Quaranteam: Phil's Tale (Ch. 28)

Chapter 28

November 20 th, 2020 (evening)

"General! Thank God you picked up. Yes, I've seen the video. Now, I need you to listen to me closely, alright?" Phil said into his cellphone as he walked into the backyard, Linda staying right by his side, keeping watch. "Don't ask me how I know this, but you can't go home right now. You need to stay on base, because the New Daughters of the Revolution know about your involvement with Covington. And don't give me any of that shit about how you and he haven't done anything wrong, General. You can save that shit for the military tribunal when you have a lawyer present. We've both seen the same video, and these women mean business, and rightfully so."

"What the hell are you talking about, Doctor Marcos?" the General's voice said on the other end of the line, still playing dumb.

Phil sighed, shaking his head. "The backdoor into Oracle? Bending results into thinking women they'd get higher pairings than they actually would just to get your friends women they liked? You providing bodies for Covington's dirty little poker game? I've been onto you for months now, General, and I've just been building my fucking case without you knowing about it, but unfortunately, these women have forced my hand, and now I have to show my cards before I'm ready, but I'm doing so specifically just to keep your dumb ass alive. The last thing I want is those women killing anyone, especially if I could've done anything about it, but the shit you and your asshat friends have been up to, if anyone's earned that kind of treatment, it's you sick fucks. Now, I'm going to be heading into the base in a few minutes, but you'd better stay out operations and hide out in your office until somebody comes to relieve you."

The General seemed to want to hold onto his supposed innocence right up to the last. "Doctor Marcos, have you lost your goddamned mind?"

"General Fielder, you just watched the same video I did, and watched Rachel DeMarco chop off the hand of your friend Mister Covington," Phil said, wondering if the General was going to try and plead his innocence all the way to the bank. "They have taken over the houses of Vikovic, Jacobsen and Covington, but I suspect there's more. That's just the ones they openly admitted to at the start. You, Haunton, Morrison, maybe even Watkins - any of you could be at risk of the NDR just taking over your house, tying you up and demanding a ransom."

"They haven't even made demands, Doctor Marcos," General Fielder said. "Beyond the one thing we can't give them - the ability to be reassigned to other people without killing their existing linked partner."

"About that... I might be able to give them what they're looking for, General," Phil replied. "It hasn't been fully tested yet, but we have a potential path to a solution I'm going to do a bit of quick investigating. If it works like initial reports are claiming, we could be getting these women reassigned to new partners within just a few days."

"That's beside the point. Even if you have such a thing, the United States does not negotiate with terrorists, Doctor Marcos!"

"Terrorists? Are you fucking kidding me, General? These women are practically political prisoners in their own homes, the horrid shit you and Covington have put them through. We've already started feeding some of this up the chain of command, and the President herself is aware of the kind of manipulation you and your good ol' boys have been doing with the Oracle. Fuck, it wasn't like you were dumb enough to make it so easy to spot that we could basically just do a quick search across all the pairings done to find out where you'd spiked it. Oh wait. You were. It was. We did."

"W-w-what are you--" The man's bluster had gone and suddenly he sounded a whole lot more shellshocked.

"Save it, Fielder," Phil snarled. "You're done. Go sit in your office, lock the door and consider exactly how badly fucked you are." He reached up and hung up the phone before looking at Linda. "Babe, tell me you've still got a couple of members of your special unit stationed at the base right now, people you trust with your life."

Linda smirked, cocking her head at him with an almost incredulous look, before taking out her phone, starting to send a text message. "What kind of woman do you take me for, babe? Of course I've always got at least a couple of Linda's Girls on the base in active duty at any moment."

"I need you to send one of them into General Fielder's office and make sure he isn't armed and isn't able to harm himself," he told her as she was already getting her phone out to text some orders. "The last thing I want is him going into his office and blowing his brains out, or, worse still, shooting his nuts off. Then we'd really be on the clock to put this Russian reassignment sperm into live use without any real time for testing, which doesn't put me at ease."

