This struck me as profoundly underhanded. Not to mention unfair. No wonder she hadn’t asked first. [You saying Laclos doesn’t like me?]
[I like you,] Ivy said.
[You’re just . . . using me.] The words in my head came with a delay, as if sending complete sentences had suddenly become impossible, and rather unnecessary.
[Does that matter?]
I considered the question. Decided I didn’t care if she was using me, so long as she didn’t leave me. [Guess not.]
[Good.]
[What . . . does that make me, though?] And this question did seem important, though I wasn’t sure how to phrase it. Every thought seemed to come from far off, as if I were listening to the mind of someone else. [I’m not who I thought I was. Not anymore.]
She sighed, the sympathy in her voice as thick as the night air. I could almost feel her sliding to the ground next to me, her back to the same root, her head pressing to my shoulder. [You’ve always known who I am. And when you took me off, you could have left me behind. But you didn’t. You put me back on. And I’m so, so glad. Thank you for coming back for me.]
14
Traitor
Whatever Laclos had given me must have triggered something deep in my subconscious mind. Maybe it was the long hours of stress and combat trauma, or the uncertainty of pretending to be someone I wasn’t. Perhaps it was a combination of all three. In my dream I really was Captain Ansell Sterling, trapped in a government office building with a pogue journalist who hadn’t fired his weapon since boot camp. Five, maybe ten locals trying to blow us apart with flash rifles, and he couldn’t bring himself to point his weapon their direction and pull the trigger. Couldn’t even soldier up enough courage, enough self-respect, enough self-preservation, to help me build a barricade at the door.
Instead, Corporal Dahl cowered under a clerk’s desk, his face pressed into the crappy government carpet, his eyes staring past me at the row of windows overlooking the street.
I thought, This is the guy who writes all those action-adventure stories for OrbSyn? The guy who gave us “Three Days on a Wounded Cruiser,” and “Life and Death as a Harpy Ace”? This is the same guy?
He’d been a lot cockier back in the mess hall at Camp Locke, when he thought he was finally going to see some action.
And it hadn’t been hard to get him on board, had it? Just promise him what he’d always wanted, or thought he wanted: a great war story based on firsthand experience.
I looked out the window, where grendel cutter drones buzzed across the sky in long waves like twentieth-century bomber formations. In the street below, Raeburn’s MADAR team closed the distance between us, but slowly, as if moving through water.
Footsteps pounded the stairway down the corridor, so I turned back to the task at hand.
I lifted my rifle, waited for the knob to turn, then emptied half the magazine into the door and wall.
Dahl had gone fetal, hands covering his ears.
“You ready to die for the republic, soldier?”
He looked up, his face plastered with sweat. “Sir?”
Pathetic. “I said, ‘Are. You. Ready. To. Die. For. The. Republic?’”
He shook his head. “I don’t want to die.”
“Nobody wants to die.” I pointed to the window. “Get up and look at that.”
He rose slowly, glancing between me and the copper sky as if not sure where to go or what to look at. That feeling of entrapment told you everything you needed to know about the man. It had followed him his whole career, his whole life. I’d read everything Raymin Dahl ever wrote, and it was obvious from his stories. He’d never known where to go or what to do.
He wasn’t officer material. He shouldn’t even be wearing a uniform. The man was a disgrace. And people were supposed to believe he could run one of my missions?
It could only work if they didn’t know the man.
“Thank you for your service,” I said, because even though he was a coward and an armchair warrior and a reporter, he had at least volunteered.
I shot him through the chest.
One shot, close to the heart, piercing his right lung.
He stood there for a minute looking down at the spreading mass of blood. Covered the hole with both hands. Dropped suddenly.
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll write the ending.”
Ivy came around from the other side of the desk. I hadn’t heard her come in.
But of course she hadn’t come in. We’d gone to her—part of the surreal logic of dreaming. We were back in the hillside warehouse with Lieutenant Dogen, whose biceps had grown to the size of watermelons.
Ivy draped one hand across my shoulder and stared at Dahl’s shuddering body. She didn’t look sad. “Goodbye, Raymin.”
“This is going out over an open channel?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“And I’m a grendel now?”
She turned and looked into my eyes, her hands on my chest. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“I shot them,” I said. “I shot those soldiers in the hall.”
“Yes.”
“And Corporal Dahl. I killed him too.”
She kissed me, her lips warm, urgent. “Of course you did.”
I closed my eyes and pulled her closer.
And I knew that this Ivy didn’t love me either. She too was using me. Searching my mind for any information that might help her cause.
I kept kissing her anyway until she pulled back, away from the chair she’d tied me to. “You’re not PSYOPS,” she said.
But it wasn’t Ivy’s voice anymore. It was Vermier’s. And that voice woke me.
Hands on her hips, the colonel glared down at me. “And you’re not a reporter. I don’t know what you are, but it isn’t that.”
I blinked in the humid night air and realized I could see normally again. No more strobing lights coming off the eastern slope. No more battle sounds. The fight seemed to have died away completely, along with the disjointed dream.
“Where is everyone?” I asked.
