The Human Forged

by Anthony J Melchiorri

  Nick nodded and kept close to One-Eighty-Nine and One-Ninety-One. The clones lined up in ranks and Nick stood at ease between them. Striding up and down the ranks, the guards counted off the clones. Overhead, the sun beat down hard. He longed for a glass of water and wondered when he would get a chance to drink or eat. His stomach growled, twisting in his abdomen.

  After finishing roll, a keeper stepped in front of the men. He twirled his finger around and barked an order.

  The clones immediately jogged at a brisk pace. They followed a path between the trees. Each loping step agonized Nick as his shirt flapped against his damaged skin. He gasped for breath as he fought to keep up. The underground support machines had ensured his muscles didn’t atrophy, but the clones seemed especially athletic.

  Rounding a corner, they broke free from the respite of the shade.

  His mouth went dry as a stitch formed in his side. His body begged for him to slow, to let his lungs and heart catch up. His muscles screamed for more oxygen. He lagged, losing his place beside One-Eighty-Nine. Nick’s strides grew shorter and he clutched at the cramped muscles under his ribs.

  A keeper jogged up and scolded Nick before running to the front of the pack. The man seemed at ease with the pace the clones kept.

  Nick fought for each step. He urged himself onward in his head. The clones’ pace seemed closer to a sprint compared to the runs Exo-Specialist training had involved. He lifted one foot with conscious effort, then the next. The clones ran tall and confident beside him. In contrast, he hunched his back and didn’t think it worth the effort to match the clones in posture. Just keep pace. Just keep moving.

  Finally, the clones slowed back to the clearing where they’d started. Each stopped and stood at ease. Their breathing seemed normal as he struggled to stay upright. He sucked in breath after breath until his pulse returned to normal and his lungs no longer burned. Whatever these people had done to produce the clones, they must have tampered with his genes and given the clones almost inhuman endurance.

  Another keeper commanded the men to visit the commissary tent, where they ate oatmeal and downed water. A cup of dry powder accompanied these meager offerings. The clones dumped the powder in their mouth and washed it down with swigs of water. Nick followed suit. He cringed at the bitter taste and the way the powder caked up when it hit his wet tongue. Repressing the urge to gag, he gulped hard to swallow it. Despite the raw skin on his back, he longed to be on the plane, sitting and waiting, rather than exhausting himself.

  One of the keepers entered the commissary. Two guards with Madsen rifles flanked him. He waited a moment as all the clones turned to face him. His chin held high, the keeper scanned the room and made an announcement.

  None of the clones spoke. A few knitted their brows as they momentarily frowned. Otherwise, they appeared stolid as they stood from the wooden benches and filed back outside. Nick tried to control his own expression, wondering what had been said. When the guards left and the clones’ voices rose up in concerned murmurs, he overheard one of the clones. “Why aren’t we leaving today?”

  Nick’s heart sank and his face scrunched in worry.

  Maybe the clone was wrong. Nick took a deep breath and strode alongside the clones. He reassured himself that it might not be as bad as it seemed. Maybe their departure was just delayed. They might be leaving soon. Tomorrow, even. Then he pictured the CRM officer seizing up against the electric fence before falling dead into the dirt and plants, his body kicking up a small dust cloud in its final tremors.

  Nick’s stomach knotted. He felt sick as he realized what he had done. In his effort to escape the night before, he had unwittingly killed the man who had purchased Nick and his clones. He had prevented himself and James from being sent from the camp. Now Nick didn’t know when the next purchaser might show up to whisk him out of this godforsaken place.

  ***

  After another round of brutal calisthenics, the keepers set up holofields for marksmanship. They distributed a faux rifle to each clone for use on the holos projected along the shooting range. Holograms of soldiers appeared next to the actual trees along the forest’s edge. Among the first batch to fire on the range, James picked out and shot at each of his projected targets with trained precision. When his time ended, Nick caught his friend’s eyes and James gave him a subtle nod before being sent to run.

