War Stories: New Military Science Fiction

All You Need ^{Mike Sizemore}

THE GIRL AND THE GUN look down the hill at the man they’re supposed to kill.

The man is dragging a large tree through the snow. Next to him, watching, is a small child.

What date is it today? says the girl.

December 20th, the gun replies.

They watch the two figures until they’re out of sight. It takes a little while. More than enough time for the girl to take the shot.

The gun is confused.

You didn’t take the shot, the gun says.

No, says the girl. And with that they head back to the airport.

The airport is a mess.

People are rushing this way and that, frantic to get one of the last seats before the Wave hits.

The girl and the gun sit against a wall watching all this.

They have a guaranteed seat on one of the last flights out. Most people don’t.

They watch men with guns—dumb stupid guns, not anything at all like the one the girl holds—try and keep a lid on things.

A man comes over and sits by them. He doesn’t carry a gun. Instead he has a thick notebook and a lot of pens.

Do you mind if I sit here? he asks the girl and the gun.

Why? the girl asks.

The gun wouldn’t have thought to ask this question and is suddenly interested in the answer.

Yes, why? asks the gun.

The man looks at them both.

He’s trying not to look scared, but they both know he is.

My paper is trying to get me on a flight. They told me to stay out of harm’s way. I looked around the airport and next to you seemed to be the safest place, he says.

The gun likes the answer. The man was scared, but he was also smart.

I saw your patch. He points to the one high up on her arm showing a cartoon coyote throttling a cartoon roadrunner.

I was in San Francisco. I saw what your unit tried to do, the man says.

The girl looks down at the patch as if she’d forgotten it was there.

It’s faded, but she remembers the day she got it.

Folds the memory away.

That was a long time ago. But sure. Take a seat, she tells the man.

The man gratefully drops down beside them. He’s smart enough not to ask anything else.

The man wakes up. Something has changed.

It’s quiet now. Most people are sleeping. It’s dark outside.

The girl and the gun are standing over him.

Here, says the girl.

The girl is offering him a sheet of paper.

He takes it and recognizes it at once.

This is your seat, he says.

I don’t need it anymore, says the girl.

He scrambles to his feet as the girl and the gun begin to walk away toward the exit.

Wait. When the Wave hits there’ll be no more planes. You won’t be able to fly out, he calls after them.

She doesn’t turn around.

It’s cold outside.

The gun doesn’t feel it, but registers the drop automatically as it focuses on the girl’s readings via the chip in her chest.

He’s right. How will we get out? the gun asks.

We’ll walk out, replies the girl.

The gun runs the figures, but says nothing.

They reach the foot of the glacier the next morning just as the Wave hits.

The girl and the gun both watch it spread from the horizon.

It turns the crystal blue sky a bright clear green before fading to a new color that sparkles, lit from beneath by the bright snow and ice and from within by the nano intelligence that just cut them off from the rest of the world.

Now isn’t that something? says the girl.

The gun understands this is a rhetorical question. It tries to lower its sensors anyway so it can experience something akin to what the girl is seeing.

After a few minutes the gun gives up.

You okay? the girl asks.

Yes, says the gun. No effect at all.

They find the first dead body that afternoon.

Nice shot, says the gun.

The girl looks down at the dead man.

The dead man looks at nothing.

They count sixteen more on the way up. All head shots.

Not far now, says the girl.

They find them in a half–collapsed tent. Exposed to everything.

You came, says the other gun in the dead woman’s lap.

The girl leans over and gently takes the weapon from the cold hands and examines it.

Are you okay? the girl asks.

Yes. We made contact at 0800 yesterday, begins the other gun.

It’s okay. We’ll take the data. We counted seventeen on the way in. That sound right?

The other gun whirs as it cycles up. Angry.

No. Twenty, says the other gun.

The girl fixes the collapsed part of the tent as best she can.

You did enough for them to have a change of heart, says the girl.

We’ll get them, says her own gun.

This is the first time her gun has spoken since they entered the tent.

She marvels for a moment at how different yet similar their voices sound to her.

Can’t worry about them now. We’ll stay tonight and set off in the morning, the girl says.

She stands and looks down at the older weapon. The same model she trained on.

She folds that away too.

If that’s okay with you, she asks.

The older gun is silent for a moment as it transfers its data over to her weapon.

We’d like that. She said that you’d come. Even with the Wave. She knew, says the other gun.

The next morning they were some way across the glacier when the other gun detonated its thermite rounds while they were still chambered.

The girl did not look back, but the gun monitored the heat spike until they were too far away for it to register any more.

We could have taken him, said the gun.

Yes, said the girl.

But we didn’t, says the gun.

Would you want to be taken? she asks.

She pauses and looks down at her gun. The sensors along the sight flicker slightly.

No, says the gun.

They walk on in silence for the rest of the day.

They come upon the men the next morning just as the sun rises into the broken sky.

They are still trying to carry the wounded one between them. She figures him for the officer.

She drops the man to his right, and then she herself drops to one knee.

They’re too far away to hear the shouting.

They’d ignore it anyway.

The uninjured man runs.

The girl and the gun track the running man.

They ignore the officer who is now sitting upright and firing wildly in their direction.

They’ll want to know why we didn’t kill the man with the tree, the girl says to the gun.

The gun fires and the running man falls face down into the snow.

No. I erased an hour and fifteen minutes from my uploadable memory and logged it as an atmospheric glitch, says the gun.

The girl moves her eye from the scope and down at the weapon in her hands. Two years together and it can still surprise her.

You understand why we walked away? she asks.

He was a low priority. Off the radar for almost a decade and presumed dead. You have operational authority on targets of opportunity, the gun replies.

The officer has stopped firing.

The girl puts her eye back to the scope and watches him bring his sidearm up to his head. She puts a round in his shoulder and moves the scope to watch the weapon fly a satisfying distance across the snow.

Nothing else? the girl asks the gun.

He wasn’t the mission, says the gun.

He wasn’t the mission and the day after tomorrow is Christmas, says the girl.

When they get to the officer he’s still alive.

He looks up at them wearily and says something that the girl doesn’t understand.

The girl levels her weapon and shoots him in the face at point blank range.

What did he say? she asks the gun.

They’ve been walking an hour.

He said, I killed you. Then he said it again. He thought that we were them, says the gun.

Good, says the girl.

Good.

The man has just set the table when the knock at the door comes.

He looks first to the child still playing with her present in front of the fire and then to his rifle leaning in the frame of the cabin.

He opens the door and looks at the girl and the gun.

We’re sorry to disturb you, but we saw the smoke. We were hoping to rest awhile. We’ll understand if you’d rather we didn’t intrude, says the girl.

The man looks at the girl. The faded uniform. He thinks she’s maybe seventeen. He’s wrong.

We? asks the man.

Merry Christmas, says the gun.

The Valkyrie ^{Maurice Broaddus}

SECOND LIEUTENANT MACIA BRANSON LEAPT into the dark abyss and descended into a purgatory of red tracer fire. The night sky held her close as the air whipped about them, reducing her world to the deadening screech of white noise. She plummeted toward the earth, not knowing where they might land. In trees. In water. Into the midst of a Heathen patrol. All she knew for sure was that they would land somewhere in Holland. She prayed that she would be at least close to her drop zone. She was deployed in service of The Order and had a duty to perform.

The church was mother, the church was father.

A grassy knoll rushed toward her and she braced for the jolt of impact without looking down. The rush of the ground toward them, despite their training, could still send a jolt of panic through a soldier. Besides, she enjoyed holding onto the peace of the horizon for as long as possible to steady her. Her knees slightly bent, she dropped her chin to her chest and tensed her neck muscles. The earth slammed into her, her body twisting and bending in automatic reaction, giving in to the crash, a rag doll carried by the current of momentum. She slid down an embankment before coming to a halt. Slogging through three inches of pooled water, she knew what she’d find when she checked her gear. Nothing would work right. Her flight suit was only designed for controlled descents. The best tech went to the evangelical deployments. The rest of the church’s military was left with equipment full of glitches, if not flat out defective. With so many theaters of operations, the troops’ equipment had been rushed into production and not battle–tested. Like many of her fellow soldiers. Her hard landing smashed the communication relay, and her leg bundle, full of extra ammo and rations, was nowhere to be found. At least the familiar weight of her Stryker XM9 pulse rifle, though it was a generation out of date, comforted her like the embrace of an old friend.

Above her, tracer fire continued to crisscross the night sky, the light of exploding flak almost reminding her of fireworks. Almost. The proximity alert lit up on her rifle.

“Fishes,” Branson challenged.

“Loaves,” a familiar voiced responded softly from the shadows. “Your comlink down, too? Where the hell are we?”

No one was happier to see Prefect Sergeant E. Kenneth Dooley than Branson. Short, quick–thinking, and ugly as a catfight, when Dooley first joined the ranks, the older soldiers took to calling him Doo–Doo. That lasted until the first time they saw him in a firefight. He stalked a battlefield with defiant determination, daring the Heathens to hit him.

“I’d guess five to seven miles from our DZ, judging from the firing,” Branson said.

She didn’t bother to check the digital telemetry or maps in her helmet subsystem. Half the time she found the continual stream of information and dogma sermons more hindrance than help. “Which way do we head?” Dooley asked.

“Where else? Toward the firing.”

They both knew it was a bad drop. The navcom signal was down across the board, so they set about cobbling together their unit the old–fashioned way. They spread out, slow and tentative. When unfamiliar soldiers joined them and saw Branson—many replacement soldiers filled their ranks for this mission—a sense of relief lit up their faces. It was as if they sensed they were in good, experienced hands. Other officers complained that she was friendlier with the enlisted men rather than she was with them. She didn’t care. The front line was where she belonged; she even volunteered for patrols. The uniform meant something to her.

Branson watched with weary eyes as this latest batch of green recruits checked through their rucksacks and readied their weapons. She waited for them to regroup before taking final stock of what the service had her working with this time.

“When are we gonna see some action?” asked a square–jawed, broad–shouldered glamour boy with curly blonde locks. He still stank of military school.

“Who’re you?” Dooley asked with the casual contempt mixed with pity of a boxer who wholly outclassed his opponent. He had little patience with replacement soldiers.

“The name’s…”

Dooley bit into a well–chewed cigar stump and swished it about in his mouth until it found its comfortable crook. “Stow it. I don’t wanna learn your name. Learning your name is the first step to getting attached, and I sure as hell ain’t getting attached to no replacement. From here out, you’re Goldy.”

“What do they call you, ma’am?” Goldy turned to Branson.

“Second Lieutenant Branson. You want to try to call me something else?” Her stare made him turn away.

Goldy spied the ink along Dooley’s arm. “What’s the tattoo?”

Dooley pulled up his sleeve to fully reveal the image of a woman astride a white horse on his arm. Long blonde hair covered by a silver helmet, with blazing blue eyes peering from underneath it, she carried both a spear and shield. “A Valkyrie.”

“What’s a Valkyrie?” Goldy asked.

“Collectors of the favored dead. They chose the slain heroes to be taken to Valhalla. If a warrior saw one before a battle, he’d die during it. I want the Nils to always see one coming.”

“You got to be careful with all that myth talk. You don’t want to be seen as a Nil or a sympathizer.”

“A Heath. They’re Nils if they have no gods; Heaths if they worship the wrong ones.”

“Still, choosers of the slain? Nice…” Goldy’s voice trailed off. Dooley had turned his back and stalked off to be about his business.

Branson pretended to have not noticed the interaction by studying the maps on her view screens as Goldy approached her. “How’d it go with Dooley?”

“We’re dutch,” Goldy said, without any trace of irony. “We hit it off swell.”

“Give it time. Newbies have to learn how to slip in between the seams.”

“I get it, ma’am,” Goldy said, obviously bored with the lesson.

“Pack ’em up, we’re moving out,” a new voice shouted out. First Lieutenant Gilbert Meshner. “Mush” behind his back.

Of course he’d been chosen for this mission. Branson spat.

Meshner wandered through their makeshift camp like a distracted tourist. A mop of black, greasy hair and dead grey eyes gave his face a grave severity. He was little more than a petty dictator who used vindictiveness in the guise of discipline. Rumor was that when they’d parachuted into Chiapas, Mexico, a Nil had charged Meshner. By the time the rest of the men got to him, the two had played “kata tag” and the Nil lay dead at his feet. But otherwise Mush’d long since developed a reputation for taking long walks away from the action. The men tried to joke it off as Meshner’s luck masking as skill, but no one knew what to make of him.

“We’re marching until high ground.” Meshner eyed Branson with something approaching scorn.

Not a single man stirred. They turned to Branson in a tacit double check of the orders.

“You heard the man. Let’s go, you scrotes!” Branson echoed.

The hills of Holland were supposed to be beautiful. The war had reduced them to greenspace ambush sites for the Nils and Heathens. The church embraced a holistic approach to fulfilling her mission: politics, technology, and the military. The Evangelical States of America already ruled their hemisphere, along with parts of Africa and Asia. The United Emirate of Islam controlled the rest of Africa along with Asia. Europe was up for grabs, a self–declared safe haven for atheists and heretics. Not that Branson cared. Nation. Religion. Tribe. Cause. There was always some supposed big idea to fight for, but in the end, all that mattered was that orders were obeyed and the mission carried out.

A dense fog crept along the field, and an eerie silence embraced them. Pulse rifle fire left a distinct odor in the air, a mix of ozone and seared flesh. The smell of death. High ground took them the rest of the night and most of the next day to find. Patrols detected Heathen troops nearby. The men marched in silence, the only sound filling the air the steady stamp of their boots slogging muddy earth. The waiting was the worst; that was what broke people. The constant state of alert, their minds imagining horrors behind every point of cover. Branson shoved that all aside.

The momentary peace gave her a chance to read up on some of her newbies. Goldy held a particular interest. His body was a stew of experimental psychotropics. For all of his country–boy persona, he had once been a serial killer with a penchant for skinning young girls before his conversion. Fortunately the church left nothing to chance when it came to one’s sanctification, even if it had to overwrite existing memories with new ones. Everyone needed redemption from something.

Praise be the blood.

“Where’s Goldy?” Branson whispered.

“Making out with the toilet.” Dooley thumbed toward some bushes. He shifted his unlit cigar to the other side of his mouth as if suddenly aggravated.

“My back teeth were floating,” Goldy muttered as he caught their eyes watching his approach.

“Tell the men to fix their katas. We attack at first light. 0530. Meshner’s orders.” Branson withdrew her edged bayonet and fixed it to the front of her pulse rifle. The high–tech stuff was good for attacking an enemy at a distance, but the final cleanup was always up close. She would always know the face of her enemy. God have mercy on her soul.

“Tell her what you told me,” Goldy said to Dooley.

“What?” Branson held her gaze on the sergeant.

“Nothing. Just campfire stories that old soldiers tell.” Dooley cut his eyes at Goldy, a silent cursing which he’d vent at some later opportunity.

“I like stories,” Branson said.

Dooley shuffled, flushed with mild embarrassment like a child caught speaking out of turn, which Branson found amusing. “You’ve already heard this one. During the American Civil War, a general kept getting these reports about how his men were afraid to be left for wounded on the battlefield. Not just afraid, but absolutely terrified, especially if they had to lay wounded at night. Try as he might, the morale of his troops kept sinking to new lows every day, but no one wanted to talk about it. The only thing any of them would say was that if you fell in combat and you wanted to survive until morning, you should hide your breath so no one knew you were still alive.

