SUED FOR PEACE (The Kurtherian Gambit Book 11) (21 page)

“And that,” Lance said looking at Peter, “Is why I don’t want you making comments.”
 

Peter nodded his understanding.

—

Malcolm and Jedidiah walked ten meters from the rock face towards their jeep, hidden in a wash about a hundred meters away, when they heard a growl behind them.

“Fast or slow?” Jedidiah asked him.

“How the hell should I know” Malcolm responded, “That’s not a growl you hear in the Aussie Outback, you nit!” The two men palmed their pistols and turned around towards the outcropping, but there wasn’t anything there. They looked in the shadows as well as they could.

“I know I heard something,” Jedidiah commented.

“Of course, you did,” An American’s voice said behind them. It was punctuated with the cocking of at least four guns, “But it was a red herring you fucks. Lay the pistols down gently, hands up, or we get a plow and bury you out here.”

The two men slowly placed the guns on the ground and stood back up, hands up in the air. Both swallowed when the biggest fucking wolf they had ever seen came out from behind one of the rocks and looked at them, tongue hanging out in the heat.

“Malcolm, that isn’t from around here,” Jedidiah whispered to his friend.

Malcolm barely shook his head, “No, no it isn’t.”

The two men were led back towards their jeep. There were four men plus the wolf, who was strangely following them like it was trained when the one in command turned towards them. “Sorry old chaps, but you aren’t allowed to see the rest of this. I’m told you won’t wake up with a headache, but then I’ve never done this.”

“Done what?” Malcolm asked, getting nervous.

Two men behind them pulled small pistols from their belts and shot the prisoners in their necks. The small darts impaled them in the back of their necks.

The shooters caught the men as they started to fall. Thirty seconds later, four Pods came down. Tim changed from wolf back to human and pulled on some pants and helped put the two men into a pod with one guard each.

They were about finished when all of their communicators chirped.

“Team Alpha, get your asses in gear. We just registered two missiles inbound.”

“Tim, here with me!” Jasper yelled, “Base, all lift but Pod two.” The other Pods disappeared, and Tim jumped into the Pod with Jasper, “Base, Lift!” The last Pod screamed up into the air as two missiles passed their location and dove into the bunker area.

The daytime lit up, the explosion's fireball went over a hundred and fifty meters into the air with a cracking boom heard for many kilometers around their base.

If there had been anyone there to hear it.

Washington D.C., USA

Richard, Mark and Samuel sat down to watch the late night news. The ladies had gone to bed, but the guys usually hung out and talked for a while.

“I don’t understand,” Richard said as he passed Mark the beer he had asked for while Richard was in the kitchen, “how you like that dark stuff. You Americans will drink anything.”

“What are you talking about?” Mark asked, looking at the bottle from the small local micro-brewery, “This is based on a German recipe, you should be asking someone from Germany that question.”

“No,” Samuel cut in as he sipped on his blood. He had warmed it up in the microwave. While not as nice as fresh, Gabrielle had told them D.C. was a strictly no fresh zone. “Richard is right, the Germans don’t know any better. They did the best they had centuries and centuries ago. They’ve bred a people who don’t have anything but ale in their blood. You Americans aren’t old enough for genetic tendencies to take hold, so you have no argument except bad taste.” He shrugged to Mark as if to apologize for speaking the truth.

“I’d say what the hell do you guys know, but you have probably known a few German beer makers in your lifetime?” Mark asked. He loved to get the two to open up about their exploits and it looked like tonight’s discussion might include something to do with Germany’s historic beer making.

“Well,” Richard replied taking a sip of his water while warming up to his story, “the history of German beer has to start with ales. They have been brewing ale for over three thousand years. It’s why I say that ale is genetically in their blood, and they have a pass for enjoying dark beer.”

“Damn, that’s some history,” Mark agreed.

“Just so,” Richard replied lifting his drink in agreement, “You can’t think as much about the recent trends in beer making when you are in Germany. There, you can sit and drink in places that were brewing ale when Christopher Columbus was sailing the seas to find your country.”

