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Chapter Text

Circa 3010

Pendulum Wars

Kubrick Clinics and Laboratories

"Dr. Wright? Dr. Wright?" called out the woman from the entryway.

Dr. Wright’s head swiveled in her direction. She stared at him as sat at his laboratory bench with a number of open notebooks and his trademark beaker of black coffee. Jesus, he looked older than she remembered, she thought. And given that she’d simply been away for a month – that was saying something. But it wasn't simply his hair that had aged – that was one constant that had remained since the beginning of the project – the gray replacing the black had noticeably spread; akin to a web of silvery roots growing and expanding along his head. But his frame appeared to have withered too, taking the smoother contours of what was left of his youth with it.

"It's not as all bad as that, is it?" chirped the man, slightly irked that she found him so adversely noticeable. Eliza was an open book, and him; not so much. He’d imagined that the earnestness which with he’d worked, the energy and the precious time he’d sacrificed for the project was still there. Surely it burned brightly in his eyes. But instead of recognizing it, she simply stood in the doorway like a child who’d just emerged from touring the local freak show. And the fact that she irritated him irritated him as well. He’d thought that he was beyond the judgment of others. But like a fly in the proverbial ointment, it seemed that a teaspoon of insecurity was attempting to contaminate the apathy he’d managed to cultivate over the years.

When it came to their competing fields of knowledge, he was miles ahead of her. With a doctorate in molecular genetics, biology and anthropology together with decades spent working in both the public and private sector, she didn’t, and couldn’t, hold a candle to him. But when it came down to negotiating the overgrown paths of scientific collaboration, policy and politics, he’d unhappily found that he played William Joseph Hammer to her Thomas Edison. His colleagues, purely out of politeness’ sake, had allowed him to serve as both a lead scientist and as one of the five project coordinators, but that had only lasted for four months.

From the moment he’d entered graduate school, he was celebrated for his innovative concepts and breakthroughs he’d accomplished in the STEM territory. He had used these talents to capitalize, with a degree of humility, on participating in and creating think-tanks that served universities and later, industrial employers. Until one day capitalizing with humility turned into capitalizing with entitlement. He was accustomed having people turn a blind eye to his eccentricities and it was this expectation of indulgence that clashed with his newer, and much more socially cooperative, role.

It had begun with minor disagreements, and somewhere along the rocky trail of petty squabbles, he’d found that a colleague’s lab had had three of four grants approved and his, for the first time in a long while, had been rejected. Never mind that his collaborator’s group’s studies were (unknowingly) closely tied to that of ongoing military research, and never mind that Sera was beginning to shake with mild tremours of war which saw a jump in defense spending. He had been overlooked. And despite all the evidence, he’d taken it personally. He had then come to the decision to go on sabbatical, which then led to the deliberate decision to withhold crucial data he’d already generated. Data that would have saved their field years of effort and time. The story got out eventually, of course, and his fellow advisors had finally found a leash with which to restrain him. They took some of his toys away, removed him from the board and demanded that he play nice with his collaborators or he’d be relegated to the role of an assistant professor in a community college for the rest of his life.

And then they replaced the position of lead coordinator with the relatively young military scientist, Doctor Eliza Solomon. Which was why he was constrained to the familiar environs of his laboratory sans the usual state-of-the-art-equipment, and she was traveling between groups, gathering and consolidating information. Information they’d produced using his ideas.

Perhaps that was why she treated him somewhat reverentially. She knew he was the driving proponent behind their progress, but while the others selectively ignored this fact, she never seemed to forget it. He’d supposed that he should have been grateful, but he always enjoyed having power over the ersatz sycophant rather than the genuine one. He found that the former usually had an agenda, and once he’d sniffed it out, he could easily leverage it to his advantage. The latter belonged to the Igors of this world and were beneath his notice. Well, when he wasn’t affected by their adulations anyway.

And Igor-Eliza, unaware of the sporadic petty resentments he held against her, shook her head – glasses nearly falling off the bridge of her nose – flustered and embarrassed. "Oh...no, sir. Of course not."

"You’re a poor liar."

She shut her eyes, abashed and a trifle mortified. Dr. Wright waved a dismissive hand in the air. "Doesn’t matter. I've just been more preoccupied lately. Too much to worry about without having to think about acceptable grooming standards in society."

"I'm sorry to hear about your wife, doctor." said Eliza; extending an invisible olive branch to appease her superior's temper. "I – well, I never thought they would re-take Hyrme. The city was well fortified."

Ah, Ofelia. Why do they always seem to think your loss would shatter me? After a year of alleged marital bliss, they’d drifted apart, each content to lead separate lives for two decades. He sighed. He supposed he’d better show a modicum of grief. "Yes. Very tragic. Who could’ve expected it?" There. Not entirely demonstrative, but at least he made the effort.

"Yes sir – of course. But I am sorry nonetheless. And if there’s anything you need..."

Dr. Wright grinded his teeth. He had no reason to be agitated by her words, but he had enough cantankerousness in him to go around for days. He nodded – the only acknowledgement he could think of to give the discomposed woman. And then, "Why are you here?"

"Dr. Erlich’s group has finished the sequence analysis and comparisons."

"On what? The rat cell lines? I told them to have it analyzed in the embryonic tissue – didn't I... They’re finished already? Why wasn’t I notified earlier?"

She wasn’t sure which question to answer first. "Yes, sir. They wanted me to tell you in person. This isn’t exactly the sort of news you share by telegram."

Who the hell communicates by telegram these days, woman? "Did the protein misfolding conditions hold?" questioned Wright. "Did the repetitions yield similar quaternary structures? Remember, the little fuckers love coming into being, but they hate being alike."

"Yes, sir. Under the conditions you’d specified, both isolated groups have yielded identical prionic structures."

At this, a gleam of hope, curiousity and interest played across Wright’s eyes. The same eagerness carried through to his voice as well. “And what about stability in the live samples? The rats?”

Eliza smiled, pleased and relieved to see him happy – if only for a brief moment. “All grown into adulthood without any marked genetic defects. Uncontrolled tumour-like proliferation has been eliminated. And I can even safely say that in rodent models, diabetes has become a disease of the past. Neuritic plaques in our more geriatric patients are dissolving over time as well.”

“Good god,” Wright muttered reverently. “The irony. Curing Alzheimer’s with the agent that causes it. You’re watching evolutionary karma unfold, Dr. Solomon. Sure, we had to poke and prod it our way a bit. But for the first time in a long time it’s happening in our favour.” He allowed himself a loud chuckle.

“Except there is one thing, and I – ”

“– except for what?” interrupted Wright, unable to contain himself.

“Our models are especially aggressive. We can’t keep the males in the same cage. We first thought that they were in heat or experiencing an equivalent behavioral episode, but not anymore. The females aren’t as docile either – but they’re not nearly as bad as the males. We also observed rapid hair growth. Basically everything that is keratin-based; the hair, claws...show a remarkable rate of development.”

“You don’t say...” murmured Wright, grinning.

She saw no reason for him to be pleased. But after a year of battling between the ends and the means by which to reach them, Doctor Eliza Solomon had realized that none of it was relevant to her. After all, she wasn’t the one doing the research. She was simply a coordinator. She facilitated communication, organized meetings, why, she was almost an administrative assistant. And as long as a currency still functioned in this economy, war-torn as it was, she still needed to put food on the table.

“I...well, yes. Of course. And despite this, the board believes that with the urgent context of our situation, an expedited response is required.”

“Human trials,” muttered Wright. And then furrowed his brow at her. “Why not go ahead then? Why come to me? I’m just the ghost writer.”

“It wouldn’t have been right, sir, to move on without your blessing. I voted for a quorum of fifteen. I won by one vote, formed the quorum and now I’m here. We’ve got fourteen yeas. You’re the fifteenth. The project won’t continue without your say-so.”

He drummed his fingers along the epoxy laminated countertop. A decade ago – this rapid progression would never have been possible. There would be protests among the ethicists in the scientific community, organizations of repute would have withdrawn any funding for the project and it would have come to a deadening halt. All theories would have remained just that. Theories.

But the Pendulum Wars had changed all of that.

Their victory-starved military were desperate. And, like all desperate, drowning men, they would fight for hold on dry land even if it meant crawling over a shore of corpses. Reasonable ethical restraints functioned well within a civilized society that nurtured its scientists as it did its artists, philosophers and philanthropists equally. But when a significant threat to that civilization emerged, morality blurred until it finally split into a violent separation of black and white. Us against them. It all came down to survival now. From an army defending their country, to a sergeant defending her platoon to a parent defending their child. Deafening and timeless and always, heartbreaking.

So the red tape was done away with. The road blocks were removed. No more lengthy spells of thumb-twiddling for committee-reviews and approvals from all manner of non-governmental institutions. The schools and the businesses and the foundations had dissolved to make room for a military government. And only their word mattered. Did your small-scale model yield reproducible results? Yes. Then get the hell up off your ass and mass-produce this sucker so that we can win this thing and go home.

Leave it to the next generation to pay the debt of conscience. If soul-sacrificing is what it takes to ensure that there is a next generation, then so be it.

“Tell them we have a quorum, Eliza. And that my answer is yes.”

“We have a limited supply of cryogenic embryos, sir. We can do one round of experiments, but in order for us to get where we want to be, we need a larger,” she struggled for a moment to find the right word, “...stock.”

Unfazed, Wright thumped his fist on his knee. “Leave that to me. Go ahead and get this ball rolling. You’ll need adolescent resources. We may not have the time for anything younger. I have some old connections I can reach out to. Maybe I’ll be able to secure some resources for you.”

She nodded, smiling nervously, and walked away.

Hours later, after several urgent phone calls, Wright sat in the same chair, staring at his computer screen. A lengthy list of names gazed back at him. He began his documentation. And then, in an unusual act of inauspicious emotion, not lacking in the dramatic, he titled it The Orphan’s Sacrifice.

3025

Fifteen years later

New Hope Research Facility

Her breath came in short, ragged gasps. The nurse, although she preferred to call him her reaper in an attempt to be theatric, helped her lean against the soft pillow, and then placed a hand on head. “You ready?” he asked.

She nodded.

He took a long, thin tube, connected to a respirator that forked into two sections which were part of a mask that would cover both her nose and mouth. He linked the contraption together and quickly inserted the necessary segments through the permanent hole they’d bored in her throat to reach her windpipe during her tracheostomy. Intubation was a familiar ritual and he did it with a cold efficiency that made her feel like she was part of the machine itself.  

He was alright really, for the most part. Unassuming, gentle and kind. But her interactions with Carl and the other orderlies were almost always confined to her illness. There was no inane chit chat about life, about boys, about nothing. There were just her diseased spasms, and his attending to them. She was certain then, that no matter how long the gods kept her weak heart thumping, when her time came, theirs would be the last faces she would look upon.

After adjusting the elastic that held it in place, he stood upright again and smiled kindly down at her.

“Give it a minute,” Carl said. “Try to think of something relaxing – like a waterfall.”

Now when was the last time she had ever seen a waterfall? she thought, annoyed. The puffs of the ventilator as it inhaled and exhaled along with her were more soothing, and the fact that she preferred a cold, sterile instrument that chirped impassively at her to an elegant force of nature was bleak enough. Never, she replied to herself. And she had doubts that she ever would.

Carl gently stroked her thinning hair, glanced up at the closed door that led to an open hallway before speaking. “They don’t like us talking with you kids, you know that? Now how did they put it exactly? Social distancing, that’s right. We encourage social distancing, and it’s as much for your sake as it is for theirs.” He scoffed. “I was working on my nursing degree, you know? Then this shit hit the fan. I needed to survive and this place...this place was too good to be true. Found that out after a goddamn week of being here. But just because I hate it here don’t mean that I hate you too. And I talk with whoever I want to goddamn talk with.” He winked at her.

Her eyes narrowed, and he recognized that a smile must have formed underneath the mask.

“Can only do this with the door closed, okay? Can’t be throwing bricks at you while those fancy white coats are waltzing down the corridor else they’ll see me here with you and switch me out for someone else. A lot of the other guys? They don’t care. Now don’t go hating on them. They gotta survive too. Probably got families of their own, problems of their own. A lot of them weren’t raised to watch out for each other. Just their own. They don’t have that quality bedside manner that I got.”

She shook silently and closed her eyes. He realized that she must have been laughing. Well there’s a first. “Now don’t overdo it else you’ll break a rib or something.”

His pager beeped at his side and he examined it.

“Being summoned again, kid. I know, I’m sorry. Can’t sit up with you this time. But remember, anything bad happens and I’ll be right back faster than you can say noodles. Hang tight. Gotta see to this one thing and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

With a hiss-click, the door shut behind him and she was left alone again with her thoughts. They were hackneyed in how circular they were. If she had the strength, she’d reach under the mattress to retrieve the packet of sleeping pills she’d squirreled away right this minute. For what, she didn’t quite know. Or perhaps she didn’t want to know. She just didn’t want to be alone.

Some days her thoughts evolved into a turbulence that made her want to thrash and scream. And other days, she was simply too exhausted to respond physically. But they were there always, reflecting back up at her if she peeked into its mirror. And tired or no, they waited patiently for her to slip in their direction. They waited to tell her that that she had no future, no family, no friends. Sure, Carl was okay. But no matter what he said, his duty was to keep her here. Their claims of wanting her treatments to succeed turned more opaque by the week. Either the treatments were failing or they were lying. Were these people leading her to salvation or damnation? But worst of all, her doubts waited to tell her that she had no control over her own life. Why, they waited for her to ask? Because her life did not belong to her.

This was going to be one of those days.

She awoke with a start, yanking her mask off, her endotracheal tube with it. Half a minute after her reflex gag settled down, her door opened and Carl stumbled in, alarmed. Damn, she thought angrily. She must have screamed again.

“Ruth? Why’d you pull off your mask, honey? Relax. Calm down...” he said, coming to her side.

And then without warning, she lashed out with her feet – still entangled in the bed clothes – kicking him in his stomach. The blow must have been quite powerful, for he was pushed a good several feet from the bed. The mask was on the floor now, and with determined strides she came near him.

