Ten anonymous black visors turned in my direction.
We looked like invaders from space.
The uniform was ordinary gray-brown urban camo, but we were bulked up by body armor, backpacks, and by the arm and leg struts of our exoskeletons, looking like gray external bones. Each of us carried a Harkin Integrated Tactical Rifle—a HITR, naturally—double-triggered to fire both 7.62-millimeter rounds and programmable grenades from the underslung launcher. Wired skullcaps were the external component of our brain–computer interface. Over the skullcap, we wore a helmet with a full-face opaque black visor. The local kids had loved the look of our rigs. To them, we’d been alien heroes, come to Region Five to restore order.
Kids could still dream.
I spoke quickly, quietly. “We’re moving out. I’m on point. Follow in your designated order, keep your interval, stick to your projected route, and do not look down.” This last was advice to myself. “Hooyah,” I added.
A soft round of responses came back to me over gen-com. “Hoo-yah.”
The dead stood on the periphery of the living: the lieutenant and two privates, held up by their rigs but slumped—burned and bloodied—heads bowed, faces mercifully hidden behind black visors spider-webbed by impacts. They would move out with us, their exoskeletons operated by the battle AI, judiciously mimicking the pattern of movement it observed in the rest of the squad.
The dead were never left behind. Not the bodies or the gear. It was a matter of honor, sure, but we were also fighting a propaganda war and Command would pancake this building before they allowed the bodies of our brothers and sisters to be mutilated or left to hang in the streets.
I turned back to the abyss, insulated from a direct assault of grief by the constant manipulations of my skullcap. Its activity triggered cascades of neurochemicals intended to keep me focused and alert, in a baseline state of wary intensity. It didn’t automatically eliminate fear though, because fear could be a useful emotion in my profession.
I drew a deep breath, all too aware of my racing heart and the tremor in my hands. I reminded myself that if I fucked up, a Kevlar rope would limit my fall. Kat was the anchor, backed up by Porter and Chan. “Don’t drop me,” I muttered to them.
“Don’t get shot,” Kat told me.
“And move fast,” Trident added. “We took out the last known sniper, but there are always going to be ten more Replacement Parts for every one that falls.”
My team, always positive.
I leaned out into the void.
We’d left the stairwell because, two floors up, surveillance showed close to seven hundred civilians waiting to get past an RP checkpoint. They were being identified, searched, and robbed of any useful valuables, before being allowed to cross a sky bridge that led to the relative safety of 21-South. The RPs on that level were vigilant. They had guards set up in the stairwells, and while we could fight our way through, a renewed battle would certainly panic the civilians and lead to unacceptable casualties.
So Command had decided stealth was our best option. We would avoid a fight by climbing unseen up the outside of the tower, until we were past the civilian-occupied floors. Our route was out of sight of the sky bridge, on the opposite side of the building, nestled in an angle of 21-North’s postmodern exterior where two semicircular walls intersected.
A rush of a warm wind growled past the rim of my helmet. I refused to look down. Instead, I twisted around, looking up at the side of the building, and as I did, my route appeared as an overlay of reality projected on my visor. I saw two handholds, indicated by right and left hand prints inside of bright-green circles. Clutching the window frame, I grabbed the first hold—a narrow lip of concrete. I set my arm hook over it, and held on with my fingers too, as backup. Then I let go of the window frame and reached for the second handhold. I did not look down.
I did not want to look down.
But I could feel, in the base of my brain, in the back of my neck, just how far I’d fall if the rope broke, if I let go. My hands were shaking. I swear every hair on my body was standing on end as I used my exoskeleton’s powered arm struts to haul myself up.
That’s when I realized I had to look down.
“Shit,” I whispered off-com. I lowered my gaze, looking for another green circle, knowing it would be there, and it was. This one had a barefoot graphic—and far, far below it was the street. How long would it take me to fall that far? What would I be thinking on the way down?
