by Linda Nagata
“We’re okay,” I tell Moon. “They’re stringing the spiderline.” The crack we heard was the bolt, shot from an air gun, embedding itself in a tree.
When we reach the base of the ridge, we find Flynn sitting balanced on Aaron Nolan’s shoulders while she secures the near end of the spiderline high in a tree. The objective is to transfer most of our squad across the road without leaving footprints.
Nolan’s team needs to cross first. He’s tasked with leading an advance group to the airfield, where he’ll be in a position to take control of the concrete blockhouse, securing the on-site employees who are housed there, to preempt any resistance. He’ll also make contact with Lucius Perez. So as soon as the spiderline is taut, Flynn, the first of his team, zip-lines over.
I catch Nolan’s arm strut, tugging him around so we can conference with Kendrick. Jaynie steps forward to listen. “Moon and I saw something moving just outside the house. It looked strange. At first I thought it was some huge dog—but I don’t really know what it was.”
“Stay alert,” Kendrick says. “If it comes down here, blow it up.”
Tuttle zips across, and then Moon. I boost Harvey, and she goes next. Kendrick has his helmet next to Nolan’s, imparting last-second instructions. “Remember, hunker down but keep your eyes open. Do not announce your presence. But when the shit hits, you need to hit back hard and fast.”
“We will, sir.”
“And if you get in trouble, we’re just a few minutes behind you—but don’t get in trouble.”
“Got it, sir.”
I help Kendrick boost Nolan up. He slides across. As soon as he’s on the other side, he takes off through the forest, with his team following single file.
Ransom and Kendrick cross next, taking up a position on the other side of the road. That leaves Jaynie and me. I boost her into the tree to unhook the spiderline. Across the road, Kendrick gets out a string of explosive charges—small white packets distributed along a length of white wire—which he secures to the end of the spiderline. Jaynie reels the line in, and a row of explosives is laid across the road, invisible against the snow.
I check the time. It’s 0053. The next step in the assault is to lure Sheridan out of the Apocalypse Fortress. This task falls to Lucius Perez. In exactly fourteen minutes, he will call her to ask if her husband—injured ex-mercenary Carl Vanda—is asleep.
She will say yes. She will remind him that her religious beliefs forbid a divorce, and then she will get into her snowcat and come down to the airfield to spend a stolen hour in his company . . . because even a dragon’s reptilian heart can revel in the passion of a secret lover.
It won’t be the first time an empire falls over an indiscretion.
• • • •
The snow has stopped but the clouds linger and there are no stars to be seen as I stand motionless, waiting in the shadow of the trees. The angel shows me the airfield. The runway is clear of snow, and the robotic plows are on their way back to the garage. Nolan is making his way through the last stretch of forest verging on the hangars; Harvey, Tuttle, Moon, and Flynn follow close behind him. Across the road, Kendrick and Ransom wait out of sight, while Jaynie holds a position beside me. There is no chatter. We know our roles. It’s only a matter of time.
At 0102 I check the feeds from the robo-rats. The first feed shows only a black screen. Using my gaze to highlight commands, I run the video backward at speed until I get an image. It shows a viewpoint high in a tree. Running it back farther, I see the house and surrounding snowfield dropping away as the rat is carried into the air. An owl must have taken it.
I switch to the second feed. This one shows what I think is snow, close up, with the horizon running vertically. My best guess is that the rat is dead. When I run the feed backward, it’s clear the rat didn’t get more than halfway to the house. Whether the owl killed it, or the cold, or something else entirely, I don’t know.
Judging from the trembling of the image, the third rat is still alive. It’s backed into a crevice, outlined as a black triangle around the view frame. The camera it carries is pointed across a snowy field. I think it’s reached the house and has hidden in the masonry below the bank of windows so that it’s looking back at us. As I watch, something slides past at the bottom margin of the video feed. I can’t tell what it is.
I check the time: 0107.
Lucius Perez should now be making his call. I wonder if he ever loved Sheridan, or if he only pretended to love her to further his career.
The digits on my clock shift, increasing minute by minute, until it reads 0111.