Carl lay on his back, too disoriented to push her away again. She took advantage of his vulnerable position and pinned him to the floor with her weight. She struck him hard on his right cheek, and then, without pausing, she did the same to his left – but with her opposite hand. She kept on the violent pattern of blows, until she felt herself being dragged away by powerful hands.

She had no fear, no remorse is was just a blur of anger. No shame that is, until she saw the bloodied man before her – lying unconscious on the floor. Words began to make sense again, and everything around her seemed to quiet down into normalcy.

Until she felt a biting jab on her arm before the dark edges of her vision overtook her, and all became silent.

3026

One Week Later

New Hope Research Facility

His forehead lay pressed onto the cold window pane in his office, and his eyes were closed. He remained standing in this fashion for several moments. Opening his eyes, he saw past the steady rivulets of water running down the glass outside, and wished that for once, could the weather throw a little fucking sunshine his way?

He berated himself instantly. Why should he deserve it, anyway?

It was all too easy to buy into a dream when the world around you was turning into an unrecognizable hellscape. He hadn’t exactly idolized the parents of this project and establishment, and he possessed wisdom enough to grasp that their tremendous ambition had come with a price, but only now did he begin to accept that it was a heavy one. One he no longer had the stamina to keep bleeding for.

He remembered Dr. Erlich’s and Dr. Wright’s public speech over a decade ago. It called for Sera to pull together during the Imulsion War. Not just figuratively, but literally as well. Before they’d been introduced by the military, a general had demanded that all of Sera’s academic and industrial institutions remove the barriers of competition and cooperate and win, or perish, broken and alone – those were the general’s words, not his. And they were going to ensure that the latter wasn’t a simply a figure of speech; six-figure fines for not assisting and sharing pertinent data would be imposed on a monthly basis on each non-participant.

Dr. Erlich spoke next, his tone more nuanced and less belligerent. They’d finally stumbled on a potential scientific breakthrough that was only secondary to the discovery of imulsion. The opportunity to cure a handful of diseases and develop weapons that would see them through this war with far less casualties than their enemies. It was finally a chance for the martial defense of mankind and its academic counterpart to become one and move towards a single goal. Eventually, it would not just benefit Sera, he said, but soon other nations – even their opponents – would come to see the light and join them to pull humanity farther into the future.

Imagine your father, Erlich had given as an example, a shell of himself, mentally crippled by the onslaught of Alzheimer’s. Imagine that after four to eight months of treatment, he not only regained more of himself, but his memories as well. Or a child with leukemia whose prognosis miraculously lengthened from two years to fifty. These weren’t the promises of sideshow preachers, he’d said. The difference here is that they could deliver. And they had the data to prove it.

It hurt a little, to recall the goosebumps he’d felt during these declarations. It was human nature to focus on the profits and not consider the losses until they finally hit. He’d just lost his job as a postdoc in a lab who’d seen all funding fall through due to the war. His idealism remained, however, and Dr. Erlich and Wright had pointed him in the correct direction to put it to use. It would have taken a great degree of stoicism to remain unimpressed and unmoved after realizing what they had the capacity to accomplish. But if he knew then what he knew now of the cost, he wouldn’t have just been unimpressed and unmoved – he’d have been horrified.

He was jolted from morbid reverie by the voice of a child being accompanied down a corridor. He couldn’t quite tell what was being said but at least they weren’t crying, and that was a relief in more ways than one.   

But long after they’d passed, their voices – cries of pain, cries of laugher – haunted him. Subjects one through twelve and – no, he reminded himself – they had names. Joshua and the others had often experienced heavy, laboured breathing. Their weakened immune systems have given way to sporadic bouts of lung infections. He could hear their grating breaths in his head; often due to the development of chronic bronchitis or tuberculosis caused by different mycobacterial strains – as little hollow intakes of air. Like unplayable, deformed wind instruments.

And the breathing difficulties were only the beginning.

The hair loss began around five to six years of age; they looked like veteran cancer patients who had undergone several treatments of chemotherapy. But of course, it wasn’t cancer that was killing them. Their own bodies had turned traitor. And he had helped bring that about. He, and the other scientists – past and present. If, hypothetically, there were to be remunerations in the future for all the...discomfort they’d caused, they’d be paying out the nose for several decades, if not, a century. With all the cutting and pasting of the genome they’d undertaken, a lot of these products would very likely be passed down each filial generation. And God only knew how far it would go, and what effects it would have.

He remembered the skin discoloration as well. Melanin production – the pigment found in mammalian tissues – was dangerously low. The children could not risk going outside. Exposure to the harmful UV rays of the sun without sufficient melanin could result in mutations, skin cancers. He recalled many a day where one of them would gaze longingly through tinted windows, rubbing their aching joints unconsciously, and ask to go outside.

No, you can’t, the orderly would answer, not unkindly. You know what will happen if you do.

Some of them insisted on it, one short day in the sunshine could surpass a lifetime spent within closed doors, they believed. But they weren’t the ones making decisions. They weren’t calling the shots.

We were, he thought. Because we knew what was best. Because father always knows best.

Turning his eyes away from the window, he stared at the framed photograph on his desk. He picked it up and studied it; obvious tenderness in his eyes. In it, he was smiling, his arm around a young disheveled boy of around seventeen. The boy’s blue eyes were striking – discernable even from a distance, and it held all the hopes, dreams and anticipation that youth could bring. He was wearing his uniform, with badges impeccably pinned to his suit, boots shiny and new, a clean-shaven face – everything in place except his hair.

The man laughed quietly, and ran his hands through his own unkempt, dark hair, briefly musing on such similarities. He gazed at himself in the photo and wondered if his son would realize how much he’d changed. But he couldn’t help but feel that for all his efforts, his son remained the better man, and would be ashamed of him if he knew the truth. He’d finally decided. He would see to it that the sins of the father would not be passed down to the son. Or at the very least, he could own these mistakes and see to it that his son did not feel responsible for them.

Putting the photograph down, he picked up a small tape recorder on his desk and turned it on.

“Marcus. Kid. I don’t know where to begin. If you were here, you’d say that the beginning was a good place. But, like everything else in life, it’s more complicated than that. So I’ll try to be brief before I chicken out. If I’m good at anything, it’s that.”

He paused and took in a breath before continuing.

“You remember when you were eleven and you scraped your knee out back? I think it was after the neighbourhood barbecue. Yeah, the first and last barbecue I’d ever gone to. I left early and came back home. Had some work to wrap up in my study. You came back in later – I don’t know what time it was – you were crying and blood was running down your leg. I got up from my desk and saw you staring at me from the living room. You stopped crying and I...I just stood there. And then I shut the door on you. I didn’t have the time and I was hoping mom would be back soon and she’d take care of you. I told myself that the work I was doing was for you and mom. And I also promised that the next time you hurt yourself, I’d dress your wounds myself and take you out to the movies afterwards.

“What I didn’t realize is that when I closed that door, I also closed myself off to you. Maybe later led to more maybe laters and it was after you’d graduated that I knew what I had done. This isn’t just an apology and while I’d like your forgiveness, I understand if you can’t bring yourself to do that. In your place, I’d have told my dad to screw himself and gone and lived the rest of my life without him. But the thing is, life catches up to you. And when it does, it’s not the times you screwed up that get to you the most. It’s the times when you’re sitting up late into the night wondering what would have happened if you took that leap. My job, as your father, was to put you first. But I didn’t. I phoned it in and I’m sorry.”

Now would be a great time to stop. To apologize a few more times and tell his only son how much he loved him. The odds were in his favour that Marcus would never find out everything about the project, never mind his role in it. Better that Marcus think him a bad father than a mass murderer. He just wanted to be free, to turn tail and run and leave all of this behind. But these demons were of his own making and everywhere he went, they’d go too. What a shame that real freedom and truth worked hand in hand. Here goes nothing.

“When Helen Cooper refined the lightmass process – I was ecstatic. Well, more relieved than ecstatic. I thought that this – a renewable source of energy – not nuclear, not cold fusion – was our saving grace. You must understand, son, that it was a virtuous act. That we had good intentions. But I suppose altruism – for all of its benefits – is not immune to corruption. Some were a lot more susceptible than others though.

“I never could understand why Sera didn’t work with our developing neighbours. If we took that imperative first step – we’d have written the guidebook on how to make friends with your enemies. We would have shared, and shared alike. But, you see, Marcus, near-sightedness was our undoing. Self-preservation demanded that we stockpile imulsion; I believe we coveted it unlike any other resource in the past. We also underestimated the smaller nations. We were so busy patting ourselves on the back that we couldn’t see what we had deprived them of. The irony of it is how they banded together to create their own coalition, and knocked us off our pedestals by excelling at the one thing we couldn’t. Working together. You don’t know how close they came to obliterating us.

“But then they got desperate and we got lucky. I suppose desperation begets desperation, and this is where my work comes in. We needed something greater than imulsion, greater than lightmass bombs to squash our enemies.

“I...hope you can forgive me for what I did...for what I’m about to tell you. And the correct response here, on your part, is shame. We...mom raised you right, so I wouldn’t expect anything less. Which is why I, coward that I am, hope I’m not with you when you hear this. I couldn’t bear it. We tampered with nature, Marcus. We were...are...playing god. And we were arrogant enough to believe that we’d come out of it winning.

"At the beginning, the pitch was great. The data was lacking in serious flaws and we were given all resources on hand to get where we needed to go. I wasn’t told the whole truth, but I wasn’t green enough to ignore the catch, even though we couldn’t see it, it was there – and I should have walked away. I should have turned my back on it all. But I was too full of myself to resist the opportunity to do this kind of work.

“Dr. Samson told us that it was time for an era of peace. And that to make peace, sacrifices were necessary. He wasn’t wrong but it’s so much easier to sacrifice a piece on the board when it means nothing to you, isn’t it? So we bought in. We were given the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to prove our mettle. We wanted...we – oh, God, what have we done, Marcus? What have we done?”

His voice broke down, and he paused the tape. How could he tell his only son that he had helped destroy his future? How could he bear the shame of it?

Tomorrow, he told himself. I can finish this tomorrow. I haven’t the nerve for this anymore.     

A few days later

He brought in the platter of food as silently as he could. Glancing sideways at the solitary window, he noted that the first rays of dawn were already prying their way inside the room. The sun cast its rays upon a heavily stocked bookshelf, and was expanding further inwards – just touching the foot of the occupied bed tentatively. He laid the platter to rest on a small end table, and drew the dark curtains across – abruptly shutting out the light. A momentary spasm of thought or conscience roused him; he remembered how the other rooms weren’t even allowed the luxury of curtains – the windows were framed by cold, rigid steel shutters. But she was an exception to the rule. Come to think of it, he wondered sadly, she was an exception to a lot of rules.

“Ruth?” he called out softly, as he began to open a small carton of milk, pouring it into a glass. “You up?”

No response.

Carl sighed. “We’ve been through this already, kid. I’m a big boy, and this isn’t the first time I’ve had the shit kicked out of me. Grew up on the nasty side of Hyrme and went to night school six days a week. Anyway, I’d rather be beat up by a friend than by a group of junkies.”

“Friend?” came a small, sheepish voice.

“Yup. Friend. Everything that happened? Water under the bridge. We’re good.”

She emerged from underneath her blanket. “But I’m sorry. I...I feel like it’s not going to go away. Or stop.” She sat up slowly, grunting as she did so. The arthritic-like pain in her joints could not be assuaged in the mornings, she had learned. Each movement her body had to make was conducted delicately. She thought of herself as an explosive device in a cheap action film; her mind being the bomb disposal unit and her body an unstable mix of flammable chemicals that could go off at any second.

Her slow and steady movements did not go unnoticed by Carl, and he smiled wanly. “You want the cortisone shots? I got some Valium here...” he reached into his pockets, pulled out a small, translucent bottle of pills, and presented it to her. “Other times, I wouldn’t give them to you, but you’ve had a rough few weeks.”

Ruth shook her head. “No thanks. I don’t think steroid injections or sedatives are particularly...receptive to my condition.” She sighed. “You know what, though?”

“What, Ruth?”

“You’d think that Dr. Doom would have put two and two together already. He sticks me with the needles and then hours later I have an episode.”

He shrugged nonchalantly, remaining silent, arranging the food on her bed tray.

She continued. “I think he knows. I think he does it on purpose and he keeps track of it; he must.” her voice tapered off into silence. She caught Carl looking at her patronizingly. “Oh please, Carl,” she said, “I’m fourteen but I’m not an idiot.”

“Never said you were.”

Ignoring him, she went on. “He’s no more trying to cure me than, than –” Ruth paused to find the appropriate words, “– than we are when we drop lightmass bombs on the bad guys.”

“Dr. Samson isn’t Dr. Doom and that’s a weak analogy, Ruth. He’s trying to help you kids out. You don’t bump into a cure in the middle of the night on your way to the john. Your medication has to go through numerous rigorous trials – it’s the harsh truth – but it’s the truth nevertheless. They’re working their asses off to help you guys out. Give you a second shot at a normal life.” he explained.

“Like the normal life he gave Adele, you mean?” asked Ruth, looking him squarely in the eyes.

He remained silent, and his brows furrowed in confusion. Adele’s death had had a particular impact on Ruth – who had not been close to any of the other children. Carl had surmised that she had taken to Adele’s unassuming nature, and the fact that she had asked nothing from Ruth save for companionship. It was a friendship that was short-lived, however, as complications from her treatments worsened, leading to her eventual death.

“They did what they could,” muttered Carl quietly.

“They murdered her!” exclaimed Ruth, her voice rising. “They kept increasing the dosage even though she was getting sicker! They were studying how her body responded to increased levels even though it was the medication that was killing her!”

Carl sucked in his teeth and let out a breath. “Adele died because her heart was operating at thirty percent of its capacity,” he paused briefly, as if considering something. “Besides, how did you come up with that bullshit conclusion anyway?”

