by Linda Nagata
Bradley Julian is a Somali veteran. Tall and slender, with deep-black skin and dark eyes, he’s our quiet intellectual who tends to overthink things. Right now, he’s looking anxious behind his mask—something Tran notices when Julian turns to hand off the angel.
“Shit, Julian,” Tran says. “You’re not worried, are you?” His white teeth flash in a predatory grin as he takes the folded drone. “We got no need to worry. With the Red on our side, we are fucking superheroes. No way we can lose.”
“What the fuck did you just say?” I ask him.
The whole line freezes.
Tran looks at me, confused, concerned, as he realizes he’s in deep shit.
“Do you imagine yourself to be a superhero, Tran?”
“It was only a joke, Captain Shelley. I was joking with Julian.”
Alex Tran is skinny and dark-skinned, his African ancestry dominant over the Vietnamese. He’s got three years of combat experience in the regular army, a bona fide war hero whose vigilance saved the lives of every soldier in his platoon when a suicide bomber targeted their operation in the Sahel. But in our outfit Tran is a rookie, the newest recruit to sign on for ETM. That’s Existential Threat Management if anyone bothers to ask, which they don’t, because everything that concerns our identities or our activities is classified. This mission is Tran’s first as part of Strike Squad 7-1. He’s still learning to live in our peculiar, parallel world, part of a ghost squad so secret, even the army doesn’t know we exist.
Tran’s gaze shifts uncertainly to Julian, before returning to me. “Sir—”
“Never fucking trust the Red,” I warn him.
No one moves, no one speaks. All eyes are on me, everyone aware that the outcome of this confrontation will directly affect the mission—and I am furious. At Tran, at myself. Five minutes from our designated drop is a hell of a time to discover that I have failed to instill in my new recruit a clear picture of our situation.
“Operating on the wrong assumptions will get you killed fast, Tran. Just because the Red sent us here, because it assigned us this mission, that does not mean it’s on our side or that it shares our interests. That does not mean it will aid us. Assume otherwise, and you put us all at risk.”
I expect this lecture to induce a simple “yes, sir” and a humble apology, but what I get is an argument.
“Sir, I do understand. We operate on our own. We don’t expect help. We don’t ask for it. But we wouldn’t be here, we wouldn’t be able to operate at all, without oversight from the Red.”
One thing I’ve noticed in the eighteen months since I fell back to Earth: It’s not the recruits with a religious background who have a hard time wrapping their heads around the limited nature of the Red. “You’re a fan of comics, aren’t you, Tran? Of superhero movies?”
He wants to deny it. I see it in the shift of his eyes. But lies don’t work in our company because we all run FaceValue, an emotional analysis app that uses tone and facial expression to interpret mood and separate truth from lies. Tran remembers this, and concedes the truth. “Yes, sir. I am a fan.”
“I thought so. From now on, you will forget every depiction you’ve ever seen of all-powerful, world-eating AIs. We are not operating within comic book rules. The Red is not infallible. It is not all-knowing. Both its reach and its ability to react are limited. Its concern for our welfare is limited—never forget that—and it is not on the side of the angels, which means that neither are we.”
I don’t say it aloud, but I’ve come to suspect that the Red is not a single entity, that instead it has multiple instantiations not always in sync with one another.
“We all have our reasons for being here, Tran. Just make sure your reasons are grounded in reality. We are not superheroes. We are not God’s angels armed with flaming swords. We are just soldiers.”
Tran is still rebellious. “But sir, LT told me that on your last mission—”
“That the Red came through for us?” I spare a brief glare for Logan, who looks at me, teeth gritted, eyes angry behind his mask. “It happens,” I affirm. “We do not count on it. We do not expect assistance—because most of the time we won’t get it. Think about it. If the Red could control the situation, why send us in at all?”
Tran does as ordered, his brows knitting as he puzzles over my question. “You’re saying if we get into trouble, we have to get ourselves out.”
“Can you operate under that knowledge? Under the certain knowledge that if we fuck up, no one—nothing—is going to save us? Because if you cannot, I invite you to stay behind.”
