Extinction

-11-

In the morning, I was awakened by Sandra’s touch. I startled, and grabbed her wrist with automatic, heartless speed.

“Ow!” she complained.

“I’m sorry,” I said, releasing her. “I guess you surprised me.”

She rubbed her wrist and her features smoothed out. “That was a bad idea. At least it’s not broken.”

I gently touched her fingers, and she pouted at first, but let me kiss them lightly. She offered me a can of something. It was stew meat, or something like it. I took it and ate the stuff cold.

“We have fake orange juice or fake coffee to go with that,” she said.

“Give me both,” I said.

I ate and looked out the window of Shed Thirty-Six. This unit had been giving us problems. Something had jammed in the factory’s craw when it tried to digest its previous project for raw materials. I must have fallen asleep trying to fix it.

“We made it to morning, at least,” said Sandra.

“How are the turrets?” I asked.

“We’ve got two operational. The third will come up soon. Major Robinson has been asking for you, but I told him you needed a few hours sleep.”

I looked at her, uncertain if she were a danger to military discipline or a godsend. She was a little of both, I supposed. It certainly wasn’t standard operating procedure to have the commander’s girlfriend chasing off his second-in-command. However, we were anything but a standard military, and she had a point. I had needed rest.

“I’ll go get him while you wake up,” she said.

“I don’t want you wandering around the base. There could still be snipers around.”

“I don’t think they would be gunning for me.”

“Probably not, but stay on station inside Fourteen, okay?”

She put her hands on her hips. “After I opened that can of cat food for you to eat and everything? This is the thanks I get?”

“You don’t make the most obedient of soldiers, Sandra.”

“I hope to hell I never do,” she said and left, swinging her hips.

I smirked after her. I hoped she would never change. The door creaked open a few minutes later. I didn’t look around. I was busy tapping on the same tablet I’d lifted from the operator of Unit Fourteen yesterday. I had to work out the maximum number of ships I could produce from the supplies I had left. I figured three turrets were enough for now to defend the base. We needed mobile forces to push them off the island. An exhibition of force was required to get them to take us seriously again.

“Robinson?” I said, “tell me about the turrets.”

Major Robinson cleared his throat. When he spoke, I heard a little slur to his speech, as if he had had a stroke or something. I supposed his cheek hadn’t completely healed over yet. “We’ve got another problem, sir,” he said.

I turned around and got my biggest surprise of the day. Leaning in over Robinson’s shoulder was a smiling face. I knew that face. It was Admiral Jack Crow.

My mouth sagged open. “Crow?”

“The same, mate!” he said, grinning. His teeth were big, white and square. His blue eyes glowed beside his hawk-nose.

I stared at him for a second, blinking.

“Thought I was out of the picture, did you?” he said, clearly enjoying my shock. “Well, anyone will tell you an old Crow doesn’t die easily. I may be even harder to kill than the famous Kyle Riggs.”

“Colonel,” interrupted Robinson, eyeing us both uneasily. I’m sure he wasn’t quite sure who he was supposed to take orders from at this point. “There’s something I need to show you out here.”

I stepped out into the sunlight, and got a second shock. Men were streaming into camp. Unlike Crow, most of them were armed. They were my marines. Nearly two full companies of them.

“Are these the men Barrera told me he sent?” I asked.

“The same, mate,” said Crow from close behind me. He’d followed us out to gloat. Somehow, having Crow at my back made my skin crawl. I didn’t turn around, though. I didn’t want to look worried.

“Thanks for bringing them in, Crow. You’ve done better than I could have hoped.”

The men all stared at one another and Crow and I. It had to be hard for them. I was the hero, but Crow had always been the superior officer. I’m sure they felt divided loyalties. With such a small, half-broken organization, it was dangerous to have anyone feeling uncertain. I felt, suddenly, like a member of some rebel camp hiding in the jungles of a banana republic. All I needed was a beret and a cigar.

“Perhaps we should talk privately?” suggested Crow, still standing behind me.

I nodded. I tossed my head in the direction of Unit Fourteen. What had once been a shed had transformed into a metallic anthill. The turret on top swiveled in twitches and jerks as the brainbox reacted to stimuli.

I walked to Unit Fourteen. Crow followed me. I never looked at him. I knew that every eye in the camp watched us. I knew that I couldn’t show any fear, or dismay. But I was feeling dismayed all right. Somehow, I’d figured I was in charge of this outfit, or what was left of it, and I had been left with no real rivals for power. It wasn’t that I was power-mad, mind you. It wasn’t even that I disliked Crow all that much. But somehow, other people in any power structure tended to get in my way.

As we reached the base of the shining conical tower, Crow whistled with admiration. “This is your work, isn’t it, Riggs? I’m constantly amazed by the things you manage to come up with. Scared the shit out of the dirtsiders, I bet.”

“It did indeed.”

“Why does this thing keep shivering and moving around?” he asked, pointing up at the projector, which was tracking something. I didn’t know what.

“It might be sensing distant aircraft,” I suggested.

“Or, it might be tracking a flock of storks, right?” asked Crow.

“If they so much as crap on this facility, this baby will toast them.”

Crow nodded and ran his hand over the smooth metal admiringly. “Yes. I have no doubt of that. I like these things you’ve made for me, Kyle. They remind me of Snapper. I miss her. Do you miss Alamo?”

