Wolf: A Military P.A.C. Novel (19 page)

Chapter 36 Kerrigan

The Swedish Isles had spearheaded the Green Initiatives Treaty campaign that led to General Samantha Ariyan having the power she did. And the resultant Oil Wars. They were nasty; kick
ed-them-in-the-balls-when-they-were-down kind of nasty. The Warsaw Commons, those countries that had signed the original Pact and a few of the newer sovereign nations had signed that new treaty. A collective agreement that allowed the world’s oil reserves to be placed into a pool for all to share, while the Green Initiatives could be adopted.

Kerrigan hadn’t appreciated his part in the effort. Argentina was the first country to balk at the measures. They were the first to fall, spearheaded by a division of the Canadian Army and all the other Warsaw Warriors. Butchers were more like it. Even though the means were peaceful at first. Trade was embargoed, then food was held back
, and the renewable oil technology, plants, and other biologicals were never delivered, until their oil reserves were pooled.

And Samantha Ariyan had been the final judicator for the U.N. She
had kept the tallies fair. So the media said.

Kerrigan defended his life by killing. He defended the world by killing. For a time
, he believed it. Until he realized it didn’t sicken him anymore.

Then he quit. Though it felt more like running from a problem, it was the only way he could deal with himself.

Lieutenant Kerrigan watched his commanding officer and recent lover take a seat behind her desk. Her clothes looked only slightly creased from the fight, and the romp she had put him through to prove her point.

That she didn’t want him dead. That she was in control.

More importantly, she seemed to want him and only him. After working with her for two years, that felt odd. He could still taste the sweetness of her breath and the soft weight of her breasts on his skin. It was enough to make him start to tingle all over, again.

He took a deep breath.

“Sammy, please introduce yourself to Lieutenant Kerrigan.” She ran her hands over the skirt of her uniform. Her eyes caught on his bare chest for a moment. Her cheeks blushed.

“Hello,
Lieutenant. I’m happy to make your acquaintance. Samantha has never introduced me to another person before this.”

Kerrigan knew the voice came from the charm bracelet on the General’s wrist. His hearing, more sensitive than ever before, could locate the slightly husky feminine tone with unerring accuracy. He wasn’t sure what scared him more.

“I’m . . . happy to meet you as well, Sammy.”

“Sammy is a P.A.C. unit
, Zach.”

“The one we’ve been working on
?”

“No. Sammy is one of a
—one of four, I think. They were built by Michael Scott’s father. This one made me your equal in combat.”

“Two days ago
, you could have wiped my ass off the floor.”

“Michael Scott would have.” Samantha pulled at “Sammy” with her long fingers
, her manicure perfect, her nails lightly brushing the metal of her P.A.C unit.

A tremor went through Zach Kerrigan. He had seen what Michael did to the wolf that was in holding. The same wolf that had calmed down after his and Samantha’s pairing. As if he could smell the difference in the air, three floors down.

“I believe you, General.”

“Good. Sammy, give
Lieutenant Kerrigan access to information due his rank. No codes or commands to the base proper. Personal info regarding me is okay.”

Kerrigan raised an eyebrow.

“It takes me a while to trust people,” she said.

“I
—Samantha, what’s going on here. I’d like to trust you . . .” He spread his hands open. “You set me up.”

“Sammy, did your analysis give you enough information
?”

“Yes,
ma’am. I think so.”

“Step onto the desk
, please.” The General put her hand to the edge of the desk.

Kerrigan watched “Sammy” shift from charm bracelet to black matte meta-material and slither across the desk
until it was in the middle of the rich red oak surface of the desk.

Kerrigan’s back stiffened as his heightened senses came into play.

Sammy continued to shift.

Kerrigan’s hand tightened around the arms of his chair.

Sammy’s ‘flesh’ was difficult to focus on; it shimmered and moved as if bacteria were growing in a Petri dish under hyper fast conditions.

Wood creaked under Kerrigan’s hands.

