The Lethal Agent (The Extraction Files Book 2) (31 page)

LRF-PS-103

SEPTEMBER 13, 2232

Vince leaned back in his office chair, satisfied to waste the afternoon in daydreams. Aida was alive.

More than that, she wanted to be with him.

With the Slight gone, Aida could be herself, could make her own decisions. And she chose him.

Infected, she’d been loyal to her husband, insistent on having a child as soon as possible, eager to have a family. On her own, she wanted him.

There was no small measure of joy in that. At last, he understood her swings, the pendulum between him and Sal, why she couldn’t make up her mind. A bug had been in her brain, controlling her, pushing her away from him.

Thoughts of the bugs brought him back to the planet. Perkins-196 had bugs. Was it their homeworld? Or just another planet they infiltrated, this one with far greater success? Or maybe that’s what the Earth would become after a few millennia of bug control.

Vince heard his tablet buzz. A new ecomm.

Still smiling, he tapped the icon and opened it.

TO: PLANETARY SYSTEMS DEPARTMENT

FROM: DR. MICHAEL FILMORE, DIRECTOR, LRF

MSG: PERKINS-196 COLONY APPROVED.

Vince cheered, even though there was no one around to hear it. They’d done it. Over the course of the next few years, they would work with Planetary Colonies, Colony Prep, and Colony Management to determine the eligibility of 196 as a future homeworld.

They could have a new home in the next few years.

Except this home would have bugs on it. Maybe Niemeyer had been right after all.

Vince closed his ecomms and walked to Dr. Niemeyer’s office. Technically, Niemeyer was his superior, but Aida had said to send him home for the day.

In his office, Niemeyer’s forehead was pressed against the screen of his tablet. Vince smiled that Niemeyer would be so upset at Filmore’s decision that he literally hit his head on his tablet.

But Niemeyer failed to move.

“Hey, get the ecomm?” Vince asked to no response.

It was then he knew his colleague was dead. Vince walked around the desk to look for a pulse, but there was none. Niemeyer’s flesh was still warm. He’d been dead less than an hour, probably only a few minutes.

In truth, Vince had never liked the guy, but that didn’t mean he wanted him to die.

Aida would take it hard.

While the entire wing was empty, Vince took the opportunity to notify Silas personally. He walked back to his office and cued up the comm.

Silas’s features filled the space above his desk a minute later.

“You guys are killing me today. It’s not even five.”

“Uh, did someone else already comm you?” Vince asked, ignoring the lack of pleasantries. They’d given up on those years ago.

“Yeah, Maggie and Kaufman. Any news on Perkins?” Silas pushed back his disheveled mess of morning hair, salt- and pepper-sprinkled as ever.

“She’s awake. Doesn’t remember any of it.” Vince relished the words, that he could say them and they were true. It didn’t seem possible hours before.

“Good. Glad to hear it. Is she the one?”

Vince nodded.

“Is that why you didn’t tell me she’d been infected so many times?” Silas didn’t mince words.

Vince nodded again. “Look, Aida’s fine for the time being, but the other researcher died. Niemeyer.”

“You think there’s a connection?”

“I’d be stupid if I didn’t.”

“You’re many things, Vince, but stupid isn’t one of them.” Silas sighed, his thoughts skewed by the early hour. “All right, I’ve already commed Masry but no big surprise she didn’t answer. I think she’s somewhere in the Southern Sector, Monterrey maybe. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear back.”

“Standard procedure for Niemeyer?” Prepping a body for return to Earth was his least favorite part. It was failure slapping him in the face, one more person he didn’t save.

At least it wasn’t Aida.

“Yeah, you know the drill. Filmore’s on board now, so you should be able to go directly through his office. Should speed things up a bit.”

“He is?” Vince asked. “Does he know about Abby?”

“No, of course not. How are you two doing by the way?”

Vince shrugged. It wasn’t all that long ago that Abby had his loyalty. They’d been assigned to their respective positions at LRF where they could keep an eye out and perform extractions as needed. Now, they rarely saw each other. Nothing had happened between them, they’d merely drifted apart. And now they each had someone else.

“You okay with that?”

“Of course. I’m happy for her. It wasn’t exactly the plan, but I think it worked out.”

“You’ve got it bad,” Silas said with a warm smile.

Vince laughed. “Yeah, I’ve got it bad.”

LRF-PQ-241

SEPTEMBER 13, 2232

Mable commandeered Theo’s tablet while they waited for news from Calvin. She’d left hers in her office, and neither of them wanted to go back and get it, not until they knew if she would recover.

In the meantime, Theo paced about the room. Mable could hardly blame him. Never had she had someone she loved in danger. She only learned about it in the aftermath. She found out Hadley had been attacked once it was over. She only knew Alex was dead when they received the ecomm from the Scholar Committee, the one she now knew was false.

