CROSS FIRE

by Fonda Lee

  The lights went on in the basement. Donovan flipped up his night vision goggles to cut the oversaturated glare. “All clear.” Leon paused. “We found something. Something bad.”

  Donovan followed Cass and Tennyson cautiously into the basement. A wave of nauseating déjà vu rolled over him as soon as he entered. They were in a cramped makeshift laboratory, and he knew immediately who it had belonged to. Much like Dr. Eugene Nakada’s previous hideout in Rapid City, the walls of this room were lined with mobile cabinets and shelving units. Except for a few murky specimen jars and trays, the shelves were empty, as if they’d been cleared off in a hurry.

  In the center of the room was a metal table occupied by a motionless human form. A man, naked, clearly dead.

  Jet breathed out in a hiss. “It’s that guy—Reveno.”

  Alexander Reveno—one of the victims Tate had mentioned in the briefing, the one whose body hadn’t been found. Until now. Reluctantly, Donovan approached the table. The line-and-dot engineer-in-erze markings on the corpse’s hands stood out against ashen skin. Donovan’s eyes drifted upward and his guts lurched. Reveno was missing the top of his head. An entire section of his scalp and skull had been removed like a cap, exposing the gelatinous pale pink folds of his brain. A map of wires and what appeared to be metal probes were attached to the cerebral tissue like a circuit board; they snaked to a machine with a display screen and control panel.

  “Sweet erze. What were they doing to him?” Jet reached out and touched a control knob on the machine’s panel. Reveno’s exocel rippled sluggishly to life down the left side of his body, like a dead limb flopping under electrical stimulation. Jet jerked back at the sight.

  Lucius and Tennyson were already handling the situation like professionals. Lucius had the camera attachment on his goggles flipped down and was taking photographs of the secret lab and the victim’s body from multiple angles while Tennyson went through the cabinets and shelves, gathering anything that might be useful evidence. Cass and Leon had gone back up the stairs. Donovan could hear them on the floor above, going through the house once more for anything worth seizing. Donovan knew he ought to get moving as well, ought to start doing something productive to help salvage the mission—but he felt uncertain and paralyzed, unable to stop staring at the mutilated body on the table.

  Thad and Vic came down the stairs. “It’s not pretty,” Jet warned them. Vic’s eyes went wide and she turned away quickly, stifling a gag. Donovan felt a bit like throwing up himself. Soldiers-in-erze were hardly strangers to violence, but this dead exo was different—grisly and clinical.

  “Hey.” Jet put a hand on Donovan’s shoulder and turned him aside forcibly. Donovan gazed into the grim set of his partner’s face; this whole thing brought up painful memories for Jet too.

  Even Thad took a second to get his bearings back. When he spoke, there was restrained anger and frustration in his normally imperturbable voice. “Gather intelligence and be back at the bird in ten.” It was clear that the sapes they’d been tasked to apprehend tonight were nowhere on the premises. Kevin Warde had slipped free—again. Thad toggled his transmitter, reporting directly to Commander Tate as he stomped heavily back up the stairs. “Command, we’ve got bad news.”

  “The mission was compromised,” Thad declared. “The sapes were definitely there—hours, maybe minutes, before we arrived. Someone tipped them off.”

  In the darkness of the T15’s cabin, Donovan felt rather than saw the round of shadowy nods. The mood on the short trip back to the Round was the opposite of the focused, anticipatory optimism on the flight out. Everyone was palpably deflated by the failure. Heads and shoulders were slouched; anger and unease warmed the stuffy confines of the stealthcopter.

  “Sympathizers in the Denver PD?” Vic suggested. Local police forces were supposed to cooperate with SecPac, but it was common knowledge that the relationship between soldiers-in-erze and civilian law enforcement was often less than friendly. Cops usually weren’t Hardened. Some were corrupt, helping Sapience by overlooking their activities or tipping them off about SecPac operations.

  “It can’t have been the DPD,” Thad insisted. “We gave them minimal notice of the raid, and no specifics. The sapes knew exactly where we were going to be, and they had enough time to wire a basement full of explosives just for us. We’re lucky to all be alive right now.” Thad’s eyes were no doubt on Donovan; he’d be dead for sure if Leon hadn’t acted so quickly. “The only people who knew the details of the mission in advance were stripes.”

