Shadows Beneath: The Writing Excuses Anthology

by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler

  He pointed at the weapon in her hand. “With those . . . Maybe the Five Sisters led us here to give us warning.”

  Katin stared at him. “That’s the third time you’ve spoken of the Sisters tonight. You don’t have to act like you believe in them.”

  “To my surprise . . . I’m not. Not pretending, I mean.” The captain pointed at the cluster of stars in the sky. “You told me that every story has some truth behind it. Finding the truth here . . . ? Makes me trust the parts I haven’t seen the truth of yet. Feel like they must have been watching over us, you know?”

  Katin followed his gaze up, to where the Sisters traveled their path across the heavens. The trail of stars behind them might even hold Lesid. Maybe the truth was that the Five Sisters had fled their homeland, or maybe they had been blown off course, or maybe they were guardians who looked over her people. And the light of Musa lay behind them, casting silver across the sea.

  Brightest light in the darkness, it consumes all who enter. . . . Not all. She had passed through the light of the moon and returned.

  The moon threw its silver light in a band across the sea, chasing her home.

  I.E.DEMON

  DAN WELLS

  They called it the BSE-7, but they didn’t tell us what it stood for. We were just the EOD team, after all, and they were the engineers: they created the technology, and we had to test it. And that was fine; that was the way it had been since I’d been stationed in Afghanistan six months earlier, and that was the way it had been for years—for centuries—before that.

  “What kind of test do you want?”

  “The BSE-7 is an explosives nullification device,” said the engineer. “We’ve installed it in a JERRV, and we need you to drive it through hostile territory and see if it works.”

  “‘See if it works’?”

  “If nothing blows up, it works,” said the engineer. “We’ll follow you with the best detection equipment we have, to see if we can find anything the BSE-7 nullifies.”

  “And how exactly does it ‘nullify’ IEDs?”

  “I’m afraid you’re not cleared for that information,” said the engineer, so I kept a civil expression, got in the JERRV, and headed out into the desert with my driver and my gunner. We weren’t cleared to know what we were driving, but we were cleared to drive it through Taliban Central hoping somebody tried to blow us up. The glamorous life of a soldier.

  We were stationed in a firebase in what we called the Brambles: not only some of the worst terrain in Afghanistan, but famous for having the most IEDs per square mile of any region in the field of operations. I figured I’d be proud of that fact someday, if I lived long enough to brag about it in a bar, but for now it was a dubious accolade at best. Especially when it attracted the attentions of contractors trying to field-test their latest brain fart. It was far too dangerous to go outside the wire alone, so we joined a convoy; well, “joined.” Seven MRAPs loaded for bear were heading north on a recon mission, and we were following on a nearby road, shorter but more likely to have IEDs. My team drove the modified JERRV, and the engineers followed behind in an MRAP of their own. If we got into any serious trouble, the convoy could reach us—theoretically—in just a few minutes. I hate relying on “theoretically.”

  The first IED turned up about an hour north of our firebase; we didn’t notice anything, but the minesweeper behind us called an all-stop because their detectors had turned up a broken one—not so much broken, once we looked at it, as it was just built wrong from the beginning. Most IEDs are simple: two planks of wood separated by foam, with contact plates made of scrap metal, and an old lamp cord leading to a big yellow bucket of explosive. This one was one of the most poorly put together I’d ever seen; it looked like a broken clock in a Bugs Bunny cartoon, with wires and bits hanging off it in all directions. I told the two engineers I was sorry we hadn’t found a real IED to test their device on, but they seemed just as excited with the broken one as you could possibly imagine, like it was the most thrilling damn thing dug out of the desert since King Tut. I rolled my eyes and got back in the JERRV, and my crew drove on through the Brambles for about twenty more minutes before the engineers called another all-stop. I got out to look at the new find.

  “Useless,” I told them, examining the new IED we’d driven over. “Better than the last one, but still hopelessly broken. The cord isn’t even connected to anything.”

  “This is wonderful!” said the lead engineer.

