[The Fear Saga 01] - Fear the Sky (2014) (67 page)

Lana frowned. It was yet another sign of how deep the counter-conspiracy went, but it was also all the more reason for her to upgrade her activities on the ground.

She reached the first submarine’s gangplank and stepped up onto the ship’s smooth black deck. Of the fourteen Ohio Class nuclear-armed submarines in the fleet, seven of them were maintained and deployed out of King’s Bay, with five at sea at any one time. That left two in harbor for maintenance and the mandatory rest period that the crew got between eighteen-month deployments. The Minnesota and Arkansas were in dock at this time, but their normally relaxed refit and resupply schedule had been stepped up because of the unprecedented events of the last two days. With the crews rapidly preparing for sea, Lana was able to slip aboard with little more than a cursory glance at her very real access badge.

She didn’t stay for long. She was only going to leave a small device in each. It looked so innocent, she thought. But where she planned to leave it would hopefully prove devastating. The devices in question were the same white phosphorus disks that Agent John Hunt had used to disable the HMS
Dauntless
a year ago. Back then, the disk had proved relatively harmless against the steel of the driveshaft, but inside the chemical boosters of one of the twenty-four behemoth ballistic missiles that each submarine carried, it would be the fuse for a titanic explosion. Igniting the missile’s chemical fuel inside the confines of the ship would be like throwing a grenade into a fuel tank, and Lana relished the image of the damage it would do.

Thirty minutes later, as she finished planting the second disk deep within the second submarine in dock, she climbed back out of the long thin vessel. In just half an hour, she had effectively disabled two of America’s fourteen nuclear submarines. When she was ready, she would have the satellites send the kill command to the disks using their large subspace tweeters. The signal would find them wherever they were and the submarines would be destroyed. She should have started doing this a long time ago, she thought as she stepped back down to the jetty. By now she could have set charges on over half of the Atlantic fleet. Admittedly, that was only one part of the United States’ vast nuclear capability, but it was still something. She was bored with this covert tiptoeing. With the satellites under attack, it was time to start fighting in earnest.

Suddenly she stopped in her tracks. Something was awry. It had been thirty minutes since she had entered the base and her charges were now set. It was extremely unlikely that they would ever be found by anyone, they were simply too small and appeared too innocuous. But now something else was happening. The satellites were worried, something was very, very wrong. Her eyes glazed over as she communed with them, seeing with their eyes, their machine thoughts melding with her own.

Just as the missiles fired by the
Dauntless
had proved more resistant than the AI had anticipated, something now seemed to be wrong with the second phalanx of missiles launched at the other two as well. After they had finished destroying all of the initial kinetic missiles, they had begun to focus on the fewer but larger tactical explosive missiles behind them. But the second wave was proving just as resistant as the javelins the
Dauntless
had thrown. With cold-hearted precision, the calculations changed. Predictions were reevaluated.

The whole world of Agent Lana Wilson had revolved around the capabilities and information the satellites had given her. Because of them she saw the world with omniscient eyes. She had been able to see around corners. She had been able to see the movements of her colleagues and her prey. She had been able to read any e-mail, access any file. The thought of losing these abilities disturbed her on a fundamental level.

It was painfully clear now that there was a pervasive counter-conspiracy in place and she knew that she needed to find these conspirators and make them pay. She would start with Neal Danielson and Madeline Cavanagh, she thought. To think that she had talked to that petulant little bitch Madeline and then let her go. She had listened to the whining of the Council and allowed herself to be duped by the machinations of the traitors that must have infiltrated it.

Most notably, John Hunt, that Nomadi shit. Yes, I know who you are, you lying bastard. You fucking snake. I’m going to kill everyone you ever spoke to on this god-forsaken planet. And then, when our glorious Armada arrives here to wipe this planet clean, I’m going to send a message back to Mobilius and see to it that every member of your family is raped and butchered. You bastard in your shroud, John Hunt, now I only hope I find you before the Armada gets here so I can kill you myself. So I can rip you apart with my bare hands. And once I have torn your limbs from your machine body, I will stake what’s left of you to the ground and make you watch as I wipe this pathetic race from the face of this planet. I’ll make you watch as I make it my planet, traitor. My own, personal, fucking world.

