Burn (6 page)

Chapter 8

The lure, the lore of the hidden.
Every side of refractory matter splitting light.
A deep blaze waiting to surface . . .

—Madeline DeFrees

Marte Chang heard the
whoosh-swoosh
of incoming air as the tray behind her opened and closed the positive-pressure pump. She smelled fresh coffee and chicken soup.

Feeding time,
she thought. She rubbed her eyes, stretched, peeled off her headset and gloveware.
How long has it been since I’ve had coffee?

She felt for the cup in the tray behind her, and watched the viroids she’d been studying fade from red to orange to black behind her eyelids. She felt wide awake, but her eyes were gritty and her shoulders knotted like fists. And her right hip throbbed where the buckle of her seat belt had caught her in the Mongoose crash.

Marte would not have slept, anyhow. Not after what she’d seen, and heard, and smelled out at ViraVax. The coffee was a luxury, one stage of freedom, a promise that there was more to come. She had been locked up at ViraVax for two months; a few more days in this isolette wouldn’t bother her much.

Except I’m so close,
she thought.
We could be moving to production now if we were at a good lab.

Marte heard some of the ruckus that Sonja and Harry raised in their cubicles. They saved her life, and she couldn’t let them down now. Marte left ViraVax with nothing but her life—Harry had thought to grab for some data on his way out the door. They were young yet, those two, and righteous indignation was a privilege of youth.

She knew all too well how they felt. It was just how she’d felt when those automatic doors at ViraVax
whooshed
closed behind her that first time. And again, when she found the human experiments that Dajaj Mishwe had boxed up so neatly at Level Five. She had wanted to scream every night, but she had her own prison to maintain on behalf of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Marte trembled now, not with caffeine, but with the emotional blowup that bubbled inside her.

I
hope I can nip this fuse before I lose it

Marte desperately hunted the combination of proteins, amino acids and free radicals that would get all three of them out of the zoo. She couldn’t do that if she went to pieces now.

She took a deep breath, then rotated her neck as she let the breath trickle slowly out her left nostril first, then her right. This was a trick of focus that her mother had taught her.

“Are you there, Major?” Marte asked, her eyes closed.

Her speaker hissed, and Major Ezra Hodge said, “Coffee, I see. They told me you were a Gardener, but of course Children of Eden don’t drink coffee, and, obviously, you do.”

Marte bumped her tray as she turned, and sloshed some bean soup onto the floor.

“But the chicken broth is made without chickens,” Hodge added, “in case you’re interested. A miracle of your own technology, I believe.”

“I’m sorry,” Marte said. This Ezra Hodge gave her a cold-belly feeling. “I thought you were Major Scholz.”

“We met briefly last night,” he reminded her, and manufactured a smile. “Major Hodge, Ezra Hodge. I’m sorry we can’t shake hands.”

Marte didn’t like the way his eyes pinned her to her chair like some exotic bug. And he didn’t
look
sorry at all. He looked greasy, and puffy, and even though she really wanted a man, she really didn’t want this one.

“You’re wasting my time,” she said, and turned back to her console.

“You have to eat,” Hodge said. “And there’s your coffee, of course. We can chat while you—”

“I can
think
while I eat,” she said. “I can’t
chat
and eat. Not while you’ve got me in here. Get lost.”

Marte touched a key on her console, and steel drum reggae drowned out his feeble squawking.

She ordered her computer, “Volume, up two,” just in case.

Marte’s soup was just cool enough to eat when Harry’s signal, an orange comet, streaked across her vision.

“Voice,” she said. Then, “Harry, did they give you mock chicken soup, too?”

“Yeah,” her speaker said, “and EdenSprings water. I’m not touching anything made by the Gardeners. From now on, I’ll stick to Coke for the rest of my life.”

She laughed.

“That’s the safest bet,” she said. “I’m living dangerously and having a coffee.”

“The chicken broth will get us, you’ll see.”

“Are we out of here yet?” she tossed back.

Her speaker was silent for a moment.

“Sorry,” Harry said. “Incoming files on our GenoVax problem. They’ve been blown; I’ll have to defrag and collate them before sending them to you.”

“ ‘Blown’? You mean, somebody else has seen them?”

“No,” Harry said. “Mr. Bartlett created the files, blew them into fragments, then mixed them up and stored them in various addresses. One fragment is an assembler. When activated, it brings the others together. It was the simplest trick that would give him the best results.”

