The Red

by Linda Nagata

  I glance up at the ducting. It runs right through the concrete wall. The gas from our initial assault should have been sucked into the room. If people are awake in there, it’s because they’ve got face masks.

  And we’ve got no time.

  I kick the door and turn right, to where the shooter has to be.

  The room is big. I already know what it looks like from the Intelligence report. The back half is boxes and canisters: food, electronic parts, weapons. Cubicle dividers screen that part off from the front. On one side are two small, glass-walled offices. At the center of the remaining space there’s a server tower, with twin consoles on either side of it, though only one gets used; the other is backup. Big, bright monitors loom above the consoles. Opposite the offices is a little kitchenette, with a fridge and microwave, a table, a couch, and more monitors tuned to the talking heads of mediots overseeing news feeds.

  Daylight bulbs fill the space with a clean white light that clearly illuminates the shooter. She’s a young girl, blond haired, with an old-fashioned gas mask strapped to her head. I recognize her from her dossier. Her name is Allison, she’s fourteen years old, and she’s lining up on me with a big fat pistol, murderous fury in her eyes.

  We both pull the trigger at the same time. Her round hits like a fist against my chest. It knocks me into the wall, while she goes over backward with a red flower blooming in her throat.

  I can’t breathe.

  I’m utterly calm anyway—and it’s all on my own. The skullnet icon is not even glowing. My brain is exhausted; my emotions are too.

  My gaze sweeps the room, taking in the bodies scattered across the floor. Not as many as I expected. Defenders must be hidden in the lanes between the stacked supplies.

  How many have gas masks and guns?

  Tuttle grabs my arm. “You okay, LT?”

  My chest spasms, and I suck in a whooping breath. The slug is a dull silver coin, pancaked in my armor. “Find Blue Parker,” I tell Tuttle. And then I scream it over gen-com: “Find Blue Parker. Now! ”

  We flip the bodies over—not gently—logging names and faces. Most are still alive. A few I’m not too sure about. Specialist Fevella checks them off a list he’s keeping. We add in everyone we know about: the civilians in the main section of the control room, the dead mercs, thirteen kids that Harvey found on Level 2. The total comes to fifty-nine, but seventy-one individuals are known to be at Black Cross. So we sweep the storage aisles and find seven more sleepers. That leaves five civilians unaccounted for, including Blue Parker.

  When I get back to the main section of the control room, I see Kendrick, sitting at a console. I do a double take because he’s not wearing his helmet. He’s still got his face mask on, but his helmet is sitting on the floor at his feet.

  From boot on up, it’s drilled into us that during combat operations the helmet does not come off. Period. End of discussion. Remove it during a field exercise and you will get to start your training all over again. Kendrick’s helmet is off because he’s talking on a Black Cross satellite phone. When he sees my visored gaze fixed in his direction, he flips me the finger.

  I go listen anyway, cranking up the volume on my helmet’s external pickups so I can hear the voices on the other end of the line. He’s talking to Intelligence. They confirm that the outgoing signal to the INDs is still being generated, so at least we know the dead man’s switch hasn’t been thrown yet. But what if the bombs can be set off from some other location?

  It’s been less than six minutes since we launched our assault, but if we don’t find Blue Parker, if we don’t send the shutdown codes, it’s for nothing.

  Kendrick moves the phone away from his mouth. The volume in my audio pickups drops automatically. “Shelley, take as many people as you need to make a data relay and get up to the top. Download coming in.”

  “I’ll go with you, sir,” Ransom says.

  “No,” Jaynie counters. “I need you here. Fevella, Flynn, Nakaoka, go with the LT. Shelley, can you pick up Hoang on Level Two? Harvey doesn’t need him.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I say with only a tinge of sarcasm. My sergeant has taken over my command, but I don’t confront her, because time is critical and she’s made the right call. With my assigned team, I sprint for the stairwell.

