by Linda Nagata
“No. My legs are dead—just like the helmet and my rig.”
“EMP,” Kendrick growls. “That nuke blew out your circuits. You’re too damn vulnerable. You need a redesign.”
“I’m feeling like the skullnet’s gone too.”
“If it is, it’s not going to do you any good to think about it. I want you stripped down, in case there’s any radiation contamination on your clothes.”
The armored vest, the jacket, and the T-shirt are easy. They help me with the pants.
“Okay, Ransom,” Kendrick says. “Let’s get him downstairs. Take his other arm.”
“You’re going to regret hauling me down there when you have to carry me out again.”
“We’ll make do.”
They haul me down six flights to Level 2, where the surviving terrorists are being held. The lights are still on—low-energy LEDs emitting a cheerful semblance of daylight. “Looks like a fucking Picasso painting.”
They put me down on the tiled floor of a shower. Someone turns on an icy stream of water that sprays over my head and shoulders.
“Fuck.”
A plastic bottle gets shoved against my hand. I grab it. “Wash everything,” Kendrick orders. “Ransom, make sure he does it.”
“Yes, sir.”
Thank God the water is warming up.
• • • •
A few minutes later I’m in one of the rooms on Level 2, sitting up in someone’s bed with a bottle of water in my hand that Ransom scavenged from some Black Cross stash. I twist the cap off and take a sip. It’s cold and nonfortified and hurts like hell as it slides past my raw throat. My eyes are starting to hurt like hell too as the ruined lenses of my overlay distort the tissue beneath. And the bruising I took from a little girl’s bullet makes my chest hurt every time I breathe.
“Hey, LT.”
It’s Flynn.
“I stole some clothes for you.”
“Not an Uther-Fen uniform?”
“No, sir. Civvies. Keep you warm when we’re evacuated.”
Since I can’t see what I’m doing, she helps me out. There’s a knit pullover and soft trousers. “This is a coat,” she says, laying a length of textured fabric in my lap. “For when we’re ready to go.”
“Any word on when that is?”
Kendrick answers, his voice coming from the vicinity of the doorway. “It won’t be long. Intelligence is going to want to take this place apart, which means we get evacuated ASAP.”
“My rig. My pack, my weapon, everything—it’s still up on Level One.”
“We’re going to leave it, in case it’s contaminated. How’s your head? You going down?”
“Yeah.” There’s no doubt now that the skullnet is dead. It’s supposed to regulate my brain chemistry, but it’s not doing that and I am not okay. I’m going down fast, falling through some inner dimension into a darkness that weighs heavier with each passing minute.
“I don’t have any tranqs,” Kendrick says. “You’re going to have to hold out.”
“Yeah . . . you know, it’s a fucking miracle we only lost Layla Wade.”
“Yeah, it is. Listen, I don’t know if you heard, but Blue Parker admitted this viper nest was funded by Ms. Thelma Sheridan. He’s offering to provide evidence, if he can get a deal.”
“So there’s proof.” I want to believe Sheridan won’t get away with it, but money can distort facts or make them disappear. “Do you think she’ll still be able to buy her way out of it?”
“She’ll try.”
“Colonel, we can’t let her do it.”
“Take it easy. You’ve done enough for tonight.”
“Yeah. I killed a whole lot of people, I don’t even know how many. I killed a kid. I had to do it—because Sheridan decided to start a war. A fucking war. Because money really can buy anything.”
“Anything at all,” Kendrick agrees. “Nukes, revolution, mindless followers.”
I think about fourteen-year-old Allison, who did her best to put a bullet in my heart. “You think money can buy clean hands?”
Kendrick snorts. “Guilt doesn’t stick to a dragon. If it did, they wouldn’t be where they are in the world.”
I meant my hands, but I think he knows that.
“We did a good thing today, Shelley. And when we get you wired up again, the guilt will go away.”
