Chapter 2
Three faces stared out from the
portrait. Little Ethan, eight years old,
a little bored, but happy to be out of school.
Behind and to his right was Amanda, late thirties, her face stern but
beautiful, stress-filled eyes shining above wide cheekbones. To her left sat Edgar, his face looking full
and healthy, hair and beard thick and black.
Reflected in the glass was another face: middle-aged, grey beginning to
streak the hair.
Breath fogged the picture, then
faded. Edgar Latterndale had aged more in the last two years as Secretary of
Defense than he had in the previous five.
A knock at the door caused him to straighten, taking his attention away
from the picture of his family.
“Sorry to interrupt, Mr.
Secretary.”
Edgar sighed, then acknowledged the
young lieutenant standing in his doorway.
“Yes, Hutchfield, what is it?”
“The explosion, sir. Crews were going through records on everyone
who was in the tunnel, and one name came up on a watch-list.”
“What name?”
Hutchfield shook his head. “Your eyes only, sir.” He held up a tablet, then placed it on
Edgar's desk.
“Thank you.” He glanced down at the tablet, then up to the
lieutenant. “Is that all?”
“Sir.” Hutchfield turned and pulled the door closed
as he left.
Edgar sighed again, then leaned
forward and picked up the tablet. He
held his thumb over a scanner at the bottom of the screen and waited for the
device to verify. An image appeared of a
young woman with bobbed blond hair.
Below, her name: Ashleigh Chuskus.
Edgar swallowed. He recognized
her. He remembered her looking different,
though: a gaunt, bald woman, eyes sunken into her head so she resembled nothing
so much as an angry skull.
So, she had been at the site of the
explosion....
He put aside the tablet Hutchfield
had given him, then turned to face his own, docked to his desk. He opened a browsing window, searched for a
moment, then settled back in his chair to watch the news. A smoking crater was all that remained of a
suburban D.C. street, rescue workers in bright orange jumpsuits swarming over
the crater's lip. Interspersed among the
workers were soldiers encased in suits of lumpy grey armor. At a gesture the volume came up. “—as to the cause, though some experts are
blaming an outdated infrastructure, which led to a gas line rupturing and
bringing down the station. The mayor has
issued a statement that—”
Edgar silenced the device and
looked back at Hutchfield's tablet, at the picture of the smiling young woman
staring out at him. It could be a
coincidence, couldn't it? She might have
been in the wrong place at the wrong time, might have been caught in a freak
gas explosion.
He knew it couldn't be that easy.
“Hutchfield,” he said, gesturing at
his tablet.
“Sir?” he answered a moment later
“Footage from the explosion: do you
have it?”
A nod. “Pulled it as soon as I saw a ping on an
eyes-only list, sir. It's already on the
tablet.”
Edgar almost smiled. Competence, honest-to-God competence. “Good work.”
Checking through the tablet, he
found several video files. After
searching through a few, he found one from a camera aimed at the platform
immediately at the bottom of an escalator.
The footage wasn't good quality, but he could make out Chuskus as she
floated down the escalator and stood at the back of the crowd. She began to yell, looking around and
gesturing frantically.
Edgar adjusted the volume, but
there was no sound.
He watched for several more minutes
as Chuskus continued to panic. People
began to take notice, to turn and record her with their mobiles. Chuskus doubled over, clutching her stomach
and convulsing. Then the footage flashed
white and died. Edgar rewound, played it
back at half speed, repeat, quarter speed...there. A few frames before the end, she appeared to
glow, then erupted in a spreading wall of flame—
“Shit.” Edgar dropped the tablet and dug into his
pants, desperate to find his mobile. It
wasn't there. He stood, rounded on his
chair, felt through his hanging jacket.
There it was. It was out, dialed,
up to his face.
Three rings, then an answer. “Elliot Nieman; state your business.”
“Ellie, this is Ed. I need to schedule a meeting.”
“Sure thing. How urgent is this?” The sound of shoes clicking on marble
filtered through the connection as she spoke.
“Say an eight.”
A moment of silence, then: “I can
get you in at one. Who all do you want
there?”
“Entire cabinet.”
She gave a low whistle. “Alrighty, then. Sounds pretty important.” She was quiet for a moment, then grunted. “You're in.
President will see you at one-fifteen.”
