The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2)

by Linda Nagata

  No false hope.

  I close my eyes again, so all that’s left for me to look at are the icons on my overlay. My gaze settles on the red X, the icon of network isolation, all connections denied. A menu pops out, offering me options. I look away.

  In an irritated voice, Lissa says, “Turn it back on, dickhead.”

  Holy shit. The ghosts are speaking at last.

  “Lissa?” I ask in a hoarse whisper, knowing her voice was a hallucination, knowing she’s not really here, but I want to play the game. “Baby?”

  No answer. But out of habit I do as she says. I gaze at the icon again, the menu pops out, and I turn my network access back on.

  Right away I get a connection. It comes up as a closed network, no Cloud access, but there’s someone on the other side who knows me, because within seconds I get a text. I don’t recognize the source, but it’s got my passcode appended, so it gets through: Reply with your GPS coordinates.

  Jaynie thinks I want to die, but I get to prove her wrong again. I don’t know who it is out there hunting me, but I dump my location data into a text and I fucking send it.

  SUPPLEMENTARY DOCUMENTATION

  * * *

  EXIT INTERVIEW

  LOOMING ABOVE ME, SILHOUETTED AGAINST the moon-washed sky, is the tall, sharp-edged superstructure of an old-style navy ship, maybe a destroyer. No lights showing, so I can’t see the flag. No sound but the wind and the idling engines.

  I want to shout, cry out for help, make my presence known, but something tells me not to. I’ve got a feeling— a strong feeling—that this operation calls for silence. So I tread water, watching the ship as the long swells roll beneath me.

  Three minutes and thirty-two seconds slide past on my time display. I hear a quick intake of breath. Turning my head, I see a swimmer treading water less than a meter away. Moonlight reflects off the facets of his face mask. He speaks in a soft voice that identifies him as American: “We’re on the same side, okay?”

  I wonder what side that is, but I don’t ask or argue. I’m okay with it. Everything feels right.

  “Quick and quiet,” he says, moving closer.

  His life vest inflates as he wraps his arms around me and then we’re moving, a little wake burbling around us as we’re dragged through the water. We submerge twice as swells roll over us and then we’re at the ship’s side. A basket is waiting.

  I know the air can’t be as cold as it feels, but in the few seconds it takes to haul us up, I start shivering. I can’t make it stop.

  The deck is empty except for one man who grips my arm and gets me up before I have time to doubt my ability to stand. He steers me through a doorway into a narrow, air-conditioned passage lit by dull red lights. It’s fucking cold.

  “Got to move fast,” my escort murmurs under his breath. He’s a bigger man than me—broad shouldered, dark skinned, dark haired. Polynesian, maybe, with his wide, powerful face. He’s dressed in a black long-sleeved pullover with no name tag, and dark cargo pants that might be part of a navy uniform but it’s hard to tell in the vague light. There’s a glint along the curve of his jaw that looks to me like the tattooed antenna of an overlay.

  I hear the swimmer behind us. “Not a mistake, Kanoa,” he says in a soft but triumphant voice. “And we beat the satellite. Twelve seconds to spare.”

  “Shut up,” Kanoa advises him. “We are not secure.”

  It’s all I can do to stay on my feet as we move swiftly through dark passages. We reach a closed hatch. Kanoa holds his wrist to a sensor plate until an electronic lock clicks, and then he pulls the hatch open.

  More dim red lights are on the other side, illuminating shared quarters with four bunks stacked floor to ceiling and a plastic table with side benches bolted to the floor. We enter. The swimmer comes in behind us. When he closes the door, the lock clicks and buzzes. “All secure,” he announces as bright white lights come on.

  Kanoa steers me past the benches and bunks and into a shower cubicle.

  “Get the wet stuff off,” he orders as he turns a spray of lukewarm water on me.

  I’m allowed a minute to rinse the salt off. Then I clear out so the swimmer—his name is Griffin—can have a turn. It’s the first time I get a good look at him. He’s a skinny guy, Caucasian with narrow features, light-colored hair shaved to a stubble. Because I’m looking for it, I see the gold tattoo of an antenna on the back of his jawline.

