by Lee Bond
And that was a huge fucking problem. Real or not, a missing Zigger in the woodpile could cause real mayhem.
Operating from the viewpoint that Samiel –working through an as-yet unknown human agent- had moved onwards to the next Zigg crew immediately -if not sooner- following Sketch’s demise, it was nearly goddamn fucking certain that the fifth member of unHarley notQuinn’s gang had either already infiltrated one of the work crews and was posing as a legit employee or was hiding somewhere on the grounds.
"Fuck, man, for all I know this motherfucker's been here for weeks already, like, buyin' food and, uh, using my Portajohns." Garth sucked at a tooth. "Goddamn time travelers."
Working backwards from his unfortunately intimate knowledge of ODDities and how they were, it wasn't hard to work up a model of late-stage Ziggurat-Alpha addiction; using his one combat scenario to bolster the data, it was easy enough to imagine an Aleph user being able to hide in plain sight.
All it'd take was a steady supply of Zigg and, basically, normal clothes and that was all.
Hence the biometric additions to the GPS trackers.
The invisible quadronix signature of each tag was going to triple in size with the fresh augmentation which meant more invisible neon lines burning into his sore eyeballs, but the situation was already bleak. Delaying would mean death.
Garth knew damn well he could stroll on upstairs and outside, take himself a big old deep whiff of the fresh night air and find the motherfucker down and then yank that geek’s fucking head clean off.
It wasn’t going to happen that way, though. There had to be a way around this, a way to eliminate these Zigg-heads without tipping his hand to Samiel.
"Tryina avoid Rockettown, USA up in this bitch." Garth muttered to himself, flicking through another dozen screengrabs of base personnel.
Nothing. Everyone looked normal.
More to the point … there had to be a way to get blood and tissue samples from them, to examine the chemical interactions Ziggurat-Aleph had on human biochemistry, a way to track and comprehend the invisible effects the drug had on people who were genetically predisposed to permanent addiction.
If he could understand how the drug –even in it’s simplest form- worked, he might even be able to engineer a method of disinfecting Drake. Yeah, it wasn’t his primary goal, but Etienne was watching and if he didn’t do something to –at the very least- appear as though he was working towards his alleged guilt-free time in the incongruity, the Emperor might start paying closer attention.
Garth rubbed his eyes again. Then he rewound the footage to the morning following Sketch and crew’s deaths.
Time to go through the pictures of all his employees, their visitors, and lookee-loos all over again. He had a few hours to kill.
He might just get lucky.
***
"Sir."
"Rommen. Why are you calling so late?" The voice on the other end of the line was crisp and clean, with a nice weave of irritation thrown in for good measure.
"It’s about the principal." Rommen cleared his throat softly. He was skirting insubordination here and wasn't terribly comfortable with the decision.
"Yes?"
"He’s … I …" Rommen suddenly felt terribly unsure of himself. This had seemed like such a good idea a few seconds ago, but now that he had his boss on the line, it seemed like the worst decision ever.
"Spit it out, boy."
"I don't know what to do, here." Rommen admitted finally, leaning his forehead against the nearest wall. "He’s … I think he's a danger to himself, sir. And possibly to others. I … his … labs are … full of things. I …”
"Son, I'm going to cut you off right there." The voice on the other end went gruff, but understanding. "Your principal isn't an easy job. I get that. Got on my desk here the latest sitrep from the feds. Their girl Devlin's just stopped three Saudi 'businessmen', two Korean assassins, a geek from Delaware who's actually guilty of seventeen high-profile suicide cases and a goddamn Minister of Finance from Australia."
"I …" Rommen stammered foolishly. "I know he's a high profile target, sir. We knew that going in. He's got enemies from all corners. But …"
"Son, somewhere else on my very large desk, I've got documents from his lawyer. Sent to every alphabet org we've got. The man gave the American military complex diagrams for five seperate upgrades to current weapons and tech. Five! One of ‘em is for a new type of munition, supposed to drill through damn near any kind of body armor the enemy’s got. I hear tell the Army can't wait to get their feet wet. He’s proving to be a valuable asset already and he isn't even finished building his goddamn house. Hell, son, the boy's provided MilTech with some kind of newfangled targeting software's got my brother Marines all hot and sweaty. I don’t even know what to say about some of the other hardware he’s sending our way, son, just that he’s the goose that shits golden schematics. Easier to off POTUS."
