The Chiral Protocol – A Military Science Fiction Thriller: Biogenesis War Book 2 (The Biogenesis War)

by L. L. Richman

  Addy’s gaze swept those assembled, a tired smile playing about her face.

  “I thought you might want to hear something positive for a change,” she told them. “I’ve been working with a team to cultivate an antigen for the yacht’s hantavirus victims using Sam’s notes. I just got word. We did it! It’s on its way to the Atliekan Queen now.”

  Gabe stepped toward the tank. “Does that mean that we can declare that part of the situation resolved, then?” he asked.

  Addy’s smile wavered as she shook her head. “I wish I could tell you otherwise, but we won’t be able to do that until we know for sure the Akkadians on that base haven’t figured out how to manipulate the virus through its chirally entangled partner.”

  Her last words had Micah freezing, his hand on the door frame.

  “What are you saying, doc?” he asked.

  Addy’s gaze met his. “Just what I’ve said before—no one who’s been exposed to that fourth vial is safe until the third vial’s contents are back in our hands.”

  MISSION PREP

  Task Force Blue HQ

  Humbolt Base, Ceriba

  Before joining Gabe with Sasha and the rest of the Hawking team, Micah stopped in to see how Sam’s rescue mission was progressing. He found the team—along with SRU Teams One through Four—in one of the VR suites set aside for combat mission prep and dry runs.

  The room was more crowded than Micah had seen in a long while, with a dozen warriors joining Thad, Boone, and Asha on the VR course. He spied Jonathan leaning against the far wall; his twin’s eyes were slitted in concentration as he watched the teams’ progress.

  Micah moved to join him, his own eyes roaming over the newly configured room.

  The space was covered with ActiveFiber, the same material that clad Wraith’s interior. The walls, the thick mat underfoot, even the room’s ceiling were coated centimeters thick with the malleable material. Just as Wraith’s interior walls could be reconfigured with a simple mental command, so too could this area.

  Harper had found recordings of the abandoned base that was their destination buried in an after-action report that had been declassified by An-Yang a few years earlier. The report was dated more than ten years back, when a team of operatives from Shang’s Controlled Substances Enforcement Agency had gone in to shut down the illegal drug operation.

  The VR room’s ActiveFiber material had been programmed to match the base’s rough dimensions, and as Micah looked on, he could see warriors climb shafts, creep down hallways, rappel from cavernous hangars, and slide past various obstacles, engaging enemies that only they could see.

  It was eerily silent. The fifteen people working the virtual Hogan’s Alley were all clad in special haptic response suits and were communicating strictly over their combat net.

  As he watched, one of them staggered as his suit’s haptic inputs responded to invisible blows dealt by an adversary. In another corner, three soldiers’ helmeted heads snapped around in reaction to the approach of enemy forces neither Micah nor Jonathan could see.

  Micah cocked his head, considering that last thought.

  Are you jacked in with the sim? he asked his twin as he came to rest beside him, unconsciously mimicking his other self’s stance.

  For answer, a link appeared on his overlay.

  When he tapped the flashing icon, he was allowed to join as an observer, the feed being sent to them from the VR simulation emulating the one the teams would send to his twin on Wraith.

  The feed compiled multiple different points of view from various operators, prioritizing them by their hierarchy on the team, as well as who was sending what over the wire. Beneath it all was laid the virtual 3D rendition of the abandoned asteroid.

  Micah knew it was likely that things had changed there in the intervening years, but it was better than nothing. The base’s bones would remain the same regardless.

  It was good enough; it had to be, for Sam’s sake.

  As he watched, one of the SRU teams came under heavy fire from fictional Akkadian soldiers who were holed up behind a barricade hastily erected from rugged durasteel alloy shipping containers in the vast cargo bay. His eyes moved to another feed when he saw SRU Team Three breach a lab where another set of equally fictional Akkadians held a group of scientists hostage.

  His gut clenched at the possibility that this scenario was all too possible a reality.

  Don’t you have a mission planning session of your own to attend? His twin’s words slid into his brain, a mental murmur.

  Yeah, but....

