The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  She.

  His wife, Thelma Sheridan?

  Though she’s a prisoner in Niamey, she’s also a hero to the paranoid types who want to get rid of the Red at any cost. Delphi said there are bombings somewhere in the country almost every day—but today is different. Today is the first day of Sheridan’s trial. It’s the day to make a statement.

  Vanda must have concluded the bomb that almost killed him was placed by Thelma Sheridan’s supporters. He couldn’t have been involved. He couldn’t have known it was going to happen or he wouldn’t have been in the building across the street. He came to kill me in person—a lesson to anyone else thinking of fucking with him—but he was taken by surprise.

  She is out of control.

  A car bomb in the street was a stupid way to try to kill me. The terrorists who did it couldn’t have known if the blast would be the correct scale or channel in the proper direction, or if I would even be in the apartment. But terrorism isn’t science. It doesn’t have to be smart, it doesn’t have to be logical. It just has to fuck with your head.

  My head is telling me I’m dangerous for anyone to be around, that innocents die when they get near me. Lissa died. Delphi almost died. I wonder how many blameless civilians are buried in the rubble that used to be my building?

  It’s not like this operation was even centered on me. Four bombs went off. I was almost an afterthought.

  I trot ahead of the fire engine to get away from its brutal siren. As I reach my block, I hear another rumble from somewhere far uptown.

  The count of the explosions climbs to five.

  • • • •

  Cars are still smoldering, filling the street with stinking, toxic smoke. Someone has draped a jacket over the face of the dead cop. I cross the street, to find seven more bodies laid out in front of my ruined building. These are uncovered; some of them are burned. Ambulances are on scene, their lights flashing but their sirens mercifully silent. I look for Delphi, but it’s my dad I see, halfway up the pile of rubble, wearing a now-filthy dress shirt and slacks as he works with three other people to dig someone out.

  A text comes in from Jaynie: No traffic allowed into city. Holland and Lincoln Tunnels closed. Bridge traffic one way only: out.

  “Shelley.”

  I whip around. It’s Delphi. Her face is dirt streaked, her hair dull with dust, her fingers seeping blood, and her clothes filthy. She eyes my bruised face, my half-closed eye. “Did you kill him?”

  “No. He got away.”

  Her gaze shifts to my dad as he and another man lift a concrete slab, sliding it farther down the heap, and she starts trembling. “At least he didn’t kill you . . . though realistically, it’s just a matter of time.”

  “Delphi . . .” I reach for her and she responds, hugging me, holding me tightly while I tell her the truth. “It’s going to be like this. You were at Black Cross. You know the kind of things Vanda-Sheridan is willing to do—and the kind of things we have to do too. And it’s only going to get worse. Vanda has more nukes.”

  She looks up at me, blue eyes even brighter surrounded by dirt. “You know that?”

  I nod. “I heard him. He wants to nuke Niamey. Shut down the trial. Shut down his own wife and the crazies who do shit like this in her name. So I’m going after him, but I’ll take you home first if you want me to.”

  This draws a bitter smile. “I don’t need help getting home—but you might need help getting to Wyoming in one piece.” She half turns in my arms. “Your gear’s over there. I got it out of the apartment.”

  “Shit, you went back up there?”

  She shrugs. “It took a few trips—your rig is heavy—but I wanted to get your things before the police closed off the building.”

  “You’re amazing.”

  She’s been helping with the search and rescue. That’s why her hands look like they do, but as the fire truck arrives civilians are ordered to clear out of the site. My dad climbs down the rubble heap, and sees me. We glare at each other for a second and a half, and then we embrace.

  “Why are you still here?” he asks.

  “I’m on my way out. You coming with me?”

  I’m not surprised when he shakes his head. “This is my home. I want to know who did this. I want to see them burn.”

  I nod. He has his own mission now, his own purpose, his own story.

  So it’s just Delphi and me.

  I text Jaynie: Can you get into Brooklyn?

