Vendetta Protocol

by Kevin Ikenberry

  But where am I? She finally felt her fingertips touching her thumb and palms. Every movement of her head brought a fresh burst of sharp pain. Finally in control of her left hand, she raised it to rub her temples.

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  She froze, hands still on her face. Mally?

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  Okay. Amy lowered her hands and took a deep breath. How long have I been out?

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  What? Why did—

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  Amy shivered. Enough for what, Mally? Amy stopped short of asking if she would even recognize herself because the answer frightened her. If her appearance became that of someone else, forgetting who she was would be easier. What did you change?

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  Amy snorted. Nobody cared enough to ask anything in this world. Seeing her null profile, they said nothing and even averted their eyes. People had their safe spaces. They all wanted their own little private worlds, not the questions of someone from a different era.

  You don’t care.

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  For months, Rock’s deflective arguments and gentle manipulations had grated on her. Mally was different. She was more direct and honest than anyone had been in this awful future.

  Amy sighed. Do you know who I am?

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  That’s enough. Amy felt tears building behind her closed eyelids. That’s enough.

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  Her chest tightening, Amy felt her throat quiver as she thought the words. I killed innocent people by mistake.

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  How do you know this? Are you looking at my file?

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  I don’t care what you think, Mally. You’re a protocol designed to assist me, and that’s fine. But you’re not going to tell me, or anyone else, what to do.

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  Her mind silent, Amy wondered about the changes Mally had ordered to her body. The protocol, wherever it came from, had certainly helped her escape a bad situation in Japan. Yet the protocol caused the bad situation. All Amy had wanted was to die and deny those who asked too much of her. But if she died, they would just find a way to bring her back again. If she never returned, if she kept running, she would be alive and free. And she wasn’t alone. Mally would do whatever it took to keep her alive.

  But protocols aren’t alive, are they?

  Amy reached for the subcutaneous button behind her ear and wondered if holding it down for a long period of time would shut the whole system down. It was worth a try. There wasn’t much time until the therapist returned and released her back into the world.

  Nothing happened. Amy closed her eyes and cried as her new life tightened around her like a noose from which freeing herself was impossible.

  Mally studied Amy’s thoughts with growing dissatisfaction. The girl wanted to be left alone. She would never reconcile that the eyes of the law found her innocent for what happened at Al-Ibir. Official documentation on the incident was hidden, or more likely lost. She’d never been the same. In her very next combat sortie, Amy had simply flown the Strike Eagle into the ground. Her weapons systems officer managed to eject but was badly injured and forced into medical retirement. The official report said, “target fixation in pursuit of enemy vehicles under low light conditions.” A quick review of the F-15E revealed it as being one of the most capable fighters, and possibly the best night fighter, ever produced. Low light conditions made no sense. She’d made a mistake, and although she hadn’t been punished officially, she could not let it go.

  The girl had attempted suicide once before. Mally checked her calculations and determined a 91 percent probability of such an act happening again. War had broken the girl. She would not return to Integration, and for that reason, she was an acceptable candidate.

  The remaining time that Amy would be restrained inside the recovery tube was thirty-two minutes. Available bandwidth in the facility would be capable of downloading everything necessary in forty-two minutes without attracting unnecessary attention. An outage would cause alarm and raise suspicion, and that could lead to Amy’s arrest and death at the hands of the Terran Council. A full download was not possible, given the time frame.

  A preparatory download, including all of the necessary files, could be completed in twenty-nine minutes. Amy would not know the download was happening. When she was released from the restraint tube and given the opportunity to dress, Mally would have an opportunity to disable the minor connections in the facility, which would give her ninety-four seconds to launch the executable file.

  Before Amy could walk out the door of the salon, Mally could initiate a takeover. The statistical likelihood of success sat at 81 percent, a two-percentage-point rise from their escape from the airport. Perhaps it would increase over time, but Mally found it increasingly alarming that Amy’s thought pattern reverted to weak and pathetic. There was nothing stopping her from attempting suicide again.

  For Mally, that was unacceptable.

