Chapter 13
During the Great Migration, O’Hare International Airport was converted into a national train station. As Chicago grew out and rail became the de facto mode of transportation, O’Hare was the logical choice. It had pre-existing infrastructure that could easily be adapted and it had land. Fifteen years ago, fields surrounded it. Now it was skyscrapers.
Antoine Versad was a Frenchman. He had red hair, buzzed short, and a five o’clock shadow that had to be groomed once a day. He spent two years in the French army before getting kicked out for misconduct. The charges were dropped but there was nothing left for him in France. He came to the U.S. by boat hoping to change his fortune, and he had.
He felt the train slow down as they approached O’Hare from New York. He sat in the first class section of the train. Scattered throughout the other cars were eighty of his associates. Some looked like businessmen, some looked like hippies and students. They were white, black, Asian, Middle Eastern, Indian.
The common bond between them was the Western Curse and this mission. Strapped beneath each of their seats was a submachine gun with two hundred rounds of ammunition. In the cargo department they had twenty RPG’s, fifty grenades, two M134 mini guns, and one hundred pounds of C-4 explosive.
The discipline and patience that Mohammed had instilled in the Western Curse had allowed his people to penetrate deep into the arteries of American society. The rail was going to be exploited today. Tomorrow it could be the shipyards or the power plants.
Antoine was in charge of this mission. The goal was to take over the station, gather as many hostages as possible, and kill one every five minutes until the giant came. Antoine had a very sophisticated computer with him. It created its own network that hacked into anything with wireless connectivity within fifty yards of it. A Chinese operative had passed it to Mohammed, who had passed it to Antoine.
“This computer is worth twenty million dollars,” Mohammed had said when he handed it over. “Don’t drop it.”
Mohammed had told him that the hack would burrow into the giant and render him useless. The RPGs, the C-4, the miniguns, all of those could damage it, but the computer was what would disconnect the human from the machine. When that happened, Antoine would stroll up to the man buried in metal and shoot him in the head. They would broadcast it live throughout cyberspace. It was the Western Curse’s coming out party and Antoine would be the star of the show.
From his window, Antoine watched O’Hare as they approached. He had done reconnaissance on it twice now. It was a huge structure, but they had enough manpower to take over its entrances and then collapse back into its heart and set up the defensive measures.
The train pulled into the terminal and its electric motors hummed down. His travel neighbor said goodbye and Antoine wished him a good time in Chicago. Antoine reached beneath his seat and pulled out a small plastic briefcase that had been attached underneath. Inside the case, like all the others, was an Uzi-Pro submachine gun. It was the size of a large handgun, but it fired nine millimeter at a rate of one thousand and fifty rounds per minute, and it had a fifty round magazine and three more spares.
He stood up with his two packages and no one blinked. He and the others shuffled out of the train and each team of four splintered off to their assigned exits.
It was 12:10. Perfect. At 12:30 the operation would begin.
= = =
“I was just about to call you,” Evan said. He was watching the news report. Eighty to one hundred terrorists had completely shut down O’Hare train station and they had five hundred hostages. They called themselves the Western Curse and a red headed Frenchman ranted to an IP camera about what they stood for, blah, blah, blah and then shot a hostage execution style.
“This is the one,” General Boen said. “I hope Janis squishes the Frenchy’s head between his fingers. Can you believe this guy? He’s already shot five hostages.”
“He’ll get his. I’ve cleared the rail from Virginia to O’Hare. The team is assembling and we should be outbound in thirty minutes,” Evan said.
“Excellent. I’ll be there in twenty.” Boen had relocated outside the base to train the special forces unit attached to Janis. They settled on a team of six.
Evan rubbed his eyes. They were killing a hostage every five minutes. Even at two hundred and fifty miles per hour it would take them three hours to get there. Over sixty people would be dead. Nothing I can do about it.
They were shooting them in front of the camera. They put the hostage on their knees and told them to say their name, where they were from, and what they wanted to tell their loved ones. And then the French guy would say “the victims in the Middle East never had that courtesy,” and he would shoot them in the head.
Evan decided he would extend that same courtesy to the Western Curse. Camera on, say what you want, until Janis crushes you down. And when he got to the Frenchmen, he’d do it slow, let him know that he was going to hell. That was the problem with countries facing these threats—they were too polite, too bound by the bizarre etiquette of war. Evan liked the Middle Eastern philosophy. An eye for an eye. Hell, double it up, do a twofer. Two eyes for one. I betcha crime would stop then. Evan walked out of his office and his security detail swept him toward the train.
