Blood Soaked and Invaded - 02 (22 page)

“Yeh,” she said, looking completely downtrodden and adorable in a freshly-assaulted kind of way. I really wanted to hug her, but I couldn’t imagine a way to do it without involving her face or my own. In lieu of the hug I gently tugged her behind me as I walked out of the room.

About halfway to the elevator and the stairs, her voice appeared in my head. “I can’t believe I actually said that.”

I answered aloud. “It was the heat of the moment, and I started it. Don’t blame yourself for following the lead of your boyfriend the jackass.” I gripped her hand a little tighter to emphasize the point. “I’m angrier about being a science experiment when I didn’t consent to it, regardless of the fact that I’m alive to be pissed off about it.”

“Being in the family way changes a person’s perspective on a lot of things, too. You can’t be quite so self centered when there’s a child involved.” It was a little strange to be hearing her in my skull, but it made perfect sense to communicate that way until her jaw finished reassembling.

“Ah, I don’t know how true that is. My parents were phenomenally self-absorbed despite having three kids. They just passed their shit down to us.” I pushed the down button on the elevator panel and shrugged.

“Wait a minute. I thought it was just you and your brother?” She turned me around to face her, looking as serious as possible with a swollen and bruised complexion.

“I guess I never mentioned her with all the shit going on. Miranda was the youngest of the three of us, and just as spoiled and self-absorbed as Mom.” I waved my free hand around, trying to dismiss the subject or at least diffuse it in the closed space of the elevator.

“What happened to her?” Charlie asked, pulling me with her as she exited the elevator and headed for the front doors.

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her in about 6 years. She left home when she was 18 and went… wherever.” Talking about my family was intensely uncomfortable on a number of fronts, not the least of which being I’d killed my two closest male relatives in self-defense. Worse, I suppose, is it could be argued that I didn’t kill my father to defend myself as much as I did it out of necessity and blind, primal rage. “I guess my folks knew where she was and what she was doing, if only because they never appeared terribly upset that she was gone. Stu never asked questions, and I was dealing with piles of my own angst at the time.”

“Can I just say that your family life sucked?” she asked me out loud.

“Jaw working?”

“Yes. It’s a little stiff yet, but the pain is gone. I can feel things shifting around in my gums, too.”

The walk back to the store was quiet and uneventful, for which I was very grateful. Nothing fell from the sky or shot big balls of plasma snot at us, but the tension between the two of us was high. We were aware of the shit I’d stirred up and she had added her own secret ingredients to the mix, and if she was feeling anything like I was, it was incredibly awful. I was lost enough in my own thoughts to be almost incapable of considering what accessories would be appropriate to complete my Crash Examination couture.

I allowed myself a slight smile as I watched her blue jeans-clad behind roll up the stairs toward our bedroom. Sex. Yeah. Something we ought to have once we figured out the reproductive mess. I missed… Using that word brought me up a little short and I stood stock still on the third step of the staircase. I was missing something that I’d never actually had: days and nights of intimacy with the woman I’d become intensely interested in. I’d fallen in love with. Deeply. Madly.

We had shared days, just days, before I’d been wrapped up in weeks of recuperation. Now a few days more, after resuming my occupation of my own brainpan. That was barely enough time to miss anything, but it was more than enough time to generate desire, intense desire, for something that I wanted. I wanted her, and it was beginning to piss me off that life was interfering with what I’d rather be doing with my time. Yes, I thought to myself, I could be grouchy enough to need another daily walk to settle my head.

By the time I’d reached the top of the stairs, Charlie was walking back across the floor with the Man Scythe, a 9mm, and a utility belt loaded with clips in her hands. She reached out and handed me the collection with a muted, “Is this all right? The clips are from your hollow point pile.”

I stood there, soaking in her sadness. “Just what I wanted. Thank you.” She nodded at me and sat down at my desk. “My love, this will all work out. Believe me it will.”

