by Michael Todd
Of all the weird things that he’d learned about in the Zoo, this was one of the most surprising. He clung to his weapon and tried to fire at the panthers as his tentacle captors raised him higher and higher into the trees. The slugs did little damage and although they struck everywhere around the beasts, they still completely ignored him. Finally, he realized that he had been drawn to the very top of the canopy, and for a moment, he could have sworn that he saw a pair of eyes look at him. They weren’t malevolent or…savage, or even primal, for that matter. Almost curious, he thought in a detached, objective way.
Niels jerked back to reality as his vine-cage began to snap or pull away. A cold dread lurched into his stomach when he looked at the ground and realized how high he was. He wanted to scream but the bile that rose in his throat drowned the sound in a gargle of despair. The grip that had supported him released and gravity instantly took hold.
The downward spiral seemed to take forever. The gunfire had ceased as the jungle around the killing field plunged into a dense and impossible silence. Even the roars and shrieks of the angry animals faded entirely as he fell. It couldn’t have taken more than three seconds, but it felt like it would last a lifetime.
Finally, he struck the ground and landed on his back. Even with the armor that was supposed to prevent any kind of shock from affecting the body inside, he could only imagine that the impact of a two-ton suit dropped from thirty feet was not what the designers had in mind. There weren’t many suits of armor in the world that could nullify an impact like that.
A sharp pain seared up his back and knocked the breath out of him. It was almost enough to make him pass out, but as he drifted between consciousness and unconsciousness, his curiosity won out and forced him to focus. Twelve bodies sprawled on the ground beside him, torn to pieces in all kinds of creative ways. The armor had been pulled off some while others simply had small puncture marks where poison had been injected.
“Fuck,” Niels whispered and looked at his legs. He knew that his back was broken, but his arms and neck still worked and he was able to drag himself up onto the roots that he’d landed on.
The tentacles now tugged and nudged at the dead men on the jungle floor. They poked and prodded at the bodies a few moments before they raised them one by one.
There was considerable inspection of the specialist, Niels noted, but it seemed that the tentacles and even the animals avoided him. He could understand why—he was a prick—but there was something oddly poetic about the fact that there was something so wrong with the man that not even an all-consuming jungle would absorb him.
He realized that a couple of the creatures had noticed him. They didn’t seem to be sure whether he was dead or not. A couple of the panthers padded over and licked their poisoned fangs. He raised his rifle and fired at them. The first one died almost instantly, but the second bounded to the left and circled in an effort to avoid the bullets. It bought the panther a few seconds, but eventually, it dropped as well.
Unfortunately, the shooting attracted the other monsters, who looked at him like they were surprised that he was still alive. Maybe he simply made this up and tried to make some sense of it all through a lame attempt to anthropomorphize the monsters that had killed his comrades and that one asshole.
They seemed malevolent enough to charge at him and he realized that his rifle was empty. There were no spare mags in his belt. He fumbled in his pouch and his fingers closed around a pair of grenades that he’d brought along. They weren’t standard issue for people like him, but he’d always made sure that he was as well armed as he could be. He’d acquired the grenades from the weapons dealer in the Staging Area.
Creatures surged toward him as he pulled his little friends clear. The tentacles slithered down from the treetops. He didn’t want to think about what would happen if they attacked him again, so he pulled the pins. Teeth and claws raked and savaged his suit of armor to rip and slash, bruise and hurt. While he couldn’t feel anything below the waist, they began to attack his torso with the same frenzied intensity. He dropped the grenades at his sides and the clips fell alongside.
The creatures seemed to realize that they were in imminent danger, but they had neither the time nor the intelligence to realize exactly how much. Niels closed his eyes and leaned back.
Chapter Twenty-One
Madigan stepped inside the bar and closed her eyes as the cool air-conditioned environment banished the heat from outside. If they ever did retire somewhere away from the Zoo, she would manage to convince Sal to take them somewhere cooler. She wouldn’t mind if it was hot in the summertime when they could go to the beach and take time off there, but only for a couple of months in the year.
She knew, though, that he would pursue this sort of lifestyle until he obtained his doctorate, and probably after that. Like every other person in the world, he liked his creature comforts, but there was something else that drove him. She didn’t know quite how to describe it other than insatiable curiosity. He wanted to fill his brain with as many facts and figures as he could. It wasn’t something that she shared with him, but she could understand it.
He wouldn’t retire anytime soon. And in truth, neither would she. Barring any kind of nasty accidents, she didn’t see herself getting a desk job to run Heavy Metal from a distance. But it still couldn’t hurt to have something planned, right?
She strode to the bar and drew in a deep breath of the cool air as she raised a hand to the bartender. It hadn’t been a lie when she told Sal that she’d been drinking less, but that didn’t mean she had stopped drinking entirely. She was still well-known enough in the bar for the man standing behind it to know what she would order. That plus the fact that she and Sal provided them with a steady stream of good, cheap vodka from the Russian base.
