Waypoint Kangaroo Read online

  “What’s with the suit?” she asks.

  “Job interview,” I say.

  Her face is a mask. “I need to download your med logs.”

  “Nothing about the tie?” I ask, following her into the exam room. “It depicts an ancient Russian folk tale. Very cultural.”

  “Take off your shirt.”

  “Why, do you mean my button-front, Oxford-weave dress garment?” I didn’t spend two hours with a clingy personal shopper to not have someone notice these threads.

  “Or I can just use the scissors.” She holds up a pair of trauma shears.

  “Okay, okay.”

  I hang my jacket on a wall hook, then sit down on the plastic-covered bench and remove my necktie. I carefully pull the thin end back through the loop holding it together, not wanting to undo the knot. It took me fifteen minutes and an instruction manual to tie the damn thing this morning, and I want to keep it until after I see Paul.

  I’ve barely gotten my shirt unbuttoned when Jessica yanks my left arm up and jams an electrode into my armpit.

  “Are we in a hurry? Hey, careful with the merchandise!” She jabs another electrode up under my chin and slaps an interface patch over my left eye. Half my vision disappears as the computer starts downloading sensor logs from my various implants.

  “You’re dehydrated,” she says, studying a display screen.

  “Had to use the pocket.” Physiologically, opening the pocket acts like a night of heavy drinking, sucking water out of my body and suppressing certain neurotransmitters. I basically get a hangover afterward. “And I wasn’t sleeping.”

  “You had a water surplus. What happened to the ice?”

  “Spilled most of it,” I reply. “You try pulling a frozen brick through a hyperspace shunt while driving a hovercar through the desert.”

  I stare at the side of her head. Jessica hasn’t looked at me once since she started the exam. That’s not normal. Usually, when I get back from a mission, she’s all over me like Martian dust on … well, everything on Mars. There’s a reason they call it “the red planet.” Those fine-grained ferrous particles get into every nook and cranny.

  Similarly, when I report in, Jessica usually examines me from head to toe, checking everything from my back teeth to my bowel movements. I’m the only person we know of who’s ever manifested any persistent superhuman ability, and the agency doesn’t want their prize Kangaroo getting sick. It’s Surgical’s job to make sure I keep laying golden eggs. So to speak.

  She’s definitely distracted today. Is something else happening in the office? Something she doesn’t want to tell me about? Am I in trouble?

  Of course you’re in trouble, Kangaroo. When are you not in trouble?

  “Stay away from caffeine for the next few days,” Jessica says, turning away from her screen to yank off my electrodes and eyepatch.

  “Are you trying to kill me?” I say, slumping forward theatrically.

  “Drink plenty of water. And don’t skip the gym.”

  “I’m not,” I lie.

  “Don’t lie,” she says. How does she do that? “You always slack off after an operation.”

  I don’t feel like it’s a good time to debate her on this point. “Fine. I’ll get all sweaty on the treadmill and catch up on my soap operas. Are we done?” I can ask her for a new emergency AED later.

  “For now,” she says. “Science wants to test you on the rotation problem again.”

  “Yeah, EQ told me. Can’t you write me a note or something, Surge?”

  “I’m not your mother,” she says. “Also, stop making up stupid nicknames.”

  “No, see, ‘Surge’ is short for ‘Surgical,’ which is your actual job title—”

  “Drink more water,” Jessica says, emphasizing each syllable as if I’m hard of hearing. “We’re done here.”

  She picks up her tablet and taps at it while walking out of the room. I get dressed in silence, wondering if I’m going to have bruises later.

  * * *

  Paul is on a vid call when I walk into his office. I probably should have knocked first, but I’m here now, and staying will be marginally less awkward than leaving. I quietly sit down in one of the two chairs in front of his desk.

  The wrinkles around Paul’s eyes and mouth make him look dignified rather than old. His gray hair reflects more light than you’d expect, looking almost silver. If he put on some weight and grew a beard, he might look like Santa Claus. With a beard and pointy hat, Merlin. With muttonchop sideburns, an eighteenth-century robber baron. Or was that the nineteenth century? Whenever people were still building railroads.

