Grunt Traitor (39 page)

Drifting.

Drifting.

Then the feeling began to wane. It slowly came back to me. Tony Scott. My name was Tony Scott. No, that wasn’t right. Mason. My name was Mason. My first name was Ben. Tony Scott was a movie director. He’d killed himself.

I became aware of a new noise. It grew louder and louder until it became my universe.

“Mason!”

The word rang like thunder.

“Mason!”

The sound of worlds colliding.

“Mason, wake up!”

My eyes snapped open. “What’s...” My mouth felt like raw hamburger. It hurt to speak.

“Dear God, you’re back,” Ohirra said. “We thought we’d lost you for good.”

“What happened?” I managed.

“You lost your mind,” she said, her eyes narrowed through the faceplate of her mask.

“You were screaming and laughing,” Sula said.

I turned to her. She’d been crying.

I looked around. We weren’t on the 101 anymore. We were inside a building, what had once been a store. Part of the roof had collapsed from the intrusion of torso-thick alien vines.

“Where’s Stranz?”

Ohirra nodded towards the door. “Standing guard.”

I licked my lips. “Full report.”

Ohirra stared at me as if I might explode. “You made us stop at Melrose. Then you went into a fugue. You remained like that for about five minutes, then you started to scream and yell and cry. I didn’t know you spoke Japanese. Or Russian.”

“I don’t.”

“Well, you did then.”

“What’d I say?”

“You said, ‘Don’t go, Hitomi. Stay with me.’”

I shook my head. “How long?”

“Two hours.”

I struggled to sit up. “Two hours? What time is it? Why didn’t you Charlie Mike?”

Ohirra sighed. “There’s the Mason I know. Frankly, we were about to leave you. It’s midnight and we have three hours to detonation.”

“You should have left.” I ran my hand over my head and mopped the sweat away. I was aware how parched I was, probably from all the screaming. “Water?”

She held out a bottle. “We found this in the back.”

I uncapped it and drank the whole thing down, the warm liquid luxurious as it entered my system.

“What happened?” Ohirra asked.

I told her, working it out as I spoke.

She took it all in, then asked the most important question. “Who was it who told you to connect?”

“I thought it was Thompson.”

“But you said he didn’t respond.”

“He didn’t, but I assumed...” I shook my head. “Right. Never assume.”

“Do you know who I think it was?” she asked, her voice suddenly tight and on the edge of anger.

“It’s one of the Masters. It was a Hypercrealiac.”

“And you just gave it access to your brain. Mason, how could you? It lured you. It tried to capture you. It probably read your thoughts.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Dammit, Mason, this was what Olivares talked to you about. You’re our leader. You can’t just go off doing things on your own. You can never tell when they’ll affect us.”

Fucking hell. First Olivares and now Ohirra, and they were both right. “You’re totally right. I felt a sort of assimilation happening. I was becoming part of a larger whole. I think the Master is using the fungees for their brain capacity.”

“But you said it spoke to you.”

“Remember, when I was a fungee I still had full brain function. All of my autonomous functions were still my own, including thinking. Do you think maybe the purpose of the fungees isn’t only to infect, but to gather so that they—
we
—could be used later by the Masters?”

“The real question is, did it get the mission parameters?”

I thought about it for a moment. “I don’t think it works that way. I don’t think it got anything useful.”

“How can you be sure?”

“It stands to reason that if it knew, then it would also know my location and send Cray to stop us.” I got to my feet. “Stranz, any movement?”

“Nothing, sir,” he said, without turning. “Glad you’re back, sir.”

I walked over and slapped the back of his EXO. “Me too, Sergeant.” I spun to Ohirra. “I can hear your thoughts. Maybe it’s lying in wait. Maybe it knows our mission but not our location. All good ideas and all valid. But unless we’re going to hang out here to discuss them further, we need to Charlie Mike. Is that good for you?”

Ohirra nodded, clearly unhappy. She approached me in her EXO, making me aware of how much larger she was in her suit. “If you want to lead, then lead. That means don’t go anywhere we can’t follow.”

“You’re right. I got it. Now, are you ready?”

“Ready.”

“Good,” I said, clapping my hands together. “So where are we?”

Sula gave a report. “In a 99 Cent Store off Sunset, east of the 101. We’re a mile and a half away from the Metro entrance. All three of us are at or around thirty-five percent power, and we have half of our ammunition left.” She reached down and picked a harmonic blade off the ground. “And here’s your sword.”

I found the sheath, slid the blade into it, and slung it across my back.

“Then let’s go.”

When I saw Sula hold out her arms for me to climb on, I shook my head.

“I’m on foot the rest of the way. This close to the hive, we need everyone ready.” I glanced at Ohirra. “Especially if the enemy knows we’re coming.”

Our land is everything to us... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember that our grandfathers paid for it—with their lives.

John Wooden Leg, Cheyenne

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

I
T WAS AS
dark as I’d ever seen it outside. The moon was hidden by clouds. Except for the illuminated displays inside the EXO helmets, there wasn’t a single man-made light for miles. I turned back to the team. Even though they towered over me, I was still the boss, and as such, I felt the need to say a few words before the final push.

“So this is my Saint Crispin’s Day speech,” I began, gazing at each one in turn.

I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could utter a word, Stranz asked, “Who’s St. Crispin?”

