by Linda Nagata
60%.
It’s true I’m in violation of unit regulations and I expected some sort of punishment in addition to my brain-wipe. But not this. Not an overwhelming assault out of the dark.
“Logan!” I shout, because I don’t like being afraid. “Is that you? What the fuck is going on?”
“Shelley!” His voice reaches me, sounding closer than I expect. “Sitrep! Why the hell did you drop out of sight?”
70%.
They clatter up out of the dark, surrounding me with the soft hissing and creaking of their dead sisters’ joints, along with the smell of fresh sweat, gun oil, and lubricant. “Are you okay?”
“What is going on?” I ask him again.
“Suspected security breach. I don’t know the details, but Bryson called it. He ran passcode resets for everyone. Yours didn’t go through.” Logan is the half-seen silhouette looming in front of me. “You dropped off the map. We thought someone came after you.”
“No one came after me. Who’s with you?”
From the figure on my left: “Me. Tran.”
And from behind me: “Roman.”
Logan speaks again. “Kanoa says to get you undercover ASAP.”
80%.
“I can’t see a damn thing out here. You have a light?”
“Yeah.” There’s a rustling noise, then a red LED switches on at waist height. He hands it to me. “What happened? Why did you shut your overlay down?”
With the red light pointed at the asphalt in front of me, I slip past him and start walking. “Kanoa’s reformatting it.”
“What?” He catches up with me in a stride. His dead sister hisses softly beside me, footplates striking in short steps so he doesn’t leave me behind. “Why would he order that?”
“And Cory is the security breach.”
“Is that a guess or do you know it?”
“I know it.”
90%.
“Bryson,” Logan says. “You heard that? Shelley says it’s Bilbo … No, he’s fine … He’s offline, yeah. Kanoa’s reformatting his overlay … shit. Well, shut it down, Bryson!”
The raw panic in that request sends a chill up the back of my neck. I pull up, staring at the counter. 93%. 94%. “Shut what down?”
95%.
Logan surges past me before he realizes I’ve stopped. “Your reformat! Kanoa didn’t launch it. The code came from outside.”
I’ve been down this road. I’ve had my head hacked before. My hands shake, but I manage to keep the fear out of my voice. “I’m at ninety-eight percent.”
“Bryson, come on! Reinitiate! Factory reset. ASAP.”
99%.
The tiny counter disappears. I stop breathing, waiting for the payload to launch its poisonous code.
But then the counter reappears.
1%.
The number hangs in my vision second after second like it’s supposed to, while I gasp at the cold night air like I’ve just finished a sprint.
“Shelley?” Logan’s voice is shaking. “Bryson wants to know—”
“Yes, it reset. It’s going slow this time. Like normal.”
“Good.”
I shine the light on the asphalt and start walking again. The AI in my skullnet operates on a baseline algorithm. That’s not nearly enough interference to keep my temper in check. Without warning, I turn around. Roman has to jump sideways to keep from running me over—and that just makes me angrier for no reason at all.
“What the fuck?” I shout at their shadowy figures—Logan, Roman, Tran—like it’s their fault. It’s not; I know that. But I am feeling so shaken and betrayed, I don’t give a shit. “Cory Helms was supposed to parse as loyal!”
“Guess Bilbo got his mind changed,” Logan says in a tone that promises retribution.
Bilbo got his mind changed by me.
“Everyone else is reset?” I ask.
“All of us,” Logan says. “He can’t get in again.”
“We going to try to recover him?” Tran wants to know. “I mean, he knows everything.”
I turn the light of the little LED back to the asphalt, wondering what payload would have been delivered if the reformat had finished. I always thought Cory was a decent guy. Guess I was wrong.
• • • •
“Captain Shelley, sir?”
I pause halfway across the barracks lobby to look at the kid on duty at the watch desk. He shrinks from my gaze, just like Cory. It doesn’t improve my mood to know I’ve turned into an asshole who terrifies people just by making eye contact.
