by Bob Mayer
“Yes, I am real,” Ms. Jones told them. “Although, Mister Doc has been right. There are occasions I was projected into here as a hologram, during some of my more difficult times.”
If this was a “good” time, no one wanted to see what she looked like during a “difficult” time.
“Since you all hear everything anyway, you might as well be present. I’m not sure how much longer I will be occupying this chair, and I think it’s time to stop some of the”—she paused, searching for the correct words, finally settling on—“pretense and mystery. We have”—she gestured with the claw of a hand at Ivar—“to give our latest member the option of joining our merry band and, if he decides yes, a name. Then there are some things I have to tell you, some of which will not please you.”
She shifted her gaze to Ivar, ignoring the others for the moment. Ms. Jones spoke so low, Ivar had to lean forward to hear her. “You do know, of course, that someone has to guard the walls around our civilization in the middle of the night? The walls between all those innocents out there who go to bed every evening, troubled by thoughts of such things as mortgages or the garbage that needs to be taken out tomorrow, or the car that is going to need new tires? The normal things most people worry about. There are even those who have grave, serious worries, such as divorce or illness or a loss of faith. But the things we in the Nightstalkers worry about, they are far graver than any of those worries.
“You know some of this because you were part of the event in North Carolina,” Ms. Jones continued. “You were there when these Nightstalkers behind you closed the Rift you helped make in the lab there.”
There was no accusation in the tone, but Ivar stiffened anyway and shifted uncomfortably on the hard plastic chair.
“Tell me,” Ms. Jones said, “what do you think Rifts are?”
“Ms. Jones, I’ve been in training—” Ivar began, but Ms. Jones cut him off.
“Do not try to obfuscate the truth,” Ms. Jones said. “I have neither the time nor inclination for it. Any spare moment you had from training, you were on the Internet, researching Rifts. And you are the only person we know of who actually opened a Rift and is still with us. Everyone else either is dead or disappeared, where we know not. I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing, but it is a reality and the reason why I’ve had you pulled out of training early.”
“Why now?” Ivar asked, and Nada half stepped forward to smack him on the back of his head for his impertinence to dare interrupt Ms. Jones. Ivar pressed on. “Colonel Orlando said there were security issues. Is that why?”
Ms. Jones shook her head. “Things have occurred, but we are not under threat here. There is a situation, but it does not appear urgent.”
Moms and Nada exchanged a what-the-frak? glance.
Ms. Jones paused and they could hear her struggle for oxygen for a moment. Then she spoke again: “What do you think a Rift is?”
“A gate,” Ivar said.
“To where?”
“Three possibilities,” Ivar said without hesitation. “Either distinct or combined. First, it could be a shift in space. So, that would mean to another place or even planet. If whatever is on the other side is even on a planet. It could be some other”—Ivar paused, then gestured a circle with his hands—“space. Second, a shift in time. The Rift could be punching through to the future. And, if time travel is invented in the future, that means they’re here now. Perhaps the past, but not likely. Third, the Rift could be to a parallel universe. When you start considering it might be a combination of two or all three, it becomes a bit overwhelming.”
Doc made some sort of noise but not enough to earn a rebuke from Ms. Jones, who was still focused on Ivar.
“What do they want?” Ms. Jones asked.
“They?”
Ms. Jones sighed and Ivar quickly spoke. “I don’t know. There were times in the lab when other Ivars materialized. I couldn’t quite figure out if I was real or one of them.” He rubbed his forehead. “I definitely sensed intelligence behind it all.”
“Did you sense a threat?” Ms. Jones asked, which caused Pitr to glance down at her in surprise and the Nightstalkers to fidget.
Ivar grimaced, obviously reluctant to answer. “There was so much going on—the Russians, the Nightstalkers coming, the other Ivars.”
Ms. Jones made a noise; what it meant, Ivar had little clue, but he was picking up the hints.
“Not particularly,” Ivar said. “Not in the lab. But there were no Fireflies there, like the team faced in Senator’s Club.” He gestured at the people behind him. “On the other side, whatever was there and trying to come through, I didn’t have a good feeling about.”