Sammy folded out into a shape, fur shivered from the soft tissue, a muzzle exuded, paws took form, and the animal stood up and shook itself out. Its fur glinted auburn under the organic L.E.D. lights of the room. Sammy stood forty-five centimetres at the shoulder, her proportions perfect.

The wood under Kerrigan’s hands shattered.

“What the . . . ?”

Samantha edged back, as best she could in a chair. “You were unconscious when Ma’ii tsoh changed.”

“Ma’ii tsoh? Changed! You mean the wolf. What? How?”

A low growl rumbled out from the desktop. Sammy faced
Lieutenant Kerrigan, hair bristling, her ears up.

“When I shocked the wolf, after it attacked you, it changed.”

“Changed. How? Never mind. That’s not possible.” Kerrigan didn’t want to think of the possibility that presented, but it slithered down from his hindbrain just the same. Because his new senses had known that as Sammy changed in front of him. It just took a while for his forebrain to catch up. His limbs trembled. The wolf in front of him, facing him down, growled again. Sammy’s eyes were the red-gold of fury.

“She’s reacting to your body language,
Lieutenant.”

“It’s a fucking machine.” It was tech. This wasn’t possible either. Machines didn’t shape into animals, didn’t threaten without an operator.

“SHE is biological Nano-tech; she is my friend, and the last link to my son. STAND DOWN, LIEUTENANT!” The shout carried the rumble of the machine’s growl under it. Lieutenant Kerrigan folded his hands into his lap, his biceps standing out in taut relief. His eyes held hers.

“Sammy, he won’t hurt us either. Please, come here.”

Sammy backed up, but she never took her eyes off of Kerrigan.

Zach blinked
, and the tension bled from the room.

Sammy sat down on her haunches, as close to Samantha as she could get in her current form.

Zach took a deep breath. “What's going to happen to me?”

“I don’t know
, Zach. The satellite feeds shows Michael as human. Sammy, have your functions changed any in becoming a wolf?”

“No
, ma’am.” That same sexy contralto he’d heard before came from the throat of the wolf. Another shiver ran down Kerrigan’s back.

“If it happens, Kerrigan
, I think your control will be . . .”

“That didn’t look like full control, Samantha. Your machine reacted to body language. That’s just an attack waiting. And I wouldn’t have hurt you.”

Samantha raised herself from her chair and walked over to Kerrigan. She slipped her legs over his lap, careful of the wood shards on the floor. “And Sammy?” Her hands went to his cheeks, the soft warmth reminding him of what she was to him.

Kerrigan looked up into her emerald green eyes fully aware that with her strength she could snap his neck with ease, but then, he would probably just heal. “I would defend myself. I don’t like dogs for the most part.”

“You’re looking at a wolf, Lieutenant. She has access to everything on the net that applies to her current physiology. She can smell your emotions. The same way you can smell mine.”

He smiled. The lust he could sense growing in her, like the musky scent of over-ripe oranges. There was another emotion overlaying that, but he didn't know what it was, didn't have a reference for it. Could she actually love him? “I couldn’t do that a week ago.”

“I doubt Michael could either, but I would bet that’s a different matter, now.”

Samantha leaned down and kissed her mate. It was a slow kiss that eased his mouth open, letting her tongue explore, and her teeth nibble at his lips. Kerrigan’s hands found their way under her blouse. She couldn’t be sure if the moan that she heard was his or hers, but it was loud enough to add to her arousal. His breath gasped as she plied his lips once more. Her hands running over his bare chest.

Neither of them noticed that Sammy had returned to her wrist, somehow, or that she had planted several hundred Nano-filaments deep into her flesh.

Chapter 37 Michael

“Boyen?” Scott said, firing another smart bullet.

“Aye, Captain.” The telltale from the computer screen in the arm of his suit blinked a few times. “That fuzzy edge is gone,
sir. Not sure what that means. But I have life signs.” Boyen pointed east, into the hills, and the caves the area sported.

“That’s not good. This is a training mission
, boys. No one has our six. And the media liaison would be pissed if they were left out.”

“Yeah, they want their oil, like the rest of the world,” said Ahmed.

