The stupid fucking nepotism case is the first out of the shuttle, practically bounding out of the aircraft. He’s out before it even lands. Dawn is the last out, the American’s three other Americans followed by Desmond and Claire. Jake gestures for Dawn to go first. She does the same and he takes her up on her offer.
It’s filled with hustle and bustle but Dawn doesn’t bother with any of that, her eyes are affixed on a pale, short woman with band-aids covering her face. If this were a cartoon Dawn would be able to see steam billowing from her ears. Dimitri, thin and gaunt, is next to her, his steps long and loping. He has a pair of Gatorade bottles in his hand – one blue, one red.
“You must be very bold, wasting our time like that!”
Anastasia almost hisses those words. Dawn sees a much taller, entirely armoured figure storm past the others with only a nod. Tech’s straight on an intercept course with the American.
Dimitri hands each bottle to the two. Dawn takes the blue one and downs half of it in one go. It’s cold and she uses the rest as a sort of icepack against her forehead. Jake takes measured sips of the red, like it’s wine or something.
“How did it go?” Dimitri asks.
The two Montagne are off to the side, talking in French. Tech is towering over the Colonel’s dumb kid, his posture anything but agreeable. He’s too quiet for Dawn to hear but she’s been on the receiving end of one of Tech’s talks before and she never wants to again.
“Good. You?” There’s more she can say. Best to keep it simple.
Dimitri looks at Anastasia. They angle their heads down and up respectively.
<
<
<
<
<
The other three all look at her, wide-eyed. She breathes heavily.
Dimitri hands Dawn a Manila envelope, an unbleached brown folder. Then he translates succinctly.
“She says it went well.”
Dawn looks over the contents of the vessel – tons of grain, dried fruit, canned goods, along with thousands of 60mm shells, 107mm and 122mm rockets, twenty thousand hand grenades and half a million bullets. A load of ‘cattle.’ In the meantime, Anastasia gets on her tiptoes and explodes.
“IT DID NOT GO WELL YOU RETARD WE ARE GOING TO HAVE SO MUCH WORK BECAUSE OF THIS I SAID THAT XIUYING AND SOPHIA AND EVELYN HAVE PLAGUE BECAUSE OF THE AETHER BOMB THING AND NOW WE WILL HAVE TO INVESTIGATE THAT AND HUMAN TRAFFICKING AND TECUMSEH SAYS HE WANTS TO BRING AMERICAN JANISSARIES ONTO THE TEAM AND–”
Then Jake steps forward and puts a hand on her head and she freezes. She looks both indignant and irate, but at least she’s quiet. Her cheeks are still as rosy as they usually are which makes it hard to tell if she’s blushing or not. Jake exhales. The sunlight hits his skin, the onyx glimmers with hints of crimson underneath.
“Are you done?”
Anastasia inhales, deeply. Then she exhales, deeply.
“I am calm now,” she lies through gritted teeth. At least she’s not yelling and calling people ‘retard’ now.
From behind her, Dawn hears heavy, armoured footsteps.
“What’s all this about?” Tech asks, apparently finished berating the dumb American. He towers above everyone else – four inches over Jake, five over Dawn, eight over Dimitri, and almost twenty over Anastasia.
“We’ve had a busy day,” Dawn replies.
“That’s an understatement. Follow me, please,” he replied, and walks off. Dawn follows, compelled by his professionality.
The four follow him all the way to where the medics have set up the circle of barricades. Encircled within are the three from the lift bridge. They’re still in their wetsuits; at least from the waist down. They all wore either compression shirts or tank-tops underneath and they’ve all sweat or bled through those. They look profoundly fucked up.
She can hear the American, arguing with a medic.
“I’m sorry, sir, but we can’t let anyone come close to them. They might be infected with a biological weapon.” The medic is firm. Daddy’s boy not getting his way brings a smile to Dawn’s face.
“What do you mean, bioweapon? That was an aether bomb!”
“We’re not going to take the chance that whatever that explosion was held some sort of bioweapon–”
Sophia, until now prostrate, speaks up. She’s on her hands and knees, a concerning puddle of blood below her mouth.
“It’s aether poisoning!” Despite her predicament she still sounds as cheery as ever. Both the medic and the Witherspoon turn to look at her. She sits up on her knees.
“It’s aether poisoning! It’s fine!” she repeats. Or maybe it’s internal bleeding from the pressure wave.
“Ma’am, you’re vomiting blood,” the medic responds. Then fucking do something about it! You’re a fucking medic!
