Greenflies Read online

  “About a week later we were transferred to…”Rice paused a planned and dramatic pause, “somewhere ELSE.”

  Almost all the Gamma Team stories ended like that. If they were to be believed, they’d traveled to every spot on the world and shot someone there, long before the first Greenfly sighting. There were a lot of special forces veterans here, but no one with the same kind of eclectic career. Boasting was sort of a pastime here, too, so there was a bit of competition in getting interesting stories into the camp grapevine.

  “So, how many countries have you been to, guys?” asked Meg, before sipping a beer she wasn’t technically supposed to have.

  “Um, all of ‘em, I think,” grumbled Klugman before changing the subject. “So, Lietner, when are you guys going to come out with those new jet packs you’ve been promising? We’ve got rookies breaking their legs in training once a week. Your dithering down there in your dungeon is cripplin’ a whole generation of would-be us-es.”

  Franz smiled and raised his hands in helplessness, “It’s not quite a jet pack but anyway, it’s out of my hands, guys. We passed the preliminary designs to the engineers weeks ago. They must be testing them for safety or something. They must be worried about you folks landing on your heads, and that’s dangerous for SOME people, Lieutenant Klugman.”

  “Not enough skull trauma training. Lazy rookies,”Leena said, deadpan.

  Hegerty’s pager beeped. He glanced downward and then stood up, his demeanor serious in a moment.

  “Colonel wants me. Everyone, have a good night.”

  “Bye, Liam,” Meg called out, somewhat drunkenly, as he headed out the door.

  She turned back to find everyone paying attention to Franz, who was describing in great detail a technical innovation he probably shouldn’t have been talking about in the first place. It wasn’t that security clearances were taken for granted here; it was that everyone here was cleared at the highest levels, so there was little doubt the secrets told at Utah Base would stay at Utah Base. So far, there’d been no formal warnings from the administrators about the breaches, but with international tensions beginning to run a bit high, that policy would certainly change.

  “Hey, Leitner, is it true what they say about the Window shrinking? Are we going to get a break?” the question came from another soldier at the table, with whom Meg wasn’t very familiar. She thought he might have been with Epsilon; in order for him to be sitting at this table with Gamma, he had to have been fairly senior.

  “It seems to be. The Greenflies have always avoided teleporting anywhere that they can’t see clearly from their home base near Jupiter. No one knows why that is. They’re certainly capable of sitting in Earth orbit and teleporting in with only a fraction of a second delay, but they don’t. They teleport straight from their home base with only a quick stop in orbit to make sure that their destination is clear of material. So, they don’t teleport anywhere with cloud cover or on the other side of the Earth from their base,” said Franz. “With the Earth moving towards the opposite side of the sun from Jupiter, they appear to be having trouble seeing through the glare. The Window is getting a little shorter on one side. In another month, we think the visibility from Troy will be very poor, indeed. A little while after that, we’ll be completely hidden by the sun. That won’t last long, but there will be glare again when we come out the other side. If the behavior of the Greenflies doesn’t change to compensate, Interception and Recovery may get some much-deserved time off.”

  There were some hoots of support from most of the soldiers. People at other tables, while they hadn’t heard what was said, joined in on the cheering.

  “Don’t get your hopes too high. These creatures are clever, in their way. They may try a new approach,” said Franz.

  “They could just move the Whaleship,” said Meg, absent-mindedly.

  Several people looked at her quizzically. Evidently, the knowledge of the Whaleship had not spread far on the base yet. Franz and the other scientists were somewhat familiar with it, although Butler had yet to present on it at one of the interdisciplinary briefings. For once, it was Meg’s turn to play the expert, and she took the role with gusto. She went on for five minutes about the stories Greenbeard had been telling in the interviews, although she needed a couple of the Xenosociology people at the table to fill in a couple blanks. The story of a giant whale that teleported between the stars had a strange mythic quality, but everyone at the table seemed to think it made sense for the Greenflies. Thus far, the soldiers had been envisioning the alien base as being Troy itself, a giant marble carved out of an asteroid.

