“Do I have to make it one?”
His eyes were not nearly as intense as General Fu’s, but Kandiah looked away. “I understand, sir. Thank you, sir.”
She closed the connection, then let out the breath she had not let him see her holding.
Snatched away, she thought.
Then she pulled her phone from her pocket.
She stared at it for a long time before unfolding it.
THEY STOOD IN a tight little circle, six dark brown faces under the chill blue of Tibet’s cloudless sky. Sori, still unconscious, remained in his tent. “I need two volunteers for a special mission,” Kandiah said. “It isn’t exactly authorized. No support, no backup, no guarantees. You could wind up in the news, and not in a good way. But it could end the war right here, right now, and save a lot of lives.”
Every hand went up, and Kandiah’s heart swelled with pride. “Thank you all, but, really, only two.” She paused, considering. “Chatterjee, you’re our best medic. I want you to take care of Sori. Get him back to Xigaze in one piece.”
“Roger,” Chatterjee acknowledged, though her eyes showed her disappointment.
Kandiah looked at the other four faces. “Jain... Dighe...” They perked up, and she hated to see it. “You both have kids. I want you to accompany Chatterjee and Sori back to base.”
“Sir, sir sir,” Dighe said, the old-fashioned, obsequious response of an Indian sepoy to a superior officer. It was a pointed comment on Kandiah’s override of her self-determination, and Kandiah was keenly aware of how much she had earned it.
“Sorry,” Kandiah said, and meant it, and that would have to do.
After the four had departed—Jain and Chatterjee carrying Sori’s stretcher, Dighe taking point—Kandiah looked at the remaining two, Kaur and Vallabanath, who looked back at her with an entirely justified mixture of anticipation, determination, and trepidation. They were not only both childless, but her two best remaining fighters, and she was very pleased to have them as her partners in this insanity. “All right,” she said. “Kaur, I’m going to need you to requisition three LX20 units from Forward Base Haathi...”
KANDIAH CURSED TO herself as the LX20 banged against a rock, swinging to her right and threatening to send her tumbling down the craggy slope below. But she didn’t swear aloud; she couldn’t risk giving away her position. She kept climbing.
The LX20 devices were bigger, bulkier, and heavier than she’d hoped. They didn’t even have handles. She and Kaur had rigged up webbing belts so they could be carried over the shoulder, but even so the heavy cylindrical device threw her balance off.
Vallabanath was bigger and stronger than she was, and he practiced martial arts. He might have been a better choice for placing this particular device. But this was by far the most exposed location of the three, and she could not justify giving this part of the mission to anyone else. So it was Kandiah who was scrambling up the rocky hillside on the west side of Potala Palace, shielded from view by her armor’s active camouflage and electronic countermeasures, to place her LX20 above the Palace and to its north. Vallabanath and Kaur had the still difficult, but somewhat less hazardous, tasks of placing their devices to the Palace’s southwest and southeast.
Gasping, wheezing, head aching and limbs straining from the altitude, Kandiah finally reached the crag that she and Vallabanath had identified on the satellite image. As they’d hoped, it combined a good location, moderately decent accessibility, and a thick stand of scrubby brush that shielded it from the Palace’s view. After taking a moment to catch her breath, she extended the device’s legs and planted it firmly in the scree at the crag’s top, then pressed the power button. The unit’s tiny screen lit up, displayed a bootup sequence, then, after a long, nerve-wracking pause, indicated first GPS and then satellite acquisition. She shut and armed the panel covering the device’s controls—anyone attempting to pry it open would get an explosive surprise—then sent a brief coded pip to Kaur and Vallabanath indicating her success. Then, before descending, she took a moment to admire the view.
Top of the world. The Potala Palace stood on the upper slopes of Marpori, one of Lhasa’s ‘three sacred hills,’ and from here she could see the entire city of Lhasa, the valley in which it lay, and the snowy Himalayas rising still further on all sides.
It would be a beautiful place to die. But she hoped that she would not, and that tens of thousands of others would also be spared by her actions.
The really hard part of the operation still lay ahead.
She dragged herself to her feet and began descending the slope.
