I rinsed my mouth, took a long drink of water, and headed for the door.
Frankly, this hike was going to suck. I was already exhausted, yesterday’s adrenaline having worn off. I’d been polishing bar stools and rental seats for months with no serious physical conditioning regimen. I was in no shape to be slogging up New Witlund’s tropical mountains. Worse, my MADAR team needed to believe that I was a decorated marine officer—the same PSYOPS captain who had earned a combat recon badge in six different theaters. If they found out who I really was—
I paused with my hand on the doorknob. Called up a map of the hotel. Saw myself in my room, with “Sterling, A” in white letters under my icon. And on the other side of the door, nothing.
No icon, no name, no rank.
Someone from Raeburn’s team should have been standing guard.
I pulled up Ivy’s proximity filter, and immediately a red blur of body heat mapped itself on the other side of the door. Someone was standing there.
[Ivy,] I asked. [Who is that?]
[From his heat print, best guess is Sergeant Major Raeburn.]
[Why is there no ID signature?]
[He isn’t wearing a comms.]
[They’re going dark?]
[Presumably,] she said. [Which means you should plan on removing your comms at the rendezvous.]
It was bad enough trying to impersonate Sterling with the help of his AI. But without that help?
This day was just getting better and better.
I opened the door. “Sergeant Major.”
“Morning, Captain,” Raeburn said. “You ready for a little walk in the woods?”
“Nothing better than early morning PT.”
We took the elevator down, then headed to the skyport in the same sled Laclos had used to shuttle me to the hotel. Raeburn took us around the edge of the tarmac to the southeast corner and parked next to a concrete outbuilding. In the distance a couple of GS-117 medical airshuttles crouched in the darkness like a pair of vultures.
The rest of the team had already assembled, including Colonel Vermier. Pajari, Hopper, and Laclos, like Raeburn, wore marine jungle camos and carried rucksacks and a variety of weapons. Vermier and I were wearing standard khaki utilities. She at least carried a 10mm service pistol. As an official UC delegate, I was prohibited by intergalactic treaty from carrying a weapon to the meeting place. My security guards could be armed to the teeth, but I wasn’t even allowed nail clippers.
Pajari unslung a rectangular plasteel case from his shoulder and set it on the hood of the sled. Red pinpricks blinked at either end. He fiddled with its twin latches, then shook his head. “If we are going dark, we have to remove the failsafe now.”
“Staff-level override,” Raeburn said. “That would be a job for the colonel.”
Vermier stepped up, her face taking on that faraway look people get when they’re working with an AI. The lights on the case flashed red twice, then showed a steady green.
Now the latches clicked open, and Pajari lifted the top to reveal a shoulder-launched missile. A hammerhead, presumably. I’d never seen one. Just knew they had an unbelievable bark-to-bite ratio. Twelve kilograms of destructive firepower capable of bringing down something as large as a destroyer.
“Don’t drop it,” Hopper said. He wasn’t wearing sunglasses now, so I felt like I was seeing his face for the first time.
“Good idea.” Pajari closed and latched the case. “In fact, I think you should carry it.”
Instead, Raeburn hauled it up over one shoulder. “PJ and I will escort Colonel Vermier and drop some breadcrumbs. Captain, you’ll be about five minutes behind us with Laclos and Hopper. No one but my team knows the route we’re taking, so in theory we should have a nice boring hike through the mountains.”
“In theory,” Pajari said.
“So let’s keep it that way, huh?” Raeburn looked back and forth between me and Colonel Vermier.
She got the hint before I did; she unsnapped her wrist-comms and slid it into her pocket.
I hesitated, not wanting to lose the sense of companionship that had supported me through the last sixteen hours. Ivy’s silent presence in the back of my mind had given me courage and a sense of confidence. She was a constant reminder that I was finally doing something that mattered. And she was my only access to the story I was writing.
Reluctantly I thumbed the release tab and pocketed the bracelet. The world immediately seemed darker, the morning hotter.
