by David Ryker
Zero tapped the tip of his own nose with an index finger. “In fact, he actively doesn’t need you, which means the only reason I can think of that you’re all still alive is because he knows Schuster won’t cooperate if the rest of you are dead.”
“So he sent you to get us out of here?” Quinn asked, confused. “Is that what this is about?”
“No, I’m pretty sure his plan is to eventually upgrade you four to a better section of New Alcatraz. This early part of your stay in general population is his way of flipping you the bird and letting you know you’re not as tough as you think you are.” Zero shrugged and held up his hands. “That’s not me, that’s Drake. I know better than to underestimate you and your men. That’s why he needed me to help trick you into stealing those ships in the first place.”
Quinn nodded as things began to dawn on him. “He wants us locked up so he always has us as bargaining chips with Dev,” he said. “And we’re close by, too. The Bay isn’t far from Government Square. That’s why we ended up in here instead of some hellhole outside the capitol.”
As much as the Jarheads had hated Oberon One, Quinn had to admit it hadn’t been as bad as some prisons they could have ended up in when they were sentenced. The UFT government had built huge, shoddy prisoner-of-war camps during the war across the wastelands of Nevada, Utah, New Mexico and Arizona. Others went up in the coastal areas of the ever-encroaching Gulf of Mexico, like San Antonio and Baton Rouge, that were home to work camps that brought in the marine life that was used to make food for the vast majority of people outside of the Towers. The space station, at least, had been temperature-controlled, and no one had ever been swept away by a hurricane.
All we had to worry about in space was stray meteorites that unleashed alien intelligences, he thought grimly.
“So was impersonating King your idea or his?” he asked.
“That was all me,” said Zero. “Drake likes to think of himself as a strategic thinker, but he’s still playing checkers, not chess. Without Toomey’s and my help, and Oscar Bloom’s money, he wouldn’t be where he is today.”
“What about Bloom? Where is he in all this?”
Zero shrugged. “He helped get Drake into power, but lately all he ever seemed interested in was his fortune and getting his daughter back. As far as I know, he and Drake haven’t spoken since before you people stole the ships and left Earth. To be honest, the man really isn’t that bright.”
“So he helped you set us up in Astana,” Quinn said with scowl.
“Bygones, Quinn. Someday I’m sure you’ll get your revenge against me, but that day isn’t today. Right now we need to focus on getting you and your men out of here.”
“So you said. But you’ve already told me that Drake wants us in here—why are you talking about breaking us out?’
Zero arched an eyebrow. “Why do you assume I’d be breaking you out? How do you know you wouldn’t just walk out the front doors of this place?”
“Because nothing is ever that easy,” said Quinn. “Especially for us.”
“Well, I suppose I can’t argue with you there. But to answer your question, yes, you’ll be breaking out. And the reason is that I need you to do something for me.”
“Of course you do, otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Nobody does anything for the Jarheads without ulterior motives, Zero—we learned that a long time ago. But you know damn well that Drake is going to drop you the minute we’re out of here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he revokes your deal.”
Zero grinned. “That’s the great thing about the deal: it’s an executive order signed by all three tribunes. They’d need to agree on revoking it, and if they could agree on things, there wouldn’t be another war brewing.”
“Are things really that bad?”
“I don’t have time to go into details here,” said Zero, rising and shifting his face back to Frank King’s. “Let’s just say the UFT has had the upper hand since the armistice, and Drake wants to press the advantage. That’s why he was still in bed with Oscar Bloom, who stands to make a lot of money off another war. As for whether breaking you out will put me in Drake’s shit books, trust me, I have a way around that.”
“Hold on a minute,” Quinn demanded. “What is this thing you’re breaking us out to do? You can’t just expect us to escape from prison without knowing why we’re doing it.”
“It’s an exfiltration mission. There’s someone you need to find and bring here to me, and you’re literally the only people on Earth who can pull it off.”
“Who’s the target?”
Zero shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
“Sorry, not right now.” Zero waved a hand over his wristband and the door on his side of the room slid open, revealing an empty hallway behind it. “When the time comes, be ready.”
“That’s it?” Quinn goggled. “Seriously? What if we don’t want to come?”
Zero shrugged. “You’re welcome to stay here, but I’m pretty sure you won’t choose that option.”
The door slid shut behind him just as Van Dyke entered through the door behind Quinn.
“Let’s go,” the guard ordered. “You can meet your cellmates in the mess for dinner.”
Quinn barely registered the man’s big hand against his back as he was led out the door and into the corridor beyond. How was Zero going to get them out? Who were they supposed to go after? What was the plan Zero had to keep Drake off their backs? How were they supposed to pull this off?
As they reached the door that would take them to the stairwell that led down to the general population mess hall, Quinn took a deep breath to quiet his mind. He had a lot of questions and very few answers, but he also knew one thing for sure, and he had to stay focused on it: they were getting out.
And once they were back on the outside, all bets were off.
