The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  So far, no one is shooting at us.

  Behind the bridge, gray photovoltaic panels form a roof over an open-air deck designed to carry shipping containers. According to the harbor surveillance images, it’s empty under there. Underneath the container deck is an enclosed deck. That’s where the INDs are supposed to be—if we have the right ship, the right intelligence, the right luck. In any case, we’re pirates.

  Maybe Jaynie is right and the Red is playing puppeteer inside my head.

  Maybe it’s in all of us.

  Because this is fucking crazy.

  I’m soaked before I descend halfway. Blasted by the gale, I should be freezing, but there is so much adrenaline pumping through my system I don’t feel a goddamn thing except a fatalistic excitement. I’m flying with the speed of a superhero, with Harvey just a few meters away. Together we swoop in toward the port observation deck. Despite the storm, our pilot manages to briefly match speeds with the Non-Negotiable.

  “Harvey, get ready!”

  “Roger that!”

  The deck heaves, the cable pays out, and the distance from impact narrows with terrifying speed. I decide to hit my release early and drop the last meter, meeting the deck with a ringing, metal-on-metal clang just as the bow drops over the summit of a wave.

  Wasn’t expecting that.

  I hurtle forward into a three-strand cable fence that saves me from plummeting to the foredeck. A geyser of white spray explodes into the air as the bow plunges into the next wave. A shower of seawater falls over me, mixing with the rain.

  As the ship climbs the next swell, I turn. Six meters separate me from the bridge, where three figures in khaki uniforms are looking at me through the heavy blue-green glass, shocked expressions on their faces. Holding on to the cable fence for balance, I swing my HITR up and fire one-handed right at them. It takes six shots before my nonlethal ammo manages to crack the window. Harvey appears beside me and together we hammer the glass until it shatters into fat cubes. By this time the bridge crew has dropped out of sight and the ship is plunging again into a wave trough.

  “Harvey, come in behind me!”

  “Roger that!”

  One bound in the dead sister takes me most of the way. A second jump leaves me crouching in the frame of the shattered window. The ship hits the trough. The impact jars me out of the window frame. I slide on the hip joint of my dead sister across an instrument board, breaking God knows what switches, but at least I’m out of Harvey’s way. A one-handed grab at the arm of a chair keeps me on my feet as the tilt of the deck reverses.

  Our window-breaking fusillade has cleared the immediate area. The bridge crew has retreated—either down a metal stairway aft or behind a large central console, I can’t tell. There’s only one crew member in sight, crouched at the aft end of the console and marked as a target by my AI. I don’t ask why. My finger just flexes on the trigger while my brain is still processing an image of a woman in a khaki uniform, Caucasian, brown hair pulled back in a tight bun, maybe forty-five years old, holding a pistol in a two-handed grip aimed in my general direction.

  She’s not wearing armor.

  My round slams into her sternum at a range of under two meters. Her pistol goes off in a wild shot as the impact knocks her down. Her head cracks against the edge of an instrument panel. Screams of outrage and terror erupt from behind the console as she collapses bonelessly to the floor—but the others don’t show themselves or try to help her.

  Delphi is silent, too skilled a handler to intrude when the action is moving this fast. She must have silenced gen-com too, because I don’t hear any chatter from the helicopter.

  I let go of my death grip on the chair, stepping around the end of the console just as Harvey comes in behind me. She arrives with more grace than I did, vaulting on purpose from the window frame to land with a thump against the rubberized floor. Water drips off her clothes and off the gray bones of her dead sister. She grips her HITR in two hands despite the angle of the deck, swinging the weapon from right to left as she searches for a target.

  With my HITR braced against my shoulder, I round the console. Behind it are two more of the bridge crew, a man and a woman huddled together. They hold each other. Neither has a weapon. I hook an elbow over a chair to stabilize myself as the ship plunges again.

  Delphi finally speaks: “Identifications confirmed as civilian crew. He’s the navigator. She’s the helmsman.”

