by Linda Nagata
We lay Issam down, and then we lie down beside him. Soon after, I hear our forward contingent stampeding madly back toward us. Leonid barks, “Drop!”
I duck my head, throwing a protective arm over Issam’s unconscious face.
The explosives go off.
• • • •
“Roll call,” I growl when the dust settles.
“Logan.”
“Tran.”
“Papa, you still with us?”
“Da.” He doesn’t sound happy about it. “This was not our mission. This was beyond our mission. Far, far beyond it.”
“I know.”
“I think the angels must be watching over us, that we are even alive.”
“So far anyway,” Logan growls.
I spend several seconds coughing. When the fit passes, I hold my hand above Issam’s nose and mouth, and am rewarded by a warm flush of exhaled breath—which makes me aware of how cold it’s gotten. I have to guess that the door out of Hell has been successfully blown open. I look up to confirm it. Through a fog of dust, I see a faint purple glow. “Let’s just get the fuck out of here.”
Under the influence of the cool air, Issam starts to waken. I leave him to recover, advancing with the others the last few meters. The twisted shards of a steel gate hang from broken hinges with a lavender twilight beyond and glinting stars. I’m still limping to the gate when a network icon flares in my overlay. A tag slides out, identifying the network.
“EXALT!” I murmur in astonishment.
“I’ve got it too,” Logan confirms, a step behind me. “An EXALT network here.”
I thought we’d be isolated, with no way to get word out, since we had to turn over our satellite relays to Luftar. They’re burnt to ash by now.
It’s a thought that brings a flush of primal fear to my skin despite the cold.
I liked Luftar. He seemed like a decent guy. But it’s not smart to think of the enemy that way.
Gen-com responds automatically to the presence of the network, opening a link to the Cloud, seeking links to the rest of our squad and to our handler. While I wait for Kanoa to check in, I push past Tran and join Leonid at the entrance.
It’s 0546 and the sky has just begun to lighten. A thin frosting of snow lies on the ground.
“Is that a path, Papa?” With the half-light and the snow it’s hard to be sure, but I think there’s a path leading into a forest of evergreen trees that might be cedar.
“Looks like it,” he says. “Not well used.”
Steep, heavily forested slopes rise on two sides, ending in snow-frosted gray peaks that frame a narrow valley. I see a shimmer and then a tiny white flash just above the eastern ridge. I think it’s the EXALT node. Easier to see is a plume of dust and white smoke from the explosives Leonid used to blow open the gate. The plume is drifting south, a marker indicating to anyone watching this region that something of interest is going on here.
Drones have surely been watching. Did they see evidence at the main gate of the conflagration we ignited?
Colonel Abajian warned he would respond to the slightest sign of hostile intent.
I check my overlay. Gen-com still shows only me, Logan, and Tran linked in. Where the hell is the rest of my squad? Where is Kanoa?
“Echo tango mike 7-1. Someone out there?”
No one responds.
Abajian might still have my squad on lockdown—but that doesn’t explain Kanoa’s absence.
“Wait here, Papa.” I slip outside.
Despite the steep valley walls, my overlay immediately latches on to signals from a constellation of GPS satellites. In seconds, my position is pinpointed. I’m in a valley with a name I’ve never heard of and can’t pronounce. Eleven kilometers south is a narrow road that might offer us a way out of here. There’s a much bigger, modern highway well to the north, past the ridge that separates us from the front gate of the UGF. I don’t know why the underground facility is here. I can’t imagine what it was intended for. Maybe it was a make-work contract designed by some Cold War defense contractor who bribed an official to gain the approval.
“Echo tango mike 7-1,” I repeat. “ETM 7-1. Kanoa. Abajian. Whoever’s there. Mission accomplished, but we need a ride out of here.”
Still no answer.
Before we left, Kanoa said I was not to worry about the future of 7-1, but I’m worried now. Abajian said he was our ally. But what if he changed his mind? Now that the mission is done, he might see 7-1 as a political liability, too dangerous to keep around.
