I shake my head, which is surprisingly heavy. And I realize I’m still wearing the symb-collar. It’s touching my throat.
“‘The only military training I’ve ever had was—’”
I squeeze her hand. “That’s enough.”
“I can keep going,” Laclos says. “I mean, it’s not very good, but I can skip ahead to the part where a special ops team saves you from the locals.”
But I know what comes next. Something about Captain Sterling dying during the grendel invasion of Quelon. “It’s all—”
“Cap? Stay with me, Cap!” She’s shouting, but her voice seems far away, and the big metal bird opens its mouth. “Hopper! Help me get him to the evac—”
—[NO DATA]—
Something pushes me in the back. A jolt.
“Clear!”
Raeburn stares down at me, his face grim. “Hold on, marine.”
The MADARs strap in.
I’m stretched out between two benches, the team staring down at me. Hopper. Pajari. Raeburn.
And I’m glad they lived, glad they survived the assignment.
Laclos hands back the paddles to someone I don’t recognize, and now my shirt is off, and I’m lying in my blood-soaked underwear with tubes coming out of me, and I don’t have a right hand anymore.
Outside, the sky changes, and I’m impossibly heavy as something presses me deeper into the sticky wet mat against my back.
We’re lifting. Rising into the New Witlund sky.
The floor tilts as we veer left, and Quelon flashes past in the window.
Laclos turns her head and starts to sit back, but I grab her hand and hold onto it.
She’s crying. For some reason, she’s crying. A special ops medic. And I can’t think why that would be, because she’s never really liked me.
Ivy said so.
The other marines look straight ahead as Laclos wipes her eyes with the back of one sleeve. “Not going anywhere, Cap.”
I’m not sure who she’s talking about, but I squeeze her hand again. Or try to. Hand is so weak now.
Laclos smells like sweat. Jungle grime and sweat mixed with blood. Not perfume. Just dirt and sweat and fear.
I see it now.
I can’t know if the mission worked.
I won’t get to see how it ends.
And I remember, no one ever does.
We’re each of us a hero in a private story. And we’ve always seen the end coming. Always found our way to the last period. The last answer. So we expect—
Till now.
This one story we don’t get to see the end of. This one story we’ve spent our whole lives telling.
The story of me.
Will my PSYOP work?
Will the story push—
Or will it pull?
I’ll never know. I can’t know.
Have to leave that to others, to her maybe.
Should care, but the copper sky is changing and my chest is so, so heavy, and Laclos says something from far away.
Her story now.
Hers to keep telling.
Maybe Laclos will see
maybe
how this one
ends.
EPILOGUE
Weeks have passed in a slow haze of overhead lights and surgical bays and masked faces.
I’m cocooned in an open-topped medical pod in a private room that must have been designed for an admiral: indirect lighting, faux wood panels with polished trim, and off to my right a wall-sized screen draped in the pinprick curtain of space. I have my own private window on the cosmos.
I know I’m on a medical ship, but the doctors won’t give me the name or even its class. Too dangerous, they say. I’m a target for the Grand Alliance. The only person to defect from the enemy. A war hero who pulled back the grendel veil of secrecy. A man who holds in his mind the key to victory, and thank you, Captain, for your service. All the evidence I need to understand that they’re probably shipping me to some core planet where a battalion of shrinks will pry open my mind with an AI corkscrew.
Just beyond the door there’s a nurses’ station where the orderlies and doctors and bionics technicians gather to talk in hushed tones, as if I mustn’t be allowed to know what’s going on.
They seem to be plotting something. Every so often one of them will glance my way and smile reassuringly.
Someone fiddles with my meds; the heaviness returns, and I can’t keep my eyes open.
When I wake again something is different. I can’t place it at first, because I’m in the same room with the same view of the universe, the same gently humming medical pod, the same lack of self-determination.
My neck is bare, and there’s a dull ache at the base of my skull. I run my fingers across my throat to prove the symb-collar is really gone.
From the doorway a doctor asks me how I feel. I mumble a response, and he comes into the room and tells me the good news about the nerve endings in the stump of my right wrist, and the overhead lights blur together and melt away to darkness.