Tran is shocked at my offer. Insulted. Infused with an anger that stiffens his spine so that I swear he grows a quarter inch taller. “No, sir. I am part of this squad. Maybe I don’t understand yet how the whole thing works, but we are fighting against fucking Armageddon. I know that much. I don’t give a shit if we’re on our own or not. I intend to be part of ETM for the duration.”
I nod, relax my shoulders, lower my voice. “That’s good to know. Now pass that fucking drone to Dunahee and make sure you are organized and ready to go.”
“We are two minutes behind schedule,” Logan warns.
I nod. “Helmets on.”
We become anonymous behind our opaque-black, full-face visors. Tiny fans kick on, but my thermal hood negates any cooling effect. I retrieve my M-CL1a HITR from my bunk and then check the icons rallying across the bottom of my display, one for every soldier in my squad: Logan, Roman, Fadul, Escamilla, Dunahee, Julian, and Tran. All of them green—nominal. I want to see them green when this mission is done.
Logan gets his own weapon and then squeezes past me to the front of the line, hauling his folded exoskeleton with him. Our dead sisters are too bulky to wear in the sub’s narrow passages, so we’ll rig up outside—if heat stroke doesn’t kill us first. We need to move out.
Logan is standing ready beside the torpedo room door. “Initiate the operation, Lieutenant.”
“Roger that, Captain Shelley.”
He cautiously opens the door into the passage beyond and steps out. I’m right behind him, my dead sister in one hand and my weapon in the other. Our sudden appearance startles two sailors. They disappear up a ladder into the control room, leaving us to make our own way through the sub.
We move quickly.
A navy lieutenant dressed in Arctic gear waits for us at the foot of the ladder that climbs to the hatch. “Cameras and sensors pick up nothing outside,” she informs us, her restless gaze shifting from one faceless visor to the next. “Not even a polar bear.”
“Conditions?” I ask her.
She turns to me in relief. Mine is a familiar voice, one she’s heard on a popular show that played a couple of years ago called Linked Combat Squad. She knows who I am; she might have figured out names for all of us. It doesn’t matter. At this point in the voyage, the crew will have developed a shared story explaining how we are a black-ops operation staffed by soldiers all reported to be dead—patriots, every one of us—and nearly everything about the story they tell one another will be true.
“Conditions are as forecast, sir. The ice pack at this location is estimated at twelve centimeters, enough to support your weight. Temperature is minus thirty-nine degrees Fahrenheit, wind speed between forty-six and fifty knots, heavily overcast, with wind-driven snow flurries.”
We are not going to be hot much longer.
I feel the deck tilt and gently rock under me; then a shattering crackle as the sub’s tower breaks through the crust.
My helmet picks up and enhances the faint voice of the sub’s commander, speaking to the lieutenant through her headset as he gives her clearance to open the hatch. She scrambles up the ladder, works the mechanism, and then shoves the hatch open, bracing it against the wind before sliding back down. I glance up at a circle as black as our visors. It is 1400 UTC. The date is December 23. The sun won’t look
on this latitude again for months to come, and at this moment in the long winter night, storm clouds have smothered even the starlight.
I focus my mind on a well-rehearsed command: Move out. My skullnet is trained to recognize neural patterns associated with common words and commands. It picks up the thought, translating it to a flat, synthesized version of my voice so that I hear myself say the words over gen-com. “Move out.”
Lieutenant Logan takes the lead. Leaving the folded frame of his dead sister, he is first up the ladder. Escamilla follows, then Dunahee, and Tran. They make a chain and hand all of the dead sisters up, and then a telescoping gangplank provided by the lieutenant. They disappear into darkness. Julian, Roman, and Fadul go after them. Then me, with the navy lieutenant coming last.
The wind hits with vicious force as I reach the top of the ladder. It’s like a negative pressure, emptying my lungs. I have to force myself to breathe as the ferocious cold ignites a searing pain in my throat.