I duck back into the tunnel where Leonid and Logan are waiting, Logan with his HITR, Leonid with the M4 he took from the armory.
“Where’s Kanoa?” Logan wants to know.
I tell him my theory. He does not take it well. Leonid growls like an irritated dog, and then he mutters, “I will see what I can arrange.” Pulling his tablet from a pocket, he moves to the door.
After another coughing fit, I turn to Tran, who’s sitting down, leaning against his backpack, his arms around his M4, eyes closed, his dark skin frosted in dust. More dust has mixed with the blood soaking his pant leg, and his chest is rising and falling with fast, shallow breaths. He needs to be evacuated, transported to a hospital and treated. But for now, all we can do is clean him up and close his wounds.
Logan helps me. The blood on Tran’s pants is cold, sticky, coagulated. We ease his pants off and manage not to restart any major bleeding. I use water from my pack to clean his leg. That lets us get a look at his wounds: seven lacerations, six of them on his thigh, one on his hip. “You look like a yeti got hold of you.”
“Shrapnel,” he growls through gritted teeth.
Logan and I work as fast as we can, pulling out bits of rock and metal before gluing each wound shut. The glue has an anesthetic that gets Tran feeling good enough that he puts his shredded, blood-soaked pants back on himself. I help him with his boot.
“We have to move out,” I tell them. “Drones will have marked the activity here. Depending who they belong to, we could be a target.”
“I’m good,” Tran says. “I can do it.”
I think he’s trying to convince himself.
Leonid comes back inside the tunnel.
“Got us a ride?” I ask him.
This earns me a dark scowl and an untranslatable Russian curse. “The details are being worked on. Also, fighter jets are coming this way.”
Even as he says it, I hear their low roar. I squeeze past him to the entrance. The remains of the shattered gate are vibrating in sympathy. Logan and Leonid crowd behind me. Together we search the sky.
“There,” Logan says, pointing to where three jets are racing in from the southwest. At first they’re just distant gray points beneath a deck of high clouds, but they draw closer with startling speed. My overlay tags them as Pakistani.
Leonid makes the same assessment. “They are out of Islamabad.” He adds, in an ominous voice, “It has been only thirty minutes since you blew up the truck. Less since the missiles ignited. It is possible these jets were already in the air, but is it likely? Or are they here to intercept an outside threat?”
“Ah, fuck,” Logan says. “You think Abajian already launched his cruise missile?”
Colonel Abajian might have launched it an hour or more ago when the news came that the other missile sites had been captured—a preemptive strike to stop Abaza taking any desperate action.
The fighters scream past our position, barely a half-klick to the west. The Pakistanis don’t have a lot of tolerance for American cruise missiles in their sovereign territory. I watch them pass over the shoulder of the mountain. I wait a few seconds for their roar to fade and then I say, “Let’s get the fuck out of here, get into the trees. I don’t want to be underground when that missile hits.”
I go back for Tran, but he’s already made it to his feet. He’s bracing himself against the wall, a grimace on his face. “Help him, Logan.”
“I don’t need help,” he protests. “I’m good.�
�
“Then go outside.”
I squeeze past, and hobble after Issam. He’s dragged himself to a sitting position, but he doesn’t look like he’s good for much more than that. I kneel beside him. He gives me a desperate, frightened look. He’s sticky with sweat and dust, and stinks of fumes just like the rest of us, and he’s breathing with a faint wheeze—but at least he’s breathing. “How badly do you want to go home?”
“You said you’d get me out,” he whispers.
“I will. But you’re going to have to help.”
I get him on his feet. I’m trying to get his arm around my shoulder when the ground shudders, a vibration that rises up through my titanium legs. I drag him stumbling to the tunnel mouth. Everyone else is already out. We emerge as a rumble of thunder rolls in from the north, a deeper register than the jets’ engines.
Logan, Tran, and Leonid are all looking back at the mountain. The rising light picks out the dirt and dried sweat on their upturned faces, the mud and smoke stains on their clothes, and it hits me again how close we came to dying—and we’re not safe yet. Boiling up behind the mountain is a column of gray smoke.
