The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (38 page)

My training continues. We run every scenario over and over again. At the end of each day, Crow comes for me with hand and leg shackles. I put them on myself, not wanting to get involved in another fight.

•   •   •   •

Then a day comes when, instead of leaving me alone in the training room, Crow takes up a post by the door. I throw him a questioning look, but of course his anonymous visor betrays nothing. “What’s up?”

Shiloh is behind the glass. She answers over the room’s speakers. “Amity has flown in today. Your mission partner, the spaceplane pilot. This is the only chance you’ll have to train with her.”

I look again at Crow. “And you’re worried I’m going to kill her?”

“And what good would that do you?” he asks.

This gets me thinking, which is not always a good thing. I haven’t tried to escape since I accepted this mission—Crow hasn’t allowed an opportunity—but if an opportunity presented itself, would I take it?

It’s my duty to make every effort to escape, that’s how I was trained, but I want to do this mission.

I want it.

Because Jaynie is right and I’m a fucking puppet operating on a program written into my skullnet.

The door opens. Amity comes in. Anyway, I assume it’s Amity. She’s a woman of moderate height, middle-aged, her full figure gone a little soft beneath a black, long-sleeved pullover and jeans. Her hair is an interesting, dark artificial red. She wears it short, trimmed in layers. My encyclopedia contains no record that will allow it to identify her, so it tags her as
unknown
.

“Honored to meet you, Lieutenant Shelley,” she says in a cold voice with a light Russian accent. “I’m here only a few hours. Let’s not waste time.”

I hesitate. I’m supposed to be the muscle on this mission. That means I should be able to take her, use her as a hostage, a human shield to buy my way out of here.

I run a few scenarios through my head:

I jump her, she proves to be more than she seems, and breaks my neck.

I jump her, and while she’s fighting back, Crow breaks my neck.

I jump her, get the best of her, get past Crow—but before we can escape the building he shoots us both, because it’s better to call off the mission than to let me go, knowing I will expose their operation.

They will never let me go.

I’ll be a prisoner even when I’m on the spaceplane, because
it’s not like I can hit Amity over the head and fly the plane myself.

So I do the sensible thing. I look her in the eye and say, “Tell me what I need to know.”

I want to escape, but I also want a chance to do this mission. Those two goals should be in conflict but they’re not, because right now there is no way for me to get away. That could change. My interpretation of Shiloh’s “managed chaos” is to keep things moving and see what shakes loose.

•   •   •   •

We run through the mission, beginning with the climb into the spaceplane’s cockpit. Amity comes in behind me, watching critically as I strap in. “You need to be faster,” she growls. “There is no way to know what might go wrong at the habitat. If we need to exit swiftly, you must be prepared. Know how to get the harness on with one hand, in the dark!”

She drops into the pilot’s seat, her body language communicating a sullen anger out of proportion to my poor performance—and I begin to sense discord in the mission plans. Or maybe I’m not the only one conscripted into service?

“You sure you want to be part of this mission?” I ask.

The gaze she turns on me promises dire consequences if I don’t proceed with care, but I probe anyway. “Maybe you know something I don’t? A reason to call it off?”

Her brows knit in an indignant scowl that tells me I’ve got it all wrong. “You understand this conversation is not private? That both Shiloh and Crow listen to all we say?”

“Standard procedure.”

“Of course.” She turns away. “
You
would be used to it.”

“You’re not?”

“Only when I’m in the cockpit.” She raises the volume of her voice, declaiming to the ceiling. “But I don’t care that
you’re listening, Shiloh. You know my opinion.” She turns to me. “I don’t trust you. I don’t trust your motives. I am the architect of this mission and you are not my choice to fly in the second seat.”

Her anger is cold. Mine is not as I consider again the sacrifice of my squad. “So why am I here?”

It’s Shiloh who answers, through the room’s speakers. “Because the mission plan was revised after we failed to launch twice. The first time, there were mechanical issues with the spaceplane and the flight was rescheduled. Then we missed the rescheduled launch because a ridiculous sequence of delays kept Amity from reaching the launch complex. It was clear to me the Red had shut down our mission.”

“So you decided you needed me.”

