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Master Sergeant Huff rapped lightly on the jamb of Skull’s open cell door. “You wanted to see me, sir?”
“Close the door and sit down, Huff.”
Huff closed and sat.
“I’ve been notified we have a mission.”
“What we, sir? And what mission?”
“We nine. Fortress Team, or whatever you want to call us. Short notice, hard fast and ugly. I’ll give you the details as soon as I am allowed, hopefully tomorrow morning.”
Huff looked speculatively at Skull, stroking his chin with his thick-fingered hand. “So what’s this little chat about?”
Skull settled back on his bunk, cocking an eyebrow at the squat black man. “Because this team is yours. We all know it. It doesn’t matter what got pinned on my collar. It doesn’t even matter that I have more experience. Now if we had time – weeks at least, like we usually would to prep for an op – I’d work on all that stuff they talk about in training schools. Situational leadership. Problem solving process. Sources of power and influence. Team building, stages of group dynamics, all that crap. But it looks like we go in just a few days – probably right when Demon Plague Two falls. So I don’t have time to do it the hard way. The easy way is, you and me, we come to an understanding.”
“Hah hah haaaa. That all seems like a one-way street – I be your nigga, massah, sho’ ‘nuff boss.”
“All that racist guilt crap won’t work on me, Huff. I see through you. You’re a street-smart guy that moved up to book smarts but never forgot where he came from, I get it. And you think you hold all the cards.”
“I do. Sir.” Huff smirked.
“Thought you might say that. The question is, are you smart enough to believe me when I tell you that you don’t?”
The smirk fell off Huff’s face. He stared Skull down for half a minute, then stood up. “A’ight. I can see you believe it. Okay, you got somethin’ up your sleeve. Mebbe because you and Tyler are good ol’ boys that both got cowshit on your boots. So what’s your deal?”
“The deal is, you run the team, I stay out of the way. I direct, you execute. I get you promoted to chief – two ranks, Huff – so you are senior to everyone but me, and in return, you support me for this op. No more undercutting my authority. Because I don’t really care about these bars or my position on the team. If you had welcomed me in instead of made me an outsider, I’d have asked them to make you a lieutenant and you’d be in charge. But you cut your own throat on that one, because you assumed I was here to take something from you. I’m not. I just want to do the mission and get back to doing what I do best.”
Huff stuck a toothpick in his mouth, chewed on it for a moment, thinking. Abruptly his whole demeanor changed, like swapping masks. “All right. All right, I’m down with that.” He held out his hand, apparently sincere.
Skull shook the hand, then sat back as Huff left the cell. What a self-taught actor. Seemed to go well, unless he’s conning me. I hope he’s just smart enough to play the game right...and besides, it will free me from the nitnoid crap to focus on what’s important...important to me anyway.
Leaving his own cell he walked past the rest of them, steel doors with safety-glass windows, like a psych ward. Locks on the outside, in case someone else went berserk. At the end of the hall he paused, looking into the common room.
Tables and chairs were set up in a corner, to eat on or play cards, but most of the room was taken up with weight and fitness equipment. Several Fortress Team members hoisted prodigious free weight bars over their heads with relative ease, laughing and joking. Skull was sure one of them had five hundred pounds on the bar, and the man – Miller, he thought – brought it down to his chest and did another overhead press, grunting.
Tests had registered a near-instantaneous two-hundred-fifty percent gain in muscle strength and about a fifty percent gain in muscular speed and reaction time. But to Skull, picking up weights or carrying equipment – or even the Eden-like healing the nanites brought – wasn’t the most impressive thing about the treatment. It was the new mobility he had.
Without pausing or preparation, Skull swarmed up the hanging rope to the steel-beamed ceiling, then hand-over-handed across to slide down a chain, stopping with his feet on the ring at the end. He bent down and put one hand in the ring, then dropped, snapping himself back vertical, feet toward the ceiling, and extended his arm in a one-limbed pushup, steadying himself with a foot hooked around the chain.
“Cool!” Miller breathed. He put down the huge weight with a clang, then ran to repeat Skull’s route and feat. In a moment he was hanging upside-down on the other ring chain next to Skull.
Denham smiled, then let go to fall nine feet, doing a handstand on the floor and then hand-walking across to the wall ladders. Hooking his toes into the rungs, he did a vertical sit-up, then grasped two separate holds to brace himself out horizontal from the wall, a human flag. Then he let go, landing lightly on his feet.
The other men watching shifted from feats of strength to testing out their new gymnastic abilities. It didn’t appear that the nanobots improved balance, but with such speed and strength, it almost did not matter. Endurance was also improved at least fivefold, as the tiny machines boosted oxygen carrying capacity on demand.
