by Linda Nagata
I jump her, and while she’s fighting back, Crow breaks my neck.
I jump her, get the best of her, get past Crow—but before we can escape the building he shoots us both, because it’s better to call off the mission than to let me go, knowing I will expose their operation.
They will never let me go.
I’ll be a prisoner even when I’m on the spaceplane, because it’s not like I can hit Amity over the head and fly the plane myself.
So I do the sensible thing. I look her in the eye and say, “Tell me what I need to know.”
I want to escape, but I also want a chance to do this mission. Those two goals should be in conflict but they’re not, because right now there is no way for me to get away. That could change. My interpretation of Shiloh’s “managed chaos” is to keep things moving and see what shakes loose.
• • • •
We run through the mission, beginning with the climb into the spaceplane’s cockpit. Amity comes in behind me, watching critically as I strap in. “You need to be faster,” she growls. “There is no way to know what might go wrong at the habitat. If we need to exit swiftly, you must be prepared. Know how to get the harness on with one hand, in the dark!”
She drops into the pilot’s seat, her body language communicating a sullen anger out of proportion to my poor performance—and I begin to sense discord in the mission plans. Or maybe I’m not the only one conscripted into service?
“You sure you want to be part of this mission?” I ask.
The gaze she turns on me promises dire consequences if I don’t proceed with care, but I probe anyway. “Maybe you know something I don’t? A reason to call it off?”
Her brows knit in an indignant scowl that tells me I’ve got it all wrong. “You understand this conversation is not private? That both Shiloh and Crow listen to all we say?”
“Standard procedure.”
“Of course.” She turns away. “You would be used to it.”
“You’re not?”
“Only when I’m in the cockpit.” She raises the volume of her voice, declaiming to the ceiling. “But I don’t care that you’re listening, Shiloh. You know my opinion.” She turns to me. “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust your motives. I am the architect of this mission and you are not my choice to fly in the second seat.”
Her anger is cold. Mine is not as I consider again the sacrifice of my squad. “So why am I here?”
It’s Shiloh who answers, through the room’s speakers. “Because the mission plan was revised after we failed to launch twice. The first time, there were mechanical issues with the spaceplane and the flight was rescheduled. Then we missed the rescheduled launch because a ridiculous sequence of delays kept Amity from reaching the launch complex. It was clear to me the Red had shut down our mission.”
“So you decided you needed me.”
“Yes, and I was right. It’s your story. King David’s meta story. So we help you, and reap our own reward.”
Shiloh is confident in herself and in her vision of reality, believing she understands the Red well enough to run this ruthless gamble. She calls me King David. I see her as a would-be Solomon, endowed with the gift of wisdom and expecting a massive payoff from it when she’s boosted into wealth and power by the deus ex machina of the Red.
That’s assuming the story plays out the way she hopes. I’ve got a feeling she’s going to be disappointed—and the scorn on Amity’s face suggests I’m not the only one who thinks Shiloh is a little too confident.
“Let’s start again,” Amity says. “I have to fly home in a few hours. We don’t have time to waste.”
• • • •
That night I lie awake until late, rereading the article in my encyclopedia on Eduard Semak, and then moving on to a web of articles on failures and cover-ups in nuclear weapons security. It’s near midnight when I finally sleep, but I’m up again at 0400, disturbed by a noise I haven’t heard before.
It’s a faint, rhythmic knocking, like a toothpick tapping against a metal plate, just audible above the whisper of the air-conditioning. I don’t move. I just listen. The sound is coming from overhead. It’s probably a beetle knocking around in the AC ducts . . . but beetles don’t usually tap out a complex rhythm: Tap! Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap! Repeating.
Moving only my eyes, I look up, taking in the faint-red familiar glow of the ceiling lights. I see nothing else.
I stand up. Good time for a piss.
