“Preferably as soon as possible.” Alma’s tone remained terse and mildly antagonistic. For someone who would have to have a professional working relationship with the country’s next president, she seemed relatively unconcerned about showing even basic cordiality to the woman who could soon hold that office.
Yang, however, remained composed and polite. “First thing Monday morning, then. I can come to your office.”
“I’ll be here.”
Alma disconnected the call and turned to Zira. “This is your team’s assignment. You should be here when I present the information to her.” Only slightly lowering her voice, she muttered, “That way I won’t have to repeat her excuses after we finish talking.”
“Sounds good,” Zira said, though she hoped Alma would be feeling a little more civil by Monday.
Alma directed her gaze to the two men in the room. “Until we’ve had a chance to talk, I don’t want any of you saying a word about this to anyone outside this room. Not even to the rest of your team. I have my suspicions about what happened, but they’re just suspicions, and I won’t have false rumors spreading around the entire office. Understood?”
“Understood,” they all replied.
“Good. Get back out there, and keep up the good work.”
* * *
The office was full by the time Angela Yang walked in the following Monday morning. There had been no notice to announce her visit, so when she stepped off the elevator with a single bodyguard in tow, the usual hubbub died down to whisper.
She walked between the rows of desks with long, graceful strides, causing the sleek ponytail high on her head to swish from side to side like the pendulum of an old-fashioned clock. She was taller than she appeared on all the broadcasts and had a narrow, bird-like build. Not a songbird or a delicate hummingbird, but the kind of bird that could strike with sharp talons and rip an animal’s chest open in seconds.
Zira stood from her desk and tugged at her shirt to smooth out the wrinkles. As she headed towards Alma’s office, Salim turned to the others in bewilderment. “Wait, is she here for us? What’s going on?” She didn’t hear if anyone answered his question.
Alma pulled a third chair into her office from an empty workstation nearby. Yang’s bodyguard waited outside. Once the proper introductions had been exchanged, they all sat down and got straight to business.
“Zira is the leader of the team who found the information I wanted to talk to you about,” Alma said. “I’ll let her brief you on what they discovered.”
Zira explained what her team had been working on in regard to the explosives used in the recent bombing and the missing munitions they’d discovered. From her CL, she projected a side-by-side display of the two inventory lists in question and waited as Yang carefully examined both.
She reached a finger towards the projection. “May I?”
“Of course,” said Zira. She slipped the CyberLink off her wrist and handed it to Yang.
The woman scrolled through both lists several times, checking every detail even though Zira had already given her the highlights. When she was finished, she handed the device back. “Thank you.”
“Well?” said Alma, whose impatience had been visibly mounting ever since Yang stepped into the room.
“I assume this is about the fact that the facility in question was on the list of target locations Chase gave me.”
Alma’s posture stiffened as she leaned forward. “You didn’t secure it like you were supposed to, and now there are hundreds of guns, dozens of soldier-bots, and hundreds of pounds of explosives in the hands of the PRM.”
“You’re upset, and I can understand that. But I hope you’ll be willing to consider my perspective.”
“Didn’t you hear what Zira said? The explosives the PRM took from this facility were used in their recent attack on government offices. People died in that explosion. If you think you have a good excuse for that, I’d love to hear it.”
Yang clasped her hands demurely in her lap. “Chase and I did our best to work together to achieve our goals while keeping everyone safe. But we didn’t always see eye to eye. You know that. I didn’t like the list he sent me, but we talked about it and made a compromise. You were with him during that discussion, as I recall.”
“I was.” Alma jammed a finger in the direction of the projections still hovering over Zira’s CL. “And I remember this munitions depot was one of the targets you agreed on. You were supposed to send one of your strike teams to take it.”
“That’s correct, but it was always against my better judgment. And after thinking about it in the weeks that followed, I realized it was a mistake to spread ourselves so thin. We didn’t have the manpower to target so many locations—not without heavy casualties, or possibly losing the fight altogether. And then what? Everyone’s efforts for all those years would have been for nothing. All the sacrifices, all the lives we’d already lost—it would have been meaningless. And I had a responsibility to protect the people who had placed their trust in my hands.”
“Chase put his trust in your hands.”
“He did. He trusted me to coordinate rebel efforts in the north and make important decisions as I saw fit, and that’s exactly what I did. I prioritized the targets I thought were most important and removed others from the list entirely, including this particular facility. As I said, I had to protect my people.”
It was a reasonable enough explanation, and the cool, easy confidence with which Yang delivered it seemed to give her words extra validity. If Zira had been in her position, she might have made the same decision. If it meant protecting the people she cared about, how could she have done anything different?
Alma, however, remained unconvinced. She sat in her chair with stiff shoulders and crossed arms, staring the other woman down like she was interrogating a murder suspect. “You don’t think that was a bad call?”
