“Mission accomplished?” she asked.
He noticed she had on a new scent, to go with her promotion, he supposed. Women. “We’ll see. I want you to set up a low-level surveillance on him. See who he talks to, where he goes, look for anything unusual. Also get someone on his family.”
“Consider it done.” She made a note on her touchpad. “Anything to worry about?”
“Probably not.” Nguyen got into the passenger seat and rolled down the window, tapping another chunk of ash against the outside of the luxurious Land Rover. It still smelled of new leather and wood. “But best to cover all bases.”
“Bases?”
“Hmm. An American expression, from baseball. It means to prepare for every eventuality.” He puffed the last of the cigar and threw it into the dust. “Where are we going?” Nguyen looked curiously around, orienting himself on the sprawling base. They seemed to be heading out into the Outback, though there was no defined edge to the unplanned city-cum-starport.
“You’ll see.” Alkina’s tone was coy, and he snapped alert inside, wondering if this was the moment when she betrayed him. His fingers went to the key fob in his pocket, ready to press the code numbers in their correct sequence, blowing Alkina’s deadman implant and stilling her heart forever.
She pulled around a low hill and under a scrubby tree, leaving the vehicle’s air conditioning running against the growing heat of the day. Then she turned to him, unbuttoning her military tunic from the top with practiced fingers. “I always christen my new cars.”
Nguyen relaxed, sensing no more deception than this pleasant little surprise. “Don’t we need champagne?”
“I think you’ll find me intoxicating enough.” She touched a control and the seats backs began to smoothly descend, forming an integrated bed of butter-soft leather. She rolled from behind the steering wheel and leaned forward, coming to rest on her hands and knees, face against his tunic as she looked up into his eyes.
“Please, Tran,” she said, her voice husky. “Make me beg.”
-18-
“I need that favor we talked about,” Jill Repeth said as soon as she sat down in Daniel Markis’ living room. “As the Chairman of the Free Communities, I think President McKenna would listen to you.”
“I know he’d listen,” Daniel said, pouring a glass of red wine and handing Jill another. “Doesn’t mean he’ll grant it. Seems like an internal decision to me. It might be stepping on his toes. And besides, I heard you have his carte blanche already. Isn’t that enough?”
His wife Elise came and sat down next to her husband, taking one hand in both of hers but saying nothing.
“Look, sir –” she began.
“Daniel is fine. You’re not under my command anymore.”
Jill cleared her throat. “Daniel, then. I don’t have that access anymore. Not since I screwed up with Rick at Richmond. I’m sure the President is still grateful, but…I was out of bounds, using that pass for personal reasons.” She put her face in her hands. “It’s not just about letting me get the bionics. I want to get on the Orion.” She looked up with pleading eyes.
Daniel and Elise Markis exchanged glances. “You and a million other people. I’d have thought the list for suicide would be shorter, but apparently there are a hundred applicants for every position, except a few of the really unusual ones, like astronaut-helmsmen. For those there are only five or ten per.”
“That’s exactly why I need your help. In fact, there’s more. Rick wants to go too.” Jill reached for and tossed her wine off with a convulsive motion, then set the glass down carefully.
Daniel rubbed his clean-shaven jaw. “Okay, let me get this straight. You want me to use my influence to get you military-grade bionic enhancements from your own government, then you two get positions aboard Orion. That’s it?” His eyebrows danced above flaring nostrils and a disbelieving smile. “Not something easy instead, like, oh, world peace?”
“I thought you were working on that?” Jill retorted.
“I am. And to do it I deploy my favors and political capital carefully.”
“Spoken like a true politician.” Her bitterness bled through.
Daniel sighed. “I haven’t forgotten my roots in boots, Jill, if that’s what you’re trying to say. I understand how you feel.”
“The way I see it, sir – Daniel – you owe me.”
“Oh.” His face hardened. “It’s like that, is it?”
