Chapter Twenty Three Alexis

A Loud banging on the door jolts Marek and Alexis out of their nap. When they look at the time, it takes them a moment to figure whether it’s night or morning. They’ve already lost track. While she can’t find any of her clothes to put on quickly enough, Marek simply grabs one of the pillows and goes to the door to answer it.

“Alright alright, I’m comin!” He swings the door open, covering himself with nothing but the pillow.” When he opens the door, Vaun is standing there in his robe, making them second guess that it’s night or not all over again.

“Uh, oh, hey Marek. I thought this was Alexis’s apartment.” He looks down the catwalk in confusion, wondering if she was maybe supposed to be on the other side of his apartment. “Sorry bout that.”

When he glances past Marek and sees her peeking out from under the covers, his eyes pop open, but hen he returns them right back to Marek. “Well, Good thing I didn’t video call you on your coms then.” He calls to her around Marek. “You’re on today. Like right now. Just got the call. Gear up and be in the hanger in no more than fifteen.”

She props herself up on her elbows behind herself. “Um, ok. No briefing?”

“Nope, emergency call. And I mean gear up heavy. Sy will give us the details on the go.”

Vaun zips back down the balcony, to his own apartment, leaving Marek standing there. She’s nervous now, and her eyes are as big as ever. It’ll be her first actual mission, and he said to gear up heavy. Heavy, coming from Vaun, can mean only one thing. Before Marek can get the door closed, she is up, naked, and scrambling for the stack of gear she keeps ready on top of her dresser.

Marek starts to get worried as he hands her clothing to her, one piece at a time. “You think you’re going on, like, a combat mission?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Babe.” His voice is upset and worried now.

“We’ve gotta earn our place around here Marek. This is how I do it. I’m not gonna be alone anyway. I can do this.” She thinks for a second, letting it sink in. Her own voice is a bit rattled too. “I kinda have to anyway, don’t I.”

With all her hear on, and rifle in hand, she barges into the main hanger, through the double doors. She’s early, but Vaun is already there with Sy, waiting. She has no idea how he beat her there. It’s almost not possible. By the time she reaches them, Mikel comes trampling in behind her. He has his standard rifle too, but also that ridiculous long rifle he made, slung across his back.

Suddenly, a pair of headlights barrels from out of the darkness and in through the main bay doors of the hanger. Don, the older white bearded pilot, screeches in across the floor in a little old open-topped military jeep. It skids on its narrow little wheels to a stop not two feet from them. Sy hands him a mug of coffee and starts giving them all the rundown while they climb into the back of the jeep.

“One of our local contractors was taking a load to the Mars launch accumulation site yesterday. On their way back, they ran into something, and went down in the ocean. Our guess is, it was another one of those damn bug things. God knows how many of em are out there now.” He shakes his head and lets out a deep breath, thinking of how things are starting to catch up to them. “Anyway, they ended up splashing down all fine and dandy. Problem is, they’re only a couple hundred miles off the north-western coast of Africa, which is definitely not good. They do have a barge on the way, but recently, another big vessel, from the coast, appears to be on a direct path to intercept them.” He shakes his head. “It’s not military.”

He knows more than he’s saying. She wants to know why she’s got ballistic plates on. “What kind of trouble?”

“They don’t really know what it was, but something made a move on them, forcing them to take evasive maneuvers. It came at them fast, and they had to enter early.”

She suspects they know damn well what it was. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure they just don’t want to fess up that those things Aaron came across. Things are totally fucked up there now, aren’t they?”

Vaun glances at Don and then back to her. “No, you’re right. They just don’t want to admit it. They’ve been skipping out on us lately, to save money. Things have slowed down, and we haven’t been asked to do any armed escorts for a while. Someone noticed, and took advantage of it. It’s not like we’re gonna go up there and act like space cops on our own dime.”

Don looks at her and Mikel. “Now, to answer your real question, the African government is not stupid enough to cease an American shuttle like this, but that doesn’t mean they’d stop an independent party from doing it either. This is a private civilian endeavor, so our government is staying out of it.”

She’s rather shocked. “Our government won’t protect one of our shuttles from being captured by the Africans?”

“It’s kind of a complicated tit-for-tat situation right now. Apparently, when General Quincy asked them for a favor on Mars, they told him to shove it. So yeah, they kind of had to call us. That, and they don’t want it to look like this mars colony has military backing. That alone would rally all our enemies to stop it under a formal cause.”

“Quincy is the guy that got you your first shuttle and all that right?”

“Yeah, he’s kind of our military liaison, but a little more on the sly. We work for the government, but we don’t work for the government.”

