“They are deciding that now,” Novak said, still measuring him with her small eyes.
Sathorn looked away from that wrinkled face. He let his eyes focus back on the screens spread around the upper third of the room in a flickering ring of real-time feeds.
“Will she make the decision today?” he said finally.
“I do not know,” Novak said, her voice crisp. “But I suspect yes…she will. The bare bones of it anyway. In fact, I suspect that decision might already have been made.”
Sathorn looked away from the screens and back at her, not hiding his incredulity, but the old woman shocked him by smiling.
“Do not worry yourself,” she said. “We are quite safe here.”
“Do not…” He practically choked on the words. “It could mean extinction. Real extinction. Or were you planning on simply cloning the last few hundred of us down here?”
Her smile lingered, but that colder look returned to her eyes.
Sathorn’s gaze followed the strange muscle movements that rippled through her small body as she shrugged.
“Do you ever think maybe that is inevitable, anyway?” she said casually.
“What is?” Sathorn let out a humorless laugh. “Extinction?”
“Yes,” she said.
At his silence, she gave him another of those small smiles.
“The human race seems to have been asking for such a thing for over a century at least,” she added. “…if not since its genetic inception.”
Staring at her, Sathorn felt a cold finger trail down his spine.
A darker suspicion crept over his mind.
Those weird eyes. The way she talked about human beings.
That fucking accent she tried to hide, that sounded even older than she looked, and she looked older than God.
The fact that she’d wormed her way into the highest corridors of power. The fact that no one seemed to be able to kick her out of the Oval Office…not even Brooks herself.
Maybe it really was all bullshit.
Maybe his pal in the NSA, Dworkin, was right. Dworkin had been drunk, of course. He’d also later claimed to be joking…but maybe he was right with what he’d said. Maybe the human race really had been played by seers all along. Maybe all of the supposed controls––SCARB, the World Court, the Sweeps, all of it––were just a smokescreen built by seers to obscure who was really in charge. A comforting lie that seers let humans tell themselves.
The illusion of control. Nothing masked real power better.
Even as he thought it, Sathorn knew that if he was right, he would never leave this room alive.
When he met the old woman’s gaze, he saw that same knowledge reflected in those blue-gray irises. The smile still toyed at the edges of her nonexistent lips, but the eyes remained shrewd, assessing. Animal-like.
Reptilian.
Sathorn imagined he saw some flicker of curiosity there too, as if she found it interesting that he would have put the pieces of her identity together now, when it was entirely too late. Sathorn watched her look at him and found himself thinking, it was over.
It really was over this time…and not just for him.
The human race was going the way of the dinosaur.
Even as he thought it, Sathorn let out a low chuckle.
No humor lived in the sound at all. It came out strangled, choked.
Still chuckling, he looked down at his thigh…where he now held his sidearm clutched in his hand. He watched it in a strange sort of fascination as he lifted the gun out of his lap. He didn’t send the command to do it. The arm and hand were no longer his.
He imagined he could almost see the puppet strings as Chief Justice Novak caused him to jam the barrel of his Beretta M9 against his own temple. He felt his fingers tighten around the handle, his finger slip into place by the trigger.
Again, without him willing it, he smiled.
She returned his smile, but the coldness never left those stone-like eyes.
“You know something, Novak?” Sathorn said.
He struggled to say even that much, forcing the words out between clenched teeth and that inhuman smile.
She inclined her head, a seer’s motion of acknowledgment.
Now that he could see it, he couldn’t unsee it. She looked so alien to him that he couldn’t imagine anyone believing her to be human, not if they really looked at her.
She looked amused now, as cold as the coldest merc iceblood he’d ever met in the field, back in the days when Sathorn had been a Ranger and fighting in the desert. Most of these icebloods got tagged with wet work for a reason, versus sitting in a room somewhere, feeding intel to agents on the ground who pulled the trigger for them.
Most of them were born murderers.
They got off on it. Killing and fucking.
It was all they knew. All they were good for.
Then again, maybe that’s what it took to survive. Maybe that’s why their race would inherit the Earth and the human race would rot from this fucking disease.
Those blue-gray eyes grew a touch colder.
“Yes?” she said. Her voice was crisp, strongly accented now. “What is it, Mr. Secretary? You had something you wished to say to me?”
Sathorn fought to smile.
That time, he couldn’t.
“You really do look like a fucking lizard,” he managed.
If she replied to his words, Sathorn never got to hear it.
The shot echoed in the small room, and Sathorn slumped to the cherry wood table.
“What do you mean, he shot himself?” Brooks frowned, staring at the woman in uniform standing in front of her. “Are you kidding me? Sathorn? Why?”
The woman flushed, her eyes betraying her discomfort.
She didn’t move out of her at-attention position, however, or lower her gaze.
“I don’t know that, sir,” she said. “I can only give you the physical disposition of the act itself. His body was found in Conference Room B, sir, in the Executive Wing. He seems to have disabled the surveillance in there before he did it, but we have no reason to suspect foul play. He had carbon residue on his fingers and his fingerprints were the only ones found on––”
“Yeah, okay, okay…” Brooks waved her off, grimacing. “Who found him?”
