“I know what must be done.” Neige sat forward. She stared at the younger woman intently enough that she looked away after a few seconds. “You are dismissed. Security will escort you off the campus.”
The woman’s lower lip quivered. “Please, Madame Chairman. Don’t do this. I have a family—” Tears came to her eyes.
“Of course you do.” She smiled. “But you failed me. You’ll be reduced three grades and returned to logistical operations. On Chinese Taipei. Your family will be allowed three visits per year. I suggest you use them wisely.”
The woman snapped erect. “What if I just quit? Walk away and report these anomalies to the media? You’re obviously covering something up, Madame Chairman.”
Neige laughed long and loud. “They are too busy reporting on what people are wearing and inciting fear, just as they are supposed to be. They won’t believe you, and we’ll bury it beneath the fall fashion season with ease.” She tilted her chin down and frowned with one corner of her mouth. “Of course, that’s if you even leave the campus alive.”
Realization dawned in the representative’s face. “Madame Chairman, I—”
“No one threatens the council, and especially me.” She pushed a button on her desk.
Two men came through the door, and before the representative could protest, one touched a powerful stunner to her neck. She crumpled to the floor.
“Orders, ma’am?”
Neige considered the young woman one last time. “Ensure she’s found someplace seedy enough that even her family will forget her.”
As the guards hustled the woman out of the office, Penelope Neige pored over the data from the incomplete report and checked the time. Crawley would arrive in time for a late dinner. Chez Renault had a table perpetually reserved for her, with a bottle of Narrobian red chilled to the proper temperature. Maybe the oysters will be good. Her stomach rumbled slightly. Seeing Crawley would be good. She’d let him run amok far too long. She now had the ammunition to stop him.
The good work always made her hungry. Eyes on the setting sun over L’Arc de Triomphe, she considered the possibility that Crawley and his predecessors had lied to the council for more than fifty years. Not only did they have another subject on walkabout, they’d lost control of that subject. That was Neige’s worst nightmare, unless control could be reestablished. A random clone with a twenty-first-century mindset could breed discontent with the world situation and rally others to its cause. The longer it walked around with a measure of control, the more people it could potentially influence. They needed to establish control quickly, and Crawley was undoubtedly ahead of her. Only one person in the world had the clearance and the experience to hide a missing subject in a manner fast enough to avoid detection.
Neige typed a simple message to her cyber-intelligence team. “Open file, and review all communications with regard to Dr. Berkeley Bennett. Report her location and all unsecure communications, my eyes only. Move Subject Alpha to Paris. Acknowledge.”
A reply came within seconds. Neige smiled with the knowledge that search programs were now open. In a few hours, a woman who might know even more about things than Neige herself would be there for questioning. Answers were a certainty.
Da’adstri, the Styrahi infantry commander, stomped through the tight passageways on Ethi Bravo toward the deployment bay where her troops gathered. This had better not be another unplanned exercise.
Manning the key listening post for interstellar movement was a six-month assignment she and her infantry-based troops loathed. But her mission to defend the outpost and its communications crews was worth it. Without them, a majority of the direct routes between the two planets would go unmonitored.
As she pushed through the entry doors, her troops snapped to attention and cleared a path out of fear and respect. At the main console, she focused on a particular young woman with short blond hair.
“You have answers, Trianne?” Da’adstri growled.
Her intelligence officer nodded. “Inbound contact in foldspace. Signature matches a Grey Jack. Estimated arrival in thirty-six hours.”
“Just one?” Da’adstri stepped into her powered combat suit.
“Yes, honnurah,” Trianne said. “The communications team has requested assistance. The Fleet had a battle platform within range. They are moving to assist.”
“They’ll arrive when?” She picked up her plasma rifle and quickly checked its readiness for battle. Satisfied, she reached for her graa’mar and tucked it into the sheath on her left thigh. The hatchet-like weapon was deadly in close-quarters combat and almost entirely unnecessary against the Greys.
Trianne tapped her headset. “Two days.”
A twelve-hour combat engagement. Not undoable. “Are there any other support vessels with that platform?”
“I’ll found out.” Trianne swallowed. She looked away for a brief moment.
Da’adstri focused her rising temper but spared the young officer. “Get me that information. Bring it to me out at Site Alpha.”
“Yes, honurrah,” Trianne said over her shoulder as she hurried out of the bay.
Da’adstri roared, “Gather your weapons and prepare to deploy!” As she walked to her command transport, she tapped her radio set with a free hand. “Deploying forces to Site Alpha. Establish control of standoff weapons and relay to my vehicle immediately.”
Her counterpart, the senior communications officer, replied, “You’ll have it, Da’adstri. Be well.”
The Styrahi commander bit her lip. “You too, Jenli.” They were on opposing ends of the political-military spectrum, but Jenli really understood and appreciated the infantry force. “Be ready on my signal. Do not hesitate to fire on my position if we are unsuccessful or if the humans are late.”
