by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
“Huh. ‘Two: the binding agent on the BSE-7, unless completely destroyed, can be used again, with the understanding that damaged binding agents are prone to unexpected catastrophic failure.’”
“Take a picture of him eating the truck,” said the driver, crawling back out of the JERRV. “You can put the photo in the manual as a demonstration of ‘unexpected catastrophic failure.’”
“Did the radio work?” I asked him.
“Well enough. The good news is, the insurgents in this area won’t be coming after us, because they’re engaged in a firefight with our convoy.”
“And the bad news,” I said, “is that our convoy can’t come get us because they’re engaged in a firefight with insurgents.”
“Exactamundo. And so far they’re losing, so they might not come get us at all. It’s a very big group of insurgents.”
I stood up and looked at the JERRV’s blackened undercarriage. “So we’re on our own, in enemy territory, under direct assault by a demon, and the only thing we can use to stop it is that thing.” I pointed at the shattered BSE-7, a charred lump that looked like a pie plate. It had been torn open, and the inside was full of something dark and sticky.
“Smells sweet,” said the gunner.
“They like sugar,” said the engineer with a shrug.
“So it is a pie plate.” I leaned in and smelled it. “Smells like . . . strawberry jam.”
“That gremlin’s almost three feet tall,” said the gunner. “If he was crammed inside that tiny thing, it’s no wonder he’s pissed.”
“That goop—which, yes, probably contains strawberry jam—is an arcane demon-binding agent,” said the lead engineer. “Once he’s bound into it, the physical space doesn’t really matter; you could bind him into a teaspoon, and that’s all the space you’d need. The majority of the BSE-7 is made up of the shaping agents that direct the gremlin’s power away from the vehicle.”
“How do we get it back in?”
“The manual explains it in detail,” said the engineer, “but the basic gist is fire and blood.”
“That’s horrible.”
“It’s a demon,” he said. “What did you expect?”
I sat down again, a plan slowly forming in my head. “What kind of grenades do we have for the captured RPG?”
“PG-2s,” said the gunner. “Old Soviet stuff.”
“You really don’t want to shoot him,” said the lead engineer.
“Sure I do,” I told him, skimming through the section on demon binding. It was far more gruesome than expected. “Just not in the way you think.” I turned to the gunner. “Get me a grenade; take off the casing.” I told the driver to get a fire going, and last I pointed at the engineer. “One of those MREs we dumped out looking for salt was spaghetti, which means that somewhere out there is a pouch full of cherry cobbler. Go get it.”
“Outside of the circle?”
“Unless you brought it with you, yeah.”
“But . . . there’s a gremlin out there.”
“There’s your gremlin out there,” I said, “so anything it does to you, you probably deserve. Don’t be scared, though, I’m coming with you—I’ll get the body, you get the cobbler.”
“Why do you need the body?”
“Have you read the demon binding manual?”
His face went pale. “Cobbler. Check.”
I took a pinch of salt from the edge of the circle, careful not to break it completely, and on three we ran, me for the dead man and the engineer for the pile of scattered MRE pouches. The gremlin ignored us at first, too busy trashing the truck, but as I dragged the body back toward the JERRV he finally noticed us and leaped toward the engineer with a cry of malicious joy. I threw the dead body into the circle and ran back toward the engineer, still scrambling on his hands and knees for the cherry cobbler. I threw the salt at the gremlin, buying us a few precious seconds, and together we found the pouch of cobbler and ran back to the JERRV. The engineer’s shirt pocket was stained dark blue, and his pants and belt were singed.
“All my pens broke,” he said sadly, gesturing at the stains.
“And the burn marks?”
“My phone caught fire.”
I tore open the cobbler pack, reached out past the salt, and placed it on the ground. The gremlin snarled at us, furious that we’d gotten away a second time, but soon he paused, sniffed the air, and crept closer. He looked at the cobbler, then at the salt, then at us. He sniffed again and took another step. A few moments later he was sitting by the open dessert pouch, his hands and face smeared with thick red syrup as he munched happily on the cherries.
