Chapter 152. The P-EAR Initiation

The first thing I got was a slap, sharp and heavy, carrying the smell of men’s cologne and cigarette smoke.

“Good morning, Tommy-boy.” Leon’s familiar, disgustingly smug baritone sounded right beside my ear.

My eyes flew open. Like a computer operating system after an emergency reboot, my brain immediately kicked its background processes into gear and started analyzing the incoming data at maximum speed.

I was in a spacious, traditional office belonging to a high-ranking Army officer. The walls held all the obligatory trappings: a formal American flag made of heavy silk, a display case filled with collectible edged weapons, and several rows of oak frames containing military decorations and commendations. Leon himself was sprawled in a deep leather chair behind a massive polished-walnut desk, his feet propped right on the desktop. He lazily held a smoking cigar in his left hand and swirled a heavy glass of whiskey in his right. His eyes had the smug, well-fed pride of a seasoned fisherman who had finally hauled a trophy catch out of the river after a long struggle.

I did not open my mouth or engage him right away. The last thing I wanted was to listen to whatever pompous speech he had clearly prepared. It was much more useful to keep calmly assessing my situation.

The hands of the round wall clock stood at 11:42. Taking into account the exact time I had arrived at the checkpoint and allowing for the fight itself on the training grounds, I had been out for a little over half an hour. Acceptable. At least that meant I was not critically late for anything yet.

Beyond the office’s wide panoramic window stretched the same unforgettable P-EAR training grounds where I had been so thoroughly beaten. From the third floor, I had a perfect view of Leon’s exhausted, sweat-soaked scouts below as they lazily stripped off their battered S-Armor and methodically dug unexploded mines out of the scorched grass. The operation codenamed “Teach the Stubborn Rookie a Lesson” was officially over.

My access to S-Power still had not been restored. Apparently, Sam was still maintaining a tight lock on the perimeter, or he had simply forgotten to deactivate the powers.

To my mild surprise, I was not restrained. After such a “joyful” welcome on the training grounds, I had fully expected to wake up in some underground bunker, chained to a steel pipe with heavy restraints, a bag over my head, and left to await the kind of elaborate torture intelligence agencies usually reserved for alien invaders. But Leon had decided not to go that far.

I gave myself a quick once-over. My fingers and hands had suffered almost no damage, but my field uniform was streaked with dirt from crawling across the roofing felt, with black, melted scorch marks where the stun rods had made contact. This shirt was fit for nothing but disposal now. Leaving my dress jacket with its Bronze Star hanging in the barracks closet and wearing a regular Army shirt for this assignment had turned out to be a damn good tactical decision.

Deep burns showed through the fabric across my back, throbbing painfully. I mentally counted about fifteen distinct points of injury. I was not even sure how to feel about that. Should I be genuinely impressed that my physiology required such a ridiculous number of simultaneous strikes from military-grade equipment just to knock me unconscious, or should I feel sorry for my burned back?

On top of that, my face was throbbing. In the hazy reflection of the window, I clearly saw a dark red bruise spreading beneath my right eye.

“So what exactly was the point of this whole circus?” I broke the silence, pointing at my battered face. “Is this how your department trains recruits? And, by the way, what exactly was I supposed to learn from that cheap-ass performance?”

“Tommy, do I look like some fucking school disciplinarian or a kindergarten nanny?” Leon drew his thick brows together, but the smug grin never left his rotten face. “I punched you in the face because I’ve wanted to do it for a very long time. Ever since the day we first met.”

Hatred, a thirst for immediate revenge, pure rage. A cocktail of destructive emotions instantly churned through my head, demanding an outlet. Then, just as quickly, it vanished without a trace, dissolved down to the last molecule by the perfect chemistry of my brain. Emotional outbursts were completely useless, economically unsound garbage in my position. This situation called for cold calculation and nothing else.

I took one swift, silent step forward, cleared the corner of the massive desk in an instant, and, putting my entire upper body behind the punch, slammed my fist squarely into Leon’s pampered face.

“What the fuck is wrong with you, Ross?!” the colonel roared.

The force of the blow sent his chair crashing backward, and the head of intelligence went tumbling across the carpet, spilling the rest of his expensive single-malt whiskey all over himself.

“What the fuck are you doing?!”

“Just felt like it,” I said evenly as I returned to my original position.

I had never considered myself a sadist, and I had never taken any physical pleasure in violence. But right now, watching the crimson mark rapidly spreading across the left side of Leon’s jaw, already destined to become an ugly blue-black bruise by tomorrow, I felt a deep sense of aesthetic satisfaction. And no, I had not given in to destructive emotions for even a second. In this particular case, I simply needed to make one basic truth clear to my temporary employer, quickly and unmistakably: whatever rules you set for dealing with me, those are the same rules I’ll use against you.

“You’re a complete asshole, Ross.” Stewart grunted as he got to his feet, jerked the chair upright, and disgustedly shrugged off his jacket, which was soaked with whiskey. “Because of you, I just wasted half a pint of excellent twenty-year-old whiskey, Tommy.”

“Don’t call me that. I can’t stand that tone.”

“I’ll call you whatever the hell I want. The regulations say I can.” He waved me off dismissively, sat back down, and lit another cigar. “As of today, you’re officially under my direct command. And if I order you to jump out of a plane without a parachute during a mission, you’ll shut your mouth and jump. Got that, Tommy?”

“I’m under your direct command for only six hours a week under the terms of my contract,” I reminded him coldly, watching his jaw twitch involuntarily for a second at my words. “That’s why you set up the ambush on the training grounds, isn’t it? You’re still pissed off because I refused to join your department full-time, aren’t you?”

