Bonus Chapters
Blue Goo
August 29, 2273 - 35 years ago
The first day of eighth grade and half the class stood huddled around Wendell Meyer, seated on an industrial table in the science laboratory. His pants were pushed up to his thigh, his ruined knee exposed for all.
Wendell helped himself to a handful of the blue goo from the ten-gallon tub next to his leg. He applied it to the mangled joint.
Near the beginning of the previous school year, almost a year to the day, he'd been trapped in the pool's hydraulic cover; the mechanical joint had mutilated his knee.
Wendell had spent the bulk of the school year in bed, taking all his classes in virtual. He'd had four surgeries, and the last set of pins had just come out last week. The doctors talked about replacing the joint all together, but Wendell’s mother had objected.
Wendell Meyer and Andrew Fox had been close friends that year. After the accident, Andrew dedicated all his spare time, and a significant amount of his family fortune, in creating and developing the goo.
"It itches," Wendell said, as his skin devoured the blue-tinted mixture. "Ouch!”
The knee swelled under the blue coating.
"ARGHHHH!" Wendell cried.
He lay back on the table, face knotted into a scream he didn't dare utter at full volume, for fear of bringing a teacher.
The boys watched as the knee repaired itself. A thick sweat popped out on Wendell's face. The joint began to make strange cracking and rending sounds. Wendell gulped air in tortured gasps.
A few seconds later the knee began to shrink, the blue tint staining the skin and bubbling from his pores. Within two minutes, Wendell's knee was back to its natural size, albeit a bit skinnier than the other, coated in a thick blue wrapping. The goo had become a kind of splint, a rubber bandage, holding the bones, tendons and ligaments in place.
Wendell swung his leg. "It works." He gestured for Jim Croswell to pass over his crutches. Jim reached out and picked them up but didn't hand them over.
"Fine." Wendell smiled and hopped down from the table. He stood on his own two feet for the first time since the accident. Smiling, he lifted and flexed the shattered knee. He walked a few steps, staring at the blue wrapped knee, and burst running from the room, screaming wildly.
Jim carried the crutches to the corner of the room and leaned them up against the wall.
"Who else wants to try?" Andrew asked.
At first the kids were skeptical.
Andrew opened a drawer full of dissection tools. "Step right up," he said and removed a tray of scalpels from the drawer.
"It can heal anything?" Stephen asked.
"It's healed everything I've tried so far," Andrew answered.
"Ha! What have you tried?" Joe Stanwood asked.
Andrew smiled. He held up his left hand and rolled up the sleeve of his school button-down. His arm was covered with the telltale blue rubber bandages.
Most of the kids looked nervous, staying well away from the surgical blades.
"I'll go first then," Andrew said, reaching out for a knife. He brought it down across the back of his left arm, opening a long gash between his wrist and elbow, spilling blood onto the counter top.
Andrew clenched his teeth and applied a smooth coating of the blue goo. He held out his arm for the others to watch. Almost as if it were reversing the damage done by the blade, the goo sealed the gash. As it worked itself out of the cut, it formed a new blue coating and a few seconds later, Andrew's arm was good as new.
Wendell returned to the lab at full speed, catching himself in the doorframe. "Thanks, Andrew! You're the best! They said I was never gonna walk again!" Wendell ran off again at full speed, his footsteps and jubilant cries trailing down the hallway.
Andrew smiled, thrilled with Wendell's recovery.
"How's it work," Croswell asked.
"Supercharged poly-synthetic nano-stemcells. Once exposed to living tissue, it works backwards to regenerate any damaged or missing cells. Seems to work pretty good, so far," Andrew said.
Andrew Fox and Jim Croswell had been friends since early childhood. Their fathers often worked together on various government projects, Andrew and Jimmy saw each other a lot growing up. They had always been great friends.
