We keep at it. Over the next few days, the battle AI changes the scenarios. We change our tactics. We do better
when we go in as two teams, advancing on parallel blocks. That divides the defense and makes it less effective, but we still don’t get inside the lab.
“They won’t let us win,” Tran concludes as we walk back to our housing, “because they have no fucking idea what the lab actually looks like.”
I laugh, but I know it’s more than that.
Civilians
, I say. I mean it as an imprecation, but it comes out weirdly flat in my synthesized voice. “They complicate everything.”
Flynn turns on me. “God
damn
!
You
complicate everything. I hate that creepy synth voice. Why can’t you just talk like a human being?”
What the hell can I say? It’s not something I even think about anymore.
Tran is quicker on the return fire.
Silence is golden
, he says. And then jumps back fast when Flynn takes a swing at him.
Civilians
are
the problem, though. It’s one thing to go all-out on an assault. It’s a different game when you have to shoot around bystanders—some who might not be as innocent as they’d like you to believe. That’s why we fucking hate urban combat.
We want to leave a small footprint. None of us wants to get to that lab by stepping over the bodies of noncombatants—but it’s starting to look like it’s going to come down to a trade, a choice of who lives and who dies. If Delphi is on August-19’s list, or Jaynie, or President Monteiro, a trade will be made.
It’s that simple.
• • • •
A media room is set up in the basement of the command center. I’m there for hours every day, taking virtual walks through the target district, memorizing the pattern of the
streets and the placement of the buildings, circling the block where the lab is believed to be located, studying the setup from every angle.
The target is an old apartment building that spans the width of the block. It has three aboveground floors and a basement. We want to enter on the south side, where a service entrance leads directly to the basement. The alternate entrance is the building’s front door, where we’d have to cross a small lobby to reach the interior stairs.
I walk through that lobby and then climb to the second floor, but that’s all I’m allowed. The virtual tour doesn’t go into the basement, because we’ve never gotten any camera eyes down there—but I can enter some of the surrounding buildings. I note which ones have multiple access points, and where it’s possible to enter from one street and exit into another. I make sure I can find my way around in daylight and after dark, with and without night vision.
Leonid has operated in the area before. He has a network of associates. Those connections have let him set up safe houses, all three of them high-walled estates. When the mission is done, we are to pick one, proceed to it with all haste, and then wait until an extraction can be safely accomplished.
It’s this last phase that needs to be improved.
I argued about it with Abajian as soon as he distributed the draft mission plan. “We don’t operate like this,” I told him as we met around a conference table along with Jaynie, Kanoa, Leonid, and Captain Montrose. “The longer we stay in one place, the more vulnerable we are. We need an immediate airlift out.”
“And you’ll get one,” Abajian promised. “
If
the situation is calm.”
Command is worried. If the district goes hot, helicopters will be easy targets. Captain Montrose was succinct:
“If a helicopter is shot down while evacuating you from the city, we won’t be able to cover it up. The mission will be exposed and impeachment proceedings will be launched against President Monteiro.”
Like me, Jaynie was suspicious. “We could be captured at any point during this operation.”
“Yes, Ms. Vasquez, you are correct. But within the target district we will have more options to secure your status.” Montrose didn’t want to discuss those options, which tells me that while they might benefit the president, they aren’t going to be good for us. “If the airlift is delayed, just get to a safe house. We’ll take care of you.”
I really would like to believe that.
• • • •
It’s evening. A few flakes of snow are falling as the squad trots to the hangar, rigged and ready for yet another trial run. The lights are out as usual. Captain Montrose is waiting for us in the dark. He’s standing at the back gate of the SUV he drives, wearing a trench coat, and farsights with night vision capabilities. “I want to introduce you to a new asset,” he says as we form a half circle around him. He turns and opens the SUV’s gate.
It’s a good thing no one is standing behind me, because I spring back two meters, powered by my dead sister. I land with my HITR braced against my shoulder and my finger on the second trigger, ready to launch a succession of grenades into the back of the truck.