  Still shivering, I get dressed in the clothes Kanoa hands me. They’re a duplicate of what he’s wearing: blue-gray trousers and a black pullover.

  Hot coffee waits on the table. I sit at one of the benches, wrapped in a blanket, struggling to keep my hands steady so the coffee doesn’t spill. When I try to speak, my throat is so swollen all I can manage is a hoarse whisper as I state the obvious: “You two aren’t regular navy.”

  Kanoa refills my cup. He sits opposite me, his dark eyes locked on mine. “We’re like you—professional soldiers wired with a skullnet and overlay, who work for the Red.”

  It’s a jolt to hear it put that bluntly, but FaceValue affirms he’s telling the truth—at least as he sees it.

  “Like you, we get assigned to address potential existential threats. Make sure no rogue operator has a chance to do what Thelma Sheridan did on Coma Day. It’s a covert war, just beginning. Black Cross, First Light, Silent Firebreak, Vertigo Gate—”

  “You know about Vertigo Gate?”

  “Those missions were some of the early skirmishes. There have been other engagements, ones you’ve never heard of. And there will be more. You need to decide if you still want to be part of it.”

  I lean forward, fired by the memory of this world as I saw it from orbit, this beautiful, fragile, irreplaceable planet that is our home. “Of course I want to be part of it.”

  Griffin, dressed just like us now, sits beside Kanoa. They trade a long look. I’ve got a feeling there’s a conversation playing out, thoughts picked up by their skullnets, translated and then transmitted between them as words, but I can’t hear any of it because I’m not linked into their network.

  After several seconds, Kanoa nods. He looks across the table at me. “You can go home if you want to. But when Susan Monteiro is sworn in as president, she will shut down Cryptic Arrow.”

  No need to ask how he knows about Cryptic Arrow. He already told me he works for the Red.

  Griffin wants to make sure I understand: “If you go home, Shelley, you’ll find yourself retired.”

  Kanoa isn’t wearing any rank insignia, but it’s clear he’s the commanding officer of this outfit, so I direct my question to him. “And if I don’t go home?”

  “I’m recruiting.”

  • • • •

  The few who know of Vertigo Gate consider the mission a success, despite the losses. Eduard Semak’s cache of rogue nuclear weapons has been secured and the B61 nuclear warhead he kept in orbit is no longer a hazard. It was recovered from the seafloor by a US Navy submarine and is scheduled to be decommissioned.

  Semak himself did not survive reentry while certain anonymous funds, in the approximate amount of $2.5 billion, were successfully transferred to new owners.

  The tragedy of the mission came in the loss of Lotus pilot Ulyana Kurnakova and her technician. Despite an extensive search of surface waters, their bodies were never recovered.

  I won’t be stepping forward to correct the record.

  Guilt cuts when I think of Delphi, but it’s better this way. She’s been through enough trials, she’s seen me die too many times. I won’t put her through that again—and it will happen again.

  This isn’t over.

  THE TEASER TRAILER TO THE NEXT ADVENTURE OF LT. JAMES SHELLEY AND HIS TEAM

  GOING DARK

  “WE ARE ENGAGED IN A nonlinear war. That means there are no ‘sides.’ There are no real allies, no fixed enemies, no certain battl
efield. Conflict occurs across financial, communications, propaganda, terroristic, and military channels in a continuously shifting matrix that can destroy a culture, crash an economy, or ignite combat depending on the weight and direction of competing interests—”

  “Including our interests,” Lieutenant Logan interjects, like this is some kind of valid counterpoint to my argument.

  It’s not.

  “Including our interests,” I acknowledge. “Whatever the fuck those are.”

  I’m James Shelley, captain of ETM Strike Squad 7-1—a linked combat squad that doesn’t exist in any official US Army record. Ray Logan is my lieutenant. Our low-voiced conversation is taking place a few steps away from the six soldiers assigned to ETM 7-1.