“Yes, and I was right. It’s
your
story. King David’s meta story. So we help you, and reap our own reward.”

Shiloh is confident in herself and in her vision of reality, believing she understands the Red well enough to run this ruthless gamble. She calls me King David. I see her as a would-be Solomon, endowed with the gift of wisdom and expecting a massive payoff from it when she’s boosted into wealth and power by the deus ex machina of the Red.

That’s assuming the story plays out the way she hopes. I’ve got a feeling she’s going to be disappointed—and the scorn on Amity’s face suggests I’m not the only one who thinks Shiloh is a little too confident.

“Let’s start again,” Amity says. “I have to fly home in a few hours. We don’t have time to waste.”

•   •   •   •

That night I lie awake until late, rereading the article in my encyclopedia on Eduard Semak, and then moving on to a web of articles on failures and cover-ups in nuclear weapons
security. It’s near midnight when I finally sleep, but I’m up again at
0400
, disturbed by a noise I haven’t heard before.

It’s a faint, rhythmic knocking, like a toothpick tapping against a metal plate, just audible above the whisper of the air-conditioning. I don’t move. I just listen. The sound is coming from overhead. It’s probably a beetle knocking around in the AC ducts . . . but beetles don’t usually tap out a complex rhythm:
Tap! Tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-tap, tap-tap-
tap, tap!
Repeating.

Moving only my eyes, I look up, taking in the faint-red familiar glow of the ceiling lights. I see nothing else.

I stand up. Good time for a piss.

As if disturbed by my movement, the pace of the tapping picks up, becoming faster, more urgent. I decide it really is coming from the air-conditioning vent, so I step up onto the bed to get a closer look. That lets me peer past the louvers, where I see a faint amber glow. At first I can’t make out what it is, but then my brain gets creative filling in the shadows and I decide I’m staring at a robo-bug like the one that came after Carl Vanda in the courtroom. The amber light seeps from twin slots on either side of a cylindrical body smaller than my little finger. Caught against the undersides of its resting dragonfly wings, the light bounces down, defining the microdrone’s curved, needle-thin legs. The wings make the robo-bug just a little too big to fit through the louvers. The noise is being produced by one of its legs tapping frantically, working through the rhythmic pattern, but it stops before it reaches the end—and the network icon in my overlay goes green.

Again, it’s Joby’s program that launches first. The upload goes before I can stop it, and then a download comes in. That’s a sequence I’ve seen before. The memory surfaces. It was in the hangar, right before . . . what followed.

Panic kicks in. I try to cancel, but I’m not in control of
my overlay. A program executes without my permission and seconds later an icon is added to my display.

It’s a link to gen-com.

Speaking with a handler’s calm inflection, Delphi says, “Shelley, confirm link.”

“
Delphi.
Link confirmed! My God, are you okay? How  . . . ?”

But I know how: The robo-bug is acting as a relay. There must be a string of them up to the surface, and Joby’s program offered a way in.

“Status?” Delphi demands. “Are you injured?”

“No. I’m fine. I’m confined in a cell.”

“Are you shackled?”

“No. Get the door open and I can go.”

“Stand by.”

The network icon goes red. No connection.

I jump down from the bed and look around, look for anything I can use as a weapon, but I’ve done that a hundred times before and I already know there’s nothing.

I stand beside the door and listen.

There’s only silence.

I worry Crow might look in through the camera eyes in the corners of my cell. I don’t want to give him a reason for suspicion, so I return to the bed, lie down again, close my eyes, and try to slow my racing heart.

Joby sent his bugs to find me. He used his own program to establish a communications link.

I’m kind of astonished at that. Joby’s not exactly fond of me and as far as I know he isn’t part of Cryptic Arrow. But on that day I ran up the stairs—knowing I couldn’t escape, just wanting to get far enough to find an outside network—his program launched, uploading the data on my legs, along with GPS coordinates of where I’d been, because I forgot to turn that function off when we headed
out after the
Non-Negotiable
 . . . a security lapse that might just save me.

The faint glow of the night-lights cuts out, leaving me in total darkness. The whisper of the air-conditioning ceases. Electricity out. I hope the basement’s network nodes are out too. I don’t want Shiloh fucking around in my head.

