Operation Grendel

by Daniel Schwabauer

  I shook my head. “If I let her in, the story will end, and nothing I’ve done will have mattered.”

  “But the treaty! The war! All those people’s lives!”

  “No, Ma. I was promised a great war story if I see this thing through. I was promised a series. Sterling promised.”

  “Who is Sterling?”

  How could I explain Captain Sterling? Did I even need to? No matter what I said, my mother wouldn’t really understand. “He’s the one calling the shots. The one who put me here.”

  “You’re the one calling the shots, Raymin.”

  I stood. Turned my back to her. Took a deep breath. “Get her out of here,” I said aloud for the official record. I wanted Hayan to hear it, and to know that I’d demanded it as the UC emissary under a formal negotiation agreement.

  “Raymin?” Mother said.

  “This isn’t in the protocols. GET HER OUT OF HERE!”

  I went to the door, but it remained closed, and I understood they were never going to let me out no matter what I did.

  [She’s not real,] I spat at Ivy. Because Ivy was gone, and I needed to hurt her for the way she was hurting me. She had promised that nothing would separate us again. [She’s a story. Just a story you’re telling me to pull me apart from the inside. And maybe it will work, and maybe it won’t, but either way I will never let you deeper into my mind. I don’t trust you, Ivy! I don’t love you. I don’t need you. I don’t want you. Do you hear me? I don’t want you anymore!]

  “Raymin?” Ivy said gently from behind me, from the place Mother had been. I could hear the hurt in her voice, the pain of longing.

  But when I turned around, the room was empty once more.

  Then—

  What else was there?

  With just over sixty-three minutes remaining till the talks could begin, and the last item of protocol checked off the list?

  What else was there to do but write?

  It was only an hour, and I was running out of time.

  So I pulled up the file and scanned through my notes and willed the words to appear as the sweat dripped from my chin onto the glassy surface of the table.

  It would be a sloppy, cobbled-together mixture of what I’d written on the trail and everything I’d recorded since entering the Takwin.

  But it would be the truth.

  I had my own way of bringing Ivy back. A way to relive our happiest moments together. And even the Alliance and all of its wyrms could not take that option from me.

  PART FOUR

  SAY 'NO' TO WYRMS!

  BY CPL RAYMIN DAHL

  ABOARD GAS TAKWIN

  16

  Implant

  I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Ivy Weber. She was supposed to be just another asset. A connection at the Holikot embassy who worked as an attaché decoding the cultural distinctions between the Grand Alliance and the United Colonies.

  But that wasn’t all she did. In her spare time she wrote scholarly articles for a family of peer-reviewed journals under OrbSyn’s banner. Articles that were ignored by virtually everyone but which lived forever in the archives. And if you knew where to look, and needed someone with expertise in grendel culture, strong opinions about the architecture of their AI subsystems, and a security clearance with the Covert Intelligence Bureau, well, Ivy Weber fit the bill.

  I read enough of her work to see that she was onto something more important than the usual academic blather. She had the bones of a story and an eye for detail. Not to mention a hint of the patriotic instinct, a well-concealed frustration with the blindness of her superiors. Ivy was spooling out the clues, but they had no interest in stitching them together.

  After reading her personnel file—what there was of it—I sent her a query via text pigeon. Told her who I was and that I was working on an assignment. Was she interested in getting the truth out? We are barbarians in their eyes, I wrote. Ben Franklin in a coonskin cap, bowing before the French court.

  She replied almost immediately, Place and time?

  I asked her to meet me at Frillz, a night club half way between our apartments, and the next evening found myself leading her outside through the back parking lot. There was a little dirt path on the sloping hill down to the riverwalk, hard-packed from years of drunks and moonstruck couples moving on to more romantic spaces.

  This time of night only the occasional drug addict lingered near the water, which barely seemed to move.

