by Linda Nagata
“No, I did not want it to happen,” Guiying says in a soft, confessional voice. “Please, before you say anything, do anything, will you see me?”
Shaw predicted it but True is stunned all the same. “In person?” she asks.
“Yes. I am… on my way to Rabat. After last night, I… I do not want it all to start again but when I saw that picture of Rogue Lightning, I knew it would.”
“The picture?” True asks.
“On the fighter, shot down during your operation in the TEZ.”
Shaw looks puzzled but True remembers what Tamara told her about a freelance intelligence agent visiting the crashed Arkinson, taking pictures. Guiying must have had an ongoing search set up for that emblem, maybe for anything to do with Rogue Lightning.
“I hope you are still in Rabat,” Guiying says. “I hope you will see me.”
True mutes the phone. She tells Shaw, “It could be a trap for you, with Guiying as the bait.”
“It’s probably a trap for both of us,” he says, touching his centipede bracelet, setting it to crawling in slow motion around his wrist and hand. “You willing to take the chance?”
Her smile is bitter. She’s been taking chance after crazy chance ever since she returned to the gate in Manila.
She unmutes the call, asks Guiying, “Will you be alone?”
“Yes. I’ve told no one where I’m going, and I’m flying on a French passport.”
So she expects to be followed but not right away. “I am not alone,” True warns her.
Shaw gives her a sharp look but his expression eases when Guiying says, “I understand.”
Do you? True thinks, though she doesn’t pursue the question. Instead she asks, “When will you be here?”
“I am scheduled to arrive at the airport in three hours.”
“Once you’re here, call me again.”
~~~
The tangerines are sweet and good for a burst of energy but it doesn’t last. “I’m going to lie down,” True says.
She goes upstairs to one of the bedrooms, lies down on a bare mattress. Stares at the ceiling, thinking. After a few minutes she gets out her burner phone, whispers a text to Colt: Don’t know if you heard all that, but we’re waiting on Li Guiying. Going to be quiet for a few hours. Take a break, and don’t text me back.
She closes her eyes. She’d like to sleep but Lincoln’s presence in the city weighs on her. Using ReqOps’ resources, it took only a few days to locate Hussam in the TEZ. If Lincoln fields the same kind of human/machine intelligence here, he might find her in just a few hours. He might find Guiying and follow her here.
True cannot allow that to happen. She can’t take the chance that Lincoln will interfere. This drama needs to play out to the end.
So she decides to check in. No more operating in the dark. She gets out her TINSL, knowing that if she wants to contact Lincoln, she has to do it legitimately. No way would he pick up an anonymous number.
“Heads up, Ripley.” Her whisper activates her digital assistant. “Text Lincoln. Message to say: Stay out of sight. Don’t go about. Don’t text me. Don’t call. I have an ongoing operation and any competing mission you launch will endanger me. You need to stay clear.”
Ripley reads it back.
“Approved,” True says. “Send it.”
“Text function is turned off,” Ripley reminds her.
“Right. So turn it on again. Leave it on this time.”
Ripley says, “Message sent.”
She closes her eyes and after a time she passes into a fitful sleep that lasts until midmorning.
At The Research Desk
In Rabat the day has just started, but it’s late night at ReqOps’ headquarters when Tamara’s phone chimes a scheduled alarm. She’s been asleep two hours on a sofa in the dimly lit lobby—just long enough to leave her feeling disoriented and imbued with dread.
She sits up and dismisses the alarm, then checks her phone for messages. Nothing, of course. Friday would have woken her early if any important updates had come through.
She lets the screen of her phone go dark. The only other light in the lobby comes from the glass exhibit cases. Her gaze rests on them, taking in the flags, the historic weapons, the worn equipment. She’s startled to realize that several of the old battlefield photos have fallen over. Knocked down by the concussion wave of the car bomb that killed Renata?
Maybe.
She stands, stiff and sore and disheveled, feeling mildly nauseous from the lingering stink of burning metal that’s still present in the building despite the installation of new air-conditioning filters. Or maybe she’s imagining the smell. Maybe it’s not in the building. Maybe it’s in her head.