  Jonathan jostled his elbow. Don’t be getting any ideas and going team guy on me now.

  Micah coughed, knowing Jonathan’s words were an attempt to rouse him from his worry over Sam. Don’t think there’s any danger in that happening. I just have the right genes for this, is all.

  He stayed another few minutes, watching the figures move around the cushioned mats, and then turned to Jonathan.

  Bring her home.

  His twin’s eyes shifted from the virtual course to meet Micah’s. He nodded. Always. Be careful, bro.

  Micah kicked up one corner of his mouth. Always, he parroted back.

  With one last look at the simulation in progress, he pushed away from the wall and slipped out of the room to find Gabe.

  The NCIC agent and Foxtrot’s team lead had opted to delay a sim run-through until they arrived on Hawking, so Micah found himself seated across from Gabe over a briefing table. Spread out in front of them was a flat 2D projection of the Merki Institute.

  The woman seated beside Gabe speared Micah with gray eyes. “Let’s run this one more time. You enter here.” She pointed. “Two Geminate Protection Detail MPs will be waiting. Once you clear them, you’ll be greeted by two Coalition Protective Services people at the secondary security station. They will walk you through the ballroom.”

  The display changed to another 2D representation, the city block surrounding the institute. With a wave of her hand, Sasha turned the flat image spread across the table into a 3D holo that rose above it.

  “Kai, Emma. You will be stationed here, and here,” she instructed the two snipers. She shot Gabe a quick glance. “Alvarez and I will take positions here, and here.”

  She gestured, and another two icons lit on the holo, flashing to identify their respective positions.

  “Connor, Franks, Noland. You three are in full drakeskin. You have the perimeter. We rotate, four hours on, four off.”

  Heads nodded all around.

  She swiveled once more, and her eyes caught Micah’s. “We’ll sweep the building the night we arrive, and then again the next morning. Hopefully these jackasses will be kind to us and do something stupid.”

  There were grunts and a few Oo-rahs, but then one of them said what was on everyone’s mind.

  “Hope is not a plan.”

  Sasha nodded at that. “And that’s why, when we arrive, we’re doing this all over again, only with our local assets. Alvarez?” Stepping back, she ceded him the floor.

  Gabe took over, using quick, concise terms to update those present on the people who would be waiting for them on the Hawking end.

  Sasha’s eyes flickered up, a tell Micah was sure she did on purpose to let everyone know she was checking her chrono.

  “Okay, everyone, sack time. We leave at 0600 tomorrow.” She glanced at the one person at their table who had yet to speak.

  Johnson, who piloted the DAP Helios that would courier them over, gave her a slow nod. “We’ll be ready, ma’am.”

  Sasha slapped her palms against the table, pushed back, and stood. “That’s it, then. Dismissed, people.”

  NIMITZ BASE

  Nimitz Base

  Portsmouth

  Hawking Habitat

  Scimitar crossed the threshold of the open hangar in full stealth. As silent as its namesake, the sleek vessel slipped from the black into the cavernous, nearly empty space like a shark slicing through the sea.

  It was weird for Micah t
o be a passenger on a Helios instead of its pilot. Although there was little likelihood that they’d need a flight engineer for this run, he’d taken the crew chief’s cradle and webbed in.

  The overlay readout that appeared as he jacked into the ship was oddly incomplete, and it took him a moment to realize why; the portions of the SyntheticVision feed that were blank were the pilot’s readouts.

  Johnson brought the ship to a stop using ship’s thrusters to nudge the Helios onto a cradle set off to one side of the bay. As the doors closed behind them, he powered down, turning to face Micah and the rest of his passengers.

  “I’ll be here when you’re ready to leave,” he told them, and then gave Micah a pilot-to-pilot nod. “If you need any space cover, you let me know.”

  Sasha, Foxtrot team’s lead, motioned him over to where she stood beside the weapons’ locker with the team. They were in the midst of a gear check, the loadout for the team varying as widely as each member’s individual skillset. Sasha had two tactical vests in her hand, and Gabe was checking the action on a projectile weapon, Pascal by his side.