“See you at the top,” Raeburn said, more to Hopper and Laclos than to me.
Laclos picked up a hydration pack from where it was lying on the ground and handed it to me. “You’ll want to drink all of this before we get there,” she said. “It’s going to be another scorcher.”
Five minutes later we slipped through a gate in the perimeter fence and plunged into the predawn darkness of the jungle. Hopper led the way, and though he often disappeared into the foliage, Raeburn’s trail markers kept me on the right path. The markers looked like wisps of blue flame welling up from the soil. In reality they were smears of fluorescent dust dropped on ground, visible only from a couple of meters away, and burning out after half an hour.
We covered almost two kilometers before dawn began to pierce the treetop canopy, and the reassuring markers grew less frequent.
Just ahead, Hopper’s easy lope kept taking him out of sight, though occasionally I’d catch a glimpse of him at a switchback standing with his head cocked to one side as if listening. Then he’d go off again to be swallowed by the trees.
Behind me, Laclos padded softly at a distance, her footsteps echoing my own. And all the while something clutched at me, a sort of emotional residue. It felt like both the presence of something and the absence of something. Like I was being stalked.
I knew what it was, or thought I did.
I’d gotten used to having Ivy back. And now she was gone again, and that fact made sense. Raeburn was right to have us remove our wrist-comms when we left the base. Hadn’t Sterling told me that Colonial comms were susceptible to enemy wyrms?
That thought lit a terrifying “what if” question in my imagination. I tried to brush it off, to tell myself it wasn’t possible. PSYOPS comms were bound to be heavily shielded. They were Fleet’s most advanced technology. Designed to protect our most guarded secrets. Sterling would not have ordered me to put on his comms if he’d thought it might be infected with enemy malware.
Then again, he’d been dying.
And he had left me one file I hadn’t bothered to open: the recording of our first interview from yesterday morning. His perspective just before the Strangler shut down our link to AFNET.
Was there something on that recording Sterling had wanted me to see? Expected me to see? If not, why include it in the mission files?
I’d been stupid not to watch it when I had the chance.
There was only one way to find out if that recording mattered. To make these negotiations work I needed to be able to access Ivy. I needed to know if I could trust her. And I needed to find out as soon as possible, without giving myself away to Raeburn’s team.
I needed to watch Sterling’s recording.
But how? Laclos was following close behind me. And I was physically occupied with the hike. Getting more and more winded with every step.
By the time we had gone eight kilometers my shoulders heaved with every breath. The sun filtered through the upper canopy and spiked the air with heat. Sweat poured off my forehead as we climbed.
At some point Laclos called, “How about a breather, Cap?”
I stopped and turned. Except for the sweat glistening on her face and hands, she might have just climbed out of bed.
I nodded gratefully and leaned back against a tree, trying to hide my breathing with deep gulps of air.
“You all right?”
I took a sip of water from my mouth tube and thought of that time back on Holikot when my apartment was robbed. Emotion is only convincing when it’s not forced,
and I needed Laclos to believe that I was really disgusted.
Admit something secret or shameful. “Been better,” I said.
“You look a little gassed.”
“A little?”
“Riding a desk?”
“Picked up a case of endocarditis six months ago.” It was a lie, of course, but better than trying to explain why a man of Sterling’s reputation was in such poor shape.
Laclos scowled, a foreign expression on her face, and I knew the message would get around. From the team’s point of view, their babysitting job had just gotten a little harder. They’d wonder why they hadn’t been told. “You got a release for this mission?”
I nodded. A different sort of lie, but one that felt safer. “If it comes down to it, I may need a few stims. Those militia boys confiscated mine in the attack.”
As the team medic, she obviously didn’t like it. “All right, I’ll see what I can do. I don’t carry antimicrobials, so you may regress in a couple of days.”
“It won’t matter at that point.”
“Well, I hope that’s not true. We’re looking for a happy ending for everybody, right?”