Maybe it’s there to stay.
Getting too old for this, she thinks as she hobbles on swollen feet through the security checkpoint. “How am I doing, Friday?” she asks as she exits the body scanner. “Anything suspicious?”
The AI’s voice answers in its consistent, calm tone. “No, Tamara. You are clean.”
She washes up, then heads for the break room, where she meets Juliet Holliday coming out. Juliet is on call for any security incursions on the upper campus. She’s wearing ReqOps combat fatigues, an armored vest, and a MARC visor that links her to Friday and the security alert system. An assault rifle is slung over her shoulder and a pistol is belted to her hip.
Nasir Peters is on duty at the lower campus.
“Hey,” Juliet says. “I just made a fresh pot of coffee.”
“Bless you, my child.”
Tamara pours a cup, then returns to the mission command post, where she’s spent most of the last day and a half. Hayden is asleep on the floor, wrapped up in a blanket beneath the wall monitor. Tamara’s assistant, Michelle, is at the research desk. She looks up as Tamara comes in. “Hey, boss.”
“Anything?” Tamara asks.
Michelle purses her lips. “Not really. Sun’s up. A lot of early-morning traffic. But our copters haven’t picked up any sign of True or of Shaw Walker.”
In a city of over a million people, this is no surprise. True could be anywhere in it—or she could be gone, traveling on some dusty road, bound for an ungoverned area beyond the Atlas Mountains.
“Thanks Michelle. Why don’t you head home, get some sleep? I’ve got this.”
Michelle departs and Tamara takes over the research desk. She sends a text to Lincoln to let him know she’s back on duty. His response comes in a few seconds: Roger that. We need to shake a lead loose today.
Tamara replies: Find your friend Dove. He’s got to know something.
Lincoln: It’s on the agenda. The text doesn’t convey gruff irritation but Tamara hears it anyway.
There are other regional PMCs he could call who might be able to provide insight or leads on Jon Helm, but he doesn’t want to advertise his presence in Rabat or risk word getting out to Shaw Walker.
Tamara has assigned her digital assistant to search for references to True Brighton, Shaw Walker, Jon Helm, Variant Forces, and to search for murders, kidnappings, assaults, weapons crimes, vehicular crimes, and incidents involving biomimetic robots within the city of Rabat.
She skims the results as she sips her coffee. Several assaults, but none involve anyone of True’s description. A double murder in a manufacturing district—gruesome, involving small explosives—but the victims were male.
Her phone beeps with the arrival of a text message. Lincoln, she assumes as she picks it up. But there is no message. The beep repeats. She realizes it’s not her phone. It’s a cloned phone left on the desk, set up to receive Lincoln’s incoming communications so she can filter them, and forward only the mission-centric items to the field phone he’s carrying.
The message is from True. Her chest tightens as she reads it. Her heart booms in her ears: Stay out of sight. Don’t go about. Don’t text me. Don’t call. I have an ongoing operation and any competing mission you launch will endanger me. You need to stay clear.
“Damn i
t, True!” she swears, loud enough that Hayden stirs in his sleep. Tamara wants to grab True and shake her—or hug her. Both maybe. The message confirms she’s alive because her phone has a biometric lock which means no one else can operate it. And it implies she’s still in the city, with the freedom to operate under her own volition and sufficient intelligence resources to know that Lincoln has come. All good signs.
But True does not want Lincoln around. She doesn’t want him for backup.
“You’ve found him, haven’t you?” Tamara murmurs. “Now what? What the hell are you up to?”
True isn’t saying and she’s not entertaining any questions. Don’t text me. Don’t call.
Tamara forwards the message to Lincoln.
It’s nearly a minute before he responds and when he does all he says is Got it.
“Not good enough, boss,” Tamara murmurs, worried over what he might do. She dictates a follow up text. You need to give her time to work this out.
You need to find her, he replies.
