A Wish the Heart Makes : Fornever in Blue Genes

by: Tigger

 

Chapter 19: Damage Control

Cat’s face was coldly emotionless as she took the report from her security watch supervisor. "Chief, whoever they were, they were pros and they had it planned down to a gnat’s ass. They had damned good intelligence, too, because they knew what they wanted and where to get it. Less than four minutes from when they took out the gate four enclave to clear their approach axis to the Med lab until they were on their way back out. They even had an anti-aircraft vehicle to cover their retreat which meant they knew about our supposedly secret little air force. It was a perfectly planned and executed op and they caught us with our pants down.!"

"Casualty report," Cat ordered stonily.

"Three dead at Gate Four. Three armed airsleds were sent up as interceptors and were downed by ground fire, six dead. So far, we know of eight dead scientists and two dead security officers at the Med lab, but we haven’t finished our search there since we are having to worry about booby traps," the watch officer went silent for a moment, and Cat immediately picked up on it.

"Give me all of it, Davies."

"Yes, Ma’am. Dr. West is one of the confirmed dead. And," Cat heard Mandy’s joked gasp behind her. "Boss? MacPherson is recorded as being in the building, too, but we haven’t found her yet."

"Ms. Donovan!" a new voice broke in. "High stress levels noted on the patient. Should I call in a doctor?"

Cat turned to face the nurse’s station, and for the first time, noticed that it wasn’t the usual day nurse. They’d long ago dispensed with the drug belt and restraint system, but at Bob West’s wheedling, they’d kept some simple monitoring equipment discreetly attached to Mandy’s body. Cat saw the look on Mandy’s face, made a quick judgement. "Not yet," she ordered. "But keep an eye on her readings." *Besides,* she thought grimly, *Bob was the only physician who was fully briefed on Operation Mandy, and most of the other MD’s worked in Bob’s lab anyway. Who the hell would we call?* Resolutely, she turned back to the security screen. "Anything else? Any idea where they went?"

For her own part, Mandy had to literally bite her tongue to keep from telling the nurse who was in charge. One thing she was going to have to fix and soon was this inclination of people to defer to Cat when Mandy was there with her Security Chief. *Just because she’s over six feet tall and eats nails for breakfast,* Mandy fumed quietly. *She’s not THAT scary, is she?* Sighing quietly, Mandy turned her attention back to the Security Watch Officer’s report to Cat.

"No, Ma’am," he continued. "They took out our sensor arrays when they took out Gate Four, and by the time we scrambled the rest of the armed airsleds, there wasn’t anything to track. Like I said earlier, whoever planned this one is very, very good, Ma’am, and they had really high grade intelligence on our layout here and our response plans."

"All right. Send out some operatives to see if they can find anything, see if anyone on the outside saw something - ANYTHING - we can use. Let me know when our perimeter is secure again."

The screen went blank. "Damn me for an UTTER FOOL!!" Cat swore as she slammed a fist into the desk. "I *knew* we’d been infiltrated, and I made the grossly amateurish mistake of thinking they’d never take direct action. Besides, I was too damned busy tracking ghost-moles to even think of reviewing and modifying our main security plan."

"Robert, Cat? Robert is dead?" Mandy’s voice asked softly, breaking into Cat’s self reproach.

"That’s what Davies said, Mandy. And Davies is too good an operator to make a report like that without being absolutely sure of the situation. Damn it! I never thought they’d take direct action against us like this. They’d been so careful to keep themselves in the shadows before this."

Mandy wanted to weep, wanted to rail against fate, wanted to mourn her friend, but the cold, rational mind that was still Matthew Sorenson wouldn’t let her. "They’ve taken my life, Cat. They almost took my company and the fruits of almost thirty years of hard work and brain sweat. But now, they’ve taken my best friend, and by all the gods, Cat, they don’t take another thing or person that is dear to me. It’s time we started taking from *them*!"

"Big words, sweetie," Cat said dully, "but we still don’t know anything more than we knew before they hit us. We are still in reaction mode and they still hold the tactical control of the situation."

"Wrong, Cat," Mandy said firmly, and was just a bit smugly satisfied to see the nurse goggle at her. *Might as well start as I mean to go, and dammit, I AM the majority owner of this company.* "We know quite a bit more than we knew before this."

"Do we?" Cat asked caustically. "I wish you’d enlighten me because I still feel like a god damned mushroom here."

"We’ve got an enemy who has, as you said, been assiduously covert up until now."

"Well, they sure as hell aren’t acting covertly anymore. Guess we know that much."

"But, think, Cat. *WHY* are they suddenly acting overtly?" Mandy asked her friend.

Cat thought for a minute. "Because they don’t think they need to act in secrecy anymore?"

"Or because they think they are ready to move on to whatever their real objective is, and that is a more direct operation. However, we very likely know something more than that, too."

