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“I can’t say I’m that unhappy, except about leaving you.” Jill Repeth spun the readout tablet idly around on the tabletop next to her husband Rick Johnstone’s cluttered CyberComm workstation within the damaged space battleship Orion. Orders to report to the provisional U.S. capital of Pueblo showed on its face. “Space just isn’t for me, I don’t think.”
Rick turned his blue-grey eyes in her direction. “Eventually you’ll be spending more and more time out here. Your skills and augmentation make that a certainty.”
“All the more reason to get back down to Earth for a while.”
“I think you have unfinished business, and you’re bored.”
“Is that wrong? I’m not cut out to be a bodyguard, and there’s not much policing to do up here. As soon as this ship starts in its conversion to a permanent orbital station and the new cargo carriers start hauling stuff up from Earth, Admiral Absen will probably have plenty of Stewards around him.”
“So you want to be where the action is. I get it. I knew who you were when I married you.” Rick leaned across to kiss her. “Vaya con Dios, you have my blessing.”
Jill leaned into him and kissed him back. “The orders say next available shuttle. That gives us twenty hours.”
“We can have a lot of fun in twenty hours.” He stood up, shutting down his console.
“Yeah. How long can you stay awake?” she asked.
“I got a battle stim left over that I haven’t turned in yet...”
“Naughty husband of mine. Sounds fun.”
* * *
Reaper slept most of the way down, even through the roughest bucking of the shuttle. It was an acquired skill most combat troops developed. She woke up alert as the wheels touched down at the enormously expanded Butts Army Spaceport, formerly Airfield, on Ft. Carson, Colorado, and soon walked off the spaceplane with a heavy duffel in each hand. For this occasion, she had put her Marine utility uniform back on.
Crisp, cool and sunny, the Colorado sky made her squint. She wasn’t used to it, and here at altitude, the sun’s rays seemed harsh as she walked across the new concrete. It smelled of hot rain and jet fuel.
Flashing lights on a black SUV greeted her as she approached the terminal building. The vehicle pulled up next to her and the doors popped open, disgorging two beefy Secret Service men. “Hop in, Master Sergeant,” Reaper heard the woman in the driver’s seat call, so she tossed a duffel to each of the men.
One stumbled and dropped her bag. The other merely gave an oof and looked at her strangely as he caught it. Each ballistic nylon sack must have massed fifty kilos. Obviously that had surprised them, as well as the ease with which she had tossed them. The two men hefted the things into the SUV’s rear cargo space, then slid back in to the back seat, one on a side, as Reaper stepped into the passenger front.
The woman driving was unknown to her, but seemed cut from the same mold as the others. “The President would like to see you, Master Sergeant,” she said flatly.
“I see.” No point in asking what about. These would either not know, or would not tell, so she kept her mouth shut until they debarked twenty minutes later in front of the Presidential Mansion in Pueblo.
“Secure those bags for me, will you gents?” Assuming her request would be granted, she followed the woman through security and soon was ushered into the august presence of President of the United States Nathan B. McKenna.
He looked far younger now than his chronological sixty-some years. When she had last seen him, he had just been infected with the Eden Plague and the rejuvenation process had not yet taken hold. Now, after several months, he looked like a young thirty, with old eyes. He sported grey dye at the temples, an affectation all the rage among Eden rejuvs in positions of power.
“Jill!” McKenna reached for her hand warmly, a two-handed politician’s grip, but she could see he was sincere. Still, she doubted his summons was for just a kumbayah with the Marine who had saved his life.
“Good to see you, sir.” Once they were seated in the Oval Office – made so in this “New White House” by renovation rather than original design – she asked, “How may I serve my country?”
McKenna poured two single-malts with his own hand. “We’ll get to that. How is Rick, and how was it up there? Tell me all about it, from a personal point of view. All I get is briefings. Tell me a story.” The man seemed eager to hear her tale of space battle, his eyes bright and interested. Had he been a dog his ears would be standing up and facing forward.
So she spent the next half hour describing everything she could, as McKenna sipped Scotch and nodded. Eventually Reaper relaxed, even with two Secret Service agents standing behind her.
Besides, she knew she could take them out if she had to.
Crazy to think that way.
Crazy not to, after all that had happened. There were still a lot of leftover Unies around. Just like after the Soviet Union fell, some always longed for the good old days of authoritarianism and order.
Once her narration finished, McKenna banged down his emptied highball on the coaster with a clinking thud. “Amazing. Thank you for that. I’m sure I’ll listen to the recording many times. Now, I thought I’d give you a heads-up on your new mission.”
“Have you found Septagon Shadow, sir?” Reaper’s eyes burned a bit brighter with hope.
“Yes, we have, but that’s about the only good news there is. Technically, they’re out of our reach.”
