An eternity later—probably five minutes in real time—Hopper’s voice pierced the stillness. “Coming in. Hold your fire.”
Laclos lowered her rifle as Hopper came into view.
“We got company?” Laclos asked.
“Looks like they were expecting us,” Hopper said. “Colonel saw the compound downslope, decided to take a short cut. Militia got her.”
“They killed Vermier?” I said, not quite believing it.
“No, sir, we’re not that lucky. They’ve got a gun to her head. And they want to talk to you.”
8
Grendels
Infuriating.
After all of the work and sacrifice that had gone into this mission. After all of the planning and self-denial. After I’d watched a man bleed out from a sucking chest wound because hundreds of millions of lives were hanging in the balance.
Vermier had thrown all of that away because she didn’t want to stay on the sidelines while a junior officer from PSYOPS went off to talk to the enemy.
Worse, I let it happen. I should have confronted her in her office. Rolled the dice that she wouldn’t dig deeply into my personnel file. Forced her to put her career on the line.
Now we would all have to deal with the fallout: the smoke and the bloody ruin awaiting us inside the front gate of the Trevalyan compound, which squatted on the mountain like some nightmare composite of postmodern architecture and medieval fortress. Its outer walls were high and angular and capped with shards of broken glass. Inside, a mansion rose above the perimeter, its wings embracing a neatly trimmed lawn and a crescent pool that sparkled with reflected sunlight.
The place reeked of money and pride and panicked afterthoughts. Whoever said the feudal system died out sixteen hundred years ago had never been to New Witlund.
The front gate lay in pieces strewn across the hard-packed earth, apparently having been shredded by fire from the ridges above. Just inside the gate, a burned-out SAV gouted lazy smoke skyward.
Around it, half a dozen bodies sprawled across the gravel. No great loss to me, of course, but the Alliance ambassador would certainly care. I couldn’t think of a more obvious way to derail the peace talks than assaulting the meeting place.
Obviously New Witlund’s disgruntled militia had known we were coming. Maybe they had firefly cameras along the jungle trail. But that sort of sophistication and money seemed way beyond them, especially since they would have needed to know where to place the tech.
More likely someone had tipped them off. Which was more terrifying than infuriating. Theoretically no one outside the team had access to the mission file. Even Sterling’s handlers at Fleet hadn’t been given the route from Camp Locke to the compound.
Still, Lieutenant Dogen’s goons had found Sterling and me inside a UCMC training base. Someone was feeding them classified intel.
I stalked deeper into the compound, Laclos trailing me, and found Sergeant Major Raeburn standing over the bodies of three grendel scouts, two men and one woman, between the mansion’s front doors and the burning sled. He wore an uneasy expression on his scarred face, but I got the impression it had nothing to do with the amount of blood spattered on the imported tiles of the sled port.
“Mansion and village are ours.” Raeburn motioned in the direction of the ridge to the west, now obscured by the compound’s western wall. “Militia’s holed up in that utility shed with the colonel.”
“How many shooters do they have?” I asked.
“Unclear. Based on what’s coming over the squawker, best guess is three plus the colonel. Pajari saw the last one disappear inside.”
“What are they saying?”
“They want to talk to you,” Raeburn said. “You mind telling me what’s going on, sir?”
How was I supposed to answer that? “Looks like somebody doesn’t want me talking to the GA.”
Raeburn glanced at the grendel corpses. Dressed in tattered, blood-soaked black-and-gray uniforms, the bodies were so mangled they might have been assembled piecemeal from a charnel house. “You sure the GA still wants to talk to you?”
I bent down to examine the closest victim. A thin, finger-width line of silver sprouted from the back of the head and looped under the chin. It almost looked like jewelry except that it didn’t lay flat on the chest but pressed unyielding into the man’s lower jaw. A symb-collar.
“We didn’t do this,” I said. “And the fact those clowns in the shed are making demands should prove that point. We have to assume their ambassador wants this meeting as much as we do.”
