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Repeth and Nguyen strapped themselves hastily into the semi-mobile seats bolted to the deck.
“Four fifty. Five hundred. Five fifty. Six hundred. Six fifty –”
The sledgehammer of an angry god struck the submarine, rolling it over ninety degrees in less than a second. Alkina, still taped into her chair, was propelled a short distance until the mobile fittings holding her seat to the deck brought her up short. Her upper body flopped, tearing the tape, her head slamming into a console. She lolled, a rag doll puppet, while the other three rubbed bruises, slowly releasing themselves from the straps.
“They do build these things tough, I’ll give ’em that,” remarked Bitzer.
“That was a nuke.”
“Yup. What did you expect?” He laughed, on the edge of hysteria.
“Why didn’t it EMP us?” Jill asked.
Bitzer sneered, “What, shielded by thousands of yards of seawater, grounded by the whole ocean, the biggest electrical sink in existence? Didn’t you ever take any physics?”
“In high school,” Jill snarled. “Not lately.”
“That’s enough, you two,” snapped Nguyen. “Will they strike us again?”
“I doubt it. Every two minutes we’re a mile farther from the launch site in an unknown direction. They will have lost us in the shockwave. And ours should be detonating soon, right? That will knock out all their sensors and command and control. Anything on the surface will be firing blind into a thousand square miles of ocean.”
Jill laughed, shaky. “Then we made it. We’re home free.”
“Probably,” Colonel Nguyen replied. “Gunnery Sergeant, you did outstanding work today but now we have to focus ourselves back inside this boat.” He pointed at Alkina. “That Australian operative there tried to interfere with the launch and we need to find out why. Trank her again, would you, and repair her bindings.”
“What the hell just happened?” Major Muzik stood in the open pressure doorway, his foot on the lip and his hands holding his swaying body upright by the jamb.
Bitzer laughed again, then choked it back. “We just launched eighteen nuclear missiles. We just set everyone’s command and control back a hundred years. We just balanced the scales.”
“Holy shit. And I slept through it. This bitch...” he walked over to Alkina’s bound and bloody form. “This bitch tranked me.”
“Me too; don’t feel too bad,” replied Repeth. She fished her trank pistol out of her cargo pocket, removed the safety cap and put the muzzle against Alkina’s neck. The drug hissed into her system with a quick pull. Jill began taping her up again, this time fastening the seat straps first, wrapping the silvery sticky stuff over the whole arrangement. She stopped for a moment to remove a slim carbon fiber blade from Alkina’s boot. She stared at the blood on it for a moment before tossing it to the colonel. “Someone got stabbed.”
He caught the blade deftly and looked at it. “All right, you two sweep the ship. Find the others. They might be wounded...or worse. We’ll stay here.” Nguyen nodded toward Bitzer, whose hands remained glued to the submarine’s helm controls.
Three minutes later they met back in the control room. Repeth remained grim and silent but Muzik began cursing, a stream of angry profanity punctuated by slams of his muscled forearm against the bulkhead.
“She killed them. The bitch killed them – Doc, Harres, Kelley. Thrust to the brain up through the mouth. With that.” He pointed at the slim black blade where it lay on a console. “She’s a Psycho, just like you said.” Muzik stomped over to grab Alkina by her bobbed black hair. He shook her head, snapping it side to side. “Wake up, bitch!”
“Major! Cease that at once. We can’t get answers if you harm her in anger. But I don’t want to have to watch her at every moment and feed her and clean up her mess here in the control room. Before she comes to, cut her out of that chair and lock her in a storeroom. Make sure you search her first. Then I want to look at...at our technicians.” Nguyen swallowed. “Go!”
Muzik and Repeth stowed Alkina in a storeroom, locking the outside with a screwdriver through the hasp, and then joined the colonel back in the control room.
“Where are they?” he asked.
“In the missile room. I’ll show you.”
One minute later they crouched by the bloody bodies of their three technicians. “Very cold. Very calculating,” Nguyen said as he turned Kelley’s blindly staring head with a fingertip. He stood to look around the room. “What’s that?” He pointed at the missile computer console.
