The Orion Plague Read online

When it beeped, she rolled out of bed and dressed automatically, layering outward with clothing, under-armor, armor, tactical vest, webbing, weapons, integrated squadcomm system, helmet, fingerless gloves. Over the past few weeks she had been methodically collecting gear she and her team would need. She looked at herself for a long moment in the reflection of her room’s window before she turned off the lamp and picked up the heavy duffel.

  By the dawn’s early light she was once again cold as ice, sharp as steel, hard as stone.

  -2-

  Rick Johnstone stared at the wall of his cell. Though the door was unlocked, a cell it remained. More like the cell of a body, perhaps; just a machine that performs a function. That’s me, a device working on other devices.

  He ached all over, from no physical cause. As an Eden his body should be in fine tune, but there were limits to even that remarkable phage. The mind, though founded on the brain, had a viewpoint of its own, and right now Rick’s was unhappy. More than that, my soul and spirit are oppressed. And Jill…I don’t even know if she’s alive.

  He’d worked in Fredericksburg for the Professor for just a day, fixing some obvious and simple problems with his headquarters computers before he’d heard the ruckus down in Old Town. Separated from the other prisoners, he’d missed the rescue of the male slave laborers.

  He’d hoped that whatever force had survived from Muzik’s battalion would make another attempt. They had to know the women were still in captivity; by the lewd comments of his captors he’d deduced how they’d been abused. But too much hope was unrealistic. Fredericksburg was on its guard and ready.

  The next day they’d thrown a bag over his head and hustled him off in a truck. Mouth taped and hands shackled, he’d been traded away to men with clipped voices, his price paid in weapons and ammunition. A short, jolting helicopter ride later he’d found himself here, at Sept.

  That’s what they called it, and he’d heard no other name for days. Eventually he’d deduced enough to realize it referred to the project called Septagon Shadow, but by then he’d been put to work on discrete, compartmented technical projects.

  As he stared at the ceiling over his bunk his mind went automatically to the latest challenge he’d been set. A natural problem-solver, Rick could no more stop thinking about a solution than a dog could ignore a bone between his paws.

  They know it, too, he thought. They give me good food, I’m not mistreated – but outside of work I can’t simply talk with someone, read something, or really do anything except solve their problems. I can work slowly but if I don’t find their answer I don’t get another task to work on, and I will eventually lose my mind here.

  “Here” was a laboratory complex, a building with windows too small to squeeze through but large enough to see the grassland, woods and a glimpse of shoreline. Rural, near the Potomac or the Chesapeake, considering the short length of the helo ride. Someplace secret, and not under the control of the legitimate US government. Though they hadn’t said so explicitly, the uniforms and the vernacular marked the staff as Unionist holdouts. Like the Nazis who fled to other places and tried to rebuild cells after World War II, these people still hope to take their power back. So where’s our Simon Wiesenthal, Lord? Is it too much to ask it be Jill?

  Jackboots stomped in the corridor, three guards every time. He might entertain fantasies of overpowering one or even two guards, but not three. His door slid back and the one he thought of as Pancho for his square jaw, drooping moustaches and swarthy face waved him out into the corridor. One minor improvement to these Nazis – all races welcomed.

  Rick rolled off the bed and stuck his feet in his soft stupid slippers. At least they keep my feet warm. No laces, cloth bottom, useless if I reached the outside. Another clever detail.

  The guards handed him off to his minder, Stanley, at the cafeteria. Why do they need three guards to get me to breakfast but only one fat nerd after that? Procedures become rules become graven in stone, and nobody asks why. He kept hoping he could use this fact somehow, but guards were always nearby, and Stanley refused to talk about anything but work. He wasn’t cruel, but he was reserved, probably afraid.

  They ate breakfast in silence.

  From there Stanley passed Rick through the cafeteria door with his keyed badge and a code, then down a short hallway to his workroom. Divided into four workstations, the room gave each man a corner. There was enough space for four technicians, no more, no less. Once he arrived, at least two of the employees were always in the room with him. One could take a break, but never two.

