by Linda Nagata
No joy. And I couldn’t see the three drones anymore. I couldn’t see any other movement, no flashes. “Francis!” I couldn’t see him either, but I knew he was climbing that slope. He’d be right in their path. “Francis, drop!” I warned him. “The goddamn robot swarm is coming toward you.”
His voice came back to me over comms. “Shit. I can’t drop. No room between these fucking trees.” Then, “Jesus! Hector’s dead. He’s fucking dead. He didn’t step on a mine either. His fucking head is blown off!”
This triggered Jesse. “Killer bots!” he screamed. “I told you. Fucking exploding killer bots. You got that yet? I’ve dropped three.” More shots. “Blown up one. How the fuck many are there?”
“We got nothin’ up here!” Mason told him. “They’re all on you!”
Mason was right. Jesse was the only one firing, the only one fighting. I could hear the steady, distant concussion of his weapon, and louder, his cursing over comms. “Goddamn, goddamn. Shaw, I need backup!”
“Retreat!” I told him. “Evade! Get the hell out of there.” Because help was going to take time. I was moving, but there was no way I could get to him in less than two minutes. It was Hector who’d been in position to back him up but Hector was dead, and Francis was in the path of the approaching swarm. “Mason, we gotta get down there.”
“I’m moving, Shaw.”
That’s when Diego jumped in, lighting up a bogie I couldn’t see. “D, what have you got?”
“Nothing.” Two more quick shots. “Just want to see if gunfire will draw the swarm off Jesse, bring the bots back up here.”
That sounded crazy to me, but Francis said, “Shit, it’s working. I got two bots coming back this way. No. Four.” And I knew Diego was a fucking genius.
I told Francis, “Let ’em get past you. We’ll take care of ’em up here. You get down there and help Jesse.”
“On it. Jesse—”
He got interrupted by another cracking explosion… and Jesse’s weapon went silent.
“Ah, shit,” Mason whispered.
Francis ignored my order and started shooting. Maybe a mech had survived the assault on Jesse and was coming after him, I don’t know. But there was another pop, a scream, whispered cursing.
“I see ’em, boss,” Mason said, dead calm. “I’m going to hit the last one in the line.”
“Make it count.”
I could hear that skin-crawling soft buzzing again and Diego moving, his pack scraping like sandpaper against the tree trunks as he squeezed between them, changing his position. It sounded like he was descending, moving toward the road.
I got my pistol out. It was easier to maneuver between the trees.
Mason fired a single shot. “Shit.”
He’d missed. I couldn’t see them yet but I fired a couple shots anyway. Confuse their algorithms. Right?
Mason fired again, again. And I saw one. I led it with my pistol, squeezed off a series of shots, and hit trees. It came at me on a zigzag. Took me three more shots but I got it. It didn’t blow up when I hit it. Just spun into a tree branch and crashed. It struck me that they weren’t that dangerous, not really, not unless they came at you in numbers. But two, maybe three, had buzzed past me and were after Diego, who was lighting things up in an effort to attract some action.
He got it, all right. The swarm was after him but he was a step ahead of all of us. He’d moved downslope until he was right above the road. Then he pulled a grenade, dropped it where he stood, and sprinted toward me. When that thing went off, it knocked trees into the road, but it made the kamikazes disappear.
“Shaw!” he yelled, trying to find me.
I moved out to where he could see me. He looked okay.
“You hear anymore?” he asked when we met up.
No. I could still hear Francis over comms, soft moans, trying to bite down on the pain, but the forest was quiet. That awful low humming, gone. “I think you got ’em,” I said.
The fight had gone on for maybe ninety seconds and I had three men down.
We set off together, moving as quickly as we could. We had to help Francis, and confirm Jesse’s status.
“If we see more,” Diego whispered, “don’t shoot at them unless they’re coming straight for us. Don’t approach them. I think perceived aggression sets them off.”
Perceived aggression. That’s how he described it. Hector had tried to touch one and it blew his head off. Jesse had lit up a swarm and then gone silent. A touch, or a fusillade—it was all the same to the machines. But I let Mason know what Diego had said.
