Soldier's Heart Part Four: Brotherhood Protectors World

by Ilsa J. Bick

  What was up with that? Squinting at a tablet, Kujo studied the stream of real-time drone feed. He was grateful to have something else to focus on than the certain knowledge he and Six would be fast-roping down from this chopper within two hours. He always got an attack of the yips beforehand, probably because the last mission he and Six had gone on for the Army, he’d ended up with a bad knee, a head full of memories he’d just as soon forget but which kept turning up like proverbial bad pennies, and a letter from Uncle Sam thanking him for his service and oh, by the way, there’s the door. Then again, if he’d not wound up with a gimpy knee and out of the service, he and Molly would never have happened. He wouldn’t be happy.

  For sure, he wouldn’t have been here in this chopper with this team going after…well, hell, what was she?

  “I don’t like this.” A bespectacled dweeb if Kujo ever met one, Hacker was buckled into the seat one down from Boone, the team leader. Fingers rattling over the keyboard of a razor-thin laptop, Hacker scowled. “This is not right.”

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. Hacker wasn’t Black Ops, not by a long shot. Too pasty-faced, like he spent all his time in front of a monitor a mile underground. “There a problem?”

  “Yeah,” Boone seconded, “if something’s screwy, I want to know now before this goes completely sideways. She’s got a rep.”

  Kujo’s ears pricked at that. A reputation? For what?

  “I don’t know yet.” Hacker didn’t take his eyes from his screen. “It’s the signal? The subject doesn’t know, but we took the precaution of programming her locator beacon to activate within a certain window if she failed to initiate contact.”

  “So, what’s the problem?” Boone asked. “It’s working, right?”

  “Yes, but it’s unstable.” Hacker peered at Boone through a bluish murk filling the cabin. The chopper was flying dark, which meant blue overheads so as not to mess up a guy’s night vision. It worked, Kujo supposed, but the blue-gray cast always made a person look like a drowning victim fished out of a lake and did Hacker no favors. “Not exactly attenuated but more intermittent. If I didn’t know better, I’d say she’s toggling it on and off as if she can’t decide whether to leave it on.”

  “I got that problem sometimes,” Boone said. “You know, those smart pluggy things for your lights? Ornery buggers. Don’t want to come on, don’t want to go on, never follow the—”

  Kujo cut in. “Could it be a glitch? Maybe it’s your programming.”

  Hacker looked as if Kujo had just let rip a particularly nasty fart. “It’s not the programming.”

  “Might be the Black Wolf,” Boone offered. “Kinda like the Bermuda Triangle of Montana.”

  “No, the beacon’s strength is unaffected. It’s simply intermittent…and before you ask, Boone.” Hacker held up a hand in a traffic stop. “No, it’s not a code.”

  “Oh.” Deflated, Boone subsided back into his slouch. “I was thinking Morse.”

  “Yes.” Hacker produced a wintry grin. “I’m sure you were.”

  “What about the hardware?” Kujo asked. “You know, the beacon.”

  “We checked. All systems are optimal. In fact, our readings would suggest some components and functions have improved exponentially.”

  Components? All systems optimal? The fingers of an eerie frisson skipped the knobs of Kujo’s spine. This was just plain weird. Everything Hacker said implied computers on both ends. But that was nuts. His own PLB was a dedicated broadcast unit. Turn it on, turn it off, and that was it. No one could hack and overwrite its programming. It didn’t have any. All a personal locator beacon did was send a signal: Here I am. “What kind of PLB is this?”

  “Different.” Hacker’s tone was clipped. “What is of more concern is the test subject doesn’t have access nor does she possess the necessary knowledge base to make modifications.”

  Unless she’s a really fast study. Kujo figured any person this guy made into a test subject was no dummy. “But you just said there’s something wrong with the signal. If you did a systems check, you should be able to tell which ends got the problem.”

  Hacker puffed up. “It’s not us.”

  Ah, so she did skunk you guys. “How’d she do it? Defeat the locator and

  pretend she was somewhere she wasn’t?” And where is this beacon anyway? His clipped on his vest. This lady’s…well, he wasn’t sure.

  “We don’t know.” Hacker’s mouth puckered to a tiny, peevish bud. “And this periodicity, on and off…it’s almost as if she’s toying with us. A little cat and mouse.”

