Authors: Christopher Heffernan
“Don't worry,
they're National Guard moving down to Virginia. The government are worried
enough that they're stripping garrisons from the Canadian occupation force.”
The car shook
with each vehicle that drove past.
“Somebody
planning on starting a war?”
“The country is
practically split in half. It's north versus south all over again, but the
reasons are different this time, not that it counts for much. There's problems
on the Mexican border as well. I don't think anybody really wants another war,
but there's a lot of posturing going on. I'm hoping it'll die down soon so we
can sort Mexico out.”
“Maybe the
people here wouldn't be itching for another war if they'd seen what happened in
Europe.”
“Do you guys
even have an army?”
“Half of it is
still rotting and rusting in Germany. They sold another quarter off on the
cheap to private companies and kept the left overs.”
The traffic
started forward again.
“What happens if
you get attacked? We can't keep bailing you out all the time. You're on your
own now.”
“Your lot sat
the last one out, but it was probably for the best. Europe wasn't like the
Asian flashpoints. Nobody wants to invade our country, or what's left of it,
anyway. They can save themselves the time and effort by buying it out with a
few billion here and there.”
Megan smiled.
“Okay, but I don't want to hear any whining when you get yourselves in trouble
and we can't come to the rescue.”
Michael leaned
back in his seat and looked out the window. He fought off a yawn. “Nobody
cares.”
Washington was
free of destruction; no destroyed buildings or abandoned cars scattered across
the roads, and people walked the streets without fear of being set upon by
cannibals. Eventually they pulled up outside a hotel.
“I'll get you
settled in here. Don't worry, it's on the house.”
“So when do I
find out what you're not telling me?”
Megan sighed,
and her expression turned cold, devoid of what little amusement she'd shown
during the ride. “Look, I know you're in way over your head, and you don't have
a clue what's going on, but you've heard of that old expression, 'curiosity
killed the cat', right? Have a long and hard think about how that might relate
to you, and then think on it again. You'll live longer that way.”
“You can take
the hood off now,” Megan said.
Michael pulled
it off, and daylight blinded him. He waited for his eyes to adjust, and then
looked around, surveying the abandoned buildings that surrounded them. They'd
been on the road for an hour and a half.
“I spend days of
my life crawling around crumbling factories and warehouses back home. You could
have taken us to somewhere a bit more scenic.”
“Nobody comes
here; we'll have plenty of privacy. Let's go, we're meeting two others inside.”
They left her
car and trod their way across broken bricks and gravel. The factory, warehouse
or whatever it had been, was cleaned out and devoid of everything except dust
and bits of the ceiling which had fallen in. Dull streaks of overcast daylight
streamed through broken windows.
“Who are we
meeting?” Michael said.
“They're not
here yet. They'll give you their names if they feel like it, if not, don't
ask.”
Michael kicked a
chunk of roof tile across the floor. “Are they going to keep us long?”
Megan gave him
that wry smile again. “For somebody who shouldn't be asking questions, you sure
do ask a lot of questions.”
He shrugged and
stared up at the grey sky through the windows. “I'm hoping your threats are
just bluster.”
“That's hoping
for a lot, isn't it?”
“Well, I figure
that's a very expensive suit you're wearing, so you're probably a professional,
and I've seen people with the same walk and posture; they're normally security,
military or law enforcement, so it doesn't seem like it's in your best
interests to shoot me.”
Her smile
widened. “That's an interesting assessment, but more fiction than truth. It's
not just you who gets in trouble if you ask too many questions, I do as well.”
“Then we're both
pieces in somebody else's game,” Michael said, checking his watch.
“More or less,
but some are more powerful and important than others, right?”
He paced towards
one of the steel pillars supporting the roof and leaned against it. “Sounds
like something out of a terrible book on philosophy.”
A car approached
nearby, crunching gravel beneath its tires. They exchanged a glance with each
other, and her hand drifted towards the pistol holstered on her belt. The
engine went quiet, doors opening and slamming shut, and footsteps came closer.
Two men in suits
entered the empty building, and the youngest, a man who looked to be in his
late twenties, wore a pair of thick-rimmed glasses. His counterpart had a black
eye and several slight scars down the left side of his face.
The rougher looking
one waved them forward. “It's better if we do this in the van, unless you like
sitting on the ground. This way,” he said, gesturing for them to follow.
Megan nodded to
Michael. He followed after them. The utility van was an inconspicuous white,
but the windows had been blacked out. They slid the side door open and motioned
for him to get inside, and he complied after a moment of hesitation. A foam
mattress had been laid over the vehicle's floor, and the roof was just high
enough for them to sit cross-legged.
Megan squeezed
in beside him, and he smelt expensive perfume as she slid the door shut and
plunged the interior into darkness.
“Sorry for the
tight fit, but this really is the best way for us to meet. And the safest,” the
elder man said.
“You're late,”
Megan said.
“Traffic, sorry.
You can call me Rick. This here is Danny.”
Danny unfolded a
laptop and pressed the power button. The glow of its screen lit their faces.
“We've been
briefed on what to provide you, but there's a catch; it's part of the deal made
by whoever sent you here. You only get a limited hard copy on a memory stick.
What we're dealing with here is top secret, classified data. Even if you talk
about this to everybody, there'll never be enough evidence to implicate
anybody. People will think you're full of shit. Do you understand?” Rick said.
Michael glanced
at each of them in turn, silent, and finally he nodded. “You know why I'm here,
then?”
Danny pushed his
glasses up as they slid down the bridge of his nose. “It's quite an interesting
turn of events, I'll give you that.”
“I'm sure you
have some suspicions of your own already, based on what you've seen, correct?”
Rick said.
