by Linda Nagata
“I don’t know how much I like being an ordinary mortal.”
She doesn’t answer. Chit-chat isn’t professional.
I tell her, “When you’re messing in my headspace, try not to turn me into a mean-ass gangster killer, okay?”
“Go to sleep, Shelley.”
Like I have a choice. The skullnet icon flickers, and I’m out.
~~~
My head is full of dreams that vanish as I snap back into awareness. I can’t recall a single image, but my brain is mired in a residue of dread. It’s as if I’ve wakened into an awareness that we are trapped, all of us, prisoners in a pointless struggle that will never change one damn thing in the world. I fight a looming sense of panic. It’s not easy to do while breathing the close, stinking air inside the cargo container, with nothing to see but darkness beyond the pearlescent glimmer of my visor’s latent icons.
I need more to look at, and I need to know where we are, so I pull up a map. At first I can’t make any sense of it. It’s just a jumble of lines drawn on a meaningless, textured background. I suck fortified water from my pack to get more calories into my system, and then I check the time. We’ve been on the road two hours and twelve minutes.
My helmet filters out the road noise, amplifying the smaller sounds: the scrape of a strut against the floor, the whisper of cloth against cloth, a soft cough from a dry throat. Someone—Ransom or Nolan—shifts, bumping a strut against my right footplate. I pull my foot back, and check the map again. I’m more alert now, and this time what I see makes sense to me. I decide we’re south and east of Dallas.
Kendrick speaks on gen-com: “We’re coming to a checkpoint. I’m with Vasquez, out of sight in the bunk behind the seats. We are going to try to get through without incident, so no movement, no sound, no lights—but be prepared to fight.”
I slide a few millimeters as the truck decelerates, before bracing myself with my hands. I’m listening hard to my helmet audio, hoping for some hint of what’s going on outside, but we’re still rolling, so all I hear are engine and tire noises, and a loose rod rattling in its socket on the door.
“If we are discovered,” Kendrick continues, his voice deadly calm, “we hit back hard and fast. Take out everyone at this checkpoint, and do it before our presence gets radioed in.”
Really? And how is that going to work? Surely someone at the checkpoint will be sitting on the side with a radio or a satellite phone in hand. That’s how I’d do it. ‘Take out everyone before word gets out’ is superhero bullshit. I put our odds of success at about one in a hundred—and if we fail, New York gets blown up. No pressure there. God, I hope Troy really loves his sister. I hope he’s good at lying.
I decide to ignore Kendrick’s order to sit tight. If we’re going to fight, I want to go into it as light, as agile, as fast as I can be. So I slip out of my backpack. No point in carrying the extra weight, or taking the chance that it will catch on something in close quarters.
“Easy,” Delphi warns. “The goal here is to avoid a fight.”
I focus on the word understood. My skullnet picks it up and transmits it without me having to speak aloud. But just because we don’t want a fight, doesn’t mean we aren’t going to get one.
Slowly, silently, I turn over. I get my feet under me until I’m crouched facing the cargo doors. I have my M-CL1a in hand. My finger is beside the trigger.
I think, Prep Ransom and Nolan.
“You got a bad feeling?” Delphi asks.
Edgy.
Behind me, I hear a faint creak of struts, then there’s a touch against my shoulder. I check the squad map, confirming that Ransom is right behind me, and Nolan is crouched beside him.
The truck comes to a stop with the diesel engine still rumbling, the loose rod still rattling. I can’t hear anything from outside.
“Three enemy visible,” Delphi informs me as she switches on angel sight. “All armed with assault rifles.”
In nightvision, I’m looking down on an anonymous four-way intersection, surrounded by terrain that is all too familiar. Though we’ve been on the road over two hours, we’re still stuck in the same ass-end of nowhere, with barbed-wire fences providing the only vertical relief in a flat, featureless rangeland.
By contrast, the intersection is busy.
