He’d slowed the big Kawasaki, but not enough to miss the bicycle that appeared out of nowhere, rider boy pedaling joy madly within his own cocoon of speed, a mirror of Skull’s. Only Skull wasn’t Skull back then, just plain Alan. But his crotch rocket had taken the kid’s leg off and the crash had thrown Linde high, a freak flight of physics ended with her chest spitted on a bent old signless post.
He’d tumbled clear into soft earth and grass, had rushed to her in time to watch the light fade from her eyes. Clamping down on his grief to save the boy, he’d ignored his fiancé’s corpse impaled there, an offering to some twisted and vengeful spirit.
His belt was a tourniquet for the boy's severed leg and he held the kid’s shaking body in his arms by the side of the road, jacket wrapped around both of them. He despaired of help until an antique Mustang convertible piloted by a ruthlessly cheerful young Special Forces lieutenant drove up, picked them up and hauled them in to Marin General in a mad screaming rush.
The boy had lived, but Linde’s death robbed all humanity from Alan’s heart. He and Lieutenant Ezekiel Johnstone had returned with an ambulance to pull her lifeless corpse off of the rusty pole, shoving the paramedics away to place her gently on the gurney and lift it onto the truck themselves, premature pallbearers.
He’d sat stoic through his abortive court martial for negligent homicide, deadlocked by Zeke Johnstone’s testimony and eventually pleaded down to loss of a stripe and Alan’s motorcycle license. The only good thing to come out of the whole crippling circumstance was the unwavering friendship between the two men, a bond that lasted almost thirty years.
---
For the first time since, he replayed the day in his head without descending into a cold killing rage. A black bird flew free, the death-crow carrying its carrion stench away. Skull watched it go with fearful regret but he found himself unable to hold on to it in the face of his new sanity.
And he realized what that must mean. He could think of no other explanation.
Angrily barging through the iris into the control room he leaned down over her seated form. “I don’t know how, but I’m a God-damned Eden now.”
She put a hand up to his chest, but didn’t push. “You shouldn’t swear. It’s uncouth.” Raphaela’s tone was light but her eyes weighed him down. “I’d say ‘thank God’ if it’s true.”
He seized her hand, bringing a wince. He shoved it away then and rolled his eyes, trying to hold on to the edge of his of anger and failing. “Not you too. To hell with God.” His voice held little conviction. “Do you even believe in God?”
She shrugged, massaging her fingers. “Not really. But I believe in being thankful for what I have, and in getting along with people. If it takes a plague to do that…is that so bad?”
“Yes, it’s bad. It takes away your free will. If you can’t choose evil, is it a choice?”
“Edens can choose evil. We still have cops and courts and jails. Just a lot fewer of them.”
Skull snorted skeptically. “Same difference. I didn’t want this. Now I’m useless.”
“Useless how?” she asked.
He thought for a moment, trying to frame his arguments. “Look, I’m a killer – and now I can’t kill.”
“You sure?” Her tone held no trace of sarcasm or taunting, for which he was thankful. His walls, his emotional armor so recently cracking, now seemed to have disappeared entirely.
She went on, “How do you feel about all the people you killed?”
He thought about it for a moment, then shrugged. “Not terrible. No burden of guilt. Is that what you mean?”
“Then you’re not really an Eden.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because I talked to them. Edens. And I am one. And when I Blended I took on the memories and experiences of a four-thousand-year-old alien that has killed countless beings starting with over a hundred of his Meme siblings, and I still feel it; I still feel every one of them. I have to lock those memories away from myself, because Memes have perfect recall. Every piece of knowledge, every experience, is physically encoded in an RNA-like molecule, like a video recording. If I brought them to mind my Eden brain would never function. But you…”
“…Aren’t affected that way!” He raised his fists overhead as if in triumph, to bump the ceiling. “Then what the hell happened?”
“There’s no way to tell for sure. This ship doesn’t have a laboratory sophisticated enough to find out.”
“What about your base?”
She shook her head. “The base is crumbling. Perhaps a quarter of the biomachines are still alive.”
Skull put his head into his hands, rubbing his eyes. “So overnight my brain gets rewired but I’m still me.” He turned over, did a one-handed stand. “I’m just as strong,” he said as he sprang back to his feet, “and fast. Maybe it was my nanos? Maybe they got into my brain?”
“I don’t know, and there’s no way to tell. More practically…here’s a test. Imagine killing someone. See how it affects you.”
“Huh. Right.” He did as she suggested, visualizing the frantic minutes when he wiped out the missile team in Geneva. “Nothing. No problem.”
“So you’re not an Eden. You just…got better. Maybe…” She bit her lip.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
He grabbed the sides of her command chair, face close to hers. “What? Come on.”
She crossed her arms beneath his looming presence as her eyes smoked. “Nothing. Don’t push me.”
He stared at her for a long moment, nose to nose. Before I’d have been angry. Now…it’s no big deal. He shrugged, backed off. “Okay. Let me know when you want to talk about it.”
Her jaw dropped. She whispered something under her breath that he didn’t catch.
