Shadows Beneath by AA. VV

Author:AA. VV. [AA. VV.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Relato, Ciencia ficción, Fantástico
Publisher: ePubLibre
Published: 2014-06-28T00:00:00+00:00

FIRST DRAFT:

I.E.DEMON

DAN WELLS

“IT’S LIKE MAGIC,” SAID THE SPOOK. The Humvee bumped wildly on the dirt road, jarring Private Harkness in the back seat, but the spook seemed unfazed. “We’ve tested this a thousand times back in the states, with every type of explosive you can think of—pressure mines, improvised mines, remotely triggered explosives, everything. The BSE stops them all.”

They were deep in the Afghani desert, about an hour from base, performing a field test on the BSE—Harkness didn’t know what the BSE was, only that it was installed on the undercarriage of their Humvee, and that it allegedly ‘stopped’ explosive attack. Not ‘shielded against them,’ not ‘detected them,’ but ‘stopped’ them. Harkness had no idea, and the rest of the team—four Humvees, a TRUCK, and a TANK—seemed to be just as clueless as he was. The spook seemed supremely confident, but then, didn’t they all? Harkness couldn’t decide if the man’s sublime arrogance was heartening or obnoxious, but he was leaning toward the latter. It was one thing to have faith in your mysterious new mine-killer, but it was just plain stupid to be this far from a forward base without a helmet.

And I’m supposed to protect him, thought Harkness. This guy’s one ambush away from Taliban-assisted suicide, and I’m the one who’s going to catch hell for it when he goes down. He offered the spook a helmet, the seventeenth time now that he’d tried, but the spook waved him away.

RANK Gomez, their Truck Commander, pressed the spook for more information. “You keep saying it ‘stops’ the explosions, but how does it stop them? How does it work?”

The spook smiled. “Flawlessly.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“That’s the only answer you’re cleared to receive,” said the spook, and Harkness saw the man’s unflappable calm fade, just for a moment, revealing a steel-eyed coldness lurking just underneath the surface. Harkness shifted his position in the back seat of the Humvee. A year ago, a look like that would have made him shift defensively, moving himself away from danger, but six months in Afghanistan had changed him. Without even thinking about it, he’d shifted to give himself greater access to his sidearm.

“Hold up,” squawked the radio, “we found another one.”

“Another?” asked Gomez, his voice dripping with disbelief. The spook smiled triumphantly, and the driver brought the Humvee to a stop. The field test was almost brutally simple: the spook’s Humvee, equipped with the BSE, drove at the head of the column, followed by a TRUCK equipped with every bomb-detector and metal detector they could put in it, scanning the road for IEDs. In the past hour they’d turned up two, and now potentially a third. None had gone off. Harkness waited while the bomb disposal team got out and neutralized the device, and soon the bomb squad RANK approached their truck.

“It’s an IED alright. Completely non-functional, same as the others.”

The spook leaned forward. “What about the pattern you observed in the other explosives?”

“The pattern continues,” said the RANK. “Each bomb is less non-functional than

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