Going Dark

by Linda Nagata

  “Something to keep in mind.”

  I look back the way we came, touched by a new worry. After its second pass, the Chinese fighter swung much farther north than it needed to. Why? Did we turn Tuvalu Station into a target just by being there?

  I ask Kanoa. He assures me Tuvalu Station is intact, but maybe that’s only because the cavalry arrived. Thinking about Jaynie as additional collateral damage on this fucked-up mission sends the chill even deeper into my bones. I want to get out of here before we make things even worse.

  We’re still eight kilometers out from Sigil. We start walking. Progress is slow because Escamilla doesn’t have his rig, and we’re all exhausted—but a few minutes later, Kanoa checks in.

  “Good news. That Chinese fighter forced the Red to revisit this mission, and we finally got an order through. Oscar-1 is on his way.”

  It’s a relief to hear it. Then again, it’ll be almost two hours before Oscar-1 reaches us. We keep walking, and even with Escamilla slowing us down, we get to Sigil first.

  • • • •

  The tiltrotor is too big to land on Sigil ’s helipad so, fighting the wind, Jason Okamoto holds it in a hover while we load our wounded and our gear. He’s in a hurry to leave, and not just because of the weather. “There’s a Canadian gunship an hour behind me,” he tells us over gen-com as we load Julian’s stretcher and secure it to the floor. “And a no-fly order in effect. So far, I’ve got official clearance, but this is not a good time to be flying on counterfeit orders—especially after that refueling fiasco.”

  “Get the door closed,” I tell Tran.

  As soon as it latches, we’re on our way, riding the buffeting wind south. Our two prisoners get left behind. Let the Canadians figure out what to do with them.

  It takes a few minutes to tie down our folded exoskeletons, secure our packs, and stow our helmets. We’re still linked into gen-com through our overlays. Fadul grabs the empty copilot’s seat. The rest of us buckle in to the fold-up canvas seats mounted on the cabin’s side rails.

  “All secure back there?” Okamoto asks.

  “Roger that.”

  He turns off the cabin lights, and then the deck tilts as he puts Oscar-1 into a steep climb to try to get us above the worst of the wind. It’s going to be a hell of a long flight home.

  I lean back, close my eyes, cross my arms over my chest, and dial the sensory feedback from my legs down to nothing. It’s warm in the cabin. That plus the darkness and the roar of the engines quickly lulls me into a half sleep—until Tran speaks over gen-com. “You know what I don’t get?”

  I snap awake, my heart racing. He’s a shadowy figure, sitting across the narrow cabin between Roman and Logan.

  “What do you not get?” Escamilla asks in a surly voice as he stretches his long legs across the cabin’s narrow floor.

  “I don’t get why we’re based in Texas. It’s fucking unfair, if you ask me.”

  Fadul is upfront in the copilot’s seat, but she’s hooked into gen-com, so she’s part of the conversation. “No one asked you,” she reminds him.

  “No, think about it. We are an illicit ass-kicking ghost militia run by an elusive, enigmatic, un-erasable AI. Right? Seems like some cool, luxury-packed, underground hideout should go along with a setup like that.”

  “Shut the fuck up, Tran,” Logan advises as he wads his parka into a pillow.

  “You got to read something besides comic books,” Roman adds, wriggling around, trying to get comfortable without releasing her harness.

  “I think Tran has a point,” I say in his defense.

  Fadul answers, “That’s because you just fucking hate Texas.”

  True enough.

  Strike Squad 7-1 hides in the open, occupying an officially mothballed US Army training facility—the very same facility from which the assault on Black Cross was launched late on Coma Day. We are based at C-FHEIT, the Center For Human Engineering, Integration, & Training—pronounced “see-fight” in army-speak. It’s where I trained when my prosthetics were new. I was the test case in an army program aimed at recycling experienced combat personnel who’d had their legs blown off. I proved the program worked, but when the economy cratered after Coma Day, funding was canceled and C-FHEIT was closed.

  It’s still officially closed, but by some bureaucratic alchemy, Kanoa was able to take it over.

