“Wow,” I said, “you guys came really fast.”
“Fast? Hell, Sarge, you held the cops off for an hour and put four in the hospital.”
There wasn’t anything to say. The words somehow registered and I did my best to make a mental note that whatever they had shot me with it didn’t mix with alcohol, had rocketed me past screwed up and into a mental time warp.
“I’ve never heard of Strategic Operations,” I finally said but they were already gone, along with the limo.
Someone wheeled me up the loading ramp onto a transport plane, and next to me the engines roared to life, spitting and whining as the rotors turned and the smell of precious kerosene-synthetic wafted over my nose, making me grin. The gurney locked to the floor and a Navy medic hovered over me. I felt a pinprick. And then he hung a saline bag, which made me feel better almost immediately, taking the edge off a headache that had appeared out of nowhere and threatened only to get worse.
“I never heard of Strategic Operations either, L-T,” he said.
“Whose an L-T?”
“You are, sir. That’s what your records say.” He showed me the flexi-tab, my name and image floating in the middle of off-green plastic. “See. Lieutenant Stanley Resnick, along with all your physical data. The rest looks classified.”
“Where are we headed?”
He shrugged. “Not my business to know.”
“Well, I’m in the shit now.”
“What do you mean?”
But I’d already started ignoring him because he was worthless. The cold air made my skin tingle, and when the aircraft started pulling take-off g’s I nearly vomited with the sensation of weight, a weight that terrified me for a moment that it would never leave, like the one I’d felt in Bea’s apartment building.
Wheezer was dead. It should have still bothered me, but the bottles I’d had in the hotel, and the scrape with police had been just the right mix to purge me of any emotion. And one other thing helped: this had to be a new mission. It’s the only reason they’d have rescued me from such a monumental screw-up, and then promoted me.
Only the high-brass thought that way.
BY T. C. McCARTHY
The Subterrene War
Germline
Exogene
Contents
FRONT COVER IMAGE
WELCOME
DEDICATION
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE
ONE: SPOILING
TWO: BIRTHDAYS
THREE: HATRED
FOUR: TRAITORS
FIVE: OUTCAST
SIX: FOREST FOR THE TREES
EIGHT: ARDUOUS MARCH
NINE: CHUCHE SOUP
TEN: CHOLLIMA MOMENTS
ELEVEN: A WARMER CLIME
EPILOGUE
EXTRAS
MEET THE AUTHOR
A PREVIEW OF CHIMERA
BY T. C. McCARTHY
COPYRIGHT
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2012 by T. C. McCarthy
Excerpt from Chimera copyright © 2012 by T. C. McCarthy
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ISBN 978-0-316-19183-8