“Great.” Edgar disconnected the call, tossed the mobile
onto his desk, then sighed. Chuskus had
blown herself up, and security hadn't noticed anything when she came in. There was only one explanation....
He sat back down, rummaged in his
desk for a moment until he found a thin black memory drive. He slid it into the new tablet, then
navigated to a folder marked “EHUD: TOP SECRET.” Clicking on it brought up a series of
security dialogue boxes, and then, finally, some hundred images.
He selected one at
random—EHUD_INCIDENT_REPORT_0017. The
screen filled with the image of a soldier in heavy armor, ceramic plates pulled
aside and the torso ripped open, organs spilling out. He closed that one, opened another, number
0032. A nude woman, her bones barely
contained by pale skin, head shaven, covered in wet blood. She was smiling, middle finger of her right
hand extended to the photographer. Edgar
swallowed. Chuskus, just as he had
remembered her. He felt nauseous.
He closed the image, returned to
the ID photo that had been placed on his desk minutes—a virtual
eternity—earlier. Something was
seriously wrong here.
He picked up his mobile again, made
another call.
“Office of General Mistlethwakey,
how may I direct your call?”
“I need to speak with Bob.”
“Who may I say is calling?”
Edgar grimaced and cradled his head
in his hand. “It's his fucking boss.”
There were several long seconds of
silence from the other end. “I'm afraid
the general is busy at the moment. I can
take a message.”
“Is the general in?”
“I'm sorry sir, I can't—”
He took a calming breath then
spoke, slowly, as if to a child. “I'll
repeat: I'm his fucking boss, and I have something to discuss with him. I've played his little shit games before, but
if he isn't seated firmly behind his desk when I arrive, there will be serious
repercussions. Am I understood?”
Before the other man had a chance
to answer, Edgar had grabbed the tablet and his jacket and left his
office.
When he arrived at the antechamber
to General Mistlethwakey's office, he was pleased to see the general's aide
sitting behind his desk, looking petulant.
“Despite a full schedule, the
general is able to see you now.”
Edgar offered up a false
smile. This poor man was only exercising
what little influence he had, and it was now going to be taken from him. “Get out,” Edgar growled. “And don't bother coming back when I'm
gone. You're being reassigned.”
The man frowned, but stood and left
without saying a word.
Edgar's smile was now genuine. He closed the office door, then swept his
hand across the underside of the receptionist's desk: there were no signs of
bugs. He straightened, took a deep
breath, and pushed through to the inner office.
General Robert Mistlethwakey sat
behind a massive black desk; with his coat off, he looked like a cotton swab
stuck in a tar pit. He smiled, his face
seeming to split in half along the edges of his leathery mouth. “Ed!
So glad you could drop by! Hear
there was something you wanted to talk with me about.”
Edgar stopped in the middle of the
room and worked his jaw for a moment.
The General was far too calm in light of the threats issued against him;
normally, he would be on the war path at this point.
“I'm here to talk to you about the EHUD
program,” Edgar said.
The General's smile grew
wider. “Ah, the Defenders.” His dark eyes, set far back in his skull,
almost seemed to sparkle.
All Edgar could do was work his jaw
again. “The Defenders? You're ready to jump to that conclusion? What if I were talking about the Defense
program, huh?”
“Oh, please.” Mistlethwakey's smile finally faded and he
leaned back. “You wouldn't sound so
damned serious when asking the question if you weren't going to talk about the
damn Defenders.”
“We have this security protocol in
place for a reason....” It was all Edgar
could do to keep the frustration out of his voice.
The General nodded. “Understood.
Now, what did you want to talk about?”
Edgar held up the tablet and shook
it. “Ashleigh Chuskus. Today she went into a metro terminal and
killed fifty people in an explosion.”
“Huh.” The General raised his eyebrows. “Sounds just awful. I rather liked her....”
“'That's awful?' That's all I get out of you? A member of your top secret weapons
program blows up the metro, and you can't be bothered to give a shit?”
The General shrugged. “It's a complex program. Statistically shit's got to go down at some
point. It's a miracle nothing bad has
happened thus far.”
And there it was, the admission
Edgar had been waiting for through the entire confrontation. He pulled up the picture of Chuskus, bloody
and defiant, and turned the tablet to face the General. “Except this isn't the first time shit's gone
down, is it?”