“One night, after an extended engagement with the enemy, the general walked his line. He often did this after a battle. You know, to pray for his men and clear his head. He saw some movement on the field between the two warring camps. A lone mook, he couldn’t tell if it was Yankee or Confederate, walked among the bodies. In the morning, the medics found the fallen bodies decapitated. Swore it was a woman with a sword.”

“Don’t that beat all?” Goldy asked.

Branson knew the story. She’d heard it many times before. From Meshner. “You and Lt. Meshner close?”

“Not really. He just took a shine to me is all,” Dooley said sarcastically.

“Must be your special brand of charm and wit.”

“Yeah, temper got the best of me again,” Dooley said. “Back in training camp, I threatened to kick his balls into the following week if he gave me any more bullshit jobs instead of letting me fight. There was this long pause. Thought I was done for, either booted out or thrown in the stockade. But he just got this strange grin, like a gator smiling at you. Said I was all right. I kinda took him under my wing after that. You know we have to raise these lieutenants right.”

“Speaking of our esteemed Lieutenant and long walks, where is Mush?” Goldy asked.

Branson’ eyes shriveled the grin on the replacement soldier’s face. Meshner was still their commanding officer and Branson’s job was to enforce discipline among the men. “I’ll go look for him.”

Praise be the blood.

The Blessed Sacrament. Thanks to the sacrament, a combination of human growth hormone and nanotech, she remained about the physical age of twenty–seven and in peak condition for fighting. Truth be told, the wars had begun to blur together. She hardly noticed when one ended and another began. Tour of duty after tour of duty, her body repaired and rejuvenated. “Through the blood we have life,” a familiar refrain, never truly aging, only knowing war. She tried not to think about how many test subjects that the church’s science division had gone through to perfect the gene therapy. Or worse, that they had occasionally remanded those burnouts back to the field. Like with Goldy.

“Fishes.” The challenge sounded, with a tremble of nervousness. Meshner’s pulse rifle swung toward Branson, who stood in the shadows. “Fishes.”

“Loaves,” Branson said in a low voice, calm and focused. She tried to speak with as little venom as possible, but she couldn’t always hide the distaste of addressing Meshner. “What are you doing out here, sir?”

“Just checking out the Nils’ lines.”

“I just came from there. Everything’s under control.” Branson staggered a little from exhaustion. Her ARM XS monitoring system pumped stims into her system, steadying her.

“War is a grave matter, the province of life or death.” Meshner paraphrased Sun Tzu.

Branson, not impressed by his book learning, finished the quote. “ ‘War is like unto a fire. Those who will not put aside weapons are themselves consumed by them.’”

Meshner sucked from a small silver flask. He tipped it in obligatory offer to Branson, who waved it off. Meshner continued drinking. “Do you know what the curse of war is?”

“Sir?”

“The loss of tears. The stress. The loss of so many. The things…” Meshner’s thought trailed off. “Most men drift through life unaware of what they truly are. Only another soldier knows how hard it is to keep his sanity doing this dirty business. What did you do before all of this, Macia?”

“This is all I do, Lieutenant. I find it easier not to worry about the person I was.” She preferred war’s clean and uncomplicated emotions; giving into it, leaving behind idle dreams of family or could’ve beens. Her father was what they called an “indigenous leader,” a colony planting novice–in–training, killed in the mission field. After her parents were killed, the church took her in. The church was mother, the church was father. So joining the Service of the Order was natural. The church birthed her and war made her in its image.

“Because the person you were might not be able to live with the things that the person you’ve become had to do? Or because you don’t remember anything before the war?”

“That’s the life of a soldier, sir,” Branson said.

“Weapons on me. We’re moving out,” Meshner shouted. Once again, the men discreetly glanced toward Branson.

“We’re expecting some of the Nils’ best.” Branson slung her weapon to readiness, not meeting the eyes of the men, treading the minefield of leading while appearing to follow. Morale was bad enough without the men wondering who to follow when the shit hit. Technically Meshner was the ranking officer, but the First Lieutenant’s role was more administrative. A liaison ensuring that the will of the church was carried out through her military arm. First Lieutenants were usually hands off, opting to work more behind the scenes. They knew the theory of war. Branson and Dooley, they were war.

The land itself struggled against them. Mud sucked at their boots as they marched toward the hedgerows that lined the town’s perimeter. Flak lit up the starless night from a town more than 10 miles away as drones passed overhead. The gloomy woods and endless fog followed them. Isolated them. Sound echoed and bounced back, carried oddly by the whims of the hollow.

They tromped along the base of a hill that hid them from the road above. Meshner held up his fist. Branson cocked her head at the distinct sound of biomech marching on cobbled roads. A lone Heathen soldier. Branson kept one eye on Meshner, the other on her squad. This was the dangerous time for green soldiers. She knew how their hearts stammered so hard they might not be able to catch their breath. Trying to maintain their composure as they stared into darkness. Trying to distinguish between normal and abnormal shadows. Praying that their anxiety for something to happen, anything, just to get the nerve–jangling waiting over with, didn’t make them do something stupid.

Goldy had wandered too far from the squad before they could do anything about it. Maybe he figured he had a better angle to see their situation from his position. Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, he was climbing up the hill to sneak up on the Heathen soldier. “Hey, buddy,” Goldy said in a mock–conspiratorial whisper.

The Heathen soldier had little opportunity to react before Goldy’s kata slipped between his ribs. His body crumpled to the ground. Goldy turned to them, pleased with his actions, but failed to notice what Branson had: This wasn’t a lone soldier separated from his unit. He was a lead advance scout clearing a path for the entire tactical unit, replete with two biomechs supporting the newcomers. The stutter of pulse fire shattered the night, muzzle fire like angry lightning bugs in the darkness. Goldy dove off the road.

“Get up that hill or I’ll have your balls for breakfast!” Dooley yelled above the whine of charges building to fire, focused light spat out as hot teeth. Dooley roared up the hill, the men quick on his heels.

A shot whizzed by Branson and she nearly choked on the accompanying adrenaline rush. She tumbled into Dooley’s position and returned fire. “You’re going to get me killed.”

“Not you,” Dooley smirked with a knowing grin. “Not today at least.”

Dooley’s eyes betrayed his attempt at humor. He was reveling in the slaughter. There were no innocents to consider, no waxing on about misguided soldiers. They were all “Heathen bastards that had to be killed” and be they men, women, or children, they would die if they stood between him and accomplishing his mission.

There was something monstrous in Holland that night.

One of the replacement soldiers took a bullet right through his mouth, sending his helmet flying and spilling him to the ground. Branson crawled over him to get to a better position. A battle still had to be fought, which left no time to mourn him. She shut down another piece of herself and wondered how much she had left to shut down.

One of the Heathens broke through their ranks. Branson intercepted him. No matter what The Order preached, there was no honor in battle. Fights were not won by adherence to rules of some imagined, gentlemanly engagement. Violence was the most primal language of humanity. Pain was the universal translator. Branson jammed her right index finger through the Heathen’s eye socket. When he recoiled, she punched him in his genitals with her left. She grabbed her pulse rifle and hammered his head with its butt.

The shooting eventually stopped. MK–241 incendiary attacks left scorched trees. Holes pockmarked the earth. Branson prayed that they hadn’t wasted these men on a bloody joyride.

All Branson wanted was to reach a command post, get a shower, and feel human again. Dismissed, she went to check on Dooley.

“How’s the leg?” Branson asked.

“Just practicing to be the dummy,” Dooley winced. He had caught a ricochet, but Branson knew that he wasn’t going anywhere.

“It’s all such a waste.”

“I’ll be patched up and ready to go again before chow time.”

“All for the church to claim another bit of real estate, to justify the use of the sword to fulfill God’s kingdom.”

“Careful. Questions like that might make some think you’re losing your beliefs.”

“The only belief of mine anyone needs to worry about is my belief in following orders. I’m just… tired.”

“Yeah, we all get tired like that sometimes.”

Goldy huddled over a body hidden in the shadows. Branson tried to make as much noise as possible when she walked toward him in order to avoid spooking him, but Goldy whirled at her approach, weapon ready. Branson calmly raised her hands. “A little jumpy?”

“I guess, ma’am.”

“Got anything good, kid?”

“Good?” Goldy demurred, not quite hiding his guilt at being caught.

“Souvenirs.”

“I found this.” Goldy pointed to a fallen Heathen soldier. “He’s the seventh body I’ve found like that. Most nowhere near any shelling.”

“Maybe someone’s collecting more… exotic souvenirs.”

Goldy’s face suddenly seemed too young to know the taste of war. “How do you do it, ma’am?”

“Do what?”

“Live with the constant fear.”

How could she explain to him that each day was a struggle to believe that life was worth living? That people were supposed to be created in God’s image, that there was a point to any of this?

“There’s no fear on stage,” Branson said. Goldy shook his head, not understanding. “It’s like an actor’s performance anxiety. Our holo–training, all that rehearsal, takes over. Resign yourself to your own death and you can do anything. Especially live.”

Branson watched her breath curl languidly in front of her. The cold air stabbed at her lungs like a swarm of needles. The treacherous, man–made forests had been planted specifically as a defensive barrier. The unrelenting shelling reduced her squad to shadows backlit by burning trees. She could barely feel her fingers despite the flames erupting in the woods. A miserable downpour, closer to sleet than rain, left thick, slimy mud that slowed their every movement. The thick fog rolled in, damp and cold, leaving the men disoriented, isolating them in their own private Ragnaroks. The thought of roads seemed like bedtime stories told to give hope to the weary soldiers. The hours might as well have been days.

Branson heard the Devil’s Whistle, the whine which made every soldier’s blood run cold. Drones gave little warning before their attack. “If you can hear the shells, you’ll be okay,” she taught. She hugged the ground, certain that this time a missile had come for her head. The earth trembled beneath her, spitting dirt in its death throes.

Then the shelling stopped.

War held Her breath. After being fired upon all night, the silences proved just as eerie. The earth stilled. Gold flames illuminated the trees. Like prairie dogs, the medics popped their heads up to scan the terrain. They scurried out of their foxholes to tend to the wounded. With diabolical timing, the shelling started again. Bleeding limbs, shorn to their rent bones, lay scattered on the field, bereft of bodies to connect to. The smell of burnt flesh filled the air.

Branson feared for her men. She eyed every fog–dulled silhouette with suspicion, not trusting any sound. At a branch snap, she whirled, finger on trigger, ready to fire until she recognized the man’s helmet. She breathed a sigh of relief. She’d just wanted to get them on the line and through a couple of days of combat. Then they’d be fine. They were good men, only green. The cries of the wounded filled her ears. But even without translation psi ops training, she understood prayers when she heard them.

When the fog lifted, decapitated soldiers littered the field. Bodies strewn about, half buried in the mud. Blood from friend and foe alike seeped into the soil. Replacement troops puked their guts out at the sight of mangled corpses. Branson inspected the bodies. A hint of suspicion tickled the back of her mind. Many of the wounds should have left some of the men hurt but not dead.

Goldy stumbled about, sure that the last round of shelling was indeed the last. He was young. And inexperienced. And oblivious to the fact that the Heathens had all night to play in the woods with their special brand of toys.

Like sniper rifles.

“Stay down, kid! Keep your head down!” Dooley yelled.

The blast tore into Goldy’s throat. His hands clasped his neck, a thin trickle of blood escaping through his fingers even as the shot cauterized itself. Men returned fire in the direction of the shot. A medic scrambled toward Goldy, not seeing the booby–trap wire. The explosive device threw his body into the air like a discarded toy. The cloud of dust and smoke made it difficult to breathe. The medic struggled to stand up on just one leg. Dooley was the first to reach the still–thrashing Goldy. Branson dashed over to help hold him down as best she could. The medic was already dressing his own leg.

“Medic!” Dooley yelled. He fumbled about his jacket for his emergency aid kit.

“I’m sorry, Sarge. I goofed up. I goofed up,” Goldy spat through his own blood.

“It’s not that bad. Hang on, kid.” Dooley slapped a bandage over it, and injected him with morphine.

“Tell me about Valhalla,” Goldy said in his treble rasp.

“It’s a huge palace, kid. Big enough for all of the warriors. All you do is drink, eat, and tell each other lies about your greatest battles.”

“It sounds great, sarge. I’m tired of fighting.” Goldy’s head fell to the side in a relaxed beatitude.

A signature dull thrum in the ear signaled everyone to scramble for cover. Branson dove into a nearby hole. Its occupant whirled to face her. Each of them brought their weapons to bear.

“Lieutenant,” Meshner said in a flat voice, not unlike a man sitting down for afternoon tea.

“Lieutenant,” Branson responded, matching his nonchalance. She lowered her weapon, but only as Meshner dropped his.

“We’re on hallowed ground.”

“We are, sir?” Branson ducked down at the renewed thrumming and then fired in its direction.

“Tilled with the blood of our enemies.”

“A lot of our blood, too, sir.”

“War has always been with us. She whispers to me. I try to silence Her, but She continues every night. I hear Her voice in the groans left in Her wake, and She only stops when the earth streams with blood. She whispers to me. She told me all about you. Her cup bearer. Always thirsty. I thought you were the one. It’s in our nature. It’s why we fight,” Meshner raised the kata. “The same spirit in which Cain killed Abel. Where we walk, the earth groans with blood in our wake.”

“Something’s not right with you, Meshner.” War did strange things to people. Sometimes Her whispers simply drove men mad. A glint of light from Meshner’s side drew Branson’s attention. A Nil’s dress kata. Her stomach tightened like a clenched fist.

“We’re both orphans of a sort, no family, no name.” Meshner drained his flask, upturning it completely to capture the last drops. “I wasn’t always ‘Mush’ the paper pusher. I had skill on the battlefield once. Then one day the war was done and I found myself back home. The white picket fence, the possibility of a normal life, was like ashes in my mouth. I had no interest in family. In friends. In any kind of social mask. What I did on the combat field was what I was. Nothing else mattered.”

“There’s blood on our hands.” Praise be the blood.

“I know. Blood that rivers couldn’t wash away,” Meshner said. “So all we’re left with are our dreams. Mine are of you. It’s always you. The two of us could…”

Branson shook her head, her eyes wanting no part of whatever it was he offered. She had the feeling that he really wasn’t speaking to her at all. She wondered if Meshner had been a burnout like Goldy. Perhaps before conversion he, too, had struggled against an inner darkness, one that clawed at him just under his surface.

“You have many guises,” Meshner said. “You die, you come back. But I can see you now. Cursed to fight and suffer over and over again. Like the others. We have sown nothing but death and blood.”

“Praise be the blood,” she said. Branson had been to the cliff’s edge of madness herself. She knew how tempting it could be to give in and dive off into the awaiting embrace of the abyss. So many nights she thought she was losing that tenuous grip on her humanity. Every night it seemed harder and harder to choose to remain human.

“As you have sown, so shall ye reap. For now is the time for harvest.” Meshner raised his kata.

Too many times she had laid awake imagining someone trying to butcher her. Her rifle blocked his kata thrust, throwing him off balance. In close quarters the rifle was otherwise useless. His strength superior to hers. He continued to drive the blade down. Fueled by desperation, she found the strength for survival. Up close the only sounds were their gasps as they struggled. He grunted when her elbow smashed into the bridge of his nose. They were reduced to animals as he grabbed her head and drove his knee into her throat. He tried to get her in a stranglehold. She bit through his hand then butted him in the jaw. She jumped to the side and drew him backwards. She caught him by the head, her fingers gouging his eyes. She pulled his head backward. Planting her foot into the back of his knee, she threw her weight into him as he fell. He rolled over, freeing himself of her. His hand fished about, retrieving his kata. He stood up slowly, his head above the foxhole. A mad, feral smile glinted in the wan light. His blood stained his teeth. His mouth twitched as if itching for a drink.