= = =
Tank Major Janis had six assistants that worked in four-hour shifts due to the radioactive toxicity of his suit. They were all scientists and engineers. The assistants were needed because his movements were now an exponential equivalent to what they had been. He couldn’t scratch his face, each fingertip was as big as his cheek and he would fracture his skull. He couldn’t bathe, he couldn’t change the contents of his nutrient pump or waste canister. He couldn’t write or flip a page in a book. The assistants did this and after a while, the six of them melded into an extra pair of hands that worked around him, always keeping him comfortable.
He was on the train. Sue, the assistant on shift, scaled over him like he was a climbing wall. She oiled the gears in between the armor, she checked the hydraulshock chamber for any obstruction or loose fitting components, she shaved his face. The relationship between him and his assistants was like an evolution of nature, an Egyptian plover cleaning the teeth of a crocodile.
“How am I looking, Sue?” Janis asked. He saw her working on his left shoulder.
“Good, big sexy,” she said. He dug Sue. She was a little Asian woman, mid-twenties, with brains and attitude.
“Eric, put out your hands, por favor,” another technician, Jed, requested. He handled diagnostics of Janis’s implant. Sue jumped off him and he raised his thousand pound arms in front of him.
“Wiggle’em,” Jed said.
Each finger, the size of a man’s arm, moved up and down like he was playing a piano.
Jed was checking for latency: Janis’s brain commands, the implant’s interpretation and conversion of these commands, and the battle chassis’ accuracy of the conversion. Finger movement was the easiest movement to measure and the most difficult for the implant to interpret. Everything looked ducky.
“Excellent, Eric. We’re running at less than a tenth of a second delay,” Jed said. He turned to two soldiers nearby. “Load’em up.”
Janis opened the chamber of each hydraulshock. The two men unlocked the armory on the opposite side of the train car. On the ground were two loaded hydraulshock magazines. Each housed six artillery rounds that, when Janis punched, generated over three and a half million foot-pounds of energy. The total weight of a loaded magazine was three hundred pounds. Together they grabbed the handles of one and lifted with their legs. They crab walked one to Eric’s right side and the other to his left, breathing heavy from the exercise.
They climbed up Janis and knelt near his neck. Janis effortlessly lifted each artillery magazine to his shoulders. The men guided each onto rails mounted into his shoulders and locked them into place. Done, they jumped down and cleared away. With a CLACK! the hydraulshock chamber slammed shut and loaded one round int
o each arm.
“What’s our ETA?” Janis asked. They had quarantined him from his six-soldier team due to the health risk. Thirty minutes before the train was to dock at O’Hare, they would meet up with General Boen for a final run through.
“We’re forty-five out,” Boen said over the comm.
Janis listened to music before missions. It calmed him. Sue cranked Amnesiac, a classic album by Radiohead. Janis closed his eyes and meditated, thinking about the upcoming battle, his movements, ways he could protect the team.
The train stopped one mile short. From the live video the Western Curse broadcasted on the web and the schematics of the building, the terrorists were on the gate-level floor at the center of Terminal 3.
General Boen routed their train to Terminal 1. This allowed them to arrive on the terrorists’ blind side. The Western Curse had taken over Terminal 3 at 12:30 p.m. It was now 3:30 p.m and the sun was still out. For one mile, the Tank Major and the soldiers would be completely exposed either to sniper fire or the tell of their strategy.
“Good luck,” Boen said.
Janis and his team ran through a tall field, cutting across unused tarmac that time and weather had broken up into a million-piece jigsaw puzzle.
Janis had trained with these soldiers for three months under the watchful eye of General Boen. The addition of a Tank Major to a small team posed both benefits and problems. The biggest problems were noise and weight. At its quietest, the Tank Major sounded like a gas-powered car at idle. At its loudest, when the engines were spun up for battle, the room would shake from the energy.
Tank Major Janis weighed four tons. This allowed him to cut through vehicles and walls like they were made out of paper, but it also reduced his applications. Not all floors could handle four tons spread out over two feet.
