The Orion Plague (4 page)

It was a strange and clinical violation, and
clearly did not bode well. He hoped it was some kind of twisted
health and wellness exam for prisoners, such as a concentration
camp doctor might have performed, uncaring but not specifically
cruel. Still it shook him, and he realized that although he was a
prisoner here, things could still get a lot worse. In some ways it
just had; fear of the unknown was a cruelty of its own.

It took longer than usual to go to sleep that
night, but exhaustion eventually overtook him. Sometime in the dark
he awoke briefly to a faint hissing sound and the smell of pine,
but dismissed it and rolled over.
If they want to gas me and
kill me, what can I do?

But the next day there seemed little amiss,
other than an itch in one eye. He rubbed at it and thought no more
about it as he performed his morning routine, which consisted of
toilet, a short shower, brushing his teeth and a shave. The brassy
mirror in the bathroom showed nothing in his eye that he could see,
though the reflection was always blurry. He supposed they were
afraid he would break a glass mirror and use the shards to hurt
himself or others, so they gave him a shiny piece of metal bolted
to the wall.

Sitting down on his bunk to put his slippers
on, he noticed they were switched the wrong way round, left on
right, right on left. That seemed odd; he always took them off as a
pair and set them down the same way he would wear them. Perhaps
they had used a sleep gas in the night so they could come in and
search his room. There was nothing to find anyway, and he wondered
why they wouldn’t just do it with his full knowledge. Or perhaps
they had installed or serviced the surveillance devices he was
certain were there. But then again, they could do that during the
day when he was at his “job.” It puzzled him, and he shrugged
unconsciously.

Today went by as every other; he wasn’t even
sure of the days of the week, and his minders took one in six
rotating days off, in which case they were spelled by temporaries.
He did his work in the quad room, and waited for his latest chance
to slip something past the three others.

When Bennie next went to the toilet and he
saw the color of flesh from Stan’s screen, he knew Marvin would be
dozing – that’s why Stan thought he could get away with his girlie
fix – and Rick quickly inserted the last bit of code into his
latest trapdoor. Now all he had to do was press a certain sequence
of keys and the system would crash for a few minutes, erasing the
logic bomb in the process. He had no idea what he would use it for
but he was trying to prepare for any opportunity.

Booted feet scraped in the corridor and he
blanked his screen just as the door burst open. Pancho filled the
entrance with a grim and disapproving look on his face. “Mister
Johnstone, please come with us.” He crooked a finger, a gesture
that would have been comical if it was not so frightening.

Rick stood up unsteadily, wondering if they
had seen what he was doing, hoping it was just coincidence. He
submitted to handcuffs and shuffled in front of the two other
jackbooted thugs as they marched down the corridor, shoving him
from time to time. Pancho was never cruel, but his men had no such
compunctions.

They took him into a section of the complex
he had never entered and put him in a cell. Little different from
his own, still it felt colder and more forbidding, a place of
fearful waiting instead of scant refuge. He saw gouges and chips in
the wall, hash marks of days, and a few scratched words.
Bugger.
Please God Help Me. Kilroy Was Here. I Pray For Death.
This
last one chilled him, and he wondered what had been done to the
writer to make him scribble his despair for all to see.

With nothing better to do he dozed on the
thin stained mattress. There was no linen or pillow, and the pallet
smelled of dust and sweat and urine. This even felt like a
different area, a section of the prison whose spirit reeked of fear
and misery. He rubbed at his itching eye.

Again came the sounds of the boots, but these
were not Pancho’s and his relatively professional crew. This group
of guards, though dressed the same, moved differently. They jerked
and twitched; one man’s eyes looked in different directions, like a
lizard’s. The leader of the detail had a forehead made of highly
polished metal, like medieval armor, and there was something about
the length of his legs that just seemed…
wrong
.

This mob did not march him away; they carried
him bodily down the corridor and he finally began to struggle. He
couldn’t help it as the fear mounted in him, the terror that he was
finally going to find out more about this place than he wanted to
know.

