“Now see here,” Horton blustered, turning to crane his head at the Chinese. “Is this some kind of, of coordinated effort to seize Russia for yourselves?”
“Quite the opposite, Mister Minister-Representative. Moscow can choose for itself. I am merely insisting they do so, in a timely fashion.” Tyler stood up, as did the rest of the FC team and the dozen functionaries and aides behind them. “Now we will bid you good day.”
“Now see here,” Horton said again, “now see here!” That seemed to be the extent of his commentary as he and the rest watched the Free Communities representatives file out, leaving the Neutral States group and the unnamed Chinese man alone with the Russians.
The Russian representative, an older woman only identifiable as such by her ample breasts sagging inside her generously cut pantsuit, turned her bulldog-jowled face to the others on her side and spoke with them in Russian for several minutes while the others waited. Eventually she turned back to Horton.
“Subject to ratification by the Central Cabinet, I would like to make a tentative application for Russia to join the Neutral States Assembly.”
A smile broke out on Horton’s face, mirrored on the visages of those around him. Even the Chinese man’s mien seemed to lighten slightly, as if pleased. “I say, then, fine show, jolly good,” the Brit burbled. He stood to walk around and shake hands with the Russian team. “Then we can leave it to our respective staffs to draw up the details for signature. Bloody good!” He turned around toward the Europeans. “Does anyone have any champagne handy?”
The French delegate turned to her staff and made the arrangements.
***
Behind the secured and bug-swept doors of the nearby Free Communities Delegation enclave, Tyler poured Jack Daniels for his team and staff with his own hand. Even the teetotalers picked up tumblers and saluted politely, touching rims to lips. Others drank deeply as he polished off his three fingers and lifted his empty glass. “Now that’s how a Texan negotiates,” he laughed.
“It certainly seemed effective,” the Brazilian delegate, a strikingly handsome woman, responded with a purr.
“Effective at what?” one of the bolder staff spoke up, a genuinely young black man with a South African flag pin. “There’s no way they’ll join the Free Communities now,” he stated sourly.
The Brazilian woman stepped over to him with sinuous grace and tapped his face gently with her open palm. “Exatamente, meu lindo amigo. But they will run screaming into the arms of the Neutral States, and thus will become their problem, as it naturally should be.”
Had the young man’s skin color been able to show a blush, he would have. As it was, the sweat that broke out on his forehead and the way he dropped his eyes said it all.
“Marta, leave the poor fellow alone,” Tyler said gently.
The statuesque woman shrugged and turned back to Tyler. “Then pour me another drink, Senhor Travis, and I shall find someone else to bother. Let us celebrate victory!”
The score of people in the room laughed, and others began talking among themselves. Tyler leaned closer to Marta. “If you want to go robbing cradles, at least don’t do it in public, my dear.”
“Actually I’d rather you robbed my cradle, Travis,” she breathed.
“Oh, you already know the answer to that. I’m a happily married man. Now, go give that boy the night of his life – discreetly, that’s all I ask.”
Marta pouted. “All right. You are just a fish on my line, Senhor Travis. I have many years to reel you in.” She ran her tongue across too-red lips and turned with a flounce back toward her latest target.
Epilogue
Russia as a Neutral States Assembly member – and one in beaten disarray – made arranging the legalities of recovering Roger Muzik’s body much easier than Jill Repeth had expected. A couple of phone calls from Travis Tyler to the new Prime Minister and the Karelian Oblast’s officials had become much more obliging, even eager to please.
She still didn’t let their police get any closer than one hundred meters away, back with the media. In fact, it looked like there were more reporters standing around on the unusually hot, unusually dry lakeside than cops.
Big picture, she was glad of that. It showed that the long-brutalized Russian media wasn’t completely cowed, and the spirit of investigation had come alive under the new more liberal rules. Unfortunately it also confirmed that someone, perhaps many someones, in the bureaucracy supplemented his or her income with a few sheaves of rubles from those same reporters in return for story tip-offs.
This threatened to complicate her operation but Jill decided that she just didn’t give a damn. She’d been charged with recovering the body and the submersible, more to keep the technology out of others hands than at any particular embarrassment. Nobody told her it had to be a deep dark secret. Wild rumors and eyewitness reports of the Salmi operation, as well as the others that toppled the illegitimate junta, mingled in the open press, so the mere news about the mission’s existence wasn’t any particular revelation.
Two divers had already recovered Roger Muzik’s body. Though less than a week in the cold lake waters, it had already shown nibbles, and she tried not to think about fishermen catching and eating the fish, and him with them. Shades of a story by Ryan King about an abusive man and a catfish pond ran unbidden through her thoughts.
Once he’d been sealed in the body bag and then in the coffin – they had plenty of lift capacity after all, they could afford some dignity – his body had been loaded into one of the two Super Ospreys. Those aircraft had carried her, the divers, a herd of SEALs and a couple of corpsmen from the LPD USS Arlington to this place in northern Russia, and they would carry them all back, plus what they came for, leaving nothing but the video the reports so avidly recorded.
