The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  “Status!” Kendrick barks. “Shelley?”

  I flounder in the snow. It takes me a couple seconds to get on my feet. “We have an enemy on the ground!”

  “Are you hit, Lieutenant?”

  “Mule kicked! It’s coming, sir!” I hear it in the forest, charging toward us, crunching in the snow with the rhythm of a running horse.

  “Blow it up,” Kendrick says. “Vasquez, you hit?”

  “Bruised.” The word is a whisper from between clenched teeth. Then she adds, “Goddamn, what the fuck is that?”

  She fires a grenade into the trees.

  My visor goes black against the ensuing explosion. A large caliber weapon hammers an answer. I drop flat in the snow, but I keep my head up, my weapon roughly aimed, and when a targeting circle appears, I cover it, and launch my own grenade.

  In the second-and-a-quarter before the grenade goes off, I get a good look at what’s coming for me. It’s a four-legged robotic monster, standing taller than a wolfhound. I’ve seen prototypes of things like it, but none that moved with the agility this one displays. It looks like a mechanical wolf skeleton, though there’s no true head, just two cross-braced struts with camera eyes. The guns mounted on either side of its spine swivel, one toward Jaynie on my left, one toward Kendrick and Ransom, who are protecting Sheridan somewhere on my right, deeper within the trees.

  The robo-wolf jumps sideways, an instant before my grenade goes off.

  It jumps straight at Jaynie.

  The explosion blackens my visor. By the time my vision clears, I’m back on my feet. Branches and chunks of snow are falling down between the trees, and Jaynie is lying on her belly, shooting at the oncoming monster—bang, bang, bang, bang—a steady rhythm, each shot striking the wolf and sparking off its frame without slowing it down at all. It leaps in the air, its gun turrets swiveling down to target her.

  “Blow it up!” Ransom screams. He sounds like he’s desperate to get into the fight—fighting is what he knows—but he’s responsible for Sheridan right now. I’d love to blow up the robo-wolf for him, but it’s already too close to Jaynie. So I switch triggers.

  The eye, I think, hoping my AI can figure it out. The targeting circle appears. I shoot.

  And the monster’s camera eye, the one closest to me, blows out. The wolf fires one of its guns, but the rounds strike the snow beyond Jaynie.

  It’s almost on top of her though—she’s about to be trampled—when she slams her arm hooks and footplates simultaneously into the snow, launching herself sideways and then bouncing to her feet, bringing the muzzle of her weapon around to target the wolf one more time.

  Now we’re both on its blind side. I can’t shoot because Jaynie is in the way. Jaynie doesn’t shoot because bullets don’t help and she’s too close for another grenade. The wolf swings its head away from her as it turns around. She backs up to stay out of sight of its good eye. I jump, moving sideways to get a clear line of fire—and for the first time since the shooting began, I see Kendrick. He’s come forward, leaving Ransom alone with the prisoner. He’s standing with his weapon ready, a few feet away from me, between the trees.

  “Move your ass, Vasquez,” he warns.

  She jumps, all the way back to the road, while the robot swings around fast, drawn by Kendrick’s voice. He squeezes the trigger of his HITR, launching a grenade. I do too, while the robo-wolf targets us both with synchronous fire from its spinal guns. I see the muzzles swivel, and I drop again to the snow. Kendrick tries to, but he’s not fast enough. The heavy rounds catch him in the belly—and then the grenades go off.

  As soon as the dual concussions slams past, I’m up. I look first for the robot. It’s crumpled, unmoving, half buried in snow. I look for Kendrick next. He’s down too. From the ridge, there comes the roar of a snowmobile. “Jaynie, watch the road!”

  “On it!”

  I bound through the snow to Kendrick; crouch by his side. Two holes in his armor are filled with blood that’s spilling over into the snow. I shrug off my pack, and dig for the trauma kit.

  Ransom comes out of the woods, still with Sheridan in his custody. Her hands are cuffed in front of her, and he’s half carrying her, half dragging her toward me. “L. T.!” He’s off-com, fury in his voice like I’ve never heard before. “What the fuck happened? Where was King David? Why didn’t you warn the colonel? You had to know that thing was coming!”

  I can’t believe what I’m hearing, and I don’t want to hear it now. “Shut the fuck up and get the prisoner into the cat.”

  I get the wound putty out.

  “You had to know!”

