Reborn, page 14
Joie watched her friend pull out the chair from a table in the corner and sit. In many ways, the space was configured like any hotel room she’d ever stayed in, save that the colors were a dark, forest green and there was no balcony.
“So talk, pipsqueak,” Joie instructed her previously unindicted co-conspirator.
Romana grinned. It was like three years vanished, until Joie saw a young woman forming the third part of a triangle on the other side.
Shit, three weird years.
And a chance to start all over again? Twenty-five was her age when she’d been blown up in Egypt. When Ernesta had moved into upper middle management for her grandfather.
“Tanerhald had a lengthy talk with his people after our long afternoon,” Romana said. “I wasn’t there, but he’s willing to use you as an agent, within limits. Certainly, it helps me.”
“You got upgraded, didn’t you?” Joie asked.
“Yeah, but not to the level you did,” Romana turned serious. “Better than Human. Are you better than Bouchard?”
“Dunno,” Joie replied. “Yormevs seemed to think that I needed to be good enough to take on someone like Carter unarmed, so he pushed. Plus, we weren’t ever going home, so he didn’t have to worry. And we’re both sterile.”
She caught the grimace that flashed on Romana’s face.
“You, too?” Joie asked delicately.
“As you said, necessary if I wanted to save the world,” Romana said. “They don’t want advanced Humans loose in the galaxy, so I won’t be able to have kids.”
“I’m sorry,” Joie offered.
That had been one thing she knew Romana had been looking forward to in a few years. Retire from the Army, find some dude, and settle down. Part of the reason Romana had never gotten cyberware.
That, and not having been blown up. Still, she was a normal woman who could walk into places even Joie couldn’t, if they were paying attention with the right scanners.
“Cost of doing business,” Romana repeated with an offhand shrug that didn’t fool Joie one bit. “Anyway, Tanerhald sent me to talk to you. He wants to meet with Yormevs, to see if the Heecha are willing to come in from the cold and help. And he sends his apologies that he let Bouchard escape. Standard paranoia on his part, augmented by me, when I saw who it was and what they’d done to the three of you. The Brakhua nearly shit themselves before I convinced them that I could talk to you.”
Joie nodded. Water under the bridge at this point. Bouchard had filed a flight plan for DC, then vanished off radar and Tanerhald’s people hadn’t had any reason at the time to be tracking him from orbit. Just one of thousands of aircraft in the skies at any given moment.
“Ernesta and I were just talking about that before you got here,” Joie said. “She thinks we need Mitch.”
It was telling, the way Romana’s eyes slid around to Ernesta. Questioning.
After all, they’d all shared him, in the biblical sense of the word. Romana hadn’t been able to make it work any better than Joie had, but that was the nature of the business. He had been on the outside, so they couldn’t tell him certain things.
He was an inside man now. Ernesta had taken advantage of that. Hot babe with an old soul, and all that.
“Why?” Romana asked oh so delicately.
“He’s a superb analyst,” Ernesta said with a grin. “Kehoe needed him to track everything and make sense of it, especially when he didn’t have access to hundreds of other analysts working the data because we’ve all gone rogue. And the man’s smart.”
“Duh,” Romana said. “Are you two an item?”
“Maybe?” Ernesta replied. “There have been conversations, but nothing solid.”
Romana surprised Joie by nodding and grinning.
“Good,” she offered. “He needed someone like Joie. That was obvious. And Joie has to like you to smile right now. So I like you.”
Joie felt a stab of emotion knife her in the gut. She was back in Seattle, outside the train station, when one woman looked at the situation and got another woman involved.
That sisterhood Joie had never realized even existed.
“So now what?” Joie asked.
“You willing to call that Heecha and browbeat him into surrendering?” Romana asked. At least she was smiling. “Tanerhald won’t do it any other way. That man’s been committing crimes only a level or so below the Danorak, even if he had good intentions. That just means less jail time at the end.”
“I can ask,” Joie said. “Won’t make any promises, because you’ve given Kehoe several days to fall back on contingency plans and grow a little desperate.”
“What’s he got?” Romana asked.
“Sergeant Stone,” Joie said. “You remember him?”
“Gruff old coot who used to be Airborne,” Romana nodded.
“Him,” Joie nodded. “Pakhet, aka Freya Malik. Another cybernaut like me, with almost the same hardware.”
“She’s out of her league here,” Romana said.
“She is, but she offered to come anyway,” Joie said. “And Kehoe doesn’t have much more.”
“That it?” Romana asked.
“One other,” Joie grinned. “My Sifu from DC. Wěn Cōng Mǎ.”
“Oh, shit,” Romana whispered. “Her?”
“Yup,” Joie nodded back. “So Kehoe might be desperate, but he’s not alone.”
CHAPTER 35
Taylor sat at the head of the table and considered his options. Three of them.
It was rude to think of them as the second string, but that was only a comparison to the team he’d sent to South America, who were varsity stars in any operation.
Mitch was here as well, but he was the bloodhound, bleary-eyed from two days of diving into Defense Department systems and trying to find a lead on Bouchard. Man had simply vanished somewhere over southern Mexico.
