Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty

Friday, April 13th, 0012 NE

2345 hours

Norilsk, Russia




BEEP. BEEP. BEEP. Beep.

Flickers of memories flitted past her. Memories that until then, when consciousness began to emerge from the fog in her mind, she’d scarcely allowed herself to have. Swirling water in an old swimming pool. A single cloud drifting across an otherwise clear sky. A ray of sunlight through the trees. Good memories. Good moments, captured in the tiny spaces she’d forgotten were ever even there. Memories of life before everything had gone dark.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

It was not so much an ejection of those memories that came so much as it was a transition. The swirling water became hands being washed furiously in a sink. The cloud became someone passing beside her—the ray of sunlight, the florescent beam that ensued. But the most jarring sensation was the noise. There was no way to ease into the noise. Rushing people, fervently spoken Russian, the beeps and whirs of various machines. One even beeped close to her. Turning her head slowly to the side, Esther fought to find focus.

A soldier. He was hooked up to a monitor. A doctor and a nurse were above him—they were inspecting something. It was his machine that was beeping. But she didn’t know who he was.

Where am I?

Lifting her head, Esther looked at her own body. Fluids were being pumped into her through an IV. She couldn’t feel anything.

Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat! A sound of weapons fire—but only in her mind. Then, the pop of a flashbang. The blaring of a klaxon, a woman’s voice. There is a Level-5 hazardous situation. Please proceed to the nearest muster point.

It was then that it returned to her. She knew where she was. She knew what room she was in. This was the medical bay at Northern Forge. But something was wrong. Some of the machines were damaged, shoved off in a corner. A generator was hooked up to others. As her dark eyes squinted, she swore she could make out bullet holes in the walls. This was not the medical bay as she knew it. Something had happened.

She needed to get up. She needed to get out of there. She needed to find her friends. Upon placing her hands down at her sides, Esther strained to push herself up. Another hand stopped her.

“Do not get up,” said a man’s voice in broken English. “I will get someone.”

Her first inclination was to protest. “I—”

“Do not get up! Please.”

She couldn’t if she tried—for the moment she strained with any ounce of strength, an agonizing pain erupted in her core. She leaned her head back and groaned. Esther didn’t see the man leave, whoever he was—but she saw the person who took his place. Her parched lips parted when Dostoevsky came into view. “Yuri…”

Placing his hand atop her leg, he said, “You are very badly hurt. You were shot in the hip. I—” His words broke off momentarily as he was jostled by a passerby, of which there were many in the packed room. “You are lucky to be alive.”

She remembered. The medical center. The battle. And…and Becan. She had saved Becan. Her goal—her mission. It was accomplished. The twisting torment of her injury washed over her like a wave; her face contorted to reflect it. But through the grimace, she spoke. “Is he okay?”

Brow furrowing, Dostoevsky opened his mouth to reply. No words came. At long last, he angled his head. “Is who okay?”

“Who do you think?” Another wave of pain—another struggle to stop herself from writhing. Tears of physical hurt welled in her eyes, despite her best efforts to stave them. “Becan,” she finally said. “Did he make it back? Is he okay?”

Dostoevsky broke eye contact briefly to look across the room, as if searching for someone. But there was something in his eyes that didn’t belong. A lost expression that shouldn’t have been there. When his gaze returned to her, the tone of his voice echoed it. “Esther…”

That pain. That anguish. How it now grew in strength. A new focus appeared in her eyes, and she glared at him. “What?”

He looked uncertain. He placed the slightest bit of pressure on her leg, where his hand still rested. She recognized it as an effort to divert her attention, even if absently. “Listen,” he said, “you need to rest right now.”

“What is it? What’s wrong?” The breaths within her. They became vehement. “Yuri, what are you not—”

“You really need to rest. You are hurt very badly.”

“What are you not telling me? Where is Becan McCrae?” Her heaving breaths grew. “Tell me you got him, Yuri. I swear to God in heaven, if you tell me you didn’t get him—”

“Esther, there was no one to get.”

His words struck her like a hammer. They hit with enough force to make her wound numb. “What do you mean?” The words came out quietly—then they seethed. “What in the bloody hell do you mean?”

“I do not know what to tell you—how else to say it.”

“He was right sodding there!” Her hand pointed off to the side, as if she was still there in EDEN Command’s medical center. “I told you to get him! I bloody pointed him out!”

“There was a man on a bed, yes—we got him. But he was just some worker. Becan was not there. He couldn’t have been.”

