by Michael Todd
They moved out of the tent together, where a team of scientists waited for them. They already had the technical data, but they needed the personal opinions of the people who took part in the tests. That was why they’d brought the whole operation to the Staging Area since they wanted the input from the men and women who were actually in the middle of it all to obtain a better view of what they needed to improve.
“The armor’s still shit,” Kennedy stated first and rolled her shoulder. Sal remembered that it was where one of the panthers had bitten through her suit. Phantom pain was a common effect of simulations. It had people up in arms all across the world regarding the psychological problems that came with it, but when the people in the simulations had endured far worse situations in actual combat, it no longer seemed to be a significant problem.
“Noted,” the scientist said and tapped away at a pad. “Was the performance unsatisfactory?”
“The performance was fine,” she said and tilted her head. “But I think that some bugs need to be worked out. It still moves too slowly. Power armor should increase speed, not bog it down.”
“She’s merely jealous that I rocked it with the new power armor,” Sal said and interrupted her complaint with a grin. The scientist didn’t look up, but Kennedy did with a smirk.
“That armor is too heavy to be used properly in the Zoo, and you know it, Jacobs,” she said with a chuckle. “Unless they scale it up to be basically a tank on two legs, it’ll be way too big and too unwieldy in actual combat.”
“They can’t scale it up,” he explained yet again. “The laws of physics would have some things to say about it as it crunched to the ground under its own weight.”
“We operate outside the laws of physics out here, Jacobs,” she said and emphasized his last name. “Or haven’t you noticed?”
She had a point on two levels. He knew he’d made a mistake when he’d called her by her first name in the simulation. They’d had talks about him never calling her Madie, and certainly not calling her anything other than Kennedy while they were out in the field. It was a matter of professionalism. And the fact that she hated to have her first name shortened under any circumstances.
The scientist nodded and ignored their banter for the most part. “Do you feel any side effects from the run?”
She shook her head. “Only a little phantom pain in the shoulder. It should be gone in a few minutes.”
“Okay, good,” the man said and passed the pad to Kennedy. “If the effects last longer than half an hour, please consult a doctor. Lay out your review of the simulation here and let the biometric scan sign it for you.”
“Will do.” She smiled and took the pad from him as he moved to her partner. He followed the same checkup procedure, but Sal noted that the man conducted it much quicker and with far more professionalism than hers had been run with.
Sal chuckled as he sat down beside Kennedy.
“I think the good doc has a bit of a crush on you,” he said with a grin as the man moved out of earshot. He hoped, anyway.
“Can you blame him?” she answered absently and tilted her head as she tapped out a quick review of the simulation. “And speaking of crushes, what’s with shouting ‘Madie’ in the middle of the sim, hmm?”
Sal shrugged. “Yeah, I know, I know. Rules haven’t changed, and to everyone else, our relationship is supposed to look platonic—merely friends with no suggestion of anything more. Still, I’d do the same if we were only friends, so I don’t know what you’re complaining about.”
“Don’t think I don’t think it’s cute, because I do,” Madigan said although she didn’t look up from the screen in her hands. “But it’s hard enough to maintain my reputation as a badass around here without you undermining it by coming to my rescue like the world’s most inept knight in power armor.”
He nodded and sighed. “Yeah, I get that. Sorry. And also for using your first name. Always Kennedy while in the field. It’s…reflex, I guess.”
She smiled as she finished her review and let the machine capture her data for the biometric signature as she glanced at him. “I appreciate your understanding, Jacobs. Believe me, I do. It’s why I agreed to work with you in the first place.”
Sal finished his own review, complete with a few notes about the armor that he’d worn since it was his first time in the simulator with that particular suit. Kennedy was right. The armor was too big to be viable as anything but a shield against more agile combatants. He added a few notes that they could possibly fit it with an actual metal shield to help with that, but he doubted it would be put into action. They’d need to run much larger teams into the Zoo than they had thus far for something like that to even be a factor.
Besides, there were lizards out there that could spit metal-melting acid, so a shield was less than useless unless they came up with a reinforcement material that would be strong enough to fend off physical attacks as well as the acid.
He sighed and set the pad down once he had finished. Kennedy waited at the door of the building. She smiled when he moved toward her, and they stepped out into the blazing Sahara sunlight.
“The money’s already in our accounts,” she said with a chuckle. “That’s one of the best things about working for corporations. They may be bastards, but they paid their money out on time. All the military stuff takes hours of red tape before they make payment. I’m surprised that they haven’t already had some congressional hearings about what is spent here.”
“They have…” Sal answered and checked his phone quickly for confirmation that the money was already in their accounts. Five grand for a couple hours’ work in the morning wasn’t too bad, he thought, and it was also a good way to keep one’s reflexes honed between trips into the Zoo.
