Then past-me pulled her into a long kiss, and I snapped the memory off.
[Yeah, delete that one too.]
[File deleted. Are you all right?]
I was staring at the first file, the one labeled Frillz. That one especially needed to be removed from my bracelet’s passive memory. But deletion on a military comms was really and truly permanent—a safeguard against grendel hacking. Once I sent it to the shredder, nothing could bring it back. The only memories I’d have of our time together would be the frail, unreliable bio-fragments left in my own mind.
Then again, was that really a problem?
I opened the second memory: Ivy splashing in a fountain downtown, relief from the summer heat. Her pants were rolled up almost to her knees, and she was soaking a couple of pre-teens who held water guns. They were strangers to us, but had drawn her—not me—into their game as though instinctively recognizing her as a natural ally.
She’d always had that power, I decided. Who didn’t want Ivy Weber on their team?
The memory froze with Ivy’s face distorted into a playful grimace as a stream of water from one of the kids sprayed her in the back. The video only ended there because I’d gotten a call and had to blink out of the recording. Her expression had made us both laugh when I showed it to her later.
[Delete,] I said. [And yeah, I’m sure.]
[File deleted,] my AI replied. [This seems to be painful for you. Are you sure you’re all right?]
The hollow feeling in my stomach rose to my throat, and I reached for another shot of the good stuff. [My girlfriend is cheating on me, that’s all. Though I guess it’s not cheating if you weren’t playing by the same rules in the first place.]
I could almost hear its algorithms trying to interpret my words and the obvious edge to my voice. [She doesn’t know what she’s missing.]
That almost made me laugh, which was probably what my AI was going for. No doubt Fleet had millions of Dear John scripts pre-programmed, one of which had to be calibrated for caustic journalists like me. They’d been dealing with the emotional effects of romantic breakups for a very long time.
Anyway, Ivy certainly did know what she was missing.
[Thanks, bracelet. That means a lot.]
[Would you like me to delete the last memory too?]
I knew what was on it without looking—had watched it a dozen times. It was the moment we’d first met. Part of an assignment, so recording had been a matter of procedure. But after that first interview, before I even asked her out, I kept wanting to rewatch it. Ivy already meant more to me than some bit player in a feature story for OrbSyn.
She’d been standing at a table inside Frillz, waiting for me beneath the throbbing lights and bluesy rhythm of some holo-band playing live from the core. The night club had felt surprisingly empty for a weekend. Probably the band. Edgers no longer cared what the core systems were doing. It had taken generations, but we’d finally realized the kids at the cool table were mostly snobs.
I toyed with the idea of watching it one last time to fix Ivy’s smile in my bio-memory. Nail it to the wall where it couldn’t be forgotten.
Overhead, the stars pulsed behind the white text of the filename Ivy Weber Holikot Interview as I wavered between past and future. The holocon of Ivy’s smiling face next to the recording didn’t make it any easier. I was already regretting the other deletions. But in the end what choice did I have? Brass says move on, you move on.
[Yeah,] I said at last, reaching again for the bottle. [Delete that one too.]
Twenty-three minutes later Ivy rang.
I sent her to messaging.
3
Resistance
I spotted her in the back of a night club on Holikot, hands fencing a beer mug.
The holo in Ivy Weber’s personnel file revealed long black hair, green eyes, and dimples you could trip over. Even the digital version of her smile was captivating.
In person, her slender beauty was magnified by the barricade scowl she’d propped up against hopeful drunks. She was clearly waiting for someone.
Artificial smoke jetted over the dance floor, lighting the club’s pulsing neons into colored plumes. The place had that unreal quality of a dream, but with a hint of detail that seemed to be shaking me, as if someone wanted me to wake.
I snatched my beer from the counter and circled behind her, pondering what to say.
Maybe it was the way she leaned on the table: lightly, and with endless patience. As if she could walk away from the club, from Holikot, from the interview I’d asked for, and feel no regrets. Ivy Weber didn’t carry the weight of the world on her shoulders, and didn’t want to.
