The ground rushed up, and Wyatt realized he was down on all fours. His body felt so heavy. Elbows wavered under the increasing strain until they suddenly buckled. He fell face-first into the dirt, smothered, unable to even turn his head and take a desperate gasp of oxygen. Then his hips gave. As he lay crumpled against the ground, the crushing fist of gravity squeezed his lungs against his spine and forced out the last of his breath in a hoarse cough. Here he was, a broken half-man, who had rejected friends and family, lovers and comfort, to hurl himself into a repulsive and lonely existence at the mercy of alien planets.
Why?
Wyatt knew he was going to die. The pain, the suffocating weight that bore down on him, left no other end.
At the edge of his vision, two shadowy figures glared at him from next to the wreckage of a burning Javelin. The first one raised its hand and pointed an accusatory finger at him.
“What do you see?” thundered Major Beck’s voice.
“Death,” Wyatt grunted. “Pain.”
The other figure pointed next. “What do you see?” asked Father Bradley.
“God.”
The shadows took a sideways step and became one, their voices joining into a single chorus. “It is the same,” they chanted. “It is the same.”
Helpless, Wyatt felt the despair flow into his heart.
“It is the same.”
Sara …
18
“Lieutenant.”
Wyatt’s eyes popped open. The stars, Proxima, all of it was gone. A lone discoloration from water damage on the ceiling was all that looked back at him.
“Over here.” Chris’s silhouette stood in the doorway.
He sat up and swung his legs off the bed. His skin felt clammy, his hair damp. He glanced at his prosthetic calf, wondering what agony lurked behind its virtual neurons, waiting for him.
“Everything okay? You were making noises.”
“Yeah.”
“Can’t say that sounds convincing.” Chris entered the bedroom but didn’t sit. “I brought Elton up to speed on our discussion about getting some human intel. If you’re ready.”
The truth was Wyatt felt far from ready. But he had learned long ago not to hesitate when it came to accomplishing key elements of a mission. Time killed all things.
He followed Chris down a hall to another room, but this one was configured as a kind of armory. Half a dozen Vectors lined the walls next to a longer-barrel L-6 Viper variant and ARC vests pockmarked from laser blasts. A small carbon-fiber folding table had been set up in the middle with two chairs. Elton waited behind one of the chairs, holding a small tablet computer in his hands.
“Are we gearing up?” Wyatt asked.
“No.” Chris sat on one of the chairs. “There are just not a lot of places in this house you can have a private conversation.”
“And this does need to be kept private. Even from the others,” Elton said.
“Okay.”
Wyatt seated himself and did his best to ignore the pain of emptiness in his stomach. Elton remained standing. The deputy chief wore a rumpled dress shirt and gray slacks that looked like they’d been slept in. Dark circles surrounded his eyes. He didn’t seem like the friendly sort.
Elton cleared his throat. “Master Sergeant Thompson explained to me a bit more why you’re here. You’re doing recon from Proxima because interplanetary shipping stopped. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“And you got shot down? That’s how you landed on Juliet?”
“Something like that.”
Elton nodded. He gave Wyatt a long look. “You stumbled into a hornet’s nest, son. Do you know what’s happening here?”
“A little, from Chris.”
The deputy chief shot a disapproving glance at the master sergeant. He placed the tablet on the table.
“Tell me what you see.”
The tablet had an old digital screen that preceded holo monitors by a good twenty years. Wyatt saw a video still of an older man with a goatee, sitting upright on a hospital bed with his legs swung over the side. The hospital gown had fallen off his shoulders and drooped toward his belly. He didn’t seem to notice or care.
“Looks like a patient.”
“Yes. This is actually one of my staffers,” Elton said. He used his fingers to zoom in on the man’s face. “See anything unusual about him?”
Wyatt leaned forward. The man in the image stared into space like he was focusing on something that wasn’t there.
“His eyes look funny. His pupils are really small.”
Elton spoke from behind his shoulder. “The unofficial name for it is constriction, since, as you’ve pointed out, the most telltale sign is your pupils constricting down to a pinpoint. There isn’t an official name.”
“So what happens to him? He just sits there?”
“At the beginning. When someone comes down with this, they become very lethargic. They lose the ability to communicate. Soon after, they don’t recognize you anymore. What’s really happening during this time is the constriction is busy destroying who they are. Everything you might have known about someone—their personality, their identity—it’s slipping away. At the end, there’s a resurgence where an infected person wakes up and becomes active again. That’s when their eyes ratchet down. And all they care about from then on is finding another person to infect.”
Wyatt thought back to Parrell and the piercing gaze of the colonists. The shower of golden sparks that filled his vision. The burning pain and the vague sense of his consciousness slipping away.
“Who did your staffer catch if from? Did he know he was infected?”
“You mean, were there symptoms he should have recognized? No. That’s probably why it spreads so quickly.” Elton shook his head. “How do you notice something’s wrong when it’s your own mind that’s fading?”
A hundred questions flooded Wyatt’s mind. Their squad had come very close to those people in the rec facility in Parrell. Had he been infected? Had Izzy? Were they going to turn into vegetables like the staffer in the video? Wyatt had so much he wanted to ask, but something told him to keep the questions to himself. He didn’t really know how Elton and Chris would react. They had only just met, and Wyatt’s mission was too important.