Both Croswell and Fox were considered top among their peers, and neither of them took any crap from Stanwood, who bullied everyone else. Croswell was far more athletic than Fox, so the mantle of leadership fell to him.
"What else did you try?" Stanwood asked, nodding to Fox’s arm.
Joe Stanwood, in his own weird way, had never fit in with anyone. Most of the boys were scared shitless of him.
Andy and Jim seemed able to tolerate him. It seemed to the other kids that perhaps Fox and Croswell were unaware of how creepy Joe actually was. It was in his mannerisms, the slow way he talked and used his hands. He was, in a word, malevolent.
Andrew removed his shirt. His body was covered with blue rubber strips and sections. There was almost no open skin for more than a few inches.
"Holy shit," Croswell said.
"I feel one hundred percent fine. It activates the RNA to work overtime, fixing whatever's out of whack.”
Stanwood looked into Andrew's eyes, taunting him. "You don't seem fine.”
Andrew began to unbuckle his pants, but several objections and declarations of trust stopped him.
"And it gets absorbed through the skin like that?" Stanwood asked.
"You saw it.”
"So, is it better for cuts or broken fingers?" Stanwood inquired.
"I think, either or," Andrew replied.
"Could it grow back a whole arm, or a leg?" Joe asked.
"I don't know, but I bet it can reattach them.”
"No way," Stanwood answered. "Brain injuries? How do you get it in there?”
"Shit, maybe it can fix you, Joe," Croswell said.
Several of the other kids laughed.
"Fox is gonna be a millionaire. I bet it'll fix anything," Stephen volunteered.
"It fixed Wendell's leg." Tom Becket said. "He's happy as shit.”
Andrew realized he didn't have to answer Stanwood's objections. The other boys were making his arguments for him. They had witnessed the power of the goo.
Joe Stanwood raised his hands, smiling.
The guys grew quiet.
"Can you re-attach someone’s head?" Stanwood asked.
"I don't know, but I'd love to try." Fox answered.
The boys heard the challenge and responded with an "Oooo.”
"Don’t cut anyone’s head off, seriously," Stanwood replied.
"I think maybe you could re-grow a finger or something, but it would be expensive," Andrew said. "I don’t think I could do it with this. We’d need a thicker composition. It would take longer.”
"How much did this cost to make all this?" Croswell asked.
"Close to seventeen million," Andrew said in a low voice.
"Holy shit!" Becket said. "What?”
"I said close to," Andrew countered. "I think you get Holy Shit at twenty.”
"How close?" Joe asked.
"If you figure in all the test batches, a little over, maybe.”
"But current medical science can already reattach limbs for a lot less," Stanwood pointed out. "And we have lots of ways to accelerate the healing process, so this is kind of redundant. It's too expensive for the common people. All you did was waste a bunch of money."
An hour later, after more than seventy healed scrapes, cuts, abrasions, lacerations, fractures, burns and contusions, they had exhausted their creativity and courage. They had a reached a place where the pain endured outweighed the novelty of having the tissue magically repaired.
Andrew took notes while the boys played. He took a sample of blood from each volunteer, usually from whatever instrument of violence used to create the tissue damage, never allowing any blade to be used twice. He bagged the tools of destruction and logged each into his noteboo
k, along with the damage done and how long it took the goo to repair the wound.
With one boy, Jesse Parker, total repair took an agonizing forty seven seconds, but Jesse's wound had been rather severe. They had attacked his leg with an electric hedge clipper. Then they applied the goo and stopped the femoral artery from dumping Jesse's entire blood supply on the laboratory floor. The boys laughed and joked as they replaced chunks of meat from his thigh.
A minute later, Jesse's leg was good as new, minus the damage to his school pants.
Croswell had wanted to see how hard the other boys could punch him. He asked each of them to give it all they had. He dared them to out do each other in a single strike. After taking a haymaker from everyone in the room, Tom got creative and broke a glass beaker over Jim's head, his face looked like hamburger. The boys stuck a straw in his mouth and coated his entire face in goo. Andrew estimated it cost almost a hundred thousand dollars to wrap Jim's face, but they had plenty left.