As if disturbed by my movement, the pace of the tapping picks up, becoming faster, more urgent. I decide it really is coming from the air-conditioning vent, so I step up onto the bed to get a closer look. That lets me peer past the louvers, where I see a faint amber glow. At first I can’t make out what it is, but then my brain gets creative filling in the shadows and I decide I’m staring at a robo-bug like the one that came after Carl Vanda in the courtroom. The amber light seeps from twin slots on either side of a cylindrical body smaller than my little finger. Caught against the undersides of its resting dragonfly wings, the light bounces down, defining the microdrone’s curved, needle-thin legs. The wings make the robo-bug just a little too big to fit through the louvers. The noise is being produced by one of its legs tapping frantically, working through the rhythmic pattern, but it stops before it reaches the end—and the network icon in my overlay goes green.
Again, it’s Joby’s program that launches first. The upload goes before I can stop it, and then a download comes in. That’s a sequence I’ve seen before. The memory surfaces. It was in the hangar, right before . . . what followed.
Panic kicks in. I try to cancel, but I’m not in control of my overlay. A program executes without my permission and seconds later an icon is added to my display.
It’s a link to gen-com.
Speaking with a handler’s calm inflection, Delphi says, “Shelley, confirm link.”
“Delphi. Link confirmed! My God, are you okay? How . . . ?”
But I know how: The robo-bug is acting as a relay. There must be a string of them up to the surface, and Joby’s program offered a way in.
“Status?” Delphi demands. “Are you injured?”
“No. I’m fine. I’m confined in a cell.”
“Are you shackled?”
“No. Get the door open and I can go.”
“Stand by.”
The network icon goes red. No connection.
I jump down from the bed and look around, look for anything I can use as a weapon, but I’ve done that a hundred times before and I already know there’s nothing.
I stand beside the door and listen.
There’s only silence.
I worry Crow might look in through the camera eyes in the corners of my cell. I don’t want to give him a reason for suspicion, so I return to the bed, lie down again, close my eyes, and try to slow my racing heart.
Joby sent his bugs to find me. He used his own program to establish a communications link.
I’m kind of astonished at that. Joby’s not exactly fond of me and as far as I know he isn’t part of Cryptic Arrow. But on that day I ran up the stairs—knowing I couldn’t escape, just wanting to get far enough to find an outside network—his program launched, uploading the data on my legs, along with GPS coordinates of where I’d been, because I forgot to turn that function off when we headed out after the Non-Negotiable . . . a security lapse that might just save me.
The faint glow of the night-lights cuts out, leaving me in total darkness. The whisper of the air-conditioning ceases. Electricity out. I hope the basement’s network nodes are out too. I don’t want Shiloh fucking around in my head.
It’s so quiet I hear my heart. I count each beat to mark the time. When I reach 473, I hear small-arms fire.
That puts me back on my feet.
The shots are distant, echoing off concrete walls. They come si
ngly or in bursts of three, with intervals of silence between. Several times, multiple weapons fire at once. I estimate five, maybe six, automatic rifles. Crow is earning his money now.
I want to know who’s out there. Who’s coming for me?
The walls tremble as a grenade goes off.
Silence follows.
I cross the lightless room, taking up a position by the door. If Crow makes it down here first, it’s a good bet he’ll come to kill me. Odds are there won’t be anything I can do to stop him . . . but I can still try to seize a weapon, go down shooting.
My network icon goes green again. The link to gen-com opens. “Status?” Delphi demands as I hear the sound of clomping footplates approaching, at least two sets, maybe three.
“I’m fine! What the hell is going on out there?”
“The building has been secured.”
“Is the basement network out?”
“Roger that. The only live network down there is ours.”
Relief sweeps over me, knowing Shiloh can’t reach into my skullnet to hit me again.
“Which cell are you in?” Delphi asks.
“The first on the left.”
Jaynie’s voice cuts in: “Got it.”
The thudding steps stop outside the door.
“Don’t jump me, Shelley, when I open this door.”
“I won’t, ma’am,” I say in a voice suddenly hoarse.
