by Linda Nagata
“I’ll be back in six minutes,” Khalid says softly. “Good luck.”
“Watch your back,” True warns him.
Rohan adds, “And don’t be late.”
Khalid flashes a smile. “Wouldn’t miss it.”
The men exit the cab. Jameson turns and opens the back door. True follows Juliet out into the driving wind, hauling her pack in one hand and holding her weapon close with the other. Felice comes behind. The wind carries the smell of smoke and of roasted meats and spices, but the taste it leaves in True’s mouth is dust, and the sound of it is a white noise that muddles a background track of howling dogs and distant engines.
Then on the edge of hearing: a faint thrum of helicopter blades.
Right on time, True thinks. It’s Blackbird, ReqOps’ little 900-s stealth autonomous helicopter, newly purchased from Eden Transit in a deal that will let it be sold back if it’s returned undamaged.
Blackbird comes armed with a sniper rifle, a light machine gun, and a set of behavioral algorithms developed by Tamara. The ship is the mission’s designated sharpshooter, and once the QRF has Hussam in custody, it’s up to Blackbird to haul the prisoner away. Success depends on Blackbird.
Rohan moves swiftly, quietly into the dark mouth of an alley. True swings her pack onto one shoulder as she follows in his wake. Juliet and Felice are on her heels. No doubt they’ve incurred the attention of the loitering men. Their goal is to be over the wall before those men agree on what is happening and make up their minds on how they will react.
Gravel pops under tires as Khalid drives away. True doesn’t look back. It’s Jameson’s assignment to linger in the shadows at the alley’s mouth, discouraging anyone who might be tempted to follow them.
~~~
On the other side of the world, Lincoln stands in ReqOps’ command post. He wears an audio headset and holds a tablet in his prosthetic hand that lets him control multiple channels of communication.
Renata Ballard is with him in the command post, strapped into a padded recliner with VR goggles over her eyes and black-lace data gloves on both hands. She’s ready for a long night in the chair, dressed in informal trousers and a baggy tunic, her blonde hair loose.
Engineering director Tamara Thomas is at a desk on the opposite side of the room along with her assistants, Naomi and Michelle. Each has her own workstation. They are ready to research and reprogram at need.
At the front of the room is Hayden Rees, a sharp kid, just a year out of high school, assigned to organize the video feeds displayed on a wall-mounted monitor. He sits at a narrow desk, using a tablet to rearrange them as priorities shift. Feeds from the QRF’s visors have been pushed into a ring of small tiles around the monitor’s periphery. Three larger tiles fill the center. One displays a three-dimensional map of the house, the result of the most recent radar scan. It shows six ghostly figures downstairs in two different back rooms, and upstairs, the three prisoners in their cell and four more individuals believed to be Hussam’s soldiers.
The other two tiles display infrared feeds from the leased surveillance drone circling at high altitude. One feed shows an overview of Tadmur. The other is zoomed in on the target compound so that Lincoln’s people are visible outside the wall.
Gold Team is in the alley. Red Team is in the narrow street behind the house. Both are presently hidden from the enemy’s tethered surveillance drone, which is struggling to complete its circuit against the wind.
The wind isn’t a problem for Blackbird’s powerful engine. ReqOps’ autonomous helicopter moves in swiftly, flying against the wind to minimize its sound profile. The plan calls for Blackbird to take the first shots, clearing the field for the QRF to advance.
It’s time.
Lincoln looks down at the tablet he’s holding. On its screen is a stack of colored bars. He taps the one labeled Blackbird and speaks to the AI pilot, giving final clearance: “Blackbird, engage Phase Green Nickel One.”
A synthesized female voice responds, “Roger that.”
Lincoln watches the wall monitor, counting silently. When he reaches five, a faint flash erupts downwind of the compound. “Aerial target one down,” Hayden reports in an excited voice.
The enemy drone is gone.
~~~
The alley is so narrow and cluttered it forces Gold Team to go single file. The wind races past, whooshing and sighing against the concrete walls, sweeping cigarette butts into ugly little drifts that pile against discarded junk: TVs and automotive parts and broken plastic crates that True has to step over or make her way around.
