She turned her head to look at the two marines down the corridor. Compton completed the line of thought before she could speak again.
“It’s not something we need to discuss among the whole team, is it? At the very least there are issues of privacy involved.”
“Yes,” she said, the relief evident in her voice.
The wind was picking up outside, and Compton was aware of the whole structure straining and groaning under the pressure. Navy engineers had pronounced it safe but he’d be happier once they were back on the mainland.
“Do you have a management regime in mind?” he asked.
Ashbury released a tired sigh.
“No.” It sounded like an admission of defeat. “Not yet. I suppose we should establish a baseline. I thought, having spoken to you about it, I might seek him out again. Now that I know what I’m looking for, and I’m not distracted by the post-mortem, I’d like to test the parameters of the effect. See if there’s anything besides biting off my tongue to mitigate it.”
He almost asked, Is that wise? but caught himself at the last moment.
“I will trust your judgment, Emmeline. But remember, the man is a certified oaf.”
She smiled then.
“And I won’t be recommending you for a Nobel either, unless they give out prizes for the bleeding fucking obvious.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
She found them on the flight deck. Hooper was doing a fair imitation of an industrial grade garbage disposal, inhaling one MRE after another. Michael, as was his wont, had eaten one hard-boiled egg. The scraps of broken, peeled shell were piled neatly between his tan combat boots. Hooper moved on to eating a Godzilla-sized bucket of chocolate ice-cream. From an actual bucket.
As she approached, the effect hit her, like walking into a thick curtain of air. She noted their relative positions on the flight deck, planning to return later and take a proper measurement. It waned a little as she approached, giving Emmeline some hope that maybe…
No.
It flared with dull heat when she moved to within six feet of him. Prepared this time, she did her best to cauterize the feelings, placing them into a cold perspex box at the back of her mind. It was like exercising through pain and fatigue. Hard, but doable.
“Do you mind if I join you, gentlemen? I couldn’t sleep,” she said, hoping they would think the chill night air responsible for the tremor in her voice.
Heath stood up, his manners as impeccable as ever. Hooper climbed to his feet as an afterthought.
“Doc,” he said, and gave her a checking out that would have been impossible to miss, even if her hormones hadn’t been boiling over. She was grateful for the breeze that cooled the hot flush on her face. Even so, she raised the mug of cocoa she’d fetched to hide any trace of the blush.
“You really should refer to me as Professor Ashbury,” she said, using the same tone she might employ for a wayward grad student late with an assignment, or one of Elana’s cats that had just sicked up on the carpet. “Or Doctor Ashbury; either is applicable. My friends call me Emma, but I do not think we will be on a first-name basis.”
“Wow,” Hooper said, obviously taken aback. Good. That was where she wanted him, at a safe distance. “Okay, Professor. Have it your way.”
They traded the sort of empty pleasantries you would expect of co-workers at the end of a long day, and all the while Emmeline tried to quantify her inexplicable attraction to this man. In the end she settled on a 1-to-10 scale, with one being the feeling of cold dead horror she remembered upon realizing her odious, neck-bearded boss wanted to get into her pants. Ten marked the ignoble moment when she caught Hooper openly staring at her breasts while rearranging the riotous boner that was trying to break free of his pants. In that dizzying instant she desperately wanted to mount him there and then on the dirty flight deck with God, Heath and a platoon of marines as her witness.
She mostly hovered around seven or eight, and for a few blessed minutes the debilitating effect even tapered off to a manageable four, around the time Hooper asked if they dealt with this sort of thing all the time. He meant xenomorphs, of course, not her runaway sexual appetite.
Heath replied with a carefully phrased half-truth.
“I was the available JSOC asset in theatre, Mr Hooper. I was down here supervising a completely routine training exercise.”
He was the JSOC asset available to Special Programs, and the training exercise was routine only for those members of the SEALs who’d been seconded to OSTP. Dave Hooper asked if they’d ever been to Area 51, which almost made her smile, and between them she and Michael were able to frame his effective detention by the Office as something akin to protective custody, with the emphasis on protective, and the custody more a matter of keeping him safe. They tag teamed him, telling him as much of the truth as seemed necessary.