***
Skull slipped out of the supposedly sealed barracks by the simple expedient of climbing through the latrine window. His tall skinny frame barely fit through it but with his incredible strength he eased himself through with just a skinned hip, which quickly healed. Once outside he took a running high jump and cleared the twelve-foot fence with room to spare. He shrugged to himself. If they complained later about his midnight excursion, what would they do, give up their best super-troop?
Deliberately running flat-out, he tested himself. He estimated that he hit forty miles an hour on the asphalt, and figured he could keep that up until his body ran out of fuel. This run was only a few hundred yards, though, over to the officers’ quarters, up to the third floor. He knocked on Forman’s door.
“Skull?” The Navy commander adjusted her bathrobe as she waved him in. “Out a bit late, aren’t we?”
“Don’t ‘we’ me, Chaplain, it’s patronizing. We need to talk.”
“Okay, sit down and talk.”
“I’ll stand. What do you think of the team?”
“Is this another of your headshrinker questions?”
He stared at her in annoyance. “No, it’s an honest one.”
“Good, let’s keep it that way. I think...I think there’s something weird going on, beyond the usual. Something more than the weirdness of nanotechnology.”
“Right, you felt it too. Let me tell you what I observe. These guys have all the skills but hardly any of the discipline of any special operators I have ever seen. They are overly macho, shortsighted, and selfish. If I didn’t know for a fact that they are not Eden Plague carriers, I’d think they were Psychos. Huff particularly troubles me. Markis is the epitome of the pararescueman: self-sacrificing to a fault, no bravado, the pure professional. Huff on the other hand...he’s calculating and underhanded, more like a gang leader than a team leader.”
“So what does that mean?” Forman ran her hands through her bob, setting a hair band into place. She didn’t seem surprised by his line of questioning.
This action caused Skull to abruptly notice her as a woman, not just a potential ally. This confused him a bit, because he’d ruthlessly suppressed his body’s urges for so long. Besides, she’s an Eden, and I’m a...what will they call us? Nanos? He stamped down brutally on his libido and answered, “It means I need you to get a look at their files. I want to know their backgrounds beyond what they claim. I want to know why they don’t line up the way they should.”
Christine looked long and hard at Skull, then came to a decision. “I don’t need to go take a look at their files. I already have.”
Skull raised his eyebrows in surprise. “Really? Why?”
“Because the general asked me to. Why do you think I’m involved with this team? There were other Edens to be guinea pigs. The general wanted someone with ironclad integrity bolstered by the Eden Plague, untainted by Unionists sympathies, to keep an eye on things. He’s a very intelligent man – and attractive, too –” she arched her eyebrows at Skull - “and he wanted me to evaluate everyone on the team.”
He ignored her jab. “Including me?”
“Especially you, Skull. But you don’t worry me nearly as much as they do.”
“What do you mean?” Skull finally sat down, leaning forward with interest.
“On the surface you are all damaged men, or should be. Every one of you has problems – disciplinary, psychiatric, and emotional. A bigger bunch of semi-functional misfits I never saw. But I’ve come to realize your own coping mechanism is highly effective. You cut yourself off from feelings so you can do horrific things you think are necessary for the greater good. You’re probably the sanest one of the bunch, within limits. The rest...well, let’s start with Huff. He was kicked out of the Pararescue program two weeks before he would have graduated – at the top of his class – for sexual assault. Probably rape, but it was never proven. The rest are almost as bad.”
Skull sat back, amazement on his face. “That’s...that’s crazy. I thought I’d be the odd man out, have to toe the line and play the straight-laced trooper game. Instead, I’m getting sick of their dirtbag attitude. And now that they have the Tiny Fortress treatment...they’re far worse. Thank God they’re going operational soon, or they’d self-destruct.”
“Operational? Really? Do tell.” Forman laid a melodramatic finger alongside her jawline, her chin on her thumb.
“Damn, I really shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Rather late to worry about that. We’re co-conspirators now.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “You’re right. Okay...in a couple of days we’re outbound for our first mission. It’s a wet op – an assassination – I don’t know the target.”
“What about the other team?”
Skull gripped the chair arm in sudden tension. “What other team?”
It was Forman’s turn to be surprised. “The...you don’t know? There’s another Fortress team. You were the first, you proved the concept. Took the biggest risk. Team Two is inside Cheyenne Mountain, I’m told.”
“Told by who?”
“Ah...well, I overheard the two Tylers talking, just a brief mention. I don’t think they realize how sensitive Eden hearing is.”