“She told me. She showed me.” Face red, Ruth reached over to her bedside table, and despite considerable pain, her hands fumbled around in the drawer, eventually pulling out a modest little notepad. “She was smart. She wrote down everything whenever she could. And she hid it from Samson. And the other nurses. And then, when she knew she wasn’t going to make it, she gave it to me.”

Carl swallowed and grasped the notebook with a wary hand. “Why are you showing it to me?”

“Because, I don’t know, you’re different from the others. Or that’s my hope, at least. Or maybe because I don’t want to end up like she did. I’m sick of being attended to by doctors telling me what’s in my best interest. I want to be in control now even if means I won’t live long. I want to die the way I choose to die. But before I do, I want to go out to the movies and eat some popcorn. I wanna sit on the steps and count the cars that go by. I wanna lose some money in a bet, I wanna learn how to drive. I want to fucking live. Let’s face it,” she laughed sardonically, “I’m not going to die of old age. But I just...want to die on my terms.”

With that, she fell back into her pillow – exhausted and spent. As she stared at her food before her, her voice grew low and defeated.

“Keep it. Show it to your Dr. Samson. Burn it or read it or whatever.” She shut her eyes and tried to catch her breath. “Besides, how can I leave this place anyway?” She let out a bitter laugh. “I can’t even walk to that door without falling over.

Chapter Text

The Next Day

Carl stepped out of the small cafeteria and walked out the back door, into the open. He stared at the dumpster to his left and then turned his back on it, pulling out a cigarette from his pocket. He lit it and as he inhaled, feeling the warm tendrils of smoke curl into his lungs, eagerly anticipated the calming lull of the nicotine as it took effect on his frayed nerves and tried to keep his thoughts from wandering towards his conversation with Ruth. It didn’t take.

“Because, I don’t know, you’re different from the others...”

“Come on, Carl,” he told himself aloud. “Get a grip. It’s just work. It’s a job. Put it on the backburner – shift’s gonna be over in a few hours.”

You don’t seriously believe they’re helping these kids, do you? I mean, you’ve gotta be one dumb fuck to be taken in by that.

“I didn’t sign up for this,” he said aloud and to no one in particular. “I’ve got a mom on dialysis and a sister and nephew to support. Family first. Everything else...later.”

Carl flipped through Adele’s note book, then thwacked it repeatedly against his palm in absent-minded frustration.

You’re not just a gear in the system anymore. You bit into the apple, Carl. And now you know. And now you’re accountable. Hope you’re looking forward to a good night’s sleep.

“Shit.” he muttered aloud. He yanked the half-burnt cigarette out of his mouth and threw it onto the ground. He stepped on it hard, extinguishing it.

He turned around and made his way back into the building.

A voice on the small intercom chirped to life, and the man approached it with a handful of papers.

“Doctor Fenix? There’s an orderly here to see you,” it said.

He put his papers down on his desk and spoke back into the communications device. “Ah hell. Not now, Kelly. I’ve got a lot of paperwork here that needs to be turned in first thing Monday. Besides, tell him to send in his complaints to HR. I can’t do anything about it anyway.”

“He says it’s a private matter, doctor. He’s not going to discuss it with HR.” replied the voice.

“Doesn’t he have a shrink? A priest?” asked Fenix, hopefully.

“Uh...I don’t know, Doctor.”

Realizing that the back-and-forth banter only served to waste more time, he relented. “Alright. Send him in.”

Carl walked into the room tentatively. His apprehensions did not go by unnoticed by the older man, who gestured for Carl to take a seat on a sofa against the wall. His visitor did so, placing his hands on his lap.

“You want something to drink? I have some scotch...” offered Fenix, believing that perhaps a little alcohol would put the man at ease. The younger man shook his head, turning down the offer. Fenix raised his eyebrows questioningly and smiled. “I’m not going to bite, son. What’s on your mind?”

“It’s not you, doc. Well, I suppose in a way it is. I can’t put what I’m about to ask you in a nicer way, but I need to know something. Is what I say going to stay within this room? Because if it isn’t, I need to know now.” Great opening. Why would someone, who couldn’t be trusted to begin with, tell the truth in the first place?

Fenix dragged a chair towards the orderly and took his seat opposite him. It was upholstered in rich maroon leather. It was the chair that helped him contemplate...well, nearly everything. “The receptionist said your name is Carl Riviera, right? Can I call you Carl?” The other man nodded. “Now I don’t know the nature of what you’re about to tell me, Carl, but if it has anything to do with the patients, that would be something you would want to inform Dr. Niles Samson about. You see – not many of our staff are aware of this, save for Dr. Samson and some others – but I’m resigning from my post. As of a month from now, I’m not going to be working here anymore.”

“That’s why it has to be you, Doc.”

Fenix shook his head, perplexed. “Me? For what? I’m afraid I don’t understand.”

“Are you going to repeat what I’m about to say to anyone else? I need to know.” insisted Carl.

Fenix paused then closed his eyes and rubbed the bridge of his nose thoughtfully and tiredly. “I don’t see how I’m better than anyone else here, but...yes, you have my word. Unless this information threatens anyone’s life, then it will not leave this room.”

“What about your receptionist?” questioned Carl nervously. “She knows I came into talk to you.”

Paranoid sort, wasn’t he? Was he a user? Possible but unlikely. HR had performed rigorous background checks on all their employees; from their lead scientists down to the janitors. Whatever the case, don’t agree to anything until you know everything. Earn his confidence. “Kelly can be trusted. And I won’t tell her what we talked about anyway. We can always just make something up. But what’s all this about? You caught me at a particularly stressful time...there’s a lot of data I need to organize for the doctor who’s replacing me. Is what you have to tell me so important?”

Carl nodded. He’d thought a lot about what he was going to say, how he was going to say it. His envisioning and planning came at the cost of a lot of sleep, and his nerves were not the better for it. He knew about Adam Fenix; the other nurses and orderlies spoke well of him. But Carl had needed more reassurance than what congeniality and modesty had to offer. He needed loyalty and he needed someone who was willing to sacrifice. Their work, well-being, safety and their way of life – these were but a few chips that they would have to place on the table.

The man he had visualized depending on was certainly not the one he had decided to choose. But things hardly ever work out as planned, and perhaps his choice would serve to fool others, just as it had fooled him.  

He had observed Adam Fenix before – and what he had mistaken for lethargy and inattentiveness, he had now inferred to be pangs of conscience. The doctor no longer administered the prescribed medication to patients himself. He would skip scheduled visits, misplace medical files, and in one instance had even written in incorrect – but markedly reduced – dosages for the terminally ill patients.

No reputable doctor would play his hand so carelessly, unless of course, he had wanted to lose. And Adam Fenix was no blockheaded simpleton. Carl had then concluded that if the man had indeed felt some remorse, an abrupt resignation resulting from that guilt would come under considerable scrutiny and suspicion. He had to be shrewd about it – there was no other alternative. The lack of diligence to his work and his patients was but an act of a forgetful old man. Doctor Fenix was not a team-player anymore, and he wasn’t to blame. The best thing for him now was to resign himself to retirement; give himself a dignified exit. Or that was what his colleagues were made to believe. His charade was working well.

Of course, Carl’s inferences could have been dreadfully wrong. After all, if he – a lowly orderly – could figure it out, so could the guys in white coats; the ones with the medical residencies and the numerous degrees. The only thing that separated them from him, and possible Doctor Fenix, was a conscience. If your mind hasn’t been trained to care for others for decades on end, then why start now?

Then there was the possibility that Fenix wouldn’t go for it. He could present his case to the good doctor only to have him run back to his superiors with this traitorous news. But the past few days of moping and strategizing had finally broken Carl’s threshold of tolerance, and he had to operate on his instincts or throw in the towel entirely.

There was nothing else for it, he guessed. Well, here goes, he told himself.

“The patients...the kids here,” he began, “they’re being tested on.”

“Of course they are. We’re here to fix the problem and find a cure; it’s been New Hope’s dream to save the children first and win the war later." It sounded too official. Too rehearsed.

Carl noted that the doctor’s voice lacked conviction. The younger man seized this possibility and continued. “What I mean to say is...the people who started this research – and I don’t mean to insinuate that you began it, although you have to admit that both you and I have helped keep the shop running – were never looking for a cure. They’re using the children here as instruments. Or maybe they’re just refining them to be what they want them to be. Do you see what I mean?”

Adam Fenix stood unnaturally still. It was as if he was dealt a hefty blow. The others feel it too, he realized. Well, some of them anyway. He had believed that leaving this place to its demise – and he was sure that it would come – would close the book on what he had done. But that wasn’t enough, apparently. The coming of this orderly seemed to be an advent of some larger conscience. As if fate was extending him an opportunity to fix things, even if it seemed a little too late.

“Yes, I understand.” he answered quietly.

“You do? I mean...that’s good. It’s good. I’ve been trying – ever since I started work here – to make out what the hell happened to these kids. I’ve never seen anything like it before. It makes stage IV cancer look like a common cold, you know? I thought it was some kind of hybrid virus. But most viruses are contagious; and none of us ever got sick. Never got what they had, I mean. You guys didn’t take any precautions to stop us from catching it. If it was just the immunity problems like lung infections and swollen joints, I could accept some bullshit story of a mutated...something. But the random violence – I don’t see and I can’t see how it fits in. One of the doctors tried to tell me the kids were having epileptic seizures. I told him, come on, doc, I’ve been in this business for twelve years now. I know an epileptic seizure when I see one. And this ain’t no muscle spasm. He looked right back at me and told me to just do my job and leave the diagnosing to them.

“Doc, those kids are dangerous. About couple weeks ago, one of them beat me unconscious. I weigh a hundred and eighty pounds, and this kid, she weighs ninety. I work out whenever I get the chance. She’s bed-ridden for a good portion of the day, heck, a good portion of her life. Now you tell me that there’s nothing weird about that.”

“What are you saying, Carl?” asked Fenix, with hesitance. “You want to lock these kids up within padded walls?”

Carl leaned forward. “No. I want to help them.”

“Why?”

“Because I have evidence that whatever shit is being done to them, is being done willfully and deliberately. They might be doing testing here, but these tests ain’t curing them. We have no right to – if you’ll pardon my language – fuck with their lives.”

“Where’d you get the evidence from?”

“Adele. One of the patients who died earlier. She kept a journal detailing every symptom, every anomaly. I’ve read it. I have it.”

“She could be hallucinating – some of the stuff we gave them are pretty strong sedatives.” fumbled Fenix.

“You and I both know that’s bullshit. And you know what?” He leaned back in his sit and crossed his arms. “I think you know. Maybe you didn’t know all along, but you sure as hell know now. That’s why you’re quitting.”

Fenix inhaled deeply. “Okay. Say you’re right. I’m not saying that you are, but let’s go hypothetical here. What can I do, Carl? I don’t pull the strings. I can’t tell Dr. Samson what to do – I can’t stop the research. The subjects here have been here for most of their lives.”

“Subjects?” Is that all they are to you?” Carl spat back.

“Of course not, but I can’t snap my fingers together and cure them.”

“No. No, you can’t. But you could help them get out. There have got to be at least twenty of them being tortured. And I’m certain that now at least one of them is aware that there is no cure, no hope for something better.”

Fenix rose from his seat. He walked slowly to his desk and absently straightened a stack of papers lying on it. What was the point of doing something now, anyway? We’ve already wrought the damage, he thought. And he wasn’t the man for this kind of job. Glancing to the right side of his desk, he studied the back of the photo frame of him and his son. He turned it so as to face him, and his shoulders drooped.

“What did they do to them?” came out Carl’s voice from behind him.

“Son,” breathed out Fenix, “you really don’t want to know. In fact, it would be better for you if you didn’t. I can tell you though, that all of those children are not going to make it this year. We can’t save them.”

“Okay.” acknowledged Carl. If their history had to be kept in the dark for the sake of their future, then so be it. And if some of them would not pull through, then that was all the more reason to save the rest. “If what was done can’t be undone, then we have to do what we can for those that remain.”

“It’s more complicated than that. They’re the only ones who’re responding positively to the treatment.”

“So what?”

“So...everyone is going to be focusing on them. They’ll be watched more often than not. There will be more tests, more observations. We can’t just say we’re taking them to go to the bathroom and then make a break for it!”

“Then what do you want to do, Doc?”

“We have to point them in another direction. We have to show them what they want to see.” replied Fenix. Schemes and strategies began to come to life and orient themselves in his mind. He sat back down. “But first,” he began, “I need to know everything recorded in that journal. Our patients – children though they may be – are unstable and violent. We need to know what we’re going up against on both sides. If we can’t save the kids from themselves, then this whole plan goes up in smoke.”

Carl rummaged in his jacket pocket and pulled out the pack of cigarettes. “Okay. Okay.” He held it up to the good doctor and asked, “S’alright if I smoke in here?”

Circa 3043

15 years after E-Day

He moves about the Locust Palace – one of the many homes to the locust Queen – with considerable ease. He knows where he came from and he knows where it is he’s going to. Four drones guarding the entrance to an antechamber acknowledge his arrival and they step aside. He is a stark contrast to the other occupants here; his face is pale and his skin is smooth. Theirs is a mottled gray, the epidermis uneven and tough – like leather.

He smiles at them as he walks by, and they return the gesture with nods. The antechamber could be called cavernous but it is certainly no cave. The ceilings and pillars display ornate engravings; rich in texture and symbolic in nature. He has little or no concept of the allegoric nature of the carvings, and it makes him all the more eager to discover their origins. But the Queen, let alone the locusts, does not fully trust him yet. They have had many a conversation about battles and wars; the battle at Ephyra is brought up frequently, but when thoughts turn to history and culture, she grows distant and a little impatient.

This time he suspects that she will perhaps talk with him about their previous conversation. The Queen detests the imulsion that surrounds her people and her land. He, on the other hand, does not. He is aware of the dangers, but he has always been successful at quelling the response of fear to ignorance. But she was...

He pauses in mid-thought, as the Queen approaches him through a side entrance, escorted by one of her High Priests and a member of the elite guards, the one she calls Skorge. In the length of time that he has known her, Skorge was a frequent companion – not in the friendly sense of the word, but more as a protective symbol – and yet, he never participates in any discourse with them. Perhaps he doesn’t need to, he realizes.

