It was about Sterling’s comms. How it was probably infected with a grendel wyrm, a wyrm that had breached its firewall when the Strangler landed west of Seranik but didn’t activate till Sterling took off his comms and I put it on.
That had been his risk to take. He’d understood the dilemma but decided the pros outweighed the cons. And he’d trusted me to deliver the United Colonies’ terms to the Alliance, even if the process of doing so was compromised. Even if it meant my mind might be torn apart by a quantum infection. Even if the MADAR team that was sent to protect us were all killed as a result.
Our lives didn’t matter when weighed against six hundred million souls. We didn’t matter to a core government that was fighting for billions of free people to retain their natural autonomy, the freedom to think. How could the few of us compare to all of that?
No, this wasn’t my story.
I was just the one writing it.
I passed the halfway point of the semi-pyramid, and though my shirt lay saturated with sweat against my skin, and my breathing sounded like that of a winded racehorse, the nervous jitters had started to melt away. The steady-stim Laclos had given me carried me on buoyant waves from terrace to terrace, every step bringing me closer to the moment of truth.
And suddenly, fingertips dusting the grass, I saw the connection. The slope up. The door at the top. The fact that I was writing a feature story for OrbSyn, and every feature was built like a pyramid rather than like the inverted triangle of hard news.
Raymin Dahl, OrbSyn word-pounder, was a feature writer!
That was why Sterling had plucked my name from Weston’s ranks. My first-person features. Stories about people. Stories built on an inductive structure. Stories shaped like a pyramid, with the best parts coming at the very end.
The polar opposite of the structure used by the Grand Alliance. The grendel model of information delivery was, in every possible way that mattered, quite the reverse. They took a deductive approach to everything, with the important always coming first and the unimportant last. It was why they had stripped the action reports from the symb-collars of the advance security team when they died, but left behind—
Slick and Tanja.
I stopped about six meters from the door to the shed. Tried to recall the first thing, the very first thing Slick had discovered when probing Trevalyan’s perimeter. The reason he had said the cartel had no serious security measures at all.
Asleep. The guard had been asleep. In a hidey-hole on the ridge just to the right. Slick had called it a hidden bunker. And what better position to occupy if you wanted to pour down fire on the inside of the compound?
The shed in front of me wasn’t a warehouse. It was part of a tunnel system, with branches feeding off into the ridges on either side. Branches with other hidey-holes, other concealed bunkers, where Dogen probably had his soldiers stationed even now with their flash rifles.
Raeburn’s plan wasn’t going to work.
The door would open. Vermier would come out. And the moment I brought her down we’d be hit by fire from at least two directions.
I hesitated on the last terrace, but what choice did I have. Slowly I closed the gap to four meters. Three.
Stopped.
The door remained closed. Somewhere off in the distance a quetzal gave its low, mournful squall.
Was this really a feature story, after all? I wondered. Or was it just a series of increasingly brutal facts: You lived. You served. You died.
Betrayal. Brute force. Deception.
In a feature, most important was always subverted by most interesting. The tail became the head, and the head the tail. You never really know what a feature is about until the end. That’s when everything that came before is revealed in a new light.
You can’t appreciate that sort of story if you already know everything, or think you know everything. Maybe that was their weakness. The flaw against which Sterling meant to use me. Maybe the problem with grendels was that they thought they knew everything interesting just because they knew everything important.
Abruptly, the door to the shed opened on darkness, and for just a moment I saw nothing. Then Vermier stepped blinking to the threshold, her face turned down to escape the full force of the sun. Her hands were bound behind her back, her ankles restricted with quick-cuffs so that she could take only the tiniest of shuffling steps. They’d put a gag in her mouth, and the fury of her helplessness was written plainly across her face.
For one brief instant I realized her hatred was directed at me. As if I were to blame for her situation.
Then again, maybe I was.
“Slowly,” a voice said from behind her.
From the darkness the muzzle of a flash rifle pointed past her at my chest.
If I intended to make a move, now would have been the time. But I could feel the scopes of other flash rifles targeting my back, and I knew that if I made any sudden movement, we’d never make it down the hill alive.
“Tell Raeburn they have shooters on the ridge,” I said as Vermier scuttled up next to me. The sergeant major would want to know why I’d bailed on his plan.
But when I looked at Vermier again I remembered we wouldn’t be in this situation if she hadn’t forced herself on the team. I said, “You’re welcome.”
Face ablaze, she looked away and continued to shuffle.
Praying that Pajari’s finger had moved away from the trigger of his sniper rifle, I stepped into the mouth of the shed.
The door closed behind me, and light flared, the sudden shift from light to dark to light disorienting.
I’d been right. The room did open up into the mountainside, with stacks of product on shelves going deep into a small warehouse.
Four soldiers, dressed in the fatigues of the New Witlund militia, stood around a table with a single empty chair.
Lieutenant Dogen stood in the center, even uglier now that a fresh cut had been opened, and subsequently stitched, across his forehead. He stared openmouthed as astonishment widened his eyes. “You’re not Captain Sterling,” he said. “You’re that orderly.”
“I told you,” a woman’s voice chided.