4
Morley Drake had faced some serious adversaries during his four decades in the Marines, but he would have gladly traded the one he was up against right now for just about any of them.
“Look, Ms. Gloom—”
“Not Ms., just Gloom,” the young woman snapped, glowering at him from the other side of the desk. Her doe eyes were blazing and the pointed tips of her short hair made him think of the teeth of a saw for some reason. “And you’ve got nothing to say that I’m interested in hearing.”
“That goes for me, too,” said Ben Jakande from his seat next to her. “You lock us up in those suites again for the better part of three weeks, with no connection to the outside world and no information about our friends, and you sit here asking us to ‘be reasonable’? Kiss my reasonable ass!”
Drake sighed; these two had obviously spent far too much time around Quinn and his Jarheads for him to expect them to just do as he said. He wished he had access to Indira Copeland the way Oscar Bloom did, but he didn’t, so it was up to him to convince them.
“Obviously, I understand your anger—”
“You can’t even begin to understand my anger,” Gloom said coldly, and he reflexively leaned back under the glare she was giving him. “And not just because of what you’ve done to us since we got back to Earth, or what you did to my friends before that. You and I have personal business to settle.”
That was enough to send a mild jolt of adrenaline through him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t understand what you’re talking about.”
“One day you will,” she said cryptically. “But by then it’ll be too late.”
Drake cleared his throat and tried to collect his thoughts. Even with all of the Trilateral Government’s intelligence resources, plus his own private ones, he’d been unable to learn anything about the woman. Not her real name, not her past, her faction citizenship, nothing. When they raided her place in the Bellagio in Vegas, they had found some computers and other tech, but the second they tried to access any of it, the agents’ computers were invaded by viciously aggressive software that shut dow
n their operating systems and devoured every bit of data in their holographic storage. As soon as that was done, her computers all released a corrosive gas from glass vials inside them that dissolved them into puddles of metal and plastic. Other than her online reputation, which was formidable, they knew next to nothing about the woman who called herself Gloom.
Jakande was a different story, so Drake decided he would use him as the pressure point to get the two to do what he needed them to do.
“Mr. Jakande,” he said, turning to the young man. “I’m hoping you’ll understand that what I’m asking of you two is for the greater good. After all, you’ve made a career out of being a crusader for the people, fighting for them—”
Jakande snorted. “Yeah, against people like you! I took you for a lot of things, Drake, but I never thought stupid was one of them.”
Anger flashed in Drake’s chest, but he resisted the urge to reach for the nitro applicator in the top drawer of his desk. He didn’t want these two to know they were getting to him; it was imperative that he convince them to go along with his plan. If he had to resort to force, everything would fall apart.
“I can see why you would feel that way—” he began.
“Can you, now?” Jakande feigned surprise. “Well, aren’t you clever.”
Drake went on as if he hadn’t heard. “Being a tribune isn’t easy; you have to please your own faction, and the leaders of the other two, all while trying to balance with the greater good. It’s a high-wire act.”
He had to be careful how he approached this, lest he give away too much, but it was imperative that he got these two on his side. And the all-important third, of course. He decided the best tack would be to appeal to Jakande’s journalistic sensibilities and offer him the biggest scoop of his career.
“What I’m about to tell you is the most classified information on the planet,” Drake said gravely. “I’m doing this without obtaining security clearance for you—that’s how important this is. Do you understand?”
Gloom and Jakande exchanged a brief glance before nodding. Their expressions indicated they were highly suspicious of what they were about to hear.
Drake sighed. “There’s no way to pussyfoot around this, so I’ll just come out and say it: the Trilateral Government is proving to be a colossal failure after just two years. Another war is on the horizon.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Jakande sniped. “You mean the three factions didn’t all learn to play nice after seven years of trying to destroy each other?”
“Not exactly,” said Drake. “At the risk of oversimplifying things, the problem is that there was no clear winner when the war ended.”
“Wait,” said Gloom, her eyes narrowing. “You’re saying that it wasn’t enough to end the war; someone had to win it?”
Drake laced his fingers together on the top of the oversized desk that sat a few meters from the bank of windows at the rear of his Government House office. It was known as the Resolute Desk, and had been built from timbers of the HMS Resolute, a British Arctic exploration vessel, and presented to President Rutherford B. Hayes as a gift by Queen Victoria more than two hundred years earlier. It had been a fixture in the presidential office since the latter part of the 20th century, and Drake had commandeered it when he was elected tribune for the United Free Territories. It was meant to remind him of the past, before the factions, and of the proud tradition of leadership that had been in place before the Trade Wars began some twenty-five years earlier.
That leadership was desperately needed now, and fate—along with some proactive planning on his part—had made him the man who would provide it.
“Look back through history,” he said. “Wars are like games: they don’t end, they’re won or lost.”
“And then the winners write the history,” said Jakande.