  Colonel Marshal came into the cantina towards the end of the story and stood behind his own men while she finished. He rarely attended functions like this. Meg thought he was maintaining an air of authoritative separation. She didn’t realize that, for Gamma Team, pretending to socialize was a duty of junior officers that they all hoped to be promoted beyond.

  “Hello Colonel,” said Meg. “Did Liam find you?”

  Marshal glanced at his own team and asked, “Find me?”

  “Didn’t you page him?” asked Meg.

  Marshal looked to his team, and an unspoken message was conveyed. All of Gamma stood up simultaneously, their mannerisms transformed from good-natured to monotone is a heartbeat. The two soldiers from Epsilon were a couple steps behind in reading the message, but they quickly grasped that their comrades in arms suspected something was amiss. They started getting to their feet, but the Colonel stopped them.

  “Stay where you are. That’s an order.”

  With that, the Epsilon soldiers sat nervously, and Gamma Team exited into the night. Once they had left, Meg also got up, left a five dollar bill on the table, and started on her own way out. At the doorway, she discovered Franz walking just behind her. He put his hand on her arm and tried to gently pull her back towards the table.

  “He didn’t want us to come, Meg. It could be trouble.”

  “I’m not one of his soldiers, Franz. Are you?” With that, she disappeared through the tavern door.

  Away from the cantina, Hegerty could behave more as he normally did, with focus and a minimum of personality. He moved towards the transit stop that allowed ready access between the training compound and the research compound. The transit stop had a small parking lot of vehicles similar to old-style jeeps, intended to allow soldiers to rapidly scramble to emergency stations. He intended to check out one of the vehicles and drive across the tarmac.

  He was uncertain why the Colonel would summon him to the weapons research lab in the other compound and not the others, but the message had been specific. He strode down the dirt road, noting the lack of people about. At this time of night, trainees were catching sack time and active duty personnel were relaxing prior to duty call at 1 AM. Besides, a light rain had begun, discouraging people from moving about.

  He swung into a dark alleyway, a shortcut to the transit stop, well-trodden. It never occurred to him to be more on-edge than usual, as this was a standard route from the cantina. Besides, this was as friendly a terrain as Gamma soldiers ever encountered. Still, his normal training and senses were enough to detect two of the five men in ambush positions as soon as he entered the alleyway. Number three gave himself away by the sound of him shifting his weight, preparing to attack.

  The man never got the chance to make so much as a step. Hegerty’s boot slammed into his jaw, a blow that broke bone and would have sent teeth flying had the attacker not been wearing a ski mask. That would have been sufficient to end his participation in the fight, but Hegerty was not one to let a possible melee weapon out of his hands. He grabbed the man, and swung him around like a hammer to go flying into attackers number one and two, who were preparing to charge down the alleyway.

  He’d only bought himself a couple seconds, but in terms of Gamma Team training, that could be considered breathing room. He quickly measured up his attackers, athletic men wearing special forces masks and black jumpsuits without body armor. There were
the two he had initially become aware of, now shoving the body of the third off of themselves in the mud. He also thought he saw the shoulder of a fourth, now, just edging around the far mouth of the alleyway. There was a small shiny spot that was most likely a fiber-optic optical device used to look around corners. Hegerty quickly tried to gauge what reaction would be rewarded and what might be punished based on his present situation. While this sort of prediction was not his forte, he guessed it a safe bet to engage these attackers with damaging but non-lethal force.

  The spray of needles from above took him completely by surprise. A fifth assailant he had not been aware of had fired some sort of weapon sending a burst of darts downward from the adjacent roof. Most of them had lodged in the back of his neck and the upper part of his shoulders, but another half dozen had splatted in the mud around him. He looked up to see the silhouette of the man, a camera held in one hand and the strange weapon in the other. Seeing the camera made Hegerty readjust his priorities. He was now obligated to not only incapacitate these men but also destroy any evidence that might harm his handler.

