by Linda Nagata
I don’t like it either, but at least we’re still alive.
• • • •
I claim a bedroom by upending my pack and dumping out everything I’ve got left on the bed. There’s not a lot. T-shirts, rations, my dwindling first aid kit. Clinging to it all is a toxic, burnt smell that puts me back in the UGF with my heart racing. I give the skullnet a few seconds to smooth things over. The icon glows … and I remind myself that the baseline program is winding down and I’m not going to have that kind of assistance much longer.
The T-shirts get tossed toward the door—I’ll wash them later and maybe the smell will go away. Clothes are going to be a problem if we have to stay here more than a day. With that in mind, I take off my civilian shirt and hang it up in the closet. Might as well keep it fresh a little longer.
All my other gear gets neatly repacked despite the smell. I want to be ready if anything happens.
Next step: figure out what is happening. I settle down on the bed, pop open my encyclopedia, and start reading the newest posts harvested from the Cloud—and it’s not good news.
Lines are being redrawn in the Arctic War. Yesterday, the last day of the old year, Russia escalated the conflict by claiming sovereignty over an immense undersea ridge, using the argument that at some point in the planet’s geological history, that ridge was part of the Siberian continental shelf. Russian fighters are patrolling the newly declared border, Canadian and American fighters are rising to challenge them, while international shipping companies, backed by Chinese money, are lobbying hard for a peace treaty to be hammered out before the spring thaw.
There have been no more strikes against orbital targets, but the damage is amplifying anyway. A small observational satellite in a known debris path was moved out of the way, only to be struck by an unmapped fragment. Now its shattered parts are adding to the hazard, and more incidents are expected.
Closer to Earth, the Pakistanis are sending fighters to taunt US Navy ships patrolling off their coast—aggressive behavior that has drawn out sorties of Indian Shikras ready to engage them. I imagine defense contractors coaching both sides, encouraging a hot conflict—hot enough to sell some armaments, but not so hot that either side is tempted to use the nukes they’ve kept stored for decades.
The Americans are saying little, and mainstream news sites make no mention of Captain Thurman or of a lost American fighter. But at fringe sites, armchair investigators are piecing together a scenario from seismic data and local gossip that is surprisingly close to the truth.
Two other raids against Broken Sky took place, one in Sudan and the other in Bolivia, but both have gone almost unremarked by a world long tired of war in both places.
After a couple of hours, Tran sends me a text. Read this! It’s all crowdsourced research, unfiltered by mediots, government, or dragons. The Angel of Death is real.
There’s a link, so I follow it to another fringe site where there’s a list of “influencers”—people of power, decision-makers—who have died in recent weeks. I look for the secretary of defense and he’s there. I look for Yana Semakova and find her name. But they are only two on a list of more than two hundred. The number shocks me. Two hundred. Spread out over four months. I cross-check a few names with other sources, just to make sure, and confirm their deaths are real.
The list includes politicians, corporate types, religious figures, scientists, and military officers. Twenty-three are Americans. Others are British, German, Chinese, Japanese, Saudi … most relatively young and healthy. All were single deaths—a sudden collapse in a crowded office building or among thousands at a political rally or on a busy sidewalk.
Tran’s right. It’s like an angel of death has been wandering through the capitals of the world, the financial centers, the military bases, the think tanks, striking down select targets—and sowing fear in those who go untouched. We’re an example. We were so shaken by Issam’s death that we fled Budapest and agreed to protective custody.
I send a text to Delphi, wanting to know she’s still okay, but I get no answer.
Tran links over gen-com. “Are you looking at it?”
“Yes.”
“I think it’s a slow-motion decapitation of the world’s leadership.”
Delphi called it the first stage of a war—but if so, it’s a quiet war, an undercover war, and it’s not clear who’s waging it. “None of the mainstream news sites have linked these deaths together.”
“It’s being suppressed. Governments don’t want it known they’re vulnerable. They make sure cause of death gets listed as ‘natural’ or ‘undetermined’ or some equivalent shit.”
“Logan?” I ask. “You listening?”
“Roger that.”
I tell them, “You know how these last months, we’ve been doing these look-and-see missions? Even Arid Crossroad. I’m starting to think we’ve been looking for the angel of death all this time, or anyway, for the lab he uses.”
Tran says, “That would be a fucking slam if we found it.”
Logan is operating from an opposite emotional pole: “Who’s to say the Red’s not the angel of death?”
I look at the list again. I don’t know most of the names on it or what they stood for or what the impact of their deaths might be—but if those deaths put us closer to midnight or consolidate power in the hands of a few, then the Red’s not behind it.
• • • •
Evening comes, with no communication from Leonid or Captain Montrose or Colonel Abajian or Major Kanoa or anyone else. No clarification of our status. No further orders.
No idea what’s coming next.
Whatever’s coming, I’m not ready. Not physically. I’ve been using the inhaler as prescribed and my lungs are healing, but my body is beat up and it’s going to take time to recover. My robot legs, of course, are not going to recover at all. I close the door of my bedroom. Time to deal with that.