“I’m not infectious! I’ve had this before, it’s just blood!”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah! I’m fine!”
The medic seems skeptical but he lets the American through. Sophia returns to her old posture, arms wobbling beneath her, but the kid wraps his arms around her and she weakly reciprocates. Her smile is wide and bloodstained and the sclera surrounding her green irises is a latticework of bright red blood vessels, some burst and some strained.
Sophia spits bloody saliva at her feet and everyone else looks away. Meanwhile, Dawn sees Xiuying using the barricades to drag herself to her feet. She uses them like a railing. She looks awful.
“Hey.”
Her voice is weak but she still keeps her posture straight. Her legs wobble and stiffen below her and she spits a glob of bloodied saliva to her side. She’ll keep fighting if she has to. Her skin is covered with a reddish sheen that’s closer to blood than sweat. Her hands white-knuckle against the barricades – plastic contraptions you can unfold and refold for portability. On the back of her hands are large, bloody welts, almost circles.
Tech takes off his armoured gauntlet and lays a hand on her forehead. Another hand grabs one of her hands and she’s too tired to protest.
“You’re hot,” he says.
“Thanks,” Xiuying replies.
His skin is dark enough to hide it, but Dawn assumes Tech is blushing. His eyes shift to her hand – the ‘wound’ of sorts is mirrored on the underside of her palm. But he pushes a thumb against it and she doesn’t react. Her other hand bears the same sort of internal hemorrhaging, dark red and purple and yellow like the swirling clouds of a gas giant.
“How bad is it?” she asks.
Dawn and Jake both look her up and down. The wetsuit and compression shirt hug her figure well. If you ignore the fact that she’s sweating blood and deathly pale she’s quite nice to look at. Dawn would kill to have a figure like hers.
“You’ll be fine,” Dawn reassures. “Instead of biochemical augmentations, South Georgia did aether exposure treatments. If we were ever overexposed we’d just–”
She mimes vomiting blood on the ground.
“BLAH everywhere. Sucked to clean up but it happened all the time.”
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
Jake nods along but everyone else listening in wears vaguely horrified faces.
“Wait, they did what?” Tech asks.
“I’ll explain later,” Dawn replies. She turns back to Xiuying. “So, any nukes?”
Xiuying shakes her head.
“No nuke. Aether warhead, though. Chrysomallos took most of the pressure wave.”
She turns to face Tech.
“Anything?”
And Tech just shakes his head.
“Waste of our fucking time,” Anastasia mutters.
“We rescued people that were going to be enslaved or something, that is no waste of time–” Dimitri says, before he’s interrupted.
“You know exactly what I mean, we were all sent running around solving other people’s problems,” says the tiny interrupter. She’s getting mad again. “Just an excuse to do errands! We got fucking bombs dropped on our head for the trouble.”
Dawn nods, and Anastasia blows a rogue strand of blonde-brown hair out from in front of her face. She bites down on her lower jaw. Calm now. Relatively speaking.
“They have some funny way of saying ‘thank you.’” Anastasia concludes.
“Would you like to tell this to the chairmen?” Dawn asks.
“What?”
“Well, the al-Jilali bridge just got fucking annihilated. Someone’s gotta explain what happened.”
“I can go,” Xiuying volunteers.
“No, you’re going to stay inside and rest. Take hot showers and use the hot tubs, go spend an hour in a sauna. External heat accelerates the breakdown of aether inside your system, so it’ll accelerate the absorption process,” Dawn replies. She’s in charge.
“Does it work?”
“Worked for me and Jake.”
Jacob nods to confirm her story.
“Take it easy tomorrow. Drink a lot of fluids.”
Xiuying forces a smile.
“Didn’t know we got sick days.”
Off in the distance, there’s the sound of someone vomiting – Sophia, all over the Witherspoon kid’s boosts. Eva drags herself over, next to where Tecumseh is standing. She looks just as bad as the other two. A bundle of blue hairs is held in her hand; the hair under her wig is a short buzzcut of dark brown with small splotches of hairlessness. There’s the remains of a pair of headphones around her neck. Missing a speaker, wires hanging loose, the works, rendered completely useless. She has a dozen more back home. No big loss. Her hands are free of the marks but she keeps her weight on her heels or toes. Maybe a rock that's dead-center in her boot.
“hey”
“You good?” Tech asks.
