The Tide_Ghost Fleet

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  “You’re developing biological weapons here, too, aren’t you?” Lauren asked.

  Emma indicated the Skull with a nod. “Weapons can be just as much of a cure. Possibly even a more effective cure. It is nice that you are trying to protect our civilians from the Oni Agent. Noble, even. But we must also fight back against the Skulls in new ways where conventional warfare has failed. A claw can still kill someone whether they have the Phoenix Compound or not.”

  “What about the Biological Weapons Convention?” Lauren asked.

  “Gone are the days when that type of diplomatic agreement mattered,” Emma said. “Those rules have been rendered useless by the Oni Agent, and the countries that agreed to them no longer exist.”

  That didn’t satisfy Lauren. “Even if you do create something that has the ability to destroy Skulls on that kind of scale, you’ve got to be sure it doesn’t affect humans.”

  “Do not worry about that, Doctor,” Emma said. “That is something for us to be concerned about. You focus on your work, and we’ll focus on ours. And if everything goes as planned, we will not only stop the FGL, but we will render your cure obsolete.”

  “Why’s that?” Navid asked, seeming offended.

  Emma smiled, her teeth blindingly white in the fluorescent lights. “Because there will be no more Skulls left on this planet.”

  -28-

  A lone wail called into the night. Shepherd fought the instinct to duck for cover. The pop of gunfire sounded a moment later. Then silence. The defenses around Fort Detrick had been vastly improved since the last time he’d had command of the base. Once the United States government began to reassemble itself, things seemed to have improved around places like this.

  That didn’t mean the Oni Agent situation had gotten any better.

  Kinsey had mobilized troops to intercept the fleet of FGL ships headed to Washington with their cargo full of Skulls, Goliaths, and God only knew what other terrors. And while that was going on, Shepherd had been informed that the enemy might have gotten ahold of nuclear weapons. If what he’d heard was true, there were no American units close enough to the site of the FGL’s heist to stop them. It was up to Dominic Holland’s group to act as first responders to the nuclear weapons threat. The Hunters were risking their asses once again to save a world that had all but written them off.

  It pissed Shepherd off, to be honest. Dom and his crew had been through hell and back, yet they were still treated with suspicion by the American brass.

  He sucked in a deep breath as he marched through the cold night air back to Fort Detrick’s clinic. The Hunters would be doing their damndest to stop the FGL, but he couldn’t sit back and let them bear this burden on their own. If there was anything he could do to help them save America’s collective ass, he was going to do it.

  There was one key question no one seemed to know: What in the hell was Spitkovsky planning to do with those nuclear weapons?

  Shepherd had a Hail Mary to answer it.

  The sterile air of the medical clinic greeted him, along with the chirp and beep of the equipment. Most of the beds were filled with soldiers and civilians who were victims of the Skulls. Others contained people who had fallen ill thanks to diseases this country hadn’t dealt with in decades, like cholera and tuberculosis. Those had once been relegated to developing nations, but America had been brought to her knees by the Oni Agent. These patients were living—maybe dying—reminders of that.

  But there was one patient who hadn’t been brought here because of the Skulls or illness.

  “Matsumoto,” Shepherd said, sitting next to the shriveled old man’s bed once more.

  The old Japanese scientist surveyed him. There were more wrinkles on his face than an elderly bulldog’s, but there was a lucidity in the man’s gaze that hadn’t been there days before. It seemed the bed rest after his swift exit from the Congo had done him good.

  “Colonel Shepherd,” Matsumoto said. He nodded his head slightly as if to offer a polite bow.

  “You must know why I’m here.”

  “You will ask me the same questions you ask me every day,” Matsumoto said, his English barely affected by an accent. “And I will give you the same answers I always do.”

  “Not today,” Shepherd said. “I want to show you something.”

  Shepherd moved aside the cup of water on Matsumoto’s bedside table and propped up a laptop computer.

  “I want you to explain one more time why you joined Spitkovsky and the FGL.”