My helmet adjusts faster than I do. The audio system filters out the wind’s roar, allowing me to hear the crunch of boots and a glassy crackle as the sub drifts against shards of broken ice.
As I climb out onto the dorsal surface of the submarine, my visor switches to night vision. At the same time, the satellite relay in my pack links automatically to our secure channel. A new icon flares on my display. “Confirm contact established,” the rich, soft-edged voice of my commanding officer instructs. Major William Kanoa used to be squad CO, but our physician refused to recertify him for field duty after a spinal injury. Now, he’s my remote handler.
“Contact confirmed,” I respond as I watch Logan and Escamilla deploy the gangplank—a twenty-centimeter-wide bridge to the unbroken floe. “We are on schedule and transitioning to the ice.” But then, because missions sometimes get scrubbed at the last minute, I ask, “We holding steady with the mission plan?”
“Roger that. Sigil remains the target. We need to know what’s going on inside its labs—”
I flinch hard as the hatch bangs shut behind me. PTSD. My heart rate spikes and I have to fight the urge to swing around with my HITR raised and ready to fire. I don’t want to scare the navy lieutenant as she steps past me to check the gangplank.
In the corner of my vision an icon brightens. It’s an intricate red mesh glowing against a black circle—my skullnet icon, its glow indicating a burst of activity in the mesh of wires in my head, signals sent to my brain to trigger neurochemicals that push me back toward a calm emotional center.
I rarely see the skullnet icon anymore and it irritates me to see it now. I don’t need a cerebral nanny always watching over me anymore. I’ve learned to handle my own emotions.
After a second, it goes away.
“There is a problem,” Kanoa says. His tone has changed; it’s become softer, more soothing. That tells me he noticed my emotional spike, and that irritates me too.
“What problem?” I ask as Fadul moves first across the bridge.
“Oscar-1 is behind schedule. Fuel issues. There’s going to be a delay in your extraction.”
Oscar-1 is Jason Okamoto, an ex-air-force pilot who has pulled us out of a couple of nasty situations. He’s scheduled to pick us up in ETM 7-1’s little nine-passenger tilt-rotor when we’re ready to withdraw.
“How far behind schedule?” I ask. Fadul reaches solid ice without incident. She unhooks from her safety line. Logan hooks the other end to one of the dead sisters. “Is he out of the game?”
“Undetermined, but we’re looking at alternate means if he can’t get through.”
“Roger that.”
I don’t like it, but extraction was always going to be the hardest part of Palehorse Keep, and I trust Kanoa to find a way to get us out.
I watch the folded dead sister slide down the gangplank, secured between two lines. When it’s safely across, Logan hauls the lines back and with the navy lieutenant’s help, he sets up to send another.
While they get our gear transferred, I make a slow turn, letting my helmet cams record a night vision perspective of the surrounding ice field.
We are four hundred kilometers north of Canada’s Ellesmere Island and only three hundred fifty kilometers from the North Pole. Immediately around us, green-tinted flurries of wind-driven snow skitter across a channel of smooth ice. But half a klick out, the floe becomes a badland of broken blocks heaved up and tumbled together.
Kanoa says, “The ice has been shifting. I’m sending a revised map.”
“Roger that. Any additional intelligence on the target?”
“Negative. No electronic traffic.”
Kanoa saved my life the night I returned to Earth. He pulled me out of the cold water of the Pacific and when I stopped shivering, he offered me a chance to make a difference, to be part of the ETM strike force, a ghost unit that executes missions determined by the Red. Sometimes it’s hard to forgive him for that—for giving me that choice.
The dead sisters have all been moved to the ice. The squad crosses next, each soldier hooking up to the safety lines before crossing the bobbing gangplank. By the time I cross, the surface has refrozen. It looks solid, though I know it’s not. I walk quickly but carefully across the little bridge, relying on the lieutenant to pull me out if I slip.
I don’t slip.
I reach the floe and unhook. The safety line snakes back, and then the lieutenant works to pull back the gangplank, one segment at a time. Around me, backpacks drop to the ice, and the dead sisters get unfolded.