“no”
Tech isn’t prepared for such a blunt answer and can’t think up a response before a gentle whine of an incoming shuttle turns all their heads skywards. Most shuttles are either the UH-101 Tlingit or the CH-64 Atlas models, with either two or four-engines but with similar, blockish hulls. This one is different, it has two tiltrotor propellors and has a fuselage like a shark, all black against the others’ white or grey. It wields a pod of rockets on each side of its fuselage, and a pair of miniguns sit unmanned along the side. There’s a golden scorpion painted on each side of the nose. C-SPEAR LEVANT DIVISION is lettered around the crest. Dawn takes out her cigarillo case and shakes it and nothing comes out. And no matter how many times she shakes it, she’s out.
This new shuttle gently settles on the ground, three sets of wheels taking the impact, and a solitary man walks out. He’s got a black blazer overtop of a bulletproof vest. Grey hair, slightly wrinkled face, Hollywood vibes, Dawn sighs deeply. Davison walks with a purpose that Dawn can’t discern.
He stares at Dawn as he approaches. Dawn stares back. We didn’t piss him off, right?
“What on earth have you kids gotten yourself into?”
Nobody dares respond. Nobody knows how to respond. Dawn isn’t sure if he’s talking to her and Jake or everyone at large. Aw, fuck, we pissed him off.
“Can I leave you alone for five minutes without you all stumbling across some new conspiracy?”
Then Scott Davison grins at the group, cocked and lopsided.
“Is everyone okay?”
Dawn steps forward, Jake next to her. They’re C-SPEAR’s Janissaries, and he’s C-SPEAR’s regional commander.
“Me and Jake–”
“Jake and I, kid.”
Such a fuckin’ stickler.
“Jake and I, are fine. Hostages rescued, hopefully they have a story to tell. Tech and ‘Mitri and ‘Tasia are fine too–”
“DID YOU JUST CALL ME ‘TASIA?”
Dawn ignores her. Next person who interrupts me gets shot.
“But I’m not sure about those Janissaries that Tech talked about. Haven’t seen ‘em.”
Tech raises a hand. At least he’s not butting in.
“Sherman, this isn’t grade school,” Davison replies.
Tech lowers his hand and clears his throat. So formal around authority. How British.
“Apologies, sir. I had them evacuated first. Should be either en route or at the University hospital now.” ‘University’ meant the American University of Nineveh. The Harvard of the new Middle East.
Davison nods.
“Xiu?”
She props herself up on the barricade.
“No nukes, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
She spits blood by her feet.
“Palantir missed everything about an aether-charged explosive.”
Eva pipes up too.
“those guys suck shit”
Davison just nods. He’s aware firsthand of how much they ‘suck shit.’ But he’s a professional.
“I’ll take it up with Mister Maddox on the performance of his company. How’s Sophia?”
Behind the barricades, Sophia has managed to raise herself to her knees and stay there unsupported. However, there’s still a small river of blood running from the corner of her mouth and dripping onto the sun-bleached concrete below. Her American boyfriend has a hand on her back, and crouches next to her. His soles are in a puddle of her vomit-blood.
“It’s always worse the second time,” Dawn mutters.
“Second time?” Xiuying asks.
“Long story.”
Davison ignores them and moves to the barricades.
“Sophia?”
Her head turns and she smiles that same bright smile, her teeth stained red.
“Boss!”
Sophia hops to her feet and flounces over to the barricade, the blonde moron behind her trying to keep up. The tank-top she wore underneath is red now and probably destined for the garbage once this day is out. On her right side the shirt is stained a deeper red, almost black. It doesn't seem to affect her movements. Nothing does, really. Her battery never runs out and taking an aether-bomb to the face was probably just an annoyance.
“How are you feeling?” the Chief asks.
“Spectacular!”
The small river of blood running from the corner of her mouth seems to disagree. She bends down and spits a concerningly large glob of blood on the cracked ground to prove her point, and then rises. Then doubles over and actually vomits. The other eight all backpedal as fast as they can to keep her vomit blood off of their shoes.
Davison moves a good ten feet to his left and stares down the American.
“Witherspoon?”
The nepotism baby looks up at Davison, his hand on Sophia’s shoulder as she retches.
“We’re going to have to go over everything that happened today.”
“Okay.”
What are you doing?
“Your father hates me and won’t step in the same room as me if he doesn’t have to.”
“Okay?”
I’m going to fucking kill you if you do this.
“So, I’m inviting you to the Burj Wolfe. We do these after-action get togethers. You’re invited to this one.”
Are you fucking kidding me?
“It’s at Dawn’s apartment.”
WHATTHEFUCKAREYOUDOING
The American is speechless for a moment.
