Now, I know what you're thinking, and the answer is no. Nuh-uh. Absolutely not, no way, no how. There is a zero percent probability that Shelley got to be Prime Red just because her father is Prime Commander.
How do I know this? It's simple. Prime Commander does not get to choose who gets promoted and who doesn't. Wizzit makes that decision, and it's practically impossible to suck up to him. Prime Commander's main job is to serve as a combination strategic adviser, sounding board, disciplinarian, and surrogate parent to us Primes. I mean, when you've got a bunch of healthy, active late-teens and twenty-somethings spending most of their time hanging out together at HQ, you've got to have a grown-up around to make sure things don't get out of hand, right?
And from what I've heard, Commander Windham didn't even want Shelley on the team in the first place. What responsible father would? We engage a couple of Enclave monsters per week, and any of those encounters could result in a fatality. When Wizzit selected Shelley as the very first Prime Violet, the old man just about exploded. I guess Wizzit and Shelley managed to talk him into it, though, and they've been going like gangbusters ever since.
Having said all that, let me add that Shelley and her dad work well together. They're two pages out of the same book -- both tall with lean, rangy builds and a kind of subtle charisma that makes everything they tell you seem like it's the most reasonable thing in the world. And when they disagree, it's kind of fun to watch them each trying to out-reasonable the other.
The commander was seated at his desk when we walked in, going over some sort of report. True to form, he didn't start out by telling us what he had figured out, if anything, about our encounter. Instead, he took off his reading glasses and motioned for us to sit down. Turning to Shelley, he said, "So, what happened out there?" Just as if he hadn't been going over the vids himself for the past fifteen minutes.
Shelley had Wizzit replay the encounter from her point of view, narrating as she went along. And you know, even seeing it from her perspective, I still couldn't quite figure out how she locked up Lily's leg the way she had. She finished up by saying, "It's obvious that the monster Enclave sent was merely a diversion, and that the main point of attack was the minder. That's unusual, but we've seen it before. She was extraordinarily strong and fast, especially considering her size and apparent sex. I'd estimate she was just over five feet tall, maybe five-one or five-two, and she couldn't have weighed much over a hundred pounds, if that much, yet she was able to kick me hard enough to cause some pain even through the force shield."
"Your face was starting to bruise when we got home," I put in. "She's definitely had some training, that's for sure."
She nodded. "I agree. She is obviously highly trained in some form of unarmed combat, probably something that emphasizes escape and evasion tactics, to judge by how easily she got away from us. I don't think she ever hesitated, not even for a second."
"What do you mean?" the commander asked her.
It's a funny thing about the commander. He'll ask a question like that, and you think, "He has no idea what I'm talking about." I know that's what I thought, the first few debriefings I had with him. After a while, though, I realized that he was usually right there with me, even ahead of me more often than not, and waiting for me to figure out what was obvious to him. Asking those kinds of questions is just his way of getting us to think about the problem.
Shelley replied, "Well, most people, if they were cornered like that, would stop and look around, or give at least some sign that they were unsure about what to do. She didn't do that. She just did everything one after the other -- boom, boom, boom -- as if she'd been doing it all her life."
The commander leaned back in his chair. "That's a good observation. Tell me, what do you think about the way she got up to the fire escape?"
She made a face, thinking. "Dad, I've seen martial artists who could do that, who could run up a wall the way she did. It's an impressive trick, but it mainly requires just speed, strength, and balance, and we already know she has all three. If I had to, I could probably teach myself to do the same thing in a couple of days. But I don't know of anyone who could have jumped that far out from the wall over to the fire escape." She shook her head slowly. "I guess, theoretically, everything she did could be done by an unaltered human body, but . . ." Her voice trailed off and she shrugged.
After a few seconds, the commander nodded and turned to me. "Do you have anything to add, Trevor?"
"Not about her training, no, but there are two or three other things, sir," I said respectfully. "Wizzit, could you switch to my POV, starting about ten seconds before the minder started fighting us? Take it about, oh, one-quarter speed, I guess."
Wizzit complied. I still don't know how he does all that he does, but either he's got some sort of AV hookup with our belts that lets him record everything we see and hear when our force shields are activated, or . . . well, I'm not sure what else it could be. I'm not sure I want to know, either. Regardless, we got a true-to-life video-and-audio replay of what had happened, exactly as I saw and heard it.
"Hold it!" I said when we got to the part where I had seen the flash of red. "Go back about half a second and play it again, very slowly. Everybody look at the bottom right." Wizzit complied again, and when it got to the good part, he stopped it without my even asking.