Rommen took a deep, deep breath, held it for a count of five. "I know all this, sir. I just..."
"Spit it out, boy. You want to end this contract?"
Rommen opened his mouth to say yes, that was precisely what he wanted, but the words weren't coming. Nothing was coming at all.
“Rommen. You there, boy?"
"I …" Rommen found his voice. "I … I … think he might be a false flag, sir."
The other end of the line went terribly silent for ten ... fifteen … twenty seconds. "You lost your mind, Rommen? False flag? Even in jest, over secure comms, that is some serious dung you're flinging."
"Sir … I … when I worked for Uncle Sam, I ran into no less than three seperate incidents that screamed false flag. I …"
"I’ve read your reports. But this is not that. There’s no way. Nickels has his fingers in too many pies, and more importantly, the US of A has got their fingers in Nickels’ pies as well. The boys in Washington love the man already and he's only been churning butter for a week or so. They wouldn't invest so much public support for a false flag, deShure. This ain’t Dallas, this ain’t the Sixties, you don’t work for HSCA."
Rommen pressed his forehead harder into the new wall, enjoying the smell of fresh paint. He knew Nickels wasn't a false flag, but whenever he tried telling his employer what was really going on, his tongue turned into ten pounds of dead weight.
"I know this isn't Dallas, sir." Rommen nodded. "And this isn't the 60's. But false flag ops are happening. There’s the …"
"Rommen, we're done here. If Nickels is somehow a false flag involving the very public face of the Federal Government, to the point where goddamn Potus knows his name, you can have my job. This is the most valuable contract we've ever picked up, and unless the man tells you, in writing and on camera, that he's going to 9/11 something, keep it in your pants. Remember, you don't work for Uncle Sam anymore. Uncle Sam died a nasty death when we smart bombed that guy in the underground bunker. Now it’s Maiden America, all right?"
"Sir." Rommen snapped to attention. "Sir, yes sir."
"Be about your business. Stay frosty. Devlin and crew can't keep all the geeks away. Your man just capsized a Dubai-based synth-fuel op. Out."
Rommen stared at his phone for a second before tucking it into a pocket. That’d be the last time he'd be able to make a secure call on the facility. Garth’s new protocols would make sure of that.
He was going to have to figure out how to keep America safe all on his own.
***
“Rooftops.” Garth muttered to himself as he looked over his half-built compound.
People were right to wonder what he was actually doing here. Everything out there –except the parkade, which was kind of hard to imagine being anything other than what it really was because it was just a huge fucking lump of concrete- bore the hallmark of ‘looking suspicious’; the school’s exterior was now festooned with plastic tarps, those connector-set scaffoldings that Garth would in no way traverse without both his Kin’kithal powers and a gravny-shield because he was pretty sure some of them
were lashed together with shoelaces and whispers, the outdoor movie theater had hit a snag because for some fucking reason there was an untouched sump system from the goddamn fucking 1940’s beneath the track and the grounds themselves looked like a bloody warzone. He hadn’t even factored in resurrecting the grounds into something a little more appropriate to the Arcade of Awesomeness yet, and quite frankly, he wasn't sure he could handle another overzealous contractor at the moment.
It was a goddamn nightmare!
“Sir?” Birchcreek’s heavy Aussie accent made it sound like he was saying ‘suuuuu’.
Garth turned to look at the team Rommen had assembled. As expected, the Kansan had picked most of the people he’d already met during his daytime escapades with Sketch, but out of deference to needing to keep the nighttime people up to speed, there were a few unfamiliar faces.
“Rooftops.” Garth performed a grand curtsey to indicate where he –they- stood. “They appear to be a major feature in my life. I once fought a guy on a roof. To the death. Well, the almost death. I was a helluva lot harder to kill then, and even though I blew a hole through his chest with a … with an improvised explosive device of uncertain nature, I ran into him again later on in … England? Yeah. England. I thought he was going to kill me all again. Or, well, try to again. But I learned about his life and well, technically speaking he wasn’t entirely responsible for his actions.”
