The Best of Us

by Karen Traviss

  “Good work, guys,” he said. “Mount up.”

  The Ainatio drone was still circling at roof height, apparently waiting for the convoy. He waved and raised his arm to give the move-out signal. Trinder’s people could see what was happening on the ground, so it’d be obvious even if they didn’t understand hand signals.

  Why wouldn’t they? I ought to give them more credit.

  The drone rocked its wings in acknowledgement — yeah, they did understand — and shot off south-east. Chris walked up the line of vehicles to do a final visual check. Jamie, smiling to himself as if he’d collected another token on the road to Erin’s affections, was sitting on the back of the gun truck behind Lee. Chris gave him a thumbs-up and a wink.

  “It’s going to be fun when we get home.” Zakko drove off with a casual confidence, as if he’d been doing this all his life, a different guy from the bag of nerves who’d set out this morning. “Nobody knows what we’re bringing back.”

  “Preferably not radioactive dust.”

  “Hah. Y’know, I think Jamie’s patience is paying off. With Erin, I mean.”

  Patience. Chris sat thinking for a moment about women who said they’d wait for a guy to get out of prison, then started dating someone else after a couple of months. It was funny how the sting had gone out of that memory. He also thought that he’d beat the snot out of his ex-boss if he ever ran into him, but he wasn’t even sure about that. They were probably both dead. Even if they’d survived, they wouldn’t be sitting around gloating about how they’d gotten one over on him. They’d be scrabbling for food. That made things even. Vengeance could be a detached, mathematical thing.

  Yeah, I’m a wrong ‘un, Dieter. But loyalty’s two-way. Your dogs might be saints, but they’re still wrong.

  The convoy retraced its route through the park and out onto the road. It was now clear of the town centre on a wide road flanked by houses with big porches and overgrown lawns set back from the sidewalk. Chris couldn’t tell if there were plants still alive in there waiting to emerge, or if they’d succumbed to die-back. But there were crocuses poking out of the grass at the edge of a driveway, purple and lavender ones. Spring was definitely here.

  “Whoa, what the hell’s that?” Zakko said.

  Chris’s hand was already on his sidearm before he took in what was coming at them head-on. For a second, the narrow profile made it hard to identify, but it was the red Ainatio drone, flying at head-height through a gap in the trees. It was bigger than Chris had realised. It was going to hit the windshield. His heart was pounding out of his chest.

  “Holy shit.” Zakko hit the brakes.

  But the drone shot past them. It hadn’t been on a collision course after all, just making sure they’d notice it. It zipped back across their path, crossing from left to right and back again. Chris had no idea what Ainatio was trying to tell him, but it didn’t look good. If they were sticking to the signals handbook, it meant they had something urgent to communicate.

  Chris wished he’d had the sense to ask Trinder for a longer-range radio when he’d offered to ride along. All he could do now was talk to the squad.

  “Six Zero to all callsigns, the Ainatio drone’s trying to get our attention, reason unknown. Assume a hazard. Slow down but be prepared to exfil fast. Reduce speed to fifteen, out.”

  The only way he could talk to Ainatio was to launch the relay drone, contact Jared, and get him to relay messages to Trinder. It was time to stop and call in. Chris had no idea what they might be driving into. The drone kept buzzing them, which he could only read as a signal to stop or prepare to divert.

  “Six Zero to all callsigns — halt here and keep your engines running.”

  Chris jumped out and walked a few yards down the road. The other vehicles had formed up behind with enough room to disperse if they needed to escape. The drone hovered a few yards away, rocking its wings. Follow me. Talking to Trinder was going to take time that they didn’t appear to have, then.

  “What is it, Sarge?” Lee called. He had the machine gun ready. Jamie was readying an extra ammo belt. “I can’t see anything.”

  Chris turned to get back into the vehicle. “It’s obviously spotted something — ”

  He was looking right at Jamie. He was still looking at him when a plume of blood arced from the guy’s head and he dropped like a stone. Lee swung the gun around and started firing.

