by Linda Nagata
“We just crashed a sensor field,” I conclude. “Assume the enemy knows we’re coming.”
Roman’s whispered answer comes through first. “Fuck.”
“Roger that,” I growl. From this point forward there is an excellent chance the mission will degrade into a slugfest on the ice. If it does, I don’t want the enemy to be able to harvest our position data from a constellation of motion sensors spread across the battlefield.
“Fadul, go after the device. Destroy it. Then sweep west. Look for more.”
“Roger that, Captain.”
She’s a hundred fifty meters ahead of me. I glimpse her as she departs our line, bent low, her weight and the weight of her pack supported by the struts of her dead sister.
“Julian, you sweep farther east. See what you can find.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Dunahee, I need the angel forward.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Stick to the plotted path. I’ll be following behind you. The rest of you spread out. Pick your own paths. Move with speed. We need to close with the target as soon as we can—and for fuck’s sake, watch the map for thin ice. Go.”
Dunahee moves out at almost double his prior pace, scrambling and slipping, his dead sister powering him around the blocks and over the ridges. Behind him, Logan and Tran take off, angling west, while Escamilla moves east after Fadul. Roman stays close to Dunahee.
“Kanoa, you got anything?”
“Negative, Shelley.”
The angel red alerts twice more as we set off two more sensors.
“Closest personnel, go after them!”
The enemy has marked our positions, but the locations of their sensors are revealed to us by their EM transmissions.
Kanoa is still analyzing the angel’s video feed. “No external activity on the platform,” he reports with unflappable calm. “No indication of live enemy on the ice. Satellite surveillance does not indicate gun emplacements—”
“RPG!” I shout over gen-com, reacting to the small, explosive flash of a rocket launch, five hundred meters east of the platform. It’s a useless warning. The rocket moves so fast it finds its target before I get the last syllable out. I drop to my belly while my visor goes briefly black, shielding my eyes from the glare of an aerial fireball. The thunder of the concussion booms through the air and vibrates in the ice.
My visor clears. I scan my squad icons. All green, thank God. No alerts, no injuries … no angel sight.
“Angel down,” Kanoa informs us.
Fuck.
I get my feet under me, jam the teeth of my footplates into the ice, and get up again. I think, map, and the skullnet picks up the request. The map’s faded icon brightens and expands. Normally it’s updated by data from the angel, but it works on line of sight too—and it shows most of my soldiers hunkered down. Only Fadul and Escamilla are moving.
“Roman!” I need my best shooter active in this game. “Try to get a couple meters of elevation. We’ve got a merc on the ice. I want you to find that fucker and take him out.”
“Roger that.”
The map shows Roman seventy meters to the south. I make sure there is no thin ice between us. Then I sprint to catch up with her, running in a bounding stride, hammering my footplates down to keep from slipping.
Fadul speaks over gen-com, her tone matter-of-fact. “Grenade.”
Boom!
Despite her warning, I flinch. That puts me into a skid and I almost go down.
“One sensor out of the way, Captain,” Fadul reports.
I see the flash of another RPG launch. “Fadul—”
I want to tell her to take cover, but it’s already too late. The concussion shakes the ice. I don’t take time to see if she’s been hit. Instead, I take off again, running. The best thing I can do now is to help Roman take down the enemy.
Roman, at least, is still alive. I see her ahead of me, using the arm hooks of her dead sister to try to scramble up an angled block of ice that’s leaning two meters into the air. “Behind you,” I warn her.
“I’m losing my grip. I’m going to slide backward!”
“No you’re not.” I crouch under her footplates and boost her up, guiding her feet to rest on my shoulder struts. “Steady?”
“It’ll do.”
Belly down on the jagged surface of the block, she lines up her weapon. I tap into her visor’s display to see what she sees.
Kanoa is there ahead of me. “Mark,” he says, as a targeting circle appears in her field of view. The AI labels it as seven hundred meters out. Roman has the wind behind her. She lines up, takes three quick shots. All three hit a ridge of ice no more than a foot high. Something moves behind that ridge: a tiny figure wearing white camo, rigged in a dead sister, and equipped with night vision goggles. It jerks into sight and then falls back down.
