Chapter 33: Artemis

January 31

Goddamn it. We're leaving.

I was leaving Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, for the night. You know, for a fat pregnant lady, spending time in Hawaii was supposed to be a relaxing vacation. NOT. But that's not what I was talking about.

The only sun I saw was through the hospital window. There was a time in the past that a coma patient's room would be shrouded, curtains over the windows, lights subdued and people whispering quietly. Then some bright bulb wondered, 'Hey! Are you trying to keep him asleep or wake him up?' Ever since, they've been providing stimulation of sensory inputs for coma patients.

Yeah, yeah. When we got off the submarine off the coast of Japan, and on to the chopper, and then on the med evac flight to Hawaii, there was a lot of worry about Zeus' condition. Worry in a medical sense. Since he had a head injury they were worried. I wasn't worried about that. I was sure – positive – that Zeus would not die from the head injury. Whether he would come back to me, now that Martinez was out of his head, was another thing entirely.

Martinez had been inside his head – 'sharing synapses' was the way the two of them often put it – since the accident in Afghanistan. Through bad times – and there were plenty of those – and good. I was hoping that there were going to be more good times in the future. But he wasn't in Zeus' head any more. I had no evidence, but I was sure of it.

First of all, there was the brain scan. 'Alex Hobart' did have some military records, of course. They were planted by Io when she made up his legend. But the medical records were 'mysteriously' missing. It seems there had been a 'computer glitch' – what else would there be with Io involved? – and all his records were gone, along with records of some other 2,348 people. Strange, but it seemed that the other 2,348 people found other ways to reconstruct their records, when they needed it. Who could follow up on that many stories and 'accidentally' find records in insurance company records or doctors' offices? Io, that's who.

Anyway, 'Alex' didn't have any records showing his medical history. Except that he obviously had a military issued military metal plate in his military head. The people on the Missouri didn't know shit from shinola about who he was or his background.

The two SEALs who knew him weren't saying anything at all about 'Alex, ' or Lt. Harvey Middleman, their former CO, as they knew him. On this trip we were Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Chesterfield – officially. He was on a ultra-secret mission, and they wouldn't say anything.

Fingerprints? There wasn't one in the known universe that would match 'Alex Hobart, ' except on his driver's license application in Austin, Texas.

Anyway (again), nobody knew anything about Alex or his brain scans, except me, Io, and – if he were still with us somehow – Martinez. Zeus told me once that back in Germany when he was just out of the operating room, somebody hooked up an EEG or something to his head, and it showed something very weird: it showed two patterns of brain wave activity. They wanted to study it some more, but he was shipped off to the hospital in Maryland and that was the end of it.

So, when his brain scan showed 'normal' activity for a coma patient, I knew Martinez was gone.

And he wasn't in my head, I was pretty sure of that. Back in Florida, Martinez had come into my brain while I was sleeping and given me a very vivid dream about waking up and rescuing Zeus. Then he left, and I think he went into Sonny's brain after that 'cause the dog made some very insightful moves in discovering where Zeus was. But that's neither here nor there. These days I wasn't having any vivid dreams – none that were Martinez, anyway.

Most of my dreams were about what I was going to do if the father of my children didn't come around soon. Yup. I said 'children, ' as in more than one. One of the things I did once I got to the Medical Center, was check in with an OB/Gyn doctor. She told me that I'd been pregnant since about Thanksgiving – give or take a few days – and that the ultrasound showed two fetuses, probably one boy and one girl. So they weren't identical twins, you can't get one of each from a single zygote – that's what they call an impregnated egg before it becomes a fetus ... I think. Makes sense if you think about it. Anyway, I was going to have two babies. And maybe no father for them.

Goddamn it. We're leaving. Going home.

"Artemis," said Io through the device in my ear. "You're still in the hospital? I thought you were going back to the apartment."

'The apartment' was a small bedroom-living room studio in a building that was set aside for family members of the guys in the military hospital. "I'm on my way, Io. Just leaving his room, now." We all knew whose room was 'his.'

