The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (33 page)

Nolan speaks calmly over gen-com: “Enemy on the interior stairs.”

Jaynie answers: “Enemy on deck.”

The assault is on.

Masked by the rumble of the engines, the shooting that erupts sounds like distant firecrackers. I move swiftly, jamming the muzzle of my HITR through the smoking doorway to let my AI take a look inside. It marks no targets and no one shoots at me. Delphi says, “Clear to advance.” I push the door wider and go inside.

The lights are off, so night vision kicks in.

The green glow reveals a nearly empty bay. Two long rows of support columns divide the space lengthwise into thirds. Metal tie-downs form parallel rows in the floor. At the far end of the bay, close to the elevator door, is a stack of shipping pallets. A forklift is strapped down beside them. Closer to the middle are three armored personnel carriers, urban models like the ones rolling around in Manhattan. And closer to me, backed up against the port side and tied down with mesh chains, are two cargo vans. I can’t tell their color because in night vision they’re just different shades of green and white.

Jaynie and Nolan trade matter-of-fact phrases:

“Three more in the shadows.”

“I’ve got an angle.”

“Fire in the hole.”

Delphi says, “I’m taking you out of gen-com.” She doesn’t want me distracted.

My link icons update and I don’t hear the battle narration anymore.

I look around the bay one more time. My AI still doesn’t find a target so I have to conclude that only the two soldiers, already dead, were left to defend the stern while everyone else—every merc still alive—is engaged in the firefight upstairs.

So long as Uther-Fen doesn’t start lobbing grenades into the bridge, Jaynie and Nolan have a good chance of holding them off.

“Delphi, I’m moving in.”

“Roger that. Cleared to advance.”

I sprint for the vans, my footplates pounding against the deck.

Nothing happens. No one shoots at me.

I reach the first van. I think it’s the blue one. I grab the handle on the sliding door and jam it down. It’s locked. So I swap my HITR for the shotgun. Holding it parallel to the van and angled down on the lock, I fire. A car alarm goes off, echoing in the bay as the door pops out a couple of inches. I slide it open. My helmet cams record everything. The video data flows to the satellite relay in my pack, which boosts the signal to Cryptic Arrow’s account, and from there it shoots around the globe to Delphi. My overlay records too.

“Fuck,” I whisper, staring at the van’s cargo area. “Delphi, is that it?”

My helmet mutes the bleating alarm while enhancing her voice. “Stand by.”

Inside the van is a massive gray cylinder, close to a meter in diameter and almost as high, bolted to the floor. There’s a keypad—my guess is that it’s a digital lock—placed next to a seam that probably marks the edge of a door.

Delphi says, “We have confirmation.” She’s trying hard to hold on to her handler’s calm diction, but I can hear a tremor in her voice. “The container you’re looking at is a lead shielding to limit leakage of detectable radiation. It’s the same structure used in the unexploded weapons recovered on Coma Day. The nuclear device is within. Don’t try to open it.”

“I won’t.”

“They want you to check the other van.”

“Roger that.”

“Please be careful.”

I don’t want to stand in the tight place between the two vehicles, so I walk around to the other side. On the way, I eye the APCs and the forklift; I scowl at the elevator . . . but nothing moves except the deck as it rolls with the waves. Again, I use the breaching shotgun—and set another alarm blaring.

Inside the second van is another gray cylinder.

Whatever else happens, we did the right thing coming here. That’s what I tell myself. Then I flash on Harvey, floating head-down in lightless, freezing waters.

Did
we do the right thing?

My focus has slipped. Delphi has to jar me back to the present. “What’s that sound? Shelley, do you hear it?”

The helmet brings me the hum of an electric motor. I swing around to see the elevator doors sliding open. Instinct takes over. I bring my weapon up, ready to launch a grenade—but it’s not my HITR I’m holding. It’s the shotgun. The unfamiliar shape of the weapon makes me hesitate.

“Shoot!” Delphi orders.

I pull the trigger—too late. A barrage of shots hammers into my visor—an impact that puts me on the floor. I hear Delphi yelling at me, “Get up, Shelley. Now. Now. Get up!”

I would like to.

I just don’t remember how.

“Can’t see,” I whisper.

“Your visor’s broken. Take your helmet off.”

I’m not supposed to do that. I can’t remember how to do it anyway.

