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Operation Grendel

Page 7

by Daniel Schwabauer


  He kept talking as we walked. “Frankly, I doubt you have the temperament to become a real journalist. But I’ll treat you the same way I do every idiot they send me. Fleet says to make you a reporter in four weeks, so that’s what I’ll try to do. If you can’t cut it by then, you’re not my problem anymore. That sound right to you?”

  “Four weeks,” I said. “I can do it.”

  “Uh-huh.” He stopped outside a door market JANITORIAL and pushed it open. “Well, you’ll be doing it here.”

  The building relied heavily on robotic cleaners, so the room was larger than I might have expected, with rows of charging bays for the cleaning bots and pressure connectors for refilling the chemical tanks of the machines. It also had a single student-style chair equipped with a writing tray.

  Any other assignment I might have assumed Weston was trying to make my life miserable to get rid of me, but I didn’t get the impression he hated me. He just didn’t want me in his newsroom. And I had my wrist-comms, so I didn’t really need anything else.

  “Nice and quiet,” I said.

  He gave me an appraising look, like I’d just passed some sort of test, then let the door whisk closed. He turned on his heels and stalked away. Since he hadn’t given me any other instruction I decided to follow him to his corner office, which turned out to be a surprisingly small, surprisingly cluttered nook walled with feeds from OrbSyn’s various news branches. Weston had a window that looked down on the street below and, off in the distance, a beach. He had a desk too, and a high-backed chair, and a desk lamp fashioned to look centuries old. He waved me into a seat and collapsed into his own.

  A holo-feed bloomed to life above his desk: high above a city, a destroyer dropped cutter drones that zoomed into the streets below and opened up with silent ordinance. A missile flared from the top of a building, white plumes billowing behind it.

  “This is your assignment,” Weston said. “You recognize it?”

  I shook my head as the scene shifted to a view from the street. Colonial marines were leaping through a darkened hole in the front of a high-rise. Talking heads appeared in eight different perspectives, recounting whatever was happening with muted urgency. Some sort of clash with the GA, obviously, but I’d never seen any of this footage before.

  “First battle of Chalmers Bay.” Weston squinted into the flickering images. “Year three of the war. You know about Ciekot, I suppose?”

  Ciekot. Dad had told me all about him when I was a kid. “He was that rear admiral the grendels kidnapped.”

  Weston rolled his eyes. “He wasn’t kidnapped. He defected. We sent two platoons and a special ops team to get him back. Traitor blew his brains out when our guys stepped into his apartment. That’s the real story here: Fleet opened a ground war in yet another system over nothing. Personally, I think our geniuses at Command and Control wanted to flip the Taino system with support from the locals and didn’t expect so much resistance from people who had only recently been converted. Of course, OrbSyn had to sell that cockamamie story to the public, and Fleet had to give Admiral Ciekot a special tombstone with a star on it.”

  “You can prove this?”

  “Of course not. Even if I could, I wouldn’t. We have three rules in this building. Before I let you go off half-cocked and start writing news stories under OrbSyn’s masthead, you’re going to convince me you know what those rules are and how they work.”

  “All right. What are they?”

  He held up his forefinger. “First, never write anything that compromises the war effort.”

  Simple enough. And why would I want to compromise it? “Okay. Got it.”

  “Second”—he flicked up another finger, forming a stubby V above the desk—“give me honest work. I don’t mean I want you to work hard. If you don’t work hard you won’t last, and you won’t be my problem. I mean tell an honest story. Don’t just shape the facts to fit whatever narrative you want to tell.”

  This one sounded suspiciously like the sort of ethical challenge professors dish out to students their freshman year, but I nodded anyway. “Simple enough,” I said. “Tell the truth.”

  He flinched a little at that word, then extended his thumb. “And third, make me feel something.”

  “Feel something? What do you want to feel?”

  “Anything. I’ve been in this business thirty-three years. My emotional core wouldn’t crack under a plasma welder. If you can make me feel something, you can make the average reader feel something. And feeling is the point. People read to be moved. To be angry or sad or hopeful or, well, anything besides bored.”

