Vendetta Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  “Hang on, Tommy.”

  “Like I ever let go, Amy,” he called as she stood the Eagle on its right wingtip and yanked the jet tightly around the end of ridge. Warning tones began to chirp in her ears as the gun locked on to them. “Give me a GPS lock.”

  “Can’t, Boss. Terrain block.”

  She glanced up at the steep mountain ridges on both sides and frowned. “Then we do this the hard way.” Without taking her fingers from the controls, she selected the GBU-10 laser-guided bombs on her outboard pylons and made ready to drop them the same way her grandfather had dropped bombs during the Pusan breakout. “Time to target?”

  “Fifteen seconds. Warheads are locked. Master arm is green—your pickle is hot,” Tommy said. She heard him change the channel and start talking to the Bradleys, but she tuned him out.

  Tracer rounds streaked up at them. She felt the impacts along the right wing, and the Eagle shuddered. A bright flash at her right shoulder made her flinch to the left, and the big jet responded. She leveled it out and realized a portion of the canopy to her right was gone. Cold desert air bit into her skin as she directed the target reticle to swing back to the looming gun platform. Anger swirled like the screaming wind in her face. Not today, motherfucker.

  She pressed the button as the cannons found her again. The twinkling lights filled her canopy as the big jet shuddered in the sky. Air-to-ground missiles streaked toward the ancient gun platform. Rounds tore into the cockpit section as Amy switched to her own cannon and returned fire.

  That must be what it’s like to die.

  I did not die there.

  Amy opened her tear-filled eyes and gazed up into the thick mist again. Her cheeks were wet. She wiped her face and took a deep, hitching breath. She looked down sheepishly to the side and met the older woman’s eyes. After a moment, the woman smiled and patted Amy’s knee like an affectionate grandmother, then she stood and walked away.

  As the woman disappeared around the pond, Amy licked her lips. Saying the words made her feel better. “I didn’t die there.”

  She knew that while the vision was just as real as the others she’d had since awakening in Sydney, it was not her death. When will I see it? Do I want to know?

  Wiping at her tears a second time, Amy stood and walked deeper into the shrine. The serene quiet filled her with peace, as if she were drinking a cup of her mother’s strong jasmine tea. She’d wandered around Europe, Africa, and Asia for more than a year after putting together the fragments of her identity. Who she was, where she lived, and where she’d died were all neatly categorized and reported to the Integration Center, but when the time came to return, she’d decided not to. There was no purpose in returning to die all over again. No one bothered to stop her, and that was just fine. That there were others like her did not matter. She had nothing in common with any of them, save for having died in service to a country that no longer existed. The fall of the United States, as people called it, hollowed her to the point of anger.

  Perhaps it was for the best. Her grandparents had lived in Japanese internment camps during World War Two despite having been in San Francisco for more than fifteen years prior to Pearl Harbor. They never spoke badly about their adopted country treating them as miscreants. Nor did they acknowledge in any way that extended family had fought in the Pacific theater against the Americans.

  Around a corner in the shrine, Amy found a tiny carving etched into the bark of a cherry tree. The Japanese pilots’ wings, complete with tiny cherry blossom in the shield, stood out as she closed the gap. The written character below them took her breath away.

  Divine Wind. The throom-throom of her heartbeat rushed into her ears as another memory, a new one, swept her away.

  “You think you’re some kind of goddamned kamikaze, Nakamura?” Colonel Jalen stomped up to her, his bald head slick with sweat. He had thrown his flight helmet at her aircraft. Its visor shattered across the tarmac not three feet from her. “What the fuck were you thinking?”

  She’d not even touched the ground yet. Her feet were still on the crew egress ladder. She’d figured he would be upset but not furious. They’d won the engagement, after all. She jumped to the ground and met her wing commander face-to-face. “Sir?”

