Authors: Brenda Cooper
Sacha was messier with his kills than Buster.
Pebble stood in front of a man he had shot. My glasses had dimmed to green and three hot spots of activity were leaving us. “Pebble,” I called. “We need to check on Estrogen.”
He nodded, but stood still and pulled a camouflage-colored ball from his pocket, commencing a short game of fetch.
“Do you have to do that now?”
He pointed at the dead men. “He needs his reward.” He threw the ball for the dog three times, ruffling his fur and—to my utter surprise—almost crying.
“Is that the first time he’s saved your life?” I asked him.
He nodded.
I patted Buster on the head, but then stopped, feeling foolish.
“We’re ready now.”
I nodded.
Estrogen breathed shallowly. Thank god. But shaking him produced no effect. He was too big to ride Sacha, too big to carry, too heavy to drag. We tucked his glasses into his pocket and covered him with my space blanket and Pebble’s camo tarp.
Pebble pointed to my foot. “Maybe you should stay and watch him?”
“We both stay, for now. Our people know where we are.”
We found a big cedar we could sit under and still see Estrogen. It sucked not to be able to do anything. But there wasn’t a medical quick-fix or handy serum for being stunned out like Estrogen.
I didn’t want to pull my boot off, but blood leaked slowly though the hole.
I stared at it for a while but then I needed to look away. “Where are you from?” I asked.
“California. North of Shasta, little town called Weed.”
“I’ve been there. I’ve got an “I Love Weed” shirt somewhere at home. If mMom hasn’t thrown it away.”
He laughed. “You?”
“Town named Concrete, in Washington.”
“So we’re both from towns with weird-ass names,” he said. “How long have you been NorAm?”
“Fifteen.”
“You don’t look old enough for that.”
I spit laughter. “Flattery doesn’t work out here.” Lights flashed to draw my attention to words flowing across my glasses. “They’re moving in now.”
“Guess it will be a while before anyone has time for us.”
“Yeah.”
“What made you show up out here?” he asked.
“Meaning since I’m a woman?”
He grimaced. “Meaning at all.”
I blinked a command to patrol our perimeter at Buster while thinking about what to tell him. “My family liked the services.”
“Anybody else on active?”
Buster took off. Sacha stayed, clearly only paying attention to his master.
I hesitated, then said, “My dad was in for twenty. He’s a vegetable. Took a bad one in the Texas Rebellion. Pretty nasty.”
“I bet he’s proud of you.”
“He doesn’t know my name anymore. He doesn’t remember his own name. He’s drooling in a VA hospital in Charleston. Before it happened, he told me never to join up.”
Sacha thumped his tail hard, twice. Pebble put his finger to his lips.
I didn’t hear anything but the rain, which had started again. My glasses didn’t identify any threats near us. Attack stats scrolled along the bottom. I caught that our main force had engaged the enemy hand to hand, and two firefights had just started around the perimeter of the compound. I pinged Buster; he sent back an all-clear.
“Sacha smells something,” Pebble whispered, barely over the decibel level of an out-breath. “A person.”
I whispered, “Scare,” which meant just that, but allowed an attack if Buster determined he was in danger.
Pebble glanced at me, and when I shook my head he gave Sacha a wait command. The Malinois lay down, fully alert, fully attentive. In spite of that, perhaps by the cock of an ear or the slight droop of his muzzle, Sacha managed to communicate his feelings about being left out of whatever Buster had been sent to do.
Tough. We didn’t have spare parts for him.
Buster’s screaming scare bark startled all of us to attention.
A crashing through cedars, a thump, and then more footsteps convinced us Buster had scared the intruder away.
“So we’re two for one,” Pebble said. “But Sacha has a kill.”
Dumb green recruit. “We’re not competing with you out here.”
He shrugged. “Can’t stop me from keeping score. Sacha saved me from the soldier, Buster saved you from the drone, and now he chased off a single undesirable. I’m ranking them about even since Sacha had to take on a human.”
The drone Buster had killed was at least as dangerous as the human, but I managed not to say anything.
My foot felt huge in my boot. I undid the laces. Some of the pressure came off, but pain sang up the back of my calf. “We’d best just wait in quiet,” I said.
He nodded, although he looked a little concerned about me fussing with my foot. Almost worried. Not what I needed.
The clouds had thickened; the night was even darker. Watching the battle at the compound inside of my glasses kept me from going crazy with pain.
The data was hard to read. But then, it’s truly impossible to fit a battle between thirty or so soldiers on our side and about twice that many rebels inside the frame of a pair of glasses. The clues were words and color, and red and green blended a bit before the colors faded more to red.