  Fevella stays at the bottom. I call ahead, get a link to Julio Hoang on Level 2, and have him take a post in the stairwell. Nakaoka drops off a couple of flights above Hoang, and then I leave Flynn behind. Even with the dead sister, sprinting up that many stairs is a challenge, and by the time I leave Flynn I’ve burned out my oxygen cylinder. I peel off my face mask as I haul myself up the second flight from the top, gasping at hot, stale, stinking air. A breeze is chasing me up from the bottom. God knows how much toxin is still in it. I’m not feeling too good, though whether it’s poison gas, cerebral exhaustion, oxygen-deprived air, or me psyching myself out, I don’t know.

  But I get a break. I’m one flight above Flynn, one below the top, when my helmet links up with our angel and the download drops in. I forward it to Kendrick. It relays through the helmets of the soldiers waiting on the stairs, and a second later, Kendrick’s voice speaks in my ears: “Received.”

  I look at the download.

  It’s just a photo of the storage area at the back of the control room. One of the robo-rats must have taken it and relayed it out, right before the gas seeped in through the AC. It shows a man with a gas mask climbing into a spider hole under the crates. Two civilians stand by, ready to lock him in I guess. I know the man is Blue Parker because I can see the data stick still hanging on a chain around his neck. In his hands I see a tablet.

  A cold sweat flushes out of my pores, because now I know what their plan is. If all is lost, Blue pops the data stick into the tablet and sends the codes remotely.

  I want to go back down to Level 3, but I don’t have any more oxygen and it will all be over one way or another by the time I get there.

  I don’t want to stay where I am, because there are two burned bodies on the landing, and the stairwell reeks of gunpowder, vomit, shit, and blood.

  So I climb up, one stair at a time.

  Now that I’m in touch with the angel again, Delphi’s back in my head. “Stay at the stairwell. We need you to relay.” She’s trying to sound stern, but there’s a quaver in her voice, just like that day when I had my legs blown out from under me.

  I lean against the frame where the fire door used to be, staring out past the main doors of the Level 1 staging area. Within a twisted and shattered frame, they hold a pastoral image of a Texas night—dried field and gnarled trees, rendered in night vision. Only a few minutes have passed since we blasted our way into Black Cross.

  I wonder, is it worse to know? Or not know?

  “Fuck it,” I whisper, and I link through our daisy chain to Kendrick’s helmet cam. I pick up the feed just as Ransom is pulling the trapdoor open. Tuttle shines a light into the hole.

  If we had something to interfere with the wireless signal from the tablet, we’d be okay.

  But we don’t.

  The only equipment we have is what was available to us at C -FHEIT.

  “Get him out,” Kendrick says.

  Jaynie and Tuttle grab Blue Parker under the arms and haul him out of the spider hole. He’s clutching the tablet in his right hand. The data stick is no longer around his neck. It’s inserted into one of the ports on the tablet.

  The fuckwad starts shrieking threats: “I’ll blow it! I will! I will! I will!”

  I shudder and shiver and close my eyes, hating him, hating every mad syllable he screeches in a voice pushed high by panic and fear.

  “I’ll blow it! I’ll blow it! Don’t touch me! I’ll blow it!”

  So why the fuck doesn’t he?

  It all goes quiet.

  I open my eyes again, to see Blue Parker with a pistol jammed under his
jaw.

  “Now,” Kendrick says in a voice pitched so low I expect my eardrums to start buzzing, “you and I both know that you didn’t really want to murder tens of thousands of people yesterday. I bet that wasn’t even your idea. And I know you don’t want to add thousands more to the body count, because you will go to hell for it, for all eternity, and after the Devil has flayed off your skin, he’ll fuck you while you’re lying on a bed of coals.”

  Kendrick is not even talking to me, and I start to sweat. When the colonel makes a threat, it’s not hard to believe it. Blue Parker believes it. He starts to cry.

  “Give me the shutdown code,” Kendrick says.

  “It’s on the stick,” Parker answers in a broken voice. “It’s labeled.”

  Jaynie takes the tablet from Parker. The screen is black, locked down with a passcode.

  “It’s four, three, two, one,” Parker tells her in a trembling voice.

  “And then boom?” she asks him.

  “No! I swear.”

