It felt like weeks went by while they waited in the improvised decontamination chamber. It had only been a few days, Gina knew on an intellectual level, but she couldn’t say how many. The dreary monotony of their plastic prison knocked her time sense completely on its ass.
She hadn’t been allowed to see much on the way here. The only thing to catch her attention was the black helicopter that had pulled ahead of them, escorted by a pair of old, heavily-armed military aircraft. They all seemed to be heading to the same destination as Bomber and Gina.
Gina remembered the humiliating showers and scrubbings on their arrival to the chamber. Most of their clothes and items were gone, incinerated in the 4×4, so they just spent their time sitting, wandering, doing occasional bits of exercise for lack of anything else to occupy their minds. Once again Bomber had shut down inside himself and blocked any attempt at conversation. He responded to her only once when she lashed out at him in frustration.
“Talk to me, you son of a bitch!” she’d snarled. “You know something! Who are these people?”
“Shh.” He held a finger against his lips, pointing at the ceiling. “Microphones. We’ll talk later.”
Gina tried one more time to find sleep on one of the hard plastic benches. She managed to close her eyes for a few precious seconds before another tray of rations arrived through the miniature airlock in the wall. Her stomach jumped at the smell of food, and she rubbed the bleariness from her eyes as Bomber went to collect the trays. The orange-brown slop with yellow bits — Gina guessed it to be some kind of pasta dish — couldn’t have looked less appetising, but she didn’t care. Her taste buds had already been destroyed by years of processed protein burgers. So they shovelled the stuff into their mouths one spoonful at a time, trying to taste as little of it as possible.
“Ah, MREs,” Bomber said after finishing his tray. “How did I ever manage without ’em?”
“Probably a lot better than you ever did eating them.” Gina looked up at the voice, which came from the little speaker above the main airlock. A man’s face appeared in the window, smiling, wrinkles half-hidden under a prodigious brown moustache. “How you doing, Jacob?”
“No way,” breathed Bomber. “Colonel Obrin?”
“Mister Obrin nowadays, m’boy. Nice to see you finally made it back to the old US of A.” The man’s deep, rolling voice reverberated through the floor. “Come on out, it’s past time we talked.” He wheeled open the airlock seal and, with a push, opened the door. Bomber was on his feet in an instant and almost ran the way to shake the Colonel’s hand. Gina followed behind him.
They emerged into what looked like a large country house, a hundred years old at the very least, richly appointed with carpets and paintings and tall windows frosted with condensation. The last rays of the afternoon filtered through as sparkling reds and golds. Another thing she noticed was the unobtrusive team of armed guards trailing a few metres behind them.
“I don’t understand, Colonel,” Bomber said softly. “I knew something was up when your people used my old callsign, but this . . .”
“That’s how we arranged it, Jacob. I’ll explain everything when we’re secure.”
The Colonel led them into a large study, where several chairs sat arranged in a semicircle around a roaring fireplace. Twin coffee tables on either side of the fire offered wine, biscuits and cigarettes. Two men swept the room with bug scanners, then gave the all-clear and bowed out the door. The Colonel waved at the appointments set for them. “Please, sit down, help yourselves. We’ve got a lot to discuss. You too, young lady,” he added to Gina.
Gina sat down mutely. She didn’t know for sure what kind of trouble she was in, but this situation made her nervous. So far Bomber’s acquaintances had been a very mixed bag.
“I assume you’ve got a few questions for me first,” the Colonel said to Bomber.
“Don’t know where to start, sir . . .” Bomber scratched his head. He seemed uncharacteristically out of his depth. “First things first, I guess. How did you find us?”
The Colonel smiled and sipped a glass of wine where he stood. “We’ve had people tracking you since the moment you set foot in this country, Jacob. You’re on our ‘subjects of interest’ list. We always knew you were alive somewhere in the world, although you’re not easy to keep an eye on. When our team saw what kind of trouble you’d gotten yourself into, they decided to intervene.”
