Hey, true believers! Incredibly enough, we're actually back with another one. And yeah, we're just outright replacing Jaime's plotline on the way to the episode climax here. So, enjoy!
Lunch in Wolf Creek's lively cafeteria had seen Jaime and Captain Ginsburg mostly alone, though not for lack of traffic. And even after an hour with Ginsburg in a classroom hearing about the incredibly exciting topic of 'field operations procedures', Jaime still wasn't sure what to make of him. He certainly wasn't cheerleading for Berkut, but he showed up for work, didn't he? She took it all in, gathered her observations and said nothing more. The cafeteria line was nothing if not efficient: people passed through to get their personalized takeout boxes, fill their pockets from a pallet of energy drinks and maybe grab a pizza box from one of three stacks. The chatter was low-key but constant, talking about a dozen different things Jaime knew nothing about. Whether or not this was normal, Jaime didn't know, but it didn't seem to bother Ginsburg, so she focused on her own lunch.
The crowd wasn't much lighter outside of the cafeteria either. The lunch rush had clearly brought a lot more people out of their hiding spots than the single central elevator could handle, creating a line at the walkway. Jaime looked at the faces and ignored the voice whispering all their names in her ear faster than she could process them. She chanced a look at the walls for a moment. Concrete and metal, no artwork or flowers.
Eventually they managed to get to the front of the line at the elevator. Ginsburg had yet to reach for the call button when the doors opened to reveal two soldiers already inside. Both were dressed in black jumpsuits, having abandoned the pretense of Army fatigues Ginsburg still wore. One of them had a strong nose and grown-out black hair with a shock of purple dye in it; Sergeant First Class Adolpho Sagabaen, US Army (ret) whispered the voice in Jaime's head. She glanced at the other, who sported brown eyes, a hint of a mustache and a shorn head. Staff Sergeant Tomás Calavera, US Army (ret) the voice continued.
"Ops?" Ginsburg asked as he entered and Jaime followed, noting how Calavera stared at her just a bit too long.
"Did the dancing shoes give it away?" Sagabaen replied. He smiled, then gave Jaime a once-over as the doors closed behind her. "Hey, new meat," he said.
"Sage," Calavera coughed.
"What?" Sagabaen countered.
"She has a name," Calavera said.
"Sorry," Sagabaen said. "My memory don't work so good. Took a header from a helo in the sandbox. That's probably it."
"What Adolpho means is that we're glad to see you back on your feet," Ginsburg finally weighed in. "Speaking of, this wiseass here is Adolpho and I'm gonna keep calling him that because 'Sage' is trying way too hard."
"You're just bitter there are no good nicks for your WASP-ass name, Captain," Sagabaen said. He nodded to Jaime. "Sommers, right? Call me Sage. All the cool kids do."
Calavera rolled his eyes. "Hey," he said to Jaime. "Tomás Calavera." After a moment, he held out his hand to shake.
Jaime shook his hand with a nod. "You all work with Antoine?"
"We do," Calavera confirmed.
"And love every doorkickin' minute," Sagabaen added.
"Where's Jordan?" Ginsburg asked.
"Where do you think?" Sagabaen said. "Ten minutes early is five minutes late in the Navy."
"You coming with?" Calavera asked, glancing first at Jaime, then to Ginsburg.
"No, she's not," Ginsburg said. "Boss wanted us there for her tech breakdown so we know what she's packing."
"They didn't tell you already?" Sagabaen said.
"Doc Anthros did," Calavera said. "We're doing it again in Plain English."
"Sounds good to me," Sagabaen said, then looked to Jaime again. "So, what unit did they kidnap you from?"
"Hmm?" Jaime asked, looking to Sagabaen.
"Where'd you serve?" Calavera asked.
"I wasn't in the military before…all this," Jaime said.
"Your three letters, then," Sagabaen said.
"What?" Jaime asked.
Silence fell over the elevator. Calavera looked to Sage, who stared down at Jaime, then to Ginsburg, who nodded.
"...fuck," Calavera said. "You mean, like, straight off the street? How the hell -"
"Need to know," Ginsburg cut in. "She was on the list. That's all I got."
"So nothing," Sagabaen said. "That's cool. Big blank page in the same elevator cab as me - except she's definitely not DoD or DoJ, so either she's the whitest Muj I've ever seen or they crammed their death machine shit into some random civvie. We shake hands, chances are I'm pulling back a bloody stump."
Jaime's heart sank down to her ankles. "...what?"
"Yeah, fuck me," Sagabean said, "Corvus was out cold after they finished chopping her up and the second she woke up she shattered Smythe's wrist and almost punched his damn face off - while drugged up enough to kill a rhino -"
"Cool it," Ginsburg said. "Nobody's hurting anyone here. Sommers isn't Corvus. End of discussion."