It’s so quiet I hear my heart. I count each beat to mark the time. When I reach
473
, I hear small-arms fire.

That puts me back on my feet.

The shots are distant, echoing off concrete walls. They come singly or in bursts of three, with intervals of silence between. Several times, multiple weapons fire at once. I estimate five, maybe six, automatic rifles. Crow is earning his money now.

I want to know who’s out there. Who’s coming for me?

The walls tremble as a grenade goes off.

Silence follows.

I cross the lightless room, taking up a position by the door. If Crow makes it down here first, it’s a good bet he’ll come to kill me. Odds are there won’t be anything I can do to stop him . . . but I can still try to seize a weapon, go down shooting.

My network icon goes green again. The link to gen-com opens. “Status?” Delphi demands as I hear the sound of clomping footplates approaching, at least two sets, maybe three.

“I’m fine! What the hell is going on out there?”

“The building has been secured.”

“Is the basement network out?”

“Roger that. The only live network down there is ours.”

Relief sweeps over me, knowing Shiloh can’t reach into my skullnet to hit me again.

“Which cell are you in?” Delphi asks.

“The first on the left.”

Jaynie’s voice cuts in: “Got it.”

The thudding steps stop outside the door.

“Don’t jump me, Shelley, when I open this door.”

“I won’t, ma’am,” I say in a voice suddenly hoarse.

The heavy lock clicks and releases. The door swings open, admitting a slice of red light along with the smell of gunpowder and fresh sweat. I peer outside. Three shadowy figures look back at me, all of them rigged in armor and bones, and carrying HITRs which they hold pointed at the ground. Their faces are hidden by the black visors of their helmets, but I know them anyway. It’s Jaynie who’s closest to me.

Jaynie wasn’t in the hangar. She’d been evacuated to a navy hospital after the
Non-Negotiable
. I wonder if her arm is still in a splint, under her gear.

Flynn is next to her, the smallest of our squad. She’s got a tiny LED flashlight with a red beam clipped to her thigh pocket; it’s the only light source in the hall. Flynn was poisoned by bee drones when we hit Reyvik Biosystems. She didn’t make it to the
Non-Negotiable
, staying behind at the hangar with Shima . . . but she wasn’t in the hangar, was she? Shima had sent her on an errand.

I look at the third figure—

“Clear the doorway,” Jaynie orders. I hear her voice twice: directly, and over gen-com. “Step into the hall.”

I do it. There’s a faint creak and hiss from her dead sister as she moves past me into the cell. “Room’s clear.”

“Roger that,” Delphi says, while I take a shuddering breath and ask what is surely not possible.

“Nolan, is that you?”

He answers in his familiar, gentle voice. “Hey, LT. I guess you thought I was dead.”

If Nolan is still alive . . . have I been wrong all this time about what happened? “Moon and Tuttle? Did they make it? And Shima?”

Jaynie’s voice takes on a hard edge as she returns to the hall. “You saw what happened to Moon. He was gunned down right in front of you. So was Shima.”

I shake my head. I don’t remember it. “What about Tuttle?”

“Dead,” she confirms, turning to look toward the end of the hall. “Any reason to think these other cells are occupied?”

“No. I’ve never seen the doors open. I’ve never seen other prisoners.”

“Stay where you are while we clear them.”

The doors aren’t locked, and the cells are empty.

“Anything we need to take care of before we pull out?” Jaynie asks me.

I think of the mission to slam Eduard Semak . . . the mission I agreed to do, wanted to do, still want to do. Fuck me, anyway. “No. There’s nothing.”

“Hold position in the basement for now,” Delphi instructs. “Still waiting on an all clear.”

Jaynie responds, “Roger that.”

“Who’s upstairs?” I want to know. “Who are you working with?”

“Squad Two. Cryptic Arrow’s second field unit. We came in together against minimal defenses. The enemy thought they were safe, thought we couldn’t find them.”

“It was Joby Nakagawa who figured out where I was. Right?”

She goes still. A few seconds slip past. Then, “I guess you could say that. Course, it was Nakagawa who opened up a hole in your head that let the enemy walk right in.”