New Praetorians 1 - Sienna McKnight

by R. K. Syrus

  “Can’t take that one back now, sailor boy.” Snakelips takes a sidelong measure of the new guy. “You got yourself squidinked.” Denbow’s SEAL trident tattoo goes up from his wrist to the back of his forearm.

  Denbow stares at Snakelips. She just keeps polishing the mahogany body of her customized sniper rifle. Maybe he’s not used to enlisteds side-talking while their CO is speaking. Tough for him. That’s how it is with them. Denbow will only have to endure it for a few hours. Then he can go back to Qatar and tell his buddies all about the most boring Army-led mission ever.

  Denbow’s move from Marines to Navy is curious. The Marines and the Navy are separate. Going MARSOC first did have one advantage: trigger time. Because of the type of deployments they get, Marine operators spend more time actually engaging enemies in sustained firefights than all the others combined. But at the end of the day, they are still Jarheads. SEALs get access to the highest-level missions, equipment, and intelligence. A transfer like that would have taken a lot of approvals and was a risk. If you washed out of BUD/S, you could spend the next five years scrubbing potatoes on the Aardvark. Denbow seems to have cherry-picked the best of all possible covert ops postings for himself.

  “As you will notice from the commander’s op sheet, which is in your HUDs,” Sienna continues, ignoring T-Rex’s eye rolling and Whitebread’s disaffected foot scraping, “he’s a highly decorated US Navy SEAL and qualified medic. He will be providing oversight for Central Command, in whose backyard we have graciously been allowed to play. On the flight in, he’s operations officer in charge. After landing, he’ll be second in command according to his rank.”

  “So, you’re a Hinge?” T-Rex’s close-to-the-red-line comment makes Sienna cringe. The slang term refers to the mythical lobotomy performed on sailors when promoted to lieutenant commander. Supposedly, they have a hinged skull flap through which half their brain can be removed. This procedure is said to be essential to the smooth running of the Navy’s chain of command. Denbow does not know it, but insubordinate rudeness from the Compton native means T-Rex is trying to make friends.

  Sienna looks at T-Rex. “You will extend him every courtesy as a member of our team. Right?” Sienna follows the rhetorical question with, “Hooah?”

  Snakelips Delicia Ortiz, Geronimo Nobu, T-Rex, and a glowering hulk slumped in the shadows in the last seat, Petr Whitebread Whitbrodsniewski, all look at the newbie. Denbow’s face and gear could have been copied from the military’s manual on the grooming and outfitting standard. He even smells like Navy-issue shaving cream and night-ops camo grease paint. Everyone instantly dislikes him.

  But their “Hooah!” in reply is genuine. Despite the interloper, they are together again. They are the Dogs of D Group again. After what seemed like a strung-out layoff waiting for Army couriers to deliver commendations, they are on the hunt. To Sienna, it feels better than good.

  Their pilot, codenamed Nightjar, squawks in. “Wheels up.”

  Bryan adds, “Final prep. Watch personal illums. We don’t want to break stealth until the last possible moment. Okay, gather in.”

  It was their year-old ritual, from back when it really looked like some or all of them would be frozen morguesicles left for another team to pick up off the South Polar glacier.

  “Seven out…” he begins to the grouped-up hands.

  “…seven home,” everyone finishes.

  The copter lifts lightly off the Lee’s deck. Sienna feels a measure of relief. Something’s just off about Stahlback. During mission planning, Roger mentioned his nickname. It finally makes sense.

  Captain Bobblehead.

  13

  ABOVE KHORASANI TERRITORIAL WATERS

  Sienna’s pilot takes ten tons of hovercopter sideways and lets it drop off the deck of the Lee elevator-with-the-cables-cut style. Her partially digested Air Force MRE lunch rises. That sensation is interrupted not by splashdown, but by a sideways, kidney-jamming g-force lurch. He is either warming up or showing off. Either way is cool as long as no one hurls. Sienna’s glad she has Nightjar on the stick tonight. He’s crazy, but he’s the Dogs’ kind of crazy.

  An exterior monitor shows the copter’s skin. Its surface polarizes and they become invisible above the darkness-shrouded water. The Dogs check each other’s gear. T-Rex does his duty as Sienna’s secretary. He syncs up Denbow’s mission scroll to update the data cache.

