Barrow was petrified with fright. She could not look at what she'd become until she'd told him this. "You people have fought him so long, studied him so hard, you believe he
is
what's next, and you're trying to save the day for humanity to go on getting fatter and softer and sicker, when the only way their bodies can even try to evolve comes out as cancer, and fucking up the planet so nothing but roaches will want it. But Keogh isn't what's next. He's the enemy we have to destroy to evolve out of what we are now, which, face it, in the grand scheme, sucks. What I think you people are afraid of, the soldiers, especially, but even you eggheads with your Gaia Earth Mother bullshit, is that when the last Keogh is annihilated, you won't want to be human, anymore, yourselves."
He hung his head for a long time as something bitter ate its way out of him. "It's not bullshit," he finally said.
Stella's ire came out full force. "What, that crystal-hugging Earth Day shit? If Nature's a goddess, she's a bitch, she's a blind idiot cunt who eats her young."
Barrow nodded. "Exactly."
"You really believe in that shit? You?"
"I used to. At least, I believed that everything in Nature is part of a single entity. The biosphere is all interconnected, everything, predator and prey, bee and flower, whale and virus, part of the same tree. And despite our best efforts to cut ourselves off from it and tear it down, it keeps on living, keeps feeding us as we destroy it. If that isn't a sacred miracle worthy of worship, what is?"
"But you don't worship it any more, do you?"
He looked around the glade at the trees, then back at her. "They poisoned the tree. Whatever was going to happen here, the Old Ones corrupted it. Life was already here when they came and started fucking around with it. I still believe there's something sacred in everything that lives, but they tainted what might have been. I think their programming is what's making us destroy it all, to clear the way for a drastic new reconception of the ideal slave race. That's why he came along when he did, using their tools to make it all happen again. The final rape."
Stella said, "He's not what's next."
Barrow's eyes widened. He leaned as close to her as he dared, which wasn't very close at all. "So you believe we can destroy him?"
"You people? Hell no. You've got technology, adapting to that just makes him stronger. No, he's going to end the way these things have always ended. With someone's teeth in his brains."
"And whose teeth? Yours?"
"Hell no,
pindejo
. But whatever he is or whoever he thinks he is, he's over, already."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because Storch is going to get him."
Barrow looked away. Her claws came out. The immediate chemical change oozing out of his pores told her what she already knew from watching his hands, which did what they always did when he pissed her off. One covered his throat, the other his genitals. Smart hippie.
"He didn't come back," Barrow mumbled.
"What do you mean, he didn't come back?"
The heat in her voice made him flush deep, cardiac-failure red, but he sat rooted. "He was dropped on an uncharted atoll in the South Pacific where he believed the original Keogh was, or the nerve center of Radiant Dawn, or something. It's a hellish place—they dropped a neutron bomb on it in the Fifties, and kept it a secret—"
"And you people took him there. And left him." When Barrow tried to explain something, his speech got jackhammer-fast, and his hands flapped in your face like birds beating themselves silly against a window. It was best to stand by with a knife to cut the bullshit before it flowed out of control.
"They flew him out there to get rid of him," he finished, hands at the defensive. "He scares them, and they don't trust him, and, to tell you the truth, neither do I."
She made him cringe away from her smile. "But you trust me?"
"No—well, yes, because you passed the blood-tests. Nobody comes in without one, even from guard duty. You're not one of us, but you're not one of Him, either, anymore. That makes you an unknown quantity, but you're not like Storch."
"Oh, really?" He smelled all the subsequent jabs in her remark, but she let him have them anyway. "Because I'm a woman, because I was a nurse, because I'm not a soldier?"
"I didn't—"
"Not even you know what I am, or what I'm becoming, so don't bullshit yourself you know what I'll do."
"Okay, I'm so— I won't."
"Better. Now, what happened?"
"He gave us a location and a wish list for gear. Then, three days ago, he left with our flight team. They put him on the kind of cargo plane that shuttles military payloads all over that part of the Pacific, mostly ABM testing, nowadays—"
"I know all that. Get to the fucking point."