Sy reaches up and circles his hand around, signaling for Don to take off. “Enough chit chat, I’ll keep y’all updated, as things progress. Good luck.”

While Don speeds off out through the hanger door, she flips her headset mic down and calls Vaun’s handle, as a mic check, but also to see what he’ll say. Apparently, he hasn’t gone by the name in a long time.

“Hey Baphomet.”

One of Vaun’s eyebrows raise, and then he looks over his shoulder at her. he can’t quite keep a straight face. “Hey rat-girl.”

Her mouth hangs open. “Hey! That’d better not be my name!”

Both Vaun and Mikel can’t hold back any longer and burst into laughter. Mikel is near to tears with it, while Vaun has a hand on his belly. “Oh my god that was hilarious. No, it’s not. Maybe we’ll get you one after this, huh. Depends on what shenanigans we get into.”

She hangs her head, but still has a smile. They got her good. “So what’s this deal with this colony launch? I’ve heard about it a couple times now. Are we really going back to Mars, after what happened?”

“We definitely are. It’s a big deal, kind of like how we took back the old moon base. Everyone else was pretty sore about that. So yeah, now that we’re about to take the old Mars colony too, shit’s gonna get real nasty. This is only the start of it, I’m sure.”

“What’s the accumulation site Sy was talkin about?”

“Well, you can’t launch the size of rocket fleet they’re using all at once. Each one of their ships alone is too big to make it off the planet. So, they’ve been doing multiple launches, accumulating supplies, and they’re gonna launch from the location-four dock. They’ve been doing it for years, and everything’s almost ready.”

Mikel is shaking his head at why they were so stupid to have launched this last shuttle without an escort. “They knew damn well that an attack was coming. What were they thinking?”

Vaun does a pretty good job of keeping a conversation going while, at the same time, bracing himself to not get thrown out of the jeep around the sharp turns. “I was thinking about that. They were intercepted on the way back, with an empty hold, which is what’s weird. Maybe that’s the only way one of the robots would be able to get in and take over without ruining the shuttle.”

When Don abruptly pulls off the road into the air field sector, she turns herself around a little to see all the hangers. The tan corrugated steel buildings so big, they can be seen from home base. They all look pretty much the same. Don pulls up to an inconspicuous white metal door behind one of them, and stops. It only has a little palm sized SSS sticker on it, and that’s all. When they all bail out, he unlocks the door and marches in, leaving it swinging open behind him. The inside of the room is dark, except for the light coming in through the doorway. Even then, they can see an even darker blotch of pure blackness in front of them in the room.

Turning the lights on doesn’t do any good either. The strange shape in front of them obscures itself in every way but by outline. There is a little bit of burnishing and staining on the black finish along some edges, but there isn’t much else to see. She can at most tell it’s some kind of aircraft. It has a sixty foot long body that tapers sharp and wide at the back, and a fairly blunt nose up front. The four wings are short and fat, with what looks like tall upright engines on each end.

When she crouches down, she can’t help but notice all of the bullet gouges on the back and underside of it. It suddenly makes the reality of what they’re doing sink in. Now she’s starting to wish she’d spent as much time down on the rifle range as Mikel did, instead of putting people in their places on the mats.

While they’re checking things out, don disappears for a second and then pops back out wearing some kind of strange looking tactical vest. There is a remote controller of some sort hanging off his chest, with a cord dangling from it. He hits a button on it and the whole flat back of the aircraft lowers down to the floor. Even the inside of it is all a dull black too, but at least the kind a person can still see. Some of the paint inside has been scraped by bullets too. At least there isn’t blood on the floor, that she can see.

Vaun grabs his bags off the back of the jeep and heads up the rear ramp of the jet with them. “Given the current conditions, we have less than ten hours to get to that shuttle. The approaching ship will be there within that much time. Nobody else wants to take this one, so we gotta get our asses moving.”

Not only is Mikel bringing his light-gas gun, but he’s also loading up one of the big flack cannons too. He hasn’t only been making custom guns, but he’s been making custom ammunition too. He pulls one of the thirty millimeter shells out of his bandolier and hands it to Vaun. All she can see is that the tip of it has something blue in it.

“Tested these out last week. Seven three-eighths inch steel rods in a printed pack.”

Vaun has an unamused look on his face. “And what exactly are you gonna do with these? Shoot a helicopter down or something?”

She doesn’t care if the gun weighs fifty pounds, has a reciprocating barrel, and a huge muzzle break on it to boot. She doesn’t want anything to do with it. “Yeah, well, you’d better shoot that thing last, cause you probly won’t be able to shoulder anything else afterwards.”