“‘Good feeling,’” Mac muttered with a snort.
“At ease,” Nada said in a low voice.
“Do you know what a criticality accident is?” Ms. Jones asked Ivar.
He nodded. “Of course. An uncontrolled nuclear chain reaction.”
Unnoticed by everyone, except Ms. Jones and Pitr, a frown crossed Doc’s face at this shift in questioning.
“How many have occurred?” Ms. Jones asked.
“Twenty-two outside of reactors,” Ivar said.
“And sixty, known, including reactors and assembly facilities,” Ms. Jones said. She lifted a hand toward her scar-covered head. “I experienced one directly at Chernobyl. It was the largest of the sixty. Known. Explain to the team what a criticality accident is exactly.”
“Well, uh, it’s the unintentional bringing together of a mass of fissionable material outside of a shielded environment. The critical mass releases radiation and neutron flux. The radiation can be very dangerous to any humans nearby.”
“The woman who opened the Gateway Rift,” Ms. Jones said, “had received what would have been a fatal dose of radiation—fatal, that is, if she’d lived long enough to have died from it.”
“Lucky her,” Mac muttered.
“That’s new,” Doc said. “Usually they’re sucked through the Rift.”
Ms. Jones ignored him, focusing on Ivar. “What if the critical mass is done intentionally?”
“Then it isn’t an accident,” Ivar said. “Did this woman have fissionable material?”
“No.”
Doc tried to keep his hand in. “Then it had to come from the other side.”
“Duh,” Mac said. “Even Roland could have figured that out.”
“Yes,” Ms. Jones said, ignoring the team interplay as she usually did. “I fear we are approaching our own form of criticality.”
“How so?” Moms asked.
Ms. Jones shook her head. “I don’t know. But for many years the Rifts and the Fireflies were relatively the same. But the last few have been different, evolving. That concerns me. Almost as if there were a plan being played out.”
“And Burns?” Moms asked. “How does he play into this?”
“That is a good question,” Ms. Jones said. “I fear we might not ever know the answer.”
“I’ll get the answer out of him,” Nada vowed.
Ms. Jones waved that comment off and focused back on Ivar. “Will you destroy Fireflies, and whatever they’re in, if ordered?”
Ivar didn’t hesitate. “Yes.”
“Will you be a Nightstalker?”
“Yes.”
Ms. Jones gestured and Pitr picked up a thick folder from among the papers on her desk. He disappeared behind Ms. Jones’s high-backed chair. A shredder went to work.
“You no longer exist,” Ms. Jones said. “All tangible proof of your existence is gone. Teams in the field have also erased your existence in the outside world. You might be a memory for people you’ve met in your life, but that is all. And memories fade, faster than most people realize.”
Ivar swallowed hard, trying to search his own memory for those who might have a memory of him.
&nb
sp; Apparently he wasn’t giving up much, he decided.
Ms. Jones finally shifted her gaze past him. “Names?”
“Fred,” Nada said right away, as Nada was wont to say. He felt every team needed a Fred and they hadn’t had one in a long time. This was met with a few eye rolls but was so expected it was pretty much ignored.
“Mini-Me,” Mac said. “We already got a Doc, so he can’t be called that, but he is a scientist. Kind of looks like a mad scientist to me.”
This nomination didn’t seem to light anyone’s fire.
“Roland?” Ms. Jones asked.
The big man didn’t like being singled out, especially by a woman. He had a thing about women in leadership roles—not a bad thing, but they made him kind of nervous. He’d rather be shot at.
“Buddy?” Roland suggested, at a loss for anything else and not having paid much attention to the candidate anyway.
“He ain’t a dog,” Mac drawled.
“A nice name,” Ms. Jones said, and Roland blushed, the barbed wire standing out in stark relief against the scar. “Eagle?”
“Chowder,” Eagle said.
“Clarify?” Ms. Jones said.
