Grunt Life (30 page)

Harry. That was the character’s name. Such an old man’s name, even though he’d never lived to become old. I remember one of the questions we’d had in Phase I about what we’d want to remember most when we became old. Harry had been so lonely towards the very end of his life. I remembered reading that shortly before I’d tried to kill myself for the last time, thinking to myself about how terrible an existence would be when you had no one to be there with you.

I’d always been a loner. I’d lived inside my own head most of the time. But that story made me understand. It made me want to reach out. It had given me the courage to let my feelings be known to Michelle.

I laughed softly to myself at the irony. Here I was, sitting on top of a mountain I’d read about ten thousand miles ago, before the Earth was invaded. Such an improbable string of coincidences. Then again, knowing Mr. Pink, it probably wasn’t coincidence. His team of psychologists probably knew and understood my psyche and psychosis better than I ever would, and had planned on this moment since the beginning.

I rolled over and stared across the plain. Not for the first time, I relished looking down on the mound rather than up at it. In the distance I saw drones coming and going, while sentries soared in lazy circles above the hive, much like the vulture above us.

I closed my eyes and prayed to the universe to protect Thompson and Aquinas. The bowels of the mound were probably the most alien place on the planet and they would almost certainly feel alone.

I pushed myself up and turned to my hated comrade.

“Come on, Olivares. Let’s go.”

“Chill out. We still have an hour.”

He lay next to me in his EXO. Like mine, it had been painted black. CBT OMBRA base techs had used tar sealant to cover the metal, which also gave it a texture to which dirt and dust could adhere. The last thing we wanted while climbing up the side of a six-thousand-meter-high mountain was for the Cray to see a reflection and investigate.

Still, I was eager to get moving. Waiting meant thinking, and I didn’t want to live inside my head right now. I had a lot of bad thoughts, especially against Olivares. Leaving the others to die was an unforgivable sin, outstripping anything I’d ever done. For all the terrible decisions I’d made and all of the soldiers who’d died under my command, I never once left them on the battlefield.

But this was a two-man mission.

“Ease up on your anger, Mason,” he said. “Your breathing... when you’re angry it increases. You’re already through seventy-eight percent of your oxygen mix, while I’m only sixty-six percent down.”

“You have a smaller heart,” I said. “It doesn’t need as much.”

“Jesus, Mason. Give it the fuck up. You always have to have a reason for someone dying and it always has to be someone’s fault. Sometimes there isn’t a reason. Sometimes it’s no one’s fault. It’s a war, man. Shit happens. People die. Life goes on.”

His words meant nothing. These were excuses.

“Do you have a comment for that too?” he asked.

I ignored him and concentrated on slowing my breathing.

He said nothing more for a time, which was exactly the way I wanted it.

We were getting used to the altitude. The trip up the side of Kilimanjaro would normally take six to seven days. It was steep, and climbers needed to acclimatize themselves. Without the time or oxygen mix, high altitude pulmonary or cerebral edema was a dangerous and very real possibility. In fact, it was believed that more people died climbing Kilimanjaro than Everest for this very reason.

But our EXOs had been equipped to be self-sealing. We were no longer breathing the outside air. Instead, we were breathing an oxygen-rich mix that mimicked the atmosphere at the base of the African mountain. It allowed us to make the trip in a single day. We didn’t
have
seven days, or enough battery power for the trip. A little way after entering the mouth of the volcano, we’d be forced to ditch the suits, opting for multicams and body armor until we’d descended far enough inside the volcanic tunnels to return to normal atmosphere.

We each carried rigid battle packs, holding water, rations, med kits, rope, an MP5 and a 9mm pistol each with armor-piercing ammunition, multicams to change to once we were inside the volcano, batteries, lights, a tablet, Semtex, thermite grenades, and spare odds and ends.

The very idea of climbing down the inside of a volcano was amazing. Reading
Journey to the Center of the Earth
in Phase I, I’d never thought we’d be repeating the same sort of trek. I doubted there’d be an entire new world below, complete with fauna and fowl, although we were obviously expecting to encounter Cray.