Mable wasn’t one to sit idly and wait. If she thought too hard about it, she would see blood seeping from a long incision, legs of a bug crawling out, more horrible in her mind than it had been in real life.

She resigned herself to research.

Aida had contracted a total of four bugs, though they had never been reported. To Mable, that constituted a huge hole in their bug-host graph.

When she pulled it up, she was shocked to see so much green. Dasia and Osip had been hard at work figuring out connections, adding in new hosts as they were confirmed.

They must be working well together.

Mable added in Dr. Aida Perkins, Planetary Systems researcher at the LRF. Mentee to Dr. Parr. Of course, once entered, her circle slid into place near one of the first. Dr. Jackson Parr had been the most recently confirmed bug death when she arrived at CPI.

She was also connected to Dr. Fobbs in LRF Robotics, the recently vacated position now held by Mable’s esteemed husband.

“Theo, come here,” she said without turning around.

He trudged over and stood behind her. “What?” he asked, all the energy gone from his voice.

“Remember how Calvin said he’d already done three extractions on Aida?”

“How could I forget?”

Mable could almost hear his teeth clench. “Yeah, sorry…”

“What does that have to do with this?” Theo ignored her apology.

“She wasn’t on it. And look, when I added her in, look where she ended up. Right here in the middle. She’s been the one they were after the whole time.”

Mable looked up to see Theo taking in the chart, evaluating the connections, scanning through the hundreds of victims.

“But why?” he finally asked.

“Her planet. It has to be. There are bugs on it. It was never about anth or art or any of it. It was always about 196. Here’s a shuttle pilot that blew up his shuttle. This one is the robotics tech that sent the probes to do her research. This one, Dr. Grant Lilliwood, he led his field in advances in interstellar propulsion vehicles.” Even as she said it, the pieces fell into place.

Theo shook his head. “Some of these still don’t fit. Why those pharmaceutical researchers you extracted? Or this one, that geneticist your brother did? The one who did brain research. There’s no connection between them and the planet.”

“Okay, I didn’t say it was a perfect theory, but this one has something the others don’t.” Mable prepared to play her ace.

“What’s that?”

“Evidence. Her planet. There are bugs on her planet. There’s no denying it. They’re connected. We don’t know all the details yet, but there’s no way around it.”

Theo exhaled deep and slow, taking his time to think, as she knew he would need, especially today.

Then came the buzz of incoming ecomm.

Theo darted forward and tapped it before Mable had even registered it had arrived.

TO: DR. THEODORE KAUFMAN, LRF

FROM: DR. CALVIN HILL, LRF

MSG: AWAKE.

Mable clasped her hands over her mouth. Never in a million years would she have thought she could have successfully performed a Slight extraction, much less under those conditions.

Warm hands appeared on either side of her face as Theo kissed the top of her head. “Thank you,” he said as he landed another half dozen kisses before she finally wriggled away from him.

“I did it!” she squealed, unable to keep back her excitement. Mable jumped from the chair and tackled Theo to the bed. “She’s awake!”

Theo laughed, the good, heavy laugh of an easy heart. “And if you ever do that to me again, so help me—”

“You’ll do what?” Mable called his bluff as she leaned down and kissed him, no sissy kisses on the cheek or head, but a real one.

“I don’t know. I’ll find something. I’ll take away your coffee privileges.” With hands on her hips, he pulled her close. “Can we go see her now?”

“How about in the morning?” Mable laughed.

“You got it.”

CPI-AQ-01

SEPTEMBER 14, 2232

After back-to-back comms from his teams on the LRF, Silas gave up on sleep. What was the point? Some other catastrophe would occur as soon as he fell asleep again.

So Silas trudged his way to his office and poured the first of many cups of coffee. He didn’t even bother to change from his loose-fitting sleep pants. His hand rubbed across his bare torso, so much softer than it had been twenty years before.

The lights of his office sprang to life when they sensed his motion in the room. His insects seemed to flutter to life, but it was only a trick of the eye.

Silas dropped his tablet beside his coffee and pulled up Maggie’s files. A planet profile. Her extraction debrief. A flow chart of bug hosts.

He started with the extraction debrief. It was a simple, two paragraph write up of the Slight extraction. With Dr. Perkins awake, Maggie joined the small group of people capable of successful Slight extractions. Now there were two of them.

Silas sipped his coffee as he read her glossed over details, her watered down version. Maggie’s report was clinical and to the point. “Agent MW made a five-inch incision behind the host vertebra,” she wrote. There was nothing about the blood, nothing about the feel of muscle under the blade.

Like Silas, Maggie would never forget the details. And like him, she would likely never reveal the horrors of that experience.

He moved on to the planet profile, unsure of what he was looking for. As Maggie had said, four native species were highlighted, the four bugs. They hovered in three-dimensional scans like he’d never seen, alive and moving where he had only seen those that were dead and preserved.

Silas looked up at his office walls—at the boxes of butterflies pinned in place, their colorful wings spread wide. The bugs were nothing like that.

