by Linda Nagata
“That’s fucked,” Tran says, sounding personally offended. “Who the hell would want that?”
Fadul knows the answer. “Psychopaths. Every time.”
“The claim,” Kanoa says, “is that it was done as retaliation, to hit back at those who sponsored the biowarfare project recently discovered in the Arctic.”
“Ah shit,” Logan says. “That rumor again? That’s been disproven.”
“The mediots keep pushing it,” I tell him.
Kanoa nods. “And the Shahin Council has reason to exploit it. Last week, one of their members collapsed on stage while delivering a speech. A young and healthy man, he was dead within half an hour. Maybe he was murdered. Maybe God struck him down. Frankly, I don’t care. The significant fact for us is that we had no warning of the orbital strike until the Shahin Council’s announcement. Our intelligence network picked up no hint, no rumor that it was going to happen—”
“Wait,” Tran says, sounding rattled. “You’re saying the Red didn’t know anything about this?”
Kanoa nods. “That’s what I’m saying, Alex. Our most optimistic interpretation is that this operation was set up in some sort of shadow world that the Red couldn’t perceive. Not visually, not electronically, not through spies or statistics or behavior studies.”
“I got a feeling it’s figured things out now,” Fadul says. “Even if these clowns have another launcher, they’re going to get slapped down hard.”
“Agreed,” Kanoa says. “And every legitimate government in the world is going to be on this.”
“You said that’s the optimistic interpretation,” I remind him. “What’s the pessimistic read?”
Kanoa’s answer is grim. “That the Red facilitated this attack as part of a long-term strategy to limit access to space.”
“Do you think that’s likely?” Logan asks. He gives me an uneasy glance. “I mean, after what happened to the Mars rocket …”
“No,” Kanoa answers. “I don’t think it’s likely. I don’t think it’s remotely compatible with the Red’s strategy. Satellite communication and surveillance technology are part of the Red’s sensory system. Sacrificing them to prevent future expeditions to Mars doesn’t make sense.”
Logan nods willing agreement. “And the Red’s already shown it knows how to slam the Mars projects without slamming the world.”
“So we’re back to the optimistic interpretation,” I say. “If you really want to call it that. The Red got blindsided by the Shahin Council, and we have no idea how. And we were blindsided in the Arctic. That whole mission, it felt like the Red didn’t really know what was going on, or it was distracted, or it was of two minds …” I hesitate. Not for the first time, I wonder if we’re wrong to think of the Red as a single entity. Why would it have to be? “You think these two incidents could be related, Kanoa?”
He ponders this for several seconds. “It’s too early to say—and we have more immediate concerns. Records show that at least nineteen missile launchers have been sold into questionable hands.”
“That’s a lot,” Escamilla says. “You think we’ll get orders?”
“It’s possible.”
ETM 7-1 operates under the paradigm Everything visible, everything accountable. But if the Red can be distracted or manipulated to the point that a look-and-see mission escalates into a regional conflict, or if it can be altogether blinded to a large-scale operation, then we’re going to lose the war.
It’s discouraging. It takes so little to constitute an existential threat to the world, while relentless, merciless action is required to push back against that threat. If nineteen missile launchers wound up in “questionable hands,” then how many lesser, but still lethal, weapons do the terrorists, the crusaders, the dragons of the world control? All wanting to impose a restricted existence or outright death on those around them.
There is no end to this war.
Maybe it’s true that most people want to live in peace—I have my doubts—but most people never get to make a choice. “Most people”—whoever they are—have always lived at the whim of those willing to use violence to get their way. Most people, throughout history, have gone along with it, willing to be entertained by the spectacle of a beheading, the horror of a living person set on fire, the thunder of shock and awe. Nothing has changed in the modern world except that each of us has the potential to generate more destruction than ever before. And nothing will change. Evil intent will always be with us, and there will always be another battle to fight.