  Much like a large animal shedding ticks, Hegerty scraped his back against one of the two walls forming the alley, ripping the darts out of his body with spurts of blood. He continued the motion to take him into one of the assailants getting to his feet. Instead of striking or kicking the man, he just planted his foot on the man’s face and stepped downward, pressing his head down into the mud while Hegerty redirected his attention.

  The other man had gotten to his feet and was throwing a series of strikes at Hegerty, all of which Hegerty deflected without moving his foot from the face of the man pinned beneath him. Despite the dim light, Hegerty could make out the black hilt of a knife on his hand-to-hand attacker’s belt. He withdrew the knife as easily as if it had been sheathed on his own belt. Instead of using it on the man beside him, he turned and flung it at his rooftop attacker. The knife hit its intended target, the video camera, which exploded in a small shower of sparks.

  Unfortunately, this redirection of his attention had allowed for the man beside Hegerty to grab him. Hegerty found a meaty arm wrapped around his neck in a hold that could either be used to render him unconscious or snap his neck, depending on the attacker’s intent. He reacted immediately, before loss of oxygen could inhibit his performance in any way. He reached over his head, grabbed his attacker’s own head, and flung him forward against the alleyway wall in a feat half raw strength and half martial throwing technique. For a moment, he feared he had killed the man, which would have resulted in reduced reward later, but the assailant still appeared to be breathing.

  The ambusher with the optical device rushed around the corner, and he was not alone. Four men with shotguns stood there, and Hegerty could see their fingers squeezing their triggers in slow motion. He knew how he should move, but his muscles were not responding as they should due to whatever drug they had loaded him up with. Baton rounds, beanbags loaded with lead shot, fired from the shotguns, and Hegerty realized he had no chance of moving out of the way. Somehow, his mind found the time to think back to reflex training in Virginia.

  While two of the beanbags struck him, cracking ribs and sending a shock through his chest that would have incapacitated others, Hegerty managed to get his hand in the way of the third. A couple of the bones there fractured, too, but he didn’t need them to hurl the bag back into the face of the ambusher who had fired it. Following up on the attack, he plowed into the four men, disbelief at his maneuver leaving them laughably slow compared to a Gamma. The way the top of his head smashed into one man’s face, he was certain his nose would hang a little to the left for the rest of his life.

  The drugs must have been slowing him down terribly, because he felt a shotgun butt descend upon his left leg. He was sure the impact had torn some muscle, but he didn’t let it bring him down to one knee. Instead, he spun around and shoved one of his unbroken fingers into an eye of his attacker, down to the second knuckle. While not technically a lethal attack, it sent the man screaming and running from the combat.

  The two men remaining in close combat had seized the opportunity to put him in a hold, one man on each arm, bending him over at the waist and forcing his arms upwards to lock him into position. It was a very good hold on a normal person, and with his injured leg, Hegerty was unable to use his disproportionate strength to his advantage. Hegerty knew of no technique to free himself from the joint lock. Therefore, he casually dislocated his left shoulder with a loud popping noise, and he launched forward to headbutt his attacker on that side. That man fell groaning.

  The remaining attacker had little chance. He found himself pinned to a wall with Hegerty’s forearm at his throat, the broken fingers sticking up at odd angles. Even with the drugs slowing him, there was still enough strength left in the Gamma to squeeze the breath out of this man if he chose. As it was, he lunged forward with his teeth and yanked the ski mask off the man.

  Even in the dim light, Hegerty could make out the face of John Murray, one of the new rookies he’d been training, destined for Lassiter’s pet project Beta team. Hegerty’s experience of the kid was that he was fast and agile, but he had zero determination. That fearfulness played across the kid’s face now.

  Another burst of darts struck Hegerty’s back, and this time, willpower wasn’t enough to keep him conscious. The final attacker dropped down from the wall, quickly moved to Hegerty, and stuck a syringe in his arm. He began drawing a small quantity of blood.

  “That might kill him,” he said, quietly, indicating the second dose of darts.

  “Betcha it won’t,” replied Murray, hurriedly sliding his mask back on.