Loss. Unimaginable. I tapped my glasses a few times as if that would change the lives back to green and turn the distant men and women back on.
There were six left. I didn’t ask my glasses to tell me who. I’d learn soon enough.
Sacha nosed up next to Pebble, as if he felt what Pebble must be feeling.
Buster had no reaction, of course. All tactics, no feelings. He sat and watched out into the gloomy dark, patient.
Pebble said, “Maybe nobody is coming for us.”
“Maybe not.” I sat there for a moment, staring into the trees and into the flashes of the battle both at once. “Can you make a travois?”
“A what?”
“A stretcher that you can pull along the ground. Indians made them. You need two long fat sticks and then we’ll use the blankets.” That would leave us only Sacha free, which I didn’t much like. I messaged Jules that we’d get back to camp on our own. No answer. I pinged camp, and got a simple, “Good luck.”
We started back down the trail with Sacha leading, Pebble pulling Estrogen awkwardly in the middle and me balanced badly on Buster in the rear. I must have looked as ridiculous as a full-sized person riding a miniature horse. But Buster was made to pack a hundred and fifty pounds, and I was twenty under that, so he could do it.
Pebble struggled so hard he fell twice.
Ten minutes in, Estrogen woke up, wide-eyed and disoriented. “It’s okay,” I lied to him. “We’re on our way back to camp and you’ll be as good as rain about the time we get there.” If we were lucky. Or maybe he’d still be a huge, disoriented soldier with a big heart. I managed to lean over and touch him on the arm once, but it almost over-balanced me right into the dirt.
“Hey, mama, it’ll be okay. We got your dog with us. He’s always been good luck.”
We heard the explosion at the same time my glasses blossomed red.
“Shit,” Estrogen said. “Don’t tell me.”
I swallowed. His glasses were tucked in his pocket, since he’d been out.
They’re like gold; lose them and you pay in a few ways. So he didn’t know what I knew. The whole compound had gone up bright enough that no one was communicating on our channels any more. I knew the lot of them, and a few of them well. The hole in my middle hurt as much as my damned foot.
Pebble stopped and turned around so he was facing me while he was still holding up Estrogen. He’d lost all color, and his eyes were big and rimmed with white.
“Face forward,” I told him. “Maybe some enemies got away.”
He pursed his lips and turned.
“Ever seen it go bad before?” I asked him.
“In training.”
When everyone with red paintball slime on them woke up the next morning as if they’d never been taken down. He was probably having a hard time.
“We can’t stop,” I told his back after he started walking again. “We’ll rest in camp. There’s dog food and bandages there.”
After a half hour of slogging, Estrogen announced, “I’d rather stumble home on stunned legs than be dragged over every rock and root in the forest.”
We stopped and let him up. He stood unsteadily, blinking and looking like he might just lie down and sleep right there. Then he pulled himself together.
“That’s better.” I had him stay in front of me so I could see how he was. He had to work hard to keep his limbs going, but at least he went. After a while I made us all stop and eat a bit of energy bar. We’d been out for hours and two of us were injured. Except for the dogs, we didn’t look or feel exactly like a high-capability team. There were only three miles between us and the camp—an hour on a straight trail with no problems, but probably two or three hours in the dark and the mud.
Sacha gave a warning bark just as we hit a steady pace again. There were no pings on my glasses to indicate a human. My Buster’s-eye view showed heat. Animal heat.
I slid off of Buster into a one-legged stand, using a sapling for balance.
Sacha barked again, sharply, and lay down on his belly, staring ahead of us. Whatever it was, Buster didn’t react to it.
One dog thought it was dangerous and one didn’t.
Then a piece of the night moved.
And breathed.
Pebble growled a command that stuck Sacha in place and pulled his gun.
“Don’t look at it.”
“What?”
“No eye contact.”
“That’s crazy,” Pebble whispered. But he was looking at the bear’s chest and not its face. Good enough.
“Bears will walk away,” I whispered back as casually as I could over my racing blood. “You don’t have to shoot. You can just make noise and be big.”
If he shot, it would tell everyone for miles around that we were here. I bent down and picked up a rock and lobbed it behind the bear and to the side.
Sacha whined as the bear took two steps toward us.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “Estrogen. Be big.”
Estrogen waved his long arms above his head and whistled.
Sacha stood in spite of Pebble’s command, his hackles up. He barked and lunged, but stopped a few feet short of the bear.
The bear hesitated. I tensed.
It looked around at us all, then it shook like a wet cat and turned and lumbered off as if we didn’t matter.
