The Reaper Plague (6 page)

“
That was just to
demonstrate your helplessness, mister Banson. You need to
understand you are helpless. Do you understand?”

Banson glared at her. “Banson, Robert J.
Sergeant First Class, 549-23 –”

“
Mister Banson, I’m not
here to interrogate you. I just want to make sure you are all
right, and that you know the terms of your imprisonment. You are a
prisoner of war and will be treated in accordance with all the
terms of the Geneva Convention, but because of your
nano-enhancement you are particularly dangerous to yourself and
others. I need to know that if we treat you properly you will not
hurt anyone or try to escape.”

“
It’s my duty to try to
escape,” he snarled.

“
I realize that, but
perhaps you could just agree to put that off for a day. A one-day
parole. You give me your word that you won’t try to escape for
twenty-four hours and I’ll let you out of these restraints and you
can eat and drink and we can sit down and talk like two normal
people.”

He shook his head. “Go screw yourself.”

Cassandra signed, smiling sadly. “That’s not
too farfetched, as I haven’t had a date in ten years. Much too busy
dealing with problems like you. Oh, my name is Cass, by the way.
Can I call you Robert? Rob, or Bobby? Bert? No? What, then?”

He jerked at the restraints. “Banson, Robert
J., Sergeant First Class –”

“
Stop that, Robert.” Cass
laid her palm on the man’s arm, a calculated caress. “You’ll hurt
yourself. We have the nanites suppressed. If we have to, we will
clean them out of your body.”

For the first time Banson looked worried,
then he froze his face and stared at the ceiling, silent.

Cass patted his arm sympathetically. “Just
let me know when you’re willing to give your parole,” she said, and
then withdrew, signaling Karl to follow her out.

Bettina shut the door with a clang then
dropped the bar with metallic finality. “Why didn’t you push him
harder?” she asked Cass conversationally.

Cass waved them farther down the corridor,
then replied quietly. “Effective interrogation takes time, subtle
psychological pressures. Rough measures rarely elicit reliable
intelligence. Torture is counterproductive. Trust me to do it my
way.” She waited until the others nodded in acquiescence. “All
right, let’s see the other one now – Marquez. After that, I’ll be
back every four to six hours. In a few days they’ll want to tell me
everything I need to know and a lot I don’t.”
I hope
, she
said to herself. Then:
Admit it to yourself, Cass, you like this
stuff. It’s fun to have power.
She answered herself:
Sure I
do. Power isn’t evil, just its misuse.

She turned to the other room, where Marquez
waited helpless. Then she had some more fun.

Master Sergeant Repeth bolted breakfast and
immediately went to talk to Captain LeBrun. She’d formally reported
to him yesterday evening in her dress uniform, but there had been
little time to talk. The formation of Homeland Security troops she
had seen one barracks over had brought some questions to her
mind.

“
What is it, Repeth?”
LeBrun was a weathered man, tanned leather over Eden Plague over
age, she thought.
He seems old inside, old for an Army Captain,
most of whom are seldom more than thirty. Maybe he’s up from the
ranks
. She pushed her speculations aside.

“
I was wondering about the
Homeland Security platoon next door, sir. What are they doing here?
Are they coming along?”

“
Yes, they’re coming along.
That’s actually a company, Master Sergeant. Smaller unit size,
though they will pick up a few more before we go.”

She frowned. “It may not be my place to say,
sir, but…unless they’re Edens now…”

LeBrun nodded. “The atrocities.” He took a
deep drag from his cigarette, and Repeth noticed the well-used
ashtray, formed in the shape of a Ranger tab, half-full of butts.
Fresh butts, she thought, since first thing this morning.

“
Yes, sir. I wonder how
many had ‘SS’ instead of ‘HS’ on their uniforms just a few weeks or
months ago. There were a lot of bad apples in the Security
Service.”

LeBrun stared at her, leaning back in his
creaking metal chair, a piece of furniture that, like everything
else in these barracks, looked like it had been in use continuously
since the Vietnam conflict. “And I heard you have some personal
experience with them.”