“You blew a hole in a guy with a bomb and he didn’t die?” This came from Mortenhaus, a tiny, wiry little fella from the middle of Nowheresville on his way to Laststopton. “Like these other ginks?”
“Hey! Whoah now, man, none of this ‘gink’ jazz.” Garth eyeballed Mortenhaus up and down like he was that drill instructor from that movie where the fat guy shot himself in the head halfway through and then you got to sit there to watch that other guy with the stupid hair wander around buying whores for the next eighty-seven hours. Mortenhaus was –according to his jacket - a Ranger, one of the best, but he’d always kept washing out of regular units because of his attitude.
“Won’t be no wonks, towelheads, zipperheads or nothing. We’re all one people. Except for the Zigg-heads, because fuck those guys. But anyways, no, Chad wasn’t like any fucking Zigg-head. Something else entirely. It was a badass fight, too. Up there on the rooftop, with the night sky at our backs, a storm approaching. Oh yeah, it was so Tarantino, Tarantino would shit himself backwards through time until he wound up back in that video store.”
“He was trying to kill you?” Rommen asked the question softly; their man seemed to be oddly nostalgic and if they could get anything …
“The lineup starts at the Oort Cloud, Rommen. People do not like me very much, even when I am trying to do the right thing.” Garth shut his eyes against the vibrant red lines crisscrossing the rooftop now; in the wee hours of the morning, when his security staff was supposed to be patrolling the grounds but were in reality taking advantage of the endless stream of cable channels made available to every screen on the property, he’d taken advantage of their interest in Intramural Ping Pong Battles –not a bad little game, honestly, if a little violent- to send a boatload of computer-controlled mini-drones all over everywhere to finish up the quadronic circuits lacing … everything. They’d swarmed across the property, silent minions laying down violent neon lines that burned with an internal radiance all their own.
It’d been a proper step one and hadn’t taken very much effort to deviate from the normal plan for a while, and watching the bog-simple drones with their ultralight aerogel bodies and advanced q-pens flitting across the property had at first been quite magical.
Until his eyes had started hurting.
“So this thing … this people trying to kill you thing, it’s not new?” Anu, a Punjabi direct from Paran –a special forces unit no one really liked talking about much these days because their leadership was apparently working under a dark star and doing things no one found very palatable- stepped forward, eyes tracking the huge tarp. Or, more specifically, the things under it.
“Christ on a bicycle.” Garth took Anu in then had to step back to continue taking the man in. “The fuck they feed you? Whole, live people? When do you have time to work, man? You gotta spend like, what, eighty hours a day in the gym? Did … did we start the Super Soldier program when I wasn’t paying attention? Fuck me. Rommen. Keep this guy away from my food. I can’t afford to starve and I don’t think I can take this guy in a fight.”
Anu smiled and nodded at the ripping he was taking from his new boss. He couldn’t help how he was shaped, or how easy the muscle came. It was one of the reasons why he’d joined the military in the first place; because he’d been so very much stronger than everyone else around him from an early age onwards, his attitude had been … less than exemplary. Serving had taught him how to defend himself and a million other things, yes, but it’d also taught him the most important lessons in life.
Humility. Self-control.
“Actually, sir, my home village fed me virgins until I was thirty-three.” Anu shrugged. “And then on mission I was forced to eat a … Chipotle Slappy Burger with Curly Fries? My life from that moment changed. Believe it or not, that is what cost me my career in Paran.”
“I’ll believe that the moment I see you eat another Chipotle Slappy Super Slam.” Garth waggled a finger. “Don’t be taking Slappy’s name in vain, man. And in answer to your question, no, the people wanting me dead thing is not a new thing. It is an old, old thing, older than the stars in these strange skies.”
“Your dossier indicates that you are no older than twenty-eight at the most, sir.” Anu cursed, made a promise to keep from talking from now on. He wasn’t supposed to’ve mentioned the dossier.
