Blades of Winter (31 page)

“My knee is a mess. Can’t you Meddies install gear that doesn’t break all the time?” I love to tease these people.

This Med-Tech is sassy and tosses back, “Can’t you glory-hound Levels stop busting everything we give you?”

“Think of it as job security.” I laugh. “What’s your name?”

“My friends call me Chico.”

“Did someone give you that as a nickname?” I take my pants off and hop up on her exam table.

“Yep.” She gathers a double handful of instruments from a desk drawer and brings them over to the table. I watch her and wait for her to continue about her name. Instead, she slides out a small shelf from the table and sets her instruments on it before pulling up her chair so she can sit with my knees at her eye level. “Do you need anesthesia?” she asks.

“Aren’t you going to tell me who gave you that name?”

She grins. “Nope.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’ll give you something to think about while I work.”

“What do I need that for?”

“You need it because I don’t want to be distracted.” She lifts my kneecap off and pokes around in the joint with a metal probe shaped like a very thin pencil. It hurts, and I flinch. She says, “Let me anesthetize you. This will be quite a bit more uncomfortable than that.”

“I can use my Nerve Jet.”

“I’d rather do it myself. That way I know exactly how much you’ve got in your system.” Chico takes a dope rag out of a small plastic pouch in one of her pockets. These are small circular cloths soaked with specific doses of painkillers. I lift my head up, and she gently sticks it to my throat. The chemicals will soak right into my bloodstream.

“Will this make me sleep?”

“No, you’ll be awake, but your pain receptors will be disabled. It can make your legs a little rubbery, and until it wears off you may have some trouble talking.”

“More thoe than nermal? Heh heh.” My speech is already slurred.

Chico smiles and takes my pulse. I lie down, close my eyes, and begin to skim through Trick’s files on my Eyes-Up display.

At first I think Chico’s anesthesia has suppressed my ability to read. Even after I adjust to the fact that the
files are all written in German, it’s still page after page of unintelligible scientific gibberish. After a minute I give up randomly rummaging and decide to see if I can find out how many of the White Stone researchers got their educations paid for by the Darius Covenant. I run a search for “Darius.”

I get about a zillion matches, but none of these documents are about scholarships or colleges. They’re about some kind of research. I skim through them and see the word
Öl
over and over.

Oil?

I run a frequency-filter, excluding common words like pronouns and articles. Near the top of the list is
Bakterien
. This word appears in the Darius Covenant documents almost as many times as
Öl
. Oil and bacteria.

What the hell do oil and bacteria have to do with each other?

I open my ExOps-issued onboard reference library—for the first time, I think—and query how often oil and bacteria appear together. The list of relevant articles fills my Eyes-Up display.

I find an article that’s written for laypeople and discover that a certain kind of bacteria is used for cleaning up oil spills. Apparently the microscopic buggers can eat petroleum. I can only imagine what they crap out afterward.

I switch back to the White Stone files. One of the Darius hits is a calendar. I bring it up. There’s something happening this weekend. I expand the entry. It’s an itinerary for Kazim Nazari, who will be traveling to Zurich for an event of some kind. It’s not a conference, or a symposium, or one of those other snooty soirées academics use to justify sucking down buckets of alcohol.

Finally I figure out that it’s a fund-raiser at the University of Zurich. The guest list is packed with megarich whales who can write checks for more than the net worth of some small countries. Listed among the glitteringly
notorious pillars of society are two Middle Eastern men. One is Kazim Nazari. The other is Imad Badr.

Well, la-de-da
.

The search also turns up a list of the researchers who work at White Stone. All of them received scholarships from the Darius Covenant—except the Europeans. I check the bios of a couple of the Euros, and it turns out they were all recruited away from the Carbon Program. Now they work together at White Stone, along with their Middle Eastern counterparts. All these eggheads are supposedly exploring new ways to have fun with petroleum. We hope this info-plunder from our Creep ’n’ Peep will tell us what they’re really hatching in there.