Something twisted in my gut, some thread from the past unraveling in the moment. How might it feel to be my real self around someone? To spend time with a woman who didn’t care that I lied for a living?
I wasn’t thinking about love. Not yet. At that moment it was just a feeling, like that tickle in the back of the throat that signals the onset of flu.
More smoke clotted the air, an unnatural swirl of brown and black that hid the lights rather than revealed them. The song spilling from the overheads, a concert streaming live from one of the core planets, had a rhythmless, bass-heavy quality that was more noise than music.
“New Witlund?” I asked, my voice rising over the crackle of flames.
“Born and raised.” She glanced at the unit patch on my sleeve. “You up for a walk?”
I set my beer next to hers. “Sure.”
She took my arm. “Be still.” Now her voice was low, urgent, not a woman’s voice at all.
I pressed my hands over my ears and blinked against the burning air.
Sterling knelt next to me, his wrist-comms pressed to mine. “Don’t say anything, Corporal. Can you fake a twisted ankle?”
I blinked against a shifting pattern of light. I was on New Witlund, not Holikot. Something had happened to the mess hall. A blanket of smokey heat squeezed the air.
I took a quick inventory. The bios on my overlay were all green. Aside from a pounding headache I wasn’t hurt. I nodded and rolled onto my side.
“We have ’em, Lieutenant!” someone shouted. “In here!”
Four silhouettes, rimmed in sunlight, came through the wreckage of the foyer, weapons raised.
The soldier in front motioned with his rifle. “Put your hands up!” He wore the black fatigues of an edge reserve unit, citizen soldiers who answered neither to Fleet nor to the Senate, but to whatever passed for a provincial government here on New Witlund.
Sterling raised his hands and turned. “Militia?”
The soldier was still a teen, with pimply cheeks and a thin neck. His name tag, stitched over paneled body armor that looked too big for his frame, read PFC KURCEK. “Yes, sir. We’re taking you into custody for your safety. Are you armed?”
“Custody” was an odd word to use under the circumstances, and I could tell Sterling didn’t like it.
“Son, I am a captain in the United Colonies Marine Corps, and if you really care about my safety, you’ll lower that weapon.”
“Captain Sterling!” The last of the four edgers was shorter, heavily muscled, and carried himself with an air of pretension that annoyed me immediately. He didn’t salute Sterling, though he did motion for Kurcek to lower his weapon. “Lieutenant Dogen, New Witlund QRS. I need you to come with me.”
“My orderly twisted his ankle,” Sterling lied. He reached down and hauled me to a lopsided standing position, mouthing the word “slow” as I hooked his shoulders for support.
“See that, private?” Dogen said in a tour-guide tone of measured respect, as if explaining something at a museum. “Colonial marines carry their own.”
“Yes, sir.” Kurcek kept his rifle pressed into the crook of his right arm, finger parallel to the trigger.
Leaning on Sterling, I fake-hobbled past overturned tables, through the twisted remains of the hall doorway, and into the spot where the foyer had been. A jagged hole in the
north wall revealed New Witlund’s copper sky and a thin sliver of sunlight.
Outside, the tropical heat felt relatively cool, the humid air refreshingly clear. Through a pallor of thinning smoke the perimeter fence and encroaching jungle shimmered. Draped above the mountains beyond, New Witlund’s rust-colored sky gave the whole moon a weirdly bipolar ambience. Like a drunken parent, it seemed familiar and strange at the same time.
An armored sled waited for us, the rear door flung open to the heat. Backed onto the curve of the patio, its hull vibrated just above the pavement as if impatient to leave. It was an old SAV “Snapper” troop carrier, a wheelless box that hovered on AG repellers. Weld together a couple of eight-meter fishing boats, one on top of the other, and you’d have the same basic shape. It was easy to see how it had gotten its surname. It was angular, armored, and slow, but its repeller drive probably made it ideal transport through the jungle. The only thing jutting from its surface was a domed turret mounted with a pair of wicked-looking rail guns. This particular SAV was older than me by at least a decade—with patchwork outer paneling so faded it was impossible to determine the original paint color.