  “Contact, contact, contact, this is Eight Zero, nine o’clock, two five metres, left side of road in the clapboard house, numbers unknown, all weapons, open fire, out.”

  “Nine Three here, man down — Jamie’s down, Three Eight is down.” That was Rich. “Fuck’s sake, he’s down.”

  Convoy procedure went to rat shit from the get-go. Everyone except the gun truck should have broken off and driven clear, but they all opened up on the clapboard house. Chris’s mind dumped every thought except finding cover and returning fire. He ran for the truck but something pinged against his pants as if he’d knocked his knee, and suddenly he wasn’t upright any more. Time slowed instantly. He was now in an intensely detailed tunnel where he could only see the headline events.

  Lee was on the radio again. “This is Eight Zero, Six Zero’s down too, Chris is down.”

  “Six Zero here, I’m okay.” Chris’s right leg had buckled under him. He lay on the road, trying to roll onto his belly to fire prone, his hand in a pool of blood. He knew his leg felt weird, but there was no pain and he couldn’t work out where all the blood was coming from. “Anyone else?”

  “Four Four here, all other callsigns okay. Chris, I see you. You’re hit.”

  Shit, Erin’s right. “Anyone got eyes on?”

  “Looks like it’s coming from two houses on the left, one on the right.”

  The drone was holding position overhead. As Chris tried to flip over, a spurt of flame shot out from it, followed by a deafeningly close explosion and a flash of white light. He thought the drone had been hit, but when he managed to roll, he saw one of the houses belching smoke and flames.

  The frigging drone opened fire. It’s armed.

  Rounds struck up dust next to him. If he’d been hit again, he still couldn’t feel it. All he could hear was his squad calling out contacts on the radio, which meant they were still alive, and that was all he cared about right now.

  A second explosion hurt his ears — another RPG? — and then someone grabbed him. He tried to turn to shoot the bastard, but it was Zakko, and the lead truck was suddenly right behind him.

  “What the hell are you doing? You’re supposed to get out of here.” Chris tried to push him away. “Now you’re stuck.”

  “I backed up. It’s okay, the truck’s still pointing the right way.” Zakko dragged Chris by his jacket and propped him against the front passenger side of the truck, level with the engine. “Your leg’s bleeding like crazy. So where do I put this tourniquet? Does that hurt?”

  “Here, let me do it.”

  “You can’t. Just point. Like this?”

  “Yeah. Tighter.”

  “That okay?”

  “Fine.”

  Chris tried not to look at his knee. Whatever had suppressed the pain was vanishing fast and it was starting to hurt like hell. But that was too bad. He’d led his people into an ambush, Jamie was probably dead because of him, and if he didn’t do something fast then the rest of them would die too. He couldn’t see the firefight from here, but he could hear it. At that rate they were close to running out of ammo.

  How the hell had he missed this on the way in? Those assholes must have been set up, watching them move in. Why didn’t he spot the signs? The firing continued but it was now being drowned out by something much louder, the deafening noise of engines.

  “Wow, they got here fast.” Zakko looked up. “Haven’t seen those things very often.”

  Chris craned his neck and got a faceful
of gritty dust. Two tilt-rotor Lammergeier gunships in red Ainatio livery hovered over the road in a whirlwind of debris, then fired missiles simultaneously into the houses on both flanks. He ducked. When he looked up again through the curtain of smoke, one of the ships had set down between the trucks and the other was coming in to land behind the APC.

  Save Jamie. Please God, let him be alive. He didn’t survive just to get shot on a frigging shopping trip.

  The tilt rotor’s ramp went down, but it wasn’t troops who came out first. It was four old industrial quadrubots the size of Shetland ponies, headless and sinister, and they peeled off in different directions. One trotted up to him, reoriented its limbs, and stood up to turn itself bipedal. Then it bent over, scooped him up, and headed for the gunship.

