by Linda Nagata
Tran moves to follow.
“Tran, hold up.” We watch the street. No enemy in sight. The drone has already turned the corner to the south. The staircase shakes as Logan hits the third landing. “Okay, go.”
With the weight of two soldiers on the stairs, the bolts jump harder. I try not to watch them, keeping my attention on the street.
“Cross street clear,” Kanoa says.
“I’ve got movement to the north.”
Night vision shows me the muzzle of an automatic rifle scanning around a corner at street level. A targeting circle pops up on my visor. Whoever is holding that gun is still out of sight. I shoot anyway. A simulated spark jumps off the tip of the muzzle as I’m awarded a hit. The weapon vanishes from sight.
Logan reaches the street. He drops into a crouch, covering the north end. I start down, bounding after Tran, not caring at this point if I bring the stairway down. I want to move out before enemy forces have a chance to trap us.
“Tran, take point. Move south.”
“Yes, sir.”
The seeker is out ahead of us, sniffing for explosive chemicals, listening for motion, scanning the rooftops and windows. As soon as I reach the street, I turn to follow Tran.
“Clear to cross the intersection,” Kanoa says.
“Roger that!”
Tran sprints, making it across in three bounds. He continues down the block, but at a more cautious pace. I keep my interval, ten meters behind him. Logan follows.
That’s one block down, five to go, before we reach the entrance of the target lab.
The seeker pulses a motion alarm, highlighting a second-floor window on the left side of the street. Tran hurls himself against the wall, his HITR aimed overhead. Nothing happens. No target posts on my visor.
“Unconfirmed,” Kanoa says.
By this time, I’ve caught up with Tran. “I’m taking point.”
I move out, sprinting to the corner. I crouch there while the seeker reconnoiters the cross street.
“Clear to cross the intersection.”
We get past the next two blocks with no opposition. Then all hell breaks loose.
Gunfire erupts from a third-story window across the street from me. There’s more gunfire from the rooftop above. I want to stay in this war game, so I throw myself sideways, diving through a broken window into the shelter of the closest building—a burned-out shell—landing on my shoulder and rolling to my feet.
Two strides take me back to the broken window. I’ve got my HITR raised to shoot high. My AI marks the third-floor site where the shots originated, but before I can return fire, a grenade takes out the target window in a white flash, the muffled boom echoing off the buildings.
Over gen-com, Tran pronounces a single word of quiet triumph. “Slam.”
I shift my aim to the rooftop, where the second shooter was positioned. I can’t see a target, but I can at least discourage any further gunfire. “Grenade,” I tell the AI. “Set distance.”
For the exercise, we use flash-bang grenades: light and noise but not generally fatal.
A green light flares in my visor, indicating the next grenade in line has been programmed to go off at the requested distance. I pull the second trigger on my HITR, but I don’t stay to see the result. I jump through the window. As the grenade goes off overhead, I’m sprinting to the end of the block. When I get there, I glance at my squad map, confirming Tran and Logan close behind, and then I bound across the intersection.
I’m ahead of the seeker now. That’s bad, because I see motion a block farther on. I crouch behind the charred hulk of a car. “Kanoa, I need eyes.”
“We’ve lost the seeker.”
I reach into my chest pouch to get the next one, but my gaze, and most of my attention, is on the street a block ahead where night vision shows me what I think are two soldiers—no, three—rigged in armor and bones.
I get the seeker out, set it on the dirty sidewalk. “Deploying Seeker-2.”
“Roger that.”
The little device buzzes to life and lifts away, streaking south.
“Do we have allies here?” I ask Kanoa.
“Negative.”
“Who are the rigged soldiers?”
“Unknown.” He sounds angry. “Best guess from Intelligence—the competition.”
“Another outfit trying to take this lab?”
“Roger that.”
“I can’t believe Command brought in a squad of LCS soldiers to run against us.” It doesn’t make sense, because there is always a shortage of LCS squads in the field. “If they can do that, why the fuck don’t they bring in the rest of my squad?” Something else occurs to me. “Or are these hired guns?”
