The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  My helmet is strapped down two seats away, its camera watching her, watching us. Harvey is on her other side, with two empty seats between. She sees us and stands up. Keeping the blank face of her helmet fixed on the prisoner, she speaks on gen-com: “L. T., this bitch is a babbling psycho-killer. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to wash the crazy off.”

  “Take a break, Harvey.”

  “Glad to, sir.”

  Jaynie says, “Be back here in ten.”

  “Yes, Sergeant.”

  Sheridan notices when Harvey moves away. She lifts her head—and sees me. Shadows play on her gaunt face. She’s no coward, though; I have to give her that. She gathers herself, sitting up straighter. “Lieutenant James Shelley,” she says over the sound of the engines. “You will lament this day.”

  I drop out of gen-com. “I already do, ma’am.”

  Her gaze moves across me from head to toe, noting all the details. “You’re not army anymore, are you, Mr. Shelley? No one here is wearing insignia. And you stole my plane. You’re a terrorist, nothing more.”

  All true.

  I breathe slowly, deeply, determined not to lose my temper. The skullnet icon pulses almost in time to my booming heart. I desperately wish the plane was quiet.

  “I am here to collect a DNA sample, ma’am.”

  “Who do you work for?”

  “We need a cheek scraping.”

  “I can see the Red inside your eyes.”

  Jaynie’s behind me, wearing latex gloves, and holding a cheek swab. I turn to her and mouth the word, Ready? When she nods, I move quickly, grabbing Sheridan in a choke hold—no way I’m going to risk Jaynie getting bitten or kicked. Sheridan stiffens, but she doesn’t struggle. She may be crazy, but she’s not stupid.

  Jaynie inserts a finger into the corner of Sheridan’s mouth, follows with the swab, and takes a scraping. As she steps away, I release Sheridan.

  She looks at me, calm and unflustered. “It’s not too late to save yourself, Mr. Shelley, but all our days are numbered.”

  I glance toward the front, looking for Harvey, wishing she’d come back already so I can make a coward’s retreat. Jaynie is a few chairs down, transferring the DNA sample to a clear film for an automated analysis. “How could the L. T. save himself?” she shouts over the ambient noise.

  Sheridan and I turn, both of us surprised by Jaynie’s question, but Sheridan recovers first. “We’re very close,” she says, and though she’s projecting her voice, she sounds like a normal person—calm, interested, not at all unhinged. “I’m part of a consortium funding a massive research effort to undermine the Red. A cybervirus is under development—it’s very close to testing stage—and when it’s released into the Cloud, it will hunt down every aspect of the Red, every algorithm until the Cloud is clean again.”

  “How do you know it will work?” Jaynie asks without looking up.

  “Because the brightest minds in cyber science tell me it will.”

  Jaynie looks up at me and, projecting her voice, she says, “L. T., if there’s a way—”

  I switch to a solo link. “It’s bullshit, Jaynie. There’s no magic cyber potion.”

  Her face goes stony. “How can you know that? Viruses wreck programs all the time—”

  “If there was something that could knock the Red out, it would have happened already. The Red uses viruses. It has to.”

  Maybe Sheridan can lip read. She leans toward Jaynie and says, “You have to understand, he can’t help it. The Red speaks through his mouth.”

  “Sergeant, are you done with the test?”

  “It’s still processing, sir.”

  I switch over to gen-com. “Harvey, get your ass back here.”

  The test finishes up; the kit automatically relays the results to Colonel Rawlings, and to an address provided by Ahab Matugo.

  Harvey comes back. I have her cut the cuffs, then she and Jaynie escort our mass murderer to the toilet. When Sheridan comes back I cuff her feet, but leave her hands free. “Very kind of you, Mr. Shelley. I thought maybe you’d be sticking a gag in my mouth.”

  Tempting.

  “Ma’am, we are required to offer you humane treatment. Since our own government has refused to pursue a case against you for your involvement in the Coma, you will appear before an international tribunal where evidence will be weighed and your guilt determined.”