  There was a prolonged, uncomfortable silence. “You’re saying someone in SecPac gave information to the sapes?” Jet’s voice was sharp with disbelief. “Who would do that?”

  “Someone in Equipment Control? Or Mission Ops?” suggested Lucius. “They have advance knowledge of planned raids and personnel assignments.”

  “Or Dispatch,” Cass said. “They know where we are at all times.”

  “My sister-in-law works in Dispatch,” Tennyson said defensively. “The background checks and erze evaluations there are as strict as anything.”

  “They’re strict everywhere, but that doesn’t mean mistakes don’t get made,” Cass said. “Look at Nakada. He was in erze before he turned traitor.”

  “So was my mom,” Donovan said quietly.

  “Yeah, but … a stripe going over to Sapience?” Jet exclaimed.

  The tone of his friend’s voice made Donovan glad it was too dark for him to see the accompanying expression of revolted skepticism. He kept silent, fighting a woozy sensation in his stomach that had nothing to do with the motion of the stealthcopter. Jet had asked what kind of soldier-in-erze would betray information to the enemy. That had been him. Last year, Donovan had tried to help Sapience save his mother from execution. It hadn’t worked.

  Thad cut off the escalating conversation. “Look, we all want to believe that every person in the erze is trustworthy, even the ones who aren’t Hardened, but sometimes it turns out that’s not the case. It’s not up to us to speculate about who the snitch might be. We should leave that to Commander Tate.”

  For several minutes, the only sound was the low background hum of the stealthcopter’s engines. “This stinks,” Cass declared loudly and bitterly.

  A grumble of agreement traveled through the cabin. Donovan leaned his head back against the bulkhead and closed his eyes. His erze mates were understandably upset, but for Donovan it was much worse than that. He’d hoped to finish something tonight. Seeing Kevin and Dr. Nakada in SecPac custody wouldn’t change the past, but at least it would’ve stitched up a part of him that still felt like an open wound. The mission’s failure had dashed salt on him instead. He was certain he would soon be visited by nightmares of exos with heads sawed open. And Jonathan Resnick, anxiously waiting back in the Round for news that would bring him some measure of peace or reassurance—he wouldn’t be sleeping tonight either.

  There was more work to be done after landing back in Round Three: transferring all the photographs and evidence they’d carried back with them to SecPac Intelligence, unloading the body of Alexander Reveno, stripping off and storing their gear, and debriefing with Commander Tate. The commander was clearly as frustrated as any of them by how the night had transpired.

  “What you found tonight is entirely classified,” Tate told them. “Any evidence that Sapience has a scientist actively researching exocels with the aim of developing a weapon cannot become public knowledge. And it certainly can’t be shared with our zhree allies, not even Soldier Werth.”

  The already dispirited mission team of exos shifted uneasily.

  “I’m not telling you to lie to our erze master,” Tate clarified, lowering her voice, “but I am telling you that I won’t be mentioning it to him, and neither will you or anyone else in SecPac. Nakada’s work is a threat to exos, and I want to be sure that we are the ones to put an end to it—not the zhree. The last thing we need right now is to give the leaders of the Mur Erzen Commonwealth any more reason to renege o
n their commitments to humanity.”

  It took them a moment to gather Commander Tate’s meaning. The zhree colonists on Earth relied greatly on Hardened humans, but the High Speaker back on the zhree homeworld held a dim view of that partnership; it was one reason relations between Earth and Kreet were strained. Any weapon that could disable exocellular armor might be used as justification to put an end to the exo experiment altogether. The idea that all of them in the room—indeed, all exos alive today—might be the last of their kind, an anomalous, ill-conceived blip in history … it was so horrible to contemplate that armor rose on everyone’s skin and the silence grew even gloomier.

  Thad spoke for all of them. “Understood, ma’am.”

  “Nor do I want the slightest word of a security breach leaving anyone’s lips,” Tate ordered. “If there’s a mole in SecPac, rumors will spook him before we can ferret out who it is.”