The irony of the modern world is that instant global communication is useless if the person you want to talk to limits contacts, like I do. I want to talk to Joby Nakagawa about my legs. I’ve still got his address. The problem is, my address has changed, so I won’t be in his contact list. Instead of calling, I decide to email: my name, the serial number of my legs, and my new address, with a short message, call me.
It’s still afternoon in San Antonio. Forty minutes later, I get a link request from his address. I accept.
“What the fuck?” His tone is icy, somewhere between caution and fury.
“Hey, Joby. Remember me?”
“Jesus! Fuck! ”
“I’m going to assume that’s a yes.”
“You’re dead,” he objects. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Yeah, sorry. I keep getting that part wrong.”
“You asshole. You’ve been active all this time, and I’ve got no data on the performance of the legs. That’s why you’re calling, isn’t it? You’re having problems with the legs. That’s the only reason you’d call.”
“You said no one else was allowed to work on them. Only you.”
Suspicious: “What’d you do to them?”
“A lot of wear and tear. Some bullet impacts. Shrapnel. I can still walk, but some of the joints are bent or broken.”
“The knee joint?”
“No, that’s fine. It’s the feet, the lower legs.”
“You want new ones?”
“Hell, yes. Can you do that?”
“There’s a private manufacturer now. Expensive. I can put in the order for you, if you’ve got the funding.”
“Do it. Forward the invoice and I’ll pay it.”
“You got a physical address for the delivery?”
“Not yet. I’ll let you know.”
“Okay. It’ll take a few days. After you make the swap, send me the old legs so I can assess the damage.”
“Sure. Not a problem.”
“Jesus, Shelley, I can’t fucking believe you’re alive. You know, you might want to consider staying ou
t of the line of fire.”
I think that’s the nicest thing Joby’s ever said to me. “Hey, thanks. But this stays between you and me, okay?”
“No shit, dickhead. I’m not an idiot.”
The invoice comes in a few minutes later. Holy shit. I check my personal account. I have about two dollars left when I’m done, but I manage to cover it.
• • • •
We set up a watch rotation. Tran goes first and then Logan. I’ve got the last watch, so I go to bed early. Lying in the darkness of an unfamiliar bedroom, I think about my skullnet. It’s been less than a day since I loaded the shutdown program. I try to decide if I can feel any difference, but I can’t. Not yet.
Anyway, better to sleep—and that’s still easy. Though my skullnet can’t receive outside input anymore, I can still communicate with it using my own thoughts. Maybe, in time, I can train it to generate a variety of mental states on command … but for now, I issue the standard instruction: sleep.
Hours later, I wake to an earbud alarm. I kill it and sit up, feeling groggy. If I’d used the skullnet to wake me, I’d feel alert, but I can’t do that anymore.
A furnace is running, heating the house. A glance past the blinds shows the street illuminated by fog-glazed moonlight. There are no lights in any of the other houses. No cars parked along the street. One of the rigged MPs stands on the sidewalk, the white vapor of an exhaled breath riding forced air currents out beneath the blank, black face of a visor.
I let the blind drop back into place and then hobble out of the bedroom, into the kitchen. Logan is sitting at an empty table, wide awake because his skullnet keeps him that way.
“Status?” I ask him.
“Nothing to report. What’s your status? You feeling any effects yet?”
“Waking up is harder.”
“I remember that.”
“Go get some sleep.”
I make coffee—something I don’t usually do—but I’m worried about nodding off. Everything is quiet until dawn. At 0705 I hear the soft clomp of footplates on the concrete outside, followed immediately by a loud, harsh concussion on the door. I know that sound. It’s the arm strut of a dead sister hammered against the wood. We used to do that in Bolivia to scare the shit out of people on the other side. Given that my heart rate just vaulted to racing speed, I’d say it works as intended.
I whisper over gen-com, “Send a wakeup call.”
There is nothing in this house that will protect us if our guards come in shooting. Our only chance is to counterattack as they enter—and if they have cameras on us, or they’re scanning through the walls, we won’t even get the benefit of surprise. I scramble for the kitchen, grabbing the biggest knives in there—little steak knives with four-inch blades. I hand one to Tran as he bolts from the hall, wearing shorts and a fighting expression. The hammerblow repeats as Logan comes behind him.
“Identify yourself!” I shout at the door. I signal Logan and Tran to move up with me. We position ourselves to make a grab for whoever we see there when the door opens.
My request is answered by a woman’s voice, muffled through the door. “Lieutenant Andrea Ashman, Intelligence. I am going to open the door, Captain Shelley. I am unarmed.”
I hand off my knife to Logan and wave him and Tran to move back.
The knob turns. The door opens slowly, just a few inches. Lieutenant Ashman and I stare at each other through the gap, both of us gauging the threat we pose to one another. She is dressed in an army service uniform. Standing behind her is one of the rigged MPs.
“We are on the same side, Captain Shelley.”
Are we? That has not been made clear to me. Eyeing the MP, I stand aside. “Come in.”
She closes the door behind her. Ashman is tall, almost six feet, thin, with a gaunt face. “I am here to conduct interviews on your recent mission. One of you … Alex Tran?” She consults a tablet, looks up at Tran. “What is your rank?”
