Amalfi Echo (8 page)

-oOo-

Two weeks of
real time and six months for Tessa. She was ready for the hit on
the Colombian drug lord, Fabio Restrepo. Unavoidably, Marion had to
be told. She was not happy.

“Does the term
‘child soldier’ mean anything to you Digby? That’s when you get
children to do things unspeakable when they’re too young to have
developed a proper sense of morality. Or any proper defences,
leaving them traumatised for life.”

“Trauma, my
ass,” Tessa said. “You’re talking to the Queen of Trauma.” She
decided not to mention to either of them the nervous spasms in her
guts whenever she thought about doing the killing thing, even on
the monsters she had as targets.

Of course,
Marion could hardly claim to be surprised. It was the logical next
step in the life Tessa seemed determined to have for herself.
Giving up, she said, “It will all end in tears,” reinforcing the
point by drenching them all in a rainstorm of tears through which
she exited.

“Okay,” Tessa
said, “is that a ‘yes’?” after the water had dissipated.

“Project Tessa,
you are cleared for take-off,” Digby said, using his hands as a
megaphone.

-oOo-

The tiny
shuttle, only Tessa-sized, deposited Tessa on a ridge overlooking
the hacienda. Being the obvious place to put a sniper, the ridge
had watchtowers and patrols. This would work to Tessa’s advantage
because the plan did not call for assassinating Fabio Restrepo.
That would draw too much attention. The patrols and watchtowers,
isolated from the main troops down at the hacienda, were a much
better target for practice. Tessa exited the shuttle tactically, as
she had been taught, as she had practiced many times now on a ship
creation of this very same ridge, including every single gunman
currently occupying it. Already she had killed copies of them many
times and had learnt how each of them reacted in a variety of
situations.

Tessa flitted
along the ridge, the Amalfi weapon and her working as one. In
addition, her ghostly combat suit now had a ghostly pocket filled
with the little glowing spheres containing the jellyfish. She
reached the third and final watchtower and decided this time to
clear it with a jellyfish. Afterwards, she conducted a scan of the
ridge. No human life. She allowed herself the luxury of climbing to
the top of the watchtower. Down in the valley below, the hacienda
was in turmoil. The noise of death visiting had carried down into
the valley. 4WDs with machine guns mounted in the back, set out
along a dirt road towards the ridge. Gunmen, some with small
missile launchers, scrambled into open trucks which also headed for
the dirt road. A helicopter lifted off a pad.

Time to go.
Tessa called the shuttle to her and was gone from the top of the
watchtower in one smooth movement.

-oOo-

In her
bathroom, in her living quarters on the sphere ship, Tessa thought
about gunslingers and how they cut notches on their rifle butts
when they had killed someone. Tessa had arranged a bathroom for
herself that was seriously oversized and crammed with pampering
equipment and accessories. She sat on a bench seat embroidered in
satin, contemplating her tattoos in her reflection in the mirror. A
change had occurred in the tattoos on her face and on her left
shoulder. A small part of each tattoo had become raised as though
it was embossed and the colours had changed from red and blue to a
uniform jet black. She had not done this change herself. It had
always puzzled her why she had done sketches of these particular
designs and given them to the tattoo studio, especially the one on
her face which had freaked out her foster parents, although her
acquaintances in the underground had thought it pretty cool. Even
she had been a little freaked out. She touched the small embossed
part of the tattoo on her face. The embossing spoke to her.
“
Amalfi
,” it said. Now she knew why she had chosen these
particular tattoos. They drew on her skin the marks that would
eventually signal she had completed her training as an Amalfi
warrior.

-oOo-

Tessa created a
pillow and hit Marion with it, going from Amalfi warrior to a kid
in an instant.

“Are you a
teenager today?” Marion said.

“Think about
it, dude,” Tessa said. She had chosen to wear a top which was cut
off at her shoulder blades so that Marion and Digby could see
clearly the tattoo on her shoulder. She walked backwards and
forwards in front of them, waggling her upper arm at them. She
inclined the tattooed part of her face towards them as she strutted
back and forth. They didn’t notice. Adults!

