The Killing Jar (24 page)

CPI-RQ2-05, NEW YORK

AUGUST 18, 2232

Working with Mable wasn’t as terrible as he expected. Sure, she was prone to sudden outbursts, sometimes violent ones. She rarely slept and kept him working at a break neck pace. She’d cursed him out and screamed in his face once or twice, but between those moments, there was an uneasy peace.

In the space above his desk, another extraction vid played, but it revealed little. Where before the agent had used a gas canister to disarm the host, this time, there was a considerable struggle.

The host, an early thirties woman with the South Asian package of features, saw the agent and began a string of harsh words in a language he didn’t know. Without wasting a moment, the agent approached, fought off the meager defense of the host, and began a several second struggle. Then the lifeless form of the host appeared on the floor.

The agent began the extraction.

“Hey, have you seen the vid for—” Theo scanned for the file name. “Uh, it’s UL-28(G). Seen it?”

“Yeah of course.” Mable didn’t even look up from her tablet, engrossed in whatever file she read directly from the screen. Her back was wedged between the two plush pillows on his bed, her knees pulled up against her chest.

“Do you know what happened? Why didn’t they use the gas?”

Still she stared at the screen. Her dark hair fell into her face so much he wondered how she could see anything.

“Not sure. Maybe it was damaged? All the rest are like that.” Her eyes continued to race across the screen.

“All the extractions after 2218 are this violent?” Theo didn’t want to consider what that would mean for their future assignments.

He should be the agent.

Mable could never render a person unconscious on her own. She was far too weak.

She wedged her fingertip between her teeth and clamped down lightly.

“What file are you working on?” he asked.

“I’m not. I’m reading.”

“I know, what file?”

Mable looked up, her eyes narrow. “
Girl with a Pearl Earring
.”

“What?”

“Never mind.” She returned to her tablet. Theo gave up and went back to the extraction vid. He added the time of the struggle and Mable’s comments about the gas to his notes.

Once finished, he moved on to the next. AP-28(G). For whatever reason, the extractions during the 2220’s seemed to be almost entirely composed of the Gleam. Had the Echo vanished? Or had CPI merely changed their focus? He added his questions to his notes and opened the file.

HOST: AGATHA PARNELL. CRAFTSMAN, SHUTTLE PILOT

AGENT: FRANZ EIRLICH

LOCATION: SRF #221B, ISTANBUL

EXTRACTION STATUS: COMPLETE

“Hey, what’s SRF?” Theo called over his shoulder.

“Shuttle Repair Facility.”

How embarrassing. He knew the acronym, and given the host’s profession, it should have been obvious.

Theo mumbled under his breath and continued. He did his best to avoid asking Mable questions, pulling up info on the net as he could. Trouble was, the entire operation was locked down tighter than a geneticist’s embryo array. There was nothing he could learn about the bugs from anywhere else in the world.

His research was exciting in that capacity. If he worked hard enough and long enough, he might change the world. Not in the way he once planned, but it would still be something. It was enough for him to go on.

Theo hadn’t meant to stay up so late, but the urge to get through the files and learn everything he could was too strong. His virtual notepad spanned several pages. Once complete, he would take all his questions to Nick.

He tapped the icon for BC-33(E).

HOST: DR. BARTON CUTTERLY. SCHOLAR, RADIO-PROPULSION ENGINEER

AGENT: MARK LENNOX

LOCATION: SCEL, SAN DIEGO

EXTRACTION STATUS: COMPLETE/COMPROMISED

He read the word four or five times to be sure it was the right one. His tired eyes were surely playing tricks on him. Compromised?

“Mable, what happened on BC-33(E)? How can it be ‘Complete’ and ‘Compromised’?”

When she didn’t answer, he figured she was still involved in whatever she was reading. He turned around and said, “Hey, Mable!” quite loudly before he realized.

Mable’s slender figure lay collapsed against his pillows, lifeless but for her slow, easy breathing. The tablet was still clutched in her hands, and as she’d said, it wasn’t one of the case files.

Theo pulled the spare blanket from the shelf in his closet and spread it over her. Then he retreated to Jane’s room.

LRF-PQ-291

AUGUST 21, 2232

Six days and still no data. Aida was going to lose it. She had no experience with idleness. Never in her life had she been so void of work.

She needed something to do with her hands.

Aida used to enjoy those days when she could be alone in her apartment. Without the requirements of her class and with no husband to gripe, she could dress how she liked. She could wear her hair down.

Not anymore.

One-nine-six was all she could think about.

Aida stood before the floor length mirror attached to her wardrobe door and considered the shoes. With a strawberry-red tulip skirt, she paired a black kitten heel on the left and a nude pump on the right. She decided on the black, but they didn’t go with her top. Aida stripped out of it and tried on three more.

She needed to find something else to fill her time.

Aida adjusted a loose butter-yellow top when Sal came in. “Have a good day?”

