Chapter 2: Pain and Guilt

The next few days were a blur for Amy as her stomach twisted in pain—pain from the undeniable rage she was feeling towards Keith and his new 'girlfriend, ' Stacy. Amy just couldn't believe how quickly the two of them had gotten together. It just wasn't fair. He hadn't even been in Houston for a week and already they were falling in love.

Hell, she'd even gotten a call from Colonel Ansel on Monday after returning from lunch. Apparently, Dr. Meridian wanted to give his girlfriend a part-time job in the lab, telling Ansel he thought there was enough work to warrant it. And worse, Ansel had actually approved! As long as her background check and medical tests came back clear, Amy was supposed to allow it.

For a moment, Amy had debated arranging for Stacy's medical tests to come back negative, but she realized that Ansel would grow suspicious of that—after all, the medical tests were just a farce. Unless Amy could find a way to break the couple up, and fast, she'd have to actually face the teenage slut at work.

Amy found herself lonely each day that week, an emotion that she was mostly familiar with though. She'd grown up an orphan, and had never been adopted, so she was used to being alone. But her childhood also made her self-sufficient, so feeling lonely was an emotion she usually repressed fairly easily. However, this week, her loneliness was too strong.

It was only natural for her to have joined the military after high school. Despite her intelligence and good test scores, she never put much work into school, so her grades were barely average. She couldn't afford college and couldn't earn a scholarship worth enough money. At first, she considered the Navy, as she really wanted to see more of the world—all she'd ever seen was Cleveland, OH. But the idea of learning to fly captured her imagination in a much stronger way than the desire to escape Cleveland did.

She joined the Air Force on her eighteenth birthday, just a few weeks after graduating from high school. Luckily, her foster parents at the time had been one of the nicer sorts and they'd let her stay with them for the two weeks she had to wait before basic training started.

Amy was determined to be the best at everything she did in the Air Force. And she was one of the lucky few, a female pilot. But not just any cargo hauler or waste of talent—Amy had flown fighter jets. A very small part of her sometimes wondered if her parents would have been proud of her for her accomplishments.

Amy hadn't been abandoned, her father had died from a drug overdose when she was still in the womb. Her mother died a few days after childbirth from complications. According to her adoption records, her mother had held her and been conscious long enough to name her Amy. But both of her parents had been poor European immigrants—illegals—so she didn't even know if she had any family somewhere in Europe. She probably did, but finding them would be impossible.

Pride came easy to Amy. She was very proud to be a warrior and fight for her country. She'd flown seven combat missions in Bosnia during Operation Deliberate Force, twenty-seven combat missions in Yugoslavia during the Kosovo War, and one black-ops mission in the Middle East that was ostensibly a part of Operation Southern Watch—the Iraq No-Fly Zone. Amy was one of the few female combat pilots who had seen action and she was extremely proud of that.

It was the black-ops mission that had garnered interest at the Pentagon though. For the last year of her career, she'd ended up serving as a General's aid, walking the hallowed halls of the military's central command. It was there that she learned of Colonel Ansel's project almost by accident. Though, later she learned that the leaked information had been planted as a way of recruiting her into the project.

Amy had accepted the new job, 'retiring' from the Air Force to become a civilian contractor. She was still in the Air Force reserves though. In fact, she nearly returned to service in late 2001 after the terrorist attacks on 9-11. But the 'Vulcan drug' was showing promise, and Ansel hadn't had to try too hard to convince her to stay.

In the end, she agreed that her own work on the drug would be far more beneficial in the long run. 'Really, ' she thought, 'What's more beneficial?—A mind-control drug that acts as a powerful truth serum, or one more fighter jock?'