“That brings me to my second question,” Bomber fixed the Colonel with a penetrating stare, “who’s ‘we’?”
“Ghosts from the past, Jacob,” Obrin answered. “Made up of mostly us vets and well-wishers. Tightly-knit. Possibly the best-kept secret in the country. Waiting for the day when the Federation is at its weakest.” He grinned at Bomber’s astonished reaction. “That’s right, Jacob. The US Army ain’t dead. It’s just biding its time. Don’t tell me you believed we’d really disbanded at the Feds’ say-so.”
Bomber sank back in his chair. “Not at first, sir. I heard some rumblings out of my old contacts, but then they started droppin’ off one by one, dead or disappeared by the Feds. I thought that was it for us.”
“Almost. They hurt us bad in the days after the takeover, bad enough to think we were gone, but all we did was go deeper into hiding.” The Colonel smiled fiercely. When he did, Gina thought he looked exactly like a moustachioed shark about to feed. “Now I’ve got a question for you two. We captured those mercenaries chasing you. Stupid bastards didn’t even know who they were working for, but I have a feeling that it wasn’t the Feds. Would I be right in presuming they’re a present from a man named Gabriel?”
“How do you know about Gabriel?”
Obrin gestured expansively with his wine glass. “Another of our ‘subjects of interest’. In fact, he’s the reason why I’m talking to you right now.” When Bomber didn’t seem to understand, the Colonel tapped one of his cufflinks. A door opened at the back of the room and a woman in a khaki military uniform took a few paces into the room, smiling at Bomber and at Gina.
“Reporting as ordered, Colonel. Good to see you two again,” she told Bomber and Gina.
“Jezebel,” Bomber blurted, staring at her. It was the woman, Gina realised in shock, the one who’d hired her to spy on Gabriel an eternity ago. Bomber laughed and pounded his fist against the armrest of his chair. “I knew it. I goddamn knew it!”
“The Captain here has been working with us for years on the Gabriel subject,” said Obrin. “She was in deep cover, we couldn’t risk revealing her affiliations to anyone. Not even you, Jacob. And we weren’t sure whether or not you’d take the job if you knew.”
This time it was Gina’s turn to speak up. “Why?” she asked. “Why are you after Gabriel?”
“That’s . . . complicated,” said the Colonel, “and something I’m hesitant to reveal in front of the daughter of Director Vaughan of the Hong Kong Federal Police.”
The Colonel clearly didn’t realise how ill-chosen his words were. They cut into Gina like knife blades twisting in her belly, turning nervousness into anger until her blood boiled in her veins. She jerked upright, trembling in fury, and started to shout through the red haze before her eyes. “Who the hell do you think you are, bringing my parents into this?!” she screamed. “I have been kicked around, hunted, tortured, shot at, and dragged halfway across the fucking planet because of this telepathic psycho and his gangs, something for which you are apparently responsible, and now you’ve got the stones to stand there and tell me I can’t be trusted?!“
When she finished, she found herself standing over the Colonel only inches from his face, her hands in the air in some wildly impressive pose. The object of her rage had shrank back from her, looking a couple of feet shorter than he did before. Jezebel stood faithfully behind the Colonel and covered her mouth to hide her quiet laughter.
“I think the lady’s just said it all,” Bomber told the Colonel. Then, his eyes on Gina, “I like ‘Vaughan’ better than ‘Hart’ anyway.”
Obrin grinned nervously. “Right! Well, in that case, you two had better come along. I’ve got something to show you.”
He gestured at the door through which Jezebel had entered. Bomber and Gina followed the Colonel out. Jezebel fell in beside them, and their guards followed not far behind.
“So how the hell did you get out of that club?” Bomber asked Jezebel. “I didn’t see where you went, couldn’t find any sign o’ you after the whole op went south. Figured that if you made it out alive, you’d probably find us.”