Jill’s face hardened in response. “You brought up politics, sir. I asked you for a favor, but maybe I should have said I’m here to collect one.”
“Even if I do owe you, this is more than one.”
“Fine, call it three and I’ll owe you a couple. But the Nebraska mission was also a fifty-fifty shot at suicide. Three good men died, and I…” She looked at her own clenched fists, slowly relaxing them to mere claws, “…I lost a piece of myself in there. But maybe you don’t owe me anything. By rights Rick should be enough. So…I’ll just ask you the favor. You do what you think is right.” She stood up. “But remember, they said they were sending the world’s best on the Orion. Hand-picked. With my record, I’m it. So I screwed up once. Everyone does. I’m still the best. And you know Rick is too. He singlehandedly kept the Free Communities – kept you – in the game for years with his network warfare, so you owe him too. Think about that, and then decide.”
Out of courtesy she didn’t slam the Markis’ front door behind her, but only barely. Great job, Jill. Go to ask the man for help and then antagonize him. He’s only the leader of a third of the world’s free countries and half of its economy. No big deal. Why didn’t you throw a drink in his face while you were at it?
She was halfway across the quiet street to the Johnstones’ before she realized she was being followed. Her hand was reaching for her holster before she remembered she was unarmed, and she turned to see Elise Markis. She stopped when she reached the sidewalk, under the watchful eye of a pair of the Chairman’s personal security detachment, letting Elise catch up.
“Jill, please,” Elise said, taking her hand. “I’ll talk to him. Don’t worry. You’re right, he does owe you. We all do.”
“And we all owe him, and you,” Jill said despairingly. “Everybody owes everyone so damn much, how are we gonna repay it all?” Tears welled suddenly in her eyes and the two women hugged each other spontaneously.
“It’s all right,” the older woman said, incongruously reaching upward to touch Jill’s bobbed hair. “You’ve been fighting for so long you forgot how not to. But you’re among friends now.”
“I know. That’s why it’s so hard. I’ve been surrounded by either brothers in arms or enemies for so long I don’t know how to act.”
“And you want to go back to it, I know. I’ve read about combat psychology, Jill. Edens aren’t immune to adrenaline addiction. Everything is simpler in a war zone. Now you have to deal with the complexity of normal life for a while and it’s hard.” Elise reached to stroke Jill’s face. “You know, Rick is like a second son to me, so that makes you a daughter. Don’t be such a stranger.”
“I think I just peed in my own pool, though.”
“Oh, Daniel? He doesn’t hold grudges. He’s just not used to being challenged anymore, at least not by anyone below the rank of General or Minister. It will do him good to remember the common soldier.”
“Marine,” Jill corrected automatically.
“Of course,” Elise said indulgently. “Say, why don’t you come over to the lab and we’ll find something for you to do. That’s probably part of it. Idle hands.”
“Sounds good.” They squeezed each other again and walked back to their respective houses.
Inside, Jill nodded to Cassandra Johnstone and Julio Marquez sitting at the dining room table. It was good to see Cass taking up with a man again. Twelve years was a long time to go without a companion, though with the longer lifespans now, she figured that would become more common. Up the stairs she went to Rick’s room.
Rick h
ad a guilty look on his face as she came in, and held his left wrist in his lap where she couldn’t immediately see.
“You know,” she said as she came over to knead his shoulders, “I’m not your mother. I’m not going to tell you not to play with that stuff. You decided not to have it ripped out and if you want to put it to use, that’s your decision and I respect it.” She ran her fingers down his arm until she touched his left wrist, and the insulated wire that jutted from under his skin.
“Okay,” he said, holding it up in front of him. “Mom hates it. She thinks it’s the first step to losing my humanity. Or maybe she blames the cyberware for my…” he tapped his head by way of explanation. “But it’s not the hardware that messed me up. It was the software that turned me into a Pavlov’s dog. Pain and pleasure, and hypno-conditioning. We were lucky that the triggers they induced to get me to try to upload the computer worm also let me think for myself, just enough.”
