He said the last thing almost like a joke. Trailing, he looked away from me again, staring at the far wall. Then he exhaled in a longer sigh.
I saw his jaw harden, right before he looked back at me.
Whatever the decision had been, he’d just made it.
I could feel it.
“I might have…a solution,” he said, his voice cautious.
His accent was stronger again. I felt my light open. As if he’d heard me, or felt the change in my light, he added,
“…You might not like it. My solution.”
Taking a breath, I nodded, letting him feel I’d suspected that.
He hesitated again. I could feel him toying with words…then wrestling with them in his head, trying to decide how to ask. I kept my thoughts in the background while he did it, although some part of me already suspected where this might be going.
In the end, he didn’t say anything at all.
He showed me pictures, instead.
Even those pictures came at me with caution. And jealousy. I felt his jealousy, and his anger at me for making this harder on him with the thing with Chandre.
Some of what I saw and felt were memories…not just his memories, but memories I shared with him. I saw the rebel fortress in China, what happened in the common room after that disastrous mission in São Paulo. I saw us in New York, a conversation we’d had in the Third Jewel after we got back from South America the second time.
After he finished sending me memories, he sent a stream of additional information, flooding my light with words, emotions and more pictures. His worries about my reaction to him asking, the fact that Balidor had suggested it, that Revik would talk to Jon for me but that he really wanted Wreg and Jon involved if we did it, along with Balidor and Yumi and most of the infiltration team.
Except Chandre. Her name had been excised from the fucking list.
Revik made that really damned clear, too.
He told me there was no way in hell he’d let Kat or Ullysa anywhere near it either, or anyone else I didn’t want involved…with the exception of Jon and maybe he’d even bend on that but he felt pretty strongly Jon and Wreg should be there. He definitely wanted Wreg there. He couldn’t expect Jon to be okay with Wreg being involved without him since they were married, and anyway, Revik wanted Jon there, too.
And so on. It went on for awhile.
And yeah, there was more, but those were the highlights.
When he finished conveying all of that, he just waited.
He didn’t let go of me, but he didn’t speak either. He watched my face, holding me tightly in his arms while I turned over his proposal in my mind.
I already knew I’d agree to it.
If this was Revik handling me, if he’d maneuvered me here in some way of his, even using my guilt about Chandre…well, I couldn’t make myself care about that, either. He’d finally worn me down to the point where it wasn’t enough to make me say no.
Not this time.
And I didn’t really think he had maneuvered me, anyway.
I knew we still might end up regretting it. And yeah, I hated the idea of Jon and Wreg being involved. I hated the idea of Balidor being there, too, mainly because I knew it would bother Revik more than he’d ever admit to me.
I knew all of that, and yet I knew I’d agree to it anyway.
So I only nodded.
“Okay, Revik,” I said. “Okay.”
7
NORAD
Secretary of Defense Johan (“Jo”) Sathorn glanced up at the giant feed monitor that covered one full wall of the meeting room. Once he focused on the screen he found he couldn’t look away. He was so transfixed by the images there, he’d already gotten most of the way into the room before he looked down at the table itself.
Once he had, he flinched.
A woman sat there. Alone.
She stared at him with oddly-small, dark eyes, her wrinkled face entirely immobile below a helmet-like covering of iron gray hair. Sathorn blinked at the intensity of her stare, then forced himself to relax. She was a creepy old broad, that was for damned sure. Definitely one of those people who came to power via appointments and back-door dealings, versus any ability to charm or even relate to groups of people en masse.
No way would anyone ever elect a face like that.
He forced a smile, mustering as friendly of a wave as he could manage.
“Are we the first ones here?” he said, still smiling. “And here I was, worried I was late.”
“You are,” she said.
Her voice was curt. Nothing in her demeanor acknowledged his smile in any way.
Weirdly, Sathorn also caught the barest hint of a Germanic accent. He’d thought he heard that before in her voice, but never so prominently. Where the hell was she really from? And why was she hiding it? There was no natural-born-citizen clause to be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, not that he knew of.
The accent was weird, in any case, a mish-mash of Germanic European and something else he couldn’t identify. Sathorn had German in-laws. He knew the difference. Was she Swiss maybe? Was German a second language for her, too?
Whatever it was, it openly mocked the Midwestern American cadence she normally pretended.
“…The meeting is canceled,” Novak added, equally blunt.
“Canceled?” Sathorn raised his eyebrows. “Why?”
“She had something else come up. Something that couldn’t wait.”
By “she,” Sathorn knew Novak meant the President.
Nodding, he turned over her words. If the old woman wasn’t in there with Brooks and the others, it had to be something military.
Glancing back at the feed monitor, he watched images flicker and change, rotating across his vision in a strangely uniform blend, one city into the other. Mostly cities in the United States were depicted here, all but the blackout cities of New York, Anchorage and Salt Lake City. In other rooms monitors depicted other parts of the world, but this room focused mainly on what remained of the States itself.
