Vanguard protocol, Marcus’s orders, and the general concept of self-preservation be damned; they were going to Sector 4 to drag their Commander’s body, or whoever killed him, back to the base.
Elias swung his leg over his bike, revving the throttle. "We ride hard. No stopping until we hit the Sector 4 perimeter line. If anything gets in our way—"
"You will shoot it, I assume," a calm, impeccably flat voice interrupted. "Though I calculate your survival rate upon entering Sector 4 with only two light vehicles and limited ammunition to be approximately three point seven percent. Four percent if Sarah managed to steal the incendiary rounds from the armory."
Elias and Sarah both slammed on their brakes, their bikes skidding to a halt.
Standing directly in the path of the motor pool exit gates was Julian.
Julian was Adrian’s personal aide, chief logistical officer, and the only man in the entire Vanguard encampment who consistently managed to keep his uniform pristine.
Even now, amidst the apocalypse and the chaos of an internal coup, Julian’s glasses were perfectly smudgeless, his clipboard was tucked neatly under his arm, and he was taking a slow, measured sip from a dented tin mug of what was undeniably terrible, lukewarm chicory coffee.
"Step aside, Julian," Sarah warned, her hand drifting dangerously close to the grip of her massive rotary cannon strapped to her back. "We don’t have time for your administrative red tape today. The Commander is out there."
Elias narrowed his eyes, his sniper’s intuition flaring. "Unless you’re with Marcus. Are you here to stop us, Julian? Did the traitor send his lapdog to ensure we don’t find the evidence?"
Julian didn’t flinch.
He took another deliberate sip of his terrible coffee, swallowed, and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his index finger.
"Elias, if I were aligned with Marcus, I wouldn’t be standing in front of you," Julian stated matter-of-factly, his tone completely devoid of fear. "I would have simply drained the petrol from your motorcycles while you were arguing in the command tent. It is much cleaner, requires less confrontation, and guarantees a fatal collision on the main highway."
Elias paused, his hand hovering over his sidearm. He exchanged a glance with Sarah. That was, unfortunately, exactly what Julian would do. The man was a terrifyingly efficient pragmatist.
"Then why the hell are you blocking the gate?" Sarah barked over the idling engines. "Marcus said Adrian is dead. We know he’s lying. We need to go get him."
"You need to turn off your engines and use your brains," Julian replied, stepping closer, completely unfazed by the heat radiating from the scramblers. "Marcus is currently consolidating power. He expects you to leave. In fact, he is praying for you guys to leave. If you ride into Sector 4, one of two things will happen. Either you will be overrun by the horde and die, thus eliminating Marcus’s two biggest political opponents. Or, you will survive, fail to find a body, and return empty-handed, at which point Marcus will court-martial you for insubordination and execute you publicly to cement his absolute authority."
Julian tapped his clipboard with a pen. "By leaving this base, you are handing Marcus the Army base on a silver platter. You are doing exactly what he calculated you would do."
"So what?" Elias snarled, his grip tightening on the handlebars. "We just sit here? We let that backstabbing snake sit in Adrian’s chair? What if the Commander is bleeding out in a ditch right now? What if he’s holding on, waiting for us?"
"Elias," Julian said softly, his voice dropping the clinical detachment for just a fraction of a second, revealing the bone-deep loyalty beneath. "Think about who we are talking about. Think about Adrian Pendelton."
Julian paced slowly between the two idling bikes. "This is the man who, last winter, was stabbed in the kidney by a Tier-3 Shadow-Stalker, pulled the blade out of his own organ, used it to decapitate the beast, and then still forced the entire Alpha Squad to complete their morning ten-mile run while he bled through his bandages. He did not let you skip burpees when you had dysentery. He is, statistically speaking, entirely too stubborn and too fundamentally infuriating to die from something as mundane as an ambush."
Sarah’s tense shoulders dropped half an inch.
She let out a short, involuntary huff of laughter that sounded more like a cough.
"If the Commander is alive," Julian continued, his voice returning to its cool baseline, "he is currently crawling his way out of whatever hell Marcus threw him into. He will survive because spite is an excellent motivator. And when he returns, he is going to be exceptionally annoyed."
Julian stopped pacing and looked directly into Elias’s eyes. "When he returns, he will need his base intact. He will need his loyal officers alive. If you run off and get yourselves killed, who is going to hold the Vanguard together? Marcus? The man can’t even manage the rationing spreadsheet without my help."
"Then what is your grand plan, Julian?" Elias asked, his tone skeptical, but he finally reached down and killed the engine of his bike.
The sudden silence in the motor pool was deafening. Sarah reluctantly followed suit, powering down her scrambler.
"We will wait," Julian said simply, raising his clipboard. "We stay here. We act like the perfect, grieving, compliant soldiers. We attend Marcus’s mandatory meetings. We nod when he speaks. And we observe."
Julian pulled a pen from his breast pocket and clicked it. "We watch the mid-level officers. We note who smiles a little too widely at Marcus’s ascension. We track who is suddenly promoted, who gets the extra rations, who helped coordinate the ’scouting mission’ that got our Commander killed. We make a list."
The lenses of Julian’s glasses caught the harsh fluorescent light of the garage, obscuring his eyes in a glare of white. "We quietly compile a comprehensive ledger of every single traitor in this encampment."