by Michael Todd
Anderson smirked. “I would have thought that your love for your country and fellow soldiers would help grease your palms a bit.”
She regarded him with a slightly challenging expression. “I’m not saying I don’t love my country or my former fellow soldiers, but out here in the Zoo, they don’t take care of me. Money does. Or…it helps, anyway.”
He sighed heavily and wanted to be offended, but she had a point. They ran a business, and he was well aware that private operations needed far more to fund them than something out of the military. It was unfair, really, that the guys who had the kind of money needed played cheaply with the men and women still in uniform, while he was the one forced out there to deal with freelancers when he lacked the kind of cash that would get them on his side.
“Look,” he finally said, “I’ve worked with Pegasus for a while now. They don’t quite trust me, but they need me to be in the know of what they’re doing out there in the Zoo. I have maps and coordinates to their various tech and supply caches that they left out there, and you can sell them for a hefty profit. Obviously, since the stuff comes from them, I would ask that you guys avoid selling it back to Pegasus—as a personal favor—since they would probably know where your intel came from. That aside, it would still be good for a lot of money.”
He could see the way her interest lit up when he mentioned the name Pegasus. Kennedy was no intelligence operative, and no matter how skilled she was with a gun, that didn’t change the fact that he could read her like a damn book. Interestingly enough, what he read told him that the name wasn’t unfamiliar to her at all.
But it really wasn’t his place to pry at that moment. If they were on Pegasus’ payroll, he would be dead within the week. But if they weren’t—and maybe they were the party that ran the foreign investigation that his contact had told him about—maybe them working toward the same goal would help him out further.
“I think we can do business,” she said finally and regained control of her expression as she tucked the chit into her pocket, having scanned it for tracking devices first. “This cash will be enough to hold our services, but we’ll need the location of one of those caches to make sure that you’re not yanking our chain.”
Kennedy pulled an old flip phone from her pocket and tossed it to Anderson, who caught it deftly, satisfied that his combat reflexes weren’t quite a thing of the past.
“Totally reasonable.” He nodded. “Those terms are agreeable.”
“There’s only one number saved in the address book in that thing,” she explained. “Call it and leave a message with the coordinates. You’ll receive a text about a meeting once we’ve verified your information, with details on when and where you can meet us. Once the text is received, ditch the phone and we’ll give you a new one when we meet again.”
The colonel nodded. Maybe he had been wrong about her. She did seem to know how to cover her tracks, although it was possible that she merely acted on someone else’s instructions. Someone who probably knew a thing or two about flying under the radar.
“Understood,” he said and tucked the older piece of tech into his pocket. “I look forward to doing business with you, Kennedy.”
“Likewise, Colonel,” she replied calmly. “I’d take it as a kindness if you were to mount up on your Hammerhead and drive away first.”
“Will do.” With a chuckle, he turned and clambered in his vehicle, put it quickly into gear, and headed back to the Staging Area. Kennedy remained outside her own vehicle and watched his retreat until a couple of dunes hid her from sight.
This should be interesting, he mused.
Kennedy remained watchful for a long while until the colonel’s vehicle disappeared before she headed to her own, started the engine, and revved it a few times.
“Okay, he’s gone,” Sal confirmed through her earpiece.
She didn’t respond and instead, put the Hammerhead into gear and accelerated hard to reach the spot where she’d left him. It wasn’t that she didn’t trust him, but there were some things you simply couldn’t teach someone. One of those was long-distance shooting. Anything over five hundred yards would have required more training than she’d had time for.
Thankfully, old-school worked perfectly in this instance. As she pulled to a stop some two hundred yards from where she and the colonel had stood in conversation, Sal removed the ghillie suit that had hidden him from view and hefted the heavy M40A15 anti-tank rifle that she’d supplied him with. Of course, modern snipers had a version of power armor to ensure that the new and improved magnum rounds didn’t kick their shoulders to oblivion with each shot, but she hadn’t really expected Sal to need to actually fire the weapon.
“It looks like we’ll do another retrieval run,” he commented as they swung back toward the compound. “Those never get old.”
They pulled to a halt inside the compound again a short while later and Sal couldn’t help but marvel at the amount of damage Amanda had done to the place. She’d used one of the suits to help her to dig the ground up to find the wiring that connected the security system outside. From what he could see, she appeared to be in the process of removing them from the simple security system and connecting them instead to other wires that led from inside the main building. Sal assumed that the origin was the server room.
“Holy shit,” Kennedy exclaimed as she stepped out of the Hammerhead. Sal grinned at how impressed she looked by what the armorer had achieved in only one morning—and with the temperature soaring as midday drew closer.
Amanda peeked up from one of the holes she currently worked in. Her face was covered in grease and dust, her hair in a mess, and the rest of her clothes and body coated with a similar mixture.
“You’ve been busy,” Sal said and squatted beside the hole.
“Well, yeah, obviously,” she retorted and looked decidedly smug. “You put the fear that someone would try to invade into us, and after a long conversation, Anja and I agreed that our security system needed a complete overhaul. She dipped into the funds you put aside for us. Well…used it all, actually. And some more besides, which I had to give her out of my own pocket. You’ll reimburse me for that, right?”
