Jill nodded. “I’m familiar with the town. It’s on the border of my region, but I’m not aware of anything going on there.”
“Correct. It’s actually Wohlreich’s. He sent a scout team to investigate.”
“It’s still near my zone of control,” Jill said, sticking her finger into the monitor. This ground her gears to no end. The Keeper was an old-school leader, having honed her skills during the Cold War, and still believed that the only person who needed to know everything was her. Everyone else had to know just enough to stay out of trouble or help in a pinch.
“Typical Keeper. How infuriating.”
There is a reason why clandestine ops are called that.
That wasn’t how Jill ran her operations in the Pacific Northwest. She made sure all her people had high-level information about what everyone else was doing, and those within a hundred kilometers of each other were updated every three days. It was an administrative slog that led to long meetings, and several of her operatives had balked at first, thinking the tedious intel unnecessary. They changed their minds when they realized the usefulness of being interconnected, knowing what a team nearby was doing, or even calling for support if a problem arose. Jill’s region eventually became one of the most well-run on the planet.
“I would have appreciated Wohlreich notifying me as a courtesy,” said Jill.
“Well, you’re being informed now,” the Keeper continued. “It should have been a pretty standard mission. They’ve been surveying the town for a few weeks. Their host commander, Prie, was detected and injured in a firefight. Unfortunately, Wohlreich has most of his resources occupied right now dealing with the fracking sites in Montana and Wyoming, so it falls upon you to help the team out. I’m transmitting the details now.”
Jill skimmed the mission report. “Looks serious. Need an extraction?”
“No. We are sending in a new host commander to finish the job. You’ll need to send escorts to accompany the new host commander and reinforce the scout team’s ranks. Also, the last report yesterday was that Prie was too injured to move. Send your doctor as well and see if we can stabilize and prep him for transport.”
“All right,” Jill said slowly. “I’ll look over the breakdown.” She checked a list off to the side. “My guys are stretched kind of thin right now. If you need a couple guys for an extended period of time, I’m not sure how many men I can cobble together, especially if we need to get Rin moved safely to the next Underground Railroad station.” She looked up at the Keeper. “I can assign Roen, my doctor, and maybe one more. That’s it.”
The Keeper nodded. “Make it a priority. We don’t know how long Prie will last, and the nearest Prophus medical facility is two days’ journey from Ontario. The new host commander will fill you in when he arrives at your base. He should be there by this evening.”
“Who is he?”
The Keeper paused, and then began to chuckle. “Oh, I just realized. This is just too good. Sometimes, karma’s an absolute bitch, and her name is Meredith.”
Jill didn’t like the sound of this. “Excuse me, Keeper?”
The Keeper told her the rest of the mission parameters. Jill’s face turned sheet white as she added one and one and came up with “oh, fuck.”
“Oh fuck is right,” the Keeper chortled. “Personal issues aside. Get this done. These are the two most important operations on your slate. I know I can depend on you. Command out.”
The screen turned black. Jill sat there for the next few minutes and tried to piece together the right words to say. Then she examined her personnel and tried to reassign agents or pull someone, anyone, off a job. In the end, there was only one clear way forward, one that she was not looking forward to.
“Fuck it, they’re professionals,” she muttered. “It’ll work. I hope.”
“Hey, Jill,” Roen’s voice popped over the comm. “Freezer two’s broken down. Everything inside’s melted.”
Jill clicked over. “Move what you can to freezer one and three, and I guess we’ll have whatever is in two for dinner.”
“Hot damn, twenty pizzas for dinner tonight. I’ve died and gone to -”
Jill closed the channel and rubbed her temples. “We are so screwed.”
She couldn’t even figure out how to break this to Roen, let alone send him on this job. The whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen. At least she had a few hours before this evening. Maybe if she framed it in such a way that he could calm down before…
The external perimeter alarm dinged. Hurley, their next door neighbor and agent manning the surveillance grid, buzzed over the comm system. “You’ve got company, Jill. Single signature inbound. Pass phrases accepted.”
So much for giving him an early warning. Well, at least the pizzas were already thawed.
8 Clandestine Op
Timestamp: 2622
Not gonna lie; the realization that I lost Tao broke me. I was distraught for months. Angry. Moody. So in shock that I questioned if I was even alive. After all, a Quasing couldn’t leave a host until death. So how did this happen?
When I found out that he had moved to Cameron, I was thrilled and mortified at the same time. At least my friend was still close. I had feared him dead. On the other hand, I was angry at him for choosing my boy. I wanted better for my son than this war. I wanted him to grow up and live a normal life where he wouldn’t get shot at. Instead, he was going to follow in my footsteps, and it made me hate myself and Tao for it.
The stack of thawing pizzas in Roen’s arms was taller than his head. It made walking up the narrow staircase from the safe house to the farmhouse a little tricky. He wondered how many of these pizzas he could handle by himself. Tao had weaned him off this food-of-the-gods early in his tenure as a Prophus, but like a first love, pizza would always be near and dear to his heart.
He whistled as he bounded into the kitchen and piled the pizzas in two neat stacks. With only four ovens, it would take a while to cook everything. That suited him just fine. For once, in the name of not wasting food, he was honor-bound to eat pizza for the next three days. Two if he tried really hard.
“Roen,” Jill called over the comm. “I need you in the living room.”
Jill was using that voice again. She had used it once in a while before they were married, much more often after they were married and had separated, and all the time now that they were back together and she was his direct superior. Well, if there was one thing he had learned over the years…
“Happy wife, happy life,” he chirped cheerfully, strolling out of the kitchen. The house was divided into small rooms, intentionally compartmentalized to create choke points in case of an attack. He walked through the living room, family room, sitting room, and finally to the room Roen referred to as the coating room, where the front door was. Jill and Hurley were already there, speaking to their visitor, who had his back to him. Roen walked closer and extended his hand, and then his mouth fell.
The man turned and exclaimed. “Oh hello, Roen. My, there seems to be a lot more of you. Are you well?”
“Marco!” he choked.
At that very moment, he nearly drew his sidearm. He had to remind himself several times that they were on the same side. This was one of the few instances that Tao not being in his head was helpful, since Tao hated Marco’s Quasing, Ahngr, more than he hated most Genjix, and Tao’s hatred for the Genjix was legendary.
“It’d be a lie if I said it’s good to see you, but no need to be uncivil about it, eh?” Marco smiled with those oh-so-perfect teeth.