“They will be here.”
Da’adstri snorted. “I will believe it when I see it.”
Jenli paused. “We’ll be ready to do what must be done, my friend.”
Da’adstri replied with a grunt and disengaged the transmission. Her central staff waited by her vehicle. “Double ammunition loads, and deploy all forward missile batteries. We defend at all costs. If this planet falls, Styrah or Earth could be next.”
The four younger warriors scattered and left her watching her troops prepare for battle. They showed no fear. Even the youngest, the ones who’d never seen the Greys in combat, were ready and would die to protect their territory without a second thought.
On her wrist, Da’adstri adjusted her communications suite and added a countdown timer. If the humans were coming, she’d need to know when and how to shape the fight.
Maybe they’ll send real warriors this time.
She pushed the thought away and boarded her command vehicle. “We deploy in fifteen minutes,” she called to her communications operators. “Connect me with the overall frequency.”
A moment later, one of her young specialists nodded to her, and she pressed the transmit button. “It’s time, ihruhraa. Today, we touch the sky.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Penelope Neige looked up from her lobster bisque with a frown. “How about we start with the subject you have on walkabout right now? You know the one? The one you failed to report to me?”
This is starting off well. Crawley pulled out the chair opposite Neige’s and settled into it. A waiter appeared with a menu that Crawley rejected with a wave of his hand. “Narrobian Red to drink, and your chef’s special for the evening.”
The waiter bowed slightly and ducked away from the table. Crawley unfolded his napkin, placed it across his lap, and stared impassively at Neige. Her fury was expected. In all of the program reports for the last five years, he’d carefully laid a web of lies to conceal sleeper program advances and buy his subjects more time. There were two courses of action. He could either go in with guns blazing or mend fences.
The twenty-first-century phrases came
easily to mind even if he didn’t fully understand all of them. Damn you, Kieran. I still don’t get the “mending fences” thing.
“I sense an accusation there, Madame Chairman.”
“Don’t bullshit me, Adam,” Neige said. “You have a subject on walkabout who is responsible for the deaths of two Terran Council agents on Hokkaido. She traveled, somehow, to New York, managed to escape a team of identification specialists, and got out of the most secure airport in Columbia without a trace. It’s time you leveled with me.”
Crawley leaned forward on the edge of the table, wrinkling the heavy tablecloth. “I can assume, then, your staff has been briefed on the situation?”
“No.” Neige reached for her wineglass. After a long sip, she said, “This program is still classified to my eyes only, as far as the Terran Council is concerned. Until you provide me answers, it will remain that way. Based on what you tell me, I’ll decide whether or not to brief my team and clear the rest of the council. We know what that would do.”
Kill everything. Without the sleeper program, Earth’s military forces would fail within hours of combat. Having the will to make a stand was a very different mindset from that of the bulk of modern service members. He took a deep breath and paused as the waiter returned with a glass of wine. Crawley took the wine and reached across the table to make a toast. “To this project, Madame Chairman, and the steps we’re forced to take.”
Neige stared at him blankly for a full five seconds before a smile appeared, and then she gave a short burst of laughter. She raised her glass and clinked it against his. “Indeed.”
They drank for a moment.
“After our first subject’s death,” he said, “which I must remind you falls upon your singular decision to deploy an untested protocol set, we were already in the process with a second subject. We were so close to a name with him that making an attempt on similar procedures was a calculated risk, Madame Chairman. Our second subject awoke thirty-four days after the first. I decided that we would proceed with her development while we held off programming the other subjects and their protocols.”
“The math doesn’t add up, Adam. She should have been back to you—”
“Months ago.” Crawley sighed. “I decided to give her more time. We saw some promising data early, but she became more withdrawn from other people and, as such, has actively repressed her memories. I kept waiting for her to make a turn.” He frowned.
Neige snorted. “She certainly did. How did she disable her protocol?”
Crawley sipped the exquisite wine and sat back in his chair. The small private dining room seemed to squeeze in on them, amplifying the effect of their conversation and making him teeter on the brink of nervousness. He laughed to break his own tension. “We gave the protocol a reset switch in case of emergency. The subject decided she wanted to take her own life and went to one of the few places where, if she could get past the subliminal programming and turn the protocol off, she could do it. What happened after she pressed that button I cannot say. Something happened, and I have no clue what.”
Neige was quiet for a moment. Crawley wondered if she’d expected him to outright lie about things. She wouldn’t have expected honesty. The truth is sometimes harder to swallow. He tried to step into the mind of his adversary—what she was planning, what concerned her, and more importantly, what she would do next. Neige obviously wanted the subject collected and euthanized but could not find her. Only one person in the world could possibly do it, and unfortunately, they both knew who it was.
Berkeley is in danger. Crawley decided to keep his neural connection silent. There would be time after this painful dinner to contact her and start things rolling. And not just her. Time is everything.
“What are you doing to find her?”