Yang’s answer was firm and immediate. “No. It was a strategic decision, and one I would make again without hesitation. We still lost a lot of people that day, and we weren’t successful in taking all of our targets. How much heavier would the losses have been if I hadn’t made the choices I made?”
“How many losses will we suffer now because the PRM has the tools to kill thousands of innocent people?”
For the first time, Yang’s expression lost some of its diplomatic civility. She raised her chin and returned Alma’s unimpressed glare with equal severity. “Did you ask me to come here just so you could criticize my decisions? You could have sent a message for that instead of wasting my time with this visit.”
“Wasting your time?” Alma was almost shouting now. Zira hoped the walls of the office were soundproofed, but she didn’t dare look out the glass to see if any of her coworkers had picked up on the tension inside. “I asked you here to confirm a huge threat to our national security—one which you were responsible for and that I now have to clean up. So I’ll criticize as much as I want to.”
“There’s no need to raise your voice,” Yang said evenly. “I regret that this happened, but we can’t change anything now. Our best course of action is to find the missing weapons before the PRM can use them.” She motioned to Zira. “You clearly have capable people here, and I’m sure they’re already hard at work doing just that. I’m happy to assist however I can.”
“Maybe you should start by taking responsibility for what happened,” Alma spat.
Yang tilted her head and regarded Alma through dark, narrowed eyes. “Publicly, you mean? I don’t think that would be wise.”
“Of course not. We wouldn’t want to ruin your chances of becoming president, would we?”
“All the years we worked together, and you still think so little of me. People are still reeling from the bombing. What kind of panic do you think you’d unleash if the public learned the PRM has automatic weapons and explosives? Chase and I might not have agreed on everything, but I’m certain we would have no argument over this.”
Alma hands clenched and
unclenched a few times like she was trying to contain her frustration. With strained civility, she finally said, “Thank you for your time.”
“If there’s anything else I can do to help, please don’t hesitate to call me.” Yang stood and extended a hand to Zira. “The same goes for you, though I have every confidence in your team’s ability to repair this situation. It was lovely to meet you.”
“You too,” said Zira, though ‘lovely’ wasn’t even a synonym of the word she would have used to describe the tension of the last several minutes.
With her bodyguard trailing along wordlessly behind her, Angela Yang swept out of the SIO office as swiftly and suddenly as she had arrived.
CHAPTER TWENTY
After Yang’s visit, Zira debriefed her team on the information Dodge and Jared had discovered and their new priority to find and reclaim all guns, bots, and explosives the PRM had procured from the former Project munitions depot. Tripp sent a message to Cedric with the same information and asked him to look for anything that might help them track down the missing weaponry.
They continued to follow the same routine as before, training in the tactical skills they would need in the field in the mornings and then following up on their investigations in the afternoons. Their tactical training was progressing well. None of the others had reached the same level of proficiency as Zira or Jared, but they were all showing steady improvement. More importantly, they remained dedicated and hardworking, and Zira never had to nag them about putting more effort into their drills.
Their investigative work advanced at a slower pace, but thanks to the intel provided by SIO’s undercover agents, Josefina and Tripp were able to construct a working model of the PRM’s organizational structure. Because the group was still new and constantly evolving, they had to update the model almost daily to reflect changes within the organization. Still, it proved to be a useful tool in identifying the PRM’s key players and tracking some of their activities.
Most notably, the group had begun to be more outspoken, organizing rallies and demonstrations all around the country that always drew a crowd. Not everyone who attended was a member of the PRM; plenty of people disagreed with the Republic’s policies without believing the PEACE Project should be restored as the governing body of the nation, and the reasons behind the protests varied widely. Some hinged on grievances over the Republic’s foreign policy and their decision to open America’s borders to international trade and diplomacy. At other demonstrations, people expressed frustration with the transition away from the ration system to a more capitalistic economy. All of these protests continued unhindered as long as there was no violence or property destruction. The Republic took people’s right to free speech very seriously.
The whole thing felt surreal to Zira, who had only ever seen one protest up close: the one in Grayridge. The Project had called it a riot, but if that term was warranted, it hadn’t become one until after unit P militants and E-1 officers opened fire on the crowd of unarmed civilians. After witnessing that, after Mei had died in her arms in the midst of all the chaos, Zira had never imagined she’d actually see a day when public protests against the government were allowed and even encouraged by protections like freedom of speech. She just hoped those freedoms wouldn’t become a threat to the Republic’s stability, but given the PRM’s involvement, that seemed a foolish hope.
Finally, after a couple of weeks had passed without any new leads, Cedric sent another report about the missing munitions they were trying to track down. It came in at the end of the day just as everyone was preparing to go home for the night. Zira had turned to her desk to pull her jacket from the back of her chair when she saw the notification flashing at the bottom of her display and opened the message.
Zira,
I found out where the PRM is storing some of their weapons and explosives. I’m not sure if they’re the same ones you’re looking for, but they’re planning to move it all soon, so if you want to act on this, you’d better move fast. I can try to find out where they’re sending it, but that might take some time.