Through the feed from the surviving rat, I hear an engine rumble. Lights shoot into the treetops and then swing down across the snow as a vehicle climbs up a ramp from an underground garage. I turn and look up at the ridge just as headlights appear on the road.
Sheridan believes herself safe. She bought her innocence, spreading enough wealth and favors around to keep her name out of all official accounts of the Coma, and anyway, this is the Apocalypse Forest. She knows that a squirrel couldn’t scamper here without a sensor detecting it. She will have no reason to suspect an ambush.
The snowcat’s engine growls louder as it reaches the bottom of the ridge. As it levels out, its headlights sweep the road in front of me, flaring in my night vision. My visor compensates, and I can see Sheridan inside the glass-enclosed cab. She must have the heater cranked up, because she’s not wearing a parka, just a light, long-sleeve pullover, ghostly white. She drives at a cautious pace, spraying feathers of snow behind the cat’s fat tracks. Just as she reaches our position, Kendrick blows the explosive charges.
A blinding flash, a geyser of snow, flaring brake lights, and the cat rocks forward, sliding down into a channel blasted out of the snow. We’ve only slowed the machine, though. We haven’t stopped it. In seconds Sheridan will coax the cat to climb out of the ditch—or she’ll put the vehicle in reverse and back out.
I sprint. With the dead sister powering me, it’s easy to bound through deep snow. I launch myself at the snowcat’s passenger window, hitting it with the elbow joint of my dead sister. The window explodes inward as Sheridan swings the muzzle of a large-caliber pistol in my direction. Fragments of safety glass spray in her face, causing her to flinch back just as she pulls the trigger. The bullet rips through the snowcat’s roof.
Ransom pops up on the other side of the cab. He hammers with his arm hook at the driver-side window. Sheridan ignores him long enough to fire two more rounds meant to discourage me, but when the window shatters behind her, she twists around to aim her weapon at Ransom. I reach through the broken window, unlock the door, wrench it open, and drop, kneeling, onto the seat.
Wearing the dead sister, it’s cramped in the cab. I move carefully, but I move fast, seizing Sheridan by the wrist just as she swings her weapon back toward me. Her finger is still on the trigger. She fires off two more rounds that go through the roof. My helmet’s audio muffles the bangs, but it conveys the wail of a siren screaming up on the hill. Sheridan must have hit a panic button when the explosives went off.
Keeping a tight grip on her wrist, I use my other hand to wrench the pistol away. Ransom gets the driver-side door open. He’s shuffling to stay in place on the moving track, but he still makes quick work of grabbing her in a bear hug. “Take her out!” I order, letting go of her wrist. He jumps backward, hauling her with him out to the snow.
I crawl into the driver’s seat, where I pop the cat into neutral and set the brake.
Gen-com activates in my visor. No point worrying about EM signatures anymore, so Kendrick has switched us all on. We can send and receive again.
I jump out the driver-side door.
Ransom has Sheridan facedown in the snow. He’s kneeling beside her, holding her wrists pinned against the small of her back while Kendrick works to secure her in plastic handcuffs, but before he can get her trussed, Jaynie
is yelling over gen-com. “Cover! Incoming!”
I look up, to see a fleet of tiny rockets illuminated by fiery tails—I count six—arcing toward us from the top of the hill.
“Expect a surprise package!” I warn. “Those probably aren’t explosives.” Because if they were, they’d be just as likely to kill Sheridan.
“Fall back!” Kendrick orders.
He hasn’t got Sheridan cuffed yet, and there’s no time now. He and Ransom each grab one of her arms. They haul her to her feet and carry her into the trees.
I’m about to follow when something else catches my eye, something on the ridge: a metallic sheen racing down the steep slope at incredible speed, not following the road at all.
“Enemy on the ground!”
Using the leg strength of the dead sister, I make it to the trees in one jump. Jaynie is there ahead of me, maybe fifteen feet away. We both turn and look up as rocket glare sets the snow in the road ablaze in night vision. No explosion though. Just a series of pops, like the sound Jaynie’s chemical gun made at Black Cross.
