Grunt Traitor (4 page)

“Ohirra, stop.”

“I don’t want to talk about this.”

Olivares offered a hand. “She was your friend, too.”

She blinked hard. Shaking her head, she said through gritted teeth, “I know that. Don’t you know how hard this is because of that?”

“Then why let yourself be complicit?”

Only the sound of the generators served as an answer. I watched the emotions play on her face. I could tell she wanted to say something, but was holding back for some reason; I said as much.

When she turned to me, I said, “Trust us.”

She exhaled as if she’d been holding her breath. “Even if I told you what I know, there’s nothing we can do about it.”

I shook my head. “I can’t believe that.”

“Believe it. She’s not Michelle anymore. She’ll never be Michelle again.”

I was aware that Olivares was staring at me. I let the buzz of the generators fill a few moments as I fought to control my emotions. “But how do you know?”

“She’s not the only one. She wasn’t even the first. They’ve tried to unhook people, but they... they go insane. When they’re hooked up they have access to the Sirens’ broadcast feed—the communication feed between the aliens on Earth and those out there. They also have access to a lot of our minds. When you remove them from the technology, it’s like losing all of your senses at once. They just can’t take it.”

Olivares jumped in. “Fine. We get that. But why?”

She shook her head and wiped a tear away. “You have no idea what the HMIDs can do... what they
have
done. OMBRA has them all over the planet. Without them, the human race as we know it would cease to exist.”

“Come on. Aren’t you exaggerating a little?”

“Not at all. We can trace the locus for virtually all incoming and outgoing alien transmissions because of the HMIDs. We’re still finding Sirens outside of hives who are providing reconnaissance information. We are now able to block their communications, forcing them to lose time and effort. The plan is to eventually learn their language so we can actually know what’s being communicated. So yeah, the HMIDs are very important.”

I’d held out so much hope, out of guilt and love.

I’d never thought I’d ever love someone again. I certainly hadn’t been looking for it; I was a professional soldier, and not such a good one at that, and I’d been in so many wars. Iraq, Afghanistan, Mali, Kosovo... fucking Kosovo, with the field of dead. No wonder, really. I’d been submerged in a miasma of other people’s hatred for too many years. And then she’d come. Then she’d wanted to be with me. Then she’d volunteered to leave me.

I asked a selfish question. “Why’d she volunteer?”

Ohirra sighed. “Her brain is wired better than most of us. Whether it’s the neurosteroids affected by PTSD, or other chemical changes created by Dissociative Identity Disorder, or a combination of both, she... you didn’t know about that, did you?”

“Dissociative Identity Disorder?”

“Multiple personalities. She’s had the problem since she was thirteen. OMBRA recruited her because of it. It was under control with medication, but she was no longer on that medication. In fact, they’ve designed drugs to enhance it.”

“They’re making her more crazy? She didn’t sign up for that.”

Ohirra glanced at Olivares, who stood beside me with his arms crossed. Then she nodded. “She did know. She was told it would be terrible. It was explained to her that there would be no going back.”

“For the hundredth fucking time, then,
why did she do it?
”

“Because she loved you. She felt powerless to save you, except if she could change and become what she’s become. She did it for you, Mason. Don’t you get it? She made herself into an HMID for
you
.”

I felt like I’d been hit by a truck. “For me?” The idea that someone would ruin their entire life, put their very existence in jeopardy, subject themselves to torture was absolutely beyond me.

But it wasn’t, was it? It was the stuff of leaders, of heroes. We’d long been brainwashed into the idea of sacrifice. From John Wayne going against the bad guys alone to Clint Eastwood out to seek revenge. It was the essential message of the Western film genre, and of the old Kurisawa-style samurai films like
Yojimbo
and
Seven Samurai
, on which
A Fistful of Dollars
and
The Magnificent Seven
were based. Toshiro Mifune and John Wayne had idealized selfless heroism. Hell, I’d done it myself, racing ahead, going on secret missions, rushing into certain death in the hopes of saving the soldiers under my leadership. It was never something I thought of rationally, it was just something I did. Just as Michelle had done. Who thinks of the consequences when they want to save someone’s life? I never have.

“And there’s nothing we can do to get her out?” I asked.

“Not unless you want to kill her.”

I leveled my gaze at her. “That’s what she wants, you know.”

“It’s what
part
of her wants. She has so many personalities. They sometimes talk to each other. We have a speaker where we can listen in. I listened one day. She was a little girl, then she was a furious bitch, then she was herself, then she was a woman who sang
Oh! Susanna
over and over.”

I tried to think through this out loud. “With so many personalities, how can she be useful?”

“They control her feed.”

“So she’s just a hooked-up guinea pig.”

“Who’s doing this so that we might live.”

I stared into the night, emotionally empty.

“Tomorrow it’s going to be your turn in the firing line.”

Without looking at her I said, “What’s the mission?”

“I can’t get into details, but we’ve discovered a new alien.”

My head snapped around.

“What am I supposed to do with it?”

“Bring it back.”

Hell, there are no rules here—we’re trying to accomplish something.

Thomas A. Edison

CHAPTER FOUR

0600
CAME EARLIER
than it should have. I’d slept in fits and starts. Images of Michelle attached to her box, tubes pumping glowing fluids in and out of her, ruled my dreams, all to the soundtrack of her singing
Oh! Susanna
in a cracked, off-key voice. It was almost like she wanted me to see her. Her face was still beautiful—sculpted cheekbones, dusky eyes, the same gaze that had held me during the night behind the generators, the night before she’d disappeared. But her skin was pale. Sores wept in dozens of places. Then everything familiar was lost. Her head had been shaved and she now wore a dark metal cap from which an arm-thick cable extended into the black box. Then there were the tubes. I wished I could rip every one of them free and jam them up Mr. Pink’s ass.