“Tommy, do I look like some bitter little bitch who’d seek revenge over petty things like that?” He took a deep drag and blew a thick, slate-gray cloud of smoke right into my face. “Besides, I’ve already done my homework at the Pentagon. I know damn well you chose my department right from the start. But those supply-line rats in the Corps had their own plans for your ass.”

“What exactly are you talking about?” I slowly returned to my chair and settled into the leather seat, keeping my eyes on the colonel as I studied him.

“Oh, come on. You still haven’t figured it out?” Leon gave a short laugh, rubbing his bruised jaw as he poured himself another glass of whiskey. “That juvenile shithole they call P-SWAT has needed someone to whip it into shape for a long time. You were the perfect candidate. Responsible, mature, levelheaded, and decisive when things get ugly. By the way, I got my hands on your report on Dillon through my own channels this morning. You’ve got a hell of a way with words, Ross. Bureaucracy at its finest. After some of those paragraphs, I actually felt like driving over to your base and putting my cigar out on that dumb bastard’s hungover face myself.”

I merely nodded, filing the information away. Leon was once again confirming my original assessment: this man knew absolutely everything that happened in the Corps barracks. A seasoned military intelligence officer, he kept both his subordinates and personnel from neighboring units under constant surveillance, tracking their every move around the clock. That made his own behavior on the training grounds that morning even harder to reconcile.

“All that work to secretly plant anti-personnel mines, deploy field generators, and damage millions of dollars’ worth of Corps equipment... And what was the point of this whole circus? Just so you could hit me in the face at the end?”

“Oh, quit whining, Tommy.” Leon casually dropped an ice cube into his whiskey, then wrapped another one in a handkerchief and pressed it against the left side of his face with a sigh. “Don’t tell me you’ve never been punched in the face before. It’s just guy stuff. A little test to see what you’re made of.”

“That is not how I handle professional matters. Physical punishment is a last resort. The last time someone hit me in the face was in middle school.”

“That might be the saddest, most pathetic thing I’ve heard all fucking week.” He took a deep swallow of his drink. “And don’t bother asking if you can have one. My minibar, you know, doesn’t exactly stock strawberry milk.”

I spent a long time silently studying the man sitting across from me, calmly considering what I should do with this asset next. Killing Leon would be too drastic. Besides, the sudden loss of P-EAR’s longtime commander would have a severely negative impact on the entire U.S. national security apparatus in the face of the Portal threat. Beat him up again, only harder? I had already done that twice. Physical pain did not break people like him. Trying to reason with him was largely pointless, too. He was a hardened product of the military system.

I drew a deep breath through my nose and slowly exhaled the last remnants of my irritation. My analytical mind led me to one pragmatic conclusion: Leon was simply this kind of person, a destructive element with his own particular methods, and I had to accept that as an unavoidable cost of the contract. Fortunately, the regulations did not require me to spend much personal time with him.

“How exactly did you knock me out on the roof?” I asked the next question that actually mattered to me.

“Alien technology adapted for human use, and for our department, by one very arrogant bitch,” the colonel snorted, clearly referring to Selina from the engineering center. “It works on the principle of a directed EMP, except the frequency is precisely calibrated not for microchips, but for biological systems and nerve synapses. Basically, I temporarily shut down all the electrical activity in your body and blocked the signals traveling to your muscles. If you really need the dry scientific details and pretty graphs, go ask your girlfriend over in engineering. I wasn’t hired to dig through all that egghead bullshit.”

Now I finally understood why my subconscious, operating in hyperfocus mode, had been throwing out one error after another. There were simply no comparable weapons anywhere on Earth in the public domain, so my database had no idea how to respond to the external stimulus. The unfamiliar waves had disrupted the nerve centers throughout my body, and my self-preservation algorithms had locked up. Vulnerability confirmed and logged for future elimination.

“That was a good lesson for you, Tommy,” Leon added, now completely serious, the last traces of his smug grin gone. “No matter how invincible you think you are, always remember this: whatever alien freak is waiting on the other side of a Portal, it’s got a damn good chance of having some kind of technology that can flatten you against the concrete in a fraction of a second.”

“So there actually was a lesson buried in this morning’s little survival exercise.” I smiled slightly, appreciating the tactical depth of his paranoia.

“You can leave the gold star on my desk.” Leon casually blew a stream of smoke toward the ceiling. “Anyway, Ross. As you’ve already figured out, this is a serious operation, and we don’t keep useless wimps around here who can do nothing but push buttons on a calculator. If you naively thought you could just sit on my roster as some glorified errand boy so I could check a box on a personnel report, you’re dead wrong. I’m going to turn you into a full-fledged P-EAR operative.”

“I work in your department for only six hours a week,” I reminded him coldly, once again making the limits of our legal agreement clear.

“And every second of those six hours will be spent inside a Portal, carrying out combat assignments just like all my other operatives. I don’t keep dead weight around here,” Leon said sharply. “You’re a freakishly fast learner, and you can absorb massive amounts of information, right?”

“I think you already know the answer, considering you decided to have this conversation with me.”

“The standard training program for a certified P-EAR operative takes exactly two years of continuous study, lectures, and practical training. But you’re special. You’re a walking supercomputer. You don’t need to waste your time sitting in classrooms listening to professors like normal people do.” Leon reached into his desk drawer and pulled out a MicroSD card. “Everything is on here, encrypted. The entire training program, specifications, tactics for dealing with otherworldly creatures, and instructions for using advanced weapons. You have exactly one week to master all of it. The next time you come in, we’re going straight into the field.”

I reached out and picked up the tiny piece of information technology from the desk. Yes, Leon Stewart was one dangerous lunatic. But I had to admit, the old army dog understood my strengths perfectly and knew exactly how to make effective use of my untapped potential.