We rendezvoused by Francis. His right hand was gone and his face and neck were shredded but he was still alive. We hooked him up to a pack of artificial blood and sprayed dressing on his wounds.
The mission was fucked. We had failed. No way to recover. The CCA would have picked up the explosions, the gunfire. Saomong was aware of us. They would be coming, and we needed to get out. Out from under their radio interference so we could call for a ride.
There was no way we could carry Hector’s body with us, not through the maze of that sapling forest. So we took his tags and his electronics and left him where he fell.
I got Francis onto my shoulders and we went to find Jesse.
Diego and Mason broke trees, pulled branches out of the way, tried to make it easier for me. We were getting close to the place where Jesse had to be, when Diego found a broken mech lying in the leaf litter. It must have been one that Jesse shot down. Diego moved in on it.
“Don’t touch that thing, D!” I warned him.
“I don’t need to touch it.” He stopped a couple meters away and scoped it. “Put a light on it, Mason. I need to see the details.”
Mason didn’t like that idea at all. “We can’t use a light,” he growled.
Like the CCA didn’t already know where we were? I came down on Diego’s side. “Get a light on it, tight beam,” I ordered. “We need to know what it is, where it came from.”
Mason fished in a pocket for his LED. He illuminated the target.
Diego took pictures through his scope. Mason pulled out a smart phone and took a couple more.
I still had Francis draped over my shoulders, so I just asked them, “What have you got?”
Mason came over to show me. We hunched over the screen to hide the light. It showed a clear, magnified picture of the mech. It was lying there, belly up. Its wings and its landing gear were broken but the fuselage was intact. A flattened diamond shape, maybe eight inches, nose to tail. Fucking kamikaze killer mech. First time I ever saw one. Color was light gray. Looked like aluminum or titanium, but it could have been plastic.
“You see those markings?” Diego asked, still studying it through his scope.
I saw them. There was a label with Western-style numerals alongside several columns of Chinese characters. The characters didn’t bother me. Those are used in a lot of Asian countries—Japan, Korea, Vietnam. No, it was the logo that burned. Lotus flower, four petals shaped like curved swords. I knew that design. Diego knew it too.
“That’s Kai Yun,” he said.
Kai Yun. The agency that was supposed to be assisting with oversight on our mission.
“Enough,” I said. “Kill the light.”
Mason switched off the display. He was still cool. He was always cool. But Diego was winding up. “What the fuck? Kai Yun is supposed to be on our side. And they blew Hector’s head off? Blew off Francis’s arm? And Jesse?”
“Yeah, and now the CCA knows we’re here,” Mason reminded us, unnecessarily.
“That too,” Diego growled.
Kai Yun had killed us. We all knew it. The question was, on purpose or by accident? That we didn’t know—but we had more immediate concerns.
“We gotta get out of here,” I told them. “That’s the only way we are going to get us some righteous justice. We get out of here, and I promise you I will see to it that someone hangs for this.”
They liked that. It settled them down. But we still
needed to confirm Jesse’s status. We pushed on, leaving the mech where it lay. We couldn’t risk recovering it and having it blow up in our hands.
Later, though, I wondered—was it as dead as it looked? Or was it still playing spy bot, recording everything it heard around it? I imagined some technician in a secure facility somewhere in Shanghai hearing those words I’d said—I will see to it that someone hangs for this. And I knew we were fucked.
No Unwinding It
There in the shadows of the courtyard, beneath a distant, dark-blue sky pearlescent with dawn, the past reshapes itself, taking on a new definition, a new truth. Past the filters of her anxiety, her regret, her horror, her exhaustion, True sees at last the process that brought about Diego’s tortured death… if not yet the reason.
The mission Rogue Lightning was tasked to carry out was an almost-routine action in a war that had been ongoing for decades and whose battles usually passed unspoken. The mission plan was based on cooperative intelligence from both Chinese and American sources. The plan denoted a precise time and place where critical leadership elements of the Saomong Cooperative Cybernetic Army could be found isolated and vulnerable—a precision that implied a spy deep within enemy councils, with ready access to outside communications.
