Nevada, looking west toward Death Valley. I was fifteen years old, and a contingent of fellow scouts had flown across the country to do some hiking in the mountains west of Las Vegas. We’d rolled into town in shorts and T-shirts, the desert a balmy eighty-five degrees in the early spring. Down the famous strip, we’d strained to take pictures of the infamous Welcome to Las Vegas sign, and we’d marveled at the Hoover Dam, which held back the deepest-blue lake I’d ever seen. Our lakes in Tennessee were black or green by comparison, a far cry from the sapphire-blue waters of Lake Mead. We’d bused out to our campground to spend the night before hiking out to a ghost town for a one-night trip.
The morning dawned chilly, but as the sun rose, the temperature climbed. By the time we’d strapped on our backpacks, our shorts and T-shirts were perfect. The old road to the west snaked through a tight mountain pass and down into a small valley. Through a notch in the western ridgeline were California and a hovering grey mass of clouds heralding a mountain storm. By late afternoon, the clouds obscured most of the sky, and grey fingers reached down from the heavens as the temperature dropped.
We were standing around the fire when my father said, “Most of the time out here, rain doesn’t hit the ground.” In my dream, I could not help but think he was a lot like me save for his greying hair and glasses.
We’d given the clouds no more thought after that. He’d lived through thousands of nights in the New Mexico high desert, and we slipped off to our tents, comfortably assured that all was well and we’d wake up in the morning to a beautiful day and pleasant hike back to the main camp.
Later, in my sleeping bag, I’d rolled onto my stomach, and I slowly became aware of weight pushing down on me. I rolled over, pushing the weight away, and it came right back. Waking up, I thrashed at my tent mate to move over, but he was on his side of the tent and snoring happily. I sat up, snapped on a halogen light, and discovered that our tent was on the verge of collapse.
Unzipping the flaps of the two-man tent, I peered out into the early morning twilight in horror. The rain hadn’t fallen at all, but in its place were more than six inches of snow—not a lot of snow, but for a cheap, built-for-summer tent, it was disaster. Shivering in my shorts and a jacket, I pulled on my hiking boots and trudged across our campsite to my father’s tent. I rapped on the aluminum pole.
“Dad!” After waiting a second, I called again, “Dad!”
“What?”
“It snowed.”
He sighed on the other side of the tent flap. “I know. Go back to bed.”
Needless to say, I wasn’t going to do that. I woke up my friends, and we built the largest fire that we could, packed our wet gear, pulled socks onto our hands for gloves, and hiked back to the main campground only to find the lodge was locked. After a few minutes of waiting, someone found a way into the lodge, and we crammed into the building to dry out and warm up, cackling madly about how the rain never reached the ground. My dad never lived it down.
Our tent ripped, snapping me out of my dream in time to see a whole corner disappear, along with the top compartment of Berkeley’s pack, into the night. Scrambling through the hole, I saw a coyote running to the east, carrying half our food like a trophy into the night.
Crawley fielded the call immediately. He’d been expecting it for two days. He propped his feet on his wide desk and leaned back in his chair. “Good evening, Madame Chairman. What can I do for you?”
“Find him.”
“We know where he is. He entered the North American frontier through the Flagstaff checkpoint roughly twenty-four hours ago. He and a young woman walked through the gate and hiked out of Flagstaff to the northeast. Given the timeframe, he’s within sixty kilometers of the California border right now.” The lie was easy and not practiced. He sounded like a politician, and it made him sick to his stomach.
“You’re guessing all of that, Adam. Without direct reporting…”
“With respect, Madame Chairman, I do have reporting. His guidance protocol is equipped to establish contact via satellite in the event of an emergency. We can also ping the protocol every twenty-four hours to establish contact, which I do not recommend.”
He could hear Penelope Neige blowing a stream of perfumed cigarette smoke and pictured the way she always did it, with her bottom lip stuck out to one side. “Why not?”
“Data transfer rate. If we ping the protocol regularly, it could shut down for up to forty-eight hours. Even a Series Three protocol has limits.”
“You’re telling me that we have a Stage Three subject who could integrate within the next several days.”
“That’s highly unlikely,” Crawley replied. “Simply put, Penelope, this subject has weeks to integration—months, in fact. This takes time. There is a very good chance he’ll return to Australia to do that.”
Neige’s voice became prickly the way it always did when he’d annoyed her. “I do not want him out where we cannot control him!”
Crawley leaned back in his chair, fingers clenched across his chest. “This experiment isn’t about control.”
“The hell it’s not! We need soldiers, millions of them, who will follow the orders of general officers like you without question! There is no other way to even stand up to our enemies.” Neige paused, and there was the sound of her blowing smoke from her lungs again. “If this subject integrates, he’s likely to question authority, take risks, and display audacious behavior. I heard about what he did in Esperance. He nearly killed himself! He doesn’t need to help others, Adam.”
“That is exactly what we need. We’re better served to raise more soldiers like him than to try and train our modern citizens. This project will succeed—”
Neige snorted. “I’m sure it will. But after this subject, you’ll have no more twenty-first-century subjects and especially no more North Americans. I’d rather deal with anything else than them. You have tens of thousands of samples, don’t you?”
Crawley smiled at the shudder in the chairman’s voice. Years of peace and tranquility did not let true politicians rest easy. They feared the military too much. Maybe there was hope after all. “If you use modern subjects and try to copy skills and procedures on them, it will fail spectacularly.” Using three-hundred-year-old DNA samples and hyper-spectral magnetic resonance imagery of the brain allowed for the re-creation of the soldier. Mismatched data would bring horrible results, but having a perfect genetic clone combined with a complete memory sample gave him reason to believe.
“That’s not important. I want your word, General Crawley, that should this subject reach Stage Four, the responsibility for any further development or termination of the experiment falls at the council level.”