“Chief Justice Novak, sir.”
“Novak,” she muttered. “Figures.”
“Sir?”
Exhaling, Brooks averted her gaze, placing her hands on her hips.
President Moira Aisha Brooks––“Moi” to her friends, of which there were precious few these days and “Moisha” to her parents, who had been confirmed dead two months ago along with most of the people Brooks grew up with in that dingy suburb of Detroit––grimaced. She didn’t comment, however. Instead she turned from the Marine altogether, looking out over the sunken floor command center from the catwalk balcony where she stood.
“Sir…” the Marine began.
“Fine. Okay.” Brooks lowered her head, fighting not to swear under her breath. “Thank you for telling me, Reynolds. You’re dismissed.”
The woman hesitated, then saluted smartly.
As she turned on her heel to walk away, Brooks called after her, “…Keep me informed if anything new comes to light around it. Anything, Marine.”
The woman saluted her again, clicking her heels that time.
With Reynolds gone, Brooks exhaled more heavily, grinding her teeth as she gripped the balcony railing in both hands, so tightly her knuckles whitened. The teeth grinding was a new habit she’d picked up too, sometime in the last six or so months.
Now she was doing it awake, in addition to while she slept.
Sathorn, a suicide? What next?
She fought to think, staring at the main intelligence board on the far side of the room. The command center stretched into the distance below her, far enough to suffer from mild perspective distortion. It was huge, maybe half the size of a football field with a ceiling that stretched three stories high. Con
centric half-rings of monitors filled much of the empty space of the main floor, culminating in a platform stage with a long conference table that seated around thirty people. The table stood directly under a wall-length feed monitor build directly into the wall itself.
That screen currently showed a map of the world.
Smaller screens jutted out of various locations, displaying 3D imagery in more or less real time, via a series of feeds rotating through different satellites, as well as whatever remained of their on-the-ground surveillance. Up on the dais, the screens projected full virtual, three-dimensional environments with a single impulse from Brooks’ implant.
It felt like being in the real place…down to the smell of sweat and blood, urine and smoke, burning bodies and rotting plant matter…and whatever else.
The military bigwigs called the command center “the Arena.”
The name always evoked gladiators in Brooks’ mind, people clawing and fighting one another to the death. Which, come to think of it, was more or less apt.
What remained of her presidency lived here now, deep below what had once been NORAD, or North American Aerospace Defense Command. The tunnels had been expanded heavily over the years, something Brooks hadn’t realized until the crisis with C2-77.
The place was a damned city of its own now, or near enough.
Her eyes focused back on the screens, shifting from one hot spot to the next.
Of course, none of those screens showed images from what had come to be called the “blackout” cities. Their cameras and satellites remained completely inaccessible to anyone inside Brooks’ administration. Brooks had seen the list of those cities so many times now she nearly had it memorized: Dubai. Hong Kong. Singapore. Munich. Buenos Aires. Oslo.
New York…Salt Lake City…Anchorage.
There were others, but those last three stung the most.
Even inside her own country, they’d locked her out.
Brooks clearly hadn’t been invited to the party where they handed out golden tickets. Then again, she hoped they choked on their damned caviar while they watched the world burn from inside their (undoubtedly) gilded cages.
So yeah, maybe her lack of an invite wasn’t that surprising.
The military still thought China was behind all of it, of course…including the blackout cities, even those inside the United States. Military Intelligence now had a working theory that China had used the disease along with their financial clout as a double-whammy of colonization and genocide, using seer armies to block off cities for their “friends” and (presumably) to begin the process of colonization after the disease wiped out any resistance.
They thought China had decided to take over the world, in other words.
According to that theory, the disease merely paved the way. It had the added bonus of freeing up natural resources for the eventual mass relocation of Chinese nationals into the newly-depopulated areas. However-many billion Chinese might be crouching behind those walls, waiting for the rest of the world to die, they would have to eat and they would need fresh water and housing and jobs…or so the logic went.
There was only one problem with that scenario.
Brooks didn’t believe it.
If the reports Brooks had been getting via back channels were in any way accurate, the Chinese had wiped out almost two-thirds of their own population in the process. To Brooks, that was a little hard to swallow, no matter how many generals tried to convince her that a) those reports were bogus, or b) the Chinese simply didn’t “value life” like Westerners did.
Again, Brooks had her doubts.
Moreover she’d gotten that back channel intel from sources who’d claimed to be recording events actually occurring on mainland China. Many of the seer feeds backed that data up, notably Drahk, probably the most reputable of those. Another, slightly more anti-Western feed run by some kind of seer mafia out of Macau said essentially the same thing.
The Chinese were dying in droves according to those sources. Faster than they were in the United States…faster than they were anyplace other than India.
Of course, her intelligence people thought it was all crap.
Fabricated data. Doctored feeds. Propaganda.