Taking a last look at her cordon of SEALs, she signaled the Super Osprey with the coffin and the auxiliaries already aboard to come in and hook up its slingload. Once the bird picked up its external cargo, it wasn’t going to land. Trying to set down with something slung beneath was what they called in the flying business a “Big No-No.”
Jill remembered seeing a Seahawk try it once, the aviator forgetting he had half a ton of pallet in a net under his bird. The result had not been pretty. One of the three crew had survived.
The enormous craft hovered in under blasting tilt-rotors and descended to ten feet, then nine, then eight, above the shoreline. The hookup man reached upward with his static probe, a cable with a long naked metal probe on each end, one driven into the ground. As he touched the VTOL’s cargo hook with it, a long spark of static electricity, generated by the rotor-props, discharged through the conductive wire and grounded itself into the earth.
That out of the way, the man dropped the probe and took the clevis of the multilegged sling and slammed it firmly into the forged aluminum clamp on the underside of the hovering beast, and then immediately ran from under.
Incrementally the VTOL lifted, pulling the sling after it, drawing upward the extender straps that lay leading into the shallow water. Soon they reached full extension and the aircraft slid over to hover directly above the heavy Dacron ropes where they entered the lake. When they became iron-taut, Jill could hear the engines labor slightly, and she felt the rotor wash increase.
Slowly the four heavy lines rose from the water, one meter, then two, until Jill could see where they attached to the lift points on the top of the submersible…the one that had carried her and Roger safely to Salmi and back. Once it lifted dripping from the lake and stabilized, the big Super Osprey rose and angled northward, heading out over the glassy expanse toward Russia’s northern border and the waiting VTOL carrier, leaving the remaining personnel in the relative quiet of the idling second bird.
The crown of cops and reporters edged forward as the SEALs backed slowly toward the aircraft, PW15s at the ready. One of them fired a single round into the ground in front of a particularly eager reporter, and the gaggle suddenly reversed itself, staying well back. Alth
ough unthinkable to do that with lethal rounds, in these days of Needleshock and the Eden Plague, Jill knew they no longer had to worry much about maiming or killing during crowd control, if they were careful.
The cordon folded in on itself with perfect discipline and Jill boarded the waiting bird. It lifted powerfully, like an express elevator to heaven, before the last commando had finished strapping himself in. Jill gave the SEAL team leader, a serious-looking lieutenant commander, a thumbs-up. It felt strange for her, in her own head a mere master sergeant, to be in charge of officers and a whole deadly team like this, but they had accepted her as the Agency’s rep, supreme in all but tactical matters.
Frankly, she’d been happy to just let them do their jobs. She glanced around at the men of the team, half of them already asleep in good combat-veteran fashion, and her thoughts continued down the track they had been running on ever since that morning she found her partner, a man she’d been on countless missions with, dead in his sleep.
This outcome confused and angered the part of her that didn’t care about rationality, but only about fairness and right. Warriors should not lay down and then fail to wake up in some lonely safe house in a foreign land. They should either die gloriously in battle with evil against overwhelming odds, or they should fall asleep one last time, home in their beds with their wives and children and grandchildren around them.
Because the Eden Plague had done away with that latter scenario, the part of her that was willing to accept death seemed still shut down and turned off, his passing unreal.
A single tear from each eye was all she allowed herself before Jill forced her thoughts away from tragedy and back to her future. Lifting a gloved finger, she used its fabric to absorb the salty liquid, dabbing at each cheek surreptitiously, not willing to let these supercharged bastions of testosterone see her cry.
One man did watch her, though, but he didn’t smirk or roll his eyes, fortunately for him. Had he done so, she might have given in to the temptation to show him what her cyberware could really do.
Instead, he pressed his lips sadly together and nodded, as if he understood, and perhaps he did. She nodded back. The US had lost a lot of good men and women in these things historians were coming to call the Plague Wars – the cold and hot conflicts, the battles and the ugly little special ops – and they weren’t over yet.
North Korea, still shielded by an independent China, held out as a bastion of insanity, but with every other nation in the world part either of the Free Communities or the Neutral States, Earth was as close to being united as it had ever been.
So where did that leave Jill Repeth? She hated the idea of going into space again, but at least out there, the conflicts were cleaner, with little room for politics, backstabbing, or rogue elements. No one would ask her to do wet work, no insurgent suppression, no desperate rescues that turned into bloody fiascos.
In short, no more human-on-human battles. She was sick of that.
As the Super Osprey descended to land on the Arlington, alongside its sister craft that had already set the submersible on the flight deck, that decision solidified. First, a transfer back to the Corps, to get her away from the Agency that she already knew was building mission files for their new cyborg operatives. If they balked, she would dig in her heels and tell them to go to hell.
If they refused, she had options now. As part of the Free Communities, the US had agree to adhere to the FC Charter, which guaranteed the right of free emigration of any citizen, regardless of status. She’d rather not have to leave the US; she’d rather go back to her beloved Marine Corps. If she wangled that, as one of the first cyborgs and with her record, no doubt they’d let her into space, where Rick was, and life made some sort of sense.
Where if comrades were going to die, they wouldn’t be murdered by overzealous Border Patrol agents, or Psychos, or rogue Septagon Shadow Men.