Then I saw someone run the experiment. A man, dressed in business casuals, took flight from a floor that I guessed to be at least fifteen stories below me. I heard his high-pitched scream. Another man followed after him. I saw it happen this time. I saw the arms that shoved him out a shattered window.
I wrenched my gaze away before they hit. I focused on the projected footprint, jamming the climbing hook of my rig against another lip of concrete, praying it would hold my weight. I boosted myself higher. Found the next foothold. Released an arm hook and used that to secure the next handhold.
The hook slipped. It scraped across concrete, sending dried pigeon dung peppering across my visor. I think I stopped breathing. I know my legs were trembling. Not from strain. Physically, the climb was easy because my exoskeleton was doing most of the work. But goddamn, we were thirty-eight stories up, I’d just seen two men plummet to the street, and my skin was puckering. I’d never trained to do this. None of us had. And I hated being this scared. I prayed I’d get shot before I fell.
“Try it again, Josh,” Trident said in a voice so calm it irritated the fuck out of me.
I looked again at the next handhold. It had shifted toward center. I set the hook against it. Got my fingers set. Past gritted teeth, I told Trident, “I’m feeling a little tense.” In truth, I was hoping I wouldn’t puke. “Maybe you could fix that for me.”
I hated having to ask, but what the fuck. Guidance was supposed to take care of my headspace. My skullcap was there to monitor brain activity and to influence it at need. It seemed to me a good time for some artificial rebalancing of my mood chemistry.
Trident spoke slowly, choosing his words. “I don’t have a… uh, a precedent that will allow me to address this situation on my own, but I submitted a request for a prescription.”
I didn’t ask how long a response would take. It didn’t matter, because with or without a fix, I had four floors to climb. So I made myself do it:
Haul up.
Move my right foot.
My left hand.
Left foot.
Right hand.
The rope trailing behind me while I schooled myself to think of nothing but the climb. I moved as fast as I dared, knowing I was an easy target for any sniper who’d evaded the kamikazes, but also concerned for my squad. They were due to follow me, and the sooner the better. If the RPs found them, the door of that office suite would not hold up against a rocket-propelled grenade.
But as much as I wanted to climb that wall with the speed of a circus act, fear made me slow and clumsy. My hands trembled, my armored gloves were wet with sweat, the tiny fans running inside my helmet were not enough to cool the flush that heated my face, and every time I slipped it got worse.
I kept on that way for one and a half floors, and then Trident came to my rescue. “Got your prescription approved,” he said.
“Hit me.”
He sent the fix to my skullcap, triggering a neurochemical response—and confidence blossomed in my brain. The transition was so extreme I wondered if it was a mistake, an overdose, because Guidance had never let me feel anything that good before. It was a heroic mindset, high, energized, but not manic. No. The opposite: a machinelike focus, and the certainty that I could do this without making a mistake.
I sucked in a sharp breath. “I think that’s going to work,” I told Trident. I looked up, set my grip. Looked down, placed my foot. Repeated that sequence, climbing steadily now. Resisting a subsurface temptation to reflect on what I was doing, or what was being done to me.
Deep down, I knew my prescription confidence wasn’t going to last long. There is a limit to how long brain cells can be artificially stimulated before they become exhausted and cease to react. But I let the concern go unexamined, and climbed.
Four floors up, Command had put a rocket through the glass wall of another office suite. The blast had opened the door to the hall, allowing Guidance to send in a palm-sized seeker to scout the floor.
“You got an update for me, Trident?” I asked as I got close.
“The entire floor reads empty, and quiet.”
That’s what I liked to hear.
I reached the suite and crawled in, onto carpet strewn with broken glass. A glance around showed charred desks and smoldering chairs and artwork and fine ceramics and children’s drawings tossed haphazardly against blackened walls. My high drained away, and in just a couple of seconds I returned to real life—that familiar baseline state in which I was wary, alert, and intensely focused on my surroundings. I didn’t mind. It’s an outlook that’s kept me alive through multiple combat missions. Heroic confidence doesn’t do that. Soldiers convinced of their invulnerability tend not to last.