I smiled. Her optimism was weirdly inspiring, despite the fact that our mission was to sell out six hundred million colonials. “Everybody wins.”
“Does Raeburn know about the endocard”
“Not yet. I—” What excuse did I have? I’d actually planned to tell the sergeant major once we were far enough from Camp Locke that Vermier couldn’t use it as an excuse to cancel the mission. In hindsight it was probably the wrong decision. It would show a lack of trust in the team. “I didn’t expect to feel it this soon.”
“You didn’t want to look like a pogue,” she suggested.
I winced at the term, though inwardly it brought relief. Laclos was seeing what she expected to see—a marine PSYOPS officer—not an enlisted journalist. “You a head shrink, too, doc?”
“Can’t protect you if we don’t know what’s going on, sir.”
“Point taken.”
“Anything else we should know?”
It dawned on me that these questions wouldn’t have originated with her. Raeburn had probably put her up to it. Which meant he was worried about something. “What do you mean?”
Laclos shrugged. “Corporal Dahl. He was kind of a jackwagon, but it couldn’t have been easy to watch him bleed out.”
“A jackwagon?” I said, surprised. “You knew him?”
She shook her head. “No offense, sir. I used to read his stories aloud to the team. Hopper always got a big kick out of it. Said he wanted Dahl to write his obituary. Pajari would usually get mad and stomp off.”
My ears burned, but I couldn’t help asking, “Why mad?”
“He thinks that kind of propaganda makes all of us look bad. Like we’re all in on the joke. War is just a show, and getting your legs blown off makes you some kind of hero.”
I wiped my palms on my shirt and took another sip from the hydration tube. “Maybe Dahl didn’t think of it that way.”
She looked off into the jungle. “I think he knew exactly what he was doing.”
“Really?”
“Edge militias seem to like him. And that hasn’t exactly turned out to be a great thing here. For us, anyway. For you.”
“Well, I barely knew the man.” Another lie. “How about a couple of steadies and we get moving?”
She dug into her med kit. “How about one steady and we take a ten-minute break.” It wasn’t a question. She passed me a small white pill.
Steady-stims were favored by operators because they produced a feeling of increased stamina without the twitchiness of a big juice stimulant. Laclos probably didn’t want to overtax my heart. It would have to do.
I popped it onto my tongue and washed it down with a mouthful of tepid water.
A moment later a feeling of calm readiness seeped into me, as if I were being held up by the air. It was a like stepping into a warm pool.
“You can have another one in six hours. Meanwhile”—she knelt on the trail facing the way we came, her rifle propped over one forearm—“you should rest.”
Rest. The word sparked an idea. “While we’re getting all personal, I think I’m going to step into the latrine and shed a couple pounds.”
She kept her eyes down the trail. “Don’t go far.”
I stepped onto the upward slope and went about three meters before I found a tree thick enough to cover my movement. A hole in the canopy revealed the full sweep of the valley we were ascending: the stream bounding in a long scar of white foam, and on the far side of the river an open glade bursting with sunlight.
My fingers shook as I fumbled with the flap of my thigh pocket. I didn’t just need to connect with Ivy. I wanted to. Bad enough I could almost smell the scented shampoo she used.
I pulled the bracelet out and snapped it onto my wrist. Felt the tingle of activation. A pause like an indrawn breath.
[What’s the matter?] Ivy asked. Somehow she knew.
[How far back do your recordings go—the ones on this unit?]
[Twenty-six hours, eleven minutes, fourteen—]
Sterling had been wearing this comms unit for a while. At least a matter of days, if not months. There should have been something on it besides the one recording flagged on my grid. [Yesterday morning? How is that possible?]
[I am a PSYOPS comms,] Ivy said. [For security reasons, everything in my memory is redactable. Captain Sterling forced a hard reset before taking off the cuff. He only left one recording fragment in the permanent archives.]
