again, are you? They taught us ethics at fuckin' Manticore.”
“I'll just bet they did. They teach you anything about justice?”
The younger man thought about it for a long moment. “Justice was served… What's next?”
“Never mind what's next,” Logan said, rising, propelled by rage. “How the hell do you figure ‘justice' was served by murder?”
Seth glanced over with an expression of mock innocence. “Any children sold into slavery lately?”
“That doesn't justify—”
“Sure it does. Bastard got what he deserved.”
Logan began to pace, hands in the pockets of his slacks. “Seth— that's not justice, that's revenge.”
“Same difference,” Seth said, and swung into a sitting position, leaning back, arms outstretched on the back of the couch.
Logan said, “I wanted to stop him— expose him, entrap him—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa— isn't entrapment illegal? I thought the ends didn't justify the means?”
“When law enforcement itself is corrupt, certain extreme measures have to be taken. It's a matter of degree, Seth— some laws go beyond politics. These are laws that have to do with society, with civilization, even religion.”
“Oh, shit, you're not gonna go
on my ass, now!”
“No… no. But ‘Thou Shalt Not Kill' is part of the social contract, Seth. You can't—”
“Bullshit! The social contract got ripped up when the Pulse went down— where was the social contract when Manticore was makin'
like instant soup in a damn test tube?”
Logan stopped pacing. He sat down next to Seth. “Don't make me regret taking you into my confidence.”
Seth's grin was a terrible thing. “Thought you had a supersoldier to play with, didn'tcha? And now you're afraid all you got is a loose cannon… am I on to something, ‘Eyes Only'?”
“Seth… please… We have the opportunity to be a team. To make a difference… ”
“We're already making a difference!” Seth sprang to his feet; now he was the one pacing, but there was a raving and ranting quality to the words that accompanied it. “Logan, you were unhappy when a corrupt official was ruining lives and selling children into slavery… and now you're telling me you're
unhappy, even though we stopped the mofo!”
“I'm not unhappy he's been stopped—”
“But you
unhappy this blight on society is dead? Are you fuckin'
”
Logan sighed. “You were acting as my… agent. I feel responsible for that man's death. And I don't like it, not one little bit.”
Seth stopped in front of Logan and put his hands together in a prayerful gesture. “How touching… but your liberal guilt doesn't negate the fact that the mission was accomplished and we saved maybe hundreds, who knows, maybe even thousands of kids from being sold into slavery.”
Logan could see he wasn't going to prevail in this debate. And he feared the moral complexities would continue to elude this kid— the supersoldier genetic makeup perhaps had made Seth a literal killing machine.
Maybe over the long haul, Logan could convince Seth that justice didn't necessarily mean the summary execution of everyone they went after. He only hoped he could control and shape Colonel Lydecker's nasty lab rat into something positive for society.
Now Seth plopped down in a chair opposite the couch. A tiny, almost naughty smile formed on the sullenly handsome face. “I think it's time.”
“Time?”
“Time we went after Manticore.”
Logan sighed again. “It is
time.”
“Well,
think it is.”
That was the level of their discourse, Logan thought:
is not,
is not…
Meeting the young man's unblinking gaze with his own, Logan said, “We don't know enough. Really, we don't know anything. We still don't know where their headquarters is, we don't know where you were raised, other than the Wyoming mountains somewhere… ”
Seth exploded out of the chair. “What have you been doing while I been risking my ass?” Seth gestured with both hands, his arms wide in frustration. “What are you doin' with those fancy-ass computers? Downloading porn? Hitting the cybercasinos?”
“These things take time.”
Bouncing on his heels, Seth said, “You've had what— three, four weeks? Enough time for me to take out Devane, and you haven't found out
”
Seething inside, Logan resisted the urge to tell Seth to use his abilities to take a spectacular flying fuck, and said, “I've started looking into old factories, abandoned prisons, military bases. But these people are smart, and they're dangerous, and they don't want to be found. If they did, you would have found them already.”
Seth seemed almost to pout, and said, somewhat childishly, “But you've had three weeks, man!”
“You've had how many years? And you haven't found them, have you, Seth?”
“I haven't been looking— I've been hiding. But now I got
and your resources… we can take 'em on, Logan! We can take 'em down!”
“And we're going to. We
And I do have a lead… ”
Seth's eyes widened, like a child anticipating Christmas. “What kind of a lead?”
“I take it you didn't see the bulletins on the LA Massacre— I ran it three times yesterday.”
“No… I was… busy.”
“I guess you were. Come with me.”
Logan walked Seth to the office-cum-broadcast-center, where the main monster computer was (as always) running and each monitor had several windows open. The cyberjournalist played the X5 a video CD of the bulletin that included the grisly footage of the Chinese Theatre slaughter. At the mention of the troops in black rumored to have supported the Brood in the massacre, Seth perked up.
“That's Manticore… that's
to be Manticore.”
Logan ran the VCD again, with the sound down. “What would draw Manticore into helping one side of a street