“On watch. Raeburn and Pajari chased away the locals. Enemy rangers haven’t changed position in almost an hour.”
I stretched and rubbed the back of my head. A knot behind my right ear felt sore to the touch, but I wasn’t badly hurt.
“What do you need to hear, Colonel?” I asked. “That I said what I had to in order to buy some time? That I did what they asked so they’d release me? Has it occurred to you that the grendels can’t use that confession video without undermining the authority of the deal we’re trying to make here? Or do you just want to believe I’m nothing but a pogue journalist?”
She didn’t like my tone, but I guess saving her life counted for something because she didn’t react to it. “All right. Let’s go with Captain Sterling, then. What I’d like, Captain, is the truth.”
“We’re losing this war.”
“And?”
“And I’m here to stop the bleeding.”
“By turning over the edge worlds to an occupying force.” It was more accusation than question. “By selling out your allies for a few years—or months—of fragile peace. A treaty we know they’ll break because they’ve broken every treaty we’ve ever signed with them.”
Technically we broke the last treaty, but I didn’t correct her. “I suppose so.”
“And what happens to New Witlund when you’re gone?”
When you’re gone? Not when we’re gone? The phrasing struck me as odd, but I brushed the thought aside for the moment.
“Everybody lives,” I said. “Instead of half the population going down in a blaze of glory.”
“Some things are worse than death.”
“Sure,” I said. “And sometimes you don’t get to pick.”
She stood there glaring at me while her words reassembled themselves in my mind. What happens to New Witlund when you’re gone? she had said.
[Ivy,] I called. [How long has Vermier been head of Camp Locke?]
&nb
sp; [Seventeen years, four months, five days, 11 hours—]
[Thanks,] I cut her off. [And does she own any property here off base?]
[Two homes registered in her name, in addition to her on-base housing. A beach facility on Lake Saborit and a cabin on Mount Coleridge.]
[How long has she owned them? Roughly?]
[The beach house, just over six years. The cabin almost five.]
So, long before she caught wind of the UCMC’s plan to close Camp Locke.
Call it a hunch. [Where was she born?]
[Liedos, South Buqueras.]
[On Quelon?]
[Yes, Captain. On Quelon.]
That explained her accent—and a lot more.
“Shots fired,” Vermier said at last. “Laclos took out one of their rangers. There’s no way I’m letting Raeburn’s team walk into that perimeter. This isn’t a peace conference any more, Captain. It’s not even a ceasefire.”
I knew what she was thinking: Raeburn still had the hammerhead, and we were already close enough to fire it. “Not necessary, Colonel. The grendel ambassador is expecting me to come alone. So I’ll march down there by myself. Safer that way for everyone.”
“You’ll just walk up to one of them and say, ‘Here I am’?”
“Something like that.”
A smiled teased the corner of her mouth. She wasn’t about to let this meeting happen. And she didn’t even have to challenge my authority or my mission. She was going to wait just long enough to make sure I’d made it through the airlock, then use the hammerhead to blow the Takwin.
Two birds with one stone, as they say.
Vermier was a New Witlunder. Her home was here. Her savings were here. She’d probably planned to retire here. And now all of that was going to be tossed away, and the keys to her homeworld handed over to the Grand Alliance.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner. Ivy had told me Vermier was hiding something.
She was the one who had told the New Witlund militia about this under-the-table deal to sell out the edge colonies. The one who had told them when and where Sterling and I were meeting, the one who had told the militia where the negotiations with the grendel emissary would be held. The one who told them which trail we were taking to the Trevalyan compound—probably arranging for her own capture.
She just hadn’t planned for Ivy Weber to release me instead of putting a bullet in my head.
Colonel Vermier was the leak.
And she was planning to kill me.
“Raeburn!” I called.
Vermier took a step back. Clenched her mouth. Folded her arms in an unconscious defensive reaction that told me I had surprised her. Maybe she realized I suspected that she would order the hammerhead into action as soon as I entered the enemy ship. Or maybe she just didn’t like my inviting a noncom into our conversation.
It didn’t matter. Raeburn appeared wearing the sort of expression every sergeant major knows how to put on.
“Captain?”
“I want you to hear this, Sergeant Major,” I said. “I’m walking into the Tak—the Strangler—alone.”
“We’re going to blow that ship,” Vermier spat.
“Agreed,” I said. “It’s the only move that fits all the facts. And it won’t be difficult so long as the ship is vulnerable. But I need time to carry out my mission first.”
Raeburn glanced at Vermier, his weather-beaten face showing no hint of loyalty to either of us.
The colonel glared at me, clearly weighing the cost of trying to assume command of an active PSYOPS mission.
At last Raeburn asked, “How long do you need?”
I breathed a sigh of relief.
The walk to the ship would take two and half hours. Hayan’s security detail would want to search me and run me through decontamination. According to the protocols listed in Sterling’s file, ninety minutes were slotted for diplomatic niceties, and four hours for the actual negotiations. So, eight hours, plus however long it took me to get out of Dodge.
“Call it ten hours,” I said. “If I’m not out of there by then, you can blow the ship.”