Montrose scrambles out of the line of fire while Kanoa comes in over gen-com: “Stand down!”
“What the
fuck
is that doing here?”
Crouched in the back of the SUV is a robo-wolf—a four-legged, headless, gun-toting, mechanical monster—the same model that killed Colonel Kendrick on the First
Light mission. It’s like a simplified wolf’s skeleton, a gray titanium horror with cross-braced camera eyes where a head should be, and automatic weapons on motorized swivels mounted on its sides.
“You expect us to work with that thing?” Jaynie asks in a low, disgusted voice.
I glance at her. She’s got her weapon braced, just like me, ready to blow the robot to pieces. Jaynie was there on the First Light mission. It took the two of us and Kendrick to bring the robo-wolf down. But tonight, we’re armed with blanks and flash-bangs. We lower our weapons, while the squad mills uncertainly between us.
Montrose recovers himself. “Yes, Captain Vasquez,” he says, stepping back to his original position. “This squad dog has been assigned to you, and you will work with it. Guidance—wake it up.”
No lights come on, no burning red eyes. Its skeletal form just slides into motion, smooth as water, generating only a whisper of noise from the joints. It leaps from the back of the truck onto the concrete, landing with a slight clatter reminiscent of the sound my feet make.
A superstitious shudder runs through me as I remember the way its rounds punched holes in Kendrick’s armored vest and ripped him up inside.
I don’t trust the thing. I don’t want it around.
But that’s an irrational reaction.
It’s just a weapon, a potentially effective one, but mindless, like a cruise missile. And this time it’ll be on our side.
I swallow against a dry throat, suck fortified water through a tube, and try to be reasonable. “It has a human handler?” My voice is just a little unsteady.
“Yes. Human guidance in concert with an AI driver—similar to your squad’s angel.”
I think,
Lock it down
, and an icy, analytical mood slides
over me. When I speak again, I sound untroubled: “If nothing else, that thing should be good for propaganda value—scaring civilians out of the street.”
We run the mission.
The “squad dog,” as Montrose calls it, runs ahead of us, drawing a hail of simulated fire, but the battle AI doesn’t tag it with any damage. Montrose speaks over gen-com. “Always keep your distance from the dog. There’s a lot of ricochet off of it and you don’t want to get hit by that.”
As it moves, the squad dog directs dual fire at the upper floors of buildings on both sides of the street. I watch carefully placed rounds slam through the concrete. The battle AI records simultaneous hits against hidden enemy positions. We come in behind it and blow the lab door. For the first time, we make it all the way inside. Mission accomplished.
Just to make sure it wasn’t a fluke, we run the assault three more times—and each time, we get through.
If the goddamned squad dog wasn’t so expensive, I’d be out of a job.
• • • •
It’s 0200 before we’re dismissed. I sleep late, not waking up until an audio signal gets piped through my overlay. I lift my head, groggy. Tran looks in the door, a grin on his face. “Kanoa says to get the fuck out of bed. We’re on.”
I check my messages and find an order to pack up and report to the hangar at 1400. We’re going to deploy. Leonid Sergun will accompany us and coordinate local ground support.
I wish I could have seen Delphi again. Talked to her.
She’s Jaynie’s handler now.
It’s better this way.
THE TRAGIC FINAL SCENE
I
N
K
UWAIT WE ACQUIRE TWO
battered, well-used SUVs customized with heavy armor under their faded paint, and we drive them aboard a barge bound for Iraq, parking them alongside shipping containers stacked four high. We are traveling by water because Leonid has a long-standing relationship with the custom officers at the port in Basra.
It’s a short trip through the northern corner of the Persian Gulf. A tugboat hauls us past oil tankers and ships from the world’s navies, to the Shatt al-Arab waterway that marks the border between Iraq and Iran. By late afternoon, we are showing false passports to an officer of the Basra port authority.
I am in disguise, wearing sunglasses, a two-day growth of beard, and a subtle, carefully applied pigment to change the apparent angles of my face. It’s enough to throw off a casual observer, which is all I need, since the Red has ensured we’re protected from standard facial recognition.
