“Let’s not exaggerate,” Nada said. “He hasn’t proved his worth yet.” He paused in his search and fixed Ivar with his gaze. “Newbies tend to have a high casualty rate.”
Moms pressed on. “We don’t do rank; we don’t do titles; we don’t do medals or badges or any of that stuff. Doc there”—Moms indicated him—“has five PhDs, right?”
“Right,” Doc said.
“And he’ll tell you all about them if you give him the chance,” Moms said.
“Lucky you,” Nada said.
“You know something about Rifts—” Moms began, but Nada jumped in.
“He even has some theories on them.”
“—but we have more missions than just Rifts,” Moms continued. “Nuclear, chemical, biological incidents are not uncommon.”
“Meaning we get called out on them a lot,” Nada said. “Hate the nuke ones,” he added. “Especially the nuke ones. Especially the last nuke one.”
“Doc will tell you about the Acme list,” Moms said. “They’re our on-call specialists.”
“‘Always listen to experts,’” Nada quoted. “‘They’ll tell you what can’t be done and why. Then do it.’ I wish that was an original Nada Yada, but Heinlein got to it first. You know Heinlein?”
Ivar nodded. “I’ve read all—”
Nada cut him off at the book. “Great. Eagle will love you for that, but you didn’t know who Harvey was, so you’re still on the short end of that stick. You’re never going to know more than Eagle, so the sooner you accept that, the better for you. Even Doc don’t know more than Eagle.”
Moms cut in. “Doc will fill you in on what we know about Rifts and the history of them. Stuff you’re never going to find on the Internet.”
“If you had, we’d have sent Roland to cut your head off,” Nada said, “and shove it in a safe.” He waited for Moms to continue but she leaned back in her chair, the old springs protesting loudly. She looked tired; hell, Nada thought, they were all tired. Maybe Ms. Jones was right. They needed a reboot. Burns being free bothered Nada and he knew he wouldn’t be able to “relax” or really think of much else until they took him down, but orders were orders.
Moms opened a drawer and took out an acetated notebook. She tossed it to Ivar. “That’s the team Protocol. You had protocols in your lab at the university, correct? Rules you followed?”
“Yes,” Ivar said.
“That’s our Bible. You’re going to get a lot of information thrown at you in the next few days—”
“Literally,” Nada said, hefting a thick binder.
Moms closed her eyes again as she rattled off a few of her favorites. “In the beginning of the Protocol is my philosophy. You can read it, but let me summarize the important stuff right now, so we start off on the right foot. Be honest. Always. Don’t hide bad news. I’m the team leader, but there will be times when you’ll have to make decisions on your own. If you have to, make the decision and act decisively.”
Nada nodded. “In Ranger school, they teach you that doing something, anything, is better than standing around with your finger up your butt in the kill zone. They call it the kill zone for a reason. We tend to enter a lot of places that would be considered kill zones. Don’t stand in it and do nothing.”
Doc spoke up. “Unless it’s best to do nothing at the moment. It depends on the situation.”
“Ain’t your briefing, Doc,” Nada said without any rancor, but that shut Doc up.
Moms reached into the same drawer and tossed Ivar a leather badge case. “For cover, you’re a senior field agent for the FBI—”
Nada snorted. “No one’s going to buy that cover, Moms. Look at him. They might have toughened him up a bit at Bragg, but he still looks like a geek.”
“The badge is real and the ID card is real,” Moms said. She looked at Ivar. “Plus, the FBI does have some geeks in it. You act like you’re the real deal, they’ll believe you. Most everyone you have to deal with is a big believer in the system. That badge puts you way up in the system. Someone thinks they outrank you, you point them in my direction.”
“No one outranks her,” Nada threw in. “If they think they do, then we might have to kill them.”
“Which leads me to this,” Moms continued. “Discipline stays on the team. I report to Ms. Jones and she reports to someone, but we’ll kill you before we let you go off the reservation. We should have killed Burns.”
Even Nada looked surprised at that, but he nodded. “Once a Nightstalker, always a Nightstalker.”
“You have to die to get off the team?” Ivar asked, ready to believe just about anything at this point.
Moms shook her head. “No. People move on to other things. Usually when they’re no longer capable of fieldwork, they go into Support. Colonel Orlando was once a team member.”
“Ended up having a bit of a problem.” Nada gestured with his thumb, indicating a drinker. “But he’s still a good man. We’ve got other ex-team members doing important stuff in Support. Just ’cause you’re a leg or an eyeball short doesn’t mean you can’t be useful.”
“Be on time,” Moms said. She gave a triumphant smile at Nada as she remembered the right order for her ending. “And last, and most important, we are ultimately accountable for the survival of the human race. That trumps the law, national borders, family, everything. Nada?”
“Any op we go on,” Nada said, “has three possible classifications: dry, damp, and wet. Dry is something we contain and want to study. Doesn’t pose a threat. Doesn’t happen often. If it wasn’t a threat in the first place, why the hell would we get Zevoned?” Nada asked, his frustration seeping through.
“Don’t go all Eagle on me,” Moms said.
Nada collected himself. “Okay, then there’s damp, which means it’s to be contained, and if we can’t contain it, we break it. Rare also. Finally, most missions are wet. We contain it until we can completely destroy it. Rifts and Fireflies are always wet.”
“‘Always’?” Ivar repeated with a questioning inflection, causing both Moms and Nada to look at him hard.
“What do you mean?” Nada asked.
Ivar pointed at himself. “I’m here. Wasn’t the mission at UNC a wet one?”
“It was,” Nada said.
“Then why am I still alive?”
“Good question,” Nada said. “Want me to kill you?”
“We needed you,” Moms said. “You reversed the Rift and shut it. You were on our side.”
Ivar shrugged. “Okay. Not that I’m complaining or anything.”
Nada shook it off and grabbed the stack of binders he’d been piling up. He gave them to Ivar, one at a time. “Nuclear Protocol. Biological. Chemical.” He grabbed another binder but paused. “We work under the three Cs — containment, concealment, and control. Containment, first and always. We lose containment, we’re fucked and sometimes the world could get fucked.”
“So this Burns guy…?” Ivar said.
“Yeah,” Nada admitted. “We lost containment. But we maintained concealment. Ms. Jones covered up the Snake going down by saying it was an experimental military aircraft on a training mission. Support got the wreckage out before daylight. We used our badges at the Gateway Arch to take the murder away from the locals and get the body out of there. Concealment is important because panic is a bad thing. Remember War of the Worlds? H. G. Wells? Sometimes, next to the armed locals, our biggest problem is the media.” Nada nodded toward the door. “They’ve been all over Area 51’s perimeter along with the alien and conspiracy theory wackos for a long time. Which is why we moved out here.
“Last, and most importantly,” Nada said, “is control. That’s where dry, damp, or wet come in. Pretty much it’s always wet.”