Grunt Traitor (28 page)

“Joub?”

She shook her head as she punched at her pad. “This doesn’t make sense. I haven’t seen this before.”

“What do you have?” Malrimple looked over her shoulder.

“See here,” she said, pointing at a line of code. “I haven’t seen anything this pure. It’s almost as if a machine created it. But then look here.” She pointed at another line of code. “This isn’t the logical flow. This is intuitive.”

Malrimple nodded slowly. “This is HMID Aquinas’s work.”

“What? How could it write code?”

“It didn’t write it. It thought it and made it happen.”

I didn’t know what they were talking about, but talking about my dead girlfriend as an
it
wasn’t going to happen. “She. Call her a fucking
she
.”

Both Malrimple and Joub stared at me. Malrimple’s eyes softened as he nodded. “All right, Lt. Mason. We’ll do that. Won’t we, Joub?”

“Uh, yes, sir.”

“So what is it that
she
did?” I asked.

“
She
wrote code that made it so that you were invisible to HMID Salinas,” Joub said.

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know.” Malrimple pointed to the data. “I want to save this and look at it later. Let’s bypass this line and open it up for contact between HMID Salinas and Lt. Mason.” He eyed me. “You ready?”

“If it’ll help.”

“I think it will,” Malrimple said. “All of this is new to us. We’re not sure what’s going on, but HMID Salinas was onto something, and I want to make sure we find out what it is before we lose it.”

I glanced at Ethridge, who looked as if his head were about to explode. I didn’t want to invite pain on myself, but part of the battlefield was in the mind. Michelle had fought there. If I could help out by letting them use me, then I would.

I nodded.

Malrimple gave Joub the thumbs up.

She typed on her pad.

A flood of ants invaded my brain, ticking, clicking, moving in and out of my thoughts. I felt my jaw fall open and my eyes slammed shut. There was no pain, but I couldn’t think of anything else except my brain filling with a million, billion trickling points of thought—ideas skittering at the speed of light. I was being filled and filled and filled, beyond capacity. I fell to my knees. My mind was a hurricane of ideas, numbers, people, places, things both human and alien and strange. I felt myself forget to breathe.

Then a wash of nothing.

“Mason, are you okay?”

I breathed.

My heart beat.

I was alive.

“Mason, are you okay?”

“Lieutenant, it’s gone. It’s over.”

I opened my eyes. My throat was raw, as if I’d been screaming. I must have been.

“Lieutenant—thank God.”

“I thought you were dying.”

I cleared my throat. “I thought I did.” I sat up with the help of two of the techs. “What happened?”

“It’s gone,” Ethridge said.

“What’s... where’d all the information go?”

Peter spoke, both through the speakers and inside the wide-open expanse of my mind. “I can now translate the Hypocrealiac language.”

After a moment, Malrimple put his hand to his head. “Oh, my God.”

Sutter shook his head. “Computational space. He needed your brain so he could work his algorithms.” Seeing my confusion, he added, “One pre-invasion study estimated that the brain has around a hundred billion neurons, each with a thousand synapses capable of making connections—think of synapses as doing the work of data storage. That’s a hundred trillion data points, or one hundred terabytes of info. Another study estimated the brain’s capacity at closer to 2.5 petabytes, or twenty-five hundred terabytes of binary data. Before the invasion, we stored petabytes in the cloud and had literally an endless capacity for storage. Since then, in this time of austerity, we have been forced to use whatever servers weren’t fried. It looks as if HMID Salinas required more space. He found it with you and Corporal Ethridge.”

“Theta waves,” I said.

Malrimple nodded.

I stood, a little wobbly on my feet. “Glad I could be of help.” Then I turned a little too fast. Everything went fuzzy and I fell to the floor.

Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain with death—the seas bear only commerce—men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world lies quietly at peace. The holy mission has been completed. And in reporting this to you, the people, I speak for the thousands of silent lips, forever stilled among the jungles and the beaches and in the deep waters of the Pacific which marked the way.

Douglas MacArthur

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

A
NEW EXCITEMENT
filled the compound as news of the breakthrough made it through the ranks. I would have thought that the information would have been classified at the highest levels, but Mr. Pink, ever the social manipulator, was using it to inspire confidence, much as he’d done with me, televising my Hero of the Mound stand over Thompson’s fallen EXO. Our mission had been postponed by at least twenty-four hours so they could discuss the ramifications of the newfound ability to translate what the aliens were saying to each other.

The night before, my brain had felt like a sponge with all the water squeezed out. I’d spent most of the time in a daze, missing night practice with the team. But when I awoke that morning, I felt refreshed, eager. I spoke with Dewhurst right after I got up, but he brushed me off as he made his way to a high-level meeting. I tried to contact Mr. Pink, but he was busy. Frankly, I wanted to know what going on. After all, I was now a lieutenant. But while a lieutenant outranked a sergeant major, that same lieutenant was the lowest level of the officer ranks—still essentially a grunt.

The more things change... I thought. So here I was again, training with the soldiers while others decided our fate. I was a mushroom—fed shit and kept in the dark.

