The Human Insurgency (4 page)

"As you know Jie, we haven't had time to deploy the
Dragon Missiles. Our civilian leaders didn't think it prudent to
store any near Shanghai - too accessible, not remote enough for
security purposes. But a small number of the Dragon Missile
prototypes were among my stockpiles. The missiles were faulty and
so expensive to fix that the powers-that-be chose to leave them
here. But the warheads themselves are still viable."

Jie gaped at him. "General, are you saying what I
think you're saying?"

General Meng had no time to explain the rest of his
plan to Jie. The battle had reached the point of no return. PLA
missiles were arcing into the sky, exploding impotently against the
invisible shields of the five carrier ships above. Cockroach
fighters from those same ships were now zeroing in on the positions
of the hidden missile silos and reducing them to scrap. At the same
time the Enemy landing parties to the north and south of the river
were threatening to spill into the city proper, fanning outward in
a two-pronged assault.

This all seemed like good news for the Enemy. On the
perimeter of the de facto beachhead which the Enemy had
established, General Meng received updates from his well-placed
scouts.

"Sir, they've wiped out most of our forces near the
landing site. They're making a push now. They're advancing right
over multitudes of our dead."

General Meng gave the order. "You have the green
light, all units. Open the box."

Among the dying and the dead PLA soldiers, some had
fallen during the fight on purpose, playing possum. These soldiers
had bombs strapped tightly to their bodies in duct tape, and these
weren't ordinary bombs. They were fusion bombs made from the
dismantled Dragon Missile warheads. The warheads were too heavy and
unstable to be fired with conventional ground weapons. But they
could be properly wired and triggered to make that all-important
chemical reaction happen. General Meng's pessimistic obsession had
gauged that without the chaos of an urban firefight, the Enemy
might detect the trap before it was too late.

"Go, go, go!" General Meng could hear the scouts
shouting to their men, fleeing pell-mell as the reactions began. On
the large monitor with video-feed of greater Shanghai, General Meng
focused his attention on the Luban Bridge and the surrounding
neighborhoods north and south of the Huangpu. Without warning,
WOOOM. A blue ball of shimmering death thrashed outward from a
central point, blinding the video-feed in washed-out glare. A
second blue sphere of devastation followed the first, and a second
shock wave surged over the face of the urban landscape. The entire
city shook, rumbling to its core. Half the ceiling of General
Meng's bunker caved in. Jie's diving push probably saved the
General's life as a huge cinderblock jarred loose and cracked the
concrete where General Meng had stood.

Meng looked like a mime in camouflage, his face
covered in white dust. He lurched out of his disorientation long
enough to order the next salvo of missiles launched.

Crackling with static, his com link still
operational, Meng heard the words that made his old heart gallop
like a stallion.

"Sir, the Monkey and the Jaguar are in the jungle. I
repeat, the Monkey and the Jaguar are in the jungle." Meng had to
smile. Those code words brought a ridiculous image into his head
even as the fate of this city of nearly 33 million hung on a
knife's edge.

He turned to Jie, and Jie said what he already
knew.

"It's about to happen, isn't it?"

"We're about to see if your father and General Chao
are as smart as they think they are. If that's what you mean then
yes, boy."

Reports were coming in of the massive, massive
craters that now scarred the earth north and south of the Luban
Bridge. The bridge itself had fallen into the river and the Huangpu
had diverted course, flooding the yawning craters with untold
gallons of liquid force.

Meanwhile volley after volley of missiles exploded
harmlessly against screens of cockroach fighters that the Enemy had
begun to use defensively as skillfully as they had in their
assault. Swarms of cockroach fighters, like schools of fish, were
providing a moving barrier that shielded the carrier-ships from
missile fire. The irony was that even if General Meng had had
Dragon Missiles deployed on the ground by this point, they would
never be able to get past those screens of cockroach assault craft.
Blowing up a huge number of the fighters might have helped, but
they needed to take out those carriers, all else be damned.