"Yeah, no shit," Sagabaen continued, "Corvus was at least trained to fight. Robot Spice here probably doesn't know how strong she is if she's not at a carnival -"
"I said, end of discussion," Ginsburg cut in.
"...Sir," Calavera said.
"Sage?" Ginsburg said.
"Got it, Captain," Sagabaen said. "Just good to know what we're in for."
Jaime, on the other hand, was all of a sudden much less certain what she was in for. One-armed pull-ups was one thing, but literally ripping people apart - and without even meaning to? She looked down at her right hand as her mind started to spin - what had they done to her? On that cheery thought, the elevator finally chimed its arrival at the destination level.
"Game faces, everyone," Ginsburg said. He stepped aside from the opening doors. Calavera and Sagabaen pushed through the middle and hurried onto the walkway. Jaime followed behind, her arms crossed in front of her as she tried to put what Sagabaen had told her out of her mind.
Even from half a walkway's distance, Jaime could hear Calavera open the door to Operations - first the small beep of the electronic lock admitting them, then almost immediately the din from inside as soon as the door was cracked open even a bit. While Sagabaen went on ahead, Calavera stopped there, holding the door for her. He didn't meet her eyes. Jaime tried not to let anything show on her face as she took one more deep breath to try to calm her racing thoughts - didn't work, but at least she tried.
Like most rooms in Wolf Creek, Operations felt too small, despite room enough for a row of desks to each side and a little platform with a semicircular desk on it. That held a total of six monitors on it, attached in turn to a thick bundle of cables running up to a plenum riser hanging from the ceiling. About half of the side desks were manned, though Jaime couldn't imagine the noise when every workstation was in use. One of the soldiers there swiveled his chair and looked up at Ginsburg, who favored him with a quick nod. PO1 Michael Jordan, US Navy (ret), the voice whispered to Jaime.
"Sommers!" came a call from the man at the center desk. Jaime's look jumped back to focus on him. Despite his short hair and close shave, he looked nothing like the soldiers everywhere else. "Almost right on time," he said before turning around in his chair. "I'm Ambrose. Nathan Ambrose. We spoke earlier? Come on up." He turned back to the screens without waiting for her reply. "We have about fifteen minutes for the brief. I'll get right into it, if that's all right with you?"
"...yes," Jaime said. She ended up standing next to Ginsburg, about ten feet from the desk.
"Then let's go," Nathan said. "All right, everybody, listen up. This is what we're calling the Augmentation Operator Orientation, freakin' short version 1.0."
He waved his right hand towards the middle set of screens. The top one was almost empty, while the bottom one showed a dense array of various little windows. Boxes with rapidly changing numbers and little color-coded bar graphs surrounded a central window with a terse transcript in it. Jaime glanced at the last line of the text.
Nathan Ambrose: freaking[?] short version one point oh
"This is how I'm looking at Miss Sommers, as Operations," Nathan said. As he spoke, the transcript kept filling in with a delay of a few seconds. "I monitor her vitals, her position, the status of the various systems -"
"And what I'm hearing," Jaime cut in, anger cutting through the swirling anxiety in her head as Nathan's every word was transcribed on the screen in front of her. Everything she said and heard, every discussion in confidence with Will, every moment of every conversation for the rest of her life, logged and filed away for them to see. The room fell quiet except for the hum of the air ducts.
"...yes, that's, uh," Nathan tried, quieter now. "Look, I don't want to beat around the bush, this wasn't built with privacy in mind. Your sensors…your ear is always listening, always recording…and while you've got a network connection, it's transmitting to us."
The silence came back. Nathan stared ahead.
"Your eye, too," he added, wincing at his own words. "Not a live feed, though."
"Small favors," Jaime said.
"Limited bandwidth," Nathan admitted. "I'd…like to move on now."
He tapped a few keys on his keyboard - one of two, Jaime noted - and the two leftmost monitors switched to displaying a schematic view of a human body, overlaid with colored markings over much of it.
"This is the hardware," he said, loud enough to address the whole room. "Shouldn't be news to any of you at this point. What Miss Sommers needs to know is, now that you have it, what can you do with it, yeah?" He turned to face her again, but she had drifted to the back of the group, peering at the monitors almost between the soldiers in front of her.
"Hey," Jordan said to her from the side. "Nice to meet you."
"...same," Jaime muttered.
Nathan leaned over to look around the men standing between Jaime and himself. "You, uh, need me to zoom into anything?"
"No," Jaime said, eyes locked on the image.
The legs - her legs - were tinged completely in orange all the way up to her hips. Further splotches of orange crept all over her ribcage, solidifying into a solid block around her right shoulder. The right arm was all colored in as well. Individual strands of orange snaked up her vertebrae, then there was a jigsaw-looking border cutting diagonally through her head, showing the replacement eye, ear and skull plate.