He placed a beer mug in front of her, filled to the brim with a thick malt beer, and she decided she would stick to the counter instead of a table. The bar would fill up quickly over the next few minutes, and she didn’t want to share her table with loud and abrasive recent returnees from the Zoo.
A handful entered as she took her first sip. They discussed something that she was already aware of. News wasn’t slow to do the rounds, even if they were stuck in the middle of a compound.
“They didn’t even get a chance to signal for help,” one of the men said and shook his head. “By the time a team got there, there wasn’t anything left. Most of the bodies were gone.”
“How would you know that?” another of the newcomers asked. “Were you on the team that got there?”
“I was part of the team that had to write the letters back to the family to explain to them that while we were reasonably certain they were dead, we only had a couple of corpses to prove it,” the first man retorted defensively.
Madigan resisted the urge to order a shot of whiskey to add to her beer. It was too early in the day to be drunk, and Sal expected her back at the compound before sunset. She didn’t want to keep him waiting.
“Kennedy, right?” A man settled onto a seat beside her. “Madigan Kennedy?”
“That’s me,” she said with a small smile and raised her glass at the young man in uniform. “How can I help you?”
“Right to business, then?” he asked.
“If you don’t mind”
“Fair enough.” He chuckled. “To cut a long story short, I’m at…let’s call it a loose end. My squad took serious casualties in our last run, and the commandant gave us word that it’ll be a while before they have the manpower to fill our quota again. Of course, they’ll plug those left into other squads when we’re needed, but I’ve been told that it’ll take some time before that happens.”
“And you want to work in the meantime,” she said to bring them to the point the younger solider seemed to want to avoid saying outright. “You’re looking for freelance work.”
“In a word…yeah,” he said with a nod. “The word around the base is that Heavy Metal is looking for muscle and can pay for the trouble.”
“What’s your name, kid?” Madigan asked.
“PFC Brian Abrams.” He grinned. “Like the tank.”
“Nice to meet you, Abrams. Look, the word around the base is right. We will need muscle soon, but the details are still a little sketchy. The basic idea is that we need a twelve-man team and we’ll move…delicate and expensive merch. The pay will be good, so if you don’t mind, you could spread the word about the opportunity so we don’t get the team up and running at the last minute.”
“Huh,” he grunted. “It sounds like something I would be interested in. And quite a few other people. Seriously, Heavy Metal has a good rep when it comes to the people you work with.”
“That’s good to know.” She swallowed the last of her pint, and after a second thought, refused when the bartender offered a refill. “Anyway, here’s my contact info. Let me know if there’s anyone else who springs to mind for the job or if you have to back out for any reason.”
“Will do,” Abrams said with a smile. “And thanks.”
“Jacobs?”
Sal glanced up from his laptop to where Anja hovered at his half-open door. It wasn’t usual for her to come to him for anything. In the past, when she’d wanted his attention, she buzzed his phone with a dozen illegible text messages until he finally wandered to the server room to see what she wanted.
“Hey, Anja,” he said and smiled as he quickly locked his laptop. “How can I help you?”
“First of all, it’s really adorable that you think a simple passcode protection will be enough to keep that data safe,” she said with a grin. “You might want to think about letting me run some encryption software on there to make sure that if anyone did get hold of it, they’d need a couple of decades to get through.”
“And what would happen if I forgot my password or something?” he asked, genuinely curious.
“Come on, a genius like you?” Anja asked before she realized that he’d asked a legitimate question. “Oh, well, you could probably simply bring it to me and I’d get it for you without too much trouble.”
“Right,” he said with a soft grunt that might have been disapproval. “Is there something I can do for you?”
“Yes. Yes, there is,” Anja said. “I have the video Courtney needs to deal with Covington ready to go whenever she is. I hoped that you could contact her and let her know.”
Sal regarded her with a little bemusement. “You have her number, and you have already monitored my conversations with her.”
“Well, yes, which is why I don’t feel comfortable talking to her myself,” she explained. “I know a lot about her, but she knows nothing of me so it would be a one-sided conversation.”
“It wouldn’t need to be a conversation at all,” he grumbled and pushed from his seat. “Send her the damn thing, add a smiley face to the message for her to know that it’s a human sending it, and violá, you have yourself a sent video.”
“Perfect. Could you do that?” She handed him a memory stick.
“Fine.” He took it from her. “But if we’re a team, you have to trust the people you work with.”
Anja shrugged. She wasn’t particularly in the mood to handle making friends across the world, but if it would shut him up about it, she would agree and conveniently forget to comply later.
“Hey, are you busy?” Madigan asked from the doorway, pushed it open, and did a quick double-take when she saw Anja in the room. She shook her head and looked meaningfully at him.
“Not particularly busy, why?” he asked and placed the memory drive on his desk.
“Do you need me?” the hacker asked, her expression anxious.
“I don’t think so,” Madigan said. “Thanks for your help, Anja.”
The woman nodded and looked away. She clearly wasn’t that comfortable with compliments, so she simply beat a hasty retreat, stepped out of the room, and shut the door behind her.
“What was that about?” Madigan asked, tilting her head.
