“
When
, Shelley?”
“I don’t know! I don’t remember. I just knew we had to act. There was no time.”
“There was time.”
“Abaza was getting suspicious.”
“He was not.”
Despite my fatigue, I draw myself up. I don’t need this shit. Not even from Papa. I’m tired, and I don’t want to answer any more questions. My glare is intended to convey that, but Leonid is not an easy man to intimidate.
“Does that work with your soldiers?” he asks me. “Because for myself, I am too old to be frightened by dark
looks. Do not forget, I was there. I saw it all. Maksim
wanted
you there with him. He wanted you to tell his story. He wanted the celebrity. You were in no danger from him.”
I look up at Logan, still leaning on the seatback. He returns my gaze with a troubled expression. “It was the only way we could get Issam out,” he reminds me. “We needed to establish control of the facility.”
“You failed in that,” Leonid says. “You never had control. You didn’t have a real plan. It’s only luck we didn’t all die trapped under that mountain.” He leans over, taps my chest. “Though you may yet die from the damage you’ve done to your lungs.”
It’s a slight touch, but it sets me coughing again. Leonid waits for the fit to pass. Then he pushes his point home. “You were haunted, Shelley. You were not thinking rationally. You were not thinking as a man who values his life and the lives of his soldiers. It’s true we would have left our new friend behind”—he looks up at Issam with an apologetic expression—“and for that I would have been sorry. But it was the rational option. You chose instead a suicide mission.”
“It was
not
a suicide mission.”
“You made it one when you attacked Maksim without a plan.”
“We had a plan. We had options. Issam was cooperating. He promised there was another way out.”
“A vague promise. A means to justify what you’d already decided to do.”
I turn to Logan again for backup, but he’s looking confused.
Is that what happened?
he asks over gen-com.
Is it?
“If you are a berserker,” Leonid says, “a suicide jihadi, so
be it, but don’t lie to yourself about it. Know who you are, what you are. Know the truth behind what you do.”
“That is
not
who I am, Papa. That’s not who we are.”
He lifts one heavy gray eyebrow. “Then it is possible you are subscribed to the wrong god.”
• • • •
I try to go to sleep; I’m exhausted. But when I nod off it’s only for a minute, two at most. There is a thick, putrid mass in my lungs that is suffocating me. When my chin slumps, it gets even harder to breathe. I jerk awake, gasping for air.
I told Abajian I wouldn’t go on a suicide mission—and then I made it one.
What the fuck was I thinking?
I didn’t see the skullnet icon, but I knew a program was running in my head—and it didn’t matter to me. I had clarity of purpose. What mattered was getting the job done, taking out the UGF,
mission first!
Leonid warned me,
Be very sure
.
I’m not sure anymore.
I go over the video I recorded, fast-forwarding through the night, looking again through my own eyes at what I did, what I said—and it doesn’t make sense to me. I burned everyone in the barracks room, knowing Maksim Abaza might be among them, knowing that if he was, I had just eliminated one of only two tenuous options for getting us out alive—and I was too arrogant even to worry about it. Moments later, after confirming Abaza was still alive, I warned him I would blow up the truck. Leonid cautioned me against making threats I was unwilling to carry out. And my answer?
Who said I’m not willing?
Papa knew then who was in control. Maybe I knew it too, but I didn’t care.
Never trust the Red.
I think I’ve heard that one before.
• • • •
Never trust the Red.
How many times have I said it?
I trusted it anyway, with my mind and my soul.
And it sent me on a suicide mission.
I stare like a zombie at the back of the seat in front of me, chasing that thought around and around in my exhausted brain, until the spell is interrupted by a question from outside my feverish mind. “You’re wired, aren’t you?”
I turn my head, puzzled, and discover that Issam has replaced Papa in the seat beside me. I scowl and press my hand against my coat, confirming the farsights I took from him are still there. He gives me a half smile. “Papa says he’ll throw me out of the plane if I give you any trouble.”
I draw in a deep breath. The rattle of my lungs reminds me to check Tran’s icon and then my own. Yep, we’re both still breathing.
“Papa’s exaggerating,” I tell him in a soft, hoarse voice. “You’re a valuable intelligence asset.”
