The Orion Plague (16 page)

“Mission accomplished?” she asked.

He noticed she had on a new scent, to go with
her promotion, he supposed.
Women
. “We’ll see. I want you to
set up a low-level surveillance on him. See who he talks to, where
he goes, look for anything unusual. Also get someone on his
family.”

“Consider it done.” She made a note on her
touchpad. “Anything to worry about?”

“Probably not.” Nguyen got into the passenger
seat and rolled down the window, tapping another chunk of ash
against the outside of the luxurious Land Rover. It still smelled
of new leather and wood. “But best to cover all bases.”

“Bases?”

“Hmm. An American expression, from baseball.
It means to prepare for every eventuality.” He puffed the last of
the cigar and threw it into the dust. “Where are we going?” Nguyen
looked curiously around, orienting himself on the sprawling base.
They seemed to be heading out into the Outback, though there was no
defined edge to the unplanned city-cum-starport.

“You’ll see.” Alkina’s tone was coy, and he
snapped alert inside, wondering if this was the moment when she
betrayed him. His fingers went to the key fob in his pocket, ready
to press the code numbers in their correct sequence, blowing
Alkina’s deadman implant and stilling her heart forever.

She pulled around a low hill and under a
scrubby tree, leaving the vehicle’s air conditioning running
against the growing heat of the day. Then she turned to him,
unbuttoning her military tunic from the top with practiced fingers.
“I always christen my new cars.”

Nguyen relaxed, sensing no more deception
than this pleasant little surprise. “Don’t we need champagne?”

“I think you’ll find me intoxicating enough.”
She touched a control and the seats backs began to smoothly
descend, forming an integrated bed of butter-soft leather. She
rolled from behind the steering wheel and leaned forward, coming to
rest on her hands and knees, face against his tunic as she looked
up into his eyes.

“Please, Tran,” she said, her voice husky.
“Make me beg.”

“I need that favor we talked about,” Jill
Repeth said as soon as she sat down in Daniel Markis’ living room.
“As the Chairman of the Free Communities, I think President McKenna
would listen to you.”

“I know he’d listen,” Daniel said, pouring a
glass of red wine and handing Jill another. “Doesn’t mean he’ll
grant it. Seems like an internal decision to me. It might be
stepping on his toes. And besides, I heard you have his
carte
blanche
already. Isn’t that enough?”

His wife Elise came and sat down next to her
husband, taking one hand in both of hers but saying nothing.

“Look, sir –” she began.

“Daniel is fine. You’re not under my command
anymore.”

Jill cleared her throat. “Daniel, then. I
don’t have that access anymore. Not since I screwed up with Rick at
Richmond. I’m sure the President is still grateful, but…I was out
of bounds, using that pass for personal reasons.” She put her face
in her hands. “It’s not just about letting me get the bionics. I
want to get on the Orion.” She looked up with pleading eyes.

Daniel and Elise Markis exchanged glances.
“You and a million other people. I’d have thought the list for
suicide would be shorter, but apparently there are a hundred
applicants for every position, except a few of the really unusual
ones, like astronaut-helmsmen. For those there are only five or ten
per.”

“That’s exactly why I need your help. In
fact, there’s more. Rick wants to go too.” Jill reached for and
tossed her wine off with a convulsive motion, then set the glass
down carefully.

Daniel rubbed his clean-shaven jaw. “Okay,
let me get this straight. You want me to use my influence to get
you military-grade bionic enhancements from your own government,
then you two get positions aboard Orion. That’s it?” His eyebrows
danced above flaring nostrils and a disbelieving smile. “Not
something easy instead, like, oh, world peace?”

“I thought you were working on that?” Jill
retorted.

“I am. And to do it I deploy my favors and
political capital carefully.”

“Spoken like a true politician.” Her
bitterness bled through.

Daniel sighed. “I haven’t forgotten my roots
in boots, Jill, if that’s what you’re trying to say. I understand
how you feel.”

“The way I see it, sir – Daniel – you owe
me.”

“Oh.” His face hardened. “It’s like that, is
it?”

Jill’s face hardened in response. “You
brought up politics, sir. I asked you for a favor, but maybe I
should have said I’m here to collect one.”

