by Carl Damen
He selected one at random—EHUD_INCIDENT_REPORT_0017. The screen filled with the image of a soldier in heavy armor, ceramic plates pulled aside and the torso ripped open, organs spilling out. He closed that one, opened another, number 0032. A nude woman, her bones barely contained by pale skin, head shaven, covered in wet blood. She was smiling, middle finger of her right hand extended to the photographer. Edarus swallowed. Chuskus, just as he had remembered her. He felt nauseous.
He closed the image, returned to the ID photo that had been placed on his desk minutes—a virtual eternity—before. Something was seriously wrong here.
He picked up his mobile again, made another call.
"Office of General Mistaren, how may I direct your call?"
"I need to speak with Lob."
"Who may I say is calling."
Edarus grimaced and cradled his head in his hand. "It's his fucking boss."
There were several long seconds of silence from the other end. "I'm afraid the general is busy at the moment. I can take a message."
"Is the general in?"
"I'm sorry sir, I can't—"
"I'll repeat: I'm his fucking boss, and I have something to discuss with him. I've played his little shit games before, but if he isn't seated firmly behind his desk when I arrive, there will be serious repercussions. Am I understood?"
Before the other man had a chance to answer, Edarus had slammed the mobile down, grabbed up the tablet, and left the office.
When he arrived at the antechamber to General Mistaren's office, he was pleased to see the general's aid sitting behind his desk, looking petulant.
"Despite a full schedule, the general is able to see you now."
Edarus offered up a false smile. This poor man was only exercising what little influence he had, and it was now going to be taken from him. "Get out," Edarus growled. "And don't bother coming back when I'm gone. You're being reassigned."
The man frowned, but stood and left without saying a word.
Edarus's smile was now genuine. He closed the office door, then swept his hand across the underside of the receptionist's desk: there were no signs of bugs. He straightened, took a deep breath, and pushed on through to the inner office.
General Loblen Mistaren sat behind a massive black desk; with his coat off, he looked like a cotton swab stuck in a tar pit. He smiled, his face seeming to split in half along the edges of his leathery mouth. "Ed! So glad you could drop by! Hears there was something you wanted to talk with me about."
Edarus stopped in the middle of the room and worked his jaw for a moment. The General was far too calm in the face of the threats issued against him; normally, he would be on the war path at this point.
"I'm here to talk to you about the E.H.U.D. program," Edarus said.
Impossibly, the General's smile grew wider. "Ah, the Defenders." His dark eyes, set far back in his skull, almost seemed to sparkle.
All Edarus could do was work his jaw again. "The Defenders? You're ready to jump to that conclusion? What if I were talking about the Defense program, huh?"
"Oh, please." Mistaren's smile finally faded and he leaned back. "You wouldn't sound so damned serious when asking the question if you weren't going to talk about the damn Defenders."
"We have this protocol in place for a reason..." It was all Edarus could do to keep the frustration out of his voice.
The General nodded. "Understood. Now, what did you want to talk about?"
Edarus held up the tablet and shook it. "Shara Chuskus. Today she went into a metro terminal and killed fifty people in an explosion."
"Huh." The General raised his eyebrows. "Sounds just awful. I rather liked her..."
"'That's awful?' That's all I get out of you? A member of your top-secret weapons program blows up the metro, and you can't be bothered to give a shit?"
The General shrugged. "It's a complex program. Statistically shit's got to go down at some point. It's a miracle nothing bad's thus far."
And there it was, the admission Edarus had secretly been waiting for through the entire confrontation. He pulled up the picture of Chuskus, bloody and defiant, and turned the tablet to face the General. "Except this isn't the first time shit's gone down, is it?"
Mistaren glared. "You were supposed to destroy those pictures."
"Destroy evidence that the Defender program had flaws? I'm a professional, Lob. I take my job seriously."
"The only reason you have that job is because you promised to destroy those pictures!"
Edarus snorted. "Well, it looks like I'm not as ethically bankrupt as you thought. Now, let me state the obvious, in case you haven't put it together yet. Here we have two pieces of evidence that your pet project has serious flaws. So, this afternoon I'm taking this down to the White House, and getting presidential approval to shut your ass down. Got it?"
"And what happens when the president finds out his little cousin's been suppressing some of this evidence? You think you'll have this job for much longer?"
Edarus lowered the tablet and stared at his shoes. In all the panic that the morning had ushered in, he hadn't had time to think of personal consequences. He shrugged. "What happens, happens. This program's dangerous, and deeply flawed, and I'm going to make sure the right thing gets done here."
Angry silence stretched between the two men. Then, the General laughed, his deep chuckle echoing around the room. "God damn, do I know how to pick them." He continued laughing, the sound degrading to a hoarse wheeze. He coughed and wiped at his eyes. "No, you're not going to tell the president anything. This thing with Chuskus? That's not evidence of a problem. That's fucking intentional."