• • • •
Reinforcements arrive. The civilian prisoners are evac’d, and then Kendrick turns over control of Black Cross to an Intelligence team. Ransom tells me they’re all wearing radiation dosimeters. He and Tuttle get to haul my ass six flights back up to the top. They’re both big men. With my added weight their dead sisters are starting to slip at the joints, but they get me in through the back gate of a waiting Chinook. I do not want to be carried even one more step than necessary, so I tell them, “Put me down at the end of the bench.”
Tuttle says something, but I don’t have a helmet anymore, nothing to boost my hearing, so I can’t make out what he’s saying over the roar of the engines. “Goddamn it, speak up!” My skullnet’s dead, and my temper is as sharp as shattered glass. “Think I can hear you over this noise?”
“Just saying, plenty of empty seats forward!”
“The squad can climb over me. Put me down.”
“Right here,” Ransom says. “Let’s do it.”
They settle me on the end of the bench. One of them clomps back down the ramp. “You doing okay, LT?” Ransom asks, revealing who has stayed behind.
“Yeah,” I lie. “How about you?”
“Hurts to breathe, but no broken ribs.”
“If you were carrying me up those stairs with broken ribs, I’d kick your ass.”
“Yes, sir.”
There’s a thud as he shoves his pack under the bench. I hear him stripping off his bones in preparation for the flight—technically he’s supposed to do that outside the helicopter, but I don’t say anything.
Footsteps and tired imprecations let me know that more soldiers are filing in. Packs hit the floor with solid thumps. The overhead racks rattle and clang as the folded-up carcasses of the dead sisters are loaded into them. Then the bench shifts as Ransom sits next to me.
“Keeping an eye on me?”
“I got your back, sir. That’s all.”
“Same—not that it will do you much good right now.”
“You were a demon from hell down there today, sir.”
I guess that’s a compliment. It feels like a gut shot.
Out of habit my gaze shifts to check the squad’s status on my visor—which of course I’m not wearing. I swear softly. Being cut off from gen-com means I don’t know where people are or what’s really going on, and I can’t put out a general query—but I’m still an officer and I can make myself a pain in the ass if I want to. I raise my voice and communicate the old-fashioned way. “Call out! Who’s here?”
A woman says, “Sarge is already doing a head count on gen-com.” Her voice is low and nasally, and for a second I don’t recognize it. Then I realize it’s Specialist Harvey, speaking with a broken nose.
“Goddamn it, Harvey! I said we’re doing a roll call.”
“Yes, sir.”
“So where’s Kendrick?”
We have a designated order for roll call, by descending rank, ascending name.
Jaynie answers from the open gate. “The colonel will evac later.”
“That makes you next, Sergeant. Call out!”
“Vasquez.”
“Fevella.”
“Harvey.”
“Moon.”
“Nakaoka.”
“Ransom.”
“Tuttle.”
“Flynn.”
“Hoang.”
“Johnson.”
There’s an interval of
silence when Wade should have called out. Then I hear the rattle of another dead sister going into the overhead rack, the thump of another pack being stowed under the bench. “Can you slide over, sir?” Jaynie asks.
I get closer to Ransom, making room for her on the end of the bench. “All the equipment’s properly stowed?” I ask her.
“Yes, sir.”
Gears whine as the back gate closes. The Chinook’s engine cranks up.
I lean toward Jaynie. My forehead hits her helmet. “Have we got a status on Sergeant Nolan’s group?” Nolan and two privates were left behind at the traitors’ checkpoint, tasked with getting rid of the pickup trucks.
“I haven’t been able to check in with Guidance, sir.”
“So no status on Fernandez and Antonio?” They were sent with Troy and the National Guard truck.
“Not yet, sir.”
“Geez!” Ransom exclaims from my other side. “I thought I only got hit twice, but there’s three bullets pancaked in my armor! And that’s just the front side. I bet there’s shrapnel in the back.” I feel him lean across me as the Chinook begins to lift. “Hey, Sarge—how many do you have?”
“I wasn’t frontline assault,” Jaynie calls out. “I don’t have any.”