  Jalen seethed at her. “First things first. You are not authorized to ever, ever contact Exercise Control as a player. Second, you will never put your aircrew or this fifty-million-dollar aircraft purposefully into a ground target, no matter the consequences.” In war games, there was an unwritten rule to never call the umpire. The game could be biased in favor of one player and not the other.

  Amy straightened. “We won the engagement, sir. The enemy withdrew from the strongpoint, and we were able to rescue the downed aircrew.”

  “Irrelevant.” Jalen shook his head. “You are supposed to fly your goddamned aircraft, not fly it purposefully into the ground for any goddamned reason. Is this some kind of family shit? Your great-grand uncle or something? Didn’t he fly a Betty right into the goddamned Hornet at Midway?”

  Amy reeled, heat filling her cheeks. How does he know that? “Sir, I—”

  “I can’t believe you made it through pilot training. Your job”—he jabbed a finger into her shoulder harness—“is really fucking simple. Fly straight and true, drop your bombs where I fucking tell you to, and then haul ass back to base and do it all over again.”

  Amy shook her head. “That stifles initiative.”

  Jalen jabbed her again. “I don’t give a shit what it stifles. Your job is to do what you’re told and kill the enemy. You die in an accident, fine. Enemy fire, fine. But putting your jet into anything on the goddamned ground target is never an option.”

  Heart racing, Amy reached out and grabbed the tree and doubled over as if struck in the stomach. The quiet temple surrounded her, but the serenity was gone. Her stomach churned with anger and long-forgotten frustration. He was wrong. All of it was wrong. They wanted her to die, and she would not die for them.

  Never again.

  She fell to the ground, shrugged her backpack around, and dug inside. The small, straight-bladed knife sat in the bottom, and her fingers curled around the elegant jade dragon handle.

  I will never go back.

  <>

  She raised her left hand to her neck, to the protrusion known as the mastoid process, and pushed in with two fingers. “Emergency shutdown, Rock. I’m sorry.”

  There were two shrill beeps and then silence. The protocol always made her feel as if someone watched her every move, even though its observation was quiet. She knew Rock could not act without her acknowledgement, and with him gone for three minutes to reboot, she could do whatever she wanted to do. It was time. The knife came free of the backpack filled with her clothes and the little-used hexhab. The small metal card, her only link to the Integration Center, glinted in a pocket. She withdrew it and peeked over her shoulder to make sure she was alone in the mist. With a flick of her wrist, just as her father had shown her years before, the slim card sailed across the three-meter-wide path and into the wide, still pond. There was barely a ripple as it sank.

  Amy looked up into the dull gray sky. The wispy virga reminded her of hanged men as the mist began to fall. The slick, cold water felt like a mask of shame on her face. There were no tears or smiles. She had failed, yes, but she would make them fail as well. This was no future she wanted. Her past made that clear. Fresh pain blossomed. Her fist was clenched around the knife’s handle, her eyes turned up to the rain, and the memory came again.

  The general rustled the reports and witness statements back into a plain manila folder. “Captain Nakamura, this tribunal finds you not guilty of fratricide during the event at Al-Baniq on August 29, 2017. Your flight status has been reinstated immediately.”

  The words should have brought relief, but instead, she felt sick
to her stomach. They wanted her to fly again, and all she wanted was to go home.

  She felt eyes stabbing her through her back. When the gavel banged and closed the proceedings, she could not look into the faces of the Canadian contingent. The wrong flare, on a dark, awful night, and Amy had targeted two five-hundred-pound bombs into the lead vehicles of a friendly convoy. She killed three men and one woman, but the Air Force wouldn’t let her resign her commission. All she’d wanted was out. The next mission was her last. They sent her out to kill again, and fate came for her. Then, she’d woken up in Sydney and knew, almost immediately, why they’d brought her back. They needed her skills. They wanted her ability to deal death.