The colonel looked like I’d just asked her to make me a nice breakfast. “I’ll give you till daybreak, captain. That’s—” she glanced up, realized her comms was missing, and cursed loudly.
“Roughly eight hours,” Raeburn said.
He’d rounded up. The real figure was seven hours nine minutes. For that I was grateful. But I also realized he wasn’t going to give me any more time than that. And I understood that no one involved in this mission really cared whether I made it out of that frigate alive.
“All right,” Colonel Vermier said. “Eight hours, Sergeant Major.”
Raeburn gave a weak salute. “Eight hours, Colonel.”
His word was good enough for me. And I couldn’t afford to wait around any longer.
I hauled up my pack, which still held two full bottles of water and a little food, and set out along the rocky ridgeline to the west.
I left my rifle by the tree so that everyone would see me unarmed. I was an emissary now. Just a harmless PSYOPS officer walking alone through the jungle with his friendly AI.
[Grid, please,] I asked.
Red ticks appeared, most of them off to my right, down the slope and set up in a long semi-circle, but one of them just ahead of me about five hundred meters.
The jungle thinned along the spine of the mountain, leaving bare rocks that looked for all the world like the dorsal plates of some primal sea monster.
The climb grew difficult, and my heart thumped wildly. Not just for the possibility of a fall, but because that lone red icon loomed so close I felt sure the enemy sniper must be seeing me. If it weren’t for the steady-stim Laclos had given me a couple hours earlier, I’m not sure I would have made it.
But when I finally stood at the crest and the icon pulsed practically underfoot on my grid, no ranger lay in site.
[Send a message,] I said to Ivy. [‘Please don’t shoot. I represent the United Colonies, and I’m here for—’]
[No need,] Ivy said. [He’s right behind you.]
“Mister Dahl,” a voice said.
I turned and saw what might have been a Colonial marine if not for the design and insignia of his jungle fatigues, and the presence of a symb-collar under his chin. “Yes,” I answered before realizing it hadn’t been a question.
“Master Sergeant Ulles, sir.” The sir surprised me. But then, he’d just called me Mister, and I recalled that military protocol didn’t apply to emissaries. “You ready for a little hike down this mountain?”
“Almost,” I said. “First I need to borrow your rifle.”
He handed it over without blinking. It was a Wasp EM-11.
“You’ve had me in your sight for a while, Sergeant?”
He grinned. “Let’s just say I was there when you woke up.”
“And you understand why this has to be me?”
“Above my pay grade, sir.”
“Even better.”
I lay prostrate in the blind next to the stick-covered blanket that had hidden Ulles a moment ago and brought the edge of the stock to my cheek. The grendel sergeant had already sighted the weapon for distance and wind, and I knew Ivy could do everything else.
Well, almost everything. Someone still had to pull the trigger.
[Are you sure about this?] Ivy asked.
I looked down the barrel. Scanned the length of the ridge. The bare space in the trees near the trail. The massive root I’d slept against.
Not far off Colonel Vermier rummaged around in her pack. She withdrew a protein bar and stood. Peeled off the wrapper. Took a bite.
For just a moment I wondered what I’d have done in her place. Would I have sold out six hundred million lives for the sake of a vacation home and a dream of my own retirement?
Or was that an unfair assessment? What if Colonel Vermier’s motives were sincere and she really did care about freedom of thought and human autonomy?
&n
bsp; I’d seen enough stupidity to recognize that Fleet’s decisions were often wrong. What if we were on my homeworld instead of New Witlund? What if it were Kanzin that hung in the balance? What would I do then?
It didn’t matter, I decided at last. Because Kanzin was on the line, and I still knew that the only thing that mattered was the feature I’d been promised. That was my only responsibility.
I called to Ivy for an auto-zoom, and Vermier’s humorless face expanded in the scope.
I opened the door to my senses, felt the AI take control. She stilled the shaking of my hands, calmed the pounding of my heart, slowed my rapid, shallow breathing. Each of these needed to be controlled. Each could easily spoil the shot.
And here’s an admission without shame: it felt glorious! Ivy and me, together again.
I said, [This is going in the story too.]
[Good.]
“Traitor,” I whispered and squeezed the trigger.
15
The Strangler
“Good shot,” Ulles said.
I didn’t ask how he knew that without looking through a scope, but handed back the rifle and waited as he stuffed the thin camo blanket into his pack.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Lead on, MacDuff.”
He blinked, then gave a polite nod. I guessed the Alliance wasn’t big on Shakespeare. Or maybe the misquote threw him off.
I followed him into the darkness.
There was no trail, but Ulles moved down the slope with the easy accuracy of an experienced scout, fast enough that I had to push to keep up, but slow enough that I never stumbled.
Ivy helped, of course. The augmentation algorithm she ran through my optic nerve highlighted the space between me and my escort, expanding the night colors and making each step more obvious.
By the time we made it down the slope and back to the trail, I was barely paying attention to my footing at all. We had at least a ninety-minute walk ahead of us, so I pulled up the file containing all of my story notes and activated thought-to-text.
Operation Grendel Page 16