“But Alkina!”
“We don’t know if that was official or she was off the reservation, but either way, if enough people know about us they will have to accept the accomplished facts. We’ll surface and demand to speak to Markis. As soon as we report to him, we’re safe.” Nguyen raised his eyebrows, soliciting acceptance of his plan. The other three nodded with relief.
“Sounds good, sir.”
“Now I need to question Alkina. Gunnery Sergeant, would you accompany me?”
“Uh, sir…” Major Muzik started, “I’d like to be there when you do.”
Colonel Nguyen’s eyes locked with the bigger man’s, deceptively calm, placid. “Major…did you sleep with Miss Alkina? No, let me rephrase that.” He lifted a finger to point in the direction of the storeroom and his voice hardened. “Did you have sex with that murdering Psycho piece of shit?”
Muzik’s jaw dropped, his reply an incoherent gobble.
Nguyen’s voice was a whip. “That sounds like a yes. Obviously your perspective is compromised, so no, Major, you will not accompany me. You will stay here with Chief Bonnagh until we return. You will not leave this control room, is that understood?”
“Yes, sir,” Muzik replied miserably.
The Colonel nodded sharply, then stalked out of the room. Repeth stared daggers at Muzik for a moment, her lip curling in contempt before following.
Bitzer turned his head away, pretending deafness. Muzik threw himself into a chair and pounded his knee in frustration with his fist, over and over.
At the storeroom Nguyen removed the screwdriver from the hasp. He spoke calmly. “Stay outside, will you Jill? Come in if there’s some kind of commotion; otherwise, let me handle this, please?”
She heard his gentle tone. Thank God he's trustworthy and on our side. “Of course, sir.”
Spooky opened the door, went inside.
Relieved to not have to think, to just execute a simple task for the moment, Repeth leaned against the opposite bulkhead, staring at the closed door. Her mind was so tired. She was suddenly ravenous, she needed to pee, and she had just launched who knows how many megantons of nuclear weapons at…what? She didn’t know. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. What if…
Inside, Nguyen stared at Alkina.
She opened her eyes and gazed back at him from her seat atop boxes of cans. “So what now? You missed your chance to kill me clean.”
He grinned, an expression that stopped short of his eyes. “Why would I do that?”
“You framed me. You’re a Psycho too. It’s the only thing that makes sense. I tried to stop your plan, whatever it was, and I failed. Now you’re going to blame me for whatever you did. What did you do?”
He leaned closer to her, his voice very low. “I gave Markis a chance. I gave the Free Communities a chance. I just decapitated the Russians, the Chinese, and most of all, the United Governments of North America. Thirty-six warheads for the Russians, thirty-six for the Chinese, and one hundred and twenty for the Americans. The other twenty-four did just what I said they would, exploded in orbit, a barrage of EMP that will leave ninety-eight percent of the satellites up there useless. I just leveled the playing field. And with a level field, Markis wins. The Plague wins. It's better world for us. We win.”
“But why?” she whispered. “We're both Psychos. We don’t care about anyone but ourselves. We’re narcissists. Why would you help him?”
Nguyen chuckled. “As you said – to help ourselves, and as I said, to level the playing field. For people like you and me. To prove we aren’t a liability but an asset. You must be young to be so ignorant. You’re blinded by your inexperience and your…state of mind. When were you infected? How old were you?”
“Sixteen.”
“Ah. I was forty-seven. I was already a stone-cold killer, but I knew what loyalty was. What it meant to be part of a team, to have brothers in arms. The Plague stripped away all my confusion, but it didn’t take that knowledge from me. People are more complex than a label. Even Psychos. Is there no one you care about beyond yourself?”
“I…I don’t know. I have a sister. We used to be close. I still…” She licked her lips.