In retrospect such a spy seems unlikely. Far more credible to believe that Kai Yun quietly deployed an autonomous combat swarm to monitor the region, with individual elements situated to eavesdrop on Saomong councils.
The swarm would have been experimental—every ACS was experimental then—but it must have been successful at first. True imagines the little mechs present but unnoticed in the villages and the forest for days ahead of the mission, gathering the intelligence that eventually guides Rogue Lightning to the planned site of the ambush. Then something goes wrong.
“You know what was funny about that mission?” Shaw asks her.
True looks past the fountain, gaze drawn to a point high on the wall at the mouth of the passage where she left a surveillance beetle. Colt will have heard Shaw’s story. She’s glad for that. He’ll follow up on it, if she’s not able to. She tells Shaw, “There was nothing funny about the mission.”
“No, you’re missing the point. The funny part, the laugh-out-loud part, was that none of us needed to be there. Not me, not Diego, not Mason or Francis or Hector or Jesse. None of us were needed because Kai Yun had made us obsolete. They had better fighters in place. More efficient soldiers. Kai Yun could have targeted the CCA leadership with that swarm and done our job for us. I think that’s what they meant to do. Show us up, show off what could be done while we were wandering around like bozos lost in the woods. But we fooled them. We were better than they thought. We got there—late, but still in time to execute the mission.”
True feels dizzy. Had Rogue Lightning been meant to arrive late? The mission plan had woefully underestimated the difficulty of the terrain. Was that on purpose? She summarizes it, needing to understand: “The swarm was there ahead of you, ready to execute the ambush… but things went wrong and Rogue Lightning was taken down by friendly fire.” It’s the conclusion True reached just a couple of days ago, after she’d met Daniel, heard his story.
“So it happens, right?” Shaw works hard to compress his voice into a casual tone, but she’s not fooled. She hears the underlying agony. “You gotta expect mistakes with an experimental system. The swarm was operating on its own, doing what it was designed to do. It just picked the wrong enemy. Those algorithms needed a little work.” He draws in a deep breath. “But that wasn’t the end of it. After Saomong captured us, when they were marching us on this trail to Nungsan, I saw another mech. I saw it twice, following us. Watching. Someone at Kai Yun watching us through its camera eyes.”
A shudder runs through him. He stands up abruptly as if to escape it. The rifle falls naturally into the crook of his arm. “That last time I saw the mech, I screamed at it to send help.” He touches the scar on his lip. “Saomong knocked a couple of teeth loose for that one.” He presses his lips together, shakes his head. “Fuck me, anyway. Fuck them all. Because the truth is that we were abandoned to the enemy to save a black mark showing up on someone’s resume. And what happened to D… it didn’t have to happen. But there’s no taking it back. No unwinding it. Shit. I’m gonna go make coffee.”
True says nothing. He needs time and she doesn’t trust herself to talk, not yet. She stares across the courtyard at the bubbling fountain, exhaustion and adrenaline forcing her heart into a frantic, shallow rhythm as she thinks again about Li Guiying, a skilled and highly respected robotics engineer, a specialist in swarming algorithms, who began her career at Kai Yun Strategic Technologies.
Guiying was behind the swarm. True has no hard proof but she believes it. She’s sure Shaw believes it too.
Guiying cultivated True’s friendship. Why would she do that? Was she a psychopath, wanting to win the trust of those she’d hurt? Or was it a ploy to keep a potential enemy close? Or was it guilt?
True imagines Alex there with her, asking: So now that you know, what will you do?
Over the years she’s envisioned retribution in a hundred forms—righteous justice—though it was never more than a what-if fantasy, her vengeance denied because no one involved was left alive. She thinks now it was lucky not to have the choice.