There was more irony to go around though. General
Meng had to wait, impotent, to see what would happen as the two
cockroach fighters manned by Chinese pilots approached their
targets. In the urgency to protect their ships from the mayhem on
the ground, the Enemy had closed up their carriers into a tight
five-pointed star. The first cockroach fighter slammed aft of the
nearest carrier on the edge of the formation, sparking a froth of
cobalt energy which tore the sky like weeping flesh. That widening
sphere of annihilation not only destroyed its initial target, it
also obliterated a second ship and left a third in such tatters
that it began to sag to port before disintegrating piecemeal as it
hurtled under the Earth's yanking gravity.

The second blast was every bit as spectacular as the
first. Two more ships vanished, their matter consumed by the fusion
energy. Meng wondered about the last flashing thoughts of the
Chinese pilots before they'd navigated to their deaths. Glorious
and noble as their sacrifices were, immortalized as they might be,
Meng suspected that none of that had mattered to the nameless
pilots. They probably envisioned their homes and loved ones and
nothing else. It was always the simple things that served as the
ultimate motivation for sacrifice.

"Report, damn it! Report! What's the Enemy's
status?!"

Meng waited while flurries of updates came in from
the damaged com link. Static hounded every other word, but Meng
managed to get the gist of the situation on the ground. The Enemy
fleet was completely destroyed. The repurposed cockroach fighters
had fulfilled their purpose. The Enemy's remaining cockroach
fighters were falling from the sky like deadly but useless
paperweights. The startled General gasped as Jie picked him up in a
bone-crushing hug.

"You did it, General!"

"I did nothing young man!" Meng frowned.
Oh,
hell
. He gave Jie a high-five.

"Compile a list of today's dead and missing. We will
bury our fallen, and if we can't bury them, we can at least honor
their sacrifice. Get to work!" No easy task, and normally not
something a General's aide would be caught dead doing. But this war
had turned many roles upside down, and Meng had to see that all
needs were filled.

"All brigade commanders, assemble for new
instructions by 1100." Meng glanced at the corner of this room
which had until recently been his command center, office, and
bedroom all in one. Half of the room was choked with rubble, and it
was a wonder the doorway hadn't been blocked.

"Oh, and Jie...get someone to start removing some of
this debris. Have the engineers check to see if the structural
integrity is still sound. I've got a war to run, and I don't have
time for this crap." Jie gave the General a quick bow and a
grin.

"Yes, General Meng! I'm on it!" After the young man
left, Meng slipped a cigar between his lips, lit it, and took a
good, long pull. Even a humorless old man could savor a victory. He
hadn't earned it, but his men sure as hell had. Meng grasped an
opened bottle of rice wine and poured it onto the floor, imagining
it soaking into the earth below.

For your sacrifices, my young, fearless fools. You
make a shriveled, old fool proud
.

The alien's body was limp. I slowly knelt down beside
it. Myla hung back, clearly traumatized by the idea of a corpse.
Don't ask me why I wasn't traumatized. I've always felt a little
not-normal…OK, maybe a lot not-normal. Jobe and I could see its
facial features better in the fading orange glow. It had no
discernible mouth and barely discernible eyes. Just two black pits
the size of grapes. Ugh...yuck. The thought of food made my stomach
lurch with the fresh corpse lying right there. I had to turn
away.

"You all right, Skye?" Kane asked. Jobe clasped my
hand and gave me a concerned look.

I yanked my wrist angrily out of reach. "I don't need
any special treatment. We need to start thinking. We need to get
out of here."

Jobe looked at me strangely. "What are you talking
about?"

I pointed at the bracelet around the thing's left
wrist. A sinewy, thin sliver of wire hugged around it. I couldn't
prove it, but it just shouted 'KEY' at me. "I think that's our
ticket out of this hellhole."

Everyone looked at me like I'd gone crazy. It was
true that I seemed to live my life through intuition a lot more
than most people. I'd always been impulsive, even as a child, but
I'd also often gotten lucky too.
You make your own luck,
Kitty-Kat
, Dad used to tell me.