  And these minders were not stupid guards. They were technicians, engineers and computer scientists almost as talented as he was, so fooling them on something tech-related was difficult.

  Not to say he wasn’t working on it; in fact, he had several snippets of code embedded in the network, hidden subroutines lurking, waiting to be activated, or gathering information in trapdoor files. Anything one person could devise, another could circumvent, and they did not seem to realize just who they had sharing the network with them.

  I wonder how much access they would give me if they knew my sole job for the last five or six years has been designing network cyber-attacks on the Big Three.

  Hacking United Russia had been easy, what he could reach; their solution to intrusion was to keep their most important networks completely separate, unconnected and physically protected. It worked, but made them inefficient.

  The North American Union was a harder target, willing to fight a war of cyber-blades, hacker bots, worms and viruses versus ICE, the name for Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics, defensive security software. It was an entertaining, clean kind of war, most of the time.

  Greater China was another matter. Their ICE was almost as good as the North Americans, but unlike them Beijing had no compunction about attacking back, even with lethal means. Quite a few of Rick’s colleagues had been assassinated by the Chinese or their proxies early in the Second Cold War, before Colonel Spooky Nguyen had put a stop to them by equally effective countertactics. The Free Communities’ prisons were full of Chinese spies and assassins.

  Today in the virtual dungeon he worked on a relatively benign subroutine, a piece of control software that helped translate nerve impulses from humans to servomechanisms. Rick had no way of knowing for sure that it would be used for sinister purposes – it was exactly the type of thing that could be put to use to control prosthetics, or teleoperated mining machines, or even play games, but it could also be used to steer combat drones or control implanted bionic augmentations. It was this latter that he considered the most likely possibility. He’d heard a few things about the Shadow cyborgs these people built.

  What should I do to this piece of software? He wondered. I’d hate to be the cause of anyone’s injury or death if it does get used for innocent purposes. But I have to believe that work like that would not need to be done in secret, by pampered slaves like me. I have to put aside my doubts and go with the most likely explanation. That’s what Mom would say, Occam’s Razor. And Jill would say, “Better to do something and be wrong than to do nothing.” What would DJ say? “Do the right thing, even if you’re afraid; bravery isn’t lack of fear, it’s facing your terror down and beating it”.

  So he fit snips of code into the program here and there, innocuous things that would by themselves cause no problems until certain specific circumstances came about. These conditions were unlikely to obtain in a laboratory. Sufficient field testing might uncover them, and that was the greatest risk; but he hoped that the induced failures, the little time bombs he planted, would trigger only in a combat situation, when certain things happened, and happened in combination.

  At which point the user might die.

  That’s the hardest thing to overcome, this belief I might cause death. But only if these subroutines are used for weapons, and personal bionic weapons at that, will these sets of conditions show up. If someone is using them to walk or run normally, or to control a loader or bulldozer, no problem
. But if they are using their servos to full or emergency capacity – such as in combat – their nerve-data will twist, their machines will betray them, and they will become vulnerable.

  So I am not killing them unless they are already killing someone else. I have to believe I will be saving the lives of their targets by undercutting their ability to inflict harm. Simply put, I’m gambling that more good people are saved by this Trojan worm than will die from it.

  He couldn’t do anything more to help his cause. Their four workstations were networked and theoretically any one of his minders could see what he was doing. Only by working subtly, and carefully watching who was distracted and when – Bennie liked to play an unauthorized shooter video game on his break, Marvin tended to doze after lunch, and Stanley had a secret stash of porn – was he able to painstakingly build his virtual time bombs.

  If only he could ever log on to a system that could access the internet, he could get a message out. But as far as he could tell there was no wireless network in the area he was allowed, and very few portable computers of any type. No one talked or texted on phones or tapped on touchpads, nor set up laptops on their lunch breaks. He saw more actual paper books here than he had in a long time. Rick presumed that all personal devices were prohibited and official ones were tightly controlled. Governments may change but bureaucratic mindsets seldom did. In this case the procedures served his slave-masters well.

