Bastion Against the Coming Storm

Prologue

It’s amazing how much everything has changed in just one lifetime.

“Perimeter breach. Perimeter breach. Security to the access tunnel! The overblast door is sealing!”

The old man sighed as he got to his feet, painfully stretching out the old kinks and pains.

Medicine had made getting old less of a challenge, but only to a point.

He was well past his centennial, and shockingly mobile and lucid for it, but even the miracles of the age wouldn’t be enough to keep him around for many more years.

Life hadn’t exactly been bad, he supposed, though he had to admit that it had gotten off to a slow start.

“Security teams responding. Enemy being held at point Bravo.”

Third act certainly seems to have made up for it, He thought with morbid amusement as he went about his affairs, ignoring the yelling and commotion beyond his office.

“Overblast door has sealed, Overblast door has sealed. Base is shifting over to internal power and environmental systems. Siege Protocols are now in effect.”

He calmly packed up his computer, making certain that his data backups were in place.

The yelling out beyond his office was increasing, but either their preparations would work, or they wouldn’t.

Rushing would only lead to him dying tired, as some of the Marines liked to say, and he was tired enough as it stood.

“Albert, best power down,” He ordered his VI, “We might be off the grid for a while.”

“Of course, Mein Herr,” The VI replied in a slightly German accent. “Entering power saving mode now.”

“Thank you,” He said, more from habit than anything else.

Being a Virtual Intelligence, Al had no real consciousness to speak of.

While far more advanced than the crude versions that had appeared in the early 2020s, Albert was still basically just an extremely advanced auto-complete algorithm, albeit one that could fool anyone into thinking they were dealing with a true intelligence.

Being polite to the genius level Virtual Intelligence hadn’t been a choice, exactly, it was just in his nature but it had felt right all the same.

No sense in poking that bear, even if he was completely certain that the VI was incapable of taking offense.

There was an old philosophical conundrum about AI and sentience that basically went, if you couldn’t prove it wasn’t sentient… best treat it like it is.

No point inviting skynet by being a dick, after all.

“Hey, Old Man, you ready to go?”

The old man smiled, looking over his shoulder to the young officer who’d appeared in his door as he packed away the system.

“Just need to put my things away,” He said as a shimmering split appeared in the air between them. The pack slipped into the pocket dimension and the split healed itself, “and now that’s done, so let’s go.”

The young officer shuddered slightly, “Don’t know how you lot can use those things, Sir.”

“Are you kidding? I know you kids don’t have time for games these days, but for me? This was a dream come true.” The old man laughed. “My own inventory? How could I resist?”

“But, you had to tear it out of… one of them.” The kid… well, the young soldier was probably in his thirties, but he looked like a teen to the old man… said with some disgust in his voice as he whispered the last bit.

“I did at that,” the old man agreed, gesturing to the door. He understood the kid’s feelings, even if he didn’t agree. The invaders were the monsters of his entire generation, and generally invoked feelings of pure disgust. “I think we’re supposed to be moving.”

“Ah, right, right. Sorry, Sir. This way, please.”

The alarms were making it hard to talk, every word had to be shouted as they moved down the halls of the old military base.

Most of the people there didn’t even know it had a name, but the old man did.

He’d read about it for the first time as a kid, back when it was the center for aerospace defense during the Cold War…

something else the kids didn’t know anything about.

He tried to not to give them a hard time over the things they didn’t know. They were a generation who grew up with a very different war, after all, and while he’d been happy to do his part, they were ones who’d bled and died for it.

“Overblast Door temperature is increasing. Estimate penetration within ten minutes.”

“That’s faster than we hoped.” he noted, more out of academic observation than anything else.

“Yes sir,” the young soldier sounded nervous.

“Don’t worry, we have time.” He assured the kid. “We planned for this. I hoped we’d get fifteen minutes, but we planned for five.”

They crossed into the main thoroughfare of the base and were slowed by the crowd as they pushed to get to the evacuation point.