I looked toward the door of the suite. It was hanging open on broken hinges. The sight left me feeling exposed. I paused to listen, but the only sounds I heard came from the battle outside. Trident was right. It was quiet up here. There was no hint of the civilian chaos I knew to be unfolding two floors below.
“Okay, Kat,” I said. “I’m going to pull up the rope.”
“Roger that. We are ready.”
I used the single rope to pull up four more, securing them to anchor points already mapped for me in the room. “Okay, let’s move.”
My soldiers started to climb, four at a time. I lay flat on the glass-strewn floor, looking down, watching their progress. Their gray adaptive camo did a good job of blending with the gray concrete. I listened to their whispers over gen-com as they began the ascent. Holy fuck, and Sweet Jesus. They sounded impressed, but not scared, because Josh made sure they were high.
Still, “Focus,” I reminded them over gen-com. “Move one limb at a time.”
The replies came in quiet confidence:
“No worries, Sergeant.”
“I’m good.”
“I got this.”
On-demand confidence. As soon as the first cohort joined me, the second started up. No one hesitated like I had. No one freaked out. They made the ascent quickly, moving from hold to hold as if they’d done this trick a hundred times because belief made it easy, and Guidance was making damn sure they believed.
On the third wave, we hauled up the dead. And then Kat, Lopez, and Fields made the climb.
“Confirm all present,” I told Trident.
“Confirmed.”
I switched to gen-com. “Next phase commences now.”
* * *
There were two stairwells inside 21-North’s concrete core. The doors to both were closed. That meant I could not send the seeker ahead to investigate. We had to go ourselves.
The closest stairwell was just a few steps away down the darkened hall. The seeker waited for us by the door, hovering at head height, a soft hum emanating from its rotors. I moved up, taking a position to one side of the door, my HITR ready. Raymond took the opposite side. Boldin and Young stacked behind us.
“Ready,” I said, and reached out, nudging the door open a crack. Through the gap there came a slice of light and the jumbled voices of a crowd—not close—but not so far away either. The tone was angry, fearful. I couldn’t understand the language, but I recognized a shouted threat, a desperate wail. “That’s got to be from the checkpoint,” Young whispered. A spillover of noise from civilians desperate to cross the sky bridge.
“Agreed.” I nudged the door wider and shoved the muzzle of my HITR through the gap, panning it, so the battle AI could use the feed from the muzzle cams to evaluate what was on the other side. As I did, I watched the feed on my visor’s display. It showed an empty stairwell lit by emergency LEDs. No debris, no bodies, no booby traps or IEDs in sight.
“Clear to advance,” Trident said.
I opened the door wider. The seeker moved first, darting past the door and then zipping down the stairwell—but it descended only a single flight before wheeling around and returning. “Clear below,” Trident said. He sent the seeker upstairs next, to reconnoiter hazards above us.
“Young, Raymond.” I gestured at them to move toward the lower stairs. “Guard the downstairs approach. Fall in when the squad is past.”
I pulled a button camera from my vest pocket, peeled off the backing, and stuck it against the wall, placing it as high as I could reach. Trident would monitor the feed. We’d know if any hostiles passed this point.
“All right,” I said, speaking softly over gen-com. “This is it. We should be past the worst of it. All we need to do now is reach the roof. We’ve got helicopters ready to come in and pick us up. So let’s move fast, but keep it quiet. Do not alert the enemy that we are here, and we’ll get to enjoy hot showers and home cinema tonight.”
I knew the skullcap was working again when I felt another sudden shift in my mood. This time my ready state ramped up, leaving me primed and eager to tackle the last half of our climb. The taut posture of my soldiers reflected a similar mood shift.
“Move out,” I said, taking the lead as we set off up the stairs.
This was not the way I’d expected to spend the day.