“Huh?” Kennedy grunted, and Sal realized that he’d trailed off in the middle of his explanation. He blinked against the glare and shrugged as he made a face.
“Oh,” he said with a chuckle. “Yeah, two congressional hearings and one in the Senate, even though those guys have nothing to do with the budget. There’s a lot of press and politics around the Zoo, and there are many people asking questions that they could get answers to with a quick internet search. Anyway, all three hearings ended with the same basic conclusion. This whole operation is run on corporate money, and military spending is kept to a minimum. That added to the amount of money that actually comes out of here made everyone agree that it would be best for their reelection campaigns to keep their paws off the Zoo. If something goes wrong, they can simply blame the corporations, fine them, and sigh in relief that this is happening on the other side of the planet and a long way from American soil.”
Kennedy gave him an odd look as she hopped into the vehicle that they’d rented for the day. “You’ve put a lot of thought into this, haven’t you?”
Sal shrugged and clambered up beside her. “I have to, don’t I? Considering that we’re technically one of these independent corporations?”
“I guess,” she conceded and started the engine. He knew from some of their talks that most soldiers around there hated the kind of red tape that went with the US military, and many of them had joined this operation for the simple reason that there was little to no actual oversight and things happened without any real repercussions.
That plus the massive amount of money they could make if they survived multiple trips into the Zoo.
“I’m in need of a drink,” Kennedy said. She put the JLTV into drive and moved across the road as the desert wind blew flurries of sand over it. He looked into the distance and mentally measured the stretch of desert before it faded into the massive green swathe that began to take over more of the horizon each day. He didn’t like that. It was spreading faster than they’d anticipated.
“It’s barely twelve-thirty PM,” Sal said but leaned back and put on a pair of sunglasses. “But I could go for a drink too. They’re serving meals at the bar now, right?”
Chapter Three
I wasn’t made for this.
She’d been called in to do the regular specialist job, but each successive visit seemed to demand more and more from her on every level. The Zoo grew faster than anybody could have imagined or calculated. That truth made all the news channels and received the attention, but nobody wanted to talk about the shit that actually happened inside.
The plants and animals presented a real problem to the teams that made the runs into the Zoo for the Pita flowers. The animals grew more and more dangerous with each mission, and lately, the squads even had to deal with plants that were not only carnivorous but also far more aggressive. The vegetation clearly viewed the humans as a food source and showed little concern about where their meat came from and what it was wrapped in. Teams had often found old suits of armor that had been cracked open from the outside with the user gone.
Seeing shit like that wasn’t good for morale any way you cut it. It was even worse that the bodies very clearly hadn’t been recovered for the purpose of identifying the dead. Were they unregulated bounty hunters or troops sent in from the Staging Area? Did they have family who needed to be notified? What had done the nasty and would the same thing happen to anybody on their squad?
These weren’t questions that you wanted to be asked if you ran a team into the Zoo. Courtney had done what she could to identify the dead. This mostly meant she would identify the pin numbers on the suits and radio them to the Staging Area with her sat phone when they had a strong enough connection. Aside from that, there wasn’t much else that she could do.
And that didn’t help morale either. They needed a specialist, but the gunners did the brunt of the work—or so they thought. Since they didn’t divide the teams into squads and instead, ran as a full unit, they now wondered why it was necessary to bring two specialists when only one would do.
It was a fair question and one that had been answered by the Zoo itself when the other specialist in their squad went down. She was the only one left, but somehow the rest of her team also expected her to be so much more than merely a specialist. When another member of their team—a gunner—went down, the leader handed her his assault rifle, and from that point forward, she had been expected to fulfill the role of a gunner to the best of her ability.
Nobody had been particularly surprised when her doctorate failed to transfer the skills of carrying loads with inferior armor or skills with the firearm.
She gripped the gun tighter. While she knew she wasn’t much good, her team relied on her to do her job anyway. She was a part of the line, and they needed her to hold it. On an earlier run—it felt like centuries ago, now— she’d gained experience under fire. After that first time, she’d begun to take a variety of guns to the Staging Area’s range and practiced firing them there, but that didn’t make her an expert out in the field.
Conway, one of the gunners that she’d worked with before, stood beside her to hold the line and helped to cover her line of fire when it was needed. The animals were a lot more aggressive than they’d been a few months before, but they still hadn’t had to deal with anything like the waves and waves of creatures that she remembered from that life-changing trip.
There were other reasons to remember that run, she mused. It had been her first time to actually have to handle a gun as a specialist, and that wasn’t the kind of thing someone forgot. But it had also been the first time she’d met Salinger Jacobs.
Youthful and inexperienced as he had been, he’d still left an impression on her that she’d tried to shake ever since. He’d stepped up when his squad needed him and earned respect that way, even though—as she’d discovered when they’d talked later—he’d been tricked into being there.