“Like I said before,” Jill reassured him, kneeling down next to the chair, “you fought it to a standstill, and you saved all our lives. The forensic programmers said you were wired to blow half a city block, as soon as your mission was complete, and that malware would have left the entire US communications network vulnerable to spying by the Unionists.” She kissed his hand, then his wrist where the wire showed. “You did good. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks. You’ll be even more proud of me when I tell you this.”
“What?”
“I want to take a walk.”
“Where?”
“Just a walk. No bodyguards, no doctors, nobody but you and me and Rosco.”
“Oh, now I’m no better than a Rhodesian Ridgeback?”
Rick laughed. “He won’t ask me about my childhood, or ‘how are we doing today Mr. Johnstone,’ or any of that garbage. He’ll just beg me to throw a ball until my arm falls off.”
“A walk outside. Well, I am proud of you. I know how hard it must be.”
Rick shrugged as if to say, no you don’t, but that’s okay.
Ten minutes later they were on that stroll, along the perimeter of the research compound, inside the fence. The mountains loomed fifty or more miles away beyond the Abe Bailey nature preserve, and it was almost as if they were outside the wire. She wasn’t sure Rick was ready for that yet. Rosco gamboled and they took turns throwing the ball to him.
“So Rick,” she began, and told him about her attempt at talking to Daniel Markis. “I’m assuming you still want to go.”
“I do. I’m sure I’ll be all right by the time it’s launched. It’s, what, almost four months away? The docs say I’ll probably have their blessing in a month or so, and Jill…I haven’t told them, but this thing in me…it’s amazing. What Shari did with it was evil, but it’s just a tool, a set of tools. Like anything else it’s how you use it, not what it is. And I hear they’re already talking about putting it in the astronauts’ heads.”
“No matter what you say, I feel kind of funny about using this technology. It seems tainted by their methods.” Jill ran her finger over his wrist where the rehealed skin covered the plug.
“So was Nazi research, but we used it anyway. And the irony is, it may save us. We’ll need every bit of edge we can get. It’s not so farfetched; fighter pilots already have some primitive versions for air combat, brainwave sensors and such. I’ve been testing mine out, and I’m starting to learn to get inside the networks, you know, with my mind. Just a little. Some of the equipment is not working, and I want to get it fixed.”
“All right then. If Markis will back us, then you’ll get your repairs, I’ll get my combat upgrades, and we’ll both be on the next spaceship outta here.” They both burst into laughter.
“You really are an action junkie, you know,” Rick said as he stopped her with a tug on her hand. “It’s what made you interesting, back in Colombia. Gun Girl extraordinaire.” He reached up to cup her head and kiss her.
She kissed him back. “If I am, what’s that make you?”
“Crazy, I guess. But either we’re both going, or we’re both staying. No more going off to war without me. Besides, I can put my talents to use on a spaceship. Maybe you'll be the one sitting around bored.”
“Silver-tongued devil. I bet that’s what you say to all the girls.”
“Never had another girl. Never will.”
Rosco the Rhodesian Ridgeback sat down and watched as the two-legs rubbed their noses together for an unreasonably long time.
-19-
Brigadier Nguyen watched from the headquarters building balcony as the outline of the superstructure of the great warship took shape in pieces. Each section was enormous compared with almost any other human undertaking, certainly larger than any vehicle ever completed. When it was all done, the Orion would mass more than any hundred aircraft carriers, yet was a vehicle that would fly into space.
It still amazed him.
The main ship under construction was separated from the nuclear propulsion drive testing area by twenty miles of outback and a low hilly range. Once all the tests were done the drive would be inverted on its reinforced struts – an incredible undertaking in itself – and the pieces of superstructure would be fitted atop it like a giant child’s model. This was the only way the Orion could be finished on time: simultaneous construction by over a hundred discrete teams, followed by a whirlwind of assembly.
