by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
“That’s why I’m here,” said the spook. “The batteries are low, so to speak, and the BSE is losing its effectiveness. I recommend we head back immediately—on the road we’ve already cleared.
“I’ll call it in,” said Gomez, and thumbed the radio, nodding to the bomb squad RANK to tell him to spread the word. “Camp Alfred, this is Operation Shatter. Our mission is complete and we request permission to return home.”
“Negative, Shatter, we just had a recon ping in your area and need you to check it out.”
The spook started to protest immediately, but Gomez quieted him with a reassuring wave. “I have a civilian and a piece of experimental equipment, Alfred, I can’t be doing recon right now.”
“It’s probably nothing, Shatter, just a glitchy drone. Just do a drive by and give us a visual confirmation and you can come straight home.”
“How many regulations do you want me to break, Alfred? Get your boss on the phone so I can talk to someone who isn’t an ASVAB waiver.”
There was a slight pause, and then the voice spoke again—the same voice, Harkness noticed, not his superior officer. “Movement reqs in your area allow for two-truck groups. Bring the bomb squad and come home, but send the rest of your convoy else to LOCATION, under the command of . . . RANK James.”
“Orders confirmed,” said Gomez. He hung up the radio, and by now the bomb squad RANK had collected the other officers in the convoy. RANK James leaned on Gomez’s open window.
“I’m taking the convoy?”
“Looks like it,” said Gomez. “The moron on the radio said it was just a glitch, but he had his panties in a wad about something. Be careful.”
“We’ll be fine,” said James, “you’re the ones on your own in Taliban country.”
“There’s no way we should be traveling with only two trucks in this region,” said the bomb squad RANK. “We’ve seen three IEDs in an hour—this place is crawling with insurgents.”
“Then let’s stop wasting time and get out of here,” said Gomez.
#
The column started moving again, and They only traveled a few minutes, however, before another call came in over the radio.
“RANK Gomez, this is Camp Alfred; you are ordered to return to base immediately. RANK James will continue north with the rest of your column to investigate an insurgent sighting. Over.”
Gomez frowned. “Message received, Alfred, but movement reqs in this area don’t allow us to travel alone. We need to peel at least one other vehicle off the column. Over.”
There was a pause, and then the voice came back. “Affirmative. Bring the bomb squad with you. Over and out.”
Gomez grumbled as he stepped out of the Humvee, slamming the door behind him and stomping off for a final conversation with RANK James. Harkness looked at the spook, and was gratified to see that the man looked nervous for the first time since leaving the base. A potential live-fire situation could have that effect, especially on civilians. Harkness suppressed a smile and offered him the helmet for the eighteenth time. He took it.
Gomez returned a moment later, and soon the column was splitting in half. Harkness felt braver now, having seen a sign of weakness in the spook, and ventured a question. “What happens if it fails?”
“The BSE?”
“We keep asking how it works, and you won’t tell us, so I figured I’d ask the opposite: what happens if it stops working? Will you know, or will the bomb squad behind us figure it out when we blow up?”
The spook gave him a strange look. “That’s an interesting question.”
“Seems like a pretty fair one to me,” said Gomez. “How will you know if it fails, or am I not cleared for that either?”
SECOND DRAFT: 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 grunts, after all, and they were the engineers: they created the technology, and we had to test it. And that was fine; that’s the way it had been since I’d been stationed in Afghanistan six months earlier, and that’s 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 an up-armored Humvee, and we need you take that Humvee 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 a bomb squad 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 and got in the Humvee and headed out into the desert. I wasn’t cleared to know what I was driving, but I was cleared to drive it through Taliban Central hoping somebody tried to blow us up. The glamorous life of a soldier.
The first IED turned up in a spot called The Brambles, about an hour north of our firebase and some of the worst terrain in Afghanistan. We didn’t see 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. I’d never seen an IED so poorly put together; 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 Humvee, and my crew drove on through the Brambles for about 20 more minutes before the engineers called another all-stop. I got out to look at the new find.
“Useless,” said the bomb tech, examining the new mine we’d driven over. “Better than the last one, but still hopelessly broken. The fuse isn’t 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 them, so I did. The third IED was only 15 minutes down the road, and the bomb tech practically took the thing apart before he let any of us get close.
“This one was live,” he said, showing us the disassembled pieces. “You 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. “We don’t need to destroy them, like he did with the first, 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 the bomb tech and then at my driver and I could tell they 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 Humvee.”
�
�Correct,” he said again. “But it’s up-armored, so you should be fine.”
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 Humvee in half, the way I’ve seen them do in other attacks—but it flipped us upside down off the side of the road. My gunner manged 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 Humvee 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 every where 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 Years 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 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 was the bomb tech fighting to get out of a seatbelt that whipped and coiled like a snake, and behind him the engineers scrambling in 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 spit 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 the driver flat on his back as the sudden shift in weight unbalanced him. My gunner reached for the jammed seatbelt with his knife in his hand, but the belt frayed before the knife even got close, evaporating like water, and the bomb tech fell out at a dead run. 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 back 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 truck 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 clip like a metal fountain.
“This one caught shrapnel in his neck,” my driver shouted, but the other 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 ran 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 fistful 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. “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 Humvee 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 behind the demolished truck.
My breath came in gasps. “What,” I asked, “in the bright blue hell, is that thing?”
“It’s a BSE-7,” said the engineer, collapsing to the ground and leaning back against the Humvee. “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—A—I—.” I shook my head. “What?”
“The BSE-7 is a Bound Supernatural Entity,” said the engineer, “a gremlin maliciously eager to destroy anything technological it comes across.”
“And you strapped it to my Humvee?”
“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 bomb tech. “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 my 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 it the next stiff breeze,” I said, “or until we starve to death, whichever comes first.”
“We could probably retrieve the MREs without any major problems,” 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 lead engineer. “Trust us on this one. You can only bind it.”
“Exactly what kind of
engineer are you?” I asked.
He didn’t answer.
“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 engineers. “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 them where we are, and that we’ve been hit with an IED. Leave the . . . weirder details vague.” He saluted and climbed through the window of the overturned vehicle. I looked at the engineer. “Now: tell me everything you know about this gremlin.”
“It would be 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 done. ‘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 of a base or camp can be surprisingly destructive.’” I threw the manual down. “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?”