Li Guiying
It’s noon when the riad’s double doors open to admit Li Guiying. She transits the passage in cautious steps, pausing to peer into every corner of the courtyard before she emerges. The sun is witness. It pours a rectangular column of light onto the tiles, the fountain, the citrus trees. The brilliance deepens, by contrast, the shade beneath the balcony—though this late in the year, the air remains cool, not even sixty degrees Fahrenheit.
Shaw has reorganized the courtyard furnishings, moving the chairs and the padded bench close to the fountain, where they’re under open sky. True objected to this, but he insisted on it. “Don’t worry. I’m watching.”
Of course he is. He told her last night he likes to know who his enemies are. He is using Guiying to draw them out. True doesn’t like it, but she resists the urge to look up. She’s not wearing her visor, so there’s nothing she could see anyway against the blinding sunlight.
She sits in one of the chairs as Guiying enters. Shaw stands behind her, stone-faced in his visor, assault rifle held casually in the crook of his arm. Guiying lowers her head in greeting. It is only the second time True has seen her in person.
She is thirty-four years old but still with the same waiflike figure and wispy, layered haircut that True remembers. Like that first time, she is finely dressed, wearing a tailored black business suit and carrying a large shoulder bag, clutching its strap in a white-knuckled grip. There are shadows under her dark eyes, and though her face is round, her cheeks are gaunt and striated with a faint red flush.
True gestures for her to sit on the bench. She does so, setting her bag on the ground beside feet sheathed in graceful black high-heeled shoes. She tries to keep her gaze on True but it drifts up, perhaps inevitably, to Shaw.
True waits, unwilling to direct the conversation. After a few seconds Guiying coughs softly into her hand. Then, in contrast to their first meeting years ago, she looks True in the eye, and her gaze is steady.
Details of that meeting come back to True and it’s not pleasant. All war is risk, Guiying said. Advancing technology demands to be used. Words that might have meant anything, but she clarifies their meaning now, and though her voice is a little hoarse, her English has become polished and her accent refined when she says, “I am responsible for the death of your son, Diego.”
At this admission, True feels her heart explode against her ribs. Eight years late, she thinks. It angers her, knowing that Guiying sought her friendship, watched her—out of guilt or insecurity, it makes no difference. And oh! it hurts to hear it said. But True did not come here for comfort. Only for the truth. At last, the truth.
Shaw, his voice a low growl, reminds them both, “It’s not just Diego. It’s hard to see past his spectacular exit, but there were more men with me on that mission. Do you know what their names were?”
The red streaks on Guiying’s cheeks deepen in color. “Their names were Francis Hue, Jesse Powers, Hector Chapin, Mason Abanov, and Shaw Walker.” Beside her the fountain sparkles in the hazy light. “It was a miscalculation,” she adds in clipped, determined syllables. “A mistake. I… wanted to prove the effectiveness of our autonomous capabilities. I wanted to show that the task given to those men could be done by my swarm instead… so that in the future there would be no need to risk the lives of our patriotic soldiers. It was a simple mission. I thought it was a perfect test. But there was an issue with the swarm’s instruction set, and… we did not have real-time communication to correct the aggressive response.”
True leans in, angry now. Guiying calls it a mistake, a miscalculation. Oh, yes. Because what she meant to do was show off her talents. She wanted to beat Shaw’s team, hijack their mission, leave them looking slow and ineffective with nothing left to do but quietly withdraw. And when it all went wrong… she abandoned them.
“You had communication,” True says. “You must have, because you instructed the last mech in the swarm not to attack, but to follow the survivors, even after they were captured. You knew they were alive.” She hears a rising strain in her voice but she presses on. “You knew where they were being held. Were you under orders to stay silent?”
“No,” Guiying says firmly, insistently. “My superiors did not know what had happened. I made a decision not to report it. Not then. This was my decision. I eliminated the data we received and I told them I was forced to destroy the swarm when it lost integrity and the components became scattered in the forest. I did this because I had to put my country first. We could not be seen as the cause of failure. Don’t you see? The recriminations that would have followed, the mistrust. Then after the video… I was afraid of how it would escalate, of what might happen.”