“That was the agreement.” Crawley bit his tongue. Saying more would enflame the chairman. Tipping his hand was not an option. Dealing with the council meant negotiating hidden strategies, to be sure, but in the end, the Terran Defense Forces held the upper hand. Success in battle meant strong support from the citizens of Earth when the elections came. The citizens of Earth would continue to try and find the best people for political representation, and they would cycle through them endlessly while the TDF remained strong and vibrant. Given a few more subjects, the TDF could even win the war. The few human units that had engaged the Greys in the Great War had fared terribly. Sleepy, and any others like him, could be the difference they needed.
“Good. At the notification of Stage Four integration, we will collect the subject and return him to you?”
“Dead or alive?” Crawley asked. “He’s a valuable subject.”
“We’ll see just how much trouble he is,” Neige replied, and the connection clicked off.
A smirk crossed his face. Most people generalized political maneuvering as a game of chess. Crawley knew far better. Chess was a game of hidden strategy to put your opponent into a series of moves ending in
their defeat. This was not chess but king of the mountain. Adam Crawley smiled and pulled up the latest of Doctor Bennett’s reports. She’d had no luck cracking the subject’s protocol with a direct attempt to gain access, but the good news was that in the event the subject went Stage Four, Crawley would be the only person to know about it for at least a few hours.
That would be time enough to evacuate the subject to Sydney and finish the experiment in a controlled environment, Crawley decided. At his desk, he wrapped a hand around the warm mug of coffee and keyed up the next project in his file. Staying ahead of the Terran Council would take every measure of his abilities for as long as he could manage.
Chapter Twelve
As the cold air invaded the small tent, all I could do was laugh. One day out of civilization, and half our food had disappeared. A damned coyote at that! Berkeley punched me in the arm.
“Stop it!” She scowled and huddled in her sleeping bag. “What are we going to do now?”
I looked through the hole into the cold, dark night. We’d been asleep an hour. The air was positively frigid. All of the body heat in our tent dissipated in a flash. I moved my pack toward the hole, but the cold air poured through regardless. “The rain has almost quit. Want to get going?”
“You’re not worried about our food? There’s only a couple of weeks’ supply in your pack.” Berkeley sighed.
The icy breeze brought a faint whiff of sage into the tent. The small bars and rations in my pack hardly felt like food. They served their purpose, but I wanted something else. Maybe even something wild. If there were coyotes, there would be other wildlife. “We can catch what we need to eat. I had some survival training.” The quick image of a rabbit roasting on a spit above a fire appeared and disappeared as quickly—another memory captured but not much data.
“You’re out of your mind.” Berkeley punched me in the shoulder. “That’s not going to be enough.”
“What’s not going to be enough?”
“Your misplaced faith in your abilities.” She smiled and shook her head. Her eyes were ocean blue and glittering in the dim lantern light.
I moved close enough to feel her breath on my face. Being close to her felt natural, and she didn’t seem to mind. “Trust me.”
“What about the tent? We can’t sleep like this! What if it rains?” Berkeley crossed her arms inside her sleeping bag.
“Who says we have to?” The ten-pound brick I’d been lugging around would cure the problem. “I have another tent.”
Her eyebrows rose. “What kind of tent?”
I shrugged and reached for my pack, withdrawing the amber-colored brick. “This.”
“A hexhab!” She snatched it from my hands. “Expedition series! This is the kind of tent that went to Mars! Why didn’t you tell me you had one?” Her expression lay between anger and amusement—the most dangerous look on a woman’s face. “We didn’t need to get any food or a tent!”
“What are you talking about? It’s a survival tent, right?” I grabbed the package away from her and studied it. It felt like an orange foil-covered brick the size of a shoebox with a button on one end. We don’t need to worry about food? Are there more barely edible rations inside this thing? She’s clearly lost her mind. “I just assumed it was no big deal.”
Berkeley sighed and reached into the remnants of her food bag. “It’s much more than a simple survival tent, Sleepy. I’ll show you later. Want something to eat?”
“Are we leaving?” I asked, ignoring the question of food.
Berkeley leaned closer, her eyes inches from mine. “Might as well. I’m not going back to sleep anyway.”
“I don’t want to keep moving at night.”
“Me either.” She yawned. “So, let’s get a few more miles under our belts before the sun comes up, hike until we’re tired, and then get a good night’s sleep. Unless you’re forgetting to tell me something else.”
I leaned closer. “Does that mean you’ll trust me?”
“Maybe.” Her breath was warm on my face, and I leaned in and kissed her. Our lips touched about the same time as our eyes closed. The kiss lasted only a moment, but it was enough to let me know she liked it and maybe, just maybe, there would be more. She smiled at me, and my heart melted a little. “Now, food?” she asked.
My face must have betrayed my thoughts because she leaned over and deftly kissed my lips again—strong, but not urgent. Definitely not platonic, I thought before I said, “That was okay?”
“For the last time, food!” She worked the zipper of her sleeping bag down a little and hunched lower in the bag. I caught a glimpse of smooth, bare thigh as she did, and the effort to drag my eyes away took longer than I would have liked, but she said nothing.
We ate the dry breakfast bars quickly, consuming more calories than our meal plan specified. Whatever she meant about the hexhab providing food was obvious to her but lost on me, and the closer she snuggled into me, the less I cared about such things. The tent came down in a few minutes, and to my surprise, Berkeley tucked the remains into the top of my backpack.
“Never know when you might need it,” she said. “Besides, always leave things better than you found them.” I couldn’t help but wonder if she thought we were being followed.
Mally, are you there?
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Good morning to you, too. Are we being followed?
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I told her about the tent but left out everything else about the morning, especially the giddy feeling in my stomach.
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Sleeper Protocol Page 14