  It was Meg who found him. Her cries quickly brought the other members of Gamma Team. When they arrived, they found Meg cradling Hegerty’s head in her lap. While there were signs of struggle everywhere, all of the others involved had staggered or been carried away.

  Their response was mostly wordless. Ramachandran quickly checked to make sure he was stable enough to travel. At her nod, Decker and Rice lifted Hegerty’s limp form, one on either side, and prepared to carry him away. Klugman positioned himself just in front of the group, to somewhat hide Hegerty’s condition. Only when they were ready to move did Colonel Marshal say anything.

  “Meg,” he said to the young girl, seriously. “Come with us. You may be in danger.”

  Leena tried to give the girl a reassuring smile, but Meg was too emotionally blank right now to appreciate it. This incident of raw violence, so casually received by her friends, was more than she could take. She knew on some level that she should cry out or call the MPs or demand an explanation, but somehow all she could manage was to follow along meekly, Colonel Marshal’s strong hand on her shoulder.

  Hegerty’s state might not best be termed sleep, but he was certainly resting. His unconscious form lay on the leather couch, a layer of lab coats laid down beneath him to prevent the blood from staining through. Dr. Ramachandran was tending to the worst of his injuries and stitching together the shallow dart wounds. Far more visible would be the contusions. For the next week, Hegerty’s face was going to be a mass of bruises. The shape of his face had changed slightly, indicating the damage might have gone more than skin deep. As for the damage to his limbs, that would probably keep him on the bench for the next two months.

  All of Gamma Team, along with Meg, were in the office of the research director of the base. Caufield was doing resource work at the Pentagon, so the team had come to call on her close confidante for assistance. Dr. Barnard himself was sitting at his desk with the phone, making quiet inquiries around the base to determine the extent to which security had been notified. Marshal was standing before Dr. Barnard’s computer, hunting and pecking an encrypted e-mail to Caufield explaining what had happened. The rest of Gamma stood at near-attention, their positions subtly arranged to respond should someone force the door. Meg sat on the floor against a bookshelf, watching as Leena ran stitches through Hegerty’s skin.

 
“There’s a needle mark here,” said Leena, inspecting Hegerty’s arm, “Not one of mine. From the dried blood, I’d say they drew blood rather than injecting anything.”

  “So, they’ll know,” said Marshal. There was a slight tinge of despair in his voice, the first emotion Meg had heard there since the first time he had spoken to her in quarantine. Except this time, she felt he was sincere.

  “They’ll know half of it,” corrected Dr. Barnard, setting down the phone. “But it’s the half that will give them power. They’ll be able to pull Gamma Team off the interception roster if they choose. Perhaps they’ll press drug-related charges to allow them to question all of you, force more medical tests, and subpoena records. If they choose to, they’ll have the right to pick you all apart and find your secrets. It would never come to that, though. Maria would come forward before any of you came to harm. But, even in this conflict, the nature of your condition would not be condoned.”

  “What condition? What’s going on? Why would anyone do that to Liam?!” cried Meg.

  “She doesn’t know?” asked Barnard.

  Marshal shook his head.

  Dr. Barnard stepped over to Meg and put a hand on her head. He had the bearing of a grandfather, and, in truth, he was one several times over. Despite herself, Meg found the hand comforting. With great effort, he sat beside her on the floor against the book case.

  “Meg, what I’m going to tell you, there are only a few people left that know. The Colonel no doubt doesn’t want me to speak, but there’s little he can do. Maria will be aghast when she finds out, but she’s held onto this secret far too tightly for far too long. In truth, if she had come forward with the secret when she first learned of it, she most likely could have walked away a hero, politically speaking. But instead, she chose to use Gamma Team for the purpose for which they were… conscripted. That’s the best term, I suppose. And now, her fate is intertwined with theirs. If their secret is discovered, they may be examined like lab animals, they will probably be denied the medication which makes them functional members of society, and they will certainly lose their sense of purpose. She, in all likelihood, will go to prison.”