The Freezer (Genesis Endeavor Book 1) (38 page)

“That I trust you. And despite that fact that you could have
any man in the world, you want me. That means a lot to me, but if you don’t
trust me, it is irrelevant.”

Now she looked away because the tears were flowing. “Jesus
Christ, Jack, if you’re fucking with me…” She turned back to him, her
confidence renewed and a fire in her eyes. “I do, Jack, I trust you completely.
You better not fuck this up.”

Jack lay back on the bed. “Well, now I see what you mean by
cold bitch…”

“Hey, that isn’t…” Jack’s laughter cut into her protest, and
she realized he was pulling her leg again. She looked down at him and punched
him in the chest. He grabbed her and pulled her on top of him. “You only have a
half hour, huh?”

“About twenty minutes, now.”

“I think that’s enough time.” She got up and turned off the
light, shed the robe again, and climbed back onto the bed.

“You know, even bruised you have an incredible body. You
didn’t have to turn out the light.” She worked his pants off and climbed on top
of him.

“You’ll say anything to get laid won’t you.”

* * *

Jack got back to the flight bay just as the transport was
landing outside Saber Cusp. Chin was at the control center, and Teague was
sitting in a chair next to him.

“That was quick, Mad Dawg.” Chin was looking at him with a
big grin on his face.

He was beginning to regret ever having shared his old
nickname with Tiny. He did his best to look serious and innocently said, “I
just brought her the datapad.”

Chin didn’t say anything, just went back to the screens in
front of him. The speaker squawked, “Fire team one, this is fire team two.” It
was Thomas’ voice. “We are just about in position. We will move as soon as your
fireworks show begins.”

“Roger that, fire team two, start runnin as soon as you hear
shots. We will keep em busy enough that they won’t even notice you.” That was
the plan anyway. Jack was anxious to see how well it worked.

* * *

Thomas led the team to the corner of a building. He peeked
his rifle around the corner and didn’t spot anyone on the night vision video
feed. To the north, all hell was breaking loose. Bursts of gunfire, muffled
thumps of grenades, and the battle cries of dying Mutes filled the air. The
diversion appeared to be working, the street was clear. He motioned for two men
to cross.

They sprinted across the open street while Thomas and two
others covered them. They made it to the next building without anyone shooting
at them. The two men took up positions and signaled for the rest to cross.

Thomas brought up the rear as his men sprinted across the
street. Just before rounding the corner he caught movement out of the corner of
his eye. Diving to the ground, he brought up his weapon and held his breath as
his heart pounded in his chest from a combination of adrenaline and the
exertion of the recent sprint. He held for ten seconds, keeping his optics
steady to spot the movement again. Just before letting it out, he caught it
again. There were two Mutes running alongside a building, heading purposefully
toward his team. He let out his breath, whispered “I got the one in front”, and
waited for confirmation from one of his men that they were ready. He held his
breath again, steadied up, got the Mute in his cross hairs, and gently massaged
the trigger. The other soldier fired within a fraction of a second of his own
shot, and the two reports echoed down the street, bouncing between buildings. The
two bodies had dropped and skidded to a halt.

Thomas took a few measured breaths, waiting to see if more
Mutes would follow, but it appeared the shots had been drowned out in the melee
to the north. Getting to his feet, he signaled his men to go around the
building to the next block and then turned them north.

* * *

It took less than ten minutes to make their way to their
destination. They had moved five more blocks to the north, and three to the
west, leaving four more dead Mutes in their wake, but so far the other fire
team’s diversion was working and they hadn’t drawn the attention of any large
group of Mutes. Thomas tapped a few keys on his PDP and an overlay of the city
came up on his visor, small red dots signifying the two fire teams location
blinked on the map. Red’s men were nearly a mile away, holding steady at the
defensive position they had set up. There was also a curved line drawn on the
map in yellow, marking the outside boundary of the sensor range for the ground
defense system. They were right at the edge of that line.