For just a moment, the room fell completely silent, and Edarus felt himself floating. This wasn't at all what he had expected...
"No," the General continued, "this was a test. A test and a message. First, I wanted to find out how you'd react to something like this. Doing what's right? At the risk of your cushy job? You passed, my friend; you passed."
Edarus slowly reached into his pocket, found the mobile he had neglected to turn off. This—what Mistaren was saying—this was important, and he needed to record it. Blackmail or evidence, it didn't matter the reason, he needed this. "And the message?"
The General straitened and his face hardened. "I am in control. The entire program, the Defenders? They're mine. What happens next is not chaos: it is planned."
There was no way to navigate to a recording program, not in his pocket, not without making the moves too obvious. Edarus released the mobile, then slowly nodded. Keep the man talking. It would all come out when he made his report to the president. "So you programed a sleeper agent to kill herself, just so you could massage your ego?"
"You've seen the pictures of what happened when the Defenders slipped our control. But did you hear any of the speech Major Fendleton gave before he was executed?"
Edarus shuddered. He remembered the pictures of Allen Fendleton, stripped of his uniform, his brains sprayed out over a concrete floor. Through the memory where tinny words, poorly recorded: "We are Defenders. We will defend. We must tick on. The Q-bomb must tick on."
The words didn't need to be said aloud. Mistaren must have seen something in Edarus's eyes; he nodded and a thin smile spread across his face.
"The Q-bomb... In theory, a small group holding unlimited power over the whole world, keeping them in line through applied self-interest. When Fendleton first told me of the concept, I thought he was crazy. When he led the Defenders in a rebellion and got himself killed, I knew he was crazy. But the more I thought about it..." The smile faded. "We've made super-soldiers, Ed. We've made gods. And what are we doing with them? The moron we have in office now just wants to use them to protect national interests. He's not seeing the global picture. But me... I've been infected by Allen. I've got his vision up here now." He tapped the side of his head with an outstretched finger. "And I've altered the program, the programming. You saw that with Chuskus. And the others... They're going to start fulfilli
ng their programming soon. And then Allen's vision will be fulfilled..."
Edarus's hands hung limply at his sides. He stared at the old man in wide-eyed disbelief, then narrowed his eyes into a death-glare. "I suppose making threats at this point would be useless, seeing as you have an army of super-soldiers backing you up."
A shrug. "Their lives are their own. I merely pointed them in the right direction and gave them a push."
"I thought you were in control?" The General opened his mouth to answer, but Edarus continued, "No, don't answer, I don't care. Why are you telling me all this?"
Mistaren slowly stood and rounded his desk. "For the Q-bomb to truly succeed, there needs to be at least one nation that will offer cooperation. I'm hoping that will be us. But the current administration..." He looked imploringly at Edarus.
For his part, Edarus refused to think through the General's implications. If Mistaren wanted to say something, he would have to say them plainly.
"In the coming months, the Defenders will be causing a lot of chaos. The president—hell, most of the cabinet—will likely not survive. For this to work out, I need the right person in place to help them when they need it most. You've already proven you're willing to give up this job that you worked so hard for in the name of 'doing right.' How much are you willing to give up in the name of world peace?"
"You're asking for treason."
The General gestured to Edarus's tablet. "You've already withheld vital evidence from the president. What's a little more crime? All I need you to do is keep quiet about this meeting, and be ready to cooperate when I give you the go ahead. You do that, and I promise you that in six months the presidency will be yours."
It was tempting. All his life, Edarus had dreamed of the office, had worked hard to climb the Washington ladder of power. But he had realized it was fruitless years ago, had resigned himself to advisory positions. Now, though—no. He couldn't do this.
He leaned in closer to Mistaren and hissed, "I won't let you kill my cousin."
Another shrug. "The president's old. How much longer do you think he's got?"
"You're older."
The General smiled. "What makes you think I plan to survive all of this?"
Edarus was taken aback. All through this meeting, he had assumed it was a power grab on Mistaren's part. Hijack the super-soldiers, show what he was capable of, profit. But as he stared into the old man's eyes, he saw something far more terrifying: belief.
Edarus swallowed. He had to get to the president, had to warn him. With any luck, it wasn't too late to retrieve the Defenders, to eliminate the threat Mistaren represented, before another Chuskus exploded... Before another Allen went on a killing spree.
The General sighed and gestured again at the tablet. "You're going to tell him everything, aren't you?"
Edarus turned and hurriedly strode from the room. He had to see the president, had to tell him what was going on. Had to tell him before the temptation proved to strong and he agreed to what the General had offered.
Even though there was still another half-hour before his meeting, Edarus was already in the cabinet room, pacing restlessly and and occasionally stopping to check under the table for bugs. Security wasn't his job, but at the moment he wasn't feeling particularly trusting of those whose job it was.