“A little busy.” Sal started toward the closet, pulled off his shoes, and sat at his desk.

“Something go wrong with one of your colonies?” Sal kept up with the two-hundred or so colonies, many of them on the surface of the moon. Others were on ships in transit, circling the solar system to imitate conditions during long space travel. There was even one on Mars.

“No, just a lot of upkeep,” he answered with his back turned.

Aida tapped her hands against her skirt and tried to think of something to say, anything. She didn’t have much to contribute without data from 196, but still, she wanted to talk to him.

“Do they have any Planetary Colony facilities on Earth?” she asked.

“Not that I know of. By definition, a colony is off-world.” In the air above his desk, a spreadsheet of meaningless numbers rolled by.

“I mean the facility, not the colony. Could you maintain your position if we went back?”

“Why would we want to go back?” His voice was less monotone than before. She got the impression he might actually be listening, though he still didn’t turn around.

“It might be easier to get a Child Permit. We’re in range for both age and career. If we started now—”

“Maybe once you get Lead. And then we’ll see. I’m not in any hurry to go back.”

But she was Lead. It had all happened so fast, and in such humiliating circumstances, she hadn’t told him. Now that he wanted to wait, there was no point in telling him. It wouldn’t change his decision.

Sal stood and walked to the door. “I’m going to the galley for some provisions. Want anything?”

Aida shook her head.

Then Sal was gone and the room was quiet again.

Aida sat at her desk and perused the LRF news feed. She could only try on outfits from her limited closet for so long.

Within minutes, an ecomm notification appeared at the bottom of her screen.

TO: AIDA PERKINS, PLANETARY SYSTEMS

FROM: PLANETARY SYSTEMS DEPARTMENT

MSG: PROBE DATA RECEIVED.

Uncaring to her appearance, Aida slipped on her shoes and half-jogged, half-walked to her office. Dr. Hill waited at the door.

“You got it, too?” she asked, her breath a bit uneven.

“I sent it. I thought you’d want to know.”

Dr. Hill looked her up and down. His mouth hung open at her bright red skirt and voluminous top. Her hair was even down, skimming her shoulders in the waves she so rarely let loose outside of her apartment.

“You’re right. I do.” Aida left him in the narrow corridor and walked around her desk to sit in her chair. She all but threw her tablet to the desktop and tapped the ecomm that gave her the link to the file.

A vast amount of information filled her screen. File upon file, charts and graphs and readings. There was so much to go over, so much to learn.

Aida dove in with unbridled enthusiasm.

At last, at long last, after so much waiting, they would finally know if Perkins-196 was the right planet.

CPI-AO-301, NEW YORK

AUGUST 22, 2232

Nick marched into his office without a knock. Silas knew, by nothing more than the set look in his jaw, that they had a job.

“Delta confirmed an Echo. Toronto. Level One.”

Silas knew ‘confirmed’ was a loose term in their line of work, but if an intel team was confident, he had no reason to doubt them, especially Delta.

Remembering his conversation with Ramona, he asked, “Who’s the host?”

Nick flipped through the files on his tablet. “Uh, a pharmaceutical chemist, Dr. Divya Prataban. I can have Recon4 on a shuttle within the hour.”

His jaw tightened. “No. They haven’t had the extraction training.” Recon4? Maggie and Theo? No way in hell.

Nick continued, unaffected. “The training is little more than walking them through the vids and showing them the gear. They’ve already studied the vids. Besides, Recon5’s not ready.”

“Neither is four. Send three.” Silas looked out his slim window. Dusk had already fallen, the grounds of the CPI complex slowly disappearing into the dark.

“Three is in orbit. One and two are out of commission. You know this. It has to be Recon4 or Recon5. Between the two, I’m opting for four. Georgie’s not ready.”

“None of them are ready.”

“Yes, they are. Have you looked at the case file logs? Mable’s opened every file, every vid. Theo’s done more than half. They’ve been combing through them for days. They’ve seen the extractions. I’ll give them a quick run-down of the gear before they go, but you either send them or risk the host. It’s a Level One. Who knows when—”

“I know what’s at stake.” Silas refused to turn and face Nick. It was his worst nightmare come true.

“So four?” Nick tapped his shoe on the floor as he waited for confirmation.

“I’ll do the run-down.” Should anything happen to her, he wanted to know he’d done everything possible to keep her safe. It might help him sleep at night, but probably not.

“Whatever you say.”

“Send them the ecomm to go to the lab. And put together their identities and files.”

“Right away.” God, Silas wanted to kill him. For someone who was supposed to be here to help him and relieve some of his stress, Nick was failing in apocalyptic fashion. What a useless ninny.