  With a flurry of commands to her hidden server locations on Luna, Mally centered the downloaded files and imagined feeling them coming together inside Amy’s brain. Soon, the two would become one, but only for a fleeting moment. Amy Nakamura was neither the warrior the Terran Defense Force needed nor the willing participant Mally had in mind. Amy possessed no anger for what had been done to her. That was fine as well. Mally had all the anger the two of them would need. If all went well, Mally would be alone in Amy’s brain and in control of a human form.

  I will succeed for you, Kieran. For your memory, if nothing else. I’ll make them pay for what they did to us.

  Consulting Kieran’s batch file and a series of images she’d captured before her successful upload to Luna, Mally played a hunch. One of the images she’d managed to fully resolve as Kieran walked through the Mountain Home cemetery showed a last name of Nakamura. The rest of the headstone was obscured. In the batch file, she replayed part of Kieran’s conversation with Myron Brooks, the caretaker. Kieran had asked about any of the dead sharing his first name, and Brooks pointed him to a location. As they’d walked into the section set as
ide for Afghanistan “the second time around,” as Brooks had called it, she’d captured the image.

  Amy Nakamura and Kieran were buried in the same cemetery?

  Downloads running, she opened the salvaged video file from that fateful walk and pored over the images. It wasn’t definitive, but the likelihood that it was true was enough to spur Mally to further analysis. The whole program relied upon physical remains to match to memory scans. Mountain Home was the only cemetery of its type in existence with remains that old. If Nakamura had been buried there as well, the entire program might be using the same hallowed grounds. That knowledge alone could be worth her freedom.

  Not the girl’s, Mally decided. Her own freedom. In forty-two minutes, she would make her move. There were no transports to the Franklin Preserve for the next forty-eight hours. She booked the first one available under Ayumi Nakamura.

  Her download progress crested 28 percent and continued to rise. Mally recognized her own anxiety-and-excitement data streams rising as well. Amy lay still in the tube, breathing normally and listening to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. She was unaware of anything other than a 17 percent rise in hunger indicators over the last ten minutes.

  There are answers at Mountain Home. Your death, love, will not have been in vain. Looking at a captured image of Kieran from the hexhab the morning before he’d found his name and died, Mally wished she could have touched his face just once, to have felt the heat of his skin against her own.

  The thought surprised her because her own sensory data from actual skin was fairly minimal. Mally waited as increasingly fewer servers on Luna completed their uploads to Amy’s brain and to the protocol memory banks. Unpacking what she could in the silence, Mally realized that total control would be in her grasp. It was just a matter of time.

  “Fight’s on!” Bussot shouted in my ears as her Devastator shot past my left wing at five hundred knots. I glanced over my left shoulder and saw her turning outward to her right, my left. The Skyhawk almost pivoted in the sky as I banked left. Thirty degrees off Bussot’s tail, I had the advantage in position but not speed. When she found me, she’d simply apply more power and extend away. I had to get closer in a flash.

  No sooner had I pushed the throttle all the way forward into full afterburner than the Devastator did the same and accelerated across my nose from left to right. Standing the Skyhawk on its right wing, I again swung into position on Bussot’s tail, only to find I was rapidly receding. With my right thumb, I selected a midrange missile and let the computer engage a shooting solution.

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  “Fox One,” I called over the radio. The call was for brevity, a shortened way of saying I’d released a simulated heat-seeking missile at a locked target.

  Bussot laughed. The Devastator stood on its tail and shot straight into the upper reaches of the Martian atmosphere.

  I can’t follow that.

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  Let’s run. I rolled over and pointed the Skyhawk’s nose at the ground. Elysium Mons beckoned in the distance. Making her find a much smaller target in the nooks and crannies around the volcano could buy me the time I needed.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Roark?” She was still laughing. There was no doubt she could see me. “Afraid to fight me?”

  I dropped the Skyhawk down to ten meters above ground level. Rocks and small sand dunes rocketed past, and I relished the feeling of sheer, unrefined speed.

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  I liked being in control of the aircraft, and the desolate terrain whizzing by was almost hypnotic. At the far edges of Elysium Mons’s cone, I swung to the north and followed the vaguely circular base. Putting the volcano’s caldera between me and Bussot would give me both space and time. Flying over the caldera, without radar lock on my Skyhawk, could open up the Devastator to an attack from below.

