The Red

by Linda Nagata

  Two rounds go into the downed merc, and then I approach the steel fire door, positioning myself beside the latch. “You’re going to open it,” I tell Ransom.

  “Yes, sir.”

  He backs up against the wall on the hinged side of the door.

  I’ve got my weapon in one hand, the stock braced against the hip strut of my dead sister, ready to fire. In my other hand I’ve got a fragmentation grenade. If the door is locked, we’re going to have to blow it open and that’s going to slow us down. I hope it’s not locked. Ransom takes the handle in his gloved hand. “Ready, LT?”

  “Just wide enough for the grenade,” I warn him. “Then get it shut and get the fuck out of here.”

  He shoves the handle down and pulls back. The door is not locked. I trigger the grenade, then toss it through the gap into the stairwell. Bullets hammer the door’s inner face, knocking bubbles into the steel. Ransom can’t get it shut against the force of impact. “Kick it,” I tell him.

  I fire down into the gap. Ransom takes a step back. There’s hesitation in the defensive fusillade. He uses the moment to launch a kick backed up by the full force of his dead sister’s leg strut. The door booms shut. “Get out!” I scream at him.

  He launches himself at the entrance, and in one bound he’s through it and outside. I’m right behind him.

  The grenade goes off. It’s a double explosion—boom, boom!—one more concussion than I can credit to my little frag. The shock vibrates through my footplates. When we look inside, the steel fire door is on the other side of the room, blown off its hinges by the concussion and hurled into the concrete wall.

  “Idiots tried to blow us up,” Ransom says. “Blew themselves up instead.”

  “Looks that way.”

  My guess is they launched a grenade at the open door, but it never cleared the stairwell. It’s going to be seared and shredded meat down there.

  I scramble back to the blackened door frame and stick the muzzle of my weapon around the corner. There are two bodies on the landing below. That’s as much as I can see because a solid wall stands between the flights of stairs.

  “Clear to descend,” Delphi says quietly.

  Two or three flights down, I’m going to lose my connection to the angel. “Bye, Delphi,” I whisper, and I jump all the way to the blood-slick first landing, letting the shocks of my dead sister take the impact as I come down between the two bodies. I back up against the hot concrete wall, getting out of the way as Ransom comes down behind me.

  A glance at the map shows Vanessa Harvey above me at the top of the stairs, Jayden Moon a step behind her, and the rest of the LCS still coming in.

  I ease forward to look down to the next landing. I don’t see anyone, so I pivot and jump again, with Ransom following. Our tactic is to move fast and deprive the enemy of a chance to set charges—but Level 2 is deep underground. We’ve got six flights of stairs to transit and we will meet enemy fire before we get that far.

  Blue Parker is huddled somewhere downstairs. He knows we’re coming. I try to imagine what’s going through his head. The nukes are his only leverage, so I don’t think he’ll blow them until there’s no doubt left that he’s going to lose. Even then—well, he’s a true believer. Reality can smack up against a mind like that and bounce off without effect—which is fine with me. The longer he takes to understand what is happening to his glorious revolution, the more time we have to win.

  Ransom and I hit the third landing and we’re met by gunfire: a maelstrom of bullets pounding into the walls, the roof, and the base of the concrete stairs above us, spewing fragments in every direction.

  I throw myself back into the corner. Ransom drops to his belly. Vanessa Harvey jumps down from the landing above, turns—and a bullet hits her visor. She slams back against the wall, just a meter away from me, sliding down to a sitting position. Her visor is dented and spiderwebbed, but it’s not perforated, so no bullet is lodged in her brain. Her chest heaves as blood runs from behind her visor onto her chest. “Talk to me, Harvey,” I say.

  “Fucking broken nose,” she growls over gen-com.

  Kendrick’s voice cuts in: “Clear the way, Shelley.”

  No way out but forward.

  I check my display. My link to Guidance is gone. Com­munication is helmet-to-helmet. My tactical AI will still help me aim, but without oversight it won’t fire. So that duty falls to me.

