“Let me have the controls,” I pleaded.
“Are you rated for a combat fighter?” she countered.
“No, but I have a great deal of experience in small craft … Are you a fan of flitter racing?”
“Who isn’t?” the Wichu pilot responded avidly.
“I am Lord Thomas Kinago,” I said. “The last race I won was the Gogatar Rally.”
“Controls over to you, my lord!” she said. “An image for my Infogrid file when we land?”
I smiled. “Of course.”
The navigational controls of a standard fighter were made as intuitive in function as possible, aided by AI as required. I leaned into them, compelling every erg that the engines could produce. I veered slight left then slight right, feeling for her responsiveness. She handled much like the steering of a racing flyer. I knew where I was, then. I could concentrate on catching up with the fugitive.
“On your left!” I shouted into the audio pickup as I flipped the fuselage ninety degrees and slid in between a supply ship and the Donre cruiser. Two tiny war craft, a helmeted pilot in each, fell in behind me, peppering me with low-level energy bolts. I bent my flyer down in a right-angled spiral and dove under the Donre ship, hoping that they would leave me alone. “Confound it, I’m trying to help keep your ambassador alive!”
“Shields holding,” Wagelev informed me. “What’s their problem?”
“Terminal contrariness,” I said, my eyes fixed on the scope. The ion trail we were following took a sharp loop upward and to the right. It led straight into an explosion of ion particles. The spy was cleverer than I had given him credit for. He had flown straight toward a group of small ships, causing them to scatter outward, burying his trail.
I nodded to myself. It didn’t matter. I knew where he must go.
I angled up and through the cloud. Ion trails etched in pale gray on the blackness led outward from it in all directions, but only one continued on in the direction of the jump point. I poured on all the speed of which the fighter was capable, but it didn’t respond with the leap I hoped for.
“Divert power from shields and weapons,” I instructed Wagelev.
“Sir, we’ll be defenseless if someone fires on us!”
“Nothing else matters if we can’t catch him, Lieutenant,” I said. I felt the small ship surge under my fingertips as the rest of the available energy transferred to navigation and helm.
The jump point lay on the heliopause of the nearest star, a red giant in its final stages before collapsing into a brown dwarf. We were several thousand kilometers away from the anomaly, so I still had a chance to get ahead of him and block his access.
Ahead and below my eyeline, the tiny bright dot and its attendant statistics reappeared on my scope. As if he had sensed me, he began weaving in an irregular corkscrew pattern, seeking to throw me off as to which angle he planned to approach the wormhole. I assessed the motions with an experienced eye. Seeing him as a racing competitor, I should be able to intuit what he was going to do next. He would have to try to elude me and get into a chicane, in this case the jump point, before I could. But what more? I had no tractor beams in this fighter. If I shot him down, I could not learn the location of the bomb, possibly before it was too late.
“Is there any way to speak to him?” I asked. The tiny dot in space grew almost imperceptibly larger. We were gaining on him. “Can you open communication frequencies that he might hear?”
“Sure. We only use three. The others are locked out.”
“Open them all.” I waited until the graphic appeared in the bottom corner of the screen. I toggled the controls so that it would broadcast my face to the fleeing fighter’s scope. “This is Lord Thomas Kinago. Please stop your current trajectory and return to the Enceladus. You need to tell me where you have hidden the explosive device.”
“Where he hid what?” Wagelev demanded, her voice on a rising note.
“Sh!” I hissed. “I know you can hear me, my friend. Turn back now, and we will work together to allay your concerns.”
“No one listens to us!” came the wail from the speakers.
“I’m listening,” I said, in a soothing tone. My craft closed in steadily on the mark on my screen. Soon, I could actually see the tiny vessel in the distance. “I’m rather good at listening. Or so my cousins tell me. Did you know that the Emperor is one of my cousins? Quite a handsome fellow, really. I’m green with envy at how well he photographs. Would you like to see a tri-dee of him? I have his entire speech from the feast to celebrate Workers’ Day.”