“You’ve got a bad concussion, Shelley.”

I hear something. Running footsteps. Heavy steps. At least two people.

From somewhere above me, a man says, “Stunned.”

I feel the press of cold steel against my throat, a sensation that has the positive effect of nailing me back into my body. I’m on my side, propped up by the mass of my backpack.

“No.” The same man. “Don’t kill him. Not yet.”

I feel my hands again. I flex my fingers.

The pressure of steel withdraws, but not the pressure from Delphi: “Shelley, goddamn it! You need to move now! There’s a pistol in a holster on your chest.”

She’s right. I reach for it. Someone grabs my wrist—a bad move on their part, since I’m still in my dead sister. I swing my arm as hard as I can and feel a satisfying impact, accompanied by a gasp, a moan. I hammer whatever it is again and the moaning stops.

A gun goes off. Sensory feedback hammers up my left thigh, into my spine—a special kind of pain, the kind that comes from my robot legs. I sit up, wrenching off my helmet and screaming, a five-second roar of agony. My legs shouldn’t generate pain at this level. This is more than maximum. I stare at the slider icon at the bottom of my overlay, the one that lets me control the level of pain I feel from the legs, and I slide it down to fucking nothing—

The gun goes off again. I see it this time: He shoots out my right knee.

I should feel nothing.

But my nerves catch fire. I swear they turn molten, burn
the inside of my body to ash. I writhe and reach for the legs, wanting to jettison them, to remove them, to make them stop telling me what I don’t want to know, that they are scrap metal.Twisted, broken, circuit-melted scrap metal—

“You’re Shelley, aren’t you?” the man’s voice says. It’s an American accent. “King David himself. Those legs give you away every time.”

My shoulders are heaving, I’m trembling, but the pain has peaked. I assess my position. The only light is what’s spilling through the doorway where I came in, but it’s enough to tell me I’m on the floor alongside the second van. The merc I hit is an unconscious heap of meat beside me. He looks in bad shape: his nose broken, front teeth missing, blood pooling in his open mouth.

I look up at the surviving merc. I’ve never seen him before. He’s at least six feet, broad shouldered, darkly tanned skin, maybe Hispanic, maybe Greek. I don’t know, I don’t care.

“Get your pack off,” he says.

I do it.

“Now strip out of that exoskeleton, nice and slow, or I’ll blow your elbow next and that will hurt even more.”

I nod.

“Start with the arms.”

I do what he says, uncinching my arms, thinking,
See, Jaynie? I don’t want to die.

The shoulder frame doesn’t fall to the ground, but it also doesn’t move with me when I lean forward to uncinch my robot legs. I try to assess the damage. There’s not much to see: just holes in the pant legs. No blood, of course. Also, no machine parts. I stretch farther to uncinch my ankles. That’s when I know for sure my legs are broken. The lower legs are loose inside my pants, no longer attached to my thighs.

I hesitate too long. He raps the muzzle of his weapon
against the back of my head, igniting a blinding wave of pain inside my skull and I almost puke. I try to sit up straight again, but he won’t let me. He’s got his hand pressed against the back of my head and his gun in my ear. If he pulls the trigger, maybe that will stop the hammering agony in my skull.

“Very slowly. Take the pistol out. Two fingers. And pitch it.”

He’s worried about the pistol in my chest holster. I do exactly what he says. The pistol rattles away under the van.

“Now the knife.”

I pull out the knife on my belt. I’ve never used a knife in combat anyway. I pitch it away, but he doesn’t let me sit up. He wants to talk. That’s fine with me.

“I knew the men you killed at Black Cross, and the ones who died in Alaska.”

My left hand is still curled under my chest. Slowly, very slowly, I use it to reach inside my vest.

“You’d be dead already, Shelley, except I heard a nasty rumor your friends are holding my boss.”

Inside my vest, I feel the stock of the handgun that I took from the ship’s captain.

“You think maybe they’d trade Vanda for you? You’ve got to have some value. The great war hero. The Lion of Black Cross.”

I’m pretty sure that’s a deal that won’t go through.

I brush my fingers against the pistol until I find the safety; I push a little harder and move the switch.

“I’m going to let you up, and when I do, I want you to roll over, out of this rig and onto your belly, facedown, with your hands behind your back. Understood?”

I nod. As he steps away, I pull the gun.

