Bridgehead: Invasion Earth (Book Book 2) Page 4

  "He was all about orders too."

  "You were on Mars?" Babe couldn't keep the skepticism out of his voice.

  "We were," a second voice added and stepped into the light.

  "Now I like me some big tall tales," said Lt. "My momma told me all about Pecos Bill growing up, and the Arkansas Traveler. But two war torn veterans that happen to be in the same spot and saying the same thing. I have a birthday, boys, but I wasn't born yesterday."

  The pretty one laughed, his gray blond hair flopping around his too skinny face.

  Now Lt could see the second man as he shifted forward into the light. Younger than the other by at least a decade, maybe more. The left side of his face and head burned, scarred. His eyes looked haunted instead of happy.

  Lt figured the injury would make him so.

  "We pulled them from the crash," said Holcomb. "They almost didn't make it."

  "Three years ago," said the older man. "Mars fell, the last outpost overrun. I think the Lick were on their way here even then. We stole a ship, one of our cargo transports. I thought he knew how to drive."

  "I told you, I'm a fighter, not a pilot."

  "Not too good at either, were you?" the laughing man said. They could tell it was a joke with the way they teased each other.

  "You're the Kid?" he turned to Lt.

  "Don't call me that," said Bonney. "Lt will do."

  "Lt," the blue eyes travelled over the suits the squad was wearing. "That's first gen tech you're wearing."

  His pink tongue worked the corners of his mouth, as he studied the suits.

  "The Lick's destroyed all the labs, we thought."

  "Yeah, we thought too. Turns out, we got us a Doc who survived and he knew where one was."

  "You have a doctor," said Holcomb. "We have sick he can help."

  "Ain't that kind of Doc," said Lt.

  "He's a Pede," Babe added.

  Weber limped closer, ran his finger along the shoulder and arm of Lt's suit.

  "The first gen had a bug," he said. "We had to work it out in the field. Your targeting software get glitchy?"

  The men around Lt nodded.

  "We just flip up the mask and eyeball it."

  Weber grinned over his shoulder at Renard.

  "Why didn't we think of that."

  "Explosive decompression."

  "Oh yeah," Weber still grinning. "Guess that's not so important down here."

  He circled the squad, his eyes travelling up and down the armor. He stopped beside Waldo and held out his hands.

  "Can I check your weapon?"

  Waldo gulped and stared at Lt. Bonney gave a fractional nod, and Waldo passed over his blaster.

  Weber hefted it in his hands, the grip and barrel nested into his palms like they were custom fitted. He sighted along the top and moved the weight with practiced ease as he aimed at something outside and beyond the wall, visible in his mind, or the ghost of enemies past.

  "Can we see the lab?" he asked in a voice Lt couldn't quite place, almost a tremble of fear, as if his request could be denied.

  But Lt needed to know. If these were real veterans of the Mars invasion, then maybe they could tell him something about fighting the Lick on earth.

  And if they knew secrets, or tactics then maybe he could kill more Licks.

  His burning desire. The thing that kept him awake at night. How to kill more. How to kill them all.

  "We have two more stops to make."

  "You can't travel," said Renard.

  Weber chuckled.

  "You're not the boss of me," he snickered and Renard gave him a tired half smile. Lt realized the muscles on the left side of his face might not work so well anymore.

  "He's my commander," Renard explained.

  "Even out of uniform," Babe asked.

  "Babe? You ain't gonna do what I say if I don't have a uniform on?" Lt busted him.

  Babe stuttered and looked around for help.

  "You're not in uniform right now, Lt. I was just- they're retired or-"

  "It's alright Babe," Lt said. "I figure if I say something worth doing, you’ll listen."

  "We're not retired," said Weber. "We were just MIA. Now you found us."

  Lt watched the two older men for a moment, considering the implications of escorting them through the woods.

  "Alright," he told them. "Ruck up. Don't fall behind."

  He left the two men to gather their gear and turned to Holcomb.

  "High Command’s gonna want to know your answer.”

  Holcomb stared at Lt with a blank expression on his tired face. The lines from worry had carved deep canyons in his skin, mountains of concern turned his shoulders into almost broken slopes.

  Staring at the suit, Holcomb stood a little straighter.

  It wasn’t much, not an iron rod of certainty, to be sure.

  “I suppose the time for hiding is over,” said Holcomb.

  “Some of us haven’t been hiding at all,” said Babe. “We’ve been taking the fight to them.”

  “We couldn’t afford the cost.”

  “We don’t have money either,” Babe snapped back.

