The Trials (The Red Trilogy Book 2) (26 page)

I listen for voices, for movement, and hear none. Just the rustle of leaves in the canopy, the chirping of crickets.

Moving on, I circle around the house. The woods have taken the yard for their own, but the driveway is claimed by only a few patches of grass, indicating someone comes now and then to visit the old place.

Someone’s here now.

An electric sedan is parked close to the covered porch. The front door is open.

An icon ignites at the edge of my vision: a solo link from Jaynie. But she doesn’t say anything. She just wants me to know she’s watching through my helmet cams.

I step onto the porch stairs and look inside. Night vision shows me an interior stairway with its banister removed. I cross the porch, treading lightly, and as I reach the open door, I finally hear a voice, its volume boosted by my helmet audio. It’s one I know. “Check,” Carl Vanda says. “Position data on the third seeker is in.”

A second voice answers, also male but younger, less resonant, with a slight country twang. “Triangulating.”

In Manhattan, Vanda came after me with a sniper rifle, but there’s a bigger operation going on here.

I use the thrust of the exoskeleton to bound up the stairs, requiring only three strides to reach the top. I’ve got my HITR ready to use if I have to, but I want to take Vanda alive.

Of course they hear me coming.

A figure appears in an open doorway near the top of the stairs. Night vision shows me the narrow face of the man in brown—Carl Vanda’s right-hand man in Manhattan, who almost killed me on the sidewalk. A thin honeycomb cast wraps his wrist and hand—I guess I broke bones when I kicked him—but he’s working despite the injury. His farsights help him see in the dark, and he’s carrying an assault rifle that he’s getting ready to use against me.

I want Carl Vanda alive, but I don’t give a shit about this guy. So it’s just a question of who can pull the trigger first. My tactical AI takes over, firing a three-round burst into his throat. His head snaps back and I’m jumping over his body as it collapses to the floor.

I burn a half second assessing the room: no furniture, old-fashioned wallpaper, a stained ceiling, a window sash thrown open with the woods beyond. The forest’s dense canopy hides the lights of the hotel, but with targeting data from his seekers, Vanda doesn’t need to see the hotel to hit it with the portable, programmable missile launcher he’s got set up by the window. The device is on a motorized tripod already bolted to the floor. My guess is he meant to pull out, and then pull the trigger remotely, maybe from halfway across the state.

It’s too late now to execute that plan, but he’s adaptable.

He tosses a luminous tablet at me—probably the one that controls the launcher. The light dazzles my night vision. I dive for the floor. A pistol goes off. The tablet bounces,
spraying its bright-green light around the room as the round explodes against the wall behind me with a concussion like a mini grenade. I keep my head up, my HITR ready as I slam against the floor. My tactical AI is ready too. It puts a targeting circle on Vanda’s chest.

He’s bulky with body armor, so I take the AI’s advice and fire two shots that knock him backward against the wall. He’s stunned, unable to breathe, glaring at me through his farsights, the pistol still in his hand but only because he can’t uncurl his fingers to let it go.

I jump to my feet, twist the pistol out of his grip, and pitch it out the window. Then I grab his farsights off his face and toss them toward the door. He’s starting to recover some volition and takes a weak swing at me, so I seize him by the front of his jacket and hurl him facedown on the floor. Shouldering my HITR, I follow him down, planting the knee joint of my dead sister between his shoulder blades with enough pressure to cut off his breathing. I grope in the pockets of my armored vest and a miracle happens: I find a zip tie, left over from First Light. I use it to bind his hands behind his back and then I haul him to his feet. He makes a wheezing sound as he gasps for air.

Outside, past the rustle of leaves, I hear a racing engine. At first I think it’s on the interstate, but then I hear the crackle and pop of leaves and twigs crushed beneath tires. Someone is on the frontage road. With a thought, I expand the squad map, but the only soldier noted on it is me. No one else is wearing a helmet.

“Jaynie, I hope that’s you coming.”

“Roger that. Is your situation secure?”

“Affirmative. I’m moving the prisoner outside.”

Vanda is hurting. I hear it in the low, grating fury of his voice when he tells me, “You’re going to Hell, Shelley. I’ll see to it.”

“Been there, asshole, thanks to you.”

I push him ahead of me across the room, steering around the black puddle of blood seeping from his compatriot, and then I make him kneel while I recover both his farsights and the ones that belonged to his dead friend. They’re probably so tight with security we won’t be able to get any data out of them, but I don’t want to leave them behind for somebody else to crack.

After that, I half drag, half carry Vanda down the stairs and outside. “Jaynie, I’m taking him out to the frontage road.”

“Roger that.” Her voice is crisp and cold. It dawns on me she’s furious, but she’s not going to let that interfere with the operation. “We’re almost there.”

She comes with lights off. As she brakes, Nolan bails out of the shotgun seat.

“Search him,” I order.

While I hold Vanda, Nolan frisks him, finding a knife, a multitool, a small pistol.

“Check his eyes. Make sure he’s not wearing an overlay.”