The heavy lock clicks and releases. The door swings open, admitting a slice of red light along with the smell of gunpowder and fresh sweat. I peer outside. Three shadowy figures look back at me, all of them rigged in armor and bones, and carrying HITRs which they hold pointed at the ground. Their faces are hidden by the black visors of their helmets, but I know them anyway. It’s Jaynie who’s closest to me.
Jaynie wasn’t in the hangar. She’d been evacuated to a navy hospital after the Non-Negotiable. I wonder if her arm is still in a splint, under her gear.
Flynn is next to her, the smallest of our squad. She’s got a tiny LED flashlight with a red beam clipped to her thigh pocket; it’s the only light source in the hall. Flynn was poisoned by bee drones when we hit Reyvik Biosystems. She didn’t make it to the Non-Negotiable, staying behind at the hangar with Shima . . . but she wasn’t in the hangar, was she? Shima had sent her on an errand.
I look at the third figure—
“Clear the doorway,” Jaynie orders. I hear her voice twice: directly, and over gen-com. “Step into the hall.”
I do it. There’s a faint creak and hiss from her dead sister as she moves past me into the cell. “Room’s clear.”
“Roger that,” Delphi says, while I take a shuddering breath and ask what is surely not possible.
“Nolan, is that you?”
He answers in his familiar, gentle voice. “Hey, LT. I guess you thought I was dead.”
If Nolan is still alive . . . have I been wrong all this time about what happened? “Moon and Tuttle? Did they make it? And Shima?”
Jaynie’s voice takes on a hard edge as she returns to the hall. “You saw what happened to Moon. He was gunned down right in front of you. So was Shima.”
I shake my head. I don’t remember it. “What about Tuttle?”
“Dead,” she confirms, turning to look toward the end of the hall. “Any reason to think these other cells are occupied?”
“No. I’ve never seen the doors open. I’ve never seen other prisoners.”
“Stay where you are while we clear them.”
The doors aren’t locked, and the cells are empty.
“Anything we need to take care of before we pull out?” Jaynie asks me.
I think of the mission to slam Eduard Semak . . . the mission I agreed to do, wanted to do, still want to do. Fuck me, anyway. “No. There’s nothing.”
“Hold position in the basement for now,” Delphi instructs. “Still waiting on an all clear.”
Jaynie responds, “Roger that.”
“Who’s upstairs?” I want to know. “Who are you working with?”
“Squad Two. Cryptic Arrow’s second field unit. We came in together against minimal defenses. The enemy thought they were safe, thought we couldn’t find them.”
“It was Joby Nakagawa who figured out where I was. Right?”
She goes still. A few seconds slip past. Then, “I guess you could say that. Course, it was Nakagawa who opened up a hole in your head that let the enemy walk right in.”
I feel an echo of the panic that hit me minutes ago, when a program downloaded and launched without my permission.
“Shima was watching you when it happened,” Jaynie continues. “Her farsights were recording. The video shows you falling like you were hit, but none of the blood on scene was yours. None of the shots taken were at an angle to hit you. The enemy got inside your head through Nakagawa’s access, and they brought you down using the skullnet.”
I scowl, struggling to remember, but nothing else comes. “They fucked with my short-term memory. All I remember about it is the smell of blood—lots of blood—and beams of sunlight stabbing through what must have been bullet holes in the hangar door . . . and being certain, absolutely fucking certain, that everyone in there was dead.” I turn to Nolan. “You were in the hangar. How the hell are you still alive?”
He raises his hand, touches the side of his helmet. “I got hit here. Creased. It was a bloody mess, a real Hollywood close shave. I was out cold for three hours.”
Bitterly, Jaynie says, “The squad never had a chance. The shooter was a robotic sniper, set up in another hangar. Delivered ten precision shots in seven seconds using a sensor system that could see through the walls. Programmed to gun down everyone but you. They wanted you because of your connection to the Red, didn’t they?”
“Yes.” Moon and Tuttle and Shima are dead because of me. “They’re the same group who hit us in the courthouse basement. They got a new merc since then. Changed tactics.”
