He turned to another student who had come up behind me at the kiosk, and I found myself moving heavily away from him, out onto the quad towards the base.
I covered the two kilometers to our apartment and opened the door with my comms. It was an older unit that had belonged to my father. As thick and heavy as a half set of handcuffs, it was nonetheless useful as a personal grid and terminal into the public side of AFNET. While I was in school, the design also marked me as a military brat, which made me something of a pariah in the journalism department. Everyone knew the armed services were screwed up. And privately I agreed with that sentiment. But publicly I wore the mask of a deeply committed patriot. My father was a hero, the war was necessary, and anyone who disagreed was either a moron or a traitor.
“There he is,” my father’s husky voice erupted from the corner. “The new college graduate.”
Framed in afternoon sunlight from the picture window, he sat in his favorite recliner, gripping its arms like some barbarian king on a throne.
“Didn’t expect you till dinner.”
“Big day for you, and no more homework to worry about,” he said. “I thought we’d celebrate with some friends down at Murry’s.”
He meant his friends, not mine. Three or four junior officers who’d been with him on various missions and were now caught in his gravitational pull at STRATCOM. He wanted to brag about me, but not from genuine pride. No, he just wanted to announce my decision to go to Fleet OCS so publicly that I couldn’t change my mind. So that it would always have been my decision, and I’d never be able to say otherwise. Command and control were his bread and butter, but he was especially fond of butter.
“Sounds good,” I lied and ducked into the head to wash up.
By the time we pulled into a parking spot at Murry’s Bar & Grill, Dad’s cabal was already seated at a table near the far wall. The place was popular with Fleet officers but typically didn’t fill up until late in the evening.
Lieutenant Wyer waved us over by hoisting a pitcher of beer. She was the only woman in the group of four, and the youngest by ten years. She’d served with Dad as a combat controller handling air strikes and transportation logistics. The other lieutenants, Meers and Lomax, were beefy combat vets who had stories they’d never shared with me. But I fully believed they would have killed for my father, no questions asked. The fourth, Captain Potaznik, was a quiet, stern-faced strategist with vampiric gray eyes and hollow cheeks. He radiated an impression of danger far beyond that of the other three, like a proximity mine that may, or may not, be armed.
I slid into my assigned seat at the head of the table, an honor never before afforded to me. We ordered food, and I answered their polite questions about my classes, my reasons for majoring in journalism, and my plans to enter Fleet OCS.
Dad’s lips pressed together when I said this, his chin lifting slightly. That expression was his only tell; for whatever reason, he didn’t believe me.
Potaznik arched one brow and dabbed the corner of his mouth with a napkin before reaching over to pour more beer in my mug. He shifted the conversation to the most recent political scandal in the Senate, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I had no knowledge of the subject, so my participation in the talk would amount to little more than a few nods or the occasional question. Dinner came, and I listened to the governmental intrigue for at least two hours.
Meanwhile, Dad put down six beers before he started paying for the hard stuff. This was a celebration, he said. Drinks were on him. At some point he told me to, “Loosen up, son,” and the way he slurred the s’s I knew he was teetering towards the mean stage. Lieutenant Wyer noticed, too, and tried to wave off the waiter when he came to offer more booze. But Dad was on a roll: “You’ll have to learn how to handle more than a couple of beers if you hope to make it at STRATCOM. Bring my kid two shots of the Inawa Red.”
“I’m fine, Dad,” I said.
“You’re not fine till I say so. Take your medicine.”
“I’m not sick.”
It was the wrong thing to say. Dad wasn’t used to being contradicted in front of his peers, and his face took on that look of suppressed rage I knew so well. The problem wasn’t that he couldn’t hide his fury, but that he could. “Are you saying you don’t need any Kanzin courage to sign with Fleet? As promised?”
Potaznik looked at Wyre, his narrow jaw drawn down into a pointed scowl. They all knew what Dad could be like and had their reasons for justifying it.