Logan, Escamilla, and Roman, rigged and armed, don’t merit a glance from the kid as they clatter past, heading for the stair. His wary eyes are fixed on me as he holds out a scrap of paper in his faintly trembling hand. “From Major Kanoa, sir. He said to give this to you.”
Fucking hell. I hate being cut out of gen-com.
I take the note and follow my escort upstairs, but it’s a weird dissociative moment in which I glimpse myself as the kid must see me: a half-human monster parading around on robot legs, scaring the shit out of innocent people.
Fuck me.
At the door of my apartment, I open the note: My office. 1900.
“Logan!” I bark because his apartment door hasn’t closed yet. “What time is it?”
“1850.”
Shit.
I take a two-minute shower, throw on a fresh combat uniform, and jog over to the Cyber Center.
“You’re late,” Kanoa says when I walk into his office.
“Add it to the list of infractions. Do we know where Cory is?”
He studies me from behind his gray steel desk. “Why are you so sure Cory’s involved?”
His question catches me by surprise. Doesn’t he know I talked to Delphi? I answer cautiously, not ready to volunteer the information. “Cory left the base last night.” I sit down in the same chair I always use. “Have you been able to contact him?”
“He hasn’t responded yet, but we know where he’s been. We know where he is. No one’s grabbed him.”
“Do you know who he’s been talking to?”
“No. But it doesn’t add up. He doesn’t have the personality profile to turn traitor overnight and launch a cyber attack that vicious against you. He’s never been comfortable around you, Shelley, but he respects you, he respects what you’ve done.”
“It’s the Mars thing. That’s his first loyalty.”
“Maybe. But he went to see Julian this morning, visited him in the hospital, stayed for an hour. If he was planning to turn around and fry your brain, why would he bother?”
But he did betray me. He emailed Delphi and gave her the means to reach me.
Granted, that was a few steps below burning my overlay.
“Logan told me Bryson picked up a security breach.”
“He got an event notice—a first-time call to your overlay. You didn’t pick up on it though.” He waits to see if I will say anything. I don’t. “Bryson checked the records. Cory had added the caller’s address to the approved list. So he called Cory to ask about it. Didn’t get through. He figured better safe than sorry and initiated a reset of everyone’s security. But your update didn’t go through.”
“Did he force the update?”
A forced update would have dumped my open link and initiated an immediate reset. Kanoa’s gaze shifts subtly before returning to me. “Bryson says no.”
“The security reset was queued, then.” Queued while I talked to Delphi. And that allowed a window of time for the attack on my overlay.
For too many seconds, Kanoa just watches me.
I know what he’s doing. He’s letting his emotional analysis program work. He’s aware now that something else happened. “Now would be a good time,” he says.
“All right. Cory was fucking with me. That first-time call? It was from Delphi … Karin Larsen.”
“Your ex.”
“Yes. He gave her my address. Put her on my contact list.”
“You didn’t tak
e her call.”
“I called her back.”
His fist hits the desk. “Goddamn it, Shelley—”
“It’s the Mars thing,” I say again, cutting him off. “He wanted to warn her. I think he hoped she could change my mind.” I tell him about the email. “He sent it to an address she doesn’t usually check, so it’s been hours. Maybe he didn’t launch that cyber attack, but sometime during those hours, he must have been involved with the party that did.”
“We’ll know soon. We’ve got an FBI agent on the way to pick him up. Suspicion of disseminating classified information.”
“You want the FBI talking to him?”
“Better that than leaving him loose. Once he’s in custody, we can contain the damage.” He leans back in his chair. “Let’s talk about Larsen.”
“Let’s not.”
“You let her believe you were dead. That’s not going to feel good. Then you appear out of nowhere and threaten her—”
“I did not threaten her.”
“That cyber attack could have been her attempt to protect both herself and the Mars project.”
“That’s bullshit. Delphi would not do that.”
“How sure are you? How sure are you that Vasquez isn’t part of this?”
I understand what he’s doing. I understand the psychology of it. He’s introducing doubt. He wants to use that doubt to destroy the trust and loyalty I still feel. And it doesn’t matter if I understand it. It’s still a goddamn effective play.
