New Praetorians 1 - Sienna McKnight

by R. K. Syrus

  Latched to the flatbed of her new ride is not as much gasoline as she hoped, but certainly enough water for days. And in a milspec metal box, something else. Could it be the mythical satellite phone? She pulls it out and dusts it off. Cyrillic letters on the outside. It’s a Russian GPS unit. She hits the power switch, and a cracked, dirty LED screen lights up.

  ГЛОНАСС/GPS

  RA.645876

  IN.578531

  That’s where she is, down to the meter, as designated in New GLONASS grid codes.

  “Fat lot of good that’s going to do me.”

  For some reason, the numbers stick in her mind. It’s not even a NATO grid, just some proprietary system the Russians have been trying to sell to private industry. Could be useful to know her coordinates; maybe there’s a Luxphone in the cab. She flings open the passenger door. And then the only sounds are the rush of desert heat and the beating of two hearts.

  33

  A boy. Local, from the looks of him. He scrunches back in the bench-style seat behind the driver’s chair. Sienna checks his hands. Empty. Empty is good. He looks… familiar? She pushes the impossible flash of recognition out of her mind. There’s something else that jabs at her, something about the way he’s sitting. The big jacket he’s got on. It’s zipped up. In this heat?

  “Hey there, little man,” she says in Dari. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

  Most likely he’s a forced recruit or a hostage from a rival village. “Why don’t you come up and sit in the front?” Sienna gently reaches back to bring him to the front. As he shifts away from her, from under the hem of his oversized jacket poke two loops of twisted electrical wires.

  The only part of Sienna that moves are her pupils; they dilate and then relax. She’d been this close to live ordnance before. But a bomb vest appearing just like that, strapped to some kid, one who those two planned to use to attack some school or hospital while they drove safely away… this atrocity brings so many emotions rushing toward the already fragile dam holding her mind together.

  It holds.

  After trauma and torture. After killing and nearly being killed so many times in the past two days. By some grace, Sienna keeps it together, if only by a thread. And that strand has to be strong enough for just one more marvel. Just one more. It has to hold.

  For one more.

  That’s what goes through her head as it vibrates with the rushing thumping noise of her own pulse. What she says out loud, as though she’s just noticed an untied shoelace on the sneakers of the boy cowering in the back of the truck is, “Please, be very still. Let’s see what you’ve got there. Let’s see what they did to you.”

  Sienna slowly reaches forward. The kid is breathing fast. A sheen of sweat gathers above his upper lip and eyebrows. Slanted rays of the sun bore through side windows. They shine off the fine dark stubble on his close-shaved head. Gently, she examines, then eases down, the jacket zipper, revealing the device. It’s a webbing-vest apparatus. Way too big for him. The bomb maker probably sewed it for a man. A man who lost his nerve. And then they grabbed this child from somewhere.

  Somewhere not far?

  The village of Six Hills? In the confusion of the destruction she caused, who would notice a kidnapping? If this isn’t the same boy Denbow intended to kill, he could be his twin. She saved him then. She’s got to do it again. She is going to. Just once more.

  The explosive apparatus is padlocked, but only through the wire loops of the ammo carrier they rigged with explosives. The boy can be cut free, but that would mean reaching around his back. No way.

  From experience and everything the bomb jockeys have told her, each of these devices are unique. Not built to last. Volatile. The builder would have told them, the now-dead guys, not to lean forward, or to the left. She doesn’t know, she can’t know. She has to disarm it here in the truck.

  Most of the triggering mechanism is hidden. On the practice models at the Base, there’s normally a push trigger or dead man’s switch. It’s nearly always close to the arming trigger that sets the whole device hot. There is often a remote, in case the bomber gets incapacitated or chickens out.

  Or happens to be a kidnapped boy who doesn’t know he is supposed to die.

  Sienna takes a deep breath and tries to let it out smoothly. Like she’s glad. So glad just to be hanging out with her new chum in the middle of Khorasan’s spacious Wandering Desert.

