The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  Happily, we don’t wait long. In about four and a half minutes, the cargo door on the air-conditioned truck swings open. Two men step out. Both are swaggering, grins on their faces as they pause in the doorway to look around at the lovely scrub landscape, before jumping down to the ground. Behind them, three young girls appear—young, like twelve or thirteen, their dark brown skin gleaming in the sunlight—all of their skin, because none of them are wearing clothes.

  Ransom and Yafiah both swear softly over gen-com, and I develop a theory for why Bibata seemed so spooked. She’s an independent woman, operating on her own, out in the middle of nowhere. Maybe she saw what was going on, or suspected. Better for her to pretend she didn’t see anything, than to call attention to herself. Getting on the wrong side of gangsters like these must be her nightmare.

  The girls stick close together, keeping their heads down in a timid posture as they scamper into the brush. My guess is they’ve been sent out to relieve themselves before the party moves on.

  “Delphi,” I whisper. “Permission to engage?”

  “I just asked, and the answer is no.”

  “We can’t just—”

  “No,” she repeats.

  “Goddamn it!” My voice never rises above a whisper, but I’m furious. I hate being the bad guy. “Ahab Matugo doesn’t tolerate slavery, so why do we?”

  “You have your orders, Shelley. Don’t be swayed by propaganda. Ahab Matugo is the enemy. An enemy who keeps shooting down our surveillance drones. We need this listening station, so you will allow this convoy to proceed unmol—”

  She’s cut off in mid-lecture as my visor loses its link to the angel. My overlay routes through the angel too, and it’s also dropped its link.

  “Helmet-to-helmet still working?” Jaynie asks.

  “I hear you.”

  “Something up high,” Dubey suggests. “Jamming the angel, but not us.”

  “You think they have a drone? Why haven’t they seen us?”

  “They’re not exactly paying attention,” Jaynie says.

  True.

  I think about it, and decide I can work with the situation. I can’t talk to Guidance, so that means I have to rely on my own judgment in the field. And my judgment tells me we have only seconds before one of the gangsters decides to check the feed from their drone.

  “Listen up. We need to know these gangsters aren’t going to turn around and murder our precious dickhead engineering team, so we’re going to move in and make sure everything’s okay. All except you, Yafiah. See that tree behind you? The one that begins branching close to the ground? Get yourself up there and let me know the second you see anyone looking worried.” She uses her arm hooks, and starts climbing. “Everyone else, stealth approach, standard interval. These gangsters are armed.”

  A wind sighs through the brush, hotter than breath. It rustles the tall grass, covering any sound we make as we advance. I’m close enough now that I can hear men talking, and the whisper of scared little girls as they’re herded back into the air-conditioned truck. A door slams.

  “L. T.,” Yafiah whispers over gen-com. “Look up. Straight up. Is that you?”

  I turn my head to gaze at the sky. Seen through my polarized visor, the sky in early afternoon is so beautifully blue it almost hurts my heart to look at it. The clouds scattered across that backdrop are a pure, bright, shining white. Beneath them is a drone aircraft, floating right above us at no more than treetop level, stationary on the wind just like a kite. It looks as if it’s made of glass, translucent, so that the sky and clouds shine through. That’s good camouflage, but the edges of the drone still show, making it easy to see. Like my angel, it’s a small device: maybe four feet from wingtip to wingtip.

  Yafiah wants to know if it’s my drone, so I tell her, “No, that’s not me. Get rid of it.”

  “Prepare for return fire,” Jaynie warns.

  With a loud burst from her HITR, Yafiah blows the drone out of the sky. There’s a small white flash and then pieces tumble down, making the brush crackle as they hit.

  “Yafiah, move!” I tell her. “You’re a target. Get out of that tree.”

  I pipe a thumbnail of her point-of-view into my visor as she drops to the ground; her footplates float as her shocks absorb the impact, and then she takes off, putting distance between herself and the tree.

  Over by the trucks, men are shouting. The guard with the assault rifle has scrambled out of the off-road truck. He brings his weapon to his shoulder and sprays bullets at the perch Yafiah just abandoned.

  “Return fire,” I say.

  The aggressive guard doesn’t have a chance. He’s hit from four different directions and drops in a spray of brilliant red blood. We all race to new positions. Tall grass sways around me and clouds of insects take flight. From the brothel truck, I hear outraged shouts, and then I’m caught by surprise as a grenade explodes behind me. The concussion knocks me to my knees, but I’m up again in a second, my weapon raised. Fire crackles in the brush as I look for my enemy.

  I spot him. Tall, grim, bearded, and dark-skinned: he has a multiple grenade launcher steadied against his shoulder. He rotates slowly looking for a target. Idiot. He should be shooting, setting the grass and brush on fire to flush us out... but it’s too late to send him back to school. It’s too late when he sees me, half-hidden in the grass. My visor helps me line up my aim, I trigger a short burst from the HITR, and he collapses beside his friend.

  Eerie silence falls over the brush. Even the wind has died away. I can’t see anyone. The brothel men have retreated back inside their brothel truck, closing the door behind them.

  Dubey says, “That drone wasn’t jamming the angel.”