Directly in front of our National Guard truck, two big pickup trucks are parked sideways across the road, blocking the way. A third pickup waits on the shoulder, its headlights illuminating the road on our driver’s side. Enemy Number 1 is standing on the running board of our truck, looking in the driver’s window, the stock of his weapon cradled in his bent arm. I can’t see the muzzle, because he’s got it aimed inside the cab. Enemy Number 2 stands on the road below, a man with a huge belly, his posture tense as he holds his assault rifle in a two-hand, cross-body grip. Number 3 is a slender shadow stalking cautiously alongside the truck, heading toward the back.
More? I ask, staring at the pickup trucks.
Delphi says, “No indication that anyone remains in the pickups, but that is not confirmed.”
Kendrick links again to gen-com, but he doesn’t speak. Instead, he pipes his audio to us so we can hear what he’s hearing. Right now that’s a man with a drawling, high-pitched voice, confidently explaining the facts of life:
“Listen here, Troy, my friend. I know you’re a loyal son of the revolution, but the fact is, you got no manifest. So no one’s gonna miss a thing if the rest of us help ourselves to a little bit of your cargo. After all, we all gotta make a living.”
Troy speaks, his voice sounding louder, closer. “Sweet Jesus,” he says. “Buddy, would you get that fucking gun out of my face?”
Enemy Number 3 has reached the back of the truck. Through angel sight I watch him try the lever that opens the cargo doors; with my ears I hear the mechanism clang and bang, but a lock keeps it from opening. Number 3 retreats, to where he can see the cab. There’s too much engine noise, too much rattling steel to hear him, but it looks like he’s yelling up to the front. Buddy confirms this when he says, “Troy, I’ll get this gun out of your face when you turn over the key to the cargo.”
Give him the key, I think—because I like Buddy even less than I like Troy.
Troy’s not too impressed with Buddy either. “Just give me a fuckin’ minute. The key’s up top, in a locker alongside the bunk.”
“Yeah?” Buddy says. “You make sure it’s a key you grab, or your brain’s gonna be all over the roof.”
“Take it easy,” Troy grumbles. I hear scrunching sounds—shoes on the vinyl seat?—and then Troy’s voice gets louder. “I ain’t that devoted to the revolution.”
A click... muffled noises... then Troy, distant again: “Here. Have at it.”
“You come on down out of the truck for a minute,” Buddy says.
In angel sight, I see Buddy jump down from his perch beside the cab door. The door opens, and Troy climbs down. They walk together toward the back of the truck, the fat man with the weapon trailing behind them.
Kendrick whispers over gen-com. “Shelley, Nolan, Ransom, this is your party. Don’t shoot each other, and try not to shoot Troy. Everyone else, hunker down and do not participate unless ordered to do so.”
Angel sight shows me three men standing behind the truck and one more off to the side. That one is Troy, who has positioned himself outside our immediate zone of fire. He really is a lot smarter than he seems.
Buddy is holding a flashlight so that its beam shines on the back of the truck. Number 3 stoops to work the lock. When I hear steel clang, and then the grinding of a lever, I drop out of angel sight and watch with my own eyes as a single door swings slowly open. The flashlight beams reaches through the gap and rakes across my visor. All I can see in nightvision is a shapeless green glare.
I shoot anyway, a short burst.
“Fuck!” Buddy screams as the flashlight disappears and I know I missed him.
The door swings shut.
I launch myself at it, hitting it w
ith my shoulder. As it slams back, I jump out, shooting a burst at the place where the fat man was standing when I last saw him with angel sight. He’s still there. As my robot feet hit the pavement, he goes down with two dark holes in his chest. His weapon clatters to the asphalt, unfired.
I swivel, looking for another target, but Buddy and Number 3 are nowhere in sight. A shattering of small arms fire comes from the side of the truck. I duck back, sheltering behind the open cargo door, but as I move, a power surge like I’ve never felt before makes my left leg spasm. The knee twists sideways. Searing pain shoots up my hip. I lose my balance and go down, but I’m able to roll onto my belly, with the HITR in my hands.
I’m aware of Nolan and Ransom, leaping over my head as they exit the truck, but I’m not watching them. All I’m looking for is a target circle in my display.
