A Learning Experience

Chapter Ten

Montana, USA

“All right,” Steve said, as he strode into the starship’s makeshift CIC. “What do we have?”

“Nine helicopters,” Mongo said. “Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters, to be precise.”

Steve swore. Black Hawks had been designed for the military, but they were also used by both the FBI and the DHS. “They’ve found us.”

“They’ve found something, all right,” Kevin agreed. “I checked the records. They’re DHS helicopters.”

“Right,” Steve said. Clearly, operational secrecy had come to an end. Somehow — and they’d figure it out later — the DHS had cottoned on to something. There was no time to worry about it now. Instead, they had to get everyone out of the ranch and then prepare a reception. At least they had a rough contingency plan for discovery. “Send the emergency signal and recall everyone on the ranch, then prepare the combat team for deployment.”

He gritted his teeth. Abandoning the ranch would be the simplest solution, but it was part of his family’s history. He couldn’t let the DHS goons — or anyone — just take it from him, no matter the cost. And besides, he had heard more than enough horror stories about how the DHS treated veterans and their families. Giving them a taste of their own medicine would feel sweet.

Kevin looked up. “You do realise that whatever we do will almost certainly be noticed?”

Stuart nodded. He’d hoped for months, perhaps a year, before they were discovered, but it was clear that there had been a slip-up somewhere. One month… at least they were on their way to establishing Heinlein Colony and preparing plans for Mars and the asteroid belt. But it would ensure a rougher meeting with the federal government than he would have preferred.

Perhaps we should have gone ahead with the plan to introduce a fusion reactor, he thought, sourly. But there was no point in crying over spilt milk. Instead, it was time to mop it up.

“I’ll be taking the lead down there,” he said. The combat team needed to see him in command, just in case they had doubts about firing on fellow Americans. Sure, they were DHS stormtroopers, but that didn’t make them the enemy. “Maintain teleport locks on all of us. If things go badly wrong, yank us out of there.”

“Understood,” Mongo said. “And good luck.”

Steve nodded. They were going to need it. Not to dispose of the incoming helicopters — it would have been childishly simple to destroy them before their pilots knew they were under attack — but to push them back without actually killing anyone. Dead pilots and stormtroopers would make it harder for the government to come to terms with Steve and his buddies. They’d have to react harshly against such an overt challenge to their authority.

Shaking his head, he made his way to the teleport chamber. One way or another, the world was about to become very different.

Jürgen cursed under his breath as the helicopter rocketed southwards. He’d never been in a helicopter before and the experience was killing him, by inches. It didn’t help that the remainder of the team, men wearing black suits and carrying assault rifles, seemed to find his near-panic hilarious. Every few seconds, the plane rocked violently, stabilised and then rocked again. He was starting to wonder if the pilot was deliberately crashing them through the worst of the turbulence.

“Just hold on in there,” the NSA agent called. Despite sharing a flight, he still hadn’t shared his name. “We’re almost there.”

Jürgen nodded, keeping his eyes firmly closed. It made it easier, somehow, if he didn’t see the ground below the helicopter. Almost there? They’d been saying the same thing ever since they’d landed at the airfield they’d turned into a staging base and then transferred to the helicopters. He reached up and covered his eyes, adding to the darkness. Maybe that would make it easier still.

The helicopter rocked again, violently. “Whoops,” the pilot called, in a thick southern drawl. “Hit a nasty spot there!”

Jürgen silently cursed him to hell.

“All present and correct,” Edward Romford said.

Steve nodded, inspecting the first combat team. They were all veterans who had been repaired and rebuilt by the alien technology, then trained endlessly on captured alien weapons. There was still some roughness in how they acted, Steve saw, but they were getting there. It was just a shame they didn’t have many combat cyborgs or powered combat suits. The ones they did have were designed for creatures the size of preteen children. God alone knew what the Hordesmen had been doing with them.

“Try not to kill anyone,” he warned, once he’d finished his inspection. “You have your shield bracelets and teleport locks. If worst comes to worst, we will beam out and leave the bastards scratching their heads. Any questions?”

Romford smirked. “Phasers on stun?”

“Definitely,” Steve said, rolling his eyes. The alien stunners worked surprisingly well, although the results tended to vary. A strong man might be out for a few minutes, while a weaker man or a child might sleep for nearly an hour. He still wished he’d had them in Afghanistan, though. They could have stunned everyone and then sorted the innocent from the guilty afterwards. “We don’t want to kill anyone.”

He ran through the tactical situation as the helicopters came into view, their rotor blades chopping through the air. It looked as though they intended to try to hover over the ranch and rappel down to the ground, a tactic that did make a certain kind of sense if they expected a hot reception. Or, perhaps, they wanted to surround the ranch and then move in. It didn’t really matter, he told himself. They were in for a very rude surprise.

“Launch the screamers,” he ordered, quietly.