  Something’s not right.

  “Delphi, mission plan said we’d find four personnel serving on the bridge.” I use a whispered undertone so our prisoners can’t hear me, leaving it to gen-com to amplify my voice. “So someone’s missing.”

  “Checking. . . . We imaged only three when you landed.”

  Was there a fourth? Did someone rabbit down the stairway when they first saw me dropping out of the sky?

  My guess is yes.

  “We assume the fourth has reported in to Uther-Fen,” I say. “Harvey, secure the door to the stairway.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Behind me a door chunks shut. It’s not steel. It’s a bullet-resistant composite.

  “Bridge secure,” Harvey reports. “For now, anyway. We could use some backup, Captain Vasquez.”

  “Right behind you, Harvey,” Jaynie answers.

  I sure as fuck hope so, because we have maybe twenty seconds before the ship’s security personnel figure out what just happened.

  There’s also the problem that no one is driving right now.

  I shift my gaze to an icon that activates a voice synthesizer and address my concerns to the woman Delphi has designated as the helmsman, remembering to whisper so I don’t give away my identity by voice analysis. “You’re the helmsman, right? I need you at your post. Get on your feet.” There is a pause, and then the synthesizer echoes my words in a booming, authoritarian male voice, “You’re the helmsman, right? I need you at your post. Get on your feet.”

  The pair just look at me, too shocked by the artificial voice to make an answer.

  “On your feet!”

  “On your feet!”

  I hate the fucking synthesizer.

  “Don’t kill me,” the woman whispers. “I’ll cooperate.”

  The only reason I can hear her frightened voice is because my helmet amplifies it.

  She rises tentatively. I step back so she can make her way to the end of the console. “I’m going to straighten us out,” she tells me in a trembling voice.

  “No. Turn us around. Take us back to the coast.”

  “What?” She looks at me, wide eyed. I can see her thoughts churning. She has no idea what cargo this ship is carrying. She’s thinking that if we go back, there will be help. The coast guard, the US Navy, the port authority. She nods. “It’s going to be rough as we come around.”

  “Understood.” I turn to her companion, the navigator. “You! Facedown on the floor.”

  The floor is wet with rain and spray blown in through the broken window, but he goes down anyway. I kneel beside him and zip-tie his wrists behind his back. “How many people have you got on this ship?” I ask him.

  “Eight crew. Maybe twelve security people.”

  “The mercs don’t always make it official, huh?”

  “We are a security company. We are not a military ship—”

  “You’re the navigator, right? We might need you, but until then, don’t move.” I start to get up.

  “Who the fuck are you?” he asks. “What are you after?”

  “The nukes on your cargo deck.”

  He rolls his eyes to look up at me. “You’re crazy!”

  An arguable point, but not about the nukes, and I want him to know it. If we get killed, I want someone here to know what is being transported on this ship. So I ask him, “What did you pick up in Brunswick?”

  “Not much. Personnel. Some v
ehicles.”

  “What vehicles?”

  “Just some vans. I don’t know.”

  “Did you check inside them?”

  “The security people handle the cargo.”

  “Just so you know, the vans have nukes inside them. You’re delivering the leftover Coma Day nukes to Africa. I hope you get paid well for it.”

  “It’s just cargo! You killed the captain over cargo.”

  I turn to look at the captain. She’s sprawled unconscious on the floor, but I can see she’s breathing. “Your captain’s not dead. I hit her with a nonlethal round—but I’m switching out my magazine. The next person I shoot is going to die—and you don’t want to die for Carl Vanda.”

  Harvey takes this as permission to swap out her nonlethals too. She jacks in the real thing, then nods at the forward windows. “Our backup’s here.”

  I stand, to see Jaynie and Nolan beyond the bow, swinging crazily on cables as the helicopter fights the wind to get them to the bridge. But the ship has already begun to turn, angling across the face of the next swell so that the deck rolls beneath them at a crazy angle—and shooting starts outside.

  “Harvey, go, go! Find that!”

