Chapter 5
“Run us through it again, Corporal.”
“Uh, Yessir, Colonel Sir,” Lopez replied nervously. Usually it would be the Sarge who handled the debrief, and it wouldn’t be done to a full bird colonel either, but he supposed the mission was enough of a cockup that he should have expected it.
The Colonel listened in silence as Lopez moved through the entire mission, only lifting a hand when he got to the odd radio transmission.
“Sir?” Lopez said, as the Colonel shuffled some papers and read something from them before speaking.
“And you confirm the report statement here, you received a compressed pulse signal from an unknown sender calling himself Bastion.”
“The message claimed it was a pulsed signal,” Lopez said carefully. “I can’t say either way myself, sir, but Specialist Kings said that the radios don’t have that capability, Sir.”
“They didn’t,” The Colonel said through lips compressed into a tight line. “Go on.”
“Um, Yessir.” Lopez stammered briefly before continuing with the story.
This time the Colonel let him go all the way to the end before speaking up again.
“Alright, Corporal, can you describe the hostile elements for me again.”
Lopez started to speak, then paused and thought about it before shaking his head.
“Not really, Sir.”
The Colonel fixed him with a glare, “Pardon?”
“Sir, it’s… I want to say they were monsters, I want to say they…
didn’t move right, like they had tentacles but not tentacles, and rolled but didn’t roll…
” Lopez gritted his teeth as he resisted the urge to kick at the ground in frustration.
“I… I don’t have the words, Sir. I can’t… They weren’t right, Colonel.”
He slumped, “They just… weren’t… right.”
The Colonel stared for an interminable time before he closed the file and nodded, “Dismissed, Corporal.”
“Sir!”
Lopez saluted before pivoting on his heel and marching out, leaving the Colonel sitting behind his desk.
After a long moment, he spoke, “Thoughts?”
“The story is consistent, something happened to them out there,” A woman said as she stepped out of the adjoining room. “I wish we had better photographs, but something in the region ruined the film. Some kind of radiation, best we can tell.”
“Radiation?” The Colonel looked over sharply. “The men?”
“We don’t know, we’ll keep watch on them for a while,” The woman shrugged, “but even if it is dangerous, it may be decades before it shows effects, and by then we’d never be able to confirm the source.”
“Fabulous.” Colonel Jack Burke growled as he again opened the folder in front of him and flipped through it. “So now we have two anomalies to track.”
The woman nodded, “Whoever is running these Numbers stations has been showing up more and more, and always in hot spots… and now…”
“Bastion.”
“Precisely,” She said in agreement. “I had their radios analyzed… they now can receive pulsed transmissions. The new coding is…”
She shook her head.
“That advanced?” He asked.
“It’s not that, it’s… if anything, it’s almost primitive.
” She admitted, “the code is pared down, bare bones, but it would have to be to fit on the limited space available on the radios. No, it’s clearly not from the same source as the Numbers stations, Jack.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was ours. ”
“Maybe it is,” Jack said thoughtfully. “I’ll put a query in the system, it’s not 1st SOCOM I’ll personally guarantee, but I can’t speak for JSOC or SOCSOUTH, let alone the NRO, CIA… there are more than a few players that could be involved.”
She nodded, “Understood. Whoever this Bastion is, or whoever he represents… he knows something. We need to speak with him.”
Jack nodded, “I know, but I put in a trace request…”
He shook his head.
“Best we can pin it down is the East coast of North America. Anywhere from the Canadian Maritimes… maybe, though not likely, as far North as the tip of Greenland, down to about the Carolinas, and even that isn’t certain because the signal was bounced at least twice off the ionosphere.
We can’t entirely rule out a third bounce, which could indicate a base station anywhere from the mid-west to Hawaii. ”
“We really can’t do better?”
“Not with a transmission lasting less than half a second and no warning it was being sent,” Jack said with a shake of his head.
“Damn. Did we find anything at the site itself?”
Jack gestured negatively, “The recovery team took in a Chinook, recovered the bodies and looked over the station but it had been abandoned. Nothing left.”
“Unfortunate. Well, one good thing came out of it,” The woman said.
“Oh?”