“Target down,” Roman whispers.
“Confirmed,” Kanoa says.
Holding my breath, I scan my squad icons, trying to see who got hit by the RPG—but everything is green. “Confirm. No casualties?”
After a second, Kanoa echoes, “No casualties.”
I step out of the way to let Roman slide down. An RPG is damned intimidating ordnance, but it has lousy accuracy at a distance.
Dunahee is outraged all the same. “Fucker was shooting at me! Blew a black hole in the ice.”
“Fucker was already out on the ice before we got here,” I point out, “patrolling with an RPG launcher as a sidearm. Whatever they’re protecting in there, they are serious. So we move in and we move fast. Go! ”
Hit hard before the enemy can fully prepare: That’s still our best option. So I run, closing the distance between me and the bright, cheery lights of Deep Winter Sigil. Partway to those lights is a massive block of ice looking like the remnant of an iceberg, with a sheer face rising four meters above the surrounding floe. I run toward it, using it for cover. We cannot afford to get bogged down in an extended firefight. Here, on our own, in the dark of the polar night, we have no means to recharge our dead sisters once their power packs run down. We have to withdraw before that happens, or we have to take control of the platform and tap into Sigil ’s power grid. Otherwise, we lose.
• • • •
As I run, I ask myself: What would I do if I were in command of the mercenaries aboard Deep Winter Sigil?
An oil-drilling platform is an amazing piece of technology, but it is not a fortress. It’s not designed to withstand an assault team armed with grenades and automatic weapons. If I commanded the defense, I would not risk my clients by hunkering down inside. I would not stage a battle that was certain to destroy what I’d been hired to protect. Instead, I would deploy my soldiers from the south side of the platform, out of sight of the enemy. I would divide them in two groups, sending one east and one west, instructing them to use the jagged ice as cover while they get into position to trap their assailants in crossfire.
If we still had angel sight, we could see them coming.
We don’t.
• • • •
A knob of ice explodes in front of me. Out of instinct I dive sideways, land on my arm strut, and roll, trying to make sense of an ominous blur of red and yellow icons flaring in my visor’s display. I come up on my belly to a fusillade of automatic-weapons fire, each shot a sharp, hard crack against the suppressed audio of the roaring gale. I squint at the squad icons, but they’re faded, translucent, hard to see—because our battle AI wants me to focus on the firefight—but I can see enough to know that we have wounded, with one critical red.
“Kanoa, injury report!” I could pull up the data, but it’s faster to ask.
“Julian’s down and critical. Dunahee and Fadul are mobile wounded.”
“Estimate of enemy numbers?”
“At least six on the ice.”
I look around. A meter away, there’s a low ridge. It’s only eighteen inches high and not thick enough to stop a round, but it offers line-of-sight cover and that’s be
tter than nothing. I belly-crawl to it, turn onto my back, and then poke the muzzle of my HITR over the top, using the muzzle cams to look around.
I can’t see much, because the iceberg is only thirty meters away and it’s blocking my view of the platform.
Frustration kicks in. I am fucking blind. I have no visual contact with the enemy, with the target, or with my own soldiers. If Delphi was still my handler, she would know what I need. She would have already expanded the map and given me a verbal summary of everyone’s position—but I left Delphi behind. I left everything.
Map! I think—and if a thought can have a bitter tone, this one does.
The AI picks it up anyway and expands the map. It shows my location still a half-klick north of Sigil. Fadul is farthest out on my east. Escamilla is with Julian, getting him stabilized. Roman is behind me, but moving up fast. Everyone else is spread out to the west. Logan and Tran are in a firefight with at least three enemy soldiers. Three more enemy positions on the eastern side of the platform are marked with fuzzy icons to indicate uncertainty.
“Kanoa, do I have a target?”
“Negative. No line of sight and out of range for grenades. You have to move in.”
