Operation Grendel
Page 2
“Kanzin?”
“Yes.”
The name reminded me I hadn’t been to my homeworld in years. To be honest, I didn’t miss it. But the thought of it being turned over to grendel shock troops brought an empty feeling to the pit of my stomach.
“Quelon,” I said, sliding the story fragments together as I spoke. “Explains why they’re closing Camp Locke.”
Sterling nodded. “In three months this place will be crawling with enemy troops. Grendels eating at this table, complaining about the heat.”
“Things are really that bad? We’re just giving up? Letting them have five systems we’ve spent centuries cultivating?”
“The simulations are clear,” Sterling answered. “If we continue trying to defend all nineteen systems, we will lose the war. And half of the edge population will be wiped out within two years.”
He’s serious, I thought. This is really happening.
I’d written a lot of stories from the safety of a skyport lounge or edge system hotel. Maybe I’d gotten too comfortable with the idea that Fleet would never let me anywhere near the real war.
“And you want me to sell that—the story of our surrender—to the six hundred million people we’re leaving behind?” I rubbed my palms against my pant legs. For my own protection, I needed Sterling to be clear on the recording. “That’s the story you want me to cover in lipstick?”
“You’d rather write the story of three hundred million deaths?”
“Of course not,” I said, ignoring the gibe. Any reporter will tell you that the only meaningful statistic is a human face. Preferably one covered in blood. But covered in fear was almost as good, and nothing would make the edge colonies more terrified than news of an imminent grendel occupation.
Sterling was offering me the story of a lifetime. Oh, he was hiding something. Probably something vital to my understanding of what was really going on. He was from PSYOPS, the dirty tricks unit.
But if the main premise of the story was correct, and Fleet really intended to turn over five colonial solar systems to the Grand Alliance, the only thing I could do to make a difference was tell the story of how it was going to happen. The true story, in advance, so maybe the edge militias could do something about it.
And it didn’t hurt that this story could also make my career.
“Good,” he said. “Then start figuring out how you’re going to convince five systems to cooperate with the enemy without accepting their symb-collars.”
I folded my arms. “If you want me to reach the edgers, Captain, you need to let me do it my way. You can’t ask them to take one for the flag while you’re slipping out the back door.”
“You’re not getting carte blanche.”
“I know how these people think. And they’re going to see this as the most callous sort of betrayal imaginable. Because it is. Nothing I say will matter if I can’t tell them the truth.”
He took a deep breath, as if making up his mind. “Tell you what. You write the story your way. But it comes to me first. Then to Major Weston.”
“I don’t do public relations.”
“This isn’t about PR. It’s about timing. The only way Fleet Intel will let your story go out live onto the OrbSyn breaking feed is if it comes through my grid. Otherwise the censors will pick it apart line by line.”
More bait. More control. A prime spot on the most prestigious news feed in the United Colonies, and all I had to do was agree to submit my story through Sterling’s comms.
We had a saying at OrbSyn. Tell the facts when you have them, the truth when possible, and the story regardless.
Or, as Weston liked to say, usually in the voice of an exasperated kindergarten teacher: Story first. Story last. Story in between.
I pretended to consider the deal, even though I’d already made up my mind. Assuming the talks succeeded, the only real question was how much we’d have to surrender in return. That story could serve as my first follow-up. Why It Had to Be Done.
On the other hand, the enemy obviously had their own plans for using the edge worlds in remaking humanity. But since no one knew what those plans were, that angle would require a zoomed-in approach. Perhaps an exposé of how adults are infected with AI wyrms. The symb-collar angle alone would be worth a five-part series. Something like Slave to a Quantum Master.
Meanwhile, I’d be salting everything with details about the treachery of the Grand Alliance, and how colonials must never succumb to the bondage of fully integrated artificial intelligence. Written well, my stories could keep our resistance militias on the occupied worlds fired up for months. They’d be passing my feature stories from comms to comms as if they were hard currency.
Raymin Dahl would tell them to never put on an infected comms bracelet no matter how attractive the benefits seemed. And they would listen. I’d write stories with titles like Say No to Wyrms and The Plight of a Human Puppet.
Remember why we’re fighting, I would write. The flag of the United Colonies stands for something. Our AIs serve us, not vice versa. Autonomy or death!
I stared out the window, and Sterling sipped his coffee in silence. He probably knew I’d already taken the bait.
“All right,” I said at last.
Ironically, that’s when the first image of the invasion appeared in the monitor above the windows: a grendel warship ripping a gash in New Witlund’s copper-and-pearl sky.
She was a small ship, wreathed in fire, and I barely breathed as she traced a bloody claw across the screen.
Sterling’s eyes widened, and I could tell he was seeing it on his private grid. He rose and went to the west window, though the view there was worse than the one that would be superimposing itself on his optical nerve.
“That’s a consular ship?” I asked.
He shook his head, still staring with wide-open eyes. “Alliance frigate. Strangler class. They’re going for our datalink off-moon. Do you know where Colonel Vermier’s office is?”
