Shedding the Demon (31 page)

After a couple of weeks of working all day, snatching bits
of sleep here and there in ten and fifteen minute bunches, and working
feverishly all night, she wore herself down. One night after falling asleep on
her feet while walking across the lab, she dropped a test tube and lost a few
hours of work. Angry at first, she finally decided she needed to take a break.
A couple good nights of sleep, and she would be sharp again.

Reave and the others would be in the tanks for four more
weeks, but she felt no closer to success. Depression and despair began to crowd
into her head, forcing out her thoughts and plans. Eventually, she gave in and
went to bed.

She dreamed about Damon, but only heard his voice and
couldn’t see him. He was calling to her from the darkness all around, but she
couldn’t find him. Every time she got close to his voice it would shift away
and she’d be lost again.

She woke worried about Damon and her friends. She felt so
helpless, caught by the Truebloods and cornered by Reave. She wondered again if
Damon was still alive or if her failure to reach him meant he could not be
saved.

A good sleep and thoughts of her friends reinvigorated her
work and she made great strides that night and over the subsequent weeks.

However, in the end, six weeks is not enough time to create
the perfect virus. She had to call it complete before the Augies were due to
emerge, since the labs would get crowded again day and night after that.

It’s not perfect, but it’ll work,
she reassured
herself as she packed it into secure cylinders that she could keep on hand at
all times. She took precautions since it was still lethal to non-augmented
humans.
The biggest trade-off,
she lamented, but there was no time to
fix it.
At least it will only kill humans slowly, they might get treatment
in time.

She knew she was fooling herself.

She’d wanted to make it airborne for simple deployment, but
that turned out to be impractical due to its lethality. How to inject the virus
was her next hurdle. She felt comforted that the hardest part was complete, but
now she wracked her brain for ideas of how to
use
her new weapon. She’d
heard of the needle-flak guns used to bring down the Demon, but she wasn’t sure
how to get access to one.

There is that guard who seems to like me, maybe I can work
that particular angle?

 

 

Joann watched Reave very closely
after he emerged from the tank. She watched for any sign that the operating
systems lacked control over his actions. Joann heard stories about the arguments
between Dr. Baksa and Renard Trueblood over the extent of the control exerted
by the systems, and it made her smile to imagine the taciturn Avelina getting
into
any
argument, much less a heated argument.

An argument with her spiritual leader no less.
What
she would have given to be present for those fights.

In the end, Dr. Baksa relented and implemented the controls.
What Renard Trueblood would never understand is that such systems degrade the
performance of the individual. Through the very act of control, a portion of
the instantaneous unconscious reaction is compromised and the mind loses some
of its “edge.” It means giving up a part of what makes the human mind a better
weapon than any computer. In all the thousands of years studying the human mind,
no one has been able to isolate that “edge,” much less reproduce it. In modern
Biolectronics it was treated as a given fact.

Nonetheless, the performance of the Augies was stunning.
They were fast, so fast it was hard to comprehend. They were strong, although
not as strong as the Demon. Their true advantage came in their redesigned
joints and musculature. They were no longer confined by the limits of human
joints, and they could rotate their arms, shoulders, hips, and legs in almost
unlimited directions. The regular humans trying to train them to use their new
bodies were quickly left behind as the Augies found their own methods to use
their new flexibility. Humans simply could not relate to the freedom of motion.
After only a few weeks, what seemed physically impossible became commonplace.

The Augies stopped using furniture altogether since they
could bend their knees backwards and swivel their hips to the side to create a
sitting position that they claimed was comfortable. It took the technicians a
long time to get used to the sight, the position looked so unnatural it made
some people nauseated.

Their powered weapons were adequate, but they did not have
the excessive firepower of the Demon. In hand-to-hand combat they were
absolutely phenomenal. Human trainers, again, could not teach them anything
past the first couple of sessions, since their physiology changed everything.

Making an Augie lose his balance was practically impossible,
so feints and misdirection tactics were nearly useless. Soon they had developed
their own style of fighting that was often too quick for the observers to
follow with the naked eye. The matches had to be replayed in slow motion to be
evaluated, and still it was difficult for a normal human to think in the
different degrees of freedom allowed by the modified joints. More than one of
the trainers volunteered to be “next in the vat.”

Soon, they needed to get out of the Spire and begin training
in the field. It couldn’t be done on Havyn, though, the risk of espionage was
too great. Renard didn’t want the true capabilities of the Augies to be known
by anyone other than his trusted inner circle.

Therefore, the entire lab, its staff, the scientists, and
the Augies were packed up and sent to another unnamed planet to conduct further
training and evaluation.

Joann could hardly contain her excitement once they arrived
at the new training facility, such that it was. It didn’t bother her to live in
tents and work from a semi-permanent building. She was enjoying the new-found
freedom. Outside of the super-secure network surrounding the Spire, she felt
safe enough to contact Ted. She desperately wanted to tell him about the danger
and have him spread the word to her other friends. She was confident in his
ability to hide them from Reave, should the need arise.