“Help me understand something,” Wyatt said finally. “It seems to me a quarantine would be the right thing to do. Not the murderous kind Chris described. One that separates the infected from the healthy until a cure can be delivered.”
Fatigue washed through the deputy chief’s eyes. He turned to Chris and let out a huff. “This is why this is a waste of time.”
“Elton,” Chris said. The master sergeant’s voice remained level. “It’s a reasonable question. You need to educate.”
The room fell silent. Elton seemed annoyed, as if Wyatt had touched on a raw nerve that had long been burned out. The deputy chief finally turned back to him and clamped his hands together.
“Originally, Governor Hewitt had the same idea,” Elton said. “But where do you draw the line? It’s contagious. Very contagious. How do you know who the carriers are when they’re early stage? Are you going to let the police drag away your child to what’s basically going to be an extermination camp, based on a suspicion? Or a brother? A parent? Quarantine is a death sentence. I’m sure we’re just a bunch of foreign objects to you, Lieutenant. You’re a spacer. But tell a Julietan rancher you’re going to tear apart his family? He’ll put a blast hole in your forehead.”
His voice dropped to a whisper. “And so, people guess wrong. A wife protects her husband. A brother protects a sister. When the constriction hits, they’ll know it was a mistake. But it’s still your loved one. Maybe someone you’ve built your entire life around. You watch as that person slips away, gone forever. Then the next thing you know, your husband, your sister, your whoever—their sole purpose becomes hunting you down so that you’re gone forever, too. I don’t know if that sounds frightening to you, Lieutenant. Let me tell you, it
is.”
Wyatt glanced over at Chris. The Marine watched him, gauging his reaction.
“Look,” Wyatt said. “No disrespect, I’m just trying to understand. Do you know what causes it?”
Elton shook his head. “No. We haven’t been able to figure that out. Not from a lack of trying. There’ve been more autopsies than I care to count. So, with no understanding of what we’re dealing with, Governor Hewitt’s policy shifted from cure to containment.” He looked over at Chris. “General McManus had a very brutal interpretation of that word.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“Martial law. Execution squads using ‘proactive selection.’ Family members torn out of each other’s arms.”
“And you decided you weren’t onboard with that.”
“Not just us. Secretary Chavez ran the Office of the Interior and opposed the plan. Hewitt jailed him. General Hu, the Security Undersecretary, attempted a coup. He was executed.” Elton suddenly appeared very weary. “The Governorship exists to protect our citizens, Lieutenant. Not eradicate them. But Governor Hewitt is utterly convinced he’s doing the right thing and is pursuing it with fanatical zeal. Those of us who didn’t agree were going to have a very short shelf life.”
Wyatt weighed the story. What level of depth would RESIT want? At a tactical level, neither Wyatt nor his team had observed any of these events. Important elements always got left out with each passing on of information. And for a response plan that would encompass political, economic, and social initiatives to ensure the well-being of millions of citizens? They’d need more. Much more.
“Thank you for sharing all this,” Wyatt said. “I’d like to ask you something. Would you be willing to go with me back to Proxima?”
The familiar look of distaste crept back into Elton’s face. “I’m not going anywhere, Lieutenant. If you think I’m going to turn my back on people who need my help, you’re out of your mind.” He waved a hand dismissively. “I wouldn’t be that much help to you anyway. I can talk about a lot of things at a high level. But if you want hard intel, you need someone who knows the details.”
“And who would that be?”
Elton and Chris shared a long glance.
“Jack Bell,” Chris said.
“And who is that?”
“He’s the Chief Analyst at the Department of Health.” Elton rubbed his hands together. “You need to understand. Everything Hewitt is doing right now is based on interpretations of how to combat constriction. Bell’s team is the group collecting, analyzing … controlling that data. Get him, and you’ll be able to understand all the drivers around what’s happening down here.”
“All right. How do we contact Mr. Bell?”
Chris stood up and folded his arms. “With a punch to the face and flex cuffs.”
“I take it he wouldn’t be cooperative, then.”
“Depends how hard that punch is.”
Wyatt thought he understood. “You want to do a snatch-and-grab. Kidnap a government official. That’s not exactly what RESIT is about.”
“I thought the I stood for Interdiction?” Chris asked.
Elton leaned over and put his hands on the table. “Our planet is falling apart. The government is acting illegally, beyond its established powers, to actively harm its citizens. You can put aside any reservations about your own team’s boundaries, Lieutenant. If your mission was to recon the situation and bring back intel, this is the only approach to do it in any meaningful way.”
Wyatt remained silent. His mind spun through the implications.
Kidnap a state official.
Utilizing a temporary alliance with Chris and his rogue faction was one thing. Asking Wyatt to become a collaborator was another. It had court-martial written all over it.
Did he really believe what Chris and Elton were telling him?
He looked at Elton. The irritation the deputy chief wore belied an earnestness in his voice. A man in deep pain, he had exiled himself rather than act in an illegal and immoral way. If he had an ulterior motive, something to gain other than what he had disclosed in his story, Wyatt couldn’t figure out what it could be.