  Kendrick looks over her shoulder as she enters the digits. A file listing blossoms on the screen. Everything is right there, in alphabetical order:

  ATLANTA LAUNCH

  ATLANTA SHUTDOWN

  DENVER LAUNCH

  DENVER SHUTDOWN

  NEW YORK LAUNCH

  NEW YORK SHUTDOWN

  “New York first,” I say.

  “Go ahead, Vasquez,” the colonel says. “New York. Make the LT happy.”

  What if it doesn’t work? What if New York blows up first? I squeeze my eyes closed as Jaynie launches the shutdown program.

  “Delphi, tell me.”

  “No report yet.”

  Seconds tick past. Then Delphi speaks to everyone over gen-com. “The New York device has disarmed itself.” Screams of joy echo in the stairwell, followed by faint cheers from far below.

  Jaynie’s graceful fingers free Atlanta next, and when the thumbs-up comes through on that, she shuts down the cancer in Denver, in Philadelphia, and in Phoenix.

  It’s all over, isn’t it? We slammed the TIA.

  I want to believe it, but I hear something. I hear jets outside.

  It sounds just like Africa, fierce engines roaring on the edge of hearing. They don’t scare me, though, because I know they must be ours—and I want to go see them. I want to go outside and be under the stars and know that the world isn’t dead. It’s a compulsion. My hands start shaking, I want it so bad. Going off-com, I yell down the stairwell to Flynn, “Tell everybody to move up one flight. Spread the word off-com.”

  “Sir?” Flynn calls, incredulous.

  “Off-com,” I repeat. “Don’t clutter gen-com. I’m just going outside.”

  She calls the order down. I hear it repeated by Nakaoka. As Flynn clomps up the stairs, I leave my post at the top of the stairwell and move to the door.

  The jets are a lot closer now. I can’t see them, but their roar builds with incredible speed as they sweep in from the west: low, fast, and dark. My helmet filters the engine noise, but it still vibrates in my bones and shakes the world. For a second I think I hear Delphi screaming at me, but it has to be my imagination . . . that way we sometimes hear voices in white noise.

  A light flicks on in the east. Bright white. It’s not the sun. It’s a rocket—a huge, multistage rocket, an anomalous tall tower of propulsion lifting off from out of nowhere. It’s got to be at least ten miles away, but the glare of its first stage chases back the night.

  Vanda-Sheridan not only makes satellites; the company launches them too.

  The rocket climbs straight up. I have no way to tell how far.

  The jets pass my position. Fighter jets: I see the glow of their afterburners as a sonic boom slams across the land. And then they release two missiles, with blazing trails that outrun the fighters and arc upward on a course to intercept the rocket, which has begun a slow turn north.

  The missiles chase the rocket, but it’s hopeless. They will never catch it.

  Then the rocket’s guidance system fails. I think the fighter pilots are jamming it, interfering with its navigation. It flips over, nose down, and it explodes.

  For some tiny shard of time, I look at the fireball, but I can’t really see it. It’s like God, or the seed of a new universe blossoming—something that is just not meant for human eyes. Terror kicks out my higher brain functions and instinct takes over. My eyes close. I wrench backward, diving into the sheltering darkness of Level 1. I land on my forearms. The struts of my dead sister take the initial impact, then my chest slams into the concrete, and then my visor. Pain shoots into the back of my skull, a black, lightless pain . . . there’s no light anywhere. I can’t see a thing, not even with night vision, but I don’t need to see. I know where the stairwell is. Flynn is just one flight down. Nakaoka’s below her, then Hoang, and Fevella.

  Why don’t I hear them on gen-com? Why don’t I get an icon? I can’t see any output, not from the visor and not from my goddamn overlay.

  Screw it. I scream instead. “Flynn, get downstairs! Go down! Go down! Go down!”

  I scramble to take my own advice—or I try to, but the dead sister won’t move. Its joints are frozen and suddenly it’s Africa all over again, and I’m stuck in a broken rig.

  The blast wave hits.

  A roaring white noise slams through my brain, the concrete floor shudders, there’s a tearing screech that sounds like a steel world caving in, and then the fragments of that world pepper my back and crack against my helmet.