  While I’m waiting for an answer, I get the first-aid kit from my pack and we all clean our cuts and bruises. Delphi glues the gouge on my shoulder, and I put on a clean but stale-smelling T-shirt that I find stashed at the bottom of my pack.

  After a few minutes Jaynie’s answer comes back: Roger that. VZ Bridge open.

  We’ll walk out over the Manhattan Bridge. Rendezvous.

  By this time, the police are getting organized. They come by, barking orders for us to move away, to move back from the ruined building. I turn to my dad—but what is there to say? Nothing that will make a difference. We trade a nod. Leave it at that. I should never have come home.

  Hefting my gear, I turn my back on the shattered rubble of his life and I walk away with Delphi beside me, pulling her battered suitcase.

  But I get only two and a half blocks before I decide my dead sister is just too damn heavy to carry. “Delphi, give me a minute. I’m going to rig up.”

  She looks unsure. “Is it legal to wear that on the street?”

  I don’t really know—but on a day like today, I don’t think it matters. “The cops are going to be too busy to worry about me.”

  The dead sister’s power levels prove good, so I strap in, and then we set out again. I’m not in uniform and I’m not using my helmet, so no one seems too bothered by my rig. Soon it’s clear we are only a tiny part of an exodus out of the city. It’s organized chaos and yet for the first time since I’ve been back home, I feel safe. There are strangers all around me, but they have their own problems. Only a few bother to comment on the rig, and all of those are just exhausted walkers wishing for their own augmentation. No one cares who I am, and no one tries to kill me.

  • • • •

  It’s late afternoon when we finally rendezvous with the squad. They’re at Trinity Park, waiting in and around two new SUVs—one gunmetal gray, the other light brown—and although they’re dressed in civilian clothes, I don’t think anyone who sees them is fooled. Their close-fitting brown skullcaps are a clear indication that not all is normal here. They’re also wearing the audio loops from their helmets, which will let them talk between vehicles.

  “You look like a gang of mercs,” I tell them as Delphi and I walk up beneath trees thinly clothed in new spring leaves.

  Jaynie flashes me a smile from beneath the rim of her skullcap. “You’re the one rigged in a dead sister. The cops didn’t try to stop you, wearing that?”

  “The cops are busy.”

  She admires my swollen eye. “You look like you got your ass kicked.”

  “Two against one.”

  She’s wearing a tight-fitting, long-sleeved blue athletic shirt that shows off her muscles and draws the eye to the elegant, alluring shape of her breasts. Her tight black jeans are equally distracting. It’s like looking at your sister and realizing how goddamn desirable she really is. Embarrassing.

  I introduce Delphi. Everyone shakes hands. Then Delphi slides into the backseat of one of the SUVs to change into clean clothes, while I get out of my rig and load up our gear. There’s not much room left in the cargo areas. Nolan gives me a rundown of what’s already there: the squad’s dead sisters, helmets, and backpacks; our squad drone, a.k.a. our angel; M-CL1a assault rifles, newly purchased; ammunition and grenades for the same; more grenades for distribution by hand; miscellaneous equipment; and enough meal packs to get us through the first couple weeks of t
he apocalypse. The weapons are surely illegal in every state, even Wyoming.

  “How the hell did Jaynie get her hands on this stuff?”

  Nolan says, “Shima set it up. We’re employed by a licensed security company now. Legit credentials.”

  “You mean you’ve got permits for all this?”

  “Everything but that piece you’re carrying.”

  I pull the dead cop’s gun out of my waistband and show it to him.

  “Primitive piece of shit.” He turns it over. “No electronics at all. Where’d you get it?”

  “Long story, but I need to get rid of it.”

  “I’ll break it down. Scatter the parts.” He checks the load, and then makes it disappear into an inside pocket of his jacket.

  Jaynie tosses me an ice pack, not yet activated. “Climb in. We need to move.”

  Harvey gets behind the wheel of the gunmetal-gray SUV; Jaynie is shotgun. I slide into the backseat with Delphi. To my surprise, Nolan comes in behind me, leaving only Tuttle, Moon, and Flynn in the other vehicle. He’s a big man and I’m feeling squeezed. It occurs to me that’s deliberate.

