Ascendance (23 page)

She let everyone pass her as they filed out into the hallway, taking care not to let Sushi the magical sword brush up against them. Maybe it wouldn’t chop off an arm or a leg on general principles, but Dave noted the effort she made, even as she continued to answer his question.

‘The Thresher’s video adds to the effect by introducing elements of doubt. Are the Horde the true enemy? Can we negotiate with them? What might be worse? Is that what you’re thinking, Heath? Professor Ashbury?’

Emmeline nodded and Heath grunted in the affirmative. Dave nearly smiled, because he knew that Karen didn’t really need to ask.

‘Something like that, yes,’ Emmeline said. ‘When he judges the moment to be right, he’ll try to collapse the same communications networks to impede our attempts to use them to re-establish control and order.’

Hooper frowned as he followed Em and the others back toward the main area of the armoury. Green cots were laid out, row upon row stretching from the guarded front entrance, under the massive ceiling, to the midway section of the drill floor. Beyond them Dave could see a series of tables at which clerks processed the endless flow of paperwork. To the left of that line half a dozen bicycle couriers stood waiting with their bikes. Colonel Gries, tall and limber, strode over to them, shook their hands and spoke to them for a few moments.

‘You said civilian comms like phone lines,’ Dave said. ‘Your military communications are separate from that, aren’t they?’

He sidestepped a quartet of pre-schoolers who had just made friends, playing hide and go seek under the cots. An older girl, maybe eleven or twelve, chased after them. He popped around her as well, tuning out her orders for her sister to behave herself.

Zach shook his head, sidestepping a mother using her stroller as a bulldozer. ‘We have separate systems but a lot of it is networked into the civilian communications grid. The enemy doesn’t have to touch our systems if they go after the civilian network. It’ll degrade our capability enough, reduce our ability to coordinate.’

‘Without that coordination they can achieve local superiority over any force they target for destruction,’ Igor added.

‘Below that,’ Karen nodded to the couriers speeding out into Manhattan. ‘They have the empaths to provide a command and control net. So far as we know, I am the only the empath you have.’

Emmeline made a face somewhere between a frown and contemplative musing.

‘We’re working on that,’ she said. Dave thought she seemed much less uptight than she had been back in the office. Maybe the cramped confines . . .

‘True enough,’ Zach said, interrupting his train of thought as he grabbed two nearby army guys. ‘What are you? Specialists? Do you have tasking?’

‘Negative,’ they said in unison, a bit put off by the navy chief’s garb.

‘You do now,’ Zach said. ‘Sir, rations?’

Heath nodded. ‘Definitely. Rope in anyone else you need.’

‘Follow me, boys, you’ve just volunteered for chow detail,’ Zach said, taking them in tow before they could argue.

‘Meet us in comms,’ Heath said.

Zach nodded and disappeared with the two soldiers, weaving through the crowd.

Dave had trouble buying it. Communications was not his thing but he had to factor it into everything he did for the oil company. Most of the civilian gear he had used proved to be tough enough. He said as much.

‘This isn’t bullshit,’ Emmeline said. ‘It’s the asymmetric principle, turning your enemy’s strengths against them.’

The professor, still bandaged and bruised from Omaha, looked like someone driving through heavy rain late at night. She was concentrating fiercely, but the awkward, self-conscious heat which he’d felt coming off her earlier had definitely dissipated. She was able to look him right in the eye. She hadn’t done that very often since she’d fessed up to having a powerful hunger for Dave’s all-meat buffet.

‘Every time the Horde or one of the other Clans has faced a prepared modern military –’

‘They’re sects,’ Karen said, correcting her before Dave could. ‘Clans are the subgroups.’

‘Excuse me, but didn’t the Djinn call themselves the Djinn Sect? Not clan?’ Emmeline said. Dave and Karen shared an eye roll.

‘Yeah, but they’re jerks,’ Dave said.

Karen nodded.

‘Everyone says so.’

Emmeline waved her hand at the Russian,
‘Fine. Every time
the orcs
have deployed in traditional battle order they’ve been destroyed. As you’d expect when medieval infantry take on modern, networked forces. It’s the same problem every insurgency has faced since 1945. Compton war-gamed scenarios to bring the tactics and strategies of the most successful insurgents to the continental US. Just in case.’

