Chapter 13: With All These Things That I've Done

The attack came a couple of days before School Day. Earth First students opened doors around the school for the assault teams. They timed the entry into the classrooms to prevent any gunfire from warning us. The best of their teams went after the highest CAP scoring students. Two teams were sent after my classmates and me.

"Don't even think about it!" one of the masked men yelled at Pranay. He aimed his weapon at Pranay's head.

The sponsors looked towards me. One team covered the others while the other team moved on me. I stood up.

"Fuck you, asshole!" a masked man yelled a second before hitting me in the face with the butt of his weapon.

"Earth First! Earth First! Earth First!"

I kept my eyes closed as I came out of unconsciousness.

"Earth First! Earth First! Earth First!"

"This is what they think of us!" yelled a voice I knew well. "This is the insanity they expect us to accept. The Confederacy can save everyone! But do they? No! They can do more, but those ... aliens do not care. They have plans for us, but they will not admit it. They don't want allies--they want slaves! Sponsors are not heroes; they are collaborators with the enemies of humanity."

"Earth First! Earth First! Earth First!"

"Enough is enough! We cannot tolerate the enemy in our midst!"

"Earth First!"

"The Confederacy will bow to us! They have no choice!"

"Earth First!"

"They will accept our demands or die!"

"Earth First!"

"Who even knows if they're telling the truth about the Swarm?"

"Earth First!"

"How does anyone know whether it's true or not? Maybe the Swarm is just a boogeyman created by the Confederacy to make FREE humans kneel!"

"Earth First!"

"Who has been allowed to go into space? Collaborators only!"

"Earth First!"

"We betray God's purpose by joining the Confederacy. We were his greatest creation and yet so many seek to forsake him by accepting animals as our masters."

"Earth First!"

I shook my head hard.

"Senator!" the guy holding my left arm yelled. "Senator Win! He's waking up!"

"This ... This boy ... This is who the Confederacy tells us should lead us to their promised lands."

The guy on my right grabbed my chin and lifted it so everyone could see my face. I opened my eyes--we were in the cafeteria. The guy moved my head from side to side so the entire cafeteria could see me. My classmates and our concubines had been led to our usual table.

"What does a boy know about leadership?" Senator Win yelled. "He's proven time and time again, in this very room, that all HE cares about is defiling woman after woman!"

I shook my head out of the guy's grip. The motion let me see where everyone stood in the room. The sponsors had been placed together; their concubines sat with them.

"The Confederacy doesn't want real leadership," Senator Win yelled. "Real leaders ask questions! Real leaders fight for their people! Real leaders treat everyone equally."

The windows grayed. The Earth Firsters turned their weapons to the windows and the doors. An interdiction field had been dropped on the school.

The men holding me understood their job. Their grips on me were loose though; they expected me to still be groggy from being knocked out. Neither the guy who knocked me out nor these two men had experience with Confederacy enhanced bone density. I used their holds as leverage to stand up. Lifting my left leg, I drove my foot into the knee of the guy on that side. Turning away from him, I broke the other guy's hold on my arm. Grabbing the broken-knee guy's head, I used the strength that the Confederacy medical engineering had given me to break his neck. I drove my elbow into the second guy's throat, collapsing his windpipe. He put his hands on his throat and stumbled back.

I reached out with my right hand towards Estrella. She had pulled out an automatic from her purse as soon as she saw me move. Tossing the gun towards me, she reached into her purse again. Earth First thought they had turned their Princess back to the 'true' path. They believed it because they wanted to and never asked the most important question in her life.

I caught the gun and put two bullets into the guy I had hit in the throat. Stepping away from the bodies, I fired on the men covering the back door. They were the closest to me and would be behind me when I faced the Senator. Estrella's second gun throw was as perfect as her first. I caught that automatic with my left hand. The Earth Firsters at the back door were down! I stepped back, continuing to move as I brought my left and right hand forward.

Hank had closed his gun range every morning for my training. After some building reinforcement, he put targets on three walls and had me stand in the middle to fire while standing still and in motion. I had fired thousands of dollars worth of rounds. The Confederacy made me ambidextrous, but Hank trained me to use both hands to kill our enemies. There were more Earth Firsters in the cafeteria than I expected. I fired and fired: head shots and ten-ring shots.