“You see? We’re not the way they say we are. Not so simple, black and white. In a way, the Edens are just as bad as the normals. They became what they hated – bigots. They decided Psychos were subhuman and they rounded them up, all they could find. But they never found me out. I remembered how to act. I remembered how to feel, even if those feelings are now secondhand. When I need to feel…I just put my old self back on, like a comfortable jacket. How do you do it?”
Alkina swallowed. “Fool them? I was trained. There is a shadow government in Australia made up of…strange people. People like you, I think. Smarter Psychos. They trained me to fool the tests and they…” She ground to a halt, lowering her eyes.
“You see? You’re not cold at all, not when it comes to your own self. You’re just as passionate as anyone when your passions are selfish. So how do they keep you under control? How do they make sure you don’t go rogue?”
Alkina sat up, slowly stripping off the remnants of sticky tape from her tunic. As soon as she could, she took the whole garment off, then lifted her undershirt over her head, leaving her with just a spandex bra over her flat breasts. She stroked her skin just below her sternum.
“If it wasn’t Eden-healed, you’d see a scar here. They implanted me with a fail-safe. A kill switch. Whenever they want…they just turn me off. Pop, and a pea-sized piece of plastic explosive next to my heart makes me go away. Like a bad little girl.” She kept tapping the spot, pensively.
Nguyen nodded. “The ultimate self-interest – survival. I suspected something like that.”
“So…Colonel…what now?”
“Call me Tran. It’s my first name. We’re comrades now.”
“We are?” Her dull surprise was genuine.
“Yes. As soon as we turn the boat over to your government, I will ask for asylum. I have a lot to offer. A lot up here.” He tapped his head. “I think I can convince them to let me join the…strange people.”
Alkina looked up at him in wonder, unfamiliar emotions bubbling to the surface. Not love, not affection; none of the finer kind of feelings, but instead admiration, and the desire to give herself over to a leader and a master that had demonstrated his worthiness. No one else had frightened her, had showed just how outclassed she was, yet had given her…something, not mercy, exactly, but…respect. Attention. Appreciation instead of contempt and derision. Pride in who she was. To a narcissist it was the ultimate drug, the emotional lifeblood that transcended threats and fear, the carrot to the stick, the one thing that could make her wholly his.
He saw it in her eyes, that conversion, and this time his smile was genuine. He reached out his hand to brush her cheek. “Now all you have to do is play along until we get there. They will go home, and we stay in Australia to build a better world.” He laughed. “Again.”
Her smile was a ghost of his, a weak, wan, unpracticed thing, but it was there. She shrugged, attempting humor. “If at first you don’t succeed…”
-29-
Captain Absen stared at the weapon in front of him on his tiny cabin desk. It was a lovely thing and deadly, a .45 automatic based on the venerable M1911 but much more modern. Knurled wooden grips and silver highlights made it lovely; the hollow-point cartridge in the chamber made it deadly.
A knock at his door startled him. Sliding the handgun under his mattress he called, “Come in.”
“Sir, SITREP from Fleet.” The rating handed his captain the secure tablet with the situation report, then shut the door as he left. On the screen the hard facts leaped out at him. Nuclear strikes. Washington. New York. Boston. Atlanta. Norfolk. Chicago. He ran his finger down the list, over a hundred entries long.
San Diego. Coronado. Kathleen and the kids, in his house on Captain’s Row. He closed his eyes, swaying sick.
Maybe they weren’t in town. There’s no
way he would know; the sub had been out and incommunicado for four months. He looked through the list again. Pueblo, Colorado, where her parents lived, wasn’t on it. Colorado Springs was the closest strike listed. And they usually took the route through Flagstaff and Albuquerque; Los Alamos was on the list but nothing else on the way. He grasped at the hope, slim as it was.
Pulling out the gun again, he checked the action. Playing with it, feeling its heft in his hand. Imagining the force of the bullet as it crashed through his brain, ending all anxiety and worry.
Even if his family survived, Captain Absen himself had failed. He might come home to find Kathleen being tortured in a Unionist prison cell, his children held hostage. That would be worse than having lost them clean in nuclear fire. Still, there was hope, and even if they were gone, he had over one hundred men depending on him.