  I wore my sleeves rolled up in the universal sign of disconnection. Likewise, Ivy Weber, late twenties, slender build, green eyes that were almost black in the darkness, had chosen a short-sleeved blouse and a noticeable absence of jewelry. No bracelet, no necklace, no eyewear.

  “Thank you for coming,” I said.

  “Hard to turn down the one person who’s read my work.” She tucked a strand of black hair behind one ear. “But I should warn you that my supervisor knows I’m talking to you.”

  “Can’t be too careful,” I said, handing her my plasteel ID card. “I’m not going to ask you to do anything you don’t want to do. Just hear me out.”

  She took her time comparing the image on its surface to my face. “All right. What do you need?”

  “I need a story,” I said as we turned to stroll downstream. “A way to tell people what’s really going on, even though nobody actually knows.”

  “You people are all the same,” she said. “And you think I can help?”

  “I think you have a theory. An idea about what happens when someone puts on a symb-collar. I think you’ve tried to get the word out without compromising classified information, but you’re not positioned to get any traction. You need a bigger megaphone. Nobody reads those journals you’re submitting to. That’s where I come in.”

  She looked at me sideways, lips pursed. “You’re going to make me famous?”

  She was intrigued, obviously, and the fact it had been so easy to spark her interest brought a lump of guilt to my throat. Sure, I was using her. But that was my job, and I couldn’t afford to let my feelings get in the way of an assignment. “That would be counterproductive. I was thinking we might work together on a story, and publish it under someone else’s name. Put it out over OrbSyn’s breaking news feed.”

  She whistled softly, a gesture so innocent it made my stomach ache. “You really think you can get around their layers of security?” she asked. “Seems like Fleet would put the clamps on it so fast we wouldn’t even see a flicker in the holo.”

  We were walking slowly alongside the river, its current swishing lazily beside us, almost keeping pace.

  “I can get the story out,” I said. “With your help.”

  She brushed back an invisible strand of hair and tapped her fingers against her lips. “This means you must have a theory too. About the grendels, I mean. What it’s like to wear one of those collars.”

  “Yes,” I said. “Starting with Admiral Ciekot. But it would be better if I could show you. If you don’t mind, I’ll retrieve my comms from my apartment. Just there.” I pointed. Up ahead a footbridge crossed over the water, with the path meandering beneath it through a short tunnel. Through the circle of darkness shone the lights of my apartment building.

  “You can pour me a drink when we get there. For the beer we left back at the club.”

  “Deal,” I said.

  “Meanwhile, I want to know which article made you think I might be digging for answers.”

  “It was the one about private soundtracks. The idea that grendels might be under constant audio stimulation designed to keep them immersed in a state of continuing euphoria.”

  She crinkled her nose, and I saw that I had missed the mark somehow, which intrigued me.

  “Not accurate?”

  “It might be,” she said. “But it’s not my theory. That’s the assumption most of the Bureau is under. They assume a sort of hypnotic or drugged state, and I don’t think that’s warranted. In fact, I think it’s underestimating them.”

  “We
have that habit.”

  “We do. But no, I think the differences are more subtle. We see them in the sorts of music we intercept whenever we hack into one of their systems.”

  “They have bad taste?”

  “Hm. No, more like good taste, but extremely limited. It’s always symphonic. Orchestral. A swirl of instrumentation designed to pluck the heartstrings and create maximum emotional texture. From what I can tell, grendels don’t make music. They play music. They engineer music. They manufacture music. But they don’t make it.”

  I thought of the driving rhythms coming from the holo-stage back inside Frillz, the rolling, artificial smoke and flashing lights. I motioned back towards the night club. “So they’re pretty much like us, but more boring.”

  She laughed. We were passing through the tunnel now, and the bridge overhead magnified her voice in the darkness. “Actually I think they’re quite a bit like us, but with excessive polish. They keep the best of a person and extinguish the rest.”

  It was the most perceptive, most chilling characterization of Alliance philosophy I’d ever heard, and I had to chew on it for a moment as we stepped out into the starlight.