Bored, they began to discuss grievous, mortal wounds. Andrew tried to dissuade them.
Gabriel joked about cutting Sandoval’s throat, who happened to not be present. He challenged Andrew to save him before he died.
Andrew countered that he'd never liked Enrique and wouldn't be inclined help him. no matter what. That would leave Gabe on the hook for murder.
Several boys laughed, and no one did anything excessively stupid.
Andrew suggested it was time to lock the goo up.
Croswell peeled the rubber from his eyes. "I want to try something bigger.”
"Something bigger like what?" Andrew asked.
"I want you to cut my arm off," Jim said.
"You're fucking crazy," Stanwood said.
"No I'm not," he replied to Joe.
Croswell looked over to Andrew. "I want you to cut my arm off.”
"Stay here." Andrew left the room. Half a dozen boys trailed after him.
Croswell, Stanwood and several others remained behind.
"Seriously Joe, you should try it, it really works." Croswell said.
"Fuck that," Stanwood said. "You don't know what the side effects are. Maybe someday you wake up and who knows. This shit might kill you a month from now.”
"Yeah, well, Fox will die first."
Andrew walked to the locked glass trophy case, in the grand entrance hall of the academy. He picked up a nearby chair and used it to knock the glass out. The surrounding boys watched as he reached into the case and removed the long samurai sword, the katana, from the daisho: a set of two swords.
The set had been awarded to the Rivendell Kendo Team from the Yagyu Sword School of Japan. Andrew's great grandfather had competed in the tournament that had claimed the glorious victory. Now, the young man had pilfered his ancestor's trophy case for an afternoon of raucous and juvenile amusement.
Andrew argued the points and counterpoints in his mind. What he was doing was contributing to science. He needed volunteers and to get them, he needed an extraordinary claim, an outrageous claim, a bit of theatre.
He had broken the glass in a calculated gesture.
He needed to put an end to the experiment while they still had a ton of goo. He needed to get caught, so the discovery could be exposed, with a number of witnesses.
On the way back to the lab, the boys joked about what they could do with such magical power. Several confirmed beatings they intended to dole out and then supply the recipient with a bit of blue goo to heal them right up. The lists of rivals were long, and the actions to be taken against them were intricate, cunning and cruel.
Once Andrew and the others returned with the sword, the boys who'd waited behind fell silent. Andrew Fox looked Jim Croswell in the eyes. He held the sword up, prepared to take it out of the sheath.
Jim stepped close to the tub and held his left arm out over it.
Andrew stepped back, and the other boys cleared back a few steps, room enough for him to draw and swing the sword.
Andrew gestured to Stephen and Jesse, standing opposite Croswell. "Grab his arm," Fox said.
The boys looked from Andrew to James, who nodded. They reached out to his hand.
"When I hit it, you have to take it right down into the goo. Then right back up to his arm," Andrew instructed.
"Goo? We should call it glue," Stephen said.
"Shouldn't we put some on his arm too?" Jesse asked.
"Yeah. Becket," Andrew pointed, "stand here, next to the tub. When I slash through the arm, Stephen and Jes are going to be holding it. Wait for the sword to pass through, and then put your hands in the tub. As they bring the forearm to the tub, I want you to take a hand full of goo up to Jimmy's stump. Got it?”
Several kids laughed, but Tom nodded.
Andrew drew the sword from its sheath.
"I wonder if he'll scream," someone in the back said.
Andrew looked James in the eye and without waiting for a count of three or a ready, set, go, Fox slashed through Croswell's bicep and humerus. The sword severed the boy's arm with little more resistance that if it were slicing through smoke. Andrew held the sword low and still after the cut.
James didn't scream. He didn't gasp. He didn't make a sound.
Tom reached into the tub.