  I nod off, dreaming of ice and wind and battles I don’t remember fighting.

  • • • •

  We stop briefly at the remote listening station on the north end of Ellesmere Island. This time, the counterfeit order that allows Oscar-1 to refuel is accepted, and we’re soon on our way. We’ll be flying through the night.

  I sleep for another couple of hours. When I wake again, I unbuckle, check on Julian, and then move up front, just to be moving. I find Fadul asleep, her head turned to the side. Okamoto is alert as always. He’s not wired, but when he flies, he runs a program in his farsights that checks his wakefulness by monitoring his gaze. He’s also got a pack of pills taped to the control panel—little doses of speed if he starts to get sleepy. Old-fashioned but effective. And in a few more hours, Escamilla will come up front to relieve him.

  I lean over to look out the windshield, but it’s night over northern Canada. There’s not much to see. Okamoto looks up at me. He’s only fifty, but his buzz-cut hair is silver, and so is his goatee. The soft lights from the instrument panel illuminate a grim expression so uncharacteristic of him that I know right away we’ve got trouble.

  It’s too loud to talk easily, so I use gen-com to open a solo link. “Something wrong with the plane?”

  “No. It’s not that.” He returns his gaze to the instrument panel. “I’m not asking about the mission. It’s not my business what you did up there. But you might want to know—we’ve got an air war going on in the Arctic.”

  Right away, I get a sick feeling in my gut.

  “It’s big and it’s getting bigger,” Okamoto says. “Rumor on the civilian stations is that China initially scrambled a fighter. They called it a response to terrorism. Canada, Denmark, and Russia all reacted, sending out their own fighters to protect their sovereign interests.”

  “Is it just posturing? Or are they taking each other down?”

  He shakes his head. “Not much solid information.”

  “Okay. Thanks.”

  I retreat to my seat and strap in, then send a message to Kanoa, asking him to check on the situation at Tuvalu Station. His response comes back within a minute: All personnel were successfully evacuated by the US Navy.

  I hope it’s true.

  CHAIN OF COMMAND

  IT’S MIDMORNING WHEN WE MAKE it back to C-FHEIT. The news that’s reached us overnight is not good. Missiles have been launched and fighters shot down, and there’s every reason to believe the air war in the Arctic will get worse before it gets better.

  Okamoto shifts our craft’s propellers from vertical to horizontal and then, descending in helicopter mode, he delivers us to C-FHEIT’s central quadrangle.

  Our two-story barracks is on one side of the open area. The gym is directly across from it, and at the far end is the gray, one-story, windowless Cybernetics Center. A flagpole stands in front of it, flying an American flag that waves with easy grace in a chill winter wind.

  We left Julian at a private hospital in Michigan; he’s scheduled to be flown down to San Antonio later today by air ambulance. Dunahee, Fadul, and Escamilla can all be treated on base. I send them to report to medical. The rest of us work in guilty silence to get the gear unloaded, and as soon as we’re clear, Okamoto takes off again, heading for a well-deserved rest.

  Our working theory is that a Chinese company was paying Vincent Glover to pirate Dr. Parris’s multi­billion-dollar microbes. When Glover realized that deal was about to fall through, he decided to salvage what he could. But he took action only because we showed up. And we shouldn’t have been there.

  I have glimpsed Armageddon. All of us have. That’s
why we’re part of this outfit. In the nine prior missions I’ve served with Strike Squad 7-1, I’ve seen four of our soldiers killed and now two critically wounded—but I always felt the action we took was worthwhile, that we’d made the world at least a little bit safer.

  Not this time.

  I dump my arctic gear in the corner of my room and set to work cleaning my weapon. We never know when we’ll be called out, so we always need to be ready.

  As I work, I think—about my own limits and how far I’m willing to go in this holy war.

  Eighteen months ago, I left behind everything that mattered to me because I was determined that Armageddon would not happen on my watch.

  So how the hell did I manage to start my own fucking war?

  • • • •

  ETM Strike Squad 7-1 is housed on the second floor of the barracks. This used to be officer territory, outfitted with suites, but the floor was remodeled and re-divided into ten individual rooms. Support personnel—all but one regular army—are housed downstairs. The one exception is a civilian intelligence analyst.