  Chris had never seen a bot like this up close before, let alone been manhandled by one. It was surreal. Then his leg was gripped by a pain so intense that it almost stopped him from breathing. He fought to stay focused but it was hard not to lose control. He could smell his own blood.

  “What about Jamie?” He was sure Zakko was right behind him. “See to him first. Is everyone else okay? What’s happened?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m afraid your comrade didn’t survive, Sergeant,” the quadrubot said, laying him on the cargo deck. It spoke like a man. It even sounded sympathetic. Chris, shocked into silence, had no idea what this thing was. Maybe it was just a remote and the voice belonged to some medic back at Ainatio who was directing it. “But let’s deal with your injury.”

  Two medics moved in. Chris wanted to focus on Jamie, but his leg was screaming me, me, me. He could hear himself panting. Damn, maybe it wasn’t his leg screaming. Maybe it was him. He was letting the squad down in front of these corporates. A dark-haired woman with a captain’s insignia and a name tape that said FONSECA squatted to look at him. She planted her rifle like a walking stick for balance.

  “Sorry we didn’t get here sooner, Chris,” she said. Everybody seemed to know who he was. “We’re just going to make sure the area’s clear. And you’ll be fine, okay?”

  For a bunch of corporate security guards, they seemed a lot better prepared than he’d realised. “You sure about Jamie?”

  Fonseca patted his arm. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”

  Chris hadn’t had Jamie’s back, and he’d never forgive himself. But unexpected people like Zakko and Fonseca had his, and he wouldn’t forget.

  05

  Why did I decide to deploy air support without Erskine’s permission when I’m a soldier in name only, you mean? Because I couldn’t sit there and watch people fighting for their lives, knowing that I could do something. Montello’s troops could have been us. And we could have been them.

  Major Dan Trinder, explaining himself to Alex Gorko

  Laurel Avenue, Kingston:

  10 minutes after the ambush

  Things weren’t going quite how Solomon had expected.

  Two of the ambushers had somehow escaped both the firefight and the missile strike and had holed up in another house. Solomon could detect their heat profiles. There were formal procedures for this kind of thing, but they seemed unnecessarily risky under the circumstances, and Solomon’s rules were not those of Captain Fonseca.

  She patched into the remaining Lammergeier’s loudhailer, standing behind a barricade of armoured vehicles that had rolled off to recover the trucks. Everyone else had their weapons trained on the house. The three dumb quadrubots spread around the back of it, under Solomon’s direction.

  “We know you’re in there. We can see exactly where you are.” Fonseca’s voice boomed across a silent road. This was her first real mission, and certainly the first time she’d killed any hostiles, but she didn’t seem shaken. “Your exits are blocked, so you’re not going anywhere. Lay down your weapons and surrender, or I’ll use force. Your call.”

  There was a long silence. Erin Piller interrupted. “Forget it. Those bastards are mine. I insist.”

  She’d declined to leave on the casevac with Chris Montello and the others, and so had the APC crew and the dog handler, plus his dogs. The transit camp team crouched behind the cover of the APC, their uniforms a threadbare mix of military uniforms and hunting gear, but the look on their faces said one thing: they would finish this, and they didn’t need Ainatio to help them do it.

  Solomon had outlived enough humans to think he finally understood mortality, but today was a revelation. He’d never seen a real man who’d been killed, really seen him rather than viewed an image in an archive, a person who wasn’t old and anonymous but someone who had friends standing nearby who were eaten up with shock, anger, and grief.

  What’s the right thing to do? What’s the safest thing to do? What’ll preserve the maximum number of lives? Are all these lives equal? Do those men deserve the same consideration as my comrades?

  Another missile would end the siege in seconds. Solomon decided it was justified. The men barricaded inside the house had chosen to use lethal force, and whether they surrendered or were captured, there were no courts or prisons to deal with them. The last thing he needed at this point in the Nomad mission was the burden of hostile prisoners who’d need to be held indefinitely. Letting them escape would only be a partial solution, because they might be part of a larger group that could return and find their way to Kill Line.

  And what about justice for Jamie Wickens and his comrades?

