by Linda Nagata
“Okay, you’re past road warrior one,” Chris says. “Maintain your speed, Khalid. Miles, you ready?”
“Roger that.”
They start around the bend in the road that comes just before the lane. “On three,” Chris says. “One. Two. Three.”
The back hatch opens, restrained by a tether so that it rises less than two feet. The sound of tires on grit, the rustle of a light wind in the trees, the smell of dust. Then a grunt from Miles as he uses his boots to shove the gray, lozenge-shape of the dormant Roach out over the back bumper. It lands with a thud as he pulls the hatch down again.
~~~
“Roach is out,” Miles says over comms, his voice low, taut with tension.
Tamara too is on edge. Anxious, frightened, and full of doubt.
She’s staffing the research desk in the command post at ReqOps headquarters. Naomi is with her. Hayden is at the front desk, managing the video feeds. Chris is pacing. His gaze is fixed on the wall monitor, palms pressed together, fingers tapping his chin in a display of anxious energy. Jameson is in the room too, standing near the door, but he’s present as an observer. Tamara is all too conscious of Renata’s absence.
She’s aware too—exquisitely aware—of the risks that both the team and the company are taking. She tried to talk to Chris about it. “We need to reevaluate,” she told him after True was recovered and the team was making its way out of Rabat. “Take a look at the risks, and weigh those against what we are standing to gain. What is there to gain, Chris? What? We’ve got True back. That’s what matters. Why go on? There’s no innocent to be rescued. No bounty. We are risking the lives of our people to take custody of a mercenary who is probably dying as we speak.”
Chris silenced his microphone before he replied. “I don’t disagree,” he said. “But we’re doing the mission. Let’s just do it the best we can.”
But how do you determine best actions when you don’t know what you’re facing?
Tamara has no idea what is under the anti-surveillance canopy or inside the target house. She doesn’t know how many enemy soldiers there are or how they’re armed or if civilians are involved. Children? She doesn’t know, because the preliminary work that would have been done on any other mission has not been done. There’s been no time.
She’s worried too because she has no eyes on Roach; she can’t see it deploy. Ideally it will have hit the road flat, with no tumbling or bouncing. Its stout, jointed legs will unfold and activate—three on one side if it needs to right itself, or all six at once if it lands upright. Lens covers will open, giving sight to the tiny cameras that stud its body. The visual data they collect will allow the onboard AI to map the fine details of its surroundings so it can navigate in stealth, moving quickly and silently, much like its namesake. While this is happening, a whip antenna, a few centimeters tall, will rise from its carapace, and then she will get a signal. The rifle barrel will not deploy. The jointed mast that supports it will remain in its cradle, allowing Roach to maintain a low profile as it scuttles downslope and into position.
Four seconds after Miles reports that Roach has deployed, the robot checks in—
Leg R1 nominal
Leg R2 nominal
Leg R3 nominal…
—a long series of reports on each of its components scrolling through a window. She shifts to a navigational view showing a scene in motion: pebbled slope padded with dry leaves and powdered with dust, dry branches slipping past as Roach moves toward its assigned position. She crosschecks its route on a map and announces, “Roach is moving into place. All components nominal.”
~~~
Rohan is in the lead, advancing quickly and quietly, paralleling a trickling stream as he follows the path projected in his visor. He carries the folded starburst copter balanced on his shoulder, loosely wrapped in camouflage cloth. Lincoln follows a few steps behind, carrying the second copter in the same way, balancing its weight with his right hand, not trusting his artificial hand to do it. Felice is in the rear.
They want to get as close to the house as they can before the enemy’s sentinel drone catches sight of them.
A red light winks on in Lincoln’s visor. “Sentinel drone about to pass to the south,” Chris warns over comms. “Take cover.”
His heart booms in slow, powerful beats as he eases deeper into the mottled shade between trees. He goes to his knees, tips the folded copter to the ground, then flattens beside it, pulling his pistol from its holster as he does.
He glances around to make sure Felice and Rohan are also belly-down. Then he looks for the drone.