“She’s not comfortable talking to Courtney, so she wanted me to send the Covington file over to her,” Sal said, waving the memory stick. “What’s up?”
“I spread the word that we’re looking for some people to transport the plant,” she said with a chuckle. “I didn’t outright say it was the plant, but I think I implied it fairly effectively. Anyone who knows anything about anything will be able to connect the dots and make the connection easily, I think.”
“Good,” Sal said with a quick nod. They needed to be subtle about this. “Anything else?”
“Well, you know this little mission will be expensive, so you might want to prepare for that,” Madigan added. “Either way, I spread the net with people I trust to find the guys who will actually run the mission. We won’t hire blind on this one. I hope you feel like walking in your armor.”
“Speaking of armor…” He handed a file to her. “This is the stuff Courtney sent me about the metal Pegasus has extracted. Apparently, much of the research Pegasus did ran through her father’s R&D group. Based on her observations—which are based on her father’s tests—this stuff won’t work very well in the Zoo. She appreciated that we’re doing this for her, but if she hadn’t looked into it, no one would have known that it would work outside the Zoo but cause a lot of deaths inside.”
“From the look of the leg that we pulled out of there, I’d say that it’s already caused a lot of deaths inside.” She gave the file a quick study. “Wait, did she tell you to say that word for word?”
“I might have paraphrased a little.” He grinned sheepishly.
Madigan chuckled. “Okay, I need to keep in touch with my guys. I’ll let you know when I have a full sheet for them.”
“Thanks,” Sal said. “Close the door on the way out?”
Madigan grinned and considered asking him what he would do after she closed the door but decided against it. They were comfortable enough with each other that if he had any needs that needed satisfying, he would come to her. As a result, she simply gave him a coy smirk that told him everything he needed to know and pulled the door shut behind her.
Chapter Twenty-Two
“Hey…Courtney?” Anja asked, suddenly very aware of the headset that she wore.
“Hi, Anja,” Courtney replied through their secure satellite link. “Sal said that you might give me a call soon. How can I help you?”
“I hope I’m not interrupting anything, and I hope the video I sent was suitable for the task.”
“It looked great,” Courtney replied honestly. “I still haven’t sent it yet, so we’ll see how that goes.”
“Right.” The hacker shook her head. “Anyway, I found a bio-locked laptop that Covington uses. A lot. It’s inside her house and under what looks like a lot of security, so that might be what you’re looking for. I’d like to confirm it, but bio-locked equipment can’t be hacked remotely. I’ll need physical access.”
“So we have to get it out of her house,” she mused, “which is why we’ll need the video anyway. Look, can I talk to Sal about this?”
“I can patch you over to his line,” Anja said with a nod. “He’s probably still working on the paperwork for all the stuff that he’s trying to pull. If you don’t mind me saying so, I think he’s a little too ambitious with all this. All that’s missing is for him to cackle maniacally while trying to take over the world.”
“That’s…a slight exaggeration,” Courtney said, although she knew that it was a lot less slight than she would like to admit. “But he has good intentions.”
“All the guys who want to take over the world do,” Anja retorted with a trace of humor. “Or they think they do, anyway. His comm is open. I’ll patch you into that.”
“Thanks.”
The Russian nodded. She knew the other woman couldn’t see her, but that wasn’t something she was particularly concerned about. Her part, for now, was done, and she could happily go back to things she knew and understood. Computers were a lot less stressful than human interaction. Sal was far better at t
alking to people than she was, and since he knew Courtney better, as well, he would be able to interpret the squeaky quality she’d heard in the woman’s voice.
Anja looked at her computer. She killed her connection to Sal and Courtney’s conversation and set it to record so she could listen to it afterward. It was still her private satellite feed and no matter what anyone thought, she needed to keep control over what was done on it.
Satisfied that the details were taken care of, she turned to the laptop where she had decrypted the stuff on the hard drive that Anderson had sent them to retrieve. She wasn’t entirely sure what she would find, but whatever it was, she’d make damn sure she accessed every last byte of data. Madigan had made a deal, and any agreement Heavy Metal made was one she made too. That was what being part of a team was all about. You shared the good and the bad and gave all you had to everything you did. Kennedy and Jacobs had given her their all when they took her on blind-sight, as it were. She didn’t particularly enjoy working for third parties like the colonel, but if her bosses felt it was important, she wouldn’t ask any questions.
A section of the hard drive had been decrypted, though most of what she read still didn’t make much sense. Her major had been in computer sciences, and all the engineering jargon that had been included in something that was clearly meant for engineers might as well have been in an alien language. It looked like designs and the pictures were there, so she hoped that someone would know what it meant when she uploaded the section that had been decrypted to her dark web drop box. Messenger sites that were flooded with random chatter tended to be ignored by the major dipper agencies due to the sheer volume of data that was put through them, which made it relatively safe to put untraceable blocks for a short amount of time.
She put a timer on the block to erase automatically after fifteen minutes, but it wasn’t really necessary. Someone accessed it and pulled it off the messenger service less than five minutes later.