“Unknown! But you are cleared to engage.”
“Roger that.” The ROE says we are not to fire unless fired upon, but that rule exists to protect civilian lives. These are not civilians.
I check the squad map. Tran is a few meters back, sheltering behind the corner of the building. Logan is farther away, beyond the intersection.
“Logan, move to the opposite side of the street. Then cross the intersection. As soon as you reach the curb, we’re both going to hit that block with grenades. Got it?”
“Roger that.”
“Tran, you stick with me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Logan crosses the main street in two bounds. He draws the interest of the enemy. A grenade goes off in the street. It’s not a direct hit, but Logan’s icon goes yellow, indicating he’s taken shrapnel. The battle AI designates it a minor wound; it doesn’t lock up his rig. He transits the cross street next, takes cover behind the corner building, and using his muzzle cams, he lines up a shot. So do I.
I stand up long enough to launch a grenade over the roof of the wrecked car I’ve been using for shelter. Then I drop down again. I wait for the double explosion—my grenade and his. Then I take off, running hard the length of the block, with Tran a few meters behind me.
“Target overhead,” Kanoa says.
I throw myself back against the closest building. Tran crouches at my feet. He starts shooting south down the street while I look up.
A gold glow projected on my visor marks a fast-moving target. I cover it and shoot.
The battle AI registers a hit.
“Enemy seeker down,” Kanoa says.
“Good. Tran, you got anything?”
“Negative. No visible targets.”
“Logan?”
“Negative.”
I flinch as an explosion goes off. I don’t see it directly, but I see the flash, hear the boom. It’s from the cross street at the end of the block. Gunfire starts up from the roof of the target building. I look for the rooftop shooters, but I can’t see them. I can’t see any muzzle flash.
“Shooters are on the opposite side of the building, aiming south,” Kanoa says.
Aiming at our competition. Can’t ask for a better opportunity than that.
“Advance!”
We run the block, cross the intersection, and we’re there. It’s a big building, filling up the entire block, and like the rest of our simulated city, it’s a wreck—but we’re supposed to interpret that as camouflage for the high-tech lab in the protected basement.
We are to enter through a basement door in the middle of the block.
The gun battle around the corner rages on, but not all of the building’s defenders are engaged. Through the seeker, we watch one of the rooftop shooters falling back to cover our side of the building.
“Enemy on the roof,” Kanoa says.
Tran covers me while I step away from the building, just far enough to get an angle on the figure three stories above—but the defender disappears before I get a shot off, and I get tagged with a nonfatal in the helmet. That would have given me a nasty headache if this was real.
Logan is already past us, advancing on the target: a steel door at the bottom of a half flight of stairs. “Confirm target,” he says over gen-com.
“Tar
get confirmed,” Kanoa responds.
Logan tosses a grenade down the stairs, falls back as the flash and boom go off.
“Tran,” I order, “cover us.”
I catch up with Logan at the top of the stairway.
The door looks intact.
“Consider it open,” Kanoa says.
I use a hand signal to instruct Logan to take point. He jumps to the bottom of the stairs, tries the door knob, and the damn thing just opens. He pushes it back only a couple of inches, just far enough to pitch another grenade through. After it pops, he sticks the muzzle of his HITR in, scanning the scene with his muzzle cams.
“Image,” I tell Kanoa.
He posts the video feed to my visor. Inside is a small, barren lobby with charred walls, empty of everything but a few bits of debris. Across the lobby is another steel door that should lead deeper into the building. Logan moves in. I jump down the stairs. “Tran, come in behind me.”
If I had more personnel, I would leave at least two soldiers outside to hold the door, but Tran’s not going to be able to do that on his own, and our priority is to get to the lab. So Tran comes with us.
