The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  But I know she will.

  So what’s my place in the world? That’s a mystery to me. I don’t know if I have one. And I’m too goddamn tired to think any more about it. So I take my helmet and the folded frame of my dead sister, and I head upstairs to shower and to sleep.

  • • • •

  Delphi wakes me a couple of hours later, with kisses on my face until I open my eyes. I take my time about it.

  Sunlight is seeping past the blinds, casting a warm glow across Delphi’s pale face. She is smiling, if only a little.

  “Anne Shima is here.”

  “Yeah?” I sit up, eager to see her.

  “And Trevor Rawlings.”

  “Ah, fuck.”

  I hate Rawlings. He tried to keep from me the fact of Lissa’s kidnapping, and when that failed, he tried to turn my squad against me.

  Deep down in a shadowed corner of my mind there’s a vault where I’ve locked up my conscience. On the rare occasion that I take it out I will sometimes find myself admitting that Rawlings might have done the proper thing given the circumstances.

  But I hate him anyway.

  Delphi sits back on the bed and gives me a look.

  “Did you know you participated in a kidnapping?” I ask her. “You’re a criminal now.”

  “I prefer to think of it as a citizen’s arrest.”

  I consider it. “You know, you might be able to sell that if you get the right judge, and I’ll testify we’re holding you here against your will.” It’s not funny, though. It’s vigilante justice, just like my dad said. “It was a big mistake to hook up with me, Delphi.”

  “I’m starting to see that . . . but then, I’m not sure what the right path is anymore. Anne’s brought a doctor with her, a specialist.” She taps the side of her head. “They’re going to inject Vanda’s brain with neuromodulating microbeads—”

  “What?”

  She nods. “I don’t know if it’s the same mix you have in your head. With LCS soldiers, the goal is to stabilize emotions while still being able to ramp them up at need. With Vanda—”

  “They just want to make him talk.”

  She nods, watching me with caution in her eyes, waiting to see how I’ll react.

  I run my hands over my scalp, feeling the bristle of hair that’s grown too long. “It’s a smart move.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I bet Intelligence has been doing interrogations this way for a while now.”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible.”

  The organic microbeads come in many types. Some are chemical sensors, others stimulate neurochemical production. I never thought about it before, but it makes sense there’s a formula, a pattern of cerebral stimulation that will make Vanda confess everything he knows.

  No doubt the same thing could be done to me.

  I shrug. The idea would scare me more if I had any secrets left to hide.

  • • • •

  I put on a clean shirt and slacks, and head downstairs.

  The house we’ve occupied has a modern-country look to it: casual, with smooth lines and basic furnishings. Anne Shima is in the living room talking to Jaynie, who looks like she hasn’t slept at all.

  “Lieutenant,” Shima says. She’s wearing an olive-drab pullover and gray cargo pants, with a pistol holstered on her hip. Her smile is warm as she looks at me. Shima is an older woman, early sixties maybe. She wears her thick white hair confined in a braid pinned to the back of her head. Her Japanese ancestry shows in her petite build. Despite her age, she’s slim and athletic, and carries herself with a military bearing. I like her. She’s no-nonsense, without Rawlings’s dominance issues.

  “Congratulations on your prisoner,” Shima says as she meets me at the bottom of the stairs. We shake hands, and then I look past her to Jaynie, whose face gives away nothing. Shima frowns. “We have a lot to talk about.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Have you started working on Vanda yet?”

  “He’s being prepped. It’ll be just a few minutes before we begin the procedure.”

  As she’s speaking, Colonel Rawlings—who is retired from the army, but happy to be addressed by his former rank—steps out of the kitchen. He looks much the same as he did when I met him in Alaska: a big man, broad shouldered, though a little stooped now with age. His white hair is buzzed in a military cut.

  We trade glares. He presses his lips together and then, skipping over all the accusations and the acrimony and the remembrances of the dead, he says, “We’ll know by noon not only where Carl Vanda’s nukes are stored, but where we can find the evidence that will prove the president had a hand in protecting Vanda-Sheridan. You did good, Shelley.”

  I hate Rawlings—but maybe a little less than before.

  • • • •

  Jaynie, Delphi, and Shima all disappear into the basement. Moon is awake, manning a tactical operations center just off the living room where he can keep an eye on the feeds from a perimeter of security cameras set up around the house and in the surrounding fields. The rest of the squad is off duty, presumably asleep.

  I eat breakfast alone in the kitchen—eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, cooked up by Rawlings before he joined Shima and Delphi downstairs. I’m trying not to think about what’s going on in the basement.

  The house we’ve occupied is climate controlled. A picture window looks out on green wheat fields and the approaching road. It’s a mistake to leave the window uncovered like that. Then again, maybe it’s not really a window. Maybe it’s a monitor set to display a view of what’s going on outside. Or maybe it’s not even showing me what’s out there now. I could be looking at yesterday or the day before.

  God, I need more sleep.

  Sleep is easy of course, thanks to the skullnet and the way it interacts with the neuromodulating microbeads implanted in my brain.