“Face masks!” I bellow, but as I reach for the pocket of my vest where I keep mine, a buzzing whine fills the air, and I know I’m wrong. The rockets haven’t delivered chemicals. “Microdrones! Prepare to defend!”
Goddamn all defense contractors and their experimental weapons.
The face mask stays in my pocket. I grab my rifle instead, raising the muzzle as three, then four, then five little helicopters descend below the tree branches. The drones have a narrow, cylindrical body suspended under a rotor with a three-foot diameter. Beneath the body, which I assume contains the power source, is a rotating gun. I see two muzzles turning to bear on me.
I pick one and shoot it. The microdrone goes up in a blinding white explosion—but at the same time, a round slams into the top of my helmet, putting me down on my ass in the snow. I hear another explosion and another, along with an ongoing fusillade of shooting. A round pings off my leg. Another pancakes into the armor over my shoulder. I’m screaming incoherently because it fucking hurts, but I keep my head up, and when a targeting circle appears, I cover it and shoot. Another explosion. I aim again. Shoot. There’s a double whump . . . and I can’t find another target.
“Status!” Kendrick barks. “Shelley?”
I flounder in the snow. It takes me a couple seconds to get on my feet. “We have an enemy on the ground!”
“Are you hit, Lieutenant?”
“Mule kicked! It’s coming, sir!” I hear it in the forest, charging toward us, crunching in the snow with the rhythm of a running horse.
“Blow it up,” Kendrick says. “Vasquez, you hit?”
“Bruised.” The word is a whisper from between clenched teeth. Then she adds, “Goddamn, what the fuck is that?”
She fires a grenade into the trees.
My visor goes black against the ensuing explosion. A large-caliber weapon hammers an answer. I drop flat in the snow, but I keep my head up, my weapon roughly aimed, and when a targeting circle appears, I cover it, and launch my own grenade.
In the second and a quarter before the grenade goes off, I get a good look at what’s coming for me. It’s a four-legged robotic monster, standing taller than a wolfhound. I’ve seen prototypes of things like it, but none that moved with the agility this one displays. It looks like a mechanical wolf skeleton, though there’s no true head, just two cross-braced struts with camera eyes. The guns mounted on either side of its spine swivel, one toward Jaynie on my left, one toward Kendrick and Ransom, who are protecting Sheridan somewhere on my right, deeper within the trees.
The robo-wolf jumps sideways an instant before my grenade goes off.
It jumps straight at Jaynie.
The explosion blackens my visor. By the time my vision clears, I’m back on my feet. Branches and chunks of snow are falling down between the trees, and Jaynie is lying on her belly, shooting at the oncoming monster—bang, bang, bang, bang—a steady rhythm, each shot striking the wolf and sparking off its frame without slowing it down at all. It leaps in the air, its gun turrets swiveling down to target her.
“Blow it up!” Ransom screams. He sounds like he’s desperate to get into the fight—fighting is what he knows—but he’s responsible for Sheridan right now. I’d love to blow up the robo-wolf for him, but it’s already too close to Jaynie. So I switch triggers.
The eye, I think, hoping my AI can figure it out. The targeting circle appears. I shoot.
And the monster’s camera eye, the one closest to me, blows out. The wolf fires one of its guns, but the rounds strike the snow beyond Jaynie.
It’s almost on top of her though—she’s about to be trampled—when she slams her arm hooks and footplates simultaneously into the snow, launching herself sideways and then bouncing to her feet, bringing the muzzle of her weapon around to target the wolf one more time.
Now we’re both on its blind side. I can’t shoot because Jaynie is in the way. Jaynie doesn’t shoot because bullets don’t help and she’s too close for another grenade. The wolf swings its head away from her as it turns around. She backs up to stay out of sight of its good eye. I jump, moving sideways to get a clear line of fire—and for the first time since the shooting began, I see Kendrick. He’s come forward, leaving Ransom alone with the prisoner. He’s standing with his weapon ready, a few feet away from me, between the trees.
“Move your ass, Vasquez,” he warns.