Crawley opened his hands. “I’m expecting that you’ve requested facial recognition permission?”
“I have. The prelate will sign it this evening. It will be effective at midnight.”
“When you have it, you’ll have our complete files on the second subject. There’s not much there that I haven’t told you.”
“Good.” Neige smiled. “I was afraid something like this could put a wedge in our friendship, Adam. It’s nice to see I was wrong.”
I don’t trust you. Crawley grinned. And you know that, which makes this even more difficult. “I hoped this subject would be as good as our first result, but things did not pan out. Emotional involvement is critical. Without it, these subjects are as vulnerable as their imprinted counterparts from the Great War.”
Neige tilted her head to one side. “There was only one failure in those experiments.”
“True, but it is one more failure than we had in this program.” If you’d left Kieran Roark alone, we wouldn’t be in this situation at all.
Neige asked innocently, “You blame me for this?”
Crawley nodded. “I do. If we’d been able to integrate our first subject, we would have been able to correlate the necessary data and make emotional connection a priority moving forward. We assumed that the next subject would be as personable and outgoing as the first. We were wrong. It would have been nice to see that definitely laid out, but we weren’t able to do that because of Mally.”
“The first subject’s protocol.” Neige nodded absentmindedly. “You’ve studied it, correct? The protocol?”
“Of course. The data sets are gibberish, but we’re getting a few tidbits.” In reality, they had only a remainder of Mally’s programming. The rest of it self-destructed when she tried to fry Kieran’s brain. They operated at a loss because of Neige’s impatience.
Neige shook her head. “And you’re frozen on all future subjects?”
“That was the agreement. I have nothing else ready for walkabout.” The remainders of Crawley’s first batch of subjects were in various stages of physical development but frozen in their mental programming. The physical growth of their bodies could not be stopped, but the rest was controllable—to a point. When the time came, they would also have their chance at walkabout, though he preferred that the Terran Council remain as far from his program as possible. Bureaucrats were not to be trusted with research—or science, for that matter.
“What do you propose we do about this subject, Adam?”
Crawley blinked. “I assumed you would want to capture and euthanize.”
“Can you give me a reason we should not?”
“We need to know what happened to your agents,” Crawley said. “If the subject was capable of something like that, outside of protocol guidance, it would provide additional information to make your request possible. And obviously, I need to know what happened with this subject. Comparing her complete, unharmed data set to what we salvaged from our first subject would be invaluable.”
Moving forward, Neige wanted to use twenty-third-century samples instead of twenty-first-century ones. The trouble was that the process relied heavily on early asymmetrical memory scans and physically matching genetic material. That could be replicated easily enough, but the twenty-first-century subjects were not docile. They knew what it had been like to fight, and die, for something greater than themselves. More importantly, they knew about gaining the initiative in a fight. The Terran Defense Force general officers had scoffed at the notion until the Battle of Libretto nearly thirty years before, when an imprinted soldier almost singlehandedly won the field. She’d been an almost perfect genetic match to her ancestor, as close as they could get without cloning, which contributed to the success of the imprint when so many others were incapable of fighting. But her battlefield success was not enough to prove that twenty-first-century memories were safe for public interaction. The rash decision-making and unnecessary risk she employed hinted at major problems to TDF commanders. Soldiers, in their eyes, were required to be controllable pawns and nothing more. The notion that an individual soldier could affect the outcome of any battle
flew in the face of TDF doctrine. As a result, imprints were banned from Earth and the program halted and refocused on cloning soldiers who would obey their leaders at every turn. Crawley thought that decision was a mistake.
“My staff has better things to do than try to find this girl in a city of twenty million people,” Neige said. “Do I have your word that you’ll let me know when you hear something?”
Like hell. Your staff is working harder than Berkeley is to find this girl. I’ll be damned if you find her first and corrupt our data sets. “Of course.”
“I must let you know, Adam, that she will be held responsible for the deaths of those agents. And if we determine that the program failed in this instance, you will be held accountable. We will find someone else to run the program.”
Crawley nodded. “I understand that.” Politicians always searched for the nearest stupid bastard to blame. Good thing I’m not a stupid bastard.
“What do you think happened? What would the girl do in this situation?”
“Good question. I think we have to assume she’s scared and the push to Columbia, which she may recognize as her home, is a natural flight response. Right now, I’m guessing she’s hiding out someplace as far off the grid as she can get.” Crawley shrugged. The olive branch was subtle, but Neige would have come to the same conclusion in an hour or two. The girl was an elusive target, and that gave him hope.
“Your choice of words always amuses me, Adam. I think you’re too familiar with the generation you’ve tried valiantly to resurrect.”
Crawley laughed. “Perhaps, but I am a student of history, Madame Chairman. I believe our ability to move forward will be based on those ideas and dreams of our collective past.”
“You have no faith in the future of our race.”
“Not in our present state, no.” Crawley reached for his wine and sipped slowly.
Vendetta Protocol Page 9
