‘Good to see you, Cross,’ Alan said, smiling. The well-built American with the brown eyes and the short, cropped dark hair and the flat face went all the way back to SRT with her. She had talked him into joining CELL when he’d left the military police. She regretted that now.
‘Boss,’ Mikey said and hugged her. It wouldn’t have been so long ago that she would never have tolerated such a thing. Now, frankly, she couldn’t give a shit. Things had not been going terribly well career-wise since she’d left the army.
They exchanged news but it was the casual stuff, nothing about the current situation. Amanda knew them well enough to know that they were hiding something.
‘So what’s the boss like, this Walters?’ she asked. Mikey and Alan exchanged a look.
‘Asher wants to see you.’ Mikey told her. The Afro-Caribbean Brit wouldn’t meet her eyes. Security was supposed to be run by John Walters. He had a reputation as a competent, if unimaginative and overly rigid, commander. He’d inherited Amanda’s team after she’d been demoted. She had spent the last eighteen months as little more than a mall cop.
It was bad news, however, if Dr Asher, the dig’s overseer, was trying to control security as well. Security was supposed to create a physically safe work environment, but under an independent command, as security matters had to sometimes override the day-to-day running of the operation they were protecting.
Also, Amanda knew Asher’s reputation. He’d been a high flyer before the New York crisis but something had happened with a subordinate of his, a Nathan Gould, which had meant Asher had fallen from favour. Amanda had also heard mutterings that before he had fallen from grace his security detail had had to cover up some of his more unsavoury activities more than once.
‘I’d rather meet Walters first, if I’m going to be his two IC,’ Amanda told them. Again there was the exchange of looks. ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ Amanda demanded. Since New York she hadn’t really cared about her career. This was the first break she’d had since her demotion. She was looking forward to working with her old team again, because she felt that she’d taken the time to train them up into something better than the rest of the grunts and toy soldiers that CELL employed. Largely, however, she just wanted to coast until she could cobble together some kind of retirement plan. Though with the constant changes to the terms and conditions of what could laughingly be called her contract, retirement seemed to be getting further and further away.
‘Seriously Amanda, Asher makes things difficult for people who don’t do as he says, could you just talk to him first?’ Alan said. Amanda didn’t like the tone of his voice. He sounded beaten.
‘Is everyone alright?’ Amanda asked as she shouldered both her kit bags. Another look was exchanged. ‘Okay, tell me right now.’
‘It’s Sam,’ Mikey said. Mikey was a tough guy. He had been a military police officer in the British army, a close protection specialist, but he sounded upset. Sam had been the youngest member of her team. She had been forever playing catch-up. Unlike most of them she had come straight from civvie street. What she had lacked in competence she had more than made up for with being likeable, and she had been improving. At the time that Amanda had been removed from command of the team Sam had been showing a great deal of promise and had acquitted herself well, or as well as any of them had, in New York. Amanda felt her stomach drop. She wasn’t going to cry — she had learned long ago to never show weakness in front of others. When she got the chance she’d kill a bottle of vodka on her own and cry then. It was easier that way.
‘What happened?’ she asked controlling her emotions. Mikey and Alan said nothing. The other two contractors would not meet her eyes. ‘Was it down here?’
‘You need to speak to Asher.’ Alan said. ‘He’s… er… well, he’s dealing with this morning’s situation.’ Amanda looked between the two of them. She felt her blood run cold.
‘Are there active Ceph down here?’ she demanded. There was no answer. She slumped against the metal cage of the elevator. The nightmare visions of New York that she had tried to ignore returned stronger than ever. Contractors from other teams blowing away those affected by the Rapture, the Manhattan Virus. Seeing her brother, infected. Half her team dead, torn apart by armoured aliens, and somehow this had all happened in her home town.
She wanted to tell them to get everyone out. Fill the caves with CELL spec ops teams or, better yet, flush the tunnels with fire. She knew from bitter experience that Hargreave-Rasch Biomedical, the parent company of Crynet Enforcement and Local Logistics, invested an awful lot more in its interest in the Ceph technology than it did in its personnel.
Dr Herman Asher found himself appalled at the appearance of the new head of security for the dig. The wiry-looking African-American woman’s hair had been shaved into some kind of Mohawk that had then been braided. Both ears were extensively pierced and she had a plug in the left. Her nose had a stud in it. She had on combat boots and bloused fatigue trousers and her CELL issue body armour, but the body armour was hanging open and he could see a white t-shirt. The t-shirt had the words London Calling and the Clash written on it, along with a picture of a man smashing a guitar on the ground. She had a tatty old long coat over the top of her body armour.
‘Miss Cross, what is the meaning of your appearance?’ Asher demanded.
‘Punk rock,’ Amanda told the bespectacled, grossly fat, piggy-looking dig supervisor. She had been thirteen years old when she had snuck into CBGBs on the Bowery in the Lower East Side for the club’s final ever gig. After New York, once she had realised that her career was over and she didn’t much care, she’d decided to go back to her old style. It reminded her that she had a personality outside of CELL. Right now, however, Amanda was more concerned with the twisted body of Lieutenant Commander John Walters that was lying on the floor of Site D.
Walters’ head had been twisted around a full hundred and eighty degrees. His chest cavity was a ruin. It looked like something had punched him in the rib cage, very hard. She reached into one of her holdalls and found a pair of surgical gloves and a pen. She inspected Walters’ chest wound and confirmed what she had expected.
‘He would have died from the blow to the chest but he was killed when his head was twisted around. Mikey, check the Grendel.’
Mikey pulled off his standard-issue gloves, which could leave fibrous trace on the assault rifle lying close to Walters, and pulled on the surgical gloves that Amanda handed him. He checked the magazine.
‘We’ve got six rounds missing,’ Mikey told her. It tallied with the spent casings on the ground. Amanda had a look around the small cave. There were at least three tunnels coming into it. Much of the cave floor had been chipped away and they were standing in trenches embedded with the alien technology.
Amanda looked at how the body had fallen and then around the cave. She pointed towards one of the tunnel entrances.
‘Alan, check around there, see if you can find the impacts.’ Alan switched on the flashlight attached to the mounting rail on the side of his Grendel assault rifle and went over to check the area Amanda had indicated.
‘I expect you to conform to basic CELL grooming standards at the very least,’ Dr Asher told her.
‘So?’ Amanda asked distractedly.
‘I beg your pardon?’ Dr Asher asked, feeling himself getting angry. Amanda sighed and looked up at the scientist. She didn’t think she was going to like the man. She had always wondered about people like him. Why would they try and make life difficult for people who were more than capable of beating the shit out of them? The piggy little scientist was flanked by two more of the security detail. One of them was Safiya, who’d worked with Amanda before. Safiya was third generation French/Algerian. She had been a police officer in Marseilles. The other guard was a weedy-looking buck toothed guy she didn’t recognise.