“That does put a point on…” Mark started to say when both of his friends started moving.

But they were too late.

—

Bai listened to his heart beat, exhaled, and stroked the trigger.

—

Samuel had just touched Mark to move him when his head exploded like a watermelon slammed by a sledgehammer.

Both vampires heard the report from the other side of the street, and their eyes went red. Richard hissed to Samuel, “Keep the women down in the bathroom and out of here. Command them, then grab the go bags.” Samuel nodded and moved at vampiric speed to the woman’s room.

Richard’s eyes, bright red in anger greater than he had felt in a long, long time stared at the window with the small hole in it. He ground his teeth together and grabbed the small metal coffee table and flung it at the window, shattering it. The coffee table was lost in the night until Richard heard a car horn from the street below. Barely a moment later, Richard flung himself through the opening, aiming himself at the building across the street.
 

He had violence on his mind.

—

Bai could see that his first shot was on target and started to turn his gun, but he had no more shots. The other two men were not visible.

Then, he flinched when the window he was looking at in his scope crashed open. He jerked his head back in reflex and looked up to see a black body fling itself out of the window. Bai barely had time to register what was happening when he heard a loud metal clang from below his window. Like a heavy body had crashed into the outside of the building.

His eyes opened in alarm as his training took over when his mind couldn’t process the reality of what was happening. Someone had just successfully jumped across the road, the two sidewalks and the setbacks for the buildings. Bai put his rifle to the side and was reaching for his pistol when the top of his own window crashed in.

He stumbled back off the bed to the floor beyond when he saw a dark figure, with red eyes glowing, standing up in his room.

Bai froze, this wasn’t possible!
 

The dark figure radiated malevolence at a level Bai had never felt, “You will be the first I tell in hundreds of years,” it spoke, its voice gravelly, “My true-name is Auran the Merciless, and you have killed my friend…”

Bai tried to scream, but all he felt was the pain.

TQB Base, Australian Outback

There were twelve new people in ADAM’s war room. All of them, hackers from his efforts on the dark web, had been brought in by different individuals in the last forty-eight hours.

Yuko had been the first, and after being introduced to Frank and their rooms, such as they were, they were issued small watches that connected with headphones. Each person could speak with ADAM directly. It was a weird sensation to know that she was having a conversation with ADAM while simultaneously, he might be having a conversation with one of the tonic twins. She named them that because one was named Gin and the other Amber.

Yuko needed some sort of mental trigger to remember the names as best she could. Her life had not prepared her for the close connection of everyone here. Her Japanese upbringing was a little unique amongst the group. Seven of the twelve were Americans, three from Europe, one from Australia, plus herself, so far.

Yuko smiled at the rest as a few noticed her come in and waved. It was a fun group, and this morning was going to be the first conference they all had with ADAM as a team.

The room had four sets of pods, each having four desks. From the top, they resembled clovers. Each desk was circular, with a small opening for their chairs to fit in. It allowed them to have a cubby hole, something that each of them was comfortable with. Most of them had been fairly alone before coming here.

All working with ADAM, and Bethany Anne, Frank, Cheryl Lynn, and Patricia. She had met Bethany Anne’s father, Peter and a few others.

It had taken her over a day to come to accept Akio wasn’t going to suddenly decide he liked girls.

Sigh…

She smiled to herself as she pulled out her chair and stepped into her round cubicle. The room itself was three containers wide and one long, so about nine-hundred square feet of space. There were screens on all walls, and they had some cool projection equipment you could use for meetings, viewing stuff jointly, even using them as whiteboards by writing on the wall.

She sat down and unplugged her headphones from her wrist, and plugged them into her keyboard. She had two screens set up so that on the left she was in command line mode in Linux, and on the right, she had browsers to look up information she might need to support her hacking efforts. Often, with ADAM getting involved, what would have taken her a couple of hours, routinely took her just five minutes because he could find the information so much faster. If he had a body, she might have been wanting to get more serious with him.