Undoubtedly, my babbling puzzled the fighters I could see coming up behind us, like the peloton in a cycle race. They would all be too late to make a difference, unless I could force the spy back again.
The fleeing craft seemed to hesitate as my image and the sound of my voice impinged upon the pilot’s consciousness. I continued to chatter, knowing how it distracted my cousins when we played games that required concentration. His serpentine flight wavered, then became a straight line. We were less than a thousand kilometers away from the jump point.
Aha! I took the opportunity to underfly him and come up between him and the nebulous corona that indicated the entry to the tame wormhole. Now I was racing ahead, a hundred kilometers ahead, trying to keep him in my wake. I flipped the craft around end over end, so I flew backward, facing him.
“Hah! You’re a way better pilot than he is, my lord!” Wagelev crowed.
“No!”
Red bolts lanced from the fighter’s weapons. I realized all too late that the circuits from both seats were open to the communication channel. I had to veer off and reverse my nose once again to dodge the deadly blasts. As I did, he shot past us toward the void.
“Oops, sorry,” the Wichu said, as the momentum threw us both sideways against our seats’ crash padding. “Switching to full shields.”
“No!” I cried. “I need the maneuverability!”
“But he’ll kill us,” Wagelev said.
“No,” I said, doggedly holding onto the controls with both hands. “No, he won’t.”
With all the skill of which I was capable, I thrust the fighter forward, causing it to describe a corkscrew path around the spy. At one point, one of our fins nearly scraped the canopy over his head. He blasted energy bolts in every direction, hoping to hit us. The telemetry indicated that he had clipped the port thruster, knocking part of the housing off into space.
We were nearing the perilous beauty of the jump point. If I let myself get drawn into its maelstrom, I could be swept anywhere from millions of kilometers to light years away from my present position. The small fighter might or might not be strong enough to withstand its gravitational force. The same went for the spy. We had to get him back safely, but I had no means of grappling him back.
Perhaps no means but charm. I opened up all frequencies to him again, and ripped the helmet off my head. The air was thin but just breathable.
“What’s your name, my friend?” I asked, focusing on the scope as if addressing him directly. I spoke gently, omitting any hint of threat or authority from my tone. “I want to know about you. We hardly had time to connect, back in the ship.”
“M… Malcolm…”
I smiled the meltingly wistful smile that hardly ever worked on my maternal unit when I sought to escape punishment for something I had done.
“I am Thomas. I hear you come from Drixol. Is that so?”
“…Yes.”
“Lady Margaretha is my cousin. Why do you want to harm others to get her attention?”
Malcolm became agitated, shifting back and forth in his crash couch.
“Our cause is just!”
“But destroying countless innocent lives won’t aid your cause,” I said. “Tell me what you want. Then I might be able to discuss it with her.”
“…Could you?”
“I certainly could,” I said. He wavered.
“We’re getting too close, my lord,” Wagelev said, on a rising note of con
cern, if not panic. “We’re gonna go through in a second!”
I gestured outside of the range of the tri-dee pickup for her to stay silent.
“Come back with me. Tell me where the device is, and we’ll meet with Margaretha about your concerns.”
“There are too many!” the spy said.
In the scope behind us, I could see more craft coming up behind me, flanked by two larger craft, an Imperium corvette and the Blut ship. Parsons! I thought in delight.
“You may write your manifesto in prison!” Captain Ranulf’s voice interrupted. “Stop now, and we won’t blow you into atoms!”
“Captain, really,” Parsons’s dry voice interjected, a mild rebuke compared with what I wanted to say. I dearly wished that I could reach through the spaceways and stifle the captain into silence.
Distracted from my voice, the spy stopped flying evasive patterns and made straight for the wavering light, a candle in the darkness. I hurtled after him, knowing that I could not pull him back. He would reach the jump point, and all lives aboard Enceladus would be lost.
In desperation, I played my last card.
“If you pass through that portal, you will never see me again, Malcom,” I said plaintively. “Never again to behold my countenance, nor that of my majestic cousin, Emperor Shojan. How sad that would be.”