Stephen and Jesse brought Jim's forearm and elbow down into the tub, passing Tom, on his way up to Jim's open stump. As Tom applied the goo, an excited pulse of blood sprayed into the room.
Jes and Stephen dunked the detached stump and reattached it to Jimmy's remaining upper arm. The room was quiet, except for the sound of blue and red drops hitting the floor.
The goo caused the skin to swell and knit together where it had separated. Blood and blue syrup bubbled from the bicep. As the excess ran off, the remainder of the goo grew darker, harder, rubbery and thick.
James smiled. He took a deep breath and wiggled the fingers of his left hand. Jesse and Stephen felt the arm come alive under their grasp. It grabbed and shook them. It had taken less than thirty seconds.
Croswell pulled the limb away and flexed it. Excess goo and plasma burst from the seam, the scar, where the limb had been severed. James punched his palm then turned and slammed his hand through a wood paneled cabinet, laughing.
Withdrawing the fist, James saw he'd damaged it anew. He laughed as he lathered the splintered fingers with, "Dr. Fox's Super-Blue Healing Goo."
During that first week of eighth grade, all the boys involved in the incident with the goo found themselves assembled in a large conference room, seated with their parents and their parent's lawyers.
Professor Cotton recited his discovery of the scene in the laboratory. The adults got the whole story, from Andrew's inspiration by Wendell's accident, to Jim's courageous determination in the name of scientific progress.
The patent filed in Andrew's name resulted in a massive windfall. In the final settlement, all the kids who'd participated in the blue goo experiment received a king's ransom. Joe Stanwood, who hadn't participated, got nothing.
Centaur Cyber Tanks
December 31, 2299 – Eight-and-half years earlier
Another night on the office couch. It was just after six when Fox awoke.
Being the dead of winter and the last day of the year, the sun still had not yet lit the horizon. Fox had a couple of hours before the Generals arrived. Fox knew the project waiting outside his office, the ten thousand cyber-tanks, would win the war.
It was footsteps that awakened him. Someone was coming. Dr. Fox sat up in the darkness and rubbed his face. Visitors' plural, there were at least two of them. Fox switched on the light.
A moment later came the knock at his door. "Yes, come in."
Chief Operator Chris Matthews and Special Agent Tasha Vangen entered.
The Doctor smiled. "So, this is it. The big day.”
Matthews nodded, "We're all ready, Sir.”
Third Gate Citizen, Chris Matthews was one of those gung-ho patriots that rarely looked before he leaped. Fox didn't trust him to think for
himself, but if you gave him an order, he'd die before giving up. You couldn't have everything in a project manager, and Matthews was better than most. He was honest and loyal, and those were qualities valuable beyond measure.
"We've got thirty-six units spooled up and another twenty-four taking on fluids and ammunition," Matthews reported.
Special Agent Vangen looked troubled. Tasha was special for several reasons, the least of which being her status as in international dignitary on loan from Sweden. By default, the clear-headed young woman often found herself elected to go up against the party line Matthews.
She was the most socially well-adjusted scientist Dr. Fox had met in years; she was sharp as a neutron laser, cool under pressure, and a pleasure to work with.
Being from such a socially progressive country, Dr. Fox suspected it was the tradition of community that allowed the young researcher to share her discoveries and triumphs with the team. Most of the other members, Citizens of the Republic, were fiercely competitive.
Tasha was also dating his Andrew’s younger brother, Geoffrey. They were secretly engaged and waiting for the project to be officially over before they said anything.
From the look on Tasha’s face, it was clear something had gone sideways. Fox knew, at this late stage of the game, that’s just the way it went sometimes.
Major General Cruthers and his staff had arrived at the nearby observation station a day earlier. Ten miles north of the border, they reviewed intelligence data, watching in fast forward as the enemy flooded into Tijuana over the past month.