His head exploded. Shrapnel of bone, brain matter, and blood sprayed her. The sniper round, more missile than bullet, had shattered his skull. His body dropped to its knees and he fell forward.

Waump. Waump. Waump.

She recognized the sound as well as she knew the sound of her own heartbeat. The Heathens were launching mortar bombs their way.

An explosion, pure concussive force, smacked them like the backhand of God and showered them in a storm of dirt, dust, and stone. All sound became muffled, taking on a looped, distorted quality. The woods erupted in a tumult of fire. A thick haze of smoke rose against the backdrop of flame. Men advanced like ghosts along the horizon. Branson scrambled for cover. Something hot burned through her three times. Her body betrayed her and her legs began to give out. Blood splayed across fingers she no longer felt. She fell alongside Meshner, burying her face under him to hide her breath. Not every monster was meant for redemption.

Praise be the blood.

One Million Lira ^{Thoraiya Dyer}

THEY MIGHT SEND THE OLD woman, Sophia thought. If she is still alive.

Draped in light–bending cloth, stretched out along the nacelle of the monstrous, hundred–and–twenty–metre–tall wind turbine, she swept the crosshairs of her .50–cal sniper rifle’s scope over Ehden’s gaping, ruined restaurants and shattered, snow–blanketed hotels.

Seemed like nobody was left alive here.

But according to the aircraft’s computer, seven passengers of seven hundred were left alive in the wreck of the skycruiser, Beirut II, which had crashed into the side of the mountain during yesterday’s snowstorm and now rested at the foot of the wind farm’s twenty–one towers. Its delicate, mile–wide wings were reduced to fragments of solar panel glittering in the midday sun. Beirut itself was over the border, roughly eighty away.

It would take two days for the Beirutis to equip a mission to reclaim the fallen cruiser from its poorer neighbour and rival, the city state of Tripoli; until then, Sophia’s instructions were to defend it from Tripoli’s Maghaweer commander, Amr ibn–Amr, called Amr the Unbeautiful by the sniggering, glamorous inhabitants of the Beiruti Sky Collective.

Patience is everything.

Sophia took a sip of melted snow from a pouch she’d filled with fresh flakes piled by the wind against the vanes. The great blades of Turbine Two turned in front of her, transforming the powerful and constant westerly into current that ran, like the Kadisha River, all the way west to Tripoli on the Mediterranean Sea. She didn’t dwell on the artillery that could potentially be brought to bear against her. Instead she watched replays of her mother’s famous Egyptian films in her mind’s eye.

I am forbidden to leave the house, Badr said serenely on screen in tortured voice–over as she dipped her pen in the ink, dark eyes shining with unshed tears. I am a caged bird.

Interviewers begged the actress to repeat those lines at age forty, even though Badr had been in The Broken Wings at seventeen. A hundred times she’d smiled and shaken her head while her long, gold earrings danced. She’d said the lines again, in the end, to Sophia, when her oncologist denied her a discharge from hospital.

This bird will stay truthful and virtuous to the very end.

Sophia’s mother had starred in over two hundred romantic roles, many of them ending in death. None of them featured leaky breast implants, the cause of her true death. It was why Sophia shot her victims through the left side of the chest, always.

The left breast, the one the Amazons had removed, the one that Badr had removed, to no avail.

You have one, too, Old Woman, saggy as it must be these days. You mocked me because I couldn’t look them in the eye. You’d better stay by the fire. I will shoot you through the left breast, if you come.

The sunset over the sea attempted to blind her. Sophia was not so distracted by the movie replay that she failed to spot the scouts of the Mountain Combat Company when they arrived, white–swathed and carrying their skis.

They were twelve hundred metres away and poorly equipped. Some of their helmets were damaged. None carried cases of the current standard insectoid nanobots that could have infiltrated the wreck and given them the information they needed without having to directly approach it.

Sophia scrutinised each face, in search of Amr the Unbeautiful, but there was no sign of him. She flipped through a series of faces, directed to her left eye by her own highly advanced helmet’s HUD, while her right eye tried to match them with the men on the slopes below.

No. None of you are valuable. None of you are important.

To keep them out of the invisible perimeter around wind farm and crumpled skycruiser, she waited for the turbine blade to pass before shooting the closest one through the self–healing cloth.

They went to ground, but it wasn’t going to ground as the well–financed Beiruti troops might have known it; there was no fading into nothingness provided by light–bending cloth, no approaching ball of flame from an auto–laser–triangulation–retaliation device, just hunkering behind walls and debris. They had to know she would be on one of the towers, but with the wind too strong to place spying nanobots, even if they did have them, and with both distance and the vibration of the blades interfering with the detection of sound and shock wave signatures, they had no hope of knowing which one.

Now choose, Sophia thought coldly. How badly did Amr the Unbeautiful wish to seize the Beirut II? Badly enough to bombard the wind farm with rockets? He could destroy her, but not without destroying Tripoli’s main source of power; not without plunging his city into darkness.

And perhaps the turbines could never be rebuilt. Perhaps the city would go into eternal darkness, as so many cities and countries across the world had done, with no more fossil fuels to burn and anyone with money gone to join the sky collectives.

A skylife wasn’t completely free of danger. The continuously flying, solar–powered, high–altitude townships must land once a month or so to replenish their supply of water. Accidents could happen. The Beirut II was proof of that. Still, a skylife was better than a landlife, even if Beirut had been forced to appropriate billions of dollars that technically belonged to Tripoli so that all of its wealthy citizens and their families could become airbound.

A decade later, the rage of those who were left behind was undiminished. The enemy was within reach, at last; on the ground, like a bird with a broken wing. Sophia would permit them no hostages.

Two more men crossed Sophia’s invisible line. She shot them, too. Killing was easy, when you accepted it was the only way to survive. She had been a killer since birth. In the summer when the heat wave had come and the crops failed, when Beirut and Tripoli were one country, she had patrolled the border against bread–thieving black market incursions; learned to kill twice with one shot, to kill the men who came and the families who now would not eat.

She killed too by being wealthy, by reaping the world’s inequality to pay for chemotherapy developed by a global corporatocracy. Was that different to a bullet through the heart?

Bullets were cleaner than starvation and the horrors of lawlessness. She hadn’t always been so wise. The old woman, who fought for money and had no scruples, had tutored her. One, Khadija had whispered in her smoke–ravaged voice, gnarled feet bare on the pine bark like a perched owl. One is five hundred thousand lira. Nine more and I can go home. Ten is enough to pay my bills today.

You fill your quota like you have a bag to be filled with geese, Sophia had accused from the lateral branch below, lowering her spotter’s scope. She’d signed up to defy her father, who wanted her married and safely out of the police force. Despite the jeers of young men who had failed to complete the commando course, she’d earned her sword–and–tiger badge in just a few months. This was her first deployment and she was uncomfortable with the intimacy of the stalking phase. She could never be so intimate with men at home; see the sweat beading in their chest hair or the smoothness of skin over breastbone, the movement of their Adam’s apples as they took long swallows of purified river water.

If you can look in a wild animal’s eye as you take its life, Khadija said, you can look into the eyes of a man.

But Sophia couldn’t. Khadija told her to aim for the chest. To pretend it was empty jackets on a clothesline. Even a weepy girl could shoot an empty jacket, couldn’t she?

Her mother’s empty jackets had filled three walk–in wardrobes. Sophia had wept over those jackets. The first and last time she had wept as an adult.

Now she scanned for the sniper that belonged to the combat platoon. She had the superior position. The only ridgeline that offered a comparable elevation was two kilometres away, too far away for backwards Tripoli to threaten her in these high winds. The sniper must position himself closer, in the ruins of Ehden.

There.

Sophia killed him and continued to search for the arriving support platoon. Most likely they would stay in the shelter offered by the mountainside, but if they were malnourished, or exhausted by the climb in the cold and the snow, who knew what mistakes they might make?

Her helmet told her that six skycruisers had landed in Beirut port. Troops had disembarked. Snowmobiles were being charged. New estimated time of arrival was noon the following day.

She didn’t get another opportunity to thin the enemy’s numbers. An hour before sunset, however, the small figure of a child was pushed by a rifle butt out into the snow from behind a concrete wall.

The child struggled with something square and presumably heavy. Snot and tears dribbled down his red face. Sophia wanted to shoot through the wall, to kill the unseen man who must be threatening him, but such solid evidence of trajectory could only end in her death. Calming herself, setting her emotions aside, like burying the bones of a meal in the snow, she watched the child wade through whiteness toward the Beirut II.

She couldn’t allow an unidentified device to be brought any closer.

Breathe in. Breathe out.

With her lungs half–emptied, in the millisecond before the blade of the wind turbine obscured the shot, she squeezed the trigger and the rifle kicked.

The small body fell.

Nobody moved to retrieve him.

Sophia switched the movie back on in her head.

Husband, I am leaving you, said the beautiful actress, her head bowed. Her bosom heaved. Distress made manifest. The jilted husband stared at her flimsily clad breasts, no doubt thinking they would soon belong to another man.

The sun went down and spotlights came to life around Turbine Two, maintaining the snowy surroundings as brightly as daylight. She had counted on the constant illumination. Her invisibility cloth permitted enough visible light to pass unidirectionally through it for her targeting to be unimpeded, but infrared radiation did not pass through at all. Unless she removed the drapes, revealing her location, her thermal imaging components were useless.

Sophia ate a small bar of chocolate and switched her insulation suit to its nighttime setting. She hadn’t washed her hands. Her fingers, when she licked the chocolate from them, tasted of gunpowder residue and light machine oil.

Patience was everything, and her gut told her that the old woman would come.

“You did what with an orphan boy?” demanded the president of the City–State of Tripoli.

The meeting room, a shadow of its former glory, showed plaster where the solid gold embellishments had been chipped away, melted and sold, but the two dozen men around the polished table were well enough accoutred to heavily distort the mean atomic mass back in the direction of one hundred and ninety–seven amu.

Yet not enough wealth to buy even one skycruiser, the president thought, despairing.

Prayer beads slipped through the fingers of the man he confronted across the table, Amr ibn–Amr, Commander of the Maghaweer.

“The cedar forest below Ehden,” the commander said as though the president had not spoken. “We must set fire to it. You will give permission, of course.”

The president, who in his youth had led the Lebanese soccer team to statistically improbable World Cup glory in the year before the first Beiruti skycruiser launched and the country was divided forever, recalled a hundred thousand flags flying in the great stadium, each one stamped with a green, stylised cedar.

“No,” he said.

He still heard the drums in his dreams. The ululation of the women. The people had voted for his familiar face, jug–eared and broken–nosed. His was the dented forehead that had scored. His were the teeth whose kicking earned that vital penalty.

“We need a smokescreen,” argued Amr, whose teeth had a gap suited to pulling grenade pins or imprisoning small birds. “Without smoke we can’t get past the snipers to approach the cruiser. The Beirut II is non–military. The passengers won’t resist.”

“The Beirutis will be here for their passengers very soon. And from your reports, I would guess there is only one sniper.”

The commander snatched the beads up into his palm. He drained the dregs of his coffee and stood up as if to leave.

“One sniper? It is an insult to suggest that is all they would send against our elite forces. Listen. Ordinary agents and canisters cannot obscure the area around the turbines where the skycruiser has crashed. The wind in the mountains is strong and constant. In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. It is why we built them there!”

The others watched in silence. The military men mocked the president for his inexperience in combat and the religious leaders mocked him for his so–called spinelessness; he had once bowed to his European sponsors, who wanted him clean–shaven. But he knew something, now, that they didn’t, and he paused to enjoy it.

“You don’t need a wildfire. To counter this sniper, you need another female sniper.”

“You heap insult upon insult.”

Everyone has her signature shot, his father’s sister had told him. Not only because she has pride in her work. But she must be paid, also, yes? Getting paid is very important.

“Look at the images again. They are all shot in the left side of the chest.”

“Respected President. Remind me when you served.”

The president had avoided conscription. He had flown on the wings of a sports scholarship into the distant arms of elite coaches, but he knew patterns when he saw them, and now that he had seen this one, his thoughts raced. Was she still alive? What if she was living from the land, in the abandoned wilds? Would he have time to find her?

“We are all taught to aim for the larger target, sir,” the crisply turned–out subcommander said from the commander’s right side.

“Why don’t we do that, then?”

“Sir?”

“Why don’t we all aim for the larger target? Use artillery to shoot down the wind turbines, like whacking the heads off wildflowers?”

Nobody answered. It was too high a price to pay. Better to swallow the humiliation of allowing the Beirutis to trespass across their borders at will.

The president had played unwinnable games before. He did not think this was one.

“If, by sunrise tomorrow morning, I have not solved your sniper problem,” he said, “you can set fire to the oldest forest in the world.”

“What are you going to do?” the commander asked incredulously. “Walk up there and offer to sign autographs?”

“I won’t be walking,” the president smiled. “My bodyguards and I will be taking the underground train. Oh, and I require every man here to give up his gold. Place your cufflinks and everything else into this ashtray, please. I have no time for budgetary wrangling.”

The mountain railway tunnels and the limestone caves that they intersected were closed at various junctions by criminal gangs; by religious cults; by the homeless, dying to the sound of dripping stalactites, out of reach of sunlight.

Every time the train was stopped and armed boys came aboard, the president faced them calmly. They were overjoyed to recognise him.

“Goal for Liban!” they cried happily, and, sometimes, “The scent of a modern man!” which was one of several foreign product endorsements routinely mistaken for a nationalistic jingo. His hosts offered pine bark tea, pistachios, and cigars. The president patiently endured their hospitality, trying not to check his watch. After a final cheek–slap from an angry sheik who told him to grow a beard, the train was permitted to complete its journey. He ascended the wet, slippery stair to the surface.

“To the Ain,” he told a farmer at the station entrance, and with the press of a gold earring into a wrinkled palm, the president and his two bodyguards secured three saddled, skinny horses that put their royal Arabian bloodstock to shame. However, the roads were fallen into such neglect that, in the absence of functional helicopters, only horses would do.

It was late evening. He had only one hope of finding Aunty Khadija. She would have no electronic devices on her person, no phone: nothing to hack and no way to track her.

The horses knew the way even without the eerie glow of the chemical lamps carried by the bodyguards through the desolate winterscape. They passed the Ain, the archway that sheltered a freshwater spring.

The forest will not burn, the president told himself, and also the fans who had waved the flags.

She stood outside her square stone farmhouse, letting blood from a goat whose throat she’d recently cut.

“Hajji!” he cried, instantly ashamed by his boyish relief at what he saw as his rescue from an impossible situation. The smell of blood made his horse shy and he almost lost control of it.

Khadija put stained fists on her apron–sheathed hips.

“My sins have been forgiven,” she scowled, blinking in the dimness, “and here you are to beg me to sin again. Get down from there, you ball–kicking fool. Let me see you. My eyes are not what they were.”

My eyes are not what they were, Khadija thought, but that is why Allah created 25X zoom, longer eye relief and a smaller exit pupil.

She would not think of the weapon she’d taken as a trophy, although she now hoped to turn against its arrogant manufacturers. It was the unknown, the unexpected, that must be brought to bear, if she had a hope of outwitting a younger, better–equipped opponent, if Trabelsi was to triumph over Beiruti.