“I don’t wear an overlay,” Vanda growls. “And no chip. Only an idiot would hardwire himself into the Cloud.”

Nolan pushes Vanda’s head back anyway, shining a light into his eyes to make sure there’s nothing there. “He’s clear. You detecting any EM?”

My helmet tracks nearby sources, but it’s not picking up anything from Vanda. “Negative.”

“Move!” Jaynie says. “Get him inside now.”

We bundle him into the backseat. I climb in behind him, awkward in my dead sister. Nolan comes in on the other side. As soon as the doors close, Jaynie is driving: over the shoulder, through the wire fence, and onto the interstate, heading west.

I look behind—no traffic—then lean my HITR against the door. “Nolan, you got any zip ties?”

We bind Vanda’s ankles together. I want to get him out of his armor so that if I have to shoot him again, it will count. “Try anything and you’ll have a concussion,” I warn him as Nolan cuts his hands loose.

He’s not stupid. He knows that while I’m wearing armor, bones, and helmet, there’s nothing he can do to hurt me. Even if he gets his hands on my HITR, it won’t fire while it’s registered to me. He might be able to take a swing at Nolan before I break his skull or snap his neck, but that’s it.

All he has left is talk.

As we work his jacket off, he asks, “Anyone still alive that you care about, Shelley?”

Nolan tells him, “Shut the fuck up.”

“You should take this chance to call them and say good-bye.”

Nolan waits until Vanda’s armor comes off, then he slams a fist into his ribs, making him grunt.

“Don’t hit him, Nolan,” I say. “The Red sent his plane nose-down in the dirt last year. He’s a shattered mess inside. We don’t want to start any internal bleeding.”

“
Burn in Hell
,” Vanda whispers.

We bind his hands again behind his back and then drape his jacket over his head so he can’t see where all this is going.

•   •   •   •

As we head west at exactly the speed limit, I think about what just happened and I wonder,
Why now?
In Manhattan I felt abandoned, it was only luck that let me live, but tonight it was the Red. Was that luck too? It’s just a rogue AI, after all. It’s not God and it’s not omniscient. It can’t be. It can’t be everywhere at once. It has to allocate resources, so it comes and goes.

Harvey speaks on gen-com. We’ve been on the road nine minutes, so it surprises me we’re still in range. “Second unit loaded and ready. Departing now.”

Jaynie and I ask the same question at the same time. “You got the angel?”

“Roger that,” Harvey says, managing to insert a note of irony.

“And you’ve got Delphi?” I ask.

“Yes, sir. All present. Vasquez?”

“Here.”

“Shima says to get off the interstate. Take Four Fifteen north and keep your speed legal. She’s setting up a safe house.”

“Roger that.”

The lights of Des Moines loom ahead of us.

I take my helmet off, put it on the floor beside my feet. I want to take off my dead sister too—it’s not made for sitting—but I need more room to do that.

This was a successful operation, but there are no
hoo-yahs
, no congratulations. No one says anything. There’s only silence, for miles.

AGAINST THE BEAST

EPISODE
2
:

SHADOW GOVERNMENTS

W
E REACH THE SAFE HOUSE
at 0341. It’s an isolated farmhouse with a couple of outbuildings and miles of wheat fields all around it. There are no lights on as we roll up, and no vehicles in sight.

Jaynie takes Harvey to check things out. No explosives go off, no commandos fall out of the sky, so we cut the zip tie on Vanda’s ankles and get him out of the car, with the jacket still over his head. His legs have gone numb. Nolan and I have to carry him through the front door and into the basement. There’s a toilet there. We cut the zip tie on his wrists so he can use it with the door open.

Flynn and Harvey rig up and come downstairs to take over guarding the prisoner. I’m ready to sleep, but Jaynie wants to see me.

•   •   •   •

There’s a small room set up as an office, with a keyboard and monitor and shelves of books on agriculture, business, political philosophy, and the history of war. Jaynie is leaning hip-cocked on the edge of the desk, watching me through her farsights as I come in.

“Close the door.”

I do it, and then finally get out of my dead sister, popping the cinches so I can step free. Jaynie waits until I fold up the frame. She’s never been to officer candidate school, but she’s studied plenty of officers. She knows how to play the role.

“We are a linked combat squad. We are about
communication
. If we do not operate as a unit, we fail.”

“It wasn’t a mission. It was just a hunch.”

“If you had any reason to believe—”

“I didn’t have a reason!”

“Just a ‘feeling’?”

“Yes,” I admit. “I had a feeling, a really strong feeling that it would be a good idea to look around.”

“So strong you rigged up and took a weapon—”

“Damn it, Jaynie, you were looking through my eyes. If I hadn’t gotten out there when I did—”

“If the Red hadn’t sent you out there.”

“
Yes.
If it didn’t send me out there we would all be dead now, along with the handful of civilians who were in that hotel. I, for one, am fucking grateful.”