  I motioned to the display above his desk, which was still streaming twenty-five-year-old holos. “So you want a story about the first battle of Chalmers Bay?”

  “A feature story, not just a recap of the facts any idiot can dredge up from AFNET. Give me something interesting.”

  “Okay. Any particular angle?”

  “Up to you. Find something that doesn’t break any of the rules. Which are . . . ?”

  Another challenge. I held up three fingers as I zipped through his short list: “Don’t hurt the war effort. Tell the truth. Make Major Weston feel something.”

  He gave the barest hint of a smile. “You have four weeks. Don’t waste them.”

  I left his office whistling. Four weeks was a veritable eternity. I could write Major Weston’s cub reporter shibboleth feature in a couple of days.

  I slept in my new office that first night, determined to hurdle Weston’s artificial barricade as quickly as possible. My grid was strewn with hundreds of holos, text articles, unclassified reports about the battle from OrbSyn’s archives, and half a dozen transcripts of eyewitness testimony pulled from the Senate’s post-battle inquiries. I ate breakfast at an overpriced cafe and put together my rough draft by late afternoon of the next day.

  I came to work early the following morning and rewrote the story three times, with my final polish dedicated to a line-by-line comparative analysis based on Weston’s checklist. Was I compromising the war effort with information unavailable to the public or the enemy? No. Was I being honest? Yes. Would it make the editor-in-chief at Orbits News Syndicate feel something? Impossible to predict.

  I sent him the finished story before lunch, headed out for a quick bite, and by the time I was standing in line at Rioni’s, my grid was already flashing an incoming text alert.

  —WESTON, C: THIS IS AWFUL. TRULY AND IRREPARABLY AWFUL. I ASKED FOR A STORY, NOT A COMP ONE ESSAY. TRY AGAIN. OR BETTER YET, GIVE UP AND JOIN THE REGULAR INFANTRY.—

  Along with the text came a little animated holo of a marine officer—obviously a cartoon caricature of Major Weston—setting a piece of paper on fire and stoically warming his hands over the blaze.

  Okay. Not what he was after.

  I started over, this time from a different perspective. More research, more combing through the newsroom’s archives, more scanning of bodycam footage and aerial drone shots.

  Day five I sent a polished story I felt sure was good enough even for the major. (I’d stopped thinking of him in human terms, as someone capable of being named, and reduced him to the status of a rank hidden inside an extra-small T-shirt.)

  Thirty minutes later he sent another rejection.

  —WESTON, C: THIS IS THE SAME NON-STORY, AND ONE I’VE ALREADY READ A ZILLION TIMES. NO DESIRE TO READ IT AGAIN.—

  My third attempt was based on an existing feature, something that had actually been published at OrbSyn. Obviously I didn’t plagiarize the original. I just studied its structure, its use of startling facts, the way it conveyed insight into the personal life of its human interest subject, a double amputee. Then I applied what I learned and composed a new feature about a woman who had returned from the first battle of Chalmers Bay in a body bag.

  —WESTON, C: READS LIKE SOMETHING FROM REGINA BAER. BUT YOU AIN’T HER AND SHOULDN’T TRY TO BE. WORSE, YOUR STORY LEAKS SEVERAL UNIT DESIGNATIONS AND THE ADDRESS OF A SPECIAL OPS TRAINING FACILITY. SEE RULE #
1.—

  I pounded the writing tray of my student desk so hard the support arm bent, leaving the surface cocked forward. I stood, kicked the desk out my way, and paced alongside the charging counter until my breathing returned to normal and the pain in my jaw went away. I’d been clenching my teeth hard enough to crack a walnut.

  When I felt calm enough to consider starting over. I propped the closet door open and dragged my chair away from the wall so I could watch the news feed streaming through the center of the building. Larger-than-life and flooded with stories from all across the republic, the holo not only reminded me why I was here, it demonstrated that what I was trying to do was achievable. Someone was creating all of that content. Presumably, reporters who had passed the major’s seemingly impossible evaluation.

