Ex-Patriots (19 page)

“What did he require these specimens
for?”

Freedom straightened up to his full height.
“The doctor’s a genius in the fields of neurology and biochemistry,
ma’am. He was trying to determine the nature of the ex-virus and
determine if anything could be done for the people who’d been
afflicted.”

“And what did he determine?”

“I couldn’t say, ma’am. I’m a soldier, not a
doctor.”

“This is everything, right?” interrupted
Smith. He’d wandered back and was looking over the cart. “Nine
crates altogether. Looks like we didn’t lose one between Los
Angeles and here.”

No one returned his broad smile.

Danielle checked the boxes and gave a nod.
“Everything looks good.”

“And here’s the colonel,” said Smith. He
waved to a quartet of men. Freedom’s back went stiff and he
delivered a sharp salute, as did the soldiers around him.

“As you were,” said the officer. He held out
his hand. “Colonel Russell Shelly, commander of Project Krypton. On
behalf of the United States Army, I’m honored to welcome you both
to the Yuma Proving Ground.”

Danielle shook his hand. Stealth ignored
it.

“You just missed your companion, Zzzap,” said
Shelly. “He left about fifteen minutes ago. Did you get his
messages?”

“If he had a full stomach he probably forgot
to send them,” scoffed Danielle.

“Well,” said Shelly, “why don’t we get out of
the sun? We could have lunch if you like. Or we’ve got a shop set
up for you, Doctor Morris. Want to take a look and see if it meets
with your approval?”

Smith cleared his throat. “Sir, there’s a
matter of some weapons and ammunition. Miss... Stealth had her guns
confiscated when we arrived.”

The colonel looked at her and his eyes
dropped to her empty holsters. “Very sorry about that, ma’am.
Standard procedure for wartime, you understand. My people are just
as antsy about armed strangers as yours are.”

“Since she is a guest,” said Smith, “in the
interest of diplomacy, I told her we’d get them back to her. Would
that be okay, sir?”

He nodded. “Of course. Sergeant, find the
officer on duty,” he said to one of his staff. “As soon as those
weapons are processed at the armory, have them unprocessed and
returned to our guest.”

“Yes, sir.” The soldier saluted and headed
off.

“Why don’t we go look at the workshop,” said
Danielle. “That’ll let me open the crates and check on the
armor.”

“If you like,” said the colonel. He gestured
them down a dusty concrete road. “It’s about a ten minute walk if
you don’t mind conserving some gasoline. Mr. Smith gave us a list
of what he thought you’d need. We got the last of it set up this
morning.”

The cart with the crates caught on a rock and
jammed to a stop. The two soldiers wrestled with it for a moment.
Danielle stepped back to make sure none of the boxes had
shifted.

“Not all of your soldiers have enhanced
abilities,” said Stealth.

“That’s correct, ma’am,” Shelly said. “The
ex-virus caught us in the middle of the program. When the President
declared a national state of emergency, we barely had fifty
soldiers through the process, plus Captain Freedom. We had a
hundred and fifty or so washouts, plus another hundred and eight
who were serving as our control group. In the time since, we’ve
lost about half of those numbers.”

“Yet it would appear you have more than that
serving here on base.”

“Some of them are survivors from other
sub-bases like Lieutenant Gibbs here.” He gestured at a man walking
with them in digital camos with a tiger-stripe pattern. “There’s
just over thirteen thousand square miles to get lost on here at
Yuma. When things got bad, everyone locked down where they could. A
lot of them couldn’t. We were lucky Krypton had been built to be
secure and self-contained. Once the situation stabilized, we
started to expand, secure other areas, and find other units that
had holed up. At the moment, I seem to be the senior officer left
alive, so people from all branches are under my command.”

“And civilians?”

“There aren’t many civilians left, ma’am,”
said the colonel. “We saved about eleven hundred people from
Yuma.”

Danielle coughed. “That’s it?”

“Unfortunately, yes. There were a lot of
folks who felt they were safer in their homes with a shotgun and a
few pistols than putting themselves under military control. With
our own limited manpower, it came down to picking our battles. We
could rescue three or four willing families in the time it took to
get one irrational resistor out of their home. So we did what we
had to do, even if it meant some people got left behind.”