“With respect, sir,” Raeburn said. “Assumptions will get you killed.”
He had a point. “Any sign of Trevalyan?”
Raeburn hooked his thumb towards the mansion’s double doors, which stood open to the blistering air. “Senior isn’t here. Place is empty except for a teenage son. He’s barricaded in a bedroom with one of his dad’s bodyguards.”
Odd. I didn’t remember Trevalyan’s file mentioning children. “He tell you anything?”
“Says he needs to get back to campus for a midterm. Goes to some private university on Quelon. Figured I’d let you break the news to him.”
I rose slowly and turned in a circle, taking in the compound’s pockmarked walls and dark spatters of blood. The covered sled port with its six empty bays and sleek red convertible were miraculously unharmed. A massive amount of ordinance had swept through this place in a very short time, most of it directed at the open space where the bus lay smoldering.
I could almost feel the mission slipping away from me. Without the peace talks, I didn’t have a story. And Fleet wouldn’t have its ceasefire. “I’ll be back, Sergeant Major.”
“They’ll have seen you coming in, sir. You want to respond to their satcom transmission?” He held out a portable radio just larger than his palm.
I shook my head. “Later. I want to talk to Trevalyan’s son.”
“Top of the stairs, first door on the right.”
I mounted the broad front steps and slipped into the blissfully cool air of the mansion. Its foyer was bigger than my apartment, with a wide staircase sweeping up from the left in an arc that carried to an upper hallway. Under it and across from the front door stood a huge bay window looking out on the pool, the rear wall, and the mountain ridge beyond. Somewhere up there in that terraced greenery was the utility shed Vermier had been taken to, probably a storage unit for the narcotics this place produced.
Laclos went past me around the corner and returned chugging a bottle of cold water. She held out a second one to me. “Kitchen.”
I downed half of it before pressing the side to my forehead. Its coolness felt marvelous. “Mission protocol said there’d be snacks.”
“Mention anything about cutter drones and dead bodies?” Laclos asked.
“I must have missed that part,” I said and headed up the stairs.
The bedroom door stood open. The dresser they’d shoved in front of it had been moved back but still slanted at an unnatural angle just inside.
I knocked and stepped inside, Laclos coming in behind me, her rifle lowered.
The kid’s teeth, slacks, and Rostram University shirt were white and semi-dazzling against his suntanned skin. He was athletic and good-looking and, based on my experience sizing people up in a glance, he seemed to know it. “Who are you?” he asked.
“Captain Ansell Sterling, UCMC. Who are you?”
The kid glanced at the other person in the room, a short, muscular man sitting blank-faced in a padded leather chair beneath another window with another spectacular view of the mountains. The man only gave a slight shake of his head, as if he hadn’t understood the question.
“Giuseppi Trevalyan,” Junior said. “You’re trespassing.”
I ignored the challenge. “You’re Master Trevalyan’s son?”
“What do you think?”
“I didn’t think he had kids.”
His lip curled into a sneer, something that looked like a nervous tic
. “Pop had two. The good one is off on a business trip. Don’t know where the old man went.”
The silver comms unit on his left wrist caught my attention. It was thin, loose, and flowed like an encircling fountain of water just above the skin. Probably a Divanese Co. special, which meant it would be one of only five hundred originals and obscenely expensive. Apparently there were numerous advantages to being cartel royalty.
“You aren’t supposed to be here,” I said.
“Yeah, well nobody told me that. It’s not like I don’t have a key.”
The bodyguard cleared his throat. He wore a less flashy comms unit on his right wrist, the line of thin silver tight against his skin. “Giuseppi has a friend in the village. He had a break in his classes and wanted to”—he hesitated long enough to polish his reply—“meet her. I’m sure you understand.”
A tryst, then. One of the locals. Not exactly a girlfriend, but someone he could bed when the mood hit him.
“Where is she?”