“So no one is supposed to know. Certainly not us on, what, Team One?” Skull stood up again, began pacing. His head hit the overhead fixture and he cursed, changing his path.
“Skull...mentally step back a minute. What if you were in charge of Tiny Fortress in this situation? Would you put all your eggs in one basket?”
“No. I understand. I’d have multiple teams too. And I might not tell them about each other. Leftover paranoia from the Unionists. But this team...it’s a Kelly’s Heroes bunch of misfits...or actually, a Devil’s Brigade. Which means...”
“You’re expendable. Or even, maybe you’re supposed to fail, perhaps in some spectacular diversion.”
“Son of a bitch.” He paced several more laps, then turned suddenly to her. “Thanks, Commander. You’re...you’re a real American, like we’re all supposed to be.” Then he turned and walked out, radiating anger.
“Huh,” Forman said to herself, aloud. “I think that was the highest compliment he could pay me.”
“I think you’re right,” said Jill Repeth from the bedroom doorway. “That was...interesting.”
“Enlightening. I’m glad nano hearing isn’t as good as Edens. I noticed you shifting around in there.”
“As you say. So, Skull is a romantic at heart.”
“Aren’t all men? They just cover it well. Every one of them wants to live for something bigger than himself. Or better yet, die gloriously for it. Skull’s just looking for the right moment. Funny, and he thinks Markis has a Christ complex.”
Jill shrugged. “Colonel Nguyen once told me we become what we hate. I think he was right.”
“Satan certainly did. Why should we be different?”
***
“What the hell is this?” Sergeant First Class Holden lifted up the back-and-chest plate armor, so different from the usual Kevlar.
“It’s the latest thing,” answered Captain JT Tyler. “Lighter and tougher than anything before. It’s a nano-machine-assembled crystal ceramic that’s guaranteed to turn most conventional rounds.”
“But what about these big gaps?”
“We have a synthetic spidersilk softsuit for you to wear underneath that will stop most of your incoming, and provide you with the flexibility to move. Between these two layers of armor and your enhanced strength and speed, you’ll be able to cut through any enemy unit like leopards through sheep.”
“Won’t they just be using Needleshock rounds? Who cares about those?” asked Miller.
“Because, dumbass, they hurt, which means enough of them will knock you down or out. Also, the ablative virus coating will occupy your nanites fighting them off, and you will immediately lose efficiency – you’ll lose strength and speed. Third, the electrical shock will knock out your nanites in the local area, like a micro-EMP. So you will wear this stuff. Put it on now, and only take it off to shower or sleep. Get used to it. That’s my orders.” JT put his hands on his hips, glaring at the team.
“Hey, uh, Captain,” Huff asked in his best oily almost-subordinate tone, “where’s the general in all this?”
“Huff, he has more to do than just run this one project and deal with the details, so he asked me to pass these simple, routine orders on to you. Is that going to be a problem?”
“Oh, no, no problem, sir. Jes’ wonderin’...”
“The general will be here to give you your final mission briefing sometime in the next few days. In the meantime, get as used to your new abilities as you can, follow the training schedule, listen to Warrant Officer Denham, and remember, you are still the property of the United States of America, even more than you were before you got the injections. You’re all giddy and high from this stuff, but you’re not invincible any more than Edens are.”
“Hah, I could take any five Edens,” boasted Holden.
“That’s what we designed the nanites for. But that also means you’re going to be sent on formerly impossible missions and you’ll be up against high odds.”
“Nothin’ to it, sir!” Miller chirped.
Captain Tyler looked sideways at Skull, who took the cue. “That’s enough already. Get it on like the captain said.” He traded looks with Huff, then walked over and began to don the gear.
Tyler stalked out.
Skull spoke to Huff in a low voice. “Funny how we’re getting orders from the lab’s chief of security.”
“Yeah. Maybe that weasel is off the reservation, I’m thinkin’.”
Skull shook his head. “Not yet he’s not, but I think he just tipped his hand. Daddy doesn’t know everything that’s going on, and Junior there resents his subordinate position. If the President isn’t fully in charge, and General Tyler isn’t fully in charge, then...politics abhors a vacuum.”
“Hah. You think JT makin’ his play?”
“Not yet. But he will, just as soon as we are on our way.”
Huff chuckled. They’d become almost buddies since they had established their arrangement. “Gotta get us out of the way, huh? Because we’d back the general.”
“Right. So just think about that over the next couple of days. Might help determine which way we jump when the time comes.”
Huff nodded, silent, as they fitted their armor.
