[Delayed? How long?]
[I’m afraid I don’t know. His soldiers made it about eight kilometers east into the mountains, but they don’t seem to be moving at all.]
Strange. How was I supposed to attend the peace talks if the parameters kept changing? What if Raeburn blew the grendel frigate before I could meet with the ambassador? For that matter, what if he blew it while I was meeting with him? [Where’s the MADAR team?]
[I have no way of knowing. They’re still dark.]
That made more sense than grendel rangers missing their appointment. Raeburn would have no problem assaulting the frigate with whatever they had at hand—even if that meant using combat knives and barbed wire.
[Is it possible Raeburn’s team is why those rangers are delayed?]
As if in answer, she sent an image to my overlay, nine red GAR icons spread out in a crescent line halfway to the Takwin. Stalemate.
[And no word from Hayan?] I asked.
[Correct. What are you going to do?]
My stomach rumbled, and I realized I hadn’t eaten for a day and a half. I felt ravenous. [Raid the pantry.]
In the kitchen I stuffed myself with expensive food on Trevalyan’s dime, closing all the windows so the air conditioning could do its job, then walked the roof and walls in the morning heat.
The stench from the bodies rising out of the courtyard filled the air, even inside the house, so I decided to do something about it. Whatever these men represented, their corpses shouldn’t be left to rot out in the sun. Sooner or later one of the village kids might stumble across them.
From the maintenance building I took a cargo hauler and a couple of tarpaulins, then spread the plasteel sheets next to the dead. The grendels I dragged onto one, scattering swarms of bluebacks and dragonflies, and folded them into it. I marked the package “GA” and used the hauler to place them outside the gate.
Trevalyan’s security detail took longer. I had to drag two of them down a flight of stairs and over thick white carpeting that would never be the same. The second tarpaulin wasn’t big enough to roll all of them into it, so I placed them one by one outside the gate and covered the pile with it. I weighted the edges with chunks of broken steel from the gate, then went inside and showered.
I’d shoved my clothes into the quick-clean first, and by the time I had washed and dressed, I was hungry again.
This time I ate more slowly, occasionally checking my grid to see if the grendel ranger icons had moved.
They hadn’t.
It occurred to me that I might learn something while I waited, so I pulled up the kitchen datapad and scanned Trevalyan’s home-net for recordings of yesterday’s firefight between the grendels, New Witlund militia, and cartel security.
Sure enough, there were eleven different angles of the whole bloody mess.
It started after the kid arrived with his bodyguard and lasted maybe ten minutes. The militia had clearly been waiting with flash rifles positioned in their hidey-holes up on the ridges.
One camera showed what had happened inside the courtyard when the armored bus crashed into the gate and four New Witlund militia hopped out to exchange fire with Trevalyan’s men. The New Witlunders seemed to hit no one, but lost one man to a neck wound.
It looked ill-planned and hopeless. They were pinned down inside the courtyard and taking fire more quickly than they must have anticipated, having only just made it to the low wall of the sled port.
They were just retreating to the sled when the grendel advance team came into the courtyard and turned the battle into a three-sided shootout.
It didn’t last long.
The grendel operators took out Trevalyan’s men with precision fire-and-move tactics, and eliminated the militia with a thermal grenade. The explosion flared white in the home-net’s optics, fading back a few seconds later to the charred skeleton of the sled vomiting fire and black smoke. The three remaining militiamen seemed to have evaporated.
That’s when the flash rifles opened up from the ridge, tearing chunks from the wall and raking the flesh from the two grendels who were moving towards the mansion.
The third enemy operator made a dash to pull his twitching friends back to cover when a mortar round, probably sent from the door of the utility shed, sent a net of shrapnel booming through the open space of the courtyard.
Nothing moved after that.
I stared at the imaging for a long time before poking Ivy. [Any news from Hayan?]
[Not a word.]
I wished I hadn’t eaten so much. My stomach had that queasy feeling I get just before I land an ugly assignment.
But we were running out of time. I didn’t know how long the grendel emissary would be willing to wait, and I wasn’t going to lose my once-in-a-lifetime war story because I’d taken a passive approach to the ending.
[How much daylight do we have left?]
[A little over six hours.]
[And how far is it to the Takwin?]
[Roughly eighteen kilometers. You wouldn’t make it by nightfall.]
A long walk, especially in this heat and over mountain trails.
But I could feel my window of opportunity closing. That grendel frigate wasn’t going to sit in the foothills forever, exposed and essentially helpless. It may have been a gunship, but lying on its belly with the power off, it had all the defensive options of a beached whale.
At some point the rangers Hayan had sent would get tired of waiting and head back to the ship. And that would be the end of the story.
The end of my story.
I wasn’t about to let that happen.
[No,] I said. [But I’ll make it before dawn.]
[A night hike would be difficult,] she said. [And potentially very dangerous.]
[You mean I might get caught between Raeburn’s team and the grendel rangers? I’ve been thinking we could circle around them. Go due west for a while and approach Seranik from the south.]
[Perhaps. But we don’t actually know where Raeburn’s team is. And there’s something else.]
[Oh?]