  Flexing her muscles? Taunting her superiors? He ran his eyes over the tablet again. The drone feed showed bright-green and orange-red embers against gray tones, courtesy of a composite and radically, souped-up and enhanced I2 coupled with night vision. Under conditions like these, snow made run-of-the-mill NV almost useless, the resolution lost within glowing green, wind-driven snow only a Grinch could love. By contrast, the I2 rendered the people and their dog down there easily distinguishable, their bodies showing as deep-orange cinders.

  Just like a Predator movie. Apt, too. That woman was pretty strange. So, was that…well, was it another dog slinking through the woods? No, too long and lean. Wolf, maybe. Odd.

  “You know what her story is?” He directed the question at Boone, the team leader. Not his real name, Kujo guessed, since the rest of the team members were Crockett, Houston, and Kit, as in Carson. Cute. At least they’d found a nice All-American frontier woodsmen theme. Except for Hacker, every team member was chiseled, grizzled, rock-hard. Kujo didn’t know if they were SEALs, Rangers, or what, and they hadn’t said. Given the chopper, though, a sleek arrow with rotors so quiet Kujo thought they might be in a movie’s special effect, he’d put money on the or what. The whole setup—the guys, this chopper, the weaponry, the super-duper tech, that dweeb Hacker—stunk of DARPA-level Black Ops. “Obviously, she’s not like the others.”

  Boone opened his mouth, but Hacker jumped in. “Correct, but the reason is above your pay grade, Mr. Kuntz. Strictly need to know—and you don’t need to know.”

  “Really?” A lick of heat streaked up his neck. He didn’t mind someone who might be smarter or better versed in stuff he wasn’t. Not his area. No sweat. What ticked him off was someone rubbing his nose in what they perceived as his ignorance. At his tone, Six, who’d been resting with his head on his paws, looked around then did a small snout-bump against Kujo’s left calf. The message was clear. Easy there, boss.

  Sound advice.

  He went for measured. “Let me put it to you this way, Hacker. I didn’t ask for this. I don’t have to be here. I was very happily sleeping in a nice warm bed in a cabin and on a mountain I’m pretty damned fond of. I’m only here because your Colonel Vance insisted and Hank Peterson vouched for him. The colonel wouldn’t say why, but I’m okay with the secrecy. Sometimes, that’s the job. But if I’m going to put myself and, more importantly, my dog on the line, I need to know what he and I are up against.” The why would be nice, too, but he wasn’t going to push it. “That shouldn’t be too hard to understand, especially for a guy with your obvious smarts and pay grade.” All right, it was a jab, but he was pissed.

  After a long pause, Hacker poked the bridge of his glasses with a finger—the middle, Kujo saw with some amusement—and said, “What is it that troubles you?”

  Interesting tactic. Hacker wasn’t going to give away anything he didn’t have to. Well, fine, if it would get him some intel. He went for the easy stuff first. “Her legs and that right arm, they’re not right.”

  “Oh?”

  Hacker was going to make him work for it. “Yeah. Oh. A normal person’s lights up deep red because of the heat given off by blood in the major arteries. The color changes to orange and then yellow because blood usually cools closer to skin.” He pointed with an index finger. “These other people...I’m guessing the smaller ones are kids...they light up the way they should, and their cores and heads, too. But not her. There�
��s no flush, no gradation. You don’t get red-hot then cooler orange and yellow. What you got are those things.” He tapped the screen again. “You got stripes, and they’re yellow not red.”

  “And what do you think they are?”

  He hesitated then thought, Oh, just go for it. “Wires. Or electrical conduits. I’m not clear on that. Like you said, not my area. But I’ve seen machines on thermal. A desktop looks like a big purple or fuchsia box. The motherboard’s black, but the fans are usually yellow or light orange on account of heat dissipation and really bright yellow or orange near the power supply. But these aren’t leaking. There’s no red, which means no blood. Well,” he amended, “you get some red, but it cuts off at mid-thigh. From there down, you get stripes. Same as that right shoulder, only I’d say whatever that is, attaches at the shoulder.”

  “Attached. Interesting choice. What do you think they are, the legs and her right arm?”