  He looks the same as that first night I met him. For better or worse, he’s been the one constant thing in my life for almost a decade now. Different assignments, different partners, different objectives. But it’s always been Paul calling the shots.

  I glance at the reversed vid image being projected onto the clear plexi screen rising out of his desktop. It looks like the Secretary of State.

  “This is on you, Paul,” the Secretary of State says. There’s no mistaking that voice. “You said your boy could handle it.”

  Paul keeps his eyes on the screen, where the camera is mounted, and gestures with his right hand, pointing at the tray on the bookshelf against the wall. I get up and pour myself a glass of water. Of course he’s already gotten the medical report from Jessica.

  “He did handle it,” Paul says. “We successfully retrieved the item.”

  “You and I seem to have different standards for ‘success.’”

  “We needed Kangaroo on this operation,” Paul says. “The item was larger than our sources indicated. Nobody else could have gotten it out of Kazakhstan as efficiently as he did.”

  “We also seem to disagree on the definition of ‘efficient.’ He left an American body back there. And he put a Kazakh citizen in the goddamn hospital.”

  Hospital. So Ol’ Whiskey-Breath didn’t die. That’s a relief.

  “I’ve got three different ambassadors yelling at my staff,” State says. “Once the President hears—”

  “Let me deal with the President,” Paul says.

  “Oh, you will.” State glares out of the screen. “But this audit is happening, Paul. Kazakhstan was the straw that broke the camel’s back. NSC is taking a fine-toothed comb to anything tagged OUTBACK.”

  “I don’t have time for this.”

  “Then you’ll make time,” State snaps. “Really, Paul, how long did you think we were going to let you run your own private little op center without any oversight?”

  “I thought the subcommittee was more interested in overlooking.”

  “Not today, Paul. I’m not in the mood,” State says. “You’re going to get some visitors from Langley, and you’re going to cooperate fully. Do you understand?”

  “I understand.” Paul’s voice is cold.

  State sighs. “Get your house in order. That’s my advice. As a friend.”

  The screen image ripples and disappears, and the plexi sheet melts back into the flat, shiny desktop. Paul looks at me. He’s not smiling. I gulp down the rest of my water and put my glass on the desk.

  “Do you know why there was a group of Hungarian operators monitoring Russia–Kazakhstan border crossings?” he asks.

  I purse my lips. “Because they were following the chicken?”

  “Because the actual State Department asked them to watch for black market arms smugglers,” Paul says.

  “Kazakhstan needs more nukes? That seems unlikely.”

  “This is serious,” he snaps. “Just in case your debriefing didn’t make that clear.”

  I stare at my empty water glass. “It did.”

  “It’s going to take a lot of diplomacy to smooth this one over. You’ll have to stay benched for a while.”

  I nod. “I brought you a present.”

  Paul stares at me for a moment, then says, “All right.”

  I open the pocket above the surface of his desk, with the barri
er in place. Paul should just see a wavy, partially reflective surface from his side of the phenomenon—that’s what Science Division found under laboratory conditions. From my side, the portal looks like a cloudy white disk suspended in midair, a filmy portal into darkness.

  I reach in, pull out the canteen, close the pocket, and start unlatching the canteen lid.

  “Didn’t you tell Oliver you lost that?” Paul asks.

  “I’m easily confused.” The airtight seal opens with a soft pop, and I pull out the glass jar. It’s cool, but not frozen. I set it down on the desk with the label facing Paul.

  I see his face light up for a split second. Of course he can’t approve of this. “Where did you get this?”

  “Atyrau, on the Caspian Sea.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Why do people peel the price tags off gifts before giving them?” I ask.

  Paul frowns, puts the caviar in a desk drawer, stares at it for a moment, then slides the drawer shut.

  Something’s going on. It can’t be a coincidence that Jessica seems so distracted today.

  “Thank you,” Paul says.