  “I didn’t fucking know, okay?”

  Moving as fast as I can, I peel back Kendrick’s armor, open his jacket, pull up his T-shirt. Two bloody craters in his belly.

  Out on the road, Jaynie fires a grenade. It goes off at a distance, somewhere near the base of the ridge. “We’ve got another minute,” she says.

  Ransom still hasn’t moved. “Shelley, you had to know.”

  “Shelley?” Sheridan asks, seizing on my name. “Lieutenant Shelley?”

  The composure, the authority in her voice, makes me look up. She’s watching me from a couple steps away, shivering in Ransom’s grip, wearing only a knit pullover and a long skirt over thin house boots. The cold has drained her face of color, but her voice conveys no trace of fear as she tells me, “God gave you no warning of what waited for you here, Lieutenant Shelley, because it’s not God who speaks to you—”

  “Shut up!” Ransom screams at her, like he knows what she’s going to say next.

  I turn back to Kendrick, my hands shaking as I jam putty into his wounds.

  “—it was the Devil, and the Devil’s betrayed you.”

  “Shut up!”

  Kendrick’s visible bleeding has ceased, but Ransom has gone fucking crazy.

  Jaynie strides up, and lays into him. “Specialist Ransom, you will conduct yourself as befits a soldier in the United—” She falters, because after all he is not a United States Army soldier, not right now.

  I turn Kendrick onto his side and use the patch on his exit wounds.

  Jaynie tries again. “Give me the prisoner, Ransom. You assist the Lieutenant.”

  I glance up. Ransom is not complying. He’s not defying, either. I don’t know what he’s doing. He’s just standing there, holding onto Sheridan. I wish I could see his face.

  I settle Kendrick back onto the snow and get up. Sheridan’s shivering is getting worse. She’s well on her way to hypothermia, maybe frostbite, and if she shows up for the trial bruised, or with blackened fingers and moldering ears, Ahab Matugo will not accept her—but Sheridan isn’t ready to surrender. She looks at me as if she can see my face through the black screen of my visor and says, “I warned you a reckoning was coming. The Red sent you here. It controls you. You are the Devil’s servant. All of you are, and you will be cast down!”

  I’m rattled, hearing her call it ‘the Red’—the same name I use.

  Ransom is rattled too, but not for the same reason. “Don’t you talk to Shelley like that,” he says, giving her a shake. “It’s God who’s kept him alive.”

  “Goddamn it, Ransom, it doesn’t matter! Jaynie, take her!”

  “It does matter, sir! It does!”

  Jaynie reaches for her, but Ransom wrenches her away. Kendrick proves he’s conscious by whispering, “Fucking do something, Shelley.” I try to take her—“Ransom, give her to me”—while Sheridan spews more crazy words, getting deeper under his skin. “You’re tools. Each one of you. Tools to be used by Satan before you’re cast into the abyss!”

  “Shut up!”

  I grab Ransom’s shoulder. He elbows me in the chest using the strut of his dead sister. I know he doesn’t mean to hurt me. It’s just that he’s too angry, too scared to think.

  It fucking hurts anyway. It knocks me off balance, knocks the air out of my lungs, and I swear to God my ribs would be broken if I wasn’t wearing armor.

  I
never took Ransom’s King David fantasy seriously, but I guess he did. It’s like I betrayed him by failing to foresee the wolf, by letting Kendrick get hit. And then Sheridan, taunting him. He’s so shaken by her accusation that it’s not God but the Devil who’s protected us that he’s out of control. He slams Sheridan face-down into the snow. Then he pulls out the pistol Rawlings gave him and points it at her, taking the most direct route to silence his doubt.

  I don’t have any breath to yell at him. I lunge instead, powered by my dead sister. Jaynie goes after him too, but I hit him first. I hit him in the shoulder. We both go down, and the pistol flies out of his hands, spinning through the air and landing just beyond Sheridan. I’m lying on my side, trying to hold Ransom down, when I see it happen: Sheridan scrambling on her knees in the snow; scooping the pistol up.

  I don’t know why her hands are cuffed in front of her... maybe because fifty-year-old women aren’t dangerous? This one is, and I’m not allowed to shoot her. I can’t even hit her, because Ahab Matugo will not take her if she’s hurt.