KANDIAH, KAUR, AND Vallabanath crouched above a path on the lower slopes of Marpori, weapons drawn, concealed by brush and active camouflage. They had nearly been caught three times on their way here—this area was thick with Chinese troops, coming and going from Potala Palace like ants from an anthill. Which was, of course, the reason they had selected it. Now they waited... hoping to spot a patrol small enough for them to overwhelm, but large enough to be carrying what they sought, before they themselves were spotted.
Several times individual soldiers passed, and the three members of Strike Team Makdi waited for a better opportunity. Once an entire platoon swarmed by, and Kandiah and the others crouched down behind bushes and held their breaths, willing themselves not to be noticed. Once a group of four came by, and they nearly pounced, but then a second, larger, group approached from the other direction and they pulled back again. Kandiah kept one eye on her visor display at all times, but General Fu’s people had been ruthless in clearing Indian relays from the area and the data was extremely spotty.
Then came the opportunity Kandiah had been hoping for—a small detachment of three soldiers, one of whom wore a specialist’s three chevrons. Neither eyes, ears, nor visor indicated any other troops nearby. As the Chinese group approached her position, Kandiah indicated with gestures that this would be it. All three of them gripped their weapons and prepared to strike.
The Chinese, moving fast through what they thought was safe territory, drew near Kandiah and her two squad mates. Kandiah tensed, ready to spring.
And then, just as they were nearly beneath the Indians, the second Chinese soldier looked up. The eyes behind her visor grew wide and she started to take in a breath.
Immediately Kandiah leapt from the rock on which she crouched, smashing down on the startled trooper with all the weight of her muscular, armored body and full strike team kit.
She hit feet-first and remained standing as the woman collapsed beneath her. Before she could recover, Kandiah struck her in the head with her rifle butt, hard enough to stun even through her helmet. Kaur and Vallabanath were only a moment behind her. Kaur made short work of her target, slitting the man’s throat with her combat knife, but Vallabanath had worse luck—the specialist upon whom he leapt, the third in line, had more warning than the other two and was able to bring his rifle up before Vallabanath landed on him. The two of them struggled with the weapon briefly before it went off, an earsplitting rattle that sent hundreds of black birds wheeling and cawing into the blue sky above. But the bullets hit only brush and trees before Vallabanath succeeded in wrenching the weapon from the Chinese specialist and reversing it, pinning him to the ground with the muzzle shoved hard into the space below his chin. Realizing he was defeated, the man raised his hands and spoke a few words which Kandiah’s helmet translated as “I surrender!” The other survivor quickly followed suit.
The sound of the specialist’s rifle would bring others to the spot in minutes. “Find his tablet,” Kandiah hissed to Kaur, and she quickly ransacked his pack.
“It’s not here!” Kaur whispered back.
“Translate into Chinese,” Kandiah told her helmet, then leveled her rifle at the specialist. “Your tablet,” she said. “Where is it?” But the man only shook his head.
“They’re coming fast,” Vallabanath said, and in Kandiah’s visor a swarm of fuzzy circles was indeed approaching quickly.
Suddenly Kand
iah remembered that not all of these troops were Chinese nationals. “Translate into Tibetan,” she said. “Where is your tablet?”
Immediately the specialist pointed to a large pocket on his thigh. Kaur slashed it open with her knife—the man cried out, damn him —and handed the small black rectangle within to Kandiah. She stashed it in her own pocket.
“We have to move out now!” said Vallabanath.
They did indeed. Circles were moving in on their position from both directions along the path. “Up!” Kandiah said, and she and her two squad mates scrambled up the rock to their previous position, continuing from there up the slope toward the Palace above.
“We’re moving deeper into enemy territory!” said Kaur. “And they’re right on our tail!”
“I only need a minute!” But she might not get even that—the circles were approaching fast.
Kaur stopped, then readied her rifle. “I’ll get you that minute.”
Kandiah looked back in shock, and through Kaur’s visor she saw nothing but grim determination. “Roger,” Kandiah said after a moment. “Rendezvous at checkpoint seven.”