  “You’re welcome.”

  He opens another drawer. “You’re going on vacation for a few weeks.”

  I nod. “I figured. Any research I can do while I’m at home?”

  He pulls out a small folder. “You’re going off-world.”

  I reach for the folder. “What’s the job?”

  Paul doesn’t give me the folder. He lays it flat on his desk, puts a hand over it, and waits for me to look at him again.

  “This is not an operation,” he says. “You’re going on vacation.”

  I don’t think I’ve ever heard him say that word in my life. “I’m going where?”

  He pushes the canteen across the desk, toward me. “I want you to return this to Oliver and apologize to him.”

  I pick up the canteen. “This, uh, ‘vacation’ isn’t at a nice farm upstate, is it?”

  He hands me the folder. I open it cautiously. Inside, there’s a transport ticket, a set of legend identity papers, and a brochure for a pleasure cruise to Mars.

  The planet Mars. Several hundred million kilometers away. Which I haven’t been allowed to visit since before the war. I’m not sure I actually want to go back. But I’m pretty sure Paul isn’t giving me a choice here.

  “This department is being audited,” Paul says. “State and CIA were developing a relationship with KNB, and your exfil raised several red flags in management.”

  KNB is Kazakh National Security. If CIA was also involved—and the Hungarian Special Service—my stomach starts turning.

  “I’ve just been ordered to open up our files for internal review,” Paul continues. “The brass are not going to like what they find, and I don’t want you here for the fire drill.”

  It shouldn’t bother me so much. Paul’s sent me all the way to Pluto on missions before. But this is different. He doesn’t need me to go do something crucial to national or planetary security. He just wants to get me out of his hair. Like a parent banishing a noisy child who’s preventing the adults from getting their work done.

  Maybe I’m still just a kid who can’t stay out of trouble.

  “What about EQ and Surge?” I ask. I don’t like calling Oliver and Jessica by their names when I’m talking to Paul. And I don’t like feeling helpless.

  “We’ll be fine. Your elevator leaves tonight. You’d better start packing.”

  His look tells me I shouldn’t argue any more. I stand up.

  “Thanks for the ticket.” It’s a dumb thing to say, but I don’t have anything else. My mind is a fog.

  “You’re welcome,” Paul says. “Don’t forget Oliver on your way out. He’ll be happy to see his canteen again.”

  * * *

  The door to Paul’s office closes behind me, and I realize he didn’t say anything about my suit. Not a word asking why I’m all dressed up, when I usually show up at the office in a short-sleeved shirt, jeans, and sneakers. I look down at my pointy-toed dress shoes. Man, I even paid to get these polished.

  I can’t decide whether Paul’s inattention is more annoying than the fact that I have to apologize to Oliver about the canteen. At least the former distracts me from the latter.

  Oliver and the flying disk are both gone when I return to the workshop. I place the canteen on the corner of the table, find a tablet that doesn’t appear to be running any special software, open a blank note, and scrawl FOUND IT SORRY BYE on the touchscreen.

  I place the tablet next to the canteen, then walk out of the workshop feeling strangely empty. Usually, when I leave that room, I’ve loaded up the pocket with gadgets and weapons, ready to take on the world. It occurs to me that even though I admire Oliver, I’ve never tried to make friends with him. Never asked him out for a drink, never asked about his family. I always thought I was keeping my work and personal lives separate, but now I realize I don’t actually have much of a personal life.

  What the hell am I going to do with an entire month off duty, and off-world?

  I nearly walk into Jessica as she enters the corridor. I instinctively raise my hands, palms up, to show that I’m not touching anything inappropriate.

  “Sorry,” I say.

  “No harm done,” she says, resuming her walk toward the stairwell. “Enjoy your cruise.”

  I stare at the back of her white lab coat for a moment, then run after her, overtake her, and spin on my heel, blocking her path. She looks up with an annoyed expression.

  “What’s going on?” I ask.

  She squints at me. “I thought you were leaving.”