“And if you had communicated your concerns to me? We could have stopped Vanda’s operation before it started. You murdered a man, Shelley. We have all participated in a kidnapping. Those are illegal acts, in case you forgot—and Vanda has a lot of friends. What I’m hearing from Anne is he may have a connection with the president.”

“Vanda is done,” I say stubbornly. “He is never going to leave that basement alive. And if the president is complicit in protecting him, that’s just one more reason he needs to be removed from office.”

“Vanda
is
done,” she agrees. “So are you. Anne may have a job for you, but I don’t. I can’t trust you. I have no way to discipline you. You are off my squad.”

I think we both knew this was coming, ever since she told me about the new command structure. I don’t like the idea of stepping away, of turning over the welfare of my soldiers to another commander, but that happens in the army. I guess it happens with mercs too. Jaynie had damn well better take care of them. . . .

But I know she will.

So what’s my place in the world? That’s a mystery to me. I don’t know if I have one. And I’m too goddamn tired to think any more about it. So I take my helmet and the folded frame of my dead sister, and I head upstairs to shower and to sleep.

•   •   •   •

Delphi wakes me a couple of hours later, with kisses on my face until I open my eyes. I take my time about it.

Sunlight is seeping past the blinds, casting a warm glow across Delphi’s pale face. She is smiling, if only a little.

“Anne Shima is here.”

“Yeah?” I sit up, eager to see her.

“And Trevor Rawlings.”

“Ah,
fuck
.”

I hate Rawlings. He tried to keep from me the fact of Lissa’s kidnapping, and when that failed, he tried to turn my squad against me.

Deep down in a shadowed corner of my mind there’s a vault where I’ve locked up my conscience. On the rare occasion that I take it out I will sometimes find myself admitting that Rawlings might have done the proper thing given the circumstances.

But I hate him anyway.

Delphi sits back on the bed and gives me a look.

“Did you know you participated in a kidnapping?” I ask her. “You’re a criminal now.”

“I prefer to think of it as a citizen’s arrest.”

I consider it. “You know, you might be able to sell that if you get the right judge, and I’ll testify we’re holding you here against your will.” It’s not funny, though. It’s vigilante justice, just like my dad said. “It was a big mistake to hook up with me, Delphi.”

“I’m starting to see that . . . but then, I’m not sure what the right path is anymore. Anne’s brought a doctor with her, a specialist.” She taps the side of her head. “They’re going to inject Vanda’s brain with neuromodulating microbeads—”

“What?”

She nods. “I don’t know if it’s the same mix you have in your head. With LCS soldiers, the goal is to stabilize emotions while still being able to ramp them up at need. With Vanda—”

“They just want to make him talk.”

She nods, watching me with caution in her eyes, waiting to see how I’ll react.

I run my hands over my scalp, feeling the bristle of hair that’s grown too long. “It’s a smart move.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I bet Intelligence has been doing interrogations this way for a while now.”

“I don’t know. It’s possible.”

The organic microbeads come in many types. Some are chemical sensors, others stimulate neurochemical production. I never thought about it before, but it makes sense there’s a formula, a pattern of cerebral stimulation that will make Vanda confess everything he knows.

No doubt the same thing could be done to me.

I shrug. The idea would scare me more if I had any secrets left to hide.

•   •   •   •

I put on a clean shirt and slacks, and head downstairs.

The house we’ve occupied has a modern-country look to it: casual, with smooth lines and basic furnishings. Anne Shima is in the living room talking to Jaynie, who looks like she hasn’t slept at all.

“Lieutenant,” Shima says. She’s wearing an olive-drab pullover and gray cargo pants, with a pistol holstered on her hip. Her smile is warm as she looks at me. Shima is an older woman, early sixties maybe. She wears her thick white hair confined in a braid pinned to the back of her head. Her Japanese ancestry shows in her petite build. Despite her age, she’s slim and athletic, and carries herself with a military bearing. I like her. She’s no-nonsense, without Rawlings’s dominance issues.

“Congratulations on your prisoner,” Shima says as she meets me at the bottom of the stairs. We shake hands, and then I look past her to Jaynie, whose face gives away nothing. Shima frowns. “We have a lot to talk about.”

“Yes, ma’am. Have you started working on Vanda yet?”

“He’s being prepped. It’ll be just a few minutes before we begin the procedure.”

As she’s speaking, Colonel Rawlings—who is retired from the army, but happy to be addressed by his former rank—steps out of the kitchen. He looks much the same as he did when I met him in Alaska: a big man, broad shouldered, though a little stooped now with age. His white hair is buzzed in a military cut.

We trade glares. He presses his lips together and then, skipping over all the accusations and the acrimony and the remembrances of the dead, he says, “We’ll know by noon not only where Carl Vanda’s nukes are stored, but where we can find the evidence that will prove the president had a hand in protecting Vanda-Sheridan. You did good, Shelley.”

I hate Rawlings—but maybe a little less than before.

•   •   •   •

Jaynie, Delphi, and Shima all disappear into the basement. Moon is awake, manning a tactical operations center just off the living room where he can keep an eye on the feeds from a perimeter