There, frozen on the screen, was what looked like a scarlet hedgehog, or maybe a scarlet hedgehog skeleton. I mean, it was just a foot or two tall, bright red, and had these quill-like things sticking out all over, but it was thin. Really thin. In its hand or paw was a small, flat box with buttons on it.
We all stared at it for a few seconds, and then the commander murmured, "JB Swift."
"Uh huh," Shelley agreed. "Haven't seen him for a long time."
I waited. Both Windhams knew that I had no idea who this guy was, and from past experience I figured it was best to let them tell me when they were good and ready instead of demanding explanations right away.
The commander stared at the screen a moment longer, then he turned to me. "A number of years ago, Enclave started experimenting with speed. The idea, we think, was that if they could get their monsters fast enough to hit us before we could react, then that would give them a leg up." He pointed at the red little guy on the screen. "That was one of their successes. Mike nicknamed him JB Swift."
"JB Swift? Okay, I get the Swift part, but what's the --"
"It stands for Just Because," Shelley broke in, answering my question before I could finish it.
I snorted. "That sounds like something Mike would say."
The commander was silent for a moment before continuing. Probably wanting to make sure our "playful banter" was done. Sometimes I think he takes the grown-up part of his job a little too seriously. "The speed research didn't work out too well for them overall. There is apparently a limit to how much their reaction time could be decreased, despite their speed. And it turns out that their fastest monsters are also necessarily their smallest, skinniest ones. Really easy to beat."
"I remember that," Shelley put in with a smile. "It was the year you gave me golf clubs for Christmas. Best year ever."
The commander grinned. I turned to stare at Shelley, wondering what the heck she was talking about. It wasn't her style to break in with random comments. I opened my mouth to ask . . . and then I got it. And I started laughing. I couldn't help it. The mental image of Shelley teeing up, yelling "Fore!", and swatting one of these little guys to the moon was just too funny.
When my fit of the giggles had passed, I wiped my eyes and said, "Sorry. Um, what's that thing he's holding?"
The commander shook his head. "No idea. What do you think it is?"
I stared at it for a while. "It looks like a remote control," I began, pulling at my lower lip.
"That much seems obvious," Shelley agreed.
"As for what it's supposed t
o be controlling . . . I think I have an idea. It has to do with one of the other things I wanted to show you. Wizzit, can you start it moving again -- slowly, so we can watch what he's doing -- and focus on that thing in his hand and also on Lily's face?"
"Lily?" The commander's eyebrows shot up.
"That's what she said her name was," I replied. "Lily Lee. We've got to call her something." Two ovals showed up on the screen, one showing JB Swift's hand and arm, and the other displaying Lily's downturned face. One thing was for certain: My daydream hadn't been much of an exaggeration. She was really pretty. Beautiful, even.
We watched as the little red monster inched his way forward in slow motion. He gradually moved his arm so that it was pointed back behind him. Lily was looking down, cringing away from me. Then I saw what I had been waiting for: one of JB Swift's fingers depressed a button on the remote.
"Freeze it here!" I called out. The scene froze. "Okay, now show us the whole picture at this instant, everything from my POV." The screen expanded to show all of JB Swift, all of Lily, and Shelley approaching her in the background, her arm starting to reach out. "At this point," I said, "he's pressed one of the buttons on that little gizmo thing, and Lily is still playing scared-little-me. Wizzit, take it forward from here, normal speed, and everybody watch Lily's face."
Of course, by now you've probably figured out what the video was going to show, haven't you? Within a second, Lily's face had lost all its expression and she was starting her attempted beatdown of us.
Shelley whistled softly. "Damn! He was controlling her."
"Good work, Trevor," the commander said absently, staring at the screen. "Really good work."
"Yeah, well, that JB Swift guy almost ran into me, which is why I noticed him," I said modestly. "And Lily was facing me, not Shelley, so she couldn't have seen."
"Wizzit," asked the commander, "are you absolutely sure that this minder, this Lily Lee, wasn't some kind of Enclave construct? An android or robot or something?"
"Absolutely sure. One hundred percent human female. My sensors detected nothing artificial about her." He paused for effect, then went on dramatically, "Even the boobies are real, and if you don't believe me, you can ask Trevor here. He got quite the handful, looks like."
That caught me by surprise, because I had no idea what he was talking about. Then I figured it out and yeah, that's probably how it would have looked to him. Shelley made a disgusted sound, and even the commander looked uncomfortable. He had probably seen it the same way Wizzit had, and knowing him, I figure he was planning a man-to-man with me later about keeping one's natural impulses in check and maintaining an image of propriety. As for Shelley, I wasn't sure what she had seen or whether her disgust was aimed at Wizzit or me.
