I could try to bring you home
Back to a life where you belong
You’re wandering out alone
Wandering on your own
Nono Rodriguez is crying, and it’s not because she’s tied up in the cockpit of the jet.
Emma spends several minutes getting her to focus. Fire has some kind of calming effect on Nono, and the pyrokinetic is an expert at wielding it to help her partner relax. Soon, she’s in good enough shape for questioning, and Alycia wastes no time.
She kneels next to the girl. Her hand is on a pistol, but it’s not drawn. She’s just ready. “What did you do, Nono?”
“I don’t remember,” the girl says between sniffles. “I don’t know…”
Alycia reviews her interrogation strategy.
Whoever or whatever just took over Nono might be gone. Or it might have restored control, but be lurking in the background, listening. Or this might be acting.
Could Nono have gone rogue of her own volition?
Do I actually think this random American schoolgirl could have fooled me for long enough to make that pay off? Alycia finds herself wondering. But Nono has made great strides at spycraft. The danger could be legitimate.
Maybe it was a mistake to train her.
No. The source is most probably the unknown of the Poppet System - the objective of their mission in Panama. Some preprogrammed command left over, maybe?
Being hijacked like that would have been stressful. The key to getting answers isn’t to confront that trauma head-on, but to work around it.
“What were you two doing yesterday?” she asks Emma.
“The usual,” the other girl shrugs. “Coney Island style hot dogs, I knocked over a jewelry store, I took Nono to the therapist I’ve been seeing, oh and there was the mind-blowing sex–”
With Emma, any or all of these could be true, or lies to relieve considerable mental stress. Alycia decides to take them at face value. “Therapist. They know who you are?”
“Yeah.”
Alycia’s voice remains calm and level. “You need to stop seeing them. We’re cutting ties with everyone for right now.”
“She and Nono were making progress,” Emma protests weakly.
“Too bad. We’ll make other arrangements. What about this morning? What were you two doing?”
“We came to MIA to hang out in case the boring-ass meeting turned interesting.”
Alycia nods. She turns back to Nono. “You remember that? Coming to MIA in the morning? How did you get there? What was Emma wearing?”
Nono sniffles. Her voice cracks, but she’s able to answer. “Took the… the 34 line… Emma was … she’s… the um… that punk leather jacket… ‘Total Chaos’…”
Alycia glances at the back of Emma’s jacket, which does indeed read “Total Chaos” in bold red letters. She nods. “And then…?”
A careful conversation follows. Nono remains tied up, despite seemingly free of the foreign influence. John Black is flying the plane, but can spare glances backward. Alex is at the ops station. Emma remains hovering protectively over Nono.
At the end of it, Alycia is reasonably certain of what happened, and briefs the team on her conclusions.
“Nono was searching the Poppet System for expertise to help her understand a reference to a particular event. Doing so activated a personality - not just a skill set, but an embedded personality - in the Poppet System. It took stock of its surroundings, saw an opportunity, and took it. Then it de-activated itself.”
Alycia looks at her team, one face after another. “It has become more urgent than ever to find a way to remove the Poppet System, not just from Nono, but from all the Grasscutters.”
“Yo, on that note, a message came in from Jason Quill while you were talkin’,” Alex says.
“It’s a trick. Do not answer,” Alycia says curtly.
Alex looks baffled for just a moment. “But, like, Jason Quill is the nanotech guy. Isn’t he–”
“I said it’s a trick, and don’t answer.” Alycia realizes too late that her voice cracked, and with it her mask of poise and self-confidence.
The others look at her with renewed concern, and it makes her want to hide away somewhere, or run for the cockpit door of the plane, or grab her gun and–
Emma is the first to read the impulse toward violence, and puts her own hand firmly on Alycia’s arm. “Easy there, chief. If you need to take a break, you go sit down.”
Alycia almost flinches, almost grabs the hand and throws Emma, but her self-control reasserts itself. “Baker-2,” she says at last, in a voice held by an iron grip. “Observe the Baker-2 protocol for external contact. Do not respond to any other messages.”
The Baker-2 protocol is a series of broadcasts that will be made. It doesn’t matter where, it only matters that they are made. The broadcasts will encode a means of making contact. The key used to encrypt the message is to be used one time, and then discarded. Events requiring Baker-2 are not expected to commonly occur.
The airplane is flying over a moonlit Pacific Ocean when the message comes in. Alex, Emma, and Nono are asleep. Alycia and John are still awake.
Alycia rouses herself from the copilot’s seat, and crawls her way aft. She pushes Alex’s sleeping body aside to get at their laptop, and acknowledge the message.
“Broadcast this,” she tells John, who gets on the plane’s radio immediately.
A few minutes and some crypto key exchanges later, the rest of the team wakes up to hear Craig Costigan’s voice, muffled and garbled over the heavily encrypted channel.
“Everyone’s alive and well,” he reports gruffly. “A little bird tells me I’ll be in closed-door Congressional subcommittee meetings for a few months. They’ll probably want Parker too. The rest of the worker bees will be safe enough - none of them know much about our field work - so they’re getting furloughed for that time. Now. What do you folks need from us?”