“It’s in the damn sand,” said Huer, brushing the fine dust of the desert off his assault rifle. The gun’s action wasn’t harmed by the sand, but Huer liked things clean. Like his motorcycle. “More like the damn sand gets into everything.”

“It’s the wind. They should use it for power like Europe and Canada,” Ahmed claimed.

“You want a new job, become a civvie,” said Captain Scott. “Stop complaining.” Michael Scott led his men back to the west and the camp they shared with the regulars, the media, the U.N., and the Warsaw Common. The cluster fuck that was his life right now.

“Humph. That’s Huer’s job,” Ahmed said.

“Yeah, and our job is to find oil and keep P.A.C. out of enemy hands. Move on, men.”

Node One: Name, PAC. Primary Interface: Captain Michael Scott: Adapting. Primary Systems: Nominal. Organics Engine: online.
Behaviour and Emotional files: Updating. Command structure: Unchanged. Vector analysis: Footsteps have a pattern. Movement is more than rhythm of heart and muscle. Environment: Damn hot. Oil is in the sand. Bloody hell. Energy. Power. Environment: ecologically unsound. Transition. Wind is power. Electric. Hydro. Laser fed Deuterium, nuclear power. Sunlight. Sodium. Environmental power is free. Updating Political Files: Power is never free. Power is energy.

Faelon’s scent lay over the brisk
odour of the pines. Wrapped around it was the coarse thick smell of oil from the helicopter that had taken her. Its engine was electric, but bearings and motors needed the blood of dinosaurs, or plants, to run. The United States, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E.—their skeletons were decaying the rest of the world.

The wind picked up, shearing snow from the tops of the evergreens to drop clumps of frozen water down his neck. Michael ignored the brief cold before his body absorbed it and turned the water warm.

“Another satellite has been brought into play, Michael.”

“So, surveillance is what twenty, thirty degrees
?”

“Yes. But the overlap makes for less downtime. They now have the resources for thermal and to ping for sonar discrepancies, as well.”

“Can you . . . ? Right. We’ve been here before.” Michael said, remembering something that had been lost to him.

He stopped to smell the shifting wind. He had new gifts, and ones not supplied by PAC or his enhancements. He wasn’t about to let them go to waste. The air was cold, but it didn’t stop the aromas of the mountains as they traced their way through to his nose: Faelon was still southwest of his position, and then there was the sharpness of rock mixed with the decay of moss, the musk of animals, and men.

And fear. He smelled fear in the wind.

“You’re becoming like Faelon.”

“You mean a wolf?”

“I don’t know.”

PAC didn’t say it, but Michael knew the thought that came on the other end of that sentence, because it was what he was thinking. They shared the same sense of loss. Of not being useful.

“What’s this mean, PAC?”

“You’re no longer within human parameters. I don’t know, yet.”

“Then we take it slow. I need you
, PAC. Don’t ever think I don’t.”

Then his jaw started to ache with a shiver of sound that rattled his teeth, and left his mind dazed.

“PAC?”

“If we wish to be undetected
. . .”

Michael heard PAC’s response to a sonar ping for the first time in his life. The noise slithered from Michael’s jaw and into his bones. He grabbed at his ears in a useless attempt to stop the sound and dropped to his knees.

“PAC. That . . . fuckin’ hurts.”

The noise stopped. Michael sighed with relief. The vibration in his bones toned down to a tingle, as if his funny bone had been hit lightly, but all over. It was especially disconcerting inside his skull.

“Their satellites won’t line up forever. Let’s just get out of the area.”

PAC’s tactical display suddenly sprang to life, blossoming in front of Michael. The thermal dots of life forms appeared, hundreds of them in the area, but only the men showed up in
coloured relief. Ten men. More than before, if he understood who they were from their equipment signature. The Canadian army was escalating their behaviour. Scattered in the area of the pass, they were moving, gaining position, high ground.

Michael ran. His bare feet gripping the snow in ways that weren’t possible for him days ago. His toes splayed. He could feel the capillary action of his blood vessels. Knew the skin of his foot was the same temperature as the snow, making it possible for him to stay on top of the terrain. It was an instinctive control that wolves exhibited, and now, Michael found that same control.