When she had
had enough of the posturing, Marion said, “We could do this all
day. On the other hand, you could tell us what this is all
about.”

Digby had
created a newspaper and rustled it for effect, peering over the
top, as though short-sighted.

“Oh, you guys,”
Tessa said. “Give me a break.”

Digby tossed
the newspaper aside, the pages separating and encircling Tessa.
“Okay, okay,” she said, punching her way out through the pages of
the newspaper. She created a chair and sat down beside Digby and
presented her left shoulder to him. “Touch the bottom left hand
corner where it’s black and raised up.”

“Are you sure
that’s what you want? I don’t want to be accused of anything.”

“Do it!” Tessa
said.

Digby ran his
fingers over the embossed portion. “What am I supposed to be
getting out of this? Is this new?”

“Nothing
happened?” Tessa asked. At Digby’s negative reply, Tessa went over
to Marion, who was sitting on a couch. “Maybe you’ll have better
luck.”

Mystified,
Marion touched the embossing and immediately recoiled. “Amalfi!”
she said.

“It spoke to
you,” Tessa said. Marion nodded. Tessa explained about the mark of
the Amalfi warrior, saying proudly, that now she really had begun
the journey.

“The one on
your face will become the same too?” Marion said.

“The one on my
shoulder will change with each kill, and the one on my face, marks
my progress towards the status of Amalfi warrior.”

Marion
frowned.

“I didn’t think
you would like it,” Tessa went on. “Please try to be happy for
me.”

Marion ran a
finger along Tessa’s hairline, reflecting. “I can see that you are
much happier now than you were and I’m very glad about that. I have
to say that I would prefer that you’d won a basketball
championship.” Marion hugged her and said “Congratulations. You
have well and truly earned this and whatever I think about it,
doesn’t matter.”

Digby put out
his hand. “Congratulations. As Marion says, you have worked
extremely hard for this and no one deserves it more than you.”

Tessa shook
Digby’s hand solemnly. “Thanks folks,” she said and embarrassed
now, disappeared amongst a huge display of fireworks.

-oOo-

Marion
organised the websites thusly: on her site she placed her broadcast
and a selection of additional material about the bugs. She started
a blog and posted a continuing stream of thoughts, prompted by her
studies, on the responsibilities of leadership which she repeated
on Twitter and other social media. These were not dry academic
dissertations but pointed remarks about how and why the world’s
leaders were failing their people in not preparing for war against
the bugs. She began to attract a following of conspiracy theorists,
geeks, anxious people looking for more anxiety, survivalists,
Islamists and Christians who hated her and loved her but not
necessarily in that order, and a huge number of people who
mistakenly believed that they were at the Revenge of the Gorgons
website, which was now enjoying a revival. Communities began to
spring up around her website and the one thing they all had in
common was that the bugs were now referred to as ‘the Gorgons’ even
though the Gorgons were spacefaring dragons and nothing like the
bugs.

Communities
too, were springing up around Tessa’s website. These were tentative
because her potential fan base still lacked focus, something to
hang their interest on. At the moment she was mostly getting the
sympathy vote. Not helping was that Digby, and the learning
programs, had forbidden her to reveal anything of her training
including field operations, or anything about the sphere ship and
since this occupied pretty much all of her time she was left with
little to say on Twitter and in the communities.

In the next
week, which was three months subjective time, Tessa carried out an
ambush against Shining Path guerrillas in the upper reaches of the
Amazon and a combined operation with Digby and Jazmine against a
Taliban stronghold in the mountains of Northwest Pakistan. Digby
was not interested in the Taliban. The operation was designed to
give Tessa experience in field risk assessment, calling in support
where required, and the learning programs wanted to reduce her
reliance on the shuttle. These kills too, were added to her Amalfi
marks.