  I put my finger beside the trigger for the grenade launcher. “Fire in the hole!” I announce over gen-com. I don’t know how far the signal will travel inside the stairwell, but my nearest soldiers will know what’s coming.

  I jump across the landing, jam the muzzle of my weapon down past the curve of the rail and, without looking, I launch the grenade. Ransom grabs my pack and pulls me down to the floor beside Harvey. The grenade goes off.

  Only the helmet keeps me from losing my hearing in the concrete confines of the stairwell. A wall of fire shoots past just above us, rising up the chimney of the stairwell. On the landing above figures drop flat and dive for corners.

  The fireball lasts only a couple of seconds. Silence follows it, but again we’ve managed to burn out most of the oxygen. No choice now but to get all the way down to Level 2 as fast as we can.

  “Get Harvey’s arm,” I tell Ransom.

  We haul her to her feet. “I’m good!” she snaps and, twisting free of my grip, she jumps through the fumes, down to the next landing. I follow, and Ransom comes after me. With no active resistance, it takes only seconds to reach Level 2. The concrete walls are cracked from the blast, and there are two more bodies on the floor, both wearing black Uther-Fen uniforms. The fire door is askew in its frame.

  Our goal is Level 3, but I want air, so I kick the fire door open, covering the hallway beyond with my weapon—but no one’s in sight. I pick up an empty magazine from the floor and use it to jam the door’s hinges.

  This is the residential level. Doors line the hall, all of them closed. Kendrick jumps down from the flight above, landing behind me. He catches Harvey by her arm strut before she can take off again. “You’re staying here.” He shoves her toward the open door to get her out of the way as Moon jumps down. “Hoang! Johnson! Assist Harvey to secure Level 2.”

  “Yes, sir,” Harvey says, biting off each word. She’s furious at being taken out of the action.

  Ransom disappears downstairs. Moon takes off after him. I turn to follow, but I stop at the rumble of a muffled explosion. “What the hell is that?”

  Kendrick says, “That would be Vasquez disabling the elevator shaft.”

  Only one way out now.

  I move out, following Moon and Ransom.

  It’s another three flights down to our goal. Jumping in the dead sisters, we get there fast. Only 110 seconds have passed since we entered the staging area on Level 1.

  Another fire door stands in our way. I can’t hear anything beyond it, but I’m certain there are at least a dozen well-armed mercs on the other side, waiting to greet us.

  According to the map, the stairwell opens onto a fifteen-foot-wide hallway joining the two halves of the dumbbell that make up Level 3. Across the hallway is the freight elevator that Jaynie just disabled. The storage lockups for food and water are on one side, the control room on the other.

  I’d like to blow the fire door open, but that would chew up what little oxygen is left in the stairwell, it would risk damaging the power supply to the control room, and it would take too much time. So I position myself beside the door and get ready to open it by hand. Ransom moves in behind me, where the wall will protect him when the shooting starts. Moon takes a position on the opposite side of the door. PFC Layla Wade comes down next. I send her to stand behind Moon. There isn’t room to fit anyone else without putting them right in front of the fire door.

  “No one else come down!” I order over gen-com.

  I reach fo
r the door handle. I need to unlatch it, and then kick it open.

  “Hold up, Shelley!” Kendrick calls over gen-com. He ignores my last directive and vaults down the final flight of stairs, filling up the space in front of the fire door. Then he turns to look back up. “Everyone, face masks on! Once your face mask is secure, stay put. Do not descend to Level Three until instructed.”

  I shoulder my weapon and get my face mask out of its titanium case. Sliding my hand up under my visor, I hold the mask against my nose and mouth, giving the engineered tissue the required ten seconds to adhere to my skin, cursing the lost time. When oxygen starts to flow, I take my M-CL1a in hand again—but now that I’ve got more O2 in my system, I start to think.

  I’m 100 percent sure that when I open the fire door, a fusillade of defensive fire will erupt from the other side.

  I really don’t want my hand shot off.

  I look at Kendrick. He’s taking off his backpack. He gets his oxygen cylinder out of it, stuffing it inside his vest.

  I really don’t want my hand shot off. So I use the time to uncinch my right leg from the frame of the dead sister.