I’d paired Stranz with Sula, and Ohirra with Macabre. We’d moved past the wide, flat Dust Bowl to a narrow valley marked on the map as the Devil’s Spit. I stood on top of a hill and watched as they moved first one way, then the other, practicing bounding overwatch. Normally one team would provide fire protection while the other would rush forward, establishing a position. Then they’d switch. But where individual soldiers would normally limit their rush to three-to-five seconds, while in the EXOs I’d commanded them to make ten-second rushes. Their servo-assisted legs could carry them twice as fast and far. Combined with the armor-plating and the ability to deliver damage faster, I wanted to make sure we pushed the EXOs to their limits.

I’d always thought that our strategy against the hive in Africa had been flat. Part of that came from never having used the EXOs in combat before, and having to feel our way through the fight. And we hadn’t been entirely aware of the abilities of the Cray, or known what was in the hive.

Now all that had changed.

We now knew how the interior was structured. We understood the Cray and their reaction to intense light. We knew how they attacked. We also knew we were going to deliver a thermonuclear device right into their midst. So it was up to Olivares and me to come up with a plan that would ensure mission completion and survival.

“Tarantula One, this is Tarantula Chief, inbound to your location.”

I checked my HUD and watched as Dewhurst’s EXO made good time through the Dust Bowl and to my location. He arrived a moment later, and I told the team to take ten.

“What’s up, boss?” I asked.

“Switch to private channel one.”

I switched. “Okay, what’s up?”

“They kicked me out.”

“Kicked you out? What does that mean?”

“Arguably the biggest discovery—the most important breakthrough in the history of mankind—and they want to monetize it.”

Monetize it?
“I don’t get it.”

“Your clowns at OMBRA had the audacity to ask me to contact our new government and invite them to pay for the right to have access to the translation data. OMBRA will provide real-time translation services for a fee.”

“Watch your blood pressure.”

“Fuck my blood pressure. Remember Iraq? We spent one hundred and thirty-eight billion dollars on contractors in Iraq, and what did we get for that? A country worse off than when the war began—a broken country that only an alien invasion saved from being overrun by third-rate terrorists.”

“How do they expect you to pay for it?”

Dewhurst sighed heavily. “In land. As a sign of good faith, we allowed OMBRA to own whatever land they were occupying. I know I said earlier that Fort Irwin was ours, but I didn’t want to confuse anyone with the complexities of our relationship. After all, for all of their greed, they were hammering the aliens better than anyone else. Out of appreciation, we gave them some land. And now they want more.”

“Did they say what they wanted?”

Dewhurst’s EXO nodded.

“And?”

“Colorado, Utah and Wyoming.”

“The
states
?”

“All three of them.”

Audacity
was the word. OMBRA wanted to own a fair chunk of what used to be America. “What are they going to do with them?”

“Whatever they want? Hell, I don’t know. Turn the whole area into one big fucking amusement park.”

I thought about that for a moment. “Why don’t you just withhold your support? Use the nuclear bombs as leverage.”

“Because we’re not like them. Although it handcuffs us to an ideal, we think it’s the best way for our fledgling country to begin. We consider OMBRA, whether they like it or not, part of our new nation. They are citizens, pure and simple, and it is the federal government’s responsibility to protect its people.”

And there it was. That ideal I so much loved. Protect the innocent from bullies—in this case, the Hypocrealiacs.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“What’s this
we
, Lieutenant? You’ve been part of OMBRA from the beginning.”

“I joined OMBRA because I thought it would be a far more entertaining way to die than jumping off a bridge.”

“How has that worked out for you?”

“I seem to be an abject failure at dying.”

“You know what they say, if at first you don’t succeed...”

“Yeah, I’ve been living that one all my life. So what are we going to do?”

“I’m not sure. I’ll have to think about it.” He gestured toward the canyon floor. “How are they doing?”

“Coming together as a team. Are we still doing the mission?”

“OMBRA’s abject greed aside, we still need to retake our planet.”

“So we’re going through with it?”

“Absolutely, Lieutenant.”

I held out my hand. “Then let’s join the others. You have a lot of practice to make up for.”

He grunted. “That’s right. I’m a regular slacker.”

We jogged down the incline to join the others. Soon, I’d broken us down into three teams, conducting bounding overwatch up and down the canyon. We kept at it until noon, then headed back to the Dust Bowl. Tomorrow would be a live fire exercise, and if we were lucky, the day after that we’d be in mission.

No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country.

General George S. Patton

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

T
HAT AFTERNOON
I was summoned into Mr. Pink’s office. I didn’t know what it was about, but I felt like I had back in school, being summoned by the principal. I was asked to go right in.

Mr. Pink rose from his desk and gestured for me to sit down. I didn’t like that at all. Politeness from him terrified me. He wore the same black pants and black OMBRA polo that he usually wore.

“I haven’t spoken to you since the hearing. How are you doing?”

That he was asking me meant he wanted something. “I’m doing fine,” I said.

“And the team? They coming together?”

I nodded. “I’ll have them ready for the mission.”

“I’m sure you will.” He stared at me for a long moment. “We go way back, don’t we, Lieutenant Mason?”

I grinned. “We’re regular best buds. BFFs even.” My eyes narrowed. “What’s this all about, Mr. Pink?”

“Do you know that even my generals call me Mr. Pink? I stopped correcting them a long time ago. It’s gotten to where I like it.”

I remained silent. He’d get to the point eventually. After all, we had a mission in two days, so he had to let me go by then.

He stood and paced to the window, where he stopped and stared out at the hot Death Valley afternoon. His hands were clasped behind his back as he contemplated something. Finally, he turned back to me.