‘What? Just in case the Taliban got a foothold in Denver?’ Dave asked, detouring around a family who’d made a little fort of their cots. A brigade of infants howled and whined. Colonel Gries, still at the long line of paperwork tables, pointed to a quartet of soldiers who crossed the drill floor in order to sort out one argument on the verge of descending into fists. He had to raise his voice to be heard over the noise of so many people crammed in together. ‘Do you know how crazy that sounds?’

‘No crazier than what’s going on out in the streets right now,’ Igor said. ‘Or in here.’ He shook his head at the scene.

‘Okay, so just bottom line it for me,’ Dave said.

‘Bottom line,’ Heath said, letting Dave catch up with him so he didn’t have to shout over the crowd. ‘There is a very good chance this Compt’n creature and the other one, Guyuk or whatever it calls itself, there’s a very good chance they could do quite terrible damage before we put them down.’

‘I don’t see it,’ Dave protested. ‘I mean, yeah, shit’s real bad outside right now. And in LA too, right?’

Heath nodded. Dave heard his name spoken again and again as they crossed the large, open area. Sometimes people pointed. Sometimes they stared. He saw one or two move toward him, but they fell back as Karen glared at them. He wondered if that was all she did.

‘But the sun will come up in a few hours,’ he said. ‘The Horde and the other sects will retreat underground, or across the universe or wherever the hell they go, and we’ll have a whole day to prepare for them. They’re not invincible. A shotgun will take the head off a Hunn a lot easier than a battle-axe. Hell, even a decent pistol will put them down if you hold your nerve and your aim. I know the army can’t be everywhere. But let’s remember where we are, the country with more gun owners than licensed drivers.’

‘Is that right?’ Ashbury said, looking sceptical.

‘I dunno,’ Dave admitted. ‘But it sounds right. These things aren’t immune to bullets, and they’re totally not immune to missiles and tanks and bombs and shit. Hell, if you don’t own a gun you could rig up a flamethrower with an aerosol can and a Bic lighter. That won’t just scare off a monster, it’ll torch them, right?’

He looked to Karen for confirmation and she nodded, slowly.

‘Yes, but I wouldn’t recommend it.’

‘You’re missing the point, as always,’ Ashbury said. ‘Hooper, I doubt I need to explain this to Colonel Varatchevsky, but you seem determined to be obtuse. Yes, one helicopter gunship can make a dreadful mess of a tightly packed company or regiment of monsters. Assuming they don’t shoot it down with harpoon-sized arrows, or some bloody dragon doesn’t barbecue the pilot. But helicopter gunships, unlike bows and arrows, don’t grow on trees. They are complicated technologies, needing skilled operators and vast support systems just to get off the ground. So too with every weapon we might pick up to fight them, right down to the simplest handgun. They are the weapons of an advanced civilisation, Dave, and advanced civilisations are hyper-complex, interdependent and riddled with points of critical failure.’

‘Okay,’ said Dave. ‘Point taken. I’m not being obtuse. But I think you’re underestimating people’s resilience. You in particular, Heath. Weren’t you paying attention in Absurdistan? We bombed and shot the shit out of the beards for ten years. It might have fucked them up, but it didn’t destroy them.’

Igor chipped in.

‘The reason places like Fallujah didn’t disintegrate when we kicked in the door and tore everything up was they were pretty much fucked up before we got there. The Triangle, Syria, Afghanistan, we just brought a different kind of Hell.’

Igor lifted his stubbled chin in a gesture toward the city outside the solid stone walls of the armoury. ‘That’s not Fallujah out there. Or at least it wasn’t when the sun set. Tomorrow? You’re gonna see just how fragile civilisation really is.’

They arrived at a cordoned-off space and were met by Colonel Gries, emerging into another space filled with computers, maps, and heavy green phones. Along the far wall, flat-screen televisions projected a series of newsfeeds. One of the screens, with a camera above it, ran a test pattern. Inside, the noise abated a notch while the heat climbed from the concentration of electronic equipment.

‘Make a hole!’ someone shouted outside. A moment later Chief Allen stepped inside and in less than a minute the table was set up and two extra chairs produced. Lunch trays just like the ones Dave’s sons used in school appeared, loaded with food.

‘B Rats,’ Allen said. ‘Ration packs. Not heated, just slopped on there. Sorry. They’ve got a truck stacked with them.’

‘It will do,’ Karen said. ‘And we thank you for it.’

She took a large spoon and pitched in, swallowing without chewing. Dave had to put Lucille down before he could eat. He was feeling hungry, but not as though he might die from it, as he had felt in New Orleans on that first day or so. Again he wished he’d taken the time to do all those tests Zach had suggested. He knew his metabolism was adjusting to his changed circumstances, but he had no idea, really, of how much he had to eat and when. He would talk to Karen about it, when they had time. She seemed to have a much better understanding of this stuff.