  “Prosthetics. Be my first thought. I just don’t see how these are flesh and blood. Except prosthetics aren’t right, either, unless...”

  “Yes?”

  Now, who was playing cat and mouse? He was in a super-duper, DARPA-level stealth helicopter with a bunch of Black Ops guys. He wondered if, on a really good close-up view, there might not be a couple of slim motherboards slipped into the woman’s calves or thighs. Or maybe something even smaller. “She’s a cyborg?”

  “Is that a question or a conclusion?”

  Jerk. He knew the military was working on futuristic armor. Read any paper and there were stories about new advances in prosthetics, where the limb could be controlled by brain impulses. But this was a step up, a leap beyond. Integrating hardware into a person was something out of a comic book. Captain America or, better yet, that scientist, Mockingbird, who’d been injected with that Nazi serum.

  “You guys made her into a super-soldier.” Not a question. Kujo swept his gaze over the tablet again. “There’s crap in her head, and don’t tell me there’s not. Yeah, this is a high-angle shot and I’d have to see more to be sure, but...” Pausing the feed, he ran a finger along a scroll bar at the bottom, going left and into the past. When he found what he wanted, he enlarged the image. “Here, she’s looking up and you can see her face, her head…they’re all wrong.”

  “Oh?” Still tight-lipped, Hacker arched an eyebrow. He probably practiced in front of a mirror while he was alone. “Wrong how?”

  “Oh, cut the crap. I’m not an idiot. A blind man could see this with a cane. Her head’s wrong. Look at a person using thermal imaging, you get something that looks like a ski mask—red or orange everywhere but the eyes, which are usually orange or yellow and then the nose and mouth and on down to the chin. But not her. Her head’s like…like…” He searched for a comparison. “Like if you’re up in a plane looking down at a city. She isn’t just lighting up. She’s got lights.” She did; her head was aglow with yellow twinkles and bright-orange spangles against the deeper red of what had to be normal brain tissue. Like fireflies or Christmas lights. Her eyes were the color of molten lava, and the area at the bridge of her nose was a hot-orange cauldron. He jabbed a finger at a crisscrossing tracery of yellow lines. “That’s hardware. Got to be. Are those more conduits? What is all this stuff?”

  “Hunh. He’s pretty good.” Lifting a hand to a grizzled cheek, Boone scratched. In the ultra-quiet cabin, the rasp of nails over stubble was like the rub of fine sandpaper over wood. “Took me a couple look-sees to get it.”

  Hacker’s jaw moved as if something had taken a piss before dying on his tongue. “We don’t know what all that is.”

  Kujo gaped. “You don’t know? You built her. How can you not know what that is?”

  “Because we don’t. This is new territory for us, too. Those lights? They’ve spread.”

  “What are they?” When Hacker only gave him a stony look, he said, “Above my pay grade, right?”

  “Yes. Let us just say those…units are no longer contained in the area of the motor cortex controlling her right arm, which was where they were originally inserted.”

  Okay, motor meant control. Control of her arm. But somehow these units had jumped the track and gone exploring? And there were so many. Had they multiplied? “Are we talking hardware? Little chips or something? You’d need them to control the arm.” He’d read as much about brain-controlled prosthetics.

  “Some. The rest…we didn’t do it.”

  Meaning, the little buggers did it themselves? What were these things? For that matter, how had they spread? Computer chips had to be placed. They couldn’t self-replicate. But maybe these weren’t your average chips. A small memory bubbled up, something he’d once seen a long time back when he was a kid…Stargate, that was it. There’d been these little machines that could work together and on any form they wished. Replicators, they were called. Creepy enough but even spookier when the replicators took on human form and began to develop personalities. “I suppose that if you told me exactly what these units are, you’d have to kill me.”

  “Wouldn’t surprise me none,” Boone put in.

  “What I can say is we’re no longer clear how much of her is now them,” said Hacker.

  Whoa. That frisson morphed into dread. “How dangerous is she?”

  “Notice he didn’t ask if. Smart guy,” Boone opined. “Me, I’ve only heard stories about this lady. Messed up a couple guys pretty good in LFX. Of course, they weren’t trying to break her. If what I heard was even 50 percent true, I’m not sure they could’ve. Said she was like a tornado.”

