Cyborg Strike (23 page)

Two divers had already recovered Roger
Muzik’s body. Though less than a week in the cold lake waters, it
had already shown nibbles, and she tried not to think about
fishermen catching and eating the fish, and him with them. Shades
of a story by Ryan King about an abusive man and a catfish pond ran
unbidden through her thoughts.

Once he’d been sealed in the body bag and
then in the coffin – they had plenty of lift capacity after all,
they could afford some dignity – his body had been loaded into one
of the two Super Ospreys. Those aircraft had carried her, the
divers, a herd of SEALs and a couple of corpsmen from the LPD
USS
Arlington
to this place in northern Russia, and
they would carry them all back, plus what they came for, leaving
nothing but the video the reports so avidly recorded.

Taking a last look at her cordon of SEALs,
she signaled the Super Osprey with the coffin and the auxiliaries
already aboard to come in and hook up its slingload. Once the bird
picked up its external cargo, it wasn’t going to land. Trying to
set down with something slung beneath was what they called in the
flying business a “Big No-No.”

Jill remembered seeing a Seahawk try it once,
the aviator forgetting he had half a ton of pallet in a net under
his bird. The result had not been pretty. One of the three crew had
survived.

The enormous craft hovered in under blasting
tilt-rotors and descended to ten feet, then nine, then eight, above
the shoreline. The hookup man reached upward with his static probe,
a cable with a long naked metal probe on each end, one driven into
the ground. As he touched the VTOL’s cargo hook with it, a long
spark of static electricity, generated by the rotor-props,
discharged through the conductive wire and grounded itself into the
earth.

That out of the way, the man dropped the
probe and took the clevis of the multilegged sling and slammed it
firmly into the forged aluminum clamp on the underside of the
hovering beast, and then immediately ran from under.

Incrementally the VTOL lifted, pulling the
sling after it, drawing upward the extender straps that lay leading
into the shallow water. Soon they reached full extension and the
aircraft slid over to hover directly above the heavy Dacron ropes
where they entered the lake. When they became iron-taut, Jill could
hear the engines labor slightly, and she felt the rotor wash
increase.

Slowly the four heavy lines rose from the
water, one meter, then two, until Jill could see where they
attached to the lift points on the top of the submersible…the one
that had carried her and Roger safely to Salmi and back. Once it
lifted dripping from the lake and stabilized, the big Super Osprey
rose and angled northward, heading out over the glassy expanse
toward Russia’s northern border and the waiting VTOL carrier,
leaving the remaining personnel in the relative quiet of the idling
second bird.

The crown of cops and reporters edged forward
as the SEALs backed slowly toward the aircraft, PW15s at the ready.
One of them fired a single round into the ground in front of a
particularly eager reporter, and the gaggle suddenly reversed
itself, staying well back. Although unthinkable to do that with
lethal rounds, in these days of Needleshock and the Eden Plague,
Jill knew they no longer had to worry much about maiming or killing
during crowd control, if they were careful.

The cordon folded in on itself with perfect
discipline and Jill boarded the waiting bird. It lifted powerfully,
like an express elevator to heaven, before the last commando had
finished strapping himself in. Jill gave the SEAL team leader, a
serious-looking lieutenant commander, a thumbs-up. It felt strange
for her, in her own head a mere master sergeant, to be in charge of
officers and a whole deadly team like this, but they had accepted
her as the Agency’s rep, supreme in all but tactical matters.

Frankly, she’d been happy to just let them do
their jobs. She glanced around at the men of the team, half of them
already asleep in good combat-veteran fashion, and her thoughts
continued down the track they had been running on ever since that
morning she found her partner, a man she’d been on countless
missions with, dead in his sleep.

This outcome confused and angered the part of
her that didn’t care about rationality, but only about fairness and
right. Warriors should not lay down and then fail to wake up in
some lonely safe house in a foreign land. They should either die
gloriously in battle with evil against overwhelming odds, or they
should fall asleep one last time, home in their beds with their
wives and children and grandchildren around them.

