The Seraphim Sequence tfc-2 Page 6

  She made her way to the mess, and wasn’t surprised to see Jay among the first crew members feasting on breakfast. His plate spilled over with crispy bacon, sausages and eggs. He talked enthusiastically, food spraying from his mouth. Damien, next to him, was quiet.

  Nasira found herself a space next to Jay and slapped him on the back of the head with a metal spoon. Jay almost choked on his food. Sophia sat opposite them, unable to keep a straight face as Jay coughed to clear his throat.

  Once he was shoveling food again, Nasira grinned and started eating. ‘Aren’t you having anything?’ she asked Sophia.

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  Her mind was on Adamicz’s diary now and it wouldn’t let go. She reached for the jug of water and poured herself a cup.

  DC was sitting next to Damien. She watched him pop two tablets and chase them with water. His breakfast appeared half-eaten. He looked up, noticed Sophia, then returned to his meal.

  The skipper appeared beside her. ‘I hope everyone slept well.’

  Sophia smiled. ‘Yes, thank you.’ She touched the papers in her pocket to check they were still there.

  The skipper noticed her plate was empty and immediately ordered someone to fill it for her. Before she could protest, breakfast was piled in front of her.

  ‘Are you alright with eggs, ma’am?’ the skipper asked.

  Sophia nodded. ‘Yes, fine. No problem.’

  As he left, Benito pushed his way in beside Sophia. He raised an eyebrow at her towering plate. ‘Eating small this morning?’

  ‘I don’t even know if it’s morning any more,’ she said.

  ‘I second that,’ Jay said. ‘One minute I was minding my own business in New Zealand; now I’m in a submarine at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t even know where we’re going.’

  Sophia put her fork down. The noise in the mess had picked up as more people populated the tables behind them. ‘Once we’re out of here, it’s up to you what you want to do.’

  Jay raised both hands in surrender. ‘All I’m saying is, last time we did this Nasira tied me to a urinal and then we crashed a helicopter into the UN headquarters.’

  Damien held up a finger. ‘And I was exposed to a nuclear meltdown.’

  ‘Yeah, that too,’ Jay said.

  ‘What about you?’ Sophia said, shifting the conversation to DC. ‘Radiation exposure, crashed helicopters?’

  DC shrugged. ‘I told you. Ex-military. No helicopter crashes.’

  She pulled a pair of dog tags from her pocket and slid them across the table to him. He seemed unsurprised. His hand closed around them, briefly touching hers.

  ‘I was looking for those,’ he said.

  ‘You slipped up. You don’t normally carry things in your pockets,’ Sophia said.

  ‘Actually I did, until I started bodyguarding a professional pickpocket. Or a genetically enhanced black operative.’

  ‘Former,’ she said, ‘on both accounts. Speaking of former, what’s your story?’

  ‘You just asked me that.’

  ‘And I shouldn’t need to ask again,’ she said.

  DC rolled his dog tags over in one hand. ‘SEAL Team Six. Pulled in by the CIA’s Special Activities Division.’

  Nasira raised an eyebrow. ‘Which group?’

  DC exhaled and poked at his food. ‘Political Action Group.’

  Nasira didn’t look impressed. ‘Political manipulation, psychological warfare, economic warfare,’ she said. ‘That’s only half a step from the Fifth Column proper.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You sound a little overqualified for just any Blue Beret attachment though,’ Sophia said.

  He met her gaze, but only briefly. ‘We all have our secrets.’

  He excused himself, forcing Damien, Jay and Nasira to stand so he could slip through with his half-finished breakfast.

  ‘So do they teach you how to use tachi swords in the Navy SEALs?’ Sophia said. ‘Or was that the Special Activities Division?’

  DC discarded his plate and left the mess.

  Sophia followed him out into the narrow corridor where no one could hear them.

  ‘Project Seraphim,’ she said, stepping in front of him. ‘What is it?’

  DC halted, and checked no one was around to overhear. Another crew member came out of the mess and squeezed past them. DC waited until he’d disappeared down the corridor, then said, ‘I told you, we all have our secrets.’

  Sophia took the papers from her back pocket and shoved it in his face. ‘Not any more.’