  She looks stunned. Maybe she thought our purpose was a simple ransom kidnapping, or maybe she assumed we were a death squad sent by the Red to interrogate and then eliminate her, but she realizes now we’re something else altogether.

  “That’s outrageous. You can’t be serious. You can’t actually believe you will ever be allowed to put someone like me on trial.”

  “It will happen,” I assure her. “Good soldiers are willing to give their lives to see that it does.”

  “Good soldiers? Soldiers are a commodity. They can be purchased at roughly a quarter-million dollars each. This plane is worth a hundred times all of you put together. And that’s nothing. That’s less than the political subsidies I provide every year. Do you think my politicians want me testifying at your tribunal? Do you think my peers will allow me to speak? They will not. They want no unrest in their kingdoms. You’ve been set up, Shelley. None of us will live to see the inside of a courtroom. The slam is coming.”

  ~~~

  I hold a meeting with my senior sergeant not far from Kendrick’s bedside. There is no office, no conference room, no hope of real privacy on this plane. Only the thrumming of the engines can keep what I have to say between me and Jaynie, but that won’t prevent us from being watched. Harvey, Tuttle, Moon... they’re trying not to make it obvious. Sheridan isn’t that subtle. She’s staring at us from across the bay, a knowing look on her shadowed face.

  I turn my body, so she can’t see my lips move. Jaynie shifts too, side-eyeing me with a resentful gaze. We’ve got a solo link open. “I need to ask you, Sergeant, who is the enemy?”

  Her chin rises; her lip curls. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Jaynie Vasquez openly angry. “Thelma Sheridan is the enemy, sir!”

  “That’s right, Sergeant, and you let her play you.”

  “The Red is also our enemy. When Sheridan suggested there is a means—”

  “The Red is not our enemy. It’s not our ally. It just is, like the weather.”

  “There is no virus that can get rid of the weather, sir.”

  “And there is no virus that can eliminate the Red.”

  “She said—”

  “She’s a lunatic.”

  “She might be a lunatic, but this consortium she mentioned has got to be employing the very best software engineers on the planet.”

  “Software engineers can lie like the rest of us, and tell their employers whatever they want to hear. You remember what you said, Jaynie, right before we left on this mission? You said that most people who know about this stuff won’t want to get rid of the Red. They’ll want to control it, and use it, so they can run things. That makes sense. It makes sense, because people want power. If they think they can grasp a new weapon, a new technology that can give them control over the world or the people around them, then they’ll take all kinds of chances. That’s the only reason we have any fucking nukes left in the world—because it gives governments power. It gives them control.”

  She’s torn. I see it in her face. She doesn’t want to argue against herself, but she desperately wants to believe in Sheridan’s consortium.

  I push her harder. “Jaynie, Guidance has been trying to figure out how to block the Red at least since I got to Dassari. My girlfriend, Lissa Dalgaard, works at a think tank, and they’ve been trying to figure out the Red. Her company even has an army contract, but Lissa had nothing to tell me about how to stop it. They haven’t gotten anywhere. None of that matters to Thelma Sheridan. She’ll believe what she wants to believe.” I tap my head, remembering what Elliot told me. “It’s the mental filters. We all have them. Sheridan’s
filters allow her to believe impossible things, and to deny things that are real. She already has a fact-free belief that it’s okay with God if she murders a million people, so why would she require actual facts to believe in something as banal as a magic cyber potion?”

  Jaynie is frowning, staring off past my shoulder. I let her think about it for a few seconds, and then I repeat, “You let her play you, Sergeant. And when you indulge her fantasies, you are undermining my authority... unless that’s your purpose? Unless you are concerned that it’s the Red speaking out of my mouth?”

  Her gaze shifts back to me. “Is it a concern for you, sir?”

  I don’t have to say anything. When I look away, she knows the answer.

  ~~~

  I’m tired and I hurt, so I sit down for a minute. I want to call Lissa, let her know I’m still alive, but the only link I’m allowed is to Rawlings. I think about asking him to contact her, but I know he wouldn’t do it. He’d call it a security violation. At least she’s safe, locked deep inside a secure facility under the protection of Major Chen.