He swears and shoots a round into my side. I get one into his throat. Given that we’re both wearing armored vests, I win.

It fucking hurts, of course. Not just my ribs, but my skull too, my pulse pounding through my head like artillery. The pain pisses me off. It makes me a little crazy, makes me want to pay him back for it, to pay someone back, and the next thing I know I’ve got the muzzle of my pistol jammed against the forehead of the merc whose face I broke—but I don’t shoot. I remember who I used to be, and I don’t shoot. The cumwad is probably going to die anyway, drowning in his own blood. I decide to push him over onto his side so the blood can drain. Maybe he’ll live.

Time to evaluate my own injuries.

Leaning forward again, I pull up my right pant leg, dreading to see what’s left of my knee.

And I think:

Holy fuck.

And:

Joby is a fucking genius.

Because my knee doesn’t look broken at all. I mean, it’s not like I could walk. The lower leg has disconnected from the knee joint, but the joint doesn’t look broken. It’s not shattered, it’s not penetrated.

The lower leg was always designed to disconnect. Joby made it that way. When the bullet hit, it must have detached on its own, failing gracefully with a reaction time faster than an air bag. And the pain I felt? That must have been the heat, the momentum of the bullet impact playing chase up my spine.

Joby promised me I couldn’t break the legs.

I pick up the leg—it feels heavy with the boot attached—and fit it carefully back into the knee joint. It locks right in and I’m able to move the foot that’s still inside the boot. Where my knee was resting, there’s a hole punched into the deck.

I pull up my other pant leg. The left socket is scarred,
but the leg still clicks into place. It still works. I move the slider icon back up again so I can get some sensation from my legs, enough to let me know where they are and what they’re doing.

I have a feeling I’m going to hear from Joby when he gets a look at this data set.

My head still hurts like hell and I’m dizzy and nauseated, but I cinch up anyway, and then I stand. My balance is almost defeated by the shifting deck; it’s only the struts of my dead sister that keep me on my feet. I manage to pick up my HITR and the shotgun. Then I have to kneel to bind the feet and wrists of the merc with the broken face. My pulse hammers in my head as I bend over him, but I get the job done. Next, I go hunting in the dark for my helmet. When I find it, I pull it on, but I can’t see a damn thing. Delphi said the display was broken. I take it off again, pull out the audio loop, and hook it over my ear. “Delphi?”

“Oh my God, Shelley!”

“Are Jaynie and Nolan still alive?”

“Yes. The enemy has withdrawn again. Shelley . . .”

Her voice breaks. Of course she thought I was dead. What else could she think?

“I love you, Delphi.”

Wrong thing to say; wrong time to say it. She starts crying.

“Delphi, I’ve got another problem.”

Shima’s voice cuts in. “Shelley, go ahead.”

“There’s got to be cameras down here. That means there’s a record of who I am.”

“Don’t worry about it. We’ve got a deal set up. Navy helicopters are incoming. You will be evacuated and all records of your identities erased. You’re still with Blue and Gold?”

“Yes.”

“You need to stay there. Guard the targets. There is still resistance on the ship.”

“ETA?”

“Seventy minutes.”

Halfway to forever.

“Is Jaynie going to make it?”

“We’ll do our best.”

Not the answer I want to hear. “Can you link me back to gen-com?”

“Stand by. . . . Done.”

“Nolan?” I ask. “You there?”

“
Fuck me
,” he answers in an incredulous whisper. “Shelley? I thought you were dead.”

Jaynie murmurs, “How many lives you planning to burn through, Shelley?”

“I don’t know, but I’m giving you one of them, okay? Jaynie? Don’t cut out on me.”

“Story’s not over yet, huh?”

“Not yet. But when we’re back on land? I’m done, Jaynie. I swear, I’m done.”

•   •   •   •

Wind and wave and engine noise combine to cloak the approach of the helicopters. From my position just inside the door of the cargo hold, I don’t hear them arrive. I only know they’ve come because Nolan describes the special-forces unit dropping in on cables just like we did. The gun battle heats up following their arrival. A few minutes later, Jaynie gets evacuated, flown away to a navy ship.

The fight’s not over. I hear sporadic gunfire for over fifteen minutes as the decks are secured. Then I’m ordered to the foredeck. Nolan and I get extracted the same way we went in: swinging in storm winds on the ends of cables.