by Linda Nagata
“Why did you come here?” True asks her.
Guiying sounds plaintive when she says, “I thought it was over. I am here to ensure it is over”—her delicate fingers slide into an angled pocket on the front of her tailored jacket and the hair on the back of True’s neck stands up—“for the protection of my government, my country.”
True lunges to her feet, sure they’ve made a fatal mistake, that beneath that stiff, tailored jacket, or maybe in her shoulder bag, Li Guiying carries explosives that she means to detonate, eliminating all of them and burying this tragedy in the past.
Shaw leans in. He has taken off the centipede bracelet. It’s quiescent as he lays it on the little table.
Guiying’s fingers pull a tissue out of her pocket. She dabs at her eyes with it, even as she casts a wary gaze at the centipede. “A biomimetic. Meant for me?”
Shaw answers, “Your choice.”
“Don’t touch it,” True warns her. “It’s toxic.”
Shaw says, “Painless justice. Doesn’t take long. Less time than Diego was screaming.”
True’s stern self-control breaks in the face of this image. The video restarts in her head. Her breathing picks up and nausea burns in her belly as she sees again the flames licking Diego’s wounded body.
Guiying says softly, “I still see it too.”
True’s anger flares. Her response is a vindictive whisper: “Good.”
But a memory rushes up as if in opposition. She finds herself recalling the sense of consolation she felt as Miles walked free from his cell. That moment eased the dark gravity of the past. In contrast this… this moment… the weight of her hostility, the burden of her resentment, is crushing her heart.
Years ago, True used to fantasize revenge… but those fantasies never wore the face of this brilliant, remorseful woman—as scarred by war as any of them—who even now reaches for the centipede.
Before Guiying’s small fingers can touch it, True is there.
“No,” she says. An isolated word, swiftly repeated. “No! Get back! That is not how this is going to play.”
To ensure it, she stomps the edge of the table. The table flips. Guiying snatches her hand away, scrambles from the bench. The centipede spills to the courtyard’s tiled floor, where True crushes it under her boot.
She lifts her chin, turns to face Shaw, and finds herself staring down the barrel of his Triple-Y. He’s moved back several steps to get clear of the chairs. His back is to a pillar. A twitch of his finger is all that’s needed to end her life and Guiying’s, too. True forces herself to look up past the weapon, to meet his eyes, veiled by the screen of his visor. Oh yes, he’s pissed off. But he hasn’t pulled the trigger yet.
She draws a shaky breath and turns to Guiying. “No deal, no promises. Just get out. Go now.”
“That’s all?” Shaw demands in a voice vibrant with locked-in rage. “After what she did to Diego?”
Guiying hasn’t moved. She stares at Shaw. A mouse caught in the cobra’s gaze.
“Her death won’t balance his,” True says heavily. “And I want no part of a murder. I know Diego would have stepped up. Stopped this. So—”
She interrupts herself as a huge, winged shadow, faint and fast, sweeps the length of the courtyard. “Are they here?” she asks anxiously, looking up, squinting against the sun’s blinding light, turning in a dizzying circle to survey the sky.
“I don’t know.” Shaw sounds worried. “I’ve got no reports. I don’t know what that was. It’s got to be stealthed. Get under cover.”
Good advice.
True lowers her sun-dazzled gaze to Guiying, who still hasn’t moved. “Get out of sight,” True tells her. It’s not a request. True grabs her daypack and Guiying’s arm, hauling her under the shelter of the balcony.
The nearness of death has left Guiying shivering and pale. “What is it?” she whispers. “What’s happened? What’s going on?”
“You must have known you’d be followed here.”
“Yes. But I believed I would have time. True, please. I need to make it right.”
“You can’t,” True tells her coldly. “Don’t ever again look to me for comfort or for absolution. I’ve got nothing to offer you. Just live with it. Live with what happened. Like I do.”
She looks across the corner of the courtyard to Shaw, who stands in shadow, his daypack on his shoulder, his assault rifle in the crook of his arm, his data glove working as he studies the display on his visor, “Shaw, what have you got?”