  * * *

  Sophia followed DC into the lockout trunk, a semicircular staging chamber originally designed to deploy Navy SEALs. It was the only place on the submarine where they wouldn’t risk being overhead. At the moment, fortunately, it didn’t contain any water. There was a ladder in the center, which disappeared into a tube above her. The other side of the trunk was stacked with metal panels. Each panel had two handles, probably equipment storage for SEAL deployment.

  DC closed the circular porthole behind him. ‘I commanded Blue Berets,’ he said.

  ‘How many?’

  He glared at her. ‘All of them. Thirteen thousand.’

  His name had been mentioned in Adamicz’s entry, but without much context. She had no idea that she was questioning the former general of the Fifth Column’s personal army: thirteen thousand former Special Forces soldiers plucked from around the world.

  ‘Should I start calling you general?’ she said.

  ‘Colonel. If you’re nostalgic.’

  ‘Hardly. And you’re a bodyguard now? That’s a perplexing career move.’

  ‘The Akhana don’t have an army, you know that,’ DC said. ‘Just security.’

  Sophia shook her head at her own stupidity. ‘You’re head of Akhana security, aren’t you? I didn’t even think of that.’

  ‘What’s left of them, anyway,’ he said. ‘How do you think I got you into this sub?’

  ‘Because you trained them,’ Sophia said. ‘Just as you trained the Blue Berets.’

  An idea started forming in her head. If DC knew how the Blue Berets operated on both an organizational and tactical level, he could be more useful than she’d first thought. If only she’d known that earlier.

  ‘When the Fifth Column knew people were defecting, I was to coordinate their … disposal,’ he said. He stared at the ladder beside her, unfocused and unnaturally still.

  ‘I’m guessing your mission didn’t go as planned,’ she said.

  He sniffed noisily through one nostril. ‘I turned on my own men.’

  ‘You saved the defectors,’ Sophia said.

  ‘Not as many as I would’ve liked. Everyone I saved was crammed on this one sub.’

  ‘How many?’

  ‘Hundred and twenty-four.’ DC’s hand closed over. He was still holding the dog tags. ‘Freeman doesn’t trust a whole lot of people. He trusts me to keep him alive. And he trusts you.’

  ‘Why?’ Sophia said.

  ‘Why are you asking me that?’

  Sophia didn’t reply. She waited, watching him intently.

  ‘You want my guess? He sees a lot of himself in you, when he was younger,’ DC said, meeting her gaze. ‘You don’t give up.’

  She looked down at her white sneakers. ‘I already have.’

  DC stepped in fractionally closer. She could smell the fragrance of his shaving cream. ‘We’re not here to talk about my history, are we? We’re here to talk about someone else’s.’

  Sophia moved her head back just enough so she could see his facial expressions.

  ‘You knew of Adamicz. You knew he was working in Project Seraphim,’ she said. ‘What do you know about the project?’

  ‘What do you know?’

  There was no point dancing around the issue. He wasn’t going to cough anything up until she admitted what she knew.

  ‘Prototype soldiers,’ she said. ‘Like Project GATE. But civilians too.’

&
nbsp; He nodded. ‘Yeah. Project Seraphim was the Fifth Column’s second attempt to program soldiers. Project GATE was the third.’

  ‘Third?’

  She’d had no idea there was more than one project. Project GATE was all she knew. Denton had enlisted hundreds of children as Project GATE test subjects, aged mostly between six and ten, picked because of their rare, strange abilities. Damien could radiate heat, Jay could generate electricity. Some test subjects kept their innate abilities secret, Sophia included. But her secret was she had no innate ability. She’d been terrified of the other Project GATE children finding out and teasing her for being ‘powerless’.

  She shook her head. ‘Three projects. I always thought there was just one.’

  Denton had trained all of the Project GATE test subjects to become operatives. Sophia’s military training had begun during adolescence, in parallel with Adamicz’s programming. She had learnt reconnaissance, escape and evasion, tactical communication, scouting and tracking, intensive unarmed and edged weapon combat, medical training, survival training in a multitude of environments, sniping and countersniping, a wide variety of small-arms training and combat diving. Following this, each test subject had moved into further training modules such as surreptitious entry, close-quarters combat and structure clearing, surveillance, countersurveillance, agent acquisition, applied explosives techniques, tactical vehicle commandeering, interception and evasive driving.

