Flyboy cocked his head. “No,” he said softly. “You don’t.”
Helen chewed on one end of the straw. “You know, you really do have the nicest blue eyes, not a tinge of gray in them at all. And when you smile, all a girl can think about is…meat.”
She burst out laughing, unable to continue her teasing. Flyboy joined her.
“You’re a scamp, that’s what you are,” he told her, leaning over to tweak her nose. “You almost had me there. How they mistake you for a serious dedicated operative is a mystery.”
She shrugged. Life couldn’t be all business all the time. “Are you going to be there tonight? I heard a couple of the commandos are interested in checking out X.”
They had agreed to refer to the serum as X in public. The serum was, of course, the drug to be tried out on her later. Helen Roston, female supersoldier-spy. Say that fast three times. She grinned at the thought. After a year of training, she was well past the apprehensive state and into the macabre. That was, as any seasoned operative knew, as ready as one could possibly get before restless anxiety settled in.
“I think I’ll be there, barring some commitments. But I know Armando Chang will, for sure. He’ll be there to answer your questions.”
“Armando. I don’t think I’ve met him.”
“No, he hasn’t been around lately, but of all of us, he’s the one you should talk to.”
“Oh.” She made a mental note about Armando Chang. “Tell me what you know anyway.”
“You mean, other than the chemical reports you’ve read? I don’t know how the new stuff will be different personally.”
“No, how did the original version work on you?” Helen had read enough to understand the effects on a human body. They were words. She was interested in the experience. “What did it do to you?”
Flyboy sat back, studying her as he weighed his words. Interesting that he would need to do that, since he had answered all her previous questions quickly. Maybe he thought she wasn’t ready to hear whatever it was he had to say. Again, interesting.
“Armando should be answering this because he took the new stuff,” he began, “but I’ll try to give you just my take on it. Our dosages were small. It didn’t work on a few of us. For me, I felt very alert, which is great for flying. As far as I could tell, everything functioned normally except that everything was also noticeably easier to do.”
More questions floated through Helen’s mind. Armando Chang had tried the new stuff? Could he remote view? “What do you mean?”
“The most difficult tasks were…” Flyboy pointed to his dessert “…a piece of cake. I was very goal-oriented, but then, I am a pretty focused person when I’m working, anyway.”
She had noticed that. “Yes, flying aircraft needs that. I imagine X makes an ordinary person extremely attentive to details,” Helen said thoughtfully.
Flyboy took her hand in his. “It’s a drug. Always remember that. No matter how you feel, just keep that in mind, that it’s the drugs. You said you see the Portal as your vehicle, and yeah, in a way you have to trust it to help you do your job. But you have to trust X, too, and that’s tougher than you think.”
She had already thought about that. Drugs, after all, invaded a body, took control of some aspects of it. To allow them to work, she had to trust them. Same as she had to trust Hades. Who in his right mind would? Yet, millions of people took drugs day in and day out, without thought, with total trust.
“Why did you let them inject the stuff in you, anyway?” she asked, curious now that she had some answers. “Did you have a choice?”
His smile was flippant. “I’m a COS commando,” he stated simply. “We’re different.”
“And that means you aren’t ever going to tell me.”
“You’ll understand more about it soon, so why go into details?”
“Does that mean you know more about my program than I do?” She arched her brows. He was still holding her hand, his thumb massaging the fleshy part under hers.
“They call you V2. What does that tell you?”
Quite a bit, Helen admitted. Quite a bit.
Seven
The meeting was supposed to be informally formal, one of those terms at Center that Helen hadn’t quite figured out yet. She took it to mean that they didn’t have a dress code. Whatever. Q and A meant mean exactly that, no matter how they did it. Those attending had to do with her training in one form or another here, and this was the first time Helen would get to see them together. Flyboy had told her at lunch that Center was a very tight-knit community, especially within its special programs. The Q and A sessions before any mission cleared the air.
Most of all, she wanted to meet Armando Chang. T. had told her that Center was keeping an eye on him. The newest COS commando, he had used the new version of the serum the most, and of them all, according to T., he was the most affected.
“He has changed, Hell,” she had said during one of their private briefings. “Not just the way he acts, but the way he talks, too. I’ve met him before he was part of the program, so I can tell the difference. But the change is slow enough that Center can’t actually pinpoint it to the drugs themselves, you know? He’s still effective, he’s somehow worked his change into an asset for the operations.”