  Everyone’s interests were best served by removing the attackers from the equation. Solomon wasn’t afraid to pass judgement. The sentence was obvious, but he knew that Fonseca’s rulebook said otherwise.

  “We’ll deal with them, Private Piller,” Fonseca said. “Just load your vehicle onto the Lammergeier and let us take care of things. We need to get your driver’s arm treated.”

  “I’m fine.” Jackson flexed his shoulder without letting go of his rifle. “I’ll be right as rain once I’ve perforated those two assholes.”

  Erin leaned across Fonseca and muted the loudhailer. “Captain, this isn’t exactly our first prom. And this isn’t your fight. We’re grateful for your intervention, but we need to sort this out ourselves.”

  Solomon interpreted that as meaning Erin intended to kill the two men one way or another, and that she thought Fonseca had neither the stomach nor the combat experience to do it. He could hear Trinder on the secure link, but he was occupied with the inbound casevac, and it wasn’t a given that he’d be able to resolve this anyway. Despite the polite observation of ranks, Fonseca had no authority over Chris Montello’s troops. If they stormed the house, how would she stop them? She wouldn’t open fire. Fonseca did things by the book because that was what Trinder expected of her. She was a good loyal 2IC, as he called it, and she wouldn’t disappoint him.

  “I’m supposed to detain them unless they leave me no alternative,” Fonseca said.

  Erin didn’t shift an inch. “Jamie was twenty-three. Twenty-three. This wasn’t worth his life. But it’s sure as shit worth theirs. And what are you going to do with prisoners? You’ve got a nice little Ainatio court, have you, with a nice little Ainatio judge?”

  Solomon decided to speak up. He couldn’t pass himself off as a non-sentient AI now. It was time they found out what he was.

  “Captain, I have a suggestion.”

  The squad stared at him. The dogs, who had already sniffed him warily before backing off, suddenly seemed mesmerised by the sound of his voice.

  “This body’s designed to withstand all the challenges I’m likely to encounter in there,” Solomon said. “I can accompany Private Piller’s squad.”

  “Sorry, what are you?” Erin stood over him, frowning. She was either in her thirties or a twenty-something aged by hardship. Her long chestnut hair was carefully braided and pinned up. “Are you a remote? Is someone back at HQ operating you?”

  “No, I’m a fully autonomous combat AI, among other things. My na
me’s Solomon.”

  “You were banned a long time ago. Everywhere.”

  “So I was. May I have a private word with the Captain?”

  “Sure.”

  Erin and the others headed back up the road to the gun truck. Solomon watched via his rear-facing cam as she picked up an automatic weapon from the back of the bullet-scarred vehicle and paused, staring past it at something. It was probably Jamie Wickens’s blood.

  These people were ready to die for each other.

  Solomon knew that this happened, but reading about it was nothing like seeing it unfold second by second, talking to people whose lives might be over in the next few minutes and who knew that. He recalled Bednarz’s very brief but clear guidance on his purpose. This moment was like understanding it fully for the very first time.

  “What do you have in mind, Sol?” Fonseca asked. “Just blow the place up?”

  “That’s certainly an effective solution, but I feel everyone’s interests are best served by standing back and allowing our neighbours to finish their mission. I can get them into the house.”

  “Risky.”

  “They need to do it.”

  “Did we screw up?”

  “Not at all. You scrambled air support as soon as the drone detected combatants moving into position, you attempted to alert the squad, and you neutralised the enemy rapidly. By the book.”

  “And a kid still got his brains blown out.”

  “That’s still not your fault. Stand down. Remember that I’m not under Trinder’s command. My rules of engagement are my own, and I’ll do what’s right and necessary for our mutual benefit. You have no responsibility.”

  “But I’m the commander here.”

  “Erskine knows you have no control over me, as I shall remind her if she questions the decision. This isn’t the time to take prisoners.”

  “I realise Erskine won’t like us bringing back violent ferals we’ve got to lock up, but we’ve still got rules.”