The Orion Plague Read Online Free PDF Page A

switched to the general
channel. “Okay, listen up. Lock, pull over somewhere safe-ish,
we’re not in any huge hurry. Butler, stay sharp, use your infrared
HUD link. Donovan...Grusky, wake Donovan up, will you?”
    Once everyone was on the squadcomm she
briefed them. “Okay, here’s the deal. The Charlottesville folks’
link-analysis connects our friend Professor Scott Stone with a
group called the Shadow Men, or just Shadows. During the Unionist
period the conspiracy nuts on the internet claimed they were a
secret organization employing kidnap and death squads to disappear
the Unionists’ political enemies, a kind of Gestapo. DOD intel
organizations were forbidden from investigating these rumors, and
were instead instructed to turn over all information to the FBI,
who were tasked with tracking down – wait for it – not the Shadows,
but the conspiracy nuts.”
    “Huh,” mused Grusky. “They wouldn’t waste
time stamping out wacko lies, only truth.”
    “Right you are. Once the nukes broke the
Unionists’ hold on the Federal government, Army ground-intel
started collating reports and information, but it’s pretty sketchy
right now. They have connected these Shadows with lots of dirty
deeds, but what caught my eye were the reports that a lot of the
disappeared people were hackers and computer wiz kids,
cyberneticists, roboticists…sound familiar?”
    “Wasn’t Mr. Johnstone a computer scientist?”
asked Butler.
    “Yes. Actually he was a cyber-warrior, a
network attack and defense expert,” responded Repeth. “He was
instrumental in the Free Communities’ defense against the cyber
assaults of the Big Three during the New Cold War,” she said
proudly. “He never picked up a gun until he was embedded with us,
but he was probably more important to the Free Communities military
than a hundred spec ops people like me.” She swallowed a lump in
her throat.
    And it’s my fault he’s gone. I should have
said no and made it stick. If I had, he’d be angry, but he’d be
safely back in South Africa or Colombia or somewhere like that,
helping his spymaster mother fight the cold grey battles of the
intelligence world, not slaving away handcuffed to a desk
or… she refused to speculate further.
    “Anyway, they have reason to believe the
Shadows took over part of the Cole pollution control plant in
Lorton, just south of Fort Belvoir, as their main base of
operations, a couple of years before Plaguefall.
    Before nuclear firefall, you mean, don’t you
Jill?
    She clubbed her guilt sulking back into its
box and went on. “The plant is big, it has lots of places to site
an experimental laboratory, and it’s easy to conceal from the
general public. They expect to see people going in and out every
day, what do they know about pollution control? It would have been
easy to get rid of bodies, too.” She blew air out her cheeks. “So
it’s thin, but that poor schizoid from Fredburg said the Professor
sold Rick to the Shadow Men, and he talked about “burn rooms.” Who
knows what that means? But if the Shadows needed high-end tech
people back then, and if any of their organization survived to need
people like Rick, then some answers might be there at that
plant.”
    The team mulled that over for a minute or
two. Then Grusky said, “Okay. I’ve chased felons down on thinner
leads. Let’s do it.”
    Lockerbie put the Beast back in gear and they
drove northward into the waning drizzle.

    ***

    Repeth flipped up her HUD glasses and put the
binoculars to her eyes. The Beast was sitting in the parking lot of
the strip mall across the six-lane expanse of US-1 from the
entrance to the plant. She couldn’t see much; dead trees screened
the industrial facility, and so did an eight-foot high cyclone
fence with vision-impeding strips woven into it.
    The stretch of asphalt around them teemed
with the remnants of buildings and burned-out vehicles,
flash-ignited by the nukes that had hit Fort Belvoir and Davison
Army Airfield