It was raining when I finally found Harper Station.
Given the fact that rainstorms had a fifty-fifty shot of drilling a migraine deep in the dark depths of my skull, I took this as something of a mixed blessing.
It had been nothing but me and the bramble and eighty goddamned pounds of gear for seventy goddamned miles.
Not exactly what I’d call a hike.
I was just starting to think I was lost again, half-prepared to hurl my cracked compass into the nearest pond, when I finally crested one green hill that looked like pretty much any other and suddenly there it was.
What had, up to this point, been nothing for me beyond a scribble on a faded, coffee-stained map, was now in my field of vision. I took a moment to check the immediate area for signs of what we argued over whether or not to call ‘life’ and also get my breath back.
Even with all my training, all the exercise required to stay alive in an apocalyptic hellscape, this had still been a damned long walk.
I was alone, though, and Harper looked desperately inviting.
For a moment I just stared at it. From this far away, it was little more than a dozen buildings, few of them larger than a shack, placed within four fifteen-foot walls. They were good walls. I could tell that even from this distance.
Big and sturdy and gunmetal gray, scratched, scored, and scarred by life this far out in the bramble.
I could just barely make out some shapes moving among the structures. I pulled my scope from its slot and put it to my eye. I studied the people that the vague shapes resolved into. My knowledge of Harper was slim at best. Before booting my ass out here, my former commanding officers had been reluctant to give me much hard data.
Couldn’t blame them. After fifty years of almost total, constant warfare with a dystopic nightmare of a state, paranoia was going to be a way of life for a long, long time to come. The big men with the iron fists and the gasmask armies were dead now, finally, but even five years later, we were still living in the shadow of their industrial conquest.
If I was very lucky, my grandchildren might possibly live to see the Earth of old, back before the haze and the monsters and the weather.
The great battle scars that had ripped the land asunder in some places, salted the earth in the others, and, in the worst of cases, irradiated it all straight to hell.
My rangefinder found one particular face standing atop a second story deck, issuing orders to a few others down on the ground.
Hmm. This was almost certainly Commander Caspian. She looked sure and stern enough in her smart gray outfit, black hair pulled into a simple but neat ponytail. She looked up and I saw that she had one glaringly white eye.
While I was trying to determine what her other eye color was, she suddenly looked dead at me.
For a moment we were locked, staring at each other from across a good half-mile of open space. I wondered what she’d do. She knew I was coming, we’d spoken on the radio on my way here. Only twice though, thanks to interference from the shitty weather.
Suddenly she was moving, ducking back halfway into an open door behind her. She came out with a sniper rifle and had it to her shoulder, scope to her eye, in a blink. I just managed to drop back down before a round came scorching over my head.
Way too close.
Damn, she was a good shot.
Slipping my scope away, I tapped my radio mounted in my eye, two short, fast taps to the temple, and it reached out to the frequency she was supposed to be using.
“This is Sergeant Gideon West to Harper Station, that’s friendly fire,” I said, then sighed as another round shrieked out and buried itself in the other side of the hill I was now laying on. “I say again, Harper Station, friendly fire. Stop shooting, you’re wasting rounds.”
I waited. Silence befell the area. No more shots.
Somewhere, a bird called, long and lonely.
Finally, my radio crackled.
“I need that confirmation code, Sergeant,” came a familiar voice.
I sighed. “Right. Confirmation Code: Delta Nine Delta Four Delta Six.”
“Confirmation Extension ID?” she asked.
“Tango Hotel Six One. Something happen?”
“Nothing more than usual, but you don’t survive to the ripe old age of thirty eight without being paranoid nowadays, Sergeant.”
“...you’re thirty nine.”
“How the fuck do you know that?” she asked, sounding somewhere between amused and annoyed.
“I had a look at your file. The nineteenth was two weeks ago,” I replied.
“...shut up and report to the front gate.”
“Is that my first official order, Commander?”
“Yes, Sergeant Smartass. Double time it. Out.” She cut the link and I chuckled despite myself.
Wiping some rainwater from my face, I got back up and began following a trail that would take me down the hill. The rain was light at least.
As I picked my way down the trail and then across the last portion of the bramble, moving between monolithic redwoods, I questioned myself on the intelligence of screwing with my new commanding officer before actually even getting to meet her in real life.
The rest of me answered the same way I always answered myself nowadays: did it really matter?
Maybe I was looking for trouble.
Maybe I was looking for a bit of pain.
I just grunted and kept on hauling that ruck through the rain. Nothing new there.
Habit made me grasp my rifle hanging from its sling as I approached the door. I double-tapped my radio again, automatically stepping to the side so as not to make a big appealing target when the door in the wall opened.