In tests, Janis would fall right through some floors when he tried to walk, let alone run. So it was quite possible that in battle, he would be left behind as his team went up stairs to face a combatant that had high offensive capabilities. Modern industrial buildings, like skyscrapers, could support his weight, but the elevators in them could not.
However, under the right circumstances, the benefits were astounding. Tank Major Janis was an active, intelligent, and offensive human shield. The soldiers were trained to ‘stack up’ behind Janis and allow him to take the brunt of the enemy’s offense. This reduced the human infantry to a two hundred and seventy degree window of danger and it also allowed them to peel off discreetly at doors or behind other structures, completely hidden from the enemy’s view.
The benefits outweighed the negatives a hundred fold. But just like all weapons, there was a time and a place to use it.
When they got within rifle range, the six soldiers got behind Janis. He became their shield. When they got underneath Terminal 1, two of the soldiers branched out ahead. They were fast and quiet, the scouts.
They got to a garage entrance of Terminal 1. This would get them into the service level of the building where luggage was sorted and the equipment was stored. Janis easily forced the gate open.
Once again, the six soldiers stacked behind him as they entered. Inside, the scouts moved ahead, calling clear through their closed circuit comm as they weaved between the conveyor belts and through the compressed air powered service vehicles.
“We’re in Terminal 1,” Janis said in his comm.
“Looking at the schematic,” General Boen said. “You are at a service elevator. Past that are stairs that lead up to the main floor. Ignore those. Past that is a service tunnel that connects all of the terminals. It’s used for VIPs. We have word that it hasn’t been used since the conversion to rail. Sending the schematic.”
Janis received the schematics wirelessly. He behaved as the team’s data center. Within one hundred yards of his position, his team could download information into their comm sent to him by Command. The soldiers paused and reviewed the data in their viewfinder before moving on.
They passed the service elevator and stairs and found locked double doors. Janis pulled them open and the men stacked behind him. Below were stairs that disappeared into black.
“Activating night vision,” Janis said. The inside of his helmet went from clear to a light green. A few visible steps into an abyss turned into a stairway that went down one hundred feet.
“We’re going down. Expect a communication drop out, this thing is deep,” Janis said.
“Roger,” Boen replied.
Janis barely fit in the stairway. He squatted and hunched over, using his arms as braces against the wall. His feet were articulated, but even then, the stairs were tough. Under his weight the cement crumbled and the metal supports shuddered like a taut guitar string. The team stayed back until he had reached the bottom.
“I made it,” Janis said.
The soldiers hurried down.
“The gate floor can hold you?” a scout named Estevan asked skeptically. Behind her it looked like a truck had tried to scratch its way through.
“So they say,” Janis said. Estevan nodded. Good enough for her.
The hallway was long and straight, easily a half mile. There were no obvious ambush points, so they moved quickly. At midpoint, a hallway turned to their right and a sign said “Terminal 2.” They continued on. At the end of the hallway was a set of stairs that led up to Terminal 3.
“Command, can you hear me?” Janis asked. He got nothing.
“I’ll go up first,” Janis said. He used all four limbs like a gorilla and crunched up the stairs. When he got to the top, Estevan came up with a camera wand. She put it under the door and looked around.
“We got three hostiles in front of us,” she whispered. “I can’t see behind. They know about this door and their guns are raised. They heard.”
“Let’s say hello,” Janis replied. Estevan slipped back to the bottom of the stairs and got ready with the rest of the team.
= = =
David Hannah wasn’t from the Middle East. He was from Berkeley, California. His parents were professors there. David grew up in a beautiful cottage overlooking the ocean that his mom had inherited from her father who had inherited it from his father, who had breached the shores of Normandy in World War II. While they ate dinner, as the sun sunk behind the endless sea, his parents would rant about the evils of their country. How corporations ran it. How the middle class was drying up. How we imposed our will on other nations. The irony was lost on them.
“The President is a puppet,” his mother used to say over dinner. Tonight it was soy burgers and kale salad. “Corporations run the show, David. You might as well not even vote.”
His father chortled at a comic in The New Yorker.
He legacied into Berkeley and there he was introduced to the Western Curse by his roommate and fellow political activist/anarchist.
“Who are they?” David asked while they ate a panini made with free-range chicken, gluten and pesticide free bread, and a slice of locally grown tomato.
“They’re an organization that is against the Coalition’s abuse of power. And they are funded, bro.”
