Laclos
She was staring down the barrel, her finger curled on the trigger.
But Ivy still loomed in the back of my mind, as if waiting for me to decide but afraid to say anything else.
[You tried to get me to kill her!] I spat.
[But you didn’t kill her.]
[That’s not the point!]
[It is the point, Ansell,] Ivy said. [You are turning yourself over to an enemy you do not understand, for reasons you cannot fully fathom. Now you have done something many Alliance Rangers could not. You have passed selection.]
[Selection? What are you talking about? How—]
[You spared the Isnashi,] Ivy said. [Therefore His Excellence will be permitted to treat you as an equal. Or something like it.]
“Well?” Laclos asked.
I lowered the Wasp and felt my hand begin to shake again.
Adrenaline, probably. Or Ivy was punishing me by removing whatever had helped me to stay calm. I’d given her unprecedented access to my senses, and now I didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.
No, that wasn’t quite right. If I hadn’t felt the difference between real and virtual, I might have actually pulled the trigger. But the line between them had grown fuzzy for a moment.
Laclos was certainly real. Even in the shadows of the night jungle she had a concreteness the Isnashi hadn’t. Behind Ivy’s overlay, I had seen her, or the shadow of her. And beneath the glistening night air I could smell Laclos’s earthy sweat. Surely that was real too.
Just as it was real that Laclos was still covering me with her rifle.
Slowly, I slung the Wasp over my shoulder by the strap.
Laclos gave me a brief, glad-we-can-still-be-friends smile and dipped her rifle to one side. “What are you doing out here, Corporal?”
Her tone carried more disdain than I expected. Betrayal will do that, I guess, though it struck me as remarkably unfair. Ignoring me made sense. But I didn’t deserve to be treated with disrespect. And I was determined to reassert the identity Sterling had given me. I wouldn’t walk onto the Takwin as Corporal Dahl. I would present myself as Captain Ansell Sterling or not at all.
Because whatever else she was, Ivy had been right about one thing: I needed to stop pretending and live the story I wanted to write.
“It’s captain, Master Sergeant,” I said. “And I have an appointment to keep. I’m walking—alone—to the new rendezvous point to conduct a classified negotiation with an emissary from the GA Those are my orders.”
Her eyes narrowed in the gloom. “We all heard the trans—”
“I don’t care what you heard! Your team allowed Colonel Vermier to be taken hostage by unfriendlies. And not by grendel special ops. By a local militia.” I was raising my voice, and it was no act. Until that moment I hadn’t realized how enraged I felt about the team leaving me alone to finish my assignment. Maybe the rage was displaced—would have been better aimed at my ex. Or Sterling. But those targets were beyond my reach.
Laclos drew back a little, her eyes flashing with suppressed anger, but doubting now what she’d been telling herself the last day or so. If I were a corporal, why was I talking to her like this?
But I wasn’t done. “I did what I had to do. I told the story I needed to tell. Because of that, both Vermier and I were released unharmed.”
“Corp—”
“Sir! You will call me sir, Sergeant!”
She flinched. “Sir—”
“No!” She’d uncorked a fury I didn’t know how to stop. “I understand Vermier took charge after I made the swap, and my open transmission made that decision easy. I also understand why you all went off to blow the grendel frigate. But none of you considered that I might still be running a PSYOP? That I might be talking my way out of a jam? After I told you that’s what I was going to do? That’s what PSYOPS is. You know that!”
“Sir, we considered that, but—”
“Considered?” I interrupted. “Considered means you weighed all the probabilities. But you didn’t. I couldn’t pass a basic qual right now! I barely made it up that last slope.”
“With all due respect, sir, what did you expect?”
All due respect. Code for no respect at all.
I wasn’t a hero. But I had traded my life for that of a marine officer. And as a result I’d been tortured and humiliated. I’d been betrayed by the woman I loved. Most importantly, I’d protected the mission and ensured it could continue. It shocked me that none of this seemed to count for anything.
Maybe that was the price of wearing the PSYOPS badge on my uniform. A team like the MADARs lived and died by a bond of loyalty, by their commitment to each other. They could handle any weirdness in each other, so long as it was genuine. What they couldn’t handle was not knowing the truth.
“Options,” I said as the rage seeped from my pores. “I mean, come on. You forgot about my endo? You couldn’t have left me any steadies? Just in case? Doc?”