“I haven’t had time to miss her, really,” I said. I rapped out my code on the door. The door dissolved open.

Crow recognized the code and laughed. “High security, eh, mate?

I gave him a wintery smile and gestured for us to go inside. He followed me.

The second I stepped inside and the door sealed itself behind us, I knew something was wrong. I began to turn, to raise my arms.

I caught a glimpse of Crow behind me. He had his fists balled up around something, a rock? I couldn’t tell. His eyes were bulging with effort, they were half-mad. I realized vaguely this must have been the face he’d worn when he’d killed people aboard the Snapper.

Truthfully, I wasn’t all that worried. He was older and in worse shape than I was. Much more importantly, he’d never been nanotized. What did I have to worry about? My biggest concern was not to accidently hurt the crazy old codger.

His balled fists came down on my temple, and I felt shocked. Not just from the power of the blow, but the speed of it. How could he?

A purple explosion went off in my brain and I went down. I rolled away from him, struggled to spring up again.

He was on me in an instant. I saw what he had in his hands now. They were big, round steel balls. Ball bearings? Something like that. He’d picked them up somewhere and had kept them in his pockets. Now, he was beating the crap out of me with them. The skin on his knuckles opened up. The skin split over the bone. I saw metal in there. Then I knew.

Training saved me. I was on my back, but I managed to yank my knees up to my chest and piston them into his body. He flew away from me like a toy tossed by a child. He crashed against the far wall, bounced off and came back at me.

By that time, however, I had gotten to my feet again. My face was a patchwork of dented flesh by then, I knew. He had hammered me in the head a half-dozen times. I was woozy, but I didn’t let on.

I grinned at him with blood outlining each white tooth. My hand were up, but I waved him forward with a flick of my fingers.

“Always wanted to take a few pokes at you, old man,” I said. I did my best to sound excited, feral—confident.

It worked. He hesitated. His face registered surprise. We circled, kicking chairs out of the way when they came near. He threw a punch or two, but I slapped them away. We were both breathing hard. Each second that passed my head cleared. I needed a break badly.

“You thought I was out of the picture, didn’t you Riggs?” Crow asked.

I nodded. “My bad. The second ship,” I said, pointing at him. “You were on it. What did you tell the Snapper to get the Nanos to let you go?”

Crow didn’t answer. Maybe he’d figured out I was stalling. He came at me, throwing roundhouse swings. I caught one with my shoulder, another with my ear. The one in the ear really hurt. I threw one uppercut into his chin that must have rattled his brains. It would have broken the jaw of a normal man.

We clinched up and wrestled for a minute, then pushed off each other again. Crow had a heavier build than I did, and I could tell he’d been in brawls before. But he was older and hadn’t had much time to adjust to being full of nanites. At first, it threw a man off, like steering a new car.

“So, what’s this all about?” I asked. “Do I owe you twenty bucks?”

Crow snorted. Blood fired out onto the floor when he did so.

“You cocked-up everything, that’s what you did.”

I gave a small shrug. “Like what?”

“Like what?” he screamed suddenly, disbelievingly. “Kyle, I flew seven hundred ships at the Macros. I left this world behind with thousands of followers and billions in cash. We met the enemy, ran them off, and somehow a few hours later I found my fleet disbanded. I couldn’t even talk to them. I finally talked the Snapper into returning, and what do I find? You had dismantled my organization, pissed off every power on the planet and setup for a last stand out here in the woods.”

I took a deep breath. I straightened up. “You’ve got a point there,” I said.

“Oh, so you admit it?”

“Yeah. I can see it from your point of view. Too bad it has to end like this, though. We had a great partnership.”

He looked troubled at that. He nodded. “You were my best man. But I was almost an Emperor. Do you realize that?”

I blinked at him. At this point, we’d stopped circling and stood a safe distance from each other, watching one another warily. “Is that what you wanted? Really?”

“I don’t know,” he said. He rubbed his chin. “That uppercut hurt.”

“Tell me about it,” I said, taking a second to run my fingers gingerly over my own face. There were new lumps and the skin had split at the seams.

He heaved a sigh. “Okay. Okay, I’m the bigger man here. I’m going to say it first.”

I looked at him expectantly.

“I’m sorry for hitting you. I just lost my cool. I’ve been losing it ever since I got my ship to unload me here and then she took off.”

“How’d you manage to get back to Earth?” I asked.

“Are we talking or fighting?” he asked.

We stared at each other appraisingly for a few seconds. I decided to take a chance. “How about I buy you a drink and explain everything, Emperor?”

Slowly, with half his mouth, he smiled at me. The other half didn’t work right yet. He nodded slowly. “Right. Let’s do it.”

Crow dropped two round stones. He’d had one in each hand. They thumped loudly on the floor and rolled away. No wonder those fists had hurt so much. He stepped to the wall and rapped out a series of raps. It was my code. I wasn’t surprised he’d memorized it. The door dilated open and he waved for me to step ahead of him into the blinding sunlight.

“As an Emperor, you rank me,” I said. “You first.”

Crow grinned with the working half of his face and blood ran down his purpling chin. Metal gleamed inside, where the bone should have been.

Crow stepped out into the open and I followed him. I didn’t intend to let him get behind me again.