“Was that something else you taught him?”

Another pause. Marte drank off her coffee and sipped her soup right out of the bowl.

“Yeah,” her speaker said. “I taught Mr. Bartlett and my dad a lot of tricks on the web, which is one way my dad always found me so easily.”

“You could have made that impossible, though, couldn’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I could. His stupid little messages . . . well, at least he kept trying to stay in touch.”

“Sonja told me he used to stay in touch by beating you.”

“Sonja had no business telling you about that,” Harry said. “He wasn’t always that way. I try to remember him before that. If he makes it . . . maybe things will be different.”

“Things?”

“Well, I don’t mean like my parents getting back together, or me living with him again, or anything like that,” Harry said. “I mean, maybe he got it out of his system. I’d like to see him happy again, but I still wouldn’t want to live with him. I’d like to get my own place now. Okay, here comes your feed. Good luck.”

“Harry?”

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for talking to me.”

Static. Marte tipped her soup bowl up and chugged it.

“Thanks for listening,” her speaker said. “I shouldn’t waste your time.”

“Never,” she said. “Talk anytime.”

Then he was gone; Marte could feel it. Or not feel it. What did she feel with the young Harry Toledo that was so noticeably absent without him?

Happy.

Uh-oh,
Marte thought,
he’s just a kid.

He was just a kid, but he’d saved her life. She readjusted her headset, stretched her aching muscles again and sighed.

The idle brain is the devil’s playground.

The GenoVax directory opened in front of her, and she moved to the customary abstracts to give herself an overview. Marte wondered how Harry had found the proper addresses for the blown files. She wanted to learn how to do that: search out anything or anyone on the nets and webs. If they got out of this, maybe he would teach her.

Marte twisted and untwisted her long black hair in her ungloved left hand while her right navigated through the ViraVax studies related to Artificial Viral Agents—specifically, “teams” of AVAs acting as smugglers, initiators and assemblers of microtubule expressways and biological engines within the cells.

This thing is set up to work fast,
she thought.
A multisystem assault on the whole body,

Any human being who had been vaccinated for anything over the past ten years was infected; ViraVax had seen to that. The cascade effect of the AVAs had to be stopped early in the process, so she concentrated on the supply lines, the microtubules, and the basic initiator-type structures.

Once I identify these triggers,
she thought,
we still have to manufacture and distribute the blocking mechanism,

Marte heard her mother’s voice in the back of her head, urging her, “Don’t let what you cannot do stop you from doing what you can.”

So she didn’t.

Chapter 9

No servant is greater than his master, nor is one who is sent greater than he who sent him.

—Jesus

Commander David Noas of the Jesus Rangers dreamed of fishes. The edge of his awakebrain registered this image as portentous while his dreambrain sucked him down a tunnel of warm water, aswarm with red, blue and turquoise lacefins. His dream self held his breath so the dreamer would not drown.

Silver, blue, yellow and green, stripes and calicos, these bright fishes drew David Noas relentlessly downward until their colors faded into shadowy reds and grays. Only luminescence flashed past him, now, and in the phantasmic glow he sensed the true hypnotic grotesqueries of the deep. The dreamself looked upward to where light and the surface were supposed to be, and the surface was gone. He knew, then, that he had been sucked into the maw of some leviathan, and if he could only outswim the current he might be spared.

A shrill, pulsing alarm startled him into letting go his one good breath and Commander Noas woke instantly, his Air Galil a chill in his fist.

“Speak!”

He relaxed his aim on the console and caught his breath.

“Sir! Special Ops Command meeting immediately at Sanhedrin Chambers, sir!”

Commander Noas flicked a finger and his bedside Watchdog displayed the image of a pale, distraught young woman at Central Security and Communications. Every light on her control board pulsed in a red fury. The woman’s brown eyes stared, wide as a deer’s, at the video pickup just to the left of his own display. The commander snorted his disgust.

Another missionary.

She wore the blue-and-white shoulder patch of a first-year missionary on a customary two-year rotation. That was his indictment of the missionary system of staffing—personnel were either coming or going, so continuity and long-term projects became very nearly hopeless. The commander made sure his own visual was off before he stepped out of bed.

“It’s the Sabbath,” he growled. “Who authorized a flipping meeting at cockcrow on the flipping Sabbath?”