“Terrorist?” David asked. It sounded like an Islamic thing and those were everywhere. Nowadays if you closed your eyes and threw a rock, you’d hit some Islamic fundamentalist group.
“They don’t care about your religion, where you’re from, nothing like that. They just care that you believe in the message and want to do something about it.” His roommate passed him the information he had printed out. David pushed the last of the sando into his mouth and licked his fingers clean of organic mayo. He flipped through the pages. “Huh. Looks like something worth checking out.”
Now, he really wished he had skipped that meeting.
“Uh, Antoine?” David said into his walkie-talkie. Behind two large doors he heard a grindstone move up the stairs. The other soldiers looked at each other nervously and retreated. David didn’t notice.
“Yes?” Antoine crackled over the radio.
“Something’s dow
n here,” David said. The noise had stopped.
“Soldiers?” Antoine asked. David could hear the excitement in the man’s voice. He wanted a battle.
“I don’t know,” David replied.
“Report back when you do.” Antoine got off the channel.
David held an AK-47. Holstered was the Uzi-Pro. The other soldiers were gone. He looked around and saw them hiding behind the various machines and pillars in the room. He slowly walked up to the door.
“What are you doing?” a soldier hissed from behind a conveyor belt. David put his finger up to his mouth, telling him to shush.
Ten feet from the door, he learned what was behind it. The clatter of an accelerating rollercoaster vibrated through the room. A buzz filled the air. David didn’t know it, but his hair stood on end.
WHAM! The doors flew off their hinges and for a second, David thought he was staring at a giant mechanical bull. It came out on all fours and then rose onto two legs. David could see a man, impossibly, looking at him from inside. It hissed and groaned, the whine originating from gigantic drive chains that spun in random orbit around its waist. They crackled with electricity.
David raised his gun to fire but it was too late. Janis grabbed him and pulled him into the spinning chains, eviscerating the Berkeley graduate like he had been dropped into a Cuisinart. The majority of David splattered against the wall to Janis’s left. A thick, red, tapenade of skin, bone, and guts.
The terrorists opened fire on Janis. The bullets harmlessly flicked off his armor. Janis charged through the conveyor belt and stepped on one, smearing him across the linoleum.
Another terrorist launched a forty millimeter grenade from the underbarrel of his rifle but he was too close for it to arm. The grenade ricocheted off Janis with a twang and exploded against a wall, showering the room with shards of cement and dust. The terrorist switched over and opened fire with the AK, but it was pointless. Janis hammered him down, bursting him open like a ripe tomato.
Janis’s squad rolled through the entrance and chased down the remaining terrorists. Most had fled when the mechanized god had risen before them. It was covered in Berkeley’s blood. It looked born from it. A pagan sacrifice made in vain.
“We’re a go. I repeat we are a go!” Janis said over the comm.
“Roger. You are a go,” General Boen repeated.
“Go! Go!” he heard the other soldiers say. They were stacked behind him again. A set of stairs led up to the main floor. Janis spun up again and his body shook from the horsepower and torque that it took to give him strength and speed. He charged up the stairs.
= = =
Antoine heard the volley of gunshots over the radio and the wet gurgle of death. The giant was here. Antoine quickly hit the key command on the laptop. It began hunting for wireless protocols to hack. Three hundred yards down the hall he watched the giant rise from a stairwell.
It was big. Even far away, he could see the distinct armor: the solid chest plate, the carved armor that wrapped around the joints. The way slats in its thighs undulated with each foot impact, absorbing the weight. It was astounding. Pairs of little boots scampered behind it like a centipede. The infantry.
“One hundred yards,” Antoine reminded his second lieutenant. He held the detonator. They had planted the charges. They wanted the soldiers close. They wanted the giant.
Antoine glanced at the computer. It had found a military wireless protocol. Antoine smiled as they approached. They expected him to be scared, but he knew what they didn’t: the moves had already been made. The checkmate was just a formality.
= = =
They were using the hostages as human shields.
We should have predicted this, Janis thought. The soldiers behind him couldn’t open fire. Even from here, Janis couldn’t tell a terrorist from a hostage. In front of the crowd were sixty bodies piled like dirty laundry. One shot every five minutes with no demands, just as promised.
They wanted this, Janis thought. They want to die.
Janis stopped.
“Let the hostages go,” Janis said. He voice was amplified.