What type of Cray was the question. Would it be the sort with wings? Or those without, like the ones that had attacked Ohirra? Or a new kind all together? What about the Sirens?

Mr. Pink had alluded to the possibility that the Cray were not the real threat, but an alien invasion force sent to weaken us. Were they ‘uplifted,’ like in the David Brin books; aliens genetically manipulated to achieve a sentience they wouldn’t have normally had? Or were they merely a marauding species, similar to David Gerrold’s?

I remembered reading the Gerrold books. Hadn’t the aliens tried to warm the planet and establish their own fauna? I tried to imagine new plants and a change of seasons. Something like that would truly change the nature of Earth. In fact, it would become our planet in name only.

Whatever their nature, I didn’t have the curiosity of a xenobiologist. Once I encountered them, I wasn’t going to be too concerned about what they ate or what language they spoke. I wasn’t worried about communicating with them; I wasn’t even planning on learning much about them. I was here to kill them, and that’s what I planned on doing. Olivares had already established that I was a killer. It was time to live up to the title.

Hero of the Mound.

I was thinking I might try on a new title. Maybe the Butcher of Kilimanjaro. That had a nice ring to it. I imagined a marquee playing across my mind and began to breathe a little easier as I mentally rehearsed all the ways I was going to kill the aliens once I got inside the tunnels.

I seriously couldn’t wait.

Why is it important that the characters didn’t have any idea about the nature of the creatures that they’d find inside of the earth?

TF OMBRA Study Question from

Journey to the Center of the Earth

by Jules Verne

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

M
R.
P
INK’S PLAN
was as inelegant as it was necessary. We were getting nowhere attacking from the surface; the iridium-reinforced shell of the mound had defeated us entirely. Although we had combat superiority over the Cray drones, we knew neither how many remained nor whether they were capable of reinforcing in mass quantities. For all we knew, they had a giant Cray queen squeezing out larvae that matured into combat drones in a matter of hours. If that were the case, we’d run out of humanity before they ran out of drones.

They needed someone on the inside. Our mission was two-fold. First, we were to make our way inside, killing where we had to kill and bypassing where we could, and get in as far as possible. CBT OMBRA needed recon. We desperately needed to know what we were up against. Did they have more Sirens in the mound, or were they a pre-invasion species only? Were there other species we hadn’t seen before? What about the Cray’s EMP projectors? Were they self-generating, or did they require charging? These and a hundred other questions needed to be answered.

Original plans had called for a two-person reconnaissance team to infiltrate using EXOs, but the geologists and volcanologists had argued against it, pointing out that the EXOS were far too bulky to make it through the questionable labyrinth mapped by the sonar and radar results we’d given lives to provide. Hence the Kevlar body armor. Still, in order to provide enough data for the attack to be successful, we required some way to record the necessary data. CBT techs created a mesh to enclose the helmets when removed from the suit, a portable EMP shield. Powered by batteries, the helmets would be able to provide full-spectrum recording, complete with intermittent radar, sonar, and power generation detection, enabling planners to look at the inside of the mound.

Assuming we survived.

Assuming we were able to either transmit the data, or ensure that the data chip was transported to friendly lines. If we had to chip it, we were lucky to have the height of technology available for our use—a flare gun with a parachute flare, which was probably the pinnacle of advancement during World War II.

The second part was a little trickier. CBT OMBRA had a three-pronged attack planned, which would occur with or without our input.

Part one encompassed the use of M712 Copperhead laser-guided projectiles, originally designed for the 155mm self-propelled Howitzer. CBT OMBRA Techs had been working to design a way to retrofit the eight-inch Howitzers with tube sleeves that would enable the projectiles to fire. Romeo Two’s EXOs were retrofitted for speed and camouflage and assigned as Forward Observers, equipped to paint the mound with laser designators to direct the Copperheads into the launch tubes, where they’d then deliver their packages. This marked an evolutionary leap in the gun bunny’s ability to provide cover support, and used lessons learned from previous battlefield interaction with the Cray.