  “Two IEDs inside half an hour,” I said gravely. “There’s active insurgents in the area, no question.”

  “Grossly incompetent insurgents,” said my driver.

  “They only have to get lucky once,” I said, but the engineers insisted we keep going, and my orders were to follow their orders, so I did. The third IED was only fifteen minutes down the road, and when I got out to examine it I didn’t like what I saw.

  “This one was live,” I said, showing them the disassembled pieces. “We drove right over it, and it could have gone off, and as far as I can tell it should have gone off, but it didn’t. I can’t explain it.”

  “The insurgents’ bomb guy is getting better,” said my driver.

  “Or our bomb-nullifier is getting worse,” I said, looking at the engineers. “The BSE-7 is what’s doing this, right? Whatever your little device is, it breaks the IEDs before they go off?”

  “Correct,” said the lead engineer.

  “But it’s not necessarily getting weaker,” said the second engineer.

  “He might be calibrating his power output to a sustainable level,” said the lead engineer. “He doesn’t need to destroy them like he did with the first two, just stop them like he did with this one.”

  I narrowed my eyes. “He?”

  “It,” said the first engineer. “I misspoke.” He smiled, and the other engineer smiled, and I looked at my driver and I could tell he felt just as nervous as I did. I glanced at my gunner, perched in the turret and looking for trouble, and he gave me a thumbs-up. No Taliban in sight. I looked back at the engineers.

  “So what happens on the next one?” I asked. “Is it calibrating its energy, or running out of it?”

  “We won’t know until we get more data.”

  “Another IED,” I said.

  “Correct.”

  “Which will either break, like these did, or blow up my JERRV.”

  “Correct,” he said again. “But it’s up-armored, so you should be fine. None of these bombs we’ve examined has been big enough to kill you.”

  I had a lot less faith in the armor than they did, and a lot more faith in the armor than in the BSE-7, but orders were orders, and when I radioed back to the firebase they agreed with the engineers. This test, and this device, were too crucial to give up halfway. I hung up the radio, shrugged my shoulders, and shook my driver’s hand. “Alpha Mike Foxtrot,” I said. “It’s been nice to know you.”

  The fourth IED exploded.

  It wasn’t a big explosion—it didn’t tear the JERRV in half, so the armor did its job—but it flipped us upside down off the side of the road. My gunner managed to duck down into the turret before the roll crushed him, and we were rattled and bruised but alive, and thanks to endless days of crash drills we managed to get all three of us out of the vehicle in just a few seconds. We came up just in time to see a wrinkly green three-year-old beating the living hell out of the engineers’ truck, and I want to be as clear as possible about this so there’s no misunderstanding: when I say the living hell, I mean the living, breathing, ever-loving hell. He was remarkably spry, that three-year-old, naked as can be and jumping around that truck like he was on springs, and everywhere he touched it the truck fell apart—not just fell apart, burst apart. Two quick leaps took him from the ground to the fender to the top of the grill, and the fender fell off before his toes even touched down on the hood. He reached out with one hand and grabbed the headlight, and somehow both headlights exploded—not just the one he touched, but both of them simultaneously, like
New Year’s Eve firecrackers packed with chrome and broken glass. The latch on the hood failed suddenly, spectacularly, launching the little green something in the air while below him the now-exposed engine erupted in a modern dance exhibition of bursting caps and hoses, each cylinder and compartment blowing off more steam than they could possibly have been holding, pop pop pop one after another like gunshots. The windshield cracked as the green thing sailed over it, and all I could see inside were the two engineers digging through their packs like madmen, their faces white with fear.

  My crew and I ran toward them, racing to help, and as I ran I raised my rifle to fire at the little green thing dancing madly on the roof. The trigger fell off in my hand, and then the stock, and then the entire gun seemed to field strip itself in a cascade of oily gunmetal. The bullets spat and jumped on the ground like popcorn, their charges exploding impossibly in the dry dirt of the Brambles. My driver reached the truck’s door and yanked on the handle; I expected the handle to come off, but was surprised to see the entire door come flying off, knocking my driver flat on his back as the sudden shift in weight unbalanced him. My gunner tried the lead engineer’s seatbelt, but it was jammed too tight to move. The little green man was dancing on the roof now, metal cracking and warping and rusting with each wrinkly footstep. I tried to open the other door and pull the engineers to safety (the door didn’t come off, just peeled away in long, corroded strips), but as scared as they were they refused to leave without their bags.

