Chapter 71: The Overwatch Guy
The highway ran east under a sky already going orange at its edges, six lanes of open concrete with the Ascender sitting on eighty and the wedge out front finding nothing worth slowing down for.
Nia’s playlist had taken over at the halfway marker exactly as negotiated, which meant the Wet Sounds speakers were currently pumping out four minutes of Korean pop with a chorus built like a chant, and I was singing along to every word of it for some reason.
Or rather, I was singing along to my personal interpretation of every word of it, since roughly sixty percent of the song was in a language I did not speak, and I was filling those parts in with confident English nonsense delivered at full volume.
"You are butchering this."
"I’m honoring it."
"You’re doing a war crime to it," Nia said, without looking up.
She had my SR-25 across her lap with the magazine out and the bolt locked back and the chamber checked twice, because she was the kind of person who checked a chamber twice even when she had personally emptied it just a second earlier, and she’d been up in that scope for the better part of twenty kilometers.
"It ranges automatically," she said.
"Yep."
"It ranges automatically, it reads the barrel’s temperature, it knows the air, and then it moves the dot."
"Yep."
"So there’s no dope card."
"Nope."
"There’s no wind call."
"Nope."
Nia lowered the rifle just enough to look at me over the top of it, and those bright green eyes had gone flat in a way I recognized from her old nest.
"Nikki, I spent four years learning how to do that with my head."
"I know."
"I was good at it."
"You were the best I ever saw."
She looked back down through the glass without another word, and after a second I watched her thumb move over the little computer below the scope, slow, the way you touch something at a funeral.
Then she snorted.
"It’s incredible... I hate it. But I want one too."
"Learn to shoot without it first."
"I will end you."
Behind us, through the pass-through, Tikki lay dead center of the king bed on his back with all four limbs stretched out to their absolute maximum, belly up, head tipped back off the pillow, a two-point-seven kilogram starfish in a bed built for two adults.
He had not moved in forty kilometers.
The highway kept giving us the same picture over and over as the light went longer.
A car off in the median, doors open, and forty meters past it one of them stumbling along the shoulder with that new loose-jointed jog.
A pickup nose-first in the ditch, and one more staggering circles around it.
A bike laid over on its side, the rider still wearing his helmet, still walking.
-TUCH-!
That one went under the wedge without the truck acknowledging it, while the wipers took care of the windshield, and the road opened back up empty ahead of us.
[Not a pileup on this whole road... Everyone who turned out here turned alone...]
That was the part the old timeline never let me see, because out here the shit show didn’t arrive as a wave.
It arrived as a guy going ninety with the radio on, turning at the exact second his passenger stopped being his wife.
I checked the dash clock against the odometer and ran it again for the third time in twenty minutes.
[Forty-some kilometers out... Sun’s down in about an hour and a half. Park a kilometer short, on foot from there, find something tall...]
The plan was simple enough to say in one breath and hard enough to take all night.
Get eyes on the truck stop before sunset, from high ground, far enough out that nothing hears an engine.
Sit on it for an hour or two.
Count the guards, count the rotations, count the guns, find where they sleep and where they eat and where they’d run to, because people in a fortified place always build the same three habits within a week.
And when the night was properly down, go in.
Nia would be up somewhere with the M110A2, running overwatch.
And I’d be the one walking through the front of it.
[...Huh.]
Funny, how back in the old days, I had never once been the one walking through the front of anything.
I was the overwatch guy.
Not because I was the best shot, since I absolutely was not, and every single one of them knew it.
I was the overwatch guy because I was the weakest link in that group by a distance that wasn’t even funny.
Worst at CQB. Worst at room clearing. Worst at breaching, at moving under fire, at making decisions with a clock on them.
So the group put me somewhere high and far away, and they didn’t just pick the best angle either... they picked the safest one, and then Lexie would go up and check my exits himself before he let me climb.
Three years of my life spent as the guy the professionals kept alive by parking him where the danger wasn’t.
And now the best room-clearer any of us had ever had was going to sit in some tree line and cover me.
I didn’t say anything about it.
I just held the wheel and let the road run under us, while something warm sat behind my ribs and refused to move until Nia broke the silence.
"So... been meaning to ask you..."
"About?"
"Angelica..." Nia said, eyes not leaving the rifle. "You know she won’t just drop everything and come gallivanting with us..."
"Hmm..."
Because here’s the thing about Angelica.
Angelica wasn’t just some blond-haired, blue-eyed, big-boobed smarty-pants.
She was the Executive Officer of the RNS Bastion, the only nuclear-powered aircraft carrier in the entire nation.
Second in command of a floating city that ran on a reactor, berthed five to six thousand people, carried eight nuclear-strike-certified aircraft, and kept twelve actual nuclear weapons in its belly.
And if that wasn’t enough, her father was the Rear Admiral.
Head honcho of the carrier, a guided missile cruiser, four destroyers, an attack submarine, a fleet oiler, a fast combat support ship, a hospital ship, and fifteen hundred men who Lexie only ever referred to as demons in human skin, and Lexie was not a man who handed out compliments like that.
A literal war god with twelve thousand troops and a world-ending fleet under him.
Rear Admiral on top.
Then a Captain heading each ship.
Then came Angelica, the XO.
Then everything else: Air Boss, Reactor Officer, Engineering, Weapons, Operations, every single one of them reporting up through her.
And yes, obviously, being the fleet commander’s daughter did not exactly slow the climb up.
Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
But I’d also spent a year in the same crew as that woman, and I can tell you with total confidence that if you dropped Angelica into that job as a total stranger with a fake name and no father anywhere on the planet, she’d have ended up in that chair anyway, just a few years slower and twice as annoyed about it.