A soft knock thumped on the door. Chris got up, opened it a few centimeters, and spoke with someone in the hallway. “Excuse me for a minute,” he said, and left.
Elton still hovered over the table. “What’s it going to be, Lieutenant? You say you came here to solve a major problem. So far, I’m not impressed with your conviction.”
“You don’t seem to like me very much.”
The deputy chief stared at Wyatt with tired eyes. “It’s not you personally, Lieutenant. It’s all of you outsiders. You don’t live here. You don’t understand who we are, what we had to go through to tame this planet. Julietans are a proud people. Hardy. Clever. Self-reliant.” His face softened slightly. “Asking for help is not something we do.”
“You’re asking for more than help,” Wyatt said. “We’re talking about taking them hostage.”
Elton gave him a long, hard look.
“Chris tells me when you first came through the quantum gate, you said you came under fire. One of your spacecraft crews got killed?”
Wyatt felt his face sour. “A RESIT ship used a boarding drone on a freighter trying to run away. That’s not the way it’s supposed to work. Lethal force is a last resort.”
“We’re already at the last resort, Lieutenant. If what’s happening here were ever to leave Juliet…”
The Deputy Chief left the room, leaving Wyatt alone with the implication hanging in the air.
19
Wyatt found Laramie in the front room sitting cross-legged on the floor. She had a ceramic bowl cradled in her hands and was eating. Again.
“Strange to see you giving up your field rations.”
“I do like other things, you know.”
A tangy smell hit Wyatt’s nostrils. “What is that, anyway?”
“It’s called meesh. Venetian noodles. I grew up on this stuff.” She slurped a spoonful into her mouth.
His stomach reminded him that he still hadn’t eaten. “Mind if I try?”
Laramie pulled the bowl away and put her hand over the top.
At first Wyatt thought she was kidding around. The look at her face revealed genuine concern.
“What, seriously?”
“It’s spicy.”
“I like hot food.”
“No.” She frowned while trying to come up with the right words. “It’s full of silicates. Not Earth spicy. Juliet spicy.”
Wyatt stared blankly, not understanding.
“Silicates are in everything here. Crops, grass. Herd animals. Remember the harpoon grass with the barbs on the end? Extreme example. All those particles stay in the food. It’ll tear up your insides if you aren’t used to it.”
“Wait. You’re saying you’re basically eating ground-up glass fragments?”
“Yep.”
“No wonder you’re so sweet.” He arched an eyebrow.
She flashed a huge fake smile before tucking back into the bowl. “How’d the meeting go?”
“Looks like we’re gonna do a little snatch-and-grab.”
Laramie stopped her spoon in midair. “Oh?”
“Yeah. I’ll tell you more later. How are our guys doing?”
“Kenny’s on security. Did I tell you I like him? He’s sharp. The rest are fed and crashed. Which reminds me, there are mild noodles in the kitchen if you want them. The pot with the red handle.”
“Red handle, got it.”
Laramie resumed eating. “Want some more good news? We can’t recharge our helmets.”
“What? Chris said we could use anything here.”
“It’s not that. Their gear is too old. The connectors they have don’t fit ours. Wrong version.”
Wyatt rolled his head back and released a groan. Unbelievable. Normally they’d charge up on the Javelin. That wasn’t an option right now. And if the batteries ran dry on their helmets, they’d have no night vision
, no assisted targeting, no comms.
“How much juice do we have left?”
“Yours was at forty percent. Mine, a little less. Everyone else is about the same range.”
“Can’t you rig something to make it work?”
“No idea how to do that, LT.”
“Any word from Teo, then?”
“Not since the train. Starting to miss that chico.”
“Yeah.”
Wyatt hoped again it was just a comm failure. He didn’t relish the idea of peeling off a couple troopers for a search party to find their Javelin. They had too much to do already.
“You know,” Laramie said, a sheet of noodles hanging off her bottom lip. “We could daisy chain our helmets together. Charge up some at the expense of others. We’d end up being short a couple, but the ones we did have would be topped off.”
Wyatt didn’t like the idea of half his team without a key piece of gear, but they couldn’t afford to lose their eyes and ears altogether.
“Do it. Drain mine. Keep yours. Buddy up everyone else. I’d rather have something than nothing.”
“I’ll get it done, LT.”
Wyatt watched her some more. “I’m sorry we can’t check on your folks.”
He regretted the comment instantly. Laramie’s chewing slowed as her eyes took on a glassy, distant quality. Not what he was going for. He was trying to show support. Now, all he had done was remind his squad sergeant of the danger her relatives might be in, while they did a recon under covert conditions.
After a moment, she just gave him a nod.
Wyatt’s stomach threatened a full-on revolt, so he excused himself before he could put his foot in his mouth again. He went to the kitchen and took a bowl from the drying rack. Two large metal pots sat atop a conduction stovetop. The one with red handles was considerably emptier.
“I was wondering if you’d had a chance to eat,” a voice said behind him.
Escape Velocity (The Quantum War Book 1) Page 13