“Nothing. Streets are quiet.”
Something cast that shadow. “We need to move out before ground troops show.”
He looks up. “You’re holding on to unfinished business.”
True’s grip on Guiying tightens as he moves through the shade of the balcony, closing the distance between them in his quick silent way. She puts Guiying behind her. The slight shake of his head reads as a judgment on the futility of this move. She argues anyway. “You said this was for me to take care of. I’ve done that. It’s over.”
The mission’s over. There are no further steps to take, no more mysteries to unravel, no more guilty parties to uncover. It’s done. But it’s left her hollow. There’s no sense of closure, no release. The old scars remain, and they have not faded.
As he looms close, she adds, unsure if she’s speaking to herself or to him, “I thought if I knew what happened, if I understood it…”
What? What had she expected? Had she hoped to make peace with what had happened? “Nothing has changed,” she says, looking up at him. Bitter words.
“Nothing ever changes,” he tells her. “It can’t. Because we all died in that forest. Even you, True.” His gaze shifts to look past her shoulder to Guiying. “Even her. Even if you never set foot in the place.”
No raving madman, him. But a killer all the same. Focused and determined. Eight years spent walling himself off from redemption. Why?
How did it come to this?
True ponders it, studying him with a tired, unselfconscious gaze, the same way she once gazed into the eyes of her newborns, striving to see into their futures, to glimpse the influence, the effect their souls might have on the world. For better? she would ask herself. For worse? With Shaw though, she strives to imagine the past. His path circumscribed by the gravity of what happened in Burma and by things that went before.
As if to assure her of his irrevocable fall, he reminds her in his soft dangerous voice, “No qualms.”
She feels it coming, the cobra’s strike. His gaze shifts. He’s a half step past her, faster than she can react. A squeak, a gasp from Guiying as his gloved hand grips her throat, right under her jaw. At the same time, his scarred hand moves to block True from reaching for her pistol.
But she has no intention of pulling a gun on him. She puts her hands up instead, palms out, backpedaling as she screams at him, “Let her go! Shaw, let her go.”
It’s not what he wants to hear. He wants her on his side. Fury contorts his face. Maybe it’s hate. He shoves Guiying hard, sending her tumbling to the tiles. “You want her?” he demands, turning to True. “She’s yours, then. None of this matters anyway.”
“Maybe it doesn’t to you.” The explosive violence in him is so close to the surface. She should just shut the fuck up. Let him go before she brings it down on herself. But her gaze drifts to Guiying choking on the floor—and she takes the chance. “Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, Shaw, but it matters to the rest of us.”
“You want to believe that. But there’s plenty like me. More all the time, ’cause good men don’t last. Diego was a good man and Saomong hated him for it, for daring to be a good man.”
“That is not why it happened! They didn’t know him. They didn’t know anything about him. They took him because he was already dying. If you were the one wounded, they would have taken you.”
“That’s not how God wrote the story, True.”
It’s his concluding statement. The end of the debate. He walks on, walks aw
ay toward the passage. She turns to stare after him, knowing she was wrong before, sure now there is still one more mystery, one more part of the story he hasn’t told her. The core of it, maybe. The black heart.
Guiying is curled on the tiles, crying softly. True crouches beside her, a hand on her shoulder. “Stay here,” she says. “Your people will come.” Then she goes after Shaw, pausing at the mouth of the passage just long enough to retrieve the wafer-shaped beetle from the wall.
Light floods into the passage as the doors swing inward. Shaw slips past them, into the street. She hurries until she’s only a step behind. Last chance.
“Shaw—”
He turns. “You don’t fucking give up, do you?”
“Nothing changes,” she reminds him.
“Shit.”
“You need to come home, Shaw.”
“You know that’s not going to happen. Can’t happen.”
She shifts her attack, a new angle. “You heard about our fighter pilot?”
“Your dead fighter pilot? Yeah, I heard Rihab claimed it.”