Without thinking, violating my own protest from
minutes before, I slipped the bracelet off the Glowing One's wrist.
I put it on my own wrist and turned toward the wall. With all my
heart I thought about that wall opening, the purplish muck sliding
free on my command.

Everyone knelt there, staring at me like I'd grown a
third breast. I waited for something to happen.

Nothing.

"Skye, even if we could get out of here, what then?"
Kane asked.

"To hell with that. I want to know what she thinks
she's doing," Oliver growled. "First you tell us to be careful, and
now you start taking desperate actions, trying to escape. What do
you think those things will do to us, hm? We've already experienced
more than a taste of what they can do when we disobey."

We all shuddered at Oliver's remark. I remembered
being mind-raped - that's what I called it, at least. When there
were enough of them clustered together they could totally overpower
your mind and make you feel like a hammered vegetable, no thoughts
or feelings of your own, only pain. They could make you a slave,
make you do exactly what they wanted. We figured that the only
reason they didn't control us more often was that it seemed to take
a huge effort on their part, agitating them as if it was almost
just as painful for them as for us.

We knew so little, and trying to break free of this
tiny cube on a ship of unguessed size…who was I kidding? This was a
snowflake's hope and a prayer in a lake of fire.

Screw it. I didn't care anymore, and yet that's when
it came to me.

"I'm getting out of here and you all are coming with
me. So help me Oliver, if I have to bitch-slap you into getting
your ass in gear, you can look forward to the back of my hand." I
glared at him for all I was worth and the tall, by-no-means-wimpy
Oliver was the first to flinch.

Jobe nodded. "Okay, what's the plan Skye?"

"I don't have a plan. I have a gut feeling. Now
please shut up and let me think." I walked over to the muck of the
wall, studying its semi-smooth, disgusting texture. I began to
reach out to it and realized that, as seamless as this wall was, it
should theoretically be permeable just like the ceiling and floor.
It was made of the same kind of stuff, wasn't it? What if the
Glowing Ones used the key like that? What if this bracelet, this
key, allowed its wearer to slip through the wall as just another
permeable barrier? I tried to touch my fingers to the purplish
gunk.

My hand went through. I cried out in a mixture of 'I
can't believe this works!' and pure exultation.

"Guys, are you seeing this?" I looked back and all
four of them were watching me, jaws to the floor.

"I'm going to step through and then try to hand the
bracelet back through at just the right moment. If we do this
right, maybe we can all use this key to get out of here."

"Yeah, but if you're wrong then you'll get stuck in
the wall," Jobe pointed out. "And if you get trapped in that wall,
Skye, you may very well die."

"Yeah, a severed limb would suck," I admitted.

"Skye, I can't let you take that risk," Jobe replied.
This wasn't Jobe talking, this was his heart talking. He really did
love me. I loved him. But I couldn't live my life around the
thought of never losing him, and that crap had to go both ways.

"Sorry Jobe." I leaned into him, kissing him hard,
stunning him as my arms encircled his neck to deepen the kiss. His
heart was thundering as I pulled away and stepped through the wall
too quickly for him to stop me.

"This is Tanya Westenridge, reporting for CNN. London
has been bombed and communications throughout the United Kingdom
have been disrupted by air strikes on all major population centers
as far north as Inverness. The Invaders are ruthless, and mass
abductions previously reported have been confirmed. Suburbs in
London, Liverpool, Birmingham, and Manchester have experienced
widespread abduction events. Small and maneuverable ships launched
from the Invader's carrier-class aircraft have carried out
overnight raids in many vulnerable neighborhoods. Tens of thousands
are estimated among the taken.

"Elsewhere in the world we have heard more
encouraging news. The Chinese government has broadcast the
breathtaking accounts of two recent victories. In the Battle of
Beijing and the Battle of Shanghai, Chinese forces were able to
annihilate two fleets of heavily armored carrier ships. Military
intelligence sources tell us that these carrier ships served as
command centers for thousands of unmanned drone fighters, and their
destruction has disabled much of the Invader's attack capabilities
in Asia.