“And I did,” she said. “Not that it was easy. We couldn’t be seen contacting you, the Feds would know about it straight away. So we had to wait ’till there weren’t so many eyes around looking for you.” She smiled. “I must say, you’ve kept ahead of them pretty well, if not by much. We heard what happened to East.”
“Yeah. Was it the same gang of goons that attacked us in New Orleans?”
“That holds with our information, yes.” She shrugged. “We can’t be sure, though. The ones we captured were all implanted with crude forget-me-nots. Everything they may have known about their past operations would’ve been deleted immediately after completion.”
“Shit,” said Bomber. “Nice work evadin’ my question, by the way.”
A rueful smile cracked the disciplined facade of her face. “Thank you. Truth is, I . . . don’t like talking about it. I’d rather fight the whole Sudan counterinsurgency all over again.” Cold shivers went up and down her body. “I knew something was wrong when Gina left the table in a hurry. I stood up under the pretence of shaking Gabriel’s hand, then punched the nearest face in and made a run for it. The rest of that night is a blur. Come morning it was just a cat and mouse game for days on end. I was trying to get into contact with base here, but they kept intercepting my messages, and when I tried to book any kind of passage they always found out which plane I was on. I had to fight my way clear of airports twice. I tried to contact you a couple times at our emergency addresses, but I never got a response on any of them. I was worried they’d caught you.”
Bomber gave her an odd look. “I checked those addresses every day, every hour when I could. There was nothing in them.”
Her jaw dropped and she froze in mid-step. Pure shock was plain on her face. “Jesus. I thought I was so careful. How did he get to them?”
“Well, he’s got an AI. That might explain a few things.” Bomber shrugged his shoulders. “Not that it matters now.”
“Obviously we underestimated him. An AI, though . . .” She exchanged a meaningful look with Colonel Obrin. “That’s a multi-trillion dollar project, and nobody’s breathed a word about it to the Feds. I’d like to know how he managed that.”
“That’s one question we may actually know the answer to,” the Colonel interjected. He waved a key card at the large steel door at the end of the passage, and it opened for him. They proceeded into a working laboratory, men and women working in white coats and safety masks, where everything was shiny and sterile and — if possible — stored in air-tight containers of bulletproof glass. Gina recognised it instantly from half-remembered documentaries and news articles and a more recent experience in New Orleans. A fully-appointed nanotech lab.
The Colonel continued, “The first thing that drew our attention to Gabriel was a clumsy hack on an old government database, around ten years ago, searching for information about a ‘Project Hephaestus’. Before you ask what Project Hephaestus is, we don’t know. We’ve been trying to find out ever since. Most of the knowledge seems to have been destroyed by the nukes or locked up in some Fed file cabinet. The best data we’ve gotten in over ten years has come off that disc you brought in, Jacob.”
He marched the group to a large hologram of a single nanobot, magnified by many orders of magnitude, of a design that Gina and Bomber recognised almost immediately. “This robot, recovered from one of our encounters with Gabriel, was part of Project Hephaestus. That’s virtually all the information we’ve got on it. We don’t know its intended function or where Gabriel got it from. It’s definitely some kind of construction bot, but without being able to look at the programming we can’t tell what it was supposed to be constructing. However, given how expensive these bots would be to manufacture just two decades ago, we can take a few educated guesses.”
“You think they built Gabriel’s AI for him,” said Bomber, not slow to arrive at the obvious conclusion.
“One of several possibilities,” the Colonel replied. “The most likely and logical one. And, if correct, something that could help us out a great deal provided we can get our hands on some live Hephaestus bots.”
It wasn’t difficult to see the possibilities. “That could wipe away the Feds’ tech advantages in an instant,” observed Gina.
“And set humanity back on course for a free world,” Obrin finished for her. “Shortly after we traced the hack to Gabriel, he caught wind of our plans to capture him. Fled the country the same day. Didn’t even bother to pack, he just went. Unfortunately none of the stuff he left behind in his flat was very enlightening, so we gave up after a couple searches. In the end we couldn’t risk attracting any more attention from the Feds. They were thick on the ground back then.” A grimace twisted his face, his moustache bristling. “Little did we know he was doing his work inside Radiation Alley. If we’d only guessed, maybe we could’ve figured it all out by now.”