“That’s the weirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen,” said the gunner.
“You got my grenade?”
“Here.” He handed me a PG-2, basically a metal tube with a short, stubby metal cone on the end. He’d removed the tapered endpiece, exposing a cone of explosives inside, and I set that part down far away from the fire. The empty endpiece I filled with binding agent from the BSE-7, scooping it out with the flat of my knife, and then I sat back, looking at the others.
“This is going to get gross.”
They nodded, eyes grim. I took a deep breath, propped open the demon’s Dash-10 manual with a rock, and proceeded to perform unspeakably horrible acts on the body of the dead engineer. The lead engineer fainted twice before the ritual was done, and I admit that I was pretty woozy as well—from disgust rather than blood loss, since I only needed a couple of drops of my own. With the bloody symbols drawn on the sides of the grenade, and the endpiece thoroughly smeared with newly reinforced binding goop, I took a deep breath, said a quick prayer (apologizing, as I did, for dabbling in demonology), and tossed the endpiece out past the salt and into the gremlin’s half-finished cobbler. The Dash-10 included a handy pronunciation guide for the incantation, and as I recited the words the gremlin was sucked into the binding agent like a genie going into a bottle.
“I take it back,” said the gunner. “That is the weirdest damn thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Reassemble the grenade,” I said, and handed him the gently smoking endpiece. He looked at it, then at the exposed explosives of the grenade, and shook his head.
“You want me to attach a ‘make things break’ demon to a high-explosive warhead? I’m not convinced that this is the smartest thing either of us has ever done.”
“Just fit it on,” I said. “This fresh, it’ll hold for a couple of hours without any trouble.”
The engineer was awake again. “What now?” he asked.
“Now we shoot him.”
He frowned, confused, and I smiled.
“Now we shoot him at the insurgents.”
The Taliban were still attacking our convoy, and we were only about five klicks away; with the gremlin no longer wreaking havoc on the truck we could hear the occasional burst of gunfire. The gunner finished reassembling the grenade, and we packed as much gear as we could before running back through the desert. The Afghanistan hills were steep and rocky under any circumstances, and even more so here in the Brambles; our travel was slow, but the engineer kept up more admirably than I expected. We made it to a low ridge after barely twenty minutes of running. We didn’t have a perfect view of the battle, but we could tell the insurgents were winning—they had mortars, snipers, good cover, and higher ground than our guys, who were essentially pinned down behind the smoking wreckage of their vehicles. It was the biggest group of insurgents I’d ever seen, and there was no backup in sight; well, none but us. I loaded the Rocket-Propelled Gremlin in the launch tube and handed it to the gunner.
“Don’t worry about a target,” I said, “just land the little bastard in the middle of their gun line and let him go to work.”
The gunner judged the distance carefully, tested the wind, aimed high for extra range. “Alpha Mike Foxtrot,” he whispered, and pulled the trigger.
The grenade sailed over the valley, trailing smoke in a fierce, straight line, and exploded in a giant ball of fire a
gainst the back of a Taliban jeep. One by one we watched as the distant insurgents stopped firing forward and turned to look at their own battle line, at the clouds of dust and oil that flew up first in one place and then another. We were too far away to see the gremlin himself, but we could track his progress easily, watching as a truck fell to pieces, as a mounted machine gun sloughed parts like a crumbling cookie, as a mortar misfired and exploded on the ground. A few of the Taliban tried to fight it, but others simply ran in terror, some toward us and some toward our convoy. No longer pinned down by fire, our friendly forces caught them easily. We zip-tied their thumbs, frisked them for weapons, and started the slow walk around the frenzied gremlin toward our convoy.
“There’s enough machinery in that insurgent battle line to keep him busy for a week,” I said. “You’d better get another demonologist in by then, because if I have to do another binding ritual I’m using you for parts.”