  The problem wasn’t lack of story material. Nor was it a desire to leak classified information or to twist the truth for the sake of a story. The problem was that Major Weston was too cynical to be moved by real news. Anything honest just wasn’t a story. And anything that read like a story wasn’t actually true.

  I started over. Sent him a fourth feature. Then a fifth, sixth, and seventh. I dragged a portable lounge chair to the roof and spent my evenings up there, writing under the open sky.

  By the middle of week four I’d sent him eleven different stories, each of which had been summarily trashed by the major as unpublishable.

  With only three days left in the training calendar, I was running out of time. My next story would be my last shot at getting Weston to stamp my passport into OrbSyn.

  I spent a couple of hours just staring at the massive holo-feed. Seeing it from a distance wasn’t efficient; from my position in the closet near the end of the floor, the whole enormous display was no bigger than my outstretched palm. I could see it in grander scale by pulling it up on my own grid. But efficiency wasn’t why it drew me in.

  The flashing images and scrolling text, centered mid-air above the atrium, weren’t any better than the stories I’d sent to Weston. If anything, they were worse. And not because I was lost in admiration of my own talent. They were worse because they constantly violated Weston’s second rule.

  OrbSyn’s feed was flooded with half-truths, with innuendo, with opinions masquerading as analysis of breaking stories from around the edge. But it wasn’t news. The whole vast river of information was just another cleverly packaged source of entertainment.

  I took the stairs to the roof and plopped down in my chair, wondering if I’d made a terrible mistake. Did I want this job? Really?

  I had thought I did. Now I wasn’t sure. But how could I decide if I didn’t understand what the job actually was?

  Overhead, the stars formed dubious constellations, most of which I hadn’t bothered to learn. OrbSyn, predictably neutral towards religion, ran astrology columns for all the terraformed planets in the republic, usually accompanied by their new mythologies. The Bell, home of Holikot’s very own polestar, was visible overhead even now, nine stars arranged in a silent outline of the Koudouni nebula.

  And all I could see in the night sky was OrbSyn and its towering news feed. The stars were facts. The nebula was a fact. Polar north was a fact. But calling it a bell? Making up a story about the “ghostly ringing” that supposedly saved sailors from crashing into a hidden reef?

  Yeah. That was OrbSyn.

  That was Fleet.

  That was my new job. Assuming I found a way to pass Weston’s test.

  Fleet had made up stories about my dad. They’d done the same thing with Admiral Ciekot. Probably they were doing it with me.

  They tell us what we want to hear, I thought. And remembered something I’d uncovered in all my digging. A quote from the Covert Intelligence Bureau’s abstruse Handbook of Psychological Operations, which read like an owner’s manual of the human mind, but with all the human parts left out.

  I pulled up the document on my grid and scanned till I found the section I had highlighted.

  Psychological Operations depend heavily on techniques gleaned from modern journalism. A good PSYOP is always based on facts rather than lies. We simply pick and choose the facts. We arrange convenient details into the sort of narrative our audience wants to believe.

  Therefore the effective field agent will:

  1. Tell people what they want to hear.

  2. Disguise the truth by admitting something secret or shameful.

  3. Empower his or her allies.

  This is what Fleet had done with Admiral Ciekot. They had woven together facts to create a narrative that would secure the republic. Facts that made people feel good about themselves and about the war effort. What they hadn’t done was tell the truth.

  Could that be what Major Weston was after? The story people wanted to hear most?

  And what was that story?

  What was the one thing every citizen wondered about, and had been wondering about ever since the Grand Alliance and its citizens turned over their autonomy to their AIs?

  I knew. Everyone knew. We’d all been asking the same question for twenty-eight years.

  What made life as a grendel so great that no one ever defected from their ranks?

  Maybe that was a story worth telling. A story Major Weston would run on his towering news feed.

  Anyway, that was the story I wanted to tell. And if I could tell that story, working at OrbSyn would be worth whatever it cost.

