The Last Good Man

Kai Yun

Adrenaline kicks hard. True’s heart rate spikes as she drops into a crouch. She looks up and down the street, and overhead. No threat in sight, but also no shelter. The buildings present vertical faces to the street, no eaves and no inset doorways, and the doors to the riad are closed.

She considers a sprint for the corner when a second, more distant crack echoes across the city. This time she spots the vertical line of a thin, descending smoke trail in the sky above the rooftops. It marks the swift fall of an object too small to identify.

More pops and cracks and smoke trails follow.

“We need to get back in the house,” she warns Shaw as she retreats to the doors, hoping they’ll open again before she draws the eye of whatever is out there.

Motion on the periphery of her vision. She looks up to see an object tumbling out of the sky. It slams against the roof of a parked car, skids off, and lands in the street a few feet from where she’s standing. It looks like a fragment of a fuselage, maybe from one of the municipal UAVs. And yet she has heard no sound of rockets or any explosions.

Shaw waves her into the riad, where the doors are swinging open. “Get under cover!”

“It’s a fucking laser, isn’t it?” she demands as she ducks back into the passage.

Shaw is right behind her. “That’s my guess. Looks like we’ve got a clean sweep of the sky underway.”

The sight of Guiying, already on her feet and at the inner end of the passage, startles True. The robotics engineer uses one hand to brace herself against the wall; she holds the other raised to her bruised throat. Her eyes flare in fear and surprise at their sudden reappearance. She starts to back away but True tells her, “Stay under cover.”

True gets out her MARC, gets it on, listening to the continuing crack, crack, crack of shattering machines, now faint, now sharp and near.

She moves up to join Shaw. They crouch in the passage, well back from the street, out of sight of the laser-wielding UAV no matter where it is in the sky. They leave the doors open, pushed back against the walls so they can watch. Shaw is muttering, engaged with his AR visor. True uses her data glove to access the sparrow’s video feed—and the colonel is suddenly with her again: “What the fuck have you gotten yourself involved with?”

She studies the sky, looking for the shooter.

“You aren’t going to find it,” Colt says. “A laser-armed UAV could be a mile up, or miles away.”

“It’s Kai Yun,” she says out loud. She glances over her shoulder at Guiying. “They followed her.” True recalls her earlier suspicion. “You did this, Shaw. You asked for this. You picked an open courtyard and baited it with Li Guiying just to see who would come out to play.”

Colt swears softly over the MARC’s comm.

Shaw says, “Of course it’s Kai Yun.” Keeping his gaze focused on his visor, he adds, “They think they’re invulnerable. They’re not even trying to be subtle. I’ve got nothing left up there. I don’t think anybody does, except them.”

“They cleared the sky? That’s crazy.”

“It’s gonna get crazier when the Arkinson launches.”

“The Arkinson?” she echoes in disbelief.

Colt says, “If you got any kind of exit plan, girl, now would be a good time to execute it.”

She ignores him and says, “You can’t scramble your air force, Shaw. This is a peaceful country, not a UA. Third-party military actions cannot take place—”

This time he looks at her, a cold gaze from behind his visor. “For God’s sake, True, are you quoting legal scripture at me?”

“He’s got a point,” Colt says. “Think who you’re arguing with.”

Okay. Right. She sees the absurdity, the pointlessness of protest, but the situation is escalating and she can’t help arguing. “Shaw, you cannot engage in an air war above this city.”

“I’ve got a defense contract that says I can.”

“What?”

“War is my business. It’s your business. We are fucking militaries for hire.”

“We are not the same,” she says. “Variant Forces is a black-hat PMC that has not signed the code of conduct and it’s run by you, a man who does not exist.”

“For God’s sake, True,” Colt rumbles. “Do you want him to shoot you?”

Shaw gives her a dark look that asks the same question—but then admits, “A local PMC is the public face of the operation.”

“Shit,” she says—all she can think to say given the twisted, tangled, dangerous world they live in. Impossible to know who’s in charge and who’s got military-grade weapons in their back pocket. War can happen anywhere, everywhere, at any moment.

But for now, the cracking has stopped. Doesn’t mean it’s over.

“Stay put,” Shaw warns her. “We’re stuck here while that laser owns the sky.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

To her surprise she hears voices outside, civilian voices. They sound puzzled, worried. She guides the sparrow’s camera to look back down at the street. It finds people at the end of the block, looking up at the sky. More people on the roof terrace across the street. They’re trying to understand what’s going on. They question each other in concern, in disbelief.

“They need to get back inside,” True says. She is sure there is a ground game on the way, and really, it’s just a question of whether Shaw’s Arkinson can eliminate the laser before Kai Yun’s foot soldiers show.

That doesn’t seem likely.

A civil-defense siren kicks in with an ear-shattering howl.