Family

by Robert J. Crane

  I spent the next few minutes trying not to talk to Kurt, who seemed equally eager not to talk to me. I was in no condition to trade barbs with him anyway, feeling heavy of tongue and slow of mind. I was fairly certain he’d say that that was normal.

  The doors to the medical unit slid open a few minutes later with a gentle whoosh. Ariadne came in first, her usual gray suit with skirt combo not doing any wonders for her pale complexion. Her red hair was light, and this time bundled over her shoulder in a ponytail, out of the way, an afterthought. I understood that, not liking to spend much time on my hair either, but I always thought she might be taking it to an extreme. She wore no makeup; or at least so little as to be unnoticeable, which meant her faded lips blended with her cheeks, and her eyelashes didn’t stand out at all.

  Old Man Winter followed her, his nearly seven-foot tall frame barely fitting through the door. He didn’t even pretend to duck, and instead acted as though the top of the door frame would move out of the way for him. I couldn’t be sure, as I was much closer to the ground and looking up, but I suspected he only missed bumping the top of his head by centimeters.

  “Ariadne,” I said as she approached. “You aren’t in Kansas anymore.” I looked down at her feet. “And no ruby slippers, though that’s hardly a surprise.”

  “How are you feeling?” Ariadne said as she came to a stop by my bedside. “Are you competent to answer a few questions?”

  “You maybe ought to ask the doctor about that,” I said, “because I’m on a couple drugs at present, and they’re making the whoosh go room.”

  She looked to Old Man Winter, as though seeking some form of confirmation from him. She did this frequently, but I rarely noticed him do anything that would indicate that he was responding to her. She turned back to me. “We need to know what happened.”

  “Pretty simple,” I said. “We made good our escape from the Omega facility, and about an hour from home they took out our car with an RPG,” I said. “You should consider equipping your cars with more weapons. If we’d had a few guns we might have made a better showing of it.”

  “It was a rental,” Ariadne said. “Hannegan and Davis picked it up in Detroit and drove it all the way to their rendezvous with you.”

  “I bet the bill for that one Hertz,” I said, clearly off-kilter if I was venturing into the land of puns.

  Ariadne gave me an insincere smile. “Why don’t you stick to the story at hand?”

  “They ambushed us,” I said, and felt a little emotion stir. “They ran us down, chased us through the woods, and they killed Andromeda. They had us surrounded, and they were about to kill us when M-Squad showed up and saved our bacon, our sausage, and every other fine pork product we possess.”

  Ariadne’s arms were crossed, probably the most common posture the woman used. “Any indication for why they wouldn’t have recaptured Andromeda instead of killing her?”

  “They didn’t give me any indications at all,” I said. “The only reason I knew they were going to kill us was because my Greek chorus told me so; Wolfe and Gavrikov told me they were going to murder us instead of capture.”

  Old Man Winter showed a hint of movement at that. What would be regarded as nothing more than the twitch of a facial nerve in others was almost a full-blown look of horror on him. “Did Wolfe or Gavrikov give you any reason for this?”

  “They didn’t say anything after that. Probably got lost in the shuffle. Or possibly the screaming after I got shot.” I frowned. “None of the enemy survived?”

  “No,” Ariadne said. “They all killed themselves.”

  “I remember hearing that. Cyanide? Who does that?” I shook my head.

  “Apparently Omega,” Ariadne said. “I can’t say I’ve met a lot of fanatics willing to kill themselves rather than be caught.”

  “That’s a shame,” I said without any remorse at all. “We’ve got bigger problems, though.”

  “Agreed,” Ariadne said. “This war between us and Omega – scratch that, this war that Omega has completely blindsided us with – is disastrous. We finally score a single victory and it’s snatched out of our hands hours later.”

  “I’m sure Andromeda would feel poorly about the fact that you’re losing this war that she knew nothing about,” I said icily, “you know, if she hadn’t just gotten killed while not even being a part of it. But by bigger problem, I meant something else.” I clenched my jaw. “She said something just before she died – that we had a traitor in the Directorate.”

