Several people were out of their houses, comparing stories. Hailey focused her hearing on them and learned that several of the pins had exploded inside closets or behind dressers where they had fallen accidentally sometime in the past. Relieved that most of the residents in the neighborhood were uninjured, Hailey headed for the main street where the nearest collection box was located.
She inspected the box and found it to be intact but smoking out of the deposit slit in the top. All of them blew, Hailey realized. She had no way to tell how many people had been injured or killed, but she knew the locals were taking care of the victims. She returned to HQ, which was staffed by the night shift. Hailey amplified her artificial voice. “Sector Security, I am Agent Ramirez of SWORD. Thousands of pins that were not collected in the bomb boxes have detonated around the colony. Most detonated in closets or boxes, causing no injuries, but there are still many victims of blast wounds. Who here has field medic training?”
Several junior officers raised their hands. “You need to get out there and help people. Do triage so the most serious cases get picked up first.”
“Yes, sir,” they answered as they headed out into the streets.
“The rest of you, I need to find Commander Kraus. Does anyone know her location?”
“I’ve already commed the commander, Agent Ramirez,” a sergeant replied. “We’ve been getting calls from everywhere. Commander’s on her way to HQ.”
“Good.” Hailey turned back to the street outside: cars rushing toward hospitals, medics rushing toward victims – commotion everywhere. From several blocks away, she heard the crying of a child. She ran toward the sound. To her horror, she saw three boys gathered around a fourth who sat on the ground bawling. The boys tried to help but didn’t know what to do. “Let me see him,” Hailey said. The three friends jumped at the sight of the black figure. “Don’t be afraid. I’m going to help him.”
Hailey kneeled by the boy who held his hand against his body with the other hand and bowed his head and cried in his misery. With a flick of her eye at her helmet’s HUD, Hailey switched off the robotic voice changer, letting her natural voice come through. “Hey, kid, where are you hurt?” The boy looked up. Hailey’s heart almost skipped a beat. “Steven.”
Immediately, she removed her helmet. “Steven, it’s me, Hailey. Remember me?”
“Secret agent Hailey,” he said amid his sobs.
“Y’like the suit?” she said with a weak smile. “Where are you hurt?”
Steven showed his hand. It was mangled and bloody. It hardly looked like a hand anymore. Hailey knew there was no saving the hand, but she was going to save the child. She wrapped a tourniquet around his wrist and pulled it tight. “Hey, give me your shirt,” she said to one of the friends. “I’ll get you a new one tomorrow.”
The friend handed over the shirt. She turned it inside-out, hoping the sweaty inside was less germ-riddled than the filthy outside. She wrapped the shirt around Steven’s destroyed hand, taking away the sickening sight, if not the pain. “OK, Steven. I’m gonna get you to the hospital now. You three, go to the police station over there and tell ‘em the secret agent said you could stay there and get warm. They probably have a shirt you can wear,” she said to the shirtless one. “Tell the cops I went to the hospital with your friend.”
The boys ran off while Hailey donned her helmet, picked Steven up, and held him against her chest. Walking as fast as she could with her load, she headed for a nearby ambulance. “Are you leaving for the hospital soon?”
“Uh, soon. Yeah. Who are you?” the startled medic asked the black-clad Wraith.
“I’m helping.” She climbed into the back of the truck with the boy and sat down on the medic’s bench.
“Uh, you, uh, can’t sit there. We have to sit there. We already have a victim coming aboard.”
“Then is the front seat available?”
“Yes, but no, you can’t go up there.”
“I can and I will. Get this truck going a-sap!” Hailey took Steven out the back doors and went to the front. The truck needed a human driver; Hailey sat in the passenger seat, cradling Steven in her arms. She sat him on her lap and guided his head to her shoulder. “You never told me what you think of my suit? Is it secret agent-y?”
“Uh huh,” Steven managed to say between sobs.
“What happened to your hand, Steven?” she asked gently, taking off her helmet once again and stowing it on the floor between her feet.
