by David Ryker
And all the while, the Gestalt would be laying waste to any resistance from the humans, even as they took over their minds and set them to war against each other.
The thoughts were small and petty, and they made Kergan feel so good.
24
“Well, it’s official,” Ben sighed, gazing at his wrist display. “You four Jarheads are under investigation for escaping prison, and Gloom and I are ‘persons of interest’ in the hacking of the network with fake news.”
Bishop cocked his head, a half-grin on his face. “All of that is technically true,” he observed. “Well, except the ‘fake news’ part, but even I have to admit our story is full of holes that we can’t fill.”
They were all gathered again in Quinn’s living room, even though they each had their own suite, except for Ellie and Bishop, who shared theirs. Quinn wondered if their apparent need to be in each other’s pocket all the time was a result of constantly risking their lives together, or if it was some bizarre leftover neuroses from their time in prison. Maybe it was a combination of both.
“What about Ellie and me?” asked Chelsea. The two women were sharing a bottle of Tiffany Tranh’s high-toned wine they’d filched before they left their suites in New Richmond.
“Chelsea is apparently in the care of a psychologist,” said Ben. “Being deprogrammed from her indoctrination by the Jarheads.”
Quinn snorted a laugh and almost choked on his beer. Chelsea beaned him with a peanut from across the room.
“Your parents are quite concerned about you,” Ben continued. “There’s a quote from your father, but nothing from your mom.”
“She hasn’t been able to slur a coherent thought in years,” Chelsea said with a frown. “I suppose I should be happy that my father went along with everything. He has a habit of digging in his heels on stuff like this, especially if he knows damn well he’s in the wrong. But this makes it look like he was right, at least in his own mind.”
Quinn glanced over to Maggott, who was deeply interested in the display on his own wrist unit.
“Earth to Maggott,” he said. “What’s so fascinating, big guy?”
“Eh?” Maggott raised his head with a look that said he’d forgotten there were other people around him. “Ach, sorry. Been messagin’ with… well, you know.”
Chelsea put her wine glass on the low, wide coffee table and sat on one of the arms of Maggott’s chair. She draped an arm over his shoulders, or at least as far as it would reach.
“None of the other Jarheads will talk to me about this,” she said. “Some sort of guy code. So I’m going to get it straight from the horse’s mouth.”
“Buffalo’s,” Bishops coughed into his hand. Ellie slapped the back of his head.
“What’s going on with you and your ex-wife?” Chelsea asked. “I mean, she was the reason you guys ended up in that fight at the bar. The least you could do is talk a little bit about her to those of us who never knew her.”
Maggott was silent for a while before answering. “She was m’world,” he said finally. “Then she wasn’t. She filed fer divorce the day we were convicted o’ treason. Then, when we ended up back here, she tracked me down. Been messagin’ back n’ forth ever since.”
“Geez.” Chelsea winced. “That’s a lot of baggage to work through. I’m sorry.”
“Especially now,” said Gloom, looking up from the omnipresent hacking box she’d been fiddling with. “Not only were you wrongly convicted once, you’re about to be wrongly accused again.”
“Aye, and I cannae tell her what’s goin’ on.” He sighed. “Dinnae make it easy on a man.”
Quinn felt his stomach drop. “Jesus, Maggott, I’m sorry. Peg didn’t even enter my head when we worked out the plan with Drake.”
“At least I have the advantage of knowing it’s all a ruse,” said Ellie. “She’s going to go through it all over again.”
“I almost wish she hadnae got in touch until this whole thing was done,” said Maggott. “But still, we might have a future, once all this shite’s over with.”
“Speaking of Peg,” said Schuster. “Did she say anything about Marcie Han and the others from the old team that she’s working for now? I thought they might try to get in touch.”
“There’s the little fact that they testified against us at our court martial,” Bishop pointed out. “That might make for some awkward conversations.”
Quinn didn’t want to go down that road right now, though he knew they’d have to eventually. Right now, they had more important things to talk about.
“Can anyone think of anything that wasn’t in the assault plan?” he asked. “Any last-minute details to tell Drake’s crew?”
“I still feel like I should tell them the truth about the ships,” said Dev. “That they’re practically capable of flying themselves.”
“What good would it do?” asked Gloom. “It’s been my experience that people like Drake’s men in black don’t listen to anyone but themselves.” She grinned. “Present company included.”
“Speaking of that,” said Chelsea. “Did anyone else get a weird vibe from that Alpha guy that Drake said was leading the mission, or was it just me?”
“I’m glad I wasn’t the only one,” said Quinn. “Even when King and I were meeting with him and Drake to go over the plan this morning. He didn’t say much, but there’s just something about him that I don’t like.”
“Maybe it’s that he’s leading the mission and you aren’t?” Bishop offered.
Quinn frowned. “Don’t talk out of your ass, Geordie.”
“Come on, Lee. You know you want revenge on Kergan. And let’s face it, you’ve never been one to sit around while someone else pulled your cart. And you’ve never let anyone take a mission away from you in the ten years we’ve known each other.”