  As Nick approached the range, a keeper handed him a rifle. He chewed on his lower lip. His performance throughout the rest of the day had proved less than adequate as he’d stumbled and gasped for air, limbs trembling and giving out in weight exercises. Hell, it wasn’t that he wanted to impress the guards and keepers; rather, he just wanted to perform as well as any of his clones. He needed to conform to their standards. James had made it clear that the keepers demonstrated no tolerance for weak links in the ranks.

  Nick curled his fingers around the grip and forestock of the practice weapon. He gauged the weight. It felt similar to a real rifle as far as he could tell. Most of the times he’d handled a weapon of this caliber—real or practice—it had been with the aid of the Exosuit. With its augmented strength, the Exo had made the heaviest weapon feel as if he lifted only a plastic toy gun. That effect had contributed to the unreal feeling of invincibility he had experienced on his hunts for CRM officers and soldiers.

  He crouched, squaring the butt of the rifle with his shoulder and aiming down the iron sights. He longed to have the guide of his AR lenses. With them, he didn’t need to aim down the barrel. The targeting reticule simply popped up on his HUD and he pulled the feather-light trigger. These rifles didn’t even offer a laser optic sight. A trickle of sweat streamed down his back. It caught on the scabbed skin.

  His forearm quivered as he steadied the rifle and held his breath. A couple of hologram soldiers flitted between trees, advancing toward him. He took aim, leading the first target as the holo sprinted across an open patch of grass. He pulled the trigger once, twice, then a third time.

  Unharmed, the holo made it across the field. Nick clenched his jaw tight and readjusted the stock against his shoulder. He held his arms tighter against his sides. The second holo lunged from behind a rotting log and Nick fired in response. One shot this time. The holo responded with a splash of red on the projected soldier’s shoulder and the holo man stumbled before recovering. Nick pulled the trigger again. A splash of red squirted from the man’s chest and the holo dissipated. He’d gotten it. He’d made the shot.

  As he celebrated the small victory, the holo he’d missed took aim at him and his rifle vibrated against his shoulder. It sent a nasty shock coursing through his body.

  A guard tore the rifle from Nick’s hand and pointed to the other clones. The man shouted a command. Hoping he understood the guard’s meaning, Nick stood, staring at the useless practice weapon, and trudged away to join up with the others waiting at the edge of the field. Opposite him, two of the keepers conferred with another guard, eyeing him as he walked away. His pace quickened and his stomach dropped. A wave of anxiety tore through him. He’d performed poorly. All the years of training as an Exo-Specialist were wasted as his mental prowess had deteriorated when he had lain hooked up to a machine that harvested his cells for DNA. He cursed inwardly at his weakness, at his mistake in killing the CRM officer that would have taken them all out of this facility, at Blue Gloves and Mohawk for abducting him, at the blond woman who had drugged him, at Rocco for taking him to Paterei prison for what was supposed to be a one-night escape to distract from his boredom in Tallinn. He cursed himself for becoming swept up in the undercurrents, the powerful tow beneath the waves that took him out to an ocean of unknown and perilous waters. Each time he thought he could surface, each time he thought he had found a way toward the light, those currents pulled him back down.

  Sixteen

  CIA biotech analyst Sara Monahan replayed Lt. Fulton’s last moments of feed before his Chip was destroyed. She pulled her hands through her long hair, her jaw clenched and her brow furrowed. Under he
r loose-fitting blouse, her muscles tensed. She’d been sitting at the desk for too long and her body screamed at her to move, to go outside, to run.

  But she couldn’t pull herself away from the holoprojection. Rasping and weak, Fulton’s voice called out for Steinweg. Fulton had recognized the man. Sara gestured to reverse back through it frame by frame until she could get a shot of the man Fulton called Steinweg. The lieutenant’s last inquiry to his killer haunted her. Steinweg? What’s going on?

  Fulton’s recognizing the man was strange enough. But the fact that Steinweg’s icy blue eyes, straight blond hair, and pale skin contrasted sharply with the standard demographics of Resistance Movement soldiers only added to her curiosity. His complexion and features stood out against those of the typical Congolese population, though she supposed the addition of South Africa and the subsequent and indiscriminate conscription of South Africans into the Resistance Movement’s forces might have had something to do with Steinweg’s role in insurgent activities.