Los Angeles, which now looked mostly deserted. They’d air-lifted some of the uber-wealthy who’d crouched there in the first months of the outbreak to higher land, mostly in New Mexico and Colorado. The majority of the coastal areas, including a long swath of Highway 1 and Highway 5 down where it twisted towards the coast in the south, were flooded now between the failing containment fields and the ever-worsening storms. Venice Beach and Long Beach, along with parts of Malibu and most of downtown San Diego were several feet underwater, although Sathorn saw signs of life here and there, even now. Boats paddling down wide streets. Smoke and fires in upper story buildings, probably survivors trying to keep fed and relatively dry.
Miami, which had even less surviving above water.
Chicago, with its looted and burned downtown.
Phoenix, which seemed to consist mainly of well-armed, roving gangs in cars cruising and patrolling the streets.
San Francisco, which had broken out into strange quadrants and zones all along the city streets, also owned by vigilante and paramilitary groups of various kinds.
The list continued.
Atlanta. Houston. Seattle. St. Louis. Philadelphia. Memphis. Detroit. Las Vegas. Cincinnati. Pittsburg, Washington D.C.…
Sathorn gazed across the flickering three- and two-dimensional images, still unable to see them as fully real. Something about being underground and removed from the day to day of what happened outside of the NORAD bunker made everything on those screens look and feel almost like fiction. Reality, such as it was, had become akin to a dystopian movie with too many extras but really good special effects.
Maybe that was just a coping strategy, too.
In any case, he wondered why Brooks hadn’t invited him in to whatever meetings might be happening downstairs. He was the damned Secretary of Defense, after all.
He considered just slinking out…leaving the room without bothering with an excuse.
Then, thinking a bit more, he changed h
is mind.
Whatever he thought of the old lady personally, she definitely had the President’s ear. She also probably knew what was going on downstairs, even if she hadn’t been included herself.
Chief Justice Novak’s influence over the Executive Branch was infamous at this point.
It hadn’t started with Brooks; it started under President Wellington.
Before Wellington, no one had ever even heard of a member of the Supreme Court being involved in decision-making discussions taking place inside the Oval Office. If asked prior to Wellington’s presidency, Sathorn would have thought such a thing must be illegal, given the supposed objectivity of the Courts and separation of powers…but Wellington started inviting the scary old fossil to planning sessions soon after he took office.
When questioned, Wellington used national security as his excuse.
Something to do with needing the branches of government better aligned after the nightmare of Caine’s treason, along with the more pressing need to root out any further spies or terror threats in-house. Other rhetoric in those years discussed “the need for the Courts to be more aware of the wider contexts that might influence their judgments on the legality or advisability of specific actions that might need be taken by the other segments of the government, particular in regard to national defense.”
Which was pure spin-politico-speak, or bullshit, as it was more colloquially known, but no one really questioned it at the time. Most thought Wellington had really done it to pave the way legally for his all-out war against China.
Some even said it was a brilliant move, politically-speaking.
Sathorn had been one of those.
Along with everyone else, Sathorn had thought Wellington had been using the Supreme Court to force buy-in from Congress in the event of an otherwise illegal and undeclared aggression against Asia as a whole…perhaps even an extermination campaign against any non-USA seers, potentially both at home and abroad.
Since no one in the administration particularly disagreed with those aims after the Caine affair, no one really stepped up and argued the point.
Then Wellington got murdered by those same seers he’d set out to destroy.
The terrorist and telekinetic seer, “Syrimne,” appeared on the scene shortly after, operating out of a bunker most believed lived in a corner of China’s Asia.
Many still muttered that a seer “coup” had taken place, and that everything had pretty much gone to hell in a hand basket from that point forward.
Sathorn had been one of those, too.
Unfortunately, it all happened too damned fast for anyone to be able to stop it, particularly given the monumental amount of bureaucratic bullshit that went into decision-making at the level of the Federal government. Many also believed that, in the years leading up to the outbreak of C2-77, Brooks lacked the single-minded conviction of Wellington when it came to addressing the dual threats from China and the seer menace.
Those screams got a lot louder when C2-77 hit the scene.
Those same screams continued now, more or less unabated, even with the remnants of the United States government living primarily underground. Sathorn didn’t disagree with most of those critics. After all, seers had all but annihilated the human race and Brooks still hadn’t ordered any major offensives against either the terrorist seers themselves or their human masters in Beijing. Sathorn had no fucking idea what nuclear weapons were even for, if they weren’t going to be used in a situation like this.
Yet, despite his own, personal criticisms about her soft response to the C2-77 outbreak and ensuing crisis, Sathorn knew Brooks was hardly a wimp. In their private talks, Sathorn noticed Brooks seemed less afraid to act than frustrated about and skeptical of the intelligence information she was being given.
Given what he’d witnessed these past few months, Sathorn was beginning to see her point.
That feeling of invisible enemies was one of the strangest aspects surrounding Brooks’ presidency, though…and there had been a fuck of a lot of strange things.