“No, sir. Never been on this base till this morn—”
That’s when the front of the building erupted in flames and I slammed backwards onto the tiled floor.
It took me ages to slip into darkness, but as I closed my eyes, the memory finally returned to me, and I heard the cadence again as if for the first time:
Five planets down, we can’t lose this ground.
Do what I’m told in the Corps.
Six grendel ships and the truth on my lips.
Life and death in the Corps.
Seven of our best, laid to rest, laid to rest.
These were the best of the Corps.
Eight, make it eight, for the round that caught me late.
Gave my life to the Corps.
2
Deletion
You get this feeling when a story is wrong. A dead feeling in the back of your brain, in the muddy places where your AI can’t look even with permission. You know something’s off, that you’re being used, that the assignment sent through your wrist-comms probably originated way over your editor’s head, at Fleet Intel maybe, or even with Psychological Operations.
Usually the point is to send a message to some covert agent who can’t be reached via more direct channels without risk of interception by a grendel wyrm. Someone living among the edgers.
Your editor might change only a couple of words, but those words will make the story worse, and won’t fit the context. Major Weston, my editor, once told me to mind my own store when I asked him why he inserted the word “qualifactory” into a piece about an orbital fighter ace.
Other times the manipulation is so hidden it doesn’t leave any footprints in your finished product. The assignment itself is your only clue.
Like sending Raymin Dahl all the way to New Witlund to interview an intel officer about a new special forces program. Why New Witlund? Why an in-person interview when Fleet Intel could easily have connected us using a secure channel? For that matter, why send a PSYOPS officer to explain a special forces program?
Two weeks ago the wrong story came from my girlfriend, Ivy Weber. We’d been together six months, and without realizing it I had started to expect our relationship to continue, maybe forever.
Then one afternoon out of the midnight clear she canceled our dinner plans.
No big deal, but it was her favorite restaurant, a corner cafe halfway between OrbSyn’s Holikot office and her apartment. And she canceled by text message via my AI. With a 30 minute timed delay, as if she didn’t feel like talking.
Okay, that happens too. Everybody has bad days, and since we’d been together I’d had more than my share.
But the text!
—WEBER, I: HAVE TO CANCEL TONIGHT. CALL YOU MONDAY.—
It was short, bland, and featureless. All things Ivy was not.
Ivy was everything I’d given up looking for in a woman. She tolerated my political pessimism, my erratic work schedule, my compulsive need to arrange facts into narratives. But she was also gracious, smart, and unconsciously attractive. She sometimes complained of her narrow frame and deep green eyes, and was constantly tucking her long black hair behind her ears. Distracting, she called it. I agreed, but for different reasons.
The implication that I should wait for her to call me—for four days, no less—clearly signaled distance. Either she was angry or something had happened that she didn’t want me involved in.
The first possibility didn’t make sense. We’d had no argument, and if I had inadvertently said or done something stupid—always a possibility—Ivy would have confronted me immediately. She didn’t pout. Her eyes sometimes flashed green fire, and she was the most determined, strong-willed person I’d ever met, but she didn’t play games.
I loved that about her. As far as our relationship was concerned, I’d always known where I stood.
Which left the possibility something else was wrong, some work or personal problem she wanted me to stay out of.
One thing you learned as a journalist was that everybody had baggage. Sometimes people deserved it and sometimes they didn’t, but either way they tried to hide it. Self-preservation was built into our genes.
My job was to dig up that stuff and see if it looked any different in the clear light of cynicism. When you expected bad behavior, you were occasionally surprised.
Maybe that was my problem. I’d stopped expecting anything really bad.
I opened a channel to my OrbSyn workstation on my wrist-comms, mentally flicked over to AFNET, and logged a comms query for Weber, Ivy, 9174336NW. I’d been telling her for months to put a tracking clamp on her bracelet, but she always replied that the only people who would ever look for her would be someone who cared about her.
Which, in this case, turned out to be true.
Her icon flickered on a transparent overlay against my natural vision, and I recognized the place instantly. It brought a hollow feeling to my chest.
She was holed up at Frillz, the night club where we’d first met.
I closed the channel and deleted my query. Anyone who knew what to look for would be able to find it, but who would bother? Using military assets for personal reasons was technically a violation of policy, but everyone did it. And some low-level reporter using AFNET’s GPS system to find out where his girlfriend had gone after she sent him a cryptic message wasn’t even a curiosity. No one at Fleet Intel would raise an eyebrow.
I walked to the kiosk and swiped my comms for a rental, picked up a sandwich and chips at a dispenser, and ten minutes later squeezed the two-door sedan into a space overlooking the club’s front entrance.
At that point I was more puzzled than worried, and I figured I could get some work done while I waited. I do some of my best writing in rentals. Besides, I still needed to deal with Fleet’s take-it-or-leave-it reenlistment offer. The bonus of $30,000 for another five years of Raymin Dahl’s feature stories would only be on the table for a few more days. After that it would start decreasing daily. Because the two best ways to motivate anyone were cash and a ticking clock.
