by R. K. Syrus
WWHI can afford them. The interplaited Serpens banner is the loved and feared and respected and resented symbol of a massive charity. In one form or another it had been around for centuries. In the last fifteen years it has gathered together more volunteers and staff than the Red Cross and Red Crescent movements put together. Its budget seems to rival the Pentagon’s. Worldwide Help is the unofficial government in the refugee safety zones in southern Khorasan.
Normally WWHI immunologists use microSwarm devices to help small outlying villages stricken with malaria. In this case—and Sienna has no reason to doubt Denbow’s story—the microSwarm was programmed to kill and wipe out all traces of the incident. No bodies, no war crime. The central government of Djoboro, whoever that is this week, is not going to complain about the retaliation. They would have done something similar, if less elaborately brutal, to anyone who jeopardized their lucrative relationship with WWHI.
The drones’ individual, bee-sized mechBrains coordinate their activities through sound. They network. As a swarm, the flying bots become a much more intelligent mechanical organism. Typically, they use ultrasonic bands out of the range of human ears. The contractor who was behind this “message” had to have one very sick, twisted mind to come up with an audible soundtrack for a mass execution.
“I didn’t believe the local kid,” Denbow says. “Not about the music. Not at first. He didn’t seem too bright. Then he showed me a video he caught on his junky old phone. It was pretty low res. It showed some real old guy waving to the kid and his friends to run away out of the kill zone, then getting hit by a small object flying at medium speed. Then falling over. Then dissolving. The phone recorded sound, too. There was music. After it was over and the microSwarm stopped stinging, the kid says he went in. He followed the inactive drones as they flew back to their hive. Stupid kid.”
“Gutsy kid,” Snakelips corrects Denbow.
He continues like he didn’t hear. “When he got to the middle, there was one person and a small chopper in the camp. Kid must have been seeing things. He told me the deadly gray bees flew into the pilot’s helmet. There was nobody else. The WWHI hostages were gone, probably exfilled by truck. The pilot. The kid couldn’t say—or was too freaked out to remember—if it was a man or a woman. The pilot listened to him complain about his dead grandpa.
“The village kid told the contractor that they were just farmers and herders and they didn’t have anything to do with the kidnappers. One day the bad guys just showed up on their land. The pilot pointed to the ransom of gemstones. A fortune was just lying there. Said the kid and the other survivors could have it. Then the contractor took off.
“Kid showed me a diamond. It was laser-holo etched with the WWHI logo, certified conflict-free and legal to sell anywhere in the world.” Denbow takes off his glove. “Here it is. Ain’t it pretty?” A swirling crocodile casting holds the looted jewel firmly in an open maw. Broad facets flash cold, dark fire.
“Damn,” T-Rex says, scratching the tribal symbol he’s growing on the side of his head.
For a few moments, the wail of plasma nacelles to either side is the only sound.
Finally, Whitebread asks, “What was it? What music did the microSwarm play?”
“It was Elvis,” Denbow says. “Suspicious Minds.”
15
OVER THE WANDERING DESERT
KHORASAN
Sienna and Bryan exchange glances. WWHI contractors. Deadly musical drones. Been there, done that. At least this mission won’t be badgered by that level of strange.
At the command console, her gloved hand pushes a trackball. After checking location and heading, she turns an exterior cam to the ground. Ambient-light view shows wispy outlines of rock and dune. Thermal and infrared views reveal more. Plasma rotor wash bleeds magenta into a corner of the screen. They don’t spin like old-style rotors. Wide plasma-induction turbines give the aircraft lift. Thin wires hold captive lightning. Sienna’s always found them hella cool and considers them one of the few reasons pilots are not complete dorks.
Telling them about the heavy-handed actions of Worldwide Help’s contractors makes Denbow more talkative. In the worst way possible. He gloms at Sienna’s insignia. His tone smacks of complacent resentment and testosterone-laced condescension.
I’ll never get used to that.
“Goes without saying, I never have any problem taking orders from female officers. Or with women in combat generally. In the field. Naturally.” He glances at Snakelips and wipes a slick of perspiration off his neck.
