“…get my strikers in there NOW!” yelled a paunchy, broad-shouldered man named Hodgkins. His features led with beady eyes and a bald spot that edged out most of his hair. His dress shirt skewed to the right from a rack of medals pinned to his breast, and his shoulders bore the crosshairs of rank. The Lead Participant from the military. He banged his fist on the table for emphasis. “It’s been twelve hours since their last communication…no video, no voice, not even a bloody still! You say we need to control the situation? How are we supposed to do that when we don’t even know what the situation IS?”

“It’s already controlled!” screamed the Secretary, a shrill woman with a thin, avian face that looked about forty but had to be at least ten years older than that. She was dressed in a button-down coat that reeked of formality and a pair of denim pants that did anything but. Clearly the closest things at hand when she’d taken the call earlier that evening. She stifled a yawn despite her energetic tone. “The breach detectors are still online, and all of them are showing green. The lab is doing exactly what …keep whatever is in there in.” She paused, and took a sip of the tea she had been brewing for the past few minutes, sipping around the tab and string she hadn’t bothered to remove. “You know as well as I do how dangerous this research is. Some of those strains were airborne originally, and some could survive for years in the harshest conditions on earth. What of one of them got into the Jetstream?”

“That’s EXACTLY why we need to act,” said Hodgkins. Glares danced around his pate, tanned to the point of glossiness. They distracted everyone he was trying to convince. “You assume this some sort of screw-up where one of his boys,” he nodded disdainfully in my direction, “forgot to carry the one, but what if it’s something else? What if the Reds, or God forbid the Sultan, got wind of what we’re up to and decided not to wait around…”

“Uh, not the Sultan,” interrupted a dark man in the corner. He spoke casually, almost indifferently, his shaven face and bloodless lips moving with the odd disharmony of someone speaking with only part of their mind. “They still haven’t found a way to neutralize our latest ‘upgrade’ to their seventeen. One encoded infrared and the whole bloody billion of them are so many slavering dogs, and they know it.” He swiped at the holoscreen in front of him, getting back to whatever he’d been perusing before this twist in the conversation halfway piqued his interest.

“Okay…” Hodgkins resumed, once he was sure the man had finished. “The Naka-Naka’s, then…what if they got intel on what our boys down there were doing, and thought they’d take it for themselves?”

“Then they were the first to die” a new voice chimed in from the end of the table. The pathologist. An austere woman in her early thirties, whose hooked nose and frumpy figure had led her towards a budding career and away from what she must have deemed were less than stellar prospects in love. She’d risen quickly through the ranks, achieving her current position as advisor to the diamondhead at an unprecedented age. “If there was an outbreak of some kind, well, the viruses our techs were working with were some of the deadliest known to man. Anyone who walked in unawares would likely to catch all kinds of hell. But that would have been the least of their concerns. Need I remind you, the modulated-beam radiation fields are lethal within thirty seconds to anyone without the proper mods.”

“A valuable safeguard,” said the geneticist, a striking man of middling age whose taught skin, perfect hair, and muscle definition made him a polarizing figure in the debates surrounding vanity mods that had been bubbling for the past few years, “but by no means foolproof. If we can engineer the mods, then so can they.” Hodgkins fixed his gaze on that section of the table. He seemed surprised to find an ally coming from that direction, but he was glad of the support. “I know what you’re thinking,” he held up a hand to the pathologist, cutting her words off at their source, “they’d have to know about them first. Well, that isn’t necessarily true. Mods are hard. They take time. To code one from nucleics up would probably be the work of months, or years, if you wanted it to do anything at all worthwhile. The vast majority of them – including those we gave our techs – are only tweaks…different skins we stretch over underlying skeletons, to guard against this disease instead of that, or neutralize longer or shorter wavelengths of radiation, or grow hair here instead of there.” His hand slide shyly upwards, as if to graze his own immaculate brow, but he caught himself before it did. “At last count there were fewer than two hundred truly different types of mods. If they wanted it badly enough, and they had the human capital, they could have sent in waves of strikers equipped with sets of all of them, and guaranteed that at least some of them would live to fight. A dozen, perhaps, or however many they thought they’d need to take such an outpost. Not something we would ever consider of course, but…” he let the silence speak for itself, setting lists of enemies more ruthless than us spinning through the table’s heads. “A maneuver like that might only take a few thousand men,” he continued. “The Naka-Naka’s were thought to be planning something very like it in Tehran, before the Krauts brought in their disintegrator.”

“But we would have seen something!” said the Secretary. “With that kind of force to organize, there’s no way they could have moved in undetected.”

“I’m not saying that’s what happened. Just pointing out that there are possibilities you haven’t yet considered.”

Hodgkins grunted, unsure whether to accept the argument or be insulted.

The Secretary stood her ground, “Okay, fine…let’s say you’re right. It doesn’t change the fact that we CAN NOT open up that bunker until we…”

Eight hours it had gone like that. An unbroken third of a goddam day, of one side calling for action against a hypothetical human foe, while the other advised caution against an unknown biological one. In the end they put it to a vote. The Actions won, four to three, with the proviso that we wait for three more days to give the de-con systems a chance to kill off what they could. It was the dark man in the corner, oddly enough that cast the deciding vote. At the time I couldn’t help but wonder if he only voted how he did because they were calling for the yeas when they tapped him on the shoulder.