While she’s clipping some of the grenades Vaun packed, onto her vest, he drags another huge pack full of stuff up the ramp and clips it to the inside wall. Something shiny in the bag catches Mikel’s attention.

“That’s a lot of those dehydrated meals. How long’s this gonna take?”

Vaun doesn’t look up while he’s zipping it closed. “However long it takes. I hope you don’t mind not being able to shit for a couple days.”

While Vaun grumpily continues to secure all of his stuff in the back, Don seems to only be taking things out of the jet. He even pulls the huge side mounted Gatling guns out from inside, rolling them down the ramp and leaving them in the middle of the floor. The multi-barreled cannons stand about as tall as she does, and have huge track belts hanging from them. When Don pushes the ammo crates down the ramp too, it sounds and feels like they weigh a good five hundred pounds each. He looks stressed about leaving them behind.

“We’re not gonna have the range we need to make it with the weight. I’ll have about a minute to drop you at the site and go, but that’s it. We’ll be cutting it close, and that’s if the tailwind lasts. I’ve got a place farther up the coast I can land without getting murdered. We’ll see what’s goin on after that.”

After they’re all inside, Vaun’s eyes dart around the cargo hold one last time before hitting the button to close the rear door. “So, we’re gonna be kinda stranded at the shuttle till their salvage ship gets there, so yeah, we can’t fuck this up. If that shuttle sinks… we sink. Got it?”

She doesn’t want to sound stupid for asking, so she doesn’t, but she wishes that maybe the other vessel is just some fishermen trying to help out. Surely the world knows about the shuttle going down. No one would attempt piracy with the world watching.

As soon as she picks one of the side jump seats to sit in, Vaun buckles her in tight. He pulls a bigger headset down from where it’s hanging above her, and hands it to her. “It’s about to get real loud in here. Put these on.”

While Don slowly drives the tilt-jet out onto the tarmac, Vaun makes sure Mikel is strapped in good, and pulls his headset down for him too. She watches Vaun methodically move about the cabin, with that laser focus and do or die look on his face. It makes her feel like everything is going to be ok, no matter how bad it might get. As soon as he takes the copilot seat, the engines kick on. She can feel the sheer power of them right away, and it makes her teeth clench tight. Her whole body tightens up.

Bright light from outside the front windows circles around the inside walls of the jet as it turns out onto the tarmac. When they take off, it’s abrupt, and incredibly forceful. The screeching roar of the engines is so loud, she can’t even hear the others in her own headset. It makes her struggle to breathe and she hugs her rifle across her chest almost tight enough to hurt. She’s never flown before, and no one warned her.

She and Mikel lock eyes nearly the entire way from take-off to full altitude. He shouts across the hull to her, even though she can hear him just fine in her headset. “I’ve got your back Alexis.”

She tells him the same thing, trying to keep her confidence. She had always though Mikel was ready for anything, but he looks easily as nervous as she is. She may have grown up in the gutter, but he’s only a dumb hick too. It has to be hard, leaving Clarice behind like this, not knowing if he’ll make it back or not. He already almost got butchered by a robot in space, and now he’s already being sent to the blender for more.

Over the hellish long flight, she only manages to get two hours of sleep, and that was at Vaun’s orders. When they land on the Atlantic coast, they only make a quick stop to refuel. There isn’t even any ocean or beach within sight. All there is, is an outbuilding by where the fuel truck met them. The place is only another big airstrip, like the one they left from. It’s disheartening. Getting out of her seat to pee is the only thing she had prayed for, so she relents in at least getting that much out of the deal.

While she, Mikel, and Don stretch their legs for a couple minutes, Vaun takes all of their guns and stuffs them into a big dry-bag and ties it into some kind of self-inflating raft thing. So he doesn’t forget, he clips some strange air canister inflatable ascent bags to their vests and shows them how to operate them. Being told to pull the red cord on something to not drown, is not the direction she was hoping things would be going. None of it sounds good at all.

Vaun has the two of them back in their seats and buckled in before Don even gets back in his seat. She can already feel the soreness in her muscles from tensing up during all the turbulence. The flight alone has about wore her out, and they’re only half way there.

She closes her eyes tight and tries to relax her body while they take off again, but she can only hold off for a few seconds. Every time the damn jet dips or rises erratically, she tightens up like a hedgehog. Eventually, when they reach altitude and the flight smoothens out, she’s able to loosen up a little. She’s so tired this time, Vaun doesn’t have to nag at her to rest.