“I was showing… my friends… a pin I found.”
“Where’d you find it?”
“Next to a… big white box.”
Hailey closed her eyes and swore under her breath. “Why didn’t you put it in the box like it said to?”
“Nobody… said to,” he claimed amid his sobs.
“The box said to. Right on top. ‘Drop flag pins here.’”
“I can’t… I couldn’t…” Steven howled as a spike of pain shot through his hand.
“Hey! Medic! I need pain meds here!” she called to the man in the back.
He arrived with a Pneumatic Medical pen. “This is the fastest way,” he said, injecting the medicine into the boy’s arm. “Are you his mom?”
“Be serious. He’s homeless. You got an antibiotic? Pretty messy wound.”
“Be right back.” The medic returned with another PneuMedic pen and injected the antibiotics into the boy’s arm. Steven began to settle down as the pain meds took effect. “What happened to him?”
“He was holding one of the pins that blew.”
“You want me to look at it?” The medic was much more helpful now that he could see there was a real human inside the suit and helmet. Hailey declined his offer.
“I placed a tourniquet. I think it needs to be amp-u-t-a-t-e-d. Let’s just get rolling, OK?”
“Two minutes,” the medic said, leaving to help get the victim into the back of the truck. He returned on the driver’s side and climbed in. He set the siren on and took off.
“Wow, Steven, you ever ride in an ambulance before? You get the siren and everything. How’s that?” Hailey asked.
“Good,” Steven whimpered.
“Your three friends, are those the boys you live with in the basement?”
“Yeah.”
“Maybe they’ll go to the school with you, huh? You know what they do in school?”
“No.”
“They teach you how to read words, like on the box, so next time you’ll know what it says.”
“I know letters,” Steven said softly.
“That’s a great start. School will teach you how to put them together to read words. It’s really cool.” Steven rested his head on Hailey’s shoulder again. His little, skinny body began to relax as the pain meds did their job. She squeezed him and whispered to him that things were going to be all right.
Steven was in the care of the surgeon when Hailey left the hospital. Corporal Lipton met her outside. “The boys told us…”
“He’s just a kid. Now a one-handed kid. We have to get these damn rebels off the street!”
“Agent Ramirez, we have four suspects in custody. You did good work.”
She looked at him. “We have hundreds of people in hospitals because my work was not good enough.”
“I suppose there are limits to what even a Wraith can do.”
“No. We don’t have limits. We’re trained, enhanced, superi—” The hopeless, ugly feeling hit Hailey so hard, she staggered, then sat on the ground. She dropped her helmet and put her head in her hands.
“Agent Ramirez, what’s wrong? How do I help you?”
She did not answer him. She wallowed in the despair brought on by the hopelessness that came out of nowhere. It was as if her LM was not working at all. It was a foreign feeling for a Wraith, but a familiar feeling for Hailey. She accepted the hopelessness into her heart like it was an old friend coming home to visit her. She knew it. She recognized it.
Hailey looked up at Corporal Lipton, an ordinary guy
in an ordinary job on an ordinary world. But it was because of her that he had this life and this job on this world. She had let his father die on Torra.
“I did everything I could to ensure the safety of the community.”
“I know you did. No one’s blaming you for this.”
“Not here. On Torra.”
“What are you talking about?”
“On Torra, when the rebellion started, I was sent there to put an end to it.” Karl sat down next to Hailey. “Rebels had infiltrated Sector Security, as well as the government, businesses, and the mines. I weeded out the bad cops and brought the rest with me to the mine. We got as many people out of there as we could, but when the shooting started, all hell broke loose.
“I should’ve just shot that damn Maxemeelin down in his house. And I should’ve shot that damn Sjorn dead on the spot tonight.”