He wished the nanos could heal his hearing but apparently they couldn’t do such fine work. He was still somewhat deaf from all the gunshots he’d fired in his lifetime, so he put a hand on her shoulder. “It’ll be okay,” he said, banality to fend off the dark.
She touched his hand, not looking at him, staring instead at the view screen. They stayed that way a long time. Neither wanted to move or ruin the moment, nor make more of it than it was.
Whatever it was.
-14-
Marquez and Banson stood warily in the holding cell as Karl Rogett and his team came in. Their handcuffs and shackles clinked and rattled, but the men didn’t move, except to shrink slightly at the weapons pointed their way.
“Gentlemen,” Cassandra began, “we’re sending you home.”
They stood there confused for a moment, until Marquez asked, “Why?”
“Shut up,” interjected Banson. “The lady says we can go home, let’s go home.”
Marquez cleared his throat. “I still want to know why. Or at least how. Did General Tyler make some kind of deal?”
“No deal.” Cassandra smiled pleasantly. “You’re just more trouble than you’re worth. Besides, we have all we need from you.”
“Bullshit, you didn’t get nothin’ from us!” Banson feinted a lunge but Cassandra didn’t flinch. Karl raised his weapon, a naked threat.
“I got plenty. Remember those long conversations we had? And then there’s this.” She held up a metal cylinder. “Say hello to your little friends.”
“Huh?” Banson’s jaw slackened.
“She means, that’s our nanos. They took our nanos out. That’s why we’re weak,” Marquez explained.
“No…” Cassandra said, dropping her head in a show of pity, “that’s not why you’re weak. You’ve always been weak. That’s just why you’re going home.” She turned her back on him in contempt, shaking the cylinder idly.
Banson broke, lunging for his tormenter. Karl’s monster taser flashed and he dropped like a stone. Bettina caught him as he fell, laying him gently on the floor.
Marquez didn’t move except to look down at his comrade. “He never could control himself.” Raising his eyes, he said, �
�Ma’am. I don’t want to go back. What do I need to do to make that happen?”
Cassandra turned around. “Don’t want to go back? Why ever not?” Catlike merriment danced in her eyes.
“Let’s just say I don’t think I’ll be treated kindly. Either of us. But you don’t want him anyway. Me on the other hand…”
She laughed, throaty. “What could you possibly offer me that I don’t already have?”
“I’ll tell you everything I know.”
Cassandra’s laughter strengthened. “Like I just said…I have everything you know already. You have nothing I want.” Not exactly true, but…
Marquez’ voice broke. “Look, Señora, I’ll do whatever job you want. I’ll be a prison trustee, I’ll work in the mines, South Africa still has mines, right? I’ll start over as a private, whatever it takes. Or send me to Australia. I hear they’ll take anyone.”
“Comes from starting out as a penal colony,” she remarked, thinking. “All right, I’ll make you a deal. One time offer, non-negotiable. First, we debrief you completely, and you hold nothing back.”
He nodded.
“Second, you become an Eden.”
He gulped, then nodded again.
“Third, you go where I tell you to, do what I tell you to, until I decide otherwise. If you step out of line, you’re back in a cell. And remember, as an Eden, a life sentence is a really, really long time.”
“Okay,” he agreed, defeated. “Whatever you say.”
“Good. Karl, prep Banson for his flight home. Then take Marquez here to the clinic and shoot him up.”
Karl looked at Cassandra expectantly. “And then?”
Her smile was Cheshire. “Send him to Antarctica.”
-15-
General Travis Tyler had a reputation as a hard man. Fair, but hard. He was a man for this time, a time of nuclear and biological horrors, of an America licking terrible body wounds, an America with a third of its population killed within the last few months.
As a long-serving combat veteran and the head of the all-important nanobot research project Tiny Fortress, he commanded loyalty and not a little bit of fear. Not since Major General Leslie Groves headed up the Manhattan Project did one military man have so much leeway with a United States administration.
The scene he had in mind was designed to leverage, to use, that power and that fear.
For the best of reasons, of course.
He looked at himself in his office lavatory mirror, rubbing at his rapidly-smoothing face. It had been only days since he had accepted the Eden Plague virus, and already he was feeling fitter, smarter, younger.
And a bit less ruthless.
Tyler accepted the inevitable with good grace: immortality in exchange for his killer instinct. It was a good trade for an old man. Yesterday he and his wife had made love with forgotten vigor and satisfaction. For the first time in years he’d finished his five-mile morning run without downing a handful of pain pills, and he’d begun to see the lines in his face disappear. Instead of sixty, he now looked forty.
Fortunately his gray hair would take a while to go.
That made it even more important that he get on with this job. Soon many of his troops and staff would instinctively dismiss a man who looked twenty-five, no matter how many stars he wore. It would take years, perhaps a new generation, to get over humanity’s biologically-based judgment ascribing wisdom and gravity only to mature appearance.
He strode down to the waiting convoy of vehicles that would take him to his meeting with the entire Secret Service Presidential security contingent. “We have the body?” he asked rhetorically. The nanocommando team leader was a good man, and they’d discussed the plan several times; there was no doubt he had it.
Still, trust but verify.