As much as he wanted to shoot down the argument, Quinn knew he couldn’t. His gut had been contradicting him for two days, ever since they’d all agreed to bow out of the mission and hand it over to someone else. He told himself that it was just apprehension over being branded a criminal again, but he knew that wasn’t true. The ruse would only be for a couple of weeks, then they could get on with their lives again as free men.
Before he could respond, the voice of the guard outside the door of his suite came through the intercom.
“You have a visitor,” it said. The door slid open immediately, prompting Quinn to wonder if he even had a say in who came into his suite now.
As it turned out, it was someone he very much wanted to see. Frank King entered, looking grave.
“Sir,” said Quinn. “What can we do for you?”
“I could murder a scotch, but we don’t have time for that, and I want to keep my wits about me.” He positioned himself in the middle of the room so that they could all see him, then he pointed to the box in Gloom’s hands. “Is there any way you can scan for surveillance tech with that thing?”
“Duh,” she replied. “It was the first thing I did when we moved back in. All of our suites are clean. Why?”
King nodded. “I should have known you people were ahead of the game. I’ve never met a group like you.”
“Sir?” asked Quinn. “Is everything okay?”
King sat down in a vacant chair table and folded his hands in his lap. The agitation in his eyes was making Quinn nervous himself.
“I can’t believe what I’m about to tell you,” said King, his voice tight and strained. He shook his head. “That rat bastard has betrayed us.”
Quinn felt a coldness in his gut as the others exchanged nervous glances. He should have known things were going too smoothly.
“What are you talking about, sir?”
“Drake!” King shook his head. “We met for a few more hours this afternoon to go over some details of how we’re going to handle my return, and after I left I realized I’d left my glasses in his office. When I went back to get them, he was talking to the mission leader, the man he called Alpha.”
“I kne
w it!” said Quinn. “There was something off about that guy.”
King shot him a bleak look. “More than you could possibly know, Lee. The office door was still open when I got there, and I lingered outside to eavesdrop—what can I say, I’m a politician—but they kept their voices low. I didn’t catch any of the conversation.”
“So what is it that has you so wound up?” asked Chelsea.
King took a deep breath as if to calm himself, and Quinn saw his fists clenching.
“Right before I left, I caught sight of Alpha’s reflection in the mirror behind Drake’s desk. There wasn’t anything unusual about that, and he didn’t see me looking at him. But just an instant before I was about to turn around and leave, I saw something that sent a chill up my spine.”
King turned to Quinn, and the look on the man’s normally placid face was enough to make his heart skip a beat. King was a handsome man, but his bitter snarl had made him ugly with rage.
“There was a red flash in his eye, Lee.”
Quinn felt his heart race as a jolt of adrenaline ran through him from head to toe. In an instant, it all made sense.
“Jesus Christ,” he breathed. “That means…”
King nodded. “That means Alpha is Agent Zero, and he’s working with Morley Drake to head up a mission that will take him straight to his old boss. Toomey.”
25
“Do you think Drake knows?” asked Bishop.
King’s humorless smile was answer enough on its own. “Oh, he knows. And I fell for it! I guess getting fucked over by him once wasn’t enough to teach me not to trust him. He denied knowing anything about Toomey and Zero, but the fact that he’s working with Zero proves it was all a lie.”
Quinn felt hot blood in his face, so he took a few breaths to calm himself down. As much as he wanted to track down where “Alpha” and his team were spending the night and confront him, he knew it was the wrong approach. They would have to be strategic.
“Our advantage here is that Zero and Drake don’t know that we know,” he said.
“That’s fine for right now,” said Schuster. “But they’re scheduled to embark for Oberon in thirty-six hours. That doesn’t give us a lot of time to get to the bottom of this.”
King sighed. “I’ve been racking my brain trying to figure out what their plan is, but I keep coming up empty. Why would they bother taking over the mission, especially from you four?” He looked at Quinn. “Not to put too fine a point on it, but we all know both of them would be much happier if you all were dead.”
“So would Kergan,” Maggott pointed out. “Fucker’d happily piss on our graves.”
“Is it possible that they’re all working together?” asked Chelsea. As she said it, her eyes widened. “Oh, God, please tell me my father’s not involved.”
“Not as far as I know,” said King. “But I wouldn’t be willing to put money on anything right now.”
Quinn ran a hand over his face. He hadn’t shaved for a few days, and his stubble was like sandpaper against his palm. Why couldn’t anything ever be simple? What had he and his friends done to piss off the gods so badly that they couldn’t just be allowed to ride off into the sunset?
“What do you think, Lee?” asked King. “I have to defer to your judgment here; you have the most experience with those two.”
Quinn’s eyebrows rose. “You’re the one who was betrayed and kidnapped by them.”
“And you’re the one who’s beaten them.” King’s snarl was gone now, replaced by a weariness that Quinn could relate to. “I’d trust any of you with my life, and I trust all of you together with the lives of the entire human race. You’ve done pretty well by us so far, even if nobody except me believes it, which means you should be the ones who decide what happens next.”
