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  1. #1

    Lobo Malo - Chapter 1 - Nags Head

    Nags Head, North Carolina
    1923 EST


    "Come on, you little bastard, boot up," growled Paxton Gregory as he stared at the small LCD screen. He'd been working all day on the microwave repeater tower, patching power leads, recalibrating servo motors for the tower's solar power collectors, and practically reinstalling the control software from scratch. It might not be in the same league as making a strike on some malcontent's outpost, but keeping the repeater up was absolutely vital for Division operations throughout the Carolinas and Virginia. "They also serve who stand and keep the computers running," his instructor at the Ranch had once told him.

    Lines of boot sequence instructions began to scroll up the screen and the long expected beep indicating a successful startup briefly filled the small communications shed. Gregory smiled as he closed up the console. Another job completed. With the repeater back up, the brief loss of coverage in the region had been restored. Now, he could relax, maybe sit down and enjoy the local community for a little bit. It wasn't like he would be leaving Nags Head right that instant. The world just didn't work like that anymore. The locals would put him up for the night and he'd be back on his way to Durham in the morning. Till then, he could enjoy the idyllic barrier islands of North Carolina.

    The sound of an air raid siren shattered his train of thought. "What the hell?" Gregory shouldered his backpack, checked his sidearm, then slung his rifle across his chest before leaving the comm shack. As warning systems went, using an air raid siren wasn't necessarily the worst idea he'd seen. It beat the hell out of tin cans on a string, which was what a lot of communities could cobble together these days. As he shut the door behind him, the settlement's "local" Division agent Letitia Sutter came over the comms.

    "Gregory, are you done with the repeater?" she said with barely controlled urgency.

    "Just got it fired up. What's going on?"

    "Some of the natives are restless. Looks like a group of MacCrae's thugs coming down from Kitty Hawk. We could use an extra hand."

    "I'll help as best I can, but I'm not Tactical," Gregory warned even as he checked the chamber on his rifle.

    "Long as you can avoid hitting me or De La Cruz, you'll be fine. Get up by the main gate."

    "Copy that. On my way." It was strange for him, even now, to find himself this close to a combat situation. Six months plus after Black Friday, and the attending collapse of civilization, Gregory could only think of a couple instances where he'd had to use his sidearm, much less the rifle he'd been issued in Savannah. Sure, he regularly cleaned and serviced the weapons he'd been issued. He put in the required number of hours at the range every week, maybe a little more than was required some weeks. But he was supposed to be in the Analytics branch. He examined data, considered raw intelligence, and fixed computers. He'd never been in the military, certainly not the police or any espionage organization. A more unlikely Division agent could hardly be found.

    "They also serve who stand and keep the computers running," Gregory muttered to himself as he came into the courtyard behind the main gate. Or what was left of the main gate. Rifle rounds whipped past him as Gregory slid down roughly behind cover. He looked over at De La Cruz. "What do they want?" he yelled over the gunfire.

    "Same as always. Free food and nobody to give them any trouble." De La Cruz raised his rifle over the top of a pile of bricks, letting off a short burst. "Looks like all of us are going to be disappointed."

    Gregory nodded, took a deep cleansing breath, then popped up, scanning the area as he put the P416 to his shoulder. Two raiders were well inside the perimeter, firing wildly, shrieking incoherently. Holding his breath momentarily, Gregory stroked the trigger, sending five rounds downrange. One raider dropped in small puffs of red mist while his companion stopped and stared slackjawed at the corpse. Another burst ended the second raider's wonder.

    "We gotta push'em back. Cover me!" De La Cruz left his cover and headed over towards a broken down pickup. Without thinking, Gregory also moved forward, breathing and scanning, his fingertip gently pulling the trigger back for a moment at a time as raiders became targets. Four more went down before he heard De La Cruz's cry of anguish.

    "Javier's down, Gregory!" cried Sutter. "Go pull him back by the garage! I'll cover you!"