“Adam,” speaks the Queen, addressing him with the utmost composure.

“Your highness.” Adam bows, before the Queen gestures for him to arise.

“I do not feel like sitting down today.” The tough tendrils emerging from her spine move about slowly in the air, each one akin to a cat twirling its tail. “Would you like to walk with me?”

“It would be my pleasure,” he responds.

“Good. I would like to hear about your son today, Adam. He intrigues me. If he is anything like his father, then he would have my utmost respect.”

Adam nods and moves beside her. They begin to walk, side by side, towards the doorway in the room.

Orsorum (Orsa) Island

Present

He woke from slumber later than he would have liked, given the nature of his dream, and breathed out slowly. He tried to tell himself that dreams were the stuff of nonsense, that his subconscious was probably working overtime. But their exchange with the Queen back at Nexus so many weeks ago had left him with uneasy and unanswered questions. Her referral to him being Adam Fenix’s son unnerved him. More frightening still, was the manner in which she had spoken of his father. Was that respect in her voice, he wondered?

He shook his head, still drowsy.

Consciousness brought with it a pounding headache, and a dry feeling at the back of his throat. He swung his legs over the side of the rickety cot and held his head in his hands. It felt like morning.

“Marcus?” called out a familiar voice from outside the room. “You up?”

“Am now.”

His friend came into the room, wiping his wet face on a small towel. “They’re asking us to do some recon tonight. You up for it?”

“Ah hell, Dom, doesn’t really matter if I am or I’m not, does it?”

Dom smiled and threw the towel onto his own bed. “No, guess not.”

Marcus rose from his bunk and pulled out his boots from underneath it. “Any reason why they want us this time? Can’t Hoffman get some others to handle it?”

His friend shrugged. “I’ve learned that asking questions is more trouble than it's worth. Especially if I have to ask Hoffman. All I know is, we have a washed-up reaver on the south beach. I guess he thinks that they’re starting to up the ante now – sending in reavers. Boats are probably more of a target – trying to look for us by air is probably their next move.”

Marcus shook his head. “Fucking locusts.” He rubbed the back of his neck, trying to ease the tension within. “Dumb as hell, but they’re persistent. I’ll give ‘em that.”

Dom rifled through his duffel bag, pulling out some of his body armor – a tattered yet usable Kevlar vest, and started to adjust the blade plates inside. “Look at it this way. We’re somewhere that’s hard to touch. One way in and one way out. At least this way we can see them coming.”

“I don’t enjoy being cornered.” responded Marcus. “That’s all.”

“Who does? But we don’t have much of a choice. To be frank, man, I think this idea of Prescott’s was pretty good.”

“Prescott didn’t think this one up, Dom.” interrupted Marcus. “He’s hasn’t got the chops to think up alternate plans unless he’s up for re-election – and that won’t be anytime soon. It was a fallback option the COG must have thought up years ago. Prescott just got handed the uniform and baton from brass that have long since died, and now he’s just in the position to take credit for it.”

Dom sighed and smiled. His friend’s disdain for politics and the people who bent to its manipulations were beneath his contempt, and he wasn’t afraid to voice it. Dom, on the other hand, was more or less immune to political metamorphoses. “Prescott or not, without this island to go to we’d be screwed. Admit it. I mean, where would we go?”

“Elingrad is still standing.” muttered Marcus, unwilling to concede so easily.

“The place is a ghost town. And there, we gotta worry about emergence holes, aerial attacks...it would be Jacinto all over again. No, it would be worse,” corrected Dom, “They could sink Elingrad within a day.”

Marcus grunted and stood up, stretching his arms. “Orsa is no picnic either.”

Dom pulled out another set of armor and threw it towards his companion. “But it’s the only picnic we can have. And I don’t know about you, but I’ll take it.”

Marcus began to strap on his armor and turned to Dom, smiling and relenting for the first time that day. “We really seem to be making a career out of setting for less. And this isn’t paradise island, but it’s been a long time since I’ve been able to sleep for eight hours straight.” He thumped his comrade on the back. “Come on, Dom, let’s go grab something to eat before we head out.”

By the time they reached the southern tip of the island, dusk had settled into night. It was cloudless, however, allowing for the moonlight to illuminate beaten paths before them. The flora on the island was a refreshing change from the decrepit and derelict buildings of Jacinto or Montevado. There were no sunken cities, no sporadic fires, no emergence holes, no stranded camps, nothing that could attest to the fact that they had been engaged in a long and bitter war. The island itself seemed like a sanctuary of sorts, a remnant of peace that existed only in dreams.

The two soldiers, driving along in silence, took in this tranquility with quiet unease. It was difficult to attune themselves to it, seeing as how it was such a contrast from the turmoil they had been immersed in on the mainland.

Dom felt his muscles tighten whenever something moved, and he frequently caught himself glancing down at his radar screen to ascertain whether they were in danger or not. And each time he did so, he breathed out in relief. It was another false alarm.

His anxieties did not escape his companion, who – without grinning but with humour in his voice – spoke and pointed in an arbitrary direction. “You might want to get out your shotgun now. I thought I saw a raccoon to our right.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it.”

“Just relax, will ya?” encouraged Marcus. “You were singing Orsa’s praises all this morning. And now that you’re out and about, you’re jumping at rats and squirrels.”

“Hey, you don’t look so thrilled yourself,” Dom nodded over at him.

Marcus grunted in response. True, he did feel as if this little peninsula was destined to be another casualty of war, but it wasn’t that which unnerved him the most. He felt cut off, herded into a corner. Sooner or later, the Locusts would discover their position. And then the situation would present itself as a terrific chance for the Queen to win this war once and for all. Everyone in one place at one time.

A hundred birds. One rock.

Marcus turned right along the beaten path and tried to set his concerns aside. At least for the moment, he consoled himself, we only have a dead reaver. It was a step-down from the four damaged boats that had washed ashore three weeks ago. And anyway –

“Can reavers make it this far?” questioned Dom suddenly.

Marcus, disturbed from his sullen reverie, asked, “What?”

“How do you think the reavers made it all the way here? It’s gotta be a hell of a long haul from Jacinto. Or Nexus even.”

Marcus shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe they have stopover flights.”

“Yeah,” chuckled Dom, “At least the Locusts must be getting some good use out of their frequent flier miles.” He wiped some mud off the radar. “But seriously though, how can they?”

“I don’t think they could. That’s why they’re dead on the beach.”

“Does this mean that they know where we are?”

“You mean: does the Queen know where we are,” corrected Marcus.

“You don’t seriously think she survived that?” he asked, incredulous.

“She hauled ass out of Nexus fast, Dom. Whether it was in their plans to sink Jacinto or not, she had no intentions of going down with the ship. You take my word for it – she’s as alive as you and me.”

Dom found it hard to resign himself to this disturbing idea. But he realized that to dismiss the thought entirely would be naive. “Okay. So supposing she’s still in charge, do you think she knows where we’re at?”

Marcus shook his head. “Nah. Believe me, if she knew, she’d come at us full force. And she wouldn’t be wasting any time.”

“Kinda dumb, though, dontcha think?”

“How so?”

“If we flooded the hollow, you’d think that she would give some thought before sending out her reavers and soldiers – knowing that a lot of ‘em probably won’t make it back.” wondered Dom.

“Which can only mean one thing – she’s either pretty frantic about finding us or we only made a little dent in their plans by flooding the hollow.”

Dom frowned. He would hate to believe the latter. Jacinto was a costly price to pay, even if they eradicated a good portion of the Locusts. But if the COG were to discover that their hordes had hardly been diminished, all that they had thought they knew about the Locusts would be proven to be false. And all their theorizing and surmising could have been torn apart like a straw hut in a hurricane.

It was painful just thinking about it.

“Man, I just hope she’s desperate. Least that way, maybe she’ll trip up.” he concluded.

“I hope so too, Dom.” responded Marcus, as he hit the gas harder and drove into the foliage.

“Lovely night for a stroll.” Marcus quipped, a scowl on his face and a boltok pistol in hand.

And it was indeed. The moon painted dancing silver streaks on the dark water. The waves crashed against one another and sand rhythmically. That, coupled with the aroma of distinct salt-tinged air, permeated their senses in a manner through which they had forgotten they possessed.

For a split second, Dom’s memory brought back the acrid smell of charred bodies to the surface, and his muscles stiffened. After the passage of several deep breaths, he was back to normal.

“Command, are you there? This is Delta.” came out the gravel-like voice beside him, a little quieter than usual.

“Affirmative,” came out the tinny voice of the dispatcher.

A small emotion within Marcus had hoped to hear the familiar voice of his friend and guide, Anya Stroud. She had been a constant throughout their missions; the planting of the lightmass bomb and the sinking of Jacinto. Despite the fact that she was physically absent during their battles – big and small – there was a certain strength about so simple a connection, something he realized that he had taken for granted all the while. He couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed to note that she wasn’t on the other end this time.

“We’re at the site. You got a bead on our location?” he said, eager to get this little excursion over with.

“Affirmative, Sergeant. You want to head about two clicks due...north-east of you. Once you find them, radio in and let us know what you find. Command out.”

Dom, who had paused walking, turned around. “Wish they let us have JACK. I’m about done with having to write reports in triplicate. Makes me feel like I have a desk job.”

“Hey, I’d take a desk job over what we do,” noted Marcus, as they proceeded to pace forward towards their destination.

Dom laughed, clearly entertained at the idea. “Yeah right! I’d like to see you at it; going nine to five.”

“We’ll never know now though, will we?”

Dom shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe a month from now every Locust will die from skin cancer and us Gears will go into retirement.”

Marcus’ face cracked a smile. “Don’t have faith that we can pull it off ourselves?” he asked. “Think we’ll have to wait for tumours to finish them off?”

“That...or some kind of plague specific to Locusts.” responded Dom, very aware of the possible irony of his statement. “If Locust numbers haven’t been decimated by now, I think we’re screwed.”

Marcus glanced at his friend. “You going pessimistic on me?”

“No…I’m going realistic. This place – maybe it only delays the inevitable, know what I mean?” Dom cast his eyes down, some truths were too hard to stomach. “But...we do what we can do, right?”

His companion remained silent. He figured that if the act of consolation felt contrived, then more often than not, it was contrived. And then it was better just to keep his trap shut.

Even through the soft glow of the moonlight, the large, dark humps weren’t quite discernible. The mass – which lay several yards away – gave off a distorted silhouette; it was uneven and unearthly. But most importantly, Marcus reminded himself, it remained unmoving, and hopefully – quite dead.

Upon closer inspection, the pair noted the splayed-out legs and tendrils of the huge beast, face shield in place, but armor absent. But it was difficult to see anything in this light, so Marcus decided that he ought to start searching for the more obvious and accessible clues amongst the bodies.

“You see anything alive under them?” he asked.

Dom pulled out a small thermal sensor from his bag and bent over, running the device alongside the body closest to him. No alarms sounded. He repeated his scans, just to be sure. A few minutes later, he looked back up at his companion and shook his head.

“I don’t see anything here, either,” muttered Marcus.

“Armor’s missing.” noted Dom. “Looks like there's no carry-on luggage either,” he said, pointing at the absence of weaponry of any type.

Marcus set his jaw tightly. “This is a scout. I’d bet my life on it.”

Dom paused, the gears of thought running furiously in his mind. Arriving at a conclusion he wasn’t sure he liked, he spoke nonetheless. “Scouts are supposed to report in, aren’t they?”

“Yeah...” began Marcus, starting to see what his friend what getting at.

“Then there should be homing devices.” finished Dom.

“Yeah.”

Dom crinkled his forehead and swore. He suddenly turned to his friend, hopeful. A few weeks before, some torn up gunboats – empty and passenger-less – had washed up ashore. If no devices were on board, then there was a solid chance that they would find nothing here either. “Did we find anything on the boats that came in a couple weeks back?”

“No. But the mines got to the boats before we could. Whatever homing beacons were strapped onto ‘em got blown to bits.”

Dom frowned and sat on his haunches to get a closer look at the face plates of the reaver. Marcus stared at one in turn, and then came over to his friend’s side. “Could be anywhere. Hell, it could be in their gut for all we know.”

Dom scrunched his face in disgust. “I thought these things smell bad on the outside...” he began.

“...Nothing for it, Dom. We gotta cut it open. I’m gonna call it in first.”

As Dom stood up and groaned, dreading the loathsome task before them, Marcus started speaking into the radio strapped to his shoulder. Command seemed unbiased – but then again, he thought – they weren’t going to be the ones doing the slicing and dicing. After a few more questions, and much to his relief, however, they concluded that someone more able and knowledgeable about Locust and reaver anatomy would be sent in. On hearing the news, Dom’s concerns were allayed and he cheered up considerably. He zipped his bag shut, and sat on the ground.

“You know, I heard that there’s crabs in these waters,” he said.

“You don’t say.” Marcus sat down on the sand.

“She loved crab,” mused Dom, more to himself than to his companion.

Marcus said nothing, realizing that despite the closure Dom found on Maria’s whereabouts, she was hardly the furthest thing on his mind. Recently, he’d noticed that Dom had difficulties speaking her name, and whenever she was the subject of conversation, it never lasted quite long and seemed more of personal reminiscing than anything else.

“Baird can’t stand seafood, though. Especially crab.” muttered Dom, predictably focusing their discourse onto another target. “Told me how he’d eaten stuffed crab a while back. We were holed up at this empty bar one time – behind a counter – we had Locusts closing in from one side, and a couple of bullets hit some glass behind us. And then he turns to me and tells me that he’s allergic to crab meat. Told me that it makes him break out in hives – and then says seafood has too much mercury.”

Marcus couldn’t help but laugh.

Dom shook his head in disbelief, chuckling at the memory. “I told him that if he could single-handedly win this war, we’d start a campaign against seafood. And if he couldn’t, he should just shut up and fight.” He smiled again and looked out into the water, musing.

