by Brandon Sanderson, Mary Robinette Kowal, Dan Wells, Howard Tayler
“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.”
“And you wouldn’t test it without one, either,” I said. “Is that you?”
He looked sadly at the corpse of the other engineer, and I nodded. “Of course it’s him. Awesome. I was worried this would be too easy.”
“There should be a chapter on troubleshooting,” said the engineer meekly.
I looked up at the gremlin, still loudly tearing the truck to pieces. “Does it just say to shoot it?”
“I don’t recommend it.”
“We have an AT4 in the trunk,” said the gunner.
“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 be useful. One: Gremlins love sugar.’ Seriously?”
“Absolutely love it,” said the engineer.
“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 out of the Humvee. “You can put the photo in the manual as a perfect demonstration of ‘unexpected catastrophic failure.’”
“Did the radio work?”
“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 a our base.”
“And the bad news,” I said, “is that they can’t come get us because they’re engaged in a firefight.”
“Exact-a-mundo. And so far they’re losing, so they might not come get us at all. This a very big group of insurgents.”
I stood up and looked at the Humvee’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 an upside-down pie plate. It had been torn open, and the inside was full of something dark and sticky.
“Smells sweet,” said the bomb tech.
“They like sugar,” said the engineer with a shrug.
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 the 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 engineer, “but the basic gist is fire and symbols 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 to we have for the AT4?”
“Donkey Punchers,” said the gunner.
“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 pointed at the gunner. “Get me a grenade. And you,” I said, pointing at the bomb tech, “take it apart.” I pointed at the driver, “you 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.”
“Out there?”
“Unless you brought it with you, yeah.”
“That’s. . . . On the other side of the salt line? There’s a gremlin out there.”
There’s you’re 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 grab the body, you get me the cobbler.”
“Why do you need the body?”
“Have you read these demon binding notes?”
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 Humvee he finally noticed us, and leaped forward with a cry of wicked 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 it, buying us a few precious seconds, and together we found the pouch of cobbler and ran back to the Humvee. The engineer’s shirt pocket was stained dark blue, and his pants and belt were singed.
“All my pens broke,” he said sadly.”
“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.” The bomb tech handed me an HEDP 502, the ‘High Explosive Donkey Punch,’ basically a metal tube with a short, stubby point 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, 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 form 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. With the bloody symbols drawn on the sides of the grenade, and the endpiece thoroughly smeared with horrifically-reinforced binding goop, I took a deep breath, said a quick a 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 the gremlin was sucked into the binding agent like a genie going back into a bottle.
“I take it back,” said the gunner. “That is the wierdest damn thing I’ve ever seen.”
“Fit it back on,” I said, and handed the bomb tech 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 have ever done.”
“Just fit it on,” I said. “It’ll hold for a couple of hours at least.”
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 base, and because we’d been driving so slowly, looking for mines, the hour we’d spent driving had only taken us about five klicks away from it; with the gremlin no longer wreaking havoc on the truck we could hear the occasional burst of gunfire. The bomb tech finished reassembling the grenade, and loaded 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 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. There was no backup in sight; well, none but us. I loaded the Rocket Propelled Gremlin in the AT4 and handed it to the gunner.
“Don’t worry about a target,” I said, “just land the little bastard in the middle of their forces and let him go to work.”
The gunner judged the distance carefully, tested the wind, aimed high for extra distance. “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 against the back of a jeep. One by one we watched as the distant insurgents stopped firing forward and turned to look at their own battle, 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. Some of the Taliban tried to fight it, but others simply ran in terror, some toward us and some toward our base. No longer pinned down by fire, our friendly forces caught them easily. We ziptied their thumbs, frisked them for weapons, and started the slow walk around the frenzied gremlin.
“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?”
EDITS: 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 gruntsEOD 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 an up-armored HumveeJERRV, and we need you take that Humveeto 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 a bomb squadthe 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 and, got in the HumveeJERRV, and headed out into the desert with my driver and my gunner. I wasWe weren’t cleared to know what I waswe were driving, but I waswe 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 in a spot called The Brambles, about an hour north of our firebase and some of the worst terrain in Afghanistan.; Wwe didn’t seenotice 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 soMost 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 HumveeJERRV, and my crew drove on through the Brambles for about 20twenty more minutes before the engineers called another all-stop. I got out to look at the new find.
“Useless,” said the bomb techI told them, examining the new mineIED we’d driven over. “Better than the last one, but still hopelessly broken. The fusecord 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 themir orders, so I did. The third IED was only 15fifteen minutes down the road, and the bomb tech practically took the thing apart before he let any of us get closewhen I got out to examine it I didn’t like what I saw.
“This one was live,” heI said, showing usthem the disassembled pieces. “YouWe 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. “WHe 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 smile
d, 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 HumveeJERRV.”
“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 HumveeJERRV in half, so the way I’ve seen them do in other attacksarmor 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 Humveevehicle 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 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 werewas the bomb tech fighting to get out of a seatbelt that whipped and coiled like a snake, and behind him the two engineers scrambling indigging through their packs like madmen, their faces white with fear.