Stupid. I had assumed the file was just the detritus of an ongoing mission, the sort of thing you save for later, something to jog the memory. But no, he had intended for me to see it. Had expected me to watch it. [He was hiding something.]
[Everyone’s hiding something. Even Colonel Vermier.]
Whatever the colonel was into, I didn’t want to know. And it didn’t matter now.
I pulled up my grid and opened the recording.
Immediately, familiar images ghosted my overlay.
The mess hall at Camp Locke, lit by a single panel near the doors. Through the long row of windows, sunrise tinged the horizon.
A warm tingling ran along my wrist as the AI nestled into Sterling’s consciousness. [Morning, Captain. I don’t see any local user data. Would you like—]
[No need. I’m familiar with your systems. I just need a little time to myself, please.]
The recording skipped, freezing at the moment Sterling rose to look out the window at the enemy frigate. No image of Dahl’s face. No conversation about selling out the edge colonies. No implications about the positive effect covering this story might have on my career.
That shouldn’t have surprised me. But it meant I still didn’t have proof of Sterling’s orders. And the fact he’d thought to erase them was disturbing. He’d left out the parts of our conversation that would prove I was acting under Fleet’s authority. The parts that outlined his plan to surrender the edge colonies for a ten-year ceasefire.
Which meant someone wanted plausible deniability. So if the mission failed, I could be buried in an unmarked tomb or incinerated in a mass grave and my memory erased from Fleet’s conscience.
I nudged the recording to resume, but it didn’t budge.
[There’s something you should know,] Ivy said. [Before you watch the ending.]
The way she said it raised the hair on the back of my neck. [Oh?]
[Whatever you think of me afterwards, I’m still your only chance of pulling this off.]
The recording flickered to life . . .
. . . and I strode towards the window, calling up the data on the enemy warship as I moved. It was a frigate, unescorted, but branded on my grid with a J-designation, which meant it boasted the newest tech fresh from a grendel shipyard.
Alarm crashed over me.
“That’s a consular ship?” Dahl asked from behind, puzzled. His voice sounded unnaturally high.
“Alliance frigate,” I corrected. “Strangler class. They’re going for our datalink off-moon. See if you can—”
[Camp Locke’s base nodes have already failed, Captain,] the AI said.
[Peaceful negotiations!] I snarled at her. [What else did that thing do?]
She hesitated for a fraction of a second. [They seem to have launched a wyrm array at us.]
[Us?]
[Your comms, specifically. I was the only target.]
[Your firewall hold up?]
[I believe so. The wyrm appears to be fifth generation, which I am well prepared to handle. However, the J-class frigates are probably equipped with newer—]
[So we won’t know for sure until your system reboots?]
[Correct. As long as you don’t shut me down or remove the comms from your wrist, any enemy wyrm that may have defeated my onboard security should remain inactive.]
[And if we do have to reboot?] I demanded. [How will we know whether you’ve been compromised?]
[You won’t, Captain. You’ll have to destroy me.]
I swore. “Do you know where Colonel Vermier’s office is?” I asked Dahl, still staring at the enemy ship.
“No, sir. Never been on this base till this morn—”
Something moved on the far side of the valley, snapping my gaze from the flicker of Ivy’s overlay to the sudden splash of movement. Through the bare patch of jungle, bursting into the sunlit glade, a dark shape ambled from the shadows, its horselike snout nosing the ground. It was broad-shouldered as a grizzly, with wide hind legs and a quick, loping gait that took it across the clearing in mere seconds.
[Ivy, what is—?]
Before she could answer, gunfire popped in the distance, the distinctive crackle of a flash rifle.
“Cap!” Laclos called.
I ripped the bracelet off my wrist and shoved it into my pocket before scrambling back onto the trail. Laclos stood, rifle ready, her head swiveling to take in our surroundings. She grabbed the back of my shirt and pulled me off the path into the brush. “Stay down, sir.”
We waited under a tapestry of green and black, the only sound a steady droning of insects.
Operation Grendel Page 8