As it was, she even felt comfortable enough one time to joke that she only wanted him for his mind.
 

He actually laughed. She wasn’t sure if ADAM understood the joke or he knew it was a joke and had figured out how to play human enough to simulate getting the joke. She had been too embarrassed after making the joke to ask him which it was.

“Welcome Yuko and good morning,” ADAM spoke in her ear.

“Good morning, ADAM,” she replied, reviewing the programs she had run last night. “Nothing new on these, huh?”
 

“No, I would have let you know this morning when you woke up.”

“Thank you, I don’t suppose you make coffee, do you?” She asked, typing on her queries.

“Why yes, I can have coffee brought to you,”

Surprised after re-running his answer in her mind she said, “Oh, no thank you! I meant that as a comment related to, well, uh never mind.”

“Is this where I am supposed to agree that I have no idea what you intended to say?”

Yuko sat back in her chair, “I suppose you do know, don’t you?”

“I have calculated to approximately a seventy-eight percent probability it had to do with figuring out if I was a perfect male.”

“How do you do that?”

“Calculate the percentages?”
 

“Yes.”

“I can tell from the vocal recording that you are embarrassed. From our previous conversations, you are emotionally inhibited during relationship discussions, and since we were discussing males, coffee and the morning, I have enough literature understanding to figure out you were probably thinking of a man that had slept over.”

By the end of his explanation, Yuko had her face covered by her hands, “Can I crawl back to Japan now?” she asked him.

“No, it would be impossible due to the Arafura Sea,” he answered.

Yuko smiled as she pulled her hands away from her face. With one small explanatory sentence, ADAM had placed her back on an even keel. It was the little things he would say, something that hinted at the massive amount of A.I. behind his avatar that allowed her to feel like he was a safe companion.

Much safer than a flesh and blood man.

“How much time before we start?” she asked as she reviewed the hacking jobs she had left running.

“We are starting now,” he replied. “One second.”

Yuko waited, not realizing that ADAM’s Arafura Sea comment was calculated to place her back into a normal emotional state. He didn’t want to hurt this woman. He tried not to run analysis on why he decided to make that a reality.
 

Because going down that analysis path might lie madness.

—

ADAM’s voice was heard in all of their headphones, “Thank you all for joining me here in Australia. From Bethany Anne and me, you are all personnel we need. A larger group that can work together on our cyber-response efforts, and help me learn in the process.”

The twelve in his group were all listening through their headphones. Some wore headphones that plugged into their ears, others had over their head designs. ADAM’s group had a budget, and ADAM had produced the industrial psychology reports necessary to demonstrate how providing the best tools suited for each individual would provide TQB with the most effective solutions and highest effectiveness levels.

Plus, ADAM was being tested with a significantly more variable and constant amount of human interactions and he found it a data input rich environment. Bethany Anne told him that he was having fun. Once he understood the concept as it applied to him, he had to agree.

TQB Base, Australian Outback

“We have launch!” E.I. Ares informed the group.

Lance spoke up, “Team Alpha, get your asses in gear. We just registered two missiles inbound!” He switched off his mic, “Ares, get those Pods out of there as fast as possible, ETA?”

“Four seconds…”

“Two seconds…”
 

The wait, Peter would recall later, felt like an hour as time seemed to stop.

Then, the ground shook perceptibly, but nothing happened inside. To Peter’s ears, it sounded like they heard an explosion from the inside of the fireball itself, he covered his ears quickly.

“No more missiles, all Pods safely away,” Ares told them.

“Somebody open the damned door.” Lance said aloud, “Before my daughter comes here and rips it off.”

Todd hot-footed it over to the bunkers door and turned the crank and started pushing it open when it was yanked from his hand, and he stared at his Queen. He swallowed as she stared back at him. He could see there was intelligence behind the red eyes, but the face practically radiated violence. He stepped to the side as she nodded to him, but didn’t speak to him.