by Brian Nelson
The moment the soldiers had exited the Valors, their swarms had dispersed over the suspected conflict zone and created a map that appeared as a tiny layer across each man’s cornea.
All possible actors were assessed and color-coded.
Green: Noncombatant, no weapons
Red: Enemy combatant, type of weapon displayed
Yellow: Fellow combatant
Orange: Undefined
When they had landed, Sawyer had noticed a cluster of about fifteen green avatars inside one of the rock formations. It had taken him a second to realize that they were in a cave. The swarms were able to use facial recognition and had identified Eric Hill and most of the White Hand immediately. With the cornea overlay, they saw each avatar’s name and weapon. Julius Strasser (SR-25 .762x51), Elliot Joubert (AR-10 .308 Win), Lethabo Naidoo (IWI ACE-N .556x45), etcetera.
As Sawyer moved into the woods, he used his neural net. Redefine enemy combatants as those over 140 pounds with firearms. That would ensure that none of the Sān were mismarked.
The neural net under his helmet (essentially a portable MRI machine) had taken three months to program. The first two weeks were the most tedious. Each word that the human brain thinks makes a unique electrical signal through the brain. To train the net, he had to read tens of thousands of words so that it learned his vocabulary. Then came teaching it nuance. The system had to learn every possible way he might think each command and know his intent. The next four weeks had been spent configuring the net so it could communicate with the swarms. Then came another six weeks of combat trials. But it had been worth it.
Disable all enemy combatant firearms and night optics. Jam all enemy combatant communications.
The sound of gunfire instantly ceased.
Mute all my communications except to Patel.
Sawyer moved through the woods toward the first cluster of red avatars. Brett Kruger. Lethabo Naidoo. Ethan Van Der Merwe. He was almost a hundred yards away, too far to see them clearly through the forest, but the swarms were circling around them, sending him crystal clear images. They were standing over a Sān woman they had just killed.
The Venger System had several layers of redundancy. He could select targets with his thoughts, with his voice, or using the tip of his rifle as a pointer. He “tapped” each man on his display with the muzzle of his rifle.
The display gave him a prompt: Incapacitate or Kill?
Kill.
He pulled the trigger. The three men dropped.
Even though he was carrying his MK-14, the nanosites killed his enemies. Only at Sawyer’s request or in case his swarms failed would the rifle actually fire.
The avatars of the dead men turned solid black on his display.
A second later, two more red avatars went black as Patel took out his first two men.
4:37:10
Sawyer heard a woman scream.
Find source of scream.
On the display, a yellow avatar flashed. Fellow combatant. Even though she was Sān, the system realized she was fighting the enemy. There were five red avatars around her.
A moment later, the swarms arrived at her location, giving Sawyer visual and audio.
The mercenaries had her pinned to the ground. “This is the little cunt that killed De Beer,” one man said. “I saw it! Speared him right through the fucking throat.” The man spoke in Afrikaans but Sawyer heard English.
One man held each of the woman’s limbs, while a tall black mercenary stood over her with her own spear in his hand. “This will be proper revenge then.” He held the tip toward her legs. “Open her up for me, lads.”
The woman screamed and fought with all her might. She was tiny compared to these huge men in body armor. As they tried to pull her legs open, she twisted and kicked, lifting herself full off the ground.
Sawyer quickly selected the man with the spear and pulled the trigger.
He collapsed.
“Pretorius?” The men looked at the crumpled body.
“Pretorius?”
Sawyer selected the other four men and pulled the trigger.
3:59:41
In the cabin of the Valor, Staff Sergeant Loc continued to work on Hill. An empty bag of saline lay on the deck while another bag was squeezed into Hill by his assistant. With so much blood loss it was imperative that his fluids were replenished. Loc gave him some morphine for the pain, but not too much. Hill was in and out of consciousness, but Loc wanted him alert as long as possible. He patted his cheeks to rouse him.
He had to shout over the sound of the rotors.
“How many fingers am I holding up?”
Hill raised his head to see. “Three.”
“Good.”
“Do you know the date?”
Hill winced in pain. “No idea.”
“Fair enough. Your girlfriend’s Jane Hunter, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, she gave me this.” He held up a fat syringe.
This seemed to get Hill’s attention. “Stasis foam?” he asked.
“That’s right.”
As one of Curtiss’s SEALs, Loc was privy to all the cool toys that the NRL was making, but this one was perhaps his favorite. During Afghanistan and Syria, Loc had personally seen six of his friends die from wounds similar to Hill’s.
Eric tightened his lips and nodded. “Okay. Go ahead.” Loc held open the lips of the wound with one hand, then eased the tip inside and pushed.
Eric gasped and gritted his teeth against the pain.
As the foam expanded, Eric’s eyes went wide, and he cried out. Within seconds the whole left side of his abdomen had swelled up grotesquely, as if he had a massive tumor growing inside him. The skin stretched and bubbled, creating a web work of stretch marks in his skin.
Eric panted and blew air out his mouth like a woman in labor as he tried to manage the pain. “Goddamn, it hurts!”