• • • •
Nine hours later, I’m in the cafeteria, brooding over an empty plate. Fadul is at the opposite end of the table, brooding on tragedies all her own, while Tran has invited himself to sit down across from me with a freshly microwaved meal steaming on his tray. He looks up in feral anticipation as we all get linked into gen-com—Tran can’t wait for the next mission—but Kanoa kills his enthusiasm with a grim announcement: “Strike two.”
Another dragon lair has been hit. This time, there are five people aboard, and there’s video.
“Push it through,” I tell Kanoa.
The video was recorded by an STS spaceplane on approach to the habitat. “Was this a scheduled run?” I ask.
“No. The spaceplane was sent to evacuate the inhabitants after a specific threat was made against them.”
The video runs silently in my overlay. Digits in the lower right corner count down distance to the habitat. The spaceplane is 104 kilometers away when the missile hits. It comes so fast I can’t even see it. The habitat just explodes, ripping apart in a burst of high-definition destruction that kicks debris in every direction.
A large fragment—possibly an airlock door—hurtles out of the void. For a split second it looks like it’s coming straight at me. I jerk to the side. Across the table, Tran ducks and swears, “Holy shit!”
The shrapnel strikes the STS plane’s fuselage and wheels out of sight.
“That wasn’t a catastrophic hit,” Kanoa assures us. “The plane is intact—it’s still up there and communicating.”
“It must have been damaged,” I say.
“No report on that yet.”
I remember when I dropped back into the atmosphere aboard another STS plane. The thermal shielding on the hull held off the quiet heat death that enveloped us. “If the heat shield has been damaged, it won’t be able to land. Does STS even have another plane?”
It’s not Kanoa who answers my question. To my surprise, it’s our senior analyst, Bryson Kominski, who only rarely participates in gen-com. “They’ve got one additional plane, presently on the ground in San Antonio.”
I’ve never met Bryson. I don’t know where he’s based. My guess is San Antonio, but he could be in DC for all I know. His low, gravelly voice and midwestern accent lead me to picture him as a stocky Caucasian in his senior years.
“I’ll bet there’s a bidding war on,” Fadul says, “with every dragon in orbit screaming for a ride home.”
“They’ve got emergency escape capsules,” I point out.
“Each one equipped with only two reentry couches,” Bryson reminds me. “And most of the habitats have at least three residents. Not that the unfavorable math is slowing the exodus. Two capsules have already popped off.”
The high frontier is in retreat.
Escamilla breaks in—I check the squad map and locate him in the gym along with Roman—“When does this get to be our mission?”
“You want this mission?” Fadul asks him.
“There is no mission without a target,” Kanoa says. “We are looking for one. So is every intelligence outfit around the globe—and I’m guessing a lot of black-market arms dealers are looking into the situation too.”
“This can’t last,” Bryson says. “These missile launchers get one shot. After that, we know where they are. And the Shahin Council cannot have more than a handful hidden around the world.”
“How many shots does it take to end the space age?” Roman wants to know.
>
“No data on that,” Bryson admits. “Maybe there’s already enough debris up there to initiate a slow cascade of collisions.”
“Fuck it,” Fadul says. She gets up from the table, grabs her tray. “It was always a game for dragons anyway.”
“It’s not just about dragons,” I tell her. “You want to operate in a world without satellite communications?”
“We have EXALT.”
EXALT is a distributed network of aerial communications towers, each self-powered by solar and wind. It’s a more rugged system than what we had before Coma Day, and it came up fast, when the Red got behind its development. But EXALT has limits.
“What about GPS?” I ask her. “You want to live without that?”
She scowls at me, while across the table, Tran looks horrified. “That’d be fucking medieval—like all those dystopian novels I used to read.”
“Block the chatter,” Kanoa says. “I want everyone to prep their gear. Then hibernate so you’ll be rested and ready if a mission does come through.”
He closes gen-com, dumping us all back into our own local spaces. The squad map winks out.