  “He’s not talking about money, Doofus,” Oakley answered. “The cost in lives.”

  Lt nodded as he stared around the compound. The long low hutch was filled with faces, gritty, scared, orange in the flickering hearth fire that stretched through the middle of the communal room.

  These people had gone to ground, literally. The hutch was half buried in the side of a hill, camouflaged to be hidden from overhead patrols. They had burrowed into the earth to hide from the invaders, intent only on survival.

  Lt wondered what that had cost them.

  Not just in terms of manpower, and bodies, but in spirit.

  He wasn’t much of a student of history, hell, school seemed like a long lifetime ago before the Lick even came.

  But he knew history was peppered with people willing to fight. Willing to revolt against aggressors, willing to stand up for something.

  Freedom, he called it, though it went by a few names.

  It was a concept, some would say even a myth. He remembered the government’s power over the media before the invasion, the way groups of people could control others with commercials and editorial pieces. Hell, even the news, which was supposed to be unbiased, turned out to have an agenda.

  All of it was gone now, supplanted by one need. Survival.

  But the Lick wasn’t going to let them survive.

  The Lick wanted them dead, and his home planet all to themselves.

  Freedom meant not letting that happen.

  Lt stared into the flames, mesmerized by the way it made shadows dance across the faces of the people staring at him in the suit. Darkness and light, flickering movement.

  They had spent too long in the darkness. Three years.

  Now it was time to show them the light and lead them out in it.

  Drag them if he had too.

  It was the only way humanity could survive.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jake stared at Renard across a campfire in a clearing. Babe and Waldo stood sentry beyond the meager light cast by the fire as Oakley tended the rabbit on a spit.

  “You keep staring at me like that and I’ll think you fancy me,” said Renard.

  Half of his face looked youthful, smooth lines not yet gone to wrinkle. The other half was healed scars, burned tissue from the top of his cheek and back. It tugged at the corner of his mouth and gave the eye on that side a droopy look, despite the sparkle hidden behind.

  “You were on Mars?” Jake asked.

  “I was.”

  “They sent prisoners to Mars,” said the boy. “That’s why we lost.”

  Weber resettled on the ground, his back against a tree as he searched for a comfortable spot.

  “We’ve heard that once or twice since we got back,” the older man said. “Usually from people who’ve lost someone. How old are you? Eighteen?”

  “Close enough.
”

  Weber nodded.

  “That’s how old I was when they sent me up,” said Renard.

  “Who did you lose?” Weber said. The left side of his face didn’t move much as he spoke. It looked spooky in the firelight, like he was wearing half a mask.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The ones who say it was our fault, the soldier’s fault, they lost someone,” Weber explained.

  His eyes danced in the firelight, like he was in on some inside joke with the cosmos.

  “Sometimes more than one someone?” Weber continued.

  “My dad,” Jake grunted an answer. “My brother.”

  Weber nodded in a wise fashion.

  “Have you heard of the Citadel?” Renard barked.

  Weber tried to wave him off.

  “That’s ancient history,” he said. “Things that matter down here are different.”

  Renard glared into the fire while Weber watched Jake, a curious look on half of his face.

  “Citadel?” Lt asked.

  “You heard of it?” Weber joked.

  “Studied it,” Lt said. “You the guy?”

  “Wasn’t much to study I suppose,” said Weber. “Unless you think studying luck is a worthwhile endeavor.”

  “Wasn’t a success,” said Lt. “Everyone died.”

  “Almost everyone,” Renard snapped.

  “Almost everyone,” Lt agreed. “One man made it out.”

  “They dropped a shipload of us in a dome,” said Weber. His thick fingers worked the kinks out of one hand, as if they ached.

  It wasn’t cold, not yet, so Lt surmised it might ache from memories.

  “Talk about a cluster. One crate of weapons for hundreds of us. One set of instructions. No training.”

  “But you survived.”

  “I survived.”

  “And you did it twice, getting off Mars.”

  Weber nodded.

  “Stole a ship,” said Renard. “Last ship out, as far as we know. We hit the atmosphere almost at the same time as the Licks exploded the EMP. Shorted out our systems.”

  He used his finger to indicate the network of scars on his head.

  “But any crash you can walk away from.”

  “Funny you surviving twice,” said Jake. “Pretty lucky.”

  “I never said I wasn’t kid. You wouldn’t want to play poker with me.”

  “What’s poker?”

  “Poker,” Babe called out of the darkness. “But I hardly know her.”

  Renard and Waldo chuckled.

  “Babe, there’s a lady present,” said Lt.

