Weapons of choice

A lapsed Buddhist, he considered their furious glares and wondered what crime he had committed in a past life. This was a karmic backlash of bin Laden proportions. What a pair of fuckin' raptors, he thought. They were working him into a corner and blindsiding him, all razor teeth and slashing claws. He'd nearly wet himself watching Jurassic Park as a little kid, and he had the same feeling of free-floating horror now, eighteen years later, facing this pair of shrews.

"Ladies…," he said, offering them his open palms.

"Jesus, Nat!" cried Duffy. "Now it's not just patronizing bullshit, it's patronizing sexist bullshit!"

"Uh… I'm sorry ladi… uh…"

"Look, Edgar," said Natoli, a petite brunette with axes in her impossibly deep brown eyes. "You got caught with your pants down. You lied to us, which means you lied to the American people. But now you can make it up to them."

"Yeah, just let us out of here to do our job," Duffy finished for her.

"No," he said firmly. "Under no circumstances. It's too dangerous."

"Oh, come on, Edgar!" Natoli protested. "Why not? This is the fucking story of the century. You can't Roswell it. It's just too big. You got ten thousand witnesses, two dozen or more of them journalists. You probably got your satellite links being hacked by CNN right now."

"Excuse me, Ms. Natoli, but CNN won't be hacking any of our communications for a very long time. I can assure you of that."

Both women snorted in amusement.

"You think so?" asked Natoli, who worked for the Atlanta-based broadcaster.

The Egg smiled kindly, which put both reporters on alert. "Oh, no. Your sources seem to have misled you. You see, the Enterprise is exactly where it's supposed to be. They're not the one's who've gone missing."

He let the implications of that hang in the air.

"Holy shit," Duffy said after a brief pause.

"Yep," nodded The Egg sympathetically. "So you see. You could interview those guys we brought over; lock them down for an exclusive if you want. But who you gonna call? I don't think they've even invented the television here yet."

"Oh," said Rosanna Natoli. Then, "Oh shit."

She slumped into a chair. Her eyes seemed to lose focus.

Duffy rummaged around in a pocket and came up with a small bottle of pills. She dry swallowed one and handed the rest to her friend. Thieu wondered what the medication was. It might explain why they were still conscious.

Whatever. At least I shut 'em up, he thought.

And for a few seconds at least, Lieutenant Edgar Thieu got to enjoy the feeling of being in control.

Dan Black was out of his depth. A few seconds after they had jumped out of the Seahawk, he'd received word that his mission was redundant. Spruance had authorized the Multinational Force to carry out search and rescue. The helicopter had lifted off almost immediately, taking Colonel Jones and leaving the two Enterprise men stranded on the Clinton. Kolhammer apologized to the pair, shouting over the sound of the rotor blades. He said it was critical they get SAR away as fast as possible.

A Negro woman appeared, wearing camouflaged pants, a heavy blue, long-sleeved T-shirt, and a bulky yellow crash helmet. She hustled them all off the flight deck, which was swarming with emergency and damage control teams. Fires burned everywhere amid the wreckage of smashed aircraft and equipment.

Black noticed that there seemed to be two island structures on the deck, separated by hundreds of yards. They hurried into the first one, and the change of atmosphere struck him immediately. The smell of burning chemicals was completely masked.

"Overpressure," said Curtis. "Wow."

The corridors, which were much wider, well lit, and better ventilated than the narrow passages of their own ship, were nonetheless crowded with personnel charging from one crisis to another. Corpsmen carrying stretchers busted past every few minutes. Firefighters in silver space suits straight out of Flash Gordon came and went. Sirens sounded, the PA blared. Ensign Curtis snapped his head left and right, trying to take it all in at once. Black was more controlled, but the mayhem conspired to knock his feet out from under him, nonetheless.

Kolhammer put a hand on his arm and tugged gently.

"You might as well come with me, Commander. I'm heading back to the bridge."

Black shrugged, and fell into step with the admiral. They passed rooms that seemed to be full of nothing but movie screens, and a mess hall that looked more like a swish restaurant and smelled of things he vaguely recalled from port visits in the Far East and the Mediterranean. It was impossible to ignore the cosmopolitan nature of the carrier's crew. Men and women of all races seemed to work in close proximity without any apparent difficulty. He saw white men take orders from what looked to be a Mexican woman, and watched as the men obeyed without question.