  “Yes, sir!”

  She vaults to the window, catches the frame with one hand, and crouches there, her HITR in the crook of her right arm as she tries to locate the shooter.

  The helmsman glances at me with cautious eyes, while on the floor the captain finally stirs. Harvey drops out of sight, and a second later I hear her shooting.

  We’re broadside to the waves now. The ship rolls hard, Harvey swears over gen-com, while out the front window, the foredeck rises under Jaynie and Nolan. Like the observation deck, the foredeck is fenced in by a three-strand cable barrier. Jaynie just misses swinging into it. She knows she’s not going to get a better chance, so she hits her release. Nolan follows. They drop to the deck, but it’s at a forty-degree lateral angle, and they slide.

  Nolan is halfway across the span of the foredeck when he gets an arm hook around a tie-down loop and jerks to a stop.

  Jaynie finds nothing to grab. She skates on her side all the way across the deck, under the cabling, and over the edge, catching herself just before she drops out of sight, with an arm hook on the lowest strand. She’s hanging on by that hook when we hit the trough. White water roars up around her, floods the foredeck, and for three seconds I can’t tell if she’s still there. Then the bow starts to climb, the water drains away, and I see her again with her HITR over her shoulder and a second arm hook gripping the highest cable as she levers herself up.

  “Holy fucking shit, Vasquez!” Harvey yells over gen-com.

  I think she speaks for us all.

  But I need to restore order.

  “Captain Vasquez, do you need assistance?”

  “Negative,” Jaynie growls. “Nolan, get the fuck to the bridge. Harvey, what’s your status?”

  “Just outside the bridge, waiting for our shooter to—”

  There is an eruption of gunfire. Then Harvey says, “That one drew blood. Can’t tell if it was a kill.”

  The ship has come almost all the way around. The swells are rolling in behind us now and the ride is smoother. Nolan uses the opportunity to cross the foredeck, disappearing from my sight below the bridge.

  “Nolan, you climbing up?”

  “Roger that, LT.”

  “Harvey, don’t shoot him.”

  “Got a better target, LT.”

  I check the feed from her helmet cam. She’s looking under the PV panels, at someone huddled by a recessed elevator door on the port side of the container deck. Harvey starts shooting, right through the aluminum corner that’s sheltering her target. Boots kick out, and then crawl away. “Damn it,” she whispers.

  Nolan finishes his climb to the observation deck. Jaynie is still below, advancing along the edge of the foredeck, gripping the cable, with the sea running in white foam below her.

  I scan the sky for the helicopter. “Tuttle, Moon, what’s your ETA?”

  Delphi answers, “They’re not coming.”

  “What? Why? We can’t run this operation with just the four of us.”

  Jaynie breaks in. “We are going to run the operation. We’ve got no choice.”

  “Well, what the fuck happened?”

  “The pilot called it off,” Delphi explains. “He felt it was too dangerous to approach the ship again, and he claimed he was running out of fuel.”

  The Non-Negotiable completes its U-turn. We are heading back to the coast. Wind is howling through the broken window and white spray is spinning off the wave crests, but the rain has lightened enough that I can see a distant object beneath the clouds, moving west ahead of us. The helicopter. A second later, it disappears.

  Nolan drops in through the broken window. “The pilot tried to pull out after dropping you and Harvey. Vasquez let him know that was not going to happen.”

  I wonder how persuasive she was, but I don’t ask because it doesn’t matter. We aren’t getting Tuttle and Moon. It will be just the four of us against twelve mercs who know the ship better than we do and who are sure to be better armed—but Jaynie is right. This is still a no-choice mission.

  A new sound grabs my attention. My helmet audio amplifies the rustling and creaking of movement on the other side of the closed door to the stairs. I see the door handle jiggle. “Back up!” I warn, gesturing at Nolan. “Back up, they’re going to blow the door.”