“Tran left regular service as a staff sergeant.” I gesture at him. “Put the knife away and get a shirt on.”
“Yes, sir.”
I turn back to Ashman. “I want to see my CO.”
“I’m sorry, Captain. Colonel Abajian is not currently available.”
“Colonel Abajian is not my CO, Lieutenant. Major William Kanoa is my CO and we are not consenting to interviews until I’ve seen him.”
“Captain Shelley, the details of your operation are critical to assessing—”
“I want to see my CO. You get Kanoa here, and I’ll tell you anything about the mission you want to know.”
She opens her mouth like she’s going to argue with me, but she decides against it. “I will communicate your concerns to Colonel Abajian.”
“Thank you.”
• • • •
Abajian decides to ignore us. We get no further visitors that day or the next. We sleep a lot.
On day three, my inhaler runs dry. Maybe it had a mood enhancer in it, maybe I’m just starting to feel the decline in support from my skullnet, but frustration kicks in, turning quickly to anger.
Delphi is silent, Kanoa is silent, Leonid is gone, and for all I know, Abajian could have been sacked for carrying out an illegal operation—making it more likely we’ll be arrested than offered a mission.
I need to know where this is going. So on day three, I step outside to talk to the MPs.
By this time, we’ve figured out that except for our guards, we’re alone in this cluster of housing. There is no activity at the other residences, no vehicles on the road. It’s possible other areas of the base are still populated, but this corner is a ghost town.
I open the front door. The snow that frosted the ground when we first arrived has melted, but the lawn in front of the residence is brown, the air is cold and crisp with a chill wind, and gray clouds fill the sky. I hear the distant roar of a passing airliner but nothing else.
Only one MP is in sight, strolling the sidewalk. That one turns an anonymous black visor toward me as I step out onto the covered stoop. A sudden crouch and three long, bounding strides puts the soldier in front of me. It takes every bit of idiot stubbornness I possess not to flee into the house. I’ve been behind that black mask, rigged in titanium, bulked out in chest armor, and heavily armed. It’s fucking intimidating, facing that down.
The MP speaks in a man’s voice. “You are required to stay inside, sir, with the door closed and blinds drawn.”
“No, Specialist. I demand to talk to my commanding officer, Major William Kanoa. Now.”
It’s not smart to defy a direct order issued by an MP rigged in a dead sister. I know that, but what the hell else can I do? The specialist uses his arm hooks, forcefully escorting me back through the door. The only thing my venture earns me is bruised biceps.
I curse Kanoa, Abajian, Leonid. Myself. We should have taken off on our own from Budapest and made them hunt us down.
Right.
Without ETM behind us? They probably would have picked us up as soon as we hit the street.
• • • •
Joby forwards an email to me, saying my legs are ready to ship. The manufacturer just needs a name and address. So I use GPS to work out the address of the house where I’m imprisoned and I give it to them. Fuck security. The name I put on it is ETM 7-1.
• • • •
Two days later I’m lying on the sofa, streaming music on my overlay—something loud and angry to match my mood—when the front door opens. A figure looms against a glowing backdrop of wintry light. I am so startled I launch over the back of the sofa. The only thing I can say for myself is that I manage to land feet-first. But then the joints in my broken foot slip, and I end up on my ass. I kill the music and scramble up as Kanoa comes in, closing the door behind him.
“Nice reaction time,” he says, setting a midsize suitcase down on the floor.
“Where the fuck have you been?”
I am six days in on a gradual withdrawal from my skullnet’s baseline maintenance,
and I’m definitely feeling it. I give up my hiding place and come out from behind the sofa. “And why the fuck are you not signed into gen-com?”
“I am. Different unit.”
That shuts me up for a few seconds. It tells me we’ve been cut loose. And why the hell am I surprised?
Logan and Tran charge into the living room, but they pull up short when they sense my mood. “We did what we had to do, Kanoa. A program launched in our heads and we executed it. And then we did what we had to do to stay alive. If you’re going to let us go because of that, I don’t give a shit. We’re better off.”
“It was for your own protection,” Kanoa says. “I thought you might have figured that out.”
“You know me better than that. I’m no optimist. I thought you were dead, or in prison.”
He grunts. “Fair enough, and not all that far from the truth. Abajian has the keys to ETM 7-1. You know that. Cory Helms is in his pocket, and he wants to use us as his personal voodoo operators. I’ve been encouraging him to back the fuck off. Part of that was putting you at a distance. I had Bryson set it up so that when you finally came back online, your software would update to ETM 7-2 to lock Abajian out.”
“I’m going to guess that didn’t make the colonel happy.”
“He buried me for a few days, but he still doesn’t have the keys to 7-2.”
“So, where are we now?” Logan asks.
“Same place we’ve been since Abajian stopped in at C-FHEIT. He has jobs he wants done, but that is not the way we work. We did Arid Crossroad because the Red was behind it.”
Tran asks, “If things aren’t settled with Abajian, how did you manage to get here?”
“The colonel can recognize a stalemate.” Kanoa cracks a cold smile. “I heard that both sides of ETM 7 were proving uncooperative, demanding to see their CO. That made him think I might still be useful.”