“Winning the war is how you determine who sets the policy after the war,” Drake continued. “The Trilateral Government was a great idea in theory, but in practice it’s been a disaster. The interests of the three factions don’t align any better now than they did during the war itself. At the risk of mixing metaphors, we haven’t beaten our swords into plowshares, we’ve simply put lipstick on the swords and told everyone they’re not swords.”
“What does any of this have to do with us?” asked Gloom. “Your political problems won’t mean a pinch of shit when the aliens arrive to take over the planet.”
Drake grinned. “Thanks to you people, that’s not an imminent threat. And believe me, you will all ultimately be rewarded for what you’ve done.”
“Really?” Jakande’s eyebrows rose. “So we can expect to get thrown in New Alcatraz like the others? That’s one hell of a reward.”
And finally, here we are, thought Drake. They had come to the point where he would have to reveal the plan—or at least a large part of it—that had led them to this point. It went against every instinct in him to do it, but he knew it was the only option.
He leaned forward on the Resolute Desk, lacing his fingers. “I need you to know that I regret all of what has happened to you and your friends,” he lied. “But I think you’ll see that it was all for the greater good.”
Gloom and Jakande rolled their eyes in synch with each other, as Drake had expected.
“Please hear me out,” he said. “Everything I did was necessary to get to the point where we find ourselves now. I had to use Agent Zero to impersonate Frank King in order to get Quinn and his men to do what I needed them to do, which was get those attack ships built and mount an assault on Oberon One.”
Jakande appeared to consider that for a moment, while Gloom simply glared at him.
“Why did you have to trick us into it?” asked Jakande. “Why not just ask nicely?”
“That video of yours threw a wrench into that,” said Drake. “By the time I reached you people in Toomey’s lair, it was all over the world. People were already starting to talk about an alien invasion.”
“That was the point!”
Drake leaned back in his chair. “I admit, I could have handled things better when Quinn and his people came back to Earth,” he said. “But you have to remember, at the time, all I knew was they had escaped from prison and killed some people in the process. They were fugitives.”
“Fugitives,” Gloom said mockingly. “Let’s not forget they were also the only people outside of you and your co-conspirators who knew that you were behind kidnapping Frank King in Astana so that you could take his place as tribune when the war ended.”
“If King had been elected, it would have been a disaster for the UFT,” Drake said evenly. “He was on the war council, yes, but that was because of his position in the old senate; he had no real military experience. The reason we had to keep him from those negotiations in Seoul was simple: he would have been a diplomat walking into a room with two literal killers; Harmony Chao and Arkady Toran are both soldiers, and they’ve both served in the trenches. King’s sum total of service was weekends in the militia, and he never came close to combat. They would have eaten him alive.”
“Wait,” said Jakande, looking confused. “Chao and Toran? The people who went on to be elected as the Indus and Allied States tribunes were in those negotiations? It was never made public.”
Drake nodded. “Now you’re getting it. Those negotiations, and everything that came after them, were just a cease-fire; as I said, the war never truly ended. The UFT needed a soldier at the helm then, and they need one even more now.”
“So you were willing to send four dedicated Marines to prison and kill your political opponent to make that happen?” asked Gloom, her eyes blazing.
“Welcome to the real world, young lady.” Drake hoped his lecturing tone wouldn’t put her off too much. “Billions of people died in that war. Sacrificing a few others for the greater good may keep people like me awake at night, but it doesn’t stop us from doing what needs to be done.”
Jakande held up a hand to stop Gloom before she could let loose with the tirade that
was, judging by her expression, about to come out.
“Let’s say for argument’s sake that I understand your reasoning,” he said. “Why did you have to frame us all again after we got back from Oberon One?”
“Because it’s his only trick,” Gloom grumbled.
“You of all people should understand, Mr. Jakande,” said Drake. “The public was starting to ask a lot of questions after your video went viral. They demanded answers about the aliens, and what the government was going to do about them.”
“As they should. My whole career has been built on exposing the secrets of those who exploit the people who can’t defend themselves.”
Drake bit down on what he wanted to say to that, which was essentially that dreamers like Jakande and Frank King were the real problem with the world.
“I understand that,” he said instead. “But you have to remember that there’s a difference between exposing Dr. Toomey and his war machines, and causing widespread panic among billions of people during a time of extremely fragile peace. I know you two have problems with authority, but on a macro scale like this, you need to have the government running things. Thinking otherwise is dangerously short-sighted. So, as much as I regretted it, we had to turn the famous Jarheads of Oberon from folk heroes back into criminals, for the good of humanity.”
He sat back in his chair and let that sink in. The pair were silent for several moments and shared a long look before Jakande turned to face Drake again.
“And you need us to back you up on your story,” the young man said. “To validate the narrative you’ve so carefully put together.”
Hallelujah, Drake thought. “In a nutshell, yes. You’ve seen the footage Zero edited from what you sent back from Oberon, I assume?”
“Yeah,” said Jakande, looking angry. “We haven’t had any network access in the weeks since you locked us up in those gilded cages you call guest suites, but one of your people went out of his way to show it to us. It makes it look like we just flew in and blew up the station for no reason.”