After a few seconds he sees it gliding past on stealthed propellers. He notes the gun barrel beneath the central pod. It doesn’t swivel to target them. It remains fixed, its muzzle pointing backward—a standard practice to reduce the chance of bugs clogging up the barrel. “Roach is awake and moving,” Chris reports.
“Roger,” Lincoln whispers. He regards Roach as the critical element in a surprise assault on the house, but it’s vulnerable to gunfire from the sentinel—so the sentinel is the first element he wants to take out.
Chris waits another twenty seconds. Then: “You’re clear to move out.”
Felice helps him get the folded copter back on his shoulder. Then they move fast, determined to get as far as they can before the sentinel returns. The soft, slick fabric of their camo doesn’t rustle and it rejects the grip of grasping twigs, but it’s hot and Lincoln is sweating. It doesn’t help that he has to work hard to keep up with Rohan’s long strides. He breathes consciously: deep, quiet, steady breaths.
“Roach is in place,” Chris reports. A few seconds later: “Okay, you’re at the hundred-fifty-meter mark. Prep the copters.”
Lincoln kneels. He puts the folded copter down, pulls off the camouflage blanket, pops off the restraints, and pulls the rotor booms into position, locking them in place so that the eight rotors are evenly distributed in a meter-wide circle. Felice stands over him, pistol in hand, watching the sky.
“Copter one ready,” Rohan whispers over comms.
Lincoln looks up to check Rohan’s work. He’s got the rotor booms fully deployed with two of them propped on little rocks to keep the copter level, but he forgot one step. “Get the plug out of the gun barrel,” Lincoln reminds him.
“Oops.” Rohan pops the plug out and pockets it.
“Cover it with the camo blanket,” Lincoln says. “We don’t want to launch until True’s in place.”
~~~
True is looking back behind the SUV. She wants to watch Roach transform but by the time she can see it, it’s already awake and scuttling off the road.
Miles has climbed over the seatback, out of the cargo compartment. He leans forward to touch her elbow. “Give me your pistol, True. I’m going with you.”
She stares at him, incredulous. “Are you serious?”
Khalid glances over his shoulder. “You can’t go. You’re not here as a soldier.”
The mics are on, so Chris is in the conversation too: “Talk to me, people. What is going on?”
True feels a gentle pressure as Miles’s fingers close around her arm—not tightly enough to interfere with her imminent exit, but enough to let her know he means what he’s saying. He tells her, “I’m going out this door at the same time as you. You might as well give me the pistol.”
“You don’t have camouflage.”
He holds up a camouflage blanket. “I don’t need a full uniform. This action is scheduled to start when you’re in position and that’s going to be ninety seconds after we exit the truck.”
Her mind races, seeking options, seeking to fit this new variable into her mental model of the coming battle.
“True?” Chris asks.
“Miles says he’s going with me.”
“Shit,” Chris says. “We can’t—”
Miles cuts him off. “No time to argue. Just call the mark.”
True concedes the truth of this by handing him the pistol. “He’s right, Chris. No time left an
d I’ve got no way to stop him. He’ll go if he wants to go.”
“Damn it,” Chris says.
But what can he do? Tell her to abort her role in the operation? He knows she’d go on her own. So he lets it run. “On three,” he says in clipped syllables. He counts down while Khalid gradually slows the truck to a fast walking pace.
The truck is visible to the second road warrior, but he’s low on the slope, he’s on the driver’s side, he’s still sixty meters away, and the flash of light and shadow as they pass beneath the trees is a kind of camouflage. True snatches a breath. Again, that soothing eclipse of shade across the windshield. She opens the door, slides out, scrambles hunched over for two paces—time enough to nudge the door gently shut. Then she’s over the road bank and into the brush, following the designated route that lights up on her visor, aware of Miles a step behind her, wearing the camo blanket like a hood.
The air is cool despite the sun. It smells of dust and some aromatic leaf. They move quietly but quickly, using the tire noise of the retreating truck to cover any sound they do make as they weave through sparse brush on a path that keeps the rocky outcropping between themselves and the house below.