  We occupy a temporary berth set up in the torpedo room of a US Navy Virginia-class fast-attack submarine that is presently passing beneath the Arctic Ocean’s winter ice pack. The remainder of the squad is asleep in temporary bunks, stacked two high and set up side-by-side in a long row between the green tubes of racked torpedoes. The squad is mostly out of sight, at rest in the lower bunks, with their gear stored in good order on top. Only me and Logan are up, conferencing at one end of a narrow passage that runs between the foot of the bunks and one of the torpedo racks.

  “The point,” I go on, “is that the identities of the good guys and bad guys will change—they have to change as circumstances change. So you never know who the enemy will be next year, or in the next engagement.”

  Ray Logan is twenty-four, making him a year younger than me. At five-ten he’s not a tall man, but his lean build and chiseled Caucasian features could have gotten him cast as an extra if he’d tried Hollywood instead of the army. He’s a hell of a fighter who likes to be at the front of any assault, so it’s almost surreal to see him cast an uneasy glance over his shoulder, as if he’s worried about someone in the squad listening in. I follow his gaze, but all I see is Carl Escamilla’s big ugly bare foot sticking out from the last bunk.

  Logan lowers his voice even further. “Jesus, Shelley, I just never thought the fucking Canadians would turn out to be the bad guys. I mean, my mom is Canadian.”

  “Nonlinear war,” I remind him. “Shifting alliances. The target is Canadian. If it makes you feel any better, what’s going on within the target might have nothing to do with the Canadian government or even a Canadian corporation.”

  Our present mission is code-named Palehorse Keep, and like every mission we undertake, it’s been assigned to us by the Red. Our target is an exploratory oil-drilling platform named Deep Winter Sigil. It’s overwintering in contested marine territory that Canada wants to claim for its own—but we’re not out to referee a territorial dispute. The intelligence we’ve received indicates something unusual is going on in laboratories aboard the platform, evidenced by security so tight, even the Red can’t penetrate it.

  When a secret is that well kept, we assume it’s dangerous, possibly an existential threat.

  So our mission is to approach in stealth, kick in the doors, take command of the facility, and determine what is being hidden there. We call this kind of assignment a look-and-see mission. We’ve done two others in recent months. Both were illicit drug labs which is not something we’d ordinarily go after, but that’s the risk of a look-and-see.

  I think we’re being sent out repeatedly because the Red is searching for a specific operation. What that operation might be I don’t know. We’re told to go look, and until we do, we don’t know what we’ll find. It could be anything, from an insurmountable defense to an innocent operation.

  Logan gets a sour look. Like me—like all of us—he used to be regular army. Nine months ago he was part of a US training force in Bolivia. His CO ordered the squad to accompany a local unit on an interdiction, which is just a kind of look-and-see. Logan had a bad feeling; he argued the intelligence was faulty. He was right. When the local unit kicked in the door, there were kids inside; no bad guys. They lit up the place anyway.

  “I fucking hate look-and-see missions,” he says with bitter sincerity.

  I want to tell him I hate them too, but what I say instead is, “I’m going to wake the squad. Be ready to take them through the mission plan one more time before we go.”

  Our chain of command is simple. We have officers because someone has to be in charge, but we don’t use designated ranks among our regular soldiers. It isn’t necessary. None of them are here for the pay or the promotional opportunities.

  My focus shifts, picking out a half-seen, translucent icon floating at the bottom of my field of view. It’s the command node for gen-com. My attention causes it to brighten, making it stand out from the icons around it—all of them projected onto the optical overlay that I wear like contact lenses in my eyes.

  The icon offers me a menu but I ignore it, muttering, “Send a wake-up call.” My command initiates a signal that’s relayed point to point to my soldiers.

  Every soldier in my LCS has an ocular overlay like mine, and every one of us also has a skullnet: a mesh of fine wires implanted beneath the scalp that monitors and regulates brain activity. Each overlay receives my command and relays it to the soldier’s skullnet; the simple AI that oversees the skullnet responds, triggering a waking routine.

  There is no moment of transition, no confusion, no sluggishness. My soldiers awaken simultaneously, with machine precision. Some stretch, some cough, but within ten seconds every one of them appears—some sitting at the end of the bunks, some standing in the passage—but all looking at me with an alert gaze, eager to learn our status.