Without slowing down, she strips off her hijab. Beneath it she wears a close-fitting skullcap that she unrolls into a camouflaged mask. The hijab she lets fall, and for a few steps it follows her, fluttering at her feet until it catches on an old car battery.
Next, she unsnaps the top of her abaya, retrieving her MARC and slipping it on. For a second she’s blind. Then the visor boots. The screen comes to life, automatically enhancing the available light so that the alley brightens and the brand names printed on the scattered junk pop into clarity. A tag confirms her TINSL is linked.
Lincoln speaks over comms: “Aerial Target One confirmed down.”
True resists the urge to look up. She didn’t hear Blackbird take the shot; she didn’t hear the impact. Both sounds were suppressed by the white noise of the wind—but Hussam’s surveillance drone is gone. She receives the news with grim satisfaction, imagining a technician inside the house frowning over a suddenly absent video feed.
Rohan holds up a hand to signal a stop. True repeats the gesture for Felice.
Time for their final mission prep.
She presses the sticky backing of her mask against her cheeks to ensure it can’t shift and obscure her vision. Dropping into a crouch, she lets her pack thump gently against the ground. Without ever losing contact with her KO, she peels off the abaya and lets the wind take it. Then she shrugs the pack on again and stands.
They are all dressed alike now in the microscopically textured fabric of their adaptive camouflage. Even seen through their light-gathering visors, they are ghosts, outlines blurred and blended into their shadowy surroundings.
The transformation has taken forty-five seconds.
~~~
In the control room, Lincoln says, “Hayden, let’s get Blackbird’s front camera on screen.”
“Yes, sir.”
The overview of Tadmur winks out, replaced by a gray-scale video showing a rapid, low-elevation approach to the town. Taking down the enemy’s surveillance drone was only the initial step of Phase Green Nickel One. Blackbird is operating on its own to optimize step two: eliminating the suspect PV boxes in the courtyard. The camera can’t see past the anti-surveillance canopy, but Blackbird doesn’t need a visual target. The beetles have precisely mapped the location of each box.
Blackbird maneuvers into position and starts shooting.
~~~
True slings her KO. Her heart is racing but her mind is calm as she turns to Rohan, ready to execute the next step in the mission plan. From his field bag he takes a climbing hook sized for the wall. Attached to it is a short rope festooned with looped handholds. He unfolds the hook, locks it open, and hands it to her along with a Kevlar mat.
He stoops, lacing his gloved fingers together. She places one boot in the proffered step. Juliet and Felice move in to help her balance as Rohan boosts her up.
In a smooth, practiced sequence, True stretches up, sets the hook over the top of the wall and drapes the mat beside it, covering the broken glass set there to discourage thieves. Still rising on the momentum of three pairs of hands, she hauls out, belly down on the mat, the crunch of glass underneath.
As expected, her view across the courtyard is blocked by the fluttering, multilayered ribbons of the anti-surveillance canopy, shimmering inches below her face like the dark surface of a wind-rippled pond. But the canopy is attached to the wall only at intervals, held in place by steel loops set three meters apart.
Between those points, the edge is loose, and as the canopy billows, a gap opens allowing True to look straight down at a slice of the tiled courtyard, with a potted cypress off to the side and one of the PV boxes directly below.
She flinches at the hair-raising buzz of bullets zipping close at supersonic speeds. She almost kicks off the wall but steadies herself: The fusillade is expected. Four quick shots and then a fifth. The bullets tear through the canopy, hitting unseen targets with sharp paks! easily audible even over the wind. A sixth shot, and the PV box below her shatters, fragments spinning halfway up the wall. Mech parts: gears and wings and featureless chips of what she suspects are plastic explosives.
Goddamn. Her mouth shapes the word though she doesn’t say it aloud. Goddamn. No sound of gunshots follows; these were sniper rounds, fired by Blackbird at such a distance that the wind has swept the noise away. Barely audible: the buzz of Blackbird’s blades as it swings around to target the compound from a different angle.