But I didn’t know what my war hero father was talking about, even though I recognized the accusation of cowardice at the heart of his question. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We had an agreement.”
As far as I knew, nothing had changed. Yet he was talking as if I had backed out of the arrangement—as if I’d just told everyone that I had changed my mind and decided to get a graduate degree in art appreciation. Worse, he was openly admitting that as far as he was concerned, I didn’t really have a choice about my own future. And never had. Which made the idea of an ‘agreement’ hypocritical. “Yeah. You gave me an ultimatum when I was eighteen, and I said okay because I had no other options. And here I am.”
“Here you are.” His eyes flashed. “Eating my food. Drinking my beer.”
“Sir—” Lieutenant Wyre interrupted.
Dad held up one finger to cut her off, but his eyes never left mine. I shoved my chair back. There was no talking to him when he got like this. And I knew if I said anything else we’d both regret it. After he’d slept it off he could drive me over to the Admin Center. I’d sign up and both of us would pretend this evening never happened. “Thank you for the dinner and the beer. I’ll walk home.”
He grabbed my right wrist and squeezed. I’d been starting to rise, but the action forced me back into the seat. Even drunk and pushing fifty, he was still physically formidable. His three combat citations had not been given to him as a favor. “I haven’t excused you.”
“What more do you want?”
He tightened his grip on my wrist as he looked each of the other officers in the eye. “My son took the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Assessment this morning at a kiosk in the student union.”
I felt my face flush as understanding washed over me. That’s what this was about? My curiosity in talking to a recruiter from another branch? Somehow Dad must have—
“Scored in the upper 99th percentile,” he continued. “Which would place him on the fast track for Fleet OCS and an ensign position at STRATCOM. A future where he could make a real difference using that brain of his for something other than writing stories.” He spat the last word out as if it were something foul he’d just discovered in his mouth.
That confirmed everything I’d suspected over the years about how he felt regarding my choice of majors. Congratulations, son. If you’re done wasting your time now, why don’t you start taking life seriously?
“Yeah, I took the test. I was curious. And Sergeant Houts—”
“Curious?” Dad interrupted. “You mean cowardly. You didn’t have the guts to tell your old man you wanted to join the weasels at OrbSyn, so you tried to slink off into the night with the infantry.”
Lieutenant Wyre glanced from me to my father, as if sensing the explosion. “Sir, that seems a little strong.”
By now the dinner conversations around us had faded away to silence. I could feel a dozen sets of eyes trying not to stare my direction.
I stood, my ribs squeezing, my dad still clutching my wrist in that relentless grip. “I’m going home,” I said. “And tomorrow—”
I was going to say, And tomorrow I’m going to enlist with Fleet, and you’ll see you worried about nothing. But his grip tightened even further, and he barked out a final command: “You are not excused!”
I just wanted to get away. I pivoted on my left foot and threw my weight backwards, drawing my right elbow towards my waist. It was a move I’d learned in one of the self-defense classes Dad had forced me to take as a kid, and it a
lmost worked. He was sitting down and had only the strength of his own grip holding onto me. I was stepping backwards with all my weight, tugging at the weak space between thumb and forefinger.
But instead of taking a full step, my right foot struck the leg of the chair, which smacked into a pillar behind me. My knee bent, giving me very little backwards momentum. What should have been a neat slide backwards and a hasty retreat turned into an awkward, humiliating stumble, with my father still holding onto my arm.
It was the last degradation I would take. He was drunk. Again. And making me look like a complete idiot because he’d assumed all the worst things.
Fury erupted inside me. I brought my left forearm down on his wrist, at last breaking his hold on me, but apparently sparking something inside him as well.
I didn’t see the beer mug coming in an arc from his right hand. It smashed into the top of my head, tipped the room sideways, and narrowed my vision to a dark tunnel of swirling faces and exaggerated movements. When the tunnel expanded again I found myself a couple of meters away on the floor, something warm and wet trickling down my face.