“We need–” Alycia wants to say ‘Jason Quill’ and isn’t sure her vocal control will faithfully serve her just at the moment. “We need expertise in nanotechnology. The source of the compromise was an unexpected Trojan in the Poppet System. We need it removed.”
There’s a pause on the line. Costigan comes back, less confidently. “Jason Quill’s rounded up a group of nanotech experts to help Mercury - your teammate, Harry Gale. He’s got some kind of nanotech virus in his system. Ordinarily I’d say you have the best shot with them. But I suspect you don’t want to be within a mile of such a high-profile business right now.”
“Correct, sir,” Alycia says carefully. “There is another possibility. The designer of the Poppet System. Alias ‘Jenny Byrne’. A product of the ANTIBODY program.”
“Russian neutralization assets, made to order. I remember.” Costigan sighs. “And Byrne is suspected to be in charge of the Grasscutters now. If there’s any successor to ANTIBODY - anonymous soldiers created to take down the powerful - it feels like it’s them.”
“Maybe.” Alycia taps her chin in thought. “Ever since his visit to Russia, Jenny Byrne would periodically visit–”
She still has trouble saying his name without expressing undesirable emotion. She sidesteps.
“–the Quill compound. She may still be doing so.”
The thought irritates her, but she continues regardless. “That stolen submarine is a logical mobile base. I would have expected a director of operations to be there. They could surface to remotely direct their hijacked assets, such as the recent attack on the HHL, then dive to avoid detection and pursuit. And you said a gathering of nanotechnology experts…”
Alycia perks up suddenly. “Byrne might be at the Quill compound right now, anonymously, to blend into this meeting and learn more. My understanding is that she’s still trying to acquire the secrets of Byron Quill’s technology. Where better to attempt that than at Byron Quill’s own home, among fellow experts in her field?”
“But Jason would recognize her,” Costigan says. “Does she have a credible disguise?”
“She might. I wouldn’t put it past her. But we…”
Alycia turns her attention to the radio. “Director. I’m sorry, but maybe it’s better if you don’t know what we’re doing.”
“I don’t need to know what you do, Charade,” she hears him say. “I know why you do it. That’s good enough.”
As the call ends, Alycia’s cheeks puff as she exhales with relief and confusion. She turns to John Black. “Newman-type robots can pass for human beings, yes? Past what point?”
“Around second base,” John drawls.
Alex almost chokes and Emma smirks. In the corner, still tied up, Nono sighs a little. But Alycia presses on.
“Can you create face masks that can disguise one or more of us, but still pass for human on close and prolonged inspection? Perspiration - hair - blush responses - but enough to conceal us?”
“Probably,” John shrugs.
Alycia points at him. “Get on it. If you can’t manage it, we’ll do it the low-tech way.”
She turns to the others. “Alex, falsify records for as many of us as you can manage. Emma, our files have a partial readout on the Quill compound and its defenses. I’ll fill in the gaps for you. Make plans for infiltration and exfiltration. I’ll review them.”
“What will you be doing?” Alex asks.
“Learning everything there is to know about nanotechnology.”
Alycia hunkers down in front of Nono, and looks her eye to eye, up close and personal. “You will be too, Nono,” she says in a soft voice, cold as ice. Her emotions are still turbulent within her, but she must master them. “If the system activates again, I’ll do my best to take you down non-lethally. But if this personality wakes up and fights back, I make no promises. Do you understand?”
Nono is visibly fearful, and doing her best to hold back her own panic. But she nods, quickly, like a hunted animal diving for its den when a predator appears. “I - I understand.”
“We’ve broken into a few places. Finally time to raid a friendly, huh?” grins Alex, perhaps in an attempt to break up the tension.
Alycia, having untied Nono in the few seconds that question took, rises and turns sharply. “For the duration of this mission, nobody is ‘friendly.’”
John remembers how he did synthetic skin originally. He’s wearing it. He can’t benefit from any subsequent improvements - calling the Newmen is off limits - but he’s able to put together a program in the plane’s molecular lathe that will do the trick.
“Biomimetic adhesive keeps the prosthetic on your real skin,” he explains. “The pores are actually much wider than they seem, and they’ll pull sweat right through. What I got here will suck if you want to impersonate anyone the target knows, but we’re going in as random researchers.”
Nono has concocted a chemical companion, using advice from a trick Alycia used once. “When you drink this, it will adjust your voice for several hours. Drink enough of it and it will give you violent indigestion, so please using it sparingly.”
Emma is on deck next, with routes into and out of the compound. Alex has forged credentials that should pass muster with the Quill computer system.
Alycia briefs the team on their covers. “Our host will have personally vetted all the primary attendees. Our cover story is that one of them forwarded the invitation to a few colleagues and we showed up. We will be suitably apologetic about the mix-up, but since we’re here, perhaps we could help…?”
John puts the plane onto a course toward the Arctic, at extreme elevation. The team pile into their Chimeras and launch, bound for that most dangerous of exotic destinations, their home town.