Mistlethwakey glared. “You were
supposed to destroy those pictures.”
“Destroy evidence that the Defender
program has flaws? I'm a professional,
Bob. I take my job seriously.”
“The only reason you have that job
is because you promised to destroy those pictures!”
Edgar snorted. “Well, it looks like I'm not as morally
bankrupt as you thought. Now, let me
state the obvious, in case you haven't put it together yet. Here we have two pieces of evidence that your
pet project has serious issues. So, this
afternoon I'm taking this down to the White House, and getting presidential
approval to shut your ass down. Got it?”
“And what happens when the President
finds out his little cousin's been suppressing some of this evidence? You think you'll have this job for much
longer?”
Edgar lowered the tablet and stared
at his shoes. In all the panic that the
morning had ushered in, he hadn't had time to think of personal
consequences. He shrugged. “What happens, happens. This program's dangerous, and flawed, and I'm
going to make sure the right thing gets done here.”
Angry silence stretched between the
two men. Then the General laughed, his
deep chuckle echoing around the room.
“God damn, do I know how to pick them.”
He continued laughing, the sound degrading to a hoarse wheeze. He coughed and wiped at his eyes. “No, you're not going to tell the President
anything. This thing with Chuskus? That's not evidence of a problem. That's fucking intentional.”
For just a moment, the room fell
completely silent, and Edgar felt himself floating. This wasn't at all what he'd expected....
“No,” the General continued, “this
was a test. A test and a message. First, I wanted to find out how you'd react
to something like this. Doing what's
right? At the risk of your cushy
job? You passed, my friend; you passed.”
Edgar reached into his pocket,
found the mobile he had neglected to turn off.
This—what Mistlethwakey was saying—this was important, and he needed to
record it. Blackmail or evidence, it
didn't matter the reason, he needed this.
“And the message?”
The General straightened and his
face hardened. “I am in control. The entire program, the Defenders? They're mine.
What happens next is not chaos: it is planned.”
There was no way to navigate to a
recording program, not in his pocket, not without making the moves too
obvious. Edgar released the mobile, nodding
all the while. Keep the man
talking. It would all come out when he
made his report to the president. “So
you programed a sleeper agent to kill herself, just so you could massage your
ego?”
“You've seen the pictures of what
happened when the Defenders slipped our control. But did you hear any of the speech Major
Fendleton gave before he was executed?”
Edgar shuddered. He remembered the pictures of Allen
Fendleton, stripped of his uniform, his brains sprayed out over a concrete
floor. Through the memory were tinny
words, poorly recorded: “We are Defenders.
We will defend. We must tick
on. The Q-bomb must tick on.”
The words didn't need to be said
aloud. Mistlethwakey must have seen
something in Edgar's eyes, must have also been replaying those words; he nodded
and a thin smile spread across his face.
“The Q-bomb...” the General
intoned, “in theory, a small group holding unlimited power over the whole
world, keeping them in line through applied self-interest. When Fendleton first told me of the concept,
I thought he was crazy. When he led the
Defenders in a rebellion and got himself killed, I knew he was
crazy. But the more I thought about
it....” The smile faded. “We've made super-soldiers, Ed. We've made gods. And what are we doing with them? The moron we have in office now just wants to
use them to protect national interests.
He's not seeing the global picture.
But me.... I've been infected by
Allen. I've got his vision up here
now.” He tapped the side of his head
with an outstretched finger. “And I've
altered the program, the programming.
You saw that with Chuskus. And
the others... they're going to start
fulfilling their programming soon. And
then Allen's vision will be fulfilled....”
Edgar's hands hung limp at his
side. He stared at the old man in
wide-eyed disbelief, then narrowed his eyes into a death-glare. “I suppose making threats at this point would
be useless, seeing as you have an army of super-soldiers backing you up.”
A shrug. “Their lives are their own. I merely pointed them in the right direction
and gave them a push.”
“I thought you were in
control.” The General opened his mouth
to answer, but Edgar continued, “No, don't answer; I don't care. Why are you telling me all this?”
Mistlethwakey stood and rounded his
desk. “For the Q-bomb to truly succeed,
there needs to be at least one nation that will offer cooperation, just to set
the example. I'm hoping that will be
us. But the current administration....” He looked at Edgar, imploring him to
understand.