A thin screaming appeared from somewhere, and
it took a moment before he realized it was his own throat making
the sound. He clamped down on it and told himself,
whatever they
do to me, I can survive and recover from it. The Eden Plague will
regenerate my body, as long as I make it through. Death is the only
thing that’s irreversible.

But he was wrong.

The Beast crossed the line of departure at
0500 EST. “Can’t see a damn thing in this rain, Top,” complained
Lockerbie. “You sure you don’t want to wait until it’s a little
lighter?”

Repeth tapped her right temple. “Forget your
squadcomm already? Drop your HUD, synch it with the Beast’s night
vision sensors in overlay mode.”

“Oh, yeah,” she said in embarrassment. A
moment later she said delightedly, “This is shit-hot! It’s like a
video game!” The Beast accelerated to fifty up the twisting country
road. To the passengers it appeared as if she was driving blind.
Grusky held on for dear life; Repeth jounced and swayed,
nonchalant. Butler cinched his harness tighter in the turret above,
and Donovan rolled his head to the side and began to snore.

“Oh, Top, I forgot to ask,” Lockerbie said
over the comm, “where are we going? Other than, well, north up this
road?”

“Access the navigation computer. It’s already
programmed in.”

“Okay…got it. Huh. We’re going to a pollution
control plant?”

“That’s what it used to be.”

“And now?”

“Now it’s the only lead I have.”

Road rolled away under rubber for many
minutes before Grusky cleared his throat and switched the squadcomm
to a private channel. “Top, you know, we’ll work better if we know
a little more about what’s going on.”

The answer came back late, but eventually
Repeth responded. “Yes, you’re right.” She switched to the general
channel. “Okay, listen up. Lock, pull over somewhere safe-ish,
we’re not in any huge hurry. Butler, stay sharp, use your infrared
HUD link. Donovan...Grusky, wake Donovan up, will you?”

Once everyone was on the squadcomm she
briefed them. “Okay, here’s the deal. The Charlottesville folks’
link-analysis connects our friend Professor Scott Stone with a
group called the Shadow Men, or just Shadows. During the Unionist
period the conspiracy nuts on the internet claimed they were a
secret organization employing kidnap and death squads to disappear
the Unionists’ political enemies, a kind of Gestapo. DOD intel
organizations were forbidden from investigating these rumors, and
were instead instructed to turn over all information to the FBI,
who were tasked with tracking down – wait for it – not the Shadows,
but the conspiracy nuts.”

“Huh,” mused Grusky. “They wouldn’t waste
time stamping out wacko lies, only truth.”

“Right you are. Once the nukes broke the
Unionists’ hold on the Federal government, Army ground-intel
started collating reports and information, but it’s pretty sketchy
right now. They have connected these Shadows with lots of dirty
deeds, but what caught my eye were the reports that a lot of the
disappeared people were hackers and computer wiz kids,
cyberneticists, roboticists…sound familiar?”

“Wasn’t Mr. Johnstone a computer scientist?”
asked Butler.

“Yes. Actually he was a cyber-warrior, a
network attack and defense expert,” responded Repeth. “He was
instrumental in the Free Communities’ defense against the cyber
assaults of the Big Three during the New Cold War,” she said
proudly. “He never picked up a gun until he was embedded with us,
but he was probably more important to the Free Communities military
than a hundred spec ops people like me.” She swallowed a lump in
her throat.

And it’s my fault he’s gone. I should have
said no and made it stick. If I had, he’d be angry, but he’d be
safely back in South Africa or Colombia or somewhere like that,
helping his spymaster mother fight the cold grey battles of the
intelligence world, not slaving away handcuffed to a desk
or…
she refused to speculate further.

“Anyway, they have reason to believe the
Shadows took over part of the Cole pollution control plant in
Lorton, just south of Fort Belvoir, as their main base of
operations, a couple of years before Plaguefall.

Before nuclear firefall, you mean, don’t you
Jill?