Moments like those – nightmarish though they seemed – were vivid. Sometimes nauseatingly so. But here...here, every intact object was an antithesis of its counterpart on the Locust-savaged mainland. The setting seemed so idyllic that it could only be a dream. That, or it was the calm center to the storm. He gazed at the horizon of the sea as they waited, every now and then looking about himself for the arrival of their locust-expert, but his eyes always returned to the tide before them.

“Dom,” spoke Marcus after a while, disrupting their silence. “You see that?”

Imagining that the man command had sent down had arrived, he turned towards the tree-line behind them. But Marcus was pointing in the opposite direction, out towards the ocean, his gaze fixed on something in the waters. It took Dom a second or two to spot it, but by then it was closer, though hard to distinguish. A lump of something bobbed up and down awkwardly, carried towards them with the aid of the current.

Marcus didn’t waste any time. “Wait here.” he instructed, as he ran into the water. The waves sloshed up around his knee-high boots, and he reached and grasped the object dragging it along the wet sand up and back onto the drier shore.

Dom jogged over to him.

He turned the object onto his back, only to reveal the bloated body of a human, his face scarred beyond recognition. “Shit.” muttered Marcus.

“One of ours?” asked Dom quietly.

“Don’t think so.” Marcus bent over the body, examining the corpse’s attire carefully. His eyes caught sight of a wet rag tied tightly to the deceased man’s right arm. He untied it with little difficulty and then held it up in the moonlight. “Recognize this?” he asked his comrade.

“Stranded...” mumbled Dom, perceiving the cloth to be something most stranded wore – signifying which group or leader they owed their allegiance to. He took the rag from Marcus, studying it closer. It was pale cream...or yellow. Yes, it was yellow, he decided. He’d seen it quite often, but that was a long time ago.

“It’s Franklin.” said Dom, handing it back, and then corrected himself. “One of Franklin’s, I mean. Gotta be. I’ve seen his guys wear it.”

“They’re using the survivors to get to us.” concluded Marcus. “How many do you think survived?” he asked the question his companion dreaded to put forth.

“I don’t know.”

“Shit. If there are more...”

“I know.”

“Hoffman and Prescott aren’t going to mount a rescue mission for ‘em.”

“They’ll say it isn’t worth the risk,” agreed Dom. “You still wanna call it in?”

Marcus stared at the corpse for what seemed like minutes. Then finally, “Yeah. Let’s call it in.” He jerked his chin at the dead man’s limp body. “Maybe this guy’ll give ‘em a decent enough reason for us to do some scouting of our own.”

“Or maybe they’ll bury him and tell us to shut up.” countered Dom, if a little hopefully.

The corners of Marcus’ mouth turned down. “We’ll see.”

Chapter Text

The Same Evening
Command Headquarters
Orsa Island

The woman nodded in acknowledgement as her superior handed her a datapad. She then spent most of the evening reading it. Prescott had proposed a scouting trip to the mainland. It was too soon. Why, then? Was it safe? Had they destroyed the Hollow and the Queen? Had they somehow left behind more than just stragglers?

Marcus isn’t going to like this. In fact, she didn’t know if she approved of it either. Too soon. It was one thing to sacrifice their stronghold, Jacinto, in order to flood the hollow and Nexus. It was one thing to bring their own and any survivors to Orsa without much explanation, to provide them with temporary sanctuary, even if for a brief time. But it was another to keep it hidden from people, like her and Hoffman, who needed to know that there was a choice. It may have been a poor one, sure, but a bad choice remained a choice regardless.

She wasn’t new to desperation, nor to the necessity to maintain privacy and confidentiality during this age of war. Should the enemy launch a large scale assault, alerting every single individual as soon as they were aware of it would lead to mass hysteria. People would panic, driven by the cries of their fellow citizens, and the situation could rapidly become unstable. Their losses would be higher than that of a populace that allowed themselves to be calmly led to safety.

No, their piddling excuse for a government would have to confer amongst each other, assess the situation and then conclude to follow through on what the best option for survival was. They’d orchestrate a trickle-down of information through the ranks – supply enough to stimulate urgency but not a stampede.

Power-hungry politicians. Ready to sacrifice everything and everyone.

Their small council was just that. Small. Which mean that every single body that encompassed it was valuable; relying on one another was more important than it had ever been in all of their lifetimes.

She scrolled down the neon orange text displayed on her datapad for the third time. The corners of her mouth turned involuntarily downwards. She set the instrument aside and leaned back in her seat and stretched.

Council headquarters had set up shop in a large building erected to host negotiations between the COG and the UIR during the Pendulum Wars. High vaulted ceilings with tasteful carvings of soldiers in battle, set in various shades of grey looked down on her. Sturdy pillars guarded each corner of the hexagonal room. Some of their stone bore minor cracks; fragments had crumbled off and been swept away where no could find them. Coral marble flooring that persisted beneath the shoes of legislators, soldiers and caretakers during the Imulsion War looked back up at her impassively.

A generator within buzzed somewhat quietly and dutifully in order to power indispensable instruments within. A string of lights illuminated a section of the large room. Anya Stroud allowed her eyes to run over some damaged glass display cabinets that the light touched. Most were prototypes of Helen Cooper’s small-scale imulsion purification apparatus. The metal alloy of the first had bent every which way – its disfigured body the result of an explosive failed undertaking – not the war. The subsequent mechanisms echoed the evolutionary diagrams of textbooks; each a little less wonky and more refined than its predecessor until finally, its triumphant descendant stood proudly at the end of the line.

What would they leave inside display cabinets for the future, she wondered? Bodies?

She redirected her attention to another larger screen before her. In her solicitude the keyboard had gone dark. She placed her left wrist on its edge and waved her right impatiently above it. Its haptic reflex vibrated through her other hand and it sprung to life – the outline of each key backlit by a muted neon blue glow. A few paragraphs strewn across the display gazed back at her; the last one an incomplete sentence. ‘Assess, but do not infiltrate without Council mandate in a high-risk situation. The following constitutes, but is not limited to...’ read the beginning of the third paragraph. She worried her lower lip and wondered if she should just go to sleep and tender her resignation the following day.

Chairman Prescott, by proxy, had deposited a condensed proposal regarding mounting a reconnaissance team beyond Orsa on her lap. He’d asked her to evaluate the risks in his report and had requested that she deliver a summation of its potential hazards in thirty hours. He was a man given to euphemistic speeches, the flourishing pomp of politics and not only did he revel in it, but he had been born to it. On one occasion, he’d even asked his speechwriter to lengthen an address he was to give troops in Jacinto. His florid talk wasn’t limited to his lectures either. He’d been known to submit first-draft proposals that were hundreds of pages long when, post-editing, they'd been reduced to half that quantity. Brevity was not the soul of his wit, and this report was testimony to it.

What are you not saying, Chairman?

He’d made remarks on the flooding of the Nexus Hollow. On how crucial it was that they ensure that their efforts succeeded. So while that was important, it wasn’t what had precipitated Prescott’s fears. ‘A small infiltration team would yield the most success...’, he had typed. A hazardous move this early in the game. But – and it was a grudging but – a smaller scaled venture of similar nature would have had to been made eventually.

But why now? And why the urgency?

The Hollow had been drowned a mere six months ago. Was something headed this way that they weren’t privy to? The Reavers they kept finding were few and far between. They were undeniably scouts. Scouts who hadn’t located their quarry yet. Or had they?

No. Hoffman would have known. Firstly, certain precautionary measures they’d discussed and documented together would have been mobilized. She saw no evidence of that.

Secondly, their modest tech department, headed by Damon Baird and a few other scientists-turned-soldiers, had begun to modify current drone capabilities. Remnants of stealth tech they’d packed along with them had started to produce promising results and now they were only constrained by limited signal tracking and how long each drone could remain in flight. A few micro solar panels were being installed to help tackle the second issue and Baird’s advisory body had estimated that they’d have a number of test units ready to deploy in three months.

Anya Stroud leaned forward on one elbow and cupped her chin in her hand. “So. I’m in a real rush to get back to ground zero and I don’t have time to pack properly,” she murmured.

“What’s that?”

Anya started at the female voice to her right. It was one of the privates she’d flown with on their way to Orsa.

“Brought you some food before the mess closed, Ma’am.” She placed a fully stacked plate of food; a mishmash of edibles they'd brought to Orsa and whatever provender the island could bestow on them, on an empty space atop the large desk. “What were you saying before?”

“Sasha,” began Anya, “You ever left home in a hurry? So fast that you forgot to take some things with you?”

“Sure. A couple of times actually. Once when I woke up late to my first day on the job and the next time when I couldn’t find my son when some e-holes hit near his school. Second one gave me some serious grey hairs.”

“His school was still open?”

Sasha cast a sheepish downwards glance. “Stupid. I know. Most parents had pulled theirs out by that point. But I wanted him to have as normal a life as possible. I wanted him to learn what I couldn’t teach him. And then I nearly lost him. Almost held my neighbour up at gunpoint to get him to drive me there – my car was in the shop. Not my finest moment, but hey, we do anything for our kids, don’t we?”

“Son of a bitch.”

Sasha’s brows knotted together in confusion. “Sorry?”

Anya opened her mouth as if to think out loud and instantly caught herself. “I...Private, you’ve just illuminated something for me that I was too stupid to see. Tell you what. Drinks are on me Saturday night.”

“You’re welcome...?” said the soldier, a wan grin creeping up her face.

Eureka, thought Anya as she watched the other woman leave. But it left her feeling more disturbed than ever.

She moved purposefully along the weakly lit hallway, past framed depictions of the horrors of war. She never liked the phrase, but how else to sum up its consequences to those alien to its nature? Sure, it sounded tacky when one said it out loud and couldn’t possibly capture the experience itself and its intense  anguish, but these messages needed to be left for the future.

So that history couldn’t blah, blah, blah? When had the present ever paid any attention to the past? The naivety of we’ll-get-it-right-this-time always came back to bite them in the ass. Not if I’ve got anything to say about it.  Because if Prescott wants his report, I’ll damn well give him his report.

He was hiding something. He must have already deployed troops to the mainland. Behind their back. She didn’t know how many, and to what end, but her closest guess came to the fact that there had already been a first reconnaissance team and something had happened to them. Maybe they’d radioed in a few distress calls or maybe they hadn’t radioed in at all. But the corpses they’d discovered had put the fear of God into the Chairman, and she was certain his worries were connected to them.

Anya glanced down at her watch. With any luck, the cadaver dicing process was still ongoing. And she needed to get to what was found before it was made known to Prescott. She’d have to work fast.

She flung the doors open to the morgue. It had served as a cafeteria once upon a time, but had now been repurposed to house the deceased. And to carve up the dead. The thing – she was always reluctant to address dead Locust and their pets with their designated names – lay flayed open on a long metal counter. Its tendrils were strewn on the cold floor, inanimate. Organs glistened against the sterile white lighting. She avoided looking any further. Numerous dissective utensils were scattered on a cart while their user rummaged among them.

“Trevor, I need to ask you a few questions.” said Anya.

The young man had his back turned to her, a pair of large orange headphones – heaven knows where he had acquired them – over his ears.

She strode forward and lifted one off his left ear.

“Jesus!” he exclaimed, jumping back. And then, a few seconds later: “You can’t do that in a morgue, dude! That’s like...that’s rule number one!”

Trevor wasn’t one for military propriety and Anya wasn’t in the mood to correct him. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

He completely removed his headphones and wore them across his neck. “Uh, I gotta get this done by morning. Only about halfway there. And it’s like two or something.”

She lowered her brows and gave him her best glower. “No, now.” She nodded towards the creature. “You’ve sliced up a few of the old ones that washed up before, right?”

He nodded.

“Notice anything different this time? Any physical anomalies, mutations, an extra appendage...I don’t know, anything?”

Trevor chuckled. “A flood won’t give you muties, lieutenant.”

Think, Anya. She was tired; her questions were floundering in the water and lacking in direction. “Alright, was it carrying anything unusual? Maybe a tracking device?”

“Yeah, it had a copy of Godfried’s Greatest Hits. Heard you guys were crushed when he took one for the team.”

What the hell was he talking about? Think! “Alright. What about the guy with him? The stranded?”

He stood still for a moment and crossed his arms. “Yeah, actually. A small data stick. Seems kinda weird that someone like him would own one. Not impossible, but not common either. Miracle it didn’t flop out into the ocean while they were joyriding. He had in a zipped pouch and double-bagged it. Musta been important to him. Had nothing else worth mentioning on him.”

“Do you have it?”

“Yeah, but,” he looked at her with doubt his eyes, “I was going to bag it separately with some of the other recovered items and that inventory is going in my report.”

“To Hoffman?”

“Nah. Prescott.”

She pursed her lips and tried to avoid hissing through clenched teeth. The chain of information, when traversing in the opposite direction, traveled through Colonel Hoffman and then on to Chairman Prescott. She held out her hand. “I’m going to need it. I’ve been ordered to collate all data on the findings and give him my summary directly.”

Trevor’s eyes twinkled and a corner of his mouth turned up. “Hey lady, I’m not a complete moron. You want the stick – you gotta just say so. But we have to lay down a few rules first.”

She let out a heavy breath. “I...alright. What?”

“One: this doesn’t get traced back to me. If it does, I’m taking you down with me. Don’t ask me how, because all you need to know is that I am fully capable of doing so. Two: I’m going to need a state-of-the-art stereo system. You know, that stuff you can hook up to a guitar or four.”

This isn’t his first negotiation. And Baird’s going to be pissed. “Fine.”

Unwilling to slink away like a completely wounded animal, she took a threatening step towards him. He flinched and stepped back. With inward satisfaction, she held out her hand.

He gave her what she had earned and then, in a futile attempt at recovery, called out to her as she was leaving. “Come back anytime! I look forward to your frequent patronage.” Laughing only from the nose down, he placed his headphones back on and returned to his work.

4 Hours Later

She left headquarters and entered the barracks. Most COGs spent their off-duty moments socializing with one another in these spartan rooms; playing cards, reading, gambling, doing whatever they could to occupy their minds and readjust to their new surroundings.