  Sara rotated the holoprojection and scanned the killer’s face, running the image through a database. The search came up with a positive result almost immediately. She blinked a couple of times and rubbed her eyes. Chewing on a fingernail as she read, she shook her head in disbelief.

  Joseph R. Steinweg had been declared dead almost a year and a half before the attack on Fulton. Steinweg had first been reported missing on a business trip to Buenos Aires when his Chip had gone off grid. A search conducted by Argentine officials had yielded no bodies. To top it off, Steinweg had served as an Exo-Specialist in the Congo just years before he’d adopted civilian life as a technical contractor for Formative Connections, an apparently global consulting and contracting firm. The US Army generally toiled to recover missing soldiers and veterans. Yet their investigations had ended up no different than the Argentinians’; they couldn’t find him.

  Why had this disappeared man set a trap for a unit he used to fight beside?

  Without any good answers, she returned her focus to the detailed feeds she had received from Fulton. According to the last vital readings, it appeared that shock had kicked in. The lieutenant’s pulse had grown weak and rapid. His breathing had turned shallow. Oxygen levels reaching his brain had plummeted as his blood pressure had dropped. No amount of administered anti-coagulants from the Exo could have prevented the rapid blood loss from Fulton’s shredded arm and the face and neck wounds he had sustained in the improvised explosive’s blast.

  Closer to the detonation point, Cooley had died immediately. Or at least her Chip had been destroyed with the explosion. No more signals had been streamed from her and the last footage Sara recovered was a blinding white flash of heat and light that had spiked all levels of radiation, thermal and otherwise, on Cooley’s Exosuit.

  Exosuit deaths were rare. Most of the time the enemy was dead long before they even saw the soldiers. Sometimes, an Exo-Specialist would make a mistake and be caught unaware. They might alert their target before they could make a kill. Wounds were not unheard of, but an actual KIA used to be an outright anomaly.

  Whether through a network of intelligence operatives or just from lessons learned after too many casualties, the CRM had adapted to Exo tactics by improvising ambushes. They had learned not to rely on defensive actions to deal with the specialists prowling half-invisible in the woods. Instead of hiding, they’d come up with a menagerie of traps to lure Specialists. Most of the time, though, they’d still underestimated the Exosuit’s protective capabilities and attacked with small-arms fires or explosives that might wound but not debilitate the American soldiers.

  This incident provided a deadly contrast. To make matters worse, Fulton had acted like a cowboy, charging into a camp that he should have taken cautiously. His and Cooley’s paralysis shots had actually set the explosives off.

  He had been too cocky. Sara shook her head, pulling back the loose strands of dark hair that fell in front of her face.

  Similar to those executed against Fulton’s squad, the more robust strategies had grown more common. She reasoned that men like Steinweg with intimate knowledge of Exo-Specialist tactics provided the vital knowledge that had led to the increasingly effective attacks against Exo units.

  But more disconcerting to her than this betrayal was Patel’s death.

  She knew how Patel had died. His throat had been slit. She’d watched the AR feed. She’d witnessed Patel’s perspective as blood poured onto his chest and into his quaking hands. The feed continued on even as his vitals faded. Somehow, a soldier, his face never visible to Patel, had been able to sneak up despite Patel’s having engaged the suit’s cloaking and his receiver’s enhanced auditory filters. The soldier had gotten close enough to touch Patel.

  Her heart had stopped when she’d seen how Patel had struggled against his attacker. The soldier, the attacker, had physically overpowered a specialist in an Exosuit. She had never seen such strength.

  At first, she’d suspected stolen technology. Somehow, the CRM had gotten hold of an Exo. That theory held little water when she saw Fulton’s feed and could see the man Fulton had called Steinweg. She guessed—and she realized a guess was the best that she could do—that this man had been the only one at the scene.

  She found no indications of any other individuals near the ambush site. She enhanced the audio recordings provided by all three members of the small squad. Straining her ears, she identified a subtle pattern of noises that seemed like the sounds of someone creeping through the undergrowth.