“Image captures” created wholesale in virtual studios.
Both her Homeland Security Chief and the head of the CIA argued vehemently that it was all just a smoke screen to fool the world into seeing China as another victim of the disease. They speculated that those false reports would continue until no one remained to fight back.
They claimed further that the satellite blackout over mainland China was proof enough that the Chinese government had engineered the blackouts over individual cities in the rest of the world. They called it “preserving prime real estate” and postulated that the Chinese intended to use surviving locals as cheap labor, slaves to the Chinese Empire that would rise from the ashes.
Since the shields over China seemed heaviest over Tibet, there was some speculation that Lhasa would end up being the new capital for a new China. It made sense, in a perverse sort of way. With the rising water levels, Lhasa would outlast many of the older, coastal cities.
Still, Brooks remained skeptical.
Well, she was until the threat arrived that morning…a threat which seemed to have come directly from Beijing.
Sighing at the reminder, Brooks threaded a few stray chunks of her curly, black-threaded-with-gray hair back into the messy upsweep she’d clipped together earlier. The more formal aspects of her presidential comportment had gone by the wayside in the past months, but she didn’t much care about that, truthfully. She’d tied her hair back casually earlier that day mainly for practical purposes, since she’d been working over the security board with the NSA and CIA analysts and leaders after receiving the threat from Beijing’s acting president, Xiao Ming Fa.
She couldn’t believe Jo Sathorn killed himself.
The shock continued to reverberate through her, making it difficult to think about anything else, even with the bigger issues currently on her plate. Sathorn was an old-school hawk, and racist to the core when it came to seers, but Brooks had at least known where she stood with him. Moreover, she’d trusted him, even when she didn’t agree with him. He had good instincts and didn’t play games…well, other than those that were par for the course in this job. Brooks hadn’t realized how much she’d depended on his blunt advice until about two seconds after that Marine told her he was dead.
Had he cracked up? Not like that should be surprising really, but somehow it was.
He’d seemed so…solid.
Bullet to the brain. Self-inflicted.
And that lizard-faced Justice found him. Novak.
Of all people, that fucking reptile had to be the one to find Jo’s body. Sathorn had made no bones about disliking that old witch, and he wasn’t alone. The three of them, Sathorn, Brooks and her Chief of Staff, Javier Garcia, called Novak “Dr. Mengele” behind her back. Brooks knew they shouldn’t do it, that it would likely get back to Novak at some point, but she couldn’t seem to make herself stop, or make the others cut it out, either.
Hell, they needed to whistle in the dark sometimes, especially now.
Damn Jo all to hell. How could he do this?
How could he do this to her?
No one in her team could take his place, not even Javier. She’d been just about to go find Jo, for crying out loud…to ask his opinion on this latest move from China. She wanted to talk to more than just the intelligence hawks and paranoid cases before she pulled the trigger on nuking an entire fucking continent. Jo might be a hawk, but he wasn’t rash…or stupid.
She had to make a decision, and soon.
Focusing back on the main screen, Brooks frowned.
The images there were of America, her home…and they were brutal.
She’d seen feed recordings of people––people who might have been “normal” citizens once, sitting in restaurants and sports bars, having barbecues and birthday parties–
–beating one another with tire irons over cans of worm-ridden dog food.
She’d seen tribal-like conditions run by private armies both in the countryside and the inner cities. Many of those modern-variety warlords and “territory bosses” had probably been career criminals in the past. Others, Brooks suspected, had not been criminals, but perhaps had the types of personalities designed to capitalize on the chaos anyway.
Weapons got stockpiled, of course.
None of that happened equally, either.
Things were most grim for women and children, as was often the case. Brooks struggled to even watch some of those images. They didn’t have the people or the firepower to intervene, not now. Truthfully, Brooks knew it made the most sense at this point to do what she suspected was being done in China and the other surviving cities, including the blackout zones.
Meaning, simply wait out the disease. Let it kill off those it was going to kill before attempting to pull the civilization back together.
Sighing again, Brooks gripped the metal balcony in front of her, rocking on her low pumps as she stared down at that row of screens.
She had to make a decision.
She had to do it soon.
If she didn’t, there might be nothing of her country and people left to save.
8
GOING OUT WITH A BANG
“Nuclear?” I stared at Wreg, feeling something in my gut clench. I looked at Yumi, realizing this information had to come from her people. “You’re sure?”
Yumi was looking at my clothes though.
I fought to ignore her stare.
It’d been a few days now, and I knew they’d all heard what happened with Chandre up on that wall. They also knew Revik hadn’t thrown me out, although some probably thought he should have. I could tell a fair few at least thought he’d let me off easy. I’d overheard whispers of theories on that, too, including guilt around his own infidelities.
Truthfully, I didn’t much care about any of that. It struck me as trivial now.
That being said, I couldn’t focus on what Yumi had just told me, either. Not now. Not tonight. I couldn’t think about this now. This would have to wait.
Dragon: Allie's War Book Nine Page 13