  “Are you kidding?” Ariadne asked, her calm demeanor unraveling slightly. She blinked several times in rapid succession, shook her head, then looked to Old Man Winter, who stood still as ever. “How…who?”

  “She didn’t say,” I replied. “But she had some strange abilities, and one of them was to…I don’t know, see beyond…somehow. She knew things she shouldn’t have known, and it wouldn’t surprise me if she figured this one out. It was almost like she knew she was going to die before it happened.”

  “Did she tell you anything else?” Old Man Winter asked. “Anything at all?”

  “She told us quite a bit – and we learned quite a bit about Omega even before this,” I said wryly. “Would you like to know who Omega is?” I saw Ariadne lean forward, curiosity consuming her. Old Man Winter was as implacable as ever as I stared back at him. “Or do you already know?”

  “I know,” he said, his words thickly accented. “I knew them when they ran the old world, when the sun did not rise or set without sacrifices being made in their names. I knew them when the influence they exerted over the world of men began to diminish. I knew them when they began putting themselves atop governments and parliaments, passing for humans while working the levers of power to their own benefit. I have seen them in the palaces of the old world and the penthouses of the new, and I know every one of their names, living and dead, because I knew them before their rise and after their fall.”

  “I’m sorry, what?” Ariadne asked, looking at her boss with barely disguised incredulity. “Who is Omega?”

  “They’re the old gods,” I said, smirking, causing Ariadne to whipsaw back around to me. “The Greek ones, the Asian, Arabic, Norwegian and so on – the ones that ruled the world in ancient times, in myth and legend. It sounds like they miss the good old days.” I kept focused on Old Man Winter, who nodded subtly. “So do you know what they’re after?”

  “Hard to say,” he replied, back to unexpressive. “The natural instinct would be to suggest they would like a return to the world of old, the one they ruled. Such a thing seems improbable, though, given the proliferation of technologies that both make their lives easier and also allow humans to kill them with a simplicity that was not to be found in the days when they held dominion over the affairs of men. They faded to the background for good reason, you know.”

  “So you don’t know what they want, either,” I said, mildly disappointed, “other than money and power.”

  “All men want money and power,” Old Man Winter said. “The only difference is scale of ambition and the means they are willing to use to acquire them.”

  “Well that sounds fun,” Ariadne said, interjecting herself back into the conversation. “But if they’re the old gods, why are they attacking us? What does killing our agents and metas get them?”

  “Access to money or power, I’d guess.” I said it, but Old Man Winter nodded along with me. “They’re playing a long game, especially if they’ve been alive for thousands of years. The moves they’re making don’t seem to make any sense by the reasonable standards I’d set, but they’re doing something – they’re after something – to make their objective reachable. The problem is we don’t know their objective, and so their means are completely incomprehensible.” I shrugged. “Like an episode of Lost.”

  “Cute,” Ariadne said. “But that doesn’t put us any closer to why they wrecked western Kansas trying to kill off our strongest metas, or why they triggered a major operation that killed dozens of our agents.�
� She paused in thought, face pensive. “What kind of powers did Andromeda exhibit? The ability to…read minds?”

  “Not minds,” I said. “Not quite. More like the ability to see things that were going to happen, to know things about people and events. She said she knew everything about Omega and was going to tell us. Then she seemed to know she was going to die. But another time, it was like she could see through a wall and knew what kind of car Zack and Kurt were driving.”

  “That was freaky,” Hannegan said from behind me. “But it might not have been her seeing through walls. If she was a telepath, she could have read our minds to know what we were driving.”

  “Not a bad point,” Ariadne said with a nod of the head after I failed to answer. “Any other powers?”

  “She could touch my skin without being drained,” I said. “And when she did touch me, it was like my pain subsided. What kind of a meta can do all that?” I looked to Old Man Winter.