Henrich Absen had never been one to shirk his duty. He unloaded and cleared the weapon and put it away.
-30-
The Nebraska cruised on the surface into Australia’s Garden Island submarine base under heavy escort, an attack submarine shadowing them with open torpedo tubes and destroyers with guns and missiles locked onto them on either flank. A naval special operations team came aboard and disarmed Nguyen and his crew, marching them away for questioning after piloting the Nebraska into its dock in a covered pen.
They were interrogated separately for five days. Eventually an Argentine Air Force long-range transport plane picked up Repeth, Muzik and Bonnagh, along with three coffins. A British Union Jack, a Congolese flag, and an old-style Stars and Stripes draped the boxes as they were loaded with full military honors.
When the big cargo plane had taken off and they could converse with only moderately raised voices, the three Free Community troops put their heads together for the first time since they had been detained.
“What the hell is going on?” asked Muzik. “Anyone know? Where’s Colonel Nguyen?”
“I heard one of the Aussies say he had asked to stay,” answered Repeth.
“What the bloody hell does that mean, asked to stay? Why?” Bonnagh’s face was confused and angry. “And does anyone know what has happened? They wouldn’t tell me much. They just grilled me about the op. I told them everything I knew. They’re supposed to be our allies.”
Major Muzik said, “I heard that our missiles nuked the Big Three – surface targets – Washington DC, Moscow, Beijing, a bunch of other places, most of the important military bases. Almost two hundred warheads. Then the Big Three fired a couple dozen more at each other before they called it off. They’re crippled. The Big Three are crippled.”
“We killed millions.” Repeth’s face fell in stunned horror. “I killed milions. I turned the key. Eighteen times I turned the key.”
“No, no, you don’t understand. Alkina plugged that module in. She changed the targeting. You and the Colonel were just doing what you thought was right.” Muzik shook her shoulders. “It wasn’t your fault.”
She slapped his hands away, eyes blazing. “Don’t touch me, you stupid prick. If you hadn’t screwed her they might still be alive, and maybe none of this would have happened. Leave me alone. Just leave me the hell alone.”
Bonnagh touched Muzik’s arm, motioning with his eyes. The major backed off and the two men withdrew to their chosen seats, each alone with his thoughts as they winged their way over Antarctica toward Buenos Aires.
***
The man in the rumpled suit stared at Colonel Nguyen from across the deeply-inlaid, polished wooden conference table. “Cigarette?” He slid a silver case across the table with a matching lighter resting on top.
Nguyen reached out with his hands to pick up the items, his eyes never leaving the other man’s. Taking out one of the tobacco-filled tubes, he snapped the flame into existence. Smoke curled from his mouth and up his nose in a French inhale before blowing forth from his thin lips. “Thank you. I have been waiting for you.”
“Yes, I suspect you have.” The man’s accent made the last word sound like “hayv.” Nguyen supposed he would have to get used to it.
“You’re one of the hidden masters. You have me at a disadvantage.”
“In more ways than one. You can call me Fenster. I’m here to negotiate terms.”
“Of course. Let’s not play games. Your interrogators got nothing from me, and they never will, unless I wish to talk. The three others of my team gave you a fairly coherent version of what happened, but it’s not the whole story. Miss Alkina gave you another version, but it’s not the whole story either. If you want the missing pieces – and my services – I want in. All the way.”
“You want to join Miss Alkina in serving us?”
Spooky laughed, his deadly amused eyes exemplifying his nickname. “So you can stick a deadman charge in my chest? Not likely. I want to be one of you.”
“You just went rogue. You just killed a hundred million people.”
“No, and yes. I’m not rogue; rogue implies a loss of control. I’m defecting to the only country on Earth that will appreciate my talents and let me be who I am. The only country that can do what is necessary to push us toward the future.”