Stealth moved her head left to right. “Where
are these civilians now?”

“Right here, ma’am.” Shelly nodded at the
soldiers pushing the cart. “It was around New Year’s last year that
we realized the solution to both of our problems. We were short on
manpower. We had over a thousand civilians who needed organization
and a way to contribute. Two birds with one stone.”

Danielle blinked and looked at the soldiers.
“You drafted them all?”

Shelly shook his head. “No one was drafted.
We had Smith explain the situation, so no one would feel coerced.
He made the offer and seven hundred of them signed up. We ran four
separate boot camps.”

“I would think the majority of the civilians
would not have been viable candidates,” said Stealth.

“Not normally, no, but these aren’t normal
times. We took anyone over sixteen and under forty-five.” He
coughed. “Between you and me, more than a few of them did it just
to get in shape. Here we are.”

The building was an oversized garage, first
in a row of near-identical structures. Smith stepped forward and
tapped a code on the keypad next to the main door and it began to
roll open. “I used all your old codes,” he said to Danielle. “Do
you still remember them?”

“Some,” she said. “It’s been a while since I
needed to use a confirmation code for anything not related to the
suit.”

He nodded. “Do you still have all the same
passwords?”

She tried to look at Stealth out of the
corner of her eye. “No,” said Danielle. “I changed a lot of them a
year or so back.”

Shelly’s gaze shifted between the two women.
“Why was that?”

Danielle shrugged. “I was bored. I was
defragging the system one day and just switched the passwords for
the heck of it.”

“For now,” said Stealth, “perhaps it is best
if those passwords remain secret.”

Smith’s smile wrinkled and the colonel gave
her a hard look. “Ma’am,” said Shelly, “I understand the past
twenty-two months have not been easy for anyone, and they’ve forced
us all into patterns of behavior we wouldn’t have in a peacetime
situation. But I can’t help feeling like you’re one of those
civilians who feels they’re a lot safer at home with their shotgun
and pistols.”

“If that were the case, colonel,” said
Stealth, “would I run the risk of being left behind?”

There was a brief silence. Then the door
clanged open.

The space was large, as big as the scenery
shop Danielle had turned into a workspace back at the Mount. The
ceiling was dotted with half a dozen sunroofs, filling the area
with natural light. A trio of large, rolling toolboxes stood in the
center of the room near a few work platforms. Along the wall were
some larger tools and tanks of gas for a welding set-up. “Very
nice,” she said.

“If you need anything else, we can try to get
it for you. Any special tables or racks for the armor can be
constructed to your specifications.”

“Well, this is a good start,” she said. “I
can use the foam molds in the crates for now.” She found a pry bar
in one of the toolboxes and opened the smallest crate. It was the
helmet. Her shoulders loosened at the sight of it.

Colonel Shelly looked down at the armored
head and met its gaze. “Would you be up for a demonstration, Doctor
Morris? Mr. Smith has been singing the praises of your armor for a
few years now. I’ve seen some videos, but I’d love to see it in
action.”

She looked at Stealth. The cloaked woman gave
a slight nod from within her hood. “I’d need some help,” Danielle
said. “Maybe half a dozen people with some electronics experience.
Or at least some brute muscle that can follow orders.”

Shelly looked at Freedom and the huge officer
gave a wry smile. “I believe specialists Wilson and Garfield fit
that description,” he said. “I’ll put in a call. We should have a
team for you in ten minutes, ma’am,” he told the redhead.

“Do you want a place to change into the
undersuit?” asked Smith. “There’s an office and bathrooms over
there.”

“No need,” said Danielle. Her fingers danced
down the buttons of her shirt and pulled it open. Underneath was
the skintight black Lycra mesh, studded with gleaming
micro-contacts. She tossed the shirt aside.

Freedom smiled. “You wear your costume under
your civilian clothes, ma’am?”

“It’s more convenient,” she said. “And it’s
kind of a security blanket.”