Luckily, I knew that I had acted with perfect innocence, and there was even a quick, easy way to prove it. "All right, Wizzit," I said patiently, "can you fast-forward to the spot where I got the 'handful of boobies'? That was the third thing I wanted to point out."
The transition was made so quickly that I suspected Wizzit was about to show it anyway. He takes good care of us Primes, sure, but he also has this perverse, childish streak in him that shows up sometimes. In less than a second we were treated to a close-up of my hand grabbing the front of Lily's blouse shortly before she ran up the wall. She twisted away in slow motion, and we all saw my hand flatten out and cup itself around her right breast before she pulled away completely.
"Stop it right here," I said. I could feel my face turning red, and I tried not to sound embarrassed. Now that I could see it, it really did look like I was trying to grab myself a freebie there. Admittedly, it was a nice-looking breast.
"Now back it up about a second and . . . freeze." I walked up to the still shot of my hand gripping her breast and tapped a bright dot on her blouse just beneath one of my fingertips. "Here," I announced, "is where I planted the bug."
The release of tension in the room was almost palpable. The commander chuckled and shook his head. Shelley exhaled loudly and said, "Geez, Trev, you know what that looked like, don't you? I wasn't going to say anything, but . . ."
"Yeah, I know," I replied sheepishly. "It looked like I was copping a feel off one of Enclave's minders. But honest, I didn't even think about that until just now. At the time, I was just afraid that she was going to get away, and I thought maybe we could listen in on what she did afterwards."
The commander tried to pull on a straight face and very nearly succeeded. "Wizzit, can you --?"
"I have located Trevor's bug," Wizzit interrupted. "Petulance" appeared to be the mood of the day. I wasn't too worried. Right now, he was mad at me for spoiling his fun, but he never carried a grudge for more than, say, ten minutes. "It began transmitting as soon as he . . . attached it and continued for the next seventeen minutes, thirty-one seconds, at which time Enclave detected the transmission and began jamming it. Playing the recording now."
We listened for seventeen minutes, thirty-one seconds. Wizzit was really good at filtering out the background noise, but even so, there wasn't much to hear. Lily scaled the fire escape, then did something that required some exertion -- probably climbing up something. We heard light, rapid footsteps accompanied by slightly quicker, heavier breathing, so she was probably running. There was a short, sharp exhalation, like a "hup!", the footsteps stopped, and then there was a heavy crash, followed by scrabbling sounds.
I had been watching Shelley all this time. (Hey, I had to look somewhere.) She was looking off into nothing and her lips were moving silently, as if she were narrating Lily's movements to herself. She seemed puzzled by the crash, though, the tip of her tongue just coming out to touch her upper lip. When the scrabbling sounds came, she nodded and said to herself, "She jumped over to another building." Yeah, that sounded right to me.
More running, then we heard a voice say calmly, "Lily, stand down." Shelley looked over at me and seemed startled to discover I had been watching her. She mouthed the words "JB Swift" at me. I nodded -- it was evidently his voice we were hearing -- and deliberately looked away from her. After that stupid boobie-grabbing fiasco, I didn't want to creep her out any more by staring.
"Standing down." That was Lily's voice, but completely flat, devoid of any expression.
"Lily, pick up the rifle and follow me."
"Following."
More footsteps, and then there was a buzzing sound that Wizzit didn't remove, so I assume that it was an Enclave teleport. It went on for about a minute. The sound quality dropped considerably after that, and I had to strain to hear what was going on. More footsteps, more footsteps, and then came a heavy clang, loud enough that it made me jump. A bit of rustling, and then we heard JB Swift's voice again. He was farther away now, though, and I couldn't make out what he said.
Silence. And then we heard something I know I didn't expect. It was soft, but unmistakable -- the sound of a woman crying. It never got very loud, not like she was wailing with grief over something she had just discovered. No, it was more like there was something she just couldn't take any more, and she gave herself up to despair.
As soon as I recognized it for what it was, I looked around at the others to see if they heard it, too. Commander Windham was sitting impassively behind his desk, his chin resting on his laced fingers. Shelley seemed more disturbed by the sound; she was staring out into space, her lips pursed tightly together and her brows knitted together in a frown.
To be honest, I wasn't sure what I felt. Pity, I guess. I knew that somewhere out there, the pretty Enclave minder we knew as Lily Lee was crying her heart out as if her life had collapsed around her and she had no friends left anywhere in the world. Which just might have been true.
Four uncomfortable minutes later, the transmission dissolved into static.
Chapter 5