As these thoughts coursed through her, she considered the charges she had just placed. The thought of losing the satellites was like contemplating an amputated limb, but she had to be practical. If they were gone, they would not be able to detonate the disks remotely. Changing her plan slightly, she activated a link to the two disks, setting a two-week timer on each of them. Good. The submarines should be at sea by then, fully submerged and en route to whichever station they were assigned to. The charges would go off while the ship was deep undersea and with any luck they would kill everyone aboard.

Now, what to do next. She walked away from the gangplank along the concrete jetty and headed for the exit. But something else was amiss. Where was everybody? The jetty had been a hive of activity only fifteen minutes beforehand when she had boarded. Where was everybody now? No doubt they were all looking at the death throes of her satellite guardians. Yes, she thought, they must be outside.

But something in her told her that could not be right. Surely all of them wouldn’t have left their posts. Without breaking stride, she pulled a pair of sunglasses from her top pocket and put them on, deploying her weapons system from behind her left eye as she did so.

As she exited the big shed to the quad outside, she paused. What the hell was this? The quad was deserted. But arranged in a wide semi-circle around the door were twenty-six men in full combat armor. Her tactical computer scanned the area and assessed the threat. Four of the soldiers were lying prone on the ground behind M249 tripod-mounted machine guns. The rest were carrying CAR-15 commando assault rifles. All of them were focused on her.

A voice rang out from one of the commandos, “We have you surrounded. We have orders to shoot you if you do not comply with our demands. Lana Wilson, you are to lie down and spread your arms out. We will secure your limbs and you will be transported to a secure facility for questioning. You have been under surveillance for some time now. You cannot escape. We know who you are.”

She looked at them. Machine guns? They wanted to take her down with machine guns? So her cover was blown. Of course it was. John Hunt must have supplied it to them. So, you think you know who I am, do you? OK, let’s see.

Her machine mind was already calculating her tactical options. As she contemplated her response, it was arranging its recommendations into escape and evacuation, or E&E options, and Stand and Fight options. Like she was going to flee these children. Dismissing the E&E list, she looked at her Stand and Fight options, noting the computer’s analysis of the weapons ranged against her. The CAR-15 rifles fired at a rate of seven hundred rounds per minute and carried thirty rounds in a cartridge. No doubt they would fire in two teams, one half of the twenty-two soldiers waiting till the first had exhausted their cartridges before firing, allowing the first group to reload while maintaining a constant rate of fire. That was what she would do.

Assuming these were trained Navy Seal troops, as they clearly appeared to be, she should expect a high hit rate from each of them. That meant that she should anticipate being hit by an estimated 128 rounds in the first second. OK. She could take that. She should assume they would be using armor piercing rounds, but they didn’t know the kind of armor they were dealing with here. Her tactical analysis continued on to the four prone men with their belt-fed machine guns. The M249 fired one thousand rounds per minute, and unlike the assault rifles, they could fire continuously. At a glance, the belts they had strung were two to three hundred rounds long … each. They also had a higher caliber and higher muzzle velocity than the CAR-15. They would come at her at around 915 meters per second. Those would hurt. Combined with the assault rifles, that would mean she would be facing around 180 bullets per second.

Half a second had passed since the ultimatum. It was more than she had needed. She selected her response, locked in the attack protocol and initiated, telling her machine mind to select its targets automatically.

The automaton that controlled her body took over. Wide beam flash laser first: blind assailants. Bang, bang, bang. The machine mind turned her head, spreading her white hot laser flashes in a wide coverage arc. Not hesitating a moment, it then focused the laser’s beam and ramped up the power, simultaneously initiating her sonic punch. Starting with the machine gunner lying where her head was already facing, she braced her stance and fired, blanketing the prone man with blistering heat and a powerful shockwave. The unfortunate man and the two men holding assault rifles either side of him were thrown back, their faces ablaze with laser heat, all of them dead before their bodies came to a halt, but as she annihilated the first machine gunner, the others opened fire. They had not been totally unprepared, it turned out. They were wearing heavily polarized goggles to protect them from the flash beam.