“I’m sure enough,” I say, but we both know that’s a lie.
“You got anything else to tell me?”
I think of Delphi’s address, locked up in my organic memory—but I’m not going to share that. “Let it go, Kanoa.”
He doesn’t push it. He’s too skilled at this game to overstep. “Holiday’s over,” he says. “Make sure 7-1 is ready to deploy. I’ve got a feeling you’re going to be busy again—and soon.”
• • • •
Logan is waiting for me in the hall. He’s wearing his combat uniform, but he’s taken off his armor and bones. “I’m still not seeing you on the squad map.”
I check the counter in my overlay. “I’m at forty-five percent.”
He frowns at his display. “It’s like you’re dead. Or gone.”
“Not yet.” We head outside. “Kanoa thinks we’re going to get a call-out soon.”
“I’ve been thinking about that, and it’s not going to work. Julian is out. Dunahee and Escamilla need at least a few weeks to heal. Fadul won’t admit she’s hurt, but she’s got a hole in her arm. We don’t have enough personnel.”
“We’ve got you, me, Roman, and Tran. And Fadul’s going to want to play regardless. Let’s make sure we’re ready.”
We inventory our equipment, weapons, and ammunition. We keep a lot of gear on hand to allow us to work in different environments, and we do a lot of training, in and out of simulators. Be ready for anything. That’s what Kanoa likes to say. We use the inventory to work up a resupply order that might get filled in a couple of days or a couple of months. You never know.
At 2110 in the evening, we’re back at the barracks, and my reformat has reached 96 percent. Logan heads upstairs. I stop at the desk. A different private is on watch. She eyes me warily but gets out of my way when I slip behind the desk, sitting down at the Tactical Operations Center.
From the TOC, I can access data from the angel that watches over C-FHEIT, as well as from the perimeter sensors and cameras. But I can also pull up a personnel map. Normally, I’d do that through my overlay, but that’s not an option right now.
The map comes up onscreen, marking the locations of everyone on base. Most of the support staff is in their barracks apartments. A few are in the recreation room. Tran and Escamilla are in the media room upstairs. Fadul is alone on the technical range. I want to see Fadul.
I head out again, cross the parade ground, enter the gym, and take the stairs down to the range, where I pause at the heavy glass door. Beyond are six shooting lanes. They’re used mostly for calibrating weapons, but Fadul is on the range practicing her manual skills. Instead of using her helmet and onboard AI, she’s shooting with just safety glasses and bright-orange earmuffs. Through the door I hear a faint pak-pak of gunshots as she cradles her HITR, its stock braced between shoulder and cheek.
I grab my own earmuffs from a rack, slip them on, and open the door while she continues to shoot in a steady cadence, nailing the same hole in the target every time. The door closes. She can’t hear me. Maybe she senses a shifting air current, I don’t know, but she pivots, bringing her weapon to bear on me, lip curled as she glares down the length of the barrel.
If there is anyone in this unit more fucked up than me, it’s Fadul, but she shows exquisite self-control, snapping her weapon up so the barrel points at the ceiling. With one hand, she wrenches off her ear muffs. I take mine off too.
“What the hell?” she demands in a high, breathy voice. There is a layer of sweat glimmering on her cheeks, and a faint tremor in her throat.
“Sorry.”
“Sorry? I don’t got you on my map, Shelley. I didn’t know you were there. You fucking scared the shit out of me. Do not test God like that. It’s considered a sin.”
“Kanoa thinks we’re going to be busy. How’s your arm? You going to be up for it?”
She makes a dismissive noise. Turning back to the range, she places her HITR carefully on the shelf before looking at me again. “You don’t got to ask me that.” She crosses her arms just below her breasts and asks, “Something else going on behind those pretty eyes?”
Her posture, her question: both are a warning not to come any closer. We are brothers and sisters in arms, and sex isn’t supposed to happen inside the squad. But Fadul and me, we don’t trust strangers. So a few times we’ve turned to each other. It’s not something we ever talk about, and it’s not why I’m here.