"I still want to get you within range of the Hummer," she said. "You know my theory: Martinez lived in an unoccupied part of Zeus' brain. I was always able to communicate with him through a home-made circuit board we inherited with the Hummer. That board was designed to communicate with humans through theta-band brain waves. It was a horrible failure in terms of communicating with humans, but it was a wonderful way of getting messages from Master Chief Martinez.

"Now," she went on, "If the Master Chief is anywhere, I think he's with the unborn children that you're carrying. Fetuses' brains in that stage of development are thought to be constantly in theta. It's the deepest, most primitive kind of brain wave activity. That's where your brain works while all the healing takes place in adults – Zeus is probably there now – and probably the development of body and brain in fetuses, too. I betting he's in there, with them.

"And we need Martinez talking again so Zeus will hear it. I don't know why he hasn't jumped back to Zeus. He did last time. Maybe it's something about Zeus' injury, or something about the children."

"I know, Io," I said as she went through all that again. We'd discussed it about a zillion times since we got back in touch. "But last time, he didn't have a brain injury. Maybe Martinez can't ... Maybe he's in there and Zeus isn't answering. Like before, when Zeus first was injured ... Maybe he isn't anywhere, anymore."

I went on: "Home. A trip home. That's what I'm going to set up tomorrow. Tomorrow I'm going to spend a lot of money..."

"Don't even think about the money, Arti," Io interrupted.

" ... and get Zeus on a plane back to Gallup, New Mexico. Then we'll be home. They've done everything that they can do, but he isn't waking up. They said that might take a while, and I'm not going to stay in Hono-fucking-lulu for 'a while.' I'm pregnant. I'm going home. I want Navajo Pete and BlueBird and Chief Painted Horse around me. I need BlueBird to call on her spirits to come and rescue 'Together with the Spirits' – that was Zeus and/or Martinez. I need her help and the Spirit's help."

"That sounds right to me. Zeus will be better off near home. You definitely will be, too. And we can find out for sure about Martinez," she said.

I nodded, and got in the rental car. When I reached the apartment, I saw Zhengfu sitting on the steps outside the building – except she wanted to be called Trav now, short for Travista. Which was apparently her name – or the name she was using now. I'd gotten her story on the flight back to Hawaii.

I thought I was weird when I was younger. Younger. Right. Like last year. I had spikey hair and was all dressed up like an imitation Goth person. But Trav! Trav redefined weird.

When she was 'on the job' she was the perfect little spy girl. Oriental looking, she cultivated a personality that just melted into the scenery. Off-work, she combed her hair into a spike job that went in all directions at the same time. She colored it Valentine's Day pink and day-glow green and hunting vest orange ... in sections. The orange was in the center. She had eye makeup to match ... sorta. One eye was dramatic Goth ... a fake tattoo of a tear at the corner of her eye, deep black eye shadow that would have been too much for a raccoon. The other eye was done in stop-light red, and when she closed her eyes, she had wide-open eyes painted on her lids – like Jack Sparrow did. Her upper lip was painted in metallic blue and the bottom lip was a maroon color. It looked like Jackson Pollock had thrown up on her head.

She rotated through various colors about once a week ... at least for the two weeks we'd been here. So far, I hadn't talked to her about Io; as far as Trav was concerned, we had communicated with somebody known as Arthur Chesterfield. Trav was still with the – somebody or other. She said it wasn't CIA, but it might have been. Or NSA, or DOD, or some other three-letter organization. I know it wasn't just Zeus' paranoia rubbing off on me ... she was a government agency operative and I wasn't about to open our bag for her.

"Hiya, Trav. What's shakin'?"

"Nothin' much," she answered. "Wasn't ready to sit around on a Sunday night doin' a whole bunch of nothin'." Now her accent was almost purely East Coast (of the U.S.) bored, preppy-girl. "So I decided to see if my preggo adventure friend wanted to hang together."

"I dunno," I said. "Might want to hang separately." She obviously didn't get the Ben Franklin reference. "Sorry, old joke based on a comment Franklin said during the American Revolution. 'If we don't hang together, we shall all hang separately, ' or something ... Anyway, we can hang. I'll order pizza." I opened the lobby door and we walked in. "You won't mind if I don't look at you while we eat ... I have a whoopsie stomach and you look like a color wheel threw up on you."