  7-1 hides in plain sight. Like the crew of the submarine, our support staff has worked out who we are. They just assume we’ve gone dark, while remaining legitimate soldiers loyal to the United States Army.

  The truth is more complex. Though we use army resources—housing, communications, transportation, weapons, intelligence—we are fighting a nonlinear war, and that means our interests only occasionally align with those of our host. It’s not a fact I’m proud of, but the way I look at it? The US Army has always operated with contradictory goals and interests determined by politicians and generals pursuing their own pet agendas. We’re just contributing one more set of objectives.

  On the second floor of the barracks is a media room restricted to 7-1. That night—the night after we kicked off worldwide media’s newest entertainment offering, War in the Arctic—I’m sitting between Fadul and Tran in one of the media room’s upholstered armchairs, watching a news-propaganda station.

  We’re all dressed alike, in uniform T-shirt and trousers. Visible below the sleeve of Fadul’s shirt is a long gash on her bicep, held together by wound glue and segments of clear tape. She’s slouched in her seat, bare feet propped up on a coffee table, glaring at the huge screen like she wants to take a swing at it. Tran doesn’t look any happier. He’s slurping his third energy drink of the evening, his legs vibrating with the overload.

  The voices of two mediots are discussing lives already lost as a video plays. It’s an angel’s-eye view of a drilling rig—not Deep Winter Sigil—on fire in the Arctic night. A column of flame envelops the derrick. One of the mediots assures us that drilling has not been completed; the well has not reached oil; there is no danger of environmental disaster.

  “These clowns don’t know what they’re talking about,” Tran says. “I mean, if there’s no petroleum, what’s feeding the fire?”

  Fadul answers without turning her head. “It’s stored fuel, idiot.”

  “That’s what they want us to believe.”

  No way to know yet what the truth is. What we’ve heard so far—and maybe it’s bullshit—is that a Chinese fighter was shot down after taking aggressive action inside Canadian territory. In retaliation, the Chinese launched a sortie that sank a Canadian Coast Guard vessel. The Russians, who resent the Chinese presence in the Arctic, jumped in to defend the Canadians, while the Danish navy deployed two frigates in defense of its client state of Greenland along with the development deals Greenland has with the Chinese. So far—if the mediots can be believed—the US has managed to stay out of the conflict, held back by a non-interventionist wing of Congress that recently passed legislation restricting the power of the president to engage in military activity outside the borders of the country. That legislation is an overt challenge to long-established war powers, and a Supreme Court review is imminent—if “imminent” is a word that can be used to describe the glacial pace of Supreme Court proceedings.

  I flinch as the door opens. A glance over my shoulder shows me Kanoa coming in. Because of his spinal injury, he doesn’t work out like he used to, but he’s a big man who still packs a lot of muscle—enough to fill up the doorway. His Polynesian heritage shows in his dark skin and his wide, strong face. Tonight he’s dressed in a black pullover and gray camo pants. As he sits behind me in the second row, I turn around and ask him, “What the fuck have we done?”

  Fadul answers first, with a derisive hiss. “You’re always saying we’re not on the side of the angels, but you don’t really believe it. You still want to be the good guy.”

  “So do I,” Tran says. “That’s why I’m here.”

  “So do we all,” Kanoa affirms.

  In that case, we’ve all failed, because good guys don’t start accidental wars. I gesture at the monitor, where family photos of the missing oil rig workers are being shown: the smiling faces of men and women whose lives never mattered all that much—except to those who loved them. “Is this a mistake?” I ask Kanoa.

  “It’s a fucking conspiracy,” Tran says, his gaze still fixed on the screen. “Forces arrayed against us, to undo our good work.”

  Kanoa side-eyes him, but Tran is too engrossed with the reporting to notice. So he returns his attention to me. “Think about it, Shelley. Would you want it to be a mistake? Do you think that’s any better?”

  “I don’t like either option. If we kicked off an accidental war, that’s a serious fuck-up. But if it’s not accidental—what does that say about what else we might be asked to do?”