PAC’s heads-up display continued to light the ground at his feet, a reference if he needed it. The men that were hunting him had the same capability though. Not in the same form as he, but they could see him and use the terrain to guide and pen him in. Michael needed the same high ground that his trackers were using. He turned up slope, still heading south towards Faelon.

If they hurt her
—Michael growled.

He dug his hands and feet into the snow and the rock of the slope before him. His grip sure, thanks to PAC acting as the muscle for his right hand, he found purchase and climbed, faster than normal, leaping from stone outcrop to tree root. His
strapped-down pack swung slightly with the lurch of his body and his rifle. He had to be wary of the barrel. He jumped to another outcropping and stopped, listening to the wind and the scents that it brought to him.

There were men here, near the top of the slope; the slither of cloth over metal gave them away.

Their fear gave them away.

He eased up to the ridgeline, looked over to the right, and then left. PAC’s holo-display disappeared as Michael got closer to the soldiers. If they had been wearing a combat suit
, the display would have been projected on the inside of his visor, unnoticeable to an outsider.

Below him, the Johnston Creek Valley spread out, and Palsatilla Pass loomed before him. That made military sense, hold the pass and none could get by them. They hadn’t counted on Michael or PAC being who they were, who they were becoming.

Snow crunched under Michael’s bare feet; it wasn’t a loud sound, barely a whisper, and was covered in the whine from the wind, and the voices of two men.

“It’s not normal for a man to live through that.”

“Tech keeps getting better. Fifty years ago, most people didn’t live over a hundred, and a combat suit wouldn’t keep you alive in the field. Barely stop a bullet in those days. He’s not so weird though, it’s that bloody wolf. I saw it when they put it on the copter, fucking thing was still alive, twitching and moving like it was in a seizure.”

“It’s not tech, and I heard its brainpan was missing.”

He saw a shiver run through one of the men. The other just stared into the distance.

The smell of fear erupted on the wind.

At the mention of the black wolf, the rage that had been following him climbed into his thoughts, stole them away. For a brief moment, he stilled completely, ready to lunge, to attack anything that got in his way of finding Faelon.

Then he remembered Ahmed Ariyan, and his reason returned. Another memory surfacing from the past.

He closed his eyes and took a breath, and another. His rage was better spent in another pursuit.

Michael’s clothes weren’t camouflaged; he stood out in dark silhouette to the snow and trees around him. He moved for cover, as fast as possible. This team didn’t notice him. Too busy talking. He slipped behind a tree, then to a boulder. A bush, a copse of trees, the browns, greens, and
the dark blue of his jeans blending in with the darker components of nature.

A metr
e.

One of the sentries moved.

Three metres.

“Look.” The other pointed to a hawk passing overhead.

Thirty metres past the two men and he could breathe for a moment. PAC, remembering and adapting, put up his display briefly, a miniature map to show what Michael was learning to guess from scent and hearing of his enemy’s behaviour.

But he wasn’t infallible. The read-out was needed.

“Thank you, PAC,” he whispered, sure his friend could hear him. For the last three years, his only companion.

Michael studied the telltale again and moved, watching his back for the two men behind him. He was sure they wanted him alive, or they would have killed him earlier. After the Oil Wars
, Michael had promised himself that he would only kill in self-defence. These men didn’t need to die, even though, tactically, it didn’t make sense to leave an enemy at one’s back.

The rage he had been feeling had leaked into everything he was doing. Now he was pouring that into saving Faelon. It was the only choice that made any sense to him.

He continued along the ridge, and soon Boulder Pass was below him. The ridge he was on flowed into the Lake Louise Valley. He could have followed it down and then back up to the ridgeline that held his cabin. But that was southeast. He would follow the ridge southwest, where it split, towards Faelon. That would put him away from any military positioning the army was following. And put him in control. They would have to play catch-up.

Michael smiled. It seemed much like Faelon’s when he had first met her.

Feral.