For his part, Edgar refused to
think through the General's implications.
If Mistlethwakey wanted to say something, he would have to say it
plainly.
“In the coming months, the
Defenders will be causing a lot of chaos.
The President—hell, most of the cabinet—will likely not survive. For this to work out, I need the right person
in place to help the Defenders when they need it most. You've already proven you're willing to give
up this job that you worked so hard for in the name of 'doing right.' How much are you willing to give up in the
name of world peace?”
“You're asking for treason.”
The General gestured to Edgar's
tablet. “You've already withheld vital
evidence from the President. What's a
little treason? All I need you to do is
keep quiet about this meeting and be ready to cooperate when I give you the
go-ahead. You do that, and I promise you
that in six months the presidency will be yours.”
It was tempting. All his life, Edgar had dreamed of the
office, had worked hard to climb the Washington power ladder. But the years of relentless struggle had eroded
his desire for greatness, until he at last resigned himself to being nothing
more than an advisor. Now,
though—no. He couldn't do this.
He leaned in closer to
Mistlethwakey and hissed, “I won't let you kill my cousin.”
Another shrug. “The President's old. How much longer do you think he has?”
“You're older.”
The General smiled. “What makes you think I plan to survive all
this?”
Edgar was taken aback. All through this meeting, he had assumed it
was a power grab on Mistlethwakey's part.
Hijack the super-soldiers, show what he was capable of, profit. But as he stared into the old man's eyes, he
saw something far more terrifying: belief.
Edgar swallowed. He had to get to the President, had to warn
him. With any luck, it wasn't too late
to retrieve the Defenders, to eliminate the threat Mistlethwakey represented,
before another Chuskus exploded....
Before another Allen went on a killing spree.
The General sighed and gestured
again at the tablet. “You're going to
tell him everything, aren't you?”
Edgar turned and strode from the
room. He had to see the President, had
to tell him what was going on. Had to
tell him before the temptation proved too strong and he agreed to what the
General had offered.
Even though there was another half
hour before his meeting, Edgar was already pacing around the cabinet room,
stopping from time to time to check under the table for bugs. Security wasn't his job, but at the moment he
wasn't feeling particularly trusting of those whose job it was.
He glanced over to his seat at the
conference table, took in the tablet lying there. The pictures, the private knowledge of the
Defender rebellion, called out to him, begging to be set free. Almost two years ago he had been given the
files in a classified dossier while the current Secretary of Defense was out of
the country. Though he was only Deputy
SecDef, Edgar had taken it upon himself to confront Mistlethwakey about the
pictures. Somehow, he had let himself be
talked into covering them up in exchange for the General's influence concerning
a promotion. Scarcely a month later the
incumbent had resigned, and Edgar found himself appointed Secretary. At the time it had seemed like a good idea to
keep the pictures, just in case. Now it
seemed like an even better idea.
His eyes slipped away from the
tablet and he continued his pacing.
Around the table, again, again, again.
He was almost back to his seat when strains of “Home Means Nevada” began
to sound from his jacket pocket. He
pulled out his mobile and answered the call, killing the song. “Hello, Amanda.”
“Where are you?” His wife’s voice was pleasant, but tinged
with sarcasm.
Edgar's stomach clenched. He wasn't in the mood for any more stress
today. “I’m at work; where are you?”
“I just left Ethan’s recital.”
“But that isn’t till two.”
“It was at ten.”
“Since when?”
Amanda sighed. “Since it was first scheduled. God, Edgar, you’ve known about this for five
months, and you promised Ethan you’d be there; you said you could get time
off.”
“Time off at two, yes.”
Amanda sighed a second time; the
mobile translated it as a high-pitched whine.
“You should have double-checked the time.”
“Yeah, well, it's too late for that
now, so can we talk about this later?
I'm busy.”
Amanda didn't respond for several
seconds. “...Busy?”
“Ye—”
“You think you're supposed to be at
Ethan's recital by two, and you're still busy?”
“Something came up!”
The door creaked, and the face of a
nervous-looking intern poked into the room.
Edgar furiously waved her away.
“Something more important than your
son.” Amanda's voice was
painfully sweet.