That made her wince. But she still thought I was just some pogue journalist on a private mission. And I needed her to believe me. To forget what she’d seen and heard on that broadcast. To think of me as Captain Sterling.
At last she slung the rifle across her shoulder, sat next to me on the log, and dug into her med pack. She passed me a white pill, which I swallowed gratefully.
I looked away, suddenly unable to meet her gaze. Marines like Laclos were too good for PSYOPS work.
A minute later the night air squeezed me in a warm embrace and lifted me to my feet. “Time to go,” I said. “I need to get to the Takwin ASAP.”
“The Takwin?”
Of course. She didn’t know what the enemy frigate was actually called. “The Strangler. I need to get there before Raeburn launches that hammerhead and blows any chance of a negotiated ceasefire. Think you can buy me some time?”
She squinted in the darkness. “You don’t understand. You can’t get to Seranik from here. There’s a line of grendel rangers supported by cutter drones and God knows what else set up in a perimeter half a klick north of us. I’m taking you back to the team.”
I sighed and hooked one thumb behind the strap of my Wasp. “I won’t ask you to come with me, Master Sergeant, but I’m not going back to Vermier.”
“It’s not a request,” Laclos said. She didn’t lift the barrel of her rifle, but it was as clear a challenge as any MP might give to a drunk officer. Sometimes a line had to be drawn.
“Who has operational command of this mission?”
She didn’t hesitate. “Vermier, then Raeburn, then me.”
I shook my head. “You remember the mission briefing. Who did Fleet give operational command to?”
An ironic smile tugged at the corner of her mouth. “Captain Sterling.”
“And who am I?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Sir.”
[Ansell,] Ivy interrupted.
I ignored the AI. Maybe I still needed her, but I wasn’t about to trust her again.
[Ansell, you need to get down. Tell Laclos to find cover. A ranger squad is coming up behind you, moving uphill about three hundred meters to the north.]
That got my attention. Not trusting her didn’t mean ignoring everything she said. I still didn’t know how much control of my AI the wyrm had. But I did know that we shared a common goal. Even if my comms was completely compromised, Ivy needed me as much as I needed her. If I didn’t make it to the peace talks, the grendel mission on New Witlund would be a failure.
I turned and squinted into the darkness. [How do I know this isn’t just another illusion?]
[When Laclos takes a round through the head, you’ll know.]
I weighed the risk of trusting her. Maybe I should just rip the bracelet off and fling it into the darkness.
As if reading my thoughts, Ivy shifted my vision to a new overlay. It was almost like using thermal optics, except that this was the full color spectrum, with the blacks washed to a dull gray, her proximity sensors heightening my natural vision. A line of red GAR ticks burned clearly across the grid.
“We need to get out of here,” I whispered, pointing downhill. “Rangers coming.”
Laclos stood instantly, cradling her rifle, and looked around. “Best available. Head back up to the ridge.”
“You don’t understand. They’re coming for me. They’re my escort.”
She glanced over one shoulder, teeth clenched. “Not going to happen. Get back up the ridge, sir.”
I considered brushing past her, but the look on her face told me she would have blown my head off. Nor could I assume the grendels wouldn’t shoot me either. Rock and a hard place doesn’t begin to describe what it would be like to be caught between Raeburn’s team and a platoon of grendels. “What are you planning to do?”
“Slow them down a little. I’ll be right behind you. Hopper will provide cover.”
Hopper was here too? Another surprise, though it shouldn’t have been. All UCMC special forces units were built around the coordination of small teams. Laclos wouldn’t have been tracking me alone.
“Go on, Captain,” she urged.
I backed onto the trail, momentarily disoriented by the rearrangement of shadows into recognizable patterns. Ivy’s night vision was surprisingly useful, considering I wore no optical gear, but it took some getting used to.
Halfway to the ridge, a blinding light stabbed my eyes. I stumbled, one arm thrown up against the pulsing white, and landed on my side in a tangle of jungle grass. Far away I heard chemical rounds popping.
It was a flash rifle. That’s what had blinded me. And the only troops on New Witlund that carried the older weapons were its militia. The Jungle Cats were determined to ruin everything.
[Turn it off!] I shouted at Ivy. [Turn off the night vision!]
