The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  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 trap door 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 ear drums 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 hers 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:

  Chicago launch

  Chicago shutdown

  New York launch

  New York shutdown

  “New York first,” I say.

  “Go ahead, Vasquez,” the Colonel says. “New York. Make the L. T. 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 Chicago next, and when the thumbs-up comes through on that, she shuts down the cancer in Phoenix, in Atlanta, and in Denver.

  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 fighters are 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 nightvision, 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 doorframe 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 5, stairwell’s open.”

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

  “Landing 6, 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 doorframe. “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 doorframe 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, 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?”

  “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 non-fortified 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, L. T.”

  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 1.”

  “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 tranks,” 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, L. T.?” 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.

  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 headcount 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.