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The Rebirths of Tao Page 7


  Tao shook his head. “I can spot talent and skill, Roen. He will beat you nine out of ten fights. You will win the tenth because he caught food poisoning, and even then, you will barely win. Jacob is that good.”

  7

  Status Call

  When the full scope of our actions came to light, humanity’s fury knew no bounds. At the time, we felt that if our existence was going to be revealed, we might as well come clean and tell them everything. Perhaps that was a mistake.

  When the truth got out, the Quasing were painted as manipulators and conspirators who had a global agenda against all humans. The Prophus and Genjix factions were treated as one evil. I cannot blame them for believing that. After all, we have preached a more peaceful solution with the humans, but have the Prophus’s action shown that to be true?

  Baji

  * * *

  “Are you sure Rin will not come to Command? The heart of our research division is here, and the facilities are much more secure. She can continue her work uninterrupted with all our resources at her disposal. That won’t be the case elsewhere.”

  Jill, leaning back in her chair with her feet up on the desk, shook her head. “Sorry, Keeper, I don’t think she cares if you’re offering a gold-plated swimming pool filled with six-packed pool boys. Greenland’s a hard sell.”

  The Keeper and her host, Meredith Frances, was the leader of the Prophus, and the only Quasing from the original Grand Council to join the splinter faction during the Spanish Inquisition. Meredith’s family came from a long line of Prophus and was one of the large financial backers of the faction. Now, even in her old age, she ruled with a firm hand and at times seemed to keep the faction together with glue, rubber bands, and sheer force of will.

  Many worried about what would happen once she passed. Meredith’s heir to the Keeper, Hubert, had died on a mission fifteen years earlier. Coupled with the death of both Field Marshal Stephen and Admiral Abrams, both lost right before the Great Betrayal, there was a huge hole in the Prophus leadership. The Keeper’s new host heir was currently only six years old.

  Jill, a rising field commander within the ranks, was considered a longshot for assuming that mantle because of the three crosses she had attached to her name. The first was that she refused to join the rest of Command in Greenland. Jill had refused to transfer there for a promotion, since she didn’t think Cameron could have a good childhood there. Most of the Prophus there were hidden either underground or lived in remote villages.

  The second problem was more serious. She was married to Roen, whom most within the organization detested. That suited him fine, since he didn’t think much of them either. Both he and Tao had developed reputations as mavericks during his tenure as a host. His subsequent flouting of authority did not help his case, or hers, any.

  Her last and most serious offense against the Prophus was that she was the one responsible for the Great Betrayal. Most Prophus disagreed with her decision to expose the Quasing and would probably never forgive her for it.

  All this suited Jill fine, because no one had ever bothered to ask her if she even wanted the job. If someone had only posed the question, she would have gladly told them she’d rather be shot out of a cannon than head the Prophus from Greenland.

  There wasn’t a week that passed without one of the Underground Railroaders bringing the topic up. She was not just the commander of the Pacific Northwest Conductor, she was infamous for being the host who made the decision to reveal the Quasing to the world, and she continually found herself defending her position, not only to strangers, but often to herself. Her usual response when asked was that she would make the same choice again. However, as the years went on, with the situation deteriorating day by day, even she found it difficult to believe her own words.

  Stop beating yourself up over it. There were no good decisions that day, Jill. For what it is worth, I still feel it was the right choice.

  “That makes you and me the only ones, then.”

  Remember, the war was over; we had lost. You snatched victory from the enemy.

  “If we can’t win, no one should. Nothing like being a spoilsport, eh?”

  In this case, yes. I cannot even imagine what the world would be like now if we had allowed them to succeed. For one thing, we would all be living in caves in Greenland, or dead.

  “Most of our people already live in caves in Greenland, or are dead. Also, if you had allowed the Genjix to win, maybe your people would already be swimming outside bodies having babies like crazy, while we humans suffocated from toxic air in blistering heat.”

  Ah, paradise.

  “Moving on,” the Keeper was saying. “If that’s Rin’s choice, then so be it. As long as she’s working against her own abomination, I don’t care where she is. I assume her escort to the next segment of the Underground Railroad has been arranged?”

  “I didn’t want to send just anyone, so I thought I’d have my husband run the route.”

  As if on cue, Roen walked into the room, going on about how he’d need to make a run into town tomorrow to stock up on salt blocks and gasoline. Jill turned away from the monitor and put a finger to her lips. She pointed at the screen and waved him away. Roen craned his head around her and saw the Keeper staring back at him. He scowled, the Keeper scowled, and then they both looked away pretending the other didn’t exist.

  One day, she will forgive him for Hubert’s death.

  “One day meaning when Meredith dies?”

  I was thinking more like when he dies.

  Roen, now out of view of the webcam, was miming. She had no idea what he was trying to say, though; he always did suck at Charades. Jill tried to ignore him, but a small smile crept up when he began to make faces. Then he started to dance. She suppressed her broadening grin.

  “Excuse me, Keeper,” she said, putting the channel on mute. She turned to Roen and hissed. “Get out of here.”