My heart leapt into my throat and stopped there, choking back whatever I’d been meaning to say.
Her voice was the sound of cheerful innocence, the sound of home, the sound of love that first drew me to her on Holikot, and when she stepped around the corner I realized I’d known from the beginning how this feature would end.
It was Ivy Weber.
10
Corporal Dahl
They searched me very thoroughly. Afterwards, I sat in my sweat-soaked underclothes, my wrists and ankles quick-cuffed to the chair.
A high-intensity work light set on a tripod shone directly into my face. Clichéd even for Dogen, but it was effective. It wouldn’t leave a permanent mark, and in a courtroom would sound only mildly irritating. In reality it seemed to drain away what remained of my energy. Even the steady-stim Laclos had given me didn’t seem to dim its effectiveness.
One of the soldiers clipped a temporary restraining-cuff across my left wrist, and I felt the prickle of activation all the way to my elbow. They’d be able to read my bios now. Probably a lot more, though they still wouldn’t be able to access any part of my mind I didn’t yield willingly.
“I’m going to ask you some questions,” Dogen said, swiping a datapad on the table across from me. His using the pad was a bad sign. It meant he didn’t want his own comms connected to the cuff on my wrist. “If I don’t like your answers, you won’t either.”
“There’s no need for that,” Ivy said, too late.
Pain lanced into my arm from the wrist all the way to the shoulder. It felt like someone had shoved a needle down the length of my forearm.
In the aftermath, nausea tore at my insides. I wanted to call Dogen a sadist and a traitor but knew he’d make me pay for it.
Besides, that sick feeling wasn’t all Dogen’s fault. The fact Ivy was here couldn’t be a coin
cidence. Somehow she’d used me for information. Used me to gain access to . . . what? What had I known as a journalist and inadvertently revealed? That I was researching the MADAR program? That I was meeting with Captain Sterling? That I was interviewing an intelligence officer on Ivy’s home world?
Dogen sat in a chair one of his men pulled up. He scrutinized Ivy’s face. “You don’t have to stay for this.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she said. “And if you try any more of that cowboy act, I’ll have you baking tiles in a work camp.”
Gratitude washed over me. Then nausea again.
She wasn’t on my side. Wasn’t my girlfriend. Wasn’t who she’d claimed to be.
Was her name even Ivy?
He stared at her icily, then looked back at me. “Who are you?”
“Raymin Dahl. Corporal. Kanzin Colonial Reserve Infantry.”
The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him. “Reserve infantry? You’re not UCMC?”
I shook my head. “I’m a Communication Specialist in the 82nd Transport-Ready Battalion.” My voice sounded weak, and I despised it. I nodded towards the cuff on my wrist, feeling cowardly. “And you don’t have to use that thing. I came here to tell you what you want.”
“Why were you with Sterling?”
“I’m a journalist. Sterling pulled some strings to get me assigned to the peace talks with the grendel emissary. Said he wanted me to write a story about it. Sell peace to the edge colonies.”
“And you agreed?”
“He didn’t give me any choice. My editor told me I’d be writing about a new special ops unit training at Camp Locke. Sterling only gave me the real assignment a few minutes before you blew up the mess hall.”
“Where’s Sterling now?”
I tried to swallow but found it impossible. My throat felt swollen. “Inside a freezer in the camp morgue.”
“He’s dead? How?”
“You shot him when we were running from that Snapper.”
“No. We saw both of you go into the building, and it was your body they carried out. We saw his comms—”
“I stole his comms,” I admitted. “I’ve been impersonating him ever since.”
Dogen’s face flushed. Or maybe it was heat from the high-intensity light. He looked down at the datapad. Probably debating whether to give me another jolt.
One of the soldiers cursed under his breath.
“Told you,” Ivy said again.
“Why?” Dogen asked. “You say you didn’t want this assignment. So why make it happen? Why risk a court-martial and execution and—” He paused as a new thought crossed his face. “Are you working for them? The Alliance?”
“No. No, of course not. I’m a journalist. I write puff pieces for OrbSyn. I have no connection to the—”
“Then why?”
How was I supposed to answer that? A man like Dogen, paranoid, fearful, drunk on his new-found power, would never believe that a man like me would care about something as ethereal as the truth. But what else could I tell him? I tried to swallow again and said, “He told me it was the only way to save the edge.”
“You believed him?”
“Yes.”
“You’re lying.” He reached for the datapad.
“Wait!” I blurted. “Look, I know it sounds crazy, but—we’re losing this war. You know that, right? Fleet can’t hold the edge much longer.”
His finger hovered over the screen. “How would you know that?”
“I’m a reporter.”
“Fleet tells you what’s really going on?”
I shook my head. “Never any real intel. But I do see what they send instead, and that’s almost as good if you know what to look for. They have us writing feel-goods. OrbSyn wants to sell the idea that victory is just around the corner. You see very much of that stuff, and you start to get the idea. It’s like a shadow. A negative impression. You can tell what’s there by what isn’t.”
Ivy came closer and sat on the edge of the table to my left. “I knew you were brilliant the first time we met, Raymin. Do you remember?”
