The Red: First Light

by Linda Nagata

  The merc keeps on talking. “I’m going to make it easy for you, Shelley. Those fighters shadowing you? Their pilots would rather stay out of our fight, but they are not going to allow you to reach the coast. When I give the order, they will shoot you down. If Lissa’s life isn’t worth anything to you, maybe you’ll play to save your own.”

  “You want me to believe you’ll murder Sheridan?”

  “It’s like this: I get a bonus if I bring Ms. Sheridan back, but if that doesn’t work out, I still get paid damn well to make sure she never gets off that plane.”

  I shouldn’t feel relieved. It’s wrong. Jaynie sees it on my face and her eyes narrow in mistrust. But if the merc is telling the truth, he’s given me a way out. I don’t have to choose between Lissa and the mission, because the mission is doomed. We have no defense against missiles.

  “The merc is lying,” Rawlings says.

  The merc offers proof. “The jets are coming in now.” I look to the west to see the fighters’ distant lights begin to move. “They’ll transition east of you to reduce the hazard to other planes in the area. If you have not changed course by the time they come around, it’s over.”

  The phone beeps. I glance at the screen and scowl. The call is ended. The merc hung up.

  To our west, the fighters are coming in fast. We have no choice. I can’t delay any longer. “Ilima, adjust course. Take us to Cape Verde.”

  “Don’t do it,” Jaynie warns. She moves a step closer to me; less than an arm’s length away. “Shelley, we can’t believe him. Those fighter pilots have threatened us over and over, but we’re still here.”

  Nolan isn’t in the cockpit—he’s down on the cargo deck—but he backs Jaynie up over gen-com. “L. T., Vasquez is right. It’s an empty threat. They won’t shoot us down, especially not in front of that plane full of witnesses.”

  Harvey agrees, saying, “It’s bullshit, L. T.” As if this is a democracy.

  But it’s not bullshit; it’s not an empty threat. It’s our new reality. Carl Vanda is behind this. He held back the fighters this long hoping he wouldn’t have to use them at all, believing Lissa’s presence would be enough to force my cooperation. It fills me with horror to know that it wasn’t enough... but there’s no choice now, and with the phone call ended, I can talk freely. “Sheridan promised it would come to this. She said none of us would live long enough to see the inside of a courtroom—”

  Rawlings cuts me off. “Lieutenant Shelley, you are relieved of command. Vasquez, Tuttle, place the Lieutenant under arrest.”

  I raise my hand to block Jaynie as she starts forward. Tuttle’s a lesser threat, because there’s not enough room for him to get close to me. “Rawlings is covering his ass,” I warn them. “If the mission is going to fail, than it’s better for him if we’re blown out of the sky. That way we can’t testify against him.”

  Lights looming bright in the west catch my eye. I glance sideways to see the fighters, only seconds away. My hand is still up to fend off Jaynie, but it’s Flynn I should have worried about. Flynn, quiet in the pilot’s seat, saying nothing, doing nothing, in the brief minutes since the merc contacted us on the radio. She goes for the holster on my thigh, snapping it open and pulling out the Beretta. It’s the only firearm still at large on the plane. Every other weapon is locked up in a strongbox.

  I don’t think about what I’m doing. I just react, slamming my forearm into Flynn’s visor, knocking her sideways. She’s strapped in, so she doesn’t go far, but her grip slips. I wrench the Beretta out of her hands just as Jaynie lunges for my arm. If we were wearing dead sisters, it might be an even match, but I’m taller and stronger. I get a grip on her jacket and shove her back hard. She lands on her ass in the tiny span of the aisle between the two back seats, and I’ve got the Beretta aimed right between her eyes.

  Fuck me.

  I am not going to shoot Jaynie. I drop my arm, taking my finger off the trigger just as the fighters shoot past us. “Ilima! Now,” I shout. The jet wash hits us, making the C-17 shudder and buck. We’re still riding turbulence when the deck tilts sideways and we begin our turn toward Cape Verde.

  Outside the windows, the two fighters sweep around and head west again.

