Going Dark

by Linda Nagata

  He turns, kicks Fadul hard in the gut, and then makes a grab for the pistol in my thigh holster. I hit him in the face with my arm strut. I don’t even think about it. It’s instinct. The back of his head hits the doorframe and he drops with his nose a crushed, pulpy, bloody mess. I’m not sure he’s breathing.

  Shit.

  Inside the cramped vestibule, Roman has shifted her aim so that her HITR is now firmly trained on Wilcox. “Don’t make a move.”

  “No problem.” He looks at me, his steady gaze communicating that he’s a professional. “I got no idea who you are,” he assures me in a calm voice. “No idea what you look like. So you got no reason to kill me.”

  “Get these bodies out of here,” I tell him. Then I turn a guilty eye on the merc I just slammed. One more sin I didn’t need. “Fadul, check his vitals.”

  She’s still hunched over her bruised belly. “Can I kill him if he’s still alive?”

  Wilcox intercedes. “Let me look at him.”

  I step out of the way. Wilcox checks his breathing. “Still with us.” Then he takes a moment to share a little personal history. “My people didn’t want me to come out here. They said the fucking Arctic is cursed. Nothing works right. People go crazy.”

  “You should have listened.”

  “Wish I did.”

  • • • •

  Wilcox is right. Most Arctic operations are plagued with issues: failed software, defective equipment, undelivered equipment, piracy, terrorism. The one exception? When a wellhead blew out last summer, personnel and equipment arrived without delay, and the well was sealed within seventy-two hours. It was an anomalous demonstration of competence and efficiency—and strong evidence that preserving the Arctic and discouraging development is part of the Red’s agenda.

  But the dragons still smell money, and they keep trying.

  • • • •

  “We’ll be back in a few hours,” I tell Fadul.

  “I’ve heard promises like that before.”

  Julian is resting on a scavenged mattress in an office just off the lobby. I crouch beside him, but he’s so high on pain meds he doesn’t know I’m there. “Hold on,” I tell him anyway. Then I nod to Dunahee, who’s sitting on the floor beside him.

  “Don’t worry, sir. We’ll be okay.”

  “Don’t let Fadul kill the prisoners.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  • • • •

  We set out after the downed helicopter. Logan takes point, running hard. The rest of us follow in a single-file line: Escamilla, Tran, Roman, and then me.

  The dead sisters augment our muscle power, but they don’t replace it. Sensors set into the joints measure the force of our strides. The harder we work, the harder the bones work. That means we can go a hell of a lot faster and farther wearing a dead sister than we could without one, but our bodies are still working, and it’s fucking exhausting to run kilometer after kilometer across terrain as rough as the ice floe. But we do it, with the wind blowing harder and fresh snow starting to shake loose from the sky.

  There’s no sign of life when we finally sight the helicopter—no movement and no lights, not even chem sticks—but the ship is intact, sitting upright on the ice and facing the wind, showing no obvious damage. The pilot must have been able to guide it to a soft landing, which means Glover and his remaining crew could still be aboard, waiting for the weather to clear.

  Logan scans the ship with an infrared scope, putting an end to that speculation. “We’ve got a body in the pilot’s seat. It’s above ambient, still chilling. Everything else is one temperature—damned cold.”

  “They’re long gone,” Tran concludes.

  I take him with me to check it out.

  No one shoots as we approach. I wipe the frost off a window and peer inside at the pilot, bulky in parka and hood, head bowed, still strapped into the seat. “Check the back,” I tell Tran as I open the pilot’s door.

  It’s a woman. There’s a bullet hole that goes through the hood of her parka, into the right side of her head. Everyone else is gone.

  “What the hell ?” I demand. “Glover didn’t have to kill her. He didn’t have to kill all those people back on the platform.”

  “He’s looking for a big payday,” Kanoa says. “And he’s not taking any chances.”

  I wonder who he’s really working for. I hope I get a chance to ask him.

  • • • •

  It takes less than a minute for me and Tran to search the interior. We don’t find anything you wouldn’t expect to find on a helicopter working in the Arctic. There are parkas, blankets, first aid supplies, chem lights, batteries … but no weapons and no biowarfare cultures.

