The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  Ransom disappears downstairs. Moon takes off after him. I turn to follow, but I stop at the rumble of a muffled explosion. “What the hell is that?”

  Kendrick says, “That would be Vasquez disabling the elevator shaft.”

  Only one way out now.

  I move out, following Moon and Ransom.

  It’s another three flights down to our goal. Jumping in the dead sisters, we get there fast. Only one-hundred-ten seconds have passed since we entered the staging area on Level 1.

  Another fire door stands in our way. I can’t hear anything beyond it, but I’m certain there are at least a dozen well-armed mercs on the other side, waiting to greet us.

  According to the map, the stairwell opens onto a fifteen-foot wide hallway joining the two halves of the dumbbell that make up Level 3. Across the hallway is the freight elevator that Jaynie just disabled. The storage lockups for food and water are on one side, the control room on the other.

  I’d like to blow the fire door open, but that would chew up what little oxygen is left in the stairwell, it would risk damaging the power supply to the control room, and it would take too much time. So I position myself beside the door and get ready to open it by hand. Ransom moves in behind me, where the wall will protect him when the shooting starts. Moon takes a position on the opposite side of the door. Pfc. Layla Wade comes down next. I send her to stand behind Moon. There isn’t room to fit anyone else without putting them right in front of the fire door.

  “No one else come down!” I order over gen-com.

  I reach for the door handle. I need to unlatch it, and then kick it open.

  “Hold up, Shelley!” Kendrick calls over gen-com. He ignores my last directive and vaults down the final flight of stairs, filling up the space in front of the fire door. Then he turns to look back up. “Everyone, facemasks on! Once your facemask is secure, stay put. Do not descend to Level 3 until instructed.”

  I shoulder my weapon and get my facemask out of its titanium case. Sliding my hand up under my visor, I hold the mask against my nose and mouth, giving the engineered tissue a required ten seconds to adhere to my skin, cursing the lost time. When oxygen starts to flow, I take my M-CL1a in hand again—but now that I’ve got more O2 in my system, I start to think.

  I’m one hundred percent sure that when I open the fire door, a fusillade of defensive fire will erupt from the other side.

  I really don’t want my hand shot off.

  I look at Kendrick. He’s taking off his backpack. He gets his oxygen cylinder out of it, stuffing it inside his vest.

  I really don’t want my hand shot off. So I use the time to un-cinch my right leg from the frame of the dead sister.

  Kendrick sees what I’m doing. “Shelley, what the fuck?” His voice is muffled by the oxygen mask.

  So is mine. “Using the resources, sir.”

  The cyborg foot can bend in multiple directions and grip with the strength of a hand—but unlike my hand, it’s replaceable. Balancing on one leg, I bend the other until I can grab the door handle with my foot.

  “Well, fuck me,” Kendrick says.

  Then he makes Moon back up a couple of steps and takes over his place on the other side of the door. This forces Wade to move all the way back to the bottom step. “Crouch low,” I tell her.

  Kendrick crouches too. “Ransom,” he says. “Moon—as soon as the door is open I want you both to pitch a flash-bang into the hallway. I’m going to use my backpack to prop the door. Got it?”

  “Got it, sir.” Ransom gets a grenade from his vest pocket. I get hold of the door handle again with my robot foot.

  “Okay, Shelley,” Kendrick says. “Let’s do it.”

  The door opens outward. I shove the handle down and kick as hard as I can.

  It flies open, swinging one hundred-eighty degrees as a chorus of automatic weapons thunder death into the stairwell. At least one of those bullets strikes my titanium foot. The impact knocks me off balance, sending me spinning into Ransom. He jams his shoulder against my chest, pinning me to the wall so I can’t fall down while he pitches his grenade past me. From the corner of my eye I see Kendrick lob his backpack through the doorway. The door swings only partly shut as the grenades go off with dizzying concussions.

  Ransom rolls back against the wall while my visor darkens to hide my eyes from the glare. Even before it clears I drop into a crouch, moving as fast as I can to re-secure the cinches on the leg strut of my dead sister. I’m getting a red-hot feedback from the limb. The foot didn’t shatter, but the joints don’t fit right anymore, and I can’t make it completely flat.

  Screw it. Joby can always make me a new one.

  And in the meantime, Moon, Ransom, Kendrick, and Wade are pouring bullets into the chaos of Level 3.

  I join them. Still crouching, I hold my HITR so the muzzle is out the door and, using the targeting cam, I shoot anything that moves. Smoke and screams fill the hallway outside. Ransom is leaning over me to shoot, so I hear him grunt when he gets hit. He disappears from my field of view, knocked back into the stairwell. On the other side of the door, Moon gets slammed backward into the wall. Screams erupt behind me, but they’re not coming from Moon or from Ransom. It’s a woman. I glance over my shoulder to see Wade down, her legs shattered and pumping blood.

  Fuck.

  “Nakaoka!” I yell. She’s the closest thing we have to a medic. “Up front! Wounded!”

  “On my way, sir!”

  Ransom is back, leaning over me again, though he’s hurting. He’s got his shoulder braced against the doorframe, his breathing is fast and shallow, and he’s dripping on my gloves. I glance at my hands, reassured to see it’s sweat not blood. His armor must have saved him.

  Wade wasn’t so lucky. Her status goes critical, posting automatically in bold red on my visor: heart rate 210; brain function declining.

  “Vasquez!” Kendrick bellows. “Now would be a good time.”

  “On my way, sir!”