True hears a man’s voice as they enter the rocks. Sudden harsh laughter and water being spilled. She pauses several seconds, waiting as a two-foot-long snake slithers away from her booted foot. A good sign, she tells herself. The shy snake’s presence confirms no third man is hidden up here.
Over comms Chris says, “Khalid is in the clear and our two warriors are walking back on the road.”
True looks upslope, evaluating the terrain, and concludes that the vegetation, the rocks, and her camouflage will combine to keep her hidden even if one of the soldiers is standing on the road’s edge, looking directly down at her position. She creeps forward again.
Now she can see two SUVs, below and to the right. They’re backed up almost to the shade of the anti-surveillance canopy as if poised for a getaway. One of them—not the one Rihab drove, but the other—has plastic crates and cardboard boxes lashed to a roof rack, and twenty-liter plastic jugs in a rack on the back bumper. The blue jug is labeled water in Arabic characters. The other is red-orange. There’s room for a third.
She works her way around a boulder. When she can see the roof of the house and the anti-surveillance canopy on the flat below, she gets down on her hands and knees and crawls.
Ten meters separate the bottom of the slope from the canopy. Close enough that she can hear the pulsing tone of an alert. She pauses to look up at the span of sky framed by the ravine’s walls, searching for the enemy’s sentinel drone, but she doesn’t see it. The tone cuts off. A man speaks in Arabic, his voice carrying easily across the quiet afternoon. He sounds annoyed, not alarmed. Something about goats… in the ravine? If they’ve been dealing with false alarms, it will make them less wary.
“I’m in position,” she whispers to Chris.
“I see you.”
Miles is a few feet away, crouched under the camo blanket.
True tips her head sideways to peer over the rock. She’s come down the slope far enough that she can see into the shaded area beneath the canopy. She looks for only a moment. Then she ducks down again, whispering, “Oh God.” Her hand goes to her face. She pushes her visor up, using the pressure of her fingers to fight the pressure in her eyes.
No one deserves to die like that.
Hell Breaks Loose
Lincoln stands in the shadows under the trees, back to a tree trunk, perfectly still, his pistol in his right hand, watching the sentinel as it returns up the ravine, passing over their position. He’s impatient, eager to move on. But he holds his position. They all do. No one moves—but the sentinel must have detected something because it circles back.
“Shit,” Rohan whispers over comms.
“Alarm’s going off up top,” Chris says.
“Don’t move,” Lincoln breathes. “The gun barrel is still locked. It hasn’t got a target yet.”
It’s possible the onboard AI issued an alert when it noted a change in the terrain caused by the camo blankets.
Chris says, “The enemy has decided that was a false alarm. True is in position.”
“Roger.”
The sentinel moves away, but instead of heading up the ravine, it goes back down again.
Chris adds, “Be aware that Miles is with True.”
“What?” Lincoln demands in a whisper. “What the everlasting fuck?”
“Save it,” Chris says. “We’ve got aberrant behavior in the sentinel. It’s circling, coming back for another pass. We need to launch. Clear those copters so I can get them in the air.”
Nothing to do but do it. “Let’s go, Rohan.”
They both move. Lincoln steps into the open, then stoops to carefully lift away the camo blanket. As soon as it clears, the rotors hum, each set winding up into a circle of blurred motion. The starburst takes off straight up and, as it does, its gun barrel swivels. Behind him, Felice starts shooting. She’s not the only one.
~~~
Tamara has preloaded both Roach and the starburst drones with multiple instruction sets. One of these sets uses map locations and biometrics in a two-factor confirmation to delineate human targets. The team is white-listed and so is Shaw Walker. There are also instructions for distinguishing children and noncombatants.