  No more. She turned the forearm-length blade toward her abdomen and paused, waiting for the breeze to come up and blow the cherry blossoms through the air. Eyes closed, Amy Nakamura prayed for a quick death, her face turned up to the wind as a tear leaked out of the corner of her right eye.

  It’s better this way.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A loud computer-synthesized voice chimed in Berkeley Roark’s head at precisely 0314 in the morning. Livermore, emergency action call. Encryption theta Charlie six two. Engage.

  Berkeley snapped up to a sitting position. “Engage sigma Foxtrot two six.”

  What in the hell?

  The call connected with four warbling encryption tones, and her heart lurched.

  “Berkeley? You there?” Major General Adam Crawley’s voice snapped her questions like a twig.

  “General,” she replied through a yawn. “What’s wrong? Kieran?”

  “He’s fine. Sorry to wake you. We’ve lost a subject.”

  Lost? Berkeley screwed up her face in concentration. “How can you lose a subject?”

  Crawley sighed. “She hardbooted her protocol. Something Kieran could not have done with his model.”

  The one that nearly killed him instead. The last thing she’d done with the Livermore project was to recommend a kill switch for the subject to use in case of emergency. “What happened?”

  “One minute ago, she shut it down. Data showed she had a knife in her hands pointed at her own abdomen. I need you to reactivate her protocol. Now.”

  Berkeley put her feet on the floor. “I can’t, General. I’m out of this. I’m—”

  “The protocol sent an emergency message. One point zero seven seconds of it got out.” Crawley snorted. “The council knows. Ninety-six-percent probability they intercepted something. They’ll see TDF all over it and trace it. If that happens, this whole thing is done, Berkeley. I gave Penelope Neige my word that the experiment was paused. The prelate is the only one outside of us who knows that the program is still running at all. My people are burying what they can right now. But you’re the best I’ve got. I need that subject back online and out of the area.”

  If the Terran Council became involved, Kieran would be in danger. Once they found out he had survived and integrated, the council would go after him with everything they had.

  She stood and walked to the mirror. A picture of the two of them on the beach stared up at her. She had to try. Berkeley swiped her hands through the air in front of the mirror, and the reflection changed to a wall screen. “Where is the subject?”

  “Sapporo. I’m sending you the location now.”

  Berkeley spun an animated globe and zoomed in on Hokkaido, the northernmost island. A flashing yellow diamond appeared. Berkeley isolated the previous frequency and engaged a transmitter from the Sapporo Tower. Finding the message sequence took ten seconds. “I have the message, General.”

  “Send it.”

  Berkeley tapped the data and pulled the message into her screen. “Just over one second, like you said, pinged to a secure-server location on Luna.”

  “Dammit. They’ve got the frequency data. They’ll know we’ve got a subject out unless we trash the message.”

  “Already gone, sir.” Berkeley verified it and locked out further changes to the transmitter’s system in another five seconds.

  “Find her, Berkeley.”

  “I’ve got nothing on primary or secondary frequencies. Even the secure ones. The protocol is in reboot.”

  “Keep trying.”

  Berkeley scrolled through a running window. “Terran Council frequencies are active. A security team has been dispatched to the shrine with a deadly force authorization. They’ll be there in four minutes, thirty seconds.”

  Crawley swore. “How much longer will the protocol reboot?”

  “The sequence is two hundred seconds. It should be online in thirty seconds.”

  “How’s Kieran?”

  Berkeley laughed. “He hates Mars.”

  “Spoken like a grunt,” Crawley said.

  “Fifteen seconds. I’m prepared to make the grab as soon as the signal is online.” Berkeley amplified the receptors on the remote tower and opened four separate channels to the primary and auxiliary protocol frequencies. Most of Sapporo would experience a brief data outage, but it couldn’t be helped. I hope to God this works. “Five seconds.”

  The flashing gold diamond turned green and flashed once before turning red.

  “What the—” Berkeley gasped. “It’s gone.”

  Crawley exploded. “What happened? Where’s the signal?”