“Yeah, well you’ll have to talk to your girl about that. But before you lodge your complaint, keep in mind that she probably saved your life.”
3:35:10
Sawyer ran through the forest into the section that had been set afire. He raced by a huge baobab tree that stood engulfed in flame, its thin limbs stretched out like a man burned in effigy. As Sawyer ran though the smoke, he noticed that the protective bubble that encased him pushed the smoke away before he even touched it.
Patel had now taken out seven more mercs. There were only four left.
Sawyer was closing in on two more. Even without the swarms he could hear them talking. They were starting to suspect something wasn’t right.
“Is your radio broken?”
“Yeah, gun’s fucked, too. Like the firing pin’s gone.”
They talked loudly because they thought they had nothing to fear.
Sawyer was about fifty yards away when he selected them and pulled the trigger.
A few seconds later, he stood over their bodies. One of their victims was not far away. Sawyer had seen thousands of dead bodies in his career, but the sight of the dead was something he had never grown accustomed to. That’s just the way human beings were. If it didn’t bother you, there was something seriously wrong with you. What always disturbed him most was a sense of disorder. The human mind is programmed to recognize patterns and to view wholeness as correct and beautiful. But to see a human body in disorder is a profoundly disturbing thing. And here was young man with his jaw shot off, an eye missing, his body grotesquely contorted from a gunshot to the chest. Sawyer did his best to just glance at him, confirming he was dead, but he knew that the memory of the glance would be with him forever.
2:56:23
Karuma huddled in the back of the small cave, shivering with fear. From outside he could hear the demon-men speaking. They knew he was in here and were discussing the best way to kill him. He knew he h
ad to get up and try to run, at least then he would have a chance. But he was too frightened. So he lay there, praying to Cagn to help him. He prayed to the god to make the demon-men go away. He repeated his prayer over and over. “Please Cagn, I’ll do anything, just make them go away.”
For a time it was quiet, and he breathed in the smell of clay and turned up soil. Then he heard the scraping of rough boots approaching the mouth of the cave.
2:41:00
Sawyer was now sprinting upward toward the far end of the dell. He looked up. Beyond the peaks of the trees, he saw the huge rock formations looming like dark titans. A flash of lightning suddenly illuminated the ancient red rocks against a bubbling purple sky.
His cameras showed the last two mercenaries, Elliot Joubert and Julius Strasser—the leader of White Hand. Strasser was busy on his radio, trying to contact his men. “Kruger, can you hear me? Venter, come in? Does anyone copy?” He was a tall, thickly built man with silver hair and suspicious eyes.
The other man, Joubert, was pulling a Sān boy from the mouth of a cave. The boy was unconscious and his face was bruised and bleeding.
“Is he dead?” Strasser asked.
“Not yet. My sig wouldn’t fire.”
This seemed to annoy Strasser. “Just slit his throat.”
Joubert pulled out his knife.
Sawyer knew he should kill them quickly, but another part of him rejected that idea. A quick, painless death was not what men like this deserved, especially Strasser.
Disengage Ghost program. Enable my rifle.
Joubert grabbed the unconscious boy by the hair and pulled his head to the side to expose the neck. He was just about to slit his throat when the familiar sound of a round being chambered in a rifle made him look up. Somehow there was a commando aiming a rifle at him. The man was moving at a run, the rifle held tight to his shoulder.
The muzzle flashed with yellow fire, and Joubert felt three hard smacks to his chest. He fell back, gasping. He could still see the world around him, but his heart was gone.
Strasser was holding his radio to his ear and his pistol at his side when the soldier appeared and shot Joubert. It happened so suddenly, and the man moved so quickly, that by the time Strasser raised his pistol, Joubert was dead and the man was only three feet away, closing fast. Strasser aimed center mass and pulled the trigger but nothing happened. Then the butt of the man’s rifle slammed into his nose, sending him reeling back.
He clutched at his face, already wet with blood, and felt the cartilage of his nose loose in the skin. He held up his other hand in submission, but the butt of the rifle struck the side of his head and he collapsed onto his knees.
Then a combat boot hit his hanging rib, cracking it. Strasser gasped in pain; breathing was suddenly excruciating. A second kick to the same spot sent the broken rib into his lung. The lung collapsed, and Strasser screamed. He rolled onto his good side and again held up a hand.
“Please, stop!”
He looked up at the man’s face, but in the darkness saw only a black silhouette. Then lightning flashed and for a moment the man was bleached in light. Strasser saw a veteran soldier, his face obscured by a beard and combat goggles, a long Bowie knife in his right hand. The blade flicked fast—in and out, striking under his extended arm and severing the axillary vein. Strasser realized that he was at the mercy of a professional killer.
“Please, stop . . . I surrender.”
Again, the knife struck fast into the soft flesh behind his knee. Now Strasser screamed even louder than before. Such pain! He rolled onto his back, his nerves bristling as pain surged from all four wounds—his face, his ribs, his armpit and his knee. He tried to think, but it was almost impossible through the pain. He knew that one more deep cut and he’d be terminal. He rolled on his back and reached for the Walther he kept strapped to his ankle. He pointed it up at the man and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
The soldier deftly snatched the weapon from his grasp, turned it on him and fired two shots—one into each of his feet.