Because the Eden Plague had done away with
that latter scenario, the part of her that was willing to accept
death seemed still shut down and turned off, his passing
unreal.

A single tear from each eye was all she
allowed herself before Jill forced her thoughts away from tragedy
and back to her future. Lifting a gloved finger, she used its
fabric to absorb the salty liquid, dabbing at each cheek
surreptitiously, not willing to let these supercharged bastions of
testosterone see her cry.

One man did watch her, though, but he didn’t
smirk or roll his eyes, fortunately for him. Had he done so, she
might have given in to the temptation to show him what her
cyberware could really do.

Instead, he pressed his lips sadly together
and nodded, as if he understood, and perhaps he did. She nodded
back. The US had lost a lot of good men and women in these things
historians were coming to call the Plague Wars – the cold and hot
conflicts, the battles and the ugly little special ops – and they
weren’t over yet.

North Korea, still shielded by an independent
China, held out as a bastion of insanity, but with every other
nation in the world part either of the Free Communities or the
Neutral States, Earth was as close to being united as it had ever
been.

So where did that leave Jill Repeth? She
hated the idea of going into space again, but at least out there,
the conflicts were cleaner, with little room for politics,
backstabbing, or rogue elements. No one would ask her to do wet
work, no insurgent suppression, no desperate rescues that turned
into bloody fiascos.

In short, no more human-on-human battles. She
was sick of that.

As the Super Osprey descended to land on the
Arlington,
alongside its sister craft that had already set
the submersible on the flight deck, that decision solidified.
First, a transfer back to the Corps, to get her away from the
Agency that she already knew was building mission files for their
new cyborg operatives. If they balked, she would dig in her heels
and tell them to go to hell.

If they refused, she had options now. As part
of the Free Communities, the US had agree to adhere to the FC
Charter, which guaranteed the right of free emigration of any
citizen, regardless of status. She’d rather not have to leave the
US; she’d rather go back to her beloved Marine Corps. If she
wangled that, as one of the first cyborgs and with her record, no
doubt they’d let her into space, where Rick was, and life made some
sort of sense.

Where if comrades were going to die, they
wouldn’t be murdered by overzealous Border Patrol agents, or
Psychos, or rogue Septagon Shadow Men.

Where she could kill aliens without remorse
and accept casualties as fortunes of war.

Where if she and her brothers and sister in
arms were going to be screwed, at least they would get a kiss first
and see it coming, and maybe even know why.

End of
Cyborg
Strike

Turn the page for an excerpt from the next Plague
Wars book 6,
Comes The Destroyer
.

Book
6 of the Plague Wars Series

One would think that during six years in
space Absen would get out here to Ceres more, but truthfully,
annual visits were enough. It was General Tyler’s role as J4, Chief
of Logistics to oversee the production efforts and pass him
reports. As with most militaries between battles, a flag officer’s
job was less about fighting and more about organizing, training and
equipping.

This time would be a bit different. Less than
a month ago the last of thousands of Pseudo-Von-Neumann factory
complexes had taken up residence atop its soft-landed asteroid.
Until then, each manufactory had been building nothing but more
factories. One made two, two made four, and so on. Now there were
over eight thousand, spaced regularly across the entire surface of
the planetoid.

This was necessary mainly to control the heat
each would generate. The carefully-selected metal-rich asteroids
actually floated, in a sense, atop a sea of frozen ices – much of
it water, but also methane and other volatiles. Raising the
temperature even a few degrees, from the pressure of the weight of
the rocks and also the leakage from the fusion power generators,
presented all sorts of challenges. Bases would settle and shift;
random pockets of oxygen found flammable gasses and burned or
exploded; crevasses opened unexpectedly as the planetoid was mined
for its materials.