I was already planning to re-up. I just didn’t want to read the contract, which had been bleating its digital PATRIOTS SERVE! reminder across my closed eyelids every morning for the last week. Problem was, I had to actually read every word of the twenty-three-page contract before I could sign. My AI had to witness that internal mental process and attest to my comprehension. Colonial comms techs don’t just protect our God-given, colonial free will from grendel wyrms. They also shield it from ourselves.
I’d read all the way to page seventeen when Ivy walked out the front door holding some officer’s hand and leaning into him like he’d just paid off her grandmother’s mortgage. I’d never seen the guy before. He was tall and athletic and wearing a major’s oak leaf on his collar.
I nudged my AI to record visuals and stared unblinking as a glossy black sled, a luxury sedan, drifted to the curb and swung open its doors. Ivy reached up, pulled the guy into a long kiss, and dipped into the back seat. The major followed.
After the sled drove off I stared at the empty street, the occasional weeknight customers going in and out of the club, the night sky alive with stars. Eventually I remembered to stop recording.
Some small, fragile part of my mind tried to argue that there might be a reasonable explanation for what I’d just seen. But I had the recording, and after I rewatched it twice, the excuses shut up.
I drove around for a while, then stopped at a pawn shop close to the base and slapped the velveted box on the counter. I’d been carrying the ring since I bought it back on Moadi. I’d hired a local artisan to set a series of peridots in a band of white gold. Green and white, like your eyes, I would have said, or some such nonsense.
The pawn-shop guy offered me twenty percent of what the ring cost. I haggled until he threw in a bottle of Inawa bourbon and a set of shot glasses etched with the Marine Corps logo. Drove back to base and returned the rental. Walked into the OrbSyn building and smuggled the bottle and shot glasses up the service staircase to my spot on the roof.
I’d been keeping an all-weather folding recliner up there for a couple of years. I liked working at night. I’d written as many features under the stars as I had wedged into the driver’s seat of a military sled or while polishing some barstool in a militia canteen.
Since my AI would never witness my signature with alcohol in my bloodstream, I spent the next hour reading the minutia of the contract, signed it, and sent it off to Fleet for processing.
Only then did I recognize the real reason I’d been putting it off. I’d been hoping Ivy and I might have a future together. A future outside the service, where every assignment wasn’t dictated by war policy or strategic need or even morale. A job where I could tell a story because it needed telling, and people needed to know. The two of us back-to-back against the galaxy, obviously doomed because that’s how life is, but at least going down together, going down fighting.
Trust.
Isn’t that what our heroes always told me they had? Isn’t that why they fought? It was never for love of service or love of the flag. It was always for the man or woman next to them. Shakespeare’s band of brothers.
Well, no journalist had faith in the people around him, military or not. How could you trust someone who was always shaping reality for the consumption of outsiders? At best the reporters at OrbSyn were a loose coalition of misanthropes who had agreed not to eat their own. We were a band of strangers.
I broke open the bourbon and tipped a finger into the glass, vaguely wondering if it had been washed but not really caring. I tossed it back and closed my eyes as the warmth seeped into my throat.
No reason to put this off, I thought. It’s over now anyway.
I pulled up the recording and zoomed in. Trimmed it to a single frame, Ivy’s lips pressed against the mysterious officer’s. Plucked that single image from the clip and deleted everything else. If I archived the video I would just be tem
pted to watch it again later, salt in the wound.
I flicked a text pigeon onto my optics and attached the damning evidence. Labeled it for Ivy’s comms, but with a nice little 30 minute delay. Fair was fair.
Regret whimpered in that tiny, malnourished corner of my soul I called a conscience. More accurately it’s the empty space left behind when my conscience exfiltrated for more defensible ground. I ignored it and sent the message, then poured myself another drink.
Would Ivy bother to call me, I wondered, or would she just let the picture serve as a clean break between us? What, after all, was there to say?
I looked up at the stars and decided a clean break was what I really needed. Probably what Ivy needed too. I was going to be at OrbSyn another five years—assuming we didn’t lose the war by then. I would be better off not trusting anyone, and Ivy would be better off not wondering what corner of the edge Fleet was sending me to.
Sensible woman, Ivy. I’d always said she was smarter than me by half.
Still sucked.
I nudged my AI. [How many memories of Ivy have I archived?]
A list of dates and locations scrolled past my vision on the left side, white text brilliant against the night sky. I selected three of the most familiar ones and sent the rest to the shredder.
[Permanent deletion?] my AI objected. [Are you sure?]
Military wrist-comms aren’t like those you can buy on the open market. They have a lot more security, a vast number of interface capabilities, and the personality of a houseplant.
[Positive.]
[File deleted.]
I called up the most recent of the remaining three videos. A few weeks prior, Ivy and I had spent a weekend at a water resort in Kadir. I scrubbed past our ride from the terminal and slowed to watch myself open the door to our hotel room. Turned back to look at her, and there she was in the hallway, eyes sparkling like I was the only person in the universe who really mattered.
Shouldn’t have watched that one obviously, but how could I look away from those eyes? I’d almost forgotten how green they were.