My old drill master’s voice was still in my head even now, a decade later: No area is friendly until you’ve made damn sure of that yourself.
It had saved my ass more than once.
“Present at the front gate, Commander Caspian.”
“Wait one.”
It was so ironic, I thought, that survival instincts and training still kept you alive, regardless of whether or not you actually wanted to survive.
The door began to slide open, and I saw that familiar one-white-eye face appear slowly. And then the door stopped, and something spat sparks.
Caspian lost her composure slightly and growled. “Sergeant West, one of the first things you can put on your list of things that need fixing,” she grunted, and then delivered a swift, hard kick to the door.
More sparks bled and then it finished its path.
I stepped in through and hit the close button with my elbow, listening more closely now as it closed.
After a moment, I grunted. “You got some servos that need replaced.”
“You have a good ear,” she murmured.
“Hard not to after...everything,” I replied.
“Quite. Come with me.”
Her other eye was blue. She was downright gorgeous up close, and it looked out of place on her in the way it always did when a very traditionally attractive woman ended up in a tough leadership role. Sometimes people just looked like they belonged doing something else.
Some people just looked like tech nerds.
Some people just looked like soldiers.
Some just looked like models, if we had those anymore.
I still didn’t believe the stories, although I’d seen a billboard once that was still surprisingly intact, and there had been a very attractive woman posing in not a whole lot on it so hey, maybe there did exist people for whom their entire career was to look good.
The only reason I looked like I belonged in my given career was because the word ‘combat’ had been placed in front of it. I got a lot of ‘you don’t look like a technician’, with the big scar down the right side of my face and the buzzed hair and the cold gray eyes, but then they went ‘oh, that makes sense’, right after I said ‘combat tech’.
Sometimes I said field tech, depending on the company.
“You have our gear?” Caspian asked as she led me towards a long, low, windowless structure.
“I do,” I replied. “All of it.”
“Thank fucking God,” she muttered. “We need it.” Stepping up to the structure, she pushed open the door. “This is the workstation, it’s where all of our gear and tech is stored, as well as are tools and spare parts and whatever else we can think of. You can stow it here for now.”
“Yep,” I replied, stepping inside.
The place was packed. Tables, desks, and shelves pretty much covered the perimeter of the room, all of them absolutely scattered with bits of metal, tools, nails and screws, bits of technology, circuit boards, and way more other junk, some of it truly esoteric.
I even saw an ancient, dirt-covered doll sitting up on one of the tables, staring one-eyed at the workstation.
The center of the building was also packed with tables and shelves, leaving a narrow path of space between the two areas.
“And that’s your new partner,” Caspian added, pointing to the lone figure standing about halfway down the structure.
I saw a slim blonde in a stained, faded blue jumpsuit with an absolutely massive amount of zippers across it standing in front of the tables. She wore a pair of big pink headphones that sported what for the life of me looked like cat ears.
She was staring at something with a small but powerful flashlight mounted on her headphones, a magnifying glass in hand.
I saw a spot of space where I could stow the gear for now not far from here. I began heading for the spot. My new partner looked busy so I figured I’d just drop it off and keep going with Caspian. She had something she wanted to say and I already knew what it was, but I couldn’t avoid it.
As I set it down, she began turning towards me and suddenly shrieked when she saw me. She leaped back, tripped, and fell on her ass. Her headphones fell off her head and she stared at me with shocked eyes.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” I said mildly. “Sorry.”
She looked past me, no doubt at Caspian, and seemed to relax.
“W-who are, who is this? What’s going on?” she asked.
“This is Sergeant West, Cat. The one you’ve been waiting for so...impatiently,” Caspian replied.
Her expression changed completely as she continued staring at me. She looked at me with something like...hope?
“You’re the combat tech?” she whispered.
I stepped closer to her and offered her a hand. “I am.”
“Oh my God,” she whispered, for a moment just staring at me still.
Tentatively, she reached up and took my hand. I pulled her to her feet. She kept looking at me, and then suddenly hugged me. I stood there for a moment, a few different emotions running feebly through my head, and, more out of habit than anything else, I hugged her back.
“Thank you.”
“Cat, you’re being weird again,” Caspian said.
“It’s fine,” I replied. “Hugs from beautiful women are always appreciated.”
Cat pulled back and looked up at me from where she’d been resting her head against my chest. For a second we just looked at each other, then she opened her mouth to say something, only nothing came out.
All at once, she backed away from me. She tried to speak again, failed to, cleared her throat.
“Uh...sorry. I’m not trying to be-uh, it’s nice to meet you. I’m Cat Hopper. And I’m-um, just, I’m-it’s good to meet you.”
“You too, Cat,” I replied, then shook her hand when she awkwardly offered it again.