Then again, Brooks had been granted the dubious honor of very likely being the very last President of the United States. Fate or some other force had chosen her to be the one to ride the ship down into the depths of the C2-77 ocean.
Not that he blamed her for what had happened. How could he?
If anything, he blamed the half-dozen leaders who came before her, who compromised with the seers and their supposed “peaceful leadership” despite the terrorist fringes they couldn’t seem to control, and that seemed to grow in number year after year. The State Department wasted years signing treaties with those impotent monks and figureheads when they probably should have been wiping the whole damned infestation off the face of the Earth.
But hindsight was always 20/20 when it came to war.
When faced with the annihilation of one’s entire species, that was likely doubly true.
Sathorn pulled out a chair, lowering his weight to the leather cushion.
He looked at Novak as he did and caught the old lizard staring at him, her eyes an oddly light blue under the side-lighting of the oval-shaped room. He could have sworn her irises were brown before…or hazel. Some muddier color, surely?
She wore eyeglasses, which Sathorn always thought a bit strange. No one needed eyeglasses in this day and age. Even poor people could get corrective surgery if they could prove it would allow them to remain employed, which just about anyone could, even the guy playing three-card-monte at the Port Authority bus terminal. Only the poorest of the poor wore those old relics, and that definitely wasn’t Chief Justice Novak.
Sathorn wondered if it was part of her old lady schtick, something meant to disarm, to make her seem grandmotherly and harmless.
If so, it wasn’t working.
The eye color thing struck him as weird, but maybe that was just a trick of the light.
“Did something happen?” Sathorn asked her. He kept his voice somber but polite, resting his arms on the cherry wood table.
The old woman continued to stare at him.
Something about the blankness of that stare, or perhaps the utter lack of feeling he could sense in it, made him nervous.
Novak blinked even as he thought it, looking away.
“Yes,” she said. Leaning back, she adjusted the metal-frame glasses, giving him a grim smile. “…The Chinese have issued another threat.”
Sathorn felt his fingers tense on the table. “What do they want?”
Novak made a vague gesture with one hand, one Sathorn wasn’t sure how to interpret.
“What do you think?” she said, again that faint trace of German accent touching her syllables. “They want us to hand over the antidote. They believe the rumors put out by the Russians that we are hoarding some kind of vaccine for the C2-77 virus. They think we are refusing to share it with the rest of the world.”
Sathorn frowned. “There’s no truth to that, is there?”
He said it without thinking.
Even so, he was startled at the faintly amused smile that ghosted the old lady’s lips.
“Why would you ask me that?” she said.
Sathorn decided to tell her the truth. He’d long believed that truth-telling begat truth-telling. People often knew instinctively when someone was lying to them, even if they chose to believe that lie for emotional or other reasons.
“One hears things,” he said. Leaning back in his chair so that the swivel joint squeaked, he smiled, mirroring her businesslike tone as he also gestured lightly with a hand. “It occurred to me that if supplies were limited…assuming such a thing existed, of course…we might sit on it for awhile. We might wait on sharing it before we had the manufacturing capacity to begin production on a large scale, especially given the civil unrest it was likely to provoke. Moreover, the Chinese have not been good allies to us in recent years…”
Trailing, he gave a loaded shrug, again gesturing a question mark with his hand.
“…I suspect they would not be h
igh on the list for distribution,” he finished. “Not only because of Caine…or even the attack on our White House and the death of our revered President Wellington…although it’s a bit of an insult to our intelligence at this point that they still deny involvement in either. Regardless of the specifics, the lies have been numerous and unrepentant. And the acts of war have been unprecedented, at least since the Nazis took power in the last century. We have any number of reasons to want to share any technology we might have in that regard with others before we gifted it to China.”
Novak didn’t blink the whole time Sathorn spoke.
When he finished, she gave him one of those half-smiles again.
“Well said,” she murmured. “Although if you are right, that snubbing may come at a very high cost, given the nature of this current threat.”
“Which is what?” Sathorn said.
“Nuclear war,” Novak replied.
She said it like she’d said everything else, drumming her fingers on the table as she watched his face, as if gauging his reaction.
When Sathorn didn’t speak, Novak shrugged. The shrug was strange, and seemed to encompass her hand as much as her narrow shoulders.
Again, he thought he heard the trace of a German accent.
“They have threatened to bomb what remains of our cities, one by one, until we hand over this antidote they believe we are keeping from them,” Novak continued in that emotionless voice. “Our President may have no choice but to take extreme measures, as a result. Preemptively, perhaps. Perhaps within the next few days. A week at most.”
Sathorn felt his face lose every shred of its warmth.
His hands felt cold too. He found himself clenching his fingers in reflex, without looking away from Novak’s face. As much as he’d wanted Brooks to make a bold military statement in the wake of C2-77, he hadn’t really wanted it to be this particular statement. Not right now. Hell, he’d figured the time for that was already hell and gone.
“Preemptively?” Fighting to get the saliva back into his mouth, Sathorn adjusted his seat, causing the leather to sigh. “As in––”
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 12