Probably her first flipping watch! Flipping amateurs!

“Sergeant Tekel, sir.”

Tekel. Tekel had been right about the Mormons and the Twin Falls Hot Bloods teaming up last fall. He was a pro, not likely to panic. The overzealous two-year wonders like the woman on his screen hallucinated Mormon infiltrators in the air-conditioning and Muslim frogmen in the hydroponics. This, thanks to the paranoia instilled in them by the weekend warriors who called themselves basic training instructors at Camp Calvary.

Their parents probably never let them stay up after sunset

The actual enemy was much more subtle: a strategic marriage, a political appointment, a handshake over hot turf. This was the kind of danger that required experience to spot. Experience, and good intelligence.

Tekel was not one to cry wolf because he had breathed the wolf’s foul breath himself, in the courtroom and in the street. And, like the commander, Tekel was Night-School trained in black ops, a service that the DIA and the U.S. government no longer provided independent contractors since consolidation of the intelligence services fifteen years back. Sergeant Tekel’s office monitored the intelligence agencies of a dozen governments as well as the Godwire, and Noas trusted Tekel’s judgment.

The commander pulled on his black pants and black sweater and finger-combed his blotches of blond hair before snugging them down with his black beret. The missionary was still on the line, and now she was crying. He slipped into his boots and squeezed the closures.

David Noas stood up to his full height of nearly two meters and activated the visual pickup on his bedside Watchdog. He knew that his rank, his size and the burn scars across his face cut an intimidating picture. That’s why he kept the scars. That, and to remind him of what a government could do to a God-fearing people.

“If you know the situation, Corporal, by all means share it.”

The commander heard a lot of shouting in the background, and Innocents weeping. The corporal started to speak, but what came out was a sob.

Exasperated, the commander snapped, “Are you under attack?”

She shook her head
no,
then tried again.

“It’s . . . it’s the Master.” She pulled her shoulders back and took a deep breath. “He’s dead, sir.”

His heart,
Noas thought.
He refused the replacement, after all.

The commander felt the hot fingers of grief at his throat, but swallowed and shook them off. The Gardeners and their interests must be protected while they mourn, the Master’s family notified. . . .

“Has anyone notified his son yet?”

Joshua Casey had been a geek of an older brother to the adopted David Noas, but he was a brilliant geek who lived to please his father. At times, his enthusiasm to please his father overstepped his theology. On this ground Joshua Casey and David Noas had formed a secret partnership to secure the Gardeners, their land and their installations worldwide. And to keep the Master alive by means that the Master did not necessarily approve.

“He’s dead, too,” the missionary reported. “Somebody blew up a dam in Costa Brava and he’s dead. Every one of them that went down there . . . they’re all dead. . . .”

The rest trailed off into sobs.

The commander’s belly went cold.

“ViraVax,” he whispered.

A chill spread up his spine and out to his fingertips.

ViraVax,
he thought,
means ‘Artificial Viral Agents.’

And AVAs meant an international incident and a big cash-flow problem if he didn’t get the cap on it right now.

“Pull it together, Corporal,” he growled. “You have a job to do. Your Master would not want you to let him down.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now, has anyone secured the area of the flood?” he asked. “Anyone at all?”

The missionary dropped her headset into position, and the commander watched a flicker of indistinct data blur the air in front of her face like colorful fishes.

“Our source at the embassy reports a U.S. SEAL team and a Costa Bravan merc unit on-site,” she said. Angry shouts of grief in the background distracted her for a moment. “No response on any facility channels.”

The one piece of information David Noas wanted was the one that was ultrasecure, one that he asked the corporal for anyway.

“Is this a contamination situation?”

She showed no undue reaction to his question, and he breathed a little easier for that. As far as she was concerned, ViraVax produced vaccines, pesticides and certain agricultural enhancements in Puerto Rico. If the cover was still good on the Costa Brava facility, they probably didn’t have to worry about a runaway biological catastrophe like the one in Japan a few years back.

“No word on any kind of contamination, Commander. Should I ask . . .?”

^“
No!” he barked. “No, I’ll catch up at Sanhedrin. Monitor embassy output and route it to me in chambers.”

Commander Noas cut the connection and rubbed the scars at his forehead.

Who dares to smite the Master of the Children of Eden on my watch?