  Ivy took my silence as a prod to keep talking. “I think it would never occur to a grendel to play a mouth harp, or dance a jig. And I’ve found no indication of bad poetry in their personal archives. As if it were simply unthinkable to spend a whole day penning a haiku or composing a limerick just for fun.”

  “No poetry at all?”

  “I didn’t say that. For historical or contextual reasons they might study the Iliad, or the Divine Comedy. Maybe even Shakespeare. But I don’t think they tell their children fairy tales before bedtime.”

  “Huh,” I said, stopping at the base of the little hill just below my apartment. A light glowed in the second-story window. One I distinctly remembered turning off. “What do they hate about Hansel and Gretel?”

  “It’s not hate,” she said, craning her neck to see what I was staring at. “It’s that their wyrms don’t find the quaintness of humanity important enough to be interesting. Anyway, that’s my—”

  “Excuse me,” I said. “Stay here.”

  Instead, she followed me up the lawn to the staircase. “What’s wrong?”

  I vaulted the steps two at a time, Ivy just behind. The door to my apartment stood open to the night air, the jamb splintered at the lock. My kitchen light was on, and the hall light around the corner.

  Ivy said, “Oh.”

  I motioned for her to stay put, but she ignored that too. Turned out not to matter. I’d been worried they might still be inside, but the place was empty. Ransacked, but empty. They’d gone through the kitchen cabinets, my dresser drawers, my closet. They’d upended my mattress and rummaged around beneath the bathroom sink.

  Fortunately they hadn’t recognized my safe, which was made to look like an air vent. My comms bracelet, cash, and datapad were still inside.

  I slipped the comms onto my wrist and sent a non-urgent request for the police. Dispatch replied with a response time of at least two hours, so I pushed the door closed and set my datapad on the kitchen table and went to pour a couple of drinks.

  All the liquor was gone. Not that I keep a lot of it around, but I’d acquired a decent stash on the top shelf of the pantry. I pointed at the empty space. “I’ll have to owe you that drink. They cleaned me out. Coffee?”

  Ivy slid into a seat at my undersized dining table. “You think that’s what they were after? Your booze?”

  “Drugs maybe, and settled for what I have. If they come back I’ll know they were looking for something else.” I dialed up two cups of strong coffee and sat across from her, my datapad between us.

  She leaned forward in the chair, elbows on her knees. “The timing of this is weird.”

  “Agreed. Not much we can do about it except kill the story. That what you want to do?” I knew the answer before I asked. I could see the determination written on her face; the intrusion had only cemented her resolve.

  Still, she didn’t commit right away. “I don’t even know what the story is. You haven’t told me your theory.”

  “Okay.” I pulled up my grid, opened my digital lockbox, and started flicking recordings over to the holo-space above the datapad. Ciekot first, with all the information I’d gathered from OrbSyn’s archives on the first battle of Chalmers Bay, then the contact recordings of every defect I’d been able to track down since I started working on this assignment.

  It took more than two hours, and by the time the last recording flickered off we had downed three cups of coffee each and shared a toasted bagel. And I had explained the story I wanted to tell, and what I needed from her.

  The only thing I left out was what it would cost her.

  “Everyone assumes it’s a matter of force,” I said. “But what if the wyrms aren’t controllers at all? At least not the sort of tyrant puppeteers we’ve painted them to be. Maybe they’re more like”—I searched for something to compare them to, and landed on the old fable from Arabian Nights—“more like genies. But with an endless supply of wishes.”

  She stared at the empty space above the datapad so long I thought perhaps she hadn’t heard me. But at last she said, “Or maybe they give you the wishes too.”

  “One way to find out.”

  “Six months?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s a lot to do in that time frame,” she said. “And there will be consequences if this gets out.”

  “Then we’ll have to keep it quiet.”

  She took a deep breath and rose, rubbing the back of her neck. “All right. I’ll send you updates as I find them. I’m going to take off. I can—”

  A knock at the door cut her short. The police had finally arrived.

