“I’m comfortable with my faith, sir.”
“Okay,” said St. George with a nod. “Max, the guy inside the demon, was a sorcerer. An honest-to-God, Harry Potter-sorcerer. As he explained it to me, he trapped the demon with a special medallion he made. Or in the medallion.” The hero shrugged. “I wasn’t clear on that part. Anyway, sometimes demons possess people and make them do evil things. He figured out a way to possess a demon and force it to do good things.”
They started walking again while Freedom mulled over the facts. “He died near the end of the outbreak, didn’t he, sir?”
“Yeah, he did. But we all know dying doesn’t mean what it used to. His ex was part of the group that attacked the Mount last fall. Which is how I got this.” He tapped the five-inch fang again.
“So he was…what, a zombie demon?”
“Yeah. Sounds silly, I know.”
“You beat him?”
St. George shrugged. “I cheated a bit, but yeah.”
“And the medallion, sir? What happened to that?”
He studied Freedom’s face. It was a firm face, but an honest one. “Destroyed,” said St. George. “I crushed it myself. The demon’s gone for good. So’s Max.”
The captain nodded. “Let’s hope so.”
The hero looked at him again.
“As you said, sir, dying doesn’t mean what it used to. Your friends are in here.”
They’d reached an oversized garage. Or maybe a small hangar. St. George held out his hand again. “Thanks for the escort.”
“Of course, sir. I believe the colonel arranged dinner with Doctor Morris and Stealth at twenty-thirty hours. I’m sure you’re invited as well.”
He batted some dust from the sleeve of his flight jacket. “I don’t think I’m dinner-ready.”
Freedom smiled. “Good thing you’ve got a new coat then, sir,” he said. “Wash up, shake the dust out, you’ll be fine.”
“Thanks, again.”
“One other thing. Your friends have some news for you. We agreed it’s best they tell you, but I hope you’ll see where we were coming from.”
“Okay,” said St. George. He looked at the honest face again. “That doesn’t sound too ominous at all.”
* * *
St. George hefted the three hundred-pound array of armored plates. “And you say they’ve got over a thousand of these…what, ex-soldiers?”
“At least,” Danielle said from inside the half-disassembled armor. “I did a sweep before we came back inside. Four other buildings in this section of the base have the same overpowered cooling units, and I saw two more near the far side. At a hundred and fifty per building…” She turned her head back to him and raised her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of exes on this side of the fence.”
He set the back section of the armor down on the work platform, nestling it into the foam cradle. “And this Nest thing makes them docile?”
“It activates enough of their brain to dominate the core behaviors which manifest, yes,” said Stealth. “Or so Sorensen claims.” She was sketching out circuit diagrams.
“If he’s lying he did a great job convincing the exes to fake it for him,” said Danielle.
St. George drifted into the air behind the armor and hooked his arms under Danielle’s shoulders. He lifted her out of the battlesuit and floated down to the ground. She shook out her legs and arms and took a few unsteady steps.
“You okay?”
“Yeah,” she said. “I was only in there a few hours. Barely had time to adjust.” She hobbled across the workshop in her bodysuit, each step more confident, and grabbed a thick power cable. She leaned into it, dragged it back with her, and plugged it into a hidden socket above the armor’s hip. “This is going to suck without Barry here. No quick recharges.”
“Another point for you to consider,” said Stealth. She didn’t look up from her notepad.
“Where are your pistols?”
The cloaked woman shifted her head inside her hood. St. George was looking at her. He pointed at the empty holsters.
“They were seized upon our arrival,” she said. “Standard military protocol for civilian guests, and by their definitions we are civilians.”
“It doesn’t bother you? Being unarmed?”
“It does not. Why do you ask?”
“I ask because I would’ve expected not having them to drive you into a rampage.”
She turned her attention back to her sketch. “Colonel Shelly asked for them to be returned to me. I am satisfied.”
He looked at Danielle. The redhead glanced up from the armored helmet and shrugged. St. George returned the shrug and nodded at the cable. “Where are they getting their power?”
“A large solar farm, three miles to the north-north-west,” said Stealth. She pointed her left hand without looking up from the diagram. “It was visible during our approach in the Black Hawk. No doubt an Armed Forces renewable resource project. I would estimate it provides the base with six to seven times the electricity of our own solar resources.”
“For less than a thousand people,” said St. George. “Not bad.”
“But twice the equipment and resources, at least,” said Danielle. She ran a second cable from the battlesuit’s helmet to her laptop. “It’s not bad, but not good. Definitely not great.” A third cable ran out from the laptop to the armored spine on the back section of the torso. The redhead’s fingers danced across the laptop’s keyboard.
St. George peered over Stealth’s shoulder. “Almost done?”
“I believe so,” she said.
“You did all that from memory?”
“Of course.”
“That’s kind of amazing.”
“Thank you, George.” The cloaked woman set the diagram in front of Danielle.
The redhead stopped typing. “Did you just thank him?”
Stealth straightened up. “Yes. What of it?”
“What’s going on with you? You’ve never thanked me for anything.”
“You have never paid me a compliment.”
“Oh. Yeah, fair enough.” She shrugged and traced the circuit patterns with her eyes. “Like I said before, it’s pretty simple. Just a monitored power source for the organic components.”
“From the slight variations in the two we saw,” said Stealth, “I would reason the Nest units are individually assembled.”
“Makes sense,” said Danielle. “They’ve got raw materials and tools, but not much in the way of actual manufacturing facilities.”
St. George glanced at the diagram. “So what’s bugging you two about this? Isn’t this a good thing?”
“Perhaps,” said the cloaked woman. “However, Cerberus and I were both struck by how simple this technology appears to be.”
“Is that bad?”
“Maybe,” said Danielle. “It’s not like these things do miracles, but they’re right on that edge of being too simple. I’m not skeptical it works because, well…” She jerked her head at the door and the Tombs across the road. “…it does. It’s just hard to believe something so small could do so much. I mean, have you ever seen anything brain-related in a hospital that didn’t need its own cart, at least? Usually its own room?”
Her laptop sang a few bars of Wagner at her. She muttered to herself and slid her fingertip back and forth across the mousepad.
Stealth’s head tilted inside her hood. “Is there a problem?”
Danielle shook her head. “The sensors got a little sluggish after I picked up that jeep. The response time was just off enough that I could feel the lag, but the diagnostics are coming up clean.”
St. George glanced at the legs and half-torso standing on the other side of the work platform. “Do you want to keep working on it?”
“No,” she said, “I want to get some food. Let’s go to this dinner. Might as well thank our saviors and enjoy our first meal as U.S. citizens in ages.” She grabbed her jeans and pulled them up over the Lycra bodysuit.
“Aren’t you going to be hot like that?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Were you wearing it under your clothes when you left this morning?”