  I let Ransom go and scramble to my knees. Sheridan swings the gun toward me. She’s shaking with cold. I don’t know how well she can aim. There’s a good chance she’ll miss, and if she doesn’t, my armor might protect me. So I lunge for the gun—but Ransom is already on his feet. He shoves me aside just as the shot goes off.

  The slug impacts his armor, knocking the wind out of him and turning him half around. Sheridan closes on him while he’s off balance, moving as fast as an AI made flesh. Jaynie can’t stop her. Neither can I. And Ransom is not thinking straight. He’ll kill her, I know it, and the mission will fail.

  “Ransom, don’t hurt her!”

  He looks at me, not at her, and she uses the opening. Ransom is wearing body armor. His helmet and visor protect his head, but Sheridan is a DC. She knows how the gear works. She knows where it’s vulnerable. She just steps in next to him, jams the pistol up under his jaw to steady her shaking hand, and pulls the trigger. His head jerks back. Blood sprays over Sheridan’s upturned face and peppers the snow. She puts two more fast shots into his brain before I can grab the gun, before Jaynie can grab her.

  Ransom collapses, his status flashing on my visor like it’s some fucking video game: Matthew Ransom, deceased.

  “Fuck!” I scream. “God-damn, God-damn, God-damn.”

  I’m a millimeter from meltdown. The skullnet can’t keep up with my fury, my despair. Jaynie knows it. She scoops up Sheridan using the strength of her arm struts, and tramps off through the snow, carrying her to the snowcat.

  “She fucking killed him!” I scream at Jaynie’s back.

  Ransom is at my feet, his blood pooling in the snow. I look from his body to the pistol I’m holding. I want to jam its muzzle against the back of Sheridan’s skull; I want to put a bullet right into her brain.

  “You fucking idiot, Ransom,” I whisper off-com.

  But I can’t roll back time, and the mission is not over yet. We need to move. So I hook my arm strut in the frame of Ransom’s dead sister and haul him across the snow, dropping him close to Kendrick. I gather my gear. The pistol goes into my pack; the pack goes over my shoulder. I pick up my HITR, and shoulder that too. With the gear secured, I turn to Kendrick. One arm hook goes around the shoulder bar of his dead sister; the other I use to hook Ransom. Then I set out across the snow, hauling both of them with me.

  Four minutes forty-five seconds have passed since we launched our ambush.

  “More vehicles coming down the hill,” Jaynie says over gen-com.

  “Roger that.”

  Sheridan is in the snowcat’s front passenger seat, her hands tied behind the seat, her feet tied together and tied down.

  Jaynie helps me get Kendrick stripped out of his rig and settled into the back seat. His blood pressure is low, but he seems stable. “Colonel, clear your visor, please. If you can.”

  He does it. His eyes are half open, his lip curled in disgust or in pain, I don’t know. “Get us the fuck out of here,” he whispers.

  “Working on it, sir.”

  I jump down and close the door. The plan was for Kendrick to drive. I can do it if I have to, but I want to hold a weapon.

  “Jaynie, can you drive this thing?”

  “I had a lesson this morning.”

  “It’s yours then.”

  I throw Kendrick’s rig and his weapon into the cargo bed, and then Jaynie helps me load Ransom. She returns to the cab; puts the cat into gear. I hear what sounds like two more snowmobiles. Trees block my line of sight to the switchbacks, so I access angel sight, and I see them, shooting down toward the bottom of the hill. Another snowcat is farther up.

  Behind me, Jaynie coaxes our hijacked snowcat across the ditch that we blasted in the road. “You coming, Shelley?” she asks over gen-com.

  “Yeah.” I turn and bound over the ditch, then haul myself into the snowcat’s cargo bed, alongside Ransom. “Go.”

  The snowmobiles reach the bottom of the ridge just as she lays on the speed. Rooster tails of snow are thrown up behind us, making it hard to see exactly where they are. I’ve got Kendrick’s and Ransom’s weapons in the back with me. I grab one, salvaging two grenades from its magazine, transferring them to mine. Then I aim straight down the road and fire.

  “Status?” Jaynie asks.

  I can’t see much past the rooster tails, so I switch to angel sight. I don’t see either snowmobile on the road, but then I pick them up in the forest. “They’re trying to flank us.”

  But weaving through the trees has slowed them down, and the airfield is not far away. I hope like hell Sergeant Nolan has got it secured. I push through a link.