Sophia.

She had seen the captured images. The president’s murky memory of the legend of Khadija’s protégé, the blonde actress’s daughter who wanted revenge on her mother’s cancer, had led him to her home, with wish and a deadline: daybreak.

In the blue–white light of her hand–held, rechargeable lantern, the posters in the stairwell were mouldy and torn. Black slush covered the marble floor and a half–bald dog snarled from a side room, hackles rising.

“This is the place,” Khadija said, smoothing one of the rips, reuniting half the ringmaster’s moustache with the other half.

Najib’s Travelling Tent of Wonders.

“Please,” the president told one of his bodyguards. “Go upstairs. Wake him up and bring him down.”

Once a wizard of the Trabelsi hologram theatre, Najib appeared in the bodyguard’s keeping with no flourishes and no defences. His neat, dark hair was brittle, his singlet worn, and his neck unshaven.

“Do not eat my dog,” he begged, before he saw who it was. “Sir! I am humbled. Why have you… How did you…”

“You sent my daughter one letter too many, Najib,” Khadija said. “Now you must help me save Tripoli, for her.”

“Is she here?” Najib stumbled in his eagerness.

“Of course not! Do you think I would let her, or any of her sisters, come back from the schools that I sent them to? Do you think I shot those poor boys at the border because I wanted a rifle of solid gold? She’s married to a French doctor, raising her family in a well–off country, far from here.”

Najib sagged.

“Then why—”

“I have dreamed that the children of my children’s children returned to stand beneath the ancient trees. The idiot commander of the Maghaweer says he will burn them at daybreak if we do not flush out the sniper on the wind turbine.”

“We?”

“You have your old recordings, I hope, Najib. And your laser projection boxes. Even though your license was taken away. The night club, the people that died from ozone poisoning? You should never have promised them a full–length feature in such a poorly ventilated space.”

“I am tired, old woman. Tell me what you want.”

“An open–air screening. With as many holograms as you can. Tonight, in Ehden.”

“Are you mad? The recordings are degraded and there is no portable power source that can run even one such projection anymore.”

“There is a transformer underneath Ehden,” the president said softly. “The power cables from all the wind turbines pass through it. Our men can get access to it without exposing themselves to sniper fire.”

Najib licked his lips.

“It has been a long time since I saw my beauties,” he admitted at last. “Far too long.”

Khadija had no cloth to hide behind on the ridge.

She murmured a quick and blasphemous prayer to the God of Snow, whose temple had once stood where she stood. In 850 BC, the Aramean King raised a great statue of Baal Loubnan at Ehden.

A hundred and fifty years later, the Assyrian King had the temple torn down and the statue overturned.

They come and they go, she thought. Christianity had come to Ehden in the 6^th century. Now the little churches and abandoned monasteries were deathly silent. So, too, the crashed skycruiser which gleamed at the foot of the towering, spotlit turbines. Was there even anyone alive inside? Was all this for nothing?

“It is done, Hajji,” said the Maghaweer subcommander. She had hand–picked him to accompany her and had already forgotten his name. He was polite, which could have been misread as insipidness, but Khadija recognised it as unflappability, which he would need if her plan failed and Sophia shot her through her left breast.

In the piercing cold and whistling darkness, her body heat should have shone out like a beacon to anyone with thermal sensors. Khadija was operating on the information, several years old, that infrared detection was not possible through light–bending cloth. If she was wrong, if improvements had been made to the technology, even the tiny peephole in the wall of snow that the Subcommander had constructed for them would be instantly obvious to the enemy.

But why should the Beirutis have made advances in military technology? They were safe in their sky–cities, protected by international treaty from satellite–based weapons, their cruising altitude too great for them to be vulnerable to attack from below.

Khadija searched the nacelle of each turbine for any sign of life. When she found nothing, she searched each ponderously swinging blade for the shadows of ropes or a discrepancy in rotation, which might have indicated the weight of a human being dragging asymmetrically on the structure.

Nothing.

On Khadija’s advice, dogs had been sent to sniff for urine around the bases of the towers but had been shot before they could come close. They must rely on Sophia revealing herself, perhaps only for a fraction of a second. Khadija must not miss.

She had no targeting computer to help her. That section of rail on her monstrous, white–anodised, stolen StraightLine 20mm sat empty. But these peaks were her brothers and sisters, and her calculating ability had not wasted away like her muscles and bones.

Her body was brittle, she knew. She could not lie full–length in the snow for very long, even in the insulating suit the subcommander had found for her, too big in the shoulders and too tight in the hips.

“Tell me,” she said as he settled alongside her.

“Yes, Hajji. Manual readings verify westerly winds of thirty–seven kilometres per hour, deformed around the turbines in the expected pattern, blade to blade interval a uniform three point two seconds, humidity sixty percent, temperature minus four degrees Celsius, altitude one thousand, five hundred and five metres.”

Khadija did not respond verbally to this information, absorbing it into herself, willing herself to become one with the mountain, with the skies and the whispering forest below, even as she made the physical adjustments.

A moment later, beautiful women sprang up in the pristine snow field between the turbines and the ruins of Ehden.

Seven widely–spaced holographic images of seventeen–year–old Egyptian actress, Badr, raised swan–like arms, imploringly. There was no sound, but the moment was famous, the words immortal.

This bird will stay truthful and virtuous to the very end.

More of the images moved in from the wings. Men and women. Some frozen. Others distorted. Najib had told the truth when he said the recordings were degraded, but the strength of the broadcast was enough that many of the images could not be differentiated in the visible light spectrum from real human beings.

Khadija flicked her sight to its thermo–optical setting. There, the figures blazed. Where the beams of the lasers intersected and the air became ionised, voxels exploded like suns. She could not waste precious time enjoying the show, however.

There.

High atop Turbine Two, the lens of a telescopic sight reflected the light.

Khadija zoomed in. Only the weapon’s sight had been uncovered by the enemy. Seeing her young, doomed mother move across the snow had confounded but not flustered Sophia. She had quickly realised that to distinguish human from hologram, she must discard the cloth. Her body remained hidden by the cloth, but the eye, the eye would be a hand’s–breadth behind the sight.

Khadija lined up her crosshairs. She’d never had a problem looking her victims in the eye, but in that instant she was grateful to Sophia for hiding her face behind the invisible cloth. Without a face, she was an un–person. Even a dog had a face.

She took the shot. The StraightLine was deafening. Her ears rang. The brass casing melted itself a cradle in the snow, and an old, familiar litany of grief and victory whispered between heartbeats, just as the trigger had been pulled between heartbeats: Thank you for the gift of your life.

It was too far for her to hear the body strike the ground but she didn’t need to glimpse the glitter of the scope falling from the turbine tower to know that it was done.

One. One is five hundred thousand lira.

One was enough. She should stand down now. The subcommander beside her murmured, “Casualty confirmed,” and moved to pack up his gear, but Khadija said sharply,

“Wait.”

Her shoulder felt like it was on fire. She no longer had the brute strength to manage the kick of such a weapon. She sensed that once she took it apart, she would never assemble it again.

Then she saw a terrified Najib being forced out into the open.

“He is worse than an animal!” Khadija exclaimed. The order for such an outrage could only have come from the commander, Amr ibn–Amr. The same man who trained his soldiers to use orphan boys to test an enemy sniper’s resolve, the same man who had threatened to burn the cedar forest that was the last thing of splendour and grace left behind when the country was stripped and consigned to the skies.

“You did say there was only one, Hajji,” the subcommander said quietly.

“And what will an animal like that do with the Beiruti women and children who are inside the wreck of the cruiser?”

“That is not for me to guess, Hajji.”

Khadija watched the Mountain Combat Company come out into the open. With increasing confidence, they moved to secure a perimeter around the unprotected craft. The commander himself went to find Sophia’s body.

He wants the light–bending cloth for himself, Khadija realised. Once he has it, nobody will be able to punish him for treating his own allies like paper targets.

Before the subcommander could protest, she shot his superior in the back, placing the bullet where it would emerge from his left breast. The soldiers in formation around their leader dropped into the snow.

“No!” the subcommander breathed, too late.

Two, Khadija thought. Two is one million lira.

She would not be paid, this time. Who cared?

“Congratulations on your promotion,” she said to the shocked subcommander, patting the stock of the StraightLine. “This is yours, now. Use it wisely, and always remember. If you can look in a wild animal’s eye as you take its life, you can look into the eyes of a man. If not, you had better shoot for the chest.”

Rubbing her sore shoulder, she packed up her survival gear. Her water and her dried goat meat. Her explosives and her wire snares.

“If I let you go, I am a traitor, Hajji.”

“Then you had better come along.”

He had carried the weapon in for her. Only he could carry it out, and only its absence would deter pursuit. For a moment, it seemed he would stay there, frozen in the snow, until the men who had been his brothers up until one minute ago came to drag him away.

“I have nothing else,” he said calmly. “I have nothing else but this.”

“I have an unmarried youngest daughter,” Khadija said. “The ball–kicking fool gave me enough gold that we could easily go to visit her. She likes skinny men.”

Snow began to fall as the subcommander helped her with her skis. It was powdery and perfect, hiding them as they swished, silent as wild things, down the sloping side of the mountain.

Invincible ^{Jay Posey}

AT THAT EXACT MOMENT, MURPH would’ve rather been floating in free space, something he usually hated. Instead he was squeezing one eye shut to keep the sweat from dripping into it and trying not to fidget. The chance that they could hear him on the other side was slight, but at this stage of the op he couldn’t risk alerting the bad guys. Or the good guys for that matter.

Between the inner and outer hulls of the Martian cutter wasn’t the most uncomfortable place he’d ever been, but it was starting to gain rank for suck factor. The recon armor protected him from all the immediate challenges—temperature extremes, high radiation, vacuum—but it wasn’t exactly designed for comfort. For all their attention to detail on the way–too–expensive rig, the eggheads still hadn’t figured out how to let him wipe sweat off his brow or scratch his nose.

He checked the time. It’d been almost ninety minutes since his team had silently docked and infiltrated the ship. Most of that time he’d spent slow–crawling his way from their tiny breach point on the underside all the way around to his current position just behind the bridge. The ship wasn’t all that big, just a six–man cutter, but with the hostages at risk and the hostiles on edge, patience was crucial.

Intel was scant on the bad guys but best guess said they weren’t the type to blow the whole ship if they thought something was up. Probably.

The rest of his team was inside the ship rather than between the hulls. Kit, Lane, and Switch would be moving into position further aft, near the galley, where the bulk of the hostages were being guarded by four pirates. Vance would be pulling security outside when Murph made entry on his target room.

“L.T., Switch,” she said; the suit’s comms made it sound like her voice was in Murph’s own head.

“Yeah,” he whispered. There wasn’t any reason to whisper with his armor on; he could’ve screamed and no one would’ve heard a thing through the sealed faceplate. Still. Tough habit to break. “Go ahead.”

“Floaters are headed your way.”

Two of the hostiles had been roving around the ship, mostly away from where they’d stashed the crew. The plan had been to secure the hostages first and then deal with the rovers afterward. But as the saying went, a plan was just a list of things that didn’t happen anyway.

“Roger that. You guys set?”

“We’re set.”

“All right, I’ll give it a couple to see what they’re up to. We’ll go on my call. Stand by.”

“Roger, standing by.”

Captain Morland didn’t wake up so much as have consciousness forced upon him. He cracked an eye but had to shut it again immediately; the light dazzled him and sent a sharp pain shooting through the center of his head. He thought a deep breath would steady him, but instead it lit the left side of his torso with fire. His sluggish mind finally started catching up, assaulting him with image fragments, sounds, smells. The unidentified craft. The unshakeable pursuit. The boarding and the short–lived defense. Broken ribs, probably a concussion. Lieutenant Griffin, dead.

The attackers were dressed like a rag–tag crew, claimed they were freedom fighters off of Mars’s moon Phobos. They made a pretty good show of it, but the takedown was too clean, too precise. Mercenaries, maybe, but they were more likely some military unit from a faction that didn’t want attention.

Morland flexed his hands against the cuffs that bound them behind his back. They’d clamped him to a support down low so he couldn’t stand up, even if he’d had the balance to do so. There was a distant buzzing, a deep drone like something was humming behind him, somewhere inside the wall. It took a moment for him to realize he was only hearing it in his left ear. Add a ruptured ear drum to the list. His head was swimming. He eased his eyes open again, hoping to relieve the lazy spin of the room.

The lights weren’t actually that bright. They’d put him in a storage room just behind the bridge; the single light above the door glowed dull orange. Morland surveyed the room slowly, careful not to shift his view too quickly. A large man stood by the only door to the room, staring down at him with a blank expression. He had a rifle slung across his chest. The rifle was pretty banged up but looked well maintained. The guy was awfully casual for someone supposedly new at this sort of thing. He didn’t even blink when Morland looked at him.

The captain scanned the rest of the storeroom. None of his crew members were imprisoned with him. Another way the “freedom fighters” had tipped their hand. Amateurs tended to keep the prisoners all together: easier to watch over that way. Sometimes amateurs would rough up the ranking officer to show all the others they were in charge. But these guys had separated the leader from the rest of the crew. If Morland had to put money on it, he’d bet the attackers were keeping his crewmates in as much uncertainty as possible, exploiting a wild range of emotions to keep them from trying anything. Was their captain dead? Cooperating with the bad guys? A traitor?

Morland closed his eyes. The room spun lazily whether he could see it or not, and at least the pain in his head wasn’t as sharp when his eyes were shut. He tried to work through the details as best he could.

Were there five or six attackers? They’d moved fast and hadn’t fired many shots. Griff was dead for certain, shot through the throat. Kady was hit, but Morland couldn’t get the image clear enough in his mind to judge the extent of her injuries. Maybe she was all right. Bad guys probably had them all down in the hold. Galley, maybe.

Why they’d targeted the Sunseeker, Morland didn’t know. They were just a small–time private shipping vessel running cargo back and forth between Mars and her moons, and the Belt when the alignments were right. She could make the trip to Earth if she had to, but Morland hadn’t done that in at least a decade. Wouldn’t anytime soon, either. Sunseeker could handle more than the six–man crew, but Morland preferred to keep it light. Now he was wishing maybe he’d taken his wife’s advice and hired on a couple of extra for security.

Then again, in this case, it likely wouldn’t have done much but gotten more of his crew killed. Vera wasn’t going to let him hear the end of it, though. If he got to see her again. He still hadn’t fixed the towel rack on the back of the bathroom door.

Three quick taps sounded on the storeroom door. Morland opened his eyes to see the big man slide to one side and work the latch. Two others were standing in the corridor. The captain noticed that the auxiliary lights were on. Running low–power, then. The thinner of the two men stepped in, his eyes flicking quickly to Morland as he entered. The ringleader. He leaned in close to the guard and held an exchange too quiet for the captain to catch. After a few moments, the ringleader came and crouched in front of the captain.

“How’s ya feel, Cap’n?” he asked. The accent almost sounded authentic enough for a hillbilly from Phobos, but not quite. Just ever so slightly forced. “Thirsty? Hongry?”

Morland held the man’s gaze. A few seconds elapsed before the ringleader nodded. “You know how it deals,” he said with a half–shrug. “Play nice a few more hours, and the big money’ll show. Then we’re on our way, same as you.”

“Not all of us,” Morland said. The ringleader nodded again.

“We are right sorry, Cap’n. If we could unspill it, we would. But all the rest are fine and well, and it’d be nice to keep that way.”

