Rick would be a unique case, Jill thought, but she had hope. With the gathering of specialists in the bustling Virginia capital – the northernmost city on the East Coast not to be nuked – someone should be able to figure out what to do. She sure couldn’t.
Oh, he wasn’t in any distress. But she was. He didn’t remember anything about her. Talking to him was like talking to a slightly ditzy acquaintance, not the brilliant and sensitive man she had fallen in love with. And when he talked about his “girlfriend” Shari – where the hell had he come up with that? It was all she could do not to punch something.
It’s not his fault. They screwed his brain up in there, some kind of mind control. When she or Doc Horton or Donovan could get Rick to talk about it, he said he didn’t remember any Shadow Men or Burn Rooms, but his eyes still went blank at their mention.
The physical exam had shown he’d had surgery on his chest and head, but they needed the imaging center in Richmond to tell them more. Whatever was in there required a good look and a good surgical team before they started messing around with it, and that meant Virginia Commonwealth University Medical Center in Richmond.
I-95 South had been cleared now so they hummed along nicely, averaging at least forty-five. She’d heard it had taken six to twelve hours to make the fifty-mile trip from Fredericksburg the first time. The main things that slowed them down were the checkpoints. The piece of paper next to her heart got them through, but there were always lines of waiting vehicles as martial law remained in force.
Once Rick woke up from the mild sedative they’d given him – he didn’t want to leave Fredericksburg, still trying to find Shari – he looked around like a child, and it nearly drove her mad to see. What did they do to you, heart of my heart? God, I know I’ve gotten off the path, forgive me for that. Punish me if you must, but Rick didn’t deserve what happened. Please, Lord, reach down and heal him.
They pulled into the bustling medical center parking lot and Jill sent Lockerbie off in the Beast to find them a place to stay that would take the military scrip she had. Real cash was in short supply. If they had to they could find a military barracks but they were all in the mood for good beds and lots of hot water.
Getting out, Jill was all ready to walk in to the enormous building when she heard Donovan say, “Okay, Rick, okay, just come…along…Top? Top!” Her head snapped around to see the medic holding on to a struggling Rick, who seemed to want to go in a specific direction, very badly.
“Hang on to him,” she said, jumping over and grabbing his other arm.
Rick had an eager look on his face and said, “I remember that. I remember that!” He tried to point, and she let his arm go but grabbed his collar. Once he could, he aimed his finger and arm across the parking lot, pointing at a group of geodesic domes, “golf balls,” and tall towers with microwave dishes and lasers pointed toward the mountains. The US was throwing satellites back up as fast as it could but the line-of-sight network was still more reliable.
“Let him walk,” she ordered, and Donovan released Rick. “If something is helping him remember, we have to let it play out. And…I want to see what he does.” Rick immediately started striding toward the installation, and they had to hurry to keep up. “Looks like a secure comms center. Maybe intel, maybe C2.”
“Reckon so,” Donovan replied, “but Top, we can’t let him in there. Who knows what they done to his brain, he could cause all sorta mischief.”
“I don’t care,” Jill said, “it’s worth the risk. We’ll watch him close.” Whatever it takes, I’m not going to pass up this chance before the shrinks get their claws into him. That scared her almost as much as seeing him this way. Maybe, if I’m lucky, we’ll have a breakthrough right now.
Donovan called, “Woah, Mister Rick, you jes watch out there.” They had run up against a tall, new cyclone fence with rolls of concertina wire atop it, and Rick made as if to climb it.
“Get him off,” Jill said, and the two of them pulled him gently down.
“But I want to go in!” he complained.
“What is it you remember?” Jill asked.
“I don’t know. I think I was here before, or someplace like it. I think if I can see more of it I can remember more.” His voice had an odd lilt to it, almost singsong, but Jill didn’t care. Anything that helped him recover what happened or connected him with reality was a good thing.
“Come on, let’s find the way in.” She turned to the right and they walked along the perimeter, passing warning signs and garnering a look from a pair of hard-faced guards. It wasn’t until halfway around, after perhaps two hundred meters, that they found the entrance. There was an armored booth and turnstiles.