He picked up a file from his desk. Inside she
caught a glimpse of her own official photo. He spoke as he skimmed,
“Triathlete, black belt in several martial arts, never failed to
max the male standard PT test, even went to the Olympic track and
field trials. Expert in all weapons quals, honor grad at your 3RT
school, honor grad at jump school, distinguished grad at Close
Quarters Combat school, on and on and on. Lost both feet to an IED
in Iraq where you were assigned to train their police in special
tactics. And then it ends abruptly. The report says you deserted,
were convicted in absentia and dishonorably discharged, but it’s a
Unionist document so I don’t put much stock in it.”

LeBrun tossed the file back onto his desk
with a thump. “Then it picks back up with a blizzard of nearly
simultaneous orders – signed by the President, for Pete’s sake –
pardoning you for all acts, rescinding the charge of desertion,
reinstating you in the Marine Corps,
promoting
you, awarding
you the goddamn
Navy Cross
for saving the President’s life,
and then assigning you to humble little me.” His expression was not
unfriendly, but skeptical.

“
And you want the gaps
filled in.”

“
That would be nice,” he
said drily. “I do need to know my people.”

“
Yes, sir. I contracted the
Eden Plague on the cruise ship
Royal Neptune
– the one they
sunk on Infection Day. I swam across to the USS
Somerset
and
sneaked aboard. I found the chaplain there and told her what was
going on – she believed me once they sank the cruise ship – and she
smuggled me off with the wounded. I rejoined my unit but my feet
were regrowing. I hid the situation as long as I could, but when
the Unionists took over they mandated Eden Plague testing for
everyone. That was when you might say I ‘deserted.’ On the other
hand, I never took an oath to the Unionist Party and they had
suspended the Constitution, so –”

LeBrun waved her explanations away with his
hand. “Never mind the legalities, just the facts.”

“
Yes, sir. Well, I went
AWOL, then they caught me in Alabama when I ran out of mountains to
hide in. They put me in a camp in Iowa. I escaped from that, made
it to the Mexico border, swam the Rio Grande – they weren’t yet
looking hard for people crossing southward – and made my way to
South America. I volunteered for the Free Communities Armed Forces.
US refugees with the right training were being swept into a Special
Operations command under Colonel Nguyen, who was working for
Chairman Markis. I was involved in a number of missions culminating
in my…well, in the action described on the award.”

“
Singlehandedly saving
the life of the President of the United States
,” he quoted from
the award’s text. “What in the hell do I do with you,
Repeth?”

“
What do you mean, sir?”
She drew herself up, dropping unconsciously to parade
rest.

“
You’re a bona fide hero,
but you’ve been fighting
against
your country for the last
ten years.”

Her expression tightened. “With all due
respect, sir, the UGNA wasn’t my country. My country is the people
and Constitution of the United States, and I was fighting
for
them, against the fascists. Sir.”

LeBrun stood up, and she realized he was no
taller than she was, a whippet of a man of perhaps five foot eight,
but his sharp eyes and intense demeanor gave him an outsized
presence. He took a final drag on his current smoke, then ground it
out. “Good. I just wanted to hear it from your own lips, Top.”
Clearly the nickname was an expression of trust: “you are my top
soldier,” in Army terms.

He reached up to the breast pocket of his
camouflage jacket and pulled out a new pack of cigarettes, looking
speculatively at her as he performed the smoker’s ritual of rapping
the packet twice on his palm to seat the tobacco, opening the
cellophane, then the box lid, then the foil inside, finally drawing
forth one of the coffin nails to light with tilted head.

She suddenly had a vision of him with a
fedora,
film noir
.

LeBrun took a deep drag before he spoke,
fragrant smoke puffing from his lips with his words. “Do you think
you’ll have any problem making the adjustment from the Special
Operations mentality back to a line unit?”

She took a slow breath, thinking over her
response. “Not if you let me do my job my way, sir,” she finally
said.