  Matsumoto’s eyes narrowed, nearly lost in the wrinkles that fanned out from them. “I did not join them any more than I joined the Americans. I was an indentured servant and nothing more.”

  “And that’s it?” Shepherd said. “You don’t strike me as a man who works without a reason.”

  The sheets around Matsumoto rustled as he straightened, dragging his withered frame up.

  “You switch sides like a mercenary,” Shepherd said. “What honor is there in that?”

  Matsumoto glared at Shepherd with the anger of a much younger man. “There was no honor when the Americans firebombed my home.” His veiny, skeletal hands balled up into fists. “There was no honor when you killed my parents, my wife, and my children. And when I was forced to work for the Americans, there was no honor in the way I existed, so frightened of death I chose to do my captor’s bidding instead of taking my own life.

  “Working for Spitkovsky did not bring me honor, either. But he promised me revenge. He promised me that the Japanese people would no longer be puppets of the West. He promised I would finally see my work come to fruition. That I would finally see my creation take life.”

  “Blah blah blah,” Shepherd said. “Old man, this is the same goddamn story you told me yesterday.” He leaned in closer. “Do you ever wonder why the last few years of your life were a blur?”

  “The device,” Matsumoto muttered.

  He was old, but he wasn’t senile. He remembered what Shepherd told him had happened when Matsumoto was on the Huntress. Dom and Lauren had discovered a neurological implant at the base of Matsumoto’s skull. It seemed to be related to the same mind-influencing technology the FGL had been using in their development of the monstrous Titans. That device had muddled Matsumoto’s consciousness, ensuring he complied with all the FGL’s Oni Agent-related demands.

  “You know why they implanted it, don’t you?” Shepherd asked.

  “Of course,” Matsumoto snarled. “It made me compliant.”

  “It goes beyond that. They didn’t want you to see what you were really doing. They didn’t want you to know that they lied to you. Everything you believed about saving Japan from the big bad West was a lie.”

  Matsumoto said nothing, but his glare conveyed enough. This was something he had not considered, but he didn’t seem ready to believe Shepherd yet.

  Shepherd had expected just that response. It was how he would’ve reacted in Matsumoto’s position, watching his entire view of the world come crashing down around him. So he’d come prepared. It had taken all his political capital to convince the higher ups to connect him with their counterparts in Japan. Their allies in the Pacific were not faring much better than the United States. Shepherd had finally made contact with a colonel in Japan’s Self-Defense Forces who was overseeing the mission to retake and secure the Tokyo metropolitan area.

  “I want you to see what the FGL has done with your creation,” Shepherd said, flipping open the laptop.

  Shepherd pressed play. He had gone through the torturous task of screening the videos and images beforehand, picking each for their emotional impact. And judging by the look on Matsumoto’s face, he’d chosen well. There was terror in Matsumoto’s eyes as he watched. On the screen, Skulls ran rampant through Tokyo. Goliaths trampled the wreckage strewn along the once-pristine streets. Through the lens of a CCD camera, a Drooler spewed acid at a family sheltering in a seafood shop. Their screams could not be heard, but the agonized expressions on their faces left little to the imagination
. Another video showed a pair of Skulls in ragged school uniforms; they had been no older than seven or eight before their transformation. Together, they tore into a man in a suit, slurping up his intestines like oversized noodles.

  More scenes of destruction played across the screen, all showing the Skulls turning on Japanese citizens. Then there were the streets devoid of life except for the skeletal monstrosities ambling between the abandoned vehicles and empty storefronts.

  Then Shepherd clicked on another video. This one had taken him the longest to find, but he knew it would be the most important. Strings of paper lanterns hung across an alley. The alley led to a row of wooden houses. Each showed signs of modernization: new paint, electric wires, and satellite television dishes. Despite the recent remodeling, this was a neighborhood Matsumoto would know well.

  The old man’s skin went paler than usual. “Yokohama.”