"Don't worry, I've got someone headed down to his office right now, and someone else securing Ops, making sure Fielder doesn't go anywhere near it," Linda said. "We knew something like this could be coming down the pipeline, and I've been warning my Girls about it for the last few weeks, that we would probably have to be relieving General Fielder of command and to be ready for that. Which means I should alert Brigadier General Lawrence that she's in charge of the base now. Has she been briefed on any of this?"

"She's in the loop," Phil said. "The President sent me a message saying that Lawrence was reliable, that she'd filled her in, and that she wouldn't have been party to any of Fielder's bullshit. She just needs to know that it's going down now. We also need to get those blood samples from Niko, as well as the sample of Sergei's semen. If it's true, we need proof yesterday. I want to verify their results independently, because I don't want to open my mouth and say we have a solution if we don't, but I'm certainly glad we have all that stuff at the ready."

"Think we can hang around the party a bit more?" Linda asked him before laughing. "Okay, okay, had to try. Let's get rolling. Loads of time, very little to do... strike that, reverse it."

"We can let everyone else hang out here while we go to the base. No need to spoil their party. Violet can keep tabs on our people, make sure they all get home safely."

"Andy's pretty worked up, baby," Linda said, ruffling his jet-black hair. "I don't know that the party's going to go on that much longer. You saw him go white as a sheet when Rachel cut Covington's hand off. He's not used to this sort of violence."

"Babe, I'm not used this sort of violence either," Phil bemoaned. "This time last year, the only time I'd been near live weapons fire was the time we went to a shooting range when we were down at Vegas. This year alone, I've been shot at multiple times! I'm trying to save lives, not help people end them or corrupt them. None of this is my jam."

"That's what you're trying to do here, dear," Linda reassured him. "Keep people from killing other people. You're damn good at it too, so don't you worry. Just do what you do, and things'll work out as best as they can."

"Optimist Linda's a little creepy. I ever tell you that?"

"Once, and I'll tell you what I told you then - you want cynic Linda back?"

"No ma'am. I wasn't saying; I was just saying."

"Sure you were."

The two of them headed back inside, updated Violet, gave Andy their goodbyes, picked up the vials and notes from Niko and hopped into the car to head back to the base. As soon as they were off Andy's property, Phil had his phone back in his hand to make his first phone call to his right-hand man, Dr. Bill McKenna.

"Hey Phil, my phone's been ringing off the hook with people asking me why I didn't tell them in advance about any of this stuff, what the President's speech throwing us all into the limelight. I hadn't realized I was in the background of some of those shots, but I'll be damned if everyone who's ever had a drink with me didn't recognize me and suddenly find my number again. What the hell do I tell them?"

"You stop answering your phone this minute, let your wife field the calls about the serum, and you get your ass into the office right now," Phil replied, talking a little faster and more furtively than normal. "I've got about a dozen things all popping off at once right now, and I'm going to need you at the lab, spinning full-time on some things."

Phil could hear the sound of Bill rustling as he was grabbing his jacket and heading out towards his car already. "Okay, you make it sound like the world's coming apart at the seams, boss, so quit scaring me and tell me what's going on."

"First thing's first - I'm going to need you to text Miguel and get him into the office as quickly as you can as well. Then, once everyone's on-site and in-person, I can bring you all up to speed."

Bill took his phone away from his ear for a second, tapped on it for a few seconds, then brought it back to his ear. "Done. Why? Did something bad happen once the news about the serum went public?"

"Let's just say we've had a rat in our midst for a while, apparently, and now the cats have rounded up the rats and are refusing to give them back until we fix their food supply."

There was a moment of total silence between the two men for a second. "Normally, I can follow your metaphors through just about any dark tunnel they wander down, boss, but you lost me."

"Yeah, that one got a bit into the weeds," Phil grumbled, realizing just how shaken he was at the moment. "My bad. There was a backdoor into the Oracle program. Someone had been fucking with the pairings. Not in large volumes, but enough to draw attention, and get caught. And some of those people in pairings that got fucked with? They're unhappy. To the extreme. To the taking hostages level."

"Wait, what?"

