Chapter 9
High school for the second time was… interesting.
Seb had never quite realized just how little he’d been taught the first time around. After decades of experience, well going through it a second time was a bit of an eye opener.
Physics, Chemistry, Biology… you name it, and whatever it was… if it was taught in schools it was basically wrong. Intentionally so, it had to be said of course. Basic courses just didn’t have the time to be right, they just had to settle for being right enough to cover basic comprehension.
Which was all fine and dandy, of course, if the students knew that. Almost none had worked that out, and Seb knew from experience that people with a little knowledge and a lot of confidence were about the stupidest people on the face of the planet.
Well, technically there are stupider people out there… they’re just not smart enough to be noticed, He thought with a wry grin.
Seb had to pack that away, however, because he had other concerns at the moment. Classes were both annoyingly easy, but also occasionally problematic since he’d honestly forgotten a lot of the material completely, as he’d never had any cause to remember it once leaving the school system.
That didn’t make the classes hard, exactly, but it did mean that he actually had to study up a bit and keep up with the work if he wanted to graduate.
Frankly, he didn’t really care if he graduated, of course, but failing out would cause all manner of annoyances and… well, disappoint his mum. Old man inside or not, that wasn’t happening.
So he dutifully packed up his school supplies, old color-coded scribblers, a mechanical pencil that he suspected might make it to christmas, some bic pens, and a white eraser, he then tossed it all in a backpack that he doubted he’d ever actually wear on his back, and headed out to catch the bus.
Half asleep he leaned his head on the glass as they drove in, only able to think about how much more sleep he’d be able to get if he could just use portals to slip into school each morning… but that would definitely raise some eyebrows and invoke some questions he didn’t want to deal with.
*****
Yeah. School sucks. It sucked the first time, and it sure as hell sucks now.
There was no way around it, Seb decided about halfway through the day. He was going to have to find a way to be productive while he was supposedly matriculating.
No laptops in class, though, so he wouldn’t be able to just run some other apps while pretending to follow along. That was another decade or so from even starting to being a thing.
I’ll work something out. I spent more time reading in class the last time around than I did any actual work… which honestly explained my grades, I suppose. Oh well, I know how to learn on my own now. I’ll make do.
He’d picked up his first novel rejection letter just before school started, which was always a nice milestone, but for the moment Seb just focused on what he’d managed to learn about the local transmissions he’d been detecting.
They were more clear somewhere around eighty kilometers or so south of home, and a little outside his normal stomping grounds, but close enough that he knew the area reasonably well.
Unfortunately it was mostly empty forest, used primarily by hunters, hikers, and campers, but there weren’t any rumors of weird stuff happening there so he had to assume that the source wasn’t just sitting around where anyone could stumble over it.
Likely a trapdoor, Seb thought.
Similar to the numbers station in Syria, trapdoors were dimensional tears where the alien footsoldiers would hide until they were deployed. All but impossible to spot from the outside, unless you knew exactly what you were looking for, the enemy had only used them as hidden beachheads in his time.
That he knew of.
Second guessing himself on everything he thought he knew was beginning to wear on him, and Seb expected that it was only going to keep getting worse as time went on.
He sighed and forced himself to refocus for a moment, staring at the chalk board.
It was going to be a long day.
*****
God that was a long day.
Seb tossed his school bag in the corner of his room and slumped across his bed, not so much tired as weary.
I really didn’t remember school being that much of a bore, and I thought it was incredibly boring the first time around. Ugh.
He groaned and sat up, there was work to do after all.
“Ok, Al, what’s the state of things? Anything new on the available frequencies?” He asked.
“The enemy appears to be trying to bait a reaction with their numbers stations.”
“Still?” Seb blinked. He wasn’t surprised exactly, but it was a sign that they didn’t give up easily, he supposed. “It’s been months, you’d think they’d have written it off as a coincidence by now.”
“It appears not. Some known military frequencies within my scope have coded references to ‘Bastion’ being passed around as well. The Officials are, unofficially, still looking for you with rather significant effort,” Al informed him.
Seb rubbed his face, that weary feeling getting all the worse.