* * *
Fifteen million people. That was the estimated population of the urban maze we called Region Five. For three years, the city’s good citizens had worked hard to whittle that number down by killing each other in a brutal civil war. On one side was a dictator who’d accumulated vast wealth and an army of ruthless enforcers. On the other was a revolutionary warlord who’d risen to power on a cult of personality while accumulating a fortune of his own. Reviled by both sides was the tiny educated class—the engineers, administrators, lawyers, skilled contractors and technicians, and the business people, who, together, possessed the thin skin of knowledge every urban complex needs to function. Most had fled during the worst of the hostilities, and what was left of Region Five’s infrastructure quickly fell apart.
The threat of mass starvation had proven sufficient to get a peace treaty signed. A few hundred of the essential expats agreed to return, and a coalition of 7,000 peacekeeping troops was promised as “a show of international support.” That’s how Captain Tardiff had put it, though he’d looked like he had a bad taste in his mouth. “We won’t be here long,” he’d promised us.
I don’t know. We’d been seven weeks in-country. It felt like a long time—but it wasn’t time enough for the Coalition to get their act together. We were still operating with half the promised troop numbers. Three thousand soldiers, assigned to occupy a city of fifteen million. The math just wasn’t going to work. So we limited our operation to the city center, where people seemed happy to have us around.
But that morning, out on patrol, we all knew something was up. I’d felt the battle AI’s anxiety bleeding through my skullcap. We all did.
And then at ten hundred local time, the hammer came down.
In that moment, when I understood we were about to be overrun, I’d felt shock, fear, horror—until a switch in my brain toggled, and I was in battle mode. Maybe it was the skullcap. Maybe it was me. My training. My experience. I’d like to think so, but I don’t know.
It didn’t really matter. We just had to get the fuck out.
It was a bloody street fight to 21-North. I can see it all in my mind, hear the screams, the gunfire, smell the burn of smoke in the back of my throat, and remember the rage and the grief I’d felt over our dead—but looking back, it feels emotionally distant, as if the memory belongs to someone else.
We wear the skullcaps to ensure it will feel that way. The skullcaps are an interface to keep us focused and on topic, and to distance us from the worst of what we’ve seen and d
one.
It’s hard sometimes to know what’s real.
* * *
We moved fast, assured by the seeker that the stairwell above us was clear. Boot plates thumping in soft percussive rhythm, faint hiss of exoskeleton joints, creak of backpacks, low whirr of fans, and the white-noise of breath drawn under duress. My helmet audio should have screened out those noises, but I wanted to hear them. I wanted to focus on them instead of on the distant boom of slamming doors, the screamed threats and the wailing, the occasional crack of gunfire. The tactical AI picked up on that, and allowed it.
We’d climbed only five flights when I felt a tremor in the concrete. It startled me badly. I ducked down against the wall just as the roar of an explosion reached us. My ears popped, and I winced against the pressure in my skull. Lopez was right behind me. He was crouched on the stairs too, with Chan behind him, huddled in a corner of the landing.
Trident spoke over gen-com. “We had four RPs investigating the suite you evacuated. The battle AI triggered the explosives.”
Trident had probably watched it happen. That was part of his job: sitting in an air-conditioned office, facing a bank of screens, overseeing the last moments of people he’d helped to target for death. I hoped Command had him wired up too.
“Roger that,” I said.
Recovering my composure, I told Lopez, “You still got a button camera, right? Stick it to the wall. I want to leave more eyes behind us.”
We renewed our climb, deploying cameras every few floors.
Our seeker had scouted the stairwell above us, and confirmed it to be clear, but we had no data on who occupied the floors we were passing. That left me feeling like I was in some stupid video game. Every few seconds, I would stride up another flight, turn the corner, see the fire door ahead, the number of the floor painted on it in cool blue. I trained my HITR on each door that I passed, imagining it slamming open to admit a shattering of gunfire from an endless spawn of suicidal characters encroaching from the other side.
Trident interrupted this fantasy with a reality update: “Pursuit is on the way. Enemy seeker has just passed the first wall cam.”
Infinite Stars Page 48