She clubbed her guilt sulking back into its
box and went on. “The plant is big, it has lots of places to site
an experimental laboratory, and it’s easy to conceal from the
general public. They expect to see people going in and out every
day, what do they know about pollution control? It would have been
easy to get rid of bodies, too.” She blew air out her cheeks. “So
it’s thin, but that poor schizoid from Fredburg said the Professor
sold Rick to the Shadow Men, and he talked about “burn rooms.” Who
knows what that means? But if the Shadows needed high-end tech
people back then, and if any of their organization survived to need
people like Rick, then some answers might be there at that
plant.”

The team mulled that over for a minute or
two. Then Grusky said, “Okay. I’ve chased felons down on thinner
leads. Let’s do it.”

Lockerbie put the Beast back in gear and they
drove northward into the waning drizzle.

***

Repeth flipped up her HUD glasses and put the
binoculars to her eyes. The Beast was sitting in the parking lot of
the strip mall across the six-lane expanse of US-1 from the
entrance to the plant. She couldn’t see much; dead trees screened
the industrial facility, and so did an eight-foot high cyclone
fence with vision-impeding strips woven into it.

The stretch of asphalt around them teemed
with the remnants of buildings and burned-out vehicles,
flash-ignited by the nukes that had hit Fort Belvoir and Davison
Army Airfield two or three miles away. Hues were muted in the
drizzle but even in bright autumn sunlight it would have been a
dreary scene, devoid of color. Almost everything green had turned
brown, and rivers of black concrete-like ash had petrified in waves
and miniature dunes.

She wondered why Commander Alkina or her
secret Psycho masters had programmed Belvoir in as a nuke target.
It was home to a lot of administrative and agency headquarters, and
the enormous hospital that had subsumed Walter Reed when it closed,
but nothing vital to the US military effort. Just a bunch of drones
in endless office cubicles, pushing electronic paper from one place
to another and getting in each other’s way.

As far as you know, that is.
Who
knows what the Unionists had hidden there? We’ll never find out
now. It’s just a smoking hole.

“Donovan, check the IdentiFinder, will
you?”

He pulled out their handheld radiation
detector and analyzer. “Looks well within limits for Edens, Top,”
he responded in his Appalachian drawl.

“Should we go right in the front door or look
for another entrance?” asked Grusky.

“I think the front door is it. What do you
see there at the gate?” She meant the space between the fence and
the shattered guardhouse, since there actually was no barrier
anymore.

“Umm…nothing?”

“Right you are. It doesn’t look like it’s
been used much or often in the last couple of months. I’m betting
that if anyone is still at the plant, they have another, more
discreet way in and out. US-1 is a main public route, and you will
notice it’s navigable. We haven’t seen any traffic but even in this
rain I can see where some people have pushed cars out of the way,
and some places where the crud has been rolled through, making a
driving lane. People may have survived in the hollows of the hills
around here; they must be salvaging from the grocery and shops.”
Repeth jerked a thumb over her shoulder at the strip mall behind
them.

Grusky nodded acquiescence. “So if I was a
Shadow I’d not make it obvious that the plant was in use, so as not
to draw attention. Or maybe,” he stroked his chin, “there’s really
no one there.”

“Only one way to find out. Lock and
load.”

“Guess I'm Lock,” joked Lockerbie to Butler
at the gun, “and you're Load.”

Grusky didn't laugh but instead looked
askance at Repeth. “We’re kicking in the front door?”

She swiveled her head around to stare at him
with dead eyes. “You got a problem with that?”

He blinked. “None whatsoever. Just want to be
clear on the plan, boss. No recon means we go in blind. Doesn’t
seem your style.”

Repeth gritted her teeth.
What the hell do
you know about my style?
“It also means we go in with maximum
surprise. The plan is shock and awe. Butler, use whatever kind of
shells you need to cut our way in. We may end up driving the Beast
straight into a building to start the extract.” She reached down
between her knees and hefted a rotary grenade launcher, loading it
with baseball-sized shells.

“You think Rick is in there?”

“I’m hoping. And if not, they’ll damn well
tell us where he is.”

“Understood.” When Repeth faced back to the
front, Grusky exchanged glances with Donovan, who shrugged.