  Logan has been conducting a hunt for footprints, but the gale and the now-steady snowfall are against him. “Wind has wiped this place clean.”

  Tran slams the helicopter door shut. “Or maybe Santa swooped in and scooped them up. We’ve got no way to tell if another helicopter set down here.”

  “No, they’re on foot,” I say. “Even assuming Glover knew another pilot willing to fly in this weather, there’s no way a second ship could have already come and gone.”

  “They’re going to be rigged,” Escamilla points out. “So they’ll make good time.”

  Logan shakes his head. “They have a civilian with them. Dr. Parris isn’t going to know how to use a rig. That’ll slow them down.”

  Tran uses his HITR to gesture toward the dead pilot inside the helicopter. “Until they decide to shoot her like they shot everyone else.”

  “They took Parris for a reason,” Logan insists.

  I’m inclined to agree, but that still leaves the central question. “Where did they go?”

  Our intelligence team comes through with an answer, relayed by Kanoa: “There’s a private research station twenty-nine kilometers to the northeast. It looks like they changed course, tried to reach it after they knew they were hit.”

  “Private?” I ask. “Like for tourists?”

  “Private, like dragon-funded. Mars research. If they prove they can live in extreme conditions, then maybe they can figure out Mars.”

  I don’t give a fuck about dragon hobbies. There’s only one thing I want to know. “Have these assholes got a helicopter that Glover can steal?”

  “The data I’m looking at indicates they do.”

  “You think he can make it there on foot? Because that’s like running a North Pole marathon.”

  “Until he can arrange another ride out of here, he doesn’t have a choice.”

  I expand the map on my display and then zoom out until I see a tag: Tuvalu Station. The tag marks a cluster of three buildings erected side by side and linked by covered passages. I cannot let Glover get there, get that helicopter, get away. I don’t know yet who was paying Dr. Parris for the work she was doing in her lab; I don’t know who’s paying Glover to recover that work. But I am not going to let this plague escape. The reason I’m here, the reason ETM exists, is to hunt down and slam any asshole who thinks it’s a good idea to brew up an apocalypse.

  I intend to see that we get the job done.

  • • • •

  My guess is the enemy will move with all possible speed toward Tuvalu Station, but I could be wrong. If they believe there’s a chance they’re being followed, then they might be waiting along the way to ambush us. Without angel sight or good satellite coverage, we can’t know. So I instruct the squad to move out in parallel, keeping thirty meters between each soldier so we’ll have eyes on a wide swath of ice. We hope to sight our quarry somewhere along that corridor—preferably before they see us.

  Kanoa provides each of us a blue-line path to follow, warning us not to trust it too far. “Your path is just a best guess based on limited data. The ice is shifting, so remain vigilant and use good judgment.”

  The paths are mapped by our intelligence team: two civilian analysts, each backed by a powerful AI that can access surveillance resources provided by the Red. That’s how we obt
ained the low-res infrared image that gave us the helicopter’s location. We’re still waiting for a high-res update.

  There are constellations of communications satellites in polar orbits, so voice and data coverage at this latitude is solid, but we need an observational satellite. The one we’re waiting for provides coverage in a surveillance corridor that continuously shifts west as the Earth rotates beneath it. We’re waiting for it to make a sweep of our position. Until it does, we have only our own eyes to rely on, with our night vision capacity reduced by the falling snow.

  Glover will be in the same situation. It’s possible he has a drone, but the wind is so fierce he won’t be able to control it.

  • • • •

  “We’ve got the image,” Kanoa says.

  “Hold up!”

  The squad halts. I crouch to reduce the impact of the wind, and then tell Kanoa, “Let me see it.”

  The detail is excellent. Tagged on the image are seven distinctly warm objects between us and Tuvalu Station. Three of those are scattered and solitary. “Intelligence thinks those are seals or polar bears,” Kanoa says. “The other four—that’s your quarry.”

