Now I understood why the place was so empty. Trevalyan hadn’t taken any chances. He probably didn’t trust us any more than he trusted the Alliance. Just left behind a few goons to make sure no one stole the silverware.
I looked over the bodies as the stink of death once again penetrated my thoughts, forcing me to rise from my crouch.
Three grendel rangers ripped apart by heavy fire from the ridges above us. Plus a second kind of ordinance. A cutter-drone maybe. And sporadic fire from flash rifles.
Slick’s voice replayed in my mind: Some of these colonials are smarter than we give them credit for, yeah Tanja?
And her reply: Exceptions to everything, Slick.
The words brought a hollow feeling to my stomach. More longing than apprehension, like that last roll of the dice after a bad night at the casino.
Could it really be so simple? I fingered Sterling’s bracelet. The colonies, the Marine Corps, Fleet, everyone on our side is simply. . . wrong?
Then the parallel thought: When haven’t we been wrong?
Dogen’s voice squawked at me from my thigh pocket, his voice weary. “Lieutenant Dogen, New Witlund QRS to Captain Sterling. I am running out of patience.”
[They’ll want you,] Ivy said. [In exchange for Vermier. That will be his demand.]
[A captain for a colonel?]
[You’re a decorated PSYOPS officer with key information critical to their future lives on New Witlund. Colonel Vermier is a career staffer with no real intel about the war.]
It made sense. Problem was, the GA ambassador would never show up while there was an active hostage situation in the area. Especially after his advance team had been slaughtered. Somehow I was going to have to convince the locals to stand down. [Any ideas how we can get them to come out?]
[You don’t need them to come out,] Ivy said. [Raeburn’s team has the hammerhead. You can take out that utility shed easily.]
[Kill them all?]
[Colonel Vermier isn’t part of this mission and would be an acceptable casualty. She shouldn’t have imposed herself on the team. And you don’t even like her.]
The idea alarmed me. To throw away someone’s life with no attempt to get her back seemed beyond cynical. But then, was Ivy’s ruthlessness a result of her being programmed for strategic psychological warfare in some PSYOPS laboratory? Or was it because she’d been hacked by an Alliance wyrm and was trying to remove the only weapon we had that was capable of taking out their high-tech frigate?
I had no way of knowing. And for the moment it didn’t matter, because either way, I needed Ivy to help me get the peace talks back on track.
Still, what if I couldn’t get the ambassador to discuss terms for a ceasefire? We would need that rocket. I wasn’t going to waste it on some drug lord’s storage cellar. [No. I won’t do that.]
[Sterling would absolutely give that order,] Ivy said, and I could almost see the expression on her face, the earnestness in her eyes. It was the look she got whenever she was ready to fight. [If you don’t give that order, you will destroy this mission. Those New Witlunders may be poorly trained, but they’ve already lost at least six of their own trying to derail the ceasefire. You really think they’ll hesitate to kill you?]
I stood there blinking in the sunlight, the sweat pouring off of me, the stench of death hanging in the air above the bodies like a blanket. She was right. They would want to kill me. And Vermier didn’t really matter. Not against the lives of six hundred million people.
But I couldn’t order Raeburn to blow up that shed—to kill everyone inside it, friend or foe.
That kind of thinking might have suited Ansell Sterling, but it didn’t fit Raymin Dahl. Such coldblooded calculation was the very thing Dahl had been railing against his entire career. He wasn’t one of those soulless Fleet uniforms who sent men to die over brunch at a private club. Raymin Dahl was the guy who exposed them.
For that matter, I wasn’t the guy in the field who made the hard decisions no one else wanted to make, then spent a lifetime trying to forget them.
I wasn’t my dad.
[No,] I said. [They won’t hesitate to kill me. I’ll have to talk them out of it.]
“Lieutenant Dogen, New Witlund QRS to Captain Sterling, UCMC—”
[Don’t do that!]
Before I could change my mind I pulled the radio out and thumbed the transmission button. “Captain Sterling, United Colonial Marine Corps. What do you want?”