I remember being shot once in my robot foot and once in the chest by little Allison. I touch my chest and wince at the pain of the bruise, follow it to its center, where the tissue is swollen. The bullet hit a lot closer to my throat than I thought. If it had hit just a little higher I wouldn’t be here.
Just bad luck, I guess.
No. That’s not what I’m thinking. I don’t want to die. I don’t.
I need to know that Lissa is alive. I want to see her again, and my dad, and Elliot. But my skullnet is dead, and there’s nothing to hold back the black void seeping into my chest.
I feel Jaynie lean against me. I’m startled by the humid warmth of her breath against my ear.
“You got your helmet off, Sergeant?”
“I’ve got to ask you off-com, sir. Why did you go outside?”
Everyone in the squad is wearing a helmet that can filter a whisper out of the engine noise. “We’re not off-com.”
“Everyone has shut off audio enhancement, sir. It’s just you and me. So why did you go outside? The colonel was screaming at you to stay in.”
Delphi was screaming at me too. I heard her voice in the white noise of the jets.
“My audio wasn’t working right. Maybe there was interference from the jets.”
Jaynie pushes me harder. “So why did you go outside?”
“I just wanted to.”
I really, really wanted to.
Jaynie says, “Too bad God got sucker-punched. He might have warned you to stay inside.”
A shudder runs through me. Jaynie doesn’t know the Red came back to visit me on the approach to Black Cross.
The Red has always been on my side, whispering premonitions of danger . . . but when I heard those fighters coming, something in my head demanded that I go outside. Why?
I think I know. Right up until the blast everything I saw was relayed out through the angel, saved for posterity.
To Jaynie I say, “It made good drama, don’t you think? A kick-ass end to episode two when I witnessed those pilots get vaporized?”
I hear an edge in her voice: “It’s not a fucking joke, sir.”
“I’m not joking. The Red’s back, Jaynie, and it was fucking with me. It was fucking with my equipment. It walked me out that fucking door.”
I feel her pull away. She thinks I’m crazy. Maybe I am.
But a few minutes later, I feel her breath in my ear again. “I don’t want to be a puppet. We need to take it out.”
“The Red? This whole fucked-up episode is because Thelma Sheridan tried to take down the Red. She murdered thousands of people and nuked the country—and the Red is still here! You want to get rid of it? Then you’re going to have to play a harder game than a dragon. Can you do that?”
“I don’t want to live with it.”
I ask her what Kendrick asked me: “What makes you think we have a choice?”
She doesn’t answer. She doesn’t talk to me at all after that.
• • • •
Eventually, we land somewhere.
The engine winds down; it’s getting easier to hear. Jaynie gets up; so does Ransom, but he’s left his helmet on the seat—a fact I discover when my elbow bumps against it. The overhead racks rattle as the dead sisters are pulled down. From the chatter, I deduce we’ve been delivered to San Antonio and that permission was given to remove helmets. An announcement must have gone out on gen-com, but I’m not linked. Can’t hear the Cloud. Can’t see the world. Can’t walk. I want to punch something.
The smooth growl of an electronic mechanism is followed by a puff of air that smells like dust and jet fuel as the ramp opens. In a clipped voice, Jaynie says, “Harvey, take care of Lieutenant Shelley.”
Not hard to figure out that she’s still pissed at me.
“Yes, Sergeant.” Evidently it’s Vanessa Harvey standing right in front of me. “Bring it up!” she yells. Then in a softer voice, “LT, you aren’t going to believe this.”
“What?”
“They brought a wheelchair for you.”
It’s an old-school model—no electronics—but they’ve sent an attendant to push it.
Dawn has come. I can tell from the purple shards of light, so dim they don’t hurt my eyes at all as I’m wheeled across the tarmac. The tramping footfalls of my soldiers following me are a comforting sound. A white artificial light appears ahead. It gets brighter, chasing back the dawn with luminous fragments so intense I duck my head. The chair’s wheels roll over a bump and the air becomes stuffy and still. I’m indoors, and the AC is not working. There are a lot of people around. Camera shutters click and flashes go off in my face. I duck my head farther and cover my eyes with my hand.