“Frankie Ray ‘o’ Sunshine, I really want to believe you, but I can’t see what you see right now. Just go do what you have to do, but please come home with your forehead in one piece. Okay?”

“Believe me, I really am not planning on allowing another trip to head injury territory. Besides, all they want us to do is go look at wreckage. I bet I won’t even clear leather before we come back home.” We shared a small laugh over that. I loaded myself for bear, gave her a kiss and headed back over to the multi-purpose center to hitch a ride.

I could hear the helicopter when I left the store, so I took off at a run. No point in being late, right?

My legs got a little workout, and I decided to push the envelope of how far I could leap in a standing jump. Prior to the bullet in the brains, a standing leap of twelve feet was candy, so it stood to my oddball reasoning that I ought to be able to manage something like twenty-four with a little extra effort.

Omura held his derisive laughter until I pulled myself up to the roof from the ignominious position of hanging on the edge by my fingers. I thanked him for being smooth and suave in the face of my inadvertent comedic episode with a manly grunt. I’m grateful that the arrival of the helicopter drowned out the sound of his snickering–I hate it when I show off and it ends up as slapstick comedy.

Jayashri, Bajali and a loaded backpack boarded the helicopter before I even ducked down to approach the doorway. By the time I’d set foot on board they had already donned the headsets and taken seats close to the opposite side of the aircraft. I decided to take it as a hint to not get too close to them, and sat in the seat closest to my door, facing forward. Was I being childish? Yes, probably. I’d done enough damage, felt badly enough about it, and really had no idea how to start repairing the rift. An apology would have sufficed, or at least started things off on the right foot, but I still felt enough residual anger that an apology would come out with overtones of resentment rather than heartfelt regret.

I’m comfortable lying to myself, but I didn’t want to do it to anyone else.

Omura pulled himself into the `copter, slid the door shut, sat down and strapped himself into the seat facing me. I watched him put the headset on, and then look around at the tense social tableau in the cabin.

His finger found the button on the headset with the ease of much familiarity and he issued a terse “Go” to the pilot. The rotors spun up all the way, and a moment later we were airborne. It felt like the Charge of the Awkward Brigade, not some sort of triumphant return to the land of travel outside the confines of our happy little stockade. There’s an old adage about beginning as you mean to continue, and if such a thing held true, then we were in for a nasty little “away mission.”

My brain immediately started tossing “Star Trek” references at me, and they left me with two major questions. Number one was, “Which one of us is Captain Picard,” and number two was, “Which one of us is the Red Shirt?” Just who was running this away mission?

As for who might be wearing the red shirt: it might be any of us, or all of us.

The train of thought led me to a question worth asking, so I flipped on the microphone. “Omura, where’s Commander Data?”

Baj and Jaya turned to look at me as though I’d sprouted a third eyeball, but Shoei just squinted at me and replied, “Fucking Tasha Yar?”

“I meant Buttons.”

“Uh. He’s not fucking Tasha Yar.” He smiled and crossed his arms. “The Major is a little under the weather at the moment. Something with the upgrade patch is messing with his ability to process emotions.”

“What do you mean by that?” Baj asked, evincing serious concern.

“I am not going to say that he has no self control,” Omura responded, “but more that he’s vastly out of practice. My theory is the patch is interacting with whatever system the original tech created for managing his random emotions and impulses. I didn’t consider him fit for duty, and told him to take some deep breaths and have a nap. The four of us can handle a simple event evaluation and investigation mission like this one.”

“Would it be appropriate for my husband and me to evaluate him when we return? There might be something to be done for him. Medications, now that we have access to them?”

“Thank you Dr. Sharma. I think it is an excellent idea.”

“Can you tell us any more about this than you did before?” Bajali appeared to be full of questions, which didn’t bother me at all. I wasn’t feeling very much like talking.