  Kendrick sees what I’m doing. “Shelley, what the fuck?” His voice is muffled by the oxygen mask.

  So is mine. “Using the resources, sir.”

  The cyborg foot can bend in multiple directions and grip with the strength of a hand—but unlike my hand, it’s replaceable. Balancing on one leg, I bend the other until I can grab the door handle with my foot.

  “Well, fuck me,” Kendrick says.

  Then he makes Moon back up a couple of steps and takes over his place on the other side of the door. This forces Wade to move all the way back to the bottom step. “Crouch low,” I tell her.

  Kendrick crouches too. “Ransom,” he says. “Moon—as soon as the door is open I want you both to pitch a flash-bang into the hallway. I’m going to use my backpack to prop the door. Got it?”

  “Got it, sir.” Ransom gets a grenade from his vest pocket. I get hold of the door handle again with my robot foot.

  “Okay, Shelley,” Kendrick says. “Let’s do it.”

  The door opens outward. I shove the handle down and kick as hard as I can.

  It flies open, swinging 180 degrees as a chorus of automatic weapons thunders death into the stairwell. At least one of those bullets strikes my titanium foot. The impact knocks me off balance, sending me spinning into Ransom. He jams his shoulder against my chest, pinning me to the wall so I can’t fall down while he pitches his grenade past me. From the corner of my eye I see Kendrick lob his backpack through the doorway. The door swings only partly shut as the grenades go off with dizzying concussions.

  Ransom rolls back against the wall while my visor darkens to hide my eyes from the glare. Even before it clears I drop into a crouch, moving as fast as I can to resecure the cinches on the leg strut of my dead sister. I’m getting a red-hot feedback from the limb. The foot didn’t shatter, but the joints don’t fit right anymore, and I can’t make it completely flat.

  Screw it. Joby can always make me a new one.

  And in the meantime, Moon, Ransom, Kendrick, and Wade are pouring bullets into the chaos of Level 3.

  I join them. Still crouching, I hold my HITR so the muzzle is out the door and, using the targeting cam, I shoot anything that moves. Smoke and screams fill the hallway outside. Ransom is leaning over me to shoot, so I hear him grunt when he gets hit. He disappears from my field of view, knocked back into the stairwell. On the other side of the door, Moon gets slammed backward into the wall. Screams erupt behind me, but they’re not coming from Moon or from Ransom. It’s a woman. I glance over my shoulder to see Wade down, her legs shattered and pumping blood.

  Fuck.

  “Nakaoka!” I yell. She’s the closest thing we have to a medic. “Up front! Wounded!”

  “On my way, sir!”

  Ransom is back, leaning over me again, though he’s hurting. He’s got his shoulder braced against the door frame, his breathing is fast and shallow, and he’s dripping on my gloves. I glance at my hands, reassured to see it’s sweat, not blood. His armor must have saved him.

  Wade wasn’t so lucky. Her status goes critical, posting automatically in bold red on my visor: heart rate 210; brain function declining.

  “Vasquez!” Kendrick bellows. “Now would be a good time.”

  “On my way, sir!”

  I run out of targets. The shooting stops. We’ve won a lull in the defense . . . and Wade isn’t screaming anymore. Nakaoka bounds down the stairway as Wade’s chest spasms in shallow, panicked breathing.

  “Moon,” I bark. “Status?”

  “Ambulatory. Noncritical.”

  “Same,” Ransom says before I can ask.

  Jaynie appears on the landing above with a bigmouthed gun in her hands. Nakaoka and Wade block the bottom of the stairs, so she vaults over the rail, coming down right behind me.

  The gun she’s carrying is illegal, a chemical weapons dispenser that we are not supposed to have. “Kendrick! Where the hell did that come from? I didn’t see it in the battle plans.”

  I thought he’d ordered face masks to protect us from enemy assault; I didn’t think we’d be the ones to violate international law.

  Jaynie shoulders past me. Kendrick says, “Need-to-know, Lieutenant.” The chemical gun goes off with a sound like popcorn as Jaynie sprays a fan of cylinders into the smoke-filled hall. “Need for secrecy.”