Over two million strong, the Christian Socialists intended take San Diego with the force of sheer numbers alone. The tension in the room was palpable. The intelligence officers were panicked, but not about the enemies’ numbers. They couldn't identify any weapons. The enemy had arrived empty handed.
The socialists always marched with artillery. There was no other way they could cross the border en-mass without some method of detonating the mines. The presence of cannon had always been the justification for the republic’s overwhelming response.
It would be difficult for the talking heads in Washington to explain the dropping of bulk munitions on a group of civilians. The officers continued to scramble, but all they could find were light arms: handguns and rifles. The People’s Army of Christ the Redeemer hadn’t brought a single cannon. Usually they had an overwhelming amount of artillery, but today, they had none.
Cold California sunlight hit the few remaining sandstone and glass structures. Ground-bound buildings and houses that could not be moved reflected a dull, empty sky. Until as little as a month ago, the sky was filled with hovering structures, but now San Diego stood empty, evacuated.
Only freeway cables remained, hanging flat and lifeless. All the hover-tech high-rises had flown away, north to Angel City, or northeast to Palm Springs and Phoenix. Washington did not want the relocations to become permanent, even if the destruction of the ground based structures in San Diego proved unavoidable. The concept of surrendering San Diego was unacceptable. The Republic would rather see the remainder of the city razed than to let it fall into enemy hands.
Despite the fact that the enemy was armed with little more than light-arms and ethanol driven vehicles, once the Christians marched in, the consensus in Washington would be to dump bulk munitions, destroying the South American People's Army of Christ the Redeemer, as well as the cities of San Diego and Tijuana.
General Cruthers advocated dropping the big one and being done with it.
His superiors strongly disagreed, arguing that the radioactive fall-out would endanger the entire coastline.
General Cruthers didn't care much for California, but his superiors made themselves clear that even a three-day carpet-bombing campaign was preferable to a nuclear event on national soil.
The General had been hearing good things about the cyber-tank project, and he was excited about its delivery in just a few hours. Today was New Years Eve, and if the intelligence estimates were correct, the Socialist People's Army would be massing at the border by sunset, crosses, guns and flags held high, prayers on their lips.
It was always the same, the faithful came and died by the thousands, and San Diego would succumb to it's bloody fate as so many smaller cities already had. The socialists would not retreat, and another rotting cavity would be created on the Republic's southern border.
The General longed to be able to stop them without destroying a hundred stories of steel and glass. He held no concern for human life. In fact, San Diego was already lost.
No one had stayed. No one was going back anytime soon.
The only thing left was to punish the enemy for their forward momentum. That was enough for him. That was all he needed to feel victorious.
The cyber-tanks were his best hope for that victory.
Two hundred miles north and seventy miles west of the coast, a twelve layer military testing facility hovered above the ocean. The unit's anti-gravity drives maintained a comfortable ten thousand feet above the water, nothing but ocean and sky in every direction, as far as the eye could see.
Three prowlers circled the facility at a ten-mile radius. Their weapons systems were always hot, ready to fire on any errant vehicles that might enter their perimeter.
Each layer of the facility was composed of several floors, with an array of hover-disks, working in unison to maintain equilibrium. The twelve levels were arranged in a stacked formation, several miles square. Each deck featured a unique environment, desert, forest or swampland. The levels grew in square footage as one went upward.
The top level stretched ten miles square and featured a rich urban environment, several blocks of seven to ten story buildings. The tests at this facility employed live ammunition and many areas had been reduced to heaps of rubble and twisted steel. While others were clearly in a state of construction, being rebuilt for the umpteenth time.
In the east, the sun touched the distant horizon. The early desert air felt clean and crisp against the Doctor's face. For the past week, he'd been in a state of panic. Finally, all the last minute details were complete, and the project was ready for delivery.
The transport landed on the upper receiving dock, and the personnel disembarked. Major General Cruthers, followed by his colleagues, was glowing with excitement. After brief introductions, Dr. Fox led the gentlemen to the storage hangar.