“Do you know what he was working on in New Orleans?” she asked.
“Trying to reconstruct the bots’ software. He’d have no choice if he wanted to recreate them from dead examples. What’s left in their memory banks is hopelessly corrupted, but get enough samples together and spend enough time on it, and it might be possible to reconstruct part of their programming. We, unfortunately, don’t have a large enough sample base to work with.” He turned his fierce smile back on Bomber and Gina. “I need live ones, and I mean to get them by any means necessary.”
Lastly, he cocked a conspiratorial eyebrow and added, “I could use a hand.”
“. . . And this is where you can sleep if you need to,” Jezebel finished, showing Gina and Bomber to an unoccupied bedroom off one of the country manor’s vast halls. “Nobody else will be using it so make yourselves at home. Still, I don’t know how long the Colonel is intending you to stay, but I wouldn’t suggest getting too comfortable.”
“Thanks,” muttered Gina. The only thing she wanted at this point was a hot bath, and she’d just spotted the en-suite bathroom leading off to the right. That meant Jezebel now needed to disappear as soon as humanly possible.
“Oh, before I forget.” Jezebel threw Gina the mobile phone she’d thought she’d lost, a present from Rat in ages past. “We’ve checked it, calls are secure and untraceable. It’s been ringing off the hook for days, you’ll probably want to get back to whoever it is. Just don’t tell anyone where you are.”
A pissed-off smirk came to Gina’s lips as she said, “I don’t actually know where I am.”
“Even better!” Jezebel smiled, patted her on the arm and walked away. “Goodnight,” she whispered, closing the door behind her.
Gina sank into a chair with a long sigh, staring at the phone in her hands. “You used to put up with this for a living?” she asked Bomber.
“Every day,” he said. “You sort-of get used to it. You gonna call ’em back or what?”
“Do you think they might be in trouble?”
Bomber snorted at the apparent ridiculousness of that question. “In Laputa? They don’t even let you on the island unless your name’s on the hacker ranking. D’you want me to dial?”
“No, I’ll do it.” She held the phone up to her lips and said, “Return last call.” A few seconds later it was ringing. Someone picked up on the third ring.
“Yes?” came a suspicious voice, familiar enough to bring a smile to Gina’s face.
“Hi, Rat,” she said. “It’s us.” Slightly lame opening, she thought after the words had left her mouth, but it would do.
Rat almost squeaked into the telephone. “Holy fuck! Are you all right? We’ve been trying to reach you for days!”
“Yeah, I know. We haven’t had a chance to use the phone. Don’t worry, though, we’re all right. Bomber says hello.” She sent Bomber a smile, and he made a little wave of his hand. “How the hell are you guys? Did you meet up with Jock okay?”
“Sure, piece of cake! There were some Fed goons at the airport when I left, but I slipped by ’em. I’ve been off painkillers since yesterday, clean bill o’ health and everything. Jock’s taking a little longer to heal up, though, the old fart.” Jock muttered curses in the background, and Rat laughed. “So have you been shot yet? You realise you’re the only one of us left without a bullet hole for a souvenir.”
Gina couldn’t resist a grin. “No, not yet, though not for lack of trying. But we’re safe now. Everybody’s off our trail for the moment.”
“Good! Hey, we’ve been looking into Gabriel for ya from this end. Lately he’s been throwing money like it was nothing, just pissing away billions of dollars, and fuck knows where it all goes. I think he’s getting more and more desperate to find you. I don’t see the why, myself, you’re not that pretty.”
“Thanks,” said Gina. In a whisper she added, “Personally, I liked you better as a boy.”