She jumps, all the way back to the road, while the robot swings around fast, drawn by Kendrick’s voice. He squeezes the trigger of his HITR, launching a grenade. I do too, while the robo-wolf targets us both with synchronous fire from its spinal guns. I see the muzzles swivel, and I drop again to the snow. Kendrick tries to, but he’s not fast enough. The heavy rounds catch him in the belly—and then the grenades go off.
As soon as the dual concussions slam past, I’m up. I look first for the robot. It’s crumpled, unmoving, half-buried in snow. I look for Kendrick next. He’s down too. From the ridge, there comes the roar of a snowmobile. “Jaynie, watch the road!”
“On it!”
I bound through the snow to Kendrick, crouch by his side. Two holes in his armor are filled with blood that’s spilling over into the snow. I shrug off my pack and dig for the trauma kit.
Ransom comes out of the woods, still with Sheridan in his custody. Her hands are cuffed in front of her, and he’s half carrying her, half dragging her toward me. “LT!” He’s off-com, fury in his voice like I’ve never heard before. “What the fuck happened? Where was King David? Why didn’t you warn the colonel? You had to know that thing was coming!”
I can’t believe what I’m hearing, and I don’t want to hear it now. “Shut the fuck up and get the prisoner into the cat.”
I get the wound putty out.
“You had to know!”
“I didn’t fucking know, okay?”
Moving as fast as I can, I peel back Kendrick’s armor, open his jacket, pull up his T-shirt. Two bloody craters in his belly.
Out on the road, Jaynie fires a grenade. It goes off at a distance, somewhere near the base of the ridge. “We’ve got another minute,” she says.
Ransom still hasn’t moved. “Shelley, you had to know.”
“Shelley?” Sheridan asks, seizing on my name. “Lieutenant Shelley?”
The composure, the authority in her voice, makes me look up. She’s watching me from a couple steps away, shivering in Ransom’s grip, wearing only a knit pullover and a long skirt over thin house boots. The cold has drained her face of color, but her voice conveys no trace of fear as she tells me, “God gave you no warning of what waited for you here, Lieutenant Shelley, because it’s not God who speaks to you—”
“Shut up!” Ransom screams at her, like he knows what she’s going to say next.
I turn back to Kendrick, my hands shaking as I jam putty
into his wounds.
“—it was the Devil, and the Devil’s betrayed you.”
“Shut up!”
Kendrick’s visible bleeding has ceased, but Ransom has gone fucking crazy.
Jaynie strides up, and lays into him. “Specialist Ransom, you will conduct yourself as befits a soldier in the United—” She falters, because after all he is not a United States Army soldier, not right now.
I turn Kendrick onto his side and use the patch on his exit wounds.
Jaynie tries again. “Give me the prisoner, Ransom. You assist the lieutenant.”
I glance up. Ransom is not complying. He’s not defying, either. I don’t know what he’s doing. He’s just standing there, holding on to Sheridan. I wish I could see his face.
I settle Kendrick back onto the snow and get up. Sheridan’s shivering is getting worse. She’s well on her way to hypothermia, maybe frostbite, and if she shows up for the trial bruised, or with blackened fingers and moldering ears, Ahab Matugo will not accept her—but Sheridan isn’t ready to surrender. She looks at me as if she can see my face through the black screen of my visor and says, “I warned you a reckoning was coming. The Red sent you here. It controls you. You are the Devil’s servant. All of you are, and you will be cast down!”
I’m rattled, hearing her call it “the Red”—the same name I use.
Ransom is rattled too, but not for the same reason. “Don’t you talk to Shelley like that,” he says, giving her a shake. “It’s God who’s kept him alive.”
“Goddamn it, Ransom, it doesn’t matter! Jaynie, take her!”
“It does matter, sir! It does!”
Jaynie reaches for her, but Ransom wrenches her away. Kendrick proves he’s conscious by whispering, “Fucking do something, Shelley.” I try to take her—“Ransom, give her to me”—while Sheridan spews more crazy words, getting deeper under his skin. “You’re tools. Each one of you. Tools to be used by Satan before you’re cast into the abyss!”