  Matsumoto said nothing more, merely stared at the screen. Two Skulls lunged into one of the houses. A woman jumped out of an open window on the second floor. Her ankle crumpled under the fall, and when she stood again, she was limping. The Skulls followed, and they didn’t bow to their injuries when they landed. The woman tried to run, but it took only seconds for the Skulls to tear into her.

  “They rebuilt it,” Matsumoto said. “After the war, they rebuilt it, didn’t they?”

  “They did,” Shepherd said. “And now look what it has become.”

  More images of Yokohama followed: broken glass soaked in blood, glinting in the sunlight. Skeletons picked clean in overgrown parks, the corpse of a Skull draped over an altar at a neighborhood Shinto shrine. This was what had become of Matsumoto’s hometown.

  “The FGL did this,” Shepherd said. “They killed all these people with the Oni Agent you helped develop.”

  “You lie!” Matsumoto said. “This is not true! This cannot be true!”

  Shepherd said nothing as the man cursed at him, reverting to Japanese. His eyelids quivered, and the vessels under his papery skin dilated. His face turned red as he yelled. Shepherd withstood the verbal abuse. He might not have understood the words coming out of Matsumoto’s mouth, but he understood the intent. The old scientist was desperate not to believe the evidence Shepherd had shown him.

  A wet sheen formed over Matsumoto’s eyes. A tear freed itself. It rolled and disappeared into the gorges of wrinkles along his cheeks. He gasped for air. “You lie,” he said once again. But this time he lacked the fury of his first declaration. More tears trickled down from the corners of his eyes. Shepherd was witnessing the collapse of the man’s reality. The false walls of vengeance and hope he’d built with the help of Spitkovsky’s lies were toppling, and the truth was all that remained.

  Matsumoto suddenly pushed himself up from the bed. Tubes trailed his hand as he reached for Shepherd.

  No, not for Shepherd but for his gun. Shepherd swatted the man away. There was no real struggle. Matsumoto was too weak to fight.

  “Killing me won’t solve anything,” Shepherd said.

  “I was not going to kill you,” Matsumoto replied.

  “I won’t let you escape that easily. You cannot take the coward’s way out.”

  Matsumoto trembled. Horror had etched itself across his face like he’d stumbled on a field of rotting corpses. Actually, that wasn’t far from the truth.

  “They lied,” Matsumoto said.

  “They lied,” Shepherd agreed. He’d finally broken through. He paused the videos on the computer. “They played you, but this isn’t over. The Japanese government is working to regain control of the country. We’ve already developed a vaccine for the Agent, and we’re distributing our scientific data to our allies across the world, including in Tokyo. This will never be the world it once was, but can we can make something new.”

  “Then what do you need me for?” Matsumoto asked. “I cannot offer you anything you have not already accomplished.”

  “I’m not asking for you to help us with manufacturing the cure. I wouldn’t trust you, anyway. But there is something I want.” Shepherd was going directly against orders now. The intel passed on from Dom’s group was strictly confidential, but Shepherd would be damned if keeping that intel confidential meant that Spitkovsky succeeded with his plans. “We don’t have much time, so I’m not going to play any more games with you. You’ve seen what those bastards have done to the world. Those same scenes in Yokohama are playing out in pretty much every other country. We all need to work together to stop the FGL.”

  “So you want to know what else they are working on,” Matsumoto said, immediately understanding the unasked question. “You already know about the Human Machine Project. Did you know they were working on an airborne version of the Agent?”

  “Yes,” Shepherd said. “Right now, there’s something else going on. The FGL stole nuclear warheads from France. I want to know what they’re planning to do with them.”

  “Nuclear weapons?” Matsumoto asked. “I... I am not sure what this has to do with the Oni Agent.”

  “Tell me, old man,” Shepherd said. “No more being a stubborn bastard.”

  He wanted to shake Matsumoto—to take out his pistol and wave it in the bastard’s face—but no threats of physical pain or even death would work. Matsumoto, for all intents and purposes, was already dead. He no longer valued his own life. But there was something that would break the man.