The drawback of this instruction set is that running the biometric identification procedure before every shot is slow, even on a human scale. In the frantic chaos of battle, the enemy can pull a trigger before an AI achieves a kill decision. It’s a parallel to the situation in traffic, where aggressive human behavior puts a properly schooled AI at a disadvantage. Tamara is unwilling to let that happen. She has seen what is under the anti-surveillance canopy—the cameras on True’s MARC visor captured it. She is certain there are no women and children present. There are only torturers.
Her breathing is ragged but her hands are steady as she revises the instructions so that Roach and the two copters can operate at a faster rate. The new rule requires only an initial biometric identification. Known elements to be tracked on an active battle map.
~~~
Lincoln draws his pistol as the starburst rises into the air. It’s darting and rocking in an evasive behavior as it immediately takes enemy fire. A bullet impacts one rotor. The parts shower down around Lincoln, but the controlling AI compensates for the damage, rebalancing the load on the seven rotors that remain, even as it shifts the gun barrel to target the sentinel.
The two machines trade shots as they rise higher and higher into the air, whirling and dancing and dodging around one another in a manic duel that shares the frantic grace of a flight of mating insects. They’re moving too fast for Lincoln to get off even a single shot at the sentinel, but if they’re doing any damage to each other, he can’t see it. The buzz and whine and crackle of stray bullets tears across the ravine in every direction.
He’s peripherally aware that their second copter has darted away, up the ravine and toward the house, to join Roach in the first wave of the attack—the machine wave.
Eight seconds, maybe nine have elapsed since launch. He turns to check on Felice, remembering the sound of her pistol going off. He finds her hunched over, one arm pressed against her breast and her hand coiled into a fist as she staggers toward him, still carrying her pistol in her other hand.
“Hey! Are you okay?” He grabs her shoulder with his artificial hand, just as a flurry of shooting erupts from the direction of the house.
She straightens up, looking that way. Past teeth clenched in pain, she says, “Bruised ribs, I think. Not broken.” Her arm lowers to reveal two spent bullets embedded in the left shoulder of her vest.
“Jesus,” he whispers. “Sit down.”
“Never mind that. You go. I’ll follow. Don’t leave True up there alone.”
He hears the firefight at the house intensify, punctuated now by the screams of maddened men.
~~~
True is on her knees, bent almost to the ground, gloved hand pressed to her forehead, fighting back against the dark gravity of Nungsan and the certainty that she has been here before, seen all this before, lived it and relived it so many times in dreams and not once able to make a difference.
Ah, Diego!
This time, it’s not a dream.
In her glimpse beneath the canopy she counted eight Al-Furat soldiers. Rihab was one. He wasn’t carrying a weapon that she could see. Two of the men were armed with video cameras. All the others held assault rifles either slung over their shoulders or casually in the crook of an arm. There might be more soldiers in the house. She doesn’t care.
She eases up to look again.
The canopy shades a nearly level, unpaved pad strewn with grit and pebbles. Three dirty white goats are lying down beneath it, close to the house. Shaw is staked on the ground at the center of the pad, face up. A U-shaped steel rod has been pounded into the ground over his ankles to hold his feet in place. A second rod arches over his neck, and a spike has been driven through the palm of his right hand, pinning his arm at an angle to his body. His left hand, the hand crippled in Burma, is still tied to his vest the way she left it, to stabilize his wounded shoulder.
His face and shoulders and the surrounding ground are wet. It’s just water, she tells herself. She wants to believe that. Water poured in his face to frighten him, to get him to talk. But she smells the reek of gasoline. A red-orange container, identical to the one in the bumper rack, is stowed beside the house. She hears a conversation, strangely clear to her mind despite her rudimentary Arabic:
Someone will see the smoke.
Let them see it. We were never here.
Shaw must be listening, too. She feels sure he understands them, that he is aware of what is about to happen. Impossibly aware, given his condition, but the knowledge is apparent in the taut arch of his back, the quick sharp breaths that make his chest rise and fall, the fixed, maddened stare of his eyes focused on the brilliant perforations in the canopy.
She remembers Daniel speaking of Nungsan and the syringe used to inject Diego with a stimulant to ensure he was awake for his execution, and to make him seem stronger than he was.