Buster had never been programmed for bear. If Sacha hadn’t alerted us, we might have been close enough to really scare it, and even black bears are dangerous if they feel cornered.
The rest of the trip back was merely wet and cold and hard. The remaining camp staff included a medic, so my foot got wrapped and braced.
The doctor kept her mouth thin and her eyes down except for the occasional glance at the door.
“Maybe some of them will come back,” I whispered.
“Maybe,” she said, her voice laced with forced cheerfulness.
I called Buster to me and we hobbled out to find Pebble. “How are you?”
“I was feeling really bad not to be part of the attack.”
“Me, too.” If we had been, we’d have saved them all or we’d be dead.
“I wish I knew how they are,” he said.
“Don’t you?”
He kept looking down. “Yeah, I guess.”
“You and Sacha did good,” I told him.
“Thanks,” he whispered.
“I think you won,” I said.
He looked over at me, his eyes dark in his dark face. “How do you figure that?” he asked.
“The bear. If it was up to us, we wouldn’t have seen it until we were on top of it.”
“The one drone could have killed us all.”
“It could have,” I said. And then I told him, “Handy to have both kinds of dogs. Maybe we’ll get assigned together again someday.”
“I’d like that.”
I’m sure if it had been light enough I would have seen him smile.
CRACKING the SKY
The memory of smoke clung to my hair
and inhabited the back of my throat. My boots cracked through a heat-dried veneer of ash that coated low hills. I walked where fire had been three days ago, before it was storm-killed by soaked clouds sent over the Cascades by NorAM command. It would be sweet if NorAM decided to follow the deluge up with some mist or a bit of drizzle, but they’d probably burned their whole weekly weathering credit with the one act. Not that I wasn’t grateful. NorAM’d probably saved our sorry lives. Almost surely. But I was still so sticky with sweat it was hard to watch our thin column wind up the ravine in front of us, much less watch for enemies.
Nothing moved but us, at least as far as I could see. Not even the air. There had been wind the day the fire had raced towards us (I thought it was set against us, and a few others did, too, but no one in command agreed). The wind screamed through us again the day NorAM created the storm and set it loose on the fire. Everything felt hot, barren, and still.
It had been pretty here. The ground had been dotted with scrub and yellow flowers. Now it lay gray and hot and still. At least the heat must have scoured it free of nano-mines. I still half expected a pile of dangers to be headed our way, some scary franken-science thrown out from the illicit labs we were advancing on.
Alongside all of us, the dogs marched in lock-step, their metal feet occasionally sliding on bits of rock.
In front of me, Mario and Joe marched side by side, looking way too un-bothered by the sun.
Kris looked as melted as I felt. Bitch was a bit more cheerful than me, though. “Still no sign of life. We’re going to make it.”
“They could have sent UAVs.”
She had the bad grace to laugh at me. “And ruined your fun?”
“UAVs don’t die.”
“They cost as much as we do.”
“More.” But people were still good for a lot of things that unmanned aircraft just weren’t so good at. Opening doors. Assessing. Reading the fear in an enemy combatant’s eyes.
The first few of our line had all reached a shadowed cleft between two low hills. I trudged up a scant incline near the end, next to Kris, exposed as hell.
As if they knew we’d been talking about them, the steady echoing thrum of copter blades came up from behind us.
I tensed.
“Safe!” Louis called from five people ahead of us. He meant it had told him it was ours, sharing the right codes in the right sequence. The dogs trusted it, too, clanking along without missing a beat. So maybe NorAM had decided to give us more help. Maybe they’d learned something. The UAV’s body was the size of my head, the rotors a stack, the whole thing flying canted a bit forward so the tail seemed to reach for the sky. The sound of its flight made my shoulder blades itch. I squinted, the sun making the silver blades into diamonds too bright to stare at. Why now, instead of after we were closer to the lab?
Why so close to us? Why one?
Instinct finally kicked in, in spite of Louis’s words. I dove sideways into Kris, tumbling her. Her eyes went wide but she said nothing, catching enough balance to scramble on all fours. Simon and Jillie reflexed after us.
Mario turned, mouth open, his eyes so dark I was sure he was about to bark at us for being scared little girls.
He never got any words out. Mario’s hand flew up to his skull and came away slick and red and I could feel the heat of little machines racing through his body, the fear of them turning me soft and small inside.
He writhed and fell.
The four of us, me, and Kris and Rob and Jill, raced away like one. My dog, Hunter, slowed to stay beside me. I ran with a hand on Hunter’s broad, full back, wishing there was power and time to mount and race away. The big dog’s metal skin felt hot to the touch. But then everything was hot, the sand, the dog, the air, my anger.