Tossing the guns aside when they emptied, I reached out again. Maria's throw was over-rotated. I twisted my hand around and caught the gun while it was upside down; I rotated my hand and brought it around to aim at Senator Win. Maria's throw with the second magazine was perfect; I caught it with my left hand.

Seven targets remained.

"Senator Win," I said. "You have escaped my grasp so often that I was beginning to think God might actually be on your side."

The back doors blew in. The side doors to the cafeteria also exploded inwards. Confederacy Marines flooded into the room through the gaps that used to be doors; more Marines crashed in through the windows.

"Everybody... " Lieutenant Miranda Jones yelled before coming to a halt. She led the team coming in through the side doors.

"El-Tee," the Marine standing next to her said. "You promised me the mother of all urban battles."

"I ... don't ... appreciate ... the ... humor, First Sergeant," Lieutenant Jones bit off every word.

The Marine threw his head back and laughed. "And now you know what I felt like when they handed me your freshly-minted butter-barred ass and told me to shape you into the fine example of a Marine officer that you are today, sir."

Lieutenant Jones sighed and lowered her weapon. She kept it facing the remaining Earth Firsters.

"So you never intended to do a pickup on School Day! At least, I got that part right," Lieutenant Jones said to me. "You also never intended to run for the county border, did you?"

I kept my eyes on the Earth Firsters.

Someone slammed a hand down on a table to my right. "Indeterminate CAP score, my ass!" Miriam shouted triumphantly. "Pay up, bitches!"

I heard Dipak, Stephen, and Pranay grumble. Palms slapped against palms.

"You knew what he was up to?" Lieutenant Jones asked Miriam, gesturing towards me.

"Not a fucking clue!" Miriam exclaimed happily.

"Then?" Lieutenant Jones raised a hand questioningly.

"I don't have to know what he's doing to follow along," she said. "His Confederacy enhancements were all I had to see."

Lieutenant Jones looked me up and down. "Confederacy enhancements?"

"Have you seen that cock?" Miriam asked her. "It's a pretty cock! Have you ever seen a pretty cock? It's a perfect column of manhood and it's PRETTY. The beast is not natural!"

"Duh!" Dipak exclaimed, slapping himself on the forehead.

Lieutenant Jones looked at my groin. "How the fuck did you get access to a med-tube, Jason?"

"Hank," I said, ignoring her question for the moment.

"I blew the gas canisters, Boss," the gun-range owner said. He was dressed as a custodian. He looked down at his computer tablet. "Looks like two of them failed though."

He turned to the side and spoke into his watch. "Team Three. Room Three Thirteen. Team One. Room One Thirty-Six. Team Two, standby."

We waited until he turned back a couple of minutes later and nodded to me. "We're in the clear, Boss."

Lieutenant Jones raised an eyebrow. "Med-tube, Jason?"

"Confederacy Marines don't ask many questions," I replied. "If an AI tells you to park a shuttle with a med-tube and go for a walk, would you ask why?"

"I didn't!" the First Sergeant announced.

Lieutenant turned to look at him.

"I figured some Central Command spook was doing some spook stuff, Sir," the First Sergeant shrugged. "In my many years of military service, I learned to only dip my foot into spook stuff as deep as I need to. If someone in command was finally going to get their head out of their behind about Earth First, who was I to question a few dozen trips in a shuttle to EF home turf!"

The First Sergeant looked at Hank and raised an eyebrow.

"The Boss made me an offer I couldn't refuse," Hank told him. "He cures my cancer--I train him and any others he sends my way. The guaranteed pickup, if his mostly insane plan worked, was a nice bonus."

Lieutenant Jones closed her eyes. "You scored in the nine range in your original CAP test and convinced the AI to ... Jesus! Fucking AIs! And fucking whatever-the-fuck you are, Jason!"

She looked at Senator Win and at me. "All of this to kill a Senator?"

"Not a Senator," I told her. "A rapist and a murderer. Isn't that right, Detective Reynolds?"

The cop who interrogated me after Michael's suicide-bombing was one of the Earth Firsters.

"Come! Come! Detective," I said. "You're too much of a cover-your-ass expert to let me down now."

Detective Reynolds nodded. A couple of the other Earth Firsters were surprised but not all of them.

"You can't kill a U.S. Senator," a black man in a suit said from beside the Marine First Sergeant.

"Secret Service Agent Ronald Michaels," I said with a nod. "Where's your partner?"