Twenty assault rifles and three machine guns roared at her, and a wall of lead rammed her against the shed behind her. Lana was stunned as the bullets hacked at her torso and upper legs. As she hit the wall of the shed, the fire continued, thudding into her like hail into a sandbag. Though the bullets were not doing her significant damage, the rate of fire was massive and unrelenting, and she flailed under the blows, trying to bring her weapons systems to bear on the remaining attackers. After two seconds, she had been hit by over three hundred rounds, each travelling at over a thousand miles per hour. Her human clothes were shredded. Her human analog hair blasted from her head as she raged against the punishing blows.

Her reactions were absolutely perfect though, information cruised through optic fibers in her body at the speed of light as she used all her phenomenal muscle power to focus her weapons on another of the big machine guns. As the first wave of the assault rifle team exhausted their magazines, the rate slowed almost imperceptibly before the second wave took up the slack. But in the millisecond gap, she was able to get her head round, and as her vision blurred across one of the remaining M249s, she fired immediately, blasting the placement and killing the gunner and three other seals standing near him.

Two of the big guns left, she thought. Now the fire was noticeably lower than before, but the pounding abuse was starting to fray and tear at her compound skin. They were getting to her. Five hundred rounds of armor-piercing lead, each round igniting as it hit her skin. The few bullets that either just missed her or careened off her toughened shell slammed into the shed wall behind her. From the other side of the wall, her crouching silhouette could clearly be seen against the armored plate where she was pinned. With the massive rate of fire, they were starting to hit the same exact spots on her body two, three times in a second, and even her resilient armor was not able to recover in time. She screamed inside at the flood of machine pain.

Bucking under the blows, her mind was registering each and every hit, and updating her on her status. Fucking gnats! Fucking mosquitoes! I’ll kill you all, you fucking bugs! Beneath her woven skin, a layer of black superconducting shielding was starting to show.

In her mind, a portion of her anger was saved for herself. When the blinding flash beam had failed, she should have immediately changed tactics, she thought. But she turned her fury at her own complacency on her attackers and screamed, then selected another tactical option. Instantly her legs braced and launched her on a high-arching trajectory. The fire immediately subsided as the gunners’ target suddenly went airborne. The highly trained seals instinctively kept their guns on her as she jumped, but the machine guns were tripod mounted, and it would take precious moments to point them skyward. Even the few rounds still hitting her were enough to throw her body back as she flew, but she had accounted for this in her calculations, and her sharp angle still had her coming up in an arc to land amongst the line of seals still firing at her.

Then a wholly different round hit her.

Her machine mind informed her instantly, flagging the round that had just slammed into her chest, even as the impact stopped her in midair. At four thousand miles per hour, that last shot had been vastly higher in power than the others. Then another hit her from a slightly different angle and she slammed back to the ground not five feet from where she had jumped from.

SHIT FUCK ASSHOLE MOTHERFUCKERS. They had her pinned by snipers as well. At least two .50 caliber, rail-mounted guns were targeting her position, her machine mind informed her. It was already calculating their positions from the angles of impact and it would have them in a moment. As if to help her calculation, two more rounds careened into her, and, along with the resumed fire from the two machine gunners prone on the ground, the blows sent her body rolling and sliding along the concrete quad floor back up to the wall she had been pinned against only three seconds ago.

FUCKING BASTARDS! she screamed in her head. She was losing. Soon they would have stripped through her outer skin to the superconductor shielding beneath. They couldn’t keep this fire up forever, but with the snipers now bringing much higher power, higher caliber rounds to bear, she was in serious trouble. She called out to the satellite above her. It was furiously attempting to take out the missiles that were closing in on it, and its outlook was looking ever bleaker than hers. The missiles were not coming down as they should, it reported to Lana and the others, the secondary barrage was shielded somehow, and they were getting close. Too close.