Myke Cole - Shadow Ops - Control Point

— Avery Whiting

Modern Arcana: Theory and Practice

The screams kept him awake all night — high and shrill, almost childlike. He knew they were Chatto’s.

Britton, who now had no trouble sleeping through the Goblin’s magical attacks or the screaming return fire of the automatic defenses, was haunted by the tortured cries of this one man. He rolled back and forth in his hooch, pulling his pillow over his head. They hadn’t bothered to take Chatto far; they’d gone to work on him immediately. Britton’s schoolhouse by the P pods had temporarily become their base of operations.

This is the man responsible for the murders you saw in those videos, Britton reminded himself. This is the man who would have gladly seen Downer raped.

But the screams carried to him, and he realized that he didn’t care. We’re supposed to be the good guys. That’s what gives us the right to judge Selfers. Because our way is better.

The thought propelled him to his feet and sent him racing out of the hooch, pushing in the direction of trailer B-6. Idiot! What do you hope to accomplish? he asked himself.

But his feet wouldn’t stop moving until the screaming became a gurgling sigh, followed by silence. He stopped, only a few hundred feet from the trailer, able to see the external sodium light glinting in the dark, beset by clouds of insects, drawn by its false-moon promise.

The light cast a sick, yellow sheen on the trailer door as it slid open, and two soldiers emerged, silhouetted against the blackness, dragging something lumpen and wet into the light.

A man followed them out, wiping his hands on his trousers, breathing heavily. He moved toward Britton, lighting a cigarette as he came. The man almost collided with him in the darkness, then fell back a step in surprise. The light from the cigarette showed the pale, doughy cheeks and blue hospital scrubs of Captain Hayes. The Physiomancer was covered in gore. His scrubs were so plastered with blood that they looked metallic under the moonlight. He gave Britton an exhausted smile.

“You should get to bed,” Hayes said. “You’re going to be a busy boy tomorrow.” He pushed past Britton and made his way out of P block.

Britton knew he should say something, impede Hayes’s progress, do anything other than stand there dumbly, staring at B-6’s now-closed door. But he couldn’t move, couldn’t speak. He felt drained of all energy. I did this. As surely as I saved the lives of those marines, I cost that man his. People die in war. Criminals pay for their crimes, sometimes with their lives. So why does this feel so wrong? He didn’t know what Hayes had done to Chatto behind that trailer door, but he could imagine.

I can’t do this anymore. I can’t work with or for these people. No matter what Therese or the rest of Shadow Coven are doing, I have to go. I have to find a way out of here.

Britton didn’t sleep another wink that night. His mind raced with escape plans. He couldn’t go to Scylla, and Therese wasn’t ready to help him yet. Where would he run to? After what he had seen at Mescalero, the Selfers trying to rape Downer, could he ever take refuge there? He lay awake, brainstorming, and was dizzy from fatigue when Fitzy finally came for him, near sunset on the following day.

“Got some more work for you,” the chief warrant officer said. “Follow me.”

They mounted one of the ever-present electric golf carts and buzzed back into the training area, following signs for the Terramantic Engineering Range. The cart bumped to a stop just as the sun was dipping below the horizon, washing all in shades of simmering orange. A broad field was stripped bare of plant growth, the dry ground randomly soaring upward into earthen bridges and ramparts. A giant length of wall ran ten feet, trailing off into mud. A tank stood on it, empty and silent, treads peeking over the edge.

Fitzy got out of the cart and beckoned to Britton, making his way toward a long wall of raised earth.

“I was hoping for more time, but the old man says we’ve gotta be ready to jump as early as tomorrow.” He paused at the wall’s edge. A white sign admonishing all that only authorized personnel were permitted behind it had been driven into the ground. “Now, I know we normally use videos to give you a read on an area you’re gating into, but this is an important run, and the brass wanted to be absolutely sure. So, this time we’re giving you a simulated environment. You’ll be gating in at sunset, so we need you to get it read now.”

The other side of the wall was a hastily constructed mock-up of a hotel entrance. Groups of contractors were still assembling a sweeping arc of broken pavement covered with sand and scrub cacti. The white paint on the broad awning was badly chipped and pocked with bullet holes. The sliding glass doors were covered with metal strips. A circular driveway, broad enough to host a fleet of vehicles, sported barricades of tires topped with barbed wire. Toppled statues, their arms adorned with bronze feathers, lay heaped beside the doorway. Wooden masks obscured their faces.

The SOC had gone so far as to pipe in smells. Britton noted the brimstone stink of diesel generators, burned rubber, and spent cordite.

“This is where the council is hiding out?” Britton asked. “Or does this have something to do with how the Apache are getting their Mountain Gods over to the Home Plane? Maybe this is how they talk to the Goblin tribes?”

“It’s not your job to worry about what it is or isn’t, Keystone. It’s your job to familiarize yourself with this set and gate your Coven to the infil point on command. You’re lucky; we were going to use this to run exercises, but it turns out Chatto confirmed our suspicions, and we’re going before his reporting gets stale. You have to admit, a physical mock-up beats the hell out of a video.”

Britton faced Fitzy. The chief warrant officer looked small, his bald forehead sheened with sweat.

“These aren’t Goblins, sir. These are Americans.”

“You’re goddamned right they’re not Goblins,” Fitzy seethed. “You’d better keep that thought foremost in your mind when we run this op, son. Grabbing Chatto is going to seem like a picnic compared to what we’re going to face when we walk into the viper’s very nest.”

“Americans, sir,” Britton repeated.

“Selfers,” Fitzy snapped back, “and therefore dead. Did you forget ol’ tons o’ fun you tackled down in those sewers? Did you miss the point of those videos we showed you? You were not pardoned to pontificate. You were given a second chance to follow orders and do your damned job. Is that perfectly clear?”

A tool. A weapon. Not a person. Remember that.

Britton stared at him for a moment before turning back to the staged scenery before him.

After a moment, Fitzy shifted uncomfortably behind him. “Got it?”

Britton nodded.

“Are you sure? You’ve got it fixed?”

Britton turned to face him again. He gestured to his eyes, letting the malevolence show. “Solid, sir. I’m good to go.”

Britton brooded over his drink in the OC that night, the tension around him palpable. His mind wrestled with escape plans, all of them ending with his heart exploding. The rest of the Coven felt it. Truelove sat nervously beside him. He tried starting a conversation twice, both times with nervous platitudes, before Richards drew him off.

All the training. All the excitement. All the pleasure that had grown from mastering his magic. For what? Killing his own people? The darkness congealed in his mind. He’d half a mind to confront Fitzy, Suppression or no, and give him the drubbing he deserved. He’d die, to be sure, but it seemed that he’d have to choose between that and being a murderer anyway. Maybe death was more honorable.