He glanced over his seat at the conference table, took in the tablet laying there. The pictures, the private knowledge of the Defender rebellion called out to him, begging to be let free. Almost two years ago he had been given the files in a classified dossier while the current Secretary of Defense was out of the country. Though he was only Deputy SecDef, Edarus had taken it upon himself to confront Mistaren about the pictures. Somehow, he had let himself be talked into covering up the pictures in exchange for the General's influence on a promotion. Scarcely a month later the incumbent had resigned, and Edarus found himself appointed Secretary.
At the time it had seemed like a good idea to keep the pictures, just in case. Now it seemed like an even better idea.
His eyes slipped away from the tablet and he continued his pacing. Around the table, again, again, again. He was nearly back to his seat when strains of "Home Means Nevada" began to sound from one of his jacket pocket. He pulled out his mobile and connected a call, killing the song. "Hello, Amanda."
"Where are you?" His wife's voice was pleasant, but with an unmistakably bitter edge.
Edarus's stomach clenched. He wasn't in the mood for any more stress today. "I'm at work; where are you?"
"I'm at Than's recital."
"But that isn't till two."
"It was at ten."
"Since when?"
Amanda sighed. "Since it was first scheduled. God, Edarus, you've known about this for five months, and you promised Than you'd be there; you said you could get time off."
"Time off at two, yes."
Amanda sighed; the mobile translated it as a high-pitched whine. "You should have double checked the time."
"Yeah, well, it's too late for that now, so can we talk about this later? I'm busy."
Amanda didn't respond for several seconds. "Busy?"
"Ye—"
"You think you're supposed to be at Than's recital by two, and you're still busy?"
"Something came up!"
The door creaked, and the face of a nervous-looking intern poked into the room. Edarus furiously waved her away.
"Something more important than your son." Her voice was painfully sweet.
Edarus closed his eyes, slowed, and rubbed his forehead. There was no easy out. "Yes, okay? Yes, something more important. These things happen. No, I can't tell you what it is. We'll talk tonight."
The high-pitched whine again. "Sure." Click.
Edarus returned the mobile to his pocket, sighed, and continued pacing. On the one hand, he felt guilty; he had promised. On the other, it wasn't as if this were a common occurrence. He had never missed a birthday party, rarely missed parent-teacher conferences. So he missed a few oddly-timed extra-curriculars; so what? Than would adapt.
Amanda though, Amanda would remember this.
He fumed for a few more minutes, only stopping at a light knock on the door. A moment later Julia Telk, Secretary of the Interior, stepped in.
"Am I interrupting anything?" she asked.
"No." Edarus turned and headed towards his seat.
"Ellie sounded pretty urgent; thought I'd better get here early."
Edarus snorted. "Hopefully you're not the only one. I'd like to get this over as soon as possible. My kid's got a recital at two."
Julia nodded. "Kind of doubt Isaac will be early. Or on time, for that matter."
"That's his prerogative."
They both sat and waited as the rest of the cabinet slowly filed in.
At precisely one-twenty-five President Isaac Latterndale finally pushed through the door and hurried to his seat at the head of the table.
"Sorry, everyone," he said, waving his hands in an it's-not-my-fault gesture. "It's not my fault. You know what the Iranian embassy is like."
Edarus felt a knot of nervousness unclench in his guts; he was finally going to get this over with.
The president sat and looked to Edarus. "So, Ellie didn't have a lot of details to give me on this. What exactly is this meeting about?"
"The explosion in the Metro this morning."
"Right." The president turned to his press secretary. "Rosencrantz, what happened?"
Eli Rosencrantz worked his jowls silently as he stared at the ceiling, then nodded and locked eyes with the president. "It, uh, it seems that a utilities pipeway in the Metro exploded, knocking out an entire line and killing some fifty people. Reports are still coming in, and rescue workers are of course on the scene. From early examinations, it seems to have been a case of age, of an antique infrastructure reaching its natural limit. The mayor's office is already pushing for legislation to cover a complete overhaul of the system."
"Very good." The president shifted slightly and
looked to Edarus. "So what about this warrants a meeting called by my military advisor?"
Edarus had to fight to keep his expression neutral. He knew that several of his coworkers had described him as looking "sinister," and any excess of emotion rapidly became melodramatic; the situation would be serious enough without his help.
"I will be speaking today about the E.H.U.D. project," Edarus said, in tones reminiscent of a catechism.
All movement in he room abruptly stopped as the words hit. The vice president cleared her throat. "The 'D' stands for...?" she asked, continuing the ritual.
"Defender."
With the name invoked, the proper ritual movements began. Phones and tablets piled onto the table, power switches were pressed, backplates pried off, batteries removed. After any possibility of electrical surveillance was removed, the secretary of state pushed his chair back and went around the room, pulling curtains shut and making sure that all the doors were securely closed. When he returned, the president finished the ritual by pulling out a small plastic tube, placing it on the table, and turning a dial at its base. The garbled noise of nonsense conversations emanated from it, and the whole of the cabinet leaned in to hear what Edarus had to say.