The projectiles themselves were a mixture of high explosive and endothermic payloads. While more than half of the Copperheads had been fitted with high explosive, the rest—and the first to be fired—had a payload of binary gas mixture; impact would create an endothermic reaction resulting in sub-freezing temperatures for anything within the effective range of the explosion.

While the Copperheads stirred the hornet’s nest like it had never been stirred before, part two encompassed an assault on the mound by EXOs. All remaining recon elements would attack along prescribed lines, culminating in climbing into the lower Cray launch ramps. Armed with additional endothermic grenades, they’d add to the sub-zero temperature, hopefully creating an environment which would dull the aliens’ senses. Once inside the mound, the EXOs would fire strobes in an attempt to further immobilize the Cray.

With the EXOs’ success in part two, part three would continue with an attack by the remaining battalions. One infantry battalion and special-troops battalion would be poised in the bunker and prepared to battle once they pushed through the underground wall into the mound chamber. The other infantry battalion, as well as the fires battalion, would infiltrate using the three holes the Cray had created in the earth, as well as the unfilled maw where the thermobaric bomb had detonated.

Then, of course, there was Mr. Pink’s new weapon. He’d had it built in secret and had rolled it into the mess hall right before we left. The Black Box: roughly the size of a van, it rested on wheels and needed its own generators. Whatever was inside remained hidden. Mr. Pink had said, through an executioner’s smile, that its true purpose would be eventually revealed.

All in all, we had a plan that might even work.

But first we had to get into the volcano.

We were a hundred meters from the top when we heard the noise. There was something up there. Was it waiting, or did it live there? We moved slowly and carefully, ready to defend ourselves.

Kilimanjaro had seven man-made routes to the top: Lemosho, Machame, Marangu, Mweka, Rongai, Shira, and Umbwe. Umbwe was the steepest and quickest, taking us in a direct line to Uhuru Peak where the Kibo caldera remained. Past the scrub, the heathers, the forest, then the tree line, the last hundred meters were almost vertical... almost. We were still able to find places for our feet and hands, but just barely.

The cold didn’t help much. The suits were designed for function and not for comfort. Although sealing the suit necessitated air conditioning and heating, we were forced to keep almost all of these off to conserve battery power. My fingers had begun to shake as we entered the ice field.

Olivares was moving first, and I was backing him up. We had no plan or choice other than to rush the top by pure brute force. We wanted to stay as far away from the fumaroles and vaporized sulfuric acid of Kibo as possible, but we might have to skirt it. Frankly, the idea was mind-bogglingly terrifying. It was going to be hard enough descending into a volcano without imagining lava bubbling through the same tunnels.

But there was time enough to be scared for that. We had to get to the top first, and then we had to survive what we encountered. As this was a covert mission, we didn’t have our usual suite of weapons. Gone was our Hydra missile system, and we no longer carried our miniguns. Instead we carried MP5 submachine guns and 9mm pistols; both were silenced to keep any killing we had to do as discreet as possible. We’d have loved the firepower, but the last thing we needed was for the Cray to come for us alone on top of this damn mountain. That is, if they could fly this high; CBT OMBRA’s xenobiologists weren’t certain about the Cray’s altitude restrictions.

Olivares crept steadily towards the summit. I moved right behind him, copying his ascent as best I could.

I checked my grip on the rock to make certain I wasn’t on ice.

“Move on three,” Olivares said.

I followed him to the summit, jerking free my pistol from where it was strapped to my thigh and grabbing my harmonic blade with my other hand. A flurry of black and brown greeted us. I was temporarily blinded as whatever was there attacked my face. I swung at it with my blade and stepped to the side.

A moment later the fight was over.

Olivares and I had killed three vultures. They’d been feeding on a desiccated body that looked like it had been up here for months. Glancing around to make sure the area was secured, I saw more bodies. The ground was about a football field long and covered with rock, leading up a ridge that hid the caldera. Dirty snow and ice dotted the field. Strewn across the length and breadth were bones, pieces of clothing, and cooking tools. I found a pot that showed little rust, suggesting it had been here for a relatively short time. We’d been wondering what had happened to the villagers. I think we’d just found some of them.