Junior shrugged and looked away. “The workers of course would have scattered as soon as the shooting started.” He sounded bitter, as if he thought she owed him something. “She’s not a fool. She wouldn’t have stuck around.”
“So not a fool . . . but a worker?” I asked, poking at his dignity, even though it didn’t matter who she was. This young man annoyed me. The fact he could use people and throw them away. The fact he clearly didn’t see that as wrong. The fact he had options, which meant that when the Alliance took over New Witlund, he’d probably just flee to a backup mansion somewhere else. “Did you see the fight outside your front door?”
His bodyguard lifted one finger for my attention. “We were both here, in this room, when we heard shooting in the courtyard. The alarm system triggered my assistant, and we were urged to lock the door and remain quiet. We didn’t receive the all clear until you arrived.”
An alarm system. I could probably access the recordings, but that would be time-consuming. “You didn’t see anything?”
“Heard the shooting,” the kid said. “But we never left the room.”
“So you don’t know how many men were here?”
“No idea.”
“And that utility shed on the hill?” I asked. “What can you tell me about that?”
He shrugged. “What’s there to tell? It’s dry storage. A place to keep product.”
Product. Obviously these two weren’t going to be able to help us get Vermier back. Best thing would be to get rid of them. One less factor to calculate. “You have keys to that sled in the garage?”
“Of course.”
“Some place you can go besides Seranik City?”
The bodyguard said, “We can take the pass to Tamani.”
“But I have class planet-side tomorrow,” Junior protested.
“Quelon’s under attack,” Laclos said. “You won’t be having classes for a while.”
“Really?” His expression changed, and I couldn’t tell if he was frightened or excited. War often impressed young men who considered life a public theater where dramas unfolded for their private amusement.
“Tell you what,” I said. “Wait three days. If you don’t see a grendel carrier dropping shock troops into Seranik by then, it’ll be safe to come home.”
“Thank you,” the bodyguard said with a carefully manicured inflection. “We appreciate your concern.”
Raeburn was waiting in the foyer with the radio, a familiar voice squawking from its tiny speaker. “Lieutenant Dogen, New Witlund QRS to Captain Sterling, UCMC, I know you’re in the house. Talk to me.”
Lieutenant Dogen. I should have known it would be him.
Raeburn held out the radio. “Anything you say will be intercepted. Grendels are listening too.”
I took the radio from his outstretched hand but didn’t depress the talk button. Instead I slipped the unit into my pocket and removed Sterling’s comms, holding up the bracelet so Raeburn and Laclos could see what I was doing.
“They’ll wait,” I said. “We need information. And I think my AI may be able to get it off one of those dead grendels. You have a problem with me reconnecting, Sergeant Major?”
“Sir,” Laclos said, “we don’t know if that comms is secure.”
“That’s a fact,” I agreed. “But we do know this mission is no longer a secret.”
Raeburn gave a long sigh. “As long as you take it off again, and let Laclos check you out afterwards.”
“Agreed,” I said, and stepped out into the blistering jungle heat. After the paradise of air conditioning, it felt like putting on a layer of warm wet clothing on an already hot and muggy day.
But I couldn’t wait to slip Sterling’s comms around my wrist. Even if the mission had gone exactly as Sterling had planned it, I would have needed Ivy’s help. Now everything in my world seemed to be unraveling. And some part of me wanted to hear her voice again, if only for the sake of my own sanity. It reminded me of what I’d been missing.
I strode over to the dead bodies and flipped the bracelet over my left wrist. Pressed the halves together.
The tingle of activation brought a surge of relief so powerful I closed my eyes as it washed over me. Was she a wyrm? Was this what a wyrm did? Was this what the Alliance was built upon—a desire for camaraderie?
[You’ve been busy,] Ivy said, her voice a smile. [Can I help?]
[You know anything about what happened here?] I asked.
[A little. I’ve been monitoring their satcom transmissions. And I was able to intercept some of the burst data the ambassador’s security team sent during the firefight.]
