You said you were going to talk about Day One. This ain't that. This is some boring shit about Network politics, about how you rich people talk to each other."
Trust me. I'm getting there. All of this stuff is relevant, believe it or not, though you might not see the whole picture for a while yet. I know I sure didn't. But I know it must seem disjointed, especially because you never saw the interview with Vladimir Andrevich. You never got the chance. A bigger story -- Day One -- came up before you could. Remember where I was when I first reported on the incidents of that day?
That's right. Hawaii. You think you're starting to put it together now, and I suppose you are -- at least part of it, anyway. The full picture is something that didn't make much sense when I finally put it together. Hell, I'm not sure it makes much sense now.
Anyway, I did my research on the flight to Hawaii. It was only two and a half hours, but turns out I didn't need all the time. As I started reading the network-assembled dossier, stuff started coming back to me.
Like I said, Andrevich was a global celeb. Everyone was a fan, even me when I was younger. I never saw him fight in person, but he was all over the network for effing years.There were some interesting details in his file, though, stuff I didn't know before.
First, there was the matter of his hometown. I'd assumed Andrevich was from Russia, but that wasn't true. He was born in a small town in the New Soviet Republic, winter 2049. That couldn't have been an easy place to grow up. After the China War in the 20s, part of Russia had split off and gone communist. Again. The land they claimed was mostly crap wilderness in Siberia near the Chinese border, so Russia let them go. Well, eventually.
There were the requisite border skirmishes and saber-rattling, but even Russia knew the land was horrible, cold, and mostly useless. There wasn't much there in the way of natural resources, and the NSR quickly became a third-world country. Even China abandoned them. China ditched Communism in the 40s, but the NSR bullheadedly stuck with it. I'd never known anyone who grew up in that area. I just assumed most people didn't make it to adulthood alive.
He was the hero of his hometown, of course. His file showed that. There was a picture of the town square in New Odessa, one showing a depressing, brown sculpture of Andrevich in a fighting pose. It looked like a child had made it -- the fight tattoos on his arms looked like they'd been scratched into the metal with a knife. They were also inaccurate.
In any civilized society, such a statue would be 30 feet high and stunningly lifelike. Fuck accurate. The fight tattoos would stand out in electric blue, showing the fighter had taken no damage and was in top physical shape. There wouldn't even be a hint that they might be turning red -- that the fighter might be tiring or injured.
Not in New Odessa. Just looking at that one picture of the town square... well, let's say I could see how Vladimir Andrevich wanted to punch someone.
I closed Andrevich's file and checked the time on my screen. Still more than an hour to fly, and I was out of research material. I suppose I could have used the time to write a few interview questions, but I don't really do that anymore. Haven't for a few years. When I stopped overpreparing for interviews was when I got noticed, got a reputation as a guy worth talking to, so I got a bit lazy. Nowadays, I came up with one question -- the first one -- and built all of my subsequent questions on the subject's responses.
Like I said, it's lazy, but it also works. It got me out of a crap job at the bottom rung of the lowest-ranked Euro Network. The Royal News picked me up, and I haven't looked back since.
I was expecting someone from Andrevich's camp to meet me. When I landed, though, I knew the person waiting as I got off the plane. It was Jeremy Ford, one of Global News' best producers. I'd worked with Jeremy for years now, but he hadn't been on my crew list in Dallas a few hours ago.
"Jeremy," I said, smiling.
"Dane," he replied. No smile, and that was unusual. Jeremy was one of the most laid-back guys I'd ever met. Something was up.
"Andrevich's people back out on the interview?" I guessed.
"No, you're set to meet with them tomorrow morning. Flight delays. Some kind of storm at the airport in Munich."
Well, that was good. I would'ver hated to have come all this way for nothing.
"So what's up?" I asked. "You look... well, not happy."
"Something else. Could be big, could be nothing."
Man of few words. That, at least, was like Jeremy.
"And?"
"Ryan wants you to stay on this. No side trips, no B story."
I knew Jeremy well. Better yet, I trusted his instincts -- he'd been the producer on the Atlantic Rail story, which had won me all sorts of awards.
"Well," I said, smiling, "We have time. What say we take a look anyway?"
"You know," he'll say, thinking he's being all smooth and casual and shit. "You know, I'm one of the few people in the world who was actually there. On Day One."
It doesn't matter where you are, either. Could be at work, showing the new guy to a desk where he'll spend his day plugged into the system, doing monkey-easy tasks for years. Could be at a party for your Great-Grandma's 132nd. Someone will do it, even though we all know by now 99% of them are full of shit.