I paused; I actually had no idea. I just remembered the speech. I looked plaintively at Ohirra, who thankfully spoke up.

“Who St. Crispin was isn’t as important as the speech,” she said. I nodded for her to continue as she glanced at me. “King Henry V gave his men a speech on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. England was outnumbered five to one. The French had thirty-six thousand troops while the English only numbered about eight thousand.”

“Jesus,” Stranz said. “Talk about walking into a slaughter.”

“
Into the Valley of Death rode the six hundred
,” Sula murmured.

“Kipling,” I noted.

But Sula corrected me. “Tennyson,” she said.

Ohirra nodded. “‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’ England didn’t fare so well there. Six hundred light cavalry were sent against more than twenty thousand Russians during the Crimean War.”

“So far this is a sucky speech,” Stranz said. “We know we’re outnumbered. You don’t have to rub it in.”

I couldn’t help a grin. Stranz was right. I needed to see if I could save it. “Shakespeare commemorated the speech in the play
Henry V
,” I said. “I saw the movie version and every time I see it again, the speech gives me chills. Sure, it talks about being outnumbered, but it also talks about pride. What was it the King said, Ohirra—
the fewer the men, the greater the share of honor
?”

She nodded. “It was the idea that the English didn’t need as many men as the French because they were intrinsically better. Don’t forget this was the first large-scale battle in which the English longbow was used. The French didn’t know what to do. The arrows crippled them.”

“The French lost something like ten thousand men while the English lost less than two hundred,” I added.

“Seriously?” Stranz seemed stunned.

Sula let out a low whistle.

“They had better weapons, just like we do,” I said.

“So what does St. Crispin’s Day have to do with it?” Stranz asked.

“It was used as a touch point, a date to mark their destined victory. I actually memorized this one stanza:
He that shall live this day and see old age, will yearly on the vigil say to his neighbors that ‘To-morrow is Saint Crispin.’ Then he will strip his sleeve and show his scars, And say ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’
It’s the idea that they’d survive, and that everyone who wasn’t part of the battle would wish they had been.”

“And it worked?” Stranz asked.

“The English won pretty convincingly,” Ohirra commented.

“Then again, it could be the more advanced weapons they were using,” I said.

“How many Cray do you think there are?” Sula asked.

I shrugged. “Hundreds. Maybe thousands.”

“How do we know this isn’t more like the Charge of the Light Brigade?” Stranz asked.

I looked to Ohirra to answer that one and she immediately jumped in. “The Charge was against several battalions of artillery, and many thousands of rifles. It was really a hopeless gesture.”

Sula closed her eyes and spoke. “
Cannon to right of them. Cannon to left of them. Cannon behind them. Volleyed and thundered. Stormed at with shot and shell. While horse and hero fell. They that had fought so well.
” When she opened her eyes again, she saw we were all staring at her. “One of the poems we had to memorize in English Lit. I also had to memorize ‘The Raven.’ Want to hear that?”

I chuckled. “No thanks. I just didn’t know I was in the midst of so many literary grunts.” I glanced at Stranz.

“Don’t look at me. I peaked at
Green Eggs and Ham
.”

“I will not eat them with the Cray. I will not eat them any day. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I am.”

Stranz grinned. “Hey, that’s good.”

Sula nodded and added, “Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’”

Stranz shook his head. “I’ve always thought that’s a stupid name for a raven. Never understood why there had to be a poem about it either.”

I stared at Stranz for a long moment, then broke into laughter. Sula joined. Stranz did too, even though he didn’t know why. Even Ohirra joined in. When I was done, I wiped tears from my eyes.

I surveyed my team of grunts. I couldn’t have been more proud. “You ready to go kill some Cray?”

All three grunts shouted, “Huah!”

I turned to head out the door and heard Stranz say, “Turned out to be a pretty good speech after all.”

I grinned as I slipped into the Los Angeles night.

The suicide bomber’s imagination leads him to believe in a brilliant act of heroism, when in fact he is simply blowing himself up pointlessly and taking other people’s lives.

Salman Rushdie

CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

S
TRANZ AND
O
HIRRA
hugged the buildings on either side of the street about thirty meters forward of where Sula walked with me down the center of the road. Silence was a must. I’d ordered harmonic blades drawn. This close to the hive, we’d have every Cray in the area on us if we so much as capped off a single round.

I missed being able to check everyone’s status and observe what they were seeing through their feeds. This was old-school leadership—like being back in Iraq or Afghanistan, but with aliens instead of IEDs.

One thing was for sure. Whatever had taken over my brain hadn’t been able to divine the nature of our mission. I’m certain if it had, it would have sent the Cray to attack us. For all I knew, the Master didn’t even see us as intelligent, or any different from a dog or cat, or any other animal running around on Earth.

At Normandie, we turned north until we hit Hollywood Boulevard. We paused in the lee of a liquor store where they promised
Checks cashed for free and a sale on six-packs of Corona!
while Stranz scouted the area ahead. We only had a few blocks to go before we could enter the nearest Red Line station where Western crossed Hollywood. Although I didn’t relish going underground, it could possibly get us where we needed without us having to encounter the enemy.

Stranz had been gone five minutes when Ohirra came to me.

“We’ve got to go. Now!”

“What is it?”

“The Cray. They know we’re here. They’re headed our way.” How did they know? Then it hit me: they’d tracked us all the way through the eyes of the fungees. “How many?”