  So he joked with his minders, he didn’t cause the guards trouble, and he filed away everything he could in his memory as the days went by. And every night before he fell asleep, he prayed for his spymaster mother to uncover this place, for Jill to come after him, and for divine help for both.

  -3-

  Inside the orphaned tent Jill Repeth found her team waiting. A battery lantern hung from the long pole, and Grusky had somehow gotten his hands on a pot of coffee and a dozen doughnuts, a testimony to his senior-NCO procurement skills. She let him have his moment of glory as he gestured toward the luxury food, taking a cruller and nodding appreciatively. It went down in five bites, chased by a half a cup of scalding black. Another benefit of the Eden Plague: no lasting tongue-burns.

  Once she’d paid due homage to breakfast, she tipped her duffel carefully until the goodies spilled out. The others gathered around, laying out the gear on the canvas floor.

  “Interesting mix you have here, boss,” Butler commented as he picked up a kilo brick, turning it over to inspect. “C-4, blasting caps, clacker. Claymores. Grenade launchers. NVGs, night sights, infrared laser designators…some of the new squadcomms?”

  “And this is just the small stuff. Lay it out nice, organize it functionally, distribute it among our five rucks.”

  “Uh, Master Sergeant, how are we getting there? Wherever ‘there’ is?”

  Repeth swept her eyes around the small circle. “I think you guys have earned the right to call me ‘Top’. Fair enough?”

  They all broke out in grins, though Grusky quickly hid his. “Thank you, Top,” he said quietly. “But our transport?”

  “Our ride’s outside, Grusky. Lockerbie, you still shit-hot behind the wheel?”

  “Never better, Top. Been doing nothing but driving these past weeks.”

  “Well, you’ll appreciate this. Leave that there.” They walked outside and Repeth buttonholed a passing Marine. “You, Marine, you are now on guard duty. Go in that tent, guard the contents, don’t touch a thing, and if anything is missing when I return, as much as one shell casing, I will personally stuff you in the nearest gun and fire you from its barrel, do I make myself clear?”

  “Clear, Master Sergeant!”

  “Proceed.” The Marine marched inside, clutching his service rifle nervously while Repeth led her team around the corner of the headquarters building to the edge of the parking area. She walked up to and laid her hands on a beat-up monstrosity that might have passed for a Humvee at one time. “This is it.”

  Lockerbie whistled, and the others hooted. “What a piece of crap!” cried Butler.

  “You shut your pie hole, Randy,” Lockerbie said sarcastically, arms crossed. “Shows what you know.”

  Grusky stepped back with Repeth, letting their juniors take a closer look. She glanced at him as he stepped close to her with a quizzical look. “Just give it time,” she whispered. “I think Lockerbie has already smoked it out. The others are fooled by appearances.”

  “Always dangerous when meeting someone new,” he said archly, bouncing slightly in his boots.

  Lockerbie ran her hands over the oddly new monster tires, then looked up into the wheel wells, examining the suspension. She lay down onto the ground and scooted underneath for a moment, then rolled out and to her feet. “Never judge a book by its cover, boys. This ain’t your daddy’s Humvee.”

  “What?” asked Butler suspiciously.

  “This paint job, this scrap metal welded on…it’s supposed to look beat up. But…” Lockerbie grabbed the passenger door and yanked it open. She had to haul on it before it would move. “Extra-heavy armor. Uprated suspension.” She walked around to the front, popped the latches and raised the hood. “And what is that? Some kind of supercharged diesel? Holy famolians, I bet this thing hauls ass!”

  Repeth nodded. “That’s the plan. And you see what it’s got up there?” She pointed at the lightweight, manually-powered turret above.

  “What the hell is that?” Butler asked as he craned his head.

  “What the hell is that?” echoed Grusky quietly from next to Repeth.

