If they come back.
“Very good,” he says,
“How’s it going out there?” I ask.
Harris purses his lips and presents his profile as if looking at someone beside him—a theatrical pose that tells me our little session is almost over. “Thank you for your patience, Master Sergeant Venn.”
I approach the window. “I was told I’d be taken to see some Gurus.”
“That meeting is not necessary.”
“Pity,” I say. “All my dreams, my other life—just made-up shit?”
“Pure and simple.”
I manage my best boyish grin. “Good to know,” I say.
“I suppose it does bring relief.” With a ramrod break at the hips, meant to be a respectful bow, he motions for the shutters to close.
All lies and deceptions, of course. I know things I can’t possibly have made up, things I learned in my other life, if I can just remember them clearly, make them stick down like wallpaper over this life; things I will apply once I get out of Madigan, if I ever get out of Madigan, if this isn’t just a prelude to Zyklon B being pumped into my suite….
The rest of the afternoon passes, my lunch arrives on schedule, I eat and don’t die. No poison gas, no quick and dirty end. The window remains closed. Another day passes. And then another.
Inside I’m buzzing. I know that feeling. Something scary incoming. I’m on the fork of two futures. In one, I’m dead. In the other, I would rather be dead. Balls-up or balls in a vise.
For a Skyrine, having any choice is outstanding.
SNATCH AND GO
I’m a light sleeper, when I sleep at all. Hours later, something jerks me out of a warm doze. The alarm clock on the bedstead tells me it’s four in the morning. The door sighs and clicks.
Not the window shutters.
The steel door.
I push my hand between the foam mattress and the bed frame, wrap the improvised sap—a twisted bath towel with one end tied around a clutch of nuts and bolts—around my wrist and through my clenched fist, and move in a flash through the bedroom door to crouch in front of my reading chair. I swing the sap around and around. The lights blaze on. Blinking, I sway on one knee, buzzing with adrenaline. A tall brunette stands there, dressed in a green flight suit. She looks at me, at the dangling sap, then back to my eyes, which are vibrating madly. I can hardly see straight.
“You’re kind of strung out,” she says.
I raise the sap.
“Keep that, if it makes you happy.” She points through the steel door. “Ready to get out of here?”
I remain on my knee, evaluating.
The brunette tightens her lips. “The Wait Staff ordered you to be killed. I’m your last hope.”
My shoulders sag. I lower the sap. I have to chuckle. “Jesus Christ! ‘Come with me if you want to live.’”
“Exactly,” she says. Her dimples vanish. “Coming?”
“Shit yeah. Where to?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Under whose recognizance?”
“Mine.”
“And you are…?”
“Commander Frances Borden, USN, Joint Sky Research Center, Mountain View, California.” She taps a finger on her watch. “We’ve got maybe ten minutes. Get dressed.”
I pick my day clothes off the desk, shed my pajama bottoms, put on pants and shirt, and stuff the sap in my pants pocket.
“No jacket?” she asks.
I shrug.
“All right, then.”
One foot after the other, more than a little skeptical, I walk behind the commander through the open steel door. There’s nobody in the big chamber outside the black-barred cage that surrounds the suite, and nobody guarding the outer lock doors that keep negative pressure on the whole shebang. I’ve never seen all the shit meant to keep me sealed tight until now, and it’s hard to believe one Navy officer could have arranged for everyone to just vanish, but we’re moving smooth and fast. No guards. No alarms. Nobody seems to care. Scary, but certainly different, and for anything that’s truly fucking different, after 124 days in stir—I’m game. I’m up for a change.
“This way, Venn,” Borden calls as I lag behind, caught up in the drama of how important and dangerous I am. “We’ve got five minutes before this place screws down tight.”
“How do you know about me?” I ask.
“You passed a tight little cylinder to a Corporal Schneider, who delivered books from the base library. Corporal Schneider passed it to me. The lab evaluated it, then sent it on.”
“What was in the cylinder?” I ask.
“A tight little manuscript, and a metal disk. A coin.”
“Did you read it?”
“I did not.”
“Did they get to Joe?” I ask.
“How the hell should I know?” she says.
We jog past a reception station, through double glass doors, and outside the main isolation building. I glance back, of course. It looks like a huge aircraft hangar, big enough to hold a hundred suites.
Borden grabs my shoulder and points to an electric Skell-Jeep idling in a red zone in the front drive. No other vehicles. Nothing else even parked. Like a dream.
I stop, hands by my side. Only now do I reach into my pocket and drop the sap. It jingles on the concrete. Nothing makes the least bit of sense. “Just who the hell are you, ma’am? And what is this, a blind date?”
Borden climbs halfway into the driver’s seat. Her eyes go flinty. “I am geek steel,” she barks. “And I am your superior officer. Don’t forget that.”
I want to smile, to reassure her I’m cooperating, but her expression tells me this is a bad idea. “Apologies. Permission to return to your good graces—ma’am.”
She lifts her eyes. “Just get in.”
We’re out under the early morning sky: light deck of clouds, blinking stars, crescent moon fogged by high cirrus. The whole base looks deserted. Borden drives the Skell diagonally across several McChord-Field runways, over grass and gravel medians, between long rows of blue lights. Absolutely nothing in the sky coming or going.
“Why no planes, no ships?” I ask as the wind rushes past.
“Broken quarantine,” she says. “Incoming load of hung weapons. Whiteman Sampler.”
“Whiteman Sampler” was a legendary incident from ten years before, when a whole Hawksbill filled with spent matter waste destined for Whiteman Air Force Base in Missouri got mistakenly diverted to Lewis-McChord. And came too damned close to contaminating the entire Pacific Northwest.
“Really?”
“Take your choice,” Borden says. “I don’t know, they didn’t tell me.”
I look up, unconsciously suck in a deep breath—and hold it. We’re not heading for one of the long strips where Hawksbills land but toward a cluster of five circles radiating from a shorter taxiway.
Borden thrusts up one hand and grabs my jaw. “Breathe!”
I open my mouth and breathe.
“It’s going to be close,” she says.
The Skell hums toward the northernmost circle, where squats a dark gray, bulky shadow. It’s an old Valor—an antique V280 tilt-rotor, used nowadays only for training. As we rumble out of the darkness, the Valor whines and coughs and begins to spin up its awkwardly massive black props. Borden cuts the Skell’s motor, slams on the emergency brake, and jumps out even before we stop.
“Go! Go!” she calls. I follow, but not too close, as we run for the descending rear hatch.