“Shit!” Tran says, his fist thumping the table. “This is real, isn’t it? We’re looking at eternally fucked-over communications. Who would want to live in a world like that? Shelley, we need to take these crazy beaters down.”
“Eat,” I advise him as I get up to dump my tray. “And make sure your gear is ready.”
He can’t let it go. “What’s it all about anyway? Money? Virgins?”
“A pastoral utopia,” Fadul sneers. “Where the women work the fields and the men smoke their weed.”
I head for the door, but behind me I can still hear Tran. “You’d have to be stoned to stay sane in a shit-primitive mud hole with no satellite uplinks and no GPS.”
And Fadul, baiting him. “Then you’d better consider laying in a supply for the apocalypse, Farmer Joe, and hooking up with some passive woman who won’t cut your throat when you slap her around.”
“Jesus, Fadul. You must have had one hell of a home life.”
“Don’t you know it.”
• • • •
It’s dusk and I’m out on a run, still two miles from the barracks and in violation of regulations because I am both unarmed and alone.
That is, I’m alone except for the angel that’s watching over me. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. The fact is, I am never really alone.
There is a slight catch, a hesitation in the flexion of my right foot every time it meets the asphalt road. It still works though, and I run fast. Hell, if I run far enough, maybe the joints will wear smooth again.
When I came to ETM, I imagined the legs would outlast me. It’s not working out that way, but I think they’re still good for another mission or two. If I make it that far, I’m going to have to break cover and give Joby Nakagawa a call.
The light is fading fast, but the road is a straight line, easy to follow as it bisects a plain of dry grass—a rustling ocean washing around groves of small trees. Only a few vehicles ever come through here—mostly supply trucks and the personnel van. Lack of traffic has left the road looking abandoned, with dust, dry grass, and dead leaves collecting on the asphalt. To the north, coyotes yip and call. They’ve come in close a few times to look me over with their cold brown eyes. I should probably carry a pistol just in case.
A link request pops up in my overlay. The overlay’s reader, set to speak in a crisp, educated, masculine voice with an American accent, identifies the caller for me: “Karin Larsen.”
Delphi.
I pull up so fast, I almost trip over my clicking feet.
For most of a minute I stand there, alone in the middle of Texas-fucking-nowhere, sweat leaping off my face into the dry air and the grass rustling around me. I’m having a hard time getting enough oxygen as I stare at the icon tagged with her name.
There is no way Delphi should be able to call me. My overlay was wiped and reformatted the same night Kanoa pulled me out of the Pacific Ocean. Only a very short list of known contacts are allowed to connect with me, and Delphi is not on that list.
The coyotes sing out in the hue and cry of a hunting pack, the link disappears—and anger sets in.
Is the Red playing me?
Using my gaze to manipulate menus, I access my call log. Delphi’s address is there at the top of the list. I commit the string of digits to memory. Then I clear my overlay and start walking.
I want to know if it was really her. I want to know how she got on my contact list. I want to call her—but I don’t. I consider instead what has changed, what might have slipped, what could explain how she found her way in.
Two possibilities occur to me. The first—that I was with Jaynie those few minutes at Tuvalu Station, but no way could Jaynie have hacked my address. And second—I asked Cory to do some personal research for me, to look into Delphi and Jaynie’s situation. I expected him to be subtle—it’s his job to slide anonymously through the Cloud—but what if he made contact? The easiest hack is the social hack. Cory left C-FHEIT yesterday on the personnel van, saying he needed to take a few days of leave. He could have arranged to meet Delphi; she could have bribed him.
I need to report the call. It’s a security breach. It’s my duty to report it—but it’s not my priority.
I walk, thinking things over, waiting for darkness to collect around me as if that could hide who I am, what I’m going to do. I wait for the coyotes to go quiet. Stars appear in ever-greater numbers. Satellites move among them. It’s hard to imagine that a few broken satellites in all that vastness could have the impact predicted by the Kessler Syndrome.
