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Chapter 15
Class Reunion
The lights were low in the briefing room, lending the assembly an air of gravity and solemnity that fit the mood of those gathered. There were more present than Buffy had dared hope, more than a dozen former Dark Angels who had come immediately upon being told of Elisa’s abduction. None who were contacted had refused the call.They would do anything it took to get her back. Buffy saw it in theirs eyes. She knew most of them. They were older now, some of them with gray in their hair and all of them with more lines on their faces, but the eyes were sharp and cold and told her that these men hadn’t lost their edge. If her daughter could be saved, these men would do whatever was required to make that happen.
It was ironic. Many of them knew Elisa Summers far better than Buffy did. They’d watched her grow from child into woman, and to many of them she was as much a part of their family as their own flesh and blood.
She cleared her throat and splashed the fine red dot of a laser pointer on the large screen behind her. It showed a computer enhanced infrared satellite image of a large structure built under mountainous terrain.
“This is our target, everyone. It’s an old M-7 research facility in the mountains of Belize, and based on the computer models we’ve derived from the satellite imaging, we’re pretty confident that it’s an exact copy of the one we destroyed in North Carolina fifteen years ago. M-7 efficiency might have been a bitch sometimes, but at least it meant they maintained a high degree of conformity from construction project to construction project.
“It took twenty of the best cryptologists in the country and five Department of Defense supercomputers working in parallel over the course of two weeks to crack the encryption sequences used in the security net of the original facility. Cade got into this one, so our best guess is that the one in Belize using the exact same encryption schemes — either that or Cade’s got a lot more resources than our intelligence indicates. So we’re going to operate under some assumptions, namely that a) we can run our simulations using the blueprints of the North Carolina facility and that b) all the old hacks and electronic tricks we used to get into that place will still work on this one.”
She paused, looking at the faces before her. Angel, dark and brooding as of old, his anger at her faded now into worry for his daughter; Willow, ever-innocent yet always steel-willed Willow; Xander, a far harder, tougher man than she knew in Sunnydale, but still despite everything the same Xander she knew and, in her own strange way, loved; Lillith, once her most dangerous enemy and now strangely vulnerable for all her bluster and bravado; the ex-Dark Angels, hard men with hearts of often surprising generosity and kindness, men who had pledged their lives to fighting an evil almost no one else knew about or believed in. If being the Slayer had no other plus going for it, getting to know and work with such remarkable people made it all worthwhile.
Her voice was quieter as she said, “My daughter probably doesn’t have much time, and if she dies, there’s a good chance this world will too. I know this is strange, me being back again. But strange always was our stock in trade. I know most of you, and I know you people are the best and I can’t tell you how glad and grateful I am that you’re here to help. If anybody in this world can pull this off, it’s you. We need an operational plan and we need it fast. The coffee’s free and black and hot, so let’s get to work.”
* * *
Pike was still marveling at the disappearance of Erin’s HUMVEE, but that didn’t stop his military mind from running through the ramifications and implications of what he just saw.
“That’s amazing, but how do you drive an invisible jeep?” he asked.
“Easy. It’s visible to you if you’re inside it because you’re in phase with it,” said Erin to the men and women gathered in the old aircraft hangar for the technology demonstration. There was empty space in the center of the hangar where the HUMVEE had been just moment before. Or there appeared to be empty space, anyway.
“So, then if you’re out of phase with the rest of the universe, wouldn’t everything else be invisible?”
Erin shrugged. “I was lucky enough to claw my way up to a C in high school physics. It’s amazing I can tell you this much. You’d have to ask a quantum physicist. Something about ‘polarized interference at the boundary of interaction’ I think someone back at the lab said. But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, I have parts in the jeep to retrofit seven vehicles with this technology. Choose wisely.”
“Now that’s a bloody useful bit of luck,” said Aston. “Rather glad I didn’t let Hudson mine the road when you were following us, like he wanted to.”
Xandra swallowed hard. “Umm … yeah, that would have had a very definite downside.”
Hudson said, “I’m thinking a couple of Apaches and Cobras — stuff that can use the stealth getting into a target area then bug out fast once it’s revealed its position.”
“That tracks,” said Pike.
“You don’t have any idea how it works?” Aston asked Erin.
“Not really,” said the Vampire Slayer. “As it was explained to me, the device shifts the vehicle slightly out of phase in time, making it invisible both in the visible spectrum and to radar. Won’t work on the infrared signature, though, which is actually good news since it means any heat seeking missiles mounted by your invisible platform will be able to acquire a target lock.”
Pike looked doubtful.
“It’s theoretically possible,” said Aston, recalling Zoot Kerschel’s forays into that technology during the M-7 conflict. “There’s been some research along that line. I’d suggest that this removes it from the realm of theory.”
“Well, however it works, it’s a major deal for our side,” said Pike.
“Can we get started on the retrofitting then?” asked Erin.
“I’ll get a team of techs together,” said Pike.
“Wish we’d had something like this in the Dark Angels,” said Aston to Hudson.
Hudson nodded. “Yeah. I like this. High speed, low drag, way cool.”
* * *
Flynn regarded the man suspended, unconscious, in the regeneration tank.
He turned to Jenny and said, “And how is our patient doing? He looks much better than last time I was here.”
Jenny looked up from the flat panel datapad she was reading from and arched an eyebrow at him. “He’s better. We still have a lot of work. The cancer ravaged his systems. The assemblers have had to rebuild some of them almost from scratch. This would have been a lot easier if you’d allowed us to bring him in earlier.”
“That would have compromised the continuity of the two six alpha timestream. You know that,” said Flynn. “It’s simple enough to pass a simulacrum off for a man on his death bed. Anything more becomes dicey in terms of event continuity and from an ethical standpoint.”
“Ethical? Don’t make me laugh, Flynn. You and ethics haven’t been on speaking terms for a long time.”
“You’re very beautiful when you’re cross, Jenny. Which means you’re almost always very beautiful,” said Flynn.
Jenny sighed. “You need to get out of human form for awhile. Some of the neural networks in the emotion centers are beginning to assert themselves. You really don’t need to replicate down to the genetic level, you know.”
“Lillith and I agree on very few things,” said Flynn. “One of them is that some of your race’s most primitive attributes are far and away the most enjoyable.”
“Is this your bizarre way of asking for a date, Flynn?”
“I know a charming little planet in the Three Echo Foxtrot Pleiades.”
Jenny rolled her eyes and looked back toward the man in the regeneration tank.
“When are you planning on informing Buffy Two Six Alpha about this? Or hasn’t that little detail mattered enough to you to plan for it?” she asked.
“My, you are in a snippy mood today.”
“I’ve never been entirely comfortably playing God, which seems to be your favorite game.”
“My dear Jenny, the simple fact of the matter is that if I were to show up in the midst of any primitive culture, I would be taken as a god straight away.”
“That must do wonders for your ego.”
“It has its appeal. This isn’t an exercise in vainglory though, Jenny. You know that. This is a crucial step in the plan. Without this, GHOST’s event chain prognostications don’t bode very well for our star Slayer.”
“That doesn’t mean I’m comfortable with the ethics here. You go around sticking nanobots into people without their consent, you for all intents and purposes start bringing back the dead, you play everyone here like pieces on a chess board — I just don’t have a real warm and fuzzy comfort zone in regards to this whole scheme.”
“But you’ll do it,” said Flynn.
“Of course I’ll do it. I’m not stupid. I know what the price for everyone will be if this project of yours fails.”