"It's pretty awesome work," Nathan commented. "As you can see, integration is almost seamless."
"Good osteoprosthetic anchorage," Jordan added. "That healed up very nicely."
"Uh huh," Jaime said, circling the back of the group. "And…the strength?"
"Right," Nathan said. A few more taps on the keyboard made the view rotate until it showed the base of her skull, with an orange spider clamped around the connection to her spine. "Kinetic feedback loop. It moderates all motoric nerve activation. It has a curve to it, so your intuition about how strong you're directing any one movement should still be fine, but there's a lot more headroom now. It's like you've been driving a Pacer in second gear your whole life and now you're in the driver's seat of a Bugatti. Mr. Kim's gonna train you how to use the higher power band safely. You put the pedal all the way down, though, you're gonna do some serious damage."
Jaime crossed her arms over her belly. That is, her arm, and the…the other one. It felt warmer than hers.
"Like, I don't know, punch someone hard enough that they need a new face?" Sagabaen asked. "Does this Bugatti of yours have any brakes?"
"Well," Nathan tried, "the best thing to actually do is not to stress about it. Stay relaxed."
"How?" Jaime said. "If people are trying to kill me."
"She's right," Ginsburg said. "Whatever the bionics can do in theory doesn't matter if she can't use them safely. I don't think we're good to go until you fix that."
"...'kay, let's define 'fix'," Nathan said, turning back to the computer. "Like, I can't make the titanium strike surface on the knuckles softer, but what I can do is put a limiter on the headroom so you top out at your natural strength. We'll just have to manually unlock it when you want to do training."
"Or when she's working," Sagabaen said. "With us right next to her. That's how this is going down, yeah?"
He stared at her, daring her to say something, to make even one move. Jaime's mouth felt dry. She had something to say, she knew she did, but it all seemed to come unstuck in her head before she even got one word out. She kept looking at him, kept trying, but it wasn't working. Everyone was looking at her now.
"We're going to make this work, together," Ginsburg cut in. "Now cool your jets."
Sage kept looking at Jaime. "That an order, Captain?"
"No," Ginsburg said. "Because if it is, Sagabaen, that means I'm pulling your fitness report and you'll be restricted to quarters until you get an all-clear from Truewell - again. So you take your chances with Sommers or the shrink. Your call."
"...Sir," Sagabaen said.
"Are we good?" Ginsburg asked.
Sagabaen finally looked at him. "We're good," he said.
"One time," Jordan whispered, so quiet only Jaime heard him. "Just one damn time."
"Dismissed," Ginsburg said. "Get in gear. FRAGO in ten, wheels up in twenty. You can catch up on the augment brief on your own time."
Sagabaen said nothing further, but his vacant look told Jaime that being told off hardly registered with him. Still, he turned and walked out, Calavera mouthing a 'Sorry' to her before he followed.
"Looking forward to working with you," Jordan added.
"Yes, me too," Jaime replied, more on politeness autopilot than anything else as her eyes stayed locked on the screen.
"I'll talk to them," Ginsburg said. "Let's get back to the orientation."
"Sure," Nathan said. A few more taps and the display of the bionics zoomed to a frontal view of Jaime's head, slowly rotating to the side to show off the extent of the skull replacement and the bionic eye connecting to some small blocky shapes nestled against her brain. "Ocular prosthesis," Nathan continued. "8x optical zoom, 32x digital. Squint at whatever you want to see closer. Your brain already directs your eyes to aim at whatever you want to focus on so the hardware doesn't have to guess. And it just keeps going until you relax your eye muscles again. If you unfocus, it zooms out again. Bit tricky to get the hang of, I guess. Do you want that locked, too?"
The view on the screen had turned all the way to the side and now began its rotation to a top view. As it did so, the orange highlights of the components faded, and instead there was yellow. Fine lines, running everywhere, deep into her brain and through it. Jaime's throat seized up, her mouth hanging open just a bit. She didn't breathe. They were in her head. The display pulled apart layer by layer, like sliding out a stack of transparencies. Each little slice had a number in the top right corner.
Ocular Prosthetic 3%
Aural Prosthetic 5%
Neural Interface .5%
Stabilization Controls 3.5%
Brainstem Replacement 1.5%
Organic Tissue 86.5%
The display showed little pulses of activity, parts of her brain lighting up for microseconds. Or being made to light up. Faster now, a flicker that the screen struggled to keep up with. Involuntarily her eyes flicked to the transcript, anywhere but the ghoulish dissection of what was left of her.
Nathan Ambrose: integration with your nervous[?] system is almost perfect uh I mean you're walking talking right all that stuff no problem yeah
His gibberish became a drone in her ears and every muscle in her tensed, storing energy for…what? What was happening to her, what did they do to her, are these even her thoughts she's thinking right now, what is this -
Silence.