Another suited man made his way through the Marines to stand next to Agent Michaels.

"You can't do this," Agent Michaels told me.

I smiled. "I'm going to guess the Senator didn't tell you about his little plan. You should consider for a moment whether he could have allowed you to live after letting you see what he did to us."

"You whore!" one of the Earth Firsters yelled. He took a step towards Estrella. "Cunt! How dare you go against God? I'll kill you."

I put a bullet through his left eye. Bringing the weapon around, I shot Detective Reynolds in each shoulder and in his left knee. The Marines had not finished turning their weapons from the Earth Firsters to me before I changed magazines.

Hank whistled. "I'll say this much for the Boss. He isn't a born shooter, but he's a fucking machine and that med-tube made him a precision-crafted machine. No wonder that computer thing likes him, he's more like them than us."

The Marines stared at me.

"To be great, you have to challenge yourself," I said, lowering the gun and turning my hand so they could see it. "Custom twenty-two modeled after the Olympic rapid-fire pistols. Hank designed it after the AI gave me the spec for weapons that the Marines invented or reworked using Confederacy technology. It took a little back and forth with the AI builds and Hank's redesigns before the piece was ready for prime time."

"The early murders from the Earth First Killer were done with a twenty-two," Pranay said. "They couldn't identify the gun though. I didn't think anything of it when a few other Earth Firsters got killed with a different twenty-two."

I nodded and smiled at the Senator. "One in the chamber, four in the magazine. I did not expect two Congressmen to tag along with you, Senator Win. And may I say, Congressman Mennen, fantastic acting job! Even the AI didn't know you were an Earth First supporter now."

The Congressman licked his lips.

"In case you have doubts," I said to the Earth Firsters. "I was the original Earth First Killer. When I bled enough pressure out of the system and couldn't get to the Senator without an unacceptable level of risk, the AI and I composed a list of candidates to aid my work: a few cops, Pranay, Stephen, Miriam, and others from around the county. I wrote the Black List. The AI gave me a secure way to communicate with the others to give them their assignments."

"I trained them," Hank announced. "Some of them anyway. The three support teams needed to have prior military experience and know how to keep their fucking mouths shut, which I didn't believe teenagers could do. Considering Stephen and Pranay all but took out a fucking ad in the local paper and hung movie posters of themselves in action, I believe I was right on that one."

"We didn't know you were a part of it," Pranay told Miriam. She extended her hands in safe directions. A pair of derringers slid from her sleeves and into her hands. She rotated her hands and the derringers slid back into the sleeves.

"The poisonings too," she told Pranay.

"They're fifty-caliber derringers custom-made like the Boss' twenty-two. Funny that she was the only one that asked for something special," Hank said, looking at Miriam like a proud papa. "Between those and the poison kills, she racked up the highest score."

"Other than Jason," Miriam said with a wink to me.

"And the Earth First shitheads didn't figure it out?" the First Sergeant asked.

"They probably would have," Lieutenant Jones said without taking her eyes off me. "Until other sponsors started getting in on the action. They would have muddied the waters, maybe even gotten Earth First to relax because they were easier to catch."

I nodded.

"Before we get to them... " Lieutenant Jones gestured towards the Earth Firsters. "How the hell did you convince an AI to go along with it, Jason?"

I tilted my head towards Estrella. "I can convince the Earth First Princess of the righteousness of my cause, can you imagine NOT winning a logical discussion with a machine about keeping your options open in a time of war? All I had to do was show the AI that I understood what IT already knew: the state and region would follow behind the county and fall to Earth First."

I stared at Senator Win for a few seconds. "The EF groups here went violent earlier than other regions because of Senator Win's influence. He has been charismatic leader ahead of every curve in his career. It's interesting that to a human a one in a thousand chance isn't important unless you're the one in a thousand, but to a machine that has some very specific goals..."

"The region and then the country," Lieutenant Jones said with a nod. "One in a thousand chance that if Senator Win was allowed to continue exerting his influence the whole of the U.S. would fall to Earth First. If the Confederacy couldn't recruit in the U.S., it would be a major handicap to the war effort."

"It was very real statistical probability, actually a greater chance of it happening than one in a thousand. If we hadn't crossed the extractions threshold the AIs have as a minimum, they would not be able to ignore it. I offered to stop Senator Win though," I said. "I had the proof of what hid behind the mask."