“There was a chance, Dave,” she said at one point, “that you could have ended up in a cell somewhere, sedated and chained down. I know Captain Heath argued very strongly against that…”
Michael did a very good imitation of a man who was pissed off at her for revealing all sorts of confidential flim-flammery and top secret thingies.
“…and to be honest,” she continued over his theatrical objections, “I think he saved a few lives doing so. I’ve only skimmed the briefing on the changes you’ve undergone since first contact…”
An outright fib, unfortunately. Sometimes you simply could not avoid them. Because, you know, top secret thingies.
“…but it’s enough to know that containment would have been the wrong option. Practically and morally.”
“Rendition?” Hooper spluttered. “Like a terrorist?”
Heath hurried to assure him he wasn’t being regarded as a threat or a terrorist and that his current situation was “More like witness protection”.
That sounded even better than “protective custody”, Em thought.
“And it was only one option,” Michael added. “Quickly rejected.”
Unfortunately that didn’t placate Hooper at all. He demanded to know what the other options might have been.
“Snipers? Air strikes? Grabbing my family? My boys?”
Telling, Emmeline thought, that he didn’t mention his wife, or rather his ex-wife. Presumably grabbing her would provide little or no leverage at all. But taking his sons would. It was the sort of detail Compton would file away, and she was somewhat relieved he wasn’t around to note it down. He would surely figure it out though. He’d already commissioned psych evaluations on this poor man…
She caught the errant feeling of care for Hooper, a moment of empathy that threatened to turn into something else under the impelling force of whatever powerful pheromones he was exuding. Emmeline attempted to soothe Hooper and her own hot mess of an id by retreating into clinical psychology 101.
“We’ve never dealt with something like this,” she said in a calm, even tone, answering his original question about Area 51, rather than the more difficult one about his exact status.
“But we have protocols. All of them untried. Untested. You came out of a violent first contact that no other subjects survived.”
“Vince did,” Hooper protested.
“No,” she corrected him. “Mr Martinelli observed the contact from close quarters. He did not take part in it directly. You survived a hostile contact, but the protocols defined you as compromised.”
“Because I survived?”
“Because you survived.”
“Oh, bullshit!”
Hooper’s anger was visible in the fists he clenched inside his pants pockets, the muscles jumping in his jawline, and the way he squeezed shut his eyes. He was obviously someone who struggled with anger management and to her dismay Emmeline found it did not affect the attraction she felt towards him. She tried to harden her heart, but he surprised her, and made that all but impossible.
“I had a brother,” he said quietly. “Had one. My baby brother. Went off and joined the army after 9/11.”
Hooper seemed to be speaking to himself as much as to them. His voice was low enough that she had to lean forward a little to hear him, and that made everything so much worse.
“Thought he was gonna chase bin Laden down himself. Instead he got blown up and shot to pieces in a fucking soft-ass Humvee in some Baghdad shithole because of fucking protocols and parameters and metrics and all of that shit you people go on with.”
His restraint was slipping. His voice grew harder and louder.
“I know the fucking ragheads who set off the bomb and pulled the triggers killed Andy. But your man Rumsfeld? And his fucking known unknowns? His protocols? He put him there to be killed. For no good reason.”
His eyes blazed at Heath, as though he were a substitute for the politicians Hooper blamed for his brother’s death.
Emmeline was tumbled about by a mad wash of emotions. Pity, sorrow, unquenched desire, and confusion. His profile hadn’t mentioned a brother.
“I am sorry, Dave,” she said quietly.
Heath looked as though he’d been carved from old, dark hardwood. His face was unreadable.
“I am sorry about your brother,” he said. “Your loss. I didn’t know. It wasn’t—”
“It wasn’t in the file?” Hooper said, chiding them. “There was no protocol?”
Heath had the decency to be embarrassed. Emmeline, normally insulated against the feelings of others, was even more unsettled by the strange and powerful empathy she suffered within Hooper’s presence.