  Once the modules were complete, Project GATE had taken a different turn altogether. The project’s lead computer geneticist, Dr Cecilia McLoughlin, had injected the test subjects turned operatives with adeno-associated viruses — harmless shells — that carried instructions for switching on pseudogenes inside the operatives’ bodies. Sophia was administered tetrachromacy — the ability to perceive hundreds of millions of colors; Damien was administered hyperaudition — perception of infrasound and ultrasound; and Jay got pentachromacy — detection beyond the visible spectrum, including ultraviolet light at one end and infrared at the other.

  The second iteration of operatives — shocktroopers — had received a much improved version of pentachromacy, which Cecilia had discovered in a test subject they’d plucked from Belarus. The test subject’s local community had hailed her as a miracle because she was able to look inside human bodies, see their organs and tissue, and identify illness and disease. Cecilia had called it hexachromacy.

  Denton’s intention was that Project GATE would forge deniable operatives with augmented abilities beyond the range of normal human capacity. It had never occurred to Sophia that perhaps this wasn’t Denton’s first attempt, that there might have been projects before GATE. She remembered something Adamicz had said when he was deprogramming her in Italy. He’d spoken of a precursor to Project GATE that began in 1991. He must have been talking about Project Seraphim.

  ‘And the first project?’ she asked.

  ‘Unsuccessful. The research was stolen,’ DC said. ‘And with Seraphim, the programming was different.’

  ‘Wait, what research? The Chimera vectors?’

  ‘Chimera vectors were decades later. The very first project was during the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s. Some sort of virus. Long before my time, I don’t know much about it.’

  ‘But the second project, Project Seraphim.’ Sophia took a step closer. ‘How was the programming different?’

  ‘The subjects were triggered remotely using extremely low frequencies. They do strange things to your behavior.’

  ‘Behavioral aberrations,’ Sophia said. ‘Neural network disturbances, altered blood chemistry.’

  DC’s eyes opened fractionally wider. ‘Well versed, I see.’

  ‘Adamicz’s diary. He mentioned a thing or two.’

  DC shook his head. ‘He forgot to mention the changes in the endocrine and immune system.’

  ‘No,’ Sophia said. ‘He covered that.’

  DC watched her for a moment in silence, then sniffed. ‘Why are you asking me questions you already know the answers to?’

  ‘I’m not so much interested in what you know but how you know it.’

  ‘Commanding the Blue Beret battalion doesn’t automatically give you every security clearance on offer,’ DC said. ‘But one can learn all sorts of things in the right places.’ He popped a pill from a plastic container in his pocket.

  She grabbed his hand. ‘What are those?’

  He didn’t pull away. ‘Antidepressants.’

  ‘I didn’t know the Akhana prescribed amphetamines,’ she said.

  ‘I didn’t know it was any of your business,’ he said.

  Sophia felt his hand tighten under hers. She released her grip. In the months that DC had been assigned to guard her, he’d always stood by her. He’d never doubted her abilities, or her reasoning. He questioned it, relentlessly, but he always trusted her.

  ‘I know what it is,’ he said softly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You choose who you allow inside. I suppose you always have. But Freeman, he just threw me in there.’

  Sophia ground her teeth. ‘What’s your point?’ she said.

  ‘That’s what annoys you, isn’t it? You didn’t choose for me to be here. Getting in your way, questioning what you do, questioning why you do it.’

  She crossed her arms. ‘Sometimes I wonder that myself.’

  He smiled. ‘Keeping you alive.’

  She snorted in amusement. ‘I think you actually have to save me before you can put that on your resumé.’

  ‘Like when Dolph wanted to sell you to the Fifth Column and we busted you out?’ he said. He reached into his pocket. ‘Just a second, I’m updating my resumé as we speak.’

  ‘I never thanked you for that,’ Sophia said. She pulled him by his overall strap and kissed him on the cheek. His stubble brushed her lips. ‘Thank you.’