“What the fuck is going on?” I growl at no one in particular.
Tuttle answers, “Photo op.” Then fear enters his voice as he whispers, “Shit! Generals! ”
Now I really want to punch something.
People are moving all around me, talking in low voices. I’m still hiding behind my hand when my wheelchair comes to a stop.
“Lieutenant Shelley,” a man’s voice says—one that sounds suspiciously familiar. “I want to thank you and your unit for what you did tonight. Uncounted lives have been saved by your heroism, and all of you have the thanks of a grateful nation.”
It’s the goddamn president.
Not that I voted for him.
But Kendrick will kick my ass if I mouth off or fail to conduct myself with the dignity inherent to an officer in the United States Army. So I drop my hand to the armrest, sit up straight, and open my eyes to the pain of the overhead lights. There’s a gasp and a twitter around me that tells me my eyes must look pretty bad, but I ignore it. I stare in the general direction of where the president must be and I say, “Thank you, sir,” in a voice that’s still hoarse and dry.
Someone touches my right hand. I’m so startled, I jerk back in the chair.
Jaynie hisses in my ear, “Shake the president’s hand.”
Fuck. But I do my job. Composing myself again, I look up. This time I have more to say. “My apologies, sir. Our LCS communicates with gen-com bulletins, but I’m not hooked in anymore. Equipment failure. And my sergeant hasn’t had a chance to brief me on our agenda.” This last I say through gritted teeth to let Jaynie know that I don’t care how pissed she is, I’m going to kick her ass when we’re out of here. And then I hold out my hand.
The president grasps it. “No need at all to apologize, Lieutenant Shelley. It is an honor to meet you.”
Next item on the agenda turns out to be Get the crazy cyborg out of sight, which is fi
ne with me. The attendant pushes my chair past shattered ghost shapes that I interpret as people. Behind me, cameras continue to click and flashes go off as the president moves on to greet each remaining member of our dual LCS, thanking them for their service.
The sounds of the ceremony soon fall behind. I hear the soft hiss of wheels against floor tiles, the astonished whispers of my soldiers as they escape the photo op, and the tramp of their boots. The attendant turns the chair to go around a corner. The air gets a little colder. My soldiers don’t follow. I hear them as they continue down the hall. It scares me to be apart from them. “What the hell is going on?”
From in front of me a voice says, “Shelley, it’s me.”
I think my mouth falls open—which works out all right because Lissa puts her lips against mine, and with her hands behind my head, she gives me a long, long kiss. Of all the things I could be thinking, the one that pops up first is that I’m really glad Kendrick made me take a shower.
With my lips brushing hers, I whisper, “Lissa, I didn’t know if you were even alive. Kendrick said someone would try to get you out—”
“They did. I’m okay. They brought me here.” She pulls back. “Major Chen’s here.”
He reveals his presence by speaking in his level, pragmatic voice. “I want to commend you, Shelley, for doing what needed doing.”
“Thank you, sir, but it was Colonel Kendrick’s victory.”
In my mind, I go back to Black Cross. I hear the jets again and I want to go see them—I need to see them, so I step outside—and I watch the rocket begin to fall. “I fucked it up at the end, Major. But I want to thank you for getting Lissa out.”
“That was Kendrick’s victory too.”
The door closes with a soft click. I’m not sure if Lissa is still with us.
Chen says, “Shelley, I need to be very clear with you. Everything that happened, everything you witnessed over the past twenty-four hours, is classified, subject to a need-to-know basis. You will say nothing to anyone without my approval.”
“I understand, sir. Where’s Lissa?”
“I’m here, Shelley.”
“You will say nothing to Lissa.”
“Yes, sir. I understand.”
Chen steps closer. I tense as he takes my wrist. “This is for you.” He puts something made of cloth in my hand. I explore its familiar shape: the smooth, strong fabric, the embedded microwire net. It’s a skullcap. “It’s preloaded with your profile.”