“Al-Furat,” she corrects.
“Al-Furat is Rihab now. The kid hates drones. And he’s a fuckin’ madman. Vicious. Worse than Hussam.”
“Come on,” True protests. “He’s nineteen.”
“Sure, but he’s lived harder than you and me. He was six when a drone strike killed his mom and two sisters. Burned half his body. Hard to forgive shit like that. You should know how that works.”
“Okay. I get it.”
“Your pilot was done when she pulled the trigger on those technicals that followed you out of Tadmur. A remote operator, throwing down hellfire to cause the only kills on the mission, no risk at all to herself. No way Rihab could let that go.”
“Did you help him?” She steps closer, wanting the truth, even now. “Lincoln thinks you did. He doesn’t believe Rihab could have set up the operation on his own. And he will come after you, if you don’t come home.”
“Fuck Lincoln,” Shaw says, backing away, backing down the hill. His truck, True remembers, is parked around the corner. “I gave him a peace treaty.”
Hope gives a rising inflection to her voice as she asks, “So you didn’t help Rihab?”
This is what she wants to believe. She wants confirmation that he had nothing to do with Renata’s death. The other things he’s done during eight lost years—they’re real. No denying it. She’s heard Miles’s graphic description of his capture and the executions. But she’s also heard Shaw pleading for mercy: Let him live. Take me instead. She is still striving to reconcile both truths.
“Think about it, True,” Shaw says in that low, lethal tone that makes her catch her breath. “I was paid to be protection for Al-Furat, and your operation kicked my ass. You tell Lincoln if he wants to come after me, join the party. Rihab’s already gunning for me, but I’ll—”
Whatever threat or promise he is about to make is interrupted by a sharp crack from overhead, like metal snapping.
Kai Yun
Adrenaline kicks hard. True’s heart rate spikes as she drops into a crouch. She looks up and down the street, and overhead. No threat in sight, but also no shelter. The buildings present vertical faces to the street, no eaves and no inset doorways, and the doors to the riad are closed.
She considers a sprint for the corner when a second, more distant crack echoes across the city. This time she spots the vertical line of a thin, descending smoke trail in the sky above the rooftops. It marks the swift fall of an object too small to identify.
More pops and cracks and smoke trails follow.
“We need to get back in the house,” she warns Shaw as she retreats to the doors, hoping they’ll open again before she draws the eye of whatever is out there.
Motion on the periphery of her vision. She looks up to see an object tumbling out of the sky. It slams against the roof of a parked car, skids off, and lands in the street a few feet from where she’s standing. It looks like a fragment of a fuselage, maybe from one of the municipal UAVs. And yet she has heard no sound of rockets or any explosions.
Shaw waves her into the riad, where the doors are swinging open. “Get under cover!”
“It’s a fucking laser, isn’t it?” she demands as she ducks back into the passage.
Shaw is right behind her. “That’s my guess. Looks like we’ve got a clean sweep of the sky underway.”
The sight of Guiying, already on her feet and at the inner end of the passage, startles True. The robotics engineer uses one hand to brace herself against the wall; she holds the other raised to her bruised throat. Her eyes flare in fear and surprise at their sudden reappearance. She starts to back away but True tells her, “Stay under cover.”
True gets out her MARC, gets it on, listening to the continuing crack, crack, crack of shattering machines, now faint, now sharp and near.
She moves up to join Shaw. They crouch in the passage, well back from the street, out of sight of the laser-wielding UAV no matter where it is in the sky. They leave the doors open, pushed back against the walls so they can watch. Shaw is muttering, engaged with his AR visor. True uses her data glove to access the sparrow’s video feed—and the colonel is suddenly with her again: “What the fuck have you gotten yourself involved with?”
She studies the sky, looking for the shooter.
“You aren’t going to find it,” Colt says. “A laser-armed UAV could be a mile up, or miles away.”