Edgar closed his eyes and rubbed
his forehead. There was no easy
out. “Yes, okay? Yes, something more important. These things happen. No, I can't tell you what it is. We'll talk tonight.”
The high-pitched whine again. “Sure.”
Click.
Edgar returned the mobile to his
pocket, sighed, and continued pacing. On
the one hand, he felt guilty; he had promised. On the other, it wasn't as if this were a
common occurrence. He had never missed a
birthday party, rarely missed parent-teacher conferences. So he missed a few oddly-timed
extra-curriculars; so what? Ethan would
adapt.
Amanda though, Amanda would
remember this.
He fumed for a few more minutes,
only stopping when he heard a light knock on the door. A moment later Julia Telk, Secretary of the
Interior, stepped in.
“Am I interrupting anything?” she
asked.
“No.” Edgar turned and headed towards his seat.
“Ellie sounded pretty urgent;
thought I'd better get here early.”
Edgar snorted. “Hopefully you're not the only one. I'd like to get this over as soon as
possible. My kid's got a recital at
two.”
Julia nodded. “Kind of doubt Isaac will be early. Or on time, for that matter.”
“That's his prerogative,” he
shrugged.
They both sat and waited as the
rest of the Cabinet filed in.
At precisely one-twenty-five
President Isaac Latterndale finally pushed through the door and hurried to his
seat at the head of the table.
“Sorry, everyone,” he said, waving
his hands in an it's-not-my-fault gesture.
“It's not my fault. You know what
the Iranian embassy is like.”
Edgar felt a knot of nervousness
unclench in his guts; he was finally going to get this over with.
The President sat and looked at
Edgar. “So, Ellie didn't have a lot of
details to give me on this. What exactly
is this meeting about?”
“The explosion in the Metro this
morning.”
“Right.” The President turned to his Press
Secretary. “Rosencrantz, what happened?”
Eli Rosencrantz worked his jowls as
he stared at the ceiling, then nodded and locked eyes with the President. “It, uh, it seems that a utilities pipeway in
the Metro exploded, knocking out an entire line and killing some fifty
people. Reports are still coming in, and
rescue workers are of course on the scene.
From early examinations, it seems to have been a case of age, of an
antique infrastructure reaching the end of its natural life span. The mayor's office is already pushing for
legislation to cover a complete overhaul of the system.”
“Very good.” The President shifted in his seat and looked
to Edgar. “So what about this warrants a
meeting called by my military advisor?”
Edgar had to fight to keep his
expression neutral. He knew that several
of his coworkers had described him as looking “sinister” behind his back, and
any excess of emotion became melodramatic; the situation would be serious
enough without his help.
“I will be speaking today about the
EHUD project,” Edgar said, in tones reminiscent of a catechism.
All movement in the room ceased as
the words hit home. The Vice President
cleared her throat. “The 'D' stands
for...?” she asked, continuing the ritual.
“Defender.”
With the name invoked, the proper
ritual movements began. Phones and
tablets piled onto the table, power switches were pressed, backplates pried off,
batteries removed. After any possibility
of electrical surveillance was eliminated, the Secretary of State pushed his
chair back and went around the room, pulling curtains shut and making sure that
all the doors were secured. When he
returned, the President finished the ritual by pulling out a small plastic
tube, placing it on the table, and turning a dial at its base. The garbled noise of nonsense conversations
emanated from it, and the whole of the Cabinet leaned in to hear what Edgar had
to say.
“After the explosion, Homeland
Security was running names and one came up on a watch list: Ashleigh Chuskus,
Enhanced Human Ultimate Defender subject number 12. I requisitioned security footage, confirmed
her identity, and ascertained that the explosion centered around her.”
President Latterndale swallowed,
his throat bulging in an almost frog-like way.
“How did she explode, exactly?”
Edgar flicked his hands into the
air. “She just...exploded. Through apparently preternatural means.”
“Shit.” The President leaned back and ran his hands
over his face a few times. He said
something, but his voice was lost in the aural slurry generated by his
device. He cleared his throat and tried
again. “Have you spoken with
Mistlethwakey about this?”
Edgar nodded. “First thing after I found out.” He rested his hand on the tablet, almost felt
the damning pictures held within, begging to be let out.
“And?” The President stared at him, and it was all
Edgar could do to maintain eye contact.
