The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (20 page)

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, LT.”

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, LT.”

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, LT?”

“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 . . .