  “If you don’t tell me, I’ll keep this laptop here, and I’ll glue your eyelids open. All this screen is going to show are the dead bodies and destruction caused by the Oni Agent. You will see every single mother who died trying to protect her children, every single kid whose body was found half-eaten. That’s what you have to look forward to for the rest of your life.”

  “Please, no,” Matsumoto said. “I don’t want to see any more. I cannot. I’m telling you the truth. I do not know what they are doing with the nuclear weapons.”

  Shepherd hit play on the laptop again. It showed a CCD video of two children running down a street, a pack of Skulls at their heels.

  “No!” Matsumoto cried. When he tried to turn away, Shepherd grabbed the man’s chin with one hand and yanked his eyelids up with the other. “I do not know! I was under the influence of that device. Everything is so muddled. It comes in bits and pieces and... maybe I heard something about nuclear weapons, but I do not remember. I do not!”

  Shepherd let him go and shut the laptop. “Then what do you remember? What don’t we know?”

  Matsumoto’s eyes glazed over. He looked as if he was deep in thought, trying to push through the fog of his mind to discover some treasure that would make Shepherd happy. “I cannot remember anything of nuclear weapons,” he said finally. “I can tell you about the airborne agent and the Human Machine Project or the Hybrids.”

  “We’ve been there, done that,” Shepherd said, losing patience. “Even if you can’t remember them talking about nukes, you’ve got to know why they might want one. Maybe they have targets in mind. Maybe you overheard plans to invade Europe or America.”

  “I did not hear about their invasion plans. Only about—” Matsumoto’s eyes went wide. “They were tracking the people who tried to create cures and weapons to use against the Agent. They knew about that group of yours that found me—the Hunters—along with some of the work going on in the United States. They did not like the Hunters, but there was something else, somewhere else that they feared. I believe they were working on a weapon, maybe multiple weapons, for the widespread annihilation of the Skulls.”

  “Was it here? Fort Detrick?”

  “I do not think so,” Matsumoto said. “Unless you are developing weapons we did not know about.”

  Shepherd mopped a hand across his face. Christ, the FGL’s intelligence network ran deeper than he had thought. Matsumoto was right about one thing—they weren’t developing any weapons of mass Skull destruction at Detrick. So who was?

  “Where was this place?” Shepherd asked. In his mind, he was already cataloguing ca
ndidate locations.

  “That I cannot tell you. Truly, that is all I know.” A pause, then Matsumoto raised a finger. “Ah, I do remember something else. This wasn’t a government organization. They specifically called it a corporation.”

  Shepherd’s stomach twisted. “Was it Mueller Pharmaceuticals?”

  Matsumoto’s eyes went wide. “Yes, yes, yes. That is it. That is it!”

  In Shepherd’s mind’s eye, he saw the nuclear blast over Frankfurt, wiping out the manufacturing plants, the airports, the train terminals, and the power stations. The beating heart of Europe’s recovery would be destroyed in an instant. Any advantages their side had against the FGL would be lost, and without their European allies, the United States would be next.

  He stood and started to walk away.

  “Wait!” Matsumoto called out in a quavering voice, sounding exactly like the feeble old man he was. “What are you going to do?”

  Shepherd didn’t bother to turn around. “I’ve got to make a call.”

  He strode out of the ward, leaving the architect of the Oni Agent alone with the memories of what his creation had done to the world.

  -29-

  “Son of a bitch,” Thomas spat.

  He hadn’t thought the FGL would know about Mueller Pharmaceutical’s efforts to manufacture the Phoenix Compound. But once he’d learned about Becker’s interest in manufacturing weapons to combat the Skulls, he could see why Spitkovsky was dead set on destroying the facility. He just hoped they would have time to stop the Karlstad. From his position on the bridge of the Huntress, all he could do was track the damn ship and guess where it would end up.