“You don’t need more than me,” Morland said. “There’s a shuttle in Hangar Two. Let the rest of my crew go home.”

The ringleader gave a grim smile and shook his head. “Can’t this time, Cap’n. But I’ll let ’em know you offered.” He gave a little half–nod, stood to his feet. “Just keep your head on. Everything’s gonna work out.”

He went back to the door and again exchanged quiet words with the guard. Before exiting, he glanced back at Morland. “Sure I can’t get you anything?”

There was something in the look, or the tone of voice maybe. The barest trace of sadness or remorse. In that moment, Morland was instantly sure of two things: firstly, the ringleader was indeed a military officer. And secondly, they were going to kill everyone on board.

The captain had to do something. But what? He was still trying to think it through when the ringleader gave him a little nod and started to turn back towards the exit.

Then the bad guy standing guard out in the hallway made a funny noise and fell down. The ringleader and the other guard barely had time to react before there was a sharp hiss and a searing flash, lightning–bright even through Morland’s reflexively closed eyes.

There was a confusion of sound, and when Morland opened his eyes again, he couldn’t quite process what he was seeing. The air was harsh and hazy. In front of him lay a circular piece of steel, smoking faintly and glowing around the edge with the dull red of rapidly cooling metal. And all three of the bad guys were sprawled on the deck, motionless.

And yet someone was talking.

“Captain Morland, sir,” the voice said, insistent. Morland shook his head, trying to clear it, to get his bearings. It sounded like the voice was coming from above him. He glanced up.

There in the ceiling was a two–foot wide hole, and through it poked the head and shoulders of the owner of the voice. There was no face, just a curved metal shield where one should be.

“We’re here to get you out, sir,” the figure said. The voice sounded slightly distorted: thin and processed.

Morland nodded. The figure above withdrew, and then, a moment later, slipped feet–first through the hole in the ceiling and dropped lightly to the deck. It hardly made any sound when it landed, which was surprising, because it seemed to be encased entirely in a metal suit. That was, the suit had a metallic texture, but it moved too fluidly, more like a rubberized suit than armor. The styling was vaguely reminiscent of the powered armor he’d seen the Marines use back during his time in the Navy, but it was far sleeker, streamlined to the point that comparing them didn’t seem fair. Distant cousins, maybe. Or generations more advanced. A compact weapon was tightly slung across the figure’s chest.

The suited figure came and crouched at the captain’s feet. It moved as easily as if the armor was its own skin.

“Captain Morland, are you injured, sir?”

It took a moment before Morland could respond. “Nothing serious, I don’t think. Concussion, maybe.”

The figure nodded. “We’re going to get you home, sir. I just need to ask you a couple of questions first.”

Morland still wasn’t exactly sure what was going on. And it was unsettling, staring at that dull, featureless plate where a face should be.

“Your wife’s full name, sir?”

Morland blinked; it was such an unexpected question. “Vera… Vera Winslowe Morland.”

“And you were born where, sir?”

“Station H44, Ceres.”

The figure moved around to the captain’s left side, revealing a second person in an identical suit crouched in the room, checking the fallen ringleader. Morland hadn’t heard the second one come in. He felt a vibration in his wrists and suddenly his hands came free; he brought them together in front of him and winced at the burning stiffness in his shoulders.

The second figure looked over at them casually and, although he couldn’t hear anything, Morland got the impression the two of them were communicating somehow. Internal comms maybe. Probably. But even with that likely explanation, the silent conversation was uncanny. A few seconds later the second figure gave a nod and moved to the door, shouldering its weapon and taking up a defensive position.

“Can you walk, sir?” the first rescuer asked.

“Yeah,” Morland answered. “I think so.”

“All right, let’s get you up,” the figure said. It slung its weapon, then leaned closer and wrapped its arm around Morland’s back to help him up. The captain hissed at the searing pain in his left side, and the figure in the suit froze immediately. “You okay?”

“My ribs,” Morland said through clenched teeth. “Might’ve broken something.”

The figure moved to Morland’s right. “Here, this’ll help.” It tapped the captain’s belt near his right hip. “Grab your belt here with your left hand, keep that elbow tucked in and locked close to your side. Should make things a little more stable.”

Morland did as he was directed, then draped his right arm over the figure’s shoulders.

“Set?” the figure in the suit said. Morland nodded. “All right, easy up.” The figure stood slowly and effortlessly lifted the captain to his feet. “Lean on me, I’ve got you. We’ll take it slow.”

Morland just nodded again. He was surprised at how weak he felt, and he was grateful for the support. The first rescuer looked over at the second one. A brief pause, and then the second figure flowed out into the corridor, weapon up.

“Here we go,” his rescuer said, and they started forward. They held at the door briefly, then slipped out into the corridor. Morland’s gaze slipped over the fallen man as they passed him still slumped against the wall. There weren’t any immediately obvious wounds, but the man’s eyes were open and dully glassed. Further down the corridor, the other figure kept watch at an intersection. It held position until Morland and his escort had passed the danger zone, then smoothly rolled around and scouted ahead again. There was something graceful in the figure’s movements, a casual precision born of countless years of experience.

“Sorry about the hole,” the figure carrying him said quietly.

“What?”

“In the ceiling back there. Didn’t want to give ’em a chance to seal themselves in with you. Still, I never like cutting up someone’s ship.”

“Oh… that’s all right.” Morland didn’t really know what else to say. “Who are you guys?”

“No one of consequence, sir.” The tone was polite and professional, but the implication was clear: questions weren’t getting answered. “Almost there.”

Looking up, Morland saw they were nearing the ship’s galley. The other figure paused outside the door, a little further down the corridor, slowly sweeping the way ahead with its weapon.

“Here we are,” the first figure said. They halted at the door, and a few moments later it opened; another suited figure greeted them, a woman. Two small plates rested on either side of her head where the other suits were smooth. He guessed it was her face–plate, retracted.

“Captain Morland,” she greeted him. “You’ve got a lot of folks here who are gonna be real glad to see you.”

The first figure must’ve said something, because the woman’s eyes flicked over to it. She shook her head.

“Array went down, I had to pop it to see.” She shook her head again. “Nah, have to get the shop to look at it.”

She stepped back out of the way. Four bodies dressed similarly to the ringleader were sprawled in various places around the room. So there’d been seven total, then. And two other people in those suits; one was crouched over one of the boarders, and the other was standing guard over a group of people who were huddled together in the far corner. Kady and Zeke, Cloud and Hunter. His crew. All there. All except Griff.

“Captain!” Kady said, and the others turned Morland’s way. The wash of emotion was almost overwhelming as the soldier escorted him over to reunite them. Kady had a pressure pack running from her collarbone over her right shoulder and was a little pale, but otherwise she looked like she was all right. Zeke had a grim but steady look. Which was pretty much normal.

“We’re working out pickup right now,” the first figure said. “Shouldn’t be much longer.” He gave the captain a little nod, then quietly withdrew.

Murph left to give the crew some sense of privacy as they welcomed their captain back into the fold. It was always better to keep some separation from the precious cargo. It never hurt to be polite, of course, but if you let them get too comfortable they tended to start asking questions, or worse, thinking they were free to do what they wanted. And that most certainly wasn’t the case, not until Murph’s team had delivered them safely home, which they had not yet done.

Lane was keeping an eye on them. His big, silent presence was imposing enough that it’d keep them in line.

“Kit, what do you have for me?” Murph asked. Kit was hunched over one of the pirates, running an ID sweep.

“Two things,” Kit said, sitting back on his haunches. “Jack. And squat.”

“The others?”

“Same.”

“Crypted?”

“Nope.”

“Erased?”

“Not even. These fellas are cleaner than a baby’s bottom.”

Murph didn’t like the sound of that, and not just because Kit had botched the saying, which might’ve been funny in other circumstances.

“You getting a good line?” Switch said as she came over and crouched next to Kit.

“Gee, Mas’sarnt, I dunno,” Kit said, “why don’t you remind me how to do this thing I’ve only done a billion times.”

Part of the mission had been to identify the unknown boarders and what they were after, but Murph hadn’t expected this level of sophistication. Probably nobody at Higher had.

And it really bothered him seeing Switch there with her faceplate open. They had the suits for a reason. He preferred everybody stay buttoned up, start to finish.

He suddenly got a funny feeling—one that he never wanted to have in the field.

“Switch, let Kit—” he started to say, but a loud pop cut him off. Kit flinched and Switch toppled over backwards.

“Lane, Vance, hostages!” Murph called, even though his people were already taking care of it, shepherding the civilians back into the corner. “Kit, you okay?”

“I’m cool,” Kit said, but Murph could hear strain in his voice. The front of his armor had a few fresh divots and pock marks and was spattered sticky red. “Switch is hit.”

Murph was already in motion towards her, but he knew what was waiting for him. He still had that sick, hollow feeling, and his mouth had gone completely dry. He crouched next to her. Her eyes were open, unfocused, staring in slightly opposite directions. Just under her right eye, through the cheekbone, a single, perfectly round hole welled red.

Kit knelt on the other side of her.

“She’s gone,” Murph said. They both just stared down at her for a span.

“Some kind of subdermal charge,” Kit said finally, glancing back at the now–mangled corpse of the man he’d just been trying to ID. “Didn’t show on the scan.”

“You set it off?”

“No way to know.”

“Better keep everybody away from the others, then,” Murph said. “Vance, roll it up. We’re moving to the bay.”

“Roger,” Vance answered, her voice cool, professional. She and Lane gathered the crew up and directed them sharply out of the galley. Murph started to arrange Switch’s arms, preparing to lift the body.

He kept reminding himself that she wasn’t really gone. Not forever. They’d get her back. They’d put her through the Process, and soon enough she’d be back. But no matter how many times he’d seen it, Murph had never been able to overcome the shock of seeing one of his team members killed in action. A dead friend wasn’t something anyone could used to.

“I got her, L.T.,” Kit said.

“I’ll carry her.”

“I said I got her.”

Murph hesitated; Kit was a better shooter than he was. Still, he heard the edge in Kit’s voice. If his head wasn’t in the right place, maybe it was better for Murph to be on the trigger after all.

“Sure, Kit. You got her.” Murph said. He got to his feet as Kit gently lifted Switch and laid her across his shoulders in a fireman’s carry. She dangled limply, and the blood that had pooled inside her helmet poured out onto the grated metal floor of the galley. Murph shouldered his weapon and led the way aft, towards the bay. As they walked, he called it in. “Kingpin, Growler.”

“Go ahead, Growler,” came the response.

“We are partial mission complete, requesting immediate extract; team plus six VIPs, with four casualties.”

“Copy that, Growler. Viking Three One is on station, full med staff on board. What’s the damage?”

“One VIP killed, two VIPs wounded, all prior to our arrival. All stable. We have one team member KIA… we lost Switch.”

There was a half–second pause, the barest hint of a hitch before the response came back.

“Understood. Viking Three One is routing to you now. Mission objectives?”

“Seven enemy KIA; team was unable to positively identify the hostile element. Be advised, environment is unsafe. Enemy KIA may be rigged with anti–personnel charges.”

“Rigged?”

“Yeah, one of the bodies detonated. We didn’t stick around for the others.”

“Roger that, Growler. We’ll get a tech crew together to follow up. Good work.”

“Not really.”

“Patching Viking Three One through. Stand by.”

There was a click as the new channel opened, and then a background hiss as different hardware and encryption schemes negotiated in real time.

“Growler, this is Viking Three One. How do you read?”

“Crystal, Viking Three One. Send your traffic.”

“Viking Three One is approaching along one–seven–one at full burn. Seven mikes out.”

“Roger that, Viking Three One. You’ve got specs on the vessel?”

“That’s an ay–firm, Growler.”

“We’ll be holding in the primary bay. Lamprey’s attached to the belly.” The Lamprey was the delivery vehicle they’d used to board the ship.

“Copy that. See you shortly, Growler. Viking Three One out.”

Murph updated the rest of the team and then completed the remaining walk in silence, reaching the loading bay a couple of minutes after he’d signed off with Viking. Vance and Lane already had the crew members gathered; they were in a quiet knot near the airlock, with Lane keeping careful watch. The body of the fallen crewmember had already been recovered and lay hidden under a heavy tarp.

The VIPs turned and glanced in Murph’s direction, but most of them looked away quickly. Only the captain continued to watch Murph’s approach. Captain Morland was a good twenty–five years older than Murph at least, but the look on his face was one Murph could easily imagine seeing in the mirror. The others couldn’t cope with having to look at the price of their freedom, draped over Kit’s shoulders. The captain, on the other hand, must’ve been in Murph’s situation at one time or another; there was understanding and muted acceptance. And more than a little survivor’s guilt, most likely.

Viking Three One was right on time, which was a nice change from other missions, and the transfer became a routine affair. It wasn’t until the VIPs had been handed off to the medical staff and Viking Three One had completed the recovery of the Lamprey that Murph let himself flip the emotional switch.

He grabbed a seat against the smooth curving wall of the transport, took his helmet off, and felt the sweat on his brow go cold. The wave rolled over him, and he closed his eyes as the adrenaline burned off and was replaced by ten tons of fatigue. Every muscle ached in a dull, distant sort of way. It was a two–hour ride back home, and Murph spent that time caught between a body that wanted to crash out and a mind that insisted on replaying the worst few moments over and over again.

They’d been back barely four hours before they were on deck again. Op tempo had been stepping up of late, but none of them had been expecting to go back out again so soon. When Murph got to the briefing room, Lane was already there in the back row, his big boots up on the table and his head down on his chest. Hard to tell if he was sleeping or thinking.

It was one of the smaller rooms, with two sets of gently curving tables arranged in three rows and a narrow center aisle, like an amphitheater in miniature. Murph slid into a seat in the second row, nearest the door. Lieutenant Commander Vega showed up a couple of minutes later and started talking before she’d even crossed the threshold.

“Sorry for the short turnaround, but Higher’s running around like the ship’s on fire for this one,” Vega said, looking up from the display in her hand and cutting herself off. She frowned at the mostly empty room.

“Probably working out,” Murph said. Vega tapped the display on the table in front a few times, considering. “Time–sensitive, huh?”

“Very,” she answered. “I’ll give ’em ninety seconds before I call them out over the ship’s comms.”

“Mighty kind of you, Boss,” Lane said from the back.

Vega was the team’s acting commanding officer while they were attached to their current task force; their ranks didn’t line up quite right on account of the different branches, but after the first couple of ops she’d been gracious enough to let them mostly call her “Boss.” She was about to reply, but just then a figure walked through the door, and she smiled instead.

“Hey, look who’s up and about,” she said.

Murph had been expecting Vance, because Kit was, as a rule, always last in, but his heart jumped a little when he saw who it was.

Switch.

She was moving a little more slowly than usual, but considering she’d been dead just a few hours earlier, she was looking pretty good. And with her came the momentary dissonance of seeing the dead raised; just as Murph couldn’t accustom himself to losing a teammate, nor could he get used to that first sight of them alive again.

“What’d I miss?” Switch asked as she slid in behind Murph and took a seat two chairs down.

“Not much,” Murph said. “You’re back online awful quick.”

Switch gave a curt nod. “Still had two backups on ice, so it was just a transfer for me.”

“How far back?”

She thought for a moment. “They had me right up until you called in that you’d secured the captain.”

Murph ran through the mission in his mind, replayed the critical moments. “That’s not bad. Lost five, seven minutes maybe,” he said.

“How’d it happen?” Switch asked.