I have the search engine look for Big Bertha. There’s one hit. The file opens in my Eyes-Up display. It’s a … receipt? It’s from the Abwehr, Germany’s version of the CIA. I read the page so quickly that I can’t understand it. When I try again, I translate the first line as “In gratitude for delivering an enemy of Greater Germany.” The document grants a special security clearance that permits unlimited access to one thing: the Carbon Program.

Even through Chico’s numbing anesthetic, I feel my temperature rising. Someone traded my father for access to Carbon. That someone is in the Blades of Persia. When I find that someone, I am going to kill the shit out of him.

A voice calls out fuzzily, like it’s behind a wall of wool blankets. “Okay! Time to wake up!”

A cotton ball bats against my cheek. The voice passes through the wall of blankets and becomes Chico’s voice. “Scarlet, you’re all done. C’mon, honey, time to wake up!”

I open my eyes. Chico’s face looms over me, and she stops patting my cheek with her hand. “Guess I gave you a little too much. Try to stay awake, okay? But don’t move around yet.”

My eyes are damp as the sedation begins to wear off. Chico cleans her tools and instruments while I shake off
the effects of the anesthetic. She sees that I’ve been crying, brings me a tissue, and dabs my eyes with it. Then she holds the tissue under my nose. Oh, God, I haven’t had this done for me since I was three years old. I blow my nose, and Chico gives me a smile. She walks out of my line of vision and bustles around. I can’t really sit up yet, but I can talk fine.

“How’d it go?” I ask.

“Great. You’ll have some tenderness in the natural tissue around the modified areas for a day or two, but otherwise you shouldn’t feel anything different.”

“When can I use them?”

“You can walk today, but I don’t want you doing anything crazy for a couple days or as long as they still feel tender.”

“Crazy?” I exclaim as I slowly sit up. My head is swirling, and my mind’s current inability to focus helps me transition from … whatever I was just thinking about … to doing my drunken sailor impression. I exaggerate my leftover slurred speech. “Who the fush you callin’ crazhy?”

Chico laughs and continues to put her stuff away.

“C’mon, Chee-sho, I’ll fush you up.” I feign a fighter’s stance, my fists held out in front of me. I try to stand, but my legs have gone on strike and refuse to hold me up. As I fall, Chico runs over and catches me.

“Wait, wait!” she exclaims. “You need to sit for a little while. I gave you a larger dose once I realized how much damage you did to your knees.” She guides me back to the examination table. I begin to lie down again, feeling dizzy.

Then I see her. She peeks around from behind Chico. Her big bug-eye lenses are down and reflect two tiny pictures of my face back at me. I reach for my gun, but it’s with my pants across the room. Someone holds me down, and the bug-eyed girl reaches into her pocket. No, not her pocket. She reaches into her chest, right into herself.

“Scarlet!” someone yells at me. “Scarlet! Oh, Jesus.” It’s Chico. She’s upset.

“What? What’s the matter?” The bug-eyed girl has vanished. Chico looks totally freaked out as I lie back on the table. She reaches over to her desk, opens a drawer, and fetches a handheld scanner shaped like a clothes iron. It’s the same kind the Med-Tech used on Pavel Tarasov in Paris.

I ask, “Did you see her, too?”

Chico freezes.

Oops. I shouldn’t have said that
.

“Did I see who?” Chico asks slowly. She hovers her scanner all over me, especially around my head. “Christ, you’ve taken so much damage.”

“Yeah, I’m a good little Intersheptor,” I brag, glad to change the subject.

“Obviously not, or you wouldn’t be so badly beaten up.”

That hurts. “How the fush would you know? Maybe I’ve worked shum tough Job Numbers!” I shout, although I only mean to yell, and I can’t seem to turn off my drunken sailor bit.

Chico steps back for a moment and looks at me. She resumes waving her scanner around me and murmurs, “I’m sorry, Scarlet. You’re right, that isn’t for me to say. It’s just that I hate to see someone so young take on so much.”

“It’s not
that
much damage.” I pout.