“Abajian,” Logan growls, using the name like a profanity. “That was his cruise missile, wasn’t it?”
And Tran—his voice ravaged, but his attitude still practical: “Good thing we didn’t stick around and try to get out the front door.”
Amen to that.
Tran is holding tight to his M4, but he’s given up his pack to Leonid. “Tran, you okay to walk?”
“I told you, Shelley, I’m good.”
He sounds like a petulant kid with a sore throat. I hope he’s not bullshitting me.
I know I sound pretty bad too, but I’m still functioning. “Logan, take point. We’ll try for the highway and maybe Papa will have a cab waiting for us.”
“A helicopter,” the old man growls, waving Tran ahead before following Logan on the path beneath the trees. He’s carrying his M4 across his body, ready to use on short notice. “And if not a helicopter, we hijack a—”
One of the fighters screams overhead, west to east, barely above the treetops.
“Move, move!” My hoarse shout sets off another coughing fit, but I keep going anyway, balancing on my broken foot while holding on to Issam to make sure he doesn’t fall behind. We stagger and stumble and trip down the trail. We put maybe a hundred twenty meters behind us as the jet swings around. On its next pass, it comes in from the south. “Get under cover!”
I drag Issam off the path; shove him into a tangle of dead branches at the base of a tree. “No movement,” I warn him.
The pilot uses his autocannon. Bullets nail the forest, but all he hits are trees. Maybe he knows we’re here, but I don’t think he’s really aiming at us. How could he be? He’s got a fucking mountain in front of him demanding his attention, and judging by his flight path, he’s lining up to put a missile right through the tunnel’s mouth—
Another jet screams into the valley. This one comes in from the east. Huddled on the ground without my rig, my helmet, my handler, without angel sight, I feel weak, blind, and helpless. I struggle to see through the treetops, to understand what’s going on. My overlay records enough to tag the second jet as American. It dives right at the Pakistani fighter. I swear the two almost collide. The American fighter pulls out south. The Pakistani banks away to the northwest with no missiles fired.
What did I just see?
I swear the American fighter just kept the Pakistani from blowing our escape route to dust. Is Abajian on our side after all?
In the relative quiet, I order our little party back onto the trail. We limp and stumble for fifty meters. Then the fighters return. This time they’re above the cloud deck. We can’t see them, but we feel the bone-shaking thunder of their engines. I think there are three, maybe more, undertaking crazy maneuvers. They start shooting, but not at the tunnel we just left behind and not at us. Judging by the sound, they are hunting each other. It’s a fucking dogfight going on above our heads. So close, I’m afraid we’re going to be collateral damage. But then they swoop away. There are explosions, another deafening pass, and then a high-pitched dopplered scream of engines, drawn out and lingering for ten seconds or more.
Through the trees I see a dying fighter plunging toward the ridge on our west, the red, white, and blue air force star logo visible in the gathering light. The fighter hits the ridge and explodes on impact, shaking the earth, shaking my soul.
Have we started another war?
“Oh my God,” Issam says. “Oh my God. Oh my God.”
I want to tell him to shut the fuck up, that a terrorist tool like him should not be shocked by violence, but I’m distracted by the sight of the pilot dropping out of the sky beneath a partly open parachute.
I leave Issam and hobble through the trees, tripping and stumbling over deadwood as I strive to keep the pilot in sight, to record the descent with my overlay and mark the point where the parachute passes out of sight. The exertion leaves me gasping, my breath steaming in the cold air.
Another fighter roars in, sweeping the area where the pilot vanished, firing its autocannon. It makes a single pass. Then it screams away. I think there’s another dogfight in the distance, but no more explosions. Just engine noise, receding into silence.
Logan speaks over gen-com. “You get a location on that pilot, Shelley?”
“Maybe. For damn sure—” I catch my breath. “You and me … are going to look.”
