New Praetorians 2 - Shetani Zeru Bryan

by R. K. Syrus

  In the center of it all was a silver orb about a hundred feet high. Perfectly round with no visible opening, its surface reflected the whole interior of the complex. Since the first day he arrived he’d never learned another thing about the structure, who was inside, or what they might be doing. Somehow the surface bent light, maybe like an active camouflage suite. When he stood in front of it, he saw what was behind the big shiny pupil as well as a reflection of himself interposed on top.

  First time he walked up the steps, he had been staring at the incredible structure. A grinning Dr. Ru came up to him.

  “It ‘looks’ like you’ve come to the right place.”

  Bryan had not laughed. The pressure changes during the flight had not helped his splitting headache at all.

  “Is there anything you can do, doc?” he’d fairly snarled back in misery.

  Dr. Ru invited him to follow him further inside. “We’ll see, Mr. Byron, we’ll see.”

  He did, while enduring Dr. Ru’s endless supply of ocular jokes. His first eyes Ru had called “training wheels for the nerves and the visions centers.” They were colored kaleidoscope orange. He hated them. Six months later, he was sporting a much more intimidating pair that glowed violet-blue.

  “Sarge, do those come with a heat-vision feature?” Nobu had cracked.

  When Bryan got back to the Post, Army docs didn’t want to hear about “three-dimensional nanoscale retina lattices.” They made sure he could tell green from red and passed him over to Intelligence.

  All those guys wanted was to make sure no one could remotely hack into his eyes. As if spies would want to watch blubber-butt PFCs doing push-ups in mud or puking under the chin-up bar.

  The implants required a tune-up every year or so.

  At Shennong, every patient got a plant. It was their responsibility to take care of them. Like it was the center’s job to take care of them, or something. It was way too Zen for Sarge Bryan.

  “Mr. Byron?” the androgynously wrapped technician asked, perhaps fearing he’s slipped into REM mode.

  “Oh, right, the bonsai,” he said, also remembering to respond to his cover identity. “We have plants at work, mostly aloe in very special pots.”

  “It must be a very nice place.”

  “It’s really the people that make you glad to punch in in the a.m., isn’t it?” Maybe a civilian called Thaddeus Byron would talk like that.

  Mr. Thaddeus Byron was a marine security consultant working for the Eurolincx Group of companies. The owner was Ran Oliphant. His nutty assistant had picked out the name. The name kind of grew on him. Like the midget tree growing out of a bowl carved to look like a big goldfish. His pretend identity’s job was as a security contractor.

  At Shennong Center, even the chair remembered people. It adjusted to his body size and weight. Somehow it even sensed the most vexing of his mementos from the throwdown with cyborgs at the South Pole. The padding under his butt softened around the area of his pelvic stress fracture.

  “Mr. Byron,” Dr. Ru came in, bustling, hyperactive, and as usual, armed with sixth-grade humor. “What do you call a deer with no eyes?”

  “Ah, search me, doc.”

  “Me too, I have no eye-deer!”

  Ru wasn’t alone. A serious-looking bigger guy with a beard was with him. Without thinking, he tried to zoom in and take a snapshot of the new guy. But his loaner optics didn’t have that feature. He was stuck with basic cable for now.

  “How’s our star patient today?

  “I’d like to say bright eyed and bushy tailed, Dr. Ru. You tell me.”

  Dr. Ru fiddled with some settings connected to his goggles. “After your exposure to very cold temperatures, I’m glad to say there’s no signal loss. If any of your organic parts had suffered frostbite…”

  “Hi there,” Bryan said to the new guy. He didn’t like discussing his organic parts with people he hadn’t been introduced to.

  “Oh, yes, this is Dr. Bendrazi,” Ru said while his colleague stared. “His expertise is nuclear medicine. The saying around here is ‘if it glows, he knows.’”

  Thaddeus Byron faked a smile at the nerd humor. Maybe Nobu, a compulsive gamer, would appreciate it more. He tried to suss out more details. Bendrazi was oddly familiar. He had really good skin too; maybe his spouse was a plastic surgeon.