  She forces a smile. The kid responds, a little. The trick will be cutting the enablers without closing any trigger circuits. The vest in front of her has too many wires sticking out. Probably just extra junk the bomb maker looped around and didn’t bother to trim off. She has to check each one.

  “What’s your name? If we’re going to hang out here for a while, I can’t keep calling you ‘little guy.’ No, you’re too old for that, almost a man.”

  The boy does not answer her. More troubling still, he does not look at her.

  “We’ll have you out of this in no time. Just sit still.”

  Slowly she pulls out her multi-tool. Sienna opens the smallest, least scary penknife she thinks will do the job. Then, covering it with her hand so as not to frighten him, she brings it forward.

  “Hold still, just like that. You’re doing really, really well. You know, my mom used to tell me a story. Whenever I was getting my hair cut or she was measuring me for clothes. It was about a beautiful butterfly that was sitting right on top of my head…”

  The sun’s slanted rays are a boot heel crushing their small metal box into the brick oven of the unpaved road. Every part of Sienna perspires.

  On the boy’s closely shorn scalp, moisture drips. Liquid materializes seemingly from nowhere and streams down over his quivering eyebrows, down his face, drip dropping off his chin. It lands, pools, and makes blotches on the dusty, olive drab jacket that looks ridiculous in this heat.

  Outside, across the desert landscape in the windows, the land has become impossibly still and hushed, as though it is watching. As though it is feeding on their life force. Hers and that of the boy.

  With skilled hands, ones that seem to move on their own, Sienna ferrets out the looped dead ends. Three in total. And the single trigger set. This device is a quick and dirty job. No wireless connection. Just a timer and push detonator. The timer is off.

  No use thinking about whether her changed body might set off the bomb. Her hands are the only tool she’s got that can save the boy. The wires are exposed, no extra conduit housing. Easy to trace their circuit. Good. Just one wire to cut. Just one.

  “…and if I moved, the butterfly would be scared and fly away. But if I held still it would tell me of the wonderful, far-off lands it had been to…”

  Just one…

  She brings the multi-tool blade up to the dirty, twisted wire. The crucial circuit.

  Just…

  She clips the twitchy, death-summoning copper ligament cleanly in two, twisting one end down and away.

  … one.

  It’s done. Safe.

  Now to find some bolt cutters or keys for the—

  Suddenly the boy flings open the side door and bursts out. Sienna grabs his coat.

  “NO!”

  He struggles out of it easily. The bomb vest remains padlocked to his narrow torso, secured over a drenched undershirt.

  He runs off. One, two, three, four, five paces over the sand. She lets go of the dusty jacket and reaches out—

  He explodes.

  Something she missed. The cut wires touching somehow. A lousy crimp job on the primer, anything could have been the cause. Or nothing at all.

  The result is instantly fatal to the boy.

  Shrapnel had been loaded in with the charge pouches—nails, bent screws, scraps from a metal workshop floor. The maker, to save resources, only loaded the front pockets with explosives.

  The concussi
ve blast slams the truck door shut, then rocks the whole vehicle so fiercely Sienna’s dazed body flies out the passenger side.

  The whole ruin threatens to tip over. The truck teeters above her momentarily insensible body like the jaw of some huge spring trap. It totters on the whisper blade edge of chomping down.

  Then the smoking bulk slams back down onto torn shock absorbers and burning tires.

  Sienna’s face is bloody; she can see it in the side mirror dangling in front of her. Pieces of glass string along her forehead like the front of a tiara. As soon as she can draw breath back into her lungs, she releases a hoarse cry.

  Just one, just one more, why couldn’t, why couldn’t you…?

  She runs out of words, out of coherent thoughts.

  Fingers tighten around palms full of sand. Hate for the men who did this. Guilt over another failure. Frustration at another innocent life lost!

  Her hands convulse. Sand superheats and turns into globs of molten glass. Like her anger, she cannot hold it any longer.