  T-Rex has received more pardons than a Catholic sinner with OCD. His persistent boundary issues center on private property belonging to people who own way too much stuff. Growing up in L.A. hadn’t helped. Technically, all members of Army Special Forces units have to be enlisted paygrade 6 or higher. The Dogs are exempt because they are a reserve (pronounced ‘refuse’) section. Before Sienna, when Delta and Green Berets got called away for real missions, their active duty included teaching PT drills and occasionally visiting local schools to urge kids to say “no” to whatever parents feared kids were saying “more, please” to.

  Even so, DoD has standards and the only way T-Rex can even have a job in the military anymore is as a specially commissioned steno-typist. He is Sienna’s personal secretary, Military Occupation Specialty Code #2115. As a colonel, she rates one. Rex even carries a dictation pad in his webbing next to a hook-bladed knife.

  Not only does he have a flexible sense of property rights, but he can’t keep his mouth shut. When he is around his best friend, Nobu, sometimes Sienna feels she’s in charge of delinquents. Ones playing with explosives, automatic weapons, and monofilament tomahawk axes that can hack the arm off a cyborg. Despite his promise to behave, it doesn’t take T-Rex long to start in on the new guy.

  “Say Mr. SEAL frogman, sir,” T-Rex says. “You realizin’ this a two-hour op at most. Looks like you packed a week’s worth of lunches.”

  Nobu gives his friend’s boot a small kick.

  “Uh, Lieutenant, sir.”

  Sienna noticed Denbow’s baggage. A stuffed three-day pack lies in regulation configuration under his jump seat.

  Denbow remains unfazed. “I like to be prepared.” He looks at the warrant officer’s name tag. “Mister… T-Rex?”

  The trickiest of the Dogs flashes Denbow a polite smile. For the L.A. native, manners are inverse. The more polite T-Rex is, the worse trouble you are in with him. “Have a nice day” is the equivalent of a death threat. She figures this quirk of his is an inversion of linguistics a much younger T-Rex learned from years dealing with foster-care bureaucrats and bleary-eyed, nicotine-vapor-inhaling, don’t-give-a-damn-anymore social workers. For T-Rex, politeness equates to apathy and the violence of the hateful, grinding neglect he experienced as a boy. He’s probably too downright shifty to pursue a career as a gypsy repo man. For some reason, he wants to be in the Army. Sienna and Bryan’s Army.

  “That’s one of the fly things about being the admin officer,” T-Rex replies. “I gets to be in charge of the stencil maker.”

  He waves a thumb toward the dark corner of the hovercopter. “See that big fellow over there? His folks came to America from Po-Land. And they were so po’ when they got off the boat they couldn’t afford no vowels for their name. So they got all consonants and stuff just jumbled together on their immigration papers. We call him Whitebread. Even signs that to re-up.”

  The specialist filling the corner of the copter takes the ribbing in stride. He reads a paperback by his helmet light.

  When the Rex mouth train gets going, it has nearly infinite track. Sienna could have put a cork in it with a small gesture, one an outsider like Denbow wouldn’t notice. For now, it’s okay for them to settle back into their rhythms.

  They have not all been together since Antarctica. Their return was followed by weeks of debriefing and reams of non-disclosure forms. Then, just when her team thought they were getting a cushy assignment in Europe, Sienna told them to pack kit for a fast smash and grab. The Dogs’ relaxing tour of France
, Switzerland, and the strange little country in between has been pre-empted by desert camo, sand, and the possibility of bullets flying at them. Sienna didn’t hear a single gripe. So let them pick on the Navy man, or each other.

  T-Rex zeroes in on his favorite victim. “Say Whitebread, wassu readin’? You finish all the comic books? Now you into novels and shiet? Man, I liked it better when you were all dyslexic illiterate.” T-Rex leans over and checks the cover. “KooYo?”

  “That’s pronounced Koo-Joe,” Sienna says. “It’s by a much under-appreciated military strategist, Stephen King.” Whitebread’s bulk and quiet nature hide a voracious intellect. He looks up like he has an idea and might as well have said it out loud. “And no, Petr. We are not getting a dog.”

  “But, we’re called the Dogs.”

  Snakelips says, “Alpha Dogs, por favor. We have company.”

  “Just don’t let Petr get started on George Martin,” Nobu says. “We’ll all be issued big-assed wolves.”