  “Dr. Ru,” Bendrazi said smoothly, making a show of looking at his pager, “I’ve just learned something. This is difficult. It’s probably better if you see for yourself.”

  Big hands with polished fingernails flicked on the wall viewscreen.

  “…and that was the horrific scene in Mumbai minutes ago.”

  Indian paramedics pushed aside a crowd of people in suits and fancy dresses. It looked like somebody had fallen off the stage during a speech.

  “Jeremy, we’re just getting an update,” said a woman announcer with an English accent. “We’re getting it from several sources. The Indian prime minister, only a year after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, is confirmed dead at Mumbai Central Hospital. Just moments ago—”

  The recap showed an older, mostly bald Indian man making a speech. He paused, smiling, then grabbed his head. His whole body was seized by some kind of standing fit. He knocked the podium over. It looked to Bryan like he was one of those puppets with strings and people were fighting for control. He spun around once, twice, then flew into the front row of the crowd.

  The picture cut back to the announcers, who looked genuinely shocked.

  So did Dr. Ru. “Oh my. That’s terrible,” he said. “I met him only last week. But it must be devastating for you, Dr. Bendrazi. He was your patient.”

  “I am shocked,” Bendrazi said coolly. “Mortified. He was more than a patient. He was my professor in medical college. While he was here for treatment, we had a good chat catching up. Out of thousands of students over the years, he remembered me. Isn’t that remarkable?”

  Dr. Ru, looking shaken, left Bryan’s room to compose a condolence message.

  “I’ve studied your case notes for years,” Bendrazi said. “All the files are anonymous, only containing details specific to my specialty. I hadn’t expected you to be fully dyschromian.”

  “Well, yeah, we like to exceed expectations,” Bryan said. Remembering to be Thaddeus, he added, “at Nova Praetorii Protective.”

  The big video on the wall switched over to an advertisement. It was for some offshore drilling project near San Francisco:

  DEEP HARVEST: DRILLING DEEPER

  TO SATISFY AMERICA’S NEEDS!

  Who the heck gets paid to make up this stuff?

  Then BBC Science came on.

  The caption scrolled: “US officials flatly deny rumors that the Ansible artifact is to be moved from the US military’s Cheyenne Mountain bunker to run tests on it in a particle collider.”

  “The Ansible,” Bendrazi said. He seemed more absorbed now than moments ago when he had watched his patient die on live TV. “Now there’s an interesting phenomenon. Something no one expected.”

  The part of the room he stood in seemed really still and quiet, the opposite of being occupied.

  “If it’s some kind of meteor,” Bryan said as casually as he could, “I guess they’ll eventually find out where it came from.”

  He was certain there was no trail leading back to his team’s mission to Antarctica in his Shennong Center file. Thaddeus the corporate security guy had been in Greenland watching out for Estonian pirates.

  Then Bendrazi just dropped the question. “I wonder if you would be able to see it?”

  “What?”

  “The Ansible. As you may know, the reason they only show drawings is the object cannot be recorded,” Bendrazi said as he flicked through the supplemental information on the bottom of the news channel. “Digital imaging does not work. Analog photographic methods like Polaroid only show a blotch. I wonder what your combined synthetic-organic irises would perceive?”

  Bryan’s thoughts flashed back six months.


  A crazy explorer in an ice cave, icicles hanging from his chin. The guy wouldn’t take his eyes off… nothing? Something Bryan’s eyes could not see. The really spooky part was touching it. Knowing something was there, feeling it in space, right in front of him, hard, unyielding, about the size of a football but like some kind of anchor into the invisible.

  “Well,” Thaddeus Byron said amiably, “I guess we’ll never find out. Fat chance of me ever gettin’ close to something they’re keeping so heavily under wraps.”

  The television framed a closeup of a Russian diplomat’s face. It was getting redder and redder. He flicked the power off. The screen turned reflective black.

  Bryan’s vision was on bypass through gamer-style goggles. They couldn’t see as many wavelengths or zoom in, but they could see reflections. In the shiny black display, he noticed Bendrazi fiddling with a ring on his finger. He looked like he was going to do something at the diagnostic console. The one that was linked to his goggles.

  It didn’t look right. It didn’t feel right.