"What’s that?"

"Once we figure out why they hit us, we will have a better idea what their objective entails. Like your man said, the people who hit the Med Lab were pros. You don’t mount that type of operation without a clear objective. We need to figure out precisely what it is they went in there looking for."

Cat closed her eyes and quietly cursed. "Right. How is it, Mandy, that I’m the spook here, and *you’re* the one who is thinking like one?"

A wry smile crossed Mandy’s face. "Mandy’s trying to have a breakdown, Cat, but Matt is pissed off, and ready to kill someone. He won’t let Mandy have her crying jag until whoever did this to Bob has paid, big time."

"That pretty face is really easy to underestimate, girl. Okay, just a sec." Cat went back to the workstation and ordered her security watch officer to report as soon as the Med Lab was safe to enter. When she turned back, she saw Mandy wiggling into her combat suit. "Hey, what is this?"

"I’m going with you, Cat. No one knows what Bob was up to in there better than I do. I am not the medical type, but I designed all of his technical gear. I might see something no one else would recognize."

Cat was about to argue and turned to the nurse. "Nurse, vitals?"

"Flat, Ms. Donovan. If I didn’t know better, I would swear she was on blockers."

"Can you monitor her if she is in the Med Lab?"

"Yes, Ma’am."

"Okay," Cat responded, recognizing that Mandy was right. Then, she thought of something. "By the way, where is Richards?" "Teri called in sick today, Ms. Donovan, and asked if I would take her watch today. I normally do the swing shift."

Cat felt her blood turn to ice as she stared at the nurse with an intensity that made the smaller woman nearly cringe. She spun back to the terminal and immediately had Davies back on screen. "Nurse Teri Richards did not show up for work today. It might be a coincidence, but then again, it might not be. I want an armed team at her quarters in fifteen minutes and I want her brought to the compound. Got that, Davies?"

"Got it, Boss. Ummm . . . do we have any legal authority for this?" he asked quietly.

"Not that I know of, Davies. Call in Jacobs for legal damage control, but do it after you dispatch the team. We may not have time to fool around with this."

"On it, Boss," he replied as his figure winked out.

Cat turned to face a stony-faced Mandy. "These people have shown a talent for disappearing when they need to, and Nurse Teri not being at work for the first time in my memory on the very day we get hit like this is just too much of a coincidence. If it turns out I’m wrong . . . "

"I’ll pay the punitive damages and consider myself ahead of the deal, Cat," replied Mandy. "Now, let’s get over to the Lab and see what we can figure out."

Cat nodded once before turning back to her desk. She opened up a drawer and pulled out a holster belt and a hand blaster. She carefully checked that the weapon was fully charged and that the safety was on before handing it to Mandy. "We don’t know that the bad guys have all left, kid," she said with quiet emphasis.

Mandy accepted the weapon and also checked that it was loaded and on safe. "Well, if we see one, I will make sure I only shoot to disable him. I have a lot of hard questions I want answered, and I don’t much care how hard I have to be when I ask them."

"If it comes down to a shootout, girl, you shoot to kill, read me?" Cat ordered, her hand locked on Mandy’s shoulder.

"It won’t come to that, Cat, because I don’t intend to give Bob’s killers a chance to shoot, and the sons of bitches will only *wish* they were dead."

Cat thought about saying something more, but the look in Mandy’s eyes forestalled her. She pulled another weapon out of her desk and fitted the belt around her waist. "Let’s go, then."

~---------------~

The flight was oddly short, Morag thought as the transport settled with a slight bounce. Either the craft was very, very fast, or where ever they had landed was extremely close to the company compound. Since there didn’t seem to be anything about the airship that was out of the ordinary for a military attack craft, that meant that the bad guys’, or rather, the bad girls’ hidey-hole was in the same basic locale as the BioCybernetics compound.

*I have to wait for them to clear away,* Morag thought, *and then see if I can contact Cat. Damn me for a fool, doing this without any type of communicator.*

Suddenly, the door to her own hiding place snapped open and Morag found herself looking out at what seemed to be hundreds of blaster barrels. "The pilot knew as soon as the door opened, stupid," the voice Morag recognized as ‘Number One’ said mockingly. "But we had to keep to our time-table, and since you couldn’t do anything except hold on for dear life inside that little cubby-hole, we decided to proceed to base. Tell me, fool, do you have a preferred way of dying? Since you are female, we can probably accommodate you that much at least. Now get out of there. The Leader wants to meet you, and wish you . . . sweet dreams."

 

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© 1996 by Tigger. All Rights Reserved. These documents (including, without limitation, all articles, text, images, logos, compilation design) may printed for personal use only. No portion of these documents may be stored electronically, distributed electronically, or otherwise made available without express written consent of the copyright holder.