  Hacker looked pained. “You make her sound more formidable than she is. Yes, she can be volatile. Yes, she’s fast. That right arm can break bricks and easily crush a man’s skull.”

  “Just for the record,” Boone put in, “it takes over five-hundred pounds of pressure to crack a guy’s head. You know what can do that? A grizzly’s jaws. An elephant using your head for a stepstool.”

  Hacker rolled his eyes. “Please. She is flesh and blood.”

  “Only sort of,” said Boone. “Those little sparkly buggers spread much more, I wouldn’t be too sure.”

  “What about the other people here?” Kujo asked. “You know who they are?”

  “No. We’re assuming she ran into them. The why is hardly our concern.”

  He didn’t know about that. Even from the drone feed, he could tell those girls were thin, bordering on anorectic. “Do you know where they’re going?”

  “The wrong way,” Boone said. “They’re on a beeline for Dead Man Mountain. Off-limits. Closed up years ago on account of continuing seismic activity, slides.”

  Why would their little science project head someplace reportedly so dangerous? Could it be she had no choice? Or was perhaps biding her time until the cavalry showed up? That would account for her, well, ambivalence, that tracker going on and off.

  Unless…his eyes locked onto those twinkling lights in her skull…what if she isn’t the only one sending up a flare?

  He wasn’t going to get all the answers, but he did have a sneaking suspicion Hacker wanted her taken down but not out so he could take a peek under the hood, see where her wires got crossed. Was there a program or two on that tablet, something that might hack into her—

  Oh Jesus. He nearly groaned out loud. The guy was using a code name just like Boone. It wasn’t Hacker. It was a sick joke. Hack Her.

  “So, what the hell do you need me for, really?” Posed to Vance, a guy he bet had a shitload of chest candy, the question had met with a polite stonewall. You’re needed. Six is needed. He looked at Boone. “Your guys seem like they got everything they need.”

  “In all honesty? We don’t exactly need you. It’s that you”—Hacker tilted his head toward Six—“come with it.”

  “Six?” At the sound of his name, the shepherd’s ears pricked. He laid a protective hand on his dog’s head. Six responded, nuzzling his palm with a muzzled snout. As a general rule, Kujo didn’t muzzle Six now that the dog was, more or less, a civili
an. Muzzles were needed on missions. Even really good dogs got excited, sometimes went after the wrong guy, or just plain barked when they shouldn’t. “Why is Six important?”

  Then something dinged. That woman, all that hardware, and now they wanted Six because his dog meant something to her.

  “That woman,” he asked, “what’s her name?”

  “I wondered when you would get there,” said Hacker. “Kate McEvoy.”

  “What?” The word fell out of his mouth like a stone. “The medic who saved Six?” He’d heard she’d also gotten a Silver Star. Except not long after, once she was stateside and all banged up, hadn’t she…? “That can’t be right. Kate McEvoy died over a year ago. Some complication or other.”

  “Well,” said Boone, giving his cheek a healthy scratch, “only sort of, I guess.”

  “Meaning what?” Although Kujo thought he already knew. They’d faked her death. Had to be it. That way, no questions, no scrutiny. “Look, I still don’t get why we’re here.”

  “I already told you.” Hacker flicked an almost disgusted look at Six. “You’re here because you’re that dog’s new handler.”

  Maybe it was the tone, maybe it was Hacker, or his own disquiet about this mission, but Kujo felt his hackles rise. Hacker was talking about Six the way the military used to talk about all its working dogs, like they were tools, useful only so long as they were sharp.

  “No.” Kujo help up a finger. “I was his handler. Six is retired. Me, too. He’s my buddy, and we loaf on the couch a lot.”

  “Oh please. You’re a Brotherhood Protector. There was that little dust-up in Wyoming last year when you went to work with Mercer Broderick and his Alliance team.” At Kujo’s startled look, Hacker nearly smirked. “You think someone isn’t keeping an eye on your people? That animal may be your buddy.” Hacker inserted air-quotes. “But you’re happy to use his skills when needed. Well, now they’re needed.”

  He was stung. Angry, too, because Hacker had caught him out. At some level what Hacker said was true. “Let me rephrase, then. How can we help?”