“You just want me for my body.” For a moment Jock talked in the background. “Oh, Jock says that if you manage to get into VR anywhere, you should go up to the nearest street guide and tell it what you said to the Emperor in Hangzhou. Then we’ll be able to find you. Don’t repeat it out loud until then, you never know who might be listening.”
“But the phone’s supposed to be secure, isn’t it?” she asked.
“Secure from who?” countered Rat. “Stay on your toes. You don’t know who’s after you and who’s not, so don’t trust anybody except Jock and me and maybe that guy of yours.”
She nodded and murmured, “I will. Right now, though, we need some sleep. And a bath. Maybe both at the same time.”
“Alright. You can tell us what the hell you’ve been up to next time, maybe. Keep out of trouble, and remember what I said.”
Gina just managed to mouth a quick, “Goodnight,” before nodding off in the chair where she sat.
Strange days ticked away in the country estate, under the watchful eye of the United States military. It seemed that Jezebel had been assigned to them on a permanent basis. She kept a constant guard outside the room, and escorted them whenever they went out the door. A little bit creepy but also oddly comforting.
She talked freely with them and asked sharp questions, her favourite subject being Gabriel and what they’d learned about him. Gina answered as best she could, but natural suspicion still nagged at her hindbrain. So she held back, left out certain details that they really didn’t need to know about. Bomber followed her lead in that — for those secrets she’d shared with him. Even he didn’t know about the dreams.
Strangely, he seemed more animated now whenever Gina looked at him, more alive somehow, like something long-dormant inside him had been shocked awake. Or like fading echoes of the man he used to be. Bomber no longer walked anywhere; he marched, and even started snapping salutes when they met with the Colonel.
“Damn, we’re sure glad you made it here alive,” the Colonel said after a long interrogation session. “Don’t know what we would’ve done without your help.”
“It’s nothing, sir,” said Bomber. However, this time he didn’t beg leave, but stepped forward and lowered his voice. “If I may ask, sir, I know it may be OpSec, but . . . Do you have plans to eliminate Gabriel?”
The Colonel looked up, narrow eyes poking out from over the mess of moustache. He sighed, “Son, if it were up to me, I’d let you in on our whole battle plan. But I got superiors still. They don’t know you the way I do, they’re still not sure they can trust you.” He glanced around as if to make sure the room was free of bugs. Then, in a whisper, “I got a plan, son. There’ll be a knock on your door tonight. Get all your stuff together, follow Jez, and we’ll brief you about what needs to be done.”
They followed Jezebel back to their room in complete silence. Somewhere along the way they’d gotten used to being listened in on, used to postponing the overwhelming desire to talk. Neither Gina nor Bomber knew why the Colonel had acted so cautious, but caution seemed like a good plan in general.
The sun set slowly as they wasted the hours ’till nightfall. The old television kept their room nice and noisy, so nobody would get suspicious about the lack of conversation. When the call for lights out came, they tidied their things into their bags and went to bed as normal.
Gina was wide awake when she heard the knock on the door. She hadn’t shut her eyes for a second. She’d been sure Bomber was asleep, but now he jumped to his feet and started throwing on clothes.
The door opened without a sound, and Jezebel’s voice hissed out of the shadows, “Come on. Keep your head down and keep quiet.”
They crept out the door and into the stark, moonlit hallway. The carpeted wooden floors creaked under their feet, and it seemed like even a deaf man should’ve heard them, but nobody noticed them as they snuck down the stairs and through an empty kitchen into the motor pool. A single bulb dangled from the ceiling, casting inadequate light on the single row of vehicles in the back of the warehouse. From where she stood Gina could make out two SUVs, some civilian cars, a lone eighteen-wheel truck and an ancient burnt-out tank in the middle of being salvaged for parts.
Half-seen in the dimness, Gina could just make out someone throwing a bag in the back of one of the cars, then slamming the door. She caught a glimpse of a massive moustache when he turned and jogged towards them. Jezebel motioned to keep their voices down.
“We’ve swept the entire motor pool, but you can never be too sure,” she whispered.