The Navy man stretches his arms over his head, looking more like a surfer than a soldier. He eyeballs Sienna’s body with an undisguised hotshot expression. “But really, being realistic, a woman can never be as strong as a man. I mean, heh, you compare someone who’s one hundred and thirty, thirty-five to, well, a man like your boy Whitebread over there. He’s got to clock in at three eighty in a towel.”
Denbow looks around. The Dogs stare back. Either Denbow thinks he’s being smart or he’s distracting them.
“In a fight. I’m talking about a real close quarters H2H throw-down. Not long-range standoff shit. Hand to hand, y’know? If it came to that. She’s a skid mark. This theoretical buck thirty-five female soldier we’re talking about. I mean anyone is, with those odds, right? I mean, it’s just physics.”
Denbow looks at Nobu. Maybe he thinks the half-Asian will be receptive to his logic. Sienna watches as the SEAL finds an Apache warrior staring back at him. Nobu looks disappointed. Maybe he’s thinking what a stingy war-belt trophy would be made by Denbow’s crew-cut scalp.
Ortiz’s knuckle tattoos blanch. There is little question of Who will be Next if Sienna lets her off the chain just then.
Sergeant Bryan grinds his foot in the deck. Denbow is a commissioned officer and, most annoying of all, able to scrub their mission at will. Her mission. He is Central Command’s boy. The whole region is USA CENTCOM’s backyard, from Egypt to Mongolia. And Khorasan’s government has not authorized the incursion into their airspace or the planned kidnapping of one of their residents. In flight, they are in Denbow’s hands.
T-Rex is getting ready to get ugly and throw things into a tailspin.
“Our esteemed Navy colleague may be articulating a valid viewpoint,” he says, very politely, while fingering a frag grenade.
The SEAL does not know the Dogs well enough to be afraid. If her team figures he’s a real danger to their mission or their teammates’ safety, consequences would ensue. Denbow would find himself foam maced, cocooned in two dozen yards of duct tape, and stuffed in the mobile crapper unit for the duration of Sidewinder. Clusterjam back on the Lee be damned. And if the Navy man was determined to be a dangerous liability or turncoat spy, a retro M67 grenade stuffed into Denbow’s jockstrap and an impromptu skydiving lesson would not be entirely off the table.
Sienna notes, with a sense of accomplishment, T-Rex limit himself to verbal barbs. Just as the tension rises to match the million-wasps-in-a-plastic-bag sound coming from the engines to either side of the now cramped and airless cabin, it is Whitebread who throws cold water on the dispute.
“Energy.”
The word comes in a baritone rumble from the slice of shadow cutting the far corner of the aircraft cabin.
“Fill something that looks smaller with enough energy,” Whitebread says with patient menace. “That makes it exactly the same as something bigger. Exactly.”
Sienna suppresses a smile. Perhaps no explanation of relativity has ever been delivered with such a homicidal undertone. Whitebread concludes his brief science lecture in a way that does not invite follow up.
“Exactly the same,” he says. “Mass–energy equivalence. Einstein. Physics.”
***
Half an hour later, they speed over modest low-rise Khorasani houses and sleeping livestock. Light-bending skin keeps them invisible. Broad, opposing plasma roto
rs spread downforce wash wide. Acoustic monitors tell Sienna their passage makes hardly a sound in the night sky. At the rear of the wide-body cabin, Bryan helps Sienna double and triple check a last-minute borrow from the Base’s experimental arsenal.
The RAPTEK weapons unit. She’s been wearing it since getting into the HALO pod for the descent from the scRamjet onto the Lee. The letters stand for “Railgun: Ansible Powered Test Kit”. Its magnetic flux can push projectiles to phenomenal speeds. Basically, the thing strapped to her shoulders is a linear accelerator. It doesn’t affect her gloves or her class ring. The ring is ceramic with a tourmaline stone dating back to 1835, courtesy of Ennis Reidt.
“You sure about this thing?”