  Repeth recited, as if from a manual, “M75 Vixen. Based on the M61 Vulcan design. Twenty millimeter twelve-barrel Gatling. Electrically driven, selective load and variable rate of fire from single to 9000 caseless rounds per minute. That’s 150 per second for you arithmetically challenged. We have Needleshock flechette for close and personal work, we have Armorshock ultra-charge for anti-vehicle use, and we have tungsten-tipped depleted uranium penetrators for structures.”

  The team just stood there in silence for a moment, then Grusky cleared his throat. “Wow. But is it sexy enough?”

  The four burst out laughing. Repeth smiled faintly. “It’ll do the job. Butler, get up there and get familiar with the gun, but don’t shoot anything. We’ll bring enough ammo to practice a bit before we cross the line of departure. Lockerbie, test drive it around HQ here, gently. We’ll get your personal gear set up. Be back in one hour.”

  ***

  Jill was itching to get going but she forced herself to wait one more day. A week would have been better but she didn’t think her patience extended that far. One day was enough, barely. These people were veterans, even if they weren’t special operators. Just dedicated MPs, willing to put their necks on the line for her. They needed the day to familiarize with their new gear.

  In a line team, cross-training was a luxury, a state of being often only achieved after long practice and demanding drill. The next-best thing was to put her people to the jobs they did well and hope she didn’t lose any of them before…well, hope she didn’t lose any at all.

  Fat chance. But truth is, I’ll risk them all for Rick.

  Once that assessment would have concerned her. Would have driven her to question herself and her motives, to have aborted the mission. It makes no sense to risk five to rescue one. As a Marine, she never understood the Air Force’s insistence on putting together an enormous mission package to go in and rescue one downed pilot.

  DJ Markis had tried to explain it to her once. “Look,” he’d said, “a strike pilot has to go alone and unafraid deep into enemy territory. He – or she – has to be at peak effectiveness in the midst of an enemy bent on killing him. That aviator has to know in his guts that we – PJs like me, and the rescue squadron aircrew – will risk our lives to get him out. Only then can he hold nothing back.”

  It made a certain kind of sense, but still seemed like mistaken priorities to her. Now, though, she was going to go off and do the same damned thing. Five for one. And from the nation’s po
int of view, risking five irreplaceable troops for one foreign liaison officer wasn’t doing the US any good whatsoever.

  But it’s not just about Rick, is it? It’s about the Professor, and these strange rumors coming out of the Death Zones. Take a few megatons of nuclear yield, stir in some alien viruses, add a dash of Unionist biological experiments, et voila, you get…what? That’s why they’re letting me go. Not for Rick.

  For information.

  So they’re using you and you’re using them.

  She pushed her speculations out of her mind to focus on the mission prep. She got their secure squadcomm set up, with their heads-up ballistic eye shields, cameras, voice-activated bone-induction mikes, integrated noise cancelling filters, and a few more nifty features only a military cybergeek could love. She ran them through drills with the explosives, the Claymores, and all of the other specialized weapons they would be bringing in the Beast.

  That’s what they had dubbed the uprated Humvee she had wangled out of the special ops unit based in Charlottesville. It had taken waving that very special paper at their commander, and a phone call to Pueblo, but in the end she had gotten everything she needed. We need guns, she had quoted to herself as she drove off with the Beast. Lots of guns.

  Now a piece of abandoned pastureland off to the west spat puffs of dirt into the air as ball ammo poured through the electric Vixen. Like a hippo gulping water the Gatling swallowed a hopper of twelve hundred caseless shells in eight seconds and belched a continuous stream of bullets, tearing up the turf and shredding the orange plastic cones they had lined up as targets. Everyone got a turn, firing, loading, clearing simulated and real stoppages.

  They practiced with other weapons as well: Armorshock rockets and command-detonated mines, rifles, pistols, submachineguns, grenade launchers. Throughout the day they consumed an ammo trailer full of destruction, until finally it was filled with nothing but emptied packages.