But, of course, you're going to believe me when I tell you that I *was* actually one of the people there on Day One. Why, you ask? Well, I can prove it, unlike everyone else. And most times, I don't even have to break out said proof. People know when they see me. Because while other guys point to a flesh-colored blob in the network feed and claim it was them, all I have to do is smile at you. Sometimes, I even introduce myself.
"Hi," I'll say. "Dane Phoenix, Global News Network."
Not my real name, of course. Phoenix is a stage name, but all the network reporters have them. Dane is what my mother named me, though, so call me that.
So, you know for a fact I was there. Most likely, you first heard about the events of Day One from me, or at least someone like me. I'll tell you the stuff they didn't show you on the network feed, the stuff they only told us in the media/entertainment complex. And I'm telling you that stuff now, because, seriously, what can it hurt at this point?
It doesn't start on Day One, of course. My involvement with the story starts a couple of days before -- Day Minus One, if you like. It was one of those days. Errand days. I had a lot of crap to take care of, not the least of which was re-registering my entertainment license. That meant a trip to Dallas.
I could have been driven there, of course. The Network would have been more than happy to hire me a vehicle and a driver. I mean, they kind of bend over backwards to do stuff for me -- I bring them ratings, after all, so they want to make sure I'm happy. Wouldn't do to have one of their most popular personalities jump ship, though, between you and me, that's something I wouldn't do. Global News is one of the few with any journalistic cred these days, though I could bitch about the pay if I wanted. But nah. Not me. My mother always told me not to rock the boat, and she was right. I was on top right *then*, but that didn't mean it would always be. I tried to be as easy as possible to work with, unlike some of my co-personalities... but I'll get to that later.
Anyway, Dallas. I decided to take the train, mainly because I was still nursing a hangover from the night before and could use the time to sleep. Network personalities always get the private cars on the train, so that meant two hours from my house in L.A. of undisturbed time.
Yeah, I know. No one actually *lives* in Los Angeles anymore, right? It's almost passé at this point, but I don't really care. I like the weather, and the old-school "we used to be the home of the entertainment industry" vibe. And Dallas is... well ... It's fucking Dallas, isn't it? Mega-City One. Too many damn laws in Texas. Too many people watching your every goddamn move.
I know. Coming from a network personality, that might almost seem funny. We all have the *hey, look at me!* disease, don't we? But the insane level of surveillance in Texas made me avoid it unless absolutely necessary -- usually once a year, like today.
So, the nap on the train didn't wipe out the hangover like I hoped it would. I might have dropped some perfectly legal amphetamines. OK, so I was pretty much flying on speed when I switched trains at Arlington for downtown Dallas. Judge if you want, I suppose. Pretend you don't take some Umbra Dynamics uppers after a rough night out. I only mention it because it becomes pertinent later.
Downtown Dallas is like time travel, man. There's this part of it called Dealey Plaza that they've kept as it was in the 1960s. When... something... happened. Can't remember what off the top of my head. But it's like walking through an old movie. Kinda cool. The train to downtown lets you off right at Dealey, and there's a pleasant five-block walk through Past-Ville to the FEC building. The FEC -- Federal Entertainment Commission-- used to be the FCC. They once regulated what we could do on Network, before I was born. Nowadays they had no regulatory power -- the Networks just paid them a yearly fee to license its personalities, like me.
Extortion, really, but the Network always paid my fee for me. All I had to do was show up, submit to a DNA scan, and sign a screen. Boom, done. But I had to do it in person, which sucked.
It took me all of five minutes to get that done, and it was almost noon. I was thinking of tracking down some lunch when the chime sounded in my ear.
A lot of the personalities have the implants. It's a simple operation in the middle ear, where their phones are implanted just above the jawline. I don't, at least not anymore. I used to, but retro is coming back in, so I had the implant taken out and replaced it with an old-school earpiece. It looked tight. Still, it was Network property, and it was always on. The chime meant it was Global News calling, and that I couldn't ignore it. I knew I had five seconds to clear my throat and get ready to start talking to whoever was on the other end.
It wasn't a person. It was one of the computers at Global News Headquarters, about a mile and a half from where I was standing in Downtown Dallas.
"Dane Phoenix," the computer's voice, deep and male, said. "You have a mandatory appointment at Global News Network Headquarters. Appointment date, 27 July 2098. Appointment time, 1315 Central. Please check in with Ryan Jackson, News Department Head. Confirm."