Somehow she made my heart race and my stomach turn at the same time. Dad was right, I decided. Love does make you cynical. “Never forget it.”
She smiled—sadly, it seemed to me. She brushed my left wrist with her fingertips, just at the edge of the prison cuff. “What happened to Sterling’s comms, Raymin?”
“I took it off.”
“Why?”
Her smile was too much. Too much gentleness. Too much tenderness. Too much promise. She knew how to peel me open. I looked back at Dogen. “I believe it’s infected with a grendel wyrm.”
For the first time the lieutenant seemed taken aback. He shifted in his chair as if searching for the right question.
I didn’t want him fiddling with the datapad, so I decided to answer all the questions he wouldn’t think to ask. What better way to convince him I was telling the truth?
“The enemy warship that landed yesterday morning is a Strangler class frigate. It launched a wyrm array at Sterling’s comms. His onboard AI initially kept it behind a firewall, but also told him the wyrm might be able to gain access on restart.”
“And when he died and you put it on—” Ivy prodded.
“It was a risk Sterling wanted to take,” I said. “He ordered me to impersonate him. Told me to put on his comms and follow the instructions in the mission file. He said the peace talks were essential.”
“And now you think his comms is infected?” Dogen looked mystified. “Then why come here? You either believe in the mission or you don’t. You can’t expect us to accept both.”
“Why not?” I asked. “If both things are true?”
Ivy looked quizzical, as if finally hearing something she hadn’t anticipated. “Why are you here?”
“To meet with the grendel emissary. I’m following Sterling’s orders.”
“He told you to follow the mission in his comms. But you took it off.” She slid from the table and came around to my right side, her left hand draped over my right shoulder. She knelt beside me. “Why?”
My sweat had evaporated now, and my sodden undershirt felt clammy against my skin. “The grendels won’t show up while there’s a hostage situation in the area. You asked for Sterling, and as far as anyone else knows that’s me. And it has to stay me in order for that meeting to happen.”
“So you agreed to the swap hoping you could talk your way out of here?” She smiled coyly, as if guarding some private joke.
“Yes,” I said. “Because I know these peace talks are the best hope any of us have to survive. And I thought maybe another militia would respect libertas cogitandi.”
Freedom of thought. The rallying cry of every colonial militia across the edge.
Dogen didn’t even blink.
Suddenly, Ivy’s hand on my shoulder disgusted me. She was still using me. Playing with my emotions, touching my skin, treating me like some kind of primitive hand terminal to be switched on and off whenever a bit of useful intel was needed for the cause.
I didn’t know her, I realized. I’d never known her. Not really. I’d fallen in love with a fake person, with a mask.
But her hand was still burning there on my shoulder, and I wanted it off.
“Of course, I didn’t realize you’d be here.” I looked Ivy in the eyes as I said it. “I didn’t know there’d be a traitor in their midst.”
Her expression hardened.
She rose. Went around to the other side of the table by the light where I could barely stand to look at her. Picked up Dogen’s datapad and held it there, hand poised above the screen as if daring me to say something else.
“Is your name even Ivy?” I asked.
For a moment I thought—I really thought—that she wouldn’t use it.
I was wrong.
“Why did you remove Sterling’s comms?” Dogen asked when I had finished vomiting.
“Couldn’t . . . let it see,” I croaked, “what I was planning
to tell you.”
Ivy softened a little and picked up a water bottle. When she pressed it to my lips, the wetness in my mouth was glorious.
I drank half as much as I wanted before she took the bottle away and set it on the table in front of me.
“Nothing you’ve told us would make any difference,” Dogen said, his arms crossed in a way that expanded his biceps. Probably he thought it made him more intimidating.
“Then you haven’t listened,” I said. “You think the grendels are monsters. If New Witlund is occupied, you think you’ll fight a guerrilla war. That’s what every colonial thinks. But it never happens. Because they aren’t monsters. They’re . . .”
Dogen glanced at Ivy, whose face was furrowed into a deep scowl. “What did it do to you, Corporal?”
Do to me? What did it do to me? What an idiotic question! “It terrified me,” I said. “And you still aren’t listening. The grendel wyrms aren’t what you think they are, and that’s why we’re losing. They’re not monsters. They’re genies.”
Dogen leaned forward. “Like, in a bottle?”
“Give you what you want. Or think you want. And you’ll never let them go.”
“You did,” Ivy said. “You took it off.”
“I only wore one for a few hours,” I said. “And as soon as I’m out of here, I’m going to put it back on.”
Ivy’s brows arced. “You still think you’re going to complete Sterling’s mission?”
I nodded. “I have to. I’m the last chance any of the colonies have.”
“Last chance?” Dogen said, clearly disgusted. “You’re a corporal!”
That was probably as solid a fact as I would find here. But it was time to tell them the rest of it. They were ready. They could believe they’d twisted it out of me. “Sterling’s comms isn’t just infected. It’s also carrying an infection. A wyrm of our own, designed to backtrack through the Alliance servers and cripple the grendel AI architecture. I found the file in a restricted folder hidden from the AI.”
Ivy studied me for a moment. “It’ll never get through. Their firewalls—”
Operation Grendel Page 11