Here, she felt a little more as if she belonged. The camaraderie that blossomed between these men and few women were not borne of bribes or status. In short, the absence of politics was refreshing and welcome. Everyone here had – at one time or another – felt the burning pain of loss and it helped cement life-long bonds.

“Anya!” called out a familiar voice from the side.

She turned to see Marcus approach her, but couldn’t tell if he was concerned or just tired. Hard to read as always.

“Bit early for you to be out here, isn’t it?” he remarked.

“I suppose so. Hey, is there any place I can have a word with you in private?”

“Private’s a relative term around here,” he said as he glanced about. One branch of the hallway led to an empty and unused bathroom. He gently led her in that direction.

A single fluorescent light flickered indecisively. Water, two to three inches deep, sat undisturbed on the floor. Debris and other...objects that Anya would rather never be called on to identify floated in it. They’d just entered when the stench hit her. She wrinkled her nose in revulsion.

“Yeah...sorry about that. One of the pipes broke a few weeks ago and the latrine queen’s been busy doing other shit. And I wouldn’t lean on anything if I were you. Had to see to a roach infestation last night. Think they came from in here.”

“Well, at least we won’t be bothered,” Anya conceded.

“So what did you want to see me about?”

“This needs to be kept under the radar, okay?”

Marcus nodded.

“Something’s happening. I’ve managed to piece together a report that Prescott isn’t going to be happy to see. While I can’t tell you everything I know, or suspect that I know, I just want you to understand that, whatever may transpire in the next few days, I’m not okay with it.”

“Prescott getting you down again?”

“You could say that,” she admitted. “It’s just that...he doesn’t get it, does he? He hasn’t served. How could he know? And the breeding farms,” at this, she let out a sudden shiver, “unconscionable.”

“I thought he was acquitted?”

“In a military court.” And she gave him a knowing glance. "And...I don't know, maybe people believed that you had to sacrifice your ethics completely and that's why he's still here. They need someone to make the tough decisions so that they don't have to."

“I get it. In your shoes, maybe I’d be pissed too. But don’t get blinded by how much you hate him. Sometimes, things aren’t always what they seem.”

“I just don’t want you to think that I agree with his point of view on things.”

“I worry about a lot things, but your conscience isn’t one of them.”

She smiled inwardly and went on. “That Reaver that you and Dom found?”

“Plus the guy.”

“Plus the guy,” she repeated, “well, it turns out our resident ME found something on him. He had it double-bagged and it seems to me that it was important to him. A data stick. Heavily encrypted.”

Marcus remained silent but he was clearly listening closely.

“One of our programs managed to decipher it and I made a copy of the file. I didn’t have time to listen to the entire thing. Had to finish up my report to Prescott and we’re supposed meet to discuss  it tomorrow. He’s not going to be happy with what I’ve got to say, I’ll tell you that much. Bit nervous about it, actually.”

“Anya. What was on the recording?”

She placed a tentative hand on his shoulder and wondered if he would shrug it off. Marcus could be sensitive about his personal space with most people. He allowed her to leave it there. “I’m not a hundred percent sure about this, but I think a lot of the things that are being talked about might involve your father, Marcus.”

He examined her face intently, searching for any sign of humour – a stifled chuckle, a smile, anything. Not that she had a predilection to joke about something as sensitive as this, but it seemed so outlandish that it had to be hazing at its crudest. It’s what most of them who’d fought and killed did though, didn’t they? The only way to pick your way through bodies of corpses was to resort to coarse jests, because all of it ultimately, had to be One Sick Joke.

And then, almost as if she was reading his mind: “I wouldn’t lie about this, Marcus. It’s something that’s important to you and that’s why,” she took a deep breath, “it’s important to me.”

She planted the data stick into his open palm and closed his fingers around it for him.

4 Hours Later

It turned out that Anya was wrong about a few things on the tape; specifically that its contents dealt primarily with his father. He couldn’t recognize his father’s voice because it wasn’t his father’s voice. And every inflection within – even if it was deliberately distorted – lacked one patent quality that belonged to his father. Coldness.

The tone of speech swung between severe anxiety and self-reassurance. If this was a fake, it was a poor effort at framing Fenix Senior. He couldn’t even speculate on what he was being framed for. Research on children? New Hope was a government facility. Everything that lay beyond the boundaries of human decency, the illegalities of it, had been made legal. If a town was run by gangsters, and an innocent had decided to rat one of them out, why run to another criminal to do so? And even if the innocent wasn’t so innocent, a turncoat would be hard-pressed to wage a single-man war and win.

What the hell were you involved in, Dad? Something worse?

The individual on tape didn’t seem to be dictating or transcribing anything either. It seemed to be more of journal concerning arrangements; considerably risky arrangements at that. There were segments of the recording that had been rendered incoherent as background noises swept in and out. But fortunately, this was not extensive – allowing for most of its narration to be heard and understood. Portions of it were unclear – not in the sense of lucidity – but more in the sense of relevance. There were random references to subjects, and he guessed that these were medical patients. His father’s name was mentioned once or twice throughout the tape, and then never again. The voice had spoken of one patient, named Ruth, quite often and mid-way through the recording, she too seemed to have been omitted. During the remainder of the tape’s entirety, the individual spoke a lot about his son – with the lack of a name – and another supposed friend, Micus. Was it a play on Marcus, he wondered?

He lay back down on his cot, stared up at the mottled-gray ceiling and hit the play button, hearing the words that had now become familiar to him. It picked up where it had left off.

“I told Ruth today,” it began. So we’re back to trying to chill out.

He listened on, anticipating the man to descend into hysterics at any second. “She seemed disturbed and upset. I thought that she’d be more hopeful, you know? But she was always unpredictable – moods and all. She said – and I quote – ‘It’s too late to save me,’ but I’m chalking this kind of talk up to her meds. Speaking of which, Dr. Doom has upped the dosage.” Marcus paused the tape. Who was Dr. Doom? His name was brought up in almost every entry. Was it one of the doctors heavily involved in the research at the facility? Was it Niles Samson? Was it his dad?

“Listening to your voices again?” said Dom suddenly, startling him.

Marcus propped himself up in his cot. “Dom, sit down – you gotta listen to this, before I get lost in this rabbit hole. Maybe you can make some sense out of it.”

Dom yawned and stretched. “Man, only thing I can make sense about right now is sleep. You could use some too.” He sat down on the edge of his own bed and began to unfasten the various buckles and zippers of his boots.

“Can’t sleep.” muttered Marcus.

“I thought you said your dad wasn’t on the tape.”

“He isn’t, but he is.”

Dom looked at him quizzically.

“This guy mentions him a couple times and then doesn’t speak about him again. And then he rambles on about his son and this other guy, Micus. And how they’re trying to get Micus out without having some Dr. Doom and his cronies find out.” Marcus shook his head, realizing how ridiculous it all sounded.

Dom smiled. “Bad plot by a bad writer?”

Marcus looked back at him, his face deadpan.

“Hey,” laughed Dom, “I’m just trying to make sense of it too. Maybe though,” he nodded towards the reticent data stick along with all its implications, “Maybe this guy was a patient at New Hope. Maybe he was in therapy.”

“New Hope isn’t a goddamn rehab center.”

“Yeah, okay. Then what?”

Marcus shook his head. “He’s not a patient. This guy probably worked there – he knows too much about the medication, the treatments, paperwork...shit like that.”

Dom narrowed his focus. For something to have the power to plague Marcus was probably something worth taking a second look at. Or listen to, in this case. “Alright, man.” He leaned back in his cot and sighed. “I’ve always wanted someone to read to me before bed anyways.”

“I’m glad I came to my son for advice. He’s a cool customer. Steady. Keeps me level. He says he’s shipping out in less than two weeks now, but I need him here. I need him to help me plan. His idea of administering the benzodiazepines was a good one. They’re mixed in with whatever Doom has been giving Micus, and they’re not going to show on any charts. At least not yet. I had suggested some barbiturates, but this stuff is much better. At least it will slow down Micus’ and Agna’s heart rate and pulse enough for us to pull us through the first phase.

"But we have a surveillance problem. Just like my son had predicted, Micus and Agna are front and center. Doom’s looking for different symptoms now. Seems to have more or less given up hope on the others. I guess...that at least he’s trying to make them comfortable. Didn’t think the guy had it in him. There is no hope for them now, right?”

Marcus paused the tape, skipping a part of the dialog he deemed unnecessary. The voice had been teetering on the edge of panic and had fallen in. Was the guy an idiot? Who, in his right mind, would document illegal activities if they could avoid it, let alone its motivations?

A word slipped into his mind. Torch. If anything happened to him, perhaps someone else would carry it in his stead.

He sped up the tape and then hit play again. The voice had recovered some of its composure.

“Can’t help but think that we’re sealing Micus’ fate, and Agna’s too. Ain’t it better to die in your sleep? Doom made the others comfortable. Will probably do the same to them. What if...one of them gets shot? In the stomach? Painful way to go. More painful knowing that I caused it.”

 Marcus wondered if the man eventually turned traitor. It was likely that he’d never find out. He continued.

"Well, we really got into it today. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean. And I think he understood that, but he was sticking to his guns. I’m convinced there’s another way to help them, but I can’t find it. He kept repeating it to me like I was already in a straightjacket. ‘One of them has to be sacrificed so that the other can live.’ I didn’t want to accept it, but the more I think about it, the more I realize that we got no choice. They ain’t gonna let us walk out with two stiffs. They’ll want to do tests, and then more tests. Then we’ll be busted. But if we use one...if we use one of them for the real thing, then believing that the other has also died won’t be so difficult.

“But the question is, which one do we pick?”

Marcus stopped the tape here, and opened his eyes. He glanced over at Dom’s bunk. His friend was fast asleep, his snores rhythmic and loud.

“Lucky bastard,” muttered Marcus.

He hit play again.

Orsa
The Following Morning
Mess Hall

“You look like hell.” spoke the blond man, in between mouthfuls of food. “They ask you to do more recon last night?”

Marcus shook his head. Dom, who in contrast to his friend, had had a considerable amount of sleep the night before spoke instead. “No. He just got caught up in Mother Goose’s fairytales.”

Damon Baird raised his eyebrows but said nothing. He channeled his momentary interest to looking about the cafeteria; peering above the rows of heads. “They had spaghetti on the menu today,” he mumbled to no one in particular. Then he turned his attention back to his companions sitting opposite him. “You seen Cole around?”

“Yeah,” nodded Dom. “Had to train some of the rooks. Said he wouldn’t be done till late afternoon. They have spaghetti, you said?” His friend nodded. “Man, I gotta get myself some of that. Haven’t had spaghetti in ages.” Dom rose from his seat, made his way amidst the other Gears sitting down to breakfast, and towards the serving section.

“So, how’s he holding up?” Baird asked, nodding in Dom’s general direction.

Marcus shrugged, poking around his food with his fork. “Alright, I guess.”

“Seems a little...I don’t know; too cheerful. You think he got some closure? With finding Maria, I mean,”

“Baird, I’m just his friend. Not his shrink. If he wants to tell me something, he will.” Marcus stared at his food, his appetite withdrawn. Truth be told, he had believed that a kind of peace had settled within Dom, and perhaps he had finally found a way to close the book on his search for his wife. It was all too obvious that he missed her tremendously, and that it pained him to speak about her, but perhaps he had found some type of solace with the knowledge that she was in a better place now. But it was really not his place to voice his opinion, and discourse that dealt with emotions was never his forte, anyway.

“Fair enough. So. Tell me about this bedtime story.”

“Nothing that would thrill you,” said Marcus.

“Try me.”

Marcus put his fork down. “Look, it’s not that I don’t wanna share or anything,” his voice almost sounded sarcastic. “It’s just that Dom thinks that it’s a waste of time, and there are moments when I think it is, too.”

Baird seemed impatient now. He furrowed his brow, a little unconvinced. “What is it?”

“It’s just a garbled recording from New Hope.”

At the mention of the facility, Baird’s eyes lit up, his curiousity piqued. “How’d you get your hands on that? Did Hoffman pull it up?”

Marcus looked back at him, his face expressionless. “Of course he didn’t give it to me, dumbass.”

“Then what? It was Anya, wasn’t it?” grinned Baird.

“Right on the money, my son,” spoke Dom coming up from behind Marcus. His tray was occupied by a single plate, onto which was piled a heap of spaghetti. He gingerly stepped into his seat beside Marcus so as not to drop the precious cargo.

“Thanks Dom.” said Marcus, with a considerable degree of acrimony.

Dom shrugged. “Well, it’s true. She got it off that dead guy who washed up yesterday.”

“And Hoffman and Prescott don’t know about it?” asked Baird loudly, and in mild bewilderment.

“Say it to the whole world, why don’t you.”

Baird winced and lowered his voice. “Sorry. But why the hell didn’t you tell me earlier? You think I was gonna blab?”

Dom chewed his food and smiled with a mouthful of spaghetti. Marcus just frowned. “No, I just don’t want to make a big deal out of it. It could be nothing. If top brass had found it, they’d have stamped it as classified and that’d be all she wrote.”

“True,” agreed Baird. “But you should’ve told me. Can you give me anything?”

"Ah, hell." Marcus finally capitulated. “There’s this guy in the recording. Real whack-job. Worked at the facility. He’s talking about stuff that doesn’t make any sense. Claims they did twisted research on kids. And that it was government sanctioned.”

Baird’s eyes widened and a grin stole over his face. “You don’t say. Should’ve come to me, man. Should’ve told me.”

At this, Dom laughed. “Why? Did he hurt your feelings?”

Ignoring Dom, Marcus weighed Baird's eagerness. He knew that look. “Okay, Baird. This is me, right here, right now, coming to you. Want me to grovel?”

“It’s not that,” said Baird, annoyed. “I got some of the stuff you brought back from the facility, and a couple things from when we were in Nexus. From them. I’m trying to fit some of it together. Catalogue it, you know what I mean?”

“I don’t believe this. You got a scrapbook?” exclaimed Marcus.

Dom nearly choked on his spaghetti. “Are you shitting me? You have Locust memorabilia?”