She draws in a sharp breath. “They were soldiers. They knew they might be sacrificed for a greater good.” She frowns down at the low table between them, composing herself, before returning her gaze to True. “It was your son, and so you think it was the wrong decision, but without cooperation between our countries, how many more would have died?”
“It wasn’t your decision to make,” True says, forcing the words past her constricted throat. She swallows and tries again. “You’re not sorry for what you did?”
“I’m sorry I had to do it.”
True presses her fist to her lips while in her mind she hears Lincoln saying, Someone’s got to do the dirty work.
Shaw picks that moment to step out from behind her. A cobra. Guiying shrinks from him, turning a shoulder to the unforgiving glint in his pale eyes.
“I never did finish the story, True,” he says in his calm way. “I didn’t tell you about our last stand. It was after Mason got hit. We’d been running for over an hour, and he’d been hit more than once. Then a bullet took him in the knee, shattered the joint. He couldn’t walk, but he could still shoot. Diego was all shot up too, hit in the side, the shoulder, the leg. And we still had Francis with us, though he was barely breathing, wasn’t gonna last long.
“I was the only one with no wounds, like I had a fucking force field around me. Mason told me, ‘I feel sorry for you. God clearly has plans for you and you are going to pay hell for catching the Old Man’s attention.’”
Shaw finally moves to sit down in the empty chair. He looks on edge, wound tight. “I told him what I thought of God.”
True glances at Guiying, listening with rapt, respectful attention.
Shaw says, “We set up a defensive position. Nothing else to do. And we held that position until we burned through all our ammo. Any UAV in the area should have observed that firefight. Command should have known, no matter what fake intelligence her office was sending them. That fucking Lincoln, he should have known. He was supposed to be shadowing us. He should have sent backup but we got nothing—and we had nothing left.”
There was a rescue effort. True knows this because Lincoln told her. But the first helicopter had to put down because of mechanical issues and by the time the second bird was on-scene, the forest was quiet and two men were missing.
<
br /> Shaw doesn’t know this, or if he does, he chooses not to believe it. He says, “Francis had passed by that time, and Mason too. He took a final hit right through the eye. Diego was the last of my men. He was in bad shape, running on adrenaline. And me? I wasn’t even bleeding. God’s a hell of a joker.”
His knuckles are white as he grips the Triple-Y.
“Diego didn’t want to surrender. He still had fight in him. He got his knife out. Said we were gonna make them kill us. I said okay, that’s how it would be—and we tried. There were just too damn many of them, and Saomong knew the propaganda value of taking us alive.”
True closes her eyes, tips her head back. Be still, she thinks as grief floods in again, a fresh tide, but she is proud, too. So proud. And horrified.
We’re gonna make them kill us.
A warrior’s resolve, when there’s no way out.
Shaw clears his throat. She opens her eyes. He’s looking away, looking into the past when he says, “So now you’ve heard it all, True. I hope it was worth the visit.”
She presses her fist over her racing heart, feeling used up, flushed and dizzy. She nods to cover the seconds it takes for her to remember how to speak. Then she tells him, “It was worth it.”
Guiying clutches the arms of her chair so tightly her hands look almost skeletal. “I am sorry,” she says. “I am sorry for the blood on my hands. I have tried to make up for it in the years since. I’ve tried to do good things. Then last night two more men died. That wasn’t necessary. It needs to stop.”
Shaw leans forward. “You triggered that when you hired them.” His words come at a fast, aggressive pace. “That was an autonomous response. It worked exactly the way it was supposed to. Not like that night in the forest. You fucked up. You fielded your swarm too early. The algorithms weren’t reliable. And another mistake—your swarm was too damn small. If you’d had sixty mechs out there, or a hundred, you could have taken care of us with no problem, no questions, no drama. No consequences. No need to be here today.”
She stares at him in shock, looking as if her courage has deserted her. Is she on the verge of panic? Will she try to run? No. She recovers herself, retreating into formal academic speech, even as tears swim in her eyes. “I believe you are correct in your evaluations. The swarm had been tested. We believed it to be combat-ready, but it was too small.”