  Wade’s status on my visor updates: heart rate, zero; brain function, flatline.

  “Advance!” Kendrick orders.

  I wheel and lunge into the hall.

  • • • •

  Smoke clouds the air. I look right, left, right again. No one’s moving. No one shoots. Blood pools the floor, seeping from bodies in Uther-Fen uniforms. Not one of them screams. Not one of them groans. Surely they can’t all be dead? What kind of nasty gas did Jaynie have in those cylinders?

  “Tuttle!” Kendrick bellows over gen-com. “You, Fevella, and Flynn! Down to Level Three.” He shoots out two camera buttons near the ceiling.

  I don’t see any civilians among the fallen, but steel doors guard both ends of the hallway. I’m contemplating what it will take to blow the door to the control room off its hinges without bringing the ceiling down when a large gray rat falls from overhead, landing with a plop in the blood. I look up to see neat ductwork and piping suspended from concrete. Then I nudge the rat with the toe-end of my footplate. A camera button is stuck on its narrow forehead. A whip-wire antenna sticks out of the back of its skull, lying flat against its spine. The mystery of how Intelligence knew exactly what was going on down here is solved.

  Ransom leans over to look. “God-damn,” he says in a voice muffled by his face mask. “Is that a robo-rat?”

  Kendrick glances at it as he steps past to survey the fallen mercs. “Sucker’s rigged up just like Shelley. Skullnet, camera, transmitter. The rest of us are fucking obsolete.” He points at a body with its throat shot out. “This one! Moon, Ransom, haul this carcass to the end of the hall.”

  They grab the body by the shoulders and drag it to the control room door, making trails of blood and bloody footprints. It’s no worse to look at than any of the carnage I saw on the way down, no worse than the torn-up bodies sprawled at my feet, but the sight of those blood trails hits me and I freeze, gripped by a sense that none of this is real.

  Someone nudges my arm. “LT,” Jaynie says. “You still with us? Better take some fluids before you drop.”

  She trots after Kendrick. I grab my water tube, slide it under the oxygen mask, and suck in a mouthful. Tuttle, Fevella, and Flynn burst out of the stairwell, one after another, their weapons in hand, heads turning as they look for a target. I gesture toward the control room. “Go. Follow the sergeant.”

  Nakaoka steps out next. She’s armed and ready too. “Not
hing I could do, LT.”

  “I know.”

  I take another mouthful of fortified water, then shove the tube back under my armor. I’m light-headed, almost dizzy. Maybe my face mask is leaking. Maybe it’s cerebral exhaustion. That happens. Brain cells run out of raw materials, waste products build up, thinking gets confused, and the skullnet can’t fix it. Only time can, and we don’t have time. Gathering my wits, I crook my finger at Nakaoka, and we trot to the end of the hall.

  We’ve got a total of nine personnel jammed together at the control room door. Jaynie is organizing them, shoving people into lines so we don’t crash into one another when we storm the room. I make my way to the front, conscious of each second ticking past. Kendrick is holding a DNA scanner that’s leashed to the wall. The shell of the scanner is plastic: flat, white, and teardrop shaped, with a micro­point at the narrow end. “Try it under the jaw,” Moon says, holding up the corpse that Kendrick wanted. “There might be blood pooled there.”

  Kendrick does it, and then he glances at a display. “Good call.” Moon and Ransom haul the body out of the way, while Kendrick turns to a keypad. “Prep the troops, Shelley,” he says as he punches in a code.

  My brain is still lagging. For about two seconds, I have no idea what we’re supposed to do on the other side of that door. “Fuck,” I whisper. Kendrick turns his visor in my direction, his hand poised above the enter key.

  “Blue Parker!” I bark. “Take him alive. The codes we need are on a thumb drive around his neck. Do not destroy the equipment! We need that too. Shoot to kill, as needed. Aim carefully! ”

  Kendrick presses the enter key.

  The door unlatches with a loud click, opening inward. Moon pushes it a couple of inches, then ducks back as a bullet flies out. Jaynie reaches around the corner with her bigmouthed gun, jams the muzzle into the opening, and shoots.