There wasn’t any doubt what she meant by it. “Still not exactly sure. Kit was getting zero on a scan, but there was some kind of implanted charge on one of the bad guys. You had your faceplate popped. Bad things.”

“Yeah, I remember the part about the faceplate… sensor array glitched out just before we breached.”

“I already gave the techs about eighteen levels of hell over that, but by all means give ’em your own when you get a chance.”

She nodded, and they just looked at each other for a moment. No matter how many times he’d been through it, there was always something uncanny about a dead friend sitting right there, asking how they’d died.

“You go see the old you?” Lane asked from behind.

“That’s a big negatory,” Switch answered over her shoulder. “Too creepy.” And then, a moment later, she turned to look at him. “You ever do that?”

Lane grunted. “Just the first time.”

The technology wasn’t all that new. Cloning, storing and transferring consciousness—a sort of hacked immortality that Murph and his teammates just referred to as the Process. Their unit was one of a precious few that enjoyed the “privilege” of having a couple of extra lives, but they’d had to earn it the hard way. The joke was that the only way you got into the unit was by proving the military couldn’t kill you anyway.

A bark of laughter came from the hall, and then Kit and Vance came in together, sweaty and in their PT gear. They both stopped short when they saw Vega already standing up front, and then quickly forgot about her when they saw Switch sitting there.

“Mas’sarnt!” Kit said, crossing the distance to her in about two steps and giving her an awkward combination handshake/one–arm hug across the table. “What’re you doin’ here?”

Switch half–stood out of her seat. “Waiting on you, Kit. Can’t believe you let the dead girl beat you to a brief,” she said, and then, as she sat back down, added, “No, wait. Yes I can.”

Kit chuckled, but a moment later Murph saw the flicker of pain on his face.

“Hey, uh…” he started, his tone suddenly somber, apologetic. Switch waved him off.

“Don’t waste the words, brother,” she said. “We’re good.” Kit’s expression was somewhere between a smile and a grimace.

Vega cleared her throat. “Sorry to break up the reunion, folks, but we need to get moving on this.”

Kit nodded and sat on top of the table. Vance moved around to the third row and traded a fist bump with Switch before sitting down next to Lane.

“The tech crew did a thorough sweep of the Sunseeker but still couldn’t turn up any ID on the hostiles. That narrows our field down to about three possible sponsors.”

“Money on Lunar,” Vance said.

“Could be,” Vega answered. “But this isn’t the sort of thing to jump to conclusions on. When our people who don’t exist are bumping into their people who don’t exist, it’s a different kind of game.”

“So what’s next?” Murph asked, hoping to get to the point.

“Well, we think something got transferred off the Sunseeker. Jettisoned, really. A little trajectory analysis turned up an unregistered frigate in the right area at the right time, and when our boys tracked its current course, they uncovered something interesting.”

Vega paused with a little half–smile, waiting for someone to be impressed. She was way too proud of the eggheads.

“Sooooo,” Murph said. “What’s next?”

Vega’s half–smile deflated. “There’s an unknown vessel keeping station awfully close to an asteroid about forty megs out from the Sunseeker’s previous position. Its signature reads like a Victor–class ship, but heavily modified; looks like they’re trying not to be noticed.” A meg was Navy–speak for a thousand kilometers, which put the target ship at the kind of distance that was so big as to be almost meaningless to Murph. For all the time he spent in space, he was a boots–on–the–ground kind of guy at heart.

“Lunar?” Vance asked. Vega nodded. Vance held a hand up and rubbed her fingertips together like somebody needed to pay up.

“We don’t know what its capabilities are,” Vega continued, “or what it might do if we tried to intercept. And we don’t want to provoke a response of any kind until we know who and what we’re dealing with.”

“You want us to hit an unknown vessel that’s kinda maybe Victor–class, sort of?” Murph asked.

“Not hit,” Vega said. “Just recon.”

Murph’s team waited in silence, knowing there was more.

“And if possible, prep the craft for a hit,” she added.

“There it is,” Kit said.

“I know it sounds risky, but Higher’s already run the scenario and drawn up a plan of action—”

“Whoa, hold up now,” Murph said, interrupting, but Vega held up a hand and stopped him.

“Before you unload, let me just run you through it.”

It didn’t take long for the briefing to turn into a grind session. They went through every detail from top to bottom and back again, asking questions, assessing risks, challenging assumptions, stripping out all the unnecessary bits that some good idea fairy had sprinkled throughout the whole thing.

Murph kept finding his gaze drawn to Switch, enough times that it started to bother him. He kept telling himself he was totally focused on the mission, and then the next thing he knew, he’d be looking over at her, and he couldn’t figure out why.

Finally, it clicked. She had a little notch in her left ear where one night a combination of beer and friendly combatives had led to a hard fall against a table and had taken a chunk out of the lobe. At least, there used to be a notch there. Now that ear was whole, undamaged. Murph had never really thought much of it before, but now he found himself missing it. In giving her life, they’d taken her scars.

He shook his head and refocused his mind on the task at hand.

Ten hours later, they were suited up and packed tightly into their narrow, low–signature delivery vehicle, the Lamprey, which they all affectionately called “the coffin.”

Murph found himself unusually distracted. He tried to tell himself it was just the long ride, or the lack of rest between operations, or the near insanity of infiltrating a virtually unknown ship. Eventually he had to admit what was really going on. Switch’s death had shaken him, and all the thoughts and emotions around it refused to be ignored.

It wasn’t like it was the first time he’d lost a teammate. He’d even been through the Process twice himself. But he had a box for that, inside. For all those things. He had a box in his heart where he kept the pain, and the loss, and the terrible things he’d seen. One day, when he’d served his time and done his duty, he planned to open that box and sort through it, and to give each memory its due. But for now it had to stay closed, and it had to stay separate. That’s how it’d always been, and how it had to be.

But no matter how hard he tried to keep that box closed, the thoughts kept leaking out.

He’d been through the Process. He was fine. Switch was fine.

But was he really the same person? The body was identical, but it wasn’t really the same. And the mind. The memories, the habits, the quirks, they were all there. But to some degree, they were just copies of something that had once been original. Backups. Did it really matter whether he was the same, or just something so like the same as to be impossible to distinguish?

Murph bit down on the mouthpiece of his helmet and sucked cool water, hoping to calm his racing mind.

It’d been so arbitrary: a glitch in a supposedly perfect system, her faceplate open, the timing of the explosion. How many little things had gone wrong to lead to that little perfect hole in her face? That was the hardest part, knowing that no amount of training or preparation could ever shield his team from the random events of the universe.

It almost didn’t matter what the mission was anymore; they’d trained for and executed so many. Hostage rescue. Recon. Ship takedown. Each was just a link in a chain that led to another. Murph just had to trust each was as important as they said, and that the whole thing had an end somewhere, some day. Mission after mission, he and his team got the job done, because that’s what they did, and not even death could keep them from the next one. And the next one. Still, all that training, all that experience, they still couldn’t escape simple bad luck.

When he’d made the unit, they’d told him he’d never have to fear death again. That he’d never have to worry about losing a brother. That they were invincible.

But they were wrong. It wasn’t that your brother never died. It was that he died a hundred times. A thousand times. And every time you couldn’t save him… well, for all Murph had suffered in his service, he’d not yet found a pain as deep as the one that came from having failed someone so completely.

He looked over at Switch then, her shoulder three inches from his. Seeing the movement, she turned her head slightly towards him. He just reached up and tapped his own faceplate three times. She nodded. He couldn’t see the smile, but he imagined one there. And he remembered the hole in her cheek, and the way her eyes had dulled.

He turned back and closed his eyes, took another sip of water. New body, new brain. Same soul. The eggheads still hadn’t figured out how to fix the scars on that one. There were more ways to break than science had found ways to fix, and that wasn’t likely to change anytime soon. For just a minute, Murph gave himself permission to feel the fear, the sadness, the anger. Just for a minute. And then, he packed it all back into his box, and locked it with a final thought.

Invincible, he thought. Well, that may be. But we sure as hell aren’t invulnerable.

Light and Shadow ^{Linda Nagata}

LIEUTENANT DANI REID WAS SERVING her turn on watch inside Fort Zana’s Tactical Operations Center. She scanned the TOC’s monitors and their rotating displays of real–time surveillance data. All was quiet. Even the goats that usually grazed outside the walls had retreated, taking refuge from the noon sun in a grove of spindly thorn trees.

The temperature outside was a steamy 39°C, but within the fort’s prefabricated, insulated walls, the air was cool enough that Reid kept the jacket of her brown–camo combat uniform buttoned up per regulation. The skullcap she wore was part of the uniform. Made like an athletic skullcap, it covered her forehead and clung skin–tight against her hairless scalp. Fine wires woven through its silky brown fabric were in constant dialog with the workings of her mind.

On watch, the skullcap kept her alert, just slightly on edge, immune to the mesmerizing hum of electronics and the soothing whisper of air circulating through the vents—white noise that retreated into subliminal volumes when confronted by a louder sound: a rustle of movement in the hallway.

Private First Class Landon Phan leaned in the doorway of the TOC.

Phan was just twenty–one, slender and wiry. Beneath the brim of his skullcap, his eyebrows angled in an annoyed scowl. “L.T.? You should go check on Sakai.”

“Why? What’s up?”

“Ma’am, you need to see it yourself.”

Phan had been part of Reid’s linked combat squad for nine months. He’d done well in the LCS; he’d earned Reid’s trust. She didn’t feel the same about Sakai.

“Okay. You take the watch.”

Light spilling from the TOC was the only illumination in the hallway. The bunkroom was even darker. Reid couldn’t see anything inside, but she could hear the fast, shallow, ragged breathing of a soldier in trouble, skirting the edge of panic. She slapped on the hall light.

Specialist Caroline Sakai was revealed, coiled in a bottom bunk, her trembling fists clenched against her chin, her eyes squeezed shut. She wore a T–shirt, shorts, and socks, but she wasn’t wearing a skullcap. The pale skin of her hairless scalp gleamed in the refracted light.

“What the hell?” Reid whispered, crossing the room to crouch beside the bunk. “Sakai? What happened?”

Sakai’s eyes popped open. She jerked back against the wall, glaring as if she’d never seen Reid before.

“What the hell?” Reid repeated.

Sakai’s gaze cut sideways. She bit her lip. Then, in an uncharacteristically husky voice, she confessed, “I think… I was having a nightmare.”

“No shit! What did you expect?”

She seemed honestly confused. “Ma’am?”

“Where the hell is your skullcap?”

Sakai caught on; her expression hardened. “In my locker, ma’am.”

The microwire net in Reid’s skullcap detected her consternation and responded to it by signaling the tiny beads strewn throughout her brain tissue to stimulate a counteracting cerebral cocktail that helped her think calmly, logically, as this conversation veered into dangerous territory.

The skullcap was standard equipment in a linked combat squad. It guarded and guided a soldier’s emotional state, keeping moods balanced and minds honed. It was so essential to the job that, on deployment, LCS soldiers were allowed to wear it at all times, waking or sleeping. And they did wear it. All of them did. Always.

But they were not required to wear it, not during off–duty hours.

The hallway light picked out a few pale freckles on Sakai’s cheeks and the multiple, empty piercings in her earlobes. It tangled in her black, unkempt eyebrows and glinted in her glassy brown eyes. “You want the nightmares?” Reid asked, revolted by Sakai’s choice.

“Of course not, ma’am.”

Use of the skullcap was tangled up in issues of mental health and self–determination, so regulations existed to protect a soldier’s right of choice. Reid could not order Sakai to wear it when she was off–duty; she could not even ask Sakai why she chose to go without it. So she approached the issue sideways. “Something you need to talk about, soldier?”

“No, ma’am,” Sakai said in a flat voice. “I’m fine.”

Reid nodded, because there was nothing else she could do. “Get some sleep, then. Nightmares aren’t going to excuse you from patrol.”

She returned to the TOC, where Phan was waiting. “When did this start?”

“Yesterday,” he answered cautiously.

Even Phan knew this wasn’t a subject they could discuss.

“Get some sleep,” she told him. “Use earplugs if you have to.”

When he’d gone, Reid considered reporting the issue to Guidance… but she knew what Guidance would say. So long as Sakai performed her duties in an acceptable manner, she was within her rights to forego the skullcap during off–duty hours, no matter how much it disturbed the rest of the squad.

What the hell was Sakai trying to prove?

Reid ran her palms across the silky fabric of her skullcap. Then, as if on a dare, she slipped her fingertips under its brim and took it off.

A cold draft kissed her bare scalp and made her shiver.

Her pulse picked up as fear unfolded around her heart.

You’re psyching yourself out.

Probably.

She studied the skullcap, turning it over, feeling the hair–thin microwires embedded in the smooth brown cloth.

No big deal, really, to go without it. It was only out of habit that she wore it all the time.

The hum of electronics within the TOC grew a little louder, a little closer, and then, with no further warning, Reid found herself caught up in a quiet fury. Sakai had always been the squad’s problem child. Not in the performance of her duty—if that had been an issue, Reid would have been all over her. It was Sakai’s personality. She didn’t mesh. Distant, uncommunicative, her emotions locked away. A loner. Seven months at Fort Zana had not changed her status as an outsider.

Reid’s emotions were closer to the surface: she didn’t like Sakai; didn’t like her effect on the squad. There needed to be trust between her soldiers, but none of them really trusted Sakai and no one wanted to partner with her. No one believed she would truly have their back if things went hard south. Reid saw it in the field when her soldiers hesitated, thought twice, allowed a few seconds to pass in doubt. Someday those few seconds would be the last measure of a life.

Reid clenched the skullcap.

Fuck Sakai anyway.

Ducking her head, she slipped the cap back on, pressing it close to her scalp. Within seconds, her racing heart slowed. Her anger grew cold and thoughtful.

Sakai thought she could get by without her skullcap. Maybe she wanted to prove she had more mettle than the rest of them, but it wouldn’t last. It couldn’t. “You’ll give it up,” Reid whispered. “By this time tomorrow, you’ll be back in the fold.”

Reid finished her watch and went back to sleep, waking at 1900. She laced on her boots, then tromped next door to the TOC, where Private First Class David Wicks was on duty.

“Anything?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. No alerts at all from Command.” He flashed a shy smile. “But my niece had her first–birthday party today.” He pulled up a window with his email, and Reid got to watch a short video of a smiling one–year–old in a pretty blue dress.

“Your sister doing okay now?”

“Yeah, she’s good.”

Wicks sent money to his sister. It was a big part of why he’d signed up.

In the kitchen, Reid microwaved a meal, then joined Sergeant Juarez at the table. “Command thinks we’ve got a quiet night.”

Juarez was no taller than Reid, but he carried fifty extra pounds of muscle. He’d been Army for seven years, and Reid was sure he’d be in for twenty if he could pull it off. “You ever notice,” he drawled, “how the patrol gets interesting every time Command says there’s nothing going on?”

“Just means we’re good at finding trouble.”

Phan reeled in, with Private First Class Mila Faraci a step behind him. “How’s it look tonight, L.T.?” Faraci asked.

“Quiet so far.”

“That’s what I like to hear.”

Juarez finished eating. He got up just as Sakai came in the door wearing a fresh uniform, her cheeks still flushed from a hot shower and her head freshly denuded of hair, leaving her scalp smooth and pale under the ceiling lights with no skullcap to hide it. Phan and Faraci were waiting together by the two humming microwaves. Phan glared. Faraci looked shocked. “I thought you were shitting me,” she murmured.