Gone.
“Any luck?” Taylor asked anyway.
“We know a great deal more about things than we used to,” Mitch replied grumpily. “However, at present, I don’t know which of about a half-dozen places he might have landed. All low-key airstrips without proper tower control. From there, he could have gone to any of fifty places I have mapped, or however many I can’t.”
Taylor nodded, commiserating with the man. Solo, he was still worth more than all of the folks Taylor had left behind in DC.
He turned back to his second string.
Stone. Pakhet. Sifu Wěn.
“Should we go through the same upgrades as Daring?” Stone asked in a gruff voice. “Or will that take too long?”
Taylor considered it. According to Yormevs, the reset to youth and upgrade was getting almost standardized, having been done three times now. And extracting cyberware and replacing it with grown parts for Freya had been sped up as well.
Still, he was looking at a week of downtime if they committed to it. Or sending one agent instead of a team.
What did he do with a white guy, a Cantonese woman, and a black woman? Pretty much anything he wanted, considering the range of languages spoken.
However, he had no clue where to send them.
Plus, he was almost dead certain that Bouchard had gone to ground in the States.
“Let’s hold off on that,” Taylor said. “Mitch, how narrow was your search?”
“Range of that jet, assuming he didn’t pause to refuel and recharge somewhere,” Mitch replied.
“If we eliminate Mexico and Canada, how much does that help?”
“Almost none,” Mitch shook his head. “Maybe ten percent of options move off the table. I need something that wasn’t written down in a computer. Air-gapped system, or verbal orders without electronics.”
“And that’s normally when I send someone in to steal them,” Taylor agreed. He turned to Stone. “Where would you hit, if you wanted radar logs that were above top secret?”
“Bases like Edwards out west,” Stone replied immediately. “Cheyenne Mountain for NORAD, because I guarantee you they have it somewhere. Doubt any civilian spot would have it, unless an airport like San Antonio happened to have them pass through the control zone while heading northwest.”
“Not northeast?” Freya asked.
“Too many people around,” Stone nodded. “Lots of open space in the west that got transformed into things. Even a bunch of old, secret missile bases from the twentieth century that never got decommissioned, just disarmed when the missiles were retired. Big hole in the ground with secure enough facilities to survive a nuclear strike. Some of them are huge.”
Taylor studied the man. Stone had done a little of everything in the service before finally retiring to a desk job because his back wasn’t up to jumping out of transports or helicopters anymore. If he knew about such places, that was because he’d been in a few. And those were the sorts of secrets that you were supposed to take to your grave.
Assuming you were still loyal to the DOD.
He looked over at Mitch, but Graydon just shook his head.
“Asked Stone about that,” he said. “Added a few places. Again, all of them are active, so if we hit one, alerts go out everywhere and we have task forces of Special Forces troops dropping in a box all around us quickly. Have to be right the first time.”
“How did everyone miss the ship Joie stole?” Sifu Wěn asked.
She’d been so quiet up until now that Taylor almost thought she was asleep.
Playing possum instead.
He studied her.
Fifty-something. Built kind of like the Buddha, except possibly as fast as Joie had been upgraded to. Stone spoke in awe of her skills, and he taught various martial arts on the side back home.
She’d been sandbagging everybody.
“Beg pardon?” he asked, just to buy a few seconds to think.
“The ship that Bandi hid,” Wěn smiled. “It wasn’t there, then it appeared when she took off. What were they using to hide it?”
“There is a field generator,” Mitch spoke up. “I asked Yormevs about it. Whatever happened to Joie in orbit was somebody turning one off just long enough to presumably grab her and insert a pilot who then turned the one on…Shit.”
Wěn smiled. Taylor was still a little lost.
“Talk to me, Mitch,” he said.
“She’s suggesting, probably correctly, that Bouchard must have something similar,” Mitch nodded to the woman. Taylor watched her grin. “Bandi had something before we made him move, and hadn’t installed them again because he was feeling a little lazy. There’s one in the mountain in Chile. Probably a few that Bouchard conned him out of over the years to protect some of the more critical facilities from someone beaming in to steal shit.”
“Or plant a bomb and blow the place up,” Freya noted.
Taylor understood and concurred. How easy would it be to just put the right-sized bomb in someone’s living room, instead of having to drop it on them? Or tasking Joie or Carter with breaking in and doing it?
Taylor rose from his seat and walked to the comm thing next to the door. They weren’t locked in, but he was feeling too lazy to walk to the office where Yormevs would probably be right now.
He keyed the button.
“How may I assist you, Kehoe?” the alien asked immediately.
“Is there a way you can do some sort of hard scan that notices spots where someone has a shield up to cloak themselves?” Taylor asked.
The sudden, drawn-out silence on the line was at least better than a flat denial.
“I will bring one of my technical experts to your space where you can ask,” Yormevs said. “I am not sure I even understand the question.”
“That’s fine,” Taylor replied. “Thank you.”
He returned to the table and sat. The others watched him, Wěn grinning ever-so-slightly.