Everything is under control.
She blinked, leisurely, as the tension flowed out of her and her breathing resumed. A nice, orderly beat came from her heart. Everything was quiet now inside her, so nice and quiet. She opened her eyes and saw that Ginsburg was in front of her. He looked…tired? Her eyes flicked to Nathan, staring straight ahead at his screens. Buried in his work, most likely; she'd figured out that much about him in those few minutes.
"Sommers?" Ginsburg asked. "Are you…okay?"
Jaime smiled. "Yeah, I'm fine." She closed her eyes again, took in a deep breath, and let it out. Her head felt like it was lost in the fog as her arms dropped slack to her side, but she was fine. Everything is under control. "Feel like I just took a big nap all of a sudden. What were we talking about?" She looked back at the screen. "Oh, yeah, the eye."
"...the eye, right," Nathan said. "Okay, so." He took a breath. "The sensor is also sensitive to near-infrared -"
Jaime heard the door to the hallway open. More precisely, she heard the clicking of the lock, a slight gasp of air as the overpressure outside pushed in, the squeak of the hinge and finally the distant drone of the environmental controls from the central shaft. She turned to look, spotting Jonas Bledsoe coming in. His chest was heaving a bit, nostrils flaring, but he kept his composure. For a second of silence, he stared at her, looked her up and down. Then it seemed like he had seen what he wanted to see, and a bit of tension faded from his posture.
"Where are we at with the operator briefing, Ginsburg?" he asked.
Nathan sucked in some air but stopped himself before speaking.
"We were just talking about the bionic eye, Sir," Ginsburg said.
"Good," Bledsoe said. He looked to Jaime. "Everything clear so far, Miss Sommers? Any questions?"
Jaime paused for a moment as her thoughts seemed like they were stuck in tar. What was he talking about? "No, Sir," Jaime said as she shook her head. "No questions."
He looked her over again. "That's what I like to hear," he said, giving her a slight nod. "Helo's waiting for you, Ginsburg. I'll have Ambrose send the rest of the brief to your mission tablets. See that your team is read up before you stand down today."
"Sir," Ginsburg said, "Miss Sommers -"
"I've got it from here, Captain," Bledsoe said. "You have your orders."
"Understood, Sir," Ginsburg said, and exited the control room.
Bledsoe waited for the door to close behind Ginsburg, and Jaime waited for him.
"That's the problem with saving the world," Bledsoe mused. "Never enough people to go around." He turned to look back at Jaime. "It's time I brought you up to speed on the situation, Miss Sommers."
"Uh, Sir, the briefing…" Ambrose said.
"Pick that up another time," Bledsoe said. "Give me the latest aerial from Paradise on 1 and our findings on 2."
Nathan demurred; a few more keystrokes closed out the schematic of the bionics and instead brought up new views. On the top-left screen was a slowly moving overhead shot of buildings and roads in a desert; none of the cars in sight moved. The bottom-left screen scrolled through a list of names, almost half of them with a "CONFIRMED" behind them.
"One of my nightmares," Bledsoe said. He gave Jaime a few seconds to take it all in. "There's been an attack on American soil. 142 dead people and they never even saw it coming. God knows I don't want to be the press secretary at the White House now." He took a deep breath. "We have reason to believe this was just a prelude to something much worse. Our field analysis of the attack vector indicates the use of advanced nanotechnology to spread a lethal chemical agent. We don't know how it works, we don't know where it came from, but if our estimates are even in the same zip code as the capability we're dealing with here, the next attack could eradicate a whole city." He took another breath. "But there won't be a next attack. We won't let it happen."
Jaime took a deep breath, trying to get her head to stop swimming. Why was she feeling so foggy all of a sudden? "What…what do you need from me?"
"We think we've narrowed down the weapon's origin to a set of shipments that arrived at the Port of Oakland six days ago," Bledsoe explained. "The electronic trail after that did not check out. We have specialists working the digital angle but I don't expect results there. As long as you have people in the loop, they're the most obvious weak point. I expect someone falsified the papers on site. That calls for some old-fashioned legwork, what we call HUMINT - human intelligence. And that's where you come in."
Jaime finally broke through the fog enough to narrow her eyes at Bledsoe. "I'm not a spy."
He turned and met her eyes. "I am aware of that, Miss Sommers, but I can't spare anyone else and getting another agency involved will cost time we don't have right now. I hate to say it but you're the only option we have. There's no combat, no risk, you're just going down to the docks to ask some questions. We'll drop you off with a suit and a badge. Your job is to find out whatever you can about the shipments. Ambrose will advise you from here." He sighed - more in frustration than exhaustion. "I am asking you to do this to save lives. I think that's something we can both agree is worthwhile."
"I suppose I can't argue with that," Jaime replied.