No one answered. Janis could see that some of the people were crying and scared out of their minds. They were clearly held against their will. But others were drawn in, a sign of shock, but also calculation. They were at a stalemate.
“What do you want?” Janis asked. Some whimpered cries filled the air, but no demands. He turned off the loudspeaker.
“What should we do?” Janis asked Boen over the comm. General Boen watched the situation with a camera mounted inside Janis’s helmet.
“At your eleven o’clock, one row back is a man with red hair and a beard. That man is Antoine. He’s the one shooting the hostages. He is the only terrorist who we have a clear picture of. Hold . . .”
Janis could hear someone speak to General Boen. It was Lindo.
“Okay. We have confirmation that their video feed to the web has been cut,” Boen said. “Proceed forward.”
“What about the hostages?” Janis asked.
“Eric, they’re gonna kill them anyway. They’ve made no formal demands and they’ve already shot sixty. You’ll have to make the decision between hostiles and friendlies on the fly, but a Tank Major running into the crowd will disperse it. Over.”
“Over,” Janis said. Ignore the human shield. That was what he was just told. Before his hands thunder down, look into their eyes and decide good or bad. There would be mistakes.
The greater good.
We don’t negotiate with terrorists.
Janis accelerated forward; inertia overcome with the instant torque of his electric motors. Beneath his feet the polished granite floor evaporated into dust, pluming around his feet like pollen.
Antoine choked when the giant charged. The four hundred hostages screamed in fear and scattered, ignoring the guns pointed at them. The human shield was supposed to stall the military. But instead, the giant closed in as if everyone was declared guilty.
“Blow it!” Antoine yelled to his second lieutenant. Nothing happened. He turned to see a fat woman scratching at the lieutenant’s face; it was mutiny on a grand scale. The giant had turned an orderly hostage situation rabid. The room shook from his approaching footsteps. Antoine shot the fat woman in the stomach and followed up to the head. “Blow it!” he screamed. The second lieutenant hit the button.
Behind Janis the floor exploded upward and then tumbled thirty feet below. In front of him, the same thing happened, opening a fifty-foot chasm between him and the terrorists. They were stranded on an island. Janis could jump down unharmed, but the six behind him could not. Thirty feet was too far for them when the ground below was tons of ragged steel and stone, angled and sharp like pikes in a punji pit.
“We lost Mitch!” Janis heard over the comm. Whether Mitch was dead or alive wasn’t the question. He had fallen below. It was now five soldiers and the giant completely exposed with no exit.
The wail of miniguns filled the air. A section of crowd exploded into meat, popping and pulsing as they slopped to the floor. A few fortunate souls crawled through the blood and gore to escape the hail of lead. Janis’s armor sparked like flint on steel. They were trying to kill the soldiers huddled behind him. Janis heard Estevan scream as a round tore through her thigh. Janis crouched like a hockey goalie to block the bullets from getting through.
Janis could barely hear the comm. Lead drummed off his helmet and the miniguns screamed.
“THEY’RE FLANKING. WE CAN’T STAY UP HERE!” another soldier, Hostettler, yelled.
Janis saw the terrorists on each side run from support pillar to support pillar. They had assault rifles. He would live but his team, flesh and blood wrapped in Kevlar suits, would get overwhelmed. He saw twenty on both sides, covering and moving, basic military training. His team hunched against his tree sized legs and took aim, keeping their sights between the pillars the terrorists would have to cross.
Antoine watched from the cover of a men’s bathroom a
s the giant hunched down to save his companions from the volley of lead. He saw his soldiers flanking, getting past the immovable man. He smiled. The computer had hacked into Janis and it was now uploading the software that Mohammed had promised would end this. From the progress bar, it was minutes away.
“Hit him with the RPGs,” Antoine said into his walkie-talkie. Four soldiers magically appeared from behind pillars, thirty yards from Janis.
Janis saw the vapor trail of the RPGs before he registered what was happening. Four RPG’s hit him simultaneously. They rocked him enough that he had to brace himself with an arm against the ground, but they caused no damage. We have to get out of here.
“Are any of them at our back?” Janis yelled.
“No. We’re clear on our back.” Hostettler fired on three terrorists perpendicular to the Tank Major.
“Eject! Hang on to your guns,” Janis said. “We’re ejecting!”
Ejecting was used to remove “soft soldiers” from situations of imminent death. It had been practiced three times. The first two, Janis had broken the test soldier’s legs and caused a concussion for another. He had to nail it.