Two of Dogen’s men hopped into the sled in front of us, one of them worming into the narrow standing platform of the top turret, the other sliding into the squad leader seat behind the cab.
Off in the distance towards the skyport a rapid string of pops cracked the air like fireworks, and suddenly the lieutenant was on my right. “That the best you got, marine?”
It was the first time anyone, anywhere, had mistaken me for an actual marine, and under other circumstances I might have enjoyed it. Maybe said something like, I’m not ugly enough to be a marine, Lieutenant. I’m Kanzin Reserve Infantry, OrbSyn press corps. A Big-Red-Oh word-pounder. You know, just to see the horrified look on the other guy’s face. But Dogen hadn’t made an honest mistake. He was just ignorant. So I gave him a fake grimace and a nod and tried to look like I was trying to hobble faster.
At the sled Sterling climbed in first and reached down to help me onto the rubber-coated platform. The SAVs rear compartment was designed for a single squad, with about as much room as a walk-in closet. Except this closet sported a metal turret platform dead center and angular wall panels checkered with mounting grommets. A single webbed squad leader chair sat across from the weapons locker just behind the cab, and two plasteel benches faced each other across a center aisle barely big enough for a dozen gear bags.
I couldn’t imagine ten people stuffed into the back of it. Four of us plus the turret platform consumed most of the space. The compartment reeked of sweat and repeller fluid, even with the stench of smoke still burning in my throat.
Private Kurcek shoved me onto the bench next to Sterling as something like lightning flickered against a high concrete wall down the street. I knew what it was, though I’d never seen the effect in an actual firefight.
Dogen slammed the rear hatch from the outside, triggering soft blue lights that washed the interior with a cold glow. Something pinged against the bulkhead as the lieutenant scrambled into the cab, and he said “Go!”
The Snapper coughed to life. It tipped forward, rising slowly like an old man from a chair. The armored glass in the hatch framed a sky veneered with black smoke. It was like looking through a sheet—everything hazed in a blur of soft edges and unexpected shadows. Then more light strobed the blackness, a string of flashes like a summer storm on the horizon.
The soldier in the turret stomped a pedal, and the railguns spun around backwards with a mechanical groan. I couldn’t see the upper half of his body, which was wedged above the roof in an armored bubble, but I heard the distinctive sound of a charging handle racking. The sled’s heavy 50-50 twins were primed.
I pulled up my grid and sent a query to my AI. [That gunfire in the distance—what kind of weapons are they using?]
A map of the base flicked onto my vision. Two icons, labeled “Dahl” and “Sterling,” drifted down the translucent overlay, with yellow approximation labels marking the probable location of the firefight.
[Audio profiles match those of the Ruger MG9a and the Bering Model VB40. However, keep in mind that AFNET is still unavailable for confirmation of—]
[So, our own Marine Corps weapons and de-commed flash rifles?]
[Yes.]
[Nothing with a GA signature? The grendels aren’t even here yet?]
[Unknowable. But no Alliance weaponry is evident in the sound profile. And standard enemy tactics for assaulting Colonial infrastructure typically involve deployment of cutter drones before shock troops.]
I gripped the front of the bench with both hands, fingers tightening on the rounded lip. Across from Sterling and me, Private Kurcek peered out the hatch window in the direction of the gunfire as if he wanted to be dropped off for a sample. But the other guy, the one in the command seat, just sat there staring at me with narrowed eyes. He was in his midthirties and wore the unadorned third chevron of an E-5 sergeant. He’d shaved recently and still had the tan line from a beard. His name tag read SGT PORTH. The rifle angled in the ready position across his chest—and therefore pointing just a few inches to the right of my head—was a Bering VB40.
A flash rifle.
I gripped the bench harder, felt my shoulders tighten as I shoved my back against the wall of the SAV, as if its armor plating could shield me from whatever was going on. It dawned on me that these guys were probably not here to rescue us.