Sakai ignored everyone. She opened the freezer and pulled out a meal packet while Reid traded a look with Juarez.

“What the hell is with you, Sakai?” Faraci demanded.

“Faraci,” Juarez growled, “you got a problem?”

Faraci was strong, tall, tough, and full of swagger, but she took care never to cross Juarez. “No, Sergeant.”

Reid got up, dumped her meal packet, and left. Juarez followed her to her quarters, where there was barely enough room for the two of them to stand without breathing each other’s air.

“What the hell?” he demanded.

“You know I can’t ask. She hasn’t said anything to you?”

“She doesn’t talk to me or anybody. It’s been worse since she got back from leave.”

Skullcaps got turned in before a soldier went on leave. It was a harsh transition, learning to live without it. But taking it up again after your twenty–one days—that was easy. No one ever had a problem with that.

“She’s just annoyed at being back,” Reid decided. “If there was a real issue, Guidance would know. They would address it. Meantime, make sure our other noble warriors don’t get in her face. I don’t want to bust the kids when Sakai is the loose cannon.”

“You got it, L.T.”

“This won’t last,” Reid assured him. “You’ll see. She’ll give this up tomorrow.”

Reid was wrong.

Sakai wore the skullcap during the nightly patrols as she was required to do, but for three days running she took the cap off as soon as she hit the showers, and it didn’t go on again until they rigged up for the next patrol. This generated its own problem: Sakai couldn’t sleep well without her skullcap. It wouldn’t be long before she was unfit for patrol.

Reid rigged up early for the night’s adventures. Her armored vest went on first. Then she strapped into her “dead sister.” The titanium exoskeleton was made of bone–like struts that paralleled her arms and legs and were linked together by a back frame that supported the weight of her pack. Testing the rig, she crouched and then bobbed up, letting the dead sister’s powered leg struts do the work of lifting her body weight. The exoskeleton made it easy to walk for hours, to run, to jump, to kick and hit, and to support the weight of her tactical rifle, an MCL1a with muzzle–mounted cams and AI integration.

The rest of the squad was still prepping when she slung her weapon, tucked her helmet under her arm, and strode out into the small yard enclosed by the fort’s fifteen–foot–high walls.

The night air was heavy with heat and humidity and the scent of mud and blossoms, but the clouds that had brought a late–afternoon shower had dispersed, leaving the sky clear and awash in the light of a rising moon. Reid allowed herself a handful of seconds to take in the night as it was meant to be seen. Then she pulled her helmet on. Seen through her visor, the yard brightened with the green, alien glow of night vision while icons mustered across the bottom of the display, one for every soldier wearing a skullcap: Juarez, Faraci, Phan, and Wicks.

A familiar voice spoke through Reid’s helmet audio: “You’re early tonight.”

She smiled, though he couldn’t see it. “So are you. Slow night?”

“Not too bad.”

He was her primary handler from Guidance, codenamed Tyrant, the only name she knew him by. His job was to assist in field operations, overseeing data analysis and relaying communications with Command from his office, five thousand miles away in Charleston. Tyrant had access to the feeds from her helmet cams as well as the display on her visor, and he kept a close eye on all of it. “Where’s Sakai’s icon?” he asked. “You didn’t give her the night off?”

The door opened and, to Reid’s surprise, Sakai stepped through, already rigged in armor and bones, her pack on, her weapon on her shoulder, and her helmet in her gloved hand. But no skullcap.

And without her skullcap, she didn’t appear as an icon on Reid’s display.

“She’s challenging you,” Tyrant murmured, amusement in his voice.

Sakai shot Reid a sideways glance, but if she was looking for a reaction, she was disappointed. Reid’s face was hidden behind the anonymous black shield of her visor.

Sakai turned away, setting her helmet down on a dusty table. Then, like a good girl, she fished her skullcap out of a pocket and put it on.

Her icon popped up on Reid’s display. Reid gazed at it and a menu slid open. She shifted her gaze, selecting “physiology” from the list of options. Her system AI whispered a brief report: status marginal; brain chemistry indicates insufficient sleep. But as Sakai’s skullcap went to work, stimulating the chemical factory of her brain, her status ramped up. By the time the squad assembled, Sakai’s condition became nominal, and the AI approved her for the night’s mission.

That night, they were to patrol far to the north. They spread out in their customary formation: two hundred meters between each soldier, with Reid on the east, Sakai on the west, and the others in between. The physical separation let them cover more territory while they remained electronically linked to each other, to Tyrant, and to the angel that accompanied them. The surveillance drone was the squad’s remote eyes, hunting ahead for signs of enemy insurgents.

Reid moved easily through the flat terrain, the power of her stride augmented by her exoskeleton’s struts and joints, while the shocked footplates that supported her booted feet generated a faint, rhythmic hiss with every step. Her gaze was never still, roving between the squad map, the video feed from the angel, the terrain around her, and the quality of the ground where her next steps would fall.

Threat assessment had gotten harder since the start of the rainy season. Stands of head–high grass covered what only a month ago had been bare red earth. Thickets had leafed out and the scattered trees had sprouted green canopies. Cattle liked to spend the hottest hours of the day beneath the trees, their sharp hooves treading the ground into sticky bogs. For most of the year this worn–out land was barely habitable, with the Sahara encroaching from the north. But for at least this one more year the rains had come, bringing life back—and providing extensive cover for an enemy made up of violent but half–trained insurgent soldiers.

Reid held her tactical rifle across her body, ready for use at all times as she searched for signs of disturbance that could not be accounted for by cattle or goats or the herdsmen who accompanied them. At the same time, video from her helmet cams was relayed to Guidance for first–pass analysis by Intelligence AIs—a process duplicated for everyone in the squad.

Tyrant remained silent as three hours passed with no anomalies found. Despite the uneventful night, no one’s attention strayed. The skullcaps wouldn’t allow it. If a soldier’s focus began to drift, brain activity would reflect it, and be corrected. Every soldier remained alert at all times.

Near midnight Tyrant finally spoke. “Reid.”

“Go ahead.”

“Weather on the way. Nasty squall from the west. ETA twenty minutes.”

“Roger that.”

She switched to gen–com, addressing the squad. “Heavy weather on the way. That means any signs of hostile activity are about to get erased. Stick to designated paths plotted by Guidance and do not get ahead of the squad.”

After a few minutes the wind picked up, bringing a black front with it. The squad map showed them approaching a road to the north, a one–lane stretch of highway paved in cracked asphalt, its position in the landscape marked by a cell tower rising above the trees. Reid spoke again over gen–com: “Wicks, you’ve got the tower on your transect. Use extra caution.”

“No worries, L.T.”

Right. It was her job to worry.

The rain reached Sakai first. Then it rolled over Phan, Juarez, Faraci, and Wicks. Reid was a few steps from the asphalt road when she heard the sizzling edge of the storm sweeping toward her. The rain hit, hammering with Biblical force, generating a chiming chorus of pings against the bones of her dead sister and enclosing her in a scintillating curtain that even night vision couldn’t pierce. At her feet, a veil of standing water hid the ground.

“Hold up,” Reid said over gen–com. “No one move until—”

An explosion erupted maybe two hundred meters away, a ball of fire that illuminated the base of the cell tower where it stood just south of the road. Reid dropped to her belly. A splash of muddy water briefly obscured her faceplate before a frictionless coating sent it sliding away. Her heart hammered: the squad map showed Wicks at the foot of the tower. “Wicks, report!”

“Grenades incoming,” Tyrant warned as another icon popped up on the map: a red skull marking a newly discovered enemy position on the other side of the road.

Reid echoed the warning over gen–com. “Grenades incoming!” Clutching her weapon, she curled into a fetal position to minimize her exposure. A status notification popped up on her display, a bold–red statement of Wicks’s condition: nonresponsive; traumatic injury with blood loss.

Goddamn.

The grenades hit. Two behind her, one to the east. She felt the concussions in her body and in the ground beneath her shoulder, but her helmet shielded her eyes and ears, and if debris fell on her she couldn’t tell it apart from the storm.

She rolled to her belly, bringing the stock of her MCL1a to her shoulder as she strained to see past the rain to the other side of the road. “Tyrant, I need a target.”

“Target acquired.”

All extraneous data vanished from her visor, leaving only a gold targeting circle and a small red point that showed where her weapon was aimed. It took half–a–second to align point and circle. Then her AI fired the weapon.

The MCL1a’s standard projectile was a 7.62mm round, but it was the second trigger Reid felt dropping away from her finger. The stock kicked as a grenade rocketed from the underslung launcher, looking like a blazing comet in night vision as it shot across the road, disappearing into the brush on the other side. Reid couldn’t see the target, but when the grenade hit, the explosion lit up the rain and threw the intervening trees into silhouette.

A second grenade chased the first, fired from Faraci’s position farther west. Reid used the explosion as cover. She flexed her legs, using the power of the dead sister’s joints to launch to her feet. Then she dropped back, away from the road and into the brush as the squad icons returned to her visor. “Juarez! I’m going after Wicks. Take Phan and Sakai. Set up a defensive perimeter.”

“Roger that.” On the squad map, lines shot from the sergeant’s icon, linking him to Phan and Sakai as they switched to a different channel to coordinate.

“Faraci, you’re with me. Full caution as you approach Wicks. Take the path Guidance gives you and do not stray.”

“Roger, L.T.”

Reid flinched as a burst of automatic weapons fire rattled the nearby brush. Another gun opened up. A glance at the squad map confirmed it was Juarez, returning fire.

“Got your route,” Tyrant said.

A transparent, glowing green rectangle popped into existence at Reid’s feet as if suspended just above the sheen of standing water. It stretched into a luminous path, winding out of sight behind a thicket. Reid bounded after it, running all–out—Hell–bent, maybe, because she could see only three strides ahead. If a hazard popped up in front of her she’d have to go through it or over it, because she was going too fast to stop. When she spied a suspiciously neat circle of rainwater, she vaulted it. Then she ducked to avoid a branch weighed down by the pounding rain.

Hell failed to claim her, and in just a few seconds the path brought her to the concrete pad that supported the cell tower, and to Wicks, who lay just a few meters behind it.

He was belly down in almost two inches of water and he wasn’t nonresponsive anymore. He struggled to lift his helmeted head, but the weight of his pack and his injuries pinned him in place. His shoulders shook with a wracking cough as Reid dropped to her knees beside him.

“Damn it, Wicks, don’t drown.”

Another grenade went off, this one maybe a hundred meters away. Reid flinched, but her duty was to Wicks. She pulled the pins on his pack straps and heaved the pack aside. Then she grabbed the frame of his dead sister and flipped him onto his back. He made a faint mewling noise, more fear than pain. The skullcap should be controlling his pain. As she shrugged off her pack and got out her med kit, she tried to reassure him. “Wicks, listen to me. We’ll get you out of here. You’ll be okay.”

He groaned… in denial maybe, or despair.

“Tyrant, where’s my battle medic?”

“I’m here,” a woman said, speaking through her helmet audio. “Let’s do an assessment.”

Reid’s helmet cams let the medic see what she saw. Wicks still had all four limbs, but most of his right calf was gone, and shrapnel had shredded the flesh of his right arm. Reid used her body to shield his wounds from the rain for the few seconds it took to apply a spray–on coagulant. Then she slipped off his helmet to check for head injuries. When she found none, she put his helmet back on.

Tyrant said, “Faraci’s at twenty meters and closing fast. Don’t shoot her.”

“Roger that.”

Juarez was still trading fire with someone to the north when Faraci burst out of the brush. She dropped her pack and then dropped to her knees beside Reid. “How’s he doing, L.T.?”

“How you doing, Wicks?” Reid asked as she slathered wound putty across his chewed–up calf.

“Fucked,” he whispered between clenched teeth.

Reid couldn’t argue. She guessed he’d lose the leg, and then he’d be out of a job that he desperately needed for his sister’s sake as well as his own. “Faraci’s going to take care of you,” she said. “You got that, Faraci? Do what the battle medic tells you, and get him stabilized.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“And keep your head down.”

Reid closed up her med kit and jammed it back into her pack. Then she shouldered the pack, along with her weapon. “Tyrant, I need a target.”

“Look toward the road.”

She did, bringing a new path into view on her display. Icons showed Juarez and Phan engaged two hundred fifty meters to the west, with Sakai half a klick farther out. Maybe Juarez had gotten word of more targets on that side and instructed her to go after them. No time to ask.

Reid took off, water geysering under her footplates until the path expanded, indicating she should slow. The path ended at a tree with a fat trunk. Livestock had churned the ground into thick mud that sucked at her boots as she braced herself against the trunk and brought up her weapon. A targeting circle appeared in her visor, but just as she aligned her aim, her attention was hijacked by a bold–red status notification that popped up at the bottom of her display: Contact lost with C. Sakai; position and status unknown.

Her finger hesitated above the trigger. Contact lost? What the hell did that mean? Even if Sakai was dead, the angel should still know her position—

Focus!

Reid squeezed the trigger, firing a burst of 7.62mm rounds.

An answering fusillade hammered the tree trunk. She spun and dropped to a crouch, putting the tree at her back as bullets whined through the space she’d just occupied.

“Target down,” Tyrant said.

“Then who the fuck is shooting at me?”

“Another target.”

“How did Command miss all this, Tyrant?”

“Debrief later. You’ve got another target. Stay low.”

The notification was gone from Reid’s display. The squad map was back up. It showed Faraci still with Wicks; Juarez and Phan circling to the west. There was no icon for Sakai.

“Reid!” Tyrant barked as he blanked her display. “Target’s moving in. You need to hit it now.”

She twisted around, still on her knees, sliding in the mud. When the targeting circle came into sight, she covered it and fired. There was a scream, much closer than she’d expected. She fired again, and the scream cut off. “Where the hell is Sakai?” she demanded, as another exchange of gunfire rattled to the west.

“I don’t know! Waiting to hear from Intelligence.”

Gunfire ceased. There was only the sound of rain.

“Three targets remaining,” Tyrant said. “But they’re pulling back.”

Reid stared into the green–tinted night. The rain was easing. Night vision could again make out the shapes of distant trees, but it could not reveal IEDs buried beneath the mud, or popper mines that the surviving insurgents might have dropped on their retreat. Command might be persuaded to send in bomb sniffers tomorrow, but tonight the other side of the road was a no–man’s–land.

“We have to let them go,” Reid said. “Tyrant, shift the angel west. I want it looking for Sakai.”

The rain had stopped by the time she returned to Wicks. Faraci had sealed his wounds and gotten him out of his rig, but she’d left his helmet on, per regulation. His visor was tuned to transparent, so that Reid could see his face, his half–closed eyes. “He’ll be okay,” Faraci said.

Meaning that he would live.

Juarez and Phan emerged from the brush as a distant growl announced the approach of the MEDEVAC helicopter. While Juarez went through Wicks’s pack, redistributing its contents, Reid stepped aside. “Tyrant, I want to see the video from Sakai’s helmet cams.”

It didn’t show much. Rain had been coming down so hard that at first all Reid saw was falling water. Then a blur that resolved into the dripping branches of a thicket, luminous in night vision; then a splash of mud. Reid checked her display, confirming she was on a solo link before she asked Tyrant, “Did someone cut her fucking head off?”

“Negative. The skullcap would have picked up remnant brain function. Reid, her helmet was removed.”

“That doesn’t make sense. If she got jumped, we’d see—” She broke off in midsentence as the truth hit. “Sakai took off her own helmet. That’s what you’re saying.”