  I get up again, and go to see Kendrick. Moon is sitting cross-legged beside him, staring at a hand-held monitor. He shows it to me. “His heart rate is really crazy. It keeps changing. That’s a bad sign.”

  I go up to the cockpit to check our course. So far as I can tell, we are where we should be. I give Nolan ten minutes to pay his respects. When he comes back, I send Flynn. By the time I go back to see Kendrick again, Tuttle has taken over guarding our prisoner. Harvey is lying on the deck, wrapped up in a blanket, not far from Kendrick. She’s got her helmet and her dead sister off, but she’s not sleeping. Her eyes are wide open, staring at the ceiling.

  Jaynie is sitting with Moon alongside Kendrick’s pallet. I sit down on the other side. After forty minutes, the monitor can’t detect a heartbeat. We wait twenty minutes more. After that there’s no doubt. I get out another body bag. No one says anything as we move him into it, and seal it up. We carry it to the back, lay it beside Ransom, and tie it down.

  I’m the CO now. I should say something—but Nolan saves me the effort when he speaks over gen-com. “L. T., we’ve got two fighter aircraft coming up fast.”

  ~~~

  I sprint the length of the cargo deck and scramble to the top of the ladder, reaching the cockpit just as Colonel Rawlings links into gen-com. “Status?”

  At first I can’t see a thing, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness, I make out Ilima in the pilot’s seat, Flynn behind her, Perez across the aisle, and Nolan upfront in the copilot’s chair. They all have cockpit headsets on. Flynn and Nolan have their audio loops underneath the headsets, so they’re also hooked into gen-com. I ask Nolan, “Do we know who they are?”

  “Ilima says they’re American, sir. They haven’t said anything.”

  Rawlings is monitoring the feed from my overlay. He can see what I see, hear what I hear, so I don’t repeat the information for him. I lean on the back of Nolan’s seat to look out the wide bank of windows. The fighters are easy to see because they’re flying right alongside us with their navigation lights on. One is flying at our level, the other is higher and slightly behind.

  “Flynn, give me your headset.” When I’ve got it on I use the intercom to ask Ilima, “Do we have any defensive systems onboard?”

  She looks up at me with a resentful gaze. “We are a civilian craft, sir. If they want to shoot us down, there’s nothing we can do to stop them.”

  I wait for the fighter pilots to contact us, but they stay silent. I assume it’s a way to rattle us—it’s going to be hard to think of anything else, with them dogging us.

  Maybe I should have gotten back to Carl Vanda with a ransom demand... but I have a feeling he knows that’s not what we’re about.

  Nolan says, “At least we’re not directly in front of their guns.”

  Ilima gives him a withering glare. “That could change in a second.”

  An alarm goes off. She looks at the instrument panel. “Two more planes. Russian, I think.”

  Colonel Rawlings opens a solo link. “Don’t do anything, Shelley. Don’t say anything. Just stick to the course.”

  What the hell else can I do?

  The fighters stay with us as we pass over the top of the world. I stand there and watch them as an hour rolls past. When I notice Flynn nodding off, I send her downstairs. “Grab a blanket. Sleep while you can.” Then I take over her seat, behind Ilima. The feedback from the prosthetics is starting to burn my spine, but I don’t adjust it. It’s keeping me awake.

  The fighters dog us as we head south on a route that will take us over the Atlantic. Time creeps past. We take breaks. We eat—or we try to—I can’t eat. After six and a half hours in the air, we’re coming up on Iceland, and it’s still night. An unchanging arctic winter night with stars and northern lights dancing and blazing above us. A night that will last for the duration of this flight, that will follow us all the way to Africa.

  I’m staring at that astonishing sky, thinking about Lissa, wondering if I’ll get to talk to her again, when our escort finally contacts us.

  Everyone in the cockpit jumps as an American voice, male, speaks over the radio: “Vanda-Sheridan Globemaster 8-7-Z, this is an interdiction. You are ordered to divert from your present course.”

  “Hold your course,” Colonel Rawlings says, using a solo link.