[The recording I played for you this morning? The one about the—]
She had paused, as if searching for the right word. [The hunter? Yeah, what about it?]
[It was one man’s selection process, something all grendel special forces go through. Call it a rite of passage.]
[Okay?]
[He didn’t survive.]
[That thing got him?]
[Yes. That thing was an Isnashi, a monster conceived as a myth, but later genetically engineered as a projection of humanity’s deepest fears. It is now thriving in the jungles of eleven terraformed homeworlds.]
The churning, uneasy feeling in my stomach rose to my throat, and I remembered the creature I’d seen yesterday just before we made it through the pass. [Those things are here? On New Witlund?]
[Yes.]
I knew there were pumas on New Witlund, but no one had told me about the moon’s giant lizard-bears. This was just peachy. [Anything else?]
[I may be able to help you, if you find yourself in real trouble.]
[Help how?]
[I can extend your physical senses a little, even without special gear.]
Extend my senses. I wanted to ask what that ability required in return, but it felt suspiciously obvious, and I didn’t want to give her anything that would open my mind to deeper manipulation. So I just sat there in silence at the kitchen table, staring at the blank datapad.
[Perhaps by as much as twenty percent,] Ivy added. [But you would need to grant me deeper access to your mind, and doing so is a violation of CNC edict 21.]
[You’ll give me superpowers if I turn over the keys to my autonomy?]
[Not exactly. I can help you slow your heart rate, or block out certain visual distractions, or combine the input from my own sensors with your natural—]
[Never mind. It won’t come to that. I’ll never be that desperate.]
I looked around at the kitchen, taking inventory, and quickl
y stuffed eight water bottles into my daypack, along with a couple of pressed breakfast cakes from the pantry.
I turned in a circle and tried to think. I hadn’t brought much, and nothing in the mansion would be worth taking. Not where I was headed.
In the compound, the stench of bodies from beyond the gate filled my nostrils, and I felt the sweat rising on my skin almost instantly.
[Here,] Ivy said as I stepped around the broken panel of the gate door. The green tarpaulin was already covered in black insects. [Pull back the corner.]
[Why?]
[Trust me.]
I drew the front of my shirt over my nose and knelt down next to the wrapped bodies. When I lifted back the corner I saw instantly what she was suggesting.
The barrel of a grendel rifle lay next to a bloody, swollen wrist.
[I’ve never fired an Alliance weapon.]
[It’s not much different from a standard auto-carbine, except there’s no safety mechanism, and the magazine is heavier.]
I considered this for a moment, then remembered the tongue of the Isnashi as the beast pursued that grendel soldier. I had to tug a little to get the rifle free of the tarp.
She was right. It was heavier.
I tipped it sideways to check that the magazine was locked to the shroud. Saw the make and model stamped into the eversteel in blocky letters: WASP EM-11.
Ivy seemed to be expecting my discomfort.
[It’s a common rifle,] she said. [Standard issue for grendel special ops.]
[Uh-huh.]
[Be grateful, Captain. It’s the weapon you want if you ever come across a monster.]
[Or a marine, apparently.]
[To a grendel, there is no difference.]
A moment later I was headed back up the pyramidal slope to the utility shed. Ivy’s suggestion, actually. My inclination had been to avoid the place, but she pointed out that however long or short the tunnels were, they would keep me out of the heat.
I opened the door and stepped into the artificial light. Primitive ceiling panels triggered as I walked through the warehouse, past shelves of something that smelled faintly of cloves. At the far end, a corridor led to a staircase and a closed door. I paused at the handle, then nudged it open.
Lights flickered on in a long array down the rough-hewn passage. By the look of the spiral swirls lining the walls, this place had obviously been built by a mining machine.
The passage leveled out a few hundred meters farther, then meandered west, apparently tracing the spine of the ridge all the way to the far side of the mountain. Which made sense when I emerged out the little steel door draped in vines a couple kilometers away from the compound.
Once again I’d gotten used to the cool air; coming out into the jungle heat made me grateful I’d paid attention to Ivy’s suggestion.
A little ways away one of New Witlund’s ubiquitous goat trails jogged along the side of a small stream, the center of a valley so steep the mountains on either side looked like giant green teeth.
[Which way?] I asked.
Ivy brought up the grid, and I noticed the rangers still hadn’t moved. It gave me confidence I was making the right decision. [Head right,] she said. [And pace yourself. You’re in for a bit of a climb now.]
The climb lasted two hours, during which time I covered a little under two kilometers, slapping biting flies most of the way. If there hadn’t been a path there, the climb would have seemed endless.
I wondered if flesh-and-blood-Ivy had come this way last night or circled back around to whatever headquarters the militia had in Seranik.
Not that it made any difference. I felt sure I’d never see her again, no matter what happened in the negotiations.
I walked eleven kilometers in the next three hours, finally cresting the rise of a foothill well to the south of Seranik City. Streetlights burned a white graph on the landscape, eerily devoid of the usual beacons of household and shop. It seemed everyone was still hunkered down, waiting for something to happen.
From this distance the city looked almost close enough to touch, but I’d done enough hiking to know it would take hours to reach the closest street. And the Takwin lay not just north, but farther west.