  So I wrote about Admiral Ciekot. How he had felt when the grendel shock troops kidnapped him. How they had forced him to wear a symb-collar, subdued his free will and crushed his own spirit under the weight of a quantum monster. I wrote about what it felt like to be manacled inside his own body, free only to watch life passing from behind the prison of his eyes.

  Somewhere deep inside, I wrote, Admiral Ciekot had longed for the freedom of a republic citizen, for the life of free choices that had been stripped from him.

  And when those Colonial marines had blown open his apartment door and told him everything was going to be okay—well, it had been a relief. No, they couldn’t give him his life back. Not with a symb-collar around his neck. But they had, nonetheless, saved him. He saw it even as he saw himself reaching for his service pistol. Felt waves of relief as the wyrm moved his left hand to pull back the charging lever.

  It wasn’t him, Admiral Ciekot, raising the muzzle to his right temple. But in his last moments he did imagine the motion as a kind of salute. A way of saying thank you to the men and women who had come for him. His friends. His comrades. His brothers-in-arms.

  I wrote the whole story sitting there on the roof under the stars. Sent it to Major Weston from my comms, then trudged down the steps and headed back to my apartment. Slept through my alarm. Showered. Ate a slow breakfast.

  And finally opened my grid to check my messages.

  —WESTON, C: SEE ME IN MY OFFICE. YOU’RE OUT OF TIME.—

  He didn’t even acknowledge me when I rapped on the door, so I stood there for a couple minutes until he let out a long sigh. “Sit down,” he said.

  I took the seat across from his desk. “You read it.”

  “I did.” Still he didn’t look at me. He was staring off to the right, obviously engrossed in something on his own grid.

  I didn’t care what he was looking at, and I was out of patience. “Am I working for OrbSyn or not?”

  His gaze flicked over to me. “Some story. Ciekot as an actual hero. No irony, no family interviews. Just a first-person feature from a perspective that doesn’t exist. I’d thought I’d seen everything.”

  “It doesn’t compromise the war,” I said. “And it made you feel something. I know it did.”

  “You know it did?” He was scowling now. “And what do you know about facts? Rule number two. I specifically told you I want honest reporting, not propaganda.”

  “Yes, sir.” I nearly spat the word at him. “But you don’t publish honest reporting. You publish stories people will read. That’s why you sat me in a chair with line of sight to your g
olden calf. So I’d learn the lesson on my own. Because anyone who can’t learn the lesson on their own probably isn’t cut out for this kind of work.”

  He cracked a faint smile. It looked genuine. “You aren’t cut out for this kind of work. Most of my reporters figure out what I want their first week.”

  “So that’s it? I’m out?”

  He shook his head. “I didn’t say that. I said you’ll never be a journalist. Not a real one. But you can pretend pretty well. Maybe that will be enough.”

  A notification appeared on my grid. Press credentials and an OrbSyn ID tag.

  “Thank you, Major,” I said.

  “Get out of here.” He turned his back to me. “And go write me a great war story.”

  7

  Wyrm

  Ivy woke me at 3:30am, as instructed.

  I had ordered her to stop using a ghostly apparition of my ex, even though she insisted face-to-face communication helped with memory retention. Seeing her translucent image was far too distracting. Still, I enjoyed hearing Ivy’s voice in my head, even if she was a simulation. Somehow Fake Ivy had captured the sweet, home-cooked perfection of the real thing. She seemed to understand why I had fallen in love with Ivy in the first place. Or maybe that I’d never fallen out of love with her.

  I dressed in the dark, out of habit pulling up my grid to see if anything important had dropped over the transom. But the link to AFNET was still down, so I skimmed through the mission plan one last time as I brushed my teeth.

  The negotiations would take place at a compound owned by the Trevalyan family in the mountains outside Seranik City. The problem was getting there. Sterling’s plan called for a discreet, day-long hike up a steep mountain valley via one of the game trails leading through the jungle. Raeburn’s team had already scoped a path during their preliminary training run before either Sterling or I had arrived. The jungle would hide our movement and help keep the location a secret.

 

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