Bomber stepped forward and asked, “What’s this all about?”
The Colonel held up a PDA showing a detailed analysis of a single nanobot, a new one to Gina, all cameras and microphones and wireless antennae. It had to be very advanced to pack so many things into one tiny bot.
“Spies?” Bomber asked into the silence.
“We first found them in the compound yesterday,” Obrin explained with a nod. “Another present from our friend Gabriel. They must’ve come in on the wind, we haven’t spotted any vehicle within miles of here that wasn’t ours.”
“Blanket nanodusting just to find us?” said Bomber, more a statement than a question. “Expensive.”
Jezebel sat down on the hood of a nearby jeep and hugged her elbows. “From the area measurements we’ve taken, a spread this large would cost at least twelve billion dollars.” She was quiet for a moment. “This is how far he’ll go to find you two. A bank account measured in trillions and no restraint in how it’s spent, as long as he reaches his goal. This was one of our most secure safehouses. I don’t know what the hell you did to get his attention this badly, but right now you two are our most valuable assets, and our most dangerous liabilities.”
Her meaning was obvious. “You can’t afford to keep hiding us,” Gina concluded.
“Right now there are six Federal Police helicopters inbound to this location, each with a squad of full constables on board,” Obrin ground out, spitting the words as if he resented having to twist his mouth around them. “We’ve been slipping out key personnel and equipment since the morning. Now we have to make sure the rest of the organisation isn’t compromised. After the attack starts it’s every man for himself, but we at least have to make a show of it to keep them off our backs and off your trail.” He held Bomber’s gaze for a moment, then lowered his head and rubbed his eyes. “It’s orders, Jacob. You’ll be given further instructions once you’re away, Jez will go with you to make sure everything goes as planned. That’s all I can say. Maybe I’ll see you in Geneva.”
“Yes, sir,” he said in a voice as hard as stone. He saluted the Colonel and took Gina by the arm. Jezebel led them along to the car prepared for them, despite Gina’s protests and demands for an explanation. Even a sharp kick to the shins didn’t faze Bomber. He bundled her into the car, locked her door, and then jumped into the passenger seat.
Minutes later they were bouncing down a rough country road, watching the first missiles streaking into the compound like rays of red fire.
They hid the car under a crumbling overpass and went out into the cool night air, without suits or protection beyond simple radiation badges. Gina breathed deep. It was good to feel wind on her face again, the claustrophobia of the suits a distant memory. The moon burned bright in the clear indigo sky, joined by the individual pinpricks of faraway stars. The valley stretched out before them, a visual reminder of both loss and hope — the carcasses of dead trees still arranged where they fell years ago, but now covered in fresh moss and half-hidden by new growth.
Less pleasant was the hint of smoke on the air, carried from the burning fires where the old country house had once stood. Occasional spurts of gunfire echoed across the distance. Every now and again a bright tracer round would arc uselessly into the sky. Jezebel’s face was drawn and pale while she watched, especially when her eyes wandered to the bare handful of vehicles scattering away from the base, engaged in a running battle with the chasing helicopters.
“There were sixty-three troops stationed in that base,” she said. “The Colonel. Major Brand. People I’ve worked with for years. How many of them are dead now? I don’t know.”
“None of the enlisted know, do they?” Bomber interjected. “About the organisation. Cells kept so blind they don’t even know there is a resistance. That’s why you’re sacrificing so much, so the Feds don’t guess your real capabilities. They can’t know you’ve known since this morning.”
“I don’t understand,” Gina stated flatly.
A dry laugh shuddered through Jezebel. “Don’t try. The second it starts making sense, you lose something inside. One of the pieces that make you human.”
“What about Colonel Obrin? The officers who know?” pressed Bomber.
“They got their orders too. If they can’t make it out during the attack, then all they get is a pistol and some privacy, and maybe the knowledge that their troops took out a Fed or two.”