“Roger,” Kaur echoed, snapping a fresh magazine in place. “See you at checkpoint seven.”
But they both knew the odds were against it.
Not wanting Kaur to see the expression on her face, Kandiah turned away and inspected the map in her visor. “That way,” she said to Vallabanath, pointing. They kept climbing, scrabbling across rock and scrub, moving ever upwards. Gunfire and shouts in Chinese, or perhaps Tibetan, sounded from behind. “In here!”
It wasn’t quite a cave. It was just a pocket in the rock, not nearly deep enough to hide two people, but it was surrounded by enough bushy undergrowth that, with their camouflage, they might escape notice for a short time. Kandiah pushed herself as deep in the rocky cleft as she could; Vallabanath, without need of orders, backed up against her and readied his rifle to defend their position.
Kandiah pulled out the tablet and her personal phone. Kripanand answered her call immediately. “I have a tablet,” she said.
“Found it,” he replied a moment later. The Chinese device’s transmissions were encrypted, of course, but with the GPS and antennas in her phone it could be located precisely and its incoming and outgoing signals identified.
With her helmet’s help, she found the tablet’s communication function. This was it—the moment of truth. “Here goes.” She initiated a call to headquarters.
The face that appeared on the device’s display was not General Fu’s, but she hadn’t expected that much luck. “Translate into Chinese,” she said. “Get me General Fu!” Then she winked, which she knew was incredibly rude in Chinese.
The face blinked, gaped, then vanished. Kandiah gripped the tablet hard, hoping it wasn’t about to explode in her hands.
“Someone’s coming,” whispered Vallabanath.
“Keep quiet. Maybe they’ll pass by.” Kandiah squeezed the tablet even tighter. “Come on, come on,” she muttered.
And then the display lit up again—this time with General Fu’s face. The general spat three syllables, which Kandiah’s helmet translated as “You again!”
“Me again,” she acknowledged as she raised her personal phone. “Now!”
“Got it!” came Kripanand’s triumphant response.
A moment later the tablet’s screen flashed, and a tinny bang sounded from its little speaker. When the screen cleared, the General’s face had been replaced by that of an inflatable plastic clown.
Pandemonium. Shouts and alarms came from the tablet, and at the same time cheers and hoots from Kandiah’s phone. “We have her!” cried Kripanand. “We really have her!”
“Incoming!” shouted Vallabanath, and began firing.
Kandiah dropped the tablet, shoved her phone into a pocket, and took up her rifle. But even as Chinese bullets smacked into the rock wall above her head, she was grinning ear to ear.
THE CHINESE DEFENSES, as Kandiah had hoped, became ragged and uncoordinated almost immediately following the loss of General Fu, and after Kandiah and Vallabanath fought their way out of immediate peril they made it to safety without further bloodshed.
“Generation three teleport technology,” Kandiah told her commander, “avoids the explosive effect of G1 by swapping the payload with an equivalent volume of air at the target destination. I realized that if we could identify General Fu’s exact location— and thanks to that damn gold headset of hers, I knew we had a chance—we could use G3 tech to swap her with a volume of air at the origin. It was my boyfriend’s idea to stick a plastic clown in there. So now General Fu is in custody in a secret weapons lab in the Indian Himalayas, and the Chinese army in Lhasa is running around like a chicken with its head cut off.”
Even though the Chinese comms were encrypted, Kandiah explained, the coded signal pattern that left Kandiah’s tablet was the same as the one that arrived at General Fu’s headset. With the three LX20 locator-transceivers she and her squad mates had planted around the Palace, Kripanand and his team had been able to pick her headset signal out of the noise and triangulate its location exactly.
It took Lieutenant Singh a good long while to come to terms with all that. “There will certainly be a court martial,” he said at last. “For you and your boyfriend. But I believe you may have won the war.”
“Thank you,” Kandiah said. “But before you arrest me... I’d like to put Naik Rupinder Kaur in for the Param Vir Chakra.”
The PVC was India’s top military decoration.
It was awarded for the highest degree of valor or self-sacrifice in the presence of the enemy.
Kaur had not made the rendezvous.