Beside her, the grappling hook shifts; its rope pulls tight as Rohan starts to climb.
True hurries to retrieve one of the capsules from her vest even as Lincoln says, “Prep the swarm.” She shoves the capsule down under the canopy.
“Release it,” Lincoln orders over comms.
She pops the capsule open. She can’t see the swarm but she can hear the buzz as four mechanical mayflies take flight. They are fast and aggressive. They have to be, because they are short-lived. Operating autonomously, they are programmed to seek out anything human.
She pockets the capsule. Pulling the knife from the sheath on her forearm, she uses it to slice an opening in the canopy even as she scrambles to get a knee on the Kevlar mat.
Rohan pops up beside her. He grips her arm, steadying her as she swivels to drop over the other side. The toe of her boot knocks fragments of broken glass into the courtyard, but it doesn’t matter. Anyone down there will already know the compound is under attack. She kicks off the wall, landing with a jarring impact in the debris field of the PV box.
~~~
Lincoln watches the four mayflies disperse. Or rather, he watches the videos collected by their cameras. Each camera sends a distorted, super-wide-angle view. Hayden has arranged all four feeds side by side on the wall monitor.
The mayflies have been tested extensively, but this is the first time they’ve been used in the field. They’re tiny devices, small enough to balance on a quarter. Their brown oval wings are a crisp film made of woven spider silk and powered by an electric motor. An articulated tail trails two wires: one an antenna, the other a barb loaded with neurotoxin.
Tamara rises from her desk, comes to stand beside him.
Comes to interpret, Lincoln hopes, because he is having a hard time understanding what he’s seeing. Everything onscreen looks miles away. Tamara points to a feed. “The third mayfly isn’t going to find a target. The others are in line.”
Lincoln makes out a tiny human figure at the distant center of one of the videos and then, with shocking speed, the view zooms in, strikes something solid.
“Got ’em,” Tamara says in satisfaction.
Lincoln scans the video array. All four feeds are frozen. Three show a solid surface that he presumes to be the skin of the targeted sentries. The other, a distant wall. He says, “Hayden, I need a fresh overview of the courtyard.”
Tamara pats him on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Lincoln,” she says. “There were two sentries and both of them are down.”
~~~
“Status?” True whispers.
No cry of alarm has greeted her arrival. She crouches in the two-meter-wide space between the wall and a parked truck. A glance up shows her the cut canopy flapping and Rohan’s looming silhouette, the muzzle of his Fortuna a spike against the night sky’s dusty blur.
“Sentries are down,” Lincoln says. He doesn’t sound sure, though. “Tamara says they are,” he amends. “I’m waiting on confirmation.”
Blackbird rumbles in the distance and two more shots sizzle through the air, hitting targets somewhere in the back of the courtyard.
True moves out, staying low, using the truck for shelter as she approaches the house, her KO ready. Rohan drops from the wall, lands behind her with a soft thump. She reaches the truck’s bumper, pauses there to peer at the house.
The windows on this side are two vertical slits. Faint white light seeps through them. Tall potted shrubs flank the front door. Between them, a sprawled body.
The mayfly would have gone for the face, delivering its cargo of neurotoxin with machine speed, its whip tail curling, jabbing a barb through clothing if necessary and into flesh, dropping its target in seconds.
“Door guard confirmed down,” she whispers.
Rohan has moved in the opposite direction. “Confirming—”
A harsh buzz interrupts him. True’s visor highlights a streak of motion, racing through the air alongside the wall, coming straight toward her. No time to think, but she thinks anyway. She thinks, I don’t want to make noise. Then her brain registers a bleating alarm from within the house, a signal that they are done with stealth. Violence of action is all they have left.
She targets the object racing toward her, hand sliding forward on the stock of her rifle. She finds the shotgun trigger—
Whatever it is, the thing in the air, it blows apart with a now-familiar pak!
Blackbird took out the threat before she could pull the trigger. “God damn it,” she swears, whispering despite the alarm. She would have had that one. She could have taken it out herself. The noise wouldn’t have mattered, because the damn alarm is still ringing.