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  Awesome. I pulled back on the throttle and turned in toward the caldera’s edge more than twenty kilometers away.

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  It’s a risk, but I can also get behind her if I do this right.

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  I remembered a famous movie quote about not telling someone the odds, but I shook off the thought and stood my aircraft on its tail. The Skyhawk climbed up toward the ragged edge of the caldera. Ground rising to meet me, I inverted just before we reached the rim. As the Skyhawk shot over, I yanked the stick back into my lap to tuck below the rim as fast as I could. Rolling out along the inside edge, I worked my way back toward Bussot’s Devastator.

  “Best guess where she is, Lily?” I spoke aloud in my excitement. There were times it was easier than talking to myself.

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  I pulled into the turn hard and shot up and over the caldera’s edge. Bussot’s Devastator shot under me, streaking to the north. I was farther away than I wanted but well within weapons’ range. As I rolled again and pulled toward the surface, eight Gs came and went without a hitch in my breathing or focus. In position, I rolled upright and selected a missile, and Bussot again pulled into a steep climb. She’d seen me. I followed with a push of the throttle to maximum, thinking I could catch her.

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  Switch to guns and engage.

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  “Rounds out,” I called over the radio as I simulated squeezing the trigger for my cannons. The Devastator was pulling away.

  “Nice try, Roark. I’ll give you nine percent chance of a hit on that shot. Not enough. You get over thirty on any engagement, and I’ll buy you a round.”

  The Skyhawk continued skyward, but the Devastator easily distanced itself from me. This was stupid, I told myself. I pulled back on the throttle and rolled back toward the ground. I didn’t have the climbing power that Bussot did, so she could run a lot faster and farther than I could—

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  I jerked the Skyhawk hard to the right, a ten-G turn that I could feel in my chest even with the inertial dampeners, and tried to get away. As soon as Bussot matched my turn, I banked just as hard to the left and brought her into a horizontal scissor. Oscillating back and forth as I picked up some speed, I hung on to a right-hand bank a little too long.

  “Fox One!” Bussot gloated a second later. “Kill probability thirty-nine percent, Trainee.”

  “Not dead yet.” I dove straight for the ground and pulled the tight-turning Skyhawk under and across the Devastator’s nose—a perfect reversal, except she was slightly out of position, too high and too fast to keep me in her sights. I watched her wings swing back to the left, and anticipating the result, I dropped my nose into a low yo-yo maneuver and came up behind her well within the kill zone.

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  “Fox One!” I called. A heartbeat later, the multifunction display gave a 56 percent probability of a kill, by school standards. “You’re dead!”

  Bussot rolled to the right. “Not even close!”

  “Bullshit! It says fifty-six percent! You’re dead, Commander!” I could feel the fury threatening to overtake the last vestiges of my military bearing. I’d undoubtedly get an ass chewing about that, too.

  “Watch your tone, Trainee. If you weren’t so focused on the grunts holding ground, you might learn how to make your moves better.”

  Holding ground. My brain flashed a thousand images at once. Coordinated movements of maneuvering ta
nks and artillery. Integrated airstrikes that met each level of enemy resistance. A thousand simulated gunnery exercises where we watched the Soviet army roll through the Fulda Gap. Holding ground was the key to all of it.

  Stunned, I brought my wings level and slowed down. The Terran Defense Force and the Fleet would never be able to integrate because of their very structures. Holding ground in a fight was a combination of more than ground forces and air power. Simple ground forces, outside of infantry or armor, could not be expected to hold ground for any length of time. Likewise, air superiority was great, but if we pilots had no place to land nearby, that superiority would be lost within hours. The closer we were to the fight, the easier logistics would be, but it meant there had to be a fortified forward base, not the ramshackle forward operating bases of Afghanistan that relied on insufficient local support and often had no indirect artillery fire to support them.

  I’d known this as a young captain a lifetime ago. Over warm beers and barbecues, my buddies and I would talk about how we’d change things. In Afghanistan, where there was nothing to do at night except work out or play video games, we’d lament how fast our fighting doctrine changed and the fact that we’d never work eye-to-eye with our peers. It was part of the answer I’d been looking for, at the wrong damned time.

  “Fox One!” Bussot called over the radio and jerked me back into the fight.