  Logan takes over: “Piss and wash up. You’ve got five minutes, and then we’re going to review roles and rules one more time.”

  All my soldiers in ETM 7-1 were officially “killed” in action or died of wounds, but death grants them no reprieve from the endless training and mission prep inherent to the army, because their best chance of surviving a mission is to understand it all the way down to their bones.

  Seventy minutes later the sub’s commander calls down from the control room to let us know we are ten minutes from our designated drop.

  “Holiday’s over!” Logan barks. “And goddamn about time. Suit up!”

  “Hoo-yah! ” Alex Tran proclaims, exchanging a fist bump across the corridor with Thomas Dunahee.

  The silence of the torpedo room evaporates as everybody moves at once. Our packs, our weapons, and our equipment are all ready. The only prep work remaining is to get into our thermal gear.

  Crammed shoulder-to-shoulder in the tight passage, we wriggle into thermal skins, pulling them on over the silky, high-tech shorts and T-shirts that are our standard-issue under gear.

  The skins are 1.5 centimeters of supple insulation that will ensure we don’t die of hypothermia—although we might die of heat exhaustion if our exit from the sub is delayed.

  I wear full leggings like everyone else, pulling them on over my prosthetic legs. The robot legs don’t need to be warm to work, but they are a heat sink. If I don’t insulate, they’ll drain the warmth from my body.

  A gray, tight-fitting thermal hood with a full-face mask goes on next. I fit it carefully. There won’t be a chance to adjust it after we launch, so I make sure it’s comfortable, and that it’s positioned so it won’t obscure my vision or my breathing.

  Already I’m starting to sweat, but I add another layer: An insulated combat uniform printed in gray-white arctic camo. It’s identical to the uniform I wore on the First Light mission, lacking insignia or identifying marks, making no claim that we are part of the United States military—because we are not part of it. We only pretend to be.

  It helps in getting around.

  I pull on my boots and then strap on a thigh holster holding a 9mm SIG Sauer. A pair of thin shooting gloves, heated with embedded wires, protects my hands. My armored vest goes on last, and then I cast my gaze back along the line.

  Boot
s stomp the deck as the squad finishes their prep. Hunched shoulders straighten. Gray-hooded heads turn toward me. Only their eyes are visible, pleading to be released into the cold.

  “Sweet Jesus,” Dunahee mutters. “Another minute in this heat and I’m going to puke.”

  He’s crammed into the middle of the passage. Behind him is Fadul, who has zero tolerance for griping. “Puke on me and I’ll stuff you under the ice,” she advises him in her quiet, dangerous tone.

  “Fadul, you’re supposed to terrify the enemy,” I remind her as I get my pack off the top bunk closest to me. “Not your brothers and sisters in arms.”

  Her lips quirk in a ghost smile as she catches my eye. “I can do both, Captain Shelley.”

  Dunahee mutters, “That’s for damn sure.”

  Pia Fadul is tall and lean, with black hair shaved to a stubble and wide, dark eyes. After the Coma Day nuclear strike, her unit, stationed in the Sahel, went without resupply or reinforcements for nine days, burning up their ammunition defending against an all-out assault. Her post was eventually overrun by a vengeful insurgent army. I’ve seen some of the video recorded by her helmet cam. Not something you’d want to see twice. There were no survivors. Officially, not even Fadul.

  Thomas Dunahee is Fadul’s physical opposite: Short, stocky, and fair-haired. He’s a college graduate who was working in banking when Coma Day took down the economy, along with his parents and sisters who lived in Seattle. He enlisted as soon as the recruiter’s office reopened. Fourteen months later, he was recruited by the Red.

  “Dunahee, you’re on drone duty. Logan, pass him the angel.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The angel we brought with us is a different model than the one I used when I was regular army. It’s smaller, with less range and no satellite uplink capabilities. But with its wings folded against the blade of its fuselage, it’s easy to carry on stealth missions. Logan retrieves it from an upper bunk and hands it off to Julian, who’s behind him. “Pass this down.”