The officer glances at me through the clear lens of her farsights. She looks over the rest of the squad. We are
strangers to her, but our nature is revealed in the way we carry ourselves, the set of our shoulders, the focus of our eyes. She’s seen our kind many times before. Basra has become a market for mercenaries. We’re just another squad, one she’s under orders to admit into the country.
Leonid makes a performance out of presenting to her a tablet that displays our equipment manifest. They chat amicably in Arabic—it wouldn’t look right to admit us too quickly—and then thumbprints and signatures get appended to electronic files and we are clear to enter the country.
Leonid takes the driver’s seat in the lead truck. I ride shotgun, with Tran, Fadul, and Roman in the backseat. The electric engine engages and we roll down the ramp. Flynn drives the second truck. She follows close behind us, transporting Jaynie, Logan, Escamilla, and Dunahee.
Welcome to Iraq.
• • • •
Basra is a precarious city, under siege from a rising sea level creeping up the Shatt al-Arab from the Persian Gulf, and rising temperatures that have already given it the hottest summers of any city on Earth. We’ve arrived in mid-January, in the late afternoon. The air temperature is barely eighty degrees American. Paradise. Unless you live here.
The other ongoing assault on the city is from its own people. The population has climbed from 900,000 in the late twentieth century to over six million now. Even though the city is veiled by a shroud of dusty brown air, I see the faint shimmer of an EXALT node. It makes me wonder: How extensive is the influence of the Red here? How does it intersect these people’s lives?
We leave the port, following a narrow street that passes by modern warehouses built since the last war rolled
through here. In contrast to the buildings, most of the cars and small trucks that crowd the street are worn out, dented, dusty. There is money here, but like most places, it’s unevenly distributed.
We join a wider thoroughfare, packed with cars both gas and electric. It takes us briefly north until Leonid swings through a traffic circle, and then we’re running south at a sedate but steady pace.
Oil facilities roll past, and the bombed-out shells of old apartment buildings. We pass a munitions factory and then a graffiti-covered wall that guards a neighborhood with bullet-scarred water towers. A decrepit slum huddles around a shining white, windowless data center. There is a massive covered stadium skirted by a vast, empty concrete parking lot tinted the same brown color as the sky.
It’s said that Iraq is the cradle of civilization, the site of the Garden of Eden. Maybe so, but if this is Eden, it just goes to show that what civilization does best is fuck up beautiful things.
• • • •
We leave the main road, turning off into a neighborhood with narrow streets crowded with foot traffic and lined with brick houses built with uneven masonry, making them seem old and tired. I turn to look behind us. Flynn isn’t following anymore. She’s been assigned a different route to make us appear less like an invasion force.
“Hey, Shelley.” My gaze shifts to Tran, sitting in the backseat between Fadul and Roman. His wide lips are pursed, his eyebrows drawn in concern. “I’m starting to worry we might turn on you.”
“What? What are you talking about?” Tran really does live in an alternate reality. “Why would you?”
“We wouldn’t want to,” he says. “But remember how
you and me and the LT all got launched into action in the UGF? What if that happens again when we hit this lab? But this time it happens to everybody but you, because the Red can’t get inside your head anymore to fire you up with your skullnet?” He gets animated, gesturing with his hands. “And then, say, you don’t like the slam we’re about to put down, so you get in the way of our programmed mission. We might have to kill you! Or you’d have to shoot us. It’d be like this tragic final scene.”
“Jesus, Tran,” Fadul says, her head cocked to glare at him, her lip curled. “We are about to commit an act of war, and you’re daydreaming about comic-book fantasies.”
“You want to think it’s a fantasy,” he fires back. “But you weren’t part of Arid Crossroad.” He looks at me again. “You get what I mean, Shelley? You get what I’m saying?”
I haven’t known Tran all that long. Palehorse Keep was the first mission we shared. But even in that short time I’ve noticed his crazy guesses have a way of turning out to be right. Not a comforting thought.