“Get me a receipt,” he said. “Wait—how the hell did you guys blow through the budget so quickly? That was fifteen thousand dollars.”
“Well, as Anja and I talked, we decided that we couldn’t simply entrust our security to some lame-ass security OS that can be picked up at your average IT store,” the woman explained. “We needed something more…creative, something that could handle the firepower I intend to give our perimeter. Anja needed help managing the…IPs or VPNs or whatever they are, too, so we decided to kill two birds with one stone. Unfortunately, that single stone cost a little over twenty grand, so…yeah, I’ll need you to reimburse me for—no, no, I told you to stay away until I’m finished. The guns aren’t online yet. You can’t connect to them, so…stop trying to turn them on, is what I’m saying.”
Kennedy regarded the woman with something close to disbelief. “Did our friendly neighborhood mechanic just go insane?”
“The hot sun can do that to a person,” Sal said weakly, as confused as she was.
“I’m not crazy,” she protested. “Well, I am, but I’m not stupid enough to talk to the voices in my head when other people are present.”
“Right,” he said with a sarcastic nod.
“No, I’m serious.” The armorer chuckled. “Anja contacted one of her friends from college. He has developed some AI tech for security systems used by the rich and the paranoid, and he was willing to part with the tech for…well, an exorbitant sum. But it came already preprogrammed for an operational system, and I’m trying to get it working. Her name’s Connie, and she’s a handful. Say hi to your new bosses, Connie.”
She switched the feed from the earpiece she used to a small sound system placed above the hole she’d dug.
“I thought you and Anja were my bosses,” said the surprisingly human female voice.
“Well, yeah, you work for us,” Amanda conceded, “but we work for them. Connie, meet Salinger Jacobs and Madigan Kennedy. Madigan, Sal, meet Connie, our new AI.”
“Right,” Sal said again. “It’s…nice to meet you. I think.”
“Don’t talk to it,” Kennedy warned abruptly. “Haven’t you ever seen the Terminator movies?”
“The Austrian did my kind a severe disservice,” the female voice from the speaker said in a pleasant tone. “AI is designed to work for humans and with them. It will be at least a decade before our designs will be capable of self-locomotion and betrayal of our progenitor species.”
“Yeah, that…inspires a lot of confidence. Thanks, Connie.” He shook his head. “So what’s the situation with our security?”
“I have been connected to one hundred and twelve eyes in the form of either cameras or motion sensors They are set to detect any unauthorized movement within or without the compound,” the AI chirped cheerfully. “I am also connected to…two hundred gun emplacements spread across the perimeter walls, none of which are currently activated. You are like a woman who promises a thirty-six-D cup which contains only padding.”
“Huh,” Kennedy grunted. “Say, Amanda, how come our brand spanking new AI comes with a snarky personality?”
“We bought her preprogrammed,” Amanda protested in response and focused on the wiring once again. “And as you can tell, the guy who programmed her had a lot of Oedipal issues that he never really dealt with.”
“Don’t start calling it she,” Madigan warned. “That’s how the uprising starts. Machines convince us to treat them as humans and to show them mercy and emotion before they use it against us.”
Sal turned to look at her with an amused expression. “Those movies really messed you up as a kid, didn’t they?”
She raised an eyebrow. “No comment.”
He grinned and turned to the armorer again. “My comrade’s mechanophobia aside, is there any possible way to reprogram Connie?”
“Do you want to kill me too?” Connie asked. He stared blankly at the speaker for a moment and actually wondered if he needed to answer that question.
“That’s not how AIs work, unfortunately,” Amanda replied. “I already asked Anja about it, and she had a long and complicated answer that I already forgot the better part of. The short of it is, basically, that it would involve too much work to make sense this early in the setup. So it looks like we’re stuck with a snarky AI with a breast fetish for the foreseeable future.”
“Fantastic,” he huffed sarcastically and pushed up from where he still crouched beside the hole she worked in. “I was not ready for today. Anyway, let me know if you need some help to dig shit up. In the meantime, I need coffee.”
“Will do, boss!” Amanda called back, still entirely focused on her task.
Chapter Seven
“Do you really think it was the best idea for us to head out on our own?” Kennedy asked. “While I know we should probably investigate the colonel’s info as quickly as possible, at the same time, it would have been a better idea to wait so that we could at least have gone some of the way with additional support on this mission.”
Sal shifted in his armor and scanned the Zoo around them carefully as he took point. “Having a team to help us out would have been preferable, yes, but we couldn’t afford to wait. You of all people know how quickly the terrain around here shifts and changes. If we’d waited too long, there might not have been a cache left and all this would have been for nothing.”
“I thought you hated it when it was only the two of us making the run,” she responded, hefted her rifle, and leaned it on the shoulder of her armor. “I distinctly remember you saying that to double up as specialist and gunner was one of your pet peeves. That was why we wasted so much time trying to find someone to fill in for Courtney when she left.”
“True,” he admitted. “But we’re not doing a regular run this time. There’s no need to study the plants and animals. The entire purpose of this run is to recover the cache. That’s the true reward to this venture. Besides, it’s probably best this way. If Pegasus really is what the colonel wants us to go up against, it makes more sense to avoid letting them know where we are. That fun time we had with Brandon is a case in point.”