It pops into existence and I cover it, firing a burst as chips of pavement kick up beside me. It turns out my target is Buddy. The bullets hit him in the chest, knocking him into the air for a half second, before gravity body-slams him to the road. He doesn’t move.
“Where’s Number 3?” I shout over gen-com.
“Number 3 is down,” Kendrick says in a calm and deliberate voice. “Where’s our prisoner?”
I turn to look at the place where Troy was standing before the shooting started. Nolan’s there now. “Got him, sir,” the sergeant says. Troy is belly-down on the ground, his arms over his head. He must have dropped at the first shot. Smart man.
“Get him up,” Kendrick says. “Shelley, you still with us?”
“Yes, sir. Are we clear?”
“We damn well better be, but I want a sweep.”
“On it.”
I roll over and sit up, the pain in my hip gone as fast as it came. Above me, most of our dual LCS is crowded in the open doorway, everyone labeled with a name. I pick some at random. “Harvey! Take Fernandez and Hoang. Circle around. Look for problems.” They jump out eagerly and disappear around the truck. “Tuttle! You, Moon, and Wade, go check the pickup trucks.”
“The rest of you get the bodies,” Kendrick adds, “and load them into the back of one of the pickups.”
Everyone bails out over my head, landing with rattling thumps on the pavement. More than one whispers a fervent thank-you-to-God for the fresh air, which really isn’t all that fresh given that it’s laden with the stink of gunpowder—but compared to the noxious air inside the truck, it’s golden.
As they clear out, I test my left leg, bending the robot knee and flexing the ankle. This produces no repeat of the weird, electric surge that knocked me down. So I get my feet under me and, moving cautiously, I stand up again. When I put weight on the leg, it’s stable.
That’s when I notice what looks like a bullet hole in my fatigues, just above the left knee. I lean down to inspect it, putting my little finger through it, just to prove to myself that it really is a hole.
Someone comes around from the side of the truck. My visor tells me it’s Jaynie. “Are you hit?” she asks.
“It’s starting to look that way.”
She grabs a little LED flashlight, and squats to look. Her finger slips into the hole; she flinches when she feels the titanium bone. “I think there’s a dent.” She looks up at me uneasily. “Do you still work?”
I raise my left foot, put it down again. “Seem to.”
My adrenaline high is draining away and I’m starting to feel shaky, especially when I consider how close that bullet came to hitting my living flesh.
Still crouching, Jaynie shines her flashlight in a circle on the pavement around us. “Gotcha.” She gets up, takes a couple of steps, and picks up something from the road. “Here, I think this is yours.”
I hold out my hand. Her flashlight shows the blob of a spent bullet dropped into my palm.
Dr. Masoud once implied my robot legs were better than natural. I have to admit, he might be right. I’m a faster runner now, I’ll never twist a knee or an ankle, and bullets bounce off the titanium, instead of shattering my natural bones.
Jaynie asks, “How many lives are you planning to burn through before you make your twenty-fourth birthday, Lieutenant?”
“I guess it depends on how many I’ve got.”
Her voice drops. “You still King David? Is God still with you?”
I consider the edgy feeling I had in the back of the truck, but that was a hunch, lacking the raw certainty of a whispered hint from the Red.
I shove the bullet into my pocket. “Delphi thinks the Red is gone. If so, it’s just luck now.”
~~~
Sergeant Nolan and two rookie privates are left behind, tasked with getting rid of the pickup trucks. Jaynie returns to the cab with Troy. Kendrick sends the rest of us back into the container truck. We cram ourselves in again among the big guns and the pallets. He closes the cargo doors, and a few seconds later, the truck rolls. Kendrick believes if we don’t acquire the shutdown codes by dawn, we lose.
Guidance distributes an intelligence briefing describing our target. The briefing includes dossiers of seventy-one individuals believed present in the facility, a number that includes the hired security. There is also an architectural diagram identifying points of resistance, and a walk-through video of the route we will follow. I look it all over with increasing disbelief.
