Indian Hill 7 by Mark Tufo

Author:Mark Tufo [Tufo, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mark Tufo
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 12

MIKE JOURNAL ENTRY 10

I had BT and Tracy watch the playback of the interview separately. BT didn’t trust him at all and Tracy trusted him implicitly. She noted how he had looked to the picture, but BT couldn’t get past the part of Pender being “infected” with Stryver DNA. One of those two was going to be right; I could only hope I’d made the right choice. But even if Pender was a traitor, possibly not even knowing that he was, he was still going to give me every advantage he could against the Progerians. There was no way the Stryvers would ever waste an opportunity to strike out against their old foe. No matter which team Pender was ultimately playing for, he would take this swing for all it was worth.

“Seriously man. You told him he could be Octoleg-Man? That’s what you’re thinking about when you interview a potential saboteur? He could be getting ready to perform egregious acts of treason all over what’s left of humanity. I don’t know if we should fear him or you more.” BT said. He was half-kidding, but not all. He was concerned, and he had every right to be. Everything I’d done so far had been by the seat of my pants with a heavy dose of winging it. We weren’t that much better off and we’d lost…well, we’d lost a lot of good people. Tough for anybody to get behind all that with any degree of confidence.

“You should fear me, ultimately, because I have the power to stop him. At least, at the moment.”

“But you’re not going to.”

“For what reason?” I said. BT was about to give me a dozen, but I kept talking before he could maybe come across a good argument I couldn’t ignore. “The Progs are directly in front of us, that’s a known fact. We’ll be able to surprise them for a little while, then they’re going to rally and they’ll be coming at us with everything they have. BT, you’ve been part of the drills–you’ve seen all the potential outcomes.”

“Don’t even pull that bullshit with me, you believe the computer models as much as you believe in unicorns that shit rainbow ice cream.”

“What do you think that would taste like?”

“Yeah, you keep making jokes because that’s how you cope, but I’m terrified, Mike.”

“Me too, man, me too.”

I’d had Beckert bring us out of our buckle and had the seventh deck properly vented of the dex gas. Could almost hear the crew take a collective sigh as I brought them an extra week back from the brink of a major battle and not have to worry about every breath they took. Besides the retrofitting or improvements or whatever Pender was doing, the ship needed some repairs. We’d not realized just how much until I sent crews out to do some space walking. When we dropped out of the emergency buckle the first time and the ship had been rocked, we’d all mistakenly thought it had something to do with the sudden halt.

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