Strasser screamed, gasped for breath, then screamed again. Never had he felt anything like this. “Please . . . please,” he panted. “Why? Why don’t you just kill me?”
For the first time the man spoke. “Because I want you to know what it feels like to be helpless and afraid. And before you die, I want you to feel pain like the pain that you have inflicted on others.”
“Oh, God, it hurts!” Strasser moaned, the agony overtaking him, consuming his mind.
Sawyer looked at his watch: 2:01:02
Disable my rifle.
He fingered on his mike. “Patel, meet me back at the camp.”
“Already halfway there.”
Sawyer lifted the unconscious boy onto his shoulders and began jogging back through the woods. The feel of the boy’s skin across his neck had an immediate calming effect on him and his rage began to subside. The killing is done, he reminded himself.
Even though the boy was unconscious, Sawyer began talking to him. “You’re going to be all right, son. You’re safe.”
01:11:56
He was only forty yards from the camp when the boy began to stir. Sawyer gently set him down at the base of a tree. He realized the boy would be terrified if he awoke to find a soldier standing over him, so he engaged the ghost program. Then he gently massaged the base of the boy’s neck until his eyes flickered open.
The boy looked around for a moment, confused, then put two fingers to the cut on his forehead.
“You’re safe now,” Sawyer said, forgetting that the translator didn’t know what language to use. To his surprise, the boy replied in English.
“Eric? Where are you?”
“I’m not Eric, but I’m his friend.”
Then the memory of what happened seemed to hit the boy. “There were demon-men! They were killing us!” The boy’s voice rose with emotion. “I couldn’t—”
“It’s okay, they’re gone. They can’t hurt you anymore.” Sawyer put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and disengaged the ghost program.
The boy gasped when he saw him and pushed his back against the tree.
Sawyer removed his goggles and smiled. “It’s okay. I’m really Eric’s friend. Eric Hill, right? Tall, black hair, nerdy, no sense of humor.”
The boy examined him a moment, then gave the faintest nod.
“Is he all right?”
“He’s hurt, but with a little luck, he’ll be okay. I’m taking him home.”
A look of sadness pulled at the boy’s face, but he said nothing.
“You’re going to be okay, too,” Sawyer said, “but you’re in shock. Let me take you to the cave. The others are there.” Sawyer held out his hands. The boy hesitated for a second then climbed into his arms.
Sawyer guessed the boy was a teenager, but he weighed no more than his eight-year-old nephew. He held him up with one arm, his rifle in the other. As he made for the cave he kept to the woods to avoid crossing the camp. The boy didn’t need to see any of that now.
They were almost at the mouth of the cave when Sawyer stopped and eased him to the ground.
“Go on. Your friends and family are inside.”
“Won’t you stay and help us?”
“I’m sorry, but I have to go.”
The boy nodded, then walked off toward the cave, but before he reached the entrance he stopped. In the bushes was the body of a dead mercenary. The boy reached down and picked up the man’s rifle.
“I’d prefer if you didn’t do that,” Sawyer said.
The boy looked at Sawyer one last time, strapped the weapon over his shoulder, and entered the cave.
Sawyer looked at his watch.
00:31:12
Time to go.
He ran through the camp and saw Patel heading for the break in the rocks that led to the waiting Valor. In t
he middle of the camp he paused for a moment, surveying the scene. There were nine dead mercenaries among the cooking fires, but over twenty dead Sān—men, women, and children. His display showed that between the cave and the woods, only thirteen Sān were still alive. Sawyer wondered if the tribe could survive such a blow or if this had been their final stand.
This is the kind of thing we should be fighting for, he thought, then took a deep breath and left the camp, knowing he would never be back here again.
As he ran he noticed Strasser’s avatar had turned from red to black. Now Sawyer regretted cutting the axillary vein—it had made his death too quick. That’s when he noticed an orange avatar—undefined—hiding in the rocks to his right. He turned to investigate and found one of the bushmen huddling in a recess.
“It’s okay,” Sawyer said. “You can come out.”
This one, too, seemed to understand him.
“Tank you,” he said in heavily accented English. “Tank you.”
“The others are in the cave. You can go find them.”
The man thanked him again, but didn’t seem to know where to go.
“Wait one second for me.” Sawyer said, and pulled out a small iSheet and took the man’s picture. The man squinted at the flash. Then Sawyer quickly typed a message and sent it.
“Okay, you can go,” Sawyer gestured with his rifle. “The cave’s that way.”
The man stumbled off. “Tank you,” he said again, bobbing his head and cowering.
Sawyer watched him go, but as he did he casually swept the muzzle of his rifle over him.
In the cabin of the first Valor, three of the Seals’ iSheets went off simultaneously. A moment later Adams approached the medic and the man on the stretcher. “Sorry to bother you, doc,” Adams said, “but Sawyer has a question for your patient.”
Loc nodded.
The SEAL held up the iSheet to Hill.
