She closed her eyes and tried her damnedest to unwind. Jill couldn’t remember the last time she wasn’t stressed. A few minutes later, she slipped into an exhausted slumber. She woke to a light tapping on her shoulder. It took a second to get her bearings. She noticed the cold silver barrel of a pistol close to her face. With a start, she lashed out.
“Easy there,” Paula cooed. “Just me.” She holstered her pistol. “Had me worried. Thought there was foul play when you didn’t answer your phone. Can’t do my job knowing the love of Roen’s life isn’t safe. I’ll feel better when Marco arrives. “
“Stop being on his side,” Jill yawned and stood up, shivering. She must have been out for a while. The water was nippy and her fingers and were wrinkled like dried plums. “Did I miss our meeting?”
“Not if we have it now,” Paula grinned and handed her a towel.
“How did you get in here?” Jill asked, wrapping the towel around her body.
Paula shrugged. “Snuck in through the pool deck of the high-rise. You’ll need to get a new lock for your front door. I’ll wait outside.”
A few minutes later, a bathrobed Jill walked out to the living room. Paula was lounging on the couch watching the cricket score recaps on ESPN. She gestured at a large thin crust pizza on the coffee table. Jill’s stomach reminded her of how famished she was.
She grabbed a slice and sat down next to Paula. “So what’s the scoop? Is the capital of the free world going to hell in a hand basket?”
Paula handed her a large manila packet. “Here are the latest intel reports. DC is already crispy. All I can do at this point is keep you lot out of the fire, or at least not too badly burned. What’s happening on the political front?”
Jill told her about the offer Simon made to Wilks, cutting through the fat and focusing on the sanctions that the Genjix seemed desperate to lift. She then laid out her alternatives to prevent Wilks from agreeing to the Genjix’s proposal.
“Start with the list of materials the sanction blocks,” Paula said, mouth half full. Jill handed the stack of paper to her. Paula glanced at it and frowned. Then she skimmed through the pages. “That’s a long list.”
Jill nodded. “We need better specifics. A lot of the banned tech on the list is predator drone technology. Could that be it? Are the Genjix trying to build a fleet of unmanned drones?”
“None of our intel suggests Skynet coming online.”
Doubtful. Control through a host is difficult enough. It is doubly so to control a proxy through another proxy. Besides, we harbor prejudice toward artificial intelligence.
Paula finished her slice of pizza and helped herself to another. She stared at it lovingly. “You know what I love about America? Your food. Now I know why you’re all so fat. You have the best food. It’s just too bad your tea is so awful.”
Jill went to the table and began to pull notes from the reports. She was going to need more time to go through everything. That meant she had to delay Wilks’ meeting with Hogan – by weeks if possible. “I need a better excuse to keep this meeting from happening,” she muttered. She turned to Paula. “I’m going to be busy for a while. You heading back out?”
“In a bit. If you don’t mind, I’d like to finish catching up on today’s breathtaking cricket replays,” Paula replied.
“Be my guest.” Jill began laying out a new plan to entice Wilks from Hogan’s deal. It would have to be a large package with several things from his wish list. The first thing she did was write down all of Wilks’ goals, from his pet projects to his major initiatives. Then she made several lists of other senators’ goals that Wilks could support. Then she connected the dots and packaged several potential deals.
Two hours later, she finished her plan and reviewed it. It was a solid start, though she was dubious about pulling it off. She stood up and stretched, bending her torso side to side. She looked at the clock: 3.42am. She’d better head off to bed. It was another early day tomorrow.
“You alright there, Paula?” she asked, turning to see what the other woman was doing.
Paula was sprawled on the couch with a half-eaten slice of pizza on a plate resting on her belly, sleeping in what seemed like a very uncomfortable position. Jill smiled and went to get the extra blankets. She moved the plate of pizza aside, layered the blankets over the sleeping agent, and tucked a pillow under her head. Then she dimmed the lights and went to her room.
Paula knocked on Jill’s bedroom door. Without waiting for a response, she walked in and sat down at the foot of the bed.
Jill’s eyes fluttered open. “Hello, Yol,” she said.
“Baji,” Yol answered through Paula. “It has been too long since we last spoke.”
“October 1944, just before the death of the Desert Fox,” Baji said solemnly.
Yol nodded. “Rommel was a good man, even if he was on the wrong side of history.”
“I did what I could for him, though the SS had long decided his fate.”
“You saved his family,” Yol replied. “That was more than enough considering the circumstances. Your host’s hands were tied at High Command.” Yol looked off into space and shook her head. “I had high hopes for him as a boy. In any other time, he could have become a great person. He was my Sonya. It was too bad we could not prevent the rise of the Third Reich.”
“Nor the Japanese imperial expansion,” Baji added. “Our entire network in China dissolved in under a year. We should have rebuilt it immediately after the war. But we focused on America and the reconstruction of Europe, allowing the Genjix to gain a foothold there. Now it is the base of their power and nearly impossible to crack.”
“Many mistakes were made. The twentieth century was a catastrophe for us and for humanity. The blame for a dozen wars lies at our feet,” Yol shook her head in disgust. “Sometimes, I wonder if Tao is right.”
“Tao is a hypocrite,” Baji snapped. “He rants that our influence over the humans is just as bad as the Genjix. That we are the cause of as much misery as they, yet he wages a personal war that cuts a path of destruction as wide as Sherman ever did. Now, with Roen a willing accomplice, he is a loose cannon no one can control. At least Tao’s previous host, Edward, had a good head on his shoulders.”
“But you heard Stephen,” Yol mused. “He found truth in Tao’s claims. That means Camr does too. Stephen is cautious and Camr even more so. We cannot ignore the facts. Global temperatures have increased three percent since the turn of the twentieth century. Carbon levels by nine. The Genjix are pushing for the industrialization of humanity in the most inefficient way possible. That cannot be coincidence.”
“It is the path of least resistance.”
“That’s the curious thing. It is not; everyone knows that. The Genjix are playing a cruel joke on this planet. Humanity could advance far quicker utilizing more efficient means of industrializing, yet the Genjix take the most toxic path possible.”
“You give them too much credit. The Genjix do not care about being cruel to humanity. That would imply that they cared enough to be cruel. Their only concern is the Return. The evil they do is simply a byproduct of their means.”
A thought occurred to Baji. She turned to Yol. “What is the longest you have ever survived in this atmosphere?”
“Thirteen minutes during Waterloo. I had to jump among nine French military officers, including three captains and a general. It was a messy day.”
“Back during the second Ice Age, we lost hundreds of thousands of Quasing to the atmosphere. Survival outside of a host depended on seconds. Now, it is minutes. With the current ultraviolet levels and carbon levels, the rate the planet is increasing in temperature…”
Yol shook her head. “It will still be five hundred years before we can survive an hour. Not even the Genjix could be so ambitious.”