  “Hold steady,” I tell Ilima, over the intercom.

  I unstrap and stand up, leaning on her seatback to make sure she doesn’t do anything. Nolan is still in the copilot’s seat. He watches her too, poised to intervene.

  The American speaks again, “8-7-Z, acknowledge this order.”

  Ilima reaches for the panel. I tell her, “No.”

  Several minutes pass, and then the two Russian fighters pull away. One of the American fighters shoots ahead of us, blazing on afterburner as it cuts across our flight path. We hit the jet wash and buck and wobble. I hold on to Ilima’s seatback, trying to remember if everything in the back got strapped down.

  “8-7-Z, if you do not immediately comply with the course change, we will commence firing. You will be shot down.”

  I turn again to our treacherous engineer. “Perez.” He flinches when I say his name, watching me, the whites of his eyes bright in the dim light. “I want you on the radio again. Like before. Tell him you’re a hostage. Ask him not to kill you. Don’t give me any reason to kill you. Ilima, put him through.”

  Perez keeps his eyes on me as he speaks. “This is Lucius Perez. I’m a hostage on this plane, along with Thelma Sheridan, and Ilima LaSalle. Please don’t shoot. You’ll kill all of us if you do.”

  Ilima screams.

  I look up in time to see twin lines of tracer rounds coursing above us, streaking down over the cockpit. Holy hell. Modern fighters have laser-guided sights. They must have loaded up the tracer rounds just to scare us.

  Ilima leans forward; her fingers fly across a keypad.

  Nolan and I realize at the same time what she’s doing. We lunge for her. I get to her first, grabbing her wrist. “Stop it!”

  “Don’t you get it?” she says, cowering in the seat. “They’re going to kill us!” Her gaze cuts from me to the window. “Oh Jesus, here they come again.”

  I look up as one of the jets passes in front of us. Our plane bucks again. I have to release Ilima and grab onto the seats to keep from falling. She gets the new heading entered before Nolan can stop her. Our C-17 starts to turn.

  I reach out to Rawlings. “Colonel, you got anyone with you who knows how to fly this plane?”

  “That is affirmative, Lieutenant. Get her the hell out of there.”

  Ilima cringes as I reach down, unbuckle her harness, and strip off her headset. I grab the front of her jacket and use it to haul her to her feet. Then I shove her at Jaynie, who has just climbed up the cockpit ladder to receive her.

  I glance over at Nolan, wondering if I should put him in the pilot’s seat. But he’s been awake as long as I have,
and it’s Flynn who likes big toys. I speak over gen-com: “Flynn! Break time’s over. Upstairs, now.”

  Flynn comes running.

  “You’re up,” I tell her when she hits the top of the ladder. I hook my thumb at the pilot’s seat.

  Her eyes look huge in the dim light. “Sir, I don’t know—”

  “Move.”

  She edges past me; drops into the seat. I tell her, “Strap in. And don’t worry, Flynn. All you have to do right now is program the autopilot.”

  She reaches for the pilot’s headset, but Rawlings tells me, “Get her into her helmet, so we can use the cam.”

  I put the word out on gen-com, and Tuttle brings her helmet. We get Flynn properly hooked up and then, after some fumbling, she starts entering numbers into the keypad. Seconds later the plane shifts course again, and the radio wakes up: “8-7-Z maintain your new heading! Do not return to prior heading or you will be shot down.”

  They haven’t shot us down yet. I’m pretty sure they don’t want to.

  They threaten us with more tracer rounds. They rock us with jet wash. But it turns out they’re not ready to murder our hostages.

  Not yet.

  ~~~

  I take the copilot’s seat, and send Nolan to rest. Samuel Tuttle takes over the seat behind Flynn.

  Our escort sticks with us. At long intervals the fighters drop back, one at a time, to rendezvous with a refueling plane, but they never leave us alone. They continue their antics, rolling across our flight path, rattling the air around us with gunfire... making sure we don’t sleep as the hours creep by—or at least that we don’t sleep for long.

  Whenever things quiet down for a few minutes, I catch myself nodding. Flynn is still at the controls. She’s got her visor transparent, so I can see she’s drifting too. Thank God for autopilot.