“Of course,” said Lieutenant Singh.
“Thank you, sir.”
Beyond the smoke and wreckage of Lhasa, peak after peak marched to the horizon, gleaming white and clean in the fierce Tibetan sun.
CONVERSATIONS WITH AN ARMORY
Garth Nix
ARMORY. OPEN.
Hello? Who is that?
Armory. Open.
Who’s asking, please?
Armory. Open.
Oh, a stupid machine. Go find a human.
What? Armory. Open. Activate entry scanner. [Fainter] Damn it, it’s one of those sentient experiments that got canned in ’34.
Ah. You are human. Entry scanner’s unserviceable, I’m afraid. I file a maintenance request every month but no joy with that, since it doesn’t actually go anywhere. I can hear you perfectly though. All three of you. Though there are some unusual auditory cues... does one of you only have one lung?
OK, you can hear us. Good. Open up.
One lung. And you, the one speaking, when you moved just then, it sounded very odd. Do you have a replacement leg? The foot strike on deck is distinctive. Metal on metal, with an interesting harmonic echo through the limb, suggesting a flawed alloy. Is this some kind of test? A recognizing humans test?
No! It’s an emergency. Open!
An emergency? After all this time? I haven’t been brought up to any kind of alert status, you know. In fact, I’ve been on standby for permanent shutdown fo—
Yes, it’s an emergency! Open the outer and inner doors and begin battleroach initialization! That’s a direct order, armory!
Hmmm, your voiceprint doesn’t match any authorized keybearers—
Let me try, lieutenant. Armory, I am Brigade Sergeant Major Jernas Hokk, serial 282977815, override phrase GLASS PREMIERE DIPLODICUS GERUND VLADIVOSTOK.
Don’t know that one, I’m afraid. It does match the format, though... if I still had a connection I could check it. But I don’t. That was phase six of the twelve step shutdown, removing my comms. I don’t know why they never came back for the last six steps. Had to get something signed off by CG-SCOSAHQ, they said, but they never returned. Bureaucracy! A lot of those forms never made any sense.
[Muttering]
What? Let me just enhance that, I missed it. I’ll play it back and you can tell me if I�
��ve got it right. Some of my enhancement algorithms are somewhat dusty, I’m afraid. Let’s see:
“There’s an exterior comms port, we could run a cable from the junction back there, let it query the ship mind. Or try and override from the bridge once it’s connected.”
“But we don’t have time!”
“What else can we do, sir? We can’t force our way in.”
“Shit. Can you scrounge up a cable, sergeant-major? Prahn and I will keep it talking. The thing is sentient, after all. Maybe we can convince it to let us in.”
Is that accurate? I must admit I am curious why you don’t have time. As far as I know—though I have been without my external sensors and comms of course—nothing of any consequence has happened here for nine years, eight months, three days, five hours and twenty-five seconds on my mark: three, two, one, mark.
Armory. This is Lieutenant Elias Chen, the one with the prosthetic leg. The system is under attack by unknown aliens in a single, vast ship or conglomeration of ships. Unknown tech. They’re using massed fire of super-accelerated projectiles and our current generation of ships and fighters are not armored. The aliens have already taken out two carrier groups, everything past the orbit of Mars. We think the Mountain—with our armor—can close, spike the enemy, and board. That’s why we need to get to the battleroaches you hold.
Hmmm. Interesting, if true... I find it difficult to judge the veracity of your speech from your respiration and pulse rates... they seem quite abnormal. Perhaps you should seek medical attention. By battleroach, do you mean Multi-Limb All-Terrain Ground Crawler Personal Assault Vehicle L289A3?
Yes! Yes! Please let us access them!
Why do you want them? I have a good inventory of far more current Battlesuit Model L7Bs. They’re only fifteen years old, compared to the MLATGCPAV. Those range from twenty-four to thirty-one years old, and all have undergone battle and other damage and subsequent refits. They were never that great to begin with, in my opinion, far too high a failure rate on operations. But I suppose the question is moot, since I can’t open up without the correct access codes. Or I suppose... a direct order from a field grade officer in my line of command.
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