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  This dusty, musty wonderful space became mine after I graduated from Camp and moved back home. At first, I spent my time down here dismantling radios and putting them back together. Once ExOps assigned me my first real Job Numbers, I began to use the shop to maintain my Mods and Enhances.

  I’ve received a bunch of mechanical modifications and biological enhancements. Mods are generally hardware, like my electrohydraulically accelerated joints or the nanoligaments that hold my limbs together while I leap tall buildings in a single bound. Enhances tend to be soft upgrades centered around my augmented nervous system. The heart of this system is called a neuroinjector, which manages the flow of drugs that help me react quickly and deal with stressful situations without losing my mind. My neuroinjector is a Nerve Jet, which is the best because the Med-Techs can program it to administer drugs to me when certain conditions are met whether I request it or not.

  Some Enhances need to be refilled, but otherwise they’re maintenance free. Mods, in contrast, need regular tinkering because they get so beaten up in the field. A few upgrades are hybrids of both Mods and Enhances, like the cameras they painted on my retinas. The cameras include solid state microhardware to transmit imagery, but with no moving parts they take care of themselves.

  I rummage around on the workbench, looking for my testing console. Finally I find it hiding under a pile of gun magazines. I uncoil the console’s sensor cable and plug it into the data socket on my hip. The console checks my fluids and looks for stress fractures in my modified joints. I run a special test to see if my internal wiring was damaged by the electromagnetic pulse I used on that helicopter.

  Everything checks out fine, but I’ve felt some tightness in my knees since that three-story jump I did earlier today. I unplug the console cable from my hip, pull off my jeans, and sit on one of the shop stools. My knees look perfectly normal if you only take a quick look. A closer inspection reveals that there isn’t any skin there, only flesh-colored metal and plastic. My ankles and elbows are the same way, but since they don’t hurt, I’ll leave them alone.

  I unscrew both kneecaps and use a flashlight to see inside. They look fine, so maybe they just need a lube job. I squirt some liquid graphite into both knees and use my fingers to rub it in. While I swing my legs back and forth to help spread the lubricant around, I imagine what Dr. Herodotus’s reaction will be if I screwed up his shiny new knees. He’s my primary Med-Tech, and he’ll be ripped that I didn’t break them in before I pulled a job. Well, that’s too bad. If it weren’t for people like me, he’d have nothing to do but install fake tits on porn stars and politicians’ wives. I finish Midasizing my knees and leave them to soak for a few minutes.

  Now for my best friend, Li’l Bertha. I take her apart, clean her out, and oil her up. While she’s stripped, I take a good look at all her pieces. Sometimes Incendiary bullets ignite early, which can screw up her electrical components. I replace two switches that look questionable and pack in fresh ammunition until her ammo indicator reads “100%.”

  My dad thought his nickname for his pistol was a real hoot. Sometimes when he worked, he’d hum along to the radio and substitute “Li’l Bertha” for the normal lyrics. When he got killed, the brass at Extreme Operations assumed his gun had been destroyed or lost. I never told them I’d found it down here in the basement and kept it for myself.

  I also found my dad’s service record. He was one of the first Levels. None of our competitors had ever combined German Mods and Chinese Enhances in the same agent before. My father and the other original ExOps Levels immediately became the baddest mofos in the Shadowstorm.

  Dad’s list of upgrades included:

  Vision Mod 1: Distance.

  Vision Mod 2: Infrared.

  Vision Mod 3: Low-light.

  Double adrenaline reserve.

  Triple adrenaline reserve.

  Legs: Reinforce joints and major tendons.

  Arms: Reinforce joints and major tendons.

  Polymetallic sheathing on long bones, rib cage, and skull.

  WeaponSynch neural link to LB-505 (left hand).

  Body-distributed audio recording suite.

  His service record included a long list of repairs and adjustments made throughout his career. It was pretty crude compared with what I’ve got now. I got all my vision work done in one session, not three. He didn’t even have Madrenaline, just a triple helping of the same old crap we’ve used for a million years. No wonder he drank so much.