She glances back to check on her team. Felice and Juliet are over the wall and moving up behind her. Even with her visor, True sees them only as suggestions of shadowy motion, but she can tell them apart because they’re tagged with names projected in faint red. Jameson drops next into the courtyard.
True says, “Felice, you ready?”
“On your word, ma’am.”
“Right behind you,” Rohan says.
A warning comes in from Lincoln: “Guard your fire as you advance. Only friendlies in the courtyard.”
“Juliet, you set?” True asks.
“Yes, ma’am.”
Juliet will stay back to provide cover, control the courtyard, and prepare for their exit.
True’s heart thunders as she growls at Felice, “Let’s go.”
With her weapon held ready to fire, it’s a two-second sprint to the door. During that span the alarm cuts out and True hears a shout from inside the house. Over comms she hears glass shattering and Chris yelling: “Go, go, go!”
Chris is at the opposite corner of the house, detailed to breach a window into the downstairs room where Fatima is believed to be, and likely Hussam with her.
True reaches the fallen sentry, glances down. He’s on his back, legs bent, eyes staring in fixed, unblinking horror. Two mayflies are pinned to his cheeks by the barbs at the end of their whip tails. The toxin they deliver is nonlethal, fast-acting, and good to keep a man down for thirty minutes—though she isn’t sure how a double dose will play out. Papers she’s read indicate residual neurological effects, but that’s better than a bullet to the brain.
Lincoln says, “Blackbird reports all targets accounted for.”
“Roger that.” She stoops to close the sentry’s eyes with a gloved hand. Then she moves up to the door, with Felice right behind her, a hand on her shoulder.
“Breach it, Mama,” Felice whispers. “You got the big gun.”
True half-smiles. “Gonna try it first.” Surveillance showed sentries moving freely into and out of the house. She’s got a hunch the door is not secure.
She reaches out, works the latch. The door opens. She kicks it wide, steps in, swings right, hunting for opposition. Her visor easily gathers enough light to show her a large room beautifully furnished in sofas, upholstered chairs, and tables of fine, dark wood. The MARC’s threat assessment function finds nothing
to highlight. No one in sight. No shots fired. She’s conscious of Felice covering the room’s left side.
Jameson and Rohan dart in, pivoting right and left.
“Clear!” True yells.
In the back of the room, a stairway climbs to the next floor. To the left, a wide passage leads to the rear of the house. Gunfire there. Following their assigned roles, Felice and Rohan move toward the sound.
On the right, a closed door hides what they believe to be an office. True advances on it, gets ready to enter. Jameson kicks the door open. True pivots inside, Jameson right behind her.
No one’s there. Just electronics filling the room with the glow of ready lights.
“Clear,” she says.
Jameson is standing in the opposite corner. She meets his gaze. They hear shouting from the back of the house. Footsteps running on the floor above. “Let’s go.” Jameson says. She nods and follows.
~~~
Gold Team has been assigned to enter the empty quarter of the house, but Red Team is entering hot, so Lincoln centers the video feed from Chris’s MARC on the big monitor and follows him virtually as he explodes into a downstairs bedroom.
Inside, beneath the window, is a low bed, occupied by a couple, both of them scrambling to be elsewhere as Chris comes in on top of them. The bedroom door is closed. A man—naked, bearded, loose heavy black hair to his shoulders—spills out of the bed, rolling, coming up on one knee with his finger on the trigger of an assault rifle. Friday identifies him with a name tag: Hussam El-Hashem. The woman is screaming, protesting in Arabic, “La’a! La’a, seeboo fi haloo.” No, no. Leave him alone. Hussam gets off two shots into the mattress before Chris plants a boot in his face, knocking him to the floor.
But Chris doesn’t go after him. He loses his balance, staggers on the bed. Looks down. The woman is there at his side, hanging on him, one hand on his arm, one on his weapon. She’s dressed in a thin white shift. Her long black hair is loose, her dark eyes wide with terror.
“We will all die!” she screams in English. “All of us!”