“Well, actually it
is
that much damage, but mostly I mean taking on so much responsibility. You’re still a Junior Level.” She puts her scanner down, takes out a small notebook and ballpoint pen, and jots down some notes. “Your Exoskin coverage is 20 percent, which is close to the limit. I’ll bet you sweat a lot.” She closes the notebook and returns the scanner paddle to her Med-Tech toolbox. “I want you to rest here until the anesthesia completely wears off,” Chico orders gently.

“All right,” I say. “Is it okay if I comm my IO?”

“Sure, sweetie, but stay on the table.” Chico looks in my eyes, gives my shoulder a squeeze, and walks out of the room, dimming the lights on her way out.

I hope she’s forgotten about my hallucination. I may need to talk to someone about that. God forbid it happened on a mission. It looked so real! I freak myself out and take a good look around the room. Nope, no dead bug-eye girls in here. Get a grip, Alix! I’ll see if Trick is busy. He always makes me feel better.

“Hey!” I comm. I keep it simple. He’ll know it’s me. If he doesn’t respond, it means he’s busy.

He comms right back. “Hey! How’s the knee?”

“Make that ‘knees.’ I screwed ’em both up.”

“They’ll be okay, though, right?” Trick sounds concerned.

“Oh, yeah, yeah. They hurt now, but I’ll be ready for action in a day or so.”

“That’s perfect. You can heal on the way.”

“Where are we going?”

“Switzerland, Hot Stuff,” Trick comms. “We’re gonna follow Kazim.”

“I was just reading his itinerary. University of Zurich, right?”

“Wow, look at you.” Trick sounds impressed. “Yeah, Harbaugh and I found his calendar after you left.”

“Is something going to happen at the fund-raiser?”

“We’re not sure, but this isn’t the first time my boss has encountered intel that includes this university. The U of Z hosts more than an annual charity gala. It also hosts a research lab for Carbon.”

Oh, that is
really
weird. “Trick, did you guys find the letter from the Abwehr about Big Bertha?”

“Not yet, we spent most of our time on those briefcase schematics.” He pauses. “How many times is your dad mentioned?”

“Once.” My comm voice darkens. “But it’s enough.”

German Cloning Research: Carbon Program (aka
Kohlenstoff Programm
)

By the end of World War II, the German Wehrmacht had seized vast wealth, engulfed a huge population, and conquered an empire stretching from the Arctic Circle to the Persian Gulf. The Reichstag moved quickly to pacify the Third Reich’s half billion new citizens. The Geheime Staatspolizei, aka the Gestapo, conspired to inflict a climate of fear and obedience. Many other government bureaus followed suit. The Ministry of Agriculture, however, chose a different strategy to introduce the new
Volk
to the joys of being German.

The Reichsminister of Agriculture reasoned that people are more likely to accept new leadership if they are well fed. To this end he launched a research project to enhance Greater Germany’s harvest by cloning the hardiest variants of crop seeds. This well-funded initiative was named the Carbon Program and attracted the finest scientific talent from all over Greater Germany. Within four years these scientists succeeded in the mass replication of a blightproof strain of wheat germ. The story of this achievement was proudly touted by the Ministry of Propaganda and received heavy coverage from news sources around the world.

Kept from the press was the fact that the Wehrmacht and the Gestapo had secretly commandeered Carbon. The program’s new goal became the asexual reproduction of humans. The subjects were to be persons gifted with fearless martial talent and the proper mental aptitude for ruthless decision making. These parentless supermen would be exploited for military purposes.

This quest required at first hundreds, then thousands of research personnel. The Carbon Program grew to become history’s most ambitious scientific enterprise and the Shadowstorm’s worst-kept secret. By the late 1950s, our intelligence agencies had provided scientists here in
America with enough data about Carbon to begin our own domestic cloning research program.

Germany stunned the world when it presented the world’s first human clone in 1959. Carbon’s director of research read a prepared statement to the press. Gen-2, their second generation of cloning experiments, had already begun. After the media event, Carbon withdrew once again from public view.