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BONCHANCE
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“Hello again, Sergeant,” Mara said to the gentleman named David Lowen. I had just received word from Katrina that Clea and the BRUTUS had entered the Guernsey base, so I was a little tense, and now Mara had asked me to accompany her. I was standing next to Simon and leaning against the door frame to the cell. I had damn near killed myself, carving ten of these cells out of a quickly made side tunnel wall in one rapid push.
“Master Sergeant. Back so soon?”
“Oh, I just wanted to play you a little something,” she said as she pulled out a tablet. His eyes widened when he saw that.
“Mayday, Mayday, this is G31, calling Mayday!”
“G31! This is Command! Where have you been?”
“We were attacked…” there was static and strange distortion, “…and had to go to ground…The storm hid us, but them as well, and they ambushed us as soon as we started moving…We’re on fire and trapped and need SAR immediately. ELB active. Lowen’s dead, and so is Tommy. Send help…”
“G31, we have your signal…Is it a Hot LZ?...G31?…G31? G31 respond!?”
She stopped the playback.”
“You bitch!”
“We had to sacrifice your Blower and some body parts,” Mara said perfectly calmly, “and now your people think you are all dead, and you don’t go looking for a dead man, do you? Because right at this moment, Guernsey is being removed from play.”
Now, his eyes really widened.
“Pity they were distracted by that SAR callout…they might have noticed the gunships coming in. Now, for the SAR, their base will be destroyed, so they’ll RTB to the closest safe harbor, and you will be listed as deceased, and nobody will ever know what happened to you.
So now, whatever hope you have is by staying in my good graces. I’ll be making this same offer to all your people; I wonder who will be the first one to take me up on it? They will get the best rewards, naturally.”
“You…” he glared at her while Mara’s face stayed calm and serene.
“’Me’ what? I’m making this offer to you first. You know, you and your men are pretty damn lucky.”
Now he looked puzzled, “Lucky? How?”
“At the moment, you’re not dead, and, believe it or not, you do have a chance of getting out of here and relatively free…as I said, I’ll be making this offer to all of your people; the first one to talk wins. Of course, I don’t expect an answer right away; you need time to think about it.” She looked at me and stood, “We can go now.”
I picked up her stool and stepped aside as she exited, and Simon shut the door and barred it. I waited until we were well away until I spoke.
“The base is destroyed?” I asked.
There’s a BRUTUS involved; the odds are pretty damn good something is going to explode…they have a distinctive way of doing things..”
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CLEA
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We moved out of the scrap and, staying close to a wall, tried to move as stealthily as we could. For someone his size, Vasa was very good at this, and our clothing shifted hues as we passed through different patterns of light and shadow, trying to break up our forms.
By staying to the side farthest away from any people, who were mainly concentrated by the areas Vasa had declared as ‘Maintenance’ and ‘The Tie-Down’, we arrived by the machinery that controlled the massive vehicle lifts. Reaching into his pack, Vasa pulled out a black block and fitted it to the side of a pipe.
“What’s that?”
“Insurance that they’ll have far more important things to worry about than us,” he set up two more blocks. “That should do it.”
His work was done here; he led the way until we were on the far side of the lifts and in a shadowed corner; the doors we needed were right ahead. I readied my pistol and made sure the suppressor was engaged; Vasa had a large knife out. I was first to the door and saw someone, and at the same moment, they saw a weirdly shaped shadow coming through. They had excellent reactions and were lunging for a red plate on the wall, but I had a readied pistol and was expecting trouble, and with a small cough, they were down before they had moved a step. There was blood on the floor, but at least we could move the body to one side as we entered.
“Which way?” I asked.
Vasa pointed toward a closed door. I moved to one side and was now carrying my submachine gun as he tried it. It was secured, so he raised his foot and kicked the whole thing out of its frame with a loud crash. There were six people at desks like the Main Level at the bunker, so I presumed this was ‘Ops’.
“If you do not wish to die, please stay seated,” I said politely. All of them froze, and another door crashed open with two men in vests and uniforms with submachine guns of their own. I was already firing and aiming high, which avoided their vests and hit the gap just below their helmets.
Another door opened, and an older woman stepped in wearing a much nicer uniform.
“Ah! I presume you’re the Commander? I said as Vasa punched a switch labeled ‘LOCKDOWN’ in big red letters. Alarms started blaring.
She was perfectly still as I approached and guided her back into her office. “Now,” I began, “as my associate begins to tear apart every security troop you have, we are going to have a long conversation.” There was a series of explosions outside. “Let’s begin; who are you, and who do you work for?”
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The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
When I left the office, I saw the entire hangar area was in smoke and flames, and Vasa was opening the large red door at the end.
“We’re done!” I called out.
“Give me a few moments; I’m fixing things up good.”
“I can see that,” I replied, looking at the bodies that had been torn in half by whatever his gun fired.
“I did give them a chance to surrender!”
“Very generous, Master Chief.”
“I thought so…Okay, I’m done!” he said as he came running toward me. “We might want to hurry!”
Nodding, I followed him to the way we had entered through the maintenance tunnel, “So what did you do?”
“Their munitions storage has just been repurposed to be a base removal system.”
“Oh. How much time do we have?”
“Not much. I had to set it short because I heard them rappelling down the elevator shafts. We really need to be fast. Not only the bomb locker, but all those Yellowjackets were carrying combat loads, and with the main vehicle lift stuck in the up and locked position, all that explosion is going to be very, very, angry about being so contained.”
He managed to squeeze his way out, and I slid the access panel shut behind me as I exited onto the section of the underground roadway between the collapse and the water, “Are those two hatches going to hold.”
He was squeezing into the verticle shaft and beginning the climb, “I doubt it. They had an impressive selection in there.”
I slipped in and shut the access door before following him up.