In the fourth
week, in the final three months of the subjective year Marion had
allowed herself, she talked with Tessa and Digby about her plans to
break the stand-off, to move things forward again. She chose to do
this in a temporary dome set up in the Valles Marineris on Mars.
The Mars setting was not a ship construct. They had all been
working hard, although Digby perhaps less so than the others, and
were having time out on the red planet.

Marion turned
her attention away from the sheer magnificence of the great red
slash in the Martian surface that rose up all around them. “What I
want to do is have a private chat with a selection of world
leaders,” she said to Tessa and Digby, sitting up businesslike in
office chairs. “I don’t imagine this is something they will want
and what I plan to do is this.” Marion opened an animation she had
created. The animation zoomed in on the White House, stopping at a
specific set of windows. The shuttle appeared from the upper right
corner and poked itself through the windows. The animation moved
inside the room where the President of the United States was
sitting on his bed, preparing to retire for the night. The First
Lady was already in bed, reading.

“I exit the
shuttle which withdraws before anyone sees it, seal the room and
have my quiet chat with the President.”

“What are you
going to say to him?” Tessa asked. “Take me along. I’d like to have
a quiet chat with him which will involve not much talking and lots
of pain.” Tessa, unsurprisingly, saw the President as responsible
for the death of her parents.

“You should
have some armed back-up,” Digby said to Marion, “if you insist on
not even carrying a side arm. The ship’s heavy weapons will not be
much use in that situation. Tessa should go with you.”

Marion rejected
this. “I don’t think so. The last thing I need is a loose cannon in
the room with me.”

“Okay, that
does it,” Tessa retorted. “I’m outta here. Think I’ll go be
touristy with the big ol’ canyon.”

Marion
immediately apologised. “I was out of line there. I’m sorry.”

“You’ve both
been working like crazy,” Digby said. “Maybe we should do this
tomorrow and spend the rest of the day relaxing in a bubbly hot tub
with a nice glass of wine and…maybe some platters of
meze
?”

Marion looked
pained. “Let’s get this done.”

“Yeah, Digby,”
Tessa said. “You do enough relaxing for 20 people. What have you
been doing anyway while Marion and me have been working our guts
out?”

“I’ve been busy
too…doing stuff,” Digby said, with as much dignity as he could
muster.

Marion called a
quick break while she gathered her thoughts. When Tessa and Digby
were settled again she said to Tessa, “I probably do need some
back-up. We’ll need to run simulations with copies anyway which
will take the edge off it for you.”

“We’ll run
Tessa’s side as a training exercise in restraint. It’s not always
about killing everything in sight,” Digby said.

For the next
two hours the three of them worked through the animations of how
each of the world’s leaders would be accessed and then hit the
bubbly tub.

Before they
left Mars, Marion said, “I’m still looking for a way to sharpen
Tessa’s online presence. If either of you can think of
anything…”

And then, in
the way these things happen sometimes, the ideal opportunity
presented itself.

-oOo-

The library
block at Delaware Montessori High was surrounded by an FBI response
team and supporting them, state troopers and the local police.
Inside the block, 22 high school students had been fitted with
explosive vests by the members of a previously unknown American
jihadist group. The students had been arranged in two rows on
library seats in front of the issuing desk. Behind them on the
wall, the jihadists had hung sheets painted with slogans and
symbols of Islamic Unity. They had painted the terrified faces of
the students with similar slogans. Several of the older boys’ faces
were bloodied from a futile attempt at resistance. Two lay
sprawled, dead, on the carpeted floor.

Outside, the
FBI negotiators were sickeningly aware that their skills would be
wasted today. The terrorists had made their demands known through
webcams set up in the library. They wanted the release of a number
of Islamic extremists held in American prisons, however, frantic
intelligence analysis had revealed strong links between this
American group and the Islamic extremists in the Algerian desert
fortress. The best guess of the FBI analysts was that the demands
meant nothing. This was payback time. The students were going to
die anyway.

Unfortunately,
this did not mean that the assembled forces outside the school
could storm the block and save whomever they could because this was
not something that could be explained to the parents or to the
wider community.