Non-Coms and troops were trying to control the flow, but it was a losing battle it seemed.

He got into the press and started forward with the group, his minder at his side.

“Do you think they’ll be able to follow us, Sir?”

“I don’t know,” the old man admitted. “They don’t use their technology this way, no idea why. It was obvious, but…”

“Obvious to you, Sir. Not to anyone else,” The kid said quickly, loyally.

The old man liked that about the kid, all of the kids he worked with, but he didn’t agree with them.

A lot of people would have seen what he did, he was just the one in place at the right time to see it.

It was what the military had brought him in to do, so he supposed it was the least he could have done for them.

For everyone.

“I just gave them the idea, the hard work was done by the engineers.”

“If you say so.”

The kid didn’t sound convinced, but it didn’t matter. He knew the truth, he was just lucky. Luckier than he deserved, he supposed.

“Readying the next group for transport.”

The kid shuddered again as they felt the field begin to power up.

“I just can’t understand how anyone can stand that thing?” He complained.

The old man looked at the kid, dropping a hand on his shoulder. “Their tech really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t get how it doesn’t bother you, Sir. Is it even technology? You carved it out of their bodies.”

“We did, and maybe it’s not tech. I doubt it, though. You don’t evolve stuff like that, you engineer it.” He said with confidence his companion didn’t share. “But even if it’s not, we checked it for virulent vectors and everything else we could. I just wish we’d been able to do more with it.”

It was an old argument, he and his peers had had many a row over that very point.

He smiled sadly, remembering all the days and nights spent fighting and arguing with the others brought in on the same program that recruited him.

Inventive minds, not tethered down to the laws of physics…

not entirely, anyway. Watching videos of people dying, then spending hours arguing with others just like himself over how they’d been killed.

Then days more arguing with actual experts in their fields, trying to figure out how what they were seeing could possibly fit within the universe as it was understood.

He’d lost most of those arguments, of course.

Not too many of the old crew left now. Not too many of anybody left. How the hell I outlived them all, I’ll never understand. So many better people could have been here.

“I guess you’d know, sir.”

The old man snorted, looking at the kid sidelong for a moment.

“What do you think I was brought in to do, anyway?”

The kid looked confused, “To reverse engineer the alien tech, Sir.”

He couldn’t keep himself from laughing as they walked, waving off help when the laughter turned into a coughing fit.

“I’m fine, I’m fine, but dear God kid, where did you get that idea?”

The young officer just looked confused, “That’s what you do, though?”

“I’m no engineer, I’ve never done anything productive like that in my life,” The old man chuckled as they started moving forward again. “You lot never looked up my file?”

“Not a lot there, we figure it was redacted.”

“Nah, I just never did anything worth noting in it,” The old man said. “I used to write science fiction. Doubt you’ve ever read any.”

The young soldier shrugged, shaking his head.

“Yeah, fell out of favor a little while after we actually got invaded by aliens.” The man admitted.

“Had a nice boom at first, until we started losing ground. Then, well, you kids have had other things to worry about… and, a lot of what we used to write about stopped being fiction I guess. I told stories, kid, stories about aliens and space ships and the like. Buncha books, did some games, even a screenplay or two that got made. That’s all. ”

“How did you come here, then?”

“Honestly? Luck. World militaries started grasping at straws, calling in creative thinkers of all sorts. Scifi authors were just one group. I got a call, actually a visit…” He chuckled, “hated answering my phone back then, but it’s hard to ignore goons in suits knocking on your door.

Figured they wanted someone to write war propaganda and, hell, I was willing to do what I could.

I was too old and too out of shape to do much good fighting, but I could spin a yarn.

Instead, they sat me down in a dark room with a ton of others, some I knew, most I didn’t, and they asked us to watch footage and tell them what we thought was happening. ”

“And you figured it out?”

“Every now and then,” The old man shrugged. “We were wrong a lot more than we were right, but yes, I got lucky a few times. A few more times than most, and ultimately I wound up here.”

“Everybody says you’re a genius.”