  Isolating the sounds, she ran them through one of her pattern-analysis algorithms that affirmed with 78 percent confidence that the pattern of noises belonged to one source, based on geographic triangulation and sequencing. Visual images confirmed the attacker had worn the blocky geometric patterns of normal jungle fatigues and that mottled paint had covered his face. Nothing indicated that he wore an Exosuit—unless he’d donned it under his fatigues, which would make hardly a lick of sense at all if he wanted to take advantage of the suit’s cloaking abilities. A former Exo-Specialist might know exactly how the suit worked, but she doubted he could overpower another soldier in a suit without one of his own. The Exosuit provided too much enhanced strength for her to consider that possibility.

  She rubbed her temples. Through her window at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, she stared out at the gray skies hanging over a screen of oaks and maples lining the complex.

  It was the perfect weather for a long run. Not humid enough to make her feel as though she pulled each breath through a blanket and not too cool to necessitate any exothermal heat enhancements. She could run as people did before genetic and Chip enhancements. It felt almost liberating, feeling the breeze tickle the bare skin on her legs and arms and taking in the unadulterated scents of the pollinating vegetation and budding trees around her as each foot rolled against the dirt pathways lined with mulch that surrounded the CIA complex. Running gave her time to think, to let ideas simmer in her mind, fitting pieces of a puzzle together as she pumped her arms and bounded down paths. She yearned to run now, to mull over how this man with no Exosuit of his own had overpowered an American Exosuit soldier.

  “Monahan, you done with that analysis on the Fulton squad?”

  Sara jumped, her head snapping to the door of her small office. Darren McCuller’s bodybuilder-like frame took up most of the space between the cramped room and the hall. One muscled arm grabbed the door frame. Dark eyelashes appeared almost girlishly long over his unblinking eyes. Late-afternoon stubble traced his striking jawline. He smacked his lips together, chewing his gum as noisily as usual.

  As a counter-biotechnologist, she should have been working on identifying what if any biotechnological agents might be implicated in this attack. Her position placed her in the uniquely miserable position of reporting to two superiors. Lauren Corello directed her more scientific ventures, including any laboratory experiments aligned with Sara’s biological computational analyses. McCuller headed a counter-technology opera
tive group with a directive to map and predict the CRM’s specific strategic use of advanced warfare technologies.

  She cringed at the sound. “Yes, I’m about done with it.”

  “Not too much from the biotech standpoint, anyway, right? I thought you’d already be done.”

  “I’m not so sure. I mean, the attacker displayed more physical prowess than statistically expected by CRM soldiers. Even if the attacker knew the weaknesses of an Exosuit, the killer exhibited superhuman strength.”

  McCuller lifted his broad shoulders and let them drop. “My guess is we’ve got a genetic enhancer. No Chip read, according to Robert Yu’s analysis of potential cybertactics and technologies.”

  “That might be it.” She pursed her lips.

  “You don’t seem convinced. Why not?”

  “We use genetic enhancers, too. Hell, Patel—”

  “Who’s that?” McCuller asked.

  “The first casualty.”

  “Ah, the guy who got his throat slit.”

  She winced. “Yes, right. He received enhancements. Even with the Exo, he couldn’t stand up to the attacker. ”

  “Well, you know how some take to enhancements better than others. If you’ve got the right genes, you’ve got the right genes.”

  “I suppose. You don’t think there’s something else at work beside the normal gamut of injectable genetic enhancements?”

  McCuller tapped his knuckles on the metal door frame, its paint marred where the door didn’t fit properly when shut. “Maybe you’re right.” He shrugged. “Keep working. I want to get this report filed by the end of the day.”

  As he left, she reopened Fulton’s feed on her holodisplay.

  McCuller would be displeased if she didn’t finish the report, but Steinweg’s apparent involvement in the attack got the better of her. Nothing indicated a reason for his mercurial allegiance to the same group he had fought against. Something was not quite right about this attack and she could not will herself to forget it. Despite McCuller’s demands, she opted to go for a run.