“Me?” he asks.
“Sophia’s a good judge of character. You can’t be as bad as Dawn really says, right?”
Dawn clenches her teeth to their shattering point. Chokes down the last three times he’s almost gotten her killed – Tikrit and Ctesiphon and Palmyra. Instead, she just glowers at the American. The bastard’s eyes flick between Davison’s off-putting friendliness and the venomous miasma that she emits.
“Uh, sure.”
“Hundred-and-seventh floor. Dawn’s place is room 107-01.”
The American seems unsure what to think. He just shrugs.
“I owe you a date,” Sophia mutters.
“Don’t worry about it,” he responds.
“Tomorrow night?”
“How about you stop vomiting blood. Then we’ll figure out where to go.”
Dawn wants to vomit herself hearing all of that bullshit. She sees Davison signal to the pilots of the C-SPEAR shuttle and the twin rotors fire themselves up. The healthy six help the crippled three out of the barricades and to the shuttle. Dawn finds the Montagne pair and they move too, wordlessly. The rotors running at full tilt make it impossible to hold any sort of conversation. They quiet down in the air when they don’t need to be at a hundred and fifty percent but for now nobody says anything.
As the shuttle lifts off, Dawn glares at her boss.
Why did you invite him to my place?
She realizes that it makes her look like a petulant twelve-year-old whose parents are forcing to invite the next-door neighbour that she hates to her birthday party. She settles for glaring at that stupid American prick from above, hoping that he doesn’t take the Chief up on his offer.
As the tiltrotor shuttle lifts off, Ryan notices Dawn glaring at him from above. He meets her gaze, wondering exactly what her deal is. Sure, she hates me, but why?
The rotors make enough noise to mask the approaching of nearly seven feet of dude behind him.
“She barfed on your shoes, dude.” The speaker is tall and freckled and ginger and recently awoken from a nap. His voice is somehow simultaneously deep yet nasally. This is Lior Abrams.
“Yeah, I know.”
Ryan drags the soles of his boots along a ‘clean’ section of concrete but the blood is also on the top of his shoes, and the laces, and probably on his socks too. I’m gonna get trench foot somehow. These are destined for the incinerator and he only just finished breaking them in.
He vaults back over the barricade, leaving it empty and pointless.
“Wish I got invited to places,” Lior mutters.
“You can come, as long as you don’t get drunk.”
Lior hesitates. Which gives Paulie a chance to do his favourite thing – enter a conversation.
“I’m in, though. Who was that Russian chick?” He’s playing with fire here. “She single?”
“Don’t you already have a girlfriend?” Flynn rumbles.
“Listen, I’m the mother-fuckin’ Italian Stallion. I could talk Bran into a threesome easily.” He most definitely could not. “Easily.”
“Nobody calls you that,” Flynn replies.
“I call me that! So does Branwen!”
“Because she wants to euthanize you,” Ryan responds.
And instead of a proper comeback, Paulie’s response is an aggrieved series of blusters, guffs, guffaws, ‘ums’, and eventually…
“What?”
He does his best to ignore Flynn laughing hard enough to cause an avalanche. He leans back on the barricade and runs a hand through his hair. It reaches his shoulders. Maybe it is too long.
“You look like an asshole,” Lior says.
“And you fall asleep alone every night.”
Paulie laughs his rabid hyena cackle and Lior stands stone-still, roasted beyond oblivion. He’s too incinerated to remember that as of a week and change ago Ryan also falls asleep alone. But he’s got contingencies. Lior doesn’t
Ryan moves back to the shuttle he came in on, and the other three eventually follow along. Both pilots are out of the cockpit, smoking cigarettes.
“Let’s get the hell outta here,” Ryan tells the two. They wordlessly share a glance, one last pull, and then stomp out their cigarettes.
Ryan takes an exhausted seat inside the shuttle. He didn’t do any fighting today, yet…
“Ah, shit,” he mutters underneath a deep exhale. Then he stands up again, realizing the day isn’t yet done.
The others join him in short order. He can’t quite figure out what Paulie and Lior are talking about, but it appears to be Lior’s chances with a certain girl.
“Listen, man, I’m telling you, this Wolfe broad, she’s Jewish and socially inept, and you’re also Jewish and also socially inept–”
“She’s a fucking dyke, man.”
That seemed to spell the end of that conversation. Ryan stood in the cockpit and waited for the pilots to plug themselves back into their machines, and then ordered them to return to the Nineveh Citadel.
And only then does he sit down, for good this time, and let his eyes close.