  Despite the turbulence, Flynn unstraps. She thinks she’s in trouble, and she’s right. She’s scrambling over the back of the pilot’s seat, in a play to get away from me, when I lose my balance and fall against her. It’s as good a time as any to confront her. I shove the Beretta into an inside pocket where she can’t reach it, then I grab her by her jacket and slam her back into the seat. “Tell me that wasn’t your idea, Flynn.”

  “Colonel Rawlings’ orders, sir.”

  “Colonel Rawlings is not your commanding officer and he does not give a shit about you.”

  In the aisle, Jaynie is getting up. She’s got her hand on Tuttle’s shoulder, holding him back.

  “Yes, sir,” Flynn says. “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “I want you out of the cockpit.” I get up and haul her with me. Jaynie squeezes out of the way as I shove Flynn toward the door. “All of you. Out.”

  “Stay where you are,” Rawlings counters.

  I lay into him. “Get off of gen-com and stop interfering. This is my squad, my mission—”

  “You’re damn right it’s your mission, and you have a duty—”

  “Didn’t you have a duty too? Wasn’t it your duty to protect Lissa? You and all your secret conspirators—”

  “You’re the one who gave it away,” Rawlings says. “That combat robot you took down, it had an infrared camera. That’s how they ID’d you, Shelley—by your heat signature. Prosthetics so cold they didn’t show up in IR. You must have looked like a ghost floating legless above the snow.”

  Fuck.

  Me.

  “You did that to him?” Jaynie demands, incredulous. Despite my order, she’s still in the cockpit, and so is Tuttle. Only Flynn has left. “No one worked that out before the mission?”

  No one did, because the legs work so damn well our mission planners didn’t think of them as a liability, and gave them no special consideration—but I should have. I live in the uncanny valley. I know the difference. I knew it walking in the forest, when shafts of ice were jammed into my bones.

  But my critical error came much earlier, at Fort Dassari, when I tried to ignore the warning of the Red. If I had listened and gotten my people out in time, I would have been standing in the snow of the Apocalypse Forest on human limbs, not the lifeless titanium legs that betrayed me, and Lissa would be safe.

  I wonder if she’s still alive.

  I take note of the fact that we are. We haven’t been blown up yet.

  “What now?” Jaynie asks me.

  I give her the answer, straight up. “We’re waiting for the Red.”

  Ransom would back me if he was here, but Jaynie has to think about it. While she does, gen-com is silent. I hope that means my soldiers trust my judgment, but it’s easier to imagine that down on the cargo deck, Nolan, Harvey, Moon, and Flynn are plotting a coup. Judging by the suspicion on his face, Tuttle is sure to join them.

  We all flinch as the proximity alarm goes off. Ilima kills it instantly. “Two more fighters,” she announces in a trembling voice. “Shikras, from the east.”

  A shudder runs through me. This is it, I just know it, this is what we’ve been waiting for. It feels like Dassari all over again and I wonder what essential piece of me I’m going to give up this time.

  But this time is different. This time I heeded the will of my artificial god. That buys me a different ending... doesn’t it?

  The radio wakes up. There’s a scrambled transmission, and then the merc speaks: “It’s over. Take them out.”

  I look east, and spot the lights of the Shikras. Their pilots don’t care if they’re seen. They kick on their afterburners. Trailing long white cones of blazing exhaust, they shoot to a higher elevation and then swoop down again on a vector that will bring them across our path.


  West of us, the American pilots are maneuvering too, but they’re not moving to meet the Shikras. One pulls straight up and away. The other dives toward us.

  I see the flare of light as a missile is released. I take grim satisfaction in the sight. It’s vindication. I knew the threat was real. Now we will be shot down. And there’s nothing I can do for Lissa anymore. Nothing I can do for anyone. Seconds left, as the missile beelines toward us.

  The nose of the C-17 suddenly drops out from under me. I stagger and catch myself against the pilot’s seat. Ilima has put us into a steep dive. Light from the instrument panel gleams against the sweat on her cheeks as she tries to evade the missile. It’s coming anyway, following us. I see it beyond her bowed head.

  Then something changes. The angle of the missile shifts. Its nose rises, its tail drops, and it’s not tracking us anymore. It shoots past our fuselage. I whip around to watch it, just as one of the Shikras blasts past. As the C-17 rolls in its jet wash and I clutch the seats to keep my feet, I glimpse the missile again, its fiery tail angling south.