[It’s already off,] she said. [I did that immediately. But you’ll be affected for a while.]
Affected? I could barely see my hand in front of my face. [How long?]
[Your natural vision will recover gradually in about half an hour.]
I didn’t have half an hour. I wasn’t sure I had five minutes. But I couldn’t see to move. And disorienting as that light had been, I couldn’t tell which direction to go.
I pressed my palms to my eyes and took deep breaths. Felt the steady-stim molding my body into preparedness. Heard the strong, persisting whump of my heart against my chest.
Around me, the night air filled with tiny sounds magnified out of proportion: movement a few meters downhill, the rustle of fabric against wet leaves higher up on the ridge, the hum of a night insect somewhere nearby.
Ivy’s handiwork, no doubt, but I welcomed it. The world around me settled into place like a cog locking into gear.
To a normal human, the strobe of a flash rifle was at worst an annoyance. In the dark, it might ruin your night vision for a while, but only if you were in the general field of fire and looking towards the barrel, in which case you had bigger problems.
But to someone with AI-enhanced vision, the strobing flashes were magnified ten-fold. This was what made the older weapons so effective against grendel shock troops for so long. At first the enemy countermeasure had been simple eye protection or visored helmets, but neither were convenient outside combat. Since grendel soldiers could be caught with their visors up or eyewear looped uselessly around their necks, the flash rifle became a staple of the infantry.
These days the grendels used better pre-sensors and trained to move in and out of their visual enhancements, so catching them off guard was nearly impossible. That was why the flash rifle had been relegated to reserve units over a decade ago.
But I had no such training and no pre-sensors.
The high-pitched whine of a magnetic burst tore through the trees nearby, showering bits of foliage to the jungle floor. Below me, Laclos spread explosive rounds into the darkness beyond. Her rifle-launched grenades popped in a long row of orange bursts, visible even to my bleary eyes. Then her steps thudded along the trail next to me and beyond, uphill to the ridge.
She hadn’t seen me in the grass. Must have expected me to already be over the ridge.
My grid lit up again. Three GAR icons were converging downslope, with a fourth moving west to a flank position.
This was my chance.
My chance to be picked up by my grendel escort. My chance for a straight shot to the negotiations. No more shooting. No more running. No more stumbling around in the heat and the darkness. All I had to do was reveal myself as the rangers came up the slope—but in a way that didn’t startle one of them into blowing my head off.
I rose, peering into the muddy black sludge of night, my ears tuned to the night sounds, my hands and knees pressed to the wet soil as if feeling its pulse.
Slowly I raised my hands.
The GAR icons were coming uphill now. Maybe fifty meters away. Somehow I felt their rifles sweeping the landscape around me, their boosted senses reaching uphill into the dense shadows.
Ivy again.
Ivy was how the enemy soldiers knew where I was. They weren’t following the MADAR team, or even the flash rifles of Dogen’s militia. They were simply searching for the proximity sensor on my comms.
Understanding pierced my mind. It sucked the air from my lungs and closed its fingers around my throat.
I was becoming one of them. A grendel, the host body for a quantum wyrm. There was only one way out. The way no one had ever taken. I would have to disconnect from Ivy forever. I would have to defect back to the republic. Back to Fleet. Back to OrbSyn.
I felt for the latch around my wrist, intending to rip the thing off and toss it away from me. I could almost feel Ivy crawling through the attic of my mind, following the footprints of my mental processes even if she could not see precisely where they led. I would have to hide this from her in order to go back to being myself. Press the tab, disconnect the bracelet, and fling it far off to the side. Someone at Fleet would recognize the good I’d been trying to do. They would understand that I had been acting under orders after all. And hadn’t I given enough already? All those wasted childhood moments sacrificed on the altar of freedom? All those fractured relationships and personal compromises? All those late-night assignments carving narratives from facts, each little lie whittling away another piece of my soul?
I started to pinch the tab-lock on the side of the bracelet, but caught myself with the comms still locked around my wrist. It wasn’t that Ivy caught me. I caught myself, heart pounding, a lump in my throat, my tongue impossibly thick. Was I really going to throw away the opportunity Sterling had given his life for? Toss away six hundred million souls at the first sight of an armed enemy? Abandon the great war story every edge colony needed to hear?