"You remember that stuffed shirt Covington who was touring around the base a while back?"

"The guy who insisted we remember he was 'the fourth' even while also joking that we could call him 'Artie'? Yeah, it's hard to forget someone that prickish, no matter how much mental bleach I pour into my brain."

"Well, his partners have taken him hostage and lopped his goddamn hand off."

That certainly stilled Bill for a second. "They whatnow?"

"They wanted to make it clear they weren't fucking around, so they got showy and demonstrative. They didn't want anyone thinking they would accept anything other than total capitulation, so they cut any daylight before anyone caught a glimpse. Nothing that'll give signs of weakness. It was a terrifying effective move, too. Especially since we know there's a chance he could regrow it, given a lucky pairing, or shit, just enough of them. It's got serious bite, but it's not anything they can't walk back from once they get what they want."

"What do they want?"

"They want to get reassigned."

"Short of killing their partner, we can't give it to them."

"We might be able to."

"What the hell are you talking about, boss?"

Both his car and Bill's car pulled into their side-by-side designated parking spaces, the two of them getting out nearly directly into each other, Phil from the passenger side and Bill from the driver's side, their two car doors narrowly avoiding collision as they both hung up their phones. "It's time I pull back the curtain for you, Bill, and show you the secrets the Wizard's been keeping."

"I'm not thrilled that you've been keeping secrets from me, Phil," Bill said, slamming his door shut with more than a little annoyance. "I thought you trusted me! I sure as shit trusted you, although I'm starting to wonder if that was a bad move on my part."

"C'mon, Bill, please don't get mad at me. I screwed up, okay? I was compartmentalizing, and I was trying to keep you safe from any of the blowback, and believe me, there's gonna be plenty of it to go around," Phil said as the two of them walked side by side together into the building, Linda walking right behind them both, scanning the people she saw in the building for the first time, as if anyone could be a potential threat that needed to locked up or put down.

They'd never looked at their own people as potential threats before, but right now, absolutely anyone could be, and Linda's hand was resting on her sidearm, ready to draw it at a moment's notice, because she wasn't entirely convinced that she wasn't going to have to today.

"Starting where?" Bill asked.

"Starting with him," Phill snarled as they walked past, pointing at General Fielder, who was sat in his office, nervously being watched over by a tall Latina woman named Muñoz, one of Linda's Girls that even Phil himself hadn't known about, her hands on her rifle. Hell, Phil had thought Muñoz had been an orderly or a researcher or a nurse. He'd seen her around the base and labs loads of times, and it was only now that he realized Linda had been preparing for something to go wrong since she'd arrived at New Eden, and all that preparation had paid off.

"Phil!" Bill whispered into Phil's ear. "You have the General in charge of the goddamned base inside of his office being held at gunpoint! Have you lost what's left of your mind?"

As soon as they were inside Phil's office, Linda put the samples she'd brought from Niko into the fridge in Phil's office before stepping back out and closed the door behind her, keeping the two closed in the office as Linda stood outside keeping watch. "No, but I didn't want to put you in harm's way, Bill, and me and Miguel have been losing our minds over this for weeks now."

"Weeks? Weeks! You knew about this for weeks and you kept it from me? What did I ever do to make you not trust me, Phil?"

"Nothing, Bill!" Phil said, throwing his hands up in the air. "I'm here! Now! Telling you everything! I thought that I was protecting you! You and your whole damn family!"

"What is that supposed to mean?"

"Think about your daughter for minute, Bill. Think about Jen. If you had thought there was even a slight chance of her being paired with somebody wrong for her, what would you have done? Or worse, someone had wanted to take her specifically to do something untoward to her?"

Bill surged towards the door, with Phil having to step in the way of his friend. "Lemme go, I'm going to kill that fucking general with my bare goddamned hands!"

"Whoa, Bill! I checked! She's fine! Her pairing was completely legitimate, but a bunch of pairings in this town weren't. Fuck, the goddamn mayor has a couple of people who shouldn't be paired with him, including Major Peters, who'll you note is not at her post right now, because I'm willing to bet Mayor Haunton is one of the people who're being held hostage that didn't get mentioned in the message they sent us."