  While I wait for my knees to get nice and saturated, I grab a book from one of the metal shelves. I like to supplement my school’s history classes with Dad’s military history books. His collection covers a lot of historical periods, but most of them are about World War II. When I was barely ten, I already knew that the Germans had started the war in Europe by invading Poland in 1939. Within a year, the Fritzes had taken Western Europe. A year after that, they pulled off the biggest amphibious operation in history when they invaded Great Britain. The Brits fought like apes but the poor sods were cornered. The Luftwaffe bombed the crap out of them until the Wehrmacht had goose-stepped all the way across the British Isles.

  The relationship between the United States and Germany stayed pretty tense until Hitler got iced by his own officers in 1942. His Nazi Party fell apart, and Germany returned to somewhat saner leadership. The war in Europe was over. This allowed America’s armed forces to focus on the stupendously ambitious Japanese, who we crushed under a galactic quantity of explosive ordnance. The bombing campaigns were so devastating that some of the smaller contested islands simply vanished. While we occupied Japan, Germany and Russia carved up the Middle East and China’s Chiang Kai-shek hacked up every Communist within two thousand miles of Beijing.

  Next there was a little war in Korea. This ground on for two years before the U.S. dropped the world’s first atom bomb on a Chinese army base in northern Korea. The end. The Korean War was where my father served as an army officer. After the war, he went into army intelligence, which led to his career as a covert agent at ExOps. There was plenty of work to do. The Chinese wanted Japan and Mongolia, the Germans wanted the Soviets’ half of the Middle East, and the Russians just wanted everything.

  After we gave Castro the boot and made Cuba a state, the U.S. wanted to be left alone to wallow in the American dream. But the dream kept getting messed up because we had to work so hard to stay touchy-feely with Greater Germany. President Nixon hated the Germans in general and their enslavement of Europe’s Jews in particular. His attitude led us to the brink of war with Germany during the oil embargo. Bad times. I was only a kid when all that went down, but I still remember the air raid drills: all of us hiding under our desks like idiots.

  I twist my kneecaps back on, pack up my tools, and put Li’l Bertha into my dad’s gun safe. My father didn’t always take his gun with him when he traveled; it depended on the Job Number. One day, eight years ago, he left for a job and never came back. When ExOps told us the Germans had executed him, I spent two terrible days and nights down here, shrieking and throwing stuff around. My mother tried to console me, but she was such a mess herself that she could barely get out of bed. The second night I dragged a chair over in front of the safe and climbed up to spin the dial. I’d swiped the combo by peeking while my father did it. I unlocked the door and found Li’l Bertha inside.

  Of course I couldn’t activate her since I didn’t have my Mods yet, but she felt perfect in my hand, and after a few minutes I was doing a nice fast draw. I thought it was Dad’s ghost teaching me. Sounds funny, I know, but c’mon, I was twelve. A few days later a very tall woman came to the house to clear out my dad’s classified materials.

  She also came for me.

  Brief History of Mods and Enhances

  In 1944, all of the four victors of World War II launched major initiatives to help them hold and consolidate their end-of-war positions. The Americans and Russians applied their industrial might to the production of vast navies and mechanized armies. The Germans
and Chinese turned to their respective scientific communities to develop the soldier of the future.

  These supersoldiers would require greatly expanded physical capabilities. To this end, scientists in Stuttgart implemented a range of mechanical modifications while researchers in Beijing experimented with a suite of chemical enhancements. Both programs eventually shifted their focus from mass-produced frontline troops to individually crafted superhuman spies.

  These upgraded agents quickly came to rule the clandestine battlegrounds. It became clear that the Shadowstorm would not be won by fleets of ships and tanks but by the bionic and biotic agents from Germany and China, respectively. The question was which of the two superspy technologies would win out.

  The answer arrived from an entirely unexpected source. Jakob Fredericks, a senior American intelligence officer at Extreme Operations Division, had his medical technicians install both chemical enhancements and mechanical modifications on several of his field agents. The results were stunning and heralded the world’s first Levels. Within months, these dually enhanced and modified agents took command of the Shadowstorm.