Cold. That’s what I needed to be. Maybe that’s what made all of Weston’s journalists successful. They were cold enough to care about their stories more than the people inside them.
[I’m here,] I said to Ivy. [Tell them I’m here.]
[They already know.]
This came as a relief. I was still mostly blind and didn’t like the idea of navigating the jungle on my own.
I rose, still kneeling, and held both hands skyward in the universal sign of surrender.
Don’t blame Fleet. Or OrbSyn. It wasn’t my years of service that had changed me. Truth was, I hadn’t changed at all. War doesn’t change you. It purges you. Strips away the masks, the uniform, the rank you hide behind. Leaves you naked and shivering for the whole universe to marvel at or to hate.
The keening wail of a heavy mortar round slashed the atmosphere. It barely registered before the ground erupted behind me, shredding the trees and sending me face-first into the ground.
Sound took on that underwater tone I remembered from the mess hall. I felt no pain, and the bios on my grid were mostly green ticks. A couple orange, but no red.
Good to go, I thought. I’ll just find the enemy, I guess.
And pushed myself to all fours.
[Ansell, stay down. Concussive force—]
I tuned her out. What did she know, anyway? She thought Laclos was a . . . was a . . . what was it? An Isnashi. That was it. She thought Laclos was some sort of monster. With a ponytail.
But Laclos wasn’t the monster.
I stood, the world canting under my feet, and stumped up the trail a few steps, lurching like a weekend bender.
“Hopper!” Laclos called.
He was there. Big, meaty arms hooking under my armpits, holding me up, half dragging, half carrying me over the ridge. “I got you, sir,” he jabbered as we moved. “I got you. You’ll be fine here in a minute. I just need to set you down someplace where doc can take a look at you. Someplace without so much metal in the air.”
Laclos followed. Her rifle spat another barrage of grenades down the slope, and I heard the popping of a dozen explosions.
One of the GAR ticks flashed a warning icon on my grid.
Two of the rangers stopped.
The one out in a flanking position kept coming but was still hundreds of meters downhill and to the west.
Hopper sat me down and propped my back against the splayed, weblike root of a kapok tree facing the ridge. I couldn’t see his face, but his shirt was saturated with sweat.
“Don’t think you got hit anywhere important,” he said. “Just a knock on the head. Probably make you a better person.” He flipped his rifle up and disappeared into the darkness of my blurred vision.
A moment later Laclos knelt next to me. I could smell her sweat heavy on the night air.
“You got any warning lights on the dash, Captain?”
“Nothing serious,” I said.
She shone a very dim yellow light into my eyes, maybe half a candle-watt in power, then jabbed a needle into my arm. “Good. This should help with the pain.”
Whatever it was, it felt cool at first, then warmed as it spread up my shoulder to my neck.
“Thanks,” I said, wondering why she hadn’t asked permission first.
“Stay here,” she replied. Then she too was gone.
The injection struck the back of my head with a suddenness I didn’t expect. The feeling of warm buoyancy from the steady-stim smoothed into a thick motionlessness, like being wrapped in a down quilt. Exhaustion tugged at my eyelids.
I nudged Ivy. [What’s going on?]
[Bad news, Ansell. Everyone seems to think you need rescuing, and they’re trying to kill each other in the process. The good news is that you get to take a little nap. Which means there’s more bad news, because Laclos obviously doesn’t trust you enough to leave you alone without sedation.]
This struck me as profoundly underhanded. Not to mention unfair. No wonder she hadn’t asked first. [You saying Laclos doesn’t like me?]
[I like you,] Ivy said.
[You’re just . . . using me.] The words in my head came with a delay, as if sending complete sentences had suddenly become impossible, and rather unnecessary.
[Does that matter?]
I considered the question. Decided I didn’t care if she was using me, so long as she didn’t leave me. [Guess not.]
[Good.]
[What . . . does that make me, though?] And this question did seem important, though I wasn’t sure how to phrase it. Every thought seemed to come from far off, as if I were listening to the mind of someone else. [I’m not who I thought I was. Not anymore.]
She sighed, the sympathy in her voice as thick as the night air. I could almost feel her sliding to the ground next to me, her back to the same root, her head pressing to my shoulder. [You’ve always known who I am. And when you took me off, you could have left me behind. But you didn’t. You put me back on. And I’m so, so glad. Thank you for coming back for me.]