Dad was standing, shouting at me, “YOU’RE A DISGRACE!” while Meers and Lomax held him back.
Wyre knelt beside me and pressed a wet napkin to my head. “That looks worse than it is,” she said. “But you might need a couple stitches. Can you stand?”
I pushed her away, rose, and lurched out into the night, the silence of the diners—most of them Fleet officers—as thick as it had always been when my dad was involved.
A moment ago I’d planned to walk home, but the war hero was in no condition to drive, and I knew one of his cronies would tuck him in eventually, so I took the sled.
I got most of the way home before I realized what I was doing. Then I had to summon a taxi from my comms, praying it would get here before Dad returned, and pre-paying for expedited service. They gave me an ETA of twenty minutes, which I could live with.
I waved the door open and hurried into my room. Stuffed some clothing into a daypack alongside my datapad. Opened the bottom drawer of my dresser where I kept the miscellaneous crap I never really used, plus an old ammo tin with my cash savings. I would need money to survive long enough to figure out what I was going to do. My bank accounts would last me a couple of days at best.
I flipped open the lid of the tin and swore. The cash was gone. All of it. Two and half years of carefully hoarded emergency funds plucked from my bedroom by my own father.
Who else would have done it? No one on base was stupid enough to steal from our residence. Clearly he’d expected some kind of confrontation. A hotheaded reaction. Maybe even a fight. Taking my cash was his way of chaining me to his influence. Once you were caught in his orbit, there was no escape.
I looked around the room at the spartan furnishings, the bland, off-white walls, the single window devoid of curtains, the dresser, the bed, the nightstand. None of it was really mine. All of it had come from him. My entire life. If I had a past here, it felt just as empty as my future. But if nothing in the room was necessary, then nothing here could hold me. I wasn’t tied to him by anything except his old comms and my old memories.
The memories I might be stuck with, but I didn’t have to wear his cast-off bracelet. I didn’t actually need it now, just as I no longer needed his approval. Besides, if I continued to wear it, he’d just use it to track me down. He was probably doing that right now, checking on me via whatever tracking software he’d installed. He would see that I was home safe and sound, still tidally locked to his heavier mass, and that knowledge would put him at ease enough to buy me some time. Probably he would order another round of drinks.
I called up my AI. His AI. [You have the address for Sergeant Houts, Public Information Command, anywhere close to base?]
[Campus recruitment?]
[That’s the one. Where does he live?]
I forwarded his address to the taxi service, verified receipt, then detached my father’s old comms from my wrist. Dad would probably follow up on that, but by then it would be too late.
My ride wouldn’t show up for another ten minutes. I didn’t want to spend more time in the apartment than necessary, but there was still one thing left to do. My bedroom was five by five, the furniture aligned, my few possessions stowed. The bed was a bit sloppy from where I’d filled my day pack, so I tugged the fabric corners into crisp angles and smoothed the pillow. Took out the ammo tin and placed it in the center. Set his old comms inside with the lid hinged open so he couldn’t miss it. Switched off the light and walked out to the street to wait.
Thirty minutes later I was knocking on a door that I sincerely hoped was the right address. By that point it was after midnight, and the air was thick with moisture under a starlit canopy not completely spoiled by light pollution.
Sergeant Houts answered the door in his boxers and a white undershirt, a passably lifelike prosthesis on his left arm. He looked annoyed. “You know what time it is, son? I work for a living—” He squinted into the darkness, his expression changing to surprise as he caught a glimpse of the blood on my face. “You all right?”
“I’m fine,” I said. “Life just took a wrong turn, and I need to evac. I was hoping the PIC might still have an opening for a guy who likes to write stories.”
He ran the good hand over his stubbled hair, looking past me into the night as if weighing his options. Maybe he suspected more than I imagined. At last he stood to the side and motioned me in. “You talk this over with your father?”