Hooper looked as though he was trying to expel all of his impacted fury with one long ragged breath.
“You wouldn’t know,” he said. “There were a lot of things people didn’t know about Andy. One thing, he signed up under Mom’s name. They changed their names when my old man ran out. I thought, fuck that old prick. It’s my name. He can’t have that, too. So I kept it.”
Nobody seemed to know what to say, and Hooper eventually filled the silence.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled in a small voice. “I shouldn’t have said all that shit. I admit I got issues with the government, the military. But you’re just people. Not the thing itself. I apologize…I run off at the mouth sometimes. Like a fucking idiot, and yeah, like a bigot sometimes. Like my old man. I didn’t mean any disrespect to you or your service, Heath. Andy, he was proud of serving.”
Emmeline observed Michael, looking for the signs she had learned to read.
His eyes remained hard, his jaw clenched, and when he spoke, it appeared he was forcing himself to be civil.
“I accept your apology, Dave.” His voice softened. “Everyone loses something in war. Even when you win, you lose something.”
“Yeah,” Hooper agreed.
And intriguingly Emmeline had lost something too. The desire to climb him like a stripper’s pole.
# # #
“There’s one last thing you could do for me,” Heath said, when it became clear their unusual supper on the flight deck of the oil rig was nearly done.
“Sure, name it,” Hooper replied, obviously trying to make amends for his earlier poor manners and ill temper.
Heath was resolved to find out why the briefing notes hadn’t covered Hooper’s dead brother. It was most likely, as the man had said, because he’d enlisted under a different name. In spite of what the conspiracy nuts thought, the government was not all-seeing. In fact, it was an endless source of amusement to Heath that the very same nut jobs who saw vast government conspiracies everywhere, also believed governments were hopelessly incompetent and couldn’t organize a cheap blowjob in a two-star brothel.
He asked Professor Ashbury and Hooper to join him in the crew lounge, where the splitting maul was still stuck fast to the floor. Not in the floor, mind you, Excalibur style. Just on it. They picked up a couple of marines on the way to help out. Sergeant McInerney and Private Everding. Given all of the other extreme events they were dealing with, the weirdness of the immovable hammer was not a first order issue. Heath understood Compton was using it as a lever in Washington, hinting at unknown energy sources with potential military applications—which was all hysterical bullshit at this point—but Michael Heath wanted to play a hunch.
It seemed impossible that Hooper could have bested the xenomorphs—the “Horde”, he reminded himself—when none of his crewmates had survived a close encounter with them. It also appeared the sledgehammer was impossible to pick up. So what would it cost them to have the man who had used it, try to dislodge it? A couple of minutes rack time. That’s all. He had Everding attempt the first hoist, just to prove to Hooper that something was awry. Sergeant McInerney begged off even trying, citing his hernia. Professor Compton arrived while Everding was lining up his attempt, and the professor resumed his low level sniping of Hooper.
Heath understood that the Special Programs boss could be difficult and prickly at the best of times, and that Hooper’s personality was no cuddlier, but he worried the two men were determined not to get on with each other. He would have to talk to Compton about it, and soon. He suspected Mister Hooper was going to be one of those men you had to let fall on their ass, again and again, before they finally learned to stand up on their own. You could be there to offer a hand up, but Hooper would just push back at any attempt to control him, and a guy who could throw heavy weights into low orbit had a whole lot of push-back to call on.
“So, what?” Hooper said after Everding’s unsuccessful attempt to lift the hammer. “You just sort of pulled Urgon’s head away from it?”
“After a fashion.” Emmeline smiled. “It made the most awful mess.”
Hooper leaned in to pick the hammer up, or to try, prompting Heath to warn him.
“Remember what happened to the weight bar. Take it easy, Dave.”