  The former special agent looked up as Micah came to a stop beside him.

  “You ready for this?” Gabe asked, and Micah gave him a brief nod.

  “Here,” Sasha said, handing him two tactical vests. “Large one’s for you; smaller one’s for him,” she lifted her chin in the direction of the large hunting cat, who rose to sniff the drakeskin-clad vest.

  {Why need this?} he asked, batting at it with a massive paw.

  Sasha rolled her eyes and muttered, “Stars and flares, whose idea was it to give a working cat an E-V wire?”

  Pascal turned baleful green eyes on her. {Heard that.}

  She scowled down at him. “I know.”

  The big cat turned to Micah. {Why?} he repeated.

  He knelt to feed Pascal’s legs through the vest’s arm holes. “It’ll protect vital organs from a direct hit. I hear it still smarts like hell if you’re hit with a projectile, but the synthsilk in the vest will diffuse the strike and keep it from being fatal.”

  The cat was silent, digesting this in whatever way a large predator like him would, while Micah sealed the vest along his spine.

  Gabe handed him a small disk, and he held it up to show Pascal.

  “This,” he told the cat, “will make you invisible. You understand what that means?”

  {Am a cat, not an idiot.}

  Micah’s lips twitched as he bent once more to affix the disk to the back of the vest. “Sorry, dude. No offense intended.”

  The disk had been Will’s idea. Hyer had helped him cobble the tech together from a commonly used nano package, and then tied it into Pascal’s E-V wire.

  Basic light-bending nano was commonly used throughout the settled worlds. Corporations often used the tech to protect their intellectual property from theft because it was impossible to defeat unless one had access to military-grade countertech.

  The tech was never intended to render the user invisible. It used refraction to bend incident light waves, blurring or warping an image and making it impossible to distinguish anything within its shroud.

  Pascal’s comm implant was simple; it didn’t thread throughout his body like the nanofloss filaments of a SmartCarbyne lattice, it was restricted to a few delicate fibers inserted into the cat’s brain. It did allow the capture of neural data, though. That data could then be sent to the disk, which in turn controlled a swarm of light-bending nano.

  As Pascal’s neurons fired, sending messages to his limbs, the implant’s feed allowed the device in Micah’s hand to predict which way the big cat was going to move and where he would place his limbs. It would then direct a magnetically controlled colloid cloud of light-bending chaff to cloak Pascal’s movements.

  It wasn’t perfect. In strong light, a wave-like ripple outlined his form whenever he moved, giving away the cat’s location. In the subtle lighting of a darkened ballroom, however, Pascal would blend into the shadows without issue.

  {So I disappear like humans on mission?} the cat asked. {Not very useful for hunting game. Prey uses scent more than eyesight.}

  His apparent disgust elicited a surprised laugh from Sasha.

  “Cat’s got a point. Too bad what your hunting in there has no scent.”

  Micah shot her a wry smile as he grabbed his own vest and shrugged into it. “Yeah, but he knows the type of cylinder they’ll most likely use to aerosolize it. That’s better than nothing.”

  Since she hadn’t been read into the chiral aspect of the mission, Micah couldn’t tell her the real reason only he, Pascal, and Sneaky Pete would be allowed entrance to the venue.

  Like Thad, he had his own worries about including the ferret in the mission, but Valenti had sided with Addy on that, overruling the Marine.

  Micah’s answer must have sufficed, for Sasha just shook her head and bent to rummage around in the weapons locker once more.

  Micah looked up as a small holoscreen on the bulkhead beside the locker chimed an alert. The screen then projected the ship’s external feed.

  Micah could tell by looking that the hangar’s ES field had dropped, and its atmosphere had been restored. Three people who had been awaiting their arrival were now on approach.

  Sasha looked from the feed to Micah. “How many years ago was it that you and Zander worked together?” she asked with a head tilt to indicate the screen.

  Micah glanced at the image of the tall, dark-haired man closing on Scimitar’s aft hatch. “Must have been about four, maybe five years, now, I think. Rafe captained this ship for a good ten years before Johnson took over. I was with him for seven.”