“I’m sorry, Agent Ramirez. I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I should’ve saved your father, Karl. I’m a Wraith! Trained. Enhanced. Superior!” She took a breath and let it out slowly. “But I’m not. I’m not superior.” As she said the words, the hopeless feelings began to ebb. She knew where the feelings came from and why they attacked her: Mandy; the T’skala Nebula. There were some things she just couldn’t accomplish alone, despite her training, enhancements, and all the times her teachers at the Scabbard told her she could – and would – always succeed independently. But she had been unable to escape the T’skala prison without Mandy’s help. Hailey knew she was not superior to Mandy or anyone else; she would never think that way ever again.
With that realization, the despair that had gripped her in the T’skala Nebula last year – and returned recently to haunt her – simply fizzled away. She focused on Karl again. “It was Max who fired the first shot. Then all the other rebels started shooting.”
“Why didn’t you shoot Max if you knew he was the leader?” Karl asked softly.
She paused a moment, then explained. “We had to separate the rebel miners from the loyal miners. I had to let it play out for a little while so we could round up all of them. If I left a bunch of low-level guys with guns on Torra, they would have rebuilt the organization. Or maybe just terrorized the citizens.” Hailey stared into space. She could see it all in her memory as the TDN retrieved every moment from storage in her brain. “It was a ‘success’ because I prevented what was sure to become a long-term, entrenched, deadly problem on Torra. The ones I didn’t save…”
“Couldn’t save,” Karl corrected her gently. He looked her dead in the eye. “You can’t save everyone. You can’t solve every problem. It’s too much to ask, even for a Wraith.”
“I always thought of the victims I couldn’t save as being unlucky, anonymous casualties. But they’re not. They’re someone’s father, or sister, or child.” Hailey’s mind went to the burned mother and child in the street, then to the dead woman with the distraught husband in the nearby neighborhood. “I always try to make sure there are no casualties. Even the ‘bad guys’ – I try not to kill people, no matter who they are.” Hailey shook her head slowly. “I should’ve stopped Sjorn. He was right there. I should’ve shot him dead. Then all these people would be all right.”
“Maybe. Maybe not. How can you know the conclusion of a different trajectory?”
She smiled meekly at him. “How’d you get so wise?” Lipton smiled and shrugged. “Karl, I’m sorry about your father. I’m sorry I didn’t save him for your family.”
“C’mon, Agent Ramirez,” Lipton said, getting up. “The past is the past. Let’s do what we can about the future.” He held out a hand. Hailey grabbed her helmet with one hand and reached her other hand up to Lipton.
Clean Up
“Agent Ramirez, thanks to you, we have two Fansha rebels in custody, one dirty Sector Security officer held for court martial, the safe house on E Street and the people who live there, and a significantly lower casualty rate than otherwise would’ve been had Sjorn’s plot with the pins worked the way he planned.”
“What’s his status?” Hailey asked.
“Sjorn? Stable. He’ll recover, then he’ll go to jail.”
“How many fatalities from the pins?” Hailey wanted to know.
“Reports are still coming in, but so far…” Commander Kraus looked at her tablet, “One hundred and ten people treated and released, seventy-two in serious or critical condition in hospitals, twenty-seven dead.”
Hailey listened stoically to the report. Her LM seemed to be functioning normally again; she filed the numbers away to be put into her report to SWORD later. “I’m concerned about one more thing regarding the rebels.”
“What’s that?” Kraus asked.
“Bracken.”
“He’s locked up. What’s the problem?”
“He wasn’t always on the duty roster when the Fanshan shuttle came in.”
Kraus puzzled over that one. “Perhaps he took someone’s place when he wasn’t assigned… without changing the log.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Can you get Lipton in here?”
“Of course.” She touched her comm. “Janice, get Corporal Lipton in here.” A few minutes later, Lipton entered the commander’s office.
“Ma’am, reporting as ordered,” he said, standing up straight.
“At ease, Corporal. Agent Ramirez wants to talk to you.”
“Corporal, you worked every shift when the Fanshan shuttle came in, correct?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Did you notice if there was anyone else who was there every time?”
“Uh, there were many flights ma’am, and several officers on duty.”
“But you know everyone, right? Think. Who was always there with you? Slade? Gomez? Nayak? Hong? Bracken? Landry?”