  He avoids pointing out the obvious problem: Our squad appears in the image too, as five hotspots spread out in an east-west line. “Why didn’t we get scrubbed?” I ask him. I’m used to spontaneous digital processing erasing our presence from general surveillance, but it didn’t happen this time.

  “Unknown. Resources may be focused elsewhere.”

  Right. Didn’t I warn Tran just a few hours ago not to count on the Red to back us up? Good advice, that. “If Glover has access to this image, he’ll know we’re coming. He could set up an ambush.”

  “You assume that anyway,” Kanoa tells me. “And note the distance. They’re only nine kilometers ahead of you.”

  “Yeah, closer than expected.”

  “A lot closer. They might have an injury, or the civilian is slowing them down.”

  Either way, it’s good news. We’re running a marathon, but so are they and I want to catch them before they make Tuvalu Station. “Move out!”

  Soon, we reach a plain of smooth ice that allows us to run at a steady pace, one I’d normally be able to maintain for miles—but the wind has turned every step into a struggle, the constant inrush of freezing air is eating at my lungs, and my thighs ache where the cold titanium of my prosthetics meets living bone. In the corner of my vision, I see the skullnet icon flicker. I don’t have to wonder what’s going on because I can feel it: The pain recedes as a rush of endorphins floods my brain.

  Palehorse Keep was supposed to be a short mission: Hit hard and fast with Oscar-1 waiting over the horizon to pull us out. Now it’s an endurance race, and we still don’t know how we’re getting home.

  I call another halt as we near the last known location of our quarry. Leaving the squad to hunker down, I send Logan to circle west, while I scout east, looking for signs of a potential ambush. All we find are scuff marks and a single boot print preserved in a thin carpet of snow sheltered in the lee of an ice ridge—but the boot print is an encouraging sign. It’s solid evidence that at least one individual in Glover’s party is not using a dead sister, and that means they’re moving slowly.

  We spread out again and resume the hunt. There’s so much snow, falling fresh from the sky or being swept up by the wind, that even with night vision, we can’t see far. It’s disorienting. Feels like running on a treadmill, getting nowhere. But conditions are forecast to change. “There’s an upcoming break in the cloud cover,” Kanoa says. “You should have clear skies in under an hour.”

  A tube hooked to a bladder in my pack brings me a swallow of fortified water that’s gone slushy. It chills my teeth and my skull and I don’t want to drink anymore, but I make myself drink it anyway. I remind my squad to do the same. We’re running across the surface of an ocean, but dehydration is a hazard we can’t overlook.

  I check the time in my overlay. It feels like hours since Kanoa predicted clear skies, but it’s been only fifty-four minutes. I want to be able to see where we’re going, to see our enemy. I sure as fuck hope we don’t run right past them.

  “Pull up, pull up!”

  It’s Tran, whispering over gen-com.

  “Shit. They’re like fifty meters away from me.”

  I drop into a crouch, breathing hard and relieved to take a break. “Have they seen you?”

  “No. No, they’re walking away from me.”

  “Keep them in sight.”

  “Sighting confirmed,” Kanoa says. He pops an image onto my display. It shows me a vague cluster of figures, details lost to snow and night vision, but one at least is rigged—and one isn’t. The other two, I can’t be sure.

  “Automatic weapons,” Kanoa says. “And that looks like an RPG launcher.”

  “I guess they wanted the option of blasting their way into Tuvalu Station.” I delete the image and then expand the map. “Kanoa, are we still due for clear skies?”

  “Roger that. Latest report gives you another fifteen minutes.”

  “Okay, this is what we’re going to do. Logan, you and Escamilla move in behind them, just close enough to keep them in sight. Roman and Tran are with me. We’re going to move around, wide to the east. It’ll be a sprint, but I want to get ahead of them while the weather covers us. We’re going to stop them now. We will not let them go on to Tuvalu Station. There will be no repeat of what happened at Deep Winter Sigil. Clear?”

  I wait for the round of acknowledgments. And then I add, “If it comes to shooting, wait for a designated target. We don’t want to shoot each other.”