Yormevs and a shorter Heecha arrived a few moments later. Introductions went quick, but Kehoe didn’t figure he’d ever see the person again. Instead, they piled a heap of technical questions on them instead.
Which turned into a long conversation in a tonal language, presumably Yormevs translating everything into Heecha. The other person thought about it and replied with a single word.
Taylor knew the answer before Yormevs even opened his mouth.
“Maybe.”
“What would it take to be certain, one way or the other?” Taylor asked.
More translation. The shrugging of the shoulders was apparently a universal thing with bipeds. At least Heecha and Danorak. Good to know, since one of these days he expected to be living with them.
Out there.
“We will do some investigating,” Yormevs promised.
Better than nothing.
Then a third Heecha, this one maybe female, but Taylor wasn’t sure, entered, walking right to Yormevs and whispering in his ear. Several back and forth, none of which he understood.
Then Yormevs paled. Eyes huge. He turned to the room.
“Joie Daring is on a comm,” he said in a small voice. “She would like to negotiate.”
Taylor nodded. Smiled, even.
Trust Joie to pull it off, whatever it was.
“So let’s talk,” Taylor said.
CHAPTER 36
Valmy studied the walls around him. Concrete. Rough-poured and painted several times, but no effort had ever been made to make them pretty.
The whole facility was like that. Sturdy, when measured on the scale of nuclear weapons, back in the era where accuracy had meant good enough to explode at low altitude and maybe take out the base.
Maybe not.
People had been wound a little too tight in those days, Americans and Russians—back when they’d been communists instead of gangsters—facing off with lots of missiles, primitive radar systems, and an assurance that if one side tried to launch a surprise attack, the other would cut loose with enough firepower to annihilate the world.
At least the Russians had pretty much fallen back to where the Brits and French were these days. The Chinese and Indians were still bitter enemies, but Pakistan and Saudi Arabia also having nuclear missiles meant that any fuckup there only ended life from the Mediterranean to the East China Sea.
A lot of old missiles had been decommissioned a century and more ago, irrelevant as technological advances moved them to submarines and aircraft. Plus a few in space that nobody talked about, even today.
Most of those weapons weren’t nuclear. Hypersonic cruise missiles could take out command and control facilities rapidly with minimal collateral damage.
Still, nobody wanted a general exchange. In the modern era, that had turned into the Shadow War, where enhanced agents like Mithras or Captain Daring had done things at a personal level, allowing everyone plausible deniability later.
Crime was, after all, in the eye of the beholder.
So TRC had been able to take over a bunch of old, decommissioned missile silo facilities, a few even built in the middle of the twenty-first century when some of the South Asian Cold Wars had threatened to get out of hand again.
But the place was ugly. Someone had obviously gotten a fantastic deal on a particular shade of green that was too dark to be called mint and too bright to be goose shit.
Everywhere. Probably still better than raw concrete, but he wasn’t entirely sure.
When this was all done, he had already made a note to increase the budget for interior decorations at places like this. More colors of paint, if nothing else.
The green reminded him of insane asylums from old movies. And not in a good way.
He’d been sitting on his bunk, mostly meditating.
Trying to figure out what the hell had happened to Daring.
He’d ordered her burned two years ago because Valmy was still confident that she’d worked a deal with Mithras to bring him in alive, when she was supposed to take the man out, and then be so badly injured that she had to be retired.
Hell, if she hadn’t been so broken in the first place, she would have been a perfect candidate for Project Carpenter.
As it was, she was too good to be left running around.
And she’d proven that, retracing her steps to South America in spite of one of the biggest manhunts in the last couple of decades chasing after her. Found the aliens. Broken into their lab. Compromised everything.
Valmy still didn’t think that Kehoe had made a wise choice, bringing the woman in instead of eliminating her, but Valmy hadn’t been prepared to deal with the blowback of issuing orders to take Captain Daring down.
Too many Senators still had fond feelings for the woman.
Back in the field, she’d even managed to kill Faulkener this time, eliminating one of Valmy’s biggest headaches and public relations issues with Congress.
Then vanished.
Only to appear in Chile, stealing his spaceship.
And then it had vanished.
Who had her? How many other players were out there, maneuvering?
What person had been able to convince Captain Daring to walk away from her country? Her oaths?
Valmy didn’t have any answers, and that stupid green paint was starting to get to him.
He rose from the bed and checked his watch.
Close enough to dinner for governmental purposes.
He needed to stay hidden in the tall grass for a bit, while other elements of TRC and the larger Intelligence apparatus started digging in for some questions.
Something had gone desperately wrong, and for once, Valmy had no idea how to deal with it.
CHAPTER 37
Joie sat in a control room like they used when launching rockets. Screens, knobs, switches, the works. Heecha had ears more or less like Humans, so she even had a headset with microphone, like those folks in the old moonshot videos or SF movies.
It had taken a little time to get through, mostly because Kehoe and Mitch had apparently been in a meeting somewhere, with Yormevs, when she’d called on the channel they’d been using.
That, and a lot of confusion she’d created at that end.
Tanerhald and Romana were present. Ernesta sat next to her.
Carter had even gotten off his ass to join them, wonder of wonders.