This wasn’t real. Lightheadedness overtook her. She gaped at him.

Eyes parted in confusion and sadness, Dostoevsky leaned closer and softly spoke. “Becan died three days after arriving at EDEN Command.”

“No…” It was barely a word. It was barely even a whisper. With the air sucked out of her lungs, Esther shook her head a single time. “No…”

“One of my team grabbed a stack of patient records on the way out. Becan’s record was in it. Esther, I am sorry, but Becan is dead. He’s been dead for almost two weeks.”

“I saw him.” Her words trembled. “I saw him.”

“Esther…”

“He saved me. He told me to comm you.”

“He did not.”

Her body lurched upward, all awareness of physical pain gone. “He was there!” Several people nearby flinched and looked at her. “He talked to me!”

Gaze shooting across the room, Dostoevsky shouted to someone in Russian. Within seconds, a doctor was rushing to the table. Esther didn’t care. Becan was somewhere in that medical bay. He’d been rescued. She’d rescued him. Whipping her head back and forth as she strained to sit up, she called out his name with frantic eyes. A nurse placed her hands on her shoulders in an effort to push her back down. Esther shoved her away, instead. The next thing she realized, she was being grabbed from all directions. She shouted nonetheless.

“Becan!”

She’d seen him. On the verge of death, she’d spoken with him. He said he’d be with her.

“Becan, I’m here! I’m right here!”

In the midst of the struggling and screaming, Esther never even felt the sedative enter her body. She never felt its effects kick in. Halfway between screaming Becan’s name and getting up to find him, she simply laid back down and went to sleep.

As doctors rushed about Esther’s bedside, Dostoevsky stepped backwards. Though he still bumped into people as he did, neither they nor he paid each other mind. The fulcrum commander’s eyes were solely on his sleeping comrade. At least, until there were too many people rushing back and forth between them for him to see her. Only then did he turn to walk away.


“What in the hell do you mean, she’s dead?” From a room just outside of the medical bay—one of the many transformed into emergency hospital rooms—the voice of Logan Marshall rose.

“I mean just what I said,” answered Bedrich, who was standing before him in the doorway. “She died in EDEN Command.”

Stitched up on a cot, the Australian’s battered condition had kept him from roaming about the base since he’d been taken in for treatment—until now. Shoving up from his cot, he leapt to his feet without so much as a grimace. “That’s not right—that can’t be right!”

“She is dead, Marshall.”

“You’re wrong.”

“She is dead!” Bedrich shouted. “Do you think I would be mistaken about the woman that saved our lives? I saw her.”

Slowly, Logan’s face began to pale.

Bedrich continued. “I asked someone what happened, and what they told me was this, that she died saving the lives of Scott Remington and the pilot girl, Tiffany. That she went after them alone—and she got them out. Now you tell me, who does that sound like to you? Do you think I am mistaken, now?”

For several seconds, Logan stared at the man across from him—until at long last, he could stand still no more. Limping forward with urgency, he pushed past Bedrich and out into the hall. Out to see for himself.

And he did.


All across Northern Forge, word of the fallen was circulating. Word of Antipov’s demise at the hands of Saretok. Word of the keeper’s death, whose body was found sprawled out and alone in a hallway near general storage. Word of two more defeated Vectors, one of whom—Marty Breaux—had been found alive, having crawled with multiple stab wounds to an abandoned E-35, which he used to take down several Nightmen before he was captured. Saretok instructed his medics to take him to Novosibirsk. Word of comrades and brethren who’d taken up arms only to die in the fight. It was an aftermath almost worse than that of Novosibirsk, if only because those who’d made it to Northern Forge were survivors already. It seemed a cruel fate, to escape certain death at The Machine only to be tracked down and massacred at the secret place that was supposed to keep them safe. The place that was supposed to be unknown.

But it was not the only unknown to fall that day. As word of the assault on EDEN Command spread across the globe, word of a new alliance proceeded it. A merger between a nation and the Nightmen who lived in it. Of newly discovered mutual interests.

It was with those same interests in mind that General Madeline Becker—the most unexpected variable to emerge from the tangled web the Nightmen had weaved—took to the podium in front of a televised, global audience. In no uncertain terms, she laid out her justification for Sydney’s presumed treachery. The recorded voice of Benjamin Archer was there to support it. Within hours of landing at Cairo, military police took Archer and the rest of the escapees from EDEN’s High Command in for questioning.