“Roman, come behind me!”
“Roger that.”
I want the high ground, so I sprint for the iceberg. The map shows it as twenty meters long, four wide, angled from northeast to southwest. Smooth, open ice lies beyond it.
I loop my HITR over my shoulder and skip-jump, using all the power of my leg struts to launch myself at the top of the wall.
I don’t make it to the top—but I get close.
I jam my arm hooks in and try to get a toehold using the teeth of my footplates—but the ice is so goddamned hard, I barely nick it.
Roman is right behind me. She gets under me, gets her arm struts under my footplates. “Got you, Shelley! Now go, go, go.”
I’m levitating, enough to get my arm hooks over the top, and then my elbows. After that, it’s easy to scramble onto the slanting, wind-swept surface.
I look around, realizing what an exposed position I’m in, no cover at all, but what the fuck. I can see everything on this side of the platform.
HITR in hand, I belly-crawl to the south edge. Check the map again. But I still don’t have a target. The smooth ice between me and Sigil is patterned in geometric panes of light and shadow cast by the glittering superstructure rising against the night sky just half a klick away.
“Kanoa—”
A gold targeting point pops up on my display. I can’t see anything in the indicated position. “You’re close enough,” Kanoa says. “Lob a grenade.”
There are two triggers on my weapon. I curl my finger around the second one, the one that controls the grenade launcher while I correct my aim, bringing a targeting circle into line with the target point. I squeeze the trigger, launching a grenade from the tube mounted under the rifle barrel.
The firefight to my east heats up, shots popping off one after another as the grenade rockets away. It explodes with a flash that dims my visor and tosses up a spray of ice crystals that briefly map the wind’s fierce currents as they’re whipped away. No fucking idea if I hit the enemy. Kanoa puts up another target point. I cover it and shoot again.
This time, when the wind carries away the cloud of smoke and ice splinters, I see a body wearing white camo and a dead sister, just like the soldier Roman dropped.
I glance at the map. “You got another target for me?”
“Roman, cover it!” Kanoa barks.
Bam! My vision goes bright white as something kicks me in the side of my helmet, hard enough that despite the weight of my pack and my rig, I go briefly airborne, dropping back a second later to land on my side. I want to curl up to reduce my exposure. I want to crawl for shelter—but I know I’ll be dead if I do. “Target,” I growl at Kanoa. The only chance I have is to lay down enough return fire to keep the shooter from shooting me again.
I roll back to my belly, returning to shooting position—but I’m not fast enough. A rifle speaks, fiercely loud even muffled by my helmet. Three slow shots. To my astonishment, none of them hit me.
“Target!” I scream at Kanoa.
“Negative. Nothing left. Roman’s cleared the eastern field.”
I shift focus from my visor’s display to the wider terrain. Roman is standing below on the ice, looking up at me as she cradles her HITR in her arms. The three shots I heard were hers. “Your head okay, Shelley?” she asks.
Fuck if I know.
I check the map. It’s been updated with the locations of four bodies, three of them on the eastern side of the platform, one to the west where Logan and Tran are still dueling with two live mercs. I want to get over there, help them finish things, but not until this side is fully secure. “Roman, I need you to make sure those dead mercs don’t do a zombie. Fadul—”
Boom!
I look up, startled by the sound of an explosion on the platform. The distant bleat of a fire alarm follows. The alarm and the muted roar of the wind are the only sounds I hear, because the shooting to the west has stopped.
I scan the squad icons—no changes. No one else is hit. “Logan—”
I want to ask him for his status, but a new sound intrudes: one of the surviving mercs, shouting, pleading for backup. My helmet audio boosts the volume of his panicked voice so that each word is clear: “Glover! Glover, where the fuck are you? Get out here! Get out here or we’re dead!”
Vincent Glover. It’s a name familiar from the mission briefing. “Glover’s the CO,” I remind the squad. “Watch for movement on the platform, because he’s going to be bringing out the big guns.”