  “He diverted it!” Ilima cries in disbelief, in joy. “The Shikra pilot diverted it!”

  The American fighter pilot who threatened to shoot us down hours ago finally comes back on the radio, but he’s not making threats anymore; he’s on the edge of panic. “Take evasive procedures, now, now, now!”

  I’m watching the receding missile—and I don’t want to believe what I’m seeing. It’s found a new target, homing in on the distant lights of Lissa’s plane.

  Ilima pulls us out of our dive as the merc comes back on the radio. “What the fuck did you do? What the fuck?” And then behind his breathless cursing I hear her one more time, my Lissa, her voice tinny with distance from the mic and pitched high in fear as she chants over and over, “I love you, Shelley. I love you. I love you. I—”

  A blazing yellow glare wipes out the night sky, illuminating our cockpit with the light of burning souls. Seconds later, the shockwave hits us. I hold on tight to keep from being bounced against the ceiling as flaming debris shoots past.

  Then it’s over. We’re flying level again, and all I see outside the windows are stars.

  On the radio, the fighter pilots are screaming accusations at each other. Someone is talking to them from the ground, telling them to hold their fire, don’t start another war, it was an accident. Colonel Rawlings is issuing orders over gen-com but I can’t understand what he’s saying because this is a dream. A dream.

  There’s a touch against my arm. “L. T.”

  I turn around. Jaynie’s right behind me. Tuttle’s with her. She puts her hand on my shoulder, concern in her eyes. “There was nothing you could do for her, Shelley. It’s not your fault.”

  She’s half right.

  I turn to Ilima. “Forget Cape Verde. Take us to Niamey.” My voice sounds a little rusty, but Ilima understands me anyway. She bites her lip and nods.

  Jaynie squeezes my shoulder. “Shelley? I’m going to take your gun, okay?” She doesn’t wait for an answer. She slips her hand inside my jacket and pulls it out of the pocket where I stowed it, then passes it quickly on to Tuttle. He turns and leaves the cockpit.

  If this is a dream, why can’t I wake up?

  ~~~

  I sit hunched at the top of the ladder with my head in my hands. After thirty minutes the skullnet succeeds in imposing an altered state on my brain that feels much like calm acceptance. Lissa is a wound that will never stop bleeding, but my need for her has been numbed and hidden behind a chemical curtain. I wipe my face on my sleeve and straighten my shoulders.

  We have a mission.

  I look out across the cargo bay to Sheridan, still buckled into her seat. Nolan, Harvey, Tuttle, Flynn, and Moon are all clustered several seats away. Moon has a bandage on his forehead; he must have bounced around when the shockwave hit. Perez is sitting in another fold-down seat, as far from everyone as he can get. That leaves only Jaynie and Ilima in the cockpit.

  I get up. On gen-com, Flynn says, “He’s coming.”

  Jaynie is in the copilot’s chair, across from Ilima. She turns her seat half around. The dim light casts exaggerated shadows around her eyes as she studies me with her habitual questioning gaze. Are you going to fall apart, sir? Or can I trust you not to blow your brains out?

  I drop into the seat diagonally across from her, drop out of gen-com, and pull on the headset. “What’s our current status?”

  “We’re about ninety minutes from Niamey, where we’ve been authorized to land. The American fighters were recalled before we reached the coast, but the Shikras are still with us, along with the media airliner.”

  The next words are hard for me to get out. “I didn’t know the Shikras were coming. I didn’t know it would work out like that.”

  Her gaze darts away, then returns with a suspicious glint. “What did you think would happen?”

  I shake my head. I don’t want to say because it’s naïve... but I thought it would all work out. Somehow.

  Jaynie doesn’t push it. Instead, like a good non-com, she fills me in. “The word is, Matugo sent the Shikras to protect us, in case the Americans decided to shoot us down.”

  “They did decide to do that.”

  She acknowledges this with a nod. “You were right about that. They were serious. If you hadn’t made us change course, they would have shot us down before the Shikras got here.”

  The Shikras diverted the missile intended for us—that’s the only reason Jaynie and I are here, talking—but after the missile spared us, it locked on to Lissa’s plane. I want to believe that was an accident; that it was a failure in the weapon’s target-acquisition rules.

  I lean back in my seat, all too aware of an exhaustion that touches every cell of my body. “That was a fucked-up end for episode three.”

  “That wasn’t the end.”

  She’s right, of course. “You ever wonder who wrote the script we’re following?”

  Jaynie scowls at the deck, thinking about this for a few seconds. Then she looks up again. “You’re thinking it’s the Red?”

  “It wants this trial to happen. That’s where this story is going.”

  And Lissa got in the way of that. She was an impediment to the mission. While she lived, my loyalty was uncertain, locked up in a black box of indecision. Would I abandon her to deliver Thelma Sheridan to trial? Or would I betray my soldiers?

  I make my confession to Jaynie. “I still don’t know what I would have done, if Lissa had lived.”

  She cocks her head. “Why think on it? It wasn’t your decision. Even King David doesn’t get to debate God’s plans.”

  True enough. The Red has its own agenda. I turn to gaze at the night beyond the window, remembering something Lissa said to me weeks ago when she was figuring all this out... that measured against the billions of people in the world, no single one of us matters all that much. Not even her. Not in the schemes of the Red.

  Lissa.

  My memory of her is like a landmine in my brain. I tiptoe around it. I don’t get too close.

  Think of the mission instead: “Ninety minutes to go?” I ask, just to be sure.

  “About that.”

  “Okay. I’m going to make sure we’re ready.”