“
By which you mean stay out
of your hair. You’re the only platoon leader that isn’t an officer.
On the books you’re just my platoon sergeant and I’m the platoon
leader. That means there’s no green looey to blame things on if
they go wrong. No buffer between you and me. That means neither of
us gets any excuses for screw-ups. You okay with that, Master
Sergeant?”

She nodded sharply. “Yes, sir.”

“
Fair enough.” He waved in
the direction of the door with the hand holding the smoke. “You’re
dismissed.”

“
Sir.” Repeth snapped to
attention, faced about and marched sharply out of his office. She
was halfway to her barracks office when she realized they hadn’t
discussed the Homeland Security company. She wondered whether that
was deliberate.

When Skull awoke the door was shut.
Suspicious, he grabbed his weapon and banged it open, to see
Raphaela sitting on the floor, stretching her hands to her toes.
She smiled at him wanly, a halfhearted thing, but he counted it a
good sign, a better alternative to being flayed with her tongue.
Stalking over as she watched, he threw himself into his chair.
“What is there to do?” he asked, vaguely irritated.

“
You can start insulting me
again.” Her tone was bantering.

“
Tempting. But
really.”

“
Waah. ‘Mommy, I’m bored.
Are we there yet?’ Well, space travel is boring,” she said,
matter-of-fact. “We can tap in to a lot of Earth broadcasts. I have
thousands of books in the memory stores.”

Deliberately suppressing a retort, trying to
keep the peace, he asked, “What about food? I’m hungry and thirsty.
You must be too.” And he realized he was; the nano must have been
holding the sensations at bay. He had eaten a combat ration, his
only one, shortly after they came on board. He cursed himself for
not thinking to have ordered Section Three to steal cases of some
kind of preserved stuff, which might also have given them an excuse
to rejoin the team and saved their lives.

Or maybe not.
Skull sighed grimly.
What’s done is done
.

Raphaela softened. “I made this. It’s not
very good but it’s nutritious.” She handed him a lump of something
brownish the consistency of cookie dough, along with a clear
misshapen plasticky bottle of water.

The lump smelled like meat gone faintly old,
and he took a nibble. “Not too bad. I’ve had much worse. There was
this time in Ecuador that we lost all our food and we ate raw
snake, and the insides of some kind of beetle, and some grubs. Now
that was awful.” He laughed, drank.
Maybe if we keep talking
normally it will all be normal. Whatever normal is.

“
Well I’m glad you like my
cooking. More like my programming.”

“
What’s it made out of?”
Skull asked.

“
Ship.”

“
What?”

“
It’s made out of ship,
just like everything here. It’s basically one big biomachine.” She
waved a hand at the surroundings.

“
Huh. So as we eat the ship
gets smaller?”

She shrugged. “Slightly, but there’s a lot of
mass that’s just there to provide materials. You should be much
more worried about the amount of fuel we’re using.”

“
Okay, how much fuel are we
using?”

“
A lot. Constant one G
burns a lot of mass even with the highly efficient fusion reactor
that powers this thing. Though it’s less efficient than it used to
be.”

“
How efficient is
it?”

“
It’s down below
ninety-three percent now. That’s horrible. Almost
failing.”

“
Since when is ‘used to
be’?”

“
Since Raphael came to
consciousness. Four thousand years, give or take.”

“
Pretty well built.” He ate
some more of the meat-dough. “So why are you being so amenable
now?”

Her dark eyes were liquid, clear and open.
“How else would I be, in the long run? I’m an Eden, remember?” She
tapped her skull. “Mentally well-adjusted. I can’t help it. I can’t
hate you, and anger isn’t sustainable.”

Skull slumped down in the seat, stunned, mind
revving. Of course she was an Eden, because Captain Sophia Ilona
had been. Somehow he’d forgotten about the Eden Plague, or figured
the Blending had bypassed it, made it irrelevant, cured it. Then
he’d just made it with an Eden…and maybe that explained
something.

“
How do you feel?” he
asked. “Think hard. Think carefully. Try to compare it to how you
felt before, when we were, umm, emotional. Before, during and
after.”