“Looks like...I don’t know. A data module?” Jill stepped over to pull it out of the data port.
Nguyen nodded. “Now we know why she killed them. It was to keep them from interfering while she used that. But for what? The missiles launched correctly.” He rubbed his bare chin, his nostrils flaring.
Repeth got it first. “But where did the missiles go?”
“What the hell do you mean?” asked Muzik.
“I believe she means, did that –” he pointed at the thumb-sized data stick “– change the missile’s targeting or detonation parameters? And there’s no way to tell.”
“What do you mean, there’s no way to tell?” Muzik asked angrily.
“I mean, Major, that none of us knows enough about these things to find out. The three men who could tell us are dead. The only way to find out is to eventually surface and make contact with someone, and not get killed or captured in the process.”
“But where do we go, sir?” asked Repeth. “Can we trust the Australians?”
Nguyen stared at her for a long moment, then shrugged with a sigh. “I’m not sure. Chief, can we find the mini-sub again?”
“Certainly, sor. Assuming the whole goddamned UG Navy isn’t there to greet us. Assuming we could reach it, it’s thousands of miles away from here. They could have found it. If I was them, I’d tag it and watch it with an attack boat, just waiting for us to come back.”
“All right. Not practical. Any other ideas?” The colonel looked around at his three subordinates.
“South Africa? Argentina?”
“How long will that take? Chief?”
“Three thousand nautical miles to Argentina, six thousand to South Africa. The UG Navy will be covering the routes to Argentina. Much safer the long way round to South Africa. Call it two weeks, give or take. We’re already headed west.”
Nguyen said, “I’m not going to wait that long. We’re just a few days from Australia. The Council’s orders were to turn the boat over to the Australians, so that’s what we’ll do. The Free Communities need those six missiles to speed along the space program; they need the warheads to threaten retaliation. We’ll just have to hope that the Australian government will play fair.”
“But Alkina!”
“We don’t know if that was official or she was off the reservation, but either way, if enough people know about us they will have to accept the accomplished facts. We’ll surface and demand to speak to Markis. As soon as we report to him, we’re safe.” Nguyen raised his eyebrows, soliciting acceptance of his plan. The other three nodded with relief.
“Sounds good, sir.”
“Now I need to question Alkina. Gunnery Sergeant, would you accompany me?”
“Uh, sir...” Major Muzik started, “I’d like to be there when you do.”
Colonel Nguyen’s eyes locked with the bigger man’s, deceptively calm, placid. “Major...did you sleep with Miss Alkina? No, let me rephrase that.” He lifted a finger to point in the direction of the storeroom and his voice hardened. “Did you have sex with that murdering Psycho piece of shit?”
Muzik’s jaw dropped, his reply an incoherent gobble.
Nguyen’s voice was a whip. “That sounds like a yes. Obviously your perspective is compromised, so no, Major, you will not accompany me. You will stay here with Chief Bonnagh until we return. You will not leave this control room, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Muzik replied miserably.
The colonel nodded sharply, then stalked out of the room. Repeth stared daggers at Muzik for a moment, her lip curling in contempt before following.
Bitzer turned his head away, pretending deafness. Muzik threw himself into a chair and pounded his knee in frustration with his fist, over and over.
At the storeroom Nguyen removed the screwdriver from the hasp. He spoke calmly. “Stay outside, will you Jill? Come in if there’s some kind of commotion; otherwise, let me handle this, please?”
She heard his gentle tone. Thank God he’s trustworthy and on our side. “Of course, sir.”
Nguyen opened the door, went inside.
Relieved to not have to think, to just execute a simple task for the moment, Repeth leaned against the opposite bulkhead, staring at the closed door. Her mind was so tired. She was suddenly ravenous, she needed to pee, and she had just launched who knows how many megatons of nuclear weapons at...what? She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. What if...
Inside, Nguyen stared at Alkina.
She opened her eyes and gazed back at him from her seat atop boxes of cans. “So what now? You missed your chance to kill me clean.”
He grinned, an expression that stopped short of his eyes. “Why would I do that?”