The rigger conceded the point, and carefully placed his hands on the wooden shaft. The scientists, marines and one-legged Navy SEAL watched him, fascinated. In the end it was something of a letdown. He picked it up like it was nothing more than a piece of gardening equipment. Compton, Heath noticed, did not seem well pleased. His disgruntlement increased as Hooper insisted on twirling the thing like a baton, twisting and spinning it around so quickly that it hummed through the air and caused a small breeze to stir in the room.
“There has to be a rational explanation,” Emmeline said. “For all of this.”
“I agree with my subordinate,” Compton added, earning him a glare from that subordinate. “Extraordinary as events may seem, I doubt we are dealing with magic here. Some arcane technological event, perhaps.”
He was still rooting for gravitons then. Emmeline confessed herself at a complete loss to even speculate what might be at work. The marines were frankly agog. Hooper was simply pleased with himself.
“So? Can I keep it?” he asked.
# # #
“Well,” muttered Compton, “I’ll admit I didn’t see that coming.”
Emmeline shook her head.
“Me neither. Michael seemed to though. It was his idea.”
Compton furrowed his brow and made a noise at the back of his throat that she assumed was meant to indicate he agreed with her, but he was not happy to do so.
“I’m going to have to think this through,” he said. “I don’t think I can promise Washington their starship drive anymore.”
“Oh, they will be disappointed.”
“Yes,” he sighed, before recovering. “And what about you? How’s your baseline study?”
“It’s not so bad at the moment,” she said, looking back to where Hooper was using a rag to clean off the sledgehammer. “It comes and goes. I can’t tie the fluctuation to anything in particular besides proximity. I’ll give it another ten minutes then write up some notes and get to bed. Perhaps Cady could take over in the morning?”
“Well, be careful,” said Compton.
“As your subordinate, Raymond, I’m always careful,” she said, without inflection.
He stared at her.
“That was sarcasm, right?
”
“Right.”
“Okay,” Compton said. “You got me. And well done. That was almost like you were a normal person.” He bade her goodnight and hurried off after Heath.
Hooper appeared by her side, holding a much cleaner looking magical hammer.
“Walk you around the grounds, Prof?” he asked. “A stroll can sometimes clear the head and put a fella in the mood for bed.”
She almost snorted at the rhyme, but checked herself. She could feel the heat in her loins beginning to throb.
All right then. Ten minutes. No more.
It was difficult, especially when Hooper turned on the charm. She imagined he was the sort of bounder who could do that with women. She didn’t have to imagine he was also the sort who could make life a septic hell for any woman foolish enough to find herself dependent on him. She’d read all of the divorce court materials in the briefing pack. Interestingly, her unnatural attraction to this bastard did not seem directly related to his behavior. She did not, for instance, feel drawn to him with any greater organic force just because he was trying to be charming. That made it harder for her to think of him as the sort of deadbeat who would spend his children’s tuition on prostitutes and alcohol. He was very convincing in that way. But consulting her rudimentary scale—How Much Do I Want to Fuck This Douchebag 1-10—she found no correlation between how she felt and what he did or said.
Still, it was an unpleasant experience having him squire her about the oil platform. Would it have been as bad as going to a terrible Washington dinner dance with the terrible Roger Penrose? She could not say. She had no Penrose baseline against which to measure Hooper’s awfulness.
The stroll around the damaged platform with Hooper, however, was undeniably awful. The storms of the previous day had broken up into ragged strips of cloud and a cold, gusting southerly wind. The discomfort of the environment was nothing compared to the bother and difficulty of simply being in this man’s presence. The more time Emmeline spent with him the more convinced she was that something intensely perverse had happened, or was happening to him on a molecular level. She endured the torture of his presence and the nigh on ungovernable feelings it stirred in her for as long as she could. There were moments, she knew, where she would have let him sweep her off to bed, if he had tried, and she supposed she had to be thankful to him for not taking advantage of that. Surely he could tell what she was feeling, if not what she was thinking. There were even a few moments when he seemed to intuit her distress, making an effort to put some distance between them. She noted the bizarre way in which her arousal began to plummet from its most intense peaks when he was more than six feet away.
A Protocol for Monsters: Dave vs the Monsters Page 7