Baird pinched the bridge of his nose. “Never mind. Let’s forget it.”

“No, let’s not.” began Marcus. Eccentric as Baird could be, he suddenly realized the importance of these macabre mementos. “What have you got?”

“Look, it’s not really a scrapbook, okay?”

“Whatever you say, Baird. Just tell us what you have.”

“Well, it’s not so much as what I’ve collected. It’s more to do with what I wrote down in my journal – about the Locusts, I mean.”

“Oh, I don’t believe this...most people write to their families...” mumbled Dom. Marcus gestured for him to be quiet.

“I noticed a little thing or two about their religion. Did you know they worship worms? I mean, hell. If they beat us, then we deserve to be extinct.”

“Baird.” Marcus interrupted. “Focus. What did you find out about the facility?”

“I have some old medical files. Totally unorganized – lots of gaps in documentation. Let’s see...I think I have some memos from a lead researcher – that Niles guy – to his staff. Things like that.”

“Hoffman know you have them?” asked Dom.

“Nope,” said Baird, quite proudly. “And he probably wouldn’t want ‘em either. Prescott would chew his ass out if he knew. And what’ll they do with it even if they had it? Probably file it away under not my problem right now. Anyway, the thing is, a lot of the stuff I have, it’s all in bits and pieces. It makes sense, but then again, it doesn’t.”

“Like a busted jigsaw,” said Marcus.

“Exactly.” responded Baird. “Which is why your little recording there makes me curious. Maybe it has some info that’ll make what I have sound coherent. Do you know who made it? Was it that dead guy from the beach?”

Marcus shook his head. “Nah. The tape’s old. A good twenty years or so. Our corpse was probably younger than that – and he may have also been a stranded.”

Baird looked away, pensive, before his eyes settled back on Marcus. The mirth of curiousity had disappeared to be replaced by something more solemn and grave. “Look. Let me borrow the tape. We could put our pieces together, and then, who knows? Could shine a light in all the so on and so forth.”

“For all the good that it’ll do,” groused Marcus, as he finally dug into his cold meal.

Chapter Text

Command Headquarters
Orsa Island

Anya Stroud paced the confines of the foyer outside the main conference room. She’d arrived a little too early and only now did she realize that it was a bad idea. The rich oak door that led to his office itself was shut. She drifted towards a tall window that looked out into an unkempt courtyard that must have been beautiful in its prime. But with the advent and passage of war, it had been abandoned and left to ruin. Well, not quite ruined, exactly. A medley of pale cerulean and yellow wild flowers swept the gentle hills; eager to finally be able to grow unhindered. Deep green birch and beech, their bark an innate off-white, cracking and shivering in the breeze, had established themselves amid copses of older trees.

She tried to recall the name of one that was in bloom closest to the window. Dogwood? Cherry blossom...? She had a feeling she wasn’t even close. Failing that, she stiffened in cheerless anticipation and resumed walking.

A door creaked open and she swung around.

“Can hear you pacing from the hallway,” said Hoffman.

He was a tall, heavily featured man, old, yet muscular. The grey eyes were aslant but keen and missed nothing. No one knew if Hoffman had lost all his hair or if he shaved it off of his own accord, and no one dared ask him. Everything about him betrayed a deliberate and subconscious irascibility. He was a colonel, and the world was at war after all. There was no time to be soft.

But of the pair – Prescott and Hoffman – Anya took more to the latter. She knew she would find in him –

“I read your report.” The words came out short. Clipped.

Finally. An ally. They could now band together against Prescott and demand that he reveal everything about –

He held out the datapad in front of him and shook it emphatically. “You were going to present this in front of the entire Council, weren’t you?”

Something’s wrong. His voice was level and it was difficult to know if her assessment had stirred up some animosity. But she pressed on. “I was hoping that we could. Together. I might have sufficient evidence to suggest that he’s dispatched Gears to the mainland without our knowledge.” And with slight impertinence of her own: “You did read the entire report, didn’t you? Or did you just give it a little skim?”

Bracing for an apoplectic reply, he directed her to a grey upholstered armchair instead. She didn’t argue and sat down. “Lieutenant. I read it – twice. You want to know what I took away from it?” He began counting off on his fingers slowly with remarkable self-restraint. But somehow, that made him all the more frightening. “Insubordination. Slander. Misappropriating evidence. Borderline treason.”

“You knew,” she breathed.

Self-restraint quickly gave way to anger. “And you were going to go in there with this information and discuss it with the representative of the CCA and the other lieutenants? Have you lost your goddamn mind?”

She’d taken her fair share of chew-outs. You had to; doing what she did. The tricky part was knowing when to duck and run, and when to swing back.

Anya shot up in defiance. “Those Gears you sent out there could give up Orsa. Sir. I’m not saying they’re cowards, but even three soldiers represent three opportunities to give up information. Then what? Do you have another island in your pocket we can run to? I don’t know about you, but I’m done taking chances. We don’t have that many left.”

Hoffman exhaled and sat down across from where the lieutenant was standing. She followed suit. He leaned forward, hands clasped in front of him. The taut muscles in his neck began to relax. “Everyone  here...we’ve been through a lot. Until it becomes habit to expect the worst. And Orsa’s quiet; gives you a lot of time to think. Some days, maybe too much time.”

Her thoughts shot off along various tangents. Where was he going with this? She steadied her gaze at him and said nothing.

“You were so engrossed in looking for a conspiracy that you didn’t stop to think that maybe, just maybe you didn’t have the whole picture. And you didn’t think how dangerous it would be if it got out.”

“You don’t know that for certain.”

“No one know anything for certain. But it takes one loose cannon, in the right place and the right time, to sink the ship. Just the one. You just admitted that yourself not three minutes ago. Let me tell you a story.

“I was in Elingrad, oh, about fifteen years back. Surrounding cities had been taken. The Gears that had defended it were dead and the remaining civilians had holed up in library. Somehow they’d gotten access to a radio and called for help. Every which way command looked at the problem, they came to the same conclusion: inadvisable due to severe loss of life. Strongly recommend allocation of resources elsewhere.

“But then the next day we get our marching orders. Priority one: evacuate Elingrad citizens. Now that’s a single,” he held up an index finger, “single company of soldiers to save about thirty civilians while trying to fend off Locusts from all fronts. Nothing to give us an edge. No air support. Absolute suicide. But ours is not to reason why. So, we prep our gear, swing it over our soldiers, ready to give the Locusts hell and get as many folks out as possible.

“We manage to get there mostly in one piece and it’s all – I’m not one for poetry – but it’s sepia as far the eye can see. No trees. Collapsed buildings, rubble everywhere; some of it still smoking. It wasn’t our first rodeo but there are few things in this world, in terms of shock value, that can beat a before and an after. Especially if after is hellfire and brimstone.

“We brought down a few enemy stragglers and found the damn library. Civilians were hiding in cleaning rooms in the basement; almost black on food and water. We spend the night there and decide to leave as soon as the sun comes up. While we’re there a fight breaks out between Sarge and Gunny Corky. More of a scrap really; we’d all be fucked if Corky decided to pull a few triggers, and he knew it too. Any loud noise would give our position away. Anyway, a private gets involved in the fight.

“And then, like it always goes, all us Joes are on our feet and we pick either one of the three and pull them apart. Turns out that Corky had somehow found out that priority one was a pretext to the real mission. Command wanted us to extract a scientist, a former defector from the UIR, and bring him, and him only, back. We’d stand a better chance of escaping with one civilian rather than thirty.”

A gust of air blew in from the corridor unexpectedly. The room grew chilly and gooseflesh prickled Anya’s skin. “But then why dispatch an entire company?”

Hoffman went on. “Bullet sponges. Sarge was to remain behind with half of us, and the rest were supposed to grab the doctor and haul ass out of Elingrad. Those of us staying behind would’ve been told that splitting up gave us better odds. It was all horseshit, of course.

“I’m not sure if they bought it, but it was enough for the moment. Sun comes up the next day and we’re all mobilized, ready to go. Then Private Hillman, the one who fought alongside Corky, comes down with a bad case of righteous anger. Tells the civilians the truth. So we all stand there awkwardly and the room’s dead silent. I felt like it went on forever. After the reality of it sunk in, people start asking questions like: why is the doctor so important? How can you put a price on a life – what gives you the right? It’s all noble indignation for a few minutes before they start looking for a scapegoat. They start off at the top. Damn councilmen. It’s always been about the weapons. Or: It’s always about the politics. It’s only about power. Screwing the people – that’s what they’re good at. Then, and this is where it gets dangerous, they need something more tangible to throw stones at...and we were in the area.

“Not a hard choice to make when you’re all riled up, huh? Sarge tried to settle them down but they were too loud and Corky and his guys were a little slow on the uptake. By that point, this one woman – middle-aged, could have been a school teacher to look at her – manages to snatch Corky’s handgun from his holster. He tries to stop her; they struggle and the gun goes off. Corky falls to the ground and he’s lying there; eyes open and in his own blood. The poor fucking idiot. Bet this isn’t how he imagined it going down.

“Now we’re all holding up our weapons and the civilians start slugging us. Some of the Gears pulled their triggers. The others, the ones who didn’t want to hurt the schoolteachers and the artists and the bus drivers, hesitate for too long. And they paid the price for it.”

“Which one were you?” Anya asks softly.

Hoffman sat back and closed his eyes momentarily. “Since everyone else was occupied, I’d taken point near the front steps. Someone had to be the lookout. On hindsight, I was lucky not to have been shot by a stray bullet.”

“Very lucky.” Anya admitted. “What happened next?”

Hoffman softly and absently thumped a closed fist against the arm rest. “The Locust came. Surprising how quickly they showed up. Maybe they already knew where we were. Maybe they followed us.” He shook his head, “Anyway, the how is irrelevant. What happened next: everything went to hell in a handbasket. Some of the civilians ran back in, some ran outside. Our remaining soldiers,” he issued a cynical and abrupt laugh, “Remaining. There were only four of us left. We followed standard procedure and aborted. Half of us bailed. The remaining half volunteered to stay behind and lay down cover fire. Don’t know what happened to them. Don’t know what happened to the civilians.”

Outside, it had begun to drizzle. Drops spattered against the window pane; clean and transparent, unlike the pollution-soaked cloudbursts in Jacinto. Anya turned her attention back to the Colonel. “Don’t you think,” she began, “that if Command had appraised your company of the real situation beforehand, it wouldn’t have come down to that?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. The thing is, everything in this world...is subject to chaos. Entropy is the natural order of things. There are reasons for why we operate on a need-to-know basis. Supposing Private Hillman knew before we set out. Maybe he still wouldn’t be okay with it. Maybe he’d still tell everyone.”

“But you didn’t give him that choice! If he disagreed, you could have told him to sit this one out.” exclaimed Anya.

Hoffman smiled sadly. “Choice? You know better than that. Say we gave Hillman a choice. When the next order comes around, and he doesn’t like that one, do we let him have pick-of-the-week again? And supposing other Gears catch on and start doing the same?”

“We owe it to them.”

“Don’t be naïve, Lieutenant,” he scoffed. “When you sign up, you’re effectively saying that you’re ready to die for your nation. Your brothers. Your sisters. A task commanded is a task completed; you know this. And as for the other aspect of choice – lives were...are at stake. The scientist we were supposed to rescue helped develop technology for the Hammer before we lost Elingrad. Sure, we got there in the end, but it took us a lot longer. We try to make the best decisions with what we have.

“But the most important thing here, the reason you’ve pissed me off,” he stabbed an emphatic finger downwards, “is that you didn’t wait to hear us out. You never intended to give us that chance. So who’s got trust issues now?”

“But Chairman Prescott – ”

Hoffman massaged a knot at the back of his neck. He seemed older than he was. “So that’s what this is all about.”

Anya’s gaze broke and she looked elsewhere.

Hoffman continued. “You’ve let your dislike for our Chairman get the better of your senses. Which are usually very reliable. Chairman Prescott is a politician. And as tempting as it is to believe they’re all evil, truth is: there are a handful who aren’t. They’re not saints either. But Prescott just might be okay. Remember the rumour about the COG dissolving the CCA because of the UIR infiltrators after the Pendulum Wars?”

The incident had occurred one year into their war with the Locusts. Following the peace treaty between the COG and the UIR, a portion of UIR members who didn’t agree with cessation of all hostilities ceded and formed their own organization. However, the body lacked adequate financial backing and instead decided to maneuver their way into the COG Civilian Association and cause trouble from within.

He continued. “All true. Know who stopped it?”

“Let me guess: the Chairman.”

“Some of us wanted to abolish the CCA entirely. Thought it was too sociopolitical. And maybe it was. But can you have imagined the fallout from that? They provided civvies with employment, fundamental education; almost all of this was free. Even all those stupid cultural events that they held before shit got real bad; everything people needed to stay sane for just a little while longer...Dalyell wanted it gone. He said the resources, despite the CCA being mostly self-reliant, were needed elsewhere. Not to mention the whole UIR rumour.

“But Prescott voted no. He said the CCA was an essential transitionary tool for the post-war era, if it ever arrived. Since its expenditures came from within, it could help our vets more than the COG could.  He was outvoted though, of course. But you know what he did then? He started a committee to investigate some of the charges discreetly and laid down so much red tape that an entire species would have had time to evolve by the time it had been cut through. I think he even installed a second committee to oversee the first committee.”

“What about the UIR dissidents?”

“Sniffed them out. Threw them in prison and lost the key. You think I could have come up with a strategy like that?” he said, rhetorically. “Wouldn’t have even entered my mind.”

“So what are you saying? You’re saying I should trust him implicitly?” asked Anya.

“No. Doubt is good, but all things in moderation. I’m saying you should give him a little more credit. Have a little more faith. And be fucking grateful that a man like that is on our side.”

Two hours into the council’s and sub-council’s weekly session, all members had adjourned briefly for the second and final time. The hands of the gilded clock on the wall crept steadily past noon. The round table, with its almost scarlet lacquer, displayed holographic interfaces where each chair was situated. Of the six that had been turned on, three had become idle after ten minutes of inactivity. A blue light pulsed softly, obscuring any data, as it waited to be awakened by its user.