I expand the new map in my visor’s display. It shows our target to the south-southeast, only five kilometers away. The sub’s sensors picked up no sign of enemy forces close at hand, but we are not safe. Even in this wind, a skilled sniper could hit us from five hundred meters out. Maybe farther. As I turn my head, the gale claws past the edge of my helmet in a skin-crawling key.
“Dunahee! Get the angel in the air.” I need to see farther. I need a realtime view of what’s out there. “And make goddamn sure you keep the angel on a tether.”
“Roger that, sir!”
Dunahee is already halfway into his rig, an operation made faster by Roman, who is helping him secure the cinches.
Rosanna Roman is our designated marksman. She’s as tall as Fadul, but more willowy. Behind her visor, her eagle eyes are blue, her hair light brown. On Coma Day, Roman’s unit was on the Korean Peninsula, hunkered down at ground zero under the artillery barrage of a flash war that the diplomats later excused as a “miscommunication”—meaning that the United States wasn’t quite as dead as some had hoped. Kanoa believes the incident was only a few minutes from going nuclear when a ceasefire was achieved 4.5 hours after the start of hostilities. That was too late for Roman: She spent the next seven months in a hospital in Honolulu, where she eventually “died” of her injuries.
I unfold my dead sister. The wind nearly blows it over. Escamilla is already rigged, so he comes over and holds it upright for me as I step onto the footplates. “First time I’ve ever rigged up in a gale,” I tell him.
“Yeah, always a new thrill with this job.”
Carl Escamilla is tall and broad-shouldered. There’s no softness at all in his sharp-featured face; there isn’t any in his outlook. He’s seen too much. He was a nine-year combat veteran recently home from the Sahel when the nukes went off. He got put on emergency duty, assigned to guard a military facility when riots erupted in the surrounding community. Families panicked. I’ve heard his former CO is up on charges for a massacre in which twenty-seven civilians who’d been seeking refuge behind the wire were gunned down.
Like all of us, he’s driven by what he’s seen, what he’s done. The cold fact is our world is seriously fucked up. Maybe ETM can help unwind some of that. Maybe if we do, the death, the suffering we’ve witnessed might be made worthwhile.
But who the hell knows?
With Escamilla helpin
g, I cinch the titanium struts to my legs and then my arms. I swing my pack onto the back frame. My HITR I carry in my hands. “You’re clear,” he says.
There is a soft, ritualized chatter over gen-com as the squad runs through the standard safety checks, confirming that each rig is properly cinched, with full power. I leave Logan to supervise, while I join Dunahee and Roman.
They’re crouched on the ice, Roman helping to hold the blade-shaped fuselage of the angel against the tearing wind, while Dunahee pulls a titanium clip from the angel’s belly compartment. A tendril of synthetic, woven spider silk pays out behind the clip; another half-kilometer is wound around a spindle in the angel’s belly. Dunahee hooks the clip to a loop on his chest armor. When it’s secure, Roman unfolds the angel’s narrow wings. Their upswept winglets are separated by a one-meter span.
I watch my display as the angel’s AI links in, its icon showing green, nominal. “Angel online,” I tell Kanoa.
“Confirmed: Angel online.”
A menu slides open in response to my gaze. I call up the angel’s video feed and get a night vision perspective of the trampled snow around Fadul’s pack. “Angel eyes open.”
“Confirmed.”
Dunahee takes the angel from Roman. I step out of the way as he angles the nose upward. “Launching drone,” he says over gen-com.
“Roger that.”
He lets the gale seize it. The angel shoots away, the thread of spider silk paying out behind it—or at least I hope it is. The thread is so fine that even with night vision I can’t see it against the ice.
Within seconds I can’t see the angel either. It’s lost to my sight against the low, fast-running clouds. But its eyes are open, looking down on the tossed and broken ice floe, and looking ahead to our destination.
“And there it is,” Kanoa says.
Deep Winter Sigil, rigged with high-efficiency lights, is kept lit like a downtown skyscraper on New Year’s Eve. What the angel sees are the reflections cast by those lights against the racing clouds.