Once seated, he stared at chicken breasts coated in cold, gelatinous, yellow gravy. He shrugged and sucked them down like he would an oyster, clearing the tray within a minute. No sooner was it cleared than another one appeared, placed in front of him by a soldier who stood in awe of Super Dave. There was nothing really enjoyable about the meal. Steel pitchers of water were set in front of them followed by a heavier sergeant, clasping his hands together.

‘We’ve got orange juice concentrate,’ he said. ‘If you have time I can make some.’

Dave spied a pot of coffee brewing across the room.

‘Coffee would be better,’ Karen said, reading his mind.

The heavy-set sergeant nodded. ‘On it.’ Zach shook the man’s hand on the way out and thanked him, before unfolding another camp chair across from Dave and Karen. Igor joined them, laying his massive sniper rifle across from Lucille.

Dave thought he could hear Lucille cooing at the rifle, flirting with it. He gave the enchanted splitting maul a sideways look of disapproval.

She continued to court the uncharmed sniper rifle.

The smirk Karen gave Dave let him know she was still reading him like a comic book. He took a moment to vividly imagine giving her the finger and her smirk grew into a smile. Emmeline observed the exchange with mortified fascination.

‘It’s considered rude to converse in psychic whispers at the dinner table, you know.’

‘Sorry,’ said Dave, chastened.

Colonel Gries turned to Captain Heath. ‘The comms guys here tell me we’re five by five.’

Heath nodded. ‘Are they sure?’

‘They set this up in less than two hours,’ Gries said, gesturing at the contained communications cell. ‘National Command Authority should be able to get through to us.’

‘So long as the phone lines hold up,’ Zach said, sipping coffee from a green paper cup.

‘Shouldn’t they have hardened satellite comms here?’ Emmeline asked, checking over her iPad.

‘This is a guard unit, ma’am,’ Colonel Gries said. ‘Not SOCOM or a signal battalion.’

Zach and Igor both pulled black objects from their gear.

‘Iridium provides,’ said Igor.

Dave recognised the bulky satellite cell phone that the oil company sometimes used on the rigs.

‘Marvellous,’ Emmeline said. ‘How did you get hold of them?’

‘We’re SEALs,’ Igor answered. ‘If we need it, we get it. Kinda like Captain Gravy Train over there.’

‘Nothing but love for you, Iggy,’ Dave said.

‘I doubt that,’ Igor poker-faced him back.

Another pair of loaded trays arrived.

‘The empty trays,’ Dave said to the soldier bringing the food. ‘Still have them?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Get some bread and throw it on top to sop up the gravy. In fact, if you have any more gravy, throw that on there as well.’

‘Oh-kay,’ the soldier said. ‘Got it.’

Emmeline gave Heath an iPad and a stack of papers.

‘This hard copy, it’s the same data as the pad?’ Heath said.

‘Yeah. Just in case,’ she said. ‘I’ve also put an executive summary up there on our screen. They will be able to see this in Washington, do a screen-cap to supplement the download.’ She pointed to a flat-screen closest to them which displayed the same data as her iPad.
Most of it made little sense to Dave. He was starting to recognise the shorthand used by the military to designate various units and bases, without yet understanding which units and bases the writing referred to.

Karen interpreted for him.

‘Not far out in the Atlantic is an Amphibious Ready Group,’ she said. ‘I suspect they are trying to decide whether to reinforce Colonel Gries or attempt to evacuate him. That red line over the map on the far screen that looks like a crumpled condom is his collapsing perimeter. The red boxes with an X in them represent the known location of an enemy unit. Some of the data is minutes old. Some of it, hours.’

‘Hold on, sorry,’ Dave held up his hand. ‘A collapsing perimeter? That’s bad, right?’

Zach shrugged. ‘There are some benefits to being on defence.’

‘Yeah,’ Igor said, contradicting him. ‘It’s bad. We don’t want to be here when it collapses completely.’

They fell silent, leaving Dave to ponder the list again.

The military jargon was opaque but the names of the cities meant something to him. New York, New Orleans and LA in red. Des Moines, Houston and Chicago in black. A bunch of foreign cities in red too. Some he recognised: Jakarta, Melbourne, Lyon, Kiev. Some he didn’t. They sounded Arabic, or maybe Russian.