“I’ll put in a call the instant we get back to base.”
“Good,” I said. “Now tell me something else: this gremlin was the BSE-7?”
“Correct.”
“So there are at least six other Bound Supernatural Entities being developed for field use?”
“Eleven, actually.” The engineer smiled. “How would you like to perform another test next week?”
AN HONEST DEATH
HOWARD TAYLER
The chirp in my earbud means that Sinclair Wollreich has pushed the panic button in his office. I slide my sidearm clear of its shoulder holster and point it at the floor in front of me in less than a second. Barry and Mohammed have theirs out and down as well, and the three of us run for the office door. I nod at Barry, who grabs the handle and pulls the door open, stepping back as Mo and I sweep straight into the room.
In and to the left. My side is clear.
“Clear,” says Mo, and I reply, “Clear!”
Barry swings in behind us, a third set of eyes on a room that is empty except for our boss.
Mr. Wollreich looks pale, like he’s seen a ghost, or maybe just jumped back onto the curb after being missed by a bus. Other than that he looks fine—middle-aged, and a little soft, but dressed to the nines in a suit that costs more than my car.
“What is it, sir?” I ask.
“It’s . . .” He glances around, still wearing that I-dodged-a-bullet-but-maybe-there’s-another-one-coming look. Then he turns and looks me in the eye, and for only the third time in the eighteen months I’ve worked for him, he lies to me. “It’s nothing, Cole. Just a drill.”
Mo mouths the word “inconceivable,” quoting The Princess Bride in order to stifle a stream of blasphemy.
“Yes, sir,” I say. “Let’s finish like it’s the real thing, then. Mo, take the corners. Barry, window. I’ll check the desk.”
“Cole,” Wollreich addresses me again, “It’s okay. I just wanted to see how quickly you guys could get here. I think you took four seconds.”
Liar. Also, that was seven seconds at least. I don’t know what he’s hiding, but my brain is already spinning scenarios. Something scared him, something he thought we could protect him from, but by the time we arrived it was gone. Or maybe it had never been here. Maybe Sinclair Wollreich hallucinated something frightening, and is now covering up for that hallucination. That . . . that makes a lot of sense. He doesn’t strike me as the hallucinating type, but he is the head of a pharmaceutical company, so maybe he’s on something.
Regardless, he pushed the panic button, and that means I don’t get to stand down until I’m sure he’s safe. He lied to me, very uncharacteristically, and that worries me.
“Sorry, sir. You’re feigning duress pretty effectively. We have to finish the sweep, and put our eyes on everything.”
Barry looks at me from behind Wollreich, and I nod. Eyes on everything is his cue for some impromptu misdirection. He holsters his weapon, pulls a chair over to the window, and steps onto it as if to check the upper frame. He balances poorly—deliberately poorly—and begins to fall.
“Oops, watch out!” he says as he corrects and jumps clear of the tipping chair.
Wollreich turns, and also steps clear.
Mo, in the far corner of the room, reaches up and sticks a cam-dot on the spot where the molding joins the ceiling, a position where it can see the entire room while remaining almost invisible.
By design, Wollreich’s office has no cameras in it. I objected to this on general principles a year and a half ago, but backed down. Now it does have a camera in it. Just because I backed down doesn’t mean I didn’t plan for contingencies.
“First day in the new shoes, Barry?” asks Mo.
“Actually it’s the fourth day, but I’m trying new inserts today and I don’t think I like them.”
“Secure the chatter, guys,” I say. Part of the act.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” says Wollreich. His face has returned to normal. “The way you came through that door, you startled me even though I knew you were coming. You guys looked like you were straight out of an action movie—one of the good ones where they get everything right.”
“They never get everything right, sir,” I say. “But thank you.”
“No, thank you, Cole. It’s apparent that I’m not paying you or your team enough. I think a fifteen percent raise is in order. I’ll send word to HR.”