"Confirmed," I sighed. I'd hoped to get in and out of Dallas without having to go into the office, but they knew I was in town. Probably knew the second I stepped off the train. Fucking Texas.
I'd never met Ryan before, though he was my boss. He'd hired me. But he picked me up out of the London market, back when I'd been working for the Royal News Network. That was in, what, 2094. We interviewed entirely over video chat, and I moved to Los Angeles as soon as he gave me the job. I'd managed to avoid him so far. Him wanting to talk to me in person... well, I had no clue what that meant, but suffice it to say it was a highly irregular request.
I had just over an hour before the meeting, and the speed was starting to rob me of my appetite. I could have called for a lift. Again, the Network would only be too happy to send a driver to me. But it was a nice day, and I was suddenly bursting with energy. That was probably the speed, too. So I decided to leg it, and covered the mile and a half in just under ten minutes.
Yeah. I walk fast. Something odd I've noticed since moving here is that Americans walk painfully slowly. I grew up in Europe, though. Amsterdam, specifically. There, everyone walks like there's a shadow person tailing them, ready to pounce and attack at any second. Here, everyone walks like they've got nowhere in particular to be, even if it's patently obvious that they do. It's weird.
So, of course, I made it to the office early. Had to ask a receptionist -- tall, blond guy with impossible good looks -- where to go. He directed me to the 23rd floor, told me to check in with the receptionist there.
I suspect the Network is doing secret cloning. The guy behind the desk on the 23rd floor looked exactly like the one in the lobby, or so I thought. Could have been the speed again. It's safe and legal, and everything, but it can throw your brain a curve ball or six if you overuse it... which I really had lately.
Anyway, the clone pointed me to Ryan's office, down at the end of the hall, with instructions to have a seat outside. I didn't. Only because I didn't have a chance, though. The door was open, and Ryan was inside. Without a word, he waved me into the office.
"You're early. I like your initiative," he said. He was wearing workout clothes, black athletic pants and a black tank top. There was a cross-training machine in his office, I saw as I stepped inside and he closed the door behind me. He'd been working out. I could tell by the sweat he was still toweling off his brow. I didn't know people still really worked out, with machines and stuff. I take the pharmaceutical route, and so does everyone else I know. Not Ryan Jackson, apparently.
"Vladimir Andrevich," Ryan said. He sat behind his desk and tossed the towel onto the machine. "You know him?"
"Know *of* him," I said. "Everyone kind of does."
"Well, everyone over the age of 15. He's been off the grid for years."
"But not anymore?" I asked. I was sweating now, too. Damn speed.
"Apparently not. His press agent contacted the Network this morning."
Andrevich was a legend when I was a kid. Best cage fighter the world had ever seen. Nowadays, it was a rare thing to be considered a global celebrity, but Andrevich sure was.
"He returning to the cage?"
"No. But the IFAA is planning a ceremony to honor him, day after tomorrow. And he's attending."
Now, that was interesting. Andrevich had been undefeated until 2094, when he'd killed a man in the cage. Accidentally, he said. And though I already suspected the answer to this question, I asked anyway.
"And this has something to do with me?" I asked.
"We're sending you out on assignment. You meet with him tonight, interview him tomorrow, cover the ceremony after."
Yep. Pretty much what I thought.
"I don't cover sports, Ryan. Celebrity beat, hard news. Wouldn't someone like Jagger Cash --"
"Jagger Cash is an idiot," Ryan said, cutting me off. "And Andrevich's people said he specifically requested you. So that's the job."
And that was it. That was all he said to me. He looked at me, then at the office door. I'm not brilliant, but I got the hint. I stood up, managed a quick half-wave, and I left. The 23rd floor clone was waiting outside, and he motioned for me to follow him.
"Your flight leaves DFW in two hours," he said, heading for the elevator.
"Where am I going?"
"Hawaii. Honolulu," he said.
"Hear that used to be pretty nice."
"Parts of the island are. The part you're heading to might as well be Chicago," he said.
"Beautiful. Background info?"
"Already downloading to your screen," he said, nodding at the thin-film screen on my forearm. I checked, and there was, indeed, a progress bar just finishing up.
"Private flight?" I asked.
"Goes without saying."
"Good man. Hey, is the guy downstairs -- "
"My brother. Yeah."
"Twins?"
"No, just born on the same day."