He was an incredibly fast climber, and he made it to the top right as a shockwave ripped through the ground. Turning, he grabbed me by the wrist and bodily pulled me up and out as he rolled to one side from the hatch just as there was another series of shocks, and then a column of fire erupted out of the shaft we had just climbed as the entire rest of the base collapsed in on the underground section, with other pillars of fire visible pouring out of other access ways.
“Countess! Master Chief! Countess! Are you there? Are you all right!?!”
“Countess to Overwatch. We’re both fine.”
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BONCHANCE
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I was standing at the entrance to the South Tunnel when the two Guts rolled in. It had barely come to a stop when the side door opened, and Clea jumped out and ran toward me.
“Oh God, I missed you so much!” she said before kissing me.
“The feeling is mutual; I’m so sorry. I was…not well-behaved.”
She nodded, “You weren’t, but you’re better now?”
“Yes…I think I am.”
By this time, the horses were being unloaded from the second Gut; this vehicle was part of the stockpile at S-21 and was being driven by the BRUTUS they called the Master Chief. He stepped out, and he was intimidating; he even made Welles look small. He looked at me as I was hugging Clea.
“So! You’re the bastard that snagged this beauty. You have no idea how jealous I am!”
Looking him straight in the eye, I replied, “I hear jealousy is good for the soul.”
He laughed, “Not bad…Vasa Olesa,” he stuck out his hand to shake.
“Bonchance Magellan, a real pleasure to make your acquaintance,” I replied as I stuck out my right hand and wondered what his reaction would be when he started to squeeze? He seemed like the sort that would do that.
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The Main Level was full, with all the most trusted members of the Duchy in the seats. Mara and Clea were standing in the front as we settled down.
“The Final War,” Mara began. “It started when Hi-Side, or the Hivers as you call them, The Orbitals, Luna, Mars, and the Belt, decided that they wanted the Earth for themselves and thought that us groundpounders shouldn’t have it. So they started dropping rocks and did their best to scrub us away without completely demolishing things they’d need later. And as you all know, they almost succeeded. They would have succeeded, except that various Earth National Governments spotted what they were up to and took steps to give them a fight.”
She looked around.
“The first step was instigating Kessler Syndrome. Firing packets of rock and debris into various satellite orbits to scrub Hi-Side’s reconnaissance and also take out several of their lower orbit stations. Before that, people like me were infiltrated to make sure we had a better idea of what was coming and to insert certain data, so some rock shots were not as accurate as they could be later, but once Kessler was started, the war was on.
It lasted for four years; we were producing ASATs and other weapons as they tried to blow up every place they thought could produce them; they still managed to get landers in, to seize areas and do ground recon, but we stopped them, and in the end, we knew we were going to lose, barring a Hail Mary, so this place was built along with other failsafes…but then, a Hail Mary did work and we had the Pox.
It tore through the orbital environments after staying asymptomatic but infectious for months and months. The Hi-Siders were very upset that the stupid groundpounders had done this, so as they were dying, they unloaded every rock they could, and as the clouds of dust cooled down the world and most of the remaining survivors died of starvation, disease, or exposure, the war ended with both sides losing.”
She looked around again, “That’s what you knew…That’s what I knew, then the Countess managed to get some answers, Clea?”
“Thank you, Duchess. That story you heard? It’s truths wrapped around a lie. Everything up to the Pox is true. It was released, and it killed over two billion Hivers, especially the ones on the Moon and in the Orbital Colonies, but none of their groups was unaffected. They did launch the final stone storm, but the ones in charge realized they had an opportunity. Most of their space-to-ground transport was limited, and even though Earth was very low in population, it was still a very big place. So, they sent down teams to build operational bases and started ‘managing’ us.”
“Managing?” Peter asked.
“Like cattle. They would guide us groundpounders into doing things that they wanted us to do, like growing luxury goods that they couldn’t produce, gathering items and materials they couldn’t find in space, and keeping our population down to an easy-to-watch level. They started this about fifty years after the war, and it lasted for about another one hundred and fifty; then, the various factions in the Hivers all started wanting to be the ones in charge. They need each other, though, so now they have to be stealthy about their fighting, but they will absolutely destroy any of their rivals if they catch them off guard. People will always be people.”
Mara started speaking again, “They want to keep their presence unnoticed, so the easiest way was to assist in setting up a quasi-feudal system and making sure their people are the rulers. The Rock Republic and a few others are the exceptions, but these new Hi-Siders haven’t cared too much as they already have enough of Earth under their control.”
“The Empire and the Southlands?” I asked.
“The Empire is controlled by the O’Neill Orbitals and the Belt, and Southland and Sun are controlled by Luna,” Clea said. “Lord Malcolm and Outpost 3, which just got broken…Thank you Master Chief...and sent out the team to grab the Duchess, were Orbital.”
“And that’s what’s going on,” Mara continued. “The Final War really never ended; it just had a lull in hostilities. And now I ask, what are we going to do about it?”
Millie Galway stood up, “Fight them. They set it up so that monsters could kill us, frighten us, and enslave us.”
I stood up, “If we fight them, it’s going to be tough. Not that I’m saying I don’t want to, but we need to be prepared.”
Mara looked at me, “Bonchance is correct…but to me, it’s the only choice. I died fighting these assholes and came back to keep doing it…but it’s not just my choice. I want you all to think about this; there is no rush to make a decision right now. The Orbitals will be trying to figure out what happened to their outpost, and there were indications left in the distress call to lead them astray. We have until at least Spring until we need to make a decision.
“Milady,” Simon stood and spoke up. “I’m with you…”
“So am I…Me as well…And me…” everyone was standing and agreeing.
“Didn’t I tell you to think about it?”
“Lady Mara,” I replied. “We have. We’ve been thinking about this for four hundred years!”