With both the invaders and the US military looking for him, he had to operate on the assumption that they would find him sooner or later. They didn’t have enough to track him now, of course, and if he were willing to just stop, he could probably stay under the RADAR so to speak.
Any actions taken would be jumped on quickly, though, and the slightest slipup would bring someone to his door.
It doesn’t even matter if it's the good guys who find me, that’s the worst part. If I get found, good guys or bad… It’s all over.
“Ok, log it all, but we’re not doing a single thing yet. We need better countermeasures first,” Seb said finally, wishing that he wasn’t eleven years old at the moment, but really he wasn’t sure that being an adult would help all that much.
“Of course, Mein Herr. Logging all relevant data for future analysis.”
Seb nodded, mostly to himself since Al didn’t have a camera up at the moment.
The problem was gnawing at him, though, because he was so far from a military strategist or tactician that he didn’t know enough to double check Al’s data…
and Seb knew from experience that trusting even a great VI was a recipe for disaster.
The technology was an amazing force multiplier, but a Virtual Intelligence like Al would multiply ignorance just as well as knowledge.
For relatively minor things, where being wrong wasn’t a game killer, it was fine to use a VI to extend your capacities into subjects that you didn’t fully know.
You wouldn’t get top tier output, but it would be workable and that might be all you needed.
For critical uses, however, Seb was all too aware that you did not trust a VI for work you weren’t knowledgeable in.
Critical tasks were always ones where VI systems were used in conjunction with human subject experts.
It made the humans vastly more productive, while catching the flaws in the VI’s pattern based output.
Seb, however, found himself in a situation where he was going to be leaning heavily on Al’s output… but without the knowledge needed to catch the flaws.
All while being in a situation where one slip equals capture, and likely extinction.
*****
1st Special Operations Command, Fort Bragg
Evelyn Sear grimaced as she looked over the reports for the fiftieth time.
The Numbers stations are showing up more and more, but they’re always gone when we get a team in position. We’ve got a mole.
Over the past few months she’d been tasked with tracking down anything related to the stations, their intrusion into NATO operational areas having caught the attentions of higher ups from several nations.
Her counterparts in Canada, Germany, the UK, France, and Poland had all come up as dry as she herself had but it was becoming clear that whoever was behind the stations had access to intelligence that was secured to the highest levels.
At first they’d thought it was the Soviets, but some back door communication had made it clear that the Soviets were working the same case… and looking at them as the suspects.
And if it’s not the Soviets, then who else? China? They don’t have the assets or general capability to push this much out beyond their borders. Who else is there?
She was beginning to think that it might be the American government, one hand not knowing what the other was doing and all that, but if so then it was a group no one knew anything about.
That wasn’t as impossible as she might like it to be, but it didn’t sit right with her either.
We’re missing something. A piece that will bring everything else into focus.
What that piece was?
Well, she figured that she’d find that out when she found it, but she was adamantly ignoring the idea that it was aliens. That was basically career suicide to even hint at, she had no doubt, so she was working on eliminating every other possibility first, despite Bastion’s warning.
It’s never aliens… until it is… but before I say it is, I’m going to be able to prove it to the densest idiot in the room.
Evelyn was still working when there was a knock at her door. Not the public facing one guarded by her secretary, but the one that opened onto the offices that were all well behind the building’s internal security.
“Come in,” She called, looking over.
Jack Burke let himself in, closing the door behind him.
Evelyn nodded politely, waving to the chair in front of her desk, “What brings you by, Jack?”
“Just reviewing the Bastion file, wanted to know if anything new had come up?”
She snorted, shaking her head, “Doing the same here. Not a peep, I’m afraid. Why?”
Jack paused, almost instinctively moving to look around before he caught himself and forced himself to relax.
“We have a mission upcoming, another station.” He said grimly.
Evelyn frowned, a little confused, “I know you’ve sent teams out after several in recent times.”
“This one is different. Afghanistan.” Jack said grimly.
Evelyn hissed, her breath sucking in through her teeth as he just nodded.
“That’s poking the bear, about as literally as you get,” She said tensely. “The Soviet forces there aren’t going to look kindly on a team of American special forces intruding on their territory.”