I smirked. I thought I saw Clone-23 smirk, as well, as the elevator doors closed and I descended quickly down into the lobby to see his brother. I was sure Clone-1 would have my ride to the airport ready, as well as the list of the crew I'd be working with. Locals, I'd guess. Hopefully, they weren't as bad as the last local crew I'd used -- the wardrobe person was shit. Shirts too small, pants too big. I'd had to go shopping myself with half an hour until I went live. Didn't want a repeat of that one -- not with a story this big.
* * *
Yeah, I know. You're saying, "What the hell, Dane? You said you were going to talk about Day One. This ain't that. This is some boring shit about Network politics, about how you rich people talk to each other."
Trust me. I'm getting there. All of this stuff is relevant, believe it or not, though you might not see the whole picture for a while yet. I know I sure didn't. But I know it must seem disjointed, especially because you never saw the interview with Vladimir Andrevich. You never got the chance. A bigger story -- Day One -- came up before you could. Remember where I was when I first reported on the incidents of that day?
That's right. Hawaii. You think you're starting to put it together now, and I suppose you are -- at least part of it, anyway. The full picture is something that didn't make much sense when I finally put it together. Hell, I'm not sure it makes much sense now.
Anyway, I did my research on the flight to Hawaii. It was only two and a half hours, but turns out I didn't need all the time. As I started reading the network-assembled dossier, stuff started coming back to me.
Like I said, Andrevich was a global celeb. Everyone was a fan, even me when I was younger. I never saw him fight in person, but he was all over the network for effing years.There were some interesting details in his file, though, stuff I didn't know before.
First, there was the matter of his hometown. I'd assumed Andrevich was from Russia, but that wasn't true. He was born in a small town in the New Soviet Republic, winter 2049. That couldn't have been an easy place to grow up. After the China War in the 20s, part of Russia had split off and gone communist. Again. The land they claimed was mostly crap wilderness in Siberia near the Chinese border, so Russia let them go. Well, eventually.
There were the requisite border skirmishes and saber-rattling, but even Russia knew the land was horrible, cold, and mostly useless. There wasn't much there in the way of natural resources, and the NSR quickly became a third-world country. Even China abandoned them. China ditched Communism in the 40s, but the NSR bullheadedly stuck with it. I'd never known anyone who grew up in that area. I just assumed most people didn't make it to adulthood alive.
He was the hero of his hometown, of course. His file showed that. There was a picture of the town square in New Odessa, one showing a depressing, brown sculpture of Andrevich in a fighting pose. It looked like a child had made it -- the fight tattoos on his arms looked like they'd been scratched into the metal with a knife. They were also inaccurate.
In any civilized society, such a statue would be 30 feet high and stunningly lifelike. Fuck accurate. The fight tattoos would stand out in electric blue, showing the fighter had taken no damage and was in top physical shape. There wouldn't even be a hint that they might be turning red -- that the fighter might be tiring or injured.
Not in New Odessa. Just looking at that one picture of the town square... well, let's say I could see how Vladimir Andrevich wanted to punch someone.
I closed Andrevich's file and checked the time on my screen. Still more than an hour to fly, and I was out of research material. I suppose I could have used the time to write a few interview questions, but I don't really do that anymore. Haven't for a few years. When I stopped overpreparing for interviews was when I got noticed, got a reputation as a guy worth talking to, so I got a bit lazy. Nowadays, I came up with one question -- the first one -- and built all of my subsequent questions on the subject's responses.
Like I said, it's lazy, but it also works. It got me out of a crap job at the bottom rung of the lowest-ranked Euro Network. The Royal News picked me up, and I haven't looked back since.
I was expecting someone from Andrevich's camp to meet me. When I landed, though, I knew the person waiting as I got off the plane. It was Jeremy Ford, one of Global News' best producers. I'd worked with Jeremy for years now, but he hadn't been on my crew list in Dallas a few hours ago.
"Jeremy," I said, smiling.
"Dane," he replied. No smile, and that was unusual. Jeremy was one of the most laid-back guys I'd ever met. Something was up.
"Andrevich's people back out on the interview?" I guessed.
"No, you're set to meet with them tomorrow morning. Flight delays. Some kind of storm at the airport in Munich."
Well, that was good. I would'ver hated to have come all this way for nothing.
"So what's up?" I asked. "You look... well, not happy."
"Something else. Could be big, could be nothing."
Man of few words. That, at least, was like Jeremy.
"And?"
"Ryan wants you to stay on this. No side trips, no B story."
I knew Jeremy well. Better yet, I trusted his instincts -- he'd been the producer on the Atlantic Rail story, which had won me all sorts of awards.
"Well," I said, smiling, "We have time. What say we take a look anyway?"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