He stared into the face of the man
he had known all his life, the adult cousin who had for so many years
overshadowed his career. The face had
changed in its long decades of public service, had aged especially in the last
six years as President. The beard was
almost completely grey, the cheeks had descended into full jowls, the eyes were
nearly covered by a drooping brow. In
what little of the eyes Edgar could see was fear, a panic reaction to being
told that the monsters he once thought he controlled now seemed to be out of
his hands.
In that moment, Edgar realized that
Isaac didn't need to see the pictures: as far as he knew, the Defenders would
always be the bloody ghouls hiding in the tablet. They were weapons to be ruled and used, but
always feared. He would never—had never—seen
them as the people that Allen saw, that Mistlethwakey saw.
Edgar removed his hand from the
tablet. “He was just as shocked as you
are. We spoke about it at length and
looked through some of the medical records, and he believes that Chuskus may have
suffered a panic attack. During the
attack, she somehow subconsciously accessed her abilities.”
Julia raised a hand fractionally
off the table. “You're saying that in a
moment of stress she acquired superpowers?
Excuse me for being skeptical, Ed, but this isn't a superhero
movie. You don't just 'get' powers.”
“Except she already had the
powers,” Edgar explained, trying to keep his voice neutral. “The General and I spoke at some length about
this, and we believe it gels with the more theoretical parts of the
program. We may have modified her
memories, but for everything to go as planned, her powers and training have to
remain at a subconscious level. The hope
was that only our triggers would activate a subject, but it looks like
other things can, as well.”
“So,” the President said, “we kill the program
now. If they start manifesting before
they're triggered, out of our control, then they're worse than useless. They're a threat. We track down the others; we take them
out.” There was a strange mixture of
bloodlust and relief in his eyes.
For just a moment Edgar entertained
the idea of nodding, of letting the sensible solution be implemented, of
keeping his job and eliminating this threat all in one easy movement of the
head. But something about his earlier
conversation, be it the words themselves or the way Mistlethwakey had said
them, weighed on him. He had already
agreed to betraying his leader's trust in the name of a promotion; what was the
harm in continuing the betrayal when the outcome was world peace.
“I would...recommend a little more
caution, sir.”
Isaac raised an eyebrow. He wasn't used to Edgar speaking up to him.
“First, the Defenders are too large
an investment and a potential return to throw away at the first sign of
problems.” The pictures seemed to hear
his words, seemed to recede deeper into the tablet. “Second, there's no reason to believe
circumstances will crop up that lead to another incident: Chuskus had a history
of instability to begin with. Third,
even if situations like this continue to happen, they pose little security
risk: the subjects keep taking themselves out.”
There was a brief round of polite
chuckles, then the President tapped on the table until the room fell
quiet. “Alright, you make sense. For now, we stay the course. Have the General put together a list of
anyone else he thinks may pose a risk, and put a little extra surveillance on
them. Meanwhile, get Fendelton
and...and...damn, I can never remember the other guy's name. Anyway, have them do a bit of experimentation
to see if they can get answers on this.”
He nodded and looked around the table, satisfaction evident on his
face. “If there are no other matters to
discuss...?”
Heads shook around the table.
“Okay.” Isaac leaned forward and shut off his
device. Immediately a faint buzzing
seemed to rush in and fill the silence.
“Edgar, thank you for keeping us appraised of these developments.” The President stood and stepped away from the
table. “Unless anything pressing comes
up, I'll see you all back here Monday morning.”
The meeting broke up and the others
stood, conversing in hushed tones and drifting towards the door.
Edgar hung behind, his breathing
shallow, the truth of what he had just done washing over him. Treason.
He had just committed treason.
Outside, in his car, Edgar drove in
stunned silence. Someone honked at him,
and he realized he was on the highway, heading back home to Virginia. He looked at the seat next to him, saw the
tablet, the black memory drive slotted into its side.
Before he could stop himself he had
the window down, then watched through the rear-view mirror as a continuous line
of Washington-bound vehicles raced over the tablet, spreading it in ever finer
pieces over the highway.
He reached into his jacket, found
his mobile, and dialed Mistlethwakey's number.
One ring, then, “What can I do for
you, Mr. Secretary?”
“Six months.”
The General didn't reply, but Edgar
could imagine the smile spreading over the old man's face.