    Gregory bolted for the pickup, a stray round whacking his backpack frame at the last second to send him tumbling behind cover. He scooted over to the downed agent, seeing the blood splashed on the ground and soaking into the man's clothing. "How bad is it?" asked Gregory, looking at the spreading stain on De La Cruz's right shoulder.

    "Hurts like hell, but don't think it hit my lung," De La Cruz hissed. "Small favors."

    "Yeah. But you probably won't be pitching for the Cubs until they make the playoffs."

    "Plenty of time, then," the agent half-laughed, his grin marred by tightly clenched teeth.

    "All right, Javier, apologies in advance, but this is gonna suck." Gregory put De La Cruz into a fireman's carry, still crouched down behind the pickup. Taking a deep breath, he bellowed, "Sutter, go!"

    Sutter ripped a long burst off over the heads of MacCrae's raiders, giving Gregory the instant he needed to pop up and start jogging over towards the garage. Whenever she saw movement, she sent a few rounds in that direction to keep heads firmly down, even as she started making her own way to the garage. Once Gregory was inside, and carefully setting down De La Cruz for the medic to look at, he took up a position and resumed firing.

    * * *

    Twenty minutes later, the shooting was over. The raiders had been wiped out to a man, a point which Gregory found more than a little disturbing. When he asked Sutter about it, she shook her head.

    "They've been getting more aggressive the last couple months. I'd pray for a hurricane to come and wipe them out, but it'd probably get us in the bargain."

    "But wouldn't it be smarter to fall back, try again later?"

    "It would. Unfortunately, Vince MacCrae is not what you'd call a strategist. He was a local goon in Kitty Hawk, managed to institute a reign of terror there over the winter, and naturally burned through all the food in town. His leadership philosophy is 'with your shield or on it,' but he'd never risk his neck the way Leonidas did." Sutter looked over the courtyard as settlement residents scavenged usable ruck from the bodies. "Time's really on our side, I'd say. But I expect MacCrae is going to keep throwing his people away until he's all that's left. And God damn him for that. It's a waste of otherwise useful human beings," she said with a note of bitterness in her voice. "Believe me, today is one of those days I want to send somebody with a good deer rifle over to Kitty Hawk and take care of the problem. But there's no guarantee somebody worse wouldn't turn up."

    "Even now, the devil you know is still the safe bet. Is Javier going to be OK?"

    "Probably so. But his arm's going to be out of commission for weeks and that's not good for us here. I expect he'll keep busy, but if I finally feel like the deer rifle option is viable, he'd be the guy I'd send. Which, of course, I won't be able to for the foreseeable future."

    Gregory nodded, then looked around as he heard the air raid siren again. Sutter scowled as she turned towards the siren. "Now what?" She tapped her SHD watch. "What's everybody seeing?"

    "Ship sighting, ma'am! Something coming in from the west!" came the report.

    "What kind of ship?"

    "Never seen anything like it."

    Sutter looked over at Gregory and received an answering nod. The two Division agents went over to the seawall and crouched down, trying to find the ship in the fading light. Setting an auto-turret on top of a stack of lobster pots, Sutter looked out, a rapidly approaching squall line obscuring her vision. "Can somebody give me a bearing?" she growled over the comms.

    "Bearing 267 degrees. About two miles out."

    Bringing her rifle scope up to her eyes, Sutter aimed towards the bearing provided. A break in the squall line revealed the inbound ship. "It's a hovercraft," Sutter murmured in stunned surprise. "Thing's the size of a missile cruiser." Suddenly, the auto-turret collapsed, its small servos whining faintly as it powered down unexpectedly. Gregory checked his watch, a baffled expression rising as he saw it power down as well. As Sutter continued to watch the approaching vessel, flashes rippled near the bow, followed moments later by half-muffled whumpf reports. "Incoming!" Sutter screamed into the comm. "Everybody get down!"

    Mortar rounds whistled through the air and came down just beyond the front gates of the settlement, cratering the ground and killing civilians caught out in the open. Gregory looked back over his shoulder, seeing the devastation, his mind seizing up for the moment. "What the hell was that?!"

    "Mortars, probably 120s. We've got about a minute before they confirm the range and adjust fire. You gotta get out of here."