Quinn knew his answer without even thinking about it, and if it had been wartime, he would have simply given the order and his men would have followed it. But this wasn’t the war, at least not the kind they were used to, and more than half of his band of misfits were civilians. None of them had any obligation to follow him or do what he said. They had lives ahead of them now, real futures, not the dead-end his men had earned from following him to prison. And the others didn’t owe Quinn a goddamned thing. They had given him everything they had, and gotten nothing in return. What right did he have to decide their fate for them?
“Guys—” he said, but Ellie raised a hand to stop him.
“Don’t bother, Lee,” she said softly. “We all know what you’re going to say. And, I think, in a way, you know what we’re going to say.”
Bishop put a hand on her shoulder, and she took it.
“Babe…”
“No, Geordie, you need to listen,” she said. “All of you need to listen. Even you, Mr. King.”
Chelsea leaned forward on her armrest, followed by Maggott, who hunkered down in his seat to be closer to Ellie. Ben had taken a seat on the floor next to the couch where Schuster and Gloom sat silently looking at her.
“I’ve known you for seven years, Lee,” she said. “In that time, I’ve spent a total of maybe eight months with my man. He’s spent all the rest of that time with you, whether it was in a war zone or in a prison cell a bazillion miles away.”
Quinn dropped his head. She was right, and he wasn’t going to argue with her about it.
She surprised him by smiling. “You think you know what I’m going to say, but you don’t. I’m not trying to make you feel guilty for what you’re thinking. I want you to know that you have my permission. Hell, more than that, I order you to follow through on what you’re thinking.”
Quinn looked up to face her, astonished. The others were looking at her as well, and he was pretty sure he saw a shimmer in Bishop’s eyes.
“What are you saying?” he asked softly.
She stroked his cheek. “I’m saying that Lee made you into a hero. All of you. It was always who you were deep down, of that I have no doubt. But it took all of you coming together to realize it.” She turned back to Quinn. “That wouldn’t have happened without you. I’m not a religious person by any stretch, but dammit, there’s something going on with you people. Something wants you to succeed with this, I know it. Otherwise, you would have been dead in Astana, or on that godforsaken space station, or in San Antonio, or Rome, or Toomey’s lair, or in his lab with the security droids. But you’re not. You’re still here.”
Quinn swallowed hard. He saw that Chelsea was openly weeping, and even Gloom had suddenly taken a deep interest in her hacking box and was looking down at it.
“Wow,” said King. “You could have a future in politics, Ms. Rosenberg. That was… that was incredible.”
“You’re a flatterer,” Ellie said with a shy grin. “That’s probably why you’re so good at politics.”
“I’m serious,” he said earnestly. “I hope you think about it.”
“We need to stop an alien invasion first. That was the whole point of my little speech.” She turned to Quinn. “At least, I’m assuming you were going to tell everyone that you’d be hijacking the assault mission?”
He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. And it would have been fucking awkward. Thanks for doing it for me.”
Maggott rose from his chair, his eyes wet, and crossed to where Ellie sat. He lifted her as easily as one would a toddler and pulled her into an embrace that made her gasp.
“Easy, Sergeant!” she croaked.
He sniffed hard and set her back down. “Sorry, lass. Dinnae know me own strength sometimes. But ye sounded like my gran there for a moment. I just had to do it.”
“Will you stop it?” Chelsea blurted. Her eyes were streaming now, her cheeks blotchy and red. “I can’t take much more of this! You all met my father; you know I didn’t grow up around this kind of thing!”
Ben cleared his throat, obviously trying to hide his own emotions. “I know I’m a Johnny-come-lately here, but I’m in. I used to think I was doing some good in the world, and maybe I was, but this is something else. This is
a real cause, and I’m all in.”
“Good,” said King. “We’ll need someone to document the mission.”
“What do you mean?” asked Quinn.
“The people of Earth will need to see proof of what’s going on out there. You saw it yourself—the ancient adage of ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ is still alive and well today. We need to show people everything that’s happening, and prove to them that you’ve made the sacrifices to do what needed to be done.”
The room was silent for several moments before Gloom finally said what was on everyone’s mind.
“And what happens if we don’t come back?” she asked.
King gave them all a grim look. “Then I’ll tell your story to every camera I can find, and I’ll leverage every last milligram of my political capital to make sure that history remembers the Jarheads of Oberon. This I swear.”
Quinn felt his own chest cramping, and he knew it was time to shake off the sentimentality. There was no room for it where they were headed.
“All right, enough of this maudlin shit,” he said sternly. “We need a plan.”
“Sneak into Alpha’s barracks and kill him in his sleep?” Gloom offered, prompting snickers from the others.
“I like the way you think,” said Quinn. “But no. We have to avoid any and all confrontation, much as we might prefer otherwise.”
“You’ve got a hell of a mind,” said King. “If you make it back, you’re not just getting pardoned, you’re getting promoted.”
“That’s a big if, sir. First things first, we need to strategize. Our plan needs to be a surprise, which means we need to move fast.”
“How fast?” asked Bishop.
“We leave at first light,” said Quinn, only he wasn’t looking at him. “I’m sorry, Ellie.”
She nodded and swallowed hard.