  “Nolan, status?”

  “L. T.! Are you going to make it?”

  “Status!”

  “We’re on schedule. Lucius Perez has identified himself. Flynn’s with him. They’re working with the pilot to get the plane ready. We’ve located and secured twelve Vanda-Sheridan personnel on the top floor of the blockhouse.”

  “Were they mercs?”

  “Four Uther-Fen... two of those might not live.”

  “The rest?”

  “Maintenance personnel. A little roughed up. Nothing serious. They told us there were four more mercs living on the hill.”

  “We made the arrest, but the enemy is coming after us. Two snowmobiles in the forest, either side of the road.”

  “Harvey and Tuttle are stationed at the end of the road. They’ll cover you. Got that, Harvey?”

  “Roger that,” she says.

  I’m still watching the snowmobiles with angel sight. The one on the ocean-side of the road is almost parallel with us. “Harvey, one of the mercs might get to you before we do.”

  “Hope so, sir.”

  “Don’t let them get past you. They could try to crater the runway, or blockade it.” That’s what I’d do; make it impossible for the plane to take off. “Nolan, when’s the plane going to be ready?”

  “They’re moving it to the end of the runway—the inland end. Because of the mountains, we need to take off over the sea.”

  “Got it.”

  “L. T., about the pilot . . .” The hesitation in Nolan’s voice tells me bad news is coming. “So far she’s cooperating, but she isn’t part of our operation. She doesn’t know what’s going on. Perez woke her up, told her she’s got an emergency flight—that’s all she knows. She’s thinking it’s a hijacking.”

  “Perez said he had a pilot lined up.”

  “Yeah. Guess he forgot to tell her about it.”

  So we get to kidnap an innocent woman.

  I decide I don’t like Perez. He betrayed Sheridan, he betrayed the pilot, and for all I know, he’s planning to betray us too.

  “Stand by.” I link to Flynn. “Consider Perez to be hostile. Don’t let him near the controls. Cuff him if you have to. How’s our pilot holding up?”

  “Perez is sweet-talking her. I think she wants to slug him, but she keeps eyeing my gun. She respect
s that.”

  “If she doesn’t cooperate, shoot Perez. We don’t need him anymore.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The map on my visor puts us 200 meters from the airfield when a fireball explodes behind one of the snowmobiles. Three quick bursts of automatic weapons fire follow, sounding like a HITR. “Status?” I demand.

  “One snowmobile down,” Harvey says.

  Tuttle adds, “The other one’s pulled back.”

  The pursuing snowcat is still on the road behind us, but it’s not catching up.

  With angel sight I see Harvey and Tuttle on foot, where the road joins the airfield. I can’t see Nolan and Moon, but the map places them near the first hangar building. “Who do I need to pick up?” I ask.

  “I’ll take care of it,” Nolan says. “I’ve acquired a vehicle that’s faster than that thing you’re in.”

  “It’s going to take us a couple minutes to transfer the prisoner and our wounded onto the plane.”

  “Sir, it’s a damn big plane. Suggest you save time and just drive on board.”

  I have to think about that for a few seconds. “What kind of plane are we talking about, Sergeant?”

  “An old C-17 Globemaster. DCs have all the best toys.”

  “You listening, Jaynie?”

  “Yes, sir. Drive on board.”

  The trees open up. I look ahead, to see the hangars and the three-story blockhouse where employees live. The buildings stand alongside the runway. The snow plows have done their job. The runway is clear, along with the tarmac in front of the hangars. There’s not even a fence to get in our way.

  “Hold on tight, Shelley,” Jaynie warns.

  I feel her downshift. The snowcat tilts up as we meet a berm of plowed snow. We climb, and then the snow gives way beneath the tracks, sending us lurching down again, riding a tiny avalanche onto the tarmac.

  I don’t know how well the snowcat will do on pavement, but we’re about to find out. Jaynie makes a ninety-degree turn, and we’re paralleling the runway. In the shadow of the hangar, I see a pickup truck begin to move. Nightvision shows me the driver, identified as Nolan in my visor. The figure in the cargo bed is Moon. No lights are on. We pass the truck, climbing back through the gears. The tracks hammer the pavement, setting the snowcat vibrating so hard I feel like my bones are going to shake loose. “Wha’ fuck kind of suspension is this?” Kendrick whispers over gen-com.