The map was hardly necessary. In front of them was a line of
debris, bones, and even the smell of rotting flesh. Anything living that had
attempted to cross this line in the last two hundred odd years had met a quick
and gruesome death. If it hadn’t been so dark, they could have looked behind
them and seen the concrete sides of the buildings facing toward their next
destination covered in bullet holes from years of being hammered by the
defensive turrets. The thought of moving any further than this sent a chill up
Thomas’ spine. He hoped to God that the code Marcus gave them would work. He
motioned for the computer guy, Dave, to come forward and start working his magic.

Thomas had always been the athletic type, a multiple
letterman in high school. There weren’t computer geeks back when he was in high
school, but there was still the nerdy, geeky type of kids that he and his
friends had bullied and tormented. Dave looked like one of those nerds, and
Thomas felt the irony of putting his life in this guy’s hands. The man looked
out of place in full combat gear. He envisioned him being more comfortable
wearing a lab coat, sporting a pocket protector with an old fashioned slide
rule poking out of it, watching a computer as lines of information rolled down
the screen. It was difficult not to wonder how the man was handling this
situation.

Dave pulled out his datapad and started pushing buttons, the
light from the screen illuminating his face through the visor of his helmet. He
examined the dark buildings around him and pressed on the screen a few more
times. The datapad beeped and Thomas saw a green light on the screen. “It’s
disarmed. We can move up to the command center. I don’t think I’ll have much
trouble getting us into the building.”

Thomas would have been the first to move in to verify the
turrets were off, but as a leader, he couldn’t take the chance. He had thought
about this point long and hard, and decided to send Kenny out there first. He
motioned for the man to proceed.

Kenny looked at Dave, said with a grin, “You better be
right,” and sprinted into the kill zone, heading for some bullet pocked debris
about twenty feet away that might provide him some cover if the turrets opened
fire. He made it to cover safely, sliding behind it like a baseball player
stealing home plate.

Thomas let out a breath he hadn’t realize he had been
holding, and patted the computer expert on the shoulder. “Good job, Dave. Okay
men, let’s move forward. Our goal is a two story gray building, about a half
mile west of here.” The men advanced cautiously, working in pairs, advancing
toward their goal. The area was completely void of life, somehow making this
part of the mission worse than sneaking through the Mute neighborhood.

They made it to the command center, a large, two story
building, built of solid concrete. There were no windows, and the only door was
ten feet high and six feet wide, made of solid steel. It was more a giant vault
than a building. To the right of the door was the only feature Thomas could
see, a simple keypad glowing in the dark of night.

Dave pulled out a small pry bar and gently pried the face
off the keypad. He then took out a small drill and drilled out the brackets holding
the keypad in place. This exposed the wiring behind, and he unplugged the wire
harness from the keypad and set it aside. He took out his datapad and a new
wire harness, which he plugged into the datapad and then into the harness he
had unplugged from the keypad. After punching a few buttons on the datapad, he
looked at Thomas and said, “Should only take a few minutes. The computer in my
datapad is logging in to the main computer system right now and requesting that
it open the door for us.”

“Requesting?” Thomas obviously didn’t know much about
computers. By the time he retired from the military, everyone he knew had a
computer at home, but those computers were like pocket calculators compared to
the datapads they carried now. He understood that the technology available now
was far more advanced than anything he was used to, but he always assumed they
were still just machines, and he figured Dave would just plug in, punch some
buttons, and tell the computer to open the door.

“The computer system inside this building is smarter than
all of us put together, in a very literal sense. There is nothing I can do to
force entry here short of explosives. However, I acquired some security
credentials from Marcus before we left, and that should get us in. If not, I brought
some Semtex, but I really don’t want to have to deal with the repercussions of
forcing entry.” The datapad beeped and the door started swinging outward.

Thomas breathed a sigh of relief. Dave started to enter and
he put a hand on the man’s shoulder, motioning to another soldier to go in
first.

