Greenflies

by Darling, Andrew Leete

  “Hello, Greenbeard,” said Butler, moving to the side of the table so that Greenbeard’s neck was not at quite such an unnatural angle. “The techs here tell me you are doing an amazing job. They’ve been making incredible headway in their communication studies. Now they just need some of the… animals… to experiment with.”

  “Soon, I do not think that will be a problem,” replied Greenbeard.

  Butler rubbed the back of his neck, a gesture Greenbeard had learned was a portent of bad news. Body language was complex for humans, but some of them had more obvious vocabulary than others.

  “That’s what I’m here to speak with you about. The leadership feels that, with only a week before the Window is expected to return, that you should be taken back to isolation. They have security concerns. I’ve told them there’s no need, and your supervisor here spoke a great deal on your behalf, but they were adamant. This will be your last day here in the lab.”

  Greenbeard ceased to instruct the table in how to be an alien transport, and he turned to face Butler fully. Butler was reminded of the many times early in the interview process when Greenbeard had slammed against the glass. There was no glass now, and even with dull claws, it would be a simple matter for Greenbeard to rip him in half. He had to reassure himself that those mock attacks had not been heartfelt threats but just a cry for attention.

  “I expect full salary,” said Greenbeard.

  “I…uh… don’t think that will be a problem.”

  “And hazard pay.”

  “Who the devil told you about hazard pay?” asked Butler.

  “Marshal,” said Greenbeard. “In one of our talks about Greenfly attack methods, I asked him about the economy of the soldier class of your species. He told me that soldiers and civilians stationed at bases in combat zones receive hazard pay. The personnel at this base are receiving hazard pay. Therefore, I require hazard pay.”

  “I’ll arrange for it,” replied Butler.

  With that, Greenbeard ceased his work with the table and dropped to all six limbs. He moved to his personal exit in what could only be called a scuttle, and the door opened for him automatically. It actually led into an airlock which would transfer him to a small glass-walled cell not far away. It was similar to his original cell, but it had a few minor furnishings. There were a few pillows strewn about, and a flat panel plasma television was mounted on one wall. It had been modified to receive Greenbeard’s flashes as a remote control, and there was a strobe below it that translated the spoken word to the language he could understand. Greenbeard would be perfectly content to remain a couch potato through the next cycle of incursions. While half his pay was in the form of a blood credit, just as with the Whaleship, the other half was in US dollars. He had already put together a substantial collection of nature videos, although an attendant in a neighboring room had to actually set them to play for him.

  Not far away, several of the civilian contractors were showing Dr. Barnard the new bioreactors dedicated to the continuous production of the alien fuel. The early applications of the fuel had been limited by its short supply, and it was a very time-consuming material to synthesize at the time. Fortunately, though, the fuel was organic, and its corresponding catalyst was a protein. Where the physicists and engineers had failed, the biotechnologists of the pharmaceutical industry were able to carry the day. They had long experience in coaxing bacterial cultures to produce similar substances through energy inefficient reactions. The alien fuel and its catalyst were actually fairly simple compared to past drug production runs. Once Big Pharma had been brought in on the project, large scale fermentors were online within a month.

  It was one such fermentor that Dr. Barnard was being shown. The civilian engineers were leading him around the 10,000 liter spherical tank, telling him about the batch turnover rates and several aspects of the production. That tank was filled with sufficient E. Coli to sicken every man, woman, and child in North America, but the microbes were instead dedicated to produce the alien fuel. There were twenty such fermentors in this part of Utah Base, and there were an equal number of catalyst reactors several hundred yards away. A leak in a set of the prototype systems had taught them to produce catalyst well away from its fuel.

  Caufield looked on at the old man from a catwalk above. She had arrived a minute ago with Rice at her side. Rarely could she be seen these days without at least one member of Gamma Team around her. She thought to herself how the war had changed the old CIA scientist she saw below her. He was far more filled with life these days than she could ever remember him, and the two had met more than a decade before. Apparently, he needed an intellectual challenge and responsibility to thrive, neither of which he had had in sufficient quantities since the end of the Cold War. He was still a small and rumpled old man, but he now exuded an authority and enthusiasm that matched his experience.

  “Donald,” she called from the catwalk, “May I speak to you for a moment?”

  “Of course, Maria,” he called back.

  He then made his excuses to the engineers and made his way to one of the stairways. Caufield met him at the bottom, to spare the old man the effort of climbing the steps. Upon seeing her close up, Barnard’s expression became more dour. He could sense that there was something troubling Caufield but no idea what the bad news could be. These days, there were so many balls up in the air at any one time, any could come crashing down with a moment’s notice.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I’ve managed to get access to the training facility in Virginia. It’s the same one our team used, but Lassiter has been expanding it steadily. Officially, it’s now being used as a secondary research facility for back-engineered technology, but I’ve been looking over its personnel files. Nearly everyone there was, in some way, responsible for the training or medical care of Marshal and his men.”

  “You think he’s preparing to create a new generation of Gammas,” said Barnard.