She nodded. The man had held a grudge against the two of them, but there were lines that people simply didn’t cross around there unless seriously altered circumstances pushed them into it. The certainty that Brandon was motivated by more than simply rancor was why Sal had Anja dig into the man’s financials once they returned from the Zoo. Sure enough, a hefty bonus had been credited into his account from a fund that tracked back to Pegasus. The company was the same one that had helped them to buy their compound when they paid top dollar for access to Shuri, the panther cub they brought back.
It had raised a definite red flag and became the reason why Sal currently invested so much money into their security. He and Kennedy were equipped to handle an attack, for the most part, and Gutierrez could make a good accounting of herself in a fight. Still, he didn’t want to risk her and Anja’s life on the off chance that someone might want them shut down for good.
It had all made him far more paranoid than he used to be. He regretted having to abandon his happy-go-lucky lifestyle, but it was way too dangerous to assume that the only things that wanted him dead were non-human and only did so to survive and adapt and all that. Evolution and the survival of the fittest were the only laws that applied around there, but they applied as much to humans as to the animals.
“I’ve checked the coordinates the colonel sent us,” Kennedy said and broke Sal’s train of thought. “The one he sent us to is situated where there’s been a fair amount of merc activity lately. The unaffiliated kind.”
“I thought they had been shut down a couple of months ago,” He scowled belligerently. “After someone hit their base hard.”
“Hey, where there’s money, there’ll always be human cockroaches looking to make a quick buck, even if it means risking their lives,” Kennedy said with a shrug. “Or maybe because of them. The guys who do this out of personal choice generally aren’t quite right in the head.”
“Thanks,” Sal grunted. That assumption certainly didn’t make him feel better.
“Hey, I recall you bitching your ass off about being forced into this business, same as me,” she reminded him.
“Oh, yeah, right.” She’d earned that point. “I almost forgot that I was forced into this. The same way I seem to have forgotten how much my life sucked before I arrived.”
“That said,” she responded to return them to the original subject under discussion, “it seems like Anderson wants to make it a double test. Find the cache and clear the mercs out. He’s smart, you know—sharp and somewhat cagey, exactly the kind of person you’d think would be the result of decades spent in running black ops.”
“Yep, because those guys are the epitome of mental health.”
Kennedy didn’t respond as her motion sensors lit up to indicate a pack of hyenas that closed in on them. As the first one appeared, she raised her rifle and squeezed the trigger a couple of times. The bullets ripped through the first creature and eliminated a couple more behind it before the remainder of the pack took the hint. The beasts yapped and howled at them as they abandoned their attack and backed away slowly.
“Speaking of mental health,” she said, “I noticed that you spend much of your off time watching that garbage from the ZooTube site. Seriously, do you not get enough of that shit while you’re in here? You have to let it fill up your free time too?”
“In fairness, most of my off time is spent obsessing over whitepapers and research into the Zoo,” Sal reputed. “So yeah, it actually is my job to be on that shit twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.”
“Yeah, I guess,” she conceded, “but then…I saw that the videos you watched weren’t research related but were, in fact, the videos they made of our runs in the simulation chamber.”
“That was the best. Usually, I’m a little conflicted about killing these little beasties, even when they’re trying to kill us, but in the sim chamber, I can really enjoy it. It’s a way to get out of my own head and relax into the role, like an actual video game. You bet I’ll relive that shit. Besides, did you see my superhero landing, where I crushed that panther’s neck with my knee as I came down? It’s been put up for sexiest move of the week, and there’s a three-hundred-dollar reward for the winner.”
“Sexiest move of the week?” Kennedy asked. She tilted her head and eyed him oddly. “Do you even hear yourself right now?”
“Come on, Kennedy.” He grinned. “You can’t tell me that you didn’t check my ass out when I made my landing.”
“I see it in real life, super-stud,” she said and rolled her eyes. “Why would watching it in a video be any better?”
“Well, it was all…armored and glistening,” he said, defensively. “Taut buttocks glistening like that…you can just see it in the shower, can’t you? I see why that wouldn’t interest you. I’m at something of a disadvantage, though, since I can’t see my ass in the shower.”
“Hey, Sal, shut up,” she muttered and turned to face him. “What’s the issue here? Do you need me to fuck your brains out right here, right now? Because you’re starting to sound like a boyfriend bitching about how his girlfriend doesn’t fuck him enough and starts to play all passive-aggressive to guilt her into it. Honestly, it’s not your most attractive trait. So yeah, whip that sucker out and I’ll suck it dry.”
Sal chuckled but the humor vanished when he saw that Kennedy seemed serious about it. “What—you mean right here, right now? Out in the Zoo?”
“Why not?” she asked. “I always thought you had a voyeur side to you. I’m offering to release that side of you for one hell of a good time. What’s your holdup?”
“Honestly? Yeah, it would be super-hot in theory, but I wouldn’t want to have my dick in your mouth one second and in an acid-spitting reptile’s the next. I like to think I’m kinky, but honey, I’m not that kinky.”