  With an anguished yell, she lets fly. Fat glass beads strike the hood of the wrecked Jeep like brittle-skinned pieces of a useless falling star. Pinprick needles burst upwards into a thousand prisms, they scatter through the air, gouging out a million colors from the pale, fading rays of the unflinching sun.

  The thunder clap of her rage. Its heat and the heat. Then one heart beats against the sand.

  34

  She speaks to an oddly shaped stick. Her words are thin. They pass through her ears and awareness without trace.

  “Hey bub, get outta my way! I got places to be.”

  She’s on all fours. No. She wants to be on all fours. First, though, she’ll do one elbow. Then figure a way around this stick in her path, and then, when she’s good and ready, she’ll get back to crawling.

  The day’s throat has been slashed neatly across at the horizon, and darker blue oozes up out of the wound. It is almost done, and she with it. Her forehead stopped leaking blood. The ringing just behind her jawbone has quieted. Concussive mementos left by the child-bomb.

  That seemed like it could have been the last. The one she wouldn’t get up from. Worse than any of the assaults during the village battle, more wounding than any bodily insult courtesy of the Chechen. The dead one, whose name escapes her just now.

  Even down there in that cellar, down there she felt freer than she did moving away from the destroyed truck. Crawling, then walking, now crawling again, away from the kid-sized crater on the other side of the road. That jail held more liberty than the empty horizon and the jeering sky. Back then, down there in that dank, foul chamber, there was something which had burned away in this crucible: a chance the good guys could win.

  Out in the open, she wants to escape. Alone in the Wandering Desert facing a stupid stick, jutting out of nowhere, she feels hemmed in. She’s got to get away from this crowd.

  Harrr.

  Irony buzzes in her skull like a fly in bottle. She’s dying of dehydration. She needs a deluge of water to come up and over her. Not to waste on drinking, she needs it to engulf her, to wash her clean. Her skin, so crackling hot and dry, the water touching it would cause each drop to hiss and bubble and burst into steam. Steam she could disappear into.

  This last wish, the mirage grants.

  ***

  A rushing noise. It grows closer. She can almost make sense of it. She knows what it is. A cool stream feeding a lake, deep and clear to many fathoms. Just out of sight. She can hear and smell that water. She arrives at a place that invades her mind, and there is no need to drink, she can just breathe in… the cooling…

  Sand and sun melt into rolling green hills. Fog shrouds sixteen-year-old Sienna as she stares at her father’s grave.

  A stoically carved headstone stands alone. The weather-pitted gray cairn is surrounded by highland moors so floridly green they hypnotize the eyes of outlanders.

  Kelley O. Langton

  Beloved Son and Brother and Friend

  Aged 21

  No mention of his being a parent on the headstone. But after a long search and a hack into Britain’s National Health Services database, Sienna had no doubts. The DNA on file proved Kelley Langton, son of middle-class Scots, became a father at seventeen and died four years later in a riding accident.

  No hint he ever knew what happened to Hamida after she was deported. Had Kelley Langton heard of her death? Her murder? How would he ever have learned the true facts of that final hour?

  It had taken Sienna the better part of a decade to reach this place. First had come the revelation from Annalies that she had not been orphaned by a car accident. Bit by bit, teenage Sienna reconstructed her personal history. Public records from Cambridge University provided glimpses. Hamida had come from what is now Khorasan to study English and sciences.

  Archived news stories and videos yielded jumbled facts. A few column inches on back pages reported a short-lived public protest led by a women’s shelter group. A thirty-second news clip showed them petitioning energetically against Hamida’s deportation. They spoke and wrote in vain. She was a pregnant minor in the UK. Hamida’s nearest male relative demanded her return. Forcible repatriation was inevitable. For her, there was no sanctuary.

  In all of the documents, the names of participant minors were cut out. The deeper Sienna dug, the more shocking the possibilities. For some horrific days and nights, Sienna thought her biological father was the student who attacked Hamida in her rented Cambridge apartment soon after she arrived.

  She needed a reliable source. Then Sienna’s darkest fear was dispelled by the oddest of characters. A year before visiting Langton’s final resting place in the highlands, she had a long Lux/Net talk with an English woman. A woman who had answers.