Garth took the news on the chin with a sly grin and a wink for Rommen, who somehow contrived a way to stand up straighter still. “Now. You guys and one girl,” Garth dipped his head at Samantha, who looked like she wanted to give him the double bird for singling her out, and continued on, “are all here because of what happened the other day, right? Rommen sat you down and showed you the scope-data that Gambelson caught from his vantage? After that, I presume you all went your separate ways and compared our footage to what that drone recorded because that’s the kind of thing you professional types do. What were your conclusions?”
Gagachuk -an actual live Canadian from one of their many actual, terrifyingly effective SpecOps groups that no one ever talked about because as nice and as polite as Canadians generally seemed to be, there was that teeny tiny little bit of a glint in their eyes that said if you fucked with them, they would promptly choose to snipe you from the longest distance ever recorded just because they felt like it before going out to eat a bunch of donuts and go ice skating- raised his hand.
When he got a lot of hairy eyeballs from his mates, he flipped them the bird.
“Fuck you guys, eh? Round robins need order. Anyways, sir, the conclusion we basically all came to is this drug Zigg operates too much like a combat stim for comfort. And that you are lying through your teeth about nearly everything.”
“Fuck my life, Gags. Fucking hell. Just … like, fuck, mate.” Birchcreek looked through his pockets for something to toss at the surly Canadian. Only thing he had was his foldable blade and Securicorps might have something against team members bouncing knives off people’s skulls. “We only just fucking talked about that. Like, ten minutes ago. Were you listening, or were you busy checking the fucking hockey scores again?”
“Leafs win against the Blue Jackets.” The words just fell out of Garth’s mouth. “They fucking rape the Jackets. Got fifty thousand on ‘em. Hey, Gags, why’s the season moved up? Every other year, this shit doesn’t start until, like, proper winter.”
Gagachuk scratched an earlobe. “Global warming, eh? Our winters are either too mild or fucking miserable, eh, making places back east completely covered in the snow. No one wants to travel in that shit, so we made it earlier. Better for business, too, looks like. Bars and pubs ar
e usually too quiet coz of the beaches. Better for tourism. You gonna answer my questions?”
It was funny. Garth had actually pegged Anu as the one to be the stickler for proper answers, but here it was, Gagachuk being argumentative. It was nice to see that he was still capable of underestimating people.
“In point of fact, Gags, no, I am not gonna answer your questions at this time. I’m like Ollie North and Clinton. I can neither confirm nor deny and I'm unsure what 'is' is. Well, about the possibilities of me not being entirely forthcoming about stuff, other than to say that you are not wrong. None of you are wrong on that point, but think of this like one of those missions where ya gotta compartmentalize. I know everything because that’s my job. My enemy is kind of like me in a lot of ways, only, you know, bad guy. I’m only gonna tell you stuff when it becomes pertinent, because there’s just no way to know what’s actually going to happen until it happens at least once. Plus, plausible deniability, right?" Garth paused to see if everyone was on the conversation train to Enlightenmentville. They were, though Gags was now mirroring Rommen’s Perpetual Frown of Disbelief.
“Groovy. This is the way that it is because if I tell you everything right away and some of the stuff doesn’t come to pass, you will be privy to shit that’ll mess my plans up. As for Zigg, you’re right. You could theoretically class it as a phase one combat stimulant, though nothing similar to the ones being worked on here in the States, in Russia, or in China. Their shit has a tendency to cause migraines, hallucinations, lack of sleep, and in extreme cases, cellular … uh … explosion. So yeah. Not … good. Japan bailed on drugs as a method of combat superiority because of reasons buried so deep under redaction it’s like buying black wallpaper.”
“Where the hell you get your Intel from?” Gambelson demanded, awed. If he could learn half the things this man spouted from his mouth like some kind of Intel-dispensing Fount of Valuable Information, he’d be a millionaire by the end of the month.
“Part of Changetech’s desire to move into National Defense contracts, boys. And girl. People. Soldiers? Whatever. Screw you. You’d be surprised what you can pick up when you’re busy hacking and slash … anyways. What? No.” Garth kicked the tarp. “We’re here for this. You guys got me talking about my favorite topic, which is how super dope I am. We’re here for this and nada.”