  When I entered the army, I volunteered for LCS service. It was cutting edge, it promised excitement, and since it was a new specialty, the opportunity was there for fast advancement—so I thought, Why not? I went into the army with a chip on my shoulder, wanting to show anyone who doubted me—wanting to show myself—that I could pull it off. Give me a demanding job, because I could do it as well as anyone.

  I volunteered. I knew what I was in for—but that didn’t kill the fear. The day I had to submit myself to the neurosurgeon to have my brain seeded with artificial control points—the neuromodulating microbeads—I was scared shitless. Just thinking about it now ramps up the adrenaline . . . reporting at 0400 to the surgical center at the training base, being sent to the showers with a depilatory, washing away every hair on my scalp, and then dressing in paper pants, the cold hospital air making the skin on my back and chest prickle.

  I walked into the surgery. I was to be conscious for the procedure, so instead of an operating table, a chair waited for me, equipped with straps to secure my arms and legs. As I sat in it, I questioned my own sanity. Why was I here? Why was I allowing this to be done to me?

  A nurse secured the straps. He smiled at me, his brows raised. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded. I didn’t want to show him how scared I was, but he knew.

  He spread a topical anesthetic across my scalp. It felt cold at first, but after a few seconds I didn’t feel anything. “It’s important you keep your head still,” he reminded me. “The more you move, the longer the procedure will take.”

  I nodded again.

  “Don’t nod. If the doctor asks you a question, use words to answer. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Next came twenty minutes of cold waiting until the doctor finally came in. Her name was Dr. Karn. A civilian, midforties. She spent every day implanting control points in the brains of soldiers.

  “There will be pain,” she assured me, “but nothing worse than a pricking sensation as the injection needle pierces the skull.�
�

  She was right: It was a pinprick pain, but drawn out across the entire time it took her ultrathin needles to pass slowly through the barrier of my skull. There were a lot of needles. Enough to keep the doctor busy over the next hour and a half. At each intrusion she would speak: “Position one, injecting. Position two, injecting. Position three . . .” And I would silently question myself: Can you feel it? What’s changed?

  Nothing.

  Every few minutes, Dr. Karn would ask me if I was doing okay, and I would lie and answer, “Yes.”

  During the whole procedure, she worked from behind me, with the instrument tray at her side.

  Not once did she let me see those needles.

  The memory of that day remains raw because it was burned into my head before I was fitted with a skullcap, which I wore until last September when the army upgraded me to a skullnet. The beads in my brain have no effect on their own. It’s the skullcap or the skullnet that triggers them to function. Ever since that day, every traumatic memory I’ve collected has been detoxified by the alchemy of a precisely engineered sequence of neurochemicals. I clearly remember the events of my past, I just don’t feel the full depth of the emotion behind them like any normal person would.

  That’s why it’s easy to put my conscience away in a box.

  That’s why it’s easy to sit here eating eggs and bacon while in the basement a physician forcibly installs control points in Carl Vanda’s brain. Pain is part of that process, but nothing he can’t handle. It isn’t pain that makes the procedure a kind of torture. Sometimes torture is just the shit that gets done to you without your consent.

  • • • •

  I’m still staring at that window-that-might-not-be-a-window when Rawlings comes back into the kitchen. He sits across the table from me, blocking my view of the hypothetical outside. “Not stewing in regret, are you?”

  I scowl, and shake my head. My plate is empty, so I push it aside. And then I think to ask him, “Is there a warrant out for me yet?”

  “For shooting the merc?”

  “And kidnapping Vanda, yeah.”

  Rawlings looks coldly amused. “No one reported hearing gunshots. The incident was not brought to the attention of any legal authority. But there’s a team from Uther-Fen at the abandoned house right now, going over the site, looking for evidence.”

  “So this is a private war?”

  “You don’t want to sit in a courtroom again, do you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Nevertheless, you, we, are in a difficult position. In the eyes of the law, we are all compromised.”

  “I understand that, sir.”

  “It’s too late for you to walk away. Do you understand that?”

  It’s beginning to sink in. I take a sip of coffee that’s gone cold.

  “I’m not going to bullshit you, Shelley. You already belong to the organization. You’re part of it. That’s a decision you already made.”

  I put my cup down, meet his gaze, and ask, “What is it you’re looking for, sir?”

  “An oath of service.”

  “I swore one of those already.”

  “To support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Yes, I know.”

  And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but the system is badly broken and things have not turned out all that well.

  “We all swore that oath, Shelley. Everyone here, except the prisoner. And we’re still bound by it, even if our activities have become extraconstitutional. But we are a military organization, and as such we have to know we have your loyalty, and that you accept your place in the ranks.”

  “And if I don’t? If I don’t agree with what we’re doing, then what?”

  “You do it anyway, just like in the army.”

  That means I have to trust those above me. I came into this because of Kendrick, because I trusted him, but Kendrick is dead.

  Rawlings is watching me. He doesn’t have farsights on. He doesn’t need them to read me. “An oath of service will formalize our relationship, and cement the foundation of trust we established during First Light.”

  “Are you my commanding officer?”