  I want to get to the stairwell. I’m desperate to get there. So I put all my strength into my right arm, fighting the dead sister’s frozen elbow joint, forcing it to bend, until I can reach a cinch on my left arm. I yank it loose and grab the next. My left hand comes free, and then it’s easy to pop all the other cinches and roll out of the rig, leaving my pack behind with it.

  But my robot legs aren’t working any better than the dead sister. I get nothing from them. No feedback at all.

  Screw it.

  I drag myself across the floor. I can’t see a thing, but I want that stairwell.

  By the time I reach it, it’s getting quiet outside. I taste dust in the air. I grab the door frame and pull myself to a sitting position. My robot legs are dead weight and there’s still no sign of life in my overlay. Still nothing on gen-com, and the screen of my visor is dead, dead, dead. I should be able to see through it if all the electronics are blown, but I can’t. And I can’t hear much of anything. The audio pickups aren’t working.

  So I break the prime directive of field operations, and I take the helmet off.

  I still can’t see anything, but now I hear Ransom’s big southern drawl: “Landing five, stairwell’s open.”

  I hear the clomping feet of at least two dead sisters climbing the stairs.

  “Landing six, stairwell’s open.”

  “You don’t want to come up here!”

  I try to yell it, but my voice is so hoarse the words come out as a growl that reverberates against the concrete. “A fucking nuclear bomb just went off outside.”

  “Shelley?” Ransom yells, so loud I swear more bits of the ceiling rattle loose and hit the floor.

  Ignoring my advice, he runs up the stairs. He’s not alone. I see a glimmer of light at last, blue-white in color like the beam of an LED flashlight, but the light is shattered into a hundred broken pieces, like gleaming shards of glass.

  “Goddamn it, Shelley!” It’s Kendrick and he’s furious. “Why the fuck isn’t your helmet on your head? Why aren’t you on gen-com? Where the hell is your rig?”

  I can’t take my gaze away from those shards of light. I’ve never seen anything like it before. “What the hell kind of light is that?”

  “What?”

  “How can you even see where you’re going with the light all fractured and scattered like that?
”

  I hear a faint sigh from the joints of his dead sister. By the sound I know he’s right in front of me, but all I see is that crazy light—splinters and facets. “It’s like looking through fly eyes.”

  Then the light shoots straight to the back of my brain like a red-hot needle. My eyes squeeze shut in agony and my head jerks back, cracking against the door frame. “Fuck.”

  “You’re supposed to be wearing your goddamn helmet!”

  “It’s broken! I can’t see or hear anything with it on!”

  “What’s wrong with him?” Ransom asks.

  I’d like to know that too.

  “How do you know it was a nuke?” Kendrick asks.

  “I saw the fireball.”

  “You looked at it? Jee-sus.” Each syllable is a beat of his anger. “I need to shine the light in your eyes. Look past my shoulder, and don’t blink.”

  “I can’t fucking see your shoulder.”

  “Guess.”

  I force my eyes open and the light comes again, but it’s not as bright this time. “Ho-ly God,” Kendrick murmurs. “You are one lucky son of a bitch. I think it’s your overlay. The surface is crackled like shattered glass.”

  Ransom says, “You can get new lenses, Shelley. Get it fixed.”

  “Yeah.” Assuming there’s still a world out there. I lean back against the door frame and try not to think about that. “How’s everybody downstairs?”

  I hear the whisper of Kendrick’s bones as he stands up again. “You know we lost Wade. Otherwise, minor injuries, and no cave-ins from the nuke. Those Cold War boys, they knew how to build a bomb shelter.”

  I tell him about the rocket, and the fighters that came to stop it out here in the middle of nowhere. “Those pilots—if they hadn’t been here, maybe she would have hit Austin, or San Antonio, or someplace farther away, but they didn’t let it happen. They sent that rocket down. And she could have just let it crash, but she didn’t. She blew the nuke. Sir, she vaporized them.”

  Kendrick spends about twenty seconds softly swearing. Then he reins in his temper. “Can you get up?”