They suspect the local police are watching them, hence the decision to move everything. I don’t know if that’s true, but you might want to check in before you do anything. I’m attaching a satellite map of the location with some notes. That’s everything I know about the place.
Stay safe out there. Tell Nova not to get herself shot.
—Cedric (Logged 5:13 PM, 03/09/2125)
Almost everyone had already left for the night, but Tripp and Josefina were still bent over their workstations, inputting new data on the PRM’s recent activities. The others couldn’t have gone far, and Alma was still in her office. If they left now, they might be able to recover the weapons before the PRM moved them.
“Tripp,” Zira called out. “Get everyone else back in here. Tell them we’re going on an adventure.”
* * *
Several hours later, they were all in a van driving through the South Pacific region to undergo their first tactical operation. Alma had approved the mission as soon as she read Cedric’s report, and the warrant had come in just before they boarded their flight. Tripp had contacted local police, who had indeed been keeping tabs on this particular PRM cell and were more than happy for SIO’s assistance in raiding the building where the weapons were being stored. Everything was in order, and in roughly half an hour, they’d be putting all the skills they’d practiced to the test.
Zira stared out the window, trying to distract herself from the nervous energy that rushed through her veins like a river. The others were all sleeping, and she knew she’d feel better if she could sleep, too. She’d tried during the flight, but the anticipation of what lay ahead prevented her mind from shutting down. This was her team’s first real mission, and although they’d been training for this for months, she couldn’t seem to quiet her doubts.
What if they failed? What if someone got hurt? What if they didn’t find anything? Was she even the best person to be leading this operation?
She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. None of those doubts were going to help her accomplish the task they’d set out to do. They had trained. They were prepared. And she definitely wasn’t going to be the best person to lead this operation if she let her apprehension control her.
In the seat across from her, Jared stirred, then yawned and stretched his arms as far as he could without bumping into Salim and Tripp on either side of him. He blinked a few times as he glanced around the van.
“Good nap?” Zira asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“Couldn’t sleep.”
He tilted his head to one side and gave her a small, amused smile. “You still get nervous before things like this.”
She rolled her eyes and crossed her arms, even though she knew he hadn’t meant it in a spiteful way. “It’s not funny.”
“Sorry. I’m just surprised. You always seem so calm and collected these days. You’re not the reckless, inexperienced operative I was partnered with in the Project anymore.”
Zira’s cheeks grew hot, and she was glad it was dark enough that he wouldn’t be able to see her blush. She wasn’t sure if he’d meant the observation as a compliment, but it felt like one anyway. One she didn’t necessarily deserve. She wanted to tell him he was wrong, that in many ways she still felt like that young, inexperienced operative just trying to prove herself to everyone. He would have known exactly what to say to quiet her doubts.
But she kept those thoughts to herself. In another life, she might have been willing to be that vulnerable with him, but not now. Not yet.
“It will be fine,” he said. “We’re ready.”
“I know.”
“How close are we?”
Zira projected the map on her CL and showed it to him. “Looks like we’ll be there in about twenty minutes. We should probably start waking the others.”
They did, and a few minutes later, the entire team was awake and watching her with bright attentiveness. She pulled up a
schematic of the building they’d be entering and considered how she wanted to divide them up. Tripp would remain outside, providing updated information, coordinating their efforts with local law enforcement, and dealing with any technical issues they ran into. The rest of them planned to go in from two separate entry points. She would lead one team, but she needed someone else to lead the other.
Her eyes darted between Jared and Josefina. Either one of them could handle the responsibility, but she’d worked with Jared under similarly high-pressure situations before, and she trusted both his skills and his judgment as an operative. For this first mission, that trust combined with his natural ability to lead was going to be critical. She needed this to go perfectly.
“Dodge and Nova, you’ll be with me,” she said. “We’ll go in from the south side here and clear the ground floor. Jared, you’ll lead a second fireteam in from the main entrance. Head upstairs and clear the second level. Local police officers will be stationed outside. Tripp, you’ll be coordinating with them as needed. We’re still not sure how many people will be in there—somewhere between five and ten, based on the information the police sent. But it could be more, so stay alert. We want to take these guys alive if possible, but shoot if you need to. Don’t let yourselves get hurt. Questions?”
Everyone else shook their heads, but Dodge raised a hand. “I have a question.”
“Yes?”
“Can we get breakfast after this? I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday afternoon, and I’m really going to regret coming all the way out here if I don’t get a decent meal at some point.”
A few of the others snickered. Josefina shook her head. “You’re concerned about your stomach at a time like this?”
“You’re not?”
“All right,” Zira said. “If none of you make any careless mistakes and we all come out of this in one piece, breakfast is on me.”
A cacophony of whoops and cheers filled the van as it pulled onto the street where they were rendezvousing with local police. When it stopped near a patrol car, they climbed out one by one and began pulling their gear out of the back. Zira went to look for the officer in charge.
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