Unfortunately “bunker” had sounded too last-days-of-Hitler and someone had started calling the room the Zoo. As in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, when the Cold War was still chilly. But then that era passed and the allusion faded.
So it had morphed from Zoo to Lions’ Den, in a time when perhaps a fiercer leader than Ms. Jones reigned, but that was too much work to sustain, so now it was just the Den.
It was a heavily fortified Den, though, surrounded by layers of security that would make Fort Knox weep with envy, so it always struck each new man as weird that the door to Ms. Jones’s office was a flimsy, hollow-core affair, poorly hinged, leaving an inch opening above the floor. The reality, though, was that the office was more a sanctum. At least that’s the way every team member thought of it. It was Ms. Jones’s sanctum, one from which she had never come out. Each member had only been in once, to meet her when they had been in-processed.
Only Moms, occasionally with Nada, got to go behind the door more than once. This was one of those times.
The weird thing was that the flimsy door and the inch gap let every person in the Den hear every word spoken in the office. But only the conversations with Moms, occasionally Nada, and the in-briefs of new personnel, from which the existing team members could generate the newcomer’s team name. Because other than when someone from the team was in the office with Ms. Jones, there was never a sound. One would think Ms. Jones talked on a phone, or radio, or to herself occasionally, but such utterances were never heard. There was never the creak of a desk chair, or even Ms. Jones breaking wind.
Some even speculated Ms. Jones wasn’t real. She was a holographic image with a voice. After all, they could agree that during in-processing all they had seen was someone — or something — sitting in a darkened chair on the other side of a massive aircraft-carrier-sized wooden desk that had absolutely nothing on top of it. Forced to squint into lights aimed forward from above and behind the desk, lights that made one long for the days of the Gestapo and bootjacks, it was impossible to determine who or what was in that big chair.
So, for someone so secretive, one wondered why she would allow every word she spoke to every guest to be heard by every team member in the Den.
And eventually each new team member silently realized what the others had already figured out: there were no secrets inside the Nightstalkers. Anything discussed in there with anyone was information the entire team was privy to. Ms. Jones might have her own secrets, but she made sure the team had none among its members.
As Ms. Jones got the debrief going, Roland and Eagle stopped needling Mac for being away updating his demolitions expertise—“Doc and Burns coulda used some help in the Fun Outside Tucson” was the last thing Roland said before silence descended and they listened in.
Ms. Jones: “You said the Rift was different. How?”
Moms went into a succinct, efficient description of how the iris had expanded beyond any recorded in the history of the unit; and she gave her best recollection, better than anyone else there, of the thing that had been growing inside the Rift and appeared ready to come out.
Ms. Jones: “An intelligent being?”
Moms had no idea. Nada had yet to weigh in, because no one weighed in unless Ms. Jones invited them.
Ms. Jones: “So the Rift was becoming something else?”
A long pause caused the three men in the Den to exchange glances. Mac raised an eyebrow at Roland and Eagle. Both shrugged.
Ms. Jones: “Ms. Moms?”
Moms: “I believe so.”
Ms. Jones: “Mister Nada?”
The team sergeant hefted his weight: “Yes, ma’am.”
Another long silence drifted through the Den.
Ms. Jones: “A portal, perhaps.”
There was no question mark in the tone, so there was no answer to the statement.
Ms. Jones: “This is not good. We must have that computer’s hard drive analyzed.”
Nada dared speak up: “Doc is laid up for a while, ma’am. Snakebit.”
Ms. Jones let out the rarest of nondialogue cues. A sigh.
Ms. Jones: “We’ll have to outsource it to someone on the Acme list. I’ll have it taken care of by Support. Now proceed with the mission from drop to completion.”
Moms proceeded in full detail, without hesitating, glossing over nothing, as if she were reading from a teleprompter. Moms was like that. She could pull together the chaos of a firefight into a coherent story better than anyone.
Ms. Jones interrupted four times, with specific questions, but it didn’t break Moms’s narrative. That is until she got to Burns getting wounded. Nada jumped into the breach.
Nada: “He got a load of cactus spikes in his ass, ma’am.”
Ms. Jones: “Thank you, Mister Nada.”
As if it was the most normal thing in the world to be attacked by a fourteen-foot-high cactus.
Moms picked up the fumble and continued onward until the team had landed back here. She fell silent, and all three men in the Den leaned forward to hear what Ms. Jones would have to say about the whole mess.
Ms. Jones: “The priority, of course, is the change in the Rift. Twenty-seven Rifts and they’ve all been exactly the same. As far as we know.”
Mac looked at Roland and Eagle and he could tell by the looks on their faces that they agreed completely.
Ms. Jones had not been idle while the team flew back. “I checked on the graduate student who ran the Rift program. A Mister Henry Craegen. Working on his PhD in physics. Nothing stands out in his background, but I’m having our Support field agents run a detailed background check to find where he might have found the bootleg copy and how he might have altered it, but I believe the hard drive will yield the most useful information.”
A short pause. Then Ms. Jones: “Now about Mister Burns.”
Everyone on the team was Ms. or Mister to Ms. Jones. Perhaps, somewhere in the distant past, that was how she had gotten her own moniker. It made the whole nickname thing seem kind of stupid, but it was as stupid as a lot of the other weird stuff they did. They did know part of her story, as it was integral to the lore of the team: she’d been a nuclear engineer in the control room the day Chernobyl blew. That explained the accent. Whatever else had happened to her was a matter of speculation. She’d gotten hit by some bad shit, there was no doubt of that. So bad no one got to see her.
Doc had been the one to float the hologram idea, speculating her voice was piped in while her real body was lying in some intensive care place surrounded by machines and kept alive by tubes, because Doc liked to imagine shit like that was real, and he swore the thing in the chair had flickered for a moment during his in-briefing. Most speculated she was some disfigured, shriveled remains of a human being whose mind could still cut like a knife, while the body was confined to a chair or bed.
How someone from Chernobyl’s control room ended up being in charge of the Nightstalkers was a mystery, but Eagle had commented it was about as likely as a muscle-bound weight lifter from Austria ending up governor of California.
In other words, who the hell knew?
Ms. Jones: “Ms. Moms?”
Moms explained Burns’s wounds, which was Moms being nice, since it wasn’t what Ms. Jones wanted to hear. “Burns suffered severe lacerations of the face, arm, and leg. Basically everywhere on that side where he wasn’t protected by body armor. He was fortunate not to have lost his right eye. A spike missed it by a quarter inch, went into his skull, and medical says they’re going to have to leave part of it in place as it’s touching the optic nerve and pulling it might cause more problems than leaving it alone. His body will just have to heal around it.”