  “I’ve heard worse,” Steph turned the rabbits, watching small droplets of grease drip into the flames to create miniature volcanos in the fire. “I had brothers.”

  “Had,” Weber sighed. “So much lost down here.”

  “Why didn’t you fight?” Jake asked. “You landed. You had access to weapons, and experience. You could have fought.”

  “Ever been in a crash, son?” Weber answered, but it felt like an evasion. A half truth.

  “We watched them all die. They hunted us on Mars, and just when we thought we won, it was a trap. We barely made it out.”

  Jake glared at the two veterans, then into the flames. He spit into the fire and listened to it sizzle on a rock.

  “We’ve watched people die. We’ve lost people, and we’re fighting.”

  “Call us cowards, son.”

  “I’m not your son,” Jake snapped and shoved up off the ground.

  He stomped toward the darkness at the edge of the campsite and muttered curses into the night.

  “Your man has a discipline problem,” Weber told Lt. “I like that in a soldier.”

  “He’s not a soldier,” said Lt. “I’m not sure what he was before. We conscripted him on a train heist. Him, her and the Doc who found the suits.”

  “We’ve heard about your exploits out here,” said Renard.

  “A real cowboy operation you’ve got going.”

  “Yeah, I’m pretty darn proud of the work we’ve done. Miles to go, though.”

  “Is it worth it?” Renard asked, but he said it in a way that seemed like he didn’t expect an answer.

  “It’s ready,” Steph announced.

  Lt took a sniff through his open visor.

  “Damn Oakley, you’re better at that than Lutz. I may have to change your name to Julia Childs.”

  “Her name’s not Oakley?” Renard asked.

  “He doesn’t use our real names,” said Steph as she slid half a rabbit into the hands of Weber and watched as he juggled it like a hot potato.

  “We heard that too,” said Weber. “But the way word travels down here, it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s made up. You’re a bit of a legend now.”

  “You hear that Babe? I’m a tall tale around here. Like Paul Bunyan and the Babe.”

  “You named him after an ox?” Weber tore off the rabbit into small strips and put it into his mouth with the tips of his fingers.

  “Hell no,” Babe squatted and accepted half a rabbit from Steph. “Named me after a baseball player.”

  “Babe Ruth,” Weber grinned and licked the grease off his fingers before tearing into some more. “Homerun and Strike Out king.”

  “How can you be both?” Babe asked.

  “Because he went down swinging, Babe.”

  Jake stomped back to the fire and sat next to Steph.

  “Drawn in by the smell of cooking,” said Lt. “Get’s ‘em every time.”

  They ate in silence for a few moments, making quick work of the small meal, then tossed the bones into the flames. The smell of roasted meat lingered over the small campsite.

  “You call them all by nicknames,” said Weber as he leaned back and stared through the canopy at the stars beyond. “But you won’t let anyone nickname you.”

  “Well, the way I figure, most folks are going to go for the easy play and call me by the moniker you did back at the compound.”

  “Billy the Kid.”

  Lt grimaced and nodded.

  “A joke my dad made, maybe. Could have been my mother. She had a comedic disposition, and the teasing from other children would have pleased her.”

  “You don’t know that it did?”

  “They passed when I was too young to know better. No other living relatives, so I ended up in an orphanage.”

  “They raided orphanages for alien fodder on Mars,” said Renard. “How did you avoid it?”

  “Clean living,” Lt smirked. “Or mayhap some of that luck you’re Sgt. is so fond of.”

  “You know my rank.”

  “Like I said, we did some studying. And I am a student of Lick killing.”

  “I’d say you were a master,” said Waldo as he stood to return to sentry duty.

  “Thank you, Waldo, that was kind of you to say in front of our guests. Killing fucking Licks is one of the pleasures I get out of a life that ain’t had many.”

  “What else do you do besides kill Licks?” Renard asked.

  “What have you heard?”

  The younger man shrugged. Lt ran some math in his head and calculated his age near the early twenties, but his face had the set of a much older man. He guessed war and crashes would do that to a man.

  “I drink beer,” said Lt.

  “Beer doesn’t exist anymore,” Babe called back to them.

  “I dream of beer,” said Lt. “And when we find it someday, I will drink it.”

  “I know how to make wine,” said Steph.

  “What are you planning to do with that suit?” Weber stared at the lumpy ruck on the ground beside Jake, but his question was directed at Lt.

  “Wine?” Lt glanced at Steph. “Oakley, if you know how to make wine, then you have the basics for bootlegging moonshine. If we found the ingredients, do you think you could build a still?”