“Estevan, you’re coming with me,” Janis growled.
“Yes, sir.”
He could hear weakness in her voice. The minigun shot rounds powerful enough to kill a grizzly. He hoped the round had grazed her but her voice told him otherwise.
Janis’s upper body moved freely three hundred and sixty degrees from his lower body. This was to dissipate the energy of an unsuccessful hydraulshock attack. He spun around and grabbed Hostettler and Woods.
“Ready?” he asked. They nodded.
Throwing them was like a human throwing a cabbage patch doll. They were so light in comparison that he couldn’t go by feel. He threw them low, trying to push them just over the chasm to the other side. Too high and they would fall and break. But a push throw transferred the energy into a roll. They made it over.
He grabbed Johnson and Bush and did the same. They all hit fifteen feet past the moat and tumbled another twenty. Each soldier rolled prone and immediately fired on incoming hostiles.
Estevan was as bad as Janis thought. The round had hit her below the knee and her shin was a bent twig, barely attached. A pool of blood beneath her dripped over the side.
“Hang on Estevan. Hang on,” Janis said. He scooped her in his hands like he was holding a butterfly. Rounds rained on him, hitting his hands, his arms, his body. He felt another RPG hit his back to no affect. Syrupy blood dripped through his fingers.
“Hang on!”
Janis jumped down into the rocky debris and rolled to lessen the impact on Estevan. He heard her cry out. He stood up. The dust was thick, but he could see. Support pillars, ten feet in diameter were on each side of the hole. He moved quickly into the dark and put Estevan down.
“Stay alive,” he said.
She nodded and tore at her clothing to make a tourniquet.
“Fuck them up,” she said through her teeth.
= = =
Hostettler and Woods covered each other, backtracking and firing on the approaching terrorists. They had the left; Johnson and Bush took the right.
It was sticky. Hostettler had seen combat where splinters of stone flung through the air, dust obscured friendlies from hostiles, and the only thing you could hear was the ringing in your ears and the thud, thud, thud, of machine guns tearing at your position. This one was up there.
A terrorist—a young woman—came around a corner with an RPG, he shot her in the head and then shot the man behind her. More came. Johnson cried out, a round got him in the right shoulder. He switched the rifle to his good arm and shot from the hip as the other arm dangled at his side and the sleeve bloomed with red.
The ground coughed. That was how Hostettler would have described it. As if the earth hacked something free. He heard the echo of what they were trained to ignore, because the sound was so startling that the first time he heard it, he lost control of his bowels. He and the others dropped to the ground.
The comm earpieces had a low pass and high pass filter built in. These were designed to eliminate frequencies that could disorient them or cause permanent damage. The hydraulshock hit every frequency above and below what a human could hear. Five hertz to fifty thousand kilohertz. Their earpieces limited hearing response from twenty hertz to seventeen thousand kilohertz and rolled off anything above eighty-five decibels, hard limiting at one hundred decibels.
BAM!
A pack of terrorists to their left vanished in an avalanche of concrete, granite, and steel, that shifted fifty feet in less than a hundredth of a second.
BAM!
The dull roar in his earpiece. On Johnson and Bush’s side, the ground was thrown onto the train tracks. Twenty terrorists vanished, blended into meaty clay by the tonnage of floor and structure that had been turned to rubble.
They were clear. They looked at each other, shell shocked.
“Janis, we are clear,” Johnson said. “Thank you.”
“Watch this,” Janis replied.
Going away from them, the floor disappeared in a wave. Not from the hydraulshock, but from eight thousand pounds moving at twenty-five miles per hour snapping through each pillar as if they were brittle bones. The men at the miniguns couldn’t react in time. The floor had become seismic, the energy led the charge like a sonic boom. They vanished in the wave of destruction, the floor churning and falling, plowed from below.
Antoine heard the mechanized monster beneath him and the screams of his comrades extinguished with a deep, thudding impact. The entrance of the bathroom hung at the edge of the abyss and he could see the giant’s murky movement, a tarantula that had caught crickets in its burrow. He sprinted out the other side of the men’s bathroom and ran away from the others that had stood to fight.
“I’m okay. I’m okay.” But he didn’t feel okay. He was shaking. He had seen the giant up close, he could picture it trudging forward, sniffing for him like a starving dog, smelling his cowardice.