After that would come as much testing of ship’s systems as could be done, but no shakedown cruise, no tryout aloft. There was neither time nor purpose to a flight test; it either worked or it didn’t, and the only possibility to recover from a mishap after launch was to bludgeon the ship into space and repair it there. It would be structurally unable to ever return to Earth.
He could see the vast storage yards with their truck-like crawlers carrying pieces of ship. Once the concepts had proven out, serial production had begun. Australia, and thus the Earth, was not betting everything on this one vessel. As fast as they could, they were making ready to assemble more. If everything went perfectly they would be able to launch a ship every two months. But only Orion would be ready to defend Earth when the alien Meme arrived.
Every week Nguyen visited the assembly site – with the rubber-stamp permission of Minister Ekara of course – and simply took it all in. This is my brainchild, he thought. Without me this nation would still be building missiles, nuclear-armed rockets as a last-ditch defense against a hopelessly superior enemy. Without a ship like this the aliens could simply stand off and pepper Earth with plague after plague, or worse, chunks of asteroid. Wipe us out like the dinosaurs. Now, the entire world is contributing, pouring precious resources into Australia – my Australia. And I alone had the vision to see it and the fortunate influence to make it happen.
And then a different mental voice reminded him: Remember, thou art mortal.
The vast construction complex teemed with eager Edens, all working sixteen hour days, striving to save the Earth. It was a strange dichotomy in Nguyen’s mind that on one hand thanked his ancestors for such willing slaves, and on the other allowed him this contemptuous cynicism. He despised them as individual drones, but appreciated them en masse; Psychos would never have done so well.
We were made to be the masters, they the slaves. Once this crisis is past, we – no, admit it in your secret heart, I – will rule. To reign immortal over a world, perhaps an interstellar empire...but there is much work to be done, and these aliens will not go gently into that good night.
Remember, thou art mortal.
He turned back from the balcony into his guest office and knocked softly on the door to the adjoining room. After a moment Minister Ekara opened the door with a smile. “I trust you are satisfied with our progress?”
“Very.” And he was. Ekara was a particularly efficient manager for projects of this type, nearly obsessive-compulsive to make things run on time. Nguyen remembered reading of Albert Speer, the Nazi Minister of Armaments that had rationalized the German war machine late in the wa
r, not soon enough to save his nation. This resemblance made Ekara useful.
Nguyen went on, “I would like to review the weaponry and Marine facilities, if you can spare some of your staff for a couple of hours.”
“Of course.” In reality this seemingly off-the-cuff request was part of a complex dance of trading favors and personal politics; Ekara’s staff had been preparing for the meeting, based on Nguyen’s well-known intentions, for at least half a workday. Maintaining the fiction that they could do it on a moment’s notice, however, allowed Ekara to seem even more competent than he already was – a stroke for his ego.
Nguyen spent the next several hours with the production experts on site. As head of Direct Action, the fact that he would be providing the nano-fortified Space Marines justified this leeway. The way they were expected to be employed became a justification all its own.
When he had first proposed the concept of boarding the enemy ship in space, the scientists and engineers had stared at him in disbelief, had called the concept impractical if not completely impossible. Once he had reminded them that he had commanded the only mission ever to board and seize an enemy nuclear submarine at sea, they had become slightly more receptive. And when he had pointed out that if they wanted to have any chance to acquire and use the enemy’s technology they would need a force trained to cleanse the enemy life form from their vehicle and capture it, they had agreed. Everyone involved thought it was the longest of long shots, but the payoff would be enormous.
It would have been extremely helpful to have Raphael’s shuttle available to examine, as an example of what they might face from the alien ship. Unfortunately, with Skull Denham out in space with the blended alien, most of the enemy tech was out of reach.
Not entirely, though. At great risk a Direct Action team had recovered the latest alien plague-spreading probe from where it fell to the seabed off the Chinese coast. Even now his people studied it in his secret laboratories, accompanied by selected scientists from Ekara’s department.
The Orion Plague Page 12