“Please don’t keep me in suspense.”
He held up a hand. “They’re in Russia. It had to be either that or China, really. Winthrop Jenkins could only move so much money out of the country before we clamped down on the transfers. Actually his elderly sister Adelia was the key. Once she became an Eden, she regained her health and vigor, and with the law on her side, she took control of the family fortune with a vengeance. So he had to find a sponsor to set them and their rogue research program up.”
Reaper pursed her lips. “What can we do, then? They’re in a sovereign country. Regardless of the program’s provenance, the U.S. has a cybernetics program and the Tiny Fortress nano program. How can we deny Russia the same?”
“That’s why I said the news wasn’t all good. You’re right, it’s difficult. With the help of the Neutral States, we’re going to put political and economic pressure on them, and see how it goes. We’ll try to get the Russians to give up Jenkins, at least. The experiments those people conducted were immoral, hideous, but the results...well, the program helped us make you, didn’t it?”
Reaper crossed her arms, unconsciously shutting down. “Like the rehabilitated Nazis helped us make rockets and jets. So sir, why am I here, if there won’t be an operation?”
“Who says there won’t be? I’m going to exhaust all other options so I have political and legal cover if there’s a covert op. We’ll need the time for your upgrades anyway. And training.”
“Upgrades?”
“You’ll see. And Master Sergeant...I detect a certain reticence.”
“It’s just...this isn’t the same as breaking people out of prison camps or restoring order to territory, or even bodyguarding an admiral.”
“Or pirating a submarine?”
Reaper cast her eyes down. “No one was supposed to get killed on that op. Can you say the same about this one?”
“You didn’t seem concerned about killing people when you were looking for Rick Johnstone...or this man.” President McKenna lifted a mug shot of Scott Stone out of a file and placed it before her.
“The Professor? He was...”
“No worse than these people.”
Reaper shook her head as if to clear it. “Sir, I was almost out of my mind with worry. I was obsessed with getting Rick back, and I was ready to mow down anyone in my way...but that was wrong. I didn’t come back to my country just to be used in a tainted op. I can shoot someone in self-defense, or even in war, especially with a round that gives them a chance to live through it, but I’m not an assassin.”
“And I’m not asking you to be. The mission, when it happens, is to go in and retrieve or destroy all their data. The goal will be to set back their program for a few years – hopefully until after this next attack from space is over with – by which time our own advances will make anything they come up with obsolete.”
Reaper chewed the inside of her cheek, considering.
“Have you seen the news reports out of Chechnya?” the President asked.
“No...why?”
“The Russians have sent in Spetsnaz and started killing every male between sixteen and sixty. No arrests, just murder.”
“And this is somehow connected to Septagon Shadow?”
McKenna nodded. “Our intel says these guys are like nanocommando zombies. They heal fast, slaughter indiscriminately, and show no remorse – no emotion at all.”
“Shadows?”
“Not full-blown cyborgs. One of our people got a good look at a corpse. Chips in his head, but nothing else.”
“So...direct brain control. This way you can use Edens – implant control circuits to burn out the virtue effect. Cheap and effective. I bet they could turn out dozens a day, just as fast as they can trank them and do some quick surgery.”
McKenna nodded. “That’s the kind of people we’re facing. No moral compunctions at all. And there’s another thing that may help motivate you.” He tapped the photo. “Professor Scott has escaped.”
“What?” She leaped to her feet, momentarily leaving the floor with the power of her cybernetic legs. She heard the agents behind her drawing weapons, and she was certain they were pointed at her head.
The President waved them back from his seat. “He busted out of the convoy bringing him to the supermax prison. Broke the heaviest shackles, ripped open a containment truck from the inside...our people believe he’s cyber-augmented.”
Reaper paced behind her chair, causing the two Secret Service agents to back up and lift their sidearms again. The motion caught her eye and she sneered pointedly at them, then turned back to the President. “He must have sandbagged me. He’d had the implants but he was clever enough to hide the fact, and let me knife him in the gut. He knew he’d have a better chance once we thought we had him well restrained. I should have known he went down too easy. Hell! I was a fool.”
“No more than us. We didn’t think to give him a body scan. He was smart, we were careless. Don’t let it get to you. He’s just one man.”
Reaper smacked one fist into another with a sound like a gunshot. “All right. I’m motivated. But I’m still not going to do wet work for you.”
“And I’m not going to order you to do something you can’t. You don’t have to decide anything yet. Just get the new equipment, train and prepare, and wait. That’s all I ask. It could be weeks, or months, or not at all.”
“Fair enough, sir.” She came to attention, facing him. “Will that be all, sir?”
McKenna looked up at her and sighed. “Yes, thank you. That will be all. Agent Stags will show you out.”