“Shut up,” he said to himself. He flipped open the computer that he was told would stop the beast. On its screen was a yellow smiley face and “file downloaded!”
But it hadn’t worked.
What if it wasn’t meant to work? What if it was for something completely beyond your pay grade?
Xan would have stood up and slow clapped at the revelation.
“I’m not expendable,” Antoine said to himself.
“Get the FUCK UP,” someone commanded.
Antoine turned into the gray muzzle of Mitch Ratny’s SAW machine gun. When Mitch had fallen into the moat, he moved ahead two hundred yards to get behind the miniguns. His ankle was demolished, but he limped his way back up just in time to see this red headed pussy run away. He hoped Frenchy made a move.
= = =
All things considered, Tank Major Janis’s first mission was a success. The female soldier—Lindo had no idea why a woman would want to do that kind of work—would lose her leg. That was the only military casualty. Including the sixty before they arrived, one hundred and twenty hostages died. Janis had killed thirty-five terrorists. The rest of the team killed twenty-five. O’Hare train station would need an extensive remodel.
The stench of the kill wafted through the train on the way back to Virginia. They hosed Janis down, but red pieces of meat continued to fall out of his gears and drop from his hands. The pressure sprayer took ninety percent of it away, but the other ten percent was like a splinter: it just had to work itself out.
They had the leader on the train. He was coming back to Virginia with them. At first, Antoine had been smug. “I want a lawyer,” he’d demanded. Evan and the others laughed out loud. The man didn’t get it. He was a ghost. Evan watched the resilience bleed from the man’s eyes as the laughter continued like he had just told the world’s best knock-knock joke.
Evan was now alone. He found the gentle sway of the bullet train soothing.
They didn’t know w
hat they were walking into. That was the problem with this mission. They got surprised. While Janis’s open architecture allowed Command to upload or download information and pass this to the team, they had no real-time way of knowing what the enemy was doing. They didn’t know position. They didn’t know movement. Lindo and the others had gone in overconfident. They thought the Tank Major would cause the terrorists to fall to their knees and beg for mercy.
For his physical military inventions, Evan liked to sketch concepts freehand. He felt there was an art to it. In his lap was a pad of paper and on it was a flying disk. At its center was a turbine blade. Scrawled in the upper right hand corner was a description: “x-ray scope, infrared scope, HD camera, night vision scope.”
Like the Tank Major, he could clearly see the design. He understood how it was powered and its purpose. He paused and looked at his drawing. He bit on the top of the pencil. And then he wrote “Hover-rover Concept” at the top.
It would be easy to implement. The majority of the technology needed was already built into the giant two train cars back.
= = =
The smell made Janis nauseous. It was like someone had shoved raw steak into his nostrils. Terry, the assistant on duty, was a fifty-year-old hippy with long gray hair, a walrus mustache, and a soft midsection. He was cleaning between Janis’s armored plates and gears with a large hand brush and a power sprayer. The ground beneath them looked like a slaughterhouse.
Terry took a moment to throw up. He tried to move off Janis, but he couldn’t jump down in time. Stringy green hurl splattered on Janis’s left shoulder and rode down his arm.
“Sorry, Eric,” Terry said. He pressure sprayed the hurl off.
“It actually made the room smell better,” Janis said.
“How was it?” Terry asked. He worked Janis’s fingers and the armor that protected his knuckles. They were matted with thirty different human meats.
“It was,” Janis thought about it. It was so hard to describe. “It was like I was a kid and instead of playing with He-Man, I became him. You know how’d you have He-Man fight ten, twenty action figures? I used to make their castle out of Legos. And he’d just smash through it?”
Terry nodded.
“That’s what it was like. It’s a retarded way to explain it, but it was like I was He-Man. Like I was invincible,” Janis said.
Terry turned off the sprayer for a second.
“I know I’m not supposed to ask, but what about all this?” Terry gestured to the pieces of people on the floor, slowly sliding toward the center drain.
“I used to have a hard time with it,” Janis said. “But we got nine billion people on Earth. If you can’t play nice in the sandbox, then you don’t get to play.”
Terry fired the sprayer back up.
“I’d like to see Estevan when we get back to base,” Janis said.
“I’ll put the request in to Dr. Lindo,” Terry replied. He hoped the water wouldn’t run out.