“If it happens, I won’t shoot you,” I promise him.
He nods with solemn gravity. “And I’ll do my best for you.”
I face forward again, more rattled than I want to admit. Leonid says nothing, not aloud, but words he spoke to me on our flight out of Pakistan echo in my head:
It is possible you are subscribed to the wrong god.
• • • •
Progress is slow. Every minute or two we stop: for people who step out into the street in front of us; for dogs scratching at their fleas; for cars emerging from nowhere, wielding the toot of a horn like a magic spell to ward off collisions.
If we were rigged in our dead sisters we could move faster than this, which is one reason we’ll be withdrawing on foot.
The sun dips below the horizon, leaving the sky aglow with light the color of dusty pearls. The crowds thin as people go to sunset prayer, and we make better progress.
The streets narrow even further. I have to push back against claustrophobia as we pass through them, schooling myself to stay calm. As I do, I start to recognize where we are from all my virtual walk-throughs in the media room. The geography is the same, but the feeling in these streets is grimmer than I imagined. Loose paper, cast-off bits of cloth, and crushed cardboard boxes collect in piles in front of the two- and three-story buildings. Oblivious to the mess, or at least unwilling to notice it, are young men, all wearing shirt-sleeves and sunglasses, or opaque farsights, who stand in small groups, smoking and watching everything around them, watching the women, especially, who pass by with swift, determined steps.
All the women I see have covered their head and shoulders in a hijab, but only a few wear robes. Many more wear long-sleeved blouses over pants, or over skirts with leggings; some wear coveralls as if they’ve just come from a mechanic’s shop or from a day spent dealing with plumbing or electrical systems. They move in groups of three or four and most groups have at least one firearm in sight. Sometimes it’s a pistol. Often it’s an assault rifle.
Whether the men watch them out of desire or curiosity or anger, I can’t tell, but what is certain is that our battered SUV is a sight even more electric, drawing their eyes away from the passing women.
Grim faces turn to regard us as we roll past. In the evening’s gathering shadows, tiny green lights blink, indicating farsights recording our presence. I think they’re EXALT farsights, controlled by the Red. I hope so. I hope the Red is on our side.
As we advance, I eye the streets, the buildings, the intersections, matching them with the geography I know. At each intersection, I go over in my mind possible ways out, reviewing the complex of streets and alleys that would make a best route, and the alternate paths we can try when things go to hell.
• • • •
We arrive at our staging area: a large two-story house surrounded by a high wall. The flat-black steel gate opens on remote control. We drive inside to a tiled courtyard. Sheets of brown canvas have been stretched between the walls to create a canopy to shade the yard and discourage the prying eyes of neighbors and of curious drones.
Kanoa stayed behind in Germany along with Delphi, but he’s here virtually as my handler. He speaks over gen-com. “There’s a cat on the wall. Don’t get jumpy and shoot it.”
“Is it wired?”
“It’s just a cat.”
We get out. The evening is surprisingly cool. I can hear traffic, chattering voices, a nearby TV. I open the back of the SUV. The squad dog is stirring, its bundle of titanium bones shifting, a predatory skeleton coming to life, aligning its weaponry as it reorganizes itself into walking form. It makes my heart beat faster and my hair stand on end.
“I hate that thing. It’s a fucking hellhound.”
Kanoa says, “You’ll be glad to have it a couple of hours from now.”
It leaps out past me, landing with a soft, rattling
click
of metal on stone. I watch it retreat to a corner, thinking about the way Kendrick died. And then I make myself stop thinking about it.
“Let’s move the gear inside.”
• • • •
Leonid gets the front door open and flips on the lights. I follow him in.
The interior has been cleaned out. No furnishings, no kitchen appliances. Doesn’t matter. We’ll be here for only a few hours. I check the bathroom and a small closet. It’s instinct to clear all the rooms, but Kanoa issues an order to stay downstairs. “The house is secure. We’ve got seekers in every room making sure of that. So stay on the ground floor. Your IR profile might be visible if you go up.”
