Operation Arcana

by John Joseph Adams

  “Don’t let her go.”

  “She’s dead, sir.”

  What did that mean, here? LaBerge had died here. Yuen had died. This had not happened to them.

  Whitebird rushed to Cobb’s side, went to his knees and grabbed for her, but though she was only inches away, he couldn’t touch her. A twist of geometry had placed her out of reach as she lay cradled in darkness, her eyes hidden behind sunglasses, but with the mangled flesh and shattered bone and broken teeth of her jaw exposed.

  He didn’t exactly see it happen. He couldn’t point to the moment, but the pliant geometry that held her stretched and shifted and she was suddenly away, lying on rocky soil among tufts of grass with a moon rising over sharp peaks, spilling a yellow light.

  Whitebird knew the place. “That’s home. That’s right by the outpost.” He looked up at Cabuto. “Go. Follow her. Follow her through.”

  Pale dust frosted Cabuto’s dark face. “No, sir. We’ve got two soldiers who need to go ahead of me, sir.”

  “Goddamn it,” Whitebird whispered. “I want you to go.”

  “Not before them, Lieutenant. No fucking way.”

  Whitebird stood up, furious. Cabuto was worth more than Foltz and Alameri together. He had a wife and kids. Arguing, though, would only waste the chance.

  “Foltz!”

  Foltz was still steps away, cursing his luck, but Whitebird discovered that Private Alameri had come quietly to his side. She looked up at him from behind her dark sunglasses. He nodded. “Go. And don’t waste your fucking life.”

  No hesitation. As Foltz came charging up, she stepped into the shadow and then she was standing on the other side, standing beside the body, an infinite distance away but still close enough that he could see her as she turned, looking up at the three of them gazing down at her. Then searing desert light infiltrated the shadow, destroying it, leaving only hardpan covered in red dust.

  “What the fuck just happened?” Foltz screamed, probing at the ground with the butt of his weapon and then hammering at it. “Why did that happen?”

  “Death’s Door,” Cabuto said.

  Foltz turned on him. “It didn’t happen when Yuen died! Or LaBerge! What was different this time?”

  “Leave it!” Whitebird snapped. He already knew what made this death different. “It just fucking happened. You are going to make it home, Foltz.”

  “Yeah? Alive or dead?”

  “Alive if you can hold yourself together. What happened to Cobb doesn’t need to happen again. It was an accident.”

  Whitebird regretted the words as soon as they were out, because they pointed Foltz to the truth.

  He backed a step away, eyeing Whitebird with a guarded expression. “The demons didn’t kill her, did they? We killed her.”

  “Friendly fire,” Cabuto affirmed as he turned in a slow circle, eyeing the terrain.

  “But it’s not going to happen again,” Whitebird added.

  Foltz nodded, though he was thinking hard.

  Thinking the same thing Whitebird was thinking: that Death’s Door opened every time they took a life . . . and not just a demon’s life. They knew that now, but it was a poisonous knowledge.

  “We’re in this together,” Whitebird emphasized.

  Foltz nodded again, though he did not seem convinced.

  They went on, deciding that it was more likely another demon would notice them if they kept moving. Or maybe more than one would come. There might even be three. Three would be enough to get them all home, and then Whitebird wouldn’t have to stay here alone.

  He’d kept his fear locked up for hours, but they were close to the end now and his dread of what that meant was rising up to choke him. Foltz would get to go home next, and then Cabuto. Whitebird would make sure of that. It was his duty. He swore to himself he would make it happen.

  Then only he would be left behind, left here, alone.

  And if the demons killed him, then what? There was no one to take his body back. What would become of his soul?

  He wasn’t sure he believed in a soul, but he worried over it anyway.

  A faint susurration reached his ears, barely audible over the crunch of their boots, the creak of their packs. He stopped and turned, scanning the plain—and this time he saw the demons at a distance, reflected in the heat shimmers so that their plumes of dust appeared elevated above the ground. One snaked toward them from two o’clock and another from four o’clock, two came from behind, and a fifth raced in from their left.

  “Ah, fuck,” Cabuto swore.

  Whitebird said, “Run.”

  Their packs banged against their backs as they sprinted for the rocks. Cabuto took the lead with Foltz on his heels. Whitebird followed. If they could get behind the fallen boulders with their backs against the black cliff, then they could make a defense, hold the demons at bay, reduce their numbers . . .