The words seemed to hit Bomber at his core. His expression never changed, but he looked down, as if there was too much weight on his shoulders to keep his head up. After a second’s hesitation, Gina put her arms around him, and he didn’t protest. His grief was old, bottled up for years and years, now given a fresh focus. Faces flashed from his mind to hers, first the Colonel, then his old squadron commander and her brother and more, friends and lovers all in uniform and all gone before their time.
Somewhere out in the valley, a rocket came screaming out of the ruins, bored straight into one of the Fed helicopters. The copter seemed suspended in time for a moment, a glowing hole inside it, and then fell out of the sky in a slow arc. A massive white fireball erupted where it hit the ground. Too bright. Gina had to look away.
“The Colonel gave me a disc with our orders,” said Jezebel. “I’m to play it for you when we reach the state line, and not before.” She turned and headed back for the car, but Bomber stopped her as she opened the door, a hand on her shoulder.
He said, “Here’s what I wanna know — why would Gabriel give our location to the Feds? Does he want us dead?”
“Enemy of my enemy, Simon,” she answered. “Divide and conquer. He knew we’d evacuate you when we found his bots. Use the Feds to flush you out, then catch you in whatever net he’s got waiting for us.” She broke eye contact and climbed behind the wheel, turned the key, revved the engine for takeoff.
Bomber took the passenger seat, and once again Gina was left in the rear. She muttered, “So we’re heading into a trap.”
“That’s one way of looking at it. Keep an eye out.”
The car lurched out of its hiding place and raced down the bumpy dirt trail, throwing up plumes of dust behind it. Gina bounced around in the back with the bags without so much as a seatbelt. She had to wonder how anyone could drive like this. No lights, nothing to see by but the green night-vision display projected in front of the windows. Half the wheels would leave the ground whenever they swerved around one of the trail’s tight corners. The on-board computer complained, but was quickly overridden and settled in to sulk.
When they reached a straight stretch of road, Jezebel shoved a small disc into the car’s player. A small hologram of the Colonel’s head appeared just above the dashboard with a fierce smile. The moustache looked even worse than Gina remembered, covering nearly half his face.
“I’ll try and keep this brief, Jacob, Gina,” he said. “First off, don’t worry about me. I’ve been waiting for this moment eight years now. It’ll be enough just to see you two safely away.” He paused, cleared his throat. “We won’t forget about you, either. The Army will send you another contact, he’ll get in touch with you when the time comes. For now I’m counting on you three to make sure our sacrifice isn’t in vain. To say it simply, we need a Hephaestus of our own. If we’re ever to have a chance at liberating anyone, we have to have an AI on our side. I want you to go and get it for me.”
“What?” exclaimed Jezebel.
“Fuck,” Bomber added for good measure.
“Head north to Missouri. There’s overseas tickets waiting for you at Paine Airport, out to Geneva,” the Colonel continued.
“Fuck!” Bomber slammed his fist into the dash. “No!”
Gina groaned inwardly as the Colonel’s words hit home. “Not again . . .”
“Hell of a last request. I know it’s a lot to ask of you after what you’ve been through. If there were anyone else I could trust to pull it off, I’d never have turned to you, but there isn’t. The Army doesn’t want to stick its neck out too far.” Obrin sighed. “What I can offer you is the support of our team in Geneva to help plan and execute the mission. They’ll contact you when you arrive, brief you on Gabriel’s compound, give you a place to kip. They should also be able to procure anything you might need for the op.”
Turning to look at Jezebel, Bomber shook his head violently. “Jez, we already marched into the lion’s mouth once, we’re not doin’ it again.”
“You will,” she grated, her voice hoarse and her cheeks wet, “because it’s the last thing the Colonel will ever ask of you. And you’re going to do it, or so help me I will hunt you down and put a bullet in your head myself.”
The Colonel’s voice went on, “I’m sorry I can’t be there myself, I really wish I could, but I got to do my part. So . . . Well, I’ve run out of things to say. Good luck and good hunting, soldiers. Out.”