“Come on, Sergeant.”
“Thanks again!” Cat called as we headed back outside.
“Yep,” I replied.
“You will have to forgive Cat,” Caspian said as she led me to the largest structure in the base, what I had seen her standing atop earlier. “She is currently our only technician, which means she is a field tech by default. And she is...nervous about leaving these walls.”
“I don’t blame her,” I replied. “I take it that means I will be assuming all field tech duties?”
“Yep,” she said.
“All right.”
She took me into a dingy dining area where a man with gray hair and sad eyes prepared something behind a counter. We locked eyes briefly.
There was grief and guilt in his gaze.
I wonder what he saw in mine.
“This way,” the Commander said.
She led me into a narrow stairwell that was almost hidden from sight, tucked up into the wall on the other side of the hall. It brought us up to a second-story office that looked not all that dissimilar from other CO offices I’d seen.
A big desk and a swivel chair. At least one big window with a view. Bulletproof glass, of course. A shelf covered in random things. Sometimes it was books, sometimes it was old printed out photographs, sometimes framed medals. And a big terminal in one corner.
The desk, near the center of the room, was more for the human side of the job.
“Sit,” she said as she walked around the desk.
I considered telling her I preferred to stand, but then I sat.
The more time I spent around Caspian, the more it felt like I knew her already. I was sure I didn’t literally know her, (she had a distinct voice with a slight twisted lilt of an accent that I’d be able to pick out in a heartbeat if I’d heard it before), but I knew her type.
She an air of calm, almost friendly authority. She was welcoming, but I knew there lay a cold, hard steel somewhere in her soul that she was not just willing to pull out and use if she had to, but very able.
Looking into this woman’s mismatched eyes, I knew she had sent men to their deaths.
Hundreds of them, maybe.
And not because she didn’t care, but because it was either lose a hundred men here and now, or lose a thousand people at some settlement somewhere.
So I took that seat. I’d been in those shoes before and just from her demeanor already, I could tell she was a tougher nut to crack than I was, and I respected that.
Tough was easy.
But tough, competent, and still human?
That was a saint.
“Let me be the first to officially welcome you to Harper Station. You’ll get the full tour after you and I have had a few words. First order of business, though: did you encounter anything of note out there, Sergeant?”
“Yes,” I replied. “I ran into a Phantom about five miles back. Killed it. I also saw an old refinery maybe six miles northeast of here and marked it on my map, since I didn’t see it marked on the old chart. Though it hadn’t been updated in a while.”
“We haven’t heard of a refinery so far. Good eye. About the Phantom...you were coming from the southeast, correct?”
“Correct.”
“Hmm. That’s the third Phantom we’ve seen in that directly...something to consider,” she muttered as she scribbled something down on her desk. She tossed aside the pen after a moment and looked at me with stern eyes. “Nothing else?”
“Nothing else, Commander.”
“Fine. Let’s talk.”
For a moment, Caspian just stared at me, her hands clasped together in front of her on the desk. She was frowning, just a little. Unhappy, but thoughtful, and even compassionate.
I thought of telling her I already knew what she wanted to talk about, and what she was going to say, but didn’t.
Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I didn’t know what she was going to say.
I felt wrong more lately.
“Your previous CO told me about the...conditions under which you were transferring. To be completely honest with you, Gideon, I didn’t think we’d ever see you. Seventy miles through the bush, alone, delivering some cargo...it seemed like a suicide attempt.”
“It might have been,” I admitted.
“You don’t know?”
“I don’t know.”
“...I understand. But you did make it, and you are here, Gideon, and…” She hesitated, then she sighed heavily and looked out the door that led onto her deck.
Out at her outpost. Her base.
Her home.
Without looking at me, she said, “We don’t have many people here, and everyone here isn’t very stable. We all want to stay alive, much as a struggle as it might be, and lead for a last meal looking appetizing is just as much a threat as a Phantom sneaking up on you.”
Here, she looked back at me, right into my eyes.
“I won’t have you threatening us or what we have here, Gideon. Gloom is infectious, and we’ve all already got some. One look at you tells me you’re the type to keep your mouth shut through it all, no matter how bad it gets. And believe me, I know the appeal. It’s seductive in its stoicism. But we are not stoic, even now, even after everything that’s happened. Tragedy is in our blood. All of us. We’re here to help each other. If you’re having problems, talk to someone.”
She looked at me dead in the eyes for another long moment. I let the silence play out, mostly because I wasn’t sure what to say.
“Understood,” I replied finally.
She let out a tiny sigh, clearly convinced she hadn’t gotten through to me. Abruptly, she stood up and then came around the desk again. “Come along, let’s get to that tour.”