So these grendels had been part of the ambassador’s security team. That made sense. Still, I was astonished. Even though she’d been riding in my pocket, Ivy knew more than I did. [You can read grendel messaging?]
[It’s in the job description.]
[Can you pull the action logs from their symb-collars? I’d like to see exactly what happened here.]
[Hm.] She seemed to consider the question. [Sorry, but the most recent recording is a routine inspection of the compound. The firefight data has been deleted. Standard GA procedure.]
[Show me what you have.]
The smell of blood and flesh rose to my nostrils for a moment, then the world went dark.
Images floated before me, a moving line of ghosts on my overlay that captured both sensory and conceptual highlights in a sort of three-dimensional essay. Ninety minutes squeezed into a two-minute cognitive encounter:
I moved downhill towards the compound’s high western wall. Only the dim albedo of Quelon filtering through the trees gave any light. Better that way, really. Tanja held my hand in the darkness, listened for any out-of-place night sounds that might mean we were compromised.
[Just ahead,] Tanja warned.
I slipped past the cartel guard in his hidden bunker near the ridge. Could have killed him easily, and that didn’t bode well for the rest of the cartel’s security measures.
[Asleep,] I answered. [You should send that in.]
[Way ahead of you, Slick.]
[Not that His Excellence will care. A meeting on New Witlund? At a compound set in the jungle foothills of Seranik City? Surrounded by hostiles? What could go wrong?]
[You need a full company of experienced rangers around you to feel comfortable?]
[Just you and my rifle. But someone needs to remember we are on enemy soil.]
[Hot shower would be nice too. You’re starting to stink.]
[That is the smell of manliness! If you didn’t like it, you’d be dialing it down.]
[You flirting with me on an op, Slick?]
[Am I ever not flirting with you, Tanja?]
[That time we faced the Isnashi together.]
[Afterwards though!]
[So I guess these reservists won’t be a problem. That what you’re saying?]
I came to the edge of the trees and watched as two red dots slid into place beside me on the grid. Lyla and Kole sent the ready signal
at the same time, and we stepped into the wash of bluish light together.
The guard at the gatehouse lifted his rifle, but the three of us walked with hands held high, our own weapons secured peacefully to our backs. Tanja would have warned me if the man seemed likely to shoot. His finger wasn’t near the trigger.
A moment later the gate opened, and two other men in dark green business robes, heavily armed and reeking of cologne, met us inside.
They gave us a full tour of the compound: the monitored perimeter, the guest house, the sled port, the sky port, the “business” storage facilities set into the hillside, and last, the mansion.
My opinion is that this compound has no serious security at all, just a team of six mercenaries—probably distant members of the Trevalyan clan.
When I asked to see Master Trevalyan, the head of security replied, “He is away on business.”
Which means the one person on New Witlund who isn’t a fool isn’t actually on New Witlund. Also, he’s a drug lord. He probably figures that if this meeting goes well, his cartel will benefit from the black market trade for decades. And if it goes poorly, he will be holed up somewhere else, lightyears from the fighting.
[Some of these colonials are smarter than we give them credit for, yeah Tanja?]
[Exceptions to everything, Slick.]
The report ended. No recommendation to keep or cancel the meeting. No mention of an attack by militia. No reference to an ETA for the grendel emissary—apparently “His Excellence” in the report.
Just a lingering warmth of self-confidence, a residue that coated every thought with the stickiness of the integration I’d just experienced. The relationship between Slick and Tanja had been a kind of permanent mental dance, except that it seemed to require no mental energy. Slick had been a hero in Tanja’s eyes. A giant among men.
I knelt next to Slick’s body and tipped his head to one side. There was a swollen mass of tissue below his ear where shrapnel had torn his neck open, but the symb-collar was still intact. It figured. Probably why combat troops sometimes said that grendel meat could go bad, but their wyrms never died.
Operation Grendel Page 9