The table was meant for a much larger group of people. Hosting only six made the endeavour feel insignificant and somewhat demoralizing. But they did what they could with what they had.

Two individuals in similar attire to Anya Stroud came in and took their seats.

Chairman Prescott took a sip of his bottled water before activating his display. “Right. What’s next on the agenda?”

Each person executed a downwards swipe at their screens with their hands until they reached the final heading.

Senator Patel, the current representative of the CCA, spoke up. “Before we move on to security, I’d just like to reinforce my point. Chairman, your Gears already have jobs. They’re soldiers and most of the basic necessities are being met by...well, you. Food, shelter, that sort of thing.”

“The civilians here have shelter; they have ration cards. And they’re free to grow their own food; it’s not as if they’re starving. Or even homeless. Corporal Bajia suggested a community garden too.” said the newly-minted Lieutenant D’Angelo.

“Yes, I understand that,” said Patel, if a little patronizingly. “But for six months, these people haven’t been employed. I’m grateful that you’re putting to use those who have trade skills and other essential experience, but we still have so many without jobs. Currently, we’ve been operating under a bartering system; exchanging possessions and such. Trade on a very small scale. But just the other day, a fight broke out in Sector D. I don’t know the precise nature of the altercation, but someone claimed that someone else owed him and hadn’t paid up. One of your Gears broke up the fight but if it wasn't for him...” he trailed off tactfully.

Lieutenant D’Angelo leaned forward in his seat. “You’re the face of the CCA right now, sir. Of all the people in this room, you have the most knowledge on how to generate a civilian workforce with limited resources. We’d be happy to cooperate in a suitable endeavour, but I’m afraid you’re going to have initiate it. Throw some ideas in the suggestion box, so to speak.”

Senator Patel drummed his fingers idly on the table. “Fair enough. Perhaps we can put our heads together and come up with something. But that still leaves out the issue of compensation. A year from now, people won’t be content with the bare minimum. They’ll want to purchase goods. And without – ”

“We don’t exactly have the resources of a printing facility to manufacture money, Senator,” chimed in Anya, eager to move on from the issue they’d spent half an hour on. “And we can’t just take everyone at their word on how much was left in the bank the last time the banks were even open. Bu-ut...maybe we can come up with an alternative system. Credit chits, maybe even some new form of electronic currency. Either way, with the Chairman’s permission, we could bump it up the list. Perhaps not above getting this island’s irrigation and plumbing systems up and running, however.” This earned her a few polite laughs. She’d extended an olive branch in Prescott’s direction. Whether he’d examined her risk assessment manuscript or not, it was one way to apologize.

Prescott didn’t disagree so she went on. “But for the time being, I’m afraid we’re going to have to accept the fact that we’re an oligarchy. Albeit a very small one.”

Senator Patel acquiesced and Chairman Prescott spoke. “If the gods see fit for us to not just survive, but survive and win, it is my hope to lay down our weapons and reinstate democratic rule. Right now though, our priority is to bunker down and weather this storm. I’m sorry that this upheaval has been rough, Senator. We will do all we can to speed things up, which is why I’ve given serious consideration to your request for civilian security measures. Colonel Hoffman here has suggested that we help train some volunteers and we’d value any input you could share on the process. I realize that our people are likely to respond more positively to local faces. In addition, they’d be more familiar with the lay of the land, their neighbours, and – ”

The heavy door creaked open and a corporal who’d recently been promoted moved over to Prescott and whispered in his ear.

He stood up suddenly, chair groaning against the wooden floor as he did so. “Ladies and gentlemen, we’ll have to cut this short for now. Let’s reconvene at a later date and my assistant will fill you in on the details. The minutes of this meeting will be shortly transferred to your accounts and records.”

They left the room in single file and hushed voices.

Ego bruised and a little off center, Anya moved down halls and passages with Chairman Prescott, Colonel Hoffman and Corporal Da Silva. The corporal led the way with the Chairman and Colonel exchanging a few words every now and again. Anya calculated that she’d better take the rear; reluctant to engage in any type of dialog as they walked.

Finally they emerged into the situation room.

Four square walls of faded fresco; depicting again, soldiers on the battlefield. This time around however, the paintings illustrated more corpses – dying or already dead. Anya looked away.

Several modern interpretations of the computers she’d been accustomed to lay atop crude plastic folding tables. They’d come a long way from simple data processors. Conventional variants could now generate ciphers in minutes, and crack them in seconds. Not to mention that they were highly efficient combat simulators and could produce diverse algorithmic solutions to almost any strategy flung their way. A monitor to the far right presented a map, and on closer surreptitious scrutiny, Anya noted a flashing red triangle, with the words PanMod, superimposed on it. But the centerpiece in the room was an array of communications equipment – a patchwork of ubiquitous and rare hardware. Corporal Ivanov, a dark-haired young man, attended to it.

He glanced over his shoulder as the quartet entered and leapt to attention.

“Chairman Prescott, Sir! Colonel Hoffman, Sir!”

“At ease, Private.” said Hoffman. “Give me a run-down.”

Ivanov looked up, acknowledging Anya’s presence. But on seeing as how the Chairman and Colonel had brought her along by choice, he decided that he was free to speak. “Panther still hasn’t reported in. Been trying for over forty-eight hours, sir.”

“Panther...?” ventured Anya.

“We left a squad of Gears on the mainland as a provisional precaution,” explained Prescott succinctly, arms folded and hawkish features creased in concentration.

Anya closed her eyes. Everything that she’d concluded was true, but was only part of a whole. And in her haste to blame Prescott, she’d brushed all doubts aside in order to sculpt the narrative to fit her own. As bitter as the truth tasted, Colonel Hoffman was right.

But she was a big girl. She would have to own her lapse in judgement and move on.

Ivanov continued. “I’ve sent in a few signals every two hours over multiple bandwidths. Not that we’ve been experiencing heavy traffic, but it doesn’t hurt to try. Scrambled outgoing messages of course. No response so far. The last ping we got from them was from this location in Elingrad,” he rose and crossed over to another display. He pointed at the red triangle Anya had noticed earlier.

“Comm sats still operational?” queried Anya.

“Yes Ma’am. If their hand-held terminals had been destroyed or even...repurposed...we’d have received an alert.” The terminals were keyed into a user’s specific biometric signature. Additionally, intel each unit carried was always encrypted. For another to attempt to use it would be impossible without granting complete local permissions from its original owner.

“And I’m sure you’ve tried to trace all HHT locations?”

“Yes Ma’am.”

“What the fuck does this all mean?” exclaimed Hoffman. “They’re in cyberspace limbo?”

“Or maybe the entire team is dead.” said Prescott finally, willing to say what none of them could at this moment.

“Look, it’s only been forty-eight hours. Maybe they were driven out of base camp and had to bunker down somewhere.” said Anya. “Someplace where they can’t get a signal to transmit.”

“Somewhere underground?”

Their collective heartbeats quickened. “Somewhere underground doesn’t necessarily mean Locust underground,” said Anya, endeavoring to counter Ivanov’s ominous suggestion.

“But if they’ve been captured that’ll be the most likely place the Locust would take them. Maybe they ditched their HHTs just in case. I mean, not that the Locust are that smart, but you know, you gotta be careful.” ventured Ivanov.

“Do you mean to say that an entire recon team got jumped at the same time and none of them thought to send out a distress call? Or even have a fallback plan?”

“Worse things have happened. Just don’t think it’s outside the realm of possibility.”

“We can stand here and tell each other goddamn ghost stories all night or we could do something about this.” said a restless Hoffman.

“Perhaps we could do both.” suggested Prescott. He looked to Hoffman and Anya in turn. “With what we currently know, it wouldn’t be prudent to run in waving our guns around in the dark. And since your assessment also urged the utmost caution, Lieutenant, cautious is what we’ll have to be for the short term. But that doesn’t mean we can’t mobilize a small squad and bench them until we know more. So we don’t get caught with our pants all the way down.”

Hoffman twisted his lips. Then he nodded. “Hurry up and wait, huh? Looks like we don’t have much of a choice anyway.”

Their makeshift training compound saw little activity during this time of day. Newer recruits were trained during the afternoon – when the sun’s rays were at its most merciless, testing their endurance and trying their stamina. Following a grueling session, a knot of young cadets squatted together and then quickly leapt up and apart; prepared for another round of thrashball.

Marcus zipped his duffel bag shut and took a swig of water to quench his thirst. Tossing the bottle into a plastic bag that had been nailed to a pillar, he began to cross the field and back to the barracks. But a muffled voice rode the evening breeze and he turned to see Baird jogging towards him with something in his hand.

“Marcus! Wait up! I think I got it all figured out,” he panted, as he bent over and grasped his knees to catch his breath. “Ran all the way from the mess to tell you...Man, I’m outta shape...”

“Well?”

Baird pointed towards a small bench, still out of breath. The pair walked towards it and sat down.

“Okay, I don’t think I figured it all out – there’s still a lot missing. But you gotta admit, we’ve come a long way from the bits and pieces – ”

“Baird, just tell me what you found.”

“You were wrong about a lot of things, man,” he said, grinning. Marcus couldn’t tell if Baird was simply pleased with his own initiative or if a little schadenfreude directed at Marcus was to blame. “You said that this guy doesn’t talk about your dad, right? Wrong. Your dad was in deep with whatever they were trying to pull off.”

Perfect. Just perfect. “It just keeps getting better and better, doesn’t it? So –”

“Not the ravings of madman,” interrupted Baird. He gesticulated with his hands. “The guy on the tape. His son was your father.” And then on seeing Marcus’ perplexed face, “Not in the literal sense of the word. He meant sun, not son. Because sun, when translated from its Latin variant into its English equivalent means phoenix. And in this case, it’s obvious that he’s not referring to the mythical bird, but to Fenix. Your dad’s last name. Not the most sophisticated code, but maybe that was all he could do at the time. Bu-ut, I’d never have figured it out if he didn’t use similar rules in referring to the other person on the tape.”

“Who?”

“Ruth. My granddad studied philology. He used to tell us about the hidden meanings of words, their derivations, you know – that sort of thing. Some of it was pretty obscene, but anyway – ”

“Baird,” said Marcus, perched at the edge of his patience.

“Okay, okay. Well in ancient Hebrew texts, Ruth means companion. And if you translate companion into Latin, you get Amicus.” explained Baird.

“I’ll be damned. Micus.”

“Exactly. Same for the other person on your tape. Agna means sheep or ewe in Latin, and if we translate this Latin variant into its Hebrew counterpart, you get Rachel. So now, we have two very real names. Ruth and Rachel. And this guy and your dad, they were dead set on getting them out of the facility.”

“Any clue as to what the hell was going on there?”

“Well, I think it’s safe to say that New Hope had its fair share of Doctor Frankensteins. And it looks like your Ruth and Rachel were subjects. I even have a small excerpt from a medical file you and Dom brought back. Go easy on it. It’s old and beaten. Here, look,” Baird handed Marcus a piece of paper, yellowed at the edges and a little fragile.

Marcus held it gingerly between his fingers and read the printed words.

Patient Name: Ruth
Age: 15

Symptom: Ruth is clearly experiencing extreme swelling in her joints and frequently cries out in pain during the night. There is a strange discoloration in her eyes, and her breathing often sounds labored. Her nails grow at a faster rate than normal, though her hair grows at a markedly reduced rate. I'll keep trying to find some type of medication to alleviate her pain without adversely affecting our studies.

She also exhibits rather erratic and unpredictable behaviour, though this is quite understandable considering her situation and symptoms. The patient continues to have her episodes where she lashes out, with malicious intent, to the closest person. She doesn’t remember these spells, and I doubt that her amnesia has been faked. She also shows remorse later.  Scans and psych evaluations can’t explain this behaviour. Recommend further tests and closer observations.

Dr. Niles Samson

After a few minutes of digesting the material, Marcus handed the paper back to Baird. The progress his friend had made was all well and good. However, it left him with more questions than answers. Did his father voluntarily poke and prod these children before he had a change of heart? And why was this Ruth so critical to their research?

Almost as if Baird had read his mind; “They singled out Ruth, there’s no question about it. But I have a hunch that your dad and the Sundance kid were trying to get her and the other girl, Rachel, out. But there was a change of plans because they had to pick who they wanted to save. That’s why our friend was talking about sacrifice. They must’ve chosen Ruth.”

“Save her from what, Baird? The research? And what does the research have to do with the Reaver that Command sliced up?”

“I don’t know. Whatever the answer is, though, you can be certain it’s not good.” deduced Baird, stating the obvious. “Too bad Hoffman didn’t let you off of Orsa. You could’ve got more answers if you went back home. Or back to the facility, at least.”

His gaze downcast, Marcus felt very tired. And very old. Suddenly Orsa seemed the better deal. Let the dead bury themselves and leave the rest of them in peace. “Yeah. Too bad.”

Command
The following day

Prescott drifted to the center of his office, and towards his desk. Its surface projected a holographic map with various routes – past and present – leaving a silver trail in their wake. He placed clasped hands behind his back; his face somber.

Colonel Hoffman, who lay seated in an armchair, was equally despondent. But he managed a languid go at optimism. “We could wait it out, you know. He’s not going to give us up. Met him a year back. He’s solid. Dependable.”

The Chairman reached out for the map, immersing a hand in the glowing three-dimensional illusion. He pushed the map aside and opened an adjacent folder. Holding his breath, he hit play.

The male voice was anything but comprehensible save for a short string of sentences, and after listening to them, Prescott found himself wishing that the entire thing had been rendered inaudible. “Situation FUBAR...remaining...dammit! ...a new development and this...jamming signal in my head; won't let us think…we are fucking oscar mike, repeat...”

“He knows we can’t send in a Raven. No evac for them. He knows.” said Hoffman again.

Prescott closed his eyes momentarily and massaged the bridge of his nose. Evacuating a few soldiers was not the pressing concern. More likely than not, they were all probably dead by now. What gnawed at his composure and resolve, however, was a feeling that a similar fate was closing in on them. And closing in fast.