  It was nearly dawn by the time Jet, Donovan, Cass, and Leon got back to the house they shared. Cass went upstairs to try to get some sleep—she and Leon were scheduled to be on patrol later that evening—but Jet and Donovan were working day shifts this month and decided it’d be better to try to stay awake and crash early. Jet started a large pot of coffee brewing and put bread in the toaster before setting to scrambling eggs. Leon came into the kitchen and sat down at the table with his sketch pad and pencil.

  “You’re not going to try to get some shut-eye too?” Jet asked him.

  Leon shrugged. “Can’t sleep yet. Too amped.”

  The other two exos nodded. The mission had been over too quickly; their bodies had been primed to expect a fight, but the tension hadn’t been given release. Donovan poured milk over granola, mixed in a tablespoon of nutritional supplement formulated for exos (with four of them in the house there was always a gallon-sized container of the stuff on the kitchen counter), and took it to the table, pausing to look over Leon’s shoulder and watch him methodically pencil-shade the ample cleavage of a nude pinup girl with the head of a cat.

  “Nice,” he said, and sat down with his breakfast.

  It was hard for Donovan to believe he’d lived here for five months already. Shortly after his father’s death, Jet and Leon had searched out this house—conveniently only ten minutes away from SecPac Central Command—and taken the initiative to move the four of them in together. It was about time anyway; exos in their late teens and early twenties typically lived in common erze residences of four to eight people. According to Nurse Therrid, reinforcing erze bonds was the best way to bolster one’s mental health. Donovan had been an urgent case, but Cass had needed support too after her combat injury and difficult recovery last year.

  The small house wasn’t much to look at compared to the state residence of the Prime Liaison, where Donovan had lived most of his life. Yet despite its modest size and the random clutter, the place held a sense of family and a feeling of home for Donovan that his father’s house—stiff and formal as it was, overly large for two people, and frequented by political staffers whom Donovan didn’t know—had never possessed. He grieved and ached for his parents, but he didn’t miss the house at all.

  Jet brought eggs and toast over to the table, and the three of them ate in companionable silence. Jet scrolled through the news. Taking a swallow of coffee from his oversized mug, he set his screen down on the table and nudged it toward Donovan.

  Donovan glanced at the article Jet had brought up. “Who Will Be the Next Prime Liaison?” In smaller type under the main headline: “Amid Protests and Delays, Zhree Leaders Prepare to Choose Country’s Next Human Ambassador.” A photograph showed three people standing together on the broad steps of the Capitol Building in Denver, which Donovan had seen from a distance mere hours ago. A tall, stately man in a blue suit and a smiling, middle-aged woman in a beige jacket, both with the bold, interlocking rings of the Administrator erze on the backs of their hands, and a younger, bearded man in a denim shirt, his hands conspicuously unmarked.

  “So you know who you’re going to pick tomorrow?” Jet asked.

  Donovan pushed the screen back toward his partner. He felt strange looking at the people vying to take his father’s place. One of them would soon be sitting in his father’s office, living in his house. “I don’t get to pick,” he reminded Jet. “The zhree zun will make the decision. They’ll want me to speak for my dad, to say what I think his opinion would’ve been.”

  “So you’re going to say Schiller, right?” Leon said, deadpan in his sarcasm. Marcus Schiller, the unmarked man in the photograph, was clearly a protest candidate, backed by the increasingly vocal and popular Human Action Party. Schiller denounced the entire process of choosing a Prime Liaison. He decried the lack of a general vote from the human population and the absence of strict restrictions on length of term. The only thing he promised he would do as Prime Liaison was eliminate the role of Prime Liaison.

  Jet snorted. “Well, I trust you to pick a new Prime Liaison more than I trust most of those politicians in Denver, and a hell of a lot more than the masses of squishies who don’t know a word of Mur or have never even met a zhree. You know exactly what it takes to be a Prime Liaison; they don’t.” He shook hot sauce over his scrambled eggs. “After tomorrow, you’re done with doing double duty as a special adviser, right? No more meetings in the Towers?”

  “Are you going to miss it?” Leon asked, switching to a finer pencil. He’d abandoned work on the cat-headed temptress in favor of an equally buxom centaur. “Being in on the important political decisions? Ever wish you were marked with rings instead of stripes?”