  But they were already too late.

  More than an hour ago they’d watched a plume of sand and vapor wander the plain before disappearing into these rocks. That demon was still there, waiting for them. Dressed in desert camo with an M4 carbine in its black-clawed hands, it crouched behind the shelter of a massive, angular boulder lying like a black prism on the ground. They were fifteen meters away when it started shooting.

  The first shots went wild. Then a burst struck Cabuto in his chest armor, knocking him over backward. Foltz caught a round in his hip. It spun him, dropping him ass-first to the ground. Whitebird jumped over him, jumped sideways, pulled a grenade from his vest, and hurled it behind the rock as a bullet chewed past his helmet.

  He dove for the ground. The grenade went off.

  The explosion blasted a cloud of dust into the air and shook the cliff hard enough that an avalanche of sharp stones dislodged, tumbling down with a roar. The body of the demon ignited on the edge of the debris.

  Foltz saw it and heaved himself up in an act of will that somehow got him to his feet. Under the incandescent light of the false sky, the blood that soaked his hip blazed red. He took a step and his leg gave out. He sat down hard again. “Goddamn it! Goddamn it, Whitebird, you got to help me!”

  Cabuto, a few meters behind Foltz, had recovered enough to make it to his hands and knees. He rocked back to a kneeling position, his weapon aimed at the oncoming assault. The storm front of demons was a hundred meters out, five plumes that blended into one, bearing down on them with a low whisper of sand on sand, punctuated by the sharp crack of arcing electricity.

  “Help me!” Foltz screamed.

  Whitebird ran past him, ran past Cabuto, and lobbed another grenade, heaving it as far as he could in the direction of the oncoming cloud. It went off ahead of the churning sand, with no effect that he could see. He looked back over his shoulder.

  The burning demon swayed like a balloon afloat on hot air, its feet just brushing the hardpan as flames spread over it in a blazing sheet: the prelude to Death’s Door opening. Foltz was trying to drag himself toward it, but for him, it was too far.

  So for the last time, Whitebird mentally updated the order of his evacuation list. “On your feet, Sergeant,” he said, rejoining Cabuto. “This one’s yours. You can make it if you run. Now, move!”

  Cabuto didn’t. He scowled past dark sunglasses while keeping his weapon trained on the oncoming cloud. “Take Foltz, sir!”

  “Goddamn it, there’s no time! Get on your feet and go!”

  Foltz had stopped his slow crawl. He twisted around, his M4 gripped in two hands. Past the blood-smeared lenses of his safety glasses, Whitebird saw fury and a sense of betrayal in his gaze. “Foltz,” he said, trying to reassure, “I’m staying with you.”

  But a decision had already crystallized in Foltz’s eyes. A calculation born of logic and desperation: there was still a way for him to go home.

  The demon storm was eighty meters out when Foltz raised his weapon, training the muzzle of his M4 on Whitebird, and on Cabuto, who was still kneeling with his back turned.

  Whitebird screamed �
��No!”—but it was already a meaningless protest, an empty aftermath to a decision made and acted upon. Deep in the pragmatic layers of his battle-trained mind, he’d concluded a calculation of his own. His conscience continued to wrestle with the choice even as his own weapon fired in a drawn-out peal of hammering thunder, dumping slugs into the midline of Foltz’s chest armor, stitching a straight line to his throat, through his face, shattering his glasses and his skull. His weapon flew out of his hands, tumbling, caught in a shower of blood.

  Cabuto lunged to his feet. He spun around, eyes wide with horror, his mouth a round orifice of shock as he held his M4 tucked against his shoulder, contemplating Whitebird over its sights.

  Whitebird shook his head, gesturing with his own gun at a black shadow seeping up through the desert floor, enfolding Foltz’s body. “Go.” Already, the body was subsiding into darkness. “Go, Sergeant. Follow him home.”

  “You killed him!” Cabuto screamed. “Why? Just to buy a way out?”

  Whitebird answered, saying what Cabuto needed to hear: “He was aiming to kill you. Us. We were his passage out of here. You saw him before. You know what he was thinking. I had no choice.” But that wasn’t the whole truth. “I fucked up and called it wrong. He was never a hero—and I let him think he could be left behind.”

  Cabuto looked like he wanted to argue more, but what was left to argue?