"Was she in on it? The shit they were doing in setting people up?"

"Peters?" Phil asked before shaking his head. "Maybe, who knows. But I'm betting she's one of the people who helped them orchestrate this palace revolt, though. This is the kind of thing that takes structure, organization, planning and access. Rachel DeMarco's the ringleader, it looks like, although I wouldn't be surprised if Mrs. Vikovic or Mrs. Covington were in the top rungs of the food chain."

"Wait, Rachel DeMarco? Our Rachel DeMarco? That can't be true. She's a good woman, kind and smart. She knows nearly more about the serum than anyone else on this base, if you ask me."

"Well, she's one of the people who's been helping them circumnavigate the Oracle system, at least until Miguel and I figured it out and put a stop to it. I don't think she was doing any of the programming - we think she had a partner for that - but she was definitely the one facilitating that person's access to and from the Oracle system. Obviously, something somewhere pushed her over the line, and she organized a bunch of women she knew were affected by this abuse of the Oracle system - because she helped do it, mind you - and is demanding a fix."

"Which we ain't got, Phil!"

"That's..."

"Phil! You just told me you were telling me everything! What the hell else is going on?"

For the next ten minutes, Phil walked Bill through everything regarding Doctor Eve Merriweather, aka the ex-Mrs. Adam McCallister, from her initial contact, to her claim to have a reassignment solution that didn't involve the death of the original partner to her defection and proving that reassignment by getting reassigned from Adam McCallister to Nathaniel Watkins, all of which they'd gotten biological proof from, and now they needed to test.

It was a lot to take in, all at once, and several times, Bill started to interrupt only for Phil to tell him to wait until he'd gotten to the end and covered everything that was going on that he knew about. About two minutes into the story, Bill had grabbed one of Phil's yellow pads of paper and started scribbling notes on it, so he could have all his questions prepared and ready when Phil eventually stopped talking. It was one of the things Phil liked best about Bill - he'd already gotten past the anger and was already focusing on next steps and preparation. Still, Phil apologized numerous times along the way, and stressed that he was never worried about Bill being a leak, but that someone in Bill's Team could be a plant, something they'd only recently been able to prove false.

Phil realized he'd been talking for about fifteen minutes when he finally stopped and looked up at Bill's face, and saw that Bill, while still probably a little annoyed at Phil, was ready to move onto fixing problems and pushing through on things. But he did want to start with one minor quibble first.

"The President of the United States called you personally and you didn't tell me about it?" Bill laughed, shaking his head, setting the pen down on top of the paper.

"I wasn't sure I was allowed to tell anybody."

"What, that you stood there in your heart boxers talking to the first female President of the United States because she called you in the morning while you were at home?"

"How did you know I was wearing my heart boxers?"

Bill rolled his eyes with a laugh. "You always sleep in heart boxers. You have like two dozen pairs. Linda asked me if it was something she should be worried about early on in your relationship. I told her it was just your way of offering homage to old, great videogames."

"She'd never even heard of Ghosts N' Goblins, had she?" Phil sighed.

"No, but can you blame her? It came out the same year she was born."

"Fine, I'll let it slide. But think you can forgive me now and we can get to work?"

"Probably, but let's start with the obvious things - did you call the President yet?"

"I wanted to get you up to speed first. You're more important to me."

Bill grinned but also looked at up him like he was crazy. "So, that's nice of you and all, but you need to call the goddamned President, Phil."

"I will, Bill, but not until after we have a plan of action. I want to have solutions for as many of these problems as we can before she even thinks to ask about them."

"Alright then, so this reassignment sperm you've got from the Russian fella Dr. McCallister brought with her. You told me what she claimed and what your friend Andy said he saw. How do you want to test it, or should we just start replicating the stuff already?"

"We're not doing anything blind unless we have to, so I want to have it tested. Run it through the usual battery of examinations, then see who we have on the volunteer list of people who actually want to get a reassignment as soon as we figure it out. See if there's any emergency cases we have on record - anyone across the country whose Primary has died and they couldn't use a Dead Man's Switch. If we've even got one or two people like that, I'd rather have us testing this against them than just letting them die."