  “You starting to think we’re on the wrong side of history?”

  “No. We’re outside of history.” When the history of this age gets written, we won’t be part of the story—but I don’t give a shit about that. I just want to know that history goes on. “Every mission we’ve done until now has been worth doing. Not this one.”

  “My first ETM mission,” Tran says. “And it was a fucking mistake.”

  “Yeah.” He’s furious about that, and I don’t blame him. “There was nothing threatening going on inside that lab.”

  “Look-and-see,” Kanoa says. His palm slices the air in a dismissive gesture. “We all know it won’t always work out.”

  I consider again my suspicion that the Red is not a single coherent entity. If it’s a divided mind, with contradictory goals, that could explain some of the mission’s failures.

  I jump as Tran’s fist hits his armrest. “Holy shit,” he says, staring at the monitor.

  The mediots have taken a break from their coverage of the Arctic War to mention other publicity-worthy events of the day. The secretary of defense is pictured briefly, and then the story shifts to a security incident on the Canadian border.

  “What?” Fadul asks.

  Tran looks surprised that we’re all staring at him. “It’s the secretary of defense. Died suddenly.”

  “Died of what?” Fadul wants to know, like she’s trying to work out a reason she should give a damn.

  Kanoa reads more into it. “Jesus. That’s the second—”

  “No, it’s the third,” Tran interrupts. “The third member of President Monteiro’s administration to die under mysterious—”

  “Hold on,” I interrupt him. “They’re talking to Dr. Parris.”

  The scene shifts to a recording studio set up to look like a nineteenth-century library, shelves with wooden shelves holding neat sets of leather-bound books—a cultural motif of intellect. Dr. Parris is the sole inhabitant of the stylized setting; I see her face for the first time as she gazes uneasily at the camera from her post in an upholstered chair. Her hair is short and gray, her eyes sunken over sharp cheekbones. There are frostbite injuries on her lips, cheeks, and the tip of her sharp nose that give her a bruised and beaten look. The mediot interviewing her gets right to the point. “Dr. Parris, there has been widespread speculation that your lab was devoted to biowarfare research—”

  That’s as far as he gets before she stops him. “A
bsolutely not.” But she’s no longer looking at the camera. She’s looking away; she’s looking remorseful. “Some of the questions directed at me by my rescuers lead me to believe the attack on my lab and the murder of my staff might have been motivated by that rumor—which makes it all the more tragic, because in fact we were working to develop new pharmaceutical applications to improve life around the globe …”

  It’s easy to see she’s shocked and grieved at what happened to her colleagues, but her work remains important to her. She answers the mediot’s questions on the objective of her work, though she carefully skirts the issue of synthetic bacterial strains.

  “At least we did one good thing,” Tran says. “We saved Dr. Parris.”

  But I have to take even that away from him. “Parris would still be at work in her lab if we hadn’t shown up.”

  Fadul shrugs. “I think it was a mistake. All those dead scientists, the war. But that’s how the game is played. Sure, the Red tries to make shit happen. It’s got some secret plan. But it can’t dictate the future. All it can do is shift the odds. Every move we make is still a toss of the dice.”

  “Not every move,” I insist. “There were elements the Red could have controlled. Why didn’t we know about Glover’s helicopter? What happened to the order to refuel Oscar-1? Why didn’t we get scrubbed from that satellite image? Why only a few seconds’ warning when that Chinese fighter came in?”

  “Why did we run into your old sergeant?” Tran asks. “That was the weirdest part of the whole mission. It’s got to mean something.”

  “Not in the way you’re thinking,” Kanoa says.

  The social code among our little coven of resurrected war heroes is that the past should be left alone. Don’t try to keep track of those we abandoned. Don’t talk about them. Don’t hold onto what was. That’s why I haven’t brought up the subject of Jaynie, but I think Tran is right. “Why was Jayne Vasquez put into play?”

  Fadul answers this question with a stony glare and cold silence. She crosses her arms and turns back to the screen, where the video has shifted to show, for about the hundredth time, bootleg video of the dead bodies aboard Sigil.