Reid had been slow to consider it because all her training argued against it. LCS soldiers must never remove their helmets in the field. Even Wicks, grievously wounded, still wore his, because in a linked combat squad the helmet was the soldier. It was protective gear, yes, but it also marked position, monitored condition, allowed communication, enhanced the control of weapons and targeting, and provided a visual interface for the shared data stream that allowed an LCS to function.

If Sakai had removed her helmet it meant only one thing: she’d walked away.

She’d deserted.

The helicopter set down, kicking up a windstorm that flattened a circle of waist–high grass. Wicks shivered as the medics loaded him onboard. He was in their care now, so they took his helmet off. His expression was disconsolate. Reid squeezed his hand and lied to him. “It’ll all work out.”

Moonlight shone through rents and tears in the clouds as the helicopter took him away.

Reid tried to put herself into Sakai’s head; tried to understand what Sakai had been thinking when she’d walked out on the squad, abandoned them, in the middle of a firefight. No love existed between Sakai and the others; no reason to think she gave a shit about any of them. The commotion had been a chance to slip away, that’s all…

Except there was nowhere for her to go, no escape, no refuge, no way home.

No way to survive for long.

Reid found it easy to imagine Sakai as suicidal, but why hadn’t Guidance known or even suspected?

Because Sakai had only worn the skullcap on patrol.

Until tonight, Sakai had been okay on patrol.

Some people were like that. They were fine so long as they were working, fulfilling whatever regimented role life had handed them, but leave them on their own and they could disappear down rabbit holes.

What twisted passage had Sakai wandered down?

Reid caught her breath, hit by a new worry: what if Sakai hadn’t run away?

The night was warm and Reid’s uniform had shed the rain so she was barely damp, but she shuddered anyway as the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She looked over her shoulder, scanning the surrounding terrain, searching for motion in the brush or beneath the trees.

Tyrant noticed. “You see something?”

The drone had been sent to search from Sakai’s last known position. “Tyrant, bring the angel back. Make sure Sakai isn’t here, hunting us.”

“Roger that.” A few seconds later: “You really think she’s turned on you?”

“I don’t know. I just want to make sure.” She switched to gen–com. “Everyone, stay low. Keep alert.”

They all dropped into a crouch.

“Somebody out there?” Juarez wanted to know.

“We’ll let the angel answer that.”

The drone searched, but it picked up no sign of Sakai anywhere nearby. So Reid sent it south, toward the fort, but Sakai wasn’t there either.

“Let her go,” Faraci muttered. “Who gives a shit? She didn’t do anything for Wicks when he went down.”

“We don’t abandon our own, Faraci,” Reid snapped. “Remember that, next time you get in a tight spot.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This is now a search and rescue, and speed is critical.” Alone, without her helmet, it was just a question of time and distance, not chance, until Sakai was found by some insurgent group. Maybe that was her goal, to get far enough away that there could be no rescue, no first aid, no helicopter evacuation while her heart was still beating.

Only four remained in the squad—Reid, Juarez, Faraci, Phan—but they still assumed their standard two–hundred meter interval, sweeping the terrain until they converged again on Sakai’s last known position. Reid got there first and found Sakai’s skullcap hanging from a branch. It felt like a message meant just for her. She shoved the skullcap into a pocket. Phan recovered Sakai’s helmet from a thicket, finding it upside down and half–full of rain. Juarez located her pack. But her MCL1a didn’t turn up. Neither did her stock of grenades, or her dead sister.

“We have two possibilities,” Reid told the squad. “She’s been taken prisoner, in which case we are obligated to effect a rescue and to recover her equipment. Or she’s gone rogue. If so, we must assume she is mentally unstable. Without her helmet she doesn’t have night vision, but she’ll be able to see well enough by moonlight to be dangerous. Use extreme caution.”

The rain had washed away any tracks that might have indicated the direction Sakai had taken, but it seemed logical to Reid that she would have headed west to northwest. “Either direction would allow her to avoid the angel’s eyes while it was monitoring the firefight, but west means following tonight’s patrol route and I don’t think that’s what she had in mind.”

“Northwest then,” Juarez said in disgust.

Reid nodded. “She’s heading for the border.”

They set off, moving fast on a no–choice mission. They had to find Sakai. Personnel did not go missing anymore. And they had to get the dead sister and the MCL1a back. That equipment could not be allowed to enter the black market. It had to be recovered, even if they took heavy casualties in the process.

“Tyrant.”

“Here.”

“Something happened when Sakai was on leave.”

“No incident in her record.”

“Go beyond the record! Something else happened just a few days ago. That’s when she stopped wearing her skullcap. Something was going on inside her head. Something she didn’t want the skullcap to fix.”

“Stand by.”

A figure of speech. Reid loped north, while her AI analyzed the feeds from her helmet cams. Every few minutes it highlighted a potential hazard: a shining thread that could have been a tripwire but turned out to be a spiderweb; a metallic sheen that might have been a cheap sensor but was only a foil wrapper, blown in from God knows where; an area of disturbed ground washed by the rain where there might be a buried IED. Reid skirted it, though she suspected it was just a resting place for cattle.

Tyrant spoke again, “Intelligence took a look at her email. She split with her boyfriend a few days ago, told him she wasn’t coming back and not to worry about money, that she’d take care of him.”

“Oh fuck,” Reid said as enlightenment hit. “This is about her life insurance.”

“It’s about more than that. The boyfriend has a six–year–old kid. Sakai got crazy on leave, had a meltdown, slammed the kid against a wall—”

Reid didn’t want to hear anymore. “That’s bullshit. Sakai passed her psych quals. She’s not like that. None of us are like that.”

“Intelligence believes the boyfriend’s story. He’s been out of work a long time. Sakai’s been sending him money. He didn’t report the incident because he can’t afford to break up with her. So he kept telling her everything was okay.”

Sakai was not the kind of person who could do something like that and ever imagine it was okay; Reid didn’t have to like her to know that. The life insurance was Sakai’s apology, a way to make amends and to ensure she never harmed the child again.

A few minutes later Tyrant announced, “The angel has found her.” He marked the position on Reid’s map. Three kilometers east–northeast. Reid switched to gen–com. “Hold up.”

A new window opened in her display, a feed from the angel that showed Sakai rigged in her dead sister, with her MCL1a in hand. Sakai surely presented a danger, yet without her helmet and her skullcap she looked fragile, her bare scalp like a gray eggshell in the sideways light of the westering moon.

“You got her, L.T.?” Juarez asked.

Reid sent him the feed and the location.

The map updated.

“Shit,” Juarez breathed. “She’s not alone.”

Scanning the ground with its infrared camera, the angel had found three figures less than a hundred–thirty meters from Sakai—a distance rapidly closing as she advanced.

Half–hidden beneath the spreading branches of a thorn tree, they appeared at first as flashes and chips of bright heat. Then they emerged draped in infrared–blocking fabric that did not hide them completely but gave them the vagueness of ghosts as they passed through tall grass, moving in a line toward Sakai. The angel identified them from profiles compiled during the firefight: they were the three insurgents who had escaped alive.

They probably couldn’t see Sakai past the vegetation, but they would be able to hear her. She was using her dead sister to trot at a careless pace, rustling grass and snapping twigs, with no way to know what lay in wait for her. They would gun her down before she knew anyone was there.

And wasn’t that what she’d gone looking for?

Reid wondered if she’d fight back; wanted her to; resolved to force her to, if she could. Reid would not let death take Sakai by surprise. She would make her face it, and facing it, maybe Sakai would choose life instead.

Fuck the insurance.

Speaking over gen–com, Reid said, “Faraci, you’ve only used one grenade. Fire another, maximum range. In Sakai’s direction.”

“L.T.?” Faraci sounded perplexed. “Sakai’s way out of range.”

“Shit, Faraci, I don’t want you to kill her. I just want you to put her on alert. Now, if that’s all right with you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The grenade shot above the tree tops, hurtling northeast, to burst above the brush. The boom rolled past while through the angel’s eyes, Reid watched Sakai drop flat, her training taking over despite the guilt and despair that had sent her north.

The insurgents took cover inside a thicket, no doubt trying to guess what the distant explosion meant for them. Caution should have made them retreat, but they wanted Sakai’s weapon and dead sister.

“Let’s go!” Reid barked. “Now, while they’re confused. Fast as we fucking can. Go, go, go!”

Tyrant posted a path. Reid jumped on it, running flat out. The joints of her dead sister multiplied the power of every stride. She crunched through grass, slid sideways in mud, bounded over deadfalls and, carrying her tactical rifle one–handed, she used the struts on her other arm as a hammer to batter aside branches.

“Sakai’s taken cover in the brush,” Tyrant said.

It was hard to look death in the face.

Tyrant spoke again. “The insurgents are moving. They’re closing on Sakai’s position.”

“Good.”

Sakai would see them, she would know what death looked like, and she would fight back. She had to.

With two kilometers behind her, Reid heard the slow tap, tap, tap of small arms fire. “Tyrant?”

“They’re trying to flush her from cover.”

Reid ducked under a tree and then battered her way along a cattle trail between two thickets. The terrain was so monotonous she felt like she was getting nowhere.

A larger–caliber weapon spoke. Reid well knew the sound of an MCL1a.

“She got one,” Tyrant reported. “Damn good shot by moonlight alone.”

Half a kilometer to go.

“The survivors are retreating.”

Too soon.

Reid heard the worried bleat of a goat just ahead of her, the sound so unexpected she almost threw herself down and started shooting.

The goats were just as frightened. They must have been sleeping in a thicket. Startled at her approach, they fled straight toward Sakai.

“Reid, get down!” Tyrant shouted. “Get down! She’s got her weapon turned on you!”

Never before had Reid heard that level of emotion in Tyrant’s voice. It scared her but she kept running, because the goats were a distraction that she could use. They were cover. Sakai wouldn’t hear her coming past the noise of their stampede.

The goat herd funneled together as they raced between two tall thickets. Then they spilled into a grove of seven or eight trees with only bare ground beneath them. Branches filtered the moonlight into shards and polygons that painted the mud and flashed over the hides of the fleeing animals.

Hidden in shadow, unseen by the frantic goats but clear to Reid in night vision, was Sakai. Reid saw her in profile, crouched and trembling with her back to a tree trunk, weapon held close to her chest, shoulders heaving, her hairless head tipped back, and amazement on her exhausted face as she watched the goats dart past.

With no night vision to aid her, she didn’t see Reid.

Briefly, Reid considered a negotiation, verbal persuasion, but she didn’t want to have a conversation while Sakai held onto her MCL1a and her stock of grenades.

So Reid tackled her. Shoulder to shoulder: their arm struts clanged as they both went down. Reid got a hand on Sakai’s rifle, got it loose, heaved it away—but that was only step one in disarming her. She still had a full complement of grenades in her vest, and her dead sister was a lethal weapon in hand–to–hand combat—though Reid had no intention of letting it come to that.

Scrambling free, she came up on her knees in a patch of fractured moonlight, her MCL1a braced at her shoulder. “Don’t move!”

Sakai wasn’t there anymore. She wasn’t wearing her pack, and without it she was more agile than Reid expected. She had rolled away, rolled onto her feet. She stood looking down at Reid with a shocked expression.

What did she see with her unaided eyes? Gray bones and the negative space of Reid’s black visor? Maybe nothing more than that, blind in the night.

No.

This close, there would be a glimmer of light from the MCL1a’s targeting mechanism.

Reid corrected her aim. “Very slowly,” she said, “crouch, and release the cinches on your dead sister, starting at the ankles.”

Sakai frowned. She turned her head, perusing the shadows, wondering maybe if they were alone. “Come on, L.T.,” she said in a low voice as she looked back at Reid. “Do it now. No one’s watching.”

“Someone’s always watching. You know that. I’m not your ticket out.”

The goats had fled. The night had gone quiet. Reid had no idea where the insurgents were, but she trusted Tyrant to warn her if it looked like they would interfere.

“Do you have it with you?” Sakai asked. “My skullcap?”

“Do you want it?”

“No! No. I don’t want it.” As if trying to convince herself. “I don’t want to die with that thing on my head.”

“You mean that when you wear it, you don’t want to die at all… right?”

Sakai shook her head. “You know what I think? I think we all start off as light and shadow, but the light seeps away when we wear the skullcap. It moves out of us and into the wires, so when we take it off, there’s only darkness left in our heads.” Titanium struts gleamed in night vision as she brought her gloved hand up to tap the center of her forehead. “Punch it, L.T. Or I’m going to take you out.”

Reid waited, and when Sakai sprang she squeezed the trigger. The round caught Sakai in the shoulder, pancaking in her armor. It didn’t penetrate, but the impact spun her around so that she landed face down, a rag doll mounted on a metal rack.

Juarez stepped out of the shadows with Phan behind him.

“Get her unstrapped,” Reid growled.

Sakai had tried to turn her into an executioner. Now, in the aftermath, fury kicked in.

Maybe I should have complied.

But Reid’s skullcap responded, modulating her outrage, defusing her brittle frustration, bringing her back to a logical center. Because that’s what it did, she decided. It didn’t control what she thought or who she was. It didn’t make her a different person. It kept her tied to who she really was. It was a shield against anger and guilt; against the emotional scar tissue that could consume a mind.

Juarez and Phan turned Sakai over; they popped her cinches while Reid checked the squad map, confirming Faraci on their flank, ready, if the two surviving insurgents made the poor choice to return.

Sakai’s chest spasmed. She sucked in a whistling breath and tried to sit up, but Juarez pushed her back down again while Phan finished removing the ordnance from her vest.

“Cuff her,” Reid said, handing Juarez a set of plastic restraints.

He got Sakai into a sitting position. She offered no resistance as he bound her wrists behind her back.

Sakai had always been a problem child, but she’d been a good soldier. The army should have protected her. Command should have required her to wear her skullcap. No soldier had the option of going naked into battle—and battles didn’t always end when the weapons were racked.

Reid crouched in front of Sakai. In night vision her face was stark; her features dragged down as if by the gravity of despair. At first she didn’t acknowledge Reid, but after a few seconds she looked up, fixing an unflinching gaze on the featureless void of Reid’s black visor.

“Is that you, L.T.?”

Shadow, unblended with light.

“It’s me.” She reached into her pocket and got out Sakai’s skullcap, holding it so that a triangle of moonlight glinted against its silky surface. “I want you to wear this.”

“No.”

“You’ll feel better.”

“You think I want to feel better?”

“So you lost your temper with a kid! You want to kill yourself over that?”

“I didn’t just lose my temper. Sixteen days without the skullcap and I was fucking out of control. If Kevin hadn’t been there, I might have killed that sweet baby. And that’s not who I am… or it’s not who I was.”

“It wasn’t the skullcap that made you do it.”

“Shit yes, it was! When I was wearing it, it hid all the crap I couldn’t live with. Made me feel okay. Didn’t even know I was falling apart inside until it was too late.”

Is that what the skullcap did? Hide the rot?

Did it matter? They had a job to do.

Reid jammed Sakai’s skullcap back into a pocket, and then she stood up. “Tyrant, we need to evacuate Sakai.”

“Chopper on the way,” he said. “ETA thirteen minutes.”

“Rest while you can,” Reid advised the squad.

They still had two insurgents to hunt and the second half of their patrol to finish—a long night ahead of them, followed by a few hours of sleep and then another patrol where their lives would be at risk every moment until they were back inside the fort. Thinking about it, Reid felt a looming abyss of emotional exhaustion, there and then gone, washed away by the ministrations of the skullcap.