Yet it could not justify what had occurred. It could not, in the eyes of the world, justify terrorism. And so, as the hours and then the days passed, the fissure between those who were with EDEN and those who were not grew. Between those who believed that the recorded words claimed to be Archer’s were in fact his and those who insisted—as Archer himself claimed from his holding cell—that it was a deep fake. Between those who felt the need for a global military protector and those who believed that each nation should be the master of its own destiny—even against hostile invaders from other worlds. Between those who believed that the ends could justify means and those for whom the means meant everything.

But that was the state of the world. It spoke nothing to the state of those who’d partaken in the events that led up to it all. Nothing to the state of the young woman, Lisa Tiffin, who suddenly found herself the last standing member of EDEN’s most elite unit, Vector Squad. Nothing to the states of those judges who knew nothing of conspiracy. Nothing to the states of the NSU’s President Belikov, or General Becker, or the newest unknown terror to enter the scene, Thoor Saretok. Nothing to the state of the Outlaw Fourteenth.

But if it did speak to those things, it might speak of the love between a young Valley Girl pilot and her best friend, and to the embrace that ensued when they saw each other again for the first time—before the pilot departed to tell the Nightmen all she’d been told by her captors. It might speak of the shattering of a scout’s heart upon realizing that the friend she’d rescued was nothing more than an apparition—be it real or in her own psyche. It might speak of the horror of a former mercenary watching the final moments of his lover’s life through her visor camera and realizing that the eyes of the man who’d killed her looked just like his own.

Or of a gritty combat technician with a damaged throat who was sitting in a room with his dog when the woman he loved, now freed from EDEN custody in the city of Novosibirsk, walked through his door at Northern Forge. No hard luck demeanor could stop his eyes from overflowing when he took Tanneken Brunner into his arms. Her eyes overflowed, too.

Or of a man who felt too old to be there hearing the voice of his wife and two sons over a secured phone line. Hearing her say that she didn’t care about anything in the past. That she would cross hell and high water to find him. And that she was sorry. He was sorry, too.

Or of a soldier—a survivor—from Falcon Platoon carving a friend’s final three words into the bulkhead of the Pariah. Swearing to himself that he would never let another commanding officer fall on his watch. That he would rise up and be the leader she believed he could be.

Or of a sinner turned saint—a man who personified redemption—realizing that the time had come again for him to take up the reins of leadership. Realizing that until the Fourteenth’s true leader had recovered, the fate of the unit would be on his shoulders. Praying that he was up to the task. Being reassured by the one woman who understood him that he was.

Or of a young man. A teenager. A brother.

At almost no point did Mark Remington leave his big brother’s side in the medical bay. He only did so to eat and occasionally sleep, as ordered to by a certain pixie-haired nurse—one who’d herself just suffered a great loss, though one would have never known it. Only upon her insistence did Mark dare to leave the room, lest he not be there when Scott opened his eyes. And in that time spent in the medical bay, he learned—not by textbook and training regimen, but by doing. By tending the wounds of those who rotated in and out of treatment. By watching how those more experienced than him operated—both figuratively and literally. By getting his hands dirty. Because he needed to. Because he wanted to.

Many passed through the doors to the medical bay in those days. Most came to get treatment. But some came simply to visit. Scott and Esther, the latter of which was also permanently assigned to the main medical bay pending recovery, received visits from their comrades regularly—even from Ju`bajai, who visited Esther with surprising frequency for an extraterrestrial who could connect from just about anywhere. It was during those days that Mark saw true healing take place for the first time. Each day started with a prayer from Dostoevsky. Each day ended with Flopper’s wagging tail. But the most impactful moment came not from a visitor, but from Esther herself, when days into her grief, she asked Mark to roll her bed next to Scott’s so she could hold his hand. Thirty minutes into the effort, the scout fell asleep. Her hand stayed in place.

Such were the days that passed in the aftermath of the events at EDEN Command. The events that divided the world. The news stayed off in the medical bay—by and large, nobody at Northern Forge wanted to hear it. Let the world sort out its problems. The mountain base had enough of its own. That was the mindset of everyone from the Fourteenth of Novosibirsk—both its official members and its adopted sons and daughters. It became the mindset of Mark Remington, too. It wasn’t like he had anyone out there in the world, anyway. His entire family was lying on a medical bed right there in front of him. And so wait, he did. Patiently. Faithfully, as a brother should. Hopefully, until he had to hope no longer. Until he received the reward he’d been waiting for: being there when it finally happened.

When, at long last, Scott opened his eyes.


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