“I've seen some
very strange things. Men capable of wiping out entire security teams
single-handedly. I've seen gunmen go down with fatal injuries, and then get
straight up again like they don't feel pain. We're always one step behind them,
turning up medical supplies that I've never even heard of before.”
“Well, you're
not dealing with the supernatural, I'll tell you that. It's military technology
developed for us during the wars. Ten years old and still top of the line. Only
the Chinese came close to anything similar, but we don't know what they've got
these days,” Rick said.
“Go on. I gather
we're not talking about simple body modification for fashion models or
cosmetics.”
Danny nodded.
“That would be correct. Some of it's based and founded upon off the shelf
commercial technologies sold and traded worldwide. It's the other bits you need
to be worried about, developed for special forces teams operating in China.”
“You know,
sometimes we get wind of stuff like this. Surgical enhancements to increase
people's abilities in work or sport, but I never thought they could do this
with it,” Michael said.
“No,” Rick said,
shaking his head. “What you get wind of is cheap knock off tech out of Africa.
It's over hyped and over sold, and the only people who buy this shit are
desperate middle-class families trying to make their children perform better in
school. They it sell it to them saying that'll get better grades, concentrate
for longer or do better on the athletics team. It's useless for anything in the
real world, but people don't know any better.”
Michael fingered
a piece of grit out the corner of his eye. “This is all new to me. We're on the
ropes back in England.”
“You and
everywhere else. Black market surgeons will fix you up on the cheap in
Johannesburg, if you don't mind the risk of dying from blood poisoning or
infection. You can get the same here or in China. Anywhere else? Forget it.
Probably for the best. I've had to clear a ton of this shit up in Washington, a
real pain in the ass. A lot of people take the risk, and some end up regretting
it more than others.”
Danny flipped
the laptop around so Michael could see a screen of the human body, diagrams and
charts. He stared at the screen for several seconds, aware of the others
waiting for his response. He rubbed his eyes and shook his head. “This doesn't
mean much to me; I don't know what any of these things do.”
“Okay, okay,
that's fine,” Danny said. “I can explain for you; it's a map of all the
modifications made to the body. You see here, you've got surgery performed on
the muscles for better running performance, right? Eye implants here, and more
surgery done on the arms and organs. You can see everything that's changed when
somebody undergoes these enhancements.
“And with these
graphs here, this line is a general averaging of results from an infantryman
who's passed through performance tests during training. This line up here is
what the average looks like when they've been enhanced. It's a composite of
things like physical fitness, endurance, cognitive thinking, yeah, you get the
picture.”
“That's quite a
jump, but it's just a number. How does this number translate into the real
world? I need to know how to find these people, and I need to know how to kill
them. Shooting them obviously doesn't work,” Michael said.
Rick put a hand
over his mouth as he coughed deeply, and a look of pain surfaced briefly on his
face. “Okay, Ward, let me put it to you like this. These enhancements do not
make superhumans. They'll die like anybody else, it's just a question of time.
There's a limit to what we can do with technology. You're ex-army right? Think
of this stuff as a force multiplier. This stuff would be wasted on a regular
infantry unit. There's no point to it. Small unit actions, though? Now that's a
different matter altogether. It's like putting special forces on acid.”
Michael gave a
sigh and leaned back against the van's interior. His eyes lingered on the
four-pack of water bottles in the corner.
“Thirsty? Here,”
Megan said, ripping one from the plastic and handing it to him.
He downed a
quarter of it one go, before wiping his mouth on the back of a hand. “Let me
backtrack a bit. These people hit a three vehicle motorcade the night before I
got my flight here. Just six of them, and they killed a lot of people,
bystanders mostly, but they cooked the guy in the limousine, too. He was a
higher-up employee of the company I work for.
“One of the unit
took a burst of automatic fire to the chest, and then got back up again. These
were rifle rounds, went straight through his vest. I followed and shot him
multiple times with my sidearm. There wasn't much blood loss, and the pain didn't
seem to bother him much, either. He only went down when he fell behind the
others during their escape. Somebody must have decided he was a liability if
captured, so they detonated his suicide vest.”
“It's part of
the package, an enhancement to the chest cavity,” Danny said, gesturing with
his hand. “Think of it like the self-sealing fuel tanks on aircraft. It'll clog
open wounds in the chest and stem the bleeding, but they'll still die
eventually. Auto injections will numb most of the pain and allow the combatant
to continue on for long enough to get medical attention.”
Rick nodded.
“These people aren't invincible. Dangerous, yes, but not invincible. Put them
against a company of infantry in a straight up firefight and they'll still
lose, there just won't be much of the company left afterwards. The problem is
that you're always going to be engaging on their terms and strengths. Small
unit actions is what this entire project was designed for.”
“Want to tell me
how you lose something so dangerous? If Eratech are fitting out private
military units with this stuff, then the Chinese will have their hands on it by
now.”
He heard the
pitter-patter of rain on the van's roof.
“Couldn't tell
you even if we wanted to. That's outside our knowledge. Our economy is tanking;
Eratech brings a lot of revenue into the country, and they have a lot of clout
with the government as well. Nobody wants to upset them, because they could
easily up and relocate to one of the African countries. They're keeping the
technology to themselves, at least for now.
“Besides, it's
not like they're struggling for money. They rake it in, and they have a
stronger hand just equipping their own personal security forces with it,” Megan
said.
“And if somebody
in my station drags in a carcass rigged with this stuff and puts it on a
platter for the world to see?”
“That would be
regrettable, but that's a concern for us, not you. Nobody here wants it falling
into the hands of the Chinese or the Africans. The world's resources are
getting depleted at a faster rate every day, World War Three should have
settled this, but it didn't, and there are still enough weapons for round four,
and if it happens, don't you think it's better that we win? Can you trust the
Chinese? The Africans? At least with us it's the devil you know,” Megan said.