“You weren’t expecting to be the one using it when you built it, were you?”
“No, but I was the only one who knew how to use it to its full potential.”
“Before you were deployed in Washington, had you ever been in a fight?”
“I’ve had several fights over the requirements for—”
“Not arguments, doctor,” he interrupted. “Fights. Had you ever come to blows with someone? Did you ever once throw a punch?”
“I’d fired over ten thousand rounds through the suit’s M2s on the firing range.”
“At wooden targets,” he said. “Did you receive any training at all as to how deal with combat situations? Basic tactics? Target priority? Anything?”
A rasping hiss came from the armor. A sigh. “No.”
“So,” said Shelly, turning back to Stealth, “the most sophisticated weapons platform on the planet has spent the past two years in the hands of an untrained civilian who didn’t want to be using it in the first place, and you think it’s suspicious I want to put an experienced soldier behind the controls?”
“I find it suspicious,” said Stealth, “the matter was not brought up until we were here and disarmed.”
The colonel looked up at the nine-foot battlesuit. “You call that disarmed? I think if Doctor Morris disagreed with me, there wouldn’t be much anyone could do to stop her, would there?”
*
“It’s very simple,” said Sorensen. He peered at the elbow joint of the Cerberus armor. It was at his eye level, and he’d pushed his glasses up onto his head to squint at it. “We couldn’t train them because they’d died.”
“No wonder you’re a doctor,” murmured Cerberus.
Sorensen stepped away from the battlesuit and moved to one of the exes standing at attention. It was a dead woman with a square jaw. “It takes three to four hours for a corpse to make the transition to ex-humanity,” he said. “Lack of oxygen destroys the mind and memories, leaving only core survival patterns like eating, basic motions, and reaction to raw stimuli like sound or movement.” He set his glasses back on his nose and rapped the dead woman on the forehead. “There’s nothing there to train. It’d be easier to teach a grasshopper how to type.”
Then he went silent, staring into space.
“Doctor,” said the colonel.
“Madelyn had a baby bib with a grasshopper on it,” said Sorensen. He looked at Shelly. “Eva and I saved it. I’m sure it’s still boxed up in the attic at our house.”
“The exes, doctor.”
“Yes,” the older man muttered. “The exes.” He glared at them for a moment, then poked the dead woman in the forehead again. The ex rocked back and forth. “The physical structure of the brain still exists,” he said. “Just like a computer processor without power. The Nest restores electrical activity to key areas, allowing simple memories to form and reflexes to be re-developed.”
Stealth interrupted him. “The Nest?”
Sorensen turned the dead woman’s head to the side before pointing at the green box. “Neural stimulator,” he explained. He looked annoyed by the question. “It took almost a year to find precisely the right regions of the brain, the correct amperage and voltage.”
“I would think decay within the brain would prevent such a device from functioning for long.”
The doctor shook his head. “No, no, no,” he said. “Yes, there’s initial decay. We have to give each subject several EEGs to make sure it’s still viable. But once the ex-virus takes hold the level of decay drops to almost nothing, so our largest worry is dehydration.”
Stealth tilted her head at Sorensen. “According to our research, the dead continue to decay, just at a decreased rate.”
He shook his head. “Your research is wrong. A lot of work was done before... before...” The doctor was lost in thought for a moment. “Before things went bad,” he said. “One of the last things they established about the ex-virus was that it’s lethal.”
Stealth shook her head. “It is harmless,” she said. “Individuals die from secondary infections, not from the virus itself.”
“Humans,” he said, nodding. “That’s not the problem. The ex-virus is a lethal bacteriophage. It attacks necrotic bacteria and uses them to reproduce. All necrotic bacteria. An ex’s decay rate drops by eighty-seven-point-eight percent.”
“They smell like they’re rotting,” said Cerberus.
“Material in their digestive tract or on their clothes,” the doctor said. “You notice none of these exes have the scent of decay on them. Once they’ve been cleaned, they tend to just smell like... well, clean skin. When you calculate in the resilience the virus creates in cellular membranes and the lower core temperatures in the afflicted—”
“Exes could remain active for years,” Stealth said.