She remembered thinking at the time that if anything like that had happened to her, she would have been on the first flight out of there and talked to a reparations lawyer as soon as she set foot on American soil. She could probably have retired with the money that came from that. Or more realistically, set herself up in some high-end university with a cushy tenure job where she could pick and choose her projects while occasionally giving lectures.
Sal had stayed. He stuck it out for another job. And another. He was now a very familiar face around the Staging Area, and he and Sergeant Madigan Kennedy had broken away and started their own company. What had they called it again? Heavy Metal? Either way, they had expanded their work and were paid a lot better than she remembered being paid. That showed that despite his age and lack of experience, he had a good eye for business as well as being a kid genius and a much better specialist-gunner than she could ever hope to be.
Courtney had been attracted to him. She even came on to him in the bar once they’d gotten back from that first mission, but he’d rebuffed her, and when he teamed up with Kennedy, she understood why. Some guys simply liked the warrior woman type.
She felt her foot catch on a root, stumbled forward, and almost fell on her face before an arm caught her around the chest.
“Stay focused,” Conway admonished and kept his eyes forward. He had used his free arm to prevent her fall, but his weapon remained aimed into the foliage.
“There’s nothing I’d like to see more than her face on the ground,” one of the other members of the squad said with a laugh. “That way, her more valuable assets are easier to access. What’s the point of having a female scientist anyways?”
“Shut it, Wayne,” Conway growled. The other man chuckled and proceeded without apparent concern at the rebuke. “Misogynistic bastard.”
“I have no idea what ‘misogynistic’ means,” Wayne retorted with a grin. “How the hell can I be something if I don’t know what it is?”
Conway flipped the man off as they continued to move forward.
“Where do they grow these assholes?” Courtney asked as she shook her head and gripped her rifle with both hands.
“On some tree somewhere,” he answered with a chuckle. “Ignore them. You’re doing more than what you’re actually paid for, so that’s definitely a win in my book.”
“Actually, they restructured my contract,” Courtney responded. It was hard to talk while on the move, since walking under this much weight meant that she would struggle to catch her breath without the added challenge of speech. “This kind of thing is apparently what I’m supposed to do out here. Well, technically, run support in any capacity as required by the squad leader. So, yeah.”
“Any capacity?” Wayne shouted from the front of the line. “Hey, I think I may need a couple of—”
“If you finish that sentence, I will feed you the butt of your rifle, I swear to God, Wayne,” Conway snapped at the man, who merely chuckled and pressed on.
“You don’t need to stand up for me, you know,” Courtney muttered and tried to focus on her breathing. “And it’s probably better if you don’t. I don’t want to be seen as a fragile female to guys like that, someone who needs a man to protect her. It only makes it worse when you have to be somewhere else to protect the rest of the squad, you know?”
He nodded. “I can’t help it. I hate bullies, and Wayne is the worst of the bunch. I’m not sure where they grew him, but he’s definitely a bad apple. I know he’s a crack shot, but I guess God had to balance out the bad with some good.”
She laughed but chose not to reply since she had already begun to lag behind the rest of the group and didn’t need any more evidence that she was out of her depth. Her inadequacies irked her because she put a lot of work into staying healthy and put in as much cardio as she could while not in the Zoo. But at the same time, she wasn’t used to this much exercise. She could do it, but probably not as well as the guys who did it all the time, and certainly not as well as some of the others could.
Despite everything, she disliked the fact that her lack of abilities only seemed to spur her detractors on. Even though Wayne was merely another meathead special-forces goon with delusions of grandeur thanks to his newly padded bank account, she couldn’t help but let his comments get to her.
It was the way she was. She could
n’t help it, and she shouldn’t have to.
Courtney stopped suddenly, and her eyes widened. Conway took a few steps ahead before he turned back to peer at her and tilted his head. He left the question unasked for a few long moments before he felt it too. The rest of the squad took a few seconds longer to register the disturbance, and by the time the rest of them realized what it was, Courtney already had her weapon hot and ready.
The ground shook with a decidedly familiar two-step quake. She knew it better than most and had been on the first team to document the massive creatures. Unfortunately, theirs hadn’t been the first team to realize what a gold mine they could be if you could take them down and survive the onslaught that came afterward and extract the goods located beside the medulla at the same time.
“Fuck, yes,” Wayne enthused as he made the stereotypical move and loaded a round into his assault rifle, even though there was already one loaded and all that achieved was to waste the round already in the chamber. Courtney gritted her teeth in an effort to bolster her courage. She didn’t want to have to deal with either the massive monster or the host of creatures that would inevitably come afterward.
But it looked like she would have to. She followed Wayne’s lead and chambered a round into her already chambered rifle. As she watched the perfectly usable round eject from the chamber, she wondered if, like her, he did it to fill the moment of waiting that seemed to stretch on forever.
Well, what do you know? That did feel good.