“You framed me. You’re a Psycho too. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I tried to stop your plan, whatever it was, and I failed. Now you’re going to blame me for whatever you did. What did you do?”
He leaned closer to her, his voice very low. “I gave Markis a chance. I gave the Free Communities a chance. I just decapitated the Russians, the Chinese, and most of all, the United Governments of North America. Thirty-six warheads for the Russians, thirty-six for the Chinese, and one hundred and twenty for the Americans. The other twenty-four did just what I said they would: exploded in orbit, a barrage of EMP that will leave ninety-eight percent of the satellites up there useless. I just leveled the playing field. And with a level field, Markis wins. The Plague wins. It’s a better world for us. We win.”
“But why?” she whispered. “We’re both Psychos. We don’t care about anyone but ourselves. We’re narcissists. Why would you help him?”
Nguyen chuckled. “As you said – to help ourselves, and as I said, to level the playing field. For people like you and me. To prove we aren’t a liability but an asset. You must be young to be so ignorant. You’re blinded by your inexperience and your...state of mind. When were you infected? How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Ah. I was forty-seven. I was already a stone-cold killer, but I knew what loyalty was. What it meant to be part of a team, to have brothers in arms. The Plague stripped away all my confusion, but it didn’t take that knowledge from me. People are more complex than a label. Even Psychos. Is there no one you care about beyond yourself?”
“I...I don’t know. I have a sister. We used to be close. I still...” She licked her lips.
“You see? We’re not the way they say we are. Not so simple, black and white. In a way, the Edens are just as bad as the normals. They became what they hated – bigots. They decided Psychos were subhuman and they rounded them up, all they could find. But they never found me out. I remembered how to act. I remembered how to feel, even if those feelings are now secondhand. When I need to feel...I just put my old self back on, like a comfortable jacket. How do you do it?”
Alkina swallowed. “Fool them? I was trained. There is a shadow government in Australia made up of...strange people. People like you, I think. Smarter Psychos. They trained me to fool the tests and they...” She ground to a halt, lowering her eyes.
“You see? You’re not cold at all, not when it comes to your own self. You’re just as passionate as anyone when your passions are selfish. So how do they keep you under control? How do they make sure you don’t go rogue?”
Alkina sat up, slowly stripping off the remnants of sticky tape from her tunic. As soon as she could, she took the whole garment off, then lifted her undershirt over her head, leaving her with just a spandex bra over her flat breasts. She stroked her skin just below her sternum.
“If it wasn’t Eden-healed, you’d see a scar here. They implanted me with a fail-safe. A kill switch. Whenever they want...they just turn me off. Pop, and a pea-sized piece of plastic explosive next to my heart makes me go away. Like a bad little girl.” She kept tapping the spot, pensively.
Nguyen nodded. “The ultimate self-interest – survival. I suspected something like that.”
“So...Colonel...what now?”
“Call me Tran. It’s my first name. We’re comrades now.”
“We are?” Her dull surprise was genuine.
“Yes. As soon as we turn the boat over to your government, I will ask for asylum. I have a lot to offer. A lot up here.” He tapped his head. “I think I can convince them to let me join the...strange people.”
Alkina looked up at him in wonder, unfamiliar emotions bubbling to the surface. Not love, not affection; none of the finer kind of feelings, but instead admiration, and the desire to give herself over to a leader and a master that had demonstrated his worthiness. No one else had frightened her, had showed just how outclassed she was, yet had given her...something. Not mercy, exactly, but...respect. Attention. Appreciation instead of contempt and derision. Pride in who she was. To a narcissist it was the ultimate drug, the emotional lifeblood that transcended threats and fear, the carrot to the stick, the one thing that could make her wholly his.
He saw it in her eyes, that conversion, and this time his smile was genuine. He reached out his hand to brush her cheek. “Now all you have to do is play along until we get there. They will go home, and we stay in Australia to build a better world.” He laughed. “Again.”
Her smile was a ghost of his, a weak, wan, unpracticed thing, but it was there. She shrugged, attempting humor. “If at first you don’t succeed...”