Was it possible they weren’t really edgers at all, but disguised grendel special operators? I’d heard of grendels using alternatives to the normal symb-collars the Grand Alliance required of its citizens—specially designed hardware that would allow them to move freely among colonials without sacrificing the benefits of integrated wyrms. Fleet had denounced that rumor as fear-mongering, but their denunciation had been a little too loud.
Then again, these guys didn’t act like a special forces squad. They lacked the precision of real training, instead covering their lack of experience with a swagger I’d seen in real militias all over the edge. Besides, who but reservists would wear black fatigues in this heat, and in broad daylight? Or sport home-sewn “Jungle Cat” unit patches on their left sleeves? Or festoon themselves in a web of ammo straps clipped on backwards?
A line of fencing whisked past. The icons on my overlay placed us outside the camp perimeter, heading towards Seranik City rather than Camp Locke’s skyport. We were moving away from potential reinforcements, away from any air cover, away from the most defensible position in the area.
I glanced at Sterling and was surprised to see him crack a grim smile.
—STERLING, A: BE READY TO MOVE ON MY SIGNAL.—
The words flicked across my grid so unexpectedly I flinched in my seat. The base network had been eviscerated by a Strangler class enemy frigate. How was Sterling sending comms messages?
He scratched his chin, eyes locked neutrally on the space next to Sgt. Porth’s command seat. “Where are we headed, Sergeant?”
“Someplace safe,” Porth said, still staring at me. “You look familiar. What’s your name?”
“Dahl,” I answered, then remembered Sterling had called me his orderly. I’d have to pretend to be someone else. Not a problem. I’d been telling stories from the first-person perspective of soldiers, marines, and pilots for years. I just hoped this guy wouldn’t recognize the face OrbSyn always ran next to my byline. “Corporal, United Colonies Marine Corps. Sorry, sergeant, but I’ve never seen you before.”
“Huh.” He rolled his tongue into one cheek and squinted at me sideways.
I looked out the back window, hoping to hide most of my face. If anyone liked the features of Raymin Dahl, it was the part-time warriors of the edge militias. They usually loved my combat action stories, in part because so few of them ever saw any real action, but also because I acknowledged they were right to distrust the bureaucracy of the Senate. Fleet did waste human lives. It did send soldiers and marines into battles we should ha
ve avoided. It did squander ships, cargo and weaponry, sacrificing essential resources on the altar of politics.
But I couldn’t say that. Not now. Now I had to pretend that I wasn’t more on his side than he knew, that I wasn’t the one journalist at OrbSyn who still tried to make sure enlisted men mattered to the republic. That I wasn’t the Raymin Dahl.
Sterling cleared his throat. “How many Alliance ships have you spotted?”
Porth gave a barely perceptible shrug. “Above my pay grade, Captain.”
“So who are we running away from?” I asked, pointing in the direction of Camp Locke, now lost behind a canopy of jungle vines. “Those weren’t Alliance shock troops in the middle of Camp Locke.”
Porth said, “Maybe you should just sit tight and be grateful the cats were here to pull you out of that situation. Whatever it was.”
“Your officer’s gonna get you killed, Corporal,” Sterling said. He was looking at Kurcek, whose head snapped around as if he’d been caught napping in class.
—STERLING, A: DUCK LEFT.—
My heart climbed into my mouth. Sterling’s gaze flicked over to me—a second warning.
I had barely started to move when Sterling shoved himself off the bench.
He moved like a cat. One instant he was sitting beside me; the next he had launched himself across the compartment and jabbed Porth in the throat. With his left hand he swung the man’s rifle away from me and towards the kid in the back just as the sergeant squeezed the trigger.
Light strobed in a blinding staccato as magnetic rounds pinged across the bulkhead in a sloping line. The line started just to the right of my face and ended in a row of bloody dots across Corporal Kurcek’s back.
One of them must have severed the kid’s spine: he raised his right hand as if swatting an insect, then tipped forward against the rear door, his faced mashed against the paneling.
“Val?” the guy in the turret called down.
Sterling tried to rip the rifle out of Porth’s grasp, but its strap hooked on something. He was still wrestling with the choking sergeant when the guy in the turret crouched down to see what was going on.
Operation Grendel Page 3