“The only Ivar I know of is a chain of seafood restaurants around Seattle,” Eagle said. “Ate at one while waiting for a ferry. Had chowder.” Eagle shrugged. “Best I could do. Under the circumstances.”
Ms. Jones moved on. “Mac?”
“Rat.”
Everyone in the room turned to look at Mac, including Ivar.
Mac clarified. “Not ’cause I think he’s a rat or nothing, just that when we rescued him in that lab, there were rats there, and he was kind of weird about them.” Mac shrugged also. “It’s all I know about the man.”
“Moms?” Ms. Jones asked the last member of the team.
“Ivar.”
Ms. Jones blinked.
“Heck, Moms,” Mac said, “we know that’s—” Then he trailed into silence.
Ms. Jones cracked a smile, which actually appeared like her face was crumbling. “Yes. I like it. He is an original. He is the only one to open a Rift and still be among us. Therefore he should still retain his name. Ivar it is.”
“Welcome to the team,” Mac said, taking a step forward and slapping him, a bit too hard, on the shoulder. “Usually we celebrate with beer, but this ain’t a beer day.”
The rest of the team shuffled by, uncomfortable under Ms. Jones’s gaze, and shook Ivar’s hand.
Then everyone regained their positions and waited for the bad news.
“I will not bore you with more ‘why we are here’ talk,” Ms. Jones said. “You all have heard it many times and Ivar will have time here at the Ranch for me to discuss it with him one on one.”
Moms and Nada exchanged a glance. They’d both expected to be gearing up and moving out to go after Burns ASAP after this. Perhaps they were leaving Ivar behind and—
“The issue of Burns has been appropriated by a higher authority,” Ms. Jones said.
“Frak,” Mac muttered.
“Fuck me to—” Nada couldn’t finish it.
“Excuse me, Ms. Jones.” Moms was the only one who would dare to stand up to the old woman. “Burns was one of us. We clean up our own messes. He killed the scientist at the Arch and he killed one of our Support in Utah along with an innocent girl. He’s ours.”
“He was ours,” Ms. Jones clarified. “But we lost him, didn’t we? We discarded him and then he turned on us. It is my fault,” she added, because she always took responsibility for everything that went wrong. “I chose him for the team. It was a mistake. One I hoped we could rectify in-house. I also made the mistake of letting him go. Believe me, Miss Moms. I want us to go after Burns very badly.”
Nada stepped up next to Moms. “Whose responsibility is it now?”
“The Cellar,” Ms. Jones said, and they all glanced over at Roland, because he’d spent some time with a Cellar operative after their joint mission during the previous holidays, saving the world from nuclear Armageddon.
Roland put both his big paws up, as if to ward off the stares. “I ain’t heard nothing from Neeley since we dropped those two CIA dickheads.” When Roland said dropped, he meant it literally, cutting the two men’s climbing rope and letting them fall to their deaths on a mountaineering expedition in South America. Such was the price of betrayal in the world of covert operations.
“It does fall under the province of the Cellar’s mandate to deal with rogue agents,” Ms. Jones said.
“Yes,” Moms agreed, “but whoever the Cellar sends, will they understand if a Firefly is involved?”
“There’s no indication a Firefly came through,” Ms. Jones said. “I told you: We have video from six different cameras of the gate. The only thing that came out was Burns.”
“What looked like Burns,” Nada corrected. “And who knows what’s in him. He took down the Snake pretty effectively. The Burns we knew couldn’t have done that.”
Ms. Jones inclined her head in agreement. “True. Burns was on the other side. We have no clue what’s over there. We have no clue if he’s even Burns anymore. But policing the ranks of the covert world is the Cellar’s province.”
Moms wasn’t ready to give up. “Does the Cellar know how to close a Rift? Because it’s highly possible Burns is here to open one. He took the computer from the Gateway Rift.”
“You raise valid points,” Ms. Jones agreed. “Points I made to my superior. That is why you will be heading to Fort Meade to consult with the Cellar personally.”
“At your request or their request?” Moms asked.