  Seventeen years earlier, this woman ran a small storefront women’s shelter in Chelmsford. London’s Citizen Juggernaut quoted her in interviews advocating Hamida’s case for asylum. When Sienna tracked her down, her organization had grown into a charitable network all over the UK and beyond. She was Fiona Fitzgibbons, registered nurse, retired. She talked a lot.

  “Oh, yes, yes, dearie, I remember. ’Orrid thing. ’Orrid. Sixteen years ago, t’was, but still like yesterday for me.”

  The stout, gray-haired woman shook her head morosely in Sienna’s monitor.

  “Now she, your mum, wot a brave girl she was, through and through, brave ’n steadfast.”

  The year before Sienna was born, university records showed Hamida stopped attending lectures. The same week, local Cambridge papers reported a disturbance and an attack on an unnamed female student.

  “That was ’er, for certain. We talked fer hours. ’Er English was very proper. Poor lass. And the one who done it, she was still deathly afeared o’ ’im.”

  There was one thing, one thing above all Sienna had to know. Was the attacker… Could he somehow be her father?

  “Oh, no! Ne’er that! Work it out, girl. You was born in September. Hamida run away from Cambridge not later’n October year previous. The villain weren’t no more yer father than Jack the Ripper.”

  Mrs. Fitzgibbon’s face pinched with memories of old upset and simmering resentment.

  “I always suspected Whitehall political tinkerin’ with the case for her asylum. I did, and I do! T’wasn’t right, sendin’ her back like that. For all it’s worth, I think she’d be proud o’ you. All you’ve done getting into your nice military college. West Point. I do like the sound o’ that. Keep you out o’ mischief, West Point will.”

  Sienna’s next question was obvious. Her genetic father was referred to only as Joe Bloggs, the UK equivalent of John Doe.

  “I seen ’im once, I did. Tall fer ’is age, but just a lad. Only seen ’im once, mind. Only once. ’is parents whisked ’im away back ta the highlands. Had to leave ’is place o’ work. They had a scandal when they come back from vacation and f
ound a girl livin’ in the barn with a bun in the oven. Sorry missy, tha’ bun woulda been you.”

  Fiona Fitzgibbons had smiled so meekly Sienna could forgive her immediately for referring to her as a bun, and missy.

  “Now, the one in charge o’ the case, chief inspector at tha’, Coriander-Phelps. ’e’d have all the records. ’e’s since died. Sorry ta say, ’e’ll be no help findin’ yer poor pa.”

  On that score, Mrs. Fitzgibbons was wrong. The late Chief Inspector Coriander-Phelps kept meticulous notes. Getting them cost Uncle Bryan a favor with someone at the Military Intelligence Corps. An official request to Interpol got them her father’s name and the medical files from the inquest into the accident that killed him. These included a sample of Kelley Langton’s DNA. A mail-in paternity testing company confirmed the final link. There could be no doubt.

  Langton’s parents never learned anything about their granddaughter. Sienna never contacted them. Perhaps she couldn’t face the possibility they might look on her with prejudice. She was a half-breed. Or, as Bryan used to term it, they were both “made to order”. Perhaps the Langtons would be suspicious she was after money. A bastard child turning up out of the blue was not something Sienna could be. And for what? To reconnect with distant family? To ask for answers they didn’t have? No.

  By then Sienna knew who her real family was. She was a McKnight. The trip to West Lothian, Scotland, was booked with Sarge Bryan’s travel miles and made with Annalies’s blessing. After a hike to the cemetery in the hills, she rested in front of the small grave mound.

  The weight of Hamida’s murder, the reality of a dead father she had never known and who would never know her, all came crashing down upon her there above the sodden, loamy earth. There, alone on the moorland, her tears merged with the dew dappled on her cheeks by fog until she could no longer tell which was which. Kelley Langton’s marker stone also gathered and sheathed off tiny water droplets borne by imperceptibly moving air. The stone, hard and weathered, also wept.