• • • •
The trail we’re on is not marked or visible on the GPS-generated map that pinpoints my position, but studying that map along with the image of the descending pilot lets me guess at the drop site—a point I estimate to be at least three kilometers away. If I had an angel, I could confirm it in a couple of minutes.
I could confirm if the pilot is alive or dead.
Probably dead. That’s what I tell myself to forestall disappointment. The chute failed to open fully; a strafing run followed.
We are going to look anyway.
We move out again. I’ve got no way to know the specifics of the political situation playing out around this incident, but I can guess at the general situation. Either the Pakistanis are furious because our mission was carried out without their knowledge or approval, or they are furious that a component of Broken Sky was exposed under their watch, and they want to eliminate all evidence that it ever happened.
We are part of that evidence. The way I see it, it’s just a matter of time until attack helicopters come hunting us, or an infantry squad rigged in dead sisters. Abajian isn’t going to risk another fighter in our defense. So we need to evacuate from this region as soon as we can, but first I need to confirm the status of the pilot. I won’t leave an injured warfighter behind.
As we continue on the trail, I watch landmarks, and when I think we’re close to the drop site, I take Logan with me, and we go to look.
“Shouldn’t be too hard to find the parachute,” Logan says.
That’s all we need to find. If the pilot is in good shape, he’ll be long gone by the time we find the drop site. If he’s dead, we’ll record the scene and move on. And if he’s wounded but unconscious, we’ll assess and figure something out. The most dangerous scenario for us is if he’s wounded and functional. Fighter pilots fly with a pistol secured in a shoulder holster.
“Let’s keep up some chatter,” I decide. “If we talk American, maybe the pilot won’t shoot us.”
We set up search transects using GPS. This lets us blunder through the forest and negotiate the uneven terrain while maintaining a consistent thirty meters between us. We go for a kilometer in a straight line. I pretend I’m okay, but my foot is locked at an awkward angle, my fingers are freezing, my lungs are hot, and I feel like I’m breathing through a coarse, wet rag stuffed in my throat.
After a kilometer, we turn around, shift our lines south, and go again. We try to keep up the chatter over gen-com, but mostly it’s Logan talking, be
cause my voice is getting worse.
We’re reminiscing about our favorite fast food from before the Coma when a voice speaks to me from out of a bush I’ve just hobbled past—not a burning bush, fortunately, although it is rattling with old dry leaves. “Identify yourself.”
American accent. Female.
I freeze, envisioning her with a finger on the trigger. I don’t want to give her any reason to squeeze. “James Shelley, captain in an irregular militia known as ETM 7-1.”
“Is that Special Forces Operations?”
“Darker.”
Logan speaks over gen-com, “I’ve got her in my sights.”
Do not shoot.
“She’s safe,” he says, “as long as her pistol isn’t aimed at you.”
I make sure the muzzle of my HITR is pointed at the ground when I turn to look at her.
She’s standing behind the bush, dressed in a flight suit and jacket, and carrying a small emergency pack on her back. There’s a compact pistol in her upraised hand, but its stubby barrel is aimed at a corner of the sky. She is Caucasian and tall, close to six feet, with short brown hair. I put her age in the mid-thirties. She’s studying me through colorless farsights resting on a prominent freckled nose. Civilian farsights would have a green light to indicate they were recording. Hers are military field issue.
“It is you,” she says, suspicion in her voice, like she still isn’t sure this is a straight deal. “I was told to find you. We’re supposed to be on the same side.”
“Yes, ma’am.” I cough. It’s a wet cough. “You pulled that fighter off us. I think we can be allies for a while.”
“I’m Captain Helen Thurman. United States Air Force.” She comes out from behind the bush and bravely offers to shake my hand.
I have to turn away, coughing—a brief fit that ends when I spit a wad of rotten lung tissue into a patch of snow.
She lowers her hand, eyeing me in concern. “Something I need to know about?”
“Noxious fumes.”
“Sounds like onset of pneumonia.”
“I fucking hope not. But enough about me. Are you injured?”
“I got hung up in a tree. Strained my back. Minor concussion.” She slides her pistol into a shoulder holster. “I’ll live.”