“We’re already running the new radio firmware through testing. Within a month, all of our teams will be running a clean version.”
“That will be useful, I suppose, but I wish we had more, I’m not going to lie.”
“You are not alone with that.”
“Well, Evelyn,” Jack said, standing up. “I’ll leave that to you, in the meantime I’m going to start hunting for our new friend, Bastion.”
*****
Seb was panting to kill himself as he slumped in place from his attempt at jogging. Running on beach sand was probably one of the best ways to get a cardio workout available to him, but while the give of the sand was good for insulating his joints from impacts it made it a helluva lot harder.
Which was a better workout, but he wasn’t in a mood to appreciate that just at the moment.
Still in better shape than I ever managed as an adult, Seb thought as his watch dinged.
Congratulations, you’ve earned a new performance badge! Weak as a kitten badge unlocked! You’re no longer an asthmatic newborn.
Seb glared at the watch for a moment before shaking his head and starting to move again. While he knew that Albert was just a VI, sometimes the twisted humor the VI model had incorporated into its patterns left him wondering.
In the end it didn’t matter, he supposed, but it was more than a little irritating.
Likely the point.
Al’s tracking of any anomalous signals had not turned up anything since the Numbers station in Libya, but knowing that the enemy were already on Earth this early in the timeline had left Seb shaken.
He wasn’t some damned superhero, what the hell was he supposed to do with any of this information?
If he could trust anyone, his best bet would be to hand over everything from his inventory over to the appropriate authorities and let them deal with it, but that was right out the window with the revelation that the enemy was already here.
They’d deeply infiltrated world governments before, and he had to assume that if they hadn’t managed it yet then they were well underway.
Giving the enemy future technology, even if some of it was based on their own tech or biology, or whatever the hell they used…
no one had ever really pinned that down, honestly…
was tantamount to suicide, and he didn’t particularly feel like entering into a murder/suicide pack with the entire human race.
That left him alone. No support, no plan, no advice. Nothing but his memories and the contents of his inventory, which was actually a pretty huge advantage between them, he knew for certain, but it still felt… lacking.
Treat it like a story, or a video game. That’s what I know, after all. The enemy is moving slowly, they’re testing right now, probing. Unless something changes, which would be my fault, I have decades before they come into the open.
As he ran, Seb continued to think about his opening moves in the game he was being forced to play, and he realized that he was thinking about it…
somewhat wrong. It wasn’t exactly a story he was living out, it was more of a…
game, yes, but he’d been thinking about even that in the wrong way.
Trying to figure out how to beat the enemy was pointless right now, he didn’t have the assets.
I’m not playing a strategy game, yet. It’s not a shooter, yet.
Right now… it’s a sims game. Don’t worry about the enemy, worry about my bank account.
Build up my life sim first, beat this stage of the game before I move on to the next.
With money and connections made in this phase, I can shift game genres later as needed.
He could do that.
In the meantime, he had to finish his run and get ready.
It wasn’t often you got to turn eleven for the second time.
*****
As it turned out, turning eleven for the second time was pretty blase.
Might have been more interesting if I had more friends, Seb supposed, but honestly he wasn’t convinced.
The local kids of the neighborhood showed up, as they did the first time so many decades earlier, and it was an ok time.
Mostly just eating hotdogs and playing games, which was really hard for him to get into until he realized that most of them would count toward his gamification workouts.
Playing tag with pre-teens was… oddly not that different this time around.
Hide and seek was a whole different story, though, and he had to let himself get caught a few times just to end the match.
Mostly, though, he now found that he simply outmatched his previous peers, despite his fitness being as pitiful as it ever had been.
It was an odd feeling.
Are kids really this dumb all the time? I don’t remember being this dumb.
Is that how it is for all kids? God, that’s depressing, here I thought I was pretty damn smart as a kid.
Guess the smartest kid in the room is like being the cleverest dog in the room, Seb thought wryly, if a little unfairly even to his way of thinking.
It was difficult, though, remembering the people he’d grown up with as the children they were instead of the adults they’d become. Even if most had moved on to other things, and all had passed away before his own timely ending, at least as best he knew.
This is going to be a problem, I think.