    "And go where?" Gregory demanded.

    A chime rang out from their watches as they came back on, a set of coordinates appearing on the face. Sutter looked at the watch. "That's D.C.," she said. "I don't know what happened to our gear, but whatever it was, the problem's localized in D.C. Looks like you're elected to go fix it. You're Analytics, after all," she said with a grim smile.

    "That's more than two hundred miles from here."

    "With all the twists and turns you'll be taking, probably closer to three hundred. But you're the one best qualified to try and fix the problem, and you're the closest asset. Which means you have to go and do your job."

    "What about you and Javier?" asked Gregory, knowing what the answer would be.

    "We're elected to play rear guard. We'll buy what time we can, but you gotta go now. Take State Route 168 to Norfolk, then I-64 to Richmond, and I-95 to D.C. Since we just whupped up on MacCrae's boys, you should be able to go north through Kitty Hawk unnoticed. There's a cache of high density rations and some ammo at a Piggly Wiggly just south of Kill Devil Hills. No gear, I'm afraid, but it should keep you fed. Now haul ***, agent."

    "Yes, ma'am." Gregory squeezed Sutter's shoulder. "Give'em hell."

    "All nine circles of it." Sutter returned to her vigil, waiting for the hovercraft to come closer. She knew she wouldn't be able to damage it, but she might just get lucky.

    Gregory began to run north.

    Washington D.C.
    1945 EST


    In her mind's eye, bullets smashed into the marble facade, sending chips flying over Alani Kelso's head. She'd gotten word "Saint" would be making his way along H Street, heading back to the Grand Washington Hotel after meeting with a Hyena chieftain north of the National Bond Bank. Kelso wanted nothing more than to shoot every last Hyena in D.C. and bury them in an unmarked mass grave somewhere, but Saint held a pre-eminent spot on her "better off dead" list. She wanted him dead first, just to get the ball rolling. The path to success was built upon small goals. And waxing him was such a small goal in the grand scheme of things. So she was visualizing the coming battle, attempting to anticipate her enemy's movements and probable reactions in order to turn them against him.

    Kelso and two other Division agents had set up near the intersection of H Street and New York Avenue. Espinoza wouldn't have been her first choice for a surgical strike like this, but the last six months had winnowed the ranks of Division agents in the Capitol. It was hard not to think "ten little agents, nine little agents," and so on down the list. Kelso really hoped she wasn't the last one in D.C. six months down the road. That would just be the final proof God had a cruel sense of humor.

    She checked her rifle once more, then settled herself behind a pair of Jersey barriers and waited. It was moments like this where she wondered how it had all fallen apart. In a halfway decently run world, Green Poison would have stayed nicely isolated to the island of Manhattan. It would be painful to lose ten million odd American citizens, and the hit to the nation's financial services and cultural attractions would be worse, but in the long run, it would be endurable. Not pleasant but survivable. In the world she inhabited, Amherst's lethal genie hadn't just gotten free of the bottle, it went on a worldwide tour. Current estimates for the world's population now sat well under one billion. In some places, the disease had barely registered. In others, like Beijing and New Delhi, it was a miracle any humans had survived. Not for the first time, Kelso cursed Gordon Amherst to a million horrible punishments in whatever hell he'd fallen into.

    "Eyes up, Kelso," murmured Espinoza in her earbud. "Target inbound."

    "Launch the bird. Get ready to keep his boys pinned down." Kelso looked down through the scope, seeing Saint strolling down the street. Range was five hundred meters. She was a good shot, but not that good. No, she wanted him inside of a hundred meters. Far enough he wouldn't be able to close too quickly, close enough she wouldn't have to try and dope out the wind or bullet drop.

    "Kelso, I got a problem here."

    "I told you to hit the head before we left," Kelso admonished gently.

    "It's not that. My bird's not working."

    "Can you diagnose the malfunction?" Saint was now four hundred meters out.

    "No joy. And it's not just the bird. My watch is dead."