He posted two men to stay here and keep an eye out for
trouble, then followed Dave and the other three men inside after getting the ‘all
clear’. They were in some sort of a foyer. The air was stale but breathable. Everyone
took out a small flashlight and started examining the room. The room itself was
incredibly plain, with highly polished marble floors and walls, but no other
decorations or furniture. On the wall in front of them was a large bronze plaque
set in the marble. Thomas put his flashlight on it and read:

Maintenance and Operations Monitoring Central
Computer

M.O.M.C.C (“Mom” for short) was powered up for the
first time in 2138 A.D. This is the first completely independent artificial
intelligence based computer ever built. Mom will control the entirety of Saber
Cusp’s defensive and civil systems for the next thousand years. This plaque
commemorates the Council’s dedication to technology.

“For all their technology, they weren’t very good at seeing
into their future, were they?” It was a rhetorical question, and nobody
answered. To the left and right were short hallways, ending in solid,
nondescript doors. Thomas consulted his PDP to determine the proper direction.

The building interior was even more quiet than the lifeless
streets outside. A shout from one of the men startled him.

“Sir! There is a large group of Mutes heading right for us! At
least fifty, maybe more!” As he said it, the sound of automatic fire came
through the open door, the muzzle flashes illuminating the room like lightning.
He could hear the shouts and yells of the approaching party, as well as the
sound of bullets pelting the building walls.

Thomas turned to Dave and said, “Can you re-arm the defense
system?”

Dave looked at his datapad and said, “Yeah, but it might not
be- ” A bullet ricocheted off the wall, spraying Thomas with shards of marble.

“Just do it! Everyone inside, NOW! Close the door!” The
soldier laying down suppressing fire backed into the door and Dave punched a
button on a keypad similar to the one he dismantled outside. The door swung
closed and the shouts and gunfire abruptly ceased, plunging the room into
darkness lit only with the small flashlights that hadn’t been dropped. The
thick door barely hummed with the sound of bullets bouncing off it.

“Arm the system!” Dave hesitated a moment, then punched in
the code to re-arm the city’s ground defenses. A low vibration was felt in the
floor and walls, but it only lasted another minute, after which there was dead
silence.

Thomas breathed a sigh of relief.
That was close.
After
their relatively smooth entry from the city’s edge to the inside of this
building, he hadn’t been expecting any problems and they were caught completely
off guard by the attack. That wasn’t the part that bothered him though, it was
the questions that started piling up in his head.
How did the Mutes find
them? How did they know they could enter the area without being attacked by the
turrets? What happened to the other fire party? Do I proceed with the mission
or abort and get the hell out of here?

He lifted his PDP and punched in the code to call Red. He
needed some answers to decide what to do next. The screen flashed “No
Connection”. His brow wrinkled in confusion. They were well within range of the
communications satellite. “Why did I lose connection to the satellite?” He
turned to Dave for answers.

“We’re in a giant vault, surrounded by alternating layers of
concrete, steel plating, and copper mesh. There is no way to contact anyone
outside from in here.”

“Shit, I didn’t think about that. Open the door, check to
see if they are all dead out there.” Everyone looked to Dave as he took out his
tools and repeated the process he had done outside.

After a minute, he looked at the screen on his datapad and
said, “This isn’t good.”

“What?” Thomas didn’t like having to prompt people for
answers all the time, and the adrenaline still coursing through his body gave
him a short temper.

“The computer won’t open the door because the defense system
is up.”

“Well shut the Goddamn thing down!”

“I can’t. The code we had before won’t work anymore. This is
what I was afraid of.”

“Are you shitting me?! Why the hell didn’t you tell me you
couldn’t turn it back off if you turned it on?”

Dave put his hands in front of him like he was pushing
Thomas back. “Whoa there! I tried to tell you, but you demanded I arm the
system. I wasn’t entirely sure I could turn it back off, but you didn’t give me
time to think it through.”