  I turn my back, putting my arms around the helmsman to shield her just as the grenade goes off. The concussion kicks hard. A chunk of debris slams against my helmet, leaving my skull vibrating, while searing heat rolls around me. I shove the helmsman to the floor, then turn, bringing my HITR to my shoulder as I assess the situation:

  The security door is hanging on its hinges, singed, its lock blown. The aluminum stairway beyond is empty, but at the bottom of the stairs are two armored soldiers, their assault rifles aimed at me. They could have lobbed a second grenade through the doorway and destroyed us, but that would have taken out the bridge crew too and damaged the equipment. It’s good to know they have some restraint.

  I don’t.

  My finger squeezes the second trigger of my M-CL1a, launching a grenade right between them. The brightness and the concussion of the explosion are filtered by my helmet. As my visor clears, I look again down the stairway. The walls are charred, but I don’t see any bodies.

  “Behind you,” Nolan warns.

  I spin around to see the captain creeping on her belly. Following her gaze, I see her pistol still lying on the deck. When I step in front of her, she stops. The helmsman is still crouched on the floor by her station, weeping, her palms pressed against her ears, while outside there’s a firefight. I want to send Nolan outside to help. I want to go down those stairs and pursue the enemy. But we have to stay with the prisoners. We have to hold the bridge.

  I pick up the stray pistol, check the safety, and drop the weapon into my vest while Nolan moves to the window. He has his HITR ready, but he’s not shooting.

  I pull the helmsman to her feet and return her to her station. Then I zip-tie the captain’s hands behind her back, finishing off with a push against her shoulder blades to encourage her to stay on the floor.

  My helmet filters what I hear, muting the sound of the firefight, amplifying a noise from below, like something being dragged. I make a decision. “Nolan, I’m going downstairs.”

  “What’s downstairs, Shelley?” Jaynie asks in terse syllables.

  “Half-dead merc, I think. Also, Blue and Gold. Fucking hope so, anyway. We need to confirm it, Jaynie. We need to make sure the nukes don’t go overboard on the way back to port.”

  The pace of shooting picks up and she doesn’t answer. Then the shooting stops. I scan my squad icons. Moon and Tuttle display as missing. Harvey and Nol
an are nominal. But Jaynie is yellow. She’s showing a rapid heart rate and declining blood pressure.

  “Goddamn it, Jaynie, are you hit?”

  “Roger that,” she says in a strained whisper amplified by my audio.

  “I’m coming after you.”

  “No, I’m coming in.”

  “I’m with her, LT,” Harvey says.

  “Get the door,” Delphi orders.

  I open the door to the observation deck, just wide enough for them to slip in.

  Though Jaynie is still moving under her own momentum, the upper half of her right arm is a bloody mess.

  “Hope the other guy looks worse,” Nolan says.

  “Damn straight he does,” Harvey answers, kicking the door shut behind her.

  “Harvey, Nolan,” I say. “Make sure nobody moves out there.”

  The deck rolls and Jaynie staggers. I catch her by an arm strut before she can go down. “Come over here, and sit.”

  “I can fucking take care of myself!”

  “Endorphins pumping, huh?”

  “Go fuck yourself, Shelley.”

  “Sit,” I insist.

  To my relief, she does.

  I get out my first-aid kit and go to work while Harvey and Nolan keep watch. Jaynie’s arm is broken. I hook her up with artificial blood and antibiotics. Then I clean up the wound and set the bone using an air splint. “You’re not going to pass out on me, are you, Jaynie?”

  “Like I said, Shelley. Go fuck yourself.”

  “I love you too.” I slap a stimulant patch on her neck. “But you’ve got to go back to work. Try to stand.”

  “I can fucking stand!”

  And she does. She turns her head, scanning the back of the ship. Her rig will hold her up; it’ll help her hold her weapon, and her tactical AI will help her aim it; it will even shoot if she lets it. She should be functional for a while. “Shelley,” she says. Gen-com boosts her voice, but I can tell she’s whispering through gritted teeth. “You need to move. Like you said. Secure Blue and Gold.”