  He’s right. The drone is gone, but we haven’t recovered our link to Guidance.

  “So what the hell can be jamming the angel and not messing with helmet-to-helmet?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  Something else grabs my attention—a faint sound amplified by my helmet—a girl sobbing.

  It puts me in a bad mood. “Get out in the open!” I scream. “All of you! Hands on your heads and leave your weapons behind. Now.”

  Nothing happens for fourteen or fifteen seconds. In my head I run through possible ways of getting everyone out of the truck without hurting the girls, but before I can come up with a reasonable plan, the truck’s rear door opens and, to my surprise, the bad guys help me by sending one of the girls creeping out all on her own. They’ve even let her put on a dress. She takes a few steps and then stops. She’s crying and shaking, sure that we’ll shoot her down.

  “You want the women?” a man yells. He appears at the door, a white man with some kind of European accent. I watch him looking around, trying to figure out where I am. “Take them. Take them all. More where that came from.”

  “Fuck you and get out where I can see you!”

  He looks right at me, guided by my voice, but I doubt he can see much. The grass is good cover.

  “Take the women and leave it at that,” he warns me. “We’ve notified the Alliance we’re under attack. American gunships will be here in a few minutes. Disappear now or you won’t have a chance.”

  Ransom snorts. “Idiot.”

  I have to agree. Our enemy has no idea who we are; he assumes we’re gangsters, here to rob him.

  I don’t really care if he’s managed to get a call out to the army; I know a call has already gone out—because when my angel is jammed, its protocol is to retreat until it can link up again with Guidance. As soon as it reappeared on her screen, Delphi would have taken control of it. No doubt she heard our brief firefight and passed the news on to Command. With luck, gunships are already on the way—and even the corrupt Alliance is not going to be able to overlook the deficient quality of their contractor’s employees once that much military hardware is in motion.

  So I let the cum-wad think he’s got me worried. Injecting an anxious note into my voice, I say, “Yeah, okay. We’ll take the women. Send the rest of t
hem out or I’ll put a grenade into your truck.”

  The man ducks back inside. “Go!” I hear him shouting. “Get out.”

  The other two girls appear at the narrow door, wearing cheap, colorful dresses. They jump down to the ground on bare feet, crying and clinging to each other.

  “Tell them to follow the tire tracks back to the road,” I say.

  Another man, someone I haven’t seen before, leans out the door and harangues them in a language I don’t know. Their expressions are hopeless as they stumble off, doing as they’re told and heading for the road.

  “Now get out of here,” the European says. “I can hear the helicopters already.”

  He’s not lying. I hear them too. I still can’t reach my angel, though, and I’d like to fix that. On top of the cargo truck is a small dish antenna. It’s the only candidate I can see for the source of the jamming signal. “Yafiah,” I whisper on gen-com, “circle around and meet the girls. Make sure they’re safe.”

  “On my way.”

  “Jaynie?”

  “Here.”

  “I’m going to encourage the enemy to leave the truck. Don’t let me get killed, okay?”

  “No worries.”

  “I’m watching too,” Ransom says.

  I put my finger next to the trigger that will launch a grenade. Then I advance into the open with quick steps, circling around the bodies of the guards. A reek of blood and shit rises from them, overwhelming in the afternoon heat.

  The European spots me—and my uniform. He’s outraged. “Who the hell are you?” he screams at me. “Fucking army moron—I’m reporting you to your commanding officer!”

  This doesn’t exactly scare me because everything I do, everything I say, and most of what goes on in my head is relayed straight to Command. I have no secrets. They know I’m an asshole, but they find uses for me anyway.

  The helicopters are easy to hear as I aim my weapon at the side of the cargo truck. “Clear out,” I advise him. “Because I’m going to blow it up.”

  “You fucking madman!” the European screams and then, in a panicked jump, he leaps clear of the truck, hitting the ground hard. His feet slip in the mud and he goes down with an unintelligible curse. Two other cum-wads scramble out after him. One looks African, the other mixed Arab, or maybe Indian.

  “Get down!” I scream at them, and they drop, falling prone alongside their companion. I have no idea which ones are Vanda-Sheridan’s engineers and which one runs the mobile brothel, and I don’t give a shit.

  Ransom and Jaynie emerge from the brush, their weapons pointed at the passive trio.

  “Dubey!” I bark.

  He appears at my side and together we go through the truck and the other vehicles, making sure no one else is there. Then I send Dubey to pull the plug on the antenna, but he’s still climbing up to the roof of the truck when the angel comes back online. I know because Delphi speaks to me: “Shelley, acknowledge.”

  “I’m here.” I wave at Dubey to come back down.

  “Status?”

  “We were forced to engage, resulting in two enemy dead, three captured, three refugees.” The gunships are circling above us, sending up a tornado of leaves and pollen. “Tell them not to kill us, okay, Delphi?”

  “Don’t worry, Shelley. I’m saving that privilege for myself.”

  “Hey, I didn’t jam the angel.”

  “The angel wasn’t jammed! We got to watch you the whole time. All the outgoing relays worked fine. We heard every word spoken.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No one does. For the duration of the operation, the angel stopped relaying all communications from Guidance, and even when I tried to switch your overlay to the local cell-phone network, I couldn’t get through—but as soon as the operation ended, two-way communication was restored.”