Jürgen heard the alarms as the helicopter shook, more violently than ever before. What was wrong? Even the strong men were starting to panic as the shaking grew worse, followed by a faint crackling sound that left the air feeling ionised. There was a series of loud bangs from underneath the helicopter, then she dropped like a stone.

“We’re going to have to make an emergency landing,” the pilot said. He no longer sounded amused by his own daring. Instead, he sounded almost fearful. “Brace for impact!”

“They’re all going down,” another voice said. It took Jürgen a moment to place it as the team’s commander, a smug man who’d laughed while Jürgen had been trying not to be sick. “Every last helicopter is going down…”

The noise of the craft’s engines grew louder, then stopped. Seconds later, there was a thunderous crash as they hit the ground. Jürgen’s eyes snapped open, revealing two of the stormtroopers forcing open the hatch and jumping out of the craft. The agent caught his arm and dragged him forward, practically throwing him after the stormtroopers. He landed badly, but there was no time to hesitate. The entire craft might be about to catch fire and explode.

“My God,” the agent said. “What happened?”

Jürgen followed his gaze. All nine helicopters had crash-landed, their passengers spilling out onto the grassy field. Some of them were smoking slightly, their pilots ordering the men to run for their lives. Others seemed almost intact, utterly undamaged. It was impossible to tell what had happened to them. There had been no reason for all nine helicopters to suffer the same fault at the same time.

“I don’t know,” he answered. But he thought about the dongles and wondered, grimly, just what else might have been invented in secret. Something to take down helicopters? “I…”

“ATTENTION,” a voice boomed. Jürgen turned to see five men standing on a grassy knoll, holding unfamiliar-looking weapons in their hands. “Discard all weapons, then proceed away from the helicopters into the field behind you. I say again, discard all weapons and then proceed into the field behind you. Resistance will not be tolerated.”

The team’s commander purpled rapidly. “You are under arrest,” he shouted, lifting his rifle. “Put down your guns and surrender, you…”

“Discard all weapons and proceed into the field behind you,” the speaker repeated. “There will be no further warnings.”

“No,” the commander said. He lifted his rifle and fired, once. The bullet glanced off the speaker in a flash of blue light and vanished somewhere in the distance. “I…”

The speaker returned fire. There was a flash of blue-red light and the commander dropped to the ground like a puppet whose strings had been cut. Jürgen stared, then leaned forward to examine the body. As far as he could tell, the man had simply been knocked out. There were certainly no physical wounds. Moments later, the speaker lifted his weapon and discharged a brighter shot into the ground in front of the DHS team. There was a colossal explosion, which cleared rapidly to reveal a small crater, smoking like a volcano. Jürgen gulped — just what the hell had they stumbled into? — and then obeyed orders. The rest of the team discarded their weapons and followed Jürgen into the next field.

“Pussies,” Romford sneered. “Big and tough when it comes to picking on unarmed men and women, but useless when their target fights back.”

Steve privately agreed. In his view, the view he’d been taught by his parents, the truly brave men went into the infantry, where they matched themselves against the enemy infantry. It was true that policemen were brave too, but it wasn’t the same. And the sort of people who would crash in like stormtroopers when they thought they had a cause weren’t worthy of any respect at all.

“Keep them covered,” he ordered. The DHS team looked thoroughly cowed, but appearances could be deceiving. Steve had seen prisoners move from cooperative to riotous within seconds in Afghanistan. “Secure their weapons, then find out who’s in charge of this bunch of monkeys.”

He examined the stormtroopers as his men moved to obey. They looked professional, too professional. Steve doubted his Marine platoon had looked anything like as good while they’d been in service, except perhaps when they’d been on parade. But, as Steve had been taught more than once, it was possible to look good or to be good. Few units managed both at once.

Perhaps we should have let them rappel down to the ground, he thought, snidely. We could have seen just how well they fucked it up.

He shook his head. There was no time for delay. The helicopters might not have managed to get off a distress signal before the screamers brought them down, but someone might well have noticed that all nine transponders had vanished. These weren’t the lax pre-9/11 days. The vanished transponders would bring some sort of reaction, probably fighter jets intent on searching for prospective terrorists. And they would probably have some ground forces in the area too. Steve had done the same in Afghanistan.

Romford returned, marching a pair of men ahead of him. Neither of them looked particularly professional; one was clearly an analyst, while the other was a Washington suit. Steve saw the simmering anger, mixed with shock and terror, in the latter’s eyes and smiled inwardly. A shocked man was a man who could be drained of information, then used as a messenger.

“Good afternoon,” he said, with mock politeness. “And who do I have the pleasure of addressing?”

The Washington man swallowed, then looked down at the grass. “Cyril Dorsey,” he said reluctantly. The man beside him let out a sound that sounded like a choked-off giggle. “I’m from the NSA.”

Steve lifted his eyebrows. “The NSA?”

“Yes,” Dorsey said. He railed, either through grim determination or through a sudden awareness of his companion’s amusement. “And you are in a boatload of trouble.”

“Try saying a shitload,” Steve advised. “It sounds so much more dramatic.”