I sat at the regimental commander’s conference table along with Ohirra, two other intelligence officers, Mr. Pink, a bald, thin man who stared daggers at everyone, and a pudgy guy who looked like he could have been a math teacher back when we had such things. I held a Styrofoam cup of coffee and blew on it. As it cooled, I glanced around the room. It had never been changed after the alien invasion.

Fort Irwin had been the home of the National Training Center, a facility for brigade-on-brigade combat training. This could mean as many as eight thousand combatants maneuvering against each other, which required an incredible amount of space. The aptly named Death Valley was so hot and desolate that almost no one wanted to live there. With more than 900,000 square miles of training ground, NTC had more than enough space for armies to train effectively. The wall still held pictures of various battles, old commanders, and aerial views of the area. A flag of the storied 11
^th
Armored Cavalry Regiment—a shield with a horse rampant across a diagonally-divided field of red and white—stood framed alongside them. To think that a unit that fought in the Philippine-American War, the Mexico Expedition of 1916, World War II, Vietnam,
and
Iraq, was decimated by the Cray and had ceased to exist; it would be staggering had I not also realized that the same could be said for each of the countries I’d mentioned. The world had forever changed, and like it or not, OMBRA was as much a country as it was a company.

A man wearing a lab coat and a NY Yankees baseball cap rushed into the room, setting a clipboard down at the other end of the table and taking a seat. “Sorry I’m late.”

Mr. Pink nodded perfunctorily. “Okay, we’re all here. Everyone introduce yourselves. My name is Wilson.” He glanced at me. “I’m the OMBRA commander here at Special Operations Headquarters North America.”

Ohirra introduced herself.

So did the two guys sitting next to her, who turned out to be Lieutenant Rosamilla and Lieutenant Reed—both intel types.

The bald guy’s name was Drake; whether that was his first or last name, I had no idea. He was OMBRA’s special security liaison and probably specialized in stabbing people in the back.

The guy who looked like a math teacher was Dr. Norman Dupree and was apparently an ethnobotanist. His voice and demeanor were more like a roughneck than a scientist, though. Could just be his southern drawl, but the way he held his shoulders and hands told me that he could probably hold his own in a fight.

Interesting.

Then came Mr. Malrimple. He was OMBRA Special Operations Chief of Science. He spoke fast, used few words, and was very New York in the abruptness of his actions.

Finally it was my turn. “We’ve all spoken about Master Sergeant Ben Mason. Most of you have seen his file. Although not everyone agrees with my decision,” Mr. Pink said, glancing at Drake, “it’s mine nonetheless. So now that everyone knows the players, let me explain the game.” He turned to me. “This is all for you, Mason, so don’t fall asleep.”

I held up my coffee and smiled.
Jerk.

“Lt. Ohirra, let’s do big picture. Brief Mason on current Blue Force Order of Battle.”

She nodded to Reed, who pulled out a map and spread it on the table. It was the world—Mercator projection—with annotated markings.

She pointed to our location to orient me. “This is where we are. OMBRA has a North American HQ in Buffalo, New York. The rest of the country is red.”

Red meant enemy forces. Blue meant good. By the looks of it, we had a fingernail hold on the country.

“The good news is that we now know how to effectively use light against the Cray. NAHQ plans are to retake New England, then Pennsylvania, then New Jersey, then New York.”

I nodded only because I couldn’t yawn. “Sounds like a great plan.”

“European command is in Bruges, Belgium. African command is at the Kilimanjaro Complex. Same place we fought, but you wouldn’t believe the upgrades it has now. We have Mediterranean Special Operations HQ in the White Mountains of Crete.”

She stood back and I noticed that most of Asia was purple, India was yellow, and Australia was gray. I asked about them.

“OMBRA has no visibility in these areas,” Mr. Pink said. “Prior to the alien invasion, we warned the governments of every country we could what was going to happen. Most of the countries didn’t believe us, but a few did. Sri Lanka has the Clarke Holding Company, named after famed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke. They’re much like OMBRA, but one-tenth our size. Still, we passed information to them, in the hopes that they’ll tell us what’s going on in Australia.”

“We have no information at all about them?”

“None. Asia is another thing all together. China has an organization three times the size of OMBRA called Shìjiè Xῑn Zhìxù, which means ‘New World Order.’” He shook his head. “At this point they are tight-lipped, unwilling to work with us, and evidentially don’t want to be friends.”

I grinned a little too maniacally. “That’s a shame. You guys at OMBRA are such nice guys. Too bad no one is left to pay your extortion money.”

Mr. Pink rolled his eyes.

Drake jumped in. “Politeness is next to Godliness, just as pain is next to my fist, young man.”

I couldn’t tell if he was kidding or not, but I was struck enough by the odd childish threat to shut up.

Mr. Pink gestured to Malrimple.

He glanced at me, but when he spoke, it was to his hands, clasped on the table. “Fauna. So far two distinct alien species have been identified—the Sirens and the Cray. These seem to be pre-invasion species designed to do what they did... reinvent the Dark Ages. There have been reports of something gigantic in the oceans, bigger than whales, purposes unknown. No further information. There are also reports of abnormal human activity in urban areas. Also NFI.” He glanced at me to see if I was paying attention, then returned his gaze to his hands. “My climatologist has also indicated that in the last six months, the Earth has warmed by three degrees. Ham radio operators have reported sea rise by ten feet in Florida, Oregon, California, and South America, which suggests the ice caps are melting. There are also reports of fast growing flora in urban areas.”

“Thank you, Malrimple.”