  Whitebread continues to argue for a pet. “So I thought, just a little one?” But seeing his idea is not gaining traction, the specialist slumps back in his seat.

  T-Rex offers advice. “Think a minute, Whitebread. Who gonna look after a pooch when you’re in stockade? Nobu? I mean, yeah, both sides of his gene pool likes dogs—well done and beside some coleslaw!”

  Geronimo “Gerry” Nobu is Sienna’s radio telephone operator and electronics expert. He has a Japanese-American father and Apache mother. As far as Sienna knows, he is no more prone to feasting on canine flesh than the rest of them. Besides sporting desperately spiky black hair and maintaining a Zen-like calm when dealing with malfunctioning equipment, he expresses his dual heritage by carrying both a short samurai sword and a modern tomahawk.

  Snakelips shakes her head. “Yo guys, time to target. Remember? The whole Sidewinder mission thing?”

  The woman who reminds the others they are not on a frat house field trip is Corporal Delicia Magdalena Ortiz. Somehow T-Rex found out the nickname her sharp tongue and occasional foul language earned her in Catholic girls’ school. Boca de la serpiente had, after a slightly bent translation, become “Snakelips.” It’s not a moniker someone who sports non-regulation knuckle tattoos reading “Who’s Next?” can really complain about.

  The Ortiz family was displaced and her father killed during the construction of the Nicaraguan Canal. A lack of patience, not lack of talent, makes Snakelips the second-best sniper on the team, after Sienna. Snakelips has perhaps the most common sense and certainly the largest heart of them all.

  “Good point, Snakelips.” Sarge Bryan checks the master displays. They are studded with electronics that control light-bending panels on the exterior. Through cameras and sensors they can watch a whole battlefield day or night and remain nearly undetectable. They need to maintain maximum stealth. They’re flying through airspace which is officially neutral but will change to hostile in a hurry if local air defense tags them.

  Denbow has some distinct habits. At some seminar or briefing, those may not have stuck in her mind. Here, next to her trusted team, their Navy chaperone is definitely the odd man out. The SEAL keeps his eyes focused front. On nothing in particular. Denbow’s file says he is six years her senior. The tight skin drawn over his jagged cheekbones makes him look older. She has a feeling that whatever his qualifications, he is no Dog.

  Then Denbow notices her, noticing him noticing nothing. Maybe the only reason he pipes up is to not appear awkward. “Full bird, huh?” the lieutenant remarks as he looks at her eagles.

  Sienna nods in his direction. If I only had a dollar…

  Bryan’s albino skin makes him a white shadow in the dark interior. His liquid-gold eyes probe the newcomer. “Hell yes, Lieutenant,” he says with pride. “Our CO’s the youngest Army colonel since Gettysburg.”

  She shrugs. “Technically, it was a battlefield bump. A jump-step after the regional Antarctic base commander he, well, he was unable to fulfill his duties on an ongoing basis.” Being frozen in a block of ice will do that. “And Roger was badly wounded. He had to take himself out of the fight.” Being nearly eaten by… something impossible will do that. Roger! Damn that was close.

  “Army mechBrains, those stubborn little buggers,” Sienna says shaking her head as though recalling a kid who just would not eat her peas. “You can’t bribe ’em, can’t scare ’em. Sometimes they just reject inputs from lower ranks without uplink override. Which we didn’t have on account of some annoying jamming.”

  “Right, the winterized cyborg hostiles,” Denbow says. “That was in your after-action report. The parts they let us see. But then the Pentagon brass confirmed you from butterbar to full bird. Unusual.”

  “They did,” Sienna returns. “And unusual is pretty much what we specialize in.”

  Sienna tries to figure out what’s underneath Denbow’s so-far blank exterior. The SEAL is probably reporting back to Stahlback, or tattling on them to some two-star fidget in Qatar. Not a problem. Once they are on the ground she will have full control. Until then, she has to play it cool. In the air, Denbow can scrub the mission for any reason or no reason at all. They’d have to return to the Lee. They’d lose their window.

  And let Asrah slip away again.

  Nobu, probably the calmest and most intuitive member of the Dogs, senses the need to humor their Navy babysitter.