They had half the crates open by the time the
group of soldiers arrived. Four of them set up the legs while
Danielle worked with Lieutenant Gibbs to assemble the codpiece. She
found a ladder, lowered herself into the legs, and Freedom’s two
super-soldiers got the torso locked together around her. The left
arm went on without a problem, but there was some trouble with the
right. By this point there was too much armor around Danielle for
her to see the problem so she tried calling out instructions.

“Wow,” said Smith. He ran his fingers across
the twisted metal on the battlesuit’s forearm. “What happened
here?”

“A few months ago I got in a fight with
another superhuman called Peasy,” said Danielle. “He ripped that M2
off and used it to club me in the head a couple of times. Wrecked
the gun and the mounting, almost broke some of the optics,
too.”

Stealth examined the damaged assembly. “What
about this made it impossible to repair at the Mount?”

“Not much,” said Danielle. She tried to
shrug, but buried in the inactive armor her tiny head just seemed
to twitch. “Nothing. It just seemed like a waste of time to rebuild
it after Peasy ripped off the old one. The barrel was bent, we
didn’t have any more ammo for the guns, and...”

Smith looked up at her. “And...?”

She shrugged. “It felt like giving up,” she
said. “If I was going to build things under half-assed conditions
with iffy material, it meant I was accepting things were going to
stay like this.”

The arm locked into place and they tightened
down the bolts. One of the super-soldiers, Hancock, got the helmet
balanced on a ladder while Gibbs made the final connections. He met
Danielle’s eyes. “Is that all of it?”

She nodded. “Get the collar bolts done and
stand back.”

The armored skull settled over her and the
soldiers spun their allen wrenches. Hancock hopped off the ladder
and pulled it away. The titan hummed with power and dozens of small
hatches snapped shut across the armor, concealing the bolts. The
collar slid together and the battlesuit’s eyes flared to life.

Cerberus flexed her fingers. “Much better,”
she said. She made a point of looking down at Freedom. Then she
stomped out into the sunlight. Colonel Shelly followed the
battlesuit outside. All of the soldiers marched behind him except
for Freedom. The oversized captain stood like a statue across from
the cloaked woman.

“After you, ma’am,” he said.

Her cloak swirled around her as she strode
out of the workshop.

Cerberus was holding a jeep in front of her
at arm’s length. She set it down on the ground. “I’ve made a few
adjustments, but at the last recorded test the suit could dead-lift
nineteen-point-four tons. The armor can deflect sustained fifty
caliber fire and can survive a direct RPG hit with minimal damage
to the suit or the pilot.”

“Amazing,” said Colonel Shelly. He ran his
eyes over the battlesuit’s armored plates. “Imagine if this suit
had gone into production. Do you know what a company of these
things could’ve done in Iraq or Afghanistan?”

“And this is still the Mark One system,” said
the titan. “We’d planned out a few improvements for the Mark Two
which we—”

“What is stored in that building?”

They all looked at Stealth. Her arm was
pointing at the third structure in line after the workshop.

Smith’s smile appeared. “I’m not sure what
you’re talking—”

“You have exchanged three glances with
Colonel Shelly at times when Cerberus has turned toward that
building. The first time you both looked at the building
afterwards. At least one of you has looked at it each time since.
What is stored there you are worried we will discover?”

“Ma’am, we’re less than an hour into this
visit,” said Shelly. “You can’t expect us to be open—”

“Cerberus,” snapped Stealth.

Inside the suit Danielle shifted though her
lenses. “It’s cooled to the point that I can’t make out any heat
signatures inside,” said the titan. “I can hear some movement,
though.”

“Open it,” ordered the cloaked woman.

The battlesuit took two steps forward and
Freedom was in front of it. He set his huge hand against the
armored chest. “Ma’am, I suggest you stand down.”

“Suggestion noted,” said Cerberus, brushing
him away. Freedom tensed to fight but Shelly waved him down.

When the keypad didn’t respond to her codes
the armored titan grabbed the edge of the door in her
football-sized hands. The huge panels slid open with a groan of
metal. Cold air washed out of the dark warehouse.

Over a hundred figures shuffled and turned
towards the door. None of them blinked at the brilliant afternoon
sun as it spilled over their dead eyes. They swayed for a brief
moment and then the exes stumbled toward Cerberus.