The cyber-tanks sat connected to various cables, power and fluids snaking along the floor to ports and pumps. The hangar smelled of industrial chemicals, gun oil and fuel. The tanks themselves were dark masses of armor plate with wicked looking tracks and munitions delivery systems protruding from several angles. Extra ammo drums were mounted on the rear fenders. Belt-fed twelve-barrel machine guns were mounted to the front. Running perfectly, they glided over rough and rocky ground smoother than ice on glass, four diesel engines powered the heavy-duty treads, top speed - two hundred kilometers an hour.
Dr. Fox led the inspection team up to one of the forward units. He pointed out the shielded sensor array, the triple redundant communications drives, overlapping armor plates and other external features before touching on the internal functions of the unit.
Colonel Thompson, standing next to General Cruthers, raised his hand. "Are these units autonomous or do they require rear-echelon support?”
"Both and neither. They house organic operators, wired to the control systems, and they also maintain constant communication with command and control agents, here at the facility.”
"You're saying there are people in there? A soldier, an operator?”
"An experienced soldier, battle tested veterans. They have some of the best reaction times we've ever seen...”
"But isn't that illegal?" the colonel interrupted.
General Cruthers rolled his eyes. "Thompson, do you want to be part of this unit or can I just transfer your ass back to Washington?”
"Sir, it's just...”
"We're trying to win a war here, Colonel.”
<
br /> "Sir, direct weapon-to-brain wiring systems have been illegal for over seventy years. The political ramifications could be...”
"It's illegal for citizens, Thompson. We can't be expected to fight a war with fucko's back in Washington making all the rules.”
Cruthers turned back to Dr. Fox. "Please continue, Doctor."
Later that afternoon, as he was escorted from the facility, Dr. Fox had an awful feeling about the impending skirmish. He had tried to impress upon the General and his staff that the bio-tanks should never be taken above level six when facing civilians. The higher levels were reserved for more advanced enemies. The Christian socialists could hardly be called an organized enemy. Their defense and offense were one and the same, a human wave of men, women, and children: healthy and young, old and sick. Their attack came in the form of a protest march. They all came.
Fox felt sick to his stomach knowing that Cruthers and staff would be commanding the base-side operators. Fox knew that Matthews and his team weren’t likely to play along. Unfortunately, they were no longer under his jurisdiction. The operators were contracted as part of the project deliverables and now accountable to the military authorities responsible for the project.
Dr. Fox suspected Cruthers intended to take the mechanized war machines to their highest level, ten, reserved for training only, one mech against another. At that level, the machines would drive over infants, relishing in the squishy sounds from beneath their treads.
Fox was suddenly awash in fear, regret, and shame. He contemplated demanding the pilot turn the vehicle around but didn't. He knew the captain would not change the flight path. If he went back and opposed Cruthers now, it would be career suicide. They would call it treason. Now there was little Fox could do besides get himself shot.
A ripple went through the crowd; it was time. The barbecues were hastily put out, and the caravan prepared to press north. Small arms were given a quick field cleaning and oiled. Ammunition was passed around and loaded into clips. Children and old folks packed into cars, alongside sand bags and ammunition crates.
The faithful fell silent for a final blessing. They crossed themselves, kissed their rosaries and plastic glow-in-the-dark statues of Jesus, (which were passed around and placed on the dashboards of the cars). They waited while the audio up front was sorted out, excusing the whispered joke or interruption to pass the tequila bottle.
Father Ricardo raised the microphone. "En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espiritu Santo.” He made the sign of the cross over the crowd, holding a crucifix in his hand, which he kissed, the microphone held low, in his left.
The people made the sign of the cross, each in their own way, in their own time.
“Brothers and sisters, we are gathered here this evening to celebrate freedom and community in the Lord. This is the birth of a new age. Tomorrow the sun will rise on another city, freed from greed and tyranny. Once these were our lands, but for 500 years, the liars and hypocrites from across the sea have stolen our birthrights.