He means my robot legs are easy to see in infrared, and that makes it simpler to identify me. So, instead of checking upstairs, I check on the other half of my squad. Pulling up the squad map in my overlay, I confirm their position at their assigned shelter: an old warehouse in a compound enclosed by a cinder-block wall.
I open a solo link to Logan. Jaynie is the CO of our squad, but that doesn’t mean I can’t do my own oversight. “Logan, report.”
“Nominal. We’re inside. Prepping.”
“Any trouble?”
“No trouble.”
“Vasquez treating you okay?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Logan, I want you to keep an eye on our people.”
He hesitates a few seconds, then: “Why? You know something?”
“No. I trust Vasquez. Just keep your eyes open.”
• • • •
We change out of our civilian clothes and into our unmarked burnt-camo, shadow-shifting uniforms. “Get your armor,” I order. “And set up your bones.”
The dead sisters get unfolded, but it’s too early to strap in. To minimize civilian casualties, we will wait until 0130 to launch our assault. The streets should be empty then, and if we get lucky, at least a few of the guards stationed around the lab might be asleep.
Tran scowls around the room at our four dead sisters standing immobile in the corners. “Looks like a headless skeleton army.”
“Someone to watch over you,” Fadul says, tossing him a meal packet.
Leonid is nervous. He doesn’t eat. While we sit cross-legged amid our gear, he paces. “You will need to move fast,” he reminds us.
“We know our roles,” Fadul says without looking up.
Leonid is not convinced. “Breaching the lab will be the easy part.”
“
Papa
,” Tran objects. “Didn’t you hear how many times we failed to reach the lab in practice? If that’s the easy part, we’re fucked.”
“That’s why we need to move quietly,” Roman says. “We want a limited engagement. Get in and get out with minimal civilian casualties.”
Fadul looks up, scowling at Leonid. “Just make sure the safe-house security systems know who we are. We’ll work out the rest.”
It takes only a few minutes to eat. Then we stretch out
on the tiled floor to sleep while we can. I don’t bother setting a watch. Guidance has a flock of seekers watching over us, along with the hellhound out in the courtyard. That should be enough eyes to keep us safe.
Roman checks out first, closing her eyes, turning off her mind. Tran is asleep a few seconds later, and then Fadul.
Leonid turns off the lights—but he doesn’t sleep. I listen to him pace, wondering what’s got him so worried. Every operation is dangerous. That’s just the way it is.
“You know something, Papa?” I whisper.
“No.”
Then after a few seconds, he adds, “This time, you will stick to the mission plan?”
“That’s my intention.”
“And what is the intention of your god?”
I admit the truth: “I don’t know.” I want to believe the Red is behind this mission, but if it is, I can’t feel it—not anymore, not the way I used to. I made that choice. But whether the Red is behind us or not, the L-AI known as Nashira is here. It’s the dominant AI in this district, a rogue angel with an agenda of its own. I’m pretty sure that agenda is not going to favor us.
I feel Papa’s worry spreading to me, but worry doesn’t do any good. I turn it back with a thought:
Calm
.
War is never predictable. We’ll do the best we can.
• • • •
My alarm goes off at 0100. I kill it and get up as Tran, Roman, and Fadul all awake. Leonid is not in the room. I link into gen-com. “Where’s Papa?”
“Waiting outside,” Kanoa answers.
I wash my face at the sink, drink fortified water, and then I rig up, pulling on my gloves, strapping into my dead sister, shrugging on my pack, shouldering my weapon. There’s a brittle tension in my chest, in my gut. The fear
and anticipation that always precede a battle. Another battle. My first engagement without the Red’s whispered warnings propagating through my brain.
“Fadul!”
“Sir?”
“Cross-check.”
“Yes, sir.”
She secures the last cinches on her dead sister and then we inspect each other’s rig, making sure everything is in order. Roman and Tran cross-check each other. We strap on our packs. Activate our weapons. I’ve got my helmet under my arm.