[Rangers are moving,] Ivy said. She brought up the grid and zoomed in on three red icons now clustered together and edging down the left side of my peripheral vision.
[Any idea why?]
[Yes,] she admitted. [I sent a distress signal.]
Without my permission? Was she allowed to do that? If she weren’t infected with a grendel wyrm, would she be able to contact a squad of Alliance Rangers without being given the direct authority to do so?
I didn’t know. I had no idea what a comms belonging to one of the Dirty Tricks Boys wasn’t allowed to do. But I needed to find out.
[Ivy,] I said. [We need to get this out in the open. I know you were infected with a grendel wyrm. I need to know how much it’s inhibiting or altering your programming. Is there any of the original comms AI left?]
Probably a stupid tactic, asking a liar if she was lying. But some part of me wanted to believe that there were limits to how badly a wyrm—even a grendel wyrm—could warp one of our most tightly protected AI systems.
Besides, I still needed Ivy. In more ways than one, I needed her.
[Captain,] she said. [There’s no time. I’m picking up thermals of a large biomass in the area. It seems to be following your trail.]
[How large?]
[At least five hundred kilograms. Maybe more.]
That was no puma. It was bigger than any land predator I’d ever heard of, including the North American grizzly. In fact, the only thing that big I knew about—the Isnashi—was something I’d never heard of until today. And the only information I had about it came from Ivy.
Yet I had seen something on the trail to the compound. And the recording I’d seen this morning had been terrifying. If Ivy was right . . .
I started to jog down the path, scanning the trees for one I could climb. But it seemed the whole jungle was fashioned from saplings and green limbs and crooked vines.
I wasn’t wearing combat armor. I didn’t have climbing spikes in my heels or folding claws embedded in my gloves.
For that matter, I didn’t even have gloves.
[Ivy, give me some options.]
[You could climb, but the Isnashi are better climbers, and you haven’t time to find a suitable tree. Your best chance is your rifle.]
[I’m a lousy shot, Ivy!]
[Let me help you.]
[How?]
[Let me in.]
[What does that mean?]
[Give me access to what you’re seeing, thinking, feeling—]
[No!]
[Senses only, then. Ansell, there isn’t much time. Give me permission to speed up your reflexes and limit the input from your eyes and ears.]
Ansell. She was calling me Ansell.
I didn’t know whether to be encouraged or terrified. Was she saying she believed in me? Did Ivy believe in me?
But giving an AI too much access to the mind ultimately eroded autonomy. It’s what started this war in the first place. And if I gave her access to my senses, what would be next? Would I have the will to—
[It’s using its heightened sense of smell. You should be able to see it on the path behind you if you—]
I knew what she was getting at instantly. Up ahead, just to the left, lay a fallen log. It wasn’t large—no bigger around than my thigh—but it would provide a little camouflage and something on which to prop the rifle. It would have to do.
I ran to the log and leapt over it, my breath coming in a series of rapid gasps as I unslung the rifle from my back and lifted the stock to my shoulder.
No safety, she had said. There was no safety. The comms was the safety on grendel rifles.
And this was a Wasp EM-11.
[How many,] I asked in a kind of mental stutter. [How many rounds in the chamber? And what kind?]
[Three,] she said. [Exp
losive penetrators.]
My hands shook. The rifle shook. The sight at the end of the rifle shook.
Something appeared over the ridgeline, close to the ground, but moving on all fours.
[Ansell, you’re running out of time.]
I let her in.
Senses only, because some doors should never be opened.
But the sensory door I wrenched open with a bang, and instantly, my hands stopped shaking.
Time slowed, if only a little, as I squinted down the barrel at the hunch-shouldered, lumbering thing at the top of the hill.
Its face was long, like that of a horse. It nosed the ground, snuffling at the soil with long flicks of its skinny tongue. Then paused to rise on its hind legs, as if scenting the wind.
I could have shot it then, except that I was seeing clearly, even in the dim light, and I couldn’t believe the thing was real.
It had a second mouth high on its chest, a mouth lined with teeth like a shark’s, but slit vertically. Then it thumped to the ground, and I felt the vibration in my knees, and the dorsal ridge on its back rippled in the motionless air like a pony’s mane.
[Ansell,] Ivy said. [Some decisions only you can make.]
It was closer now, knees to the soil, body low, head turning left and right. Its tongue flicked again, lifting like a finger pointing directly towards me. [Only me.]
[Only you, Ansell. Who will you be? Will you pass selection? Or will the beast take you?]
It shuffled closer, tongue straight, eyes staring.
[Ansell, there’s no more time!]
I swallowed back my fear and closed my eyes. Let the image of that flowing mane resolve into what I knew it to be.
What it must be.
—STERLING, A: FIRE YOUR WEAPON!—
Not a mane.
A ponytail.
I took my finger off the trigger.
“You going to put that down?” Laclos asked. “Or do you want me to pop you?”
13
Laclos
She was staring down the barrel, her finger curled on the trigger.
But Ivy still loomed in the back of my mind, as if waiting for me to decide but afraid to say anything else.
[You tried to get me to kill her!] I spat.
Operation Grendel Page 14