  Mods and Enhances have come a long way since those early days, of course. What was once a radical combination of two competing technologies is now practiced by all the major intelligence agencies. If the stealthy and sudden delivery of death and chaos can be considered a gift, the world has only to thank Jakob Fredericks.

  CHAPTER 3

  NEXT MORNING, FRIDAY, MAY 2, 7:15 A.M. EST CRYSTAL CITY, VIRGINIA, USA

  “Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be caffeine.” I swig my coffee and continue. “Now where the hell is my bus? Amen.”

  I’m down the street from my house, waiting for the number 23 bus. My sunglasses serve as a dam of hipness against my school uniform’s ocean of dorkitude. My dark red hair, starched white shirt, and forest-green blazer conspire to transform me into a refugee from Christmas Freak Island. At least the pants are simple khakis.

  ExOps agents who haven’t finished college are required to pursue a bachelor’s degree. A normal school would let us wear ripped jeans and Elvis Presley T-shirts, but we don’t go to a normal school. We attend a special satellite of George Washington University called Saint Boniface Academy. It’s basically a finishing school for government-spawned homicidal maniacs like me. The academy is modeled after private Catholic schools, hence my stupid outfit. The strict discipline and structure supposedly helps us become better agents, but after two years at St. Bony’s I’m not sure it’s the students who need discipline and structure.

  To help me through my daily imprisonment, I begin every school day with a big travel mug of my mom’s atomic-powered Cuban Blend. My father called it “Java Más Macho” and said it could put hair on a Dutchman’s ass. This kind of language usually got a harrumph out of Mom while Dad would peek over his newspaper and wink at me.

  I’m so tired this morning that I’d drink this coffee even if it put hair on my ass. My mind kept me awake all night, replaying yesterday’s excitement in New York. The Med-Techs have named this type of insomnia Post-Stimulant Sleep Disorder. If you asked me, I’d just call it a freaking action hangover. Then this morning we had no hot water, so I haven’t even had a shower. Blech.

  A midsize black Cadillac glides up the street and stops across the road. The tinted driver-side window whirrs open to reveal my field partner, Patrick. ExOps teamed me with him after we graduated from Camp. We’re the same age, and at five foot six he’s taller than me by two inches. He’s got light brown hair and a round face that always seems ready to break into a grin.

  When we met back at Camp, he was in the middle of going through puberty. His voice broke during our first year, which led to some hilarious low- and high-pitched comm-training phrases like “TARget AcquIREd Alpha LEAder. Please adVISE.” I teased him mercilessly about his squeaky voice, but he’s so good-natured that he just laughed along with me. He’s smart, he’s funny, and his devotion to my every need plays out well in the sack. I couldn’t have asked for a better partner.

  Patrick leans out the window and calls, “Hello, little girl. Want some candy?”

  I’m about to launch into my oversexed schoolgirl act when Raj leans forward from the backseat and growls at Patrick. “Knock it off, Solomon.” Then to me: “Get in the car, Scarlet. The Front Desk wants to see you.”

  Raj and I just missed each other at spy school, which we called Camp A-Go-Go. He graduated the year before I started, but stories about me trickled up to him before I got out of Initial Training. Mom told me that some of the ExOps staffers started a pool, betting on how fast I’d get promoted, until their boss shut it down.

  When Raj met me, I was the youngest agent ever to graduate into the field. The big guy had been ExOps’ previous flavor of the month, and he didn’t like being pushed aside by some pip-squeak fifteen-year-old no matter how famous her father had been. We were the big assholes on campus, and since we were both hopped-up, psychotically competitive youths with more pride than sense, that rivalry played itself out with elegance and grace.