The craft arrowed toward the pinpoint wormhole, with half the contingent of the Enceladus and the Blut ship behind it. Then, it veered away.
“May I have a tri-dee of you to keep?” Malcolm asked, in a voice nearly as wistful as mine.
“I will even personalize it,” I said firmly.
The small craft went limp in space. The Blut ship beat the rest of the peloton to the floating fighter and fixed it with a tractor beam.
* * *
The DNA sample from my cheek was sufficient to confirm Malcolm as a denizen of the Imperium, not a citizen of the Trade Union. I was able to deliver the promised tri-dee before he was bundled firmly in the direction of the brig.
I returned to my cabin, where I found Parsons already in situ. He stood to one side out of harm’s way as I gladly shed the dull black carapace of my disguise and sought through my wardrobe for suitable party clothes.
“I knew you would be able to restore yourself to our bosom,” I said. “I think I did as well at my end in performing efficiently extemporaneous action, don’t you think? I communicated successfully incognito with your contact, revealed the spy and convinced him to give himself up, as well as providing proof to the authorities. The ship is saved!”
A tiny motion of the area above his left eyebrow was a noncommittal reaction, not approving or disapproving as far as I can tell.
“My lord, you could have found a less ostentatious and less hazardous way of obtaining the DNA,” he said. “And also of compelling the spy to surrender. You could have communicated with him via tri-dee broadcast, and never exposed yourself to the hazards of space in a craft as unprotected as a fighter.”
“I could,” I said, shrugging into a coat that had been sewn for me with illuminated threads woven into the complicated sapphire-blue damask. Coffee swooped in to do up the complicated silk frogs down the front. With a critical eye, I turned back and forth in front of the mirror. I did look absolutely splendid. I beamed up at Parsons, satisfied on all fronts. “But where would have been the fun in that?”
Hawaiian author Linda Nagata’s military scifi series The Red, set on near-future Earth, has wracked up accolade after accolade. Her trilogy started out self-published and then got picked up by a major publisher after the reviews and critical praise, and she continues the saga here with a brand-new short story that parallels the main action in The Red trilogy. It takes place in a different theater of operations, but shares the idea of the augmented infantry soldiers who make up a Linked Combat Squad.
REGION FIVE
LINDA NAGATA
I was a soldier not a human fly, but Trident swore the battle AI could make it work. My helmet’s audio quieted the sounds of shouts and screams and gunfire from the streets below, and the rumble of helicopters above the city, so that it was easy for me to hear Trident as he spoke over a private channel from his post at the Guidance office in Charleston: “You’ve got to trust me, Josh. We’ve got a viable route for you. But it’s only going to work if you move out when I call it. No hesitation.”
I wondered when we’d gotten to a first-name basis. Trident was the lieutenant’s remote handler, but the lieutenant was dead in a checkpoint blast that had been just one in a simultaneous wave of attacks that brought our peacekeeping efforts to an abrupt end.
It had been “Sergeant Miller” when Trident first opened a persistent link with my helmet’s audio, informing me of what I already knew: that I was now in command of my Linked Combat Squad. We’ll work together, he’d told me. I’ll help you get out of there. That was thirty minutes ago, as a guerilla army of RPs poured up out of the subway tunnels, and barricades were going up in the streets. Time enough for our relationship to get tight—but I didn’t like what he was asking me to do next.
Asshole, I thought, but I focused a little too hard on the sentiment. My wired skullcap picked up the cerebral pattern, my tactical AI interpreted it, and a synthesized voice spoke the thought for me in a flat artificial tone that went out over the persistent channel linking me to Trident. “Asshole,” it said.
“Oops,” I added out loud.
Trident took it well. “You just need to get the squad to the roof, Josh.”
“I understand the goal.” I just didn’t like the route.