Where she could kill aliens without remorse and accept casualties as fortunes of war.
Where if she and her brothers and sister in arms were going to be screwed, at least they would get a kiss first and see it coming, and maybe even know why.
End of Cyborg Strike
Turn the page for an excerpt from the next Plague Wars book 6, Comes The Destroyer.
Comes The Destroyer Excerpt
Book 6 of the Plague Wars Series
One would think that during six years in space Absen would get out here to Ceres more, but truthfully, annual visits were enough. It was General Tyler’s role as J4, Chief of Logistics to oversee the production efforts and pass him reports. As with most militaries between battles, a flag officer’s job was less about fighting and more about organizing, training and equipping.
This time would be a bit different. Less than a month ago the last of thousands of Pseudo-Von-Neumann factory complexes had taken up residence atop its soft-landed asteroid. Until then, each manufactory had been building nothing but more factories. One made two, two made four, and so on. Now there were over eight thousand, spaced regularly across the entire surface of the planetoid.
This was necessary mainly to control the heat each would generate. The carefully-selected metal-rich asteroids actually floated, in a sense, atop a sea of frozen ices – much of it water, but also methane and other volatiles. Raising the temperature even a few degrees, from the pressure of the weight of the rocks and also the leakage from the fusion power generators, presented all sorts of challenges. Bases would settle and shift; random pockets of oxygen found flammable gasses and burned or exploded; crevasses opened unexpectedly as the planetoid was mined for its materials.
People died, and often. Peacetime safety protocols had long since fallen by the wayside. Workers took risks and most of the time got away with them, driven by the oncoming desperation and the knowledge that anyone who survived could be restored.
Artemis provided a safe base atop the largest of the rock mountains, containing administration, hospital facilities, and every other cat and dog that happened to need care and feeding. Thus it was here that the Admiral landed and received his briefings, but that was not really his purpose. He was here for a more important, if symbolic reason.
He strapped himself into the cockpit of a shuttle, one of hundreds that workers used to service the factories. While largely automated, nothing humans had yet created was truly maintenance-free. Everything needed supervision, tending, and the repair that only a set of human hands could perform. That meant thousands of people, keeping the VNs, as they were colloquially known, in running order.
Of course, by doing so, they ensured the VNs would eventually produce hundreds of millions of man-hours worth of warships for the defense of Earth and its solar system.
Now the shuttle pilot flew her dozen passengers the short hop over to VN1, the very first factory to be emplaced. On the next rock mountain over, roughly ten kilometers away, they landed on the designated pad of the huge factory complex. Three hundred meters on a side and twenty high, the integrated building contained everything necessary to produce EarthFleet’s best hopes for victory.
A score of workers could be seen standing inside the VN’s crew compartment at the thick molecular glass window, looking at the arriving shuttle. A couple of them waved. “Are we going inside?” Absen asked as the pilot made no move to unstrap.
“No, sir,” the woman said, “unless you insist. We can get just a good a view from right here, and save ourselves a lot of time and trouble.” She popped a lever on her seat and rotated it a quarter turn toward the center, the better to address her passengers. Her name tag read “Lockerbie” and she wore a warrant officer’s bar.
“So –” Absen began to ask, when she pointed out the front shuttle viewport. He turned to see enormous double doors, sized for a jumbo jet hangar, begin to open slowly, withdrawing into recesses.
General Tyler moved up to squat between the seats, and others in the shuttle moved forward to crane their heads for a piece of the view. “What we should be seeing is the very first Aardvark to be prod
uced by a VN. It and about a hundred others will be the operational prototypes for testing and evaluation. We started production on these three months earlier than the rest, to give us time to revise the runs based on the results.”
“Aardvark? I thought these were called A-24 Avenger IIs.”
Tyler shrugged. “Officially, sure, but just like the A-10 Thunderbolt II that everyone called a Warthog, or the F-16 Fighting Falcons that were always Vipers…some nomenclature battles are just not worth fighting. Besides, you’ll see why it got its name in a minute.
The doors finally opened to reveal the front of the craft inside, a proboscis that started squat and thick but narrowed rapidly to a truncated point like the nose of its namesake. The thing was ugly, that much was clear. A blocky utilitarian craft with nothing of beauty about it, nevertheless Absen found himself wanting to love it, because it represented life and salvation for his planet.
The Aardvark rolled slowly out of the hangar, drawn by a robot tug cart toward its metal-surfaced launch pad. Almost a hundred meters long, thirty wide and twenty high, it looked more like a high-speed train engine than a spacecraft. Unlike that vehicle, it sprouted nodes and fittings all over its surface.
“Pretty big for one person,” Absen remarked. “Looks kind of like a squared-off submarine with no sail.”
“Remember their final option,” Tyler answered. “If they are going to suicide, why put more than one in it?”
“Point. But can just one pilot really fight this thing?”
“They’ll have fully functional cybernetics just like a helmsman,” Tyler said. “In fact, once the real op starts, they might never unplug. There is a sophisticated computer suite that can run the ship while the pilot sleeps or if he or she is incapacitated, but basically, everything is one integrated system.”
Cyborg Strike Page 17