  “Just get out!” I said. Springs were bursting out of the seats like twisted daggers, sending puffs of upholstery wafting through the chaos like fat foam snowflakes.

  “We need MREs!”

  “What?” Somehow, despite the crazy green weirdo destroying the truck—or maybe because of it—this was the last thing I’d ever expected them to say.

  “We need the MREs,” they continued, scouring madly through their bags. “It’s the only way to stop it!”

  “To stop the . . . green guy?” He was chewing on the ceiling now, literally tearing into it with his teeth and ripping out chunks of metal, cackling like a madman.

  “Just help us!”

  “You can look for them outside,” I said, and hauled the engineers out by anything I could reach, shoulders and necks and arms, throwing the men in the dirt and tossing their heavy packs on the ground beside them. My belt came apart as I worked, the buckle bending nearly in half like someone was crushing it with invisible pliers, and the vehicle bucked wildly as the tires exploded in a string of deafening bursts. I went for my sidearm, drawing on the wrinkly green man at close range, but the rack slid off like it wasn’t even attached, and the bullets sprayed up out of the magazine like a bubbling metal fountain.

  “This one caught shrapnel in his neck during that last burst,” my driver shouted, looking at the second engineer, but the lead engineer drowned him out with cries of “MREs! Find the MREs, as many as you can!” He was already tearing open a plastic bag, dumping the interior pouches in the dirt and fumbling for one in particular. I turned to the wounded engineer and found a twisted chunk of truck frame lodged in his neck. He was already dead.

  “We need to get out of here!” I shouted.

  “I found one!” cried the lead engineer, and he tore open the smallest pouch from the MRE, the salt, and threw a pinch of the stuff at the wrinkly green thing still tearing the truck to pieces. When the salt hit him the green man screamed, leaped off the truck, and scampered behind a boulder.

  I stared in surprise, my eyes wide. I still didn’t know what was going on, but I didn’t need another demonstration to convince me. “We need more salt,” I said, and turned to the group with a shout. “Find more MREs!” Soon all of us were tearing open pouches of food, searching for the little packets of salt, and the engineer led us back to the flipped JERRV and directed us to dump the salt in a circle around it. We had barely enough to complete a thin, scattered border before the wrinkly green thing charged us in a rage, howling and brandishing a jagged tailpipe. When he came within a few feet of the salt circle his howl turned to a scream of fear, and he retreated again to the demolished truck, smashing it with wicked glee.

  My breath came in gasps. “What,” I asked, “in the bright blue hell, is that thing?”

  “It’s a BSE,” said the engineer, collapsing to the ground and leaning back against the JERRV. “Though it isn’t really bound anymore, so it’s just an SE. A supernatural entity: lambda-class demon, minor manifestation.”

  “Minor?”

  “It’s a gremlin,” he said. “They destroy technology. Made them a bitch to study in the lab.”

  I had no idea what to think, and my mouth seemed incapable of forming any words beyond the first aborted syllables of sentences: “To— I—” I shook my head. “What?”

  “That creature is the power source for the BSE-7,” said the engineer. “A Bound Supernatural Entity. The 7 refers to a gremlin, maliciously eager to destroy anything technological it comes across.”

  “And you strapped it to my truck?”

  “It was bound,” he said quickly. “Its energies were directed, like a . . . like a shaped explosive. All the tech-breaking power is pointed out and down, so anything you drive over, like a landmine or an IED, gets broken before it can do anything to hurt you. It can’t do anything to your own vehicle—unless, obviously, the binding breaks and it gets loose.” He gestured feebly at the truck, which the gremlin was now gleefully disemboweling.