  “I am sure of it. Since the Tokyo incident, the general has been zealously pursuing the files and personnel associated with the original program. When Beta team didn’t come back and most of Gamma did, he must have reached the conclusion that unaltered soldiers are not up to the challenge.”

  “Or he wanted soldiers of his own that would do absolutely anything to get the job done,” said Barnard, “regardless of what the job might be.”

  The official story had been that most of Beta team had been eliminated by the teleportation mines, but Farcus had managed to get to the alien embarkation point and launch a suicide mission. A half-dozen people knew or suspected that all of Beta had, in one way or another, been murdered. Barnard was one of the people who knew for certain. Lassiter was one who suspected.

  “I’m going to the facility. In case I don’t return, I’m entrusting the stewardship of Gamma Team to you. You’ll find everything you need to operate as their handler in the safe in my office,” she said, handing him a small slip of paper, “Please burn that, of course.”

  “Maria, if he’s allowing you to visit the installation…”

  “We’re all old hands at this sort of thing,” interrupted Caufield. “More so than battling aliens with lasers and hovercraft. I’ve made all the arrangements necessary to see that the project is completely flushed into the light of day should anything happen to me. No less than two senators and three representatives hold the proper files now, and each of them has a Sword of Damocles from Claude’s old files hanging over them. And I’m not going alone.”

  Barnard glanced over to Rice, silently looking around for any security risks. He leaned forward to whisper in her ear, an act she had to cooperate with given Barnard’s diminutive size.

  “Maria, if he has reactivated the program, you won’t be able to trust the existing Gammas. He need only offer them an increased dose to kill you themselves,” whispered Barnard. “Your hold over them was always dependent upon you being the sole source of their narcotics.”

  “I know, Donald. I’m bringing Hu. He knows th
e program.”

  Barnard held up the little slip of paper with the safe combination. “And this?”

  “Redundancy,” she replied. “And who else could I trust with them?”

  “I’ll see to it they’re taken care of, even if they’re removed from service. They’ll never want,” said Barnard. “You must see to it that you come back. They are not the only ones who need you. The Window will be open in a week, and we have no idea what creatures have been brewing in those great incubators of theirs. They are not simple-minded creatures, these Greenflies, despite the lack of true tool use. They have had as much time to develop new plans as we have, and thousands of subjective years experience in dealing with problem species like us. A week after the Window opens, the laser attack. There will be a counter-attack, and Tokyo shows that they’re willing to attack our cities. There are forty-seven interception teams now that need your help.”

  Maria just smiled. Her next words were to Rice.

  “Captain Rice, you are now responsible for Dr. Barnard’s safety until he or I tells you differently. He is your new handler until further notice.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Rice replied.

  Barnard had not heard about his promotion, but there were the new rank insignia on his BDUs. It made sense. With Klugman’s death, it made more sense to disburse the Gammas into five separate teams as commanders than to try to place one normal with a team full of Gammas. He pitied whatever new team drew Colonel Marshal as their new commander.

  “I’ll be back, Donald.”

  She touched his shoulder, just for a moment, then left for the runway. Like her predecessor, Maria Caufield had a tendency to be wrong about some very important things.

  The war room was no longer alone in the world. Half of the people in it were now there to liaise with other similar deployment centers around the planet. Twenty separate interception programs were networked, from Russian Migs to African infantry. The neutrino detection system had been further improved. The process of communicating data from a dozen water tanks across the globe had been expedited to provide triangulation of arriving alien craft in seconds. Even during the downtime when the Window was closed, a few teleportations were observed in high Earth orbit every day. The rate was fairly constant. It was considered to be surveillance, teleportation into space being far safer than teleportation to the planet’s surface.

  The flight officer was overseeing ten interception planes executing training patrols across North and South America, a low stress operation but one that could still have casualties depending on the skill of the trainees. A number of laser satellite test firings were also scheduled for the day. The map on the center screen was alive with similar preparation missions all across Earth. It was difficult to believe that this was a quiet day, the map being more animated than at the peak of the interception program of the previous incursion cycle. The prevailing feeling in this room was that humanity was prepared.

  Except for the occasional satellite malfunction. A small triangular section of the map went blank over the northern Pacific. It was no larger than the state of Ohio, but it was a fairly obvious deficit.

  “SATCOM, we have loss of data from a satellite over the international date line at fifty degrees north,” said Flight. “What is the nature of the malfunction? Over.”

  The satellites were monitored by specialists in the Air Force, based in Colorado. There was a brief pause before reply.

  “Flight, we confirm loss of data. Switching to backup satellite coverage over that grid, over.” came the staticky reply.

  The edges of the Ohio-sized triangle began to close in visibly as satellites rotated and adjusted their trajectories to make up for the silence of their brother. The defect was corrected quickly. Satellite malfunctions were part of the standard day, as the pieces of equipment trying to communicate were constructed by several nations over forty years.

  “Was the bird hot? Over,” asked Flight. He was asking if the lost satellite was one of the new laser-equipped generations of spy satellite.

  “Negative, Flight. It was an old Soviet can. Over.”

