Read Plague Wars 06: Comes the Destroyer for Free Online Page B

thought she was trying to manipulate him.
    “So, bottom line,” he went on after a moment, “there’s no point in hunting down unknown Blends.”
    Rae rubbed her face with one hand. “I think that it might be interesting and useful to identify them if you can, but after hundreds or thousands of years, they will just be people – long-lived and wise, but no longer unique, now that humanity has gained effective immortality. Perhaps the best thing would be to quietly put out the word that the ‘powers that be’ do not care, and would welcome their help – if they exist.”
    Absen nodded. “I’ll spread that word. Quietly. Now, let’s talk about our strategy for the meeting.”

Chapter 8
    Orion station’s command conference room filled with carefully vetted personnel, taking seats along the wall, but only the admiral plus seven sat down at the table.
    Absen placed himself at the head, the prototype EarthFleet coat of arms above him on the wall. He could smell the paint among the closeness of packed bodies in the room, and made a note to have someone look at the ventilation. The engineers still hadn’t quite gotten everything worked out.
    To his right, Rae attracted attention despite the conservative dress and manner, in this case probably just because of her unique semi-alien status. Absen was happy she did not seem to be wearing perfume. The woman was distracting enough without enhancements.
    To Absen’s left sat Australia’s Senior Under-Minister of Research and Production James Ekara. He knew the slim dapper man was the true force behind the figurehead of his appointed minister, and a member of that nation-continent’s secret shadow government, the Committee of Nine.
    Secret to the general populace, anyway.
    In the last year, Ekara had been responsible for an enormous increase in the Free Communities’ ground-based space and weapons production capacity. He would be instrumental in the execution of what they decided today. Probably only the Third Reich’s Albert Speer had ever had as much authority over the entire economy of a nation, really a multinational effort, as he. Beneath the veneer of its democratic system, and guided at the top by General Nguyen’s unwavering hand, Australia had become the coordinating arsenal of the Free Communities, and thus, of Earth.
    Absen still couldn’t figure out how he felt about working with Psychos like Ekara and Nguyen. Or ‘Outliers,’ as the functional ones liked to be called. Chaplain Forman, his psychology advisor, had told him she had identified at least of dozen mental sub-groupings of these aberrations, but the psychobabble had gone over his head. As far as he was concerned, anyone with a compromised conscience fit the description, and made him very nervous.
    But Markis had assured him that Ekara was vital to the war effort, hyper-competent, and would cooperate. Absen didn’t have the luxury of choosing his tools today.
    The other civilian leader present from the Free Communities was US Special Envoy Travis Tyler, a rangy hard-edged man with the youthful body and old eyes of the rejuvenated, a look not so different from Absen’s own. While America’s economy no longer held the top spot even in the FC, his nation still led the world in the two vital fields of nanotech and human-interfaced cybertech, as well as remaining one of the world’s few with nuclear arms.
    From the Neutral States, Minister of Economy Annika Skolbourg and Russian Minister of the Interior Viktor Kredenko sat to Rae Denham’s right. While the latter nation was technically part of the NS, like America it held a special place with its nuclear arsenal and its cyborg program derived from the Septagon Shadow debacle.
    The third bloc was represented by Secretary General Chang Jiaoshi, at the opposite end of the table. Unlike the others, not only was this woman high up in the economic hierarchy of her nation, but actually held the number two position in China. Beside her, sitting stiffly in