  “By who?”

  “No one! No one here did anything. It just happened.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Yeah? No kidding.”

  ~~~

  Too much has happened to cover up the crime. So the engineers and the slaver are all taken into custody though I still don’t know who’s who. The three girls are transported by gunship to a refugee camp farther out in the Sahel—far enough to find their way back home, I hope.

  Yafiah and Ransom don’t have to fight over who gets to drive, because I put each of them behind the wheel of one of the contractor’s two trucks. Our revised orders are to bring the load on as far as Fort Dassari, and guard it. In a day or two, Command will fly new engineers out to take over the project. Delphi makes me promise that when they come to get the trucks, I won’t kill them.

  ~~~

  Jaynie and Dubey go first in the convoy on their ATVs. The two big, open-bed trucks follow, and I come last. I’m stuck driving the third ATV, which means I can’t do more than glance through the angel’s eyes. It’s a vulnerable feeling, not being able to study the terrain around me. I drive on the right shoulder, which at least lets me see something of the road beyond the trucks.

  “Delphi?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “You got any bogeys out there?”

  “Nothing. I would tell you if there were.”

  I know she would. I also know she’s handling other soldiers, not just me. She’s busy—which is why I need to make sure I hold on to some percentage of her attention.

  A few more minutes pass. The wind picks up, lightning arcs across black clouds to the south, and the air is heavy with the promise of rain.

  “Delphi? The angel was hacked, wasn’t it?”

  Several seconds go by without an answer. I check my icons. I’m still linked.

  “Delphi?”

  “Tech is looking into it.”

  “Did you just talk to someone? Were you told not to say anymore than that?”

  “I talked to tech. They had nothing new to tell me.”

  We put another five klicks behind us. I hear the rain coming: a crackling, drumming static growing steadily louder as it sweeps across the plain.

  “Delphi?”

  “Yes, Shelley?”

  “I thought no one could hack through our security.”

  Silence.

  “If you don’t answer me I’m going to think the angel has cut out again.”

  “Check your icons.”

  The rain hits in a sudden deluge that sluices across my visor. The live view gets replaced by a simulated view derived from my helmet’s camera buttons, with the rain distortion subtracted.

  “Delphi, what if the angel cuts out again when we’re on patrol?”

  “That’s a concern,” she concedes. “And it’s being discussed. I’ll let you know.”

  I would like to be part of that discussion, but I know that isn’t going to happen.

  The rain passes in just a few minutes and where the sun breaks through the clouds, the road starts steaming.

  “Any bogeys?” I ask Delphi.

  “Why, Shelley? Do you have one of your ‘feelings’?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you acting like a nervous little kid?”

  It’s because I feel vulnerable, going without angel sight.

  ~~~

  Our cloud-fractured shadows stretch out in front of us, getting longer as the afternoon grows old. It’s a relief to finally roll into the village, even if we have to cut back our speed to a walking pace.

  We get a colder reception than on the way out. Bibata must have dropped hints of what she saw, or suspected, because people eye the trucks with suspicion. I look for her, wanting to let her know that we took care of things, but while the angel locates her truck alongside her mother’s house, Bibata doesn’t come out to say hello. I’d like to go see her, but I can’t do it. I’d get reprimanded for harassment just by knocking on her door.

  The first truck rolls past the north edge of the village. An old woman with weathered gray skin stands by the road, watching. She has a young girl beside her, about the age of t
he girls in the brothel truck. As I approach on my ATV, she raises her hand, gesturing for me to stop.

  I relay my status on gen-com. “I’m stopping for a minute. Keep the convoy moving. I’ll catch up.”

  The woman gestures impatiently at the young girl, who speaks to me in excellent English. “Grandmother wants to know what you saw out there, Shelley.”

  I’m relieved to share the news, certain that it will get back to Bibata. “I saw some bad men, but they’re not out there anymore.”

  “You kill them, Shelley?” she asks eagerly.

  “We killed two. Three were arrested.”

  She translates this for Grandmother, who asks her a question. She repeats the question for me, in English. “Were there girls? Were they killed?”

  “Three girls. They’re alive. You do what Grandmother tells you, and stay safe.”

  “I have a gun,” she says proudly. “If any cunt hunter comes for me, Grandmother says to kill him.”

  Without a good harvest, Grandmother might not have enough food for the next year, but the war is close enough that she’s invested scarce money in a weapon that isn’t likely to offer much protection if things really go south.

  “You be careful with your gun,” I tell her.

  The trucks have both cleared the village. They’re picking up speed. I look around one more time for Bibata, but I don’t see her, which is probably for the better. What we have between us—it’s performance art, not love. I’ve been in love. I know.

  Taking my foot off the brake, I head out.

  I have to drive like a madman to catch up with the trucks.

  ~~~

  It’s 1730 by the time we get back to the fort. Delphi is as tired as I am. She checks out, leaving me in the care of my second-shift handler, a guy codenamed Pagan. “Hey Shelley,” he greets me. “Heard you’ve had a busy twenty-four.”