Fenster took a drag from his own cigarette, blowing the smoke upward as he pursed his lips, staring at the burning tip contemplatively. “How do we know we can we trust you?”
“Oh, please, spare me. You can’t know. We’ve resurrected the status quo ante; things are the way they were before, when we had to trust each other because we decided to, not because the Eden Plague told us to. Human nature has not changed, not fundamentally. Plenty of narcissists have been successful, even honorable men. At least we’re consistent. The difference between you and me, and other, pardon the epithet, ‘Psychos’, is that we’re wise enough to look past our own immediate gratification and think long-term. With the Eden Plague carriers to front the government and us to wield the real power, we have the perfect setup – as long as we remain sub rosa. Like the mythical vampires of popular fiction, we retain power only as long as we wield it carefully. Deftly.”
Fenster’s eyes narrowed. “Cheeky Pommy bastard, aren’t you?”
“I’m not British. I just like the accent. I lived for so long with a damaged brain that when the Plague repaired mine I decided to learn how to speak the Queen’s English properly.” His vowels suddenly flattened, became clipped. “If you prefer Midwest American, I can do that too. But why are we wasting time talking about accents? I know you can’t make this decision alone. Go talk to your superiors.”
Nguyen turned to the one-way glass covering one wall of the room. “You people back there, I need to speak to the masters. The ones who can actually decide. Come back with your terms, and let’s have a civilized conversation. I’m done talking to someone without the power to say yes.” He took a last pull from the cigarette and stubbed the butt out in the flimsy plastic ashtray, then turned around. He stayed that way as Fenster walked out.
***
Alkina didn’t look up as Nguyen entered her cell. “So they let you live. And you’re a General.” Her tone made it rhetorical, if it wasn’t already self-evident by Nguyen’s very presence. Her posture showed defeat.
“Of course. They need my knowledge, they can use my skills. And soon I will be an indispensable and permanent part of the power structure.”
“What about me? Do you kill me now? Or just cast me aside like a used condom?”
“That’s quite a metaphor for a woman who chose Muzik over me.”
Alkina looked up, distressed. “That was different. That was the job.” She was confused by her own emotions, for she’d never before cared what someone thought of her, except as a simple assessment of her own advantage. Now she found herself desperate to please this man.
“I know. I know, Ann, forgive me for saying such a cruel thing. And I didn’t come here to kill you, or to gloat.” He paused, searching her eyes. “All I need to know is: do you want to join me?”
“Join you?” Hope flared in her, a lifting
of the despair and the belief that she was expendable. “But they all think I nuked…everything.”
“Yes. But they don’t care. What’s done is done. All your records will be wiped. You will be given to me. Be my right hand. I will train you better than they have. I will keep you by my side, and take you places you never could have gone on your own. I will teach you how to be human…of a sort. Of our sort. But you must surrender to me completely. Body and mind and soul.”
She drew a deep breath. Happiness suffused her body, a dark joy that wanted to give herself up to him, to let him make the decisions, to pass over the horrible weight of responsibility along with the reflected shame, guilt and contempt she saw in the eyes of the normals and the Edens. Only he would accept her for what she was: remorseless, but not unfeeling; ruthless, but not passionless.
“I will. I shall. I do. I’m yours.”
“You are now mine. And because of that, I am yours. I alone love you. I alone will be true to you. I alone am worthy of your loyalty.” He took his finger off the button of the deadman device in his pocket, carefully snapping the cover closed. The code to her implant had been one of his conditions, a little bit of insurance for the future. It could take ten years, or a hundred, but there might come a time when Ann Alkina decided she no longer needed Nguyen Pham Tran. He would be prepared. But for now, for a while, with her he could let his guard down, and just be…human.
He leaned over to drink from her lips.
Interlogue
Timepoint circa minus 4400: ~2400 BC
All but one of the two hundred remaining children of the Watchers were monsters.
The Demon Plagues Page 16