The shoulder-mounted mayhem-dispensing device hugs her trapezoids like a neoprene yoke. Being one of the few people in the world cleared to know about the Ansible artifact has its advantages. One of them is trying out inventions based on its peculiar qualities—future weapons the military’s research arm, DARPA, is feverishly and secretively developing. Gadgets all governments promised each other never to build.
“Tried it out enough in the lab,” she assures him. “Time for a field shakedown.”
“I’m surprised they let you sign it out of the armory,” Bryan says, suspicious.
Sienna pretends to fix a wrist strap on the RAPTEK.
He lets out a short sigh. “They did let you borrow it, didn’t they?”
“Well, it’s Friday and everyone who’s cleared to be in that section is away till Monday. No one will ever know it’s been gone.”
“Sienna, colonel,” Bryan says with mild exasperation. “They’re away because the Ansible tests are happening in Europe. All the new comm systems are offline. Is this here thing even gonna work?”
Sienna flexes her arms. A flick of her wrist deploys a mean, two-pronged fléchette into her palm. Green and IR-aiming lasers flash on. The system syncs to her helmet visor.
“You bet it works,” Sienna assures Bryan. “The juice comes from a cold-fusion beryllium source. They just touched the chip to the exterior of the Ansible one time and it started vibrating like a quartz crystal, except millions of times more powerful. No moving parts. What can go wrong in one day?”
All the same, Sienna quadruple-checks the weapons system’s controls. As the RAPTEK warms up, she feels a small vibration in the base of her spine where the power plant is. That’s normal, she guesses. For a prototype system powered by a possibly alien artifact. All function lights are green. Check. If used properly, it probably won’t take her fingers off. Check. That’s all the science she cares to learn from the guy who delivered it.
***
Weeks ago, an ultra-geek from the DARPA’s Adaptive Execution Office showed up with a box. It was the size of a footlocker. He flashed an order scroll that unnerved the commandant. Ignoring everyone, he made a bee-line for Sienna. Above a shimmering hologram barcode, his name tag read “Perdix, AEO.”
He presided over the unboxing of the RAPTEK like a young preacher performing his first baptism. Perdix and Nobu nearly had nerdgasms as they went over its features. She only half listened to the lecture delivered by the intense boy from Cheyenne Mountain. He looked like he hated sharing his toys.
To ensure it stayed in place, there were several points of contact between her skin and a sort of hydrostatic gel. This gel looked and felt wet, but was not. The knowledgeable and attentive Perdix was about her age but seemed younger and older at the same time, in some bizarre, scientist way. As the RAPTEK latched on, Perdix stroked the interlocking scales of the personal railgun’s armored exterior.
“He seems to like you.” Perdix’s manner was close enough to creepy to irritate. If Sienna thought he was being degen, she’d have punched him. He seemed much more interested in the weapons system. He didn’t even notice her scars.
“You talk about it like it’s alive.”
Perdix—and Sienna quickly came to the conclusion that was not his real name—met her eyes with a watery gray gaze through glasses which weren’t corrective at all. His little white hands pressed on her wrists, elbows, and shoulder blades to make sure the fit was perfect.
“There are many things we don’t know,” Perdix replied with eerie excitement. “About the An… I mean, the artifact. And that includes all related tech. There are many things we can’t fathom. Yet. Not really.” Perdix almost purred as he stroked the RAPTEK. “And it’s all thanks to you and your group of brave soldiers that we have it at all.” As if she and the Dogs had dragged the Ark of the Covenant back from the South Pole just for him. “An unexpectedly optimal outcome. You were not my first pick to lead the retrieval mission. I was overruled.”
What a shocker. “Well, we’re happy to have exceeded expectations.”
Just like that, Perdix’s interest for the humans in the room dissipated. “As I said, he seems to—”
“Yeah, seems to like me.” She flexed her arms, dropped her visor, and sighted in on a demo target.
“Careful. It is designed for field testing, eventually. But there’s only the one. The Navy tried for years to make their electromagnetic railgun system work. Never could. Not enough energy. And they didn’t ask us to help. They called the project Veloticas Eradico.” Perdix mouthed the Latin in a highfalutin way.