I didn’t want to glance back toward Mario’s body, but I did. Most of the line was down, the dogs on their sides, faces scarred with soot. Someone had managed to knock the silver copter out of the sky. My quick glance didn’t say how many people from the front of the line had made it. If any.
The fear of things too small to see drove us a long way in spite of the sapping heat and the surreal burned and wetted and baked ground.
We regrouped behind a stand of rocks. Small cover, the rocks hot enough to burn hands where we touched them, tinged with silicates so they shimmered, big enough to throw shade if the sun weren’t directly above us.
Jillie looked over at me, her face shocked. I checked the rest of the group. Eight had made it to the rocks. Eight people and eight bots, so sixteen. I checked what I’d been left with. Two new recruits, the speed of death thrumming through them so deeply fear seemed to leak from their sweaty, dirty pores. Jillie and a thin boy from Seattle who leaned over, puking. The scientist. The two trainers, busy already, checking the metal dogs for damage, probably glad as hell to have something to do. Kris, the ever optimistic and bitchy. Simon, who was only happy when he was actually fighting, who got an orgasmic look on his face in hand-to-hand, and yet wouldn’t kill a spider if it landed on his mouth in the middle of the night. Thank god for Kris and Simon and the trainers. Maybe between us we could protect the two newbies.
Simon had already managed to climb up the rock pile in spite of the heat, peel his binoculars out of his pack, and look toward the carnage. I caught the shift in his uniform from ash gray to the tan of the rocks. He grunted softly from about five feet above me.
“What do you see?” I asked him.
He shook his head. “Stupidity.”
“No shit. See any more copters?”
“Damn things are fast.”
I pulled the handheld out of my pocket and swiped up the tracking chip info. Close-together green dots for us, dark for humans and light for robot dogs. Three more humans on the far side, two with fading vital signs. I whispered an apology to them since we couldn’t even try and get there yet. Red death dots made a ragged line across the open spaces. I called for overhead pictures. I got back two-inch pixels, which was enough to see that everyone had died in place, and even the dogs had made no more than a few steps. They’d been targeted. The poison that killed people didn’t kill robots. So whoever sent the UAV knew who and what was coming for them.
Illegal nano for sure, scattered by an illegal UAV. NorAM would tell—I breathed in deep, re-thinking who was left—NorAM would tell
me
more once they analyzed the info.
Shit.
I did want command. But not now, and not here.
NorAM would have the same information I had, except maybe our condition. We’d lost two of the scientist embeds, but we still had one left. Alissa Frietag, a small woman with twice the strength she appeared to have, and a fierce determination to get into the labs. I stared at her for a moment, assessing. Small, so thin I would be able to wrap my hands around her waist with only a little effort. She looked pissed off instead of scared.
Good. So all we had to do was protect Alissa, get into the well-defended lab, and give her some time to assess it before we destroyed it. Yep, that should be easy.
I typed my message to NorAM.
We’re okay. Sci1 looks fierce. We need cover
.
Or to withdraw, but I didn’t have to tell them that. They knew. If we withdrew, GenGreen would simply destroy everything and smile and invite us and a bunch of media in the front door just in time to see a lab devoted to feeding the starving. We didn’t want to leave them time for that. Other NorAM forces had blocked the roads out. Of course, we could just get them from the air. But people up the chain wanted the lab intact. Apparently there was some thing or knowledge so valuable that we weren’t willing to just blow it up and move on.
I’d half expected we’d be recalled within a day of starting out. The goal had been to come in unnoticed, but the UAV screamed that GenGreen and its private armies had noticed us. The fact that our code was compromised suggested they’d also paid off someone. With luck, that would be a dead rat from our group, but more likely it was someone else inside NorAM.
I scanned the horizon again. Listened. No wind. No rotor blades. Puking boy had stopped hacking and spitting.
Damnit. Time to lead.
“Everybody gather up.”
Simon started to clamber down the rock, but I gestured for him to stay. He’d be able to hear me from up there. The dog handlers got the big bots to stand and look at me, too, cocking their not dog-like heads sideways at me in a dog-like motion. Good. At least someone had a sense of humor.
I glanced down at my handheld. The screen was still blank.
“You all okay?”
I looked them each in the eye. At least they all looked back at me. Five women including me, three guys. The men were Simon, Scott of the weak stomach, and one of the two dog trainers, John. Then me, Kris the steady and bright, Jillie, Alissa Frietag the scientist, and the other dog trainer, a woman named Paulette.