“You ever think about going back, Fadul?”
“Ah, Jesus.” She turns away, shaking her head.
“Do you?” I press, because I know what she left behind.
Her dark eyes return to me, narrow, angry. “The dead don’t get to go back.”
“Sure, that’s what we tell ourselves. But if one of your kids saw you on the street, ran up to you and said, ‘Mama, please come home’—”
Her eyes flash as she cuts me off. “You leaving us, Shelley?”
I don’t have an answer for that, but she has an answer for me. “I’d tell that baby I wasn’t real. That I was a dream. My kids don’t need some fucked-up, wired zombie feeding them breakfast every morning. They do need a guardian angel, and that’s who I am, even if they never know it. That’s who you are.”
The counter hovers at 99 percent. I watch it until it disappears, replaced by an array of icons that wink into sight and then slowly fade.
“You back with us, Captain?” she asks me.
“Yeah. I’m back.”
• • • •
For the second night in a row, I’m launched again out of a dreamless sleep. I check my time display: 0334. Bryson speaks on gen-com, “Alert. Alert. Strike Squad 7-1, new orders. All personnel are to report immediately—unarmed—to a unit inspection at the west end of the parade ground. Do not rig up. Repeat: do not rig up. All weapons shall remain secured in lockers.”
The link to gen-com drops and a red X pops up in my overlay, indicating lockdown, no connections allowed.
I roll out of bed, sure that Bryson is compromised. I step into my trousers while I try to link back into the base network. I can’t even get a menu. I try to link into gen-com, hoping for a point-to-point connection, but gen-com is not responding either.
No doubt now.
I pull on a T-shirt, grab my HITR from its charging rack, cross the room in two strides, and hurl the door open. “Rig up!” I shout into the corridor. “Armor and bones!”
I stomp the length of the hall, shoving doors open, confirming everyone is up and awake
and strapping into their dead sisters. “Anyone got access to gen-com?”
“Negative, sir!”
“No, sir!”
Only Kanoa is missing.
I race down the stairs, scaring the private manning the TOC—another private, wide-eyed and not quite twenty years old. “What alerts have we got?”
“None, sir. Everything’s quiet.”
I cut behind the desk, drop into a chair in front of the TOC, call up the current status of perimeter sensors.
All the sensors are off.
Fuck. This is exactly how we got through the Apocalypse Forest to hit Thelma Sheridan. “Status listening,” I say to alert the TOC to voice input. “Display angel sight.”
The monitor goes black except for a caption: C-FHEIT SECURITY DRONE LIVE FEED. CHANNEL: NIGHT VISION. CHANNEL CLOSED.
“We are on our own!” I shout up the stairs. The upper floor rumbles with activity: shuffling feet, the thumping of plastic locker doors, grunts, and soft curses. I spin out of the chair, circle the desk, and sprint to the door. I open it cautiously. Just outside, the night is quiet, but farther off I hear the rumble of a small armada of heavy-duty helicopters, probably Black Hawks.
I close the door and turn around. “Private, I want you to roust everyone on the first floor. You will get them down into the basement within two minutes. Understood?”
Her eyes are wide, her mouth a small round O, but she snaps off a determined “Yes sir!” and runs for the dorm rooms, shouting and banging on the doors.
I look up the stairs to see one of my soldiers—I’m pretty sure it’s Tran—fully rigged, HITR in hand. “We’ve got at least three Black Hawks incoming,” I tell him. “Get everyone down here. We need to issue heavy weapons—”
The front door opens. I jump out of the way and bring my weapon up, training it on Kanoa as he comes in.
He’s half-dressed like me in trousers and T-shirt. He’s got boots on, but they’re still untied. “What part of ‘unarmed’ do you not understand, Captain?” he barks. “Put that weapon away.”
He stomps across the lobby. I follow on his heels. “Major, we are under attack—”
He catches sight of Tran at the top of the stairs. “What the fuck are you doing rigged?”
“Gen-com is down,” I insist. “Bryson’s been compromised.”