“Sterling,” Lieutenant Dogen said. He seemed surprised I’d finally answered. “There’s been enough bloodshed. All we want is to talk.”
“So talk.”
“Not like this. In person. The colonel for you. Come unarmed to the door. I’ll send her out when you’re a few meters away. If you run, we’ll kill you both. If you cooperate, you’ll both live. You have my word.”
His word. Maybe that meant something and maybe it didn’t. Before I put my life in his hands I needed to know the colonel was still alive. “Put her on.”
A short pause, then Vermier’s unmistakable voice saying, “Captain, you will take out that frigate and—”
Silence. A moment later Dogen said, “You have one hour. Then she gets a bullet in the head.”
I turned and looked at Laclos, who had walked over from the front porch and was watching me with narrowed eyes. “Sir, that’s not a good idea.”
“Give me a minute.” I handed her the radio and headed towards the covered sled port. Past the dead grendels and into the shade. Through the empty bays and halfway to the red convertible that was unlike any I’d seen before. Obviously an import from some core system manufacturer so exclusive they didn’t need to market to someone like me.
Ivy ghosted into view next to me, worry clouding her eyes. She wasn’t real, of course, but the filmy projection was enough to stop me in my tracks just under the overhang.
[You don’t have to prove anything,] she said, facing me. [Not to me, not to Fleet, and especially not to your father.]
[What are you talking about?]
[You want to hate him, but you can’t because he’s a war hero. He has campaign stars and valor ribbons and a reputation for looking out for his marines. And unlike your mother he at least didn’t leave you. So, how could you hate a man like that?]
I didn’t hate him, but she had no idea, this ghost-Ivy in front of me, the girl with Ivy’s face, Ivy’s mannerisms, Ivy’s way of standing with her weight on one foot, arms crossed as if calculating her next move on a chessboard. [I don’t hate him.]
[No. You want to be like him.]
[You don’t know what you’re talking about.]
[It’s not his fault that he only really understood one thing. How to be an officer but not a dad. That’s why the only real choice you’ve ever had was to not become him. So you ran away from the academy, enlisted in the reserves, and made a career out of turning the UCMC into a living hyperbole. You write puff pieces that are so overblown the only people who can’t tell they’re lies are the officers who want to see heroes in the mirror. And buried somewhere in all that patriotic verbiage are the implications of what you really believe. That the colonies are corrupt. That the Corps is rotting away. That the war is being lost because it wasn’t worth winning in the first place.]
[First I want to be my father,] I said. [Now I want to be a grendel?]
[You are not a traitor. Your father was wrong. And this is the wrong decision. You cannot walk into that shed alone.]
I realized suddenly that she didn’t believe I could do it. Not really. And somehow that hurt worse than everything else.
I took a deep breath. Ivy would have to stay behind. If the militia saw what was on Sterling’s comms, my story would never get out. [Okay. Talk to you soon.]
[Please,] Ivy said.
I pressed the release tab and peeled off Sterling’s comms. Ivy’s ghost flickered away, her presence in my head melted to silence, and the loneliness of the sled port assaulted my senses.
All around the quiet he
at of the compound thickened. The dead bodies of the grendels and the militia were beginning to swell under the buzz of swarming insects.
Nearby stood a row of heavy ceramic jars with miniature banana trees sprouting from each center.
I scooped back a handful of soil in one of them, pressed Sterling’s comms down into it, and covered it up with dirt.
Clenched both hands into fists to keep them from shaking. Shoved away the thought that I had just buried Ivy as surely as if I’d lowered her body into the earth.
Sweat saturated my fatigues and brought a sudden dryness to my throat. It wasn’t likely that Lieutenant Dogen and his New Witlunders would kill me. Not right away. They’d want information first.
They’d want to know the truth.
So I’ll tell them, I thought. I’ll tell them what they want to hear.
9
Feature Writer
“How you feeling, sir?” Laclos asked.