  He cleared his throat, and slowly, ponderously slowly, began to answer. “Only one kind can touch an incubus or succubus without being drained – but I assure you she was not one of…those.” There was a glassiness in his gaze as he said it. “She could be some hybrid of powers given her by her parents, as has been known to occur from time to time – something new.”

  “Would Dr. Sessions know?” I asked.

  “Unlikely,” Old Man Winter said. “His study is limited to the things he can quantify.”

  Something broke loose in my mind as I put together something Perugini said earlier with Old Man Winter’s words. “You’re having him perform an autopsy…experiments…on Andromeda.” I said it sadly, stifling the sense of outrage I felt over the violation of her body.

  “An autopsy.” Ariadne gave me a pat on the shoulder. “No real experiments, just…taking tissue samples, very close to what a coroner would do anyway.”

  “I see.” The only reason I didn’t lash out at them about it is because I could see the canniness in it, and in Ariadne’s response. It caused me to burn a little, under the skin, metaphorically, but that was because I disliked the idea of her being…meddled with, as though it would affect her peace in death. For all I knew, she wasn’t at all peaceful in death.

  And even sadder for her…I realized at that moment that I was probably the only one in the entire world who actually cared that she was dead.

  “What’s the next move?” I tried to guide my brain onto a new track, away from that grim thought, before it favored me with the inevitable comparison between me and Andromeda – because I’d been where she was, without anyone to care whether I lived or died.

  “We’re at war,” Ariadne said. “We have all our agents on recall, every single campus is at a heightened state of alert. All six Directorate campuses have reported similar incidents, with human agents being drawn out on missions and slaughtered. We’ve lost something like seventy-five percent of our human resources in the course of the last few days, along with a few metas.”

  I started to ask something, to mention my amazement at the scope of that number and what it meant, but stopped when the doors slid open behind Old Man Winter and someone walked into the medical unit. I could feel the drugs affecting my system, because I actually smiled when I saw who it was. I might have smiled anyway, if I knew no one else was around, but in this case I did it in spite of that. “What’s up, Doc?”

  “Been watching those Looney Tunes DVDs I lent you?” The wide smile that greeted me in return was good enough to give me a warm, fuzzy feeling. Dr. Quinton Zollers made his way across the medical unit to my other bedside, after greeting Ariadne and Old Man Winter with a perfunctory nod. “I had a feeling you’d have an appreciation for Wile E. Coyote, after all you’ve been through.” He looked down at me, and his mocha skin crinkled around the eyes. “Maybe even more, now.”

  “Yeah, I don’t remember the bullets in those cartoons doing quite this kind of damage,” I said, pointing toward my afflicted arm. “I expected some general scorching all about my body, but this? Ouch.”

  “Thought I’d check on you,” Zollers said. “Heard you ran into your mom.”

  “I did,” I said. “And as much as I’d loooove to talk about it…” I wouldn’t, but I’d be willing to with Zollers more than anyone else. “…we were just discussing the war.”

  Zollers frowned, his dark face made darker still by his expression. “We’ve lost a lot of good people in the last few days.”

  “More to come if we’re not careful,” Ariadne said. “And if it’s really true we have a traitor in our midst—”

  “Traitor?” Zollers asked, scrunching his face. “Where’d this come from?”

  “Andromeda,” I said, and met his gaze; I could see the concern in him. “She told me before she got killed by those Omega gunmen.”

  “I see,” Zollers said. “Well, that’s a kink in our garden hose.”

  “To put it mildly,” Old Man Winter said. “If true, I want this traitor ferreted out.”

  “How do you propose to do that?” Ariadne said. “I mean, we have a staff of hundreds just at this campus, assuming here was where Andromeda meant, and assuming she knew what she was talking about.”

  “You can narrow that down,” I said. “These guys, this attack, it wasn’t random. We were on US Highway 8, taking the long way home to try and avoid getting hit – you can’t tell me they sent a helicopter along every major route to the cities. Someone knew where we were, knew we were coming, and it’s because they either managed to figure out how to trace our cell phones or because someone gave them our route.”