“Even if I do owe you, this is more than
one
.”

“Fine, call it three and I’ll owe you a
couple. But the
Nebraska
mission was also a fifty-fifty shot
at suicide. Three good men died, and I…” She looked at her own
clenched fists, slowly relaxing them to mere claws, “…I lost a
piece of myself in there. But maybe you don’t owe me anything. By
rights Rick should be enough. So…I’ll just ask you the favor. You
do what you think is right.” She stood up. “But remember, they said
they were sending the world’s best on the Orion. Hand-picked. With
my record, I’m it. So I screwed up once. Everyone does. I’m still
the best. And you know Rick is too. He singlehandedly kept the Free
Communities – kept
you
– in the game for years with his
network warfare, so you owe him too. Think about that, and then
decide.”

Out of courtesy she didn’t slam the Markis’
front door behind her, but only barely.
Great job, Jill. Go to
ask the man for help and then antagonize him. He’s only the leader
of a third of the world’s free countries and half of its economy.
No big deal. Why didn’t you throw a drink in his face while you
were at it?

She was halfway across the quiet street to
the Johnstones’ before she realized she was being followed. Her
hand was reaching for her holster before she remembered she was
unarmed, and she turned to see Elise Markis. She stopped when she
reached the sidewalk, under the watchful eye of a pair of the
Chairman’s personal security detachment, letting Elise catch
up.

“Jill, please,” Elise said, taking her hand.
“I’ll talk to him. Don’t worry. You’re right, he does owe you. We
all do.”

“And we all owe him, and you,” Jill said
despairingly. “Everybody owes everyone so damn much, how are we
gonna repay it all?” Tears welled suddenly in her eyes and the two
women hugged each other spontaneously.

“It’s all right,” the older woman said,
incongruously reaching upward to touch Jill’s bobbed hair. “You’ve
been fighting for so long you forgot how not to. But you’re among
friends now.”

“I know. That’s why it’s so hard. I’ve been
surrounded by either brothers in arms or enemies for so long I
don’t know how to act.”

“And you want to go back to it, I know. I’ve
read about combat psychology, Jill. Edens aren’t immune to
adrenaline addiction. Everything is simpler in a war zone. Now you
have to deal with the complexity of normal life for a while and
it’s hard.” Elise reached to stroke Jill’s face. “You know, Rick is
like a second son to me, so that makes you a daughter. Don’t be
such a stranger.”

“I think I just peed in my own pool,
though.”

“Oh, Daniel? He doesn’t hold grudges. He’s
just not used to being challenged anymore, at least not by anyone
below the rank of General or Minister. It will do him good to
remember the common soldier.”

“Marine,” Jill corrected automatically.

“Of course,” Elise said indulgently. “Say,
why don’t you come over to the lab and we’ll find something for you
to do. That’s probably part of it. Idle hands.”

“Sounds good.” They squeezed each other again
and walked back to their respective houses.

Inside, Jill nodded to Cassandra Johnstone
and Julio Marquez sitting at the dining room table. It was good to
see Cass taking up with a man again. Twelve years was a long time
to go without a companion, though with the longer lifespans now,
she figured that would become more common. Up the stairs she went
to Rick’s room.

Rick had a guilty look on his face as she
came in, and held his left wrist in his lap where she couldn’t
immediately see.

“You know,” she said as she came over to
knead his shoulders, “I’m not your mother. I’m not going to tell
you not to play with that stuff. You decided not to have it ripped
out and if you want to put it to use, that’s your decision and I
respect it.” She ran her fingers down his arm until she touched his
left wrist, and the insulated wire that jutted from under his
skin.

“Okay,” he said, holding it up in front of
him. “Mom hates it. She thinks it’s the first step to losing my
humanity. Or maybe she blames the cyberware for my…” he tapped his
head by way of explanation. “But it’s not the hardware that messed
me up. It was the software that turned me into a Pavlov’s dog. Pain
and pleasure, and hypno-conditioning. We were lucky that the
triggers they induced to get me to try to upload the computer worm
also let me think for myself, just enough.”