  “That thing came after us,” said the driver. “Unless one of you’s a robot and didn’t tell me, I don’t think it limits its destruction to technological devices.”

  “Case in point,” said the gunner, “your dead friend over there.”

  “Now you understand why we needed to find the salt as quickly as possible,” said the engineer. “The salt will hold it, though, as long as nothing breaks the circle.”

  “So we’re safe here until the next stiff breeze,” I said, “or until we starve to death, whichever comes first.”

  “We’ve got plenty of MREs,” said the driver.

  “I think I’d prefer to starve,” said the gunner.

  “There’s got to be a way to kill it,” I said. “Our guns fell apart, but the knife didn’t—maybe that’s too simple a machine to be affected?”

  “You can’t kill a demon,” said the engineer. “Trust us on this one. You can only bind it.”

  “Exactly what kind of engineer are you?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer.

  “And we can’t forget the Taliban,” said my driver. “This is the fourth IED we’ve run across in the last hour. There’s a group here, and they’re active, and they’re doing something they don’t want anyone to see. And after all the noise our gremlin’s been making, they’re going to know we’re here.”

  I turned to the engineer. “Can we use the radio with that thing’s . . . anti-technology field ruining everything?”

  “Anything inside the salt circle should work fine.”

  “Get it working,” I told my driver. “Tell the convoy where we are, and that we’ve been hit with an IED. Leave the . . . weirder details vague.” He saluted and climbed in through the window of the overturned vehicle. I looked at the engineer. “Now: tell me everything you know about this gremlin.”

  “It would probably be easier to just read the manual.”

  “You have a manual for a gremlin?”

  “The BSE-7 is intended for field use,” he said. “We have a Dash-10 operator’s manual already printed, though it’s obviously just a prototype.” He pulled a slim paper booklet from his backpack and handed it to me.

  “‘BSE-7 Vehicle-Mounted Anti-Explosive Device,’” I read. “‘The BSE-7 is powered by a lambda-class demon, commonly called a gremlin. It is designed to be mounted under . . .’” I skipped ahead, leafing past the usage sections to the fifth chapter: Maintenance. “‘If the device fails and the supernatural entity becomes unbound, it can be held at bay with salt.’ Which we’ve don
e. ‘Salt can be found in every MRE, and should be easy to come by, even in the field. Your first action should be to contain the demon in a circle of salt, as an unbound gremlin inside a base or camp can be surprisingly destructive.’” I threw the manual down. “It says our first action should be to contain the demon, you idiot, not us.”

  “The manual makes that sound a lot easier than it is.”

  “They always do.” I picked up the booklet, found the same page again, and continued reading. “‘With the demon neutralized in a salt circle, report the malfunction immediately to your assigned demonologist.’ We have an assigned demonologist?”

  “They’re still in training,” said the engineer, “with plans to deploy just before the BSEs go into general use. We’d never send a demon into the field without a trained demonologist to wrangle it.”

  “Which means you wouldn’t test it without one, either,” I said, and looked at the corpse of the dead engineer. “Is that him?”

  The living engineer shrugged helplessly. “There’s a chapter on troubleshooting,” he said meekly.

  I looked up at the gremlin, still loudly tearing the truck to pieces. “If it causes trouble, we shoot it?”

  “I don’t recommend it.”

  “We have an RPG-7 in the JERRV,” said the gunner. “Took it off some Taliban last week.”

  “I really don’t recommend it,” the engineer insisted. “Any weapon you use against it will fail as soon as it leaves the salt circle, and I don’t think I have to tell you what happens when a rocket-propelled grenade fails.”

  “It was just a suggestion,” said the gunner.

  “‘Chapter 6,’” I read, “‘Troubleshooting. If you have no access to a demonologist, your first priority is to reinforce the salt circle containing the demon and requisition a new demonologist immediately.’ Thanks, that’s very helpful. ‘If you absolutely must attempt to control the demon without a trained expert, there are some tricks that may be useful. One: gremlins love sugar.’ Seriously?”

  “Absolutely love it,” said the engineer.