She waited until mid-morning a few days into the excursion
to make the attempt. Unlike her previous skulking around the lab, she wanted to
do this while communication traffic and general noise was at its height.
Shaking, she punched up the private emergency codes given to her on the last
night she saw Ted and the others.

“
Kyndra’s cold clutches!
Joann! I can’t believe it!”
Ted came on the line almost immediately, picture and all.

“Hi Ted, I’ve got some amazing stories to tell you, but now
is not the time.” Joann’s knees sagged and she had to sit down on a nearby
chair. Relief suffused her boy, and she trembled uncontrollably.

She’d been so alone for so long.

“Are you OK?” Ted asked with heartfelt concern.

“Good enough. Now, all I can give you is that the group is
in danger. Get them safe, as deep and quiet as you possibly can - yourself
included.” Ted knew better than to interrupt, the safe time on this link was
dwindling quickly.

“There’s a man you need to be afraid of,” Joann continued, “Reave
Nachman—he’s a Trueblood agent. He’s the one who killed Kevin, Lauren, and the
kids. There’s nobody out there more dangerous than this lunatic and he’s got it
in for me and all of you. He’s threatened to use you and the others as leverage
to get what he wants. Please, get everyone safe.”

“I’m on it. We’ve got to break here, but trust me, I’ll take
care of it.”

Relieved, Joann went back to work.

The next few weeks went by quickly and the Augies continued
to improve. Their abilities were uncanny and frightening, and there were many
times Joann caught herself gripping the canisters of her virus in the pockets
of her coat.

Reave had not spoken to her since the tank, and she began to
wonder if the control system was actually working. She could not allow herself
to believe it, but as time wore on she became less diligent in her denial.

Joann woke with a start and sat up quickly trying to get her
bearings. A moment later she realized a priority message had awakened her,
setting off an alarm on her screen, which now sat waiting and flashing on the
desk at the foot of her bed. Not surprisingly, it was from Ted.

She sighed and she rubbed her eyes in an attempt to wake up
and focus. “This had better be something important,” she said to the darkness.

She pulled up the message and was piqued to find it was
text-only. Ted never used text only—he felt it was amateurish.
He must have
been in a real hurry,
Joann thought, and a chill prickled along her neck.
Her eyes scanned quickly, and grew wider as she read the short note.

“
Sweet Savior’s Tears
” was all she could say as the
chill turned into a cold sweat over her whole body.

 

 

Fully awake now, Joann found her
hands shaking as she soaked in the implications of what Ted found.
I have to
tell someone,
her mind raced, thoughts spinning chaotically,
but who?

She knew she couldn’t trust just anyone with this
information, she needed to get it to the top, immediately. She also realized
that her accusation would be met at best with skepticism and doubt. It would be
especially suspicious since she had chosen Reave for the program in the first
place.

Dr. Baksa. It has to be her. She can take it directly to
Reverend Trueblood and he’ll listen to her.
This plan raised another issue,
since Dr. Baksa was back at the Spire. Joann doubted that Reverend Trueblood
would ever let her leave the Spire again.

Joann spent the last week floating in a fog of anxiety. She
continued to watch Reave, but he showed no alarming signs.

Finally, the day came that they were to pack up and head
back to the Spire for deployment into “defense of the Consensus,” as Reverend
Trueblood said in his remote address to the group.

The night before their departure, she was awakened by
another priority message. This time Joann came awake immediately. She hadn’t
been sleeping well since the prior message.

 

 

Apparently Reave was a good actor,
and much smarter than she realized. She kicked herself for becoming complacent,
and for lacking the will to finish him off earlier.

She assumed Reave was going to kill Reverend Trueblood or
something equally nasty, but again she felt outclassed and helpless. She had no
idea what to do with her information.

Damon.
The thought came suddenly into her mind.
If
he’s alive he may be the only one who can stop Reave one-on-one.
She
hesitated only a moment before risking a return message to Ted.

 

 

Joann got up and started packing,
realizing she wouldn’t be able to sleep any more this morning.

 

**** ****

 

Damon and Leland McKrae had been
spending a lot of time together over the past few weeks, finding more in common
than Damon ever suspected. It was not unusual for them to linger on the mess
deck well after the crew had cleaned up and moved on.

Most of their discussions focused on theology. Not the
theology of Kydraism that Damon had been raised in, but in the theology of the
ancient Christian religion that Leland espoused. Damon found it not much
different overall, although Leland insisted that the apparent small differences
were indeed quite significant.

They’d been discussing forgiveness, a subject Damon
struggled with constantly. He liked the idea, since he felt the need for it so
acutely, but he could not comprehend how Leland’s people could express it so
freely. Damon was still afraid to go planetside with Leland to meet the others.
He simply felt that he could not face them.

At least not yet.

Leland assured him that the time would come when he would be
able to accept their forgiveness.
In fact,
Leland said many times,
the acceptance of forgiveness is oftentimes more difficult than the offering.

Ken Westron walked into the mess, moving quickly and
muttering to himself. “There you are,” he said to both of them.

Neither Damon nor Leland felt obligated to respond,
especially since Ken continued talking without pause.

“I just received the most interesting communication. Damon,
you’re friends with Joann Tashus, yes?”