“I, who am become speed, kill.”
“Precisely. The RAPTEK you wear is basically DARPA’s update on the ancient sling. The original mass-driving weapon. Besides the obvious biblical reference to the David and Goliath sortie, the Greeks used lead sling bullets extensively in the Peloponnesian War. The effective range of specially cast projectiles was four hundred meters, about twice that of the contemporary bow and arrow. They even inscribed taunts to the enemy on the missiles.”
Perdix smiled at how naïve the ancient Greeks and Romans were, or she was, or both. “They even believed the best slingers could throw so fast the speed of their shots through air would melt the metal before it struck the target. An interesting, if completely misguided, inkling of hypersonic aerodynamic heating. Thanks to our RAPTEK, you, Colonel McKnight, are the first foot soldier slinger in history of whom that’s scientifically accurate.”
She knew all that. West Point’s curriculum featured the classics, especially where they were connected to historical warfare. Perdix would have known that if he’d bothered to look at her academic record.
He just thinks of me as a grunt, an animated mannequin.
She flexed her hand in the glove module. One of the practice projectiles lying on the table flew into her hand. Perdix looked perplexed. Sienna cheated him out of some more mansplaining about how the thing worked. As she fingered the metal ball inside invisible lines of magnetic force, she made a mental note to look up the relevant lines of the Aeneid.
Later, in a dog-eared text, she found them:
His lance laid by, thrice whirling round his head
The whistling thong, Mezentius took his aim.
Clean through the temples hissed a bolt of molten lead,
And prostrate in the dust, the gallant youth lay dead.
Inside the Base’s underground test firing range, she gained confidence. Perdix fussed.
“It’s a little tricky—”
“I got it.”
The scientist gawked anxiously, but he wisely stayed out of her way. The guy’s attitude, his dumbed-down tech babble, his soft hands, they all bugged her. Also his name. Damn. He probably picked it out himself and was arrogant enough to think workaday soldiers like her and her team wouldn’t know.
In Greek mythology, Perdix was the student of master builder Daedalus. His apprenticeship ended in a fit of ancient nerd jealousy. The older man booted Perdix off the Acropolis. Legends say he transformed into a dorky partridge. In real life he probably just went splat.
Shutting the vault-sized doorway on him, she told him she’d be a while and not to wait up
for her. “And Perdix, I’ve been to Athens. Watch your step on the Acropolis—it’s a nasty drop.”
***
Maybe she borrowed the RAPTEK because she wanted to give Perdix the finger. Under her flight suit, it looks like the imprint of some kind of custom body armor. But unlike ceramic scale armor, it is more flexible and doesn’t chafe. Maybe it does like her.
Images of hills, small and cruel, dash past virtual window screens. Sienna goes over a final team readiness check.
“No biggie,” Sienna assures a worried-looking Sarge. “I’ll have it back before they know it’s been halfway around the world without them. Just wait until we all get one.”
She holds the hovering fléchette up to Bryan’s metallic eyes.
“More firepower than any assault rifle. Only caseless ammo to carry. Never overheats. I can switch between antipersonnel, non-lethal, and troop support ordnance instantly. Face it, Sarge.” She pounds him lightly on the shoulder. “Guns and bullets are so over.”
She carefully sets down the small projectile. Sienna definitely does not want to send it blasting around inside the copter. Its outsides are plenty tough, but designers no doubt assumed no gunfights would be taking place inside the cabin.
16
They are close. The Navy guy’s window to screw things up is closing. As though on cue, a burst of static in her ear precedes the update from the cockpit:
“Target structure in two-five seconds.”
“Solid copy, Nightjar. Snakecharmer actual out,” Sienna replies to the pilot, using the Dogs’ mission call sign.
Sienna gives the Dogs a hand signal to confirm everyone heard that. Nobu nods as he checks out the SEAL’s communications system. Her RTO tends to the newbie first, so he can then set their chaperone safely by the door. That way Denbow can’t get into any mischief.