  He leaned in and kissed her on the lips. “Just wanted to make sure I can still hold your attention.” Roen looked over at the screen and waved. The Keeper, looking like she was etched out of stone, did not wave back. He held onto her hand until the very last second as he left the room.

  “Apologies, Keeper. Please continue.”

  The Keeper’s face looked a little more sagged than usual. “Jill, my dear, I’m amazed he was ever able to land you, and even more so that you two are still together. Please tell me he has redeeming qualities that he hides from the rest of civilization.”

  “Probably not, but I wouldn’t have him any other way.”

  The Keeper shook her head. “No matter what, you are not assigning that man to someone as important as Rin. I forbid it.”

  “Keeper, he’s the best I have.”

  “I don’t care if he’s the last human being under your command with legs. You are not placing the linchpin to stopping Quasiform in his care. Send someone else. Yourself if you have to.”

  Jill furrowed her brow. “Sorry, but my operative days are over. I was never really good at being an operative, anyway. Besides, you do remember what happened last time I was put in a position to make a decision that affected all Quasing, don’t you?”

  “Of course I do,” the Keeper snapped. “I was there. Dumbest decision I’ve ever made.”

  Jill cocked her head to one side and sighed. “Meredith, you can’t take the blame for my – ”

  “You bet your ass I can, girl.” The Keeper’s voice took on a softer tone and for a second, she almost looked warm and affectionate. “Listen, Jill, regardless of what happened afterward, that was one of the bravest calls I’ve ever seen. You showed me something that night. That’s why you head the West Coast. It’s one of the toughest regions in the world. Things could have been different if we had played our cards right. We didn’t handle it like we should have, so don’t beat yourself up over it.”

  “I appreciate that but –”

  “And I won’t handicap your career because of that either. Good or bad, that call lives and dies
with me. When I’m gone, girl, we’ll need more people like you keeping things together.”

  “Yes, Meredith. And thanks.”

  “Don’t thank me, yet. Consider it a possible punishment.” And just like that, Meredith was back to being the ice-cold Keeper. “There’s one more thing you need to pay attention to near the Oregon border. One of our clandestine operations has run red near your territory. For the past few months, we’ve been tracking the flow of money to that region. Supply logistics, bribes, raw materials, building machinery and such, all allocated in massive amounts to a small town in the middle of nowhere on the far eastern edge of Oregon named…” The Keeper looked off-screen. “… Ontario.”

  Jill nodded. “I’m familiar with the town. It’s on the border of my region, but I’m not aware of anything going on there.”

  “Correct. It’s actually Wohlreich’s. He sent a scout team to investigate.”

  “It’s still near my zone of control,” Jill said, sticking her finger into the monitor. This ground her gears to no end. The Keeper was an old-school leader, having honed her skills during the Cold War, and still believed that the only person who needed to know everything was her. Everyone else had to know just enough to stay out of trouble or help in a pinch.

  “Typical Keeper. How infuriating.”

  There is a reason why clandestine ops are called that.

  That wasn’t how Jill ran her operations in the Pacific Northwest. She made sure all her people had high-level information about what everyone else was doing, and those within a hundred kilometers of each other were updated every three days. It was an administrative slog that led to long meetings, and several of her operatives had balked at first, thinking the tedious intel unnecessary. They changed their minds when they realized the usefulness of being interconnected, knowing what a team nearby was doing, or even calling for support if a problem arose. Jill’s region eventually became one of the most well-run on the planet.

  “I would have appreciated Wohlreich notifying me as a courtesy,” said Jill.

  “Well, you’re being informed now,” the Keeper continued. “It should have been a pretty standard mission. They’ve been surveying the town for a few weeks. Their host commander, Prie, was detected and injured in a firefight. Unfortunately, Wohlreich has most of his resources occupied right now dealing with the fracking sites in Montana and Wyoming, so it falls upon you to help the team out. I’m transmitting the details now.”

  Jill skimmed the mission report. “Looks serious. Need an extraction?”

  “No. We are sending in a new host commander to finish the job. You’ll need to send escorts to accompany the new host commander and reinforce the scout team’s ranks. Also, the last report yesterday was that Prie was too injured to move. Send your doctor as well and see if we can stabilize and prep him for transport.”

  “All right,” Jill said slowly. “I’ll look over the breakdown.” She checked a list off to the side. “My guys are stretched kind of thin right now. If you need a couple guys for an extended period of time, I’m not sure how many men I can cobble together, especially if we need to get Rin moved safely to the next Underground Railroad station.” She looked up at the Keeper. “I can assign Roen, my doctor, and maybe one more. That’s it.”

  The Keeper nodded. “Make it a priority. We don’t know how long Prie will last, and the nearest Prophus medical facility is two days’ journey from Ontario. The new host commander will fill you in when he arrives at your base. He should be there by this evening.”

  “Who is he?”

  The Keeper paused, and then began to chuckle. “Oh, I just realized. This is just too good. Sometimes, karma’s an absolute bitch, and her name is Meredith.”

  Jill didn’t like the sound of this. “Excuse me, Keeper?”

  The Keeper told her the rest of the mission parameters. Jill’s face turned sheet white as she added one and one and came up with “oh, fuck.”