In the gathering darkness, the land looks the same in all directions. No lights mark C-FHEIT’s buildings, because we’ve got a permanent blackout protocol. Windows in the gym and the barracks use one-way opaque glass, while the Cyber Center doesn’t bother with windows at all. I rely on GPS to tell me where I am.
One mile out, I stop again. And I send a link request.
She picks up right away, adds a visual.
Her eyes are shadowed with dark circles and worry lines that weren’t there before, but she’s beautiful anyway with her bright blue gaze and shiny blond hair pulled back from her face—and I have never felt so damned and lost in all my life.
I’m not sitting in front of a camera and I’ve got no icon, so she doesn’t see me.
“Say something,” she urges me.
“I’m sorry.” Sorry for a hell of a lot.
Little wrinkles appear between her eyebrows as her gaze shifts away from the camera. She’s frowning past me when she says, “Keep talking. I need more to confirm a voice identification.”
She’s operating in handler mode: cool and efficient. I try to do the same. “How much did you pay Cory Helms to access my address?”
“It is you.” She looks at the camera again. “Were you behind what happened on the freeway yesterday?”
Of course she would want to know. “Is that what Cory told you?”
“His email said you wanted something like that to happen—and it did.”
“He emailed you?”
“Yes, and he wasn’t looking for money. He’s angry and he’s scared. He sent the email hours ago, but it went to my public account. That’s noncritical stuff. I don’t look at it until I have a chance to sit down, and with the incident yesterday—” She catches herself. “Shelley, he knew things about you.”
Cory knows things about everyone here. “Do you know where he is now?”
“No. There’s just the email.”
And it’s been hours since he sent it. “I have to go.”
“Shelley!” Her sharp tone freezes me. “I need to know. Are you a prisoner?”
I wish I had that excuse, but I shake my head there in the dark where only the angel can see me. “I want you to know—I didn’t know that was going to happen yesterday. Mars is a mistake, but—”
My overlay shuts down. The li
nk to Delphi winks out. Everything goes: the icons, the tags, the connections. My display is wiped clean, leaving me no way to call out. For nine seconds I stand there with nothing in my field of view except the starlit sky. I am silently praying for my system to come back when a tiny orange-yellow light ignites in the lower left corner of my vision. I’ve seen it before. It’s a counter, monitoring a reformat of my overlay. Progress so far: 10%.
That can’t be right.
I’ve had my overlay reformatted twice and it takes hours—but I have to commend Kanoa for decisive action. A brain-wipe is the nuclear option for stopping an electronic tryst. “Fuck you anyway, Kanoa,” I mutter. I memorized Delphi’s address for a reason.
Not sure yet if I’ll call her again.
And fuck me for not seeing Cory as a threat. He set me up, and now I can’t even report him as a security risk. Not until I get back to base.
The counter ticks over to 20 percent. That is too damned fast. What the hell is going on?
• • • •
It’s gotten so dark, I can’t see the road. I take a best guess at where it is and start back, walking as fast as I dare. The counter hits 30 percent. My anxiety rises with it. I still can’t see where I’m going, but I start jogging anyway. I want to get back. I want to find Kanoa. I want to slam him up against a wall. Let him bust me for it. What the hell do I care?
40%.
Just stay the fuck out of my head.
I run off the road. I can’t really feel textures with my titanium feet, but I can sense the difference when my right foot impacts the hardpan on the road’s shoulder. I steer back onto the asphalt.
50%.
I hear the clatter of footplates striking asphalt somewhere ahead of me. It’s the sound of soldiers running—more than one—running fast, toward me.
I can’t help myself. I pull up sharply as instinct insists that I am prey. Blind in the night, unarmed and unarmored, dressed only in PT shorts and T-shirt, I am at the mercy of even a single rigged soldier—and I hear at least three.
Why? What’s happening? Is this a disciplinary action?