"Yes, I say hypocrites, though many profess to be members of the faith. They were once People of the Lord, but they have fallen. For the Lord says that one cannot serve two masters, and they are the servants of gold.
“They erect borders and issue citizenship cards of different status. That is not truth. For are we not all children of the one true God? What is a citizen? It's just a word, an idea. It's an idea that is used to separate the children of God. Used to put one person's worth above another's. We are not different, American or Mexican, European or Asian, African, Columbian or Canadian; we are all children of the Lord. So we must be - brothers and sisters.
"Show me a border in the earth. It does not exist. The Lord did not create borders. He created mountains, rivers and oceans, which some men miscall borders, but they are only mountains, rivers and oceans.
“We serve truth. For only the truth can set you free. I am the way, the truth, and the life. Serve the poorest among you, so that he may know the Lord's tender loving care.
"When We, The People Of The Word, arrived here in this place, our Lord struck the enemy with fear and made him take flight. He does not stand and face us. He does not want to hear the Word of God. He knows we come in the name of Justice, Liberty, and Equality.
“There is not made, the missile that can kill an ideal. Our enemy once worshipped these same ideals, and they know how powerful they are, but they have grown corrupt and criminal in their twilight years. The Lord has raised us up and put us in this place that we might spread his word among them.
“Our Heavenly Father has done his part. He has shown us the road we must travel. It is up to us to follow it. Let's bring the light to those who are lost, trapped in darkness. Lord, though the way before us may be full of peril, give us courage to press forward and return to these, our ancestral lands. I bless you in the name of our Lord, Jesus Christ. En el nombre del Padre, y del Hijo, y del Espiritu Santo. Amen.”
The blessing over, celebratory beers were cracked and the People’s Army fired up competing mariachi music from rival sound systems.
In the failing light, torches, flashlights, and vehicle-mounted flood lights burst to life. The engines of the faithful were put in low gear and the army surged forward, crossing the imaginary border from Mexico into the United States, with high-pitched screams, and bursts of automatic gunfire punctuating the auspicious nature of the event.
Shaped like an elbow, the coastline of San Diego is dotted with hills, climbing from and returning to the Pacific Ocean. The People's Army had a twelve-mile march to the center of the downtown area. The first few miles were littered with mines: a cratered, barren stretch of barbed wire, collapsed trenches and half-buried corpses. The Immigration Customs Enforcement Agency had declared the land a free-fire zone decades ago. Both sides fired mortars into it anytime someone tried to cross.
The Christian Communist Army made slow progress, as everything in their path was consumed. Stretches of barbed wire were rolled up and secured to vehicles. Metal barricades were cut with high-powered torches and used like railroad ties to repair the path ahead. From the sand bagged backs of rolling pickup trucks, the People’s Army fired homemade mortars across the no-mans land, detonating the waiting mines and blowing holes in the longer stretches of barbed wire.
The battle had just begun, but already the city had been given up for dead. Only the inevitable desiccation of the metropolitan corpse remained - the smashing of street-level windows and burning of storefronts. San Diego had no power or water flowing through her veins, no foodstuffs were delivered to her markets. Not one floating residence or business structure adorned her skyline. Anything that could be carried out during the evacuations had been taken long ago.
The marines had built their barricades on the southern wall of the city. Teams of sharp shooters occupied every room with a view and platoons held strategic locations along every major route. But all combined, they numbered under twenty thousand. The People's Army had swollen to several million strong.
The marines were required to stop the enemy at all costs, but against millions, they knew they could hardly even slow them down. Before long, the remaining soldiers heard the first of the proximity mines go off.
The Christians ran vehicles into the minefields at high speed. The mines were set to be triggered by foot traffic, so a single vehicle could take out several, providing it didn't crash into a collapsed tunnel, crater, or any of the dozens of other likewise destroyed remains of its ancestors.