  “Oh fuck is right,” the Keeper chortled. “Personal issues aside. Get this done. These are the two most important operations on your slate. I know I can depend on you. Command out.”

  The screen turned black. Jill sat there for the next few minutes and tried to piece together the right words to say. Then she examined her personnel and tried to reassign agents or pull someone, anyone, off a job. In the end, there was only one clear way forward, one that she was not looking forward to.

  “Fuck it, they’re professionals,” she muttered. “It’ll work. I hope.”

  “Hey, Jill,” Roen’s voice popped over the comm. “Freezer two’s broken down. Everything inside’s melted.”

  Jill clicked over. “Move what you can to freezer one and three, and I guess we’ll have whatever is in two for dinner.”

  “Hot damn, twenty pizzas for dinner tonight. I’ve died and gone to –”

  Jill closed the channel and rubbed her temples. “We are so screwed.”

  She couldn’t even figure out how to break this to Roen, let alone send him on this job. The whole thing was a disaster waiting to happen. At least she had a few hours before this evening. Maybe if she framed it in such a way that he could calm down before…

  The external perimeter alarm dinged. Hurley, their next door neighbor and agent manning the surveillance grid, buzzed over the comm system. “You’ve got company, Jill. Single signature inbound. Pass phrases accepted.”

  So much for giving him an early warning. Well, at least the pizzas were already thawed.

  8

  Clandestine Op

  Timestamp: 2622

  Not gonna lie; the realization that I lost Tao broke me. I was distraught for months. Angry. Moody. So in shock that I questioned if I was even alive. After all, a Quasing couldn’t leave a host until death. So how did this happen?

  When I found out that he had moved to Cameron, I was thrilled and mortified at the same time. At least my friend was still close. I had feared him dead. On the other hand, I was angry at him for choosing my boy. I wanted better for my son than this war. I wanted him to grow up and live a normal life where he wouldn’t get shot at. Instead, he was going to follow in my footsteps, and it made me hate myself and Tao for it.

  * * *

  The stack of thawing pizzas in Roen’s arms was taller than his head. It made walking up the narrow staircase from the safe house to the farmhouse a little tricky. He wondered how many of these pizzas he could handle by himself. Tao had weaned him off this food-of-the-gods early in his tenure as a Prophus, but like a first love, pizza would always be near and dear to his heart.

  He whistled as he bounded into the kitchen and piled the pizzas in two neat stacks. With only four ovens, it would take a while to cook everything. That suited him just fine. For once, in the name of not wasting food, he was honor-bound to eat pizza for the next three days. Two if he tried really hard.

  “Roen,” Jill called over the comm. “I need you in the living room.”

  Jill was using that voice again. She had used it once in a while before they were married, much more often after they were married and had separated, and all the time now that they were back together and she was his direct superior. Well, if there was one thing he had learned over the years…

  “Happy wife, happy life,” he chirped cheerfully, strolling out of the kitchen. The house was divided into small rooms, intentionally compartmentalized to create choke points in case of an attack. He walked through the living room, family room, sitting room, and finally to the room Roen referred to as the coating room, where the front door was. Jill and Hurley were already there, speaking to their visitor, who had his back to him. Roen walked closer and extended his hand, and then his mouth fell.

  The man turned and exclaimed. “Oh hello, Roen. My, there seems to be a lot more of you. Are you well?”

  “Marco!” he choked.

  At that very moment, he nearly drew his sidearm. He had to remind himself several times that they were on the same side. This was one of the few instances that Tao not being in his head was he
lpful, since Tao hated Marco’s Quasing, Ahngr, more than he hated most Genjix, and Tao’s hatred for the Genjix was legendary.

  “It’d be a lie if I said it’s good to see you, but no need to be uncivil about it, eh?” Marco smiled with those oh-so-perfect teeth.

  Roen wound his immediate instincts to punch the guy in his perfect teeth into a tight ball and stuffed it deep down into his gut. “What are you doing here?”

  Marco took off his jacket and held it out to him. Roen was perfectly content standing there, not taking it, until a glare from Jill gave him second thoughts. He accepted the jacket and hung it on one of the coat hooks lining the room. It must have been raining outside; the thing was soaked all the way through. He pulled his hands away and noticed that they were stained red.

  With newfound concern, Roen tapped on Hurley’s shoulder. “Wake up Ines. She’s down in the safe house. Tell her we have injured.”

  Hurley hurried off. Roen reached forward to help Marco, but was waved off.

  “Don’t worry about me, old chap,” Marco said. “Most of it isn’t mine.” He grimaced. “Ran into those fine Interpol folks coming in from Vancouver. That border of yours is like the Thirty-eighth Parallel now.”

  “You fool,” Jill berated Marco, ushering him into the main room. “Why didn’t you tell me you were injured?”

  “Really, hardly that.” Marco winked. “I couldn’t by any chance trouble you for a drink?”

  Roen led him into the sitting room and noticed the Brit wince as he sat down on the couch. He also limped, though that might have been an old injury he had sustained protecting Jill several years back. The reality was, Roen owed Marco for that one. The man was responsible for her still breathing today. However, as much good as he had done for Jill, he had always equally been an ass to Roen.