  “What’s going on?” I ask as we head out, with Flynn’s vehicle following us.

  Jaynie turns around to look at me—“We need to work some things out”—and I know we’re on dangerous ground.

  “Are you talking about you and me? Or the squad?”

  “All of us.”

  “Then let’s make sure we’re all here.” I’ve still got the communications software Anne Shima loaded into my overlay for First Light, so I use that to log in to gen-com. “Roll call,” I say, just to annoy everybody.

  Jaynie nods, and carefully pronounces her name, “Vasquez.”

  The others follow by rank:

  “Nolan.”

  “Harvey.”

  And from the other car:

  “Moon.”

  “Tuttle.”

  “Flynn.”

  “And Delphi’s here too,” I add. “Though she’s not hooked in.” I’m watching Jaynie warily; she’s watching me. I’m pretty sure I know what this is about, but I want to hear her say it.

  She gets right to the point. “Shelley, you’re too impulsive to serve as CO of this squad. If we’re going to do this, we need to set up a new rank structure.”

  I turn to Nolan, to gauge his feelings on this. He nods. “If Colonel Kendrick were here, it’d be different.”

  Harvey glances back over her shoulder. “Nobody’s better than you at the front of an assault,” she assures me. “No one’s going to forget Black Cross. But the CO needs to keep the full scope of the mission in mind.”

  “And to operate under known parameters,” Jaynie adds.

  “So this is about the Red? You think it makes decisions for me.”

  “It’s about you and the Red.”

  I glance at Delphi, but she’s staring out the window. Staying out of it? Or not objecting because she agrees?

  “What’s your proposed rank structure?” I ask Jaynie.

  Nolan says, “We voted on it.”

  “This is a fucking democracy?”

  Jaynie’s finely shaped eyebrows knit in a brief scowl. “It was. Temporarily. But now I’m CO, and you’re my second. Can you work with that?”

  Taking orders from Jaynie? I’ve done that before and I didn’t like it. I answer honestly, “I don’t know. I had an idea I would be establishing mission priorities.”

  “This outfit isn’t Uther-Fen. We pick our missions. Nobody is fucking telling me my priorities without my input.”

  “Yeah? Well, maybe I can get your input on this: that our first priority should be locating the rest of Carl Vanda’s nukes before he uses them on innocent populations, on our allies, on people who have helped us.”

  Jaynie draws back a little. Her eyes narrow. “Report,” she says. “Tell me what you know.”

  She makes it an order. I play along, summarizing the high points of my encounter with Vanda because I want her to know what happened. When I mention the cop, Nolan swears, “Ah fuck, is that the gun you gave me?”

  Harvey throws me a grin over her shoulder. “Nothing impulsive about you, sir! Arming yourself with a murdered cop’s gun. Hoo-yah! King David! I’d follow you anywhere.”

  “Harvey,” Jaynie warns in a voice endowed with the same quiet threat as a baseball bat. “Keep your eyes on the fucking street.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” But she’s still grinning as she turns her full attention back to traffic.

  “It wasn’t impulsive,” I say defensively. “It was the result of a split-second assessment. I had a chance to bring Vanda down and I took it.”

  Jaynie raises an eyebrow. “Did you kill him?”

  Same question Delphi asked. Same answer: “No.”

  I report on the street brawl, on what I heard.

  This earns me the skeptical look that is Jaynie’s signature expression whenever I’m involved. “You were barely conscious. You sure you understood what was going on?”

  She’s pissing me off. “Hold on. I’ve got video.” I avert my gaze and then scroll through my menus.

  “You’re recording things again? When did you get switched on?”

  “I didn’t get switched on. I turned it on myself after the first bomb went off, when we were still in the apartment. Just another one of my fucking impulsive moves.”

  I check to make sure I turned the recording function off. Then I skim through the video in my overlay, bracket a clip around the time Vanda is speaking, and extract it. “Who’s got a tablet?”