  “Go now!” Whitebird shouted, knowing that neither of them—no one who had been in that place—would ever really leave.

  The sergeant’s gaze shifted to the burning demon, transformed now into an arch of flame framing a transient passage back to the world. “You better get your ass in gear, Lieutenant. You better fucking run!”

  Cabuto turned and stumbled into the shadow, dropping out of Whitebird’s sight.

  The swirling sand storm was almost on him when Whitebird took off, sprinting for the fire. The demon-driven sand swept past him and then spun around, encircling him to block his way but he plunged through it, the grains hammering in tiny, painful pricks against his cheeks and pinging against his sunglasses, his helmet, his clothes. Demon figures resolved out of the red-tinged chaos, some armed with white swords and others with guns.

  Whitebird started shooting. He emptied his magazine at half-seen shapes until he felt the fire’s searing heat radiant against his face. Only then did he look at it, and within the encircling arch of flame he saw familiar stars spangling the moon-washed night sky of home—a step away or an infinite distance, he didn’t know.

  In the dusty air above his head the whistling passage of a demon’s white blade sounded, descending on him.

  He dove.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Linda Nagata is the author of The Red: First Light, a near-future military thriller nominated for both the Nebula Award and the John W. Campbell Memorial Award. Among her other works are The Bohr Maker, winner of the Locus Award for best first novel; the novella “Goddesses,” the first online publication to receive a Nebula award; and the story “Nahiku West,” a finalist for the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. Though best known for science fiction, she also writes fantasy, exemplified by her “scoundrel lit” series Stories of the Puzzle Lands. Linda has spent most of her life in Hawaii, where she’s been a writer, a mom, and a programmer of database-driven websites. She lives with her husband in their long-time home on the island of Maui.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Publisher/Editor: Jim Minz, for acquiring and editing the book, and to the rest of the team at Baen Books.

  Agent(s): Seth Fishman for being awesome and supportive (writers: you’d be lucky to have Seth in your corner), and also to my former agent, Joe Monti, the agent who sold this particular anthology but is now a book editor whom I plan to sell many other anthologies to.

  Cover Artist: Dominic Harman, for the wonderful, spot-on artwork.

  Cover Designer: Jason Gurley, for taking Dominic's art and turning it into a beautiful cover.

  Mentors: Gordon Van Gelder and Ellen Datlow, for being great mentors and friends.

  Colleagues: Ross Lockhart for a little behind-the-scenes editorial assistance; Myke Cole for answering a bunch of stupid military jargon questions for me; Kate Galey for vetting my Tolkien references; and Andrew Liptak for title consultation and steering me toward that great Eisenhower quote I riffed on in my introduction.

  Titlers: I had a hell of a time coming up with a title for this anthology, so I held a little title contest on my website. I got somewhere in the vicinity of 750 title suggestions (!!!), but big thanks go to J. P. Behrens, who came up with the winning suggestion of Operation Arcana. And Steven Howell, who almost came up with the same thing (Arms & Arcana), deserves an honorable mention for his suggestion of Runes of Engagement, which I also liked a lot.

  Family: my amazing wife, Christie; my mom, Marianne, and my sister, Becky, for all their love and support.

  Interns and First-Readers: Lisa Andrews, Britt Gettys, Bradley Englert, Amber Barkley, and Jude Griffin.

  Writers: Everyone who wrote stories for this anthology, and all of my other projects.

  Readers: Everyone who bought this book, or any of my other anthologies, and who make possible doing books like this.

  United States Armed Forces: Thank you for being real-life heroes and inspiring so many of our fictional ones.

  ABOUT THE EDITOR

  John Joseph Adams is the series editor of Best American Science Fiction & Fantasy, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. He is also the bestselling editor of many other anthologies, such as The Mad Scientist’s Guide to World Domination, Armored, Brave New Worlds, Wastelands, The Living Dead, and The Apocalypse Triptych (The End is Nigh, The End is Now, and The End Has Come). Called “the reigning king of the anthology world” by Barnes & Noble, John is a winner of the Hugo Award (for which he has been nominated eight times) and is a six-time World Fantasy Award finalist. John is also the editor and publisher of the digital magazines Lightspeed and Nightmare, and is a producer for Wired.com’s The Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. Learn more at johnjosephadams.com and follow him on Twitter @johnjosephadams.