“Like I said before,” Jill reassured him,
kneeling down next to the chair, “you fought it to a standstill,
and you saved all our lives. The forensic programmers said you were
wired to blow half a city block, as soon as your mission was
complete, and that malware would have left the entire US
communications network vulnerable to spying by the Unionists.” She
kissed his hand, then his wrist where the wire showed. “You did
good. I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks. You’ll be even more proud of me when
I tell you this.”

“What?”

“I want to take a walk.”

“Where?”

“Just a walk. No bodyguards, no doctors,
nobody but you and me and Rosco.”

“Oh, now I’m no better than a Rhodesian
Ridgeback?”

Rick laughed. “He won’t ask me about my
childhood, or ‘how are we doing today Mr. Johnstone,’ or any of
that garbage. He’ll just beg me to throw a ball until my arm falls
off.”

“A walk outside. Well, I am proud of you. I
know how hard it must be.”

Rick shrugged as if to say,
no you don’t,
but that’s okay
.

Ten minutes later they were on that stroll,
along the perimeter of the research compound, inside the fence. The
mountains loomed fifty or more miles away beyond the Abe Bailey
nature preserve, and it was almost as if they were outside the
wire. She wasn’t sure Rick was ready for that yet. Rosco gamboled
and they took turns throwing the ball to him.

“So Rick,” she began, and told him about her
attempt at talking to Daniel Markis. “I’m assuming you still want
to go.”

“I do. I’m sure I’ll be all right by the time
it’s launched. It’s, what, almost four months away? The docs say
I’ll probably have their blessing in a month or so, and Jill…I
haven’t told them, but this thing in me…it’s amazing. What Shari
did with it was evil, but it’s just a tool, a set of tools. Like
anything else it’s how you use it, not what it is. And I hear
they’re already talking about putting it in the astronauts’
heads.”

“No matter what you say, I feel kind of funny
about using this technology. It seems tainted by their methods.”
Jill ran her finger over his wrist where the rehealed skin covered
the plug.

“So was Nazi research, but we used it anyway.
And the irony is, it may save us. We’ll need every bit of edge we
can get. It’s not so farfetched; fighter pilots already have some
primitive versions for air combat, brainwave sensors and such. I’ve
been testing mine out, and I’m starting to learn to get inside the
networks, you know, with my mind. Just a little. Some of the
equipment is not working, and I want to get it fixed.”

“All right then. If Markis will back us, then
you’ll get your repairs, I’ll get my combat upgrades, and we’ll
both be on the next spaceship outta here.” They both burst into
laughter.

“You really are an action junkie, you know,”
Rick said as he stopped her with a tug on her hand. “It’s what made
you interesting, back in Colombia. Gun Girl extraordinaire.” He
reached up to cup her head and kiss her.

She kissed him back. “If I am, what’s that
make you?”

“Crazy, I guess. But either we’re both going,
or we’re both staying. No more going off to war without me.
Besides, I can put my talents to use on a spaceship. Maybe you'll
be the one sitting around bored.”

“Silver-tongued devil. I bet that’s what you
say to all the girls.”

“Never had another girl. Never will.”

Rosco the Rhodesian Ridgeback sat down and
watched as the two-legs rubbed their noses together for an
unreasonably long time.

Brigadier Nguyen watched from the
headquarters building balcony as the outline of the superstructure
of the great warship took shape in pieces. Each section was
enormous compared with almost any other human undertaking,
certainly larger than any vehicle ever completed. When it was all
done, the Orion would mass more than any hundred aircraft carriers,
yet was a vehicle that would fly into space.

It still amazed him.

The main ship under construction was
separated from the nuclear propulsion drive testing area by twenty
miles of outback and a low hilly range. Once all the tests were
done the drive would be inverted on its reinforced struts – an
incredible undertaking in itself – and the pieces of superstructure
would be fitted atop it like a giant child’s model. This was the
only way the
Orion
could be finished on time: simultaneous
construction by over a hundred discrete teams, followed by a
whirlwind of assembly.

After that would come as much testing of
ship’s systems as could be done, but no shakedown cruise, no tryout
aloft. There was neither time nor purpose to a flight test; it
either worked or it didn’t, and the only possibility to recover
from a mishap after launch was to bludgeon the ship into space and
repair it there. It would be structurally unable to ever return to
Earth.