  Donovan shook his head at once. “Hell no. The country needs a real Prime Liaison.” The assassination of Dominick Reyes had left a vital role empty at a difficult time. Despite Donovan’s protests, Administrator Seir had made him an interim adviser to the zhree zun, a position that should’ve lasted only two or three months but, given the political gridlock in Denver, had stretched into over six—more than enough time for Donovan to appreciate how enormous his father’s job had been and how deeply he was in over his head.

  An alert flashed onto Jet’s screen just as Donovan’s comm unit went off as well, vibrating on the kitchen counter. Leon tucked his pencil behind his ear and looked down at his own comm; they’d all received the same message. “What’s an erze inspection?” Leon wondered aloud. “Because apparently, we have one next Friday afternoon.”

  Jet’s eyes narrowed as he read through the entirety of the communication. “This didn’t come from Commander Tate. It came straight from Soldier Werth. ‘All active-duty, Hardened soldiers-in-erze in Round Three are to present themselves for ceremonial inspection by visiting Mur Erzen Commonwealth dignitaries.’” Jet handed the screen to Donovan, who’d leaned over to read it over his partner’s shoulder. “Sounds an awful lot like the High Speaker’s visit.”

  “We all remember how well that went,” Leon said dryly.

  Donovan frowned. “That was only last year. And they’re sending someone again?” Usually, decades went by between visits from Mur Commonwealth leaders. Earth was too remote and unimportant a colony for the zhree homeworld of Kreet to pay much attention to. Granted, the High Speaker had had his visit to Earth unexpectedly cut short, but if he or one of his representatives was returning to complete the aborted tour, then why return to Round Three?

  Jet muttered the thought aloud for all three of them. “This can’t be a good thing.”

  After Cass and Leon departed on patrol early that evening, Donovan settled on the sofa with his screen, intending to review his notes before the next day’s meeting in the Towers. Jet said, “I was planning to go over to Vic’s for a while.”

  “Okay,” Donovan said. “Or she could come over here, if you want.”

  “It’s our Hardening anniversary this week. A tough time for her parents, you know. I should go over there and bring some flowers or something.”

  “Right.” Donovan’s voice fell a little. “I forgot that was this week.” Ordinarily, a Hardening
anniversary was a minor celebration warranting a get-together with friends, perhaps a barbecue or a night out, but it had never been a happy occasion for Vic or her family. Vic’s twin brother, Skye, had died at the age of five in the procedure that had made them exos.

  Jet paused at the front door and glanced back. “You good?”

  Donovan pulled off the headphones he’d just put on and looked up from his spot on the sofa. “I’m fine,” he said. This was not the first time Jet had seemed torn between wanting to spend time with his girlfriend and being fearful about leaving Donovan alone. To be fair, there had been a couple of instances last year when Donovan had said things—about not deserving to be a stripe, about how he should’ve died instead of his father—that had freaked Jet out. With everything that had happened in the last twenty-four hours, it wasn’t surprising that Jet was looking at him with trepidation, but there were times Donovan resented his friend’s concern.

  Jet remained standing by the door for another second, then came back and sat down on the edge of the armchair across from Donovan. “I can’t stop thinking about the mission last night,” he admitted. “About how the sapes knew we were coming. Wiring that basement to explode—it wasn’t just about killing us. They wanted to destroy the evidence that Nakada was there, dissecting exo bodies.”

  Donovan set the screen down on his lap. Eugene Nakada’s daughter had died in Hardening; since then, the scientist had become obsessed with how exocels worked. “Digging inside an exo’s brain would be exactly his sort of research,” Donovan agreed.

  “We’ve been hunting Nakada for months, but he’s managed to stay one step ahead of us. We assume Warde’s protecting him, but maybe it’s more than that. I feel like we’re missing something.” Jet stood up and started pacing. “Cass said something in the stealthcopter this morning: Dr. Nakada was in erze before he turned traitor. Out of all the sapes in that house, he’s the only one who ever lived in the Round, who might still have friends here. Whoever the informer is, I think Nakada’s the connection.” Jet stopped. “We should interview his ex-wife again.”