“They don’t got him no more,” Flynn says, speaking for the first time. “Not if he’s one of them we met coming down. LT, I wasn’t no part of what happened in that hangar. I want you to know that. I wasn’t there only ’cause I had to drop off your package, that’s all.”
“Hey, take it easy. Who said you were part of it?”
“Everyone’s actions were evaluated,” Jaynie explains. “Mine too. I wasn’t there either. Both of us could have been conspirators.”
Flynn again, in an icy voice: “I’m no fucking conspirator, sir.”
“I never thought you were, Flynn.”
But she’s carrying a burden of guilt and my reassurance doesn’t help. “When I got back to the hangar, an’ saw what they did . . .” She breaks off, turns her helmeted head to gaze at the empty hall. “They gunned down Moon, sir, just to get him out of the way. They slaughtered Tuttle. I thought it had to be Uther-Fen that hit us, an’ I swore I’d see every one of ’em dead.”
I swore vengeance too, but I traded that oath for a mission that will never happen now. The disappointment runs deep—and it makes me feel out of control, like I’m a windup toy: Point me at an objective, turn me on, and I’ll go after it.
Not this time. My rescue came too soon.
“What happened to us in that hangar . . . it never made the news, did it?”
“Hell no,” Jaynie says. “And this operation won’t either. Black Phoenix. That’s the mission name.”
Delphi breaks in. “You’re cleared to head out.”
We jog for the stairs. The first corpse we pass is just inside the fire door. “Flynn, give me your flashlight.”
She hands it over. I use its dim red beam to examine the body. It’s a big man. He’s barefoot, dressed only in shorts and an armored vest like he was caught sleeping when the hammer came down. His throat is shot out. Someone has laid him out neatly on his back, w
ith his blood-spattered helmet removed and placed beside his head, portrait-style, to ensure a clear photographic record of the dead. He has a sun-darkened Caucasian face with glazed eyes staring from beneath a heavy brow, buzz-cut silver hair, a crooked nose, blood from his mouth drying across a one-day growth of stubble.
I’ve never seen his face, but I know him. “That’s got to be Crow. He was always wearing a helmet and dead sister—but I guess he didn’t have time to rig up tonight. He was there at the hangar, Flynn. That was his operation.”
“Fucking merc,” she mutters. “Burn in Hell.”
One floor up, there’s a second body, this one rigged in an exoskeleton. Like Crow, this merc has been turned faceup, the helmet placed near the head. The Silent One, judging by the body size. I shine my light on the face, but I still can’t tell if this was a man or a woman. Someone less sortable, maybe. It’s a youthful, smooth-featured, black-skinned face, with thick eyebrows and dark irises just visible behind half-closed eyes. There’s no hint of beard growth on the smooth, pale cheeks, but a good depilatory could explain that as easily as gender.
It doesn’t matter though.
I move on.
One more floor and Flynn opens the door to a parking garage, but there’s another body on the landing above, so I break away to take a look.
It’s Shiloh. She’s laid out like the others. Exit wounds have ripped open her chest. She’s dressed in civilian clothes and she wasn’t wearing armor. She never had a chance—just like Moon, and Tuttle, and Shima.
Nolan explains, “She didn’t go down when we told her to. She tried to run.”
“She believed the Red would be on her side.”
Hooking into King David’s meta story is a fool’s game.
I head back down the stairs.
• • • •
“We’re pulling out in three minutes!” a commanding voice—male—announces as we enter the parking garage. “Get your rigs and your weapons stowed now.”
The only light is what spills from the open doors of two cargo vans, but that’s enough to show me the tense faces of the Squad Two soldiers—ten of them, all strangers to me, and all dressed in anonymous charcoal-colored combat uniforms and black skullcaps. There’s a pause in their quiet, coordinated haste as curious faces turn in my direction—and I’m suddenly conscious of my neon-green prison attire, scruffy beard, and slovenly hair. They pretend not to notice. Nods and smiles greet me, and then they’re back to work, folding their dead sisters, bagging their helmets, and loading everything into the backs of the vans.