"Wha—Okay. He parachuted to the atoll successfully, and that's the last we saw of him. The plane refueled on a little US outpost on Howland Island and came back twelve hours later, but there was no sign—"
"Did you land and look for him?"
He rolled his eyes, wanting to correct her, tell her that he hadn't done any of this, or known about it much before she did. "It's a radioactive rock, the beach-sand is dusted with plutonium, the water's crazy with sharks, and there was no airstrip to land a C-130 on, Ms. Orozco. He refused to take a radio, or the extraction rig Costello offered him. He took some infra-red beacons, but they weren't activated where the pilot could see them. We saw no sign that he'd ever been there."
"So what? You just left? Or did you—?"
He guarded his throat and his nuts again as he said, "If it was a strategic target, like he said, we had to be sure. This isn't Geneva Convention-approved warfare, Ms. Orozco. We're fighting for our lives. Up in space, a Russian team took out the RADIANT satellite last week, while you were in Idaho. They all died, as did the
Mir
crew, but one of them didn't just die. It was Keogh, up there, Ms. Orozco. He had control of the station."
In her old, human life, Stella had watched the news regularly, and had followed
Mir
. "But there's nobody up there, now."
"No, not anymore. The governments of both countries sent up a team to watch RADIANT, but they all died up there. And that's the closest to a victory we've had in this fucking war."
Stella closed her eyes.
"We have to hit Keogh when and where we can, because time is running out. You know that, better than anyone."
Stella's skin bristled, chromatophores in her skin radiating angry, poisonous tree frog red. Her pheromones soured to drive him back, but he was too thick with mushy empathy to get the message. He came closer, trying to comfort her.
"I'm sorry, Ms. Orozco, I didn't know how—"
"How what, Dr. Barrow? How close? I've only met him a few times. I don't know him, and I sure as fucking hell don't love him."
He squirmed. "But he—"
"He came back and got me. That's why you idiots are dead wrong, with your trying to outthink him. He'll kill Keogh and he'll come back for the same reason he got me, because that's all the
cabron
knows how to do."
Major Aranda snapped awake to a screaming headache and the sense that he was not alone. He rolled out of bed and across the floor to his holstered pistol hanging from a chair, pointed it at the dark. His brain throbbed like weevils were eating it, and the wounds under the sweat-soaked bandages around his head and neck stung so bad they blurred his vision, but he could hear quite clearly.
Sounds outside his quarters. Slowly, silently, he crept to the door and peered out into the corridor. Animal noises, snarling, claws raking stone, a gurgling yowl—furtive, but clear as a bell. All the other doors were shut. The ponds of dim amber light captured no motion. In defiance of what he saw, the sounds grew louder, wilder, like great cats in heat running amok in the ventilation ducts.
He ran down the corridor, skin prickling into goosebumps, clad only in skivvies and undershirt and clammy night-terror sweat. Did no one else hear it? Was he hallucinating? Was he even awake?
He stopped at an intersection. To his left, the corridor ended in a gallery overlooking the dew-misted canopy of the forest biosphere, where the mutant bitch had holed up. Was it her? He clutched his gun tighter. She was a cancer in their midst, the very thing they were sworn to destroy. Storch called her a refugee. Barrow wanted her for a pet. Aranda believed she was more, a threat to the Mission every bit as great as Keogh, if she wasn't still a part of him. Perhaps the noises were coming from her, and the time had come to do something about her. He listened, stilling his racing mind and shivering body. The sounds came from another direction, from higher up in the complex.
He passed a sentry who blankly stared at him when he shouted, "Don't you hear it?" The sentry shook his head at his wild-eyed and shouting CO waving a gun in his underwear in the middle of the night. Aranda knew how it looked, but he went on, anyway. Alone. The noises were getting louder.
A chill, creeping fear clutched him by the balls, but there was also a rising kid-on-Christmas-Eve kind of exhilaration. He was the only one up and out of bed, and he was going to surprise the hell out of Santa—or somebody.
He used to know how to react to situations like these, but they always ended so horribly that he took drugs and radical shock therapy to forget.