“Well, you’ll get to see it in about ten minutes, but I’ll give you the rundown. Local surveillance on the Capital reported a small explosion and smoke from the South East waterfront area, otherwise known as the No-Go. A drone was dispatched from Bolling Air Force Base to check it out, and the images they got looked a lot like what we reported from earlier today. The info went up the chain of command, and we ordered the immediate area locked down for study and recovery.”

Baj’s face lit up like a little boy on Christmas morning. “You think there is wreckage?”

“There is definitely wreckage. From the shots I’ve seen, it looks like a black and gray egg that cracked into pieces after destroying some brick walls along the way.”

“I cannot wait to get my hands on it!” The rest of the morning was forgotten, or so it seemed. Bajali Sharma had the only thing in the world that would make him put aside whatever concerns might be living in his head: technology to pull apart. “Do they know if it was manned or if it was a drone of some kind?”

“No one has given me a clear answer on that. I guess we’ll see when we get there.”

“You must tell me why you wanted Jayashri with us. If the craft had no pilot, then there is no reason for a doctor of medicine to be on the team. We would heal ourselves.”

Against my own will, I was starting to catch some of his perkiness and excitement. The smile on his face looked as Machiavellian as the Grinch, and as frenetic as a high school bimbo on speed or a beagle that needs to pee. “Clearly, there must be a body or… I have no idea, but it is VERY exciting!”

Omura looked back at me, smirked, and said, “He’s excited.”

“Yes, I can tell.” Baj had made an excellent point about Jayashri’s presence on the team, which made me wonder about myself. “Why did you ask for me on this little away mission? I’m not the token Red Shirt, am I?”

He shook his head. “Not at all. You’re Mister Whorf. If I need something killed I’m counting on you to go whack it and then bring the bits back for Dr. Crusher over there,” he cocked his thumb at our resident MD, “to autopsy. Work for you?”

“Grunt.”

“That was expressive of you, Mr. Whorf.”

“Today is a good day to kill things. Grunt.”

My comment scored a tight smile, and I was content with that for the moment. I would have preferred if there were a low likelihood of needing to kill things, but on the other hand, fighting for my life would probably bleed off stress. I’d always fancied myself to be a pacifist, regardless of the “sports” I’d participated in before leaving home, and it was a little more than unsettling that fighting for my life had become a form of stress management, to say nothing of creating a certain amount of moral difficulty.

The pilot interrupted my internal juggling. “Sir, we’re coming around on the site. There’s a heliport to east, but it is outside of the secure area. I’m going to put us down in the park south of the site. Call it a hundred yard walk.”

“Thank you Lieutenant, that will do just fine.”

I looked out the windows in the door as we came around. I counted six Humvees, a gray 18-wheeler and two black Chevy Suburban-type vehicles. The Humvees were stationed at each intersection, preventing anything interesting from entering the secure area. Some of the soldiers were in evidence, wearing Hazmat suits, standing around the wreckage that Shoei had described. It certainly looked the worse for wear and the side of the warehouse that it fell into didn’t look too snazzy either.

Helicopters land with a strange glide-thump, and Blackhawks did it with a little more pronounced thump than the few civilian `copters that I’d flown in. Omura threw the hatch open, hopped down and cleared the rotor area. I copied his rapid disembarkation, and the Sharmas followed behind me.

Omura took up the lead and we walked north to the first checkpoint, where he took care of the hassle of identifying us and flashing ID that carried a security clearance higher than the soldiers would ever see again in their careers. Unsurprisingly, they let us by with no other questions. I wondered if I’d ever get a fancy ID card that would let me evaporate red tape and resistance. One could only hope.

“All right.” Omura turned to us and continued, “Doctors Sharma, I want you both with me. Ask questions but please do not field any questions about why none of us are in protective garments. I’ll point out the OPS experts to you.” With an authoritarian finger, he issued me my orders. “Frank, I want you out here as our early warning system. Ping me if anyone asks you too many questions or if you are about to get nose to nose with anyone above the rank of Captain. For most of these soldiers, having us show up is like the Secret Service coming to check out your backyard barbeque.”