  This inspires a tight-lipped smile. “Shima’s in command of the field units. I’m her aide.”

  Good.

  “The organization is known to our allies as Cryptic Arrow.”

  “Cryptic Arrow?”

  “Yes.”

  “And we have allies?”

  “Yes, Lieutenant. We are not alone. Cryptic Arrow is an extraconstitutional force, but there are elements within the government and the military who will act to support our missions—even if that only means turning a blind eye.”

  This is the first time I’ve been given information on the organization, so while Rawlings is in a mood to talk, I push for more. “You said Shima commands the field units. Are there others besides us?”

  “We’ve put together another squad since First Light. Squad Two. But the reality is, we’ll never have a lot of boots on the ground. It’s the nature of the game we’re playing. We can’t compete on scale, so our actions will always be heavily leveraged.”

  “Meaning the goal is more propaganda actions, like First Light?”

  “No. First Light was not propaganda. That was an essential action. That’s what we do. Going after Vanda’s nukes is an essential action. You proposed the mission, Shelley. Do you intend to be part of it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I say it without hesitation because he’s right: I’m already in. There is no going back. This is the game I will play until my luck runs out.

  “Who is in command of Squad Two, sir?”

  “You don’t need to know that.”

  I’ve missed something. “You’re not going to assign me to Squad Two?”

  “You are the assault leader of Squad One, the Apocalypse Squad, under the command of Captain Vasquez.”

  I raise my eyebrows. “Captain Vasquez? Sir, Captain Vasquez kicked me off her squad.”

  “Vasquez gets to deal with the personnel she is assigned, Lieutenant. It’s her misfortune that she gets to deal with you.”

  Rawlings summons Shima and Jaynie from the basement. They stand as witnesses while I take the oath. The words are simple enough. I will not divulge my knowledge of Cryptic Arrow or betray any loyal member.

  When I’m done, I salute Jayne Vasquez, my former sergeant, now my commanding officer.

  Shima dismisses us both, telling us to catch up on our sleep while we can.

  Jaynie departs without comment.

  I stay to ask, “Where’s Delphi?”

  “Downstairs,” Shima tells me, “helping with the interrogation. But that space is off-limits except to essential personnel.”

  “Fine by me. I don’t want to know what you’re doing down there.” And then I remember to add, “Ma’am.”

  I return to my borrowed bed.

  As always, sleep comes when I invite it.

  • • • •

  I bolt awake at the sound of a gunshot. It repeats, the concussion muffled by walls but accompanied by a kick that vibrates through the bones of the house.

  I grab my pistol and launch myself at the door, throw it open and run to the top of the stairs. Delphi is below in the living room, standing with Rawlings. She looks up at me, wide eyed.

  “What the fuck just happened?”

  Rawlings’s explanation is terse: “We got what we needed from Vanda.”

  • • • •

  Shima wants us to see the confession. Not the long interrogation, just the summary, after they mapped their way around inside his head and knew exactly how to keep him talking, speaking only the truth. Everyone gathers in the media room.

  The video is fixed on Vanda. He’s sitting on the floor, on what looks like a mattress, with pillow
s around him that prop him up as he leans back against a wall. His legs are secured together in a body wrap, with his wrists shackled at his hips. The gray T-shirt he wears is dark with sweat. There’s a brown skullcap on his head.

  He stares off to the side, his gaze unfocused. He looks stoned with fatigue, dazed, at the failing edge of his strength, his head tipped back, eyes half closed, breathing elevated, sweat gleaming on his skin.

  A woman’s voice, one I don’t recognize, speaks from off camera in a kindly tone. “The nuclear terrorism that took place on Coma Day—”

  “I told ya,” he interrupts, his voice a hoarse whisper, his words slurred. I see his eyes shift toward the camera though his head doesn’t turn. “I had nothin’ to do with that. Nothin’.”

  “I understand that, but for the record, tell me one more time what happened, in your own words, so I can believe you.”

  “Yeah? And what’s it gonna be after that? A bullet in my head?”

  Delphi squeezes my hand. No one in the room says a thing.

  “What happened on Coma Day?” the interrogator asks. “What was your involvement?”

  He gives a little sideways shake of his head. “Tha’ was all hers. She cracked. That whole thing, it was crazy—”

  “Who cracked?”

  “The Queen. The one we all serve. My wife, Ms. Thelma Sheridan.” He turns his head to look beyond the camera. “It wasn’t her style to adapt to situations. If she didn’t like somethin’, she changed it. If she got hit, she hit back hard. Yeah, so she got hit: the company, the main company, Vanda-Sheridan—she put my name first but it was her baby—and it was bleedin’ money. But she didn’t know who threw the punch. It drove her crazy. Then my plane went down. Left me ninety percent dead, out of it for weeks. Somethin’ turned her head during that time. She decided her enemy was this fuckin’ invisible monster she called the Red. By the time I heard it, she’d made it her truth. I told her she was crazy. She said I didn’t know, I hadn’t seen. She said it was the Red that tried to kill me. Anyway, she had an enemy in her sights now, so she hit back.”