  “You were distracted all through my exam,” I say. “You didn’t even take any blood or tissue samples.”

  “Do you want me to stick a needle in you?”

  “No,” I say, “that’s not the point.”

  “So to speak.”

  Now she’s scaring me. “I thought you were distracted by prepping whatever my next job was going to be, but now Paul’s putting me on leave, so it can’t be that.” I narrow my eyes. “Did he finally agree to loan you out to another division? Is that it? You’re moonlighting or something?”

  She stares at me for a second. The corner of her mouth twitches, as if it might curl up into a smile, but it doesn’t.

  “Kangaroo, it’s a good thing you’re a field operative,” she says, “because you’d make a lousy interrogator.”

  I raise my hand and point a finger at her mouth, accusingly. “See? You’re almost smiling. This isn’t normal. Tell me what’s going on.”

  “It’s nothing big,” she says.

  “Just tell me!”

  “It’s nothing big,” she repeats, and actually smiles.

  I have to deal with the cognitive dissonance of a genuine human emotion on Jessica’s face before I can process the joke she’s making.

  “The nanobots?” I ask.

  She nods. “Science Division approved my proposal.”

  The nanobots are the latest biotechnology to be added to my permanently implanted arsenal of espionage tools. They’re the same microscopic machines that hide the doorways in the maze and reshape Paul’s plexi desktop display, but retooled for medical use. Right now, several billion of them are flowing through my bloodstream and camped out in my soft tissues, maintaining a body-wide wireless mesh network for my other tech implants.

  This is the first time the agency has actually put the nanobots into a human—thanks, guys, that’s not worrisome at all!—and they want to make sure nothing catastrophically bad happens before doing anything more complicated with them. Everyone remembers what happened the last time somebody released swarms of untested biotech into Earth’s atmosphere. No one wants another agricultural disaster followed by a decade of environmental cleanup.

  Enough nanobots working together can assemble and disassemble just about anything at the atomic level. That’s great if you can control them and potentially apocalyptic if you can’t. Be
cause of what happened during the Fruitless Year, no government is willing to openly support nanotech development—but in secret, every military wants their own tiny tin soldiers.

  Fortunately, I have one of the best doctors on the planet watching out for me. And my agency-built nanotech is nothing like the hybrid swarms that killed apple trees all over the world. My nanobots are purely technological, with no biological factors that could mutate out of control. They do interact with my body, but these nanobots are only using some blood sugars as fuel to power very basic radio functions. Fewer wires connecting my implants means fewer ways for the network to break.

  Jessica has been champing at the bit to write her own nanobot software ever since our superiors approved them for field use last year, and she’s been frustrated by how slowly the bureaucracy moves. We may work in an above-top-secret black ops intelligence agency, but we still work for the government.

  “I tested the remote-programming setup yesterday,” Jessica says. “There are some version control issues, but nothing insurmountable. I can already flash small batches of nanobots in the lab.”

  “Wait, it’s working already?” Now I’m excited. “When do I get my hollow leg?”

  Her frown returns. “I don’t know what that means.”

  “We talked about this. The ethanol-eating program? I drink all I want, but don’t get intoxicated, and the nanobots use the alcohol for fuel?”

  Jessica shakes her head. “I just got the system set up. We’re nowhere near ready for live testing yet.”

  “Come on, this is the perfect opportunity,” I say. “I’m going on a cruise. It’s the ideal environment for evaluating—”

  “This isn’t just another implant,” she says. “This is a very complex combination of individual moving parts and cluster control algorithms.”

  “You mean a swarm?”

  “Don’t use that word,” she snaps. “We never use that word. Understand? It’s going to be tough enough to get future nanotech projects approved without reminding people of what went wrong in the past.”

  “Fine,” I say. I was too young to understand the Fruitless Year when it happened, but I remember how spooked all the adults around me were. And the sudden lack of delicious apple pies. “I won’t say the S-word. But I’m being serious here. I’ll be gone for weeks, and I plan to drink a lot of—”