“None ma’am,” Lipton said, shaking his head as she listed names.
Hailey thought about that. “Human witnesses are often unreliable – through no fault of their own,” she added quickly. “It’s just how the senses and the brain work. But maybe Karl’s right. Maybe… Commander, please give me a minute to review the duty logs, then I’ll need to see Bracken.”
“Of course, Agent. Anything you need. Lipton, go get—”
“No need. I have them.” Hailey mentally reviewed the same duty logs she had studied to find that Lipton was on duty every time the Fansha shuttle arrived. She looked at Bracken’s days, then Slade’s and Gomez’s and Nayak’s and Hong’s and everyone else’s.
“Got it,” she said after only thirteen seconds. “Where’s Bracken?”
In complete armor from head to foot, Hailey stepped into the holding cell that held Bracken. He started at the sight of the night-black figure and scooted away as far as he could in the small cell. Hailey flicked a glance at the voice filter icon on her HUD and spoke menacingly to the former Sector Security officer.
“You took points to let certain Fanshans pass without inspection.”
“No, I didn’t!” Bracken lied.
“You were at the spaceport every time the Fanshan shuttle arrived.”
“No. Who told you that?” Bracken was still stressed, but he told the truth.
“Another inspector was there every time you were not.”
“How would I know?” he asked defiantly. He knows.
Hailey left abruptly. Returning to the commander, she said, “I need Hong, Nayak, Gomez, and Maretti to stand against the wall behind Bracken. You’ll see for yourself who it is.”
It took a little while to round up the various officers, but when Hailey had them all in one room, Lipton escorted Bracken in to stand before them, handcuffed and dour. Bracken saw the four fellow officers and locked eyes with one of them. Inside her helmet, Hailey smiled. “Sit.”
Lipton led Bracken to a chair, his back to the officers standing against the wall, and the Wraith in front of all of them. Bracken shifted, trying to get comfortable in the hard chair.
“One of you was working with Bracken, taking altern
ate inspection shifts, letting Fanshan rebels through at the terminal.” Hailey let the accusation sink in, then stared at each suspect, calling them by name. “Private Hong.”
Hong reacted disbelievingly while Bracken reacted with smugness at the Wraith’s mistake. “I didn’t do anything with the rebels! I swear,” Hong insisted. Hailey put up a hand, which shut up the private instantly.
“Private Nayak.” Again, the accused protested. Bracken said nothing, but also everything – with his smug expression. Hailey moved on.
“Private Maretti.” The scene played out the same as the two before.
“Private Gomez.” Gomez protested, just as the others had. Bracken sat stonily – but his eyes dilated twelve percent. His pulse sped up by six beats per minute. His forehead temperature rose by half a degree. “Lipton,” the Wraith said, “take Hong, Nayak, and Maretti out.” With a wave of his hand, Lipton indicated the three privates should leave. Then Lipton left the room, followed closely by Hailey.
Commander Kraus had been watching the closed-circuit vid in the hallway outside. Hailey removed her helmet. “Did you see it?”
“See what? They all protested. Bracken didn’t say anything.” Hailey disallowed the internal curse that usually followed a statement like that: Sector Security – or marines or EURO agents or bureaucrats – are so damn dense. Can’t see the obvious right in front of them.
Instead, this time, she thought, Sector Security don’t have ocular implants, neural nets, parietal micrometers, synaptic hyperlinks, and every other advantage I gained artificially. They are not inferior humans. They are just not Wraiths. She breathed in deeply and let it out slowly. She could rely on people like Kraus and Lipton and Mandy, and herself – even without implants.
“Forgive me, Commander. I can see bio-signs you might not be able to see. Gomez’s protests were false. Bracken’s stoicism covered internal anxiety. Gomez is Bracken’s accomplice in this crime. I’m sure if you leave them together long enough, one of them will slip up and say something he shouldn’t.”
“You’re sure?” Kraus asked.
Hailey's Comet Anthology Page 16