Logan crosses the lobby, tries the next door, and again the damn thing just opens. He scans the other side with his muzzle cams. The feed shows a corridor that runs the width of the building. We are at one end. It’s hard to see any detail because it’s dark, even for night vision. I can make out two side doors, one on the right and one on the left, about a third of the way down. I can’t see anything beyond that. So I get a tiny LED light out of one of the pockets on my vest. As Logan pushes the door open, I switch on the light and pitch it.
It spins end over end, its light flashing in my visor and bouncing off the floor, the ceiling, the walls. For a fraction of a second I can see all the way to the corridor’s end. Two-thirds of the way down, there’s a second set of side doors. Both are open, with a rigged soldier emplaced in each. All I can see of each soldier is an arm strut, and the HITRs they’re holding, aimed up the corridor at us.
Grenades launch from both weapons with a whump amplified by my helmet. I try to duck back into the lobby. Too late. The flash-bangs go off in my face. My visor blazes red—and the battle AI takes me out of the game. The joints of my dead sister lock up and I go down hard on the floor. My helmet audio shifts to white noise, my visor goes black, my overlay’s display blinks out, and I am dumped from gen-com.
My hands are strapped to my frozen rig, but I still manage to clutch my HITR with a finger curled over the first trigger—not that it matters. The weapon will have been deactivated too.
Panic stirs and tries to make an escape. I feel like I’ve been transported back to Black Cross after the EMP knocked out all my electronic systems.
And my skullnet is down to 60 percent of baseline support.
I listen to my own harsh breathing. It’s up to me to keep a grip on a rational state of mind. No outside assists. I work at it. I push back against the fear. It’s just an exercise. No one is going to hurt me.
Logan is probably as dead as I am, but the flashes of light seeping around the edge of my visor hint that Tran is still fighting. Then the flashes stop. After that, there’s nothing.
I envision being trapped like this for hours, for days, forever. I listen to my breathing. Fast. Way too fast. I don’t want to wind up screaming hysterically. Then it comes to me: I’m not on my own. I still have the skullnet. No outside input allowed, but I can still communicate with it. It’s still part of me. And I think, Calm. Be calm. Lock it all down.
It works, just like it did yesterday. But this time, I don’t even need the graph of my neurological status. My breathing slows; my fingers ease their grip on my HITR. It still feels like I’ve been lying dead for fucking forever, but I can handle it on my own.
I start counting out loud just so I can measure the passing of time, and at what I estimate to be three minutes and twenty-one seconds the white noise in my helmet shuts off. Captain Montrose speaks over the audio. “The exercise is over. All participants are restored. Rendezvous at the command center in ten minutes.”
My overlay and my visor both wake up. Night vision kicks in. My dead sister unlocks and I can move my limbs again.
I look up to see two rigged soldiers standing over me. Not Tran, not Logan. The proportions are wrong. The enemy, then. Hired guns. My squad map affirms their anonymity, noting their positions with nameless orange dots.
The one closest, the shorter one, offers me a gloved hand half enclosed in a frame of struts. A symbolic gesture, given the assist available to me from my dead sister. A gesture of trust. I clasp the hand and, using the power of my own suit, I kick myself to my feet.
The enemy soldier speaks off-com. “Sorry about taking you down like that, Shelley. I didn’t know you were playing in this game.”
It’s Jayne Vasquez.
Fuck me.
• • • •
From day one of LCS training, the emphasis is on coordination. Our challenge is learning to work together as a fluid, adaptable unit, with each soldier utilized to his or her best capabilities within the framework of the squad and of the mission. In a high-stress combat environment, that only works if we trust each other’s abilities and loyalties. We don’t risk that trust by training against each other. Ever. It’s not always harmony in the barracks, but in the field, we are always on the same side.
But Jaynie is not on my side anymore.
“What are you doing here?” I ask her. I’m speaking off-com, because we don’t have shared communications.
She answers cautiously, “You didn’t know I’d be here?”
Someone moves behind me. A reverse helmet cam shows me Logan getting up off the floor. “No. I thought you were busy with your Mars project.”
“Didn’t Karin tell you? We’ve been grounded.”