  What could he do? If he said something, they’d be more likely to get suspicious of him than one of their own physicians. Bryan couldn’t raise a fuss. It could blow his cover.

  If they connected him to the man who was paying his medical bills and they figured out who he was, the path led right to Sienna. For the first time in a while, Bryan froze, not knowing what to do.

  Maybe he was just feeling antsy from being in a hospital room. The fiber cable connecting him to the console felt like a tether. The monitor was only a computer. What harm could you do through a computer?

  Bendrazi turned his back so Bryan couldn’t see what he was doing. If he had his fully functional eyes he could have searched for another reflective surface to get a zoom-in angle. Using these goggles was like riding on a tricycle after getting used to a blown-out Mustang.

  What was that guy up to? Bryan fought the urge to get up, walk over, and push the solid-looking man out of the way. Then the door chimed.

  It was a gardening robot.

  Its mechBrain recognized each of them. “Hello… Patient Mr. Byron… and… Dr. Bendrazi.”

  About four feet high, they were a common sight in the Shennong Complex. The multiple sensors on its head pointed up at the bearded doctor.

  “Dr. Bendrazi, may we have the room?”

  “What?” the broad-shouldered doctor looked as though he was going to hit the robot.

  “You are not listed as one of Patient Mr. Byron’s attending or consulting physicians. Plant-care protocols require solitude.”

  Bendrazi looked like he was going to swat the little tin fellow. They stared at each other, human eye to bot sensor. The human blinked.

  “Mr. Byron, I’ll check in on you before you’re discharged,” he said frostily.

  The door slid closed.

  The robot wheeled over to the midget tree. It extended a probe into the goldfish-shaped planter. The top of its turret flipped open. Inside were miniature gardening tools.

  A moment later, the bot’s head closed up again.

  “My mistake, Patient Mr. Byron. The soil is sufficiently hydrated. I will return tomorrow.”

  As he watched the bot leave, he had the distinct impression he should be obliged to the little fellow. For what? He hadn’t a clue.

  Thaddeus Byron lay back and flicked through available holo-magazines.

  The Jane’s Defense Weekly’s headline warned:

  AVAST, YE MECHBRAINS!

  HIJACKINGS EMPLOYING ARMED DRONES POSING A REAL THREAT TO INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING

  He glanced over the pictures of mechanical mayhem on the open seas and looked forward to being Sarge Bryan again.

  13

  NOW

  MARCH 20

  KHORASANI AIRSPACE

  NEAR THE GULF OF OMAN

  Sarge Bryan stares at the jammed-open door of the hovercopter, a gaping rectangle of black space, rushing, wailing. Moments ago, Sienna, his Sienna, their Sienna, stood right there. Stood before vanishing, falling down into the hostile land she barely survived being born in.

  It finally took her.

  Not right. She had not stood. She had hung in some impossible halo. Then the dark stole her. She had drifted out of the hatch and got grabbed by the hundred-mile-an-hour torrent of air whipping past their aircraft.

  No! It can’t be! was all he had time to think.

  Were his eyes deceiving him? They couldn’t. Only human eyes deceive.

  Bryan’s cyber-eyes sent the live picture to his brain. The real-time view looked like the moment after a flashbulb had just gone off. Everyone inside the helo:

  Nobu

  T-Rex

  Snakelips

  Petr

  The tag-along Navy SEAL next to the hooded prisoner.

  They all gawked.

  Snakelips Ortiz has one hand on her mahogany sniper rifle, the other hand on the local kid, Anis.

  Radio guy, Nobu. His buddy Warrant Officer T-Rex.

  Big Petr is closest to Bryan. Right next to him, near the jammed-open hatchway. They had both tried to grab Sienna. They both failed.

  Wind lashes Bryan’s cheeks. He makes a small muscle gesture, like a half blink. With that gesture, Bryan engages his cyber-eyes’ replay feature.

  His view flickers. The last thirty seconds replays. Video and audio.

  Sienna is in the cabin, right in front of him. Some kind of ionization is on her. Her body lifts up, as if they’re in free fall. But she’s the only one. His own hand reaches out.