“Yeah,” I said, stepping across the threshold into the light. “We talked it over.”
12
The Isnashi
[This will be your final test,] Ivy said from the ether of waking. [Today you will face the Isnashi in its own world.]
Predawn light filtered through the open window, spreading muddy shadows through the room.
I’d fallen asleep in a recliner, and the air now felt clammy against my skin.
Slowly, Ivy’s words edged their way into my waking mind. [Test?] I asked. [Isnashi?]
The shadows of furniture along the far wall shifted as light settled behind them in a blurred tapestry of falling vines.
I was running. Uphill, through a patch of clearing in the jungle, most of it hazy under the gloom of twilight. I got the sense I was running both to something and from something.
On the other side, a hunter’s blind shimmered ten or twelve meters off the ground.
Sounds behind me, the thing, whatever it was, coming fast. As I leapt, the thing made a low rumbling sound, a sort of snuffle deep in its throat.
I caught the tree on the instep spikes of my left boot, raked the trunk with eversteel claws extended, and nearly ran skywards, spiraling to the right as the Isnashi followed.
Only once did I glance over my left shoulder. The creature resembled a bear, except it was larger and more flat-bodied. It’s tongue snaked out in a long flick behind me as I continued my scramble upward.
The tree actually groaned under its weight, and when I reached the blind I realized I’d been hoping the tiny shelter would provide enough protection to at least slow it down, if not camouflage me long enough I could take a killing shot. But how much of a shot would I get while trying to aim back around the tree rather than down?
I stumbled onto the narrow platform and grabbed my rifle, a precision Wasp EM-11 with five explosive rounds in the chamber. The blind wobbled under my weight as I leaned back against the hollow tube railing.
I lifted the stock to my shoulder but didn’t know which side of the tree it would appear on, so I swung the barrel back and forth half a dozen times before pausing to listen.
The Isnashi made no sound at all. Even with augmentation set to priority, I couldn’t hear any indication of its claws gouging the wood. Couldn’t hear anything except the pounding of my heart against my ribs.
Five days and nights on the hunt. League after league of dry and wet trails. No real sleep, no food since the first day, and all
my fresh water gone. A quick run to the LZ to plant my pickup beacon, and the monster chooses that moment to attack.
One way or the other, it would be the end of my selection.
The tree shook.
At last, something scraped the bark to my right.
I swung the barrel over, licked my lips, and curled my finger to the trigger.
The jungle faded.
In my mind Ivy stood next to my recliner with her hands folded. I couldn’t actually see her, of course, but I could feel her there, waiting.
[Where did you get that recording?]
[I pulled it from the archives of the Takwin. A simple hack really, since it wasn’t classified and had been marked as a failure. The candidate in question didn’t pass selection.]
Simple? Nothing about that recording was simple, including its origin. Yet Ivy somehow knew how to hack the archives of a J-class grendel frigate specializing in quantum intelligence.
I had little doubt that Sterling’s comms was compromised. What I didn’t know was the extent of it. Had Ivy been completely subsumed by a grendel wyrm, or was she fighting back, trying to wrest control from the enemy so that we could continue with the mission?
I rose from the recliner and stalked to the window.
Maybe it didn’t matter how deeply Sterling’s comms was compromised. If I assumed that my new bracelet wasn’t really a piece of UCMC tech anymore, but an enemy AI sent to secure something for its master, would my situation really change?
I took a deep breath of the ashy air and closed the window.
The real question was, did Ivy and I want the same thing?
And the obvious answer was yes. The Alliance wanted a peace treaty; the United Colonies wanted a peace treaty.
I was about to turn myself over to a team of grendel rangers for protection. What did it matter if I got help from an enemy soldier—or an enemy AI?
[You asked me to wake you,] Ivy said. [And I thought you’d want to know that the Ranger escort HGA Hayan sent has been delayed.]
Operation Grendel Page 13