“That’s right. She did tell me that.” One piece of good news. I eye the soldier behind Jaynie. “Roman?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You came out against me?”
“We didn’t know it was you, sir. We were expecting irregulars. No one else.”
“Who else is here? Fadul?”
“She’s outside. Escamilla and Dunahee weren’t part of the exercise. They’re still waiting on a medical clearance.”
I am wired on the dregs of adrenaline and panic. That’s not helping my temper. Neither is the growing awareness that we’ve all been set up.
I hit gen-com. “Kanoa.”
No answer.
“Kanoa, I need you to confirm who—”
Montrose speaks again, cutting me off. “Captain Shelley, you are to report to the command center now by order of Colonel Abajian.”
That’s the confirmation I need.
“Colonel Abajian can go fuck himself, Captain. I don’t play games like this. I’m done.”
I turn to go. Logan steps out of my way as I head outside.
• • • •
There’s enough moonlight that I can see without night vision. So as I start up the stairs, I take off my helmet. That’s a violation of regulations, but like I said, I’m fucking done. I’m not playing Abajian’s games anymore.
Tran is waiting at the top of the stairs. “Come on, Shelley. We’re ETM. You can’t—”
“We’re not ETM anymore,” I tell him. “Not with Abajian holding the strings.”
I step around him, only to be blocked by another soldier, one who’s more than a foot shorter than I am. I know of only one LCS soldier of such tiny size. “Shit,” I whisper. “Flynn?”
I don’t know what I was expecting from her. Definitely not her arm hook darting out to catch my shoulder strut. Flynn is in a worse mood than I am. She uses her entire body and every bit of amplified force from her dead sister to yank me off balance. I’m about to go down when she body-slams me onto the hood of a junked car parked against the curb. I drop my helmet, but I somehow keep my head from hitting. I think my back struts leave an imprint, but I don’t look. I roll awa
y, landing on my feet. Then I backpedal into the street, still holding onto my HITR.
“Goddamn it, Flynn! What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“It’s you! ” she shouts, her voice shrill as a teenager’s, though she must be twenty by now. “You fuckin’ betrayed us all when you left us, LT. You let us think you were dead. Gone with all the others! You’re such a piece of shit! You’re just a fuckin’ piece of shit.”
This is not the best night I’ve ever had.
By this time, Jaynie is at the top of the stairs. “Flynn, stand down!”
Flynn ignores her. She starts after me again, but Tran at least is still on my side. He intercepts her, using the same technique on her that she used on me. Grabbing her arm strut, he hurls her against the building. Then Jaynie’s between them, pushing Tran aside. “Flynn! You want to do this job or not?”
If Flynn answers, I don’t hear it. But Jaynie lets her go. Flynn straightens up, takes her helmet off, glares at me. She’s not wearing a skullcap. Jaynie must have made her give it up. Her hair is white in the moonlight, grown out to a short cut, soaked with sweat. “You should have fuckin’ taken me with you, LT.”
“I did what I had to do, Flynn.”
I flinch as Fadul’s low voice speaks unexpectedly from just behind my ear. “She’s a kid, for Christ’s sake. You could at least tell her you’re fucking sorry.”
“I’m not sorry.” Flynn might be dead now if I’d brought her into ETM.
Fadul walks past me, picks up my helmet, turns around, and shoves it in my gut. I grab it, of course. I’ve got no choice. “Gen-com just updated. Kanoa checked in. He says to put your helmet back on and get your ass over to the command center, wherever the fuck that is. He thinks you’ve got a problem with your wiring. Ask me, it runs deeper than that.”
• • • •
I think Fadul is probably right, but I don’t put my helmet on, and I lock down my overlay to keep Kanoa out, because I am done.
I start back through the ruins, carrying my helmet in one hand, my HITR in the other. The night is clear and cold, with the countryside washed in moonlight. It’s beautiful. And it’s only a kilometer and half by road to the command center, with the residence just a few hundred meters beyond. That’s nothing for infantry.