“Yes, sir.” The two men piled into the back of the armored SUV and the five-vehicle group raced off.
It was only ten minutes or so to the Presidential Mansion complex, but they bypassed the main residence to pull in at the large double doors of a basketball gym left over from the days when the government compound was a university campus. Inside, ranks of Secret Service men and women sat in the bleachers, most of them in their usual dark suits.
Army troops controlled the building this time, not the Secret Service. This fact made the latter distinctly uncomfortable; Tyler could see it in their eyes and their demeanors as they sat. He could also sense their unease at having been disarmed.
His ten nanocommandos stayed near him at all times. They weren’t unarmed, and his people and some of the Secret Service eyed each other like stiff-backed dogs; however, most of the Service people kept their eyes down.
They had a lot to be ashamed of.
Two of the commandos carried a stretcher in, its burden covered by a blanket, and set it down in the center of the floor. Looks like the right time for a coup, Travis thought. Some of the Secret Service people are smart enough to sense it too. But are they smart enough to wait and see? Well, that’s one reason I had them disarmed.
“Colonel,” he addressed the commander of the Army troops, “clear your men out and set up an external perimeter. No one comes nearer this building than thirty meters.” They filed out the several exits, and then he told his commandos to double-check the security. Only when there was no one but his bodyguards and the Secret Service people remaining did he begin his speech.
“Most of you know me by sight, but for those who don’t, I’m General Travis Tyler, in charge of the lab complex and the base as well. And some of you know my son.” He reached down to flip the blanket off the body on the stretcher, revealing the corpse of Major John Thomas Tyler, US Army, deceased.
A gasp went up from the Service personnel, and a buzz of conversation.
“Silence!” Tyler roared. “Now I’m going to tell you all something some of you already know. For those of you who don’t have a clue, count yourself lucky. For those who do, I suggest you prepare yourself for hell, because there’s only one way through.”
He gestured with a straight arm at the body. “This was my son. I executed him with my own hands, for murder, for treason on the battlefield, and for suborning treason. My son betrayed me, he betrayed the President, and he betrayed the United States – and so have many of you. Some of you are even now hooked on an addictive nanobot, one which serves up euphoria and steals your free will and your self-respect. I hear you call it nanocrack. I bet some of you are already feeling withdrawal effects. And guess what – you aren’t getting any more. Ever. Not from him, and not from anyone else. I’ve already cleaned house in the labs. I’ve already summarily executed three more people. Remember, we’re still under martial law.”
Tyler could pick out many of them now by the horrified, trapped looks on their faces. Others, showing confusion, were likely innocent. He went on, gesturing at the body again.
“I considered locking JT up, trying to treat him medically, trying to rid his body of the viruses and nanomachines he had injected himself with in a quest to be a superman. But he spread the nanocrack he discovered to others. He spread it to those he wanted to control; he spread it to many of you; and he slipped it to the President, to try to control him too. We don’t entirely know how deep the corruption goes, but I couldn’t take the chance that my son and his hidden allies could pull off the coup he planned. He had to be made an example. My example, so you know how serious I am.”
Tyler paced up and down in the middle of the wooden floor, the body and his commandos his backdrop. “Some of you are wondering if I’m taking over instead. The answer is unequivocally no. The President is being cleansed and detoxified. For those of you who are addicted, this is your one and only chance, right now, to save yourselves. If you are addicted, stand up and walk over there, where my men are waiting.” he pointed with an arm. “Right now, no kidding, do it right now. If we find anyone with those nanos in his system after this one-time amnesty, the penalty will be summary execution.”
Several people stood up immediately, reso
lutely, followed by more in a wave. Within a minute over fifty people, about half of the Secret Service Presidential security detachment, were standing in the designated place hanging their heads. “All right, the rest of you stay in the bleachers. There is a medical team coming in to run tests on all of you right now.”
A man, red-faced and sweating, stood up suddenly from the bleachers and bolted for the addicted group. Tyler smoothly and unhurriedly lifted his .45 from its holster, cocked it and shot the man three times in the lower torso. He collapsed to deathly stillness on the polished wooden floor.
A ringing silence followed the three sharp reports, and Tyler thumbed the hammer down as he swept the bleachers with his gaze. “Apparently he didn’t believe me when I said that was his last chance. So. One final amnesty. Five seconds. Now or never.” He waited, but no one moved, and eventually he nodded sharply and holstered his weapon.
“Now listen, all of you. You will say nothing about what happened here today. Nothing whatsoever. No one can know the President’s protection is so incompetent, or how you people failed.” His tone dripped with contempt for those who had lapsed in their duties. “No one need know how you soiled yourself and your reputation. That includes what happened to my son, or this man, or any other details. Until the United States has full control of its own territory again, this is all top secret.”
He turned to the commandos. “Captain, take these sorry sons of bitches to the hospital for treatment. And get that body out of here.” He gestured at the man he’d shot.
Shot with Needleshock, but no one needed to know that right now. He’ll live, though he’ll never be in the Secret Service again. I hear the Free Communities have a nice rehabilitation camp in Antarctica.
The Reaper Plague Page 7
