Bio-Weapon

Both Hawthorne and the bionic captain turned.

Out of the woods loped six men. They wore the red body armor of Political Harmony Corps, with black helmets, boots and silver packs. A wire from the packs ran to the slim laser pistols clutched in their gloved fists.

The bionic captain moved like liquid death. He leaped and shoved Hawthorne down. Then he drew his sidearm and knelt on one knee, snapping off rapid-fire shots.

Hawthorne spit pine needles out of his mouth.

The captain fired a huge gyroc pistol, the heavy slugs igniting in mid-flight, assisted by internal rockets. The armor-piercing bullets penetrated the intruders’ protective shells and exploded. Three of the PHC squad already lay dead. Two fired lasers. One beam hissed over the General, the heat hot on his cheek. The other beam touched the bionic captain’s non-firing arm, frying flesh and bio-metal. The captain grunted, but drugs clamped down on the pain and kept him lucid. He fired twice more and two more red suits went down.

Hawthorne froze, and he realized Ulrich had pressed the inhibitor switch. But his mouth wasn’t frozen. “Behind you!” shouted Hawthorne.

BOOM.

General Hawthorne closed his eyes in sick defeat. Then he heard a familiar grunt, Ulrich. The Air Marshal pitched onto the needles beside him. The last PHC killer died under a hail of gyroc rounds.

Click.

General Hawthorne slowly rose. A moment later, the captain had his hand on his elbow. Blood dripped from the bionic shoulder.

“Are you all right?” asked Hawthorne.

“Never mind me, sir.” The captain scanned the forest. “Let’s get you below.”

“Yes,” said Hawthorne. He glanced at Ulrich, at the crushed windpipe. The bionic captain was brutally strong. He wondered then what the cyborgs were like, if they were that much superior to the bionic men?

As the captain hustled him to the door, he realized that it had almost ended for him. His stupidity bade him recall an ancient piece of prose.

Thucydides, the historian of the Peloponnesian War between the ancient Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta, had written it. It had concerned the various factions of various feuding city-state allies. Thucydides had written about people plotting and jockeying for political power within those states.

As a rule, those who were least remarkable for intelligence showed the greater powers of survival. Such people recognized their own deficiencies and the superior intelligence of their opponents. Fearing that they might lose a debate or find themselves outmaneuvered in intrigue by their quick-witted enemies, they boldly launched straight into action. Their opponents, over-confident in the belief that they would see what was happening in advance, and not thinking it necessary to seize by force what they could secure by policy, were the more easily destroyed because they were off their guard.

Hawthorne was on his guard now against PHC plots. He just hoped it wasn’t too late.

3.

Nadia lowered the headphones and stared at the bulkhead. She hid in a tiny crawl space, her home away from home. She had a folding lounge chair that served as her bed, several boxes of concentrates, a wall stacked with five-gallon jugs of water and a horde of tech equipment and tools. All this left her about ten square meters of floor space. Her vacc suit and helmet lay on a box and an oxygen re-charger stood beside the porta-pot. The only way out was the airlock. Marten had said that this had been one of his parents’ former bolt holes.

Now…

Nadia shook her head in denial of the latest catastrophe. It simply couldn’t be happening. They had come so close, too close for this to happen. When Marten hadn’t shown—she had waited a half-hour over the limit. Then she’d fled and come here to hide and wait and try again. And he hadn’t shown the next day, at the new location. That’s when she became frightened.

Now…

She dropped the headphones onto the floor. Marten was gone. Everyone in the Sun Works was in a panic. Repair pods to the docks, shuttles scurrying all over, the Doom Star Genghis Khan hiding behind Mercury. Those five boost ships now made sense, and all those missiles lifting from the boost ships. Marten had been in one of those. That’s what the military code said, the one she’d just been listening to. The shock troops were on bearing as targeted.

Nadia sat motionless on the lounge chair, her mind blank. Finally, she forced herself to suck from a food-tube and sip water. “Marten,” she whispered. Tears trickled. She would never see him again. She sank into the lounge chair and cried. Later she wiped away the tears. Then she fiddled with the various pieces of equipment. Maybe he would return home from a successful mission, but she couldn’t believe that, didn’t dare trust it to happen. She had to think and be hardheaded.

The answer finally came. She could see no other way around it.

Nadia donned the vacc suit and boots, entered the airlock and made the long walk to the observation dome where they had first found the pod. She entered the hab and warily studied the bare area. Then she pulled a bug detector from her pocket, scanning her surroundings. Spy-sticks watched the corridor. Well, that couldn’t be helped. Hopefully the operator wouldn’t understand what he saw. She wasn’t a shock trooper, and that’s what Marten had told her they watched for.

She put the vacc suit in the locker and hurried down the corridor. A tangler was strapped to her thigh. It was the one Marten had said he’d used over four and half years ago. It had been exactly where he’d said he had hidden it. She hoped she wouldn’t have to use it.

4.

Hansen chortled in glee. He had her. He sat in his office and watched a screen with Nadia Pravda as its subject. He had re-routed certain spy-sticks so they only played at his desk screen. He watched Nadia stride down a utility corridor and to an empty hanger door. He wasn’t sure what she was doing in there. As he waited, he typed on a special keyboard newly installed in the desk. He loved being Chief Monitor. He loved all these gadgets. Watching people when they didn’t know they were being watched, he couldn’t compare the feeling to anything he’d known before. It was power.

He switched back to the hanger door. What was she doing in there? Too bad, he hadn’t been able to get clearance for spy-sticks in the hangers. He shrugged, waited and then checked his credit account. Oh, lovely. He bobbed his head. Dust sales had skyrocketed since he’d taken over.

A red light blinked.

He switched back to the hanger door, watching Nadia close it, glance both ways and hurry down the corridor with a heavy duffel bag slung over her shoulder.

Hansen leaned forward to examine the bag. It seemed to be full of little baggies. “Beautiful,” he whispered. At last, he would recover the stolen product. He needed it more than ever in order to fill several orders. Patience did pay off.

He turned to his intercom to summon his special team: Ervil, Dalt and Methlen. But his door opened and two Trustees entered unannounced. They were beefy, sneering men in brown plastic armor, the personal servants of Highborn. The Trustees as a group displayed big bushy sideburns. These two seemed too young to have them. Theirs were probably glued on. They stood in the doorway, arrogantly peering at his cluttered office and then at him.

As he swiveled around to better see them, Hansen innocently switched off the screen and pressed another