He sighed, fighting down the temptation to start yelling at the damned bureaucrat. “What are you doing here?”

The analyst glared at him. “What are you doing with the veterans?”

Steve was momentarily nonplussed. The veterans? And then it clicked. Someone had noticed that a number of veterans were disappearing, then tracked it back to the ranch and realised that the trail ended there. Hell, he wouldn’t have given the NSA the time of day, but perhaps the analyst had good reason to be concerned about the veterans. For all he knew, they could have been sacrificed to the dark gods.

“The veterans are fine,” Steve assured him. He briefly considered introducing Romford, then decided against it. The veteran looked young enough to be his own son. “But you have trespassed on my property.”

“We have a search warrant,” Dorsey insisted. “And you attacked us!”

“Technically speaking, this is an embassy, which you attacked,” Steve said. Did it really count as an embassy if the host country didn’t know about it? But it didn’t matter. If nothing else, the mere suggestion that it was an embassy would cause no end of panic in the corridors of power. Storming a foreign embassy was pretty much an act of war. “However, we are prepared to forgive your trespass in exchange for a few minor considerations.”

Cyril Dorsey started to splutter again, his words tumbling over themselves so fast that Steve couldn’t even begin to follow them. Instead, he waited for the man to shut up and then continued.

“You will go back to your superiors and inform them that this ranch is an embassy of another power,” he said. “Furthermore, you will tell them that we expect a meeting with the President one week from today, at a location of his choosing. He may bring one companion to the meeting, if he wishes. Until then, this ranch is to remain isolated. If any federal elements are sighted within ten miles of the ranch, they will be fired on without further warning.”

“Now, look here, you son of a bitch,” Dorsey snapped. “You can’t make threats like that!”

“Oh, those poor bastards,” Steve said, looking over at the troopers. “What did they do to deserve having a fool like you in command?”

He looked back at Dorsey, dropping his facade of politeness. “Let me be clear on this, you fucking idiot,” he snapped. “You are massively outgunned and you and your men are at my mercy. And, as you proposed to raid, with live ammunition, a ranch that holds my wife, children and relatives, I am not feeling very damn merciful! You could have knocked on the damn door and asked about the vets!”

Resisting the temptation to shake the man, he instead leaned closer until their faces were almost touching. “You will go back to Washington and deliver the message I gave you,” he snapped. “And then you will resign, retire from federal work and go live somewhere else, somewhere where your stupidity won’t risk lives. Or I will fucking hunt you down and kill you!”

The man cringed back. Steve was unsurprised — and unimpressed. He’d met too many paper-pushers who had no real awareness of the world surrounding them. Washington produced the idiots by the bucket load, then put them in charge of making government policy actually work. They never seemed to realise that they could push people too far and that, one day, their house of cards would crumble into dust. Or that their mistakes could cost lives.

“There’s one thing I want you to see,” Steve said, very quietly. “Turn around.”

Dorsey obeyed. Steve smiled, then activated the interface and sent a single very specific command. For a long moment, nothing seemed to happen… and then a beam of red light struck down from high overhead, burning a hole into the ground. Dorsey let out a strangled cry as the ground shook, almost toppling over in horror, just before the beam snapped back out of existence, leaving a glowing crater. It was far worse, Steve knew, than the smaller weapon he’d used to make his earlier point. And it would be visible on every observation satellite in position to see it. Maybe Washington wouldn’t believe Dorsey’s tale, but they’d believe the satellites.

“Strip,” Steve ordered. He raised his voice, addressing the rest of the assault team. “All of you. Strip.”

He waited until the team was naked, then pointed towards the road leading down to the nearest town. Naked as they were, it was quite possible that the team would be arrested for indecent exposure. By the time they managed to convince the local police of who they were — or make a phone call to Washington — they would have undergone one hell of a lot of humiliation. Steve felt a moment of grim satisfaction — he hated the regular humiliations at the hands of government bureaucracy — then turned his attention back to Dorsey. Somewhat to his surprise, the man had remained on his feet.

“Remember the message,” Steve said. He reached into his pocket and produced a business card. “You can call me on that number, when you’re ready to let me know where you want to meet. Anywhere will do.”

He paused, significantly. “And remember what I said about any federal forces near the ranch. Go.”

The men fled. Steve took a look at the helicopters, then silently marked them for disassembly and conversion into something Heinlein Colony could use. If nothing else, now the secret was out, they could order whatever they wanted openly. But recruitment was going to be far harder in future. The government would try to slip a few of its own agents into the system.

“You could have handled it better,” Kevin said, though the communicator. The intelligence agent sounded doubtful. In his world, there was no such thing as a dead enemy. “They’re going to be pissed.”

“It had to be done,” Steve said, shortly. There was no way he would have passed up on the chance to humiliate the bureaucrats. “Washington is like a bull. Sometimes you have to hit the bastard in the nose just to make it pay attention.”

“Yeah,” Kevin said. “And how many idiots who try that get gored by an angry bull?”