  I run out of targets. The shooting stops. We’ve won a lull in the defense... and Wade isn’t screaming anymore. Nakaoka bounds down the stairway as Wade’s chest spasms in shallow, panicked breathing.

  “Moon,” I bark. “Status?”

  “Ambulatory. Non-critical.”

  “Same,” Ransom says, before I can ask.

  Jaynie appears on the landing above with a big-mouthed gun in her hands. Nakaoka and Wade block the bottom of the stairs, so she vaults over the rail, coming down right behind me.

  The gun she’s carrying is illegal, a chemical weapons dispenser that we are not supposed to have. “Kendrick! Where the hell did that come from? I didn’t see it in the battle plans.”

  I thought he’d ordered facemasks to protect us from enemy assault; I didn’t think we’d be the ones to violate international law.

  Jaynie shoulders past me. Kendrick says, “Need-to-know, Lieutenant.” The chemical gun goes off with a sound like popcorn as Jaynie sprays a fan of cylinders into the smoke-filled hall. “Need for secrecy.”

  Wade’s status on my visor updates: heart rate, zero; brain function, flatline.

  “Advance!” Kendrick orders.

  I wheel, and lunge into the hall.

  ~~~

  Smoke clouds the air. I look right, left, right again. No one’s moving. No one shoots. Blood pools the floor, seeping from bodies in Uther-Fen uniforms. Not one of them screams. Not one of them groans. Surely they can’t all be dead? What kind of nasty gas did Jaynie have in those cylinders?

  “Tuttle!” Kendrick bellows over gen-com. “You, Fevella, and Flynn! Down to Level 3.” He shoots out two camera buttons near the ceiling.

  I don’t see any civilians among the fallen, but steel doors guard both ends of the hallway. I’m contemplating what it will take to blow the door to the control room off its hinges without bringing the ceiling down when a large gray rat falls from overhead, landing with a plop in the blood. I look up, to see neat ductwork and piping suspended from concrete. Then I nudge the rat w
ith the toe-end of my footplate. A camera button is stuck on its narrow forehead. A whip-wire antenna sticks out of the back of its skull, lying flat against its spine. The mystery of how Intelligence knew exactly what was going on down here is solved.

  Ransom leans over to look. “God-damn,” he says in a voice muffled by his facemask. “Is that a robo-rat?”

  Kendrick glances at it as he steps past to survey the fallen mercs. “Sucker’s rigged up just like Shelley. Skullnet, camera, transmitter. The rest of us are fucking obsolete.” He points at a body with its throat shot out. “This one! Moon, Ransom, haul this carcass to the end of the hall.”

  They grab the body by the shoulders and drag it to the control room door, making trails of blood, and bloody footprints. It’s no worse to look at than any of the carnage I saw on the way down, no worse than the torn-up bodies sprawled at my feet, but the sight of those blood trails hits me and I freeze, gripped by a sense that none of this is real.

  Someone nudges my arm. “L. T.,” Jaynie says. “You still with us? Better take some fluids before you drop.”

  She trots after Kendrick. I grab my water tube, slide it under the oxygen mask, and suck in a mouthful. Tuttle, Fevella, and Flynn burst out of the stairwell, one after another, their weapons in hand, heads turning as they look for a target. I gesture toward the control room. “Go. Follow the sergeant.”

  Nakaoka steps out next. She’s armed and ready too. “Nothing I could do, L. T.”

  “I know.”

  I take another mouthful of fortified water, then shove the tube back under my armor. I’m lightheaded; almost dizzy. Maybe my facemask is leaking. Maybe it’s cerebral exhaustion. That happens. Brain cells run out of raw materials, waste products build up, thinking gets confused, and the skullnet can’t fix it. Only time can, and we don’t have time. Gathering my wits, I crook my finger at Nakaoka, and we trot to the end of the hall.

  We’ve got a total of nine personnel jammed together at the control room door. Jaynie is organizing them, shoving people into lines so we don’t crash into each other when we storm the room. I make my way to the front, conscious of each second ticking past. Kendrick is holding a DNA scanner that’s leashed to the wall. The shell of the scanner is plastic: flat, white, and tear-drop shaped, with a micropoint at the narrow end. “Try it under the jaw,” Moon says, holding up the corpse that Kendrick wanted. “There might be blood pooled there.”

  Kendrick does it, and then he glances at a display. “Good call.” Moon and Ransom haul the body out of the way, while Kendrick turns to a keypad. “Prep the troops, Shelley,” he says as he punches in a code.

  My brain is still lagging. For about two seconds, I have no idea what we’re supposed to do on the other side of that door. “Fuck,” I whisper. Kendrick turns his visor in my direction, his hand poised above the enter key.

  “Blue Parker!” I bark. “Take him alive. The codes we need are on a thumb drive around his neck. Do not destroy the equipment! We need that too. Shoot to kill, as needed. Aim carefully!”

  Kendrick presses the enter key.

  The door unlatches with a loud click, opening inward. Moon pushes it a couple of inches, then ducks back as a bullet flies out. Jaynie reaches around the corner with her big-mouth gun, jams the muzzle into the opening, and shoots.

  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 facemasks.

  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 back-up. 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 newsfeeds.

  Daylight bulbs fill the space with a clean white light that clearly illuminates the shooter. She’s a young girl, blonde-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, L. T.?”

  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 facemask on, but his helmet is sitting on the floor at his feet.

  From boot-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 L. T. 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 nightvision. Only a few minutes have passed since we blasted our way into Black Cross.