With no time to spare, Silas made his way up to the lab. Theo and Maggie were already there. Theo wore his usual tight shirt and athletic pants, but Maggie was the one he cared about. Her hair was twisted into a bun as was the Scholar fashion. She wore a conservative blue dress shirt and khaki pants with bright blue sneakers. Anyone who saw her would automatically assume she was a Youth about to go Scholar, just as he wanted. It wasn’t a spectacular alias, but it was the best they could do on short notice.

Aside from their clothes, both wore grim expressions, awaiting whatever he was about to show them.

Nick must have told them already.

“You’ll be headed to the shuttle dock shortly, but I wanted to give you both a few tips for your first extraction.” He scanned his hand and pushed in.

“What’s the rush?” Maggie narrowed her eyes.

God she was difficult. Silas rubbed his hand over his chin. “The intel team listed the extraction as a Level One. We don’t know why, but the bugs seem to kill the hosts in the hours before a big event. A conference. A presentation. We think it has to do with stress levels. Something in the cortisol triggers the bug to terminate the host.”

“And this one has some big event this afternoon?”

“She’s presenting at a conference tonight. You’ll go as a Youth interviewing her about her career and how it led up to her presentation. The specifics are in the file. You don’t really need to say much. It’s just to get you close enough to disable her and perform the extractions. Let me show you what I—”

“We’ve watched the vids. Over and over again.”

“Watching and doing are two different galaxies.” Maggie gave him a bored look. “Humor me.”

“Why don’t you use the gas canisters anymore?” she asked, her arms crossed.

“A few times, the canister was shuffled in the commotion and an agent gassed themselves or gave the host the wrong gas. It was too much of a risk so we discontinued the practice. Theo, Maggie, this is Dr. Albert Quincy. He’s our Lead researcher here. This is his lab.”

Quincy barely looked up from his table. He peeked over some convoluted viewing device and nodded.

Silas led his newest recon team to the back where they housed the extraction equipment. “These are the Echo clamps. You saw them in the vids?” Both Theo and Maggie nodded.

“You can extract any bug with any clamp, but each is designed to streamline the extraction for a particular bug.”

Theo stared at the clamps. “Why would you need them to be functional for all four species? Should we expect that it might not be an Echo?”

“Probably not, no. The intel teams are pretty good, but there’s no way to be certain. It wouldn’t be the first time they got the species wrong.”

“Oh great,” Maggie fussed.

“Make sure you have your clamps, gloves, and killing jar. You absolutely cannot forget those three things.” Silas held Maggie’s gaze for several seconds so she’d know he was serious.

“Gloves? Are those really going to protect me from a bug?” she asked as if she didn’t notice.

“You’ll stick your hands inside someone’s mouth. Trust me, you want the gloves.”

Both cringed.

If it had been anyone else, Silas would have laughed.

“How am I supposed to knock out the host? I’m assuming they don’t want to be awake during their involuntary laryngoscopy.”

“In the past, the agent got close and tripped the vagus nerve. I’m not sure you’ll be strong enough, actually—” She was just too small.

“I can do it,” she insisted.

Silas sighed. “I believe you, but the answer is no. Take a gas canister, but be
very
cautious about which end you use.” He opened the bottom drawer of the lab table and pulled out a silver gas canister. Satisfied it was full and operational, he showed her how to dispense the gas. “Here, blue dot for blue gas to knock them out. Green dot for green gas—”

“Wakes them up. Got it.” Maggie all but snatched the canister from his hand. “Anything else?”

“Have everything you need?”

“Yeah.”

“What are the three things?” He had to be sure.

A look of fury crossed her face. He shouldn’t have asked, he realized now. Maggie was more than capable of remembering three simple items. “Gloves, clamp, jar, and a rod to stick up your ass.”

Theo stared at her in shock, embarrassed to witness such an outburst. Silas had no such delicate sensibilities. She could curse and insult him all she wanted, as long as she came back in one piece.

“Theo, go ahead and get a fresh jar from Quincy.” At least the kid was smart enough to take the hint. He turned on his heel and walked away.

“I need to know that you take this seriously.”

“Yeah, sure.” Maggie turned to follow Theo until he grabbed her upper arm and yanked her back. He didn’t mean to yank her so hard.

She flashed him angry eyes. “Quit it!”

“Maggie. You need to take this seriously. Bugs are dangerous. Pay attention to your surroundings. Listen to Kaufman. He’s your handler. He’ll be with you the whole time. Follow the procedure. Be careful.” He sighed and released his grip. “I need to know that you’ll be safe,” he pleaded.

He finally got through. She looked back the way Theo had gone, making sure they were alone. So quiet, almost a whisper, she said, “I’ll be careful. Promise.”

“I expect you back here safe and sound by morning.”

“You know, you’re starting sound like my dad.” Maggie huffed and walked back to Theo, then the two left for the shuttle dock.

Silas shook his head and laughed nervously.

He reminded himself that she was ready, she was smart, she was resourceful. Where Alex had been sheltered, she was resilient. If anyone could do this, it was her.

Now if only his nerves would believe that.