  “Lieutenant, heard your SEAL element just got back from Africa,” Nobu says. “Some local gangster took over a clinic in Djoboro. Threatened to hack up the doctors and feed them to crocs if they didn’t get a ransom. Bet you SEAL guys sorted them out.”

  Denbow does not reply immediately. It’s like he’s mulling over what to say, or struggling with some horrific memory. Heck, in their jobs they all have enough of those to last a lifetime. Maybe Denbow just has a stick up his ass, and sans said stick, he might be a good guy. Maybe. But if how he reacts under pressure can get them all killed, maybe just isn’t enough. Not today.

  “Right. You heard that,” Denbow finally says, his voice barely audible over the whine of the engines to either side of the cabin. “What you didn’t hear, ’cause it was kept real quiet, is that the place in Djoboro they decided to hit was a Worldwide Help International facility.”

  That tidbit causes everyone to perk up and listen.

  “Oy, cagada.”

  “You’re joking.”

  “For reals, boss?”

  Even Whitebread grunts in surprise.

  14

  Speaking of the unusual. Someone trying to raid a Worldwide Help International facility is almost unheard of. For good reason. They are the colossal humanitarian charity that, when threatened, bites back.

  “Must have been some new terrorist kids on the block,” Sarge Bryan says. “Everyone knows you don’t screw with WWHI. Maybe they thought the hospital was an independent NGO flying fake banners to scare people. Or figured Worldwide Help headquarters wouldn’t notice before the local government paid up.”

  “The Serpens banners were real,” Denbow says. “And WWHI HQ noticed. Right away. Three of their doctors and eight infectious-disease technicians were taken out of their cots. The Dengue fever patients, just locals with no cash value, were the stars of the ransom-demand video. They got hacked up and fed to crocs.”

  “Don’t they teach these people anything in terrorism school these days?” T-Rex is indignant at the falling standards in insurgent education. “First class on the first day should be: Don’t mess with Colonel McKnight’s Dogs. In fact, don’t mess with anyone from North Carolina. Second: no matter how cute they is, forget about kidnapping any nurses from Worldwide Help. They’ll always jam you up before you know what’s up.”

  “So, Lieutenant, what happened? Did you and your squad sort them out?” Nobu asks. “Was it pretty hairy?”

  Denbow looks at Nobu, then at Sarge, then out the virtual window. “It
wasn’t anything,” he says flatly. “A WWHI contractor went in before SOCOM even got the call. By the time we dropped in, it was all over. They used a microSwarm with lethal effect.”

  “Just lots of bodies, huh?”

  Sienna sees a weird look crawl across Denbow’s chiseled features. Like he’s happy and creeped at the same time.

  “No. No bodies. A few smashed drones, and these divots in the dirt. Shallow, man-sized holes lined with muck. Lots of them, these… patches. Most had weapons lying beside them, nothing else. No bones. No DNA, either. We tried to ID who’s who, assuming these were remains of the guys who raided the hospital camp. We wanted to make sure the warlord was dead.”

  Denbow shakes his head. “No dice. The swabs just came up with random protein strings. It was like the bad guys and anyone not tagged WWHI personnel were digested and spat out. For a mile around. Exact. As if it was laser ranged. Inside, every military-aged person, even livestock and jungle animals, all got stung. Worldwide Help sorted it out. And they wanted to send a message.”

  “Worldwide Help contractors,” Bryan acknowledges grimly. “They work solo and sort hard.”

  Denbow’s face shows Sienna that he’s not finished. He’s deciding whether he wants to share something else.

  “And y’know,” Denbow adds deliberately. “That wasn’t the best part of that freak show.”

  Not even T-Rex has anything to say.

  “Our team was sent to recon. One boy from a village nearby said there was music playing during the, uh, activity. When the music stopped, so did the screaming.”

  Sienna knows about microSwarm drones. Each bot is about the size of a fat bumblebee. They are used to deliver medicine to remote communities and wild animals. Immunizing herds of reindeer against anthrax in Siberia, stuff like that. They could also be weaponized.

  The Base has an inventory of systems adapted to put down smokescreens; they work even in high winds. The Geneva Conventions outlaw use of swarms as offensive ordnance because they can deliver targeted pathogens and precision-guided chemical weapons. Of course, what really stops armies from using them to kill and maim is cost. Drone swarm modules are extremely expensive to manufacture and maintain.