Ms. Jones nodded at the import of the question. “Hannah wants to meet you. And I want you to be my personal liaison to the Cellar, as it appears we’re going to be working together more often in the future.”
Moms didn’t move. “And the team?”
“Is in stand-down,” Ms. Jones said. She held up a hand as Moms prepared to protest once more. “Again, I made all the points you are prepared to make, but again, I was listened to but not agreed with. The Snake was badly damaged and is in depot maintenance. The team was damaged. It is time for various members to rest, refit, retrain.” She shifted her gaze. “Nada, I believe you have personal business to attend to in Los Angeles. A birth?”
Nada blinked, not surprised that Ms. Jones knew about his family, but that she thought he would ever consider it a priority, especially with someone like Burns loose. But the way she’d shot down Moms told him there was no argument he could use. He was going to Los Angeles.
“I do,” he said.
“Good. Take the time to visit your family. After you give Ivar the Protocols to study, of course.”
“Yes, Ms. Jones,” Nada said, resigned to having to visit his family and taking time off. A condemned man would have looked happier. The last time he’d been in California with family, he’d had to bail out on his niece Zoey under less-than-optimal circumstances, and he wasn’t expecting to be welcomed with open arms.
“Doc.” Ms. Jones had already moved on. “You will be in charge of Mr. Ivar after Moms and Nada give him the Protocols. Show him the Can. Take him into the Archives. He is to know everything you know about Rifts and Fireflies.”
Mac snorted, as if to indicate he didn’t think that was much.
“Yes, Ms. Jones,” Doc said, bowing to the inevitable and ignoring Mac. He cleared his throat, something on his mind.
“Yes?” Ms. Jones asked.
“What role on the team does Ivar take?” Doc asked. “I’m the team scientist.”
“He is your assistant,” Ms. Jones said.
“No one else has an assistant,” Doc pointed out.
“No one else needs one,” Ms. Jones snapped. She held up a frail hand as if to stop the impact of the words. “I do not say that to disparage you. I say that because it’s the other
way: We need more help understanding the problems we deal with, particularly Rifts and Fireflies. Ivar is the only person who has opened one and is still with us. That brings a unique perspective to the table. We need one because Burns walked through a Rift and is with us now. The Nightstalkers and all the iterations of our predecessors have been dealing with this problem since its inception in 1947. We’ve been on the defensive. It is time to change that. To be preemptive. I want the two of you to work on that.”
Doc took a step forward. “Does that mean you want us to consider opening a controlled Rift?”
Nada shook his head. “No one has ever opened a controlled Rift.”
“Not yet,” Doc said.
“I did,” Ivar said.
Mac snorted and Doc began shaking his head. Ivar held up his hand. “When you can open it and close it, you control it. I admit I have little clue how I did either, and I wasn’t in charge of my own faculties, but still.”
“Exactly,” Ms. Jones said. “And that is why you are here and that is why you and Doc will work together. Any more questions, Mr. Doc?”
“No.” Doc took a step back.
“Mac, Kirk, Eagle, and Roland.” Ms. Jones said the names ominously. “You need to relearn some basic lessons about following rules, after your stunt in Arkansas, which we never had time to address. You need some training. A flight is awaiting you at the auxiliary field. Colonel Orlando will escort you to Fort Bragg.”
“Oh shiit,” Mac muttered. “Not Bragg.”
“You all have your instructions. Please follow through. Of course, as always, you are on immediate recall.”
The Nightstalkers exited Ms. Jones’s office, a defeated group if ever there was one.
That was still living.
When the door shut behind them, Pitr reached down and unhooked the two lines. Then he gently scooped Ms. Jones up and carried her to her room. He laid her in the bed, reattaching the lines and then the monitoring gear.
They’d known each other since Chernobyl and it was obvious she’d gotten the worse of that event. She’d saved his life, warning him against flying over the reactor to dump a load of concrete. At the same time, she’d risked her own life, going into a control room to rescue another engineer—one of the engineers who’d helped make the disaster.