I was crouched on the edge of an abyss, behind a concrete pillar that had once framed the now-blown-out glass wall of an office suite on the thirty-eighth floor of an eighty-eight story skyscraper designated as building 21-North. The suite was a temporary refuge for my LCS—my Linked Combat Squad. Fifteen soldiers, twelve of us still alive. We’d set up booby traps to be triggered by the battle AI when the door was inevitably breached. Of course we planned to be gone by then.
I looked past glittering fragments of shattered glass at a forest of high-rise buildings, a hundred or more: the once-affluent city center of Region Five. Scattered fires billowed and blazed in offices that had been hit by rocket fire, and black smoke from burning cars wended up from the street, poisoning the air between the buildings.
Beyond the towers, just visible through the smoke, were the mixed districts. Green marked the gated neighborhoods with their large parks and luxury homes; gray was the color of the ugly, low-rise concrete block apartments that served as middle-class housing; and sealing the spaces between them—like multicolored mold—were the slums. A vast, interconnected maze of tumble-down homes that sprawled all the way to the glittering airport, ten miles out.
The airport was our goal, our destination. Home base. Safety in a region gone mad, and it was my task to get my LCS there before the RPs got to us. But car bombs and barricades had closed the roads out of the city center, and snipers held posts in most of the buildings, waiting to pick off any foreign soldier unwise enough to set foot in the streets. So Command had decided that our only way out was up.
I felt pressure on my shoulder. Turned to see Kat’s hand, inside an armored glove. Leaning down, she asked off-com: “How long we gonna be here, Sergeant?” Her voice crisp, calm, reflecting the focused state of her baseline mood.
“Not long. We’ll be going as soon as the route is clear.”
We’d decimated the crew of RPs that had followed us up the stairwell, but there would be more. We didn’t call them “Replacement Parts” for nothing. RPs were shock troops drawn from the slums, the expendable weapons of a warlord who crapped in gold-plated toilets while he claimed to be fighting for the poor. RP training was minimal, but they came in such numbers and jacked up so high on designer drugs it hardly mattered. We’d probably killed thirty or more, just getting into 21-North. I hoped their signing bonus was worth it.
Kat dropped into a crouch beside me. “Busy out there
,” she observed, still off-com so the rest of the squad wouldn’t hear her.
“Robot war,” I agreed, answering the same way as we watched a pair of cheap kamikazes dart past in the gulfbelow us. They were small UAVs—four-foot wingspans, electric engines, propeller driven—fast and agile. They peeled off, heading in opposite directions down an adjacent avenue.
Trident had sworn that we’d won the initial air war. Enemy UAVs had been eliminated while we climbed the tower, and anything still in flight belonged to us. Maybe it was true.
I flinched as another kamikaze dropped out of the sky. It shot past us in a dive so steep I thought it was aimed at a target in the street. But fifteen or twenty floors below our position, it shifted its trajectory, pulling up, and then accelerating through a shattered window in the building across the street. Red flames ballooned at the point of impact.
“You know why this city is code-named Region Five?” Kat asked.
“Not sure I want to know.” Kat’s theories were rarely comforting.
She told me anyway. “It’s because this fucked-up city is the fifth circle of Hell. The fifth circle is ruled by anger—and as you know, everyone in Region Five is mad as hell.”
Sad truth.
Trident interrupted our little exercise in philosophy. “This is it, Josh. You are clear to move out.”
“Roger that.”
Trident wanted me to trust him. I’d told him the relationship was moving a little fast, but hell, it’s not like I had a choice. He had access to up-to-the-second intelligence summaries prepared by Command’s analytical AIs, and to angel-sight from surveillance drones, and to every camera and mic in our squad. All of that gave him a better grasp of the battlefield’s dynamics than I could hope to have, despite him being thousands of miles away. I needed his guidance, his input, his oversight. I had to trust him.
I stood, rising easily to my feet despite the weight of my pack, buoyed up by the powerful joints of my exoskeleton. Kat stood too, and together we turned to the squad. Gen-com, I thought. My skullcap picked up the request and shifted my audio channel. “Heads up,” I said, speaking softly, trusting the com system to boost my voice.
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