"Makes sense. I bet there's one or two people out there, praying for something like this to come along. Any chance we can help them, they'll leap at it."

"I've already seen a couple of reports of people who had to be euthanized because they didn't have any other option, so there's already a network hotline for anyone who's in this situation. It's pretty uncommon, but not unheard of. There might be a few people already currently on the hook, so I'll need to hurry."

"You find anyone, and I mean anyone in the United States in that state right now, you grab a couple of the Air Force wingnuts and you head out there to test and see if you can get it to work. Niko said they have enough of a sample that could be divvied up about ten ways, so leave a little bit of it here for us to keep studying but--"

"But you can always go get more from the source, and if I'm zipping off, I can't. Right. If we've got a small Team that's all going to die because their Primary was killed, let's not hospice anyone we don't have to, and get them into a test case where we can reassign them, either collectively to an existing Team, or divvied up among other Teams."

"Whichever. Ms. Merriweather--"

"Wait, who?"

"Doctor Eve McCallister is going by her maiden name now. Although maybe that would make her Ms. Merriweather, rather than Mrs. Whatever, we'll ask her when we see her when she wakes up tomorrow. Anyhow, remember how I said she was abducted against her will when Adam defected? She's ditched him now, and she's gifting us this whole reassignment thing. Like I said, she saw the Russians had it, so she stole it and brought it to us, as a way of getting back at her husband. Hell, Andy thinks she even wants to join our research team."

"She defected!"

"No, she was kidnapped when Adam defected. They were some of the first people paired, remember? So if she didn't go when he left, she'd be dead already."

Bill grumbled rubbing at his thick, bushy mustache. "You make a fair point. I don't have to like it, but it's a fair point. And you said she got reassigned today to someone inside New Eden?"

"Yeah, Nathaniel Watkins. Andy seems to think he's okay."

"Didn't you tell me Andy also thought he was in Covington's little cabal?"

"Andy's convinced he was just doing the same thing that he was when he dabbled into the mess - trying to protect friends and family. Andy's the reason that Charlotte and I are together, and that Charlotte and Dev's daughter is with him, instead of both of them being with Covington."

"Why the hell didn't Charlotte say something to us?"

"She's been in a bit of a grief daze since her husband died and like most people, she assumed that Oracle was going to do her right, not knowing it'd been hacked and overridden. It should've been a giant red flag to the officers who dropped them off at Covington's house that a mother and daughter were going to the same place, but Charlotte said Rachel told them it was because she was going be paired with Arthur and Asha was going to be paired with Arthur's son, which is flatly ridiculous, because the 5th isn't even double digits, but people just assumed that the ones given them orders knew what they were doing and let Covington sign for both of them."

"Taking Charlotte seems like a majorly stupid risk, Phil. She works here. She could've told us, told all of us about how she and Asha were paired outside of regulations, or, hell, even said something about it before it happened!"

Phil frowned and bit his bottom lip before continuing. "So, this Covington asshole's been tormenting people who won't submit to pairings, and before you get mad at me, I just found out about this one a couple of days ago and it's made me so mad I can barely think straight, so I didn't want to tell you because I know with you thinking about Jen, it would've only gotten way worse way faster."

"How do you mean, 'tormenting' them?"

"So, we've had so many people come through here that you probably don't remember her, but there was an Olympic athlete named Piper Brown who came through here a ways back. Well, she was assigned to Covington, but when she got there, she was getting bad vibes and refused to pair with him, and demanded she be sent back and partnered to someone else. Instead, Covington locked her in a room and decided to sit and wait on it."

Bill looked so mad Phil was afraid he'd tear a portion of the wooden desk off. "How long?"

"Longer than she should've--"

"How. Long."

"... ten days."