“We’ve got a CIA contact who’s embedded with the Muj,” Jack said, “they’ll help the team in-country, but we’re trying to keep the circle tight on this one. Haven’t even told the Company why we’re going. They think it’s a weapons deal, guns for opium.”
Evelyn grimaced at that, but nodded in understanding.
The CIA had a bit of a history of… well, not exactly dealing in drugs, but certainly looking the other way when certain groups did the deed…
and then taking a skim off the top for their troubles, so she wasn’t surprised by that precisely…
but Jack Burke wasn’t CIA, and the Special Forces didn’t generally involve themselves in such things, to say nothing of Delta.
“You didn’t tell them it was your people.” She said after a moment’s thought.
“Nope. I don’t like how they do business, but right now that’s not my concern,” Jack said.
“My guys are going to burn the drugs. We’ll pay the Company their wergild so they don’t think anything of it, but as far as they’re concerned my guys are Mercs looking for a payday.
Can’t trust anyone, someone is flipping intel and until we find out who, I’m not taking any chances. ”
Evelyn settled back, considering that for a moment.
“Why come to me?” She asked after a moment. “You can’t be sure that I’m not the leak.”
Jack smirked, a rather infuriating expression he was inordinately proud of, “You’re not. I’ve had guys I trust on you for the last three months.”
Evelyn’s eyes narrowed as she stiffened, her voice dangerously low, “You’ve what?”
“I told you, can’t trust anyone. Until I clear someone, I’m assuming they’re burned. You’ve been cleared. Mostly.”
“Mostly?” She hissed, irritated by his tone and smirk.
“You’re as clear as I can make you,” He told her with a shrug. “And I need you on this. Overwatch for the whole mission.”
“You have better people for that.”
“If it were just the set mission, true,” Jack conceded. “But there’s something else tied to this that we both want.”
Evelyn breathed out slowly, leaning back.
“Bastion,” She said without question.
“Exactly.”
Evelyn considered it, briefly, then nodded. “Alright, I’m in. Who else has been read in on this?”
“Other than us?” Jack asked, still smirking at her.
“Of course!”
“No one. The cover op is the real op as far as everyone else is concerned.” Jack said firmly. “Even the men on the ground, save one, think they’re just there to give weapons over to the Mujahadin for their fight against the Soviets.”
*****
Army C-130, Over the Mediterranean
Sergeant Lopez looked over his new team as they relaxed, about half of them grabbing shuteye, the rest amusing themselves with whatever they had at hand.
They weren’t Delta, this mission wasn’t the sort that Delta would be assigned to normally, but they were all Green Berets and there weren’t any newbies in the group.
The Lieutenant was Graham Smith, and he’d been in and out of Afghanistan a half dozen in the last year alone for missions that were close enough to their cover.
The rest of the team were mostly his men, through and through.
Excellent record, all of them spoke the languages and knew the customs, and Lopez just hoped that was going to make a difference.
I have got to be the stupidest grunt on the face of the planet. Why did I ever agree to this?
The first rule of the Army was never volunteer.
I right muffed that one up, didn’t I?
When the Colonel came to him, though, he hadn’t been able to muster the will to tell the man off. It wasn’t just the rank either, he was Delta… in an informal conversation with a superior, he’d done worse in the past than tell the man off.
Never in uniform, of course, and never on the record. That was the sort of thing that couldn’t be overlooked, but there was less of a barrier between officers and enlisted in groups like the Green Berets, and even less so when you got to Delta.
No Delta operator was just enlisted. You didn’t get picked unless you could think, act, and be more than just a grunt.
Good leaders in the Force knew that, and there was a lot more leeway and a lot less distance between Officers and enlisted for that very reason.
So he could have told old Jack off and walked away, politely or otherwise, and Lopez was confident that his career would have been fine.
But he didn’t.
And now he was sitting on another C-130 heading for another desert… hoping to find another monster.
The stupidest grunt in the Army.
The C-130 droned on, completely ignorant and uncaring of the thoughts of one Sergeant Lopez.
*****