The marines heard the mines begin, and the call went out over the radio for all soldiers to retreat to bravo positions as air strikes were expected to begin any minute. The young soldiers retreated and waited, but the air strikes never came.
At the Centaur Facility General Cruthers argued with the high command about the launch orders. He wanted to activate half the arsenal, but couldn't get Washington to commit that level of support. Besides, there were only a dozen control stations and a dozen operators, restricting the initial
run to only a dozen units, launched one at a time. The General's demand to allow the tanks run unsupervised had ended the debate. Cruthers roundly cursed Washington as a bunch of rear echelon cowards, and only managed to get seven tanks off the ground.
The first cyber-tank unit crashed into the no man's land opposite the Soldiers of Christ. The People stopped in their advance and regarded the impact site.
They had watched it come whistling in and expected a massive explosion. The impact was immense, huge clouds of dirt and debris billowed upward, but there was no explosion.
Several shots were fired at the vehicle, the bullets screaming away as they bounced and tumbled from the armored surface.
The unit offered no response.
Despite their fear of the blackish metallic vehicle, the men crept forward. It took several minutes for the rag tag band of resistance fighters to surround the vehicle, but eventually, they did.
They inspected its government-assigned markings, meaningless combinations of letters and numbers. One drunken soldier leaned up close against a tinted window. " Oye, hay un tipo aqui." . He looked over his shoulder to his comrades. "Y sus ojos son de oro." .
The crowd jumped back as the engines inside the tank ignited. Before they could move away, barrels rose from the machine's hide, and it lurched forward. The courageous men closest to it were crushed under the sharp treads.
Hundreds were mowed down by the fire-belching machine guns, blasting hot shrapnel into the Soldiers of Christ.
The next two units landed closer to the northern side of the border, and had to drive forward to meet the enemy.
The following four came to earth behind the southern border, chewing up God's People from behind.
There was no escape. There was no mercy, and by dawn, there was no more conflict in San Diego.
A shootout in the operations lab prevented more than seven launches. When ordered to set the tanks to level ten, the lead operator, Matthews, objected and found himself in a heated argument with the soldiers. One of them accused him of being a traitor and struck him. Matthews drew his weapon and two soldiers shot him a dozen times.
Matthew's comrades, including Geoffrey Fox, drew their weapons and had themselves a wild-west shootout with the soldiers, right there in the control room. Wielding small arms, the operators shot at the soldiers who, sporting assault rifles, opened fire on everything, killing the operators, each other, and utterly destroying the machinery.
The Generals, watching the satellite feeds in the officer's command center, weren't present in the operations lab and failed to either prevent the massacre or be caught up in it. And to be fair, they didn't much care.
The tanks were free to destroy everything that moved along the forward battle area; a job they executed with ruthless and brutal efficiency.
One young operator, who'd stepped out to use the washroom, managed to escape. Tasha hijacked a maintenance vehicle and slipped from the facility with a shipping convoy.
The patrols overhead ignored her, distracted by the news from the research station. By the time the generals realized a possible witness was at large, Tasha had long since vanished.
Reading about the political fallout, Ashley had recognized her photo. She remembered the chaos that followed her Father's delivery of the tanks. The war in San Diego was over, but the method used to accomplish the victory had left the Republic sick to its stomach.
Much of the blame had fallen on Fox's shoulders for designing the tanks. He was called a Monster and a War Criminal. He was accused of being some hideous mixture of Hitler, Stalin, Genghis Khan and John Robert Oppenheimer.
The in-house security video of the control room shoot-out was leaked to the press, and the truth of the soldiers’ actions, as well as the loss of Andrew’s brother Geoffrey, silenced the interest in seeing Dr. Fox take the fall for the debacle.
Ashley read, a short time later, a new task was presented to her father… Project Epsilon.
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