It took her half an hour to work her way from the sergeant to the chief to the lieutenant to the captain to the major to the colonel in charge of the facility – she still didn’t know what it was, since it was unmarked – before the pass she carried got them inside. Because of all the rigamarole she surmised it had to be an intelligence setup, probably some kind of COMINT – communications intel – though who they were listening to was anyone’s guess.
“Colonel Murdo,” Jill said when the pinch-faced woman finally let them in, “I know this goes against all your security procedures and instincts but we’re still in a combat zone, still under martial law, and this pass gives me access to any US government facility. Any. If you have to, feel free to put a call in to Pueblo, but that signature is real. We need to come in and look around.”
“Actually, Master Sergeant, I recognize your name, and I believe you,” the Colonel said with a grimace. “We break lots of rules around here to get the job done, what’s a few more? I know, it’s not really rulebreaking if the President gives you that kind of blanket access, but it feels like it.” She smiled, suddenly, turning her face from forbidding to delighted. “Kinda fun, huh? Let’s go.”
Colonel Murdo gave them the grand tour, though Jill was savvy enough to realize that by taking control of a situation she couldn’t avoid, the woman was just making the best of a bad situation, and might steer them toward some things and away from others. Probably thinks we’re here for some kind of inspection, Jill thought, and didn’t disabuse the colonel of the notion. Frankly, even Jill didn’t quite know what they were doing, so she cued off of Rick.
He walked around looking at the antennas and structures, then headed for a boxy prefab with a river of cabling running into it, most gathered into large conduits. Reaching for the door, he was frustrated when it seemed to be locked. He tugged on the handle, looking distressed.
“What is it, Rick?” Jill asked.
“It’s in there. I know it is.”
“What’s in there?”
“The key to me. If I can see in there I’ll remember.”
Jill stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged. “Okay…Colonel?”
“This is our secure server building for the high-security networks,” she said worriedly. “Is this really necessary?”
“I’m afraid it is,” Jill said with more confidence than she felt. “Open it up, please.” No matter what it takes.
The colonel stepped in front of the keypad and lock, waving a chipped badge in front of it and punching in a code that she hid from the rest with her body. The magnetic lock sounded a clunk, and the door opened a crack with a hiss of pressurized air.
Inside, the large room was filled with humming servers, blinking lights and a rat’s nest of cabling. Rick took a deep breath, then turned right and headed down a narrow alley between tall racks that held the computer machinery. Jill could feel the blast of the air conditioning vents competing with the fans drawing heated air from over the hot circuitry and chips.
“What’s he doing?” Colonel Murdo asked. She pointed at Rick, who had stopped in front of one machine and was swaying back and forth as if drunk, and scratching one wrist with the other hand.
“Rick?” Jill asked, walking toward him.
He turned toward her, digging at his wrist until blo
od came. “Jill,” he whispered hoarsely. “Jill!”
“You recognize me!” she said with delight, but Rick did not seem delighted. Rather, horror filled his face.
“Jill…shoot me.”
“What?” She stopped, half-reaching for him, not understanding. “No, Rick, you’re confused.”
“Jill, I remember. I remember, Jill…it burns…IT BURNS,” he half-screamed, pulling a wire out of his wrist where the self-inflicted wound was. “I can’t hold it for long, Jill, shoot me or we all die!” He spasmed with pain, his fingers clawing at the rack.
Pushing aside thought and fear, Jill suddenly knew that Rick’s mind was back and she had to trust him. With a smooth and practiced motion she brought up her PW10 and fired one round into Rick’s left shoulder, the arm with the now-revealed wire trailing from it.
He jerked as the high-voltage Needleshock capacitor dumped its electric load into his flesh, knocking him to his knees. “Again! Shoot me shoot me shoot me –” He repeated those two words over and over until with a prayer and a convulsive squeeze she unloaded most of the magazine into him, one quick shot at a time.