  Sasha grunted. “Kickass pilot,” she remarked. “I remember when he left Shadow Recon. You folks lost a good man.”

  He nodded. “I’ll bet the Nimitz CO was pretty pleased when he accepted the promotion to command the base’s wing, though.”

  He looked away from the feed and down at the tac-vest and drakeskin suit he wore, mouth twisting into a wry smile. “I remember dropping your team to a few places, back when I was his copilot.” He shook his head. “Never thought I’d be doing things from your end.”

  “About that,” Sasha turned to face him. “I know I said it in the briefing, but I’ll say it again. I get that you and the cat here are immune to whatever bioweapon the Akkadians have on them, but you’re not immune to this.” She patted the P-SCAR rifle that hung on a three-point sling around the neck of the specialist first-class who was standing beside her.

  Sasha’s eyes drilled into Micah. “No heroics. Identify the bioweapon, neutralize it, and then get the hell out of there and let us do the rest. Capiche?”

  “Capiche, ma’am.”

  Sasha’s stare edged into glare territory, and Micah wondered if he’d overstepped with that last bit. Before he could say anything, she turned back to the weapons locker, where she grabbed a flechette and a spare set of clips.

  “I hear you qualified as Expert on the range,” she said.

  He nodded. “Yes, ma’am. Major Snell requires all Shadow Recon to requalify regularly.”

  “Good.” She handed him the flechette and spare pair of clips.

  He slid it into a holster that rested in the hollow of his lower back, just below the kidney.

  Next, Sasha handed him a small, palm-sized backup CUSP and a spare battery. The CUSP, he tucked into an ankle holster. The battery went into one of the vest’s pockets, alongside the clips.

  A chittering noise broke the silence, and he saw Foxtrot’s leader close her eyes as if in pain.

  Opening them once again, she shot Gabe a displeased look. “I’m with Severance on this. Ferrets have no place on this mission.”

  Gabe merely nodded. “I understand your position. It was the colonel’s call after…certain things were discussed.”

  {This chiral shit’s getting harder to pass off,} Micah warned.

  Gabe sent him a hooded glance. {I know. Just do the best you can.} He paused and scrubbed his
chin with one hand. “I’ve had a talk with Sneaky Pete, impressing upon him the seriousness of this situation. He knows we expect him to be quiet, and he knows what he’s looking for.”

  “Stars and flares, I hope so,” she muttered, shaking her head and stalking back toward the cargo bay doors.

  “Good thing we have one of these for him, too,” Gabe said to Micah, holding up a disk similar to the one Pascal now wore.

  Micah snorted. “Good thing Will added audio chaff to it. Something tells me he doesn’t understand ‘quiet’.”

  Gabe chuckled quietly.

  They both turned when they heard Sasha ask Johnson to lower Scimitar’s aft ramp.

  “Ready for this?” Gabe asked quietly.

  Micah twitched his head in a response that could mean just about anything. He knew the other man wasn’t referring to the mission. In about thirty seconds, he’d be coming face to face with someone who’d flown combat missions with him—with Jonathan—for seven years.

  “You sure you’ll be able to fool him?” Gabe persisted.

  Micah shrugged uncomfortably and ran a hand through his hair. “The two most obvious differences between me and Jonathan are superficial things,” he said with more confidence than he felt. “Okay, so our hair parts differently. I can explain that as a bad haircut. If he notices that I’m now right-handed, I’ll tell him I’ve been practicing working with my non-dominant hand.”

  Gabe nodded, satisfied.

  Micah wished he could settle his own doubts as easily.

  We’ll see how well I can sell it soon enough, he thought, following Gabe down the ramp.

  Rafe reached out a hand as Micah approached. Micah slapped his into the other man’s open palm, and Rafe pulled him close to thump him on the back.

  Releasing him, he muttered, “Crazy-ass ‘Head’ Case, living up to your call sign, I see. What? You think you’re a team guy now, or something?”

  Micah rolled his eyes but ignored the jibe, turning instead to face the others as Rafe and Gabe shook hands.