We were sitting in the kitchen at a rustic wooden table carved to look like something from a hunter’s lodge and coated in enough transparent plasteel to armor a cargo shuttle. Laclos sat across from me with a bottle of cold water and a single white pill at her elbow. Time for another steady-stim, but not until I proved I hadn’t become a grendel sleeper agent by reconnecting to Sterling’s comms. I felt like a dog waiting on a treat.
“Tired,” I said. “And angry, to be honest.”
She looked up from the tablet she was recording my vitals on. “Second thoughts? You don’t have to do this, you know.”
“You think they won’t shoot her?”
Laclos shrugged. “I think they understand the hell they’ll bring down on themselves if they don’t back off. Dogen is already looking at a twenty-year term. Or worse.” She looked down at her tablet, then read from a diagnostic. “You notice anything different about your AI when you put it back on?”
“No,” I said truthfully. Ivy hadn’t changed riding in my pocket. She’d been exactly what I expected. Exactly what I needed.
Laclos stared at me with narrowed eyes as a wave of guilt knotted my throat. I couldn’t tell her that, yes, my comms might be infected by a grendel wyrm, but I had no way of knowing for sure, and even if it was infected, I still needed to use it in order to complete my mission. Because I wasn’t really Captain Sterling.
Maybe I’d be able to tell her at some point, but not now. Not when I was about to walk unarmed to the door of that utility shed.
She looked back at her tablet. “After the Strangler attack, did the onboard system display any firewall warnings?”
“Yes. She said it was a fifth generation attack she was well prepared to handle.” Also the truth, though it left out the important caveat of not taking it off. Which I had done twice. Three times if you counted taking it off initially.
Laclos flashed a curious smile. “She?”
“It’s an advanced system,” I said. “A PSYOPS thing, meant to tidy up your grid through deep neural bonding. I even had to give her a name.” This last bit of information slipped out before I realized what I was saying.
“Oh?” she said, typing rapidly. “And what do you call her?”
“Ivy,” I said. “Like the plant, not the injection.”
She smiled again and slid the pill across the table with the bottle of water. “This should help with the climb.”
I slipped the pill onto my tongue. “So I’m not a monster?”
“You are,” she said. “You’re just one of ours. Drink all of that.”
I did as instructed, gulping the cool water as the near-instant stimulant worked its magic. By the time I’d emptied the bottle I was ready to go. “Let’s get this over with.”
Raeburn appeared in the doorway holding a jar from the pantry. He spread flour across the table, then sketched a map of the hill in the powder. “Pajari’s upstairs with a clear shot all the way up the mountain. Do not make a move until Vermier clears the threshold. When the door is open and you have the space to do it, dive on the colonel and roll. Pajari will fire over your head with the long gun, which should buy you a couple of seconds.”
I pictured grabbing Colonel Vermier and pulling her to the ground. “She’s not going to be happy. Especially if she gets hurt.”
“Cross that bridge,” Raeburn said. “Hopper’s in the trees at four o’clock. Here. Level with the door but at a bad angle. From that spot he can put a lot of rounds into the opening without hitting anything.”
“Plus it’s Hopper,” Laclos said, straight-faced. “He can put a lot of rounds anywhere without hitting anything.”
Raeburn ignored her. “Mostly he’ll add noise and confusion to the inside of that shed so the unfriendlies don’t take potshots at you on your way out.”
Unfriendlies. I’d forgotten the term. “So we get one shot from Pajari after I make the first move, then the colonel and I better be as far away as possible if we want to live?”
Laclos looked stricken, like I’d just slapped her. “I was kidding, sir. We’ve got your back. Hopper’s actually a great shot.”
She’d been trying to help me relax. Probably figured Sterling’s robust combat history would kick in with the right encouragement. But how would I know what it was like to play the part of a battle-hardened veteran? I decided to go for the easy insult. “Not what it says in his top-secret PSYOPS file.”
Laclos laughed nervously. “Quote you on that?”
“When it’s over. Don’t give him any excuses.”