    Kelso jerked her head up slightly. She looked down at her own watch, seeing that it too had died. "Abort mission. Fall back to the Theater. We need to get in touch with Manny and ask him what the hell he did to our gear."

    "Ortega couldn't do anything like this, even by accident," Espinoza protested. "This is way more serious."

    "Fall back to the Theater,"repeated Kelso. "Just stay still until they pass by, then stay low when you move behind them." She put her eye back to the scope for just a moment, looking at Saint, seeing the range at two hundred meters and falling. Something had just screwed her plan into oblivion. And when she found out who was responsible, she was going to collect some scalps for it. "I'll deal with you later," she swore silently to herself before putting away the rifle and willing herself to stay stock still as the Hyenas walked within twenty meters of her position.

    * * *

    "Explain, Ortega," Kelso growled, leaning on her knuckles across the map table from Manny Ortega. "Feel free to use multisyllabic words if it helps."

    "I'd love to, Kelso, but I've got no idea how what happened happened. All I know is one minute, everything is working the same way it's been working for the last six months and change. The next, every piece of SHD tech is either dead or thrown back to local resources, which is to say its own processor and memory. If you think you're steamed, you should have heard the ham radio conversation I had an hour before you got here. Some Division commander up in New York City sounds like she wants to chew girders and spit nails out. Polite as you please, nice and even tone, and scared the snot out of me. I've got no answers for you yet."

    Kelso's eyes narrowed. "You have to know something."

    "I'm a freaking signals guy! The closest I ever came to touching your stuff is tying JTF comms in with yours, and that was right after Black Friday. And in case you haven't noticed," Ortega said with a sweep of his hand, "I'm a little busy trying to keep possibly the last symbolic structure in this city from being turned into a crack house, a traitor's barracks, or a disease incubation center!" He ran a hand through his hair, then shook his head. "Alani, hand to God, I don't know how this happened. All I know is that for the last hour or so, you and every Division agent in this city have been broadcasting in the clear. No scramble, no encrypt." Ortega watched the blood drain out of Kelso's face as she realized what he was saying. With the right equipment, anybody could localize them, eavesdrop on their conversations, and track them no matter where they went. "If I had to guess, the same condition exists for Division agents elsewhere in the country. Beyond that, I don't know how this affects you. I've only been read in on the fact you exist. The technical details of your infrastructure is still classified and above my pay grade."

    "Hell, Manny, everything you've done since Christmas is above your pay grade," said Kelso softly, a contrite look on her face. "And under the extremely exigent circumstances, I suppose I can give you a high level overview of SHD tech and how it works. Keep in mind, I'm Tactical, so I'm more versed in how to use it in the field, not how it works in the rear.

    "Basically, every Division agent has a mobile processing node that they carry with them at all times. Those mobile nodes form the basis for an Intranet-of-Things, sending data streams to a supercomputer central processing node through dedicated microwave communications repeater stations. We effectively have our own cellular communications and data network. With ISAC running on the central node, we can analyze relevant historical images and video within their real space locations, identify and geolocate friends or hostiles to within a tenth of a millimeter, refine and update targeting solutions for our offensive remote systems in real time, and generally stack the deck cold in our favor. Multiple Division agents can instantly form a mesh network with each other's gear to help further improve processing capacity without having to enter a single command or push a single button.

    "However, ISAC really does a lot of the heavy lifting, computing-wise. In theory, if the central node goes down, backup nodes activate to pick up the slack. But it seems either the theory isn't sound or whatever hit the central node also shanked the backup nodes. All of the backup nodes. The central node isn't supposed to be a single failure point for the entire network."

    "And yet..."

    "Yeah." Kelso closed her eyes. "Honestly, Manny, I'm the wrong sort of agent to fix this. I need somebody from our Analytics branch, and they need to be an IT god to help sort this mess out."

    "What happens if you or they can't get it sorted out?" asked Ortega quietly.

    "Then the bad guys get their chance to stack the deck. And there's a lot more of them than there is of me and mine."
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  2. #2
    Good adaptation of the game story! Nice work!
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  3. #3
    I do try.
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