  Ivy hung around long enough to give them her statement, and at that point it was so late I offered to let her sleep in my bed. She chose the couch, and I scrambled some eggs in the morning and walked her all the way back to her apartment. I thanked her at the door, pausing awkwardly without knowing why, as if something unspoken were expected. A handshake, a kiss, a signed contract on OrbSyn letterhead. Whatever it was, I couldn’t decipher it, and I nodded at her tired smile as she closed the door.

  Walking home via the riverwalk, the feeling of emptiness grew, a sense of hollowness churning just below my stomach. Had I told her everything? Of course not. But had I told her enough? Certainly she understood what I was asking. Did she understand what it meant?

  Later that day she sent a text pigeon to my grid.

  —WEBER, I: LEAVING TODAY FOR NEW WITLUND TO SEE MY FOLKS. SEE YOU WHEN I GET BACK?—

  The message lit a spark of happiness I hadn’t expected. I responded immediately:

  —COUNTING ON IT.—

  But two seconds after the happiness came the panic. Was that response too strong? Did it imply a more intimate relationship than we really had? I fretted away the next hour over those three words. But that evening Ivy sent another message that she enjoyed talking to me, and I wondered if she felt any angst over sending a couple of stupid texts, or if that was just me.

  The day she returned from New Witlund I met her at the skyport with a bottle of wine. I still owed her a drink, after all. And after that it got easier. I’d be working the edge in some ratty hotel, and I’d send her a haiku or a military ballad or a holo of someone dancing to an Irish whistle. Once I even wrote her a limerick that began, There once was an unhappy grendel, and she called it a masterpiece that put my other stories to shame. I hadn’t known just how easy it was to knock a woman off her feet with poetry, or I would have tried dating more back in college.

  Three months into our relationship—still unofficial, but not unacknowledged—she started acting strange. Not exactly paranoid, but fearful. Someone was watching her, she said. Nothing she could point to exactly, but a feeling. In her apartment, all alone, doors locked, suddenly she’d realize that she wasn’t alone after all, that someone was seeing her, either through the wind
ow blinds or by some bit of tech planted while she was away or, by far the worst possibility, through her own comms.

  She would take it off, put it in a drawer, and go somewhere else. Sleep on the couch. Sleep in her office at the embassy. Pay for a rental sled just to sleep in the back seat.

  She told me all of this while I was off on assignment, but by the time I returned she was back to her old self, with new details that would make our story even more convincing when it finally ran.

  I suggested a vacation, and she immediately agreed. We picked a water resort in Kadir. Fancy hotel. Her eyes sparking in the hallway like I was the only person in the universe who really mattered. When she pulled me into a long kiss I knew I had to tell her everything. What it would cost when the story finally ran.

  But not right away. Because she had to know already. Didn’t she? Anyway, that was the excuse I made for postponing my confession. Why ruin our time together? We were both happy. But by the time we’d made it back to Holikot I was lying to myself again, telling myself the relationship didn’t have to end after all.

  The weeks after that getaway passed in a blur of growing happiness and fear, the former blinding me to the latter. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that I saw what I expected. Ivy was working too hard. She wasn’t used to so much travel. She wasn’t used to wearing a mask.

  With so many projects in queue, I clung to the two or three hours we spent together each week and told myself that all of this would be over soon.

  On Inawa I put the finishing touches on an assignment and stopped at a jeweler’s booth at a local art fair. Overpaid for a band of white gold set with peridots as green as her eyes, and didn’t even blink at the number siphoned from my bank account.

  She picked me up at the sky port in a rental littered with fast food wrappers, clothing, toiletries, and even a couple of pillows. She had bags under her eyes, but she’d showered, and her hair smelled faintly of lilac cleanser.

  I told her to drive back to her place, that I’d sit on her couch for ten hours so she could get some uninterrupted sleep. She didn’t even pretend to object.