  I start east, with Roman and Tran running behind me in single file. It’s a damn good thing the wind is blowing hard. It covers the harsh rasp of my breathing. The cold sears my throat and I half expect my lungs to shatter, but I keep going until Kanoa says, “Turn west now. Cut them off.”

  He uses GPS to position us in the path of our quarry.

  The swirling snow thins, revealing an expanse of ice as smooth as a frozen pond, with no cover in any direction. “Standard interval,” I whisper, gesturing to Roman and Tran to take up positions on either side of me. They spread out, so that we stand thirty meters apart.

  The wind slows. Night vision shows me a handful of stars overhead. I brace my feet, bring my HITR to my shoulder, and will myself to see past the lingering scatter of wind-driven snow.

  “There,” Roman whispers. “Seventy meters.”

  I see them: three soldiers rigged in dead sisters and night vision goggles. The one in front carries an RPG launcher; the other two are assisting the civilian, half-carrying Dr. Parris as they support her by her arms.

  “Drop your weapons!” I bellow, not really expecting them to.

  And they don’t. They don’t even take time to process my request. I might as well have yelled Game on!

  My tactical AI puts up a target. I cover it and fire a three-round burst, dropping the merc with the RPG launcher as he heaves it to his shoulder. There’s a spray of panicked gunfire from one of the other mercs—shots fired without taking the time to aim. Tran hits him twice. Blood flies on the second shot, proving that at least one bullet got past armor, into flesh.

  Two of three are down—but Roman hasn’t taken a shot yet.

  She is standing motionless, the wind at her back and her HITR steady, braced by her arm strut as she targets the last mercenary. He has his arm around the throat of the civilian; he’s holding a pistol pressed to her head.

  Dr. Parris is bundled up in a parka with a fur-lined hood and a thermal mask that hides her face. She’s a tall woman, which makes her a good human shield. All I can see of the merc is his arm and the left side of his hooded head.

  “You’ll want her alive!” he shouts.

  My overlay gets a voice ID, tags him as Vincent Glover.

  I don’t argue with him because he’s right. I do want Parris alive. I have questions I want to ask her.

  I’d like to take h
im alive too, but I think the odds are against it.

  Quietly, I tell Roman, “Take him.”

  Bam!

  One shot. The bullet buzzes in past the civilian’s ear, cracks Glover’s goggles, and drills him in the left eye.

  • • • •

  Dr. Parris is in bad shape. She’s sitting on the ice, shaking, exhausted, incoherent. Whether she’s suffering from psychological shock or hypothermia, I don’t know, but we need to get her out of the weather—and we’re still six kilometers from Tuvalu Station.

  I consider my options, and then I pop the cinches on my dead sister. “Escamilla, you’ve run slaved rigs before, right?”

  “Not something I want to remember, Shelley.”

  “Sorry. I need you to do it again.”

  Exoskeletons are expensive. When soldiers die wearing them, the army wants them back. It’s a sergeant’s responsibility to recover both the body and the dead sister—which is why it’s possible to slave one dead sister to another, so it can be walked off the battlefield even if the soldier strapped into it is dead.

  “You’re going to strap the civilian into your rig?” Tran asks.

  “Yes.” Parris is tall, at least six-one. Close enough to my height. I’d rather put her into Glover’s rig, but we don’t have the control codes for his equipment.

  I crouch beside Parris. She’s not using night vision, but the clouds have opened up, admitting an auroral light that shimmers across the ice—enough for her to see me, if only as a silhouette. She squints at me past frost-covered lashes as I explain to her what we’re going to do. She seems to understand; at any rate, she cooperates while Escamilla helps me strap her to the rig.

  Roman stands watch while we handle Parris. Logan and Tran search the bodies. They empty pockets and packs, strip off hoods and masks, and then lay each soldier out on the ice and take portrait shots so Kanoa can use facial recognition to identify them. We need to know who the enemy is.

  Parris waits quietly, strapped into my exoskeleton, but as she begins to recover a little strength, she gets anxious. “Who are you people?” she asks, her voice hoarse, wind-burned. And when no one answers, her tone ratchets up: “Vince killed everyone! You know that, don’t you?”