The projected Gleam shimmered like a cerulean penny, its legs pumping beneath it as it scurried over something in its environment, its wide, circular body hovering above. Had he not known better, Silas would have thought it an interesting new species, a beautiful creature. Scholars would beat each other senseless for permission to study it.

But Silas did know better. Only CPI knew the capabilities of these creatures. How they operated was a complete mystery, one that was slowly coming to light.

They were close. He could smell it; the hairs on his arms tingled with the closeness of it.

Now they had a planet. A source, a homeworld, a clue.

More than they’d ever had before.

A victory, a small one, but they were so rare these days, Silas couldn’t help but feel the thrill of it. Instead of comm-ing to tell him of another bug-induced casualty, Maggie had commed to tell him she figured out a huge piece of their fucked-up puzzle.

Now they just had to put it all together.

Once satisfied the bugs were authentic, identical to those his agents extracted from hosts all over the world, Silas moved on to the flow chart.

It was a chaotic, jumbled thing. Circles and lines criss-crossed and overlapped with seemingly no reason. The chart filled his screen to the edges, and when he swiped, he found it went on in every direction.

One name in particular caught his eye: Dr. Grant Lilliwood. The pride of Ramona’s life, so unfairly stolen. A gift to his industry who died with a major accomplishment on his horizon.

Silas, the fourth son of struggling Craftsmen parents, and Grant, the only child of the great Dr. Ramona Lilliwood, should never have had cause to be childhood friends. Nonetheless, Silas had more memories of dinners at the Lilliwood home than his own.

When Grant died, Ramona found the bug. A capable anatomist in her own right, she performed a physical autopsy on her own son, determined to learn his cause of death when so many others had failed. She sought approval to open CPI and named Silas her second hand, sponsoring him through school to get the doctorate he needed to garner some measure of Scholar confidence.

Ramona didn’t know he had Masry on his side as well.

The degree made it all the more legitimate in the files.

Grant’s death had sparked the entire facility, Silas’s life’s work. Through the death of his oldest friend, Silas had found purpose.

It was Grant’s circle he tapped first. When he did, the connecting lines grew brighter, small descriptions appearing over each one.

DR. VIRGIL RATHBONE – LEAD PROPULSIONS ENGINEER (CIPE)

DR. AMELIA ST. CLOUD – MENTOR

DR. VALENCIA PRAIRIE – POTENTIAL GENETIC MATCH (VIA SCHOLAR COMMITTEE)

At sight of the last name, Silas remembered her. Grant had shown him a handful of candidates and asked for his advice, of which Silas had offered none. He knew nothing about Scholars back then, understood little of their strange practices.

Silas hadn’t realized it was her. She was Valencia Delacourt back then. He had never put it together.

Until now.

Under the lines, he saw a pair of letters: MW, TK, DD, JG, or OM. Initials, he realized.

His hand sent the ecomms within thirty seconds. Four minutes later, Dasia, Jane, and Osip stood in the doorway of his office, all groggy and squinting against the light.

“How much have you had to drink, Dr. A?” Osip asked, running a hand through his messy hair.

“None. You three worked on this?” He motioned to the chart above his desk.

They nodded.

“How did you get this information?”

Osip looked over at Dasia. “Uh, we used the Scholar database to find working relationships.”

“Why didn’t you use the Scholar research reports? Didn’t Nick show you how we do it?”

“Uh, I mean, he told us to use them, but we didn’t know what to look for. This made more sense to us.” Silas was unsurprised to hear Nick had been less than thorough.

Then, Silas asked the question he really wanted to know the answer to. “Why did you add this one, Dr. Prairie?” Again, he motioned to the chart.

“It says right there. She was one of his potential matches. We found her information in the Scholar databases. Took us a while to find her, actually.” Osip straightened his vest.

“Yes, but why her? Why not the other matches as well?”

Osip looked back at Dasia before he said, “She was the only one who got infected.”

Silas looked back at the chart with new appreciation. Three professionals who knew or worked with Grant had been infected. And, according to the connecting lines, each of those had other affiliations with bug hosts.

“Mable was right. It’s intentional. Someone is behind this, coordinating the attacks,” Silas began. Then, he told them about the planet, about the bugs, and Kaufman’s sister. All of it.

None moved as he spoke. They simply listened, taking it all in.

“Who knew Theo had a sister?” Osip said at the end, like that was the only piece he’d picked up.

“She’s had a total of four extractions. There has to be a reason she’s been targeted. It seems the planet is the obvious choice.” It was Jane who put it together first.

“Okay, so what do we do now?” Dasia asked. Her blonde hair stood in a messy pile at the back of her head. Her hands were hidden in the sleeves of a too-big sleep shirt.

“Reconfigure this chart with the matrix. Use the planet as context, and tell me how they relate. Maybe, just maybe, we can figure out how they select their hosts.”