"TEN D--You know, I'm not even going to bother telling you how fucked up and dangerous that is, because you know better than anybody how fucking stupid that is!" Bill shouted as he stood up and started to pace in the small amount of free space in Phil's office. "And this Piper woman, she's okay? You're sure? Because she sure as shit shouldn't be, according to the odds! Or the science! Or precedent! That's well outside of the recommended range, and so far into the redline zone that she's basically one toe out of the grave instead of one foot in it! How bad of a state is she in now that she's been partnered?"

"She went through a regeneration as a result, but other than that, she seems perfectly fine."

"Thank fuck for that!" Bill spewed, throwing his hands up. "We've got enough blood on our hands from all the people that we couldn't save, plus the ones we might have been able to save if we were faster or smarter or whatever."

"Bill, you can't keep beating yourself up over the ones we couldn't get to," Phil said, placing his hand on his friend's shoulder. "We're human. We have limitations. We can only do so much."

"It still feels like it's not enough," Bill sighed, the energy just draining out of him. "It never was enough and it's never been enough and it's never going to be enough. We're just stuck here, looking at the never-ending list of people that we failed to keep safe and protected."

"But because of us, Bill, millions of people are still alive," Phil said, giving Bill what seemed like a much-needed hug. "It sucks, but we're survivors, and the other survivors are counting on us to help them keep being survivors. Now I need you to suck it up, pull your shit together and help me through this, because I have, like, a hundred things to do at once, and not nearly enough people I trust to help me do them. I promise you, from this point forward, no more secrets, okay? You can ask me anything and if I have an answer, I will tell you."

Bill seemed to consider his options carefully, but had only one real question to ask him. "You didn't have anything to do with sending me Kenna, Jen's friend, did you?"

Phil laughed, shaking his head. "As much as I would love to take credit for creating 'Kenna McKenna,' the guy she was supposed to be paired up with really was DOA and they brought her back to base, but the dude was deep in the Santa Cruz mountains, so it was four hours there and back, but she was last drop of the day. All that meant by the time she was back on base, it'd been three full days since she'd been injected. We gave her the option of a guy who we would've had to send her on a plane for or you, and she couldn't have jumped on your name faster. And as much as I would love to tell you that was all about you, I think it was more about her wanting to stay local. You're high enough of a percentage pairing that you'll be fine. Speaking of which, I know we've already got you paired with 2nd Lieutenant Alvarez, but I want to get you paired with a second member of Linda's Girls as soon as we can. I'll have Linda draft up a list of who's available and unpaired yet so we can get you a second person on your security detail as soon as possible."

"Is that necessary?"

"I've got two people on me full time, and Linda's already talking about turning it into at least three if not four, just for my safety, and you're my right-hand man, Bill, which means I need to have you protected, so I can tell you everything now."

"Okay, okay, I'm sure we can find someone I like well enough to add to my security detail," Bill said. "But lemme ask - why's Linda got her hand on her gun the whole time she's out there?"

"We think maybe there's one or two Covington loyalists still maybe hidden among the base, or maybe one of these New Daughters of the Revolution laying in wait, and the last thing I want is folks on either side getting an inkling of what we can and can't do before we have the facts, otherwise they'll think we can do shit we can't and get mad at us when it doesn't work that way," Phil grumbled.

"Looks like we've got four women in Dodge City, Kansas who just lost their Primary two days ago to a combine harvester accident that damaged him beyond the ability for a Dead Man's Switch to reset them. They've basically started putting their affairs in order, but they agreed they were going to wait a week before being euthanized."

"Got it," Phil said, taking part of the vial marked "Sergei Reassignment Sperm," splitting it into another bottle, sealing it and handing it to Bill. "Put this into a storage unit set to warm, grab one of the planes and someone to fly it, and take Alvarez with you. Call Andy or his partner Niko when you're getting the plane ready, and they'll walk you through what they saw and how to use it, because there's apparently a handful of caveats you need to keep in mind."

"Do I even want to ask?"

"Probably not, but do it anyway."

"We're not done with the conversation about you filling me in on what I've missed, Phil."

"I know, Bill, but you gotta go save four women's lives first."

The two men walked out of Phil's office as Bill grabbed his Trilby from the coatrack and donned it atop his head. "On it. McKenna... out!"