  DC opened his mouth and words stumbled out. ‘Uh, that’s … that’s fine.’

  She stepped past him and out of the lockout trunk. She made her way back to her bunk, deep in thought. DC knew more about Project Seraphim. And if she was going to get to it, she needed to pull the right threads.

  Chapter Nine

  ‘In twenty-eight years of service, I’ve never seen muscular repair like this before,’ the hospital corpsman said.

  Jay felt a slight pinch as the corpsman removed a stitch. ‘So I’m good to go?’

  ‘You shouldn’t be,’ she said. ‘But you are.’

  ‘Thanks, doc.’ Jay slipped his overalls back over his shoulders.

  The corpsman was shaking her head, lips parted. ‘I don’t understand how … What drugs are you on?’

  Jay listed them on his fingers. ‘Scotch, gin, beer — Italian preferably — tequila. Oh, and Polish vodka, homemade.’

  ‘Is there anything else I can help you with?’ she said. ‘Prescriptions?’

  A few options came to mind but he pushed them aside. He wasn’t in his apartment with nothing better to do than drink and sleep. He felt renewed, fresh. He needed to do something else. Something better.

  ‘I think I’m good,’ he said. ‘Thanks.’

  He took the ladder to the recreation deck and gravitated toward the bench press, watching from the corner of his eye as Nasira, Benito and half a dozen crew sparred on the other side of the deck. They were running through some sort of drill. It was probably a good thing, Jay thought. If Benito was going to be hanging around this lot, he needed to learn how to shrug off a combatant or two.

  Jay slipped weights onto both ends of the barbell, clamped them in place, then settled in on the bench. He slipped on his fingerless gloves and flexed them with satisfaction. He stared at the ceiling; it seemed unfinished, with banks of fluorescent lights, metal boxes and pipes threading overhead. He closed his eyes, found an even grip on the barbell and inhaled.

  The crew circled Nasira and attacked her en masse. Jay paused to watch. She moved calmly, taking them down one by one, sometimes two by two. Her movements were fluid, deceptively fast. The crew got bac
k to their feet, wincing but eager for another go. Nasira hadn’t even broken a sweat.

  Jay nodded. Not bad.

  ‘Hey,’ one of the crew said. He was upon Jay in seconds, shaking his hand. ‘Name’s Rhyss.’ His accent was Australian. He narrowed his eyes. They were the color of ice. ‘Jay, right?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Jay cleared his throat, tried to make his voice deeper. ‘Arming the torpedoes, huh?’

  Rhyss blinked. ‘What? Nah, just training with Nasira, mate.’ He scratched at an impenetrable beard beneath his thin, tapered nose. ‘Crew call me Chickenhead.’

  ‘Chicken … head?’ Jay said.

  Another crew member approached, laughing.

  ‘When he gets excited on the sonar, his head does this,’ the guy said, jerking his head back and forth. It reminded Jay of a pigeon. ‘Like a chicken.’

  Chickenhead gave a forced laugh. ‘And if you haven’t had the misfortune of being introduced, this is Big Dog.’

  Next to Chickenhead’s slender six-foot frame, Big Dog was compact and, well, kind of hairy. If his imposing arms were any indication, he was a regular user of the Perseus’s gym equipment. He wore a gray beanie over shaggy black hair and was one of the few crew members Jay had seen with a clean-shaven face, except for a strange patch on his chin that reminded Jay of a martini glass. But instead of an olive in the martini glass, there was a piercing.

  Big Dog must have seen him staring. ‘First thing I did when we jumped ship off the Fifth Column.’

  Chickenhead pulled back the sleeve of his T-shirt to reveal a small tattoo of a ship’s anchor on his shoulder. ‘Fuck the system, right?’

  Jay peered closer. ‘That’s … small.’

  ‘I was hesitant,’ Chickenhead said.

  Big Dog winked. ‘Commitment issues.’

  Chickenhead flashed a mischievous grin. ‘Hey, you should join us.’

  ‘Nah, I was just going to do a few sets—’

  Big Dog was shaking his head. ‘That wasn’t a question, dude.’ He slapped Jay on the back. ‘It would be an honor to train with a black operative.’