  The red icon flashed twice and disappeared. “I lost it. Completely.”

  “Backup telemetry?”

  Berkeley wanted to throw her hands in the air. “Trying. Can a subject turn the protocol off completely?”

  “Negative.” Crawley took a deep breath. “Was it intercepted?”

  “There’s no way. We’re talking milliseconds of data. Maybe less than that.” Berkeley scanned the frequency control node in Sapporo. “The protocol was online point zero seven milliseconds. There was nothing else on that frequency at all.”

  “Did the protocol connect to any data transceiver?” Crawley asked.

  “Unlikely. I’ll start a search now. Even if the protocol engages a data system, it’s like finding a needle in a haystack the size of Antarctica.” There were more than thirty thousand possible network connections within a kilometer radius—in northern Japan, more than six million. A data connection would be impossible to isolate.

  Crawley spoke slowly. “Could the council have intercepted it?”

  “Not within a second, no. I think we’re looking at a malfunction.”

  Crawley sighed. “Maybe. Switch to the Terran Council team frequencies. Get me anything you can.”

  Berkeley locked on within seconds. “They are ninety seconds away. Two agents, both armed. They’re not broadcasting. No video signals at all. Audio is quiet.”

  “Thoughts?”

  Berkeley shrugged but remembered that Crawley could not see her. “I don’t know what their standard operating procedures are. Looks pretty routine for them.”

  “Keep trying,” Crawley said.

  Fingers flying, Berkeley engaged the internal cameras in the government-controlled autocar and slid an extra layer of encryption into the feed. Tied into a subaccount of the prelate’s own system, she had the ability to see anything she wanted and without reproach.

  “Got video. Pushing it to you now.” She opened another connection to Crawley.

  Inside the autocar, two bored-looking Japanese men with longish hair rode in silence. Departing the skyway, the car dropped to street level. As it accelerated to pass traffic, the man on the left gazed down into the car and brought up a large rifle.

  “They’re carrying actual weapons. This is not a routine response,” Crawley said. “They suspect a sleeper, and they’re prepared to kill her. Get me a signal, Berkeley.”

  “There’s nothing, General. The whole temple has gone silent.”

  The autocar turned into the Hokkaido Shrine and slid to a stop at the entrance. An elderly man in a
long white ceremonial robe came forward, gesturing wildly and speaking Japanese instead of Standard.

  “You have a translator, Berkeley?”

  Berkeley tapped and swiped. The shouts and calls of the fleeing crowd came through the speakers in unaccented and emotionless English. The priest stepped aside as the agents passed unheeded into the shrine. “They’ve evacuated the civilians.”

  “In case she commits suicide.”

  “It’s against the law,” Berkeley said.

  The agents walked quickly around the pond.

  “Not in Japan, Berkeley. It’s a sacred event. That’s why the civilians are out. The priests will let her do it if she can overcome the civil programming.”

  For more than a hundred years, suicide and a host of addictions had been prevented by deep hypnotic programming in the womb. A small percentage of people would overcome their programming yearly. Genetic manipulation was not perfect, nor could it cure everything.

  “Can she?” Berkeley asked.

  “She knew to shut down the protocol, Berkeley. I have to assume she can do anything she wants. That’s why she’s late.”

  “For integration?”

  “We let her go because there was great promise. I didn’t want to rush it.”

  Like we rushed Kieran. She bit back the comment. They’d backed away from the aggression solution to ensure a better connection, a better memory. The only downside was the possibility for negative feedback. Unchecked, it would snowball. And if a sleeper, one of the cloned soldiers from the twenty-first century, could overcome her protocol and her programming, the entire program was in jeopardy. Crawley’s promise to the chairman had been an outright lie. The program was not paused at all. There were other subjects in the queue beyond this one. The lost subject had departed on walkabout before Kieran left Earth.

  Kieran is sixty million miles away, and there is nothing I can do for him, unless…