“Just like my farsights.”
I nod.
Issam returns to his original question. “You
are
wired, right? You have an embedded neuromodulating net?” He presses his fingers against his scalp to illustrate. “Here? Implanted against your skull?”
“Yes.”
“And an overlay, too. That’s a dangerous combination.”
“It’s how I work. Anyway, you were Maksim’s pet technician. Did you get hazard pay for that?”
The question is meant as a jab, but he takes it seriously. “I haven’t been paid since Coma Day.”
“Yeah. Coma Day changed everything.” It changed all of us. We all have our stories. “Where were you?” I ask him. “Still at Stanford?”
“No. I wish I’d been there. But I was on a flight over the Atlantic, bound for Switzerland. The defense department was trying to recruit me for a ‘Manhattan Project’ focused on AI. It didn’t feel voluntary. They were going to protect us. Isolate us. I didn’t want to play. So, I got in touch with an old friend.”
“The one you told me about?”
“Yes. He arranged for me to get to Canada and then to Europe. It didn’t go the way I expected.”
“Can’t trust anyone.”
“I couldn’t get back home. I wanted to, but I kept getting pulled deeper and deeper into . . . well, into things I didn’t want to be part of.”
Not the most compelling story I’ve heard. “You’re clear of it now—and if you’re telling me all this because you’re worried I’ll testify against you, forget it. I can’t testify because I don’t exist. None of us do.”
“What I really want to tell you is that I used to be wired, too.”
“Say that again?”
“I used to be wired. Like you. It was a cutting-edge thing. Popular in the AI community.” FaceValue does not flag a lie. “Interface with the Cloud, tailor your own emotions. You had to go to Japan to get it done, but . . .” He shrugs.
I tell him what Cory told me. “It’s illegal now. For civilians.”
“Is it?” Issam shrugs. “Congress was slow and senile and so focused on the next election that there weren’t any laws against it when I had it done. But when the DOD came knocking on my door, I panicked. I thought they’d lock
me up when they found out. In hindsight, my fear doesn’t make any sense. There was no legal basis. They probably didn’t know what a skullnet was, but I was scared, and I just knew I had to run.”
“You think that was the Red? It got inside your head, made you panic?” Only then do I realize what he’s really telling me. “Wait . . . you said you
used
to be wired?”
“Yes. I had the skullnet taken out. I told my new ‘friends’ I regretted it, that it was an abomination. It’s a simple surgery to remove it. I had the overlay taken out later.” His brow wrinkles, reflecting complex thoughts. FaceValue says that he’s sincere. “I’ve run a lot of scenarios and done a few studies. All of it shows how impossible it is to escape the influence of the Red. It doesn’t really matter how far you withdraw or where you hide. We are all part of the world and sooner or later the Red reminds us of that. Still, influence can be resisted, challenged, turned. We’re not puppets. Not until we let it inside our heads. Once you do that, you never know who’s in control. That’s why I took my wire out. The next time I do something terminally stupid, I want to know it’s all me.”
• • • •
I think this plane won’t ever land.
Logan comes back to sit with me, though we don’t talk. Not at first.
I study his icon. His vitals are running hot. Elevated heart rate and blood pressure. Elevated muscle tension. He’s on edge.
“You’re worried,” I say. My voice is not much more than a whisper and I move only my lips, knowing that any other motion risks setting me coughing again.
I feel his eyes on me. “This plane is so damn slow.”
“And Tran’s not doing any better.”
“Neither are you.”
Not something I really want to think about.
“You think Papa was right?” he asks. “We weren’t meant to get out of there?”
“We were meant to destroy the place. Compelled to. You remember feeling that way?”
“Yes.”
“And whatever happened after that . . . just didn’t fucking matter.”
He’s silent again for most of a minute. “We were set up. And then thrown away.”
“We were.”
“It pisses me the fuck off.”
Everyone in ETM shares a basic personality type. I could call it a propensity for service, but fuck it. We’re circle-jerking, self-righteous cumwads with a tacked-on messiah complex and an addiction to risk. Intellectually, we’ve always known that in the calculations of the Red, no individual matters all that much. But emotionally, it’s hard to overlook being shoved into the fire. And it’s not the first time for me. It happened at Black Cross, when the Red walked me outside. It happened at
Sigil
, when I stood up on that block of ice and made myself a target.