People died, and often. Peacetime safety
protocols had long since fallen by the wayside. Workers took risks
and most of the time got away with them, driven by the oncoming
desperation and the knowledge that anyone who survived could be
restored.

Artemis provided a safe base atop the largest
of the rock mountains, containing administration, hospital
facilities, and every other cat and dog that happened to need care
and feeding. Thus it was here that the Admiral landed and received
his briefings, but that was not really his purpose. He was here for
a more important, if symbolic reason.

He strapped himself into the cockpit of a
shuttle, one of hundreds that workers used to service the
factories. While largely automated, nothing humans had yet created
was truly maintenance-free. Everything needed supervision, tending,
and the repair that only a set of human hands could perform. That
meant thousands of people, keeping the VNs, as they were
colloquially known, in running order.

Of course, by doing so, they ensured the VNs
would eventually produce hundreds of millions of man-hours worth of
warships for the defense of Earth and its solar system.

Now the shuttle pilot flew her dozen
passengers the short hop over to VN1, the very first factory to be
emplaced. On the next rock mountain over, roughly ten kilometers
away, they landed on the designated pad of the huge factory
complex. Three hundred meters on a side and twenty high, the
integrated building contained everything necessary to produce
EarthFleet’s best hopes for victory.

A score of workers could be seen standing
inside the VN’s crew compartment at the thick molecular glass
window, looking at the arriving shuttle. A couple of them waved.
“Are we going inside?” Absen asked as the pilot made no move to
unstrap.

“No, sir,” the woman said, “unless you
insist. We can get just a good a view from right here, and save
ourselves a lot of time and trouble.” She popped a lever on her
seat and rotated it a quarter turn toward the center, the better to
address her passengers. Her name tag read “Lockerbie” and she wore
a warrant officer’s bar.

“So –” Absen began to ask, when she pointed
out the front shuttle viewport. He turned to see enormous double
doors, sized for a jumbo jet hangar, begin to open slowly,
withdrawing into recesses.

General Tyler moved up to squat between the
seats, and others in the shuttle moved forward to crane their heads
for a piece of the view. “What we should be seeing is the very
first Aardvark to be produced by a VN. It and about a hundred
others will be the operational prototypes for testing and
evaluation. We started production on these three months earlier
than the rest, to give us time to revise the runs based on the
results.”

“Aardvark? I thought these were called A-24
Avenger IIs.”

Tyler shrugged. “Officially, sure, but just
like the A-10 Thunderbolt II that everyone called a Warthog, or the
F-16 Fighting Falcons that were always Vipers…some nomenclature
battles are just not worth fighting. Besides, you’ll see why it got
its name in a minute.

The doors finally opened to reveal the front
of the craft inside, a proboscis that started squat and thick but
narrowed rapidly to a truncated point like the nose of its
namesake. The thing was ugly, that much was clear. A blocky
utilitarian craft with nothing of beauty about it, nevertheless
Absen found himself wanting to love it, because it represented life
and salvation for his planet.

The Aardvark rolled slowly out of the hangar,
drawn by a robot tug cart toward its metal-surfaced launch pad.
Almost a hundred meters long, thirty wide and twenty high, it
looked more like a high-speed train engine than a spacecraft.
Unlike that vehicle, it sprouted nodes and fittings all over its
surface.

“Pretty big for one person,” Absen remarked.
“Looks kind of like a squared-off submarine with no sail.”

“Remember their final option,” Tyler
answered. “If they are going to suicide, why put more than one in
it?”

“Point. But can just one pilot really fight
this thing?”

“They’ll have fully functional cybernetics
just like a helmsman,” Tyler said. “In fact, once the real op
starts, they might never unplug. There is a sophisticated computer
suite that can run the ship while the pilot sleeps or if he or she
is incapacitated, but basically, everything is one integrated
system.”

“Who’s in there now?” Absen asked.

“Test pilot named Yeager. You might have
heard of him.”

“What? You mean –”