Each tiny needle the gun fired poked a hole and sent a convulsive shock through his body, but didn’t do enough damage for even ten or fifteen rounds to kill him. It was, after all, designed to be non-lethal. She was careful to stay away from his heart and head but she felt his pain every time she fired, until the Colonel and Donovan, not understanding, grabbed her from behind.
He lay twitching and unconscious on the ground, and Jill had to elbow the colonel in the gut and shake Donovan off of her to get free. “There’s something wrong,” Jill gasped. “He’s been implanted with something and whatever it is, he wants us to stop him from using it. He recognized me.” She dropped to her knees to cradle him in her arms. “Rick! Are you all right? Did that do it?”
His eyes fluttered, then he started to struggle as his body rapidly healed the small wounds. “No, I have to...” He twisted, reaching for a server rack.
“Rick, tell me what it is!”
“No, no, Jill, it's...” His eyes seemed to clear for a moment, then the pain showed through and he screamed. “It's making me...I can't...they put something in me! If I complete my mission I'm expendable. Maybe...bomb,” he gasped, slapping his chest. “Shock me!” His eyes rolled back and he passed out from the pain.
Jill understood. “Donovan, hold him here, sit on him if you have to! Where’s a high-voltage line?”
Colonel Murdo pointed out a thick cable running behind the racks, and Jill reached to grab it, dragging all the slack she could toward the fallen man. “Ma’am, go get a medic right away. Send someone to the hospital if you have to, an ambulance, something. They’ll need to treat shock, electrical burns, and maybe restart a heart. Go, fast. I’ll wait as long as I can.”
“For what?” the colonel asked, then answered herself, “Never mind, I’m on it.” She bolted out the door.
“What’re you gonna do, Top?” Donovan asked.
“Whatever I have to. What I don’t know is, what can take more juice – an Eden, or the cybernetic evil they put in him.” With that, she pulled out her combat knife, made a bight in the thick wire, and cut it like a rope.
Her knife flashed and popped as it sliced through the copper strands, and the smell of seared flesh filled the room, along with curls of plasticky smoke. “Gah,” Jill cursed and dropped the knife. The dead end of the wire fell, but she kept the hot side in her left hand, holding on to it well back from the fully-juiced severed tip. The bank of servers the wire powered fell dark and silent.
“The colonel is going to hate me for this…Donovan, take his hands and tie them to that bare metal rack with some of this thin wire. Yeah, just pull them out, we’re going to crash this place anyway. His skin has to be touching it, he has to be grounded. And rip his tunic open, just pop the buttons. I need skin! Quick, he’s waking up.”
Donovan looked like he had no idea what was going on but Jill knew he trusted her enough to blindly follow orders, so it was the work of a moment for him to do as she said. “Now back up. This won’t be pretty. I have to do it now.”
As soon as Donovan was out of the way, she jammed the bare copper wire against the flesh of his chest, where Doc Horton had said he’d had some kind of surgery. Two and two still made four and by Jill’s calculation, the only thing dangerous enough to kill them all had to be hidden in his chest, probably a block of explosive.
It was a toss-up whether the enormous electrical charge would trigger the stuff anyway, but she didn’t see much choice. Without knowing anything about the electrical pathways, she had to just hope that Rick had known what to do and had thought the electrical charges of the Needleshock rounds would do the trick. Well, if they didn’t set it off, this shouldn’t either.
She held it against his chest for as long as she could stand it, the smell of his flesh singeing twin to her own right hand, now reddened and useless. It felt like she was burning her own self, but she had no choice. Finally she could take it no longer and pulled the wire away, handing it to Donovan. “Put this somewhere safe,” she said, and fell to her knees next to the dead man.
For dead he was, at least at this moment. No pulse in his neck or wrist could she feel, and she started to clear his airway with her one good hand before Donovan grasped her shoulders gently from behind and pulled her out of the way. “I got this, Top. It’s my job.” Expertly he ran through the steps of CPR, and that’s how the EMTs found them four minutes later, in full resuscitation mode.