“It’s Kai Yun,” she says out loud. She glances over her shoulder at Guiying. “They followed her.” True recalls her earlier suspicion. “You did this, Shaw. You asked for this. You picked an open courtyard and baited it with Li Guiying just to see who would come out to play.”
Colt swears softly over the MARC’s comm.
Shaw says, “Of course it’s Kai Yun.” Keeping his gaze focused on his visor, he adds, “They think they’re invulnerable. They’re not even trying to be subtle. I’ve got nothing left up there. I don’t think anybody does, except them.”
“They cleared the sky? That’s crazy.”
“It’s gonna get crazier when the Arkinson launches.”
“The Arkinson?” she echoes in disbelief.
Colt says, “If you got any kind of exit plan, girl, now would be a good time to execute it.”
She ignores him and says, “You can’t scramble your air force, Shaw. This is a peaceful country, not a UA. Third-party military actions cannot take place—”
This time he looks at her, a cold gaze from behind his visor. “For God’s sake, True, are you quoting legal scripture at me?”
“He’s got a point,” Colt says. “Think who you’re arguing with.”
Okay. Right. She sees the absurdity, the pointlessness of protest, but the situation is escalating and she can’t help arguing. “Shaw, you cannot engage in an air war above this city.”
“I’ve got a defense contract that says I can.”
“What?”
“War is my business. It’s your business. We are fucking militaries for hire.”
“We are not the same,” she says. “Variant Forces is a black-hat PMC that has not signed the code of conduct and it’s run by you, a man who does not exist.”
“For God’s sake, True,” Colt rumbles. “Do you want him to shoot you?”
Shaw gives her a dark look that asks the same question—but then admits, “A local PMC is the public face of the operation.”
“Shit,” she says—all she can think to say given the twisted, tangled, dangerous world they live in. Impossible to know who’s in charge and who’s got military-grade weapons in their back pocket. War can happen anywhere, everywhere, at any moment.
But for now, the cracking has stopped. Doesn’t mean it’s over.
“Stay put,” Shaw warns her. “We’re stuck here while that laser owns the sky.”
“Yeah, I got that.”
To her surprise she hears voices outside, civilian voices. They sound puzzled, worried. She guides the sparrow’s
camera to look back down at the street. It finds people at the end of the block, looking up at the sky. More people on the roof terrace across the street. They’re trying to understand what’s going on. They question each other in concern, in disbelief.
“They need to get back inside,” True says. She is sure there is a ground game on the way, and really, it’s just a question of whether Shaw’s Arkinson can eliminate the laser before Kai Yun’s foot soldiers show.
That doesn’t seem likely.
A civil-defense siren kicks in with an ear-shattering howl.
Unsettled Times
“I was not expecting to see you here, Lincoln. I did not know you were in Rabat.”
Lincoln sits across a desk from Dove Barhoum, a man he has traded emails with on several occasions but whom he has never before met in person. Dove’s weathered face, sun-blackened and set in a deep scowl, suggests he is not at all pleased to be meeting Lincoln in his office now.
“These are unsettled times,” Dove goes on. “We all watch one another. We wonder who is an enemy, who is a friend… who has a contract for mutual defense. I have no such contract with you. But who will see you here and assume that I do?”
“Only your own staff,” Lincoln says. His left elbow is propped on the armrest of his chair, his prosthetic fingers rapidly tapping—a restless motion that draws Dove’s gaze and seems to unsettle him. “I didn’t announce that I was coming.”
Dove’s scowl deepens. He’s understood the accusation. After so many unreturned phone calls, a surprise visit looked like the only way to find him at his desk.
Lincoln says, “I am not here to put you in danger or to antagonize you. I’ve lost contact with one of my employees. I need to track her down, for her sake and for mine. I know you talked to her yesterday.”
“True Brighton,” Dove says. His scowl eases and his gaze grows distant. “She was here, sitting where you are sitting now. We spoke only briefly. She was careful to explain she had not come to me as a representative of Requisite Operations. Her business was of a personal nature. It is not something I can discuss.”