“Don’t think so,” Fadul counters. “Looks like we got no heroes on deck today. Motherfuckers are rolling back the canvas hangar on the landing pad. They’re bugging out.”
I can’t see the landing pad from my position. It’s hidden behind the platform’s massive superstructure. But Fadul is wide east. I look through her helmet cam to see the wind tent sliding open on motorized tracks, folds of loose canvas shivering in the gale as the hemispherical struts collapse on each other. The tent’s retreat reveals a midsize civilian helicopter that my overlay identifies as an Agusta Westland. The blades are loose and starting to spin up.
“It’s not just the pilot pulling out,” Fadul says. “I make out at least one, maybe two in the backseat. Fucking Vincent Glover is abandoning his soldiers.”
I can hardly believe it. Mercenaries work for the money, but they’re still loyal to one another—or I used to think so. But I abandon the question of mercenary ethics when my skullnet icon lights up, indicating sudden and significant interference in my headspace. Not that I need the hint. An awareness comes over me, a certainty that I need to prevent that helicopter from leaving. I don’t want to destroy it, but I need to know what’s on board.
“Fadul, can you hit the pilot?”
“Pilot’s a civilian,” Kanoa reminds me. “Passengers might be civilians too.”
“Out of my range anyway,” Fadul adds. “And I’d be shooting across the wind.”
I’m closer than Fadul, I’d be shooting down the wind, and it doesn’t matter if I can’t see the helicopter now, because I’ll be able to see it when it takes off. “Cover me, Roman.” She’s a better shooter than I am, but I have the high ground. “I am not letting that helicopter go.”
I stand up on the iceberg, brace my feet against the blast of the wind, and bring my weapon to my shoulder.
“You operating, Shelley?” Kanoa wants to know.
“Roger that.”
Operating. That’s what we call it when the Red gets inside our heads, pushing its agenda so we feel it, so we know what needs to be done. The skullnet icon is glowing and I have no doubt at all that I am operating on a program written by the Red.
“More figures on the landing pad,” Fadul reports as the volume of engine noise climbs. And then her tone shifts. “Incoming!”
I don’t
flinch, even when an RPG explodes to the east, a last rogue shot as the helicopter goes airborne. I see the blur of its rotors through the platform’s superstructure. Confidence floods me. I know I’ll be able to hit it.
I wait for a better angle. Two seconds, three, the wind steady against me. I think the pilot wants to stay low, keep the platform behind him, but the wind catches his ship, lofts it up. A targeting point pops up in my field of view, sighted on the engine block. I fire a three-round burst.
And I hit it.
I know I do.
But nothing happens. Tracking its flight with the muzzle of my weapon, I shoot three more bursts—but the helicopter keeps going, accelerating southeast across the wind like it’s heading for Greenland.
“Nice shooting, sir,” Roman says.
She’s fucking with me. I expect that from Fadul, but not from Roman. I scowl down at her—but then I remember the RPG. “Fadul! Status?”
I check her icon—it’s gone yellow—but Fadul sounds fine when she says, “Motherfucker missed me.”
I look again at Roman. She’s standing with her head cocked, watching the retreating helicopter. “The wind’s pulling a streamer of black smoke out of the engine block,” she reports. “I don’t think they’re getting far.”
My skullnet icon fades from sight. The unearthly confidence I felt goes with it and I’m suddenly conscious of my exposed position atop the highest point anywhere on this ice field. “Jesus,” I whisper, looking up warily at Sigil’s decks.
Kanoa knows exactly what I’m thinking. “No activity on the platform,” he assures me. “And Logan’s got an offer of surrender from the two remaining enemy on the ice—though you might want to move to a less exposed position anyway.”
“Yeah.”
I jump down, managing not to land on my ass, but my hands are shaking—and not from the cold. The Red wanted me to take that shot, wanted it enough to risk making me an easy target. I’d like to believe it ran a calculation first, that it plotted the positions and status of every enemy soldier remaining and determined my exposure was minimal—but I don’t believe it.