Hard as it may be to believe, that wasn’t our biggest problem at the time. It was part of the problem, yeah, but the real issue was how we could work around it. The big problem was Doc Sorensen. The doc was crazy worried about his family. Turns out he had a wife and a teenage daughter back home. We caught him twice trying to steal a Humvee so he could go get them. Freedom pointed out to the old guy there was no way he’d make it over a thousand miles and back, but the doc didn’t care. He argued they couldn’t order a civilian around and threatened to quit the program.
That was when Smith stepped in. The monkey-boy finally started carrying his own weight. God knows how, but he’d pulled some strings and gotten Sorensen’s family on a plane heading out here. Only problem was we didn’t have an airstrip on the Krypton base. There are seven here at the proving ground, including one nobody’s supposed to know about, and the closest one’s about nineteen miles west and north of us.
Unlike Krypton, it wasn’t fenced off. There were exes all over it. A lot of them were wearing tiger-stripe camo and flight suits. I knew it was on a list of priority areas to reclaim as soon as things stabilized. Thing is, we needed it now.
The captain came up with a plan. A pretty solid one. We were going to co-ordinate landing time with a mobile unit. Unbreakable Twelve under Sergeant Washington was going to drive a Guardian armored vehicle to the airstrip and hit the runway at the same time as the plane. They collect the doc’s wife, daughter, and the pilot as soon as they touch down, then bring them back to Krypton safe and sound.
This was the other problem, because going off-base meant we had to open all three gates. Twice. And we hadn’t opened them since the wall of exes got here.
Most of us were on the gates. My section, Twenty-two, and Thirty-two were inside the first ring of fences. Captain Freedom had issued us all M16s on single-shot. They felt like toys after carrying a Bravo for months. Too light and too small. Their volume didn’t even go to eight, let alone eleven. All we were going to do was walk back and forth, stick our rifles through the fence, and pop exes as they headed for the gates. The catch was we only had two magazines each. The quartermaster was already rationing ammo, just to be safe. So one for the exit, one for the return.
Sections Eleven and Thirty-three had the second ring. When the gates opened they formed a single lane into the base. They were in charge of any exes that slipped in there. Sergeant Monroe, the new platoon sergeant, was with Eleven and itching for a chance to take out some of the dead.
And above us all, in one of the watchtowers, the captain was conducting the orchestra with a Mk 19 grenade launcher. They’d stripped off the vehicle mount and he had three or four cans of ammo with him. He could almost use the damned thing as a pistol. He was going to make a lot of noise away from the base. In theory, the exes would follow.
Colonel Shelly wasn’t too keen on any of this, but he and Smith had a talk and monkey-boy convinced him taking care of Sorensen was in all our best interests. Maybe there was still final testing to be done and if the doc left we were all going to explode or something. Smith talked with the soldiers from Twelve for half an hour, too, impressing the importance of this on them, asking them again and again if they were sure they were up for it, if they knew how to handle different things that might happen. I think in the end they were ready to smack him.
Actually, I know they were ready to smack him. Britney told me so when we met up for a good luck fuck in the armory before she left. Yeah, it’s frowned on, but believe me, once you’ve had superhuman sex or enhanced sex or whatever you want to call it... well, we weren’t going to give it up until they ordered us to. Besides, at the time I was pretty sure First Sergeant Kennedy didn’t know. She was serious about her new rank, and I’m sure she would’ve had us both over the coals. I found out a little later that she did know, and it was an awful way to find out.
Squad Twelve left with no problem. It all went smooth and by the numbers. Captain Freedom dropped a cluster of grenades about a hundred yards from the fence and half the exes wandered off to see what was making all the noise. They were halfway there and he dropped another cluster to keep their attention.
Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. Why didn’t he just use the grenades on the exes. I asked that, too, when we were going over the plan. Kennedy smacked me upside the head and reminded me the dead things were already dead (her exact words). The blast might mangle them, might even destroy one if it got caught just right, but odds are it’d just be wasting grenades. A mashed-up, slashed-up torso will kill a person pretty quick, but all it does is slow down exes.
In five minutes our teams in the outer ring had picked off about two hundred exes that wouldn’t leave the fence. The posts on the gates got pulled and Twelve got escorted out. They had one of the base’s five Guardians and Adams was behind the wheel. He floored it and kicked up a fan of dirt and dust as they shot across the desert. In theory they’d reach the airstrip in about thirty minutes, just as the plane was touching down.