  The massive Specialist Whitebread also tries to catch her.

  No use.

  Some kind of static charge surrounds her. It repels his hands, and she drifts toward the open door. She gets pulled out as though the hand of darkness grabbed her. The little Khorasani girl screams a higher pitch than the plasma rotors.

  Bryan’s cybernetic eyes play the scene over and over. He can’t stop it.

  Since she fell, things have happened. He’s tried to… he’s tried to do something, anything.

  His vision snaps back to real time. His armor-plated chest heaves, pressed on by gripping hands and braced forearms. They hold him back.

  The replay cuts in again, streaming the awful seconds from memory chips just inside his temples.

  Sienna… falling to her death?

  He tells his implants to go to live view.

  He gets simultaneous view. Her fall plays in a rectangular inset window in the corner of his vision. The live-view abyss of the open hatchway sits behind it. Empty. Mocking.

  His knuckles bleed. He must have hit his hand against something. Oh yeah, the metal door to the idiot pilot Nightjar who refused to set down. Some backtalk guff about Khorasani Air Defense jets above, still hunting the helo with lethal intent.

  “You WILL set this piece of crap down!”

  The pilot wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

  No more use, then, pounding on the door. Every hypersecond-vibration pulse of the plasma rotors, every air current that rocks them, takes him farther away. He has to go after her.

  A low-altitude chute hangs on the fuselage. He grabs it. Someone tries to yank it away. Whitebread’s grim face speaks silently. What did he say?

  Bryan hits Replay.

  The recorded audio feeds right into his cochlear nucleus. Lips move. Voices cut in and out battling the sounds of howling wind.

  Sounds, present and past, jumble.

  “…copter’s going too fast…”

  SCHREEEH

  “…flying too low…”

  HWWWOOOAR

  Petr’s calm, sciencey voice explains, “…under one hundred feet… compressed gas that opens the chute will feed… canopy into plasma rotors. A human body jumping into a hundred-knot slipstream will be snapped in half.”

  Need to think.

  Petr’s so calm. He’s flipped the switch. He’s alert, thinking. Why can’t I…

  “Even if the canopy doesn’t burn up in the engines and the wall of air doesn’t br
eak your back, the fall will kill you in less than three seconds. You or anyone else who tries to go after her, the colonel, I mean.”

  Whitebread said that. He was right, of course. The big guy is smarter than most assume he is. Always tells it straight. Bryan punches him good and hard.

  Eyes shut now, he can’t see anything but that insane replay. Sienna falls again.

  And again.

  The idiot pilot, the one who won’t set down and rescue his fellow soldier, talks over comms.

  “—can’t go back. The last shot from the fast movers was not air-to-air. They launched hypersonic tracking drones. If our stealth was working, we could risk a landing. Our portside light-bending array is disabled. It’s suicide. If we slow down, we’d light up their screens like a Roman candle. Can’t do it.”

  Leaving her behind. Gutless swabbie. Swabbies.

  Navy… the ship!

  Bryan glances at the map on the center console. How long has it been? How far have they traveled? Forty-five seconds? Sixty? A minute at this speed… that’s kilometers from the mark and increasing every second.

  Got to fix the position she fell, if there’s any chance. Gotta, before I screw that up, too.

  The ship.

  “Nightjar, radio the Lee,” Bryan hears himself say. “Send them GPS where the colonel fell. They’ve got stealth flyers, drones, and satellite link. There’s still a chance—”

  He forces the horrific replay to stop. Sienna becomes a freeze-frame blur. The pixels go gray and fade.

  He looks around at the others. T-Rex hangs back, seeing what the next move is. He keeps an eye on their prisoner, Sidewinder. The blackout hooded waste of humanity they went halfway around the world for.

  Snakelips Ortiz is with the girl. She also shadows the loose-cannon idiot SEAL who shot up the helo door while trying to blow the head off a twelve-year-old Khorasani boy.

  None of this would have happened….

  Nobu and Whitebread hold him down in a flight seat. Matching bruises bloom on their jaws.

  I must have hit them both. Stupid. They could have fallen out too. They’re my guys, our guys. They are just trying… Dumb, dumb, dumb.