That wasn’t a lie. That was him committing to the earlier lie with a bribe, which means, if I’m reading him correctly, that he knows I know he lied, and he wants to talk to me in private about why he really pushed the button.
“Thank you, sir,” I say.
“Very generous, sir. Sorry about the chair thing,” says Barry.
“I’ll make sure Barry spends his bonus on better inserts,” says Mo.
“We’ll leave you to your business, sir.” And we do.
Out in the anteroom, which does have cameras, I screen Mo as he sits down at the edge of the camera’s field of vision and reaches around and under the chair. The receiver he plants against the wall looks exactly like a wall plate.
I check my phone’s Bluetooth list, and “GENERIC HEADSET” appears. I select it and punch in my phone number, and it vanishes from the list. Just like it’s supposed to.
That afternoon, Wollreich calls me into his office.
“Sir?” I ask.
“Take a seat, Cole,” Wollreich says.
I sit, and wait for Wollreich to speak.
“You know that wasn’t just a drill earlier?”
“Yes, sir. Something scared you. What was it?”
“Probably a hallucination. There was somebody in my office. I looked up, sensing movement I guess, and then hit the panic button when I didn’t recognize the intruder. I think he was about to speak, but as soon as I hit the panic button he vanished.”
“Vanished how, sir?”
“Like a screen wipe.” Wollreich is describing a PowerPoint transition. I know exactly what that looks like, having been a captive audience for more than a few of them. “Except,” he continues after a moment, “there was some dissolve to it as well. As if, from top to bottom, the intruder evaporated. Only faster than that.”
He’s not lying.
I’m not sure exactly how I know he’s not lying, but I think it’s kind of like how some people always know where there’s a speed trap. There are cues out there to be read, but I’m reading them unconsciously. It’s not a hundred percent accurate at first, but once I’ve spent enough time with somebody I’m never wrong.
“I believe you, sir.”
“You believe it happened, or you believe that I saw what I’m telling you I saw?”
“I believe your account of the event, sir. You’re not making this up. I suspect you’re also concerned. Concerned for your own sanity, and for your position here with the company.”
He blows out the breath he’d been half holding.
“There’s more to it than that, Cole. I’m concerned that this may be a side effect. How much have you been told about
our upcoming product lines?”
“We’re approaching the approval phase of a ‘vaccination’ against Alzheimer’s, we’re in late-stage testing on a telomerase regulator that promises to prevent a large percentage of cancers, and we’ve just gotten approval for an HIV treatment.”
“Very succinct.”
“That’s a summary of what I’ve been told, sir. I can tell there’s something else going on, and that I’m not supposed to be in on the secret.”
He sits back in his chair, steeples his fingers, and purses his lips. “So, what have you figured out?”
“Nothing, sir. And if you’re about to let me in on the secret, please keep in mind that if the information is valuable enough, a competitor may be willing to kill to get it. You’re paying me and my team quite well, but if you’re sitting on a billion dollars’ worth of information, my threat assessment will change, we’ll have to hire more people, and everybody will get paid more.”
“So be it. Cole, the drug interaction between these three products is going to extend human lifespan, maybe by a full order of magnitude. Old-age deterioration is going to go away. You and I will live to see the twenty-second century, and I’m not betting against seeing the thirtieth.”
I think about that for a moment. If this is true . . .
“Sir, are you sure this works?”
“Quite sure. We’ve got a lab full of eight-year-old white mice, and we’re three years into some secret trials on in-house volunteers. Including me. I’ve never felt better, and my eyesight has improved as the lenses in my eyes regained their youthful flexibility.”
“Obviously this secret is worth way more than just a billion dollars.”
“There’s more. We’ve got a brain trust positioning the company for the long game. We already know what the short-term future looks like. When the news breaks that this three-drug interaction extends the human lifespan, the entire product line will be nationalized by overwhelming popular demand, probably in a special legislative session. But before the United States does that, half a dozen other countries will already have deployed it within their national health care systems. We won’t own any of it.”