This time I wake wearing a new hand. Flesh toned, strong, and passably lifelike. It feeds my brain the sensations of real fingers, but muted, as if someone slathered my hand in adhesive and pulled a glove over it. Still, it does what I ask it to, and they give me a battery of tests and smile a lot and say that before long I’ll be able to pick my nose and not feel the difference.
They’re making me a new set of legs too, though the bionics tech says it will take longer to fit them to my stumps because of the neural feedback loops necessary to walking and balancing. She seems sincere, but I’d bet a case of Inawa Red that they’re stalling to keep me from walking around and asking a lot of awkward questions.
Call me paranoid.
They dial up the nighty-night stuff again a day or two later—in this room the slipstream of time never seems to move at the same speed—and it occurs to me just before I float away that they’re tinkering with my mind as I sleep. And there’s nothing I can do about it.
But I wake again and am surprised to find that I’m wearing a new comms bracelet on my left wrist. The spartan layout of my auto-grid tells me this is a PSYOPS unit.
The systems indicators are all green except for its connection to AFNET. And of course I can feel the presence of my new AI lurking in the background with the cold colonial patience of a valet.
Two folder icons blink in the upper right corner of my vision. The first is labeled, “Citation 9741506-7.” They’ve awarded me another medal. Cheaper than a promotion and the corresponding pay raise.
But that’s not what offends me.
How can I tell them I don’t want it? That the only reason I came back from my integration was that they were telling me the wrong story? That every time Fake Ivy tried to tell me the story of my own heroism, she reminded me I was really someone else.
I shudder in my cocoon and pull the single white sheet higher.
They don’t understand: I wanted to believe the lie. Told myself that even if I couldn’t be the hero of Corporal Dahl’s story, I could still be the hero of my own. But then she brought me Raymin Dahl’s parents and inadvertently reminded me that I killed their son.
Well, that was the mission, but it doesn’t make me a hero.
I sweep the folder unopened into the shredder.
[Permanent deletion?] my new AI asks with a tone of disapproval. [Are you sure?]
[Positive.]
[All right. File deleted.]
For a long time I stare at the second icon, the one labeled “Operation Little Duck.” Another mission already? But it’s the Corps, and I’m an asset. The war still rages.
Regulations prohibit destroying mission orders unopened, but I drag that folder to the shredder too.
Or try, anyway. The icon snaps back onto my grid.
I try again with the same result.
“Aren’t you going to read it, Cap?” Laclos asks.
She’s sitting there in a translucent chair smiling like she knows something
cheerful she can’t wait to tell me. Her hair is pulled back in a ponytail, her face still grimy with dirt and sweat.
I understand instantly, without needing to sort it out for myself: this is my new AI’s way of assembling my fragmented memories into an image I can trust.
Fat chance.
Could the republic really be stupid enough to install bonding personalities on military hardware? To adopt the AI strategy of the Grand Alliance?
Of course we’re stupid enough. Maybe it was only a matter of time. As long as I’ve been at PSYOPS there have been idiots arguing we should fight fire with fire.
The thought leaves me clenching my teeth.
But Laclos is still smiling, and if seeing her doesn’t make me happy, it does remind me that such a thing as happiness exists. “No,” I insist. “I’m not going to read it. I want it deleted.”
“Can’t do that, Cap. Sorry.”
“Why not?”
“Orders. Don’t you trust me?”
It’s a challenge. She’s wearing the same expression the real Laclos used when she tried to lighten my mood before I went into that utility shed.
It isn’t working this time, either. “You are an AI projection. You’re not real. Definitely not Laclos.”
“Never claimed to be,” she says. “Just trying to find a way to make you comfortable. So it will be easier to open up. You know, help you heal and stuff.”
“Well, doc, it’s not working.”
She snorts. “Obviously the problem is the patient.”
Unfortunately, that does sound like Laclos. Not expecting an answer, I ask, “Where is the master sergeant, anyway?”
“New Witlund,” Laclos says. “All of Raeburn’s team are there helping to hold the moon for the Marine Corps. And the grendel fleet still hasn’t taken Quelon.”
That surprises me. “How is that possible?”
“High levels of resistance. Rumors about people not giving in to the wyrms.”
On my grid the second icon starts to flash. “Can I get a link to AFNET? I would love to see some of this.”