Early morning light spills into the courtyard, coloring the limes and tangerines on the little trees. She gets up, follows Shaw to the kitchen—a narrow but modern room with high-end appliances and a quartz countertop. They’re out of sight of her surveillance beetle here, probably outside the range of its audio pickups too.
Shaw looks up from his contemplation of the brewing coffee. His AR visor is on the counter. No screen filters his pale gaze.
“I thought they were all dead,” she says. “Everyone who had hurt him.”
“You were lucky, then. I always knew someone was left. I never thought I would know who it was.” Gentle words, wrapped around a cold promise.
True is surprised to discover she wants no part of a murder—if that’s what he’s thinking. “You need to come home with me,” she says, shifting gears, resolving to persuade him. “You are the survivor, Shaw. The only witness. You need to testify, demand an investigation.”
“No.” He says it casually.
“You don’t have a choice,” True insists. “You promised them justice. Righteous justice. You owe them. It’s up to you to shine a light on what happened. That’s what she’s afraid of. That’s why she’s been following me.”
“No,” he says again. “She’s not afraid. Not of that. She’s had eight years to clean up the mess. There won’t be evidence left to find, no proof she had any part in it, or that it ever happened. All you’ll hear from officials on both sides is denial and outrage. If they respond at all.” He surprises True with a slight smile. “She’s tried to get close to you because she wants you to take care of it.”
This requires a few seconds to sink in, a few seconds for her to grasp his meaning.
When she does, she recoils. “No, you’re wrong.”
She wants him to be wrong. True wants to imagine Guiying as a psychopath drawn to her because of some twisted fascination at the magnitude of what happened at Nungsan. A psychopath requires no consideration. But if instead she is a secret penitent? Someone haunted by guilt she cannot bring herself to reveal?
True clutches the counter as she is slammed by the weight of a bone-deep exhaustion.
“You going to forgive her?” Shaw asks.
“No.” One syllable uttered in soft certainty. No.
It isn’t possible. It’s not possible to escape. In her head the video plays again: Diego’s screams, the crucifixion, the flames. The resolute grip of a black hole. Could Shaw be right? Was even Guiying caught in that inexorable orbit?
“I’m putting up a bounty on her,” Shaw says as he pours the coffee.
True catches her breath. Her hand goes to her mouth. Deeper and deeper, she thinks. She asks, “Don�
��t you want to hear her side?”
He shrugs and hands her a cup that she accepts automatically, only to be startled at the heat against her hands. He says, “Better if you take care of it. That’s what she wants. Why don’t you call her? Let her know her options. Let her know it’s time.”
True sips the coffee, a strong brew, perfect, and wonders, What is right action, in this circumstance, in this time? She despises the idea of a private bounty. That’s retribution. A warlord’s justice. Guiying’s involvement has not been proven, may never be proven. If Shaw is right, there will be no legal way to make the case.
So don’t resist.
Call her. Confront her. Invite her to speak in her own defense. Isn’t that right action? It’s something close, anyway. Better than a warlord’s bounty.
Her gaze returns to Shaw. “You haven’t posted the bounty yet?”
“Not yet.”
“Don’t post it.”
“Call her.”
True decides instead to compose an email. She keeps it simple, one line:
It’s time to tell the truth.
She appends the number of her temporary phone and sends it.
~~~
Does she expect a response? Yes and no. The moment feels like a break point between alternate timelines, each branch equally likely. She leans against the kitchen counter, sipping coffee, not thinking too much. Shaw busies himself collecting tangerines from the courtyard trees and peeling them, perfuming the kitchen with citrus oil. After twenty minutes, True says, “She’s not going to call.”
Seconds later, the burner phone rings.
Shaw meets her gaze, an eager glint in his eyes. She nods, swipes to accept the call, puts it on speaker. She doesn’t say anything though, and after a few seconds Guiying’s voice speaks into the silence with tentative uncertainty. “True? True, are you there?” Shaw cocks his head, the slant of his eyebrows posing a question. “True,” Guiying whispers, “I never wanted any of it to happen.”
True hears this as a confession but, if so, it’s also a lie. “Yes,” she counters. “You did.”