“Listen,” Jill said to the team leader, “he’s got some kind of cybernetic implant in his chest and his arm and who knows where else. He needs emergency surgery to take it out or it will kill him and maybe other people too. You have to sedate him as soon as he starts to wake up or whatever’s inside him might activate.”
“We’ll do our best,” the man said, looking imperturbable despite the strange instructions. In a moment they had Rick on a gurney and loaded into the ambulance for the short trip to the hospital.
***
The handsome young surgeon took Jill out onto a balcony so he could light up a cigarette with shaking hands. “I got the bomb,” he said, “and I hope to hell I never have to do that again. But you did the right thing. The metal in his system carried the electrical charge to the control unit and burnt it to a crisp, even though it was insulated. You hit it with enough charge that it blew right past whatever safeties it had. And somehow the same charge didn’t set off the detonator. He must have a guardian angel, it’s a freakin’ miracle.” The man took a heavy drag on the smoke and let it out slowly.
“What about the rest of the cyberware?” Jill asked.
“I’m not messing with any more. The scans say there’s nothing dangerous in there – well, physically dangerous anyway – and the web woven into his brain is implanted far too deep for me to want to go in after it. If you want it out I suggest you fly him to Switzerland or someplace that can get a team of brain surgeons together with the best microsurgery robots available and plan the operation for a week.” He shook his head. “Damndest thing. Who put that in him?”
“Nazi Unionist scum, playing Doctor Mengele. We cleaned out a lab of theirs up at Pax River. I’d thought his problems were just mental.” Jill punched the wall gently with her undamaged fist. “I was wrong. And lucky, thank God.”
“Happy to be of service.” The surgeon looked at Jill speculatively. “He your boyfriend?”
“Fiancé.”
He shrugged. “Oh, well. Lucky man.”
“More than you know, Doctor. More than you know.”
-14-
The incomprehensibly massive drive system sat inverted on the desert of the Australian Outback, over a hundred miles from anywhere. It looked like an enormous bowl one hundred meters in diameter and one hundred meters tall. More than anything else right now it resembled a small sports stadium. By itself it weighed almost one million tons, though smaller than the main battle module
that would eventually mate with it.
Ten times heavier than the largest oceangoing ship ever built, it had been constructed in place in just under four months, using the new rail lines and heavy airstrip nearby, a staggering achievement. Over a hundred thousand men and women worked on the site, along with innumerable heavy construction machines. Now, all that equipment and those people were fifty miles away behind a range of low hills, building pieces of the main ship to come.
Brigadier Nguyen stood alongside Under-Minister Ekara, staring at the structure from a distance of only one mile. The foot-thick crystal of the bunker would not be enough to stop the radiation and debris thrown off by the ignition of the drive system, so Ekara ordered, “Close the shutters. Seal the bunker.”
Servos whined; the bunker housing the control center closed itself off from the rest of the world and prepared for the first test. Technicians counted down smoothly, a controlled chaos of crisp checklists and even crisper responses. Nguyen was reminded of NASA launches that had so impressed him as a boy.
“D minus one minute. Minister Ekara, please take your position.” The call shook Nguyen out of his reverie; he forced himself to remain calm, but inside he was full of concern. Failure of this project could damage him and Ekara both in the Committee, as Nguyen originated the idea and Ekara was in charge of making it work. He watched his counterpart step over to the console, to hold his hand above the large red button. The final ten seconds were agony.
“Three. Two. One. Fire in the hole.”
Not “Liftoff,” or even “Ignition.” Most of the workers here were not rocket scientists – they were nuclear and high-explosive engineers, and they used their own familiar terminology. Ekara’s hand dropped, smoothly and precisely, to depress the large mushroom-like trigger.
For seconds the whole structure shook, but far less than Nguyen had expected. The test crew smiled nervously around the room at each other, then looked upward at the thick bunker roof as a different sound, the hissing whoosh of the first atmospheric shockwave, came on the heels of the ground shock.
The Orion Plague Page 10