  Ariadne exchanged a look with Old Man Winter. “Only a dozen, maybe a few more knew that you were on your way back. But there aren’t that many likely routes back to the Directorate. Interstate 94 may be the most likely, but Highway 8 is not that far out of the question. They may have scanned 94 and then gone to the alternate as soon as they realized you weren’t there.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. “The timing is all wrong. They hit us at an isolated point in the road, one of the last few. They hit us with an RPG, which required some effort to set up the shot, and—”

  “They caught us at the worst possible moment,” Kurt said, interrupting and drawing the attention back to him. “There’s no way they caught us by pure accident. They knew. They knew we were on that road, at that time.”

  “They could have traced our cellphones, though,” I said. “It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened even on this trip.”

  “Did you have your cellphone on you?” Kurt looked at me, expectant.

  “No; it got destroyed…in the last car that blew up when they fired a rocket at it,” I said sheepishly.

  “Remind me not to go for a Sunday drive with you,” Zollers said.

  “So, I didn’t have mine,” I said. “The question is, did Scott have his? Did Zack?”

  “Zack did,” Ariadne said. “It’s how we tracked you down to send in M-Squad. He had the line open to us.”

  “And I had him,” I said. “Good thing we didn’t leave him behind.”

  “Yeah,” Kurt said, dark clouds brewing upon his face, “unlike some poor bastards I know.”

  “They kept on us when we were out there, too,” I pointed out. “They followed us relentlessly. Scott and I assumed they had a thermal imaging device of some sort, tracking our body heat, but they may have just been tracking Zack’s cell phone.”

  “That’s not easy to do,” Ariadne said. “It’d take a hell of an expert to track the GPS in a phone. And you’d have to know what phone you’re looking for, first.”

  “Which is where your traitor would come in,” Zollers said. “If they knew who was on the mission, they could pass along the cell number and allow Omega to track them down. Further, this is hardly the sort of deeply traitorous stuff that you’d expect. It could have been done by someone unintentionally.”

  “How do you inadvertently give away the cell phone numbers of agents in a manner that gets them killed?” Kurt asked. />
  “Simple enough,” Zollers said. “My work cell phone, for instance, contains the numbers for almost every agent in the Directorate’s Minneapolis campus. All it would take is for my cell phone to be viewed by another party for them to have all the numbers for every single person who’s been hunted and killed in the last few days. The person whose phone was viewed wouldn’t even necessarily have to know about it – perhaps they simply…” He hesitated. “…were deceived. They might have…slept with someone, stepped into the shower and allowed them access to their cell phone…”

  I felt scarlet creep up my cheeks, hot embarrassment at Zollers’ words, at the suggestion. All it took to get people killed was the numbers of every agent they wanted tracked down, pilfered from a Directorate Operative’s cell phone by someone from Omega, unsupervised. Someone like James Fries.

  “We could search through everyone,” Ariadne said, “for months, and still come up dry. This is…so much data. So many people. How do you even start?”

  “You don’t need to start,” I said, feeling the dark cloud settling in over me. “It was me. I left my cell phone in my hotel room last night with an Omega operative,” I said, “while I was on the conference call with you, Ariadne. I didn’t know he was Omega at the time, and I didn’t know what would happen, but it was me…I left it in there with him for at least a half-hour.” I shook my head, and pummeled myself inside for my supreme stupidity. “It was me.”

  Chapter 6

  The room seemed to freeze around me, the life drained out of it like air all exhaled in one great breath. I didn’t want to look up at any of them, but when I did, I saw Ariadne staring at me in numbest shock, her mouth open and trying to move, caught comically agape. Zollers cleared his throat and looked away, which was, I think, the worst reaction of them all. I heard Kurt snort on the bed behind Zollers, but I didn’t much care about him.

  “What…” Ariadne stumbled over her attempt to speak, then recovered, her face going through several changes of expression. “What were you…” Her eyes rolled back, like she was trying to recall something, and I saw her white-knuckle the railing of my bed, before she finally managed a full sentence. “What…was he doing there?”