Absynthe by Brendan P. Bellecourt

Author:Brendan P. Bellecourt [Bellecourt, Brendan P.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2021-12-07T00:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Seven

During the war . . .

Dr. Colette Silva sat across a white-linen tablecloth from Sergio. The plates between them were fine china. The silverware was blindingly bright. They were in the dining room of the Blackstone Hotel, one of the finest restaurants in Chicago. Colette was normally excited about these sorts of dinners, but her mind kept wandering back to Liam, to Project Echo, to the fog and the glowing lights within.

Sergio was apologetic for being late. As was always the case when he felt guilty, he did most of the talking. Colette was glad of it, and if her silence deepened his guilt and made him talk even more, so much the better.

As the first courses came, she couldn’t help but think of how she’d sat across from another man entirely, years before. It had been in her parent’s home in Miami, and the man had been President Nolan himself. He’d traveled by zeppelin, all the way from Novo Solis, to plead with her in person to come work for the government, to work for him.

She was hardly surprised he was trying to recruit her—she’d made a name for herself in the burgeoning field of symbiotic psychology, a name she was proud of. What did surprise her was his dogged persistence. She’d declined his offer three times already, the final one making it clear that meeting in person would only serve to decrease the chances of her accepting, not improve them.

President Nolan was a heavyset man with jowls and several chins that strained against his shirt and ascot. What remained of his graying brown hair had been combed forward, a throwback from the end of the previous century. Normally confident to the point of boorishness, he sat in her parents’ living room, looking like a polar bear that had somehow found itself in the tropics.

“In the end,” he told her, “the project you’d be helping us to undertake is not for purposes of war, but for peace. The strain of bacteria I told you about was developed in Switzerland, stolen by the Germans, and thank God has fallen into our hands so that we can unlock its secrets before they unleash something terrible upon us, upon the world.”

Colette could already see gaping seams in President Nolan’s story, but she also recognized that Echobacterum sentensis had vast implications for humanity. Assuming its purported abilities were true, it could bridge the mental gap between people, creating new pathways for worldwide communication.

It was President Nolan’s fear-mongering and truculence toward other nations that had caused her to decline his offers thus far, but she was beginning to see how dangerous it would be to let the project continue without a trustworthy moral compass such as herself. There was no telling what other nations might do with such power, whether it was the Germans, the Swiss, or anyone else who might get hold of the bacteria. For that matter, there was no telling what the U.S. military might do with it.

Colette was acquainted with many of the scientists the President had already recruited.

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