“Delphi,” I murmur.
“Here.”
“Who the hell put this report together?”
“Intelligence provided the briefing.”
“I know that. But if Intelligence has someone on the inside who can do a video walk-through, why doesn’t that agent just grab the shutdown codes?”
“Negative. There are no sympathetic personnel inside. Shoot to kill, as needed. No exceptions.”
“That’s crazy. Somebody had to take the video. Who was it?”
“I don’t know, Shelley. And you don’t need to know. Just know where you’re going, and know what you’re looking for. You’re going to lose communication with me when you’re inside. So do the run-through now. You won’t be able to ask questions later.”
~~~
The facility is codenamed Black Cross. It’s a cold war relic built with black-op funds in the 1960s, and quietly sold at the turn of the century to a Texas rancher and oilman as a thank-you for some forgotten political favor. The rancher wanted it for an Armageddon shelter, just in case God didn’t actually show up on doomsday to collect the faithful.
The facility has decent security. Cameras are positioned around it. A single dirt road leads up to it. Its surface profile is a low, sprawling hill, covered in dry grass and grazed by scrawny cattle. In another landscape the hill might be a convincing natural feature, but here it provides the only relief to an unrelenting flat geometry. A satellite antenna sits just below the hill’s high point. We are not to take out that antenna. It’s the dead-man’s switch that sends a continuous signal of reassurance to a geosynchronous satellite, which relays the signal to the nuclear weapons in New York and other nice places. If the signal fails, the bombs go off.
Entry into Black Cross is through a set of wide double doors embedded in the artificial hillside. There are also ventilation shafts—three in all—around the hill. None are large enough to climb down, and all are secured by heavy grates and watched by cameras. They’re included on the map purely for academic interest.
Guidance has decided our only way in is through the front door. We were never trained in finesse, so there will be nothing subtle about our assault. If the doors are locked, we’ll blow them open, and in the ensuing confusion we will enter.
There is a staging area on the inside, designated Level 1. A large freight elevator descends to Levels 2 and 3, but we will be taking the stairs. Level 2 is an east-west tunnel with living quarters appended to it. Level 3 is a north-south dumbbell-shaped chamber with food storage on one side and a control room on the other.
Security is provided by experienced mercenaries identified as employees of Uther-Fen Protective Services. All are
foreigners, with poor English skills, which will hopefully make it difficult for them to take control of the nuclear devices.
“Violence of action” is our strategy: move fast and hit hard. Take down the enemy in the critical seconds before he can react. The scheme strikes me as even more ridiculous than our checkpoint assault. I have to admit that plan worked, but at the checkpoint we faced only three enemy soldiers, none of them well-trained. Uther-Fen Protective Services is going to be a lot better staffed.
I do the walk-through several times. It’s an amazingly detailed record, given that we’ve got no one inside. I visit every room, every closet in the facility. I survey the names and faces of every murderous traitor within, as well as the names and faces of their kids, of which there are a few.
“Delphi, what about the kids?”
“Shoot to kill, as needed,” she repeats. “No exceptions.” Then she adds, in a softer voice, “You can accept an offer of surrender. Just remember, if those bombs go off, a lot more kids are going to die.”
Intelligence has ascertained that the shutdown codes we need are on a thumb drive hanging around the neck of the newly installed president of Independent Texas. He’s a tall, thin, blond-haired, self-important yahoo, maybe thirty years old, named Blue Parker, no doubt for his pretty blue eyes. He’s the photogenic face of this revolution—and its fall guy when the independence thing fails, though I doubt he’s figured that out yet.
I’m looking forward to meeting President Blue Parker and assisting him to understand the tenuous nature of his title.
~~~
It’s 0346 when we finally get to where we’re going. We pile out of the back of the truck, and form up beneath the cover of a tree. Cows watch us by moonlight; some start moving away.
Delphi projects a schematic onto my visor that lays a bright green trail across the field. “This is the route you need to take,” she tells me. “It’s plotted to avoid the security cameras. Do not deviate.”