“Sorry. You poked a hornet’s nest. Would you believe you’re public enemy number one on the Alliance feeds? The Corps is moving mountains to keep you hidden.”
Of course they are.
More control. More secrecy. More strings being pulled by distant puppet masters.
I turn away and stare at the wall panel, the endless white paint spatter of stars receding into nothing. But she doesn’t leave. I can smell her sitting there, the jungle scent of grime and sweat and dried blood. And I wonder if this is how it will always be, if the ghosts of my past will haunt every corner of my future.
“Cap,” Laclos asks impatiently, “are you going to read the mission file or not?”
“No.”
“Aren’t you at least curious about the name?”
The name. Operation Little Duck.
It is weird. But I don’t want to give her the satisfaction of a response, so I just lie there in the silence as the words niggle at the back of my mind. A vague feeling of familiarity mixed with emptiness tells me I’ve forgotten something important. “Doesn’t sound like a name STRATOP would use.”
“That’s because this one,” she says, “originated with the CIB.”
The Covert Intelligence Bureau? The department Ivy Weber had worked for?
Relief floods through me. The spy agency has no control over my future. Whatever they want with me, they can’t order me to comply. Though I suppose it could be argued that I owe them something.
Scratch that. I definitely owe them.
But another mission? So soon?
“What do they want?”
“You’re not going to read it?”
“No.”
Laclos leans back in her chair again. “Okay. But I’m gonna give you crap about this forever.”
I give her an irritated scowl. “About Operation Little Duck?”
She laughs. “Have you even read your own features? It’s from Hansel and Gretel. The poem at the end, after they’ve killed the old woman and they’re looking for a way out of the witch’s woods. They can’t get home without crossing a river, but the water is too wide and too deep. So Gretel asks for help from a duck. She says, ‘Will you help us, little duck, / The two of us who have no luck? / There is no bridge or woodland track, / So will you take us on your back?’”
I’m staring at her, mouth open, but she just laughs again, fading from view as the folder on my grid opens by itself.
It’s a single-page letter bearing the logo of the Covert Intelligence Bureau and signed by the Director. It reads:
Captain Ansell Sterling, UCMC,
On behalf of a grateful republic, the Bureau is pleased to facilitate your way home.
Home? What does that mean? I’m a marine. Home is wherever I’m stationed. And I’m not on assignment now, so—
I read it six times, but still don’t understand.
Until, behind my grid in the real space of the doorway, I see her leaning against the frame.
This time there’s nothing fake about her dimples, her green eyes, or the hopeful melody of her voice.
“Hello, Ansell,” she says.
“Hello, Ivy.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Every writer depends on the insight and support of other people.
My wife, Carrol, provided feedback on several drafts and shouldered the difficult task of encouraging me to keep at it. Without you, nothing I write would see the light of day, nor would it deserve to.
To my beta readers, those fearless bleeders of red ink who critiqued every chapter—Meriah Bradley, Andi Cumbo-Floyd, Timothy Jackson, Rosey Mucklestone, Sarah Noe, Josh Noe, Adrienne Rollick, and Jared Schmitz—thank you for your careful readings. You are fantastic story analysts.
Amanda Luedeke, you liked this project enough to let it go; for that act of humility I am sincerely grateful.
Russell Galen, your comments on that early draft were tremendously helpful in shaping the direction of my rewrites.
Huge thanks to Steve Laube for understanding my love of science fiction and believing that Operation Grendel deserved a place on someone’s bookshelf. The Tinkerbell effect is real; this book would have died had you not clapped your hands.
And finally, to all the young OYANers whose love of story inspired my “wonderology.” May you fuse truth and story without compromising either.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Daniel Schwabauer, M.A., is a lifelong reader of speculative fiction. His professional work includes stage plays, radio scripts, short stories, newspaper columns, comic books and telescripting. Daniel’s middle grade fantasy series, The Legends of Tira-Nor, has received numerous awards, including the 2005 Ben Franklin Award for Best New Voice in Children’s Literature and the 2008 Eric Hoffer Award.
He studied science fiction under science fiction great James Gunn before graduating from Kansas University’s Master’s program in Creative Writing in 1995. He lives in Olathe, Kansas, with his wife and dog.
Website: DanSchwabauer.com
Facebook: facebook.com/schwabauer
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