  “Roger that,” said Flight, dismissing the issue. “Tower, why is Omega still sitting there on the runway? They should be over Alaska by now.”

  Operations proceeded as normal, distributed across a planet. The problem with distributed systems struck them that day. Because there was no single entity receiving all of the information, there was no one to realize one of the deep space neutrino detections occurred thirty seconds before the satellite failed. Even had someone made the connection, they could not have realized this was a Greenfly experiment in satellite interception. Nor could they have known the reason for the selection of this particular satellite. The Cyrillic letters “KGB” were painted upon its side.

  Chapter 22: Turncoat

  The facility had changed since the last time Caufield had overflown it. Gone was the forested perimeter which had hidden rope training courses and a hidden motion detector security system. The trees had been clear cut, and in their place were metal-walled warehouses and Quonset buildings.

  The look of the facility was terrifyingly similar to the training complex at Utah Base. This formerly small compound had inspired that facility, and apparently, turnabout was fair play. Captain Hu, in the pilot seat, leaned over to his boss and pointed out specific aspects of the base.

  “You can tell that one’s a barracks from the air conditioners that look like they’re stapled onto the side of the Quonset!” he shouted over the helicopter noise. “It’s a very standard configuration. I’ve seen it dozens of times at rapid-deploy bases. Each one of those things can house over a hundred people.”

  And there are three of them, thought Caufield to herself. She could not even comfort herself with the thought that they might be intended for other types of personnel. The civilian staff buildings had been expanded as well, indicating that they were not the inhabitants of the Quonset barracks.

  The specific buildings for training the Gamma Team soldiers had been duplicated right down to the architecture. There were now two enclosed gun ranges, when a single one had been more than sufficient for the previous team and was just about enough for all of Utah Base. There were similar duplications of the gym and the jump training facility. There were also three long warehouses, easily the size of football fields. One of those could have been an enclosed facility for practicing with the new high-speed hovercraft, but she had no idea as to the other two. Their size was quite large, even by the scale she had grown used to at Utah Base. The biggest addition was the runway, complete with a pair of hangars big enough to house a bomber. She had not heard of any of the scant supply of B-1s being redirected here, but she would not put it past Lassiter.

  “Not much life down there,” said Hu.

  “If he just started training them in the past few months, they’ll still be in their hospital beds most of the time,” said Caufield. “The process takes time, according to the old files. It will be another three months before they’re up to the previous troops’ level of competence.”

  “That’s still fast,” replied Hu.

  “Yes, it is.”

  The Huey swooped down, under a local control tower’s orders to land on a helipad beside the main runway. There were a pair of people waiting to greet them there, and Caufield was astonished to see that Lassiter was one of them. She had expected him to appear triumphant or smug, but his face was blank or perhaps slightly hostile. He stood nonreactive as the helicopter wound down and Caufield and Hu exited the craft. The tension built as they walked towards the General, as if Caufield and Lassiter were two magnetic north poles trying to come together.

  “Maria.”

  “General.”

  The general’s adjutant and Caufield’s pilot were completely invisible.

  “We both know why you’re here,” said Lassiter, “You’ve come to verify with your own eyes that I’ve reinstated the recruitment of augmented soldiers. No doubt, you’ve come armed with threats of telling Co
ngress, the Administration, and the general public about what’s going on here.”

  Caufield nodded tacitly.

  “Then let’s make sure you know exactly what to tell them.”

  Lassiter indicated that Caufield and Hu should follow, and he began to lead them towards the heart of the new facility. It was not as empty as it had appeared from the air, but all of the personnel about were either civilians or security personnel. There were no soldiers training, and many of the newer training buildings appeared in incomplete stages of construction. Caufield’s hopes began to rise that she might not be too late.

  The General and his nameless assistant led the pair to one of the Quonset barracks. The main entrance was handprint-secured, and the attention of the automated cameras here led Caufield to believe there was a sophisticated feature recognition system in place throughout the camp as well. There was little chance of a covert strike being successful here, an idea she had already toyed with. The security alone was not enough reason for her to refrain from sending in Gamma to destroy this operation. If they perceived a source of narcotics other than Caufield, her hold over them would vanish in an instant. Lassiter might keep them doped to the gills and harmless just out of spite, and they would be happy to cooperate.

  Inside the Quonset hut, the main chamber was divided into two parts, an entryway with some basic maintenance and medical equipment and the barracks themselves. From the entryway, Caufield and Hu were led up a metal stairway to a catwalk which hung over the barracks proper. What they saw there made their blood run cold.

  It was not a barracks so much as a recovery area. The beds were lined up with just enough room between them for nurses and other medical personnel to maneuver between them. The medical readouts for each patient were integrated right into the foot of the bed, as were the source bottles for several IVs. Caufield could see a familiar yellow shade in one of those bottles. Most of the patients were unconscious or lethargic. A few of them were restrained, a common procedure for Gamma soldiers who were being allowed to experience withdrawal. Without a taste of withdrawal, the hold of the addiction was very weak. Once a few cycles of withdrawal and reintroduction to the drugs had been administered to a soldier, nothing else mattered.