James Knapp - The Silent Army

“Don’t finish that sentence,” he said. He glared at me down over the pistol’s sight.

“Please do what Fawkes wants,” I said. “If you don’t do it, he’s going to kill you—”

“Shut up!” he barked, knuckles white on the gun’s grip. Blood had rushed into his face, lines of orange branching out underneath the skin. They glowed like electric light. The breath that blew out of his nostrils was warm. He seemed so alive right then.

“You’re not Faye,” he said in a low, even voice. His vitals spiked, but his eyelids had drooped. He looked the way he did when he first woke me, with calm murder in his eyes. “I shouldn’t have done what I did. She wouldn’t have wanted it.”

“I didn’t know what it meant,” I said. “I couldn’t know what I wanted.”

“She would never have helped Fawkes.”

“But I did help him, Nico.”

“She never would have killed Sean. You aren’t Faye. You’re Faye’s corpse.”

“My memories are the same. My consciousness—”

“It’s not the same,” he said. “I thought it was. I hoped it was, but it’s not the same. I don’t want to hear anymore. Tell me where he’s hiding them.”

“I can’t.”

“I pulled the maritime ID for a tanker called the KM Senopati Nusantara off a revivor. Is that ship still out there? Is that where they are?”

“Please help us, Nico. Fawkes can still get to you.”

“He’s already done his worst.”

“No, he hasn’t.”

“He has to me.”

His body grew very still; then his eyelids drooped and the muscles in his trigger finger twitched. I almost didn’t get my hand up in time. The muzzle flash lit the inside of the car, and I felt the heat of it against my face. Burned powder peppered my skin as the bullet punched through the seat behind me. Smoke drifted from the barrel as I swung my other hand and slapped him across the face.

I hadn’t meant to do it, but it stopped him. He just stared, the gun forgotten in his hand.

“How could you?” I heard myself whisper to him. The words, like the slap, came from some unknown place, some old remnant of myself.

He didn’t try to fire a second shot. He was still staring when I opened the door and slipped out into the dark.

I cruised across the tarmac, and tried to push the encounter with Faye out of my head. For the second time I’d had her in my sights, and for the second time I’d let her go.

It wasn’t the slap that stopped me, or what she said. It was the look in her eye, that look a revivor wasn’t supposed to have. That same look that I saw, just for a second, in that girl revivor’s eyes during the Goicoechea raid, when this all started. As if somehow what I’d done had wounded her.

“How could you?”

I shook my head and tried to focus. That look was imagined. It was only there because I put it there, because I wanted it to be there. Maybe she did carry around memories of our time together, but unlike the girl in Goicoechea, Faye was someone I’d known, and something didn’t carry over. Faye could never have gone along with this. She would never have asked me to either. The thing that waited for me in the backseat of my car knew there would be a nuclear detonation inside the city, and didn’t care at all. If its ghrelin inhibitor was switched off, it would …

A sheet of rain misted the windshield. Rather than go down that road, I sifted through the information she’d given me again. Fawkes had heavily redacted it, but even so, it was extensive. To prove any of it would take years of independent investigation, and since the FBI had been compromised, that would never happen. Still, if there was any truth to it, then the situation was even worse than I’d thought.

The names that appeared on his list were high-profile, powerful people, and not all of them were as secretive as Motoko Ai. Robin Raphael was a media mogul with an empire based out of the Central Media Communications Tower, one of the largest buildings in the city. He ran video and print news on at least fifty different fronts. Charles Osterhagen was a retired general whose name was known to anyone who’d served in the grind. He was the founder of Stillwell Corps. Two of the other names on the list were investors on the list of superwealthy.

They weren’t people you just called out and accused, not even with proof. They weren’t people you just approached on the street, or who quietly disappeared. They had teams of lawyers and professional security. If he thought I could get to any of these people, Fawkes was out of his mind.

A Chimera helicopter crossed the gray sky up ahead, and I picked up its scan as I approached. It had been two years since I’d been to Voodoo Proper, as the Heinlein facility was known. It hadn’t gotten any friendlier. The half mile of open tarmac that circled the main facility was dotted with guard stations, and electronic eyes followed my vehicle as I made my way across it. A second helicopter appeared and moved across the sky in the distance, and off to the northwest, a jeep was patrolling the main campus.

Wachalowski, this is Noakes. Any word back from the Indonesians?

It’s a dead end. The shipyard already collected the insurance on the lost ship. They don’t want any talk that it might still be intact.

I don’t know how long the DoD will let us sit on that satellite.

That ship is out there.

I’ll do what I can, but right now the majority of our resources are tied up tracking the nukes. We can’t afford to waste time.

The weapons are on that ship.

I’d like to believe that, Wachalowski, but we can’t say for certain they’re not still in the city, and that has to be our priority. Find something concrete.

Understood. I’m entering Heinlein’s main facility. I’ll have to switch off soon.

This would be easier if we just brought him in.

If we try that, Heinlein’s lawyers will crush us.

There’s no delicate way to do this, Wachalowski.

Maybe not, but Michael Heinser was one of their major players. The check I ran flagged him as a high-level revivor R & D man, but the specifics of his position were classified. There was no way to bring him in for questioning without some level of public exposure. No matter how else you looked at it, the one place no media would be able to follow was onto the grounds of Heinlein Industries.

You are entering a restricted area. No unauthorized communications are permitted in or out from this point forward. No unauthorized scans, visual, audio or data recordings are permitted beyond this point….

A red flag popped up in my visual display and warning data began streaming by as the JZI detected an orbital beam painting my vehicle. I’d just been targeted by a satellite capable of incinerating me right there on the tarmac. A second later, a pulse caused the information to warp in front of me, and my JZI powered down.

They were jumpy. I couldn’t blame them.

I checked my cell phone, and it had powered down too. Not knowing exactly where we were supposed to meet, I continued straight toward the main compound. A full minute passed before I saw another vehicle come into view up ahead. It moved to intercept me.

The vehicle was a black military jeep. Without the JZI I couldn’t make out who was in it, but he flashed his lights and I cruised to a stop. The jeep pulled up a few car lengths away, and a middle-aged man with dark skin got out. He was wearing a suit, and a badge fluttered in the wind from a clip on his belt.