  Jaynie has one up front. She gives me the address. Delphi rejoins the conversation. “Send me a copy too. The clip first, but I also want the whole record.”

  When Delphi plays the clip on her farsights, the sound is isolated to her ears, but Jaynie has the volume turned up on her tablet so we all can hear. Mostly it’s grunts and thumps and hard breathing as I wrestle with Vanda; then I’m getting kicked in the ribs and Vanda is speaking. He’s breathing hard between words, but he says more than I remember, his voice hoarse and dry: “She got in the way of my operation. She is out of control.” His words get harder to hear as he walks away. “I’m putting an end to this chaos. Niamey is glass.”

  The video shows the approach of the fléchette gun, with buildings and blue sky in the background. Then, for a fraction of a second, just at the edge of the video, we glimpse Vanda’s partner, the man in brown. He has narrow features—a sharp nose, with prominent cheekbones behind deeply tanned skin. Opaque black farsights hide his eyes, contributing to a cold expression that vanishes as his thin lips part in a scream I don’t remember hearing. The clip ends with a spray of blood as I disarm him.

  “Shit,” Nolan breathes as he settles back in his seat. “You cut that one close.”

  Delphi doesn’t say anything, but she has her arms crossed, hugging herself tightly, her shoulders hunched.

  I return to the issue that matters. “Vanda has nukes.”

  My skullnet has tuned out most of the pain, but being reminded of it lets the pain break through. It shortens my temper. As Jaynie turns around again to look at me, I lean forward, getting in her face. “You get it, Jaynie? He has nukes and he’s acting like it’s nothing to move them around the globe. He could be moving them already.”

  “I get it, Shelley.”

  Her gaze warns me to back off, but I don’t. “This is our mission,” I insist.

  Delphi speaks up using her handler’s voice: cool and stern. “This is not your mission. It’s the president’s mission. This video needs to get sent up the chain of command.”

  “We’re not part of the chain of command.”

  “I still have contacts in Guidance. I’ll send it there.”

  I don’t object. It’s worth a try, but I don’t think it will work. “Somewhere a
long the chain of command, someone is going to make this record disappear, or hold it back until it doesn’t matter anymore.”

  Jaynie looks like she wants to take a swing at me—but she’s less impulsive than I am. “I’ll call Anne, see if the organization wants to do background on this.”

  That would be useful, because there’s not a damn thing we can do until we know where the nukes are stored. “You might also want to suggest to Anne that she forward that video to Ahab Matugo. Let him know what’s coming.”

  “I’m already on it, Shelley.”

  I punch the ice pack, blending the chemicals. Then I lean back and lay it against my swollen eye. After a few minutes I pull up the video again. I watch it from the start. I want to know if there was a warning sign, if there was something I should have seen, should have sensed that would have told me a massive bomb would soon go off in the street, killing innocents . . . but there’s nothing. God didn’t speak to me.

  Koi Reisman said it’s not my story anymore. The silence in my head is reason to believe her. But if it’s not my story, if the Red has cut me off, why does the plot keep looping back to me?

  • • • •

  We escape Brooklyn, and then take Interstate 80 across New Jersey. No one tries to stop us. I study the traffic, noting individual vehicles, wondering if any of them have been assigned to follow us.

  There’s nothing obvious.

  Connectivity is good, so I use my overlay to look for updates on the Manhattan bombings. Details are easy to find. Every aspect of the rescue work is being posted for public consumption, but analysis of the identity, origin, and motivations of the terrorists is almost nonexistent. Next, I skim through transcripts of Thelma Sheridan’s first day of trial, but after the opening statements, most of it is legal maneuvering. Finally, I follow up on Koi Reisman’s claim that a rogue nuclear device was recovered in the capital. There’s nothing solid, but there are rumors and informed speculation that a major terrorist strike was averted just before the start of our court-martial.

  “Delphi?”

  She turns from staring out the window. Her eyes are red rimmed, from dust or distress, I don’t know.