Raeburn slid his index finger twice through the flour. “This plan makes the mountain your enemy going up, and your friend coming down. If they don’t shoot you as soon as the door opens, you’ll have the first move. Since action beats reaction nine times out of ten, you should be able to dive on Vermier and pull her to the ground. We’ll buy you time to roll downhill a few meters until you’re out of their line of site. Doc and I will also provide additional covering fire as you run back to the compound. Of course, all of this depends on you being right. That they want to use you, not execute you.”
“I’m right,” I said, injecting more confidence in my voice than I actually felt. “Let’s get it over with.”
“You sure you’re up for this, Captain?”
I rose, the sweat on the back of my uniform clammy against my skin. “We’ve got nine dead, including three grendel peacekeepers. And it would have been worse if Trevalyan hadn’t left the place almost empty. What happened here is about to be repeated on a scale we haven’t seen since the war started. It’s already happening on Quelon. As I see it, we’ve got this one chance to work something out with the Alliance. The only thing standing in the way of a ceasefire is that pack of overpaid idiots in the shed.”
I didn’t specifically mention Colonel Vermier as one of the idiots, but I didn’t leave her out, either.
Raeburn nodded at Laclos and picked up his rifle. “Good luck, sir.”
They left through the front door.
I counted to a hundred before following them into a wave of heat that was somehow worse than it had been thirty minutes earlier.
Left the compound through the main gate.
Headed west up the slope towards the utility shed.
If time slowed to a crawl yesterday when Sterling was bleeding out in that third-floor office, it seemed to stop altogether as I climbed.
The building jutted from the mountain like a concrete dormer, its rear wall nestled into the hillside. Hopper had briefly looked through the house for blueprints but didn’t have the time for a thorough search. I suspected the shed was actually the entrance to a larger storage facility where the cartel kept its supply of “product” to be readied for shipment. Which meant Dogen’s militia probably had access to whatever firepower Trevalyan kept there for emergencies.
I plodded methodically up the slope, running my hands through waist-high sawgrass as if to catch a few last impressions of life. The jungle had been cut back all the way to the top, probably to make movement smoother for the cargo sleds hauling
bundles between the cartel sky port and the shed. The result was a kind of terraced ascent reminiscent of the Mayan pyramids.
Six minutes dragged into an eternity. Every step, every heartbeat, every glance at that reinforced door seemed a roll of the dice, as if at any moment a mag round would punch a hole in my chest and I’d drown in my own blood as Sterling had. But this was the story I’d come to write, so I kept walking.
For the last four years Raymin Dahl had been writing feature stories from an OrbSyn cubicle—or a skyport terminal, or a base lounge, or even the barstool of some territorial roadhouse—and never actually seen what he described. It had always been someone else, some soldier or marine or fleet with a faraway look and an ear for the story readers wanted to hear.
Now I was actually in the mix, and there was nothing heroic, nothing noble about it at all. I just wanted to be somewhere else. Would have given anything to be able to watch some other dumb puke climb that hill in my place, and maybe watch through a scope as Pajari and Raeburn and Hopper were watching me.
All those faraway looks I’d seen during my interviews came back to me in a rush. That attitude of disgust and loathing as I asked the latest war hero to describe what it was like to live through a firefight. Maybe their commanding officer took a round through the neck, or a friend lost her legs to a cutter-drone, or a shipmate was bisected by an airlock door.
And how did you feel? I would say. And of course I could see what they were feeling as soon as I asked. It was etched on their faces. They wanted to beat my brains out for asking such an arrogant, stupid pogue question.
But how they felt about the question wasn’t what I was asking. And they never punished me, never even objected to the question. They knew I had to ask it. Because that’s the story, and everyone knows it. The story is what you’re feeling when things are at their worst and you do something brave and horrible and desperate anyway. That’s all any story is.
And it was the story I was writing as I climbed that hill.
This story wasn’t about me. It wasn’t about the jungle or the cartel or the New Witlund militia.
Operation Grendel Page 10