Now it was the first time again, and he'd never shot a gun at anyone before, and his mind was so shot full of holes, losing it would be an empty formality.
He went on, up through the sleeping base to the quarantine lab, and the airlock. Remarkably, none of the Greens were here, and the maze of workstations and equipment were silent, except for a few computers rendering to themselves in the dark.
The sound was so goddamned loud he couldn't believe nobody had already raised the alarm, but there were Mark Branca and Jeremy Labrador, the only other survivors of the Idaho operation, standing at attention beside the airlock. Branca was still in his skivvies, but he wore a flak vest and a helmet, and carried a rifle. Labrador had a gun too, but he still looked half-asleep.
"We heard it too, sir," Branca said, saluting crisply.
He almost kissed them, he loved these fucking guys so fucking much.
They loved him, too, for how he got them out of Idaho. They spread the word that he was solid in the face of shit out of Dante's
Inferno
, that he sacrificed no one without anguish or strategic gain. He let the monster take a swipe at him while they fetched the charges and detonated them down the air shaft. He lost his ear and what remained of his never-remarkable good looks. He got them out. The two survivors had made him a de facto Purple Heart out of bullet fragments taken from their body armor. It sat in a case in his quarters, more prominently displayed than the real ones.
He usually never listened to the praise or the curses of enlisted men, but he had to this time, because he had no recollection of having done any of it. He had stopped taking the drugs to try to get it back, but there were no night terrors, no hideous flashbacks, to tell him what the fuck happened up there. He only knew that they got the motherfuckers, no matter what that mutant bitch or that hippie egghead cocksucker Barrow said. The war was almost won, and he had almost won the right to forget it all, for good.
"It's coming from the airlock, sir," Branca prompted him. Labrador looked around blearily, eyes glassy, registering nothing. Labrador sustained only a few flesh wounds, and wasn't on any painkillers that Aranda knew about. Jesus, the shit never stopped. The things he had left to remember about Army life—the procedure, the drilling, the stupidity of soldiers who slipped or just fell—
Branca was up against the airlock, peering into the black vacuum inside through the armored porthole. "Think I see it," Branca said. Labrador yawned, scratched his balls with his rifle barrel.
At least one of you is on top of this shit,
he thought. He checked the magazine in his pistol. NGS shells. He'd seen them turn Keoghs to slush in minutes, and he had the other guys' say-so that they worked in the field, so…
"I can't open the lock, sir," Branca reminded him. "It retina-scans, remember?"
"Yeah, I—" Aranda went to the scope and pressed the cold rim of the lens against his eye socket. It felt like it was cupping his eye in preparation for scooping it out. It scanned and approved him. He threw the switch beside the airlock and the hatch swung open with a rush of bottled air.
"Told you it'd work, Brute," Branca said, with a weird hillbilly accent, which was strange, because Branca had no sense of humor, and hailed from Chicago.
"Thanks, Major, thanks a whole lot," said a voice from within the airlock. Aranda stepped back and raised his gun to shoot. He could see nothing inside, but now the voice seemed to be coming from behind him.
"Awful sorry about that scrape back in Potatoland, but we had to make it look good, you understand."
"You're not getting past me, motherfucker," Aranda said and fired into the airlock.
In the flash of the muzzle, he saw nothing but his bullet bouncing around the chamber. He hit the emergency lights, the switch right next to the alarm, but he must have forgot to hit the alarm. He forgot so many things, but they were so awful—
In the yellow strobing light, he saw only an empty airlock. He could still hear the phantom noises, but he could no longer deny where they were coming from. They, like the voice of the intruder, were coming from between his ears.
"Aw shit, Major, don't tell me you forgot…"
"We kicked your fucking asses," Aranda snarled, "and you came to the wrong place for payback."
"Oh payback's here, Major. We already got more than a piece of you."
Branca smiled at him and unzipped his flak vest. On his chest hung a string of human ears. Most were rotted and shriveled to nubs of yellow, peeling cartilage, but one, a left ear, was only a few days off the bone. Branca chuckled and stopped being Branca.