I’m stubborn, but I can learn.
“This is a nonlinear war.” I turn my head, enough that I can see him. “Alliances shift depending on circumstance. That’s how the Red operates. We need to operate that way too. Be on our own side. Think for ourselves.”
“We
do
think for ourselves.” He’s speaking quietly, urgently; there is fear behind his words. “Most of the time. And I don’t want to quit what we’re doing. We’ve done good things. Worthy things—”
Unforgivable things.
“—but the Red is changing. It wasn’t like this before. Last time out, we started a fucking war. This time, we were meant to be sacrificed for a minor tactical gain. Where does that leave us? We can’t just go along with it. Next time could be worse. But quitting is a lousy choice too. Shelley, I know you’re thinking that if Issam could get rid of his skullnet, we can too. Close up that vulnerability. But—”
“We don’t have a choice.”
Not what he wants to hear. “There’s always a choice.”
“No. Like you said, next time could be worse.”
“So, take out the skullnet? That’s what you’re going to do?”
“What else can we do?”
His hand coils into a fist. He looks like he’s going to start punching the seat in front of him. “It’s not going to work for us. You know it. We can’t make the transition. If we take out the skullnet, we’ll crash so hard, there’s not going to be anything left.”
Yeah. That’s how it works. The skullnet is addictive. The brain gets used to its input and when that input stops, the system crashes, and we go down hard. I’ve been there. I know.
Something else is lodged in my mind, something else Logan said.
The Red is changing. It wasn’t like this before.
Guess I should have known it would go this way.
Guess Jaynie was right.
• • • •
We land in Budapest. There’s no reason we should be allowed into the country, but Leonid makes it work. We’re met on the tarmac by a black van with heavily tinted windows. There is a bodyguard in a business suit who takes up a post outside the plane.
The van’s driver boards the plane to help with our gear.
He offers to take my HITR, but I am tired, hurting, angry, and worried—and that means I want the security of being well armed. So I insist on carrying it myself. The driver shrugs. The bodyguard doesn’t flinch either as I slide into the van’s backseat, hugging my weapon.
Tran is too far gone to move under his own power, so Logan works with Captain Thurman to get him into the van’s front bench seat. Leonid makes sure all our gear is off the plane.
I press my head against the cold glass of the window, listening to Thurman talking to the driver just outside the van’s open door. “US embassy first, understand?”
And Leonid: “Yes, fine. But stop in the street to let her out. Do not park or try to enter the grounds.”
She climbs into the back of the van to sit beside me. “You and your soldiers don’t have to stay with Sergun,” she says. “You’d be better off coming with me to the embassy.”
“No.” It’s a whisper, my eyes watering as I struggle not to cough.
“I know you’re unsure of your status, but Command is aware of you. I was told to link up with you, remember? We’re on the same side.”
“It’s complicated.”
Leonid and Issam climb into the middle seat. The van door slides closed.
Thurman speaks in a softer voice as the van starts to roll. “I’m not going to keep any secrets when I debrief. I don’t know what that’s going to mean for you.”
Leonid turns around, his elbow on the back of the seat as he looks at me. “You have intelligence to offer, Shelley. You are not without value. If you turn yourself in, do it in your own time, on your own terms.”
I nod and then whisper, “What Papa said—assuming I’m not dead by morning.”
• • • •
We drive beyond the
No Stopping
signs in front of the American embassy and then pause at the curb just long enough for Thurman to jump out. I turn around to look as we pull away. She’s still wearing her flight suit, which draws immediate interest from the guards on duty in front of the gate. The last I see of her, she’s holding her ID up for their inspection.
I continue to watch the traffic behind us, anxious to know whether we’re being followed, but I can’t pick out a vehicle. Probably, a drone has been assigned to watch us.
A few minutes later we descend into the basement parking area of a private hospital, coming to a stop in front of the glass doors of a brightly lit lobby. Hospital attendants in white coats wait with a gurney. Tran is moved onto it. They start to wheel him away. When I realize we’re being separated, I panic. “Logan, go with him!”