In the previous timeline, when the airborne strain took ninety percent of everyone, it took the warship the same way it took everybody else, all at once, everywhere, on every deck.
And the ships being very fancy sealed steel boxes only made things worse.
Twelve thousand went in.
And only about twenty-five hundred came out.
Her father survived. Most of the captains survived. A lot of the Operations Officers did too.
And so did Angelica.
By the end of week one they had taken the entire fleet back, deck by deck, compartment by compartment, and Lexie told that story maybe six times and never once explained how, and Angelica never told it at all, which is how you knew what it had actually cost.
Then they took the Bastion into Ashport and tied it close to the docks, used the reactor to keep the lights on, and around that steel hull they built the single greatest safe zone in the entire western half of the country.
Until spring.
And by the end of summer it was a shadow of what it had been, half of that courtesy of the Infected and half of it courtesy of men who looked at a functioning city and decided they should be running it.
And by the end of that first year, when the Variants showed up, the Bastion fell, exactly like every other place.
I was never there.
I wasn’t good enough or strong enough to make that trip to Ashport, and I knew it, so I never once tried.
Nia was never there either.
Everything the two of us knew about the greatest fortress in half of the country, we knew because people who did live it told us about it over the years, in pieces, usually late, usually while we were cleaning our rifles, or getting shit faced high.
Even that Ashport safehouse I kept going on about isn’t mine.
Lexie found it when he was in Ashport.
I had never once seen the inside of it.
So Nia asking that question wasn’t something that came out of nowhere.
Nia had her father.
I had four people.
Lexie had a son, a daughter-in-law, and a grandson, and he lost every single one of them in the previous run.
But if the pattern holds and that grumpy old bastard woke up when I think he did, then I promise you he is not losing them twice.
But Angelica, unlike us who had people who could be fitted into a few RVs...
Angelica had a kingdom.
"Of course she won’t..." I said, not taking my eyes off the road.
"You told me you were gonna leave the others at Leo’s village... in that fortress you’re planning on making them..." Nia said, voice soft and eyes still on the rifle. "Then we’d head further west, nab Lexie... and then Ashport before winter sets in."
"Uh-huh... that’s the plan... though we’d have to make a quick run back to drop his folks at Leo’s..."
"Nikki." She turned in the seat to face me. "We aren’t going to fetch Angelica, are we?"
"No... We’re going to fight a war bigger in proportions than our collective imagination..." I said it flat, the same way I’d have told her we needed diesel. "And we’re going to change history... just for her."
Her breath caught.
And I chuckled, and looked over at her.
"She would’ve done the same. Besides, if there is one person left in the world worth betting our... no, humanity’s future on... it’s our bimbo."
Nia didn’t say anything for a good long while.
Before eventually, she chuckled, putting her head back against the seat, and that little chuckle slowly turned into a roaring laugh.
"That’s rich coming from a dude with magic powers, a sci-fi gun, and a fucking grappling hook."
I snorted.
"And the best part..." I said, turning to her with a grin, "... if the pattern holds true, she too regressed... she would’ve regressed eight full days before the shit show hit in this timeline... She’s probably made contingencies for contingencies... And I’m pretty sure she’s already secured the fleet and has docked by Ashport, way ahead compared to the previous timeline."
"Yeah," Nia nodded, "She’d have known what was coming for her own people."
"That’s the thing, she couldn’t have stopped it..." I added. "Ninety percent of that crew was already carrying it before she ever woke up, same as everyone... Nothing left to fix. All she could do was get ready for the day most of her fleet turns at once, quietly, without telling anybody why."
"But it hit fifteen days early."
"And then it hit fifteen days early..." I tapped the wheel. "So she got caught with her pants down, same as us... But knowing her, caught with her pants down still looks better than most people’s best day. My money’s on three, maybe four thousand alive and at Ashport right now..."
"Three to four thousand navy folks..." Nia repeated slowly. "With an entire Carrier Strike Group..."
"With a nuclear reactor and peeps that can keep it running..." I added.
"And nukes," Nia added.
"And 20mm depleted uranium autocannons too."
"And we’re going to walk up to that and say your lords and saviors have arrived." Nia snorted, "And we got a wizard with us..."
"If nothing drastic happens... we’re going to walk up to that with a fleet of our own..." I corrected with a chuckle. "Small one... That cruise ship at Lake Adler will go in my pocket and come back out with whatever the Crafting Menu will let me bolt onto it, and I have the credits for. Autocannons, plate... the works. And I’ve been eyeballing a destroyer in the catalog, one of the automated hulls that doesn’t need a crew at all... the System itself will be its operating intelligence..."
"...You can BUY a destroyer?"
"I can buy a Nuke too," I looked at her with barely concealed smugness. "The price is offensive, though. I’d need to kill roughly everything in three provinces... But it’s on the menu."
Nia stared at me for a second, then dropped her head back against the headrest and let out a long breath at the ceiling.
And once again, a comfortable silence descended, and then she promptly broke it again just as I had begun humming my nonsense.
"So what’re you gonna do once it’s all done?" she asked, her voice gone whimsical, almost dreamy. "... Once we’ve fought, and won, after we got celebrated as... I don’t know war heroes, I guess... and now it’s time to kick back our feet..."
"Huh... never really thought about it..."
I let the highway run under us for a few seconds before-
"Maybe a cozy farmhouse with decent land, cattle, by a river or a lake... another cat for Tikki to play with and..." I looked over at her with a massive grin. "A massive fucking harem!"
And the look she shot my dreams was one of absolute disgust.