  Raj is six years older than me and carries 295 pounds on a six-foot-five frame. He tends to wear heavy motorcycle boots, black jeans, and big capelike duster overcoats. We’re both seen as fast-track Levels, him because of his size and mission capabilities, me because of my speed and rapid progress through Camp A-Go-Go. Since Raj is a Vindicator, we don’t compete for the exact same assignments, but competing for attention hasn’t made us any friendlier.

  I hop in the front passenger-side seat and say to Patrick, “Hi, Trick. How’s tricks?”

  “I’ve been busy, my dear,” he answers as he drives the car away from the bus stop. “But not as busy as you’ve been.”

  The word “busy” has a few meanings in our business. What it means here is that he (and of course all of Extreme Operations) has figured out that Virgil’s incompetence as a dispatcher allowed me to sneak onto a Job Number meant for a much higher Level. “Busy” also refers to the fact that I told my Med-Tech I had the proper clearance for my new Mods before that was, in fact, the case. Trick doesn’t care so much about bureaucratic propriety, but he knows that the Front Desk really frowns on that kind of procedural chicanery.

  Raj is bucking for another promotion, so he frowns on it, too. “Scarlet,” he rumbles, “do you have any idea of the resources that have gone into your current system?” As a Level 8, Raj is my superior. He reminds me of this as often as possible. He insists on calling me by my ExOps field name, Scarlet. We field agents use each other’s handles when we pull a mission, but it’s more personable to use our regular names when we’re just driving around. Raj isn’t very personable. He’s never even told any of us what his real name is. I tried convincing his former Camp classmates to tell me, but they all refused. Our boss knows, but by the time you’re a Front Desk at Extreme Operations, you’ve learned how to keep a secret.

  I pull the vanity mirror down so I can see Raj’s big head and reply, “One million, six hundred sixty-nine thousand, eight hundred and fifty-two dollars.” That kind of money used to produce a Level 10, but nowadays it’s average for a Level 4 like me.

  Raj does some calculating, then announces, “It’s got to be more than that now.”

  We keep arguing while Patrick drives across the Williams Bridge into D.C. I keep it out of my voice, but I’ve started to regret my recent visit to Dr. Herodotus. I honestly thought the whole clearance thing was a load of bureautrash. While I pretend to listen to Raj, I mentally access my copy of the Administration Department’s equipment manual. It lives in my head along with all the other files the Med-Techs stuffed in there when I had my Mods installed.

  The virtual document appears in my Eyes-Up display and overlays my view of the physical world around me. I focus my gaze on the table of contents entry for maintenance, and the document scrolls to that chapter. Reading, reading … there’s all kinds of stuff in here about how to maintain Extreme Operations property, including oneself. I run a search for the w
ord “clearance” and get 179 matches from this chapter alone. Damn.

  Raj finally finishes blathering: “… and now you’ve thrown off your Level Cycle and Development Schedule.”

  I turn around to look at Raj and say, “Look, Rah-Rah, I’ve already got one mother to deal with. Tell me something useful, like if I need to let anyone know that I’ll be out of school today.” Raj glowers at me but doesn’t answer. He hates it when I call him Rah-Rah.

  Patrick answers my question. “We’ve already notified the head of your department, Alix.”

  I look over at Trick and inquire, “So what’s happened to Miss Alixandra Nico that keeps her out of the academy today? Have I stopped to help a homeless band of gypsy children? Have I been abducted by aliens?” Normally, Trick would begin to trade progressively more ridiculous situations with me, but instead he laughs weakly and doesn’t look at me.

  This makes me uneasy. I grumpily cross my arms and turn my head to look out the window to hide my nervousness. I’m dying to talk to Trick over our implanted commphones, but I’m worried that Raj will be able to tell and will insist on knowing what we’re comming about. He’s really observant, and little changes in our expressions can sometimes reveal that we’re comming to each other.

  Some people have trouble using a commphone, but I picked it up easily. I got a head start from going to holiday dinners at my mom’s parents’ house. My grandparents expected everyone to carry on three conversations at once, so they would ask you a question even if you were already talking to someone else. The only time I experienced a similar cacophony was the day I went away to Camp with seventy-four other kids.