  ~~~

  The media plane lands ahead of us in Niamey. It’s 0307 local time. The temperature outside is eighty-two degrees American. We’ve all changed into the summer-weight uniforms we brought with us: gray camo, with no insignia.

  Our gear gets stowed in the packs—everything but our weapons, which we’ll leave behind in the locker, and our ammunition, which we leave out in the open. Our helmets get carried in their own padded sacks. We won’t be wearing them. We need to show our faces, and own what we’ve done. But we’re all still linked through our audio loops, and everyone is still wearing a skullcap, except me.

  When the gear is packed, we strap into our dead sisters.

  I put Jaynie in charge of our prisoner. There’s a stunned look
on Thelma Sheridan’s face that I think must closely resemble my own. I feel no sympathy for her, though, anymore than I do for myself.

  “You’ll follow us with Sheridan,” I tell Jaynie. “Ilima and Perez will come last.”

  We move the two body bags holding Kendrick and Ransom to the center of the cargo bay, close to the ramp. I put Nolan and Tuttle between them. Harvey goes on the left, with Moon behind her; Flynn goes on the right behind me. For each of the bodies, we have an empty exoskeleton, neatly folded. I give those to Moon and Flynn to carry.

  “Ready!” I bark. “Kneel!”

  Six of us drop to one knee.

  “Secure grip!” We grasp the loops of the body bags with the arm hooks of the dead sisters. “Stand!” The bags sag only a little.

  I look to Perez, who is waiting by the ramp control. When I nod, he triggers the mechanism to lower the ramp, opening the cargo bay to night—the same endless night—pushed back by a ring of blazing lights.

  The light falls across lines of black-skinned soldiers in brown combat fatigues, arrayed in a perfect double vee. Whether they’re here to greet us or arrest us, I don’t know, but standing at the far point of the vee is a man I recognize from the pictures and video I’ve seen, my former enemy, Ahab Matugo. He’s a tall, distinguished-looking man, young enough that his hair is still black. He’s wearing a business suit, as most politicians do. Officials stand behind him, men and women, all of them formally dressed. Though it’s three in the morning, everyone looks wide awake.

  Beyond the soldiers and the officials are the media, some of them no doubt disgorged from the plane that landed ahead of us.

  I wonder how far this story will be allowed to spread and how the Red will try to play it.

  I wonder if there will ever be an episode four.

  If there is, I sure as hell hope I’m not part of it.

  With my gaze fixed straight ahead, I issue my last order as commanding officer of the ragged remains of our C-FHEIT LCS. “For-ward, march!”