The communit buzzed in my hand. I glanced down and saw what I expected. I looked back at the group. “Orders are to keep going, move more evasively, get to the lab. They’ll send in some cover and some help after we get it secure.”
“Ma’am.”
“Scott?”
“Just us. To take the whole place?”
I nodded. “What supplies do we have?”
John spoke a litany he’d pretty clearly memorized. “Water. Food. Handhelds. First Aid. Light. Blankets. “
Crap. I glanced at Paulette, who stood with one hand on her robot’s head as if it were flesh and blood. She swallowed. “The same.”
So we were eight for eight on supplies and zero for zero on weapons? We wouldn’t starve while we were destroying an enemy lab with our bare hands. Good thing.
John must have seen the look on my face. “We do have some rockets and launchers, and a few mines.”
“Our handguns,” I added. “And the knives on our belts. Any useful solar?”
Paulette shifted on her feet, swaying. “Not enough for the dogs.” Her face had gone white. “Enough for us.”
Jillie’s eyes widened and she looked like she was about ten and desperate for a friend. I knew what she was thinking. That we’d need to raid the supplies on the other dogs. I didn’t look directly at her, but I made sure I could see her relax when I said, “We’re not going out there.” Stray microbots could kill us as easily as they’d killed everyone else. It might be slower without a direct hit, but three of the damned things in your soft tissue guaranteed death. There would be no recovery of the other dogs or their packs, or anything else. Not until NorAM could send containment suits out. Not today.
I updated NorAM with our status, and requested a storm.
They suggested quite formally that we do without.
I counter-suggested quite formally that without power we would die before we got the job done instead of while we were doing the job.
I stood still, staring at the screen, waiting for them to discuss amongst themselves and then get back to me. I was half hoping they’d say no and decide we could go back or wait for more people and stuff or something.
Instead, they answered way too fast. They promised lightning.
Whatever was in that lab mattered to them. I swallowed. I’d been trained. I’d even succeeded in a live exercise. And out of our group, I was the only one still alive and rated for it. I glanced at the dog handlers. “We do have the laser?”
John nodded, his eyes gleaming a bit.
I surveyed the group. “We are going to crack the sky and bring home the power.”
Allisa’s tongue darted out between her full lips, and she looked like she was about to be seated at a banquet table. Jillie’s eyes widened again, and the trainers glanced at the dogs. Kris and Simon, who knew the calculus, nodded.
We had orders to go forward, so no turning tail. Probably wouldn’t work anyway, since GenGreen would follow us and keep whatever they were protecting at the level of rumor. We could go forward. Would. We carried the worst weapons on us—some as small as the ones GenGreen just killed most of us with. But we would need power to eat and drink and scatter signal around, power to feed the tiny weapons, power to control the lab. Stored power, available on demand.
In addition to the power to get there.
That had been on the other dogs, along with the more power-hungry of the weapons. But we’d run them a long way to get here. The robotic dogs were stronger than us by far, faster, fleeter if less graceful. But when we ran out of juice, we just reached into our will and found more. When robots ran dry, they stopped.
So be it.
Death or a miracle.
“Rest. Simon and I will take a watch.”
They nodded, the old hands falling almost immediately to the ground, accepting rest. Jillie and Scott followed. Alissa Frietag leaned back against the stones, closing her eyes and whispering under her breath.
I clambered up beside Simon and sat looking out over our distant dead and toward the buried lab. The very idea of it made me feel small and fragile even if I was one-sixty with my boots on and no real fat. Bulky for a girl. We were all fragile when it came to nano and biologicals and whatever else GenGreen and its partners were dreaming up to protect their solution for the world from the combined North American Government, which had a different one. The NorAM populace had voted almost as one from the wet northern reaches of Canada to the sweltering, hurricane slapped coasts of the Yucatán. They’d said to stop intervening, preferring to take their chances with nature than to trust the multinationals.
There was no money in letting nature balance itself. Hence the science wars, and this small battle.
The dead between us and the next hill attested to the seriousness of this small battle. Our own corporations, or at least multis born here, killing us. Assholes. I swore I’d do my best. Both to kill the big scary lab and to stay alive.
I was gonna miss Mario, even if he was a loudmouthed idiot.
Simon opened the conversation. “This sucks.”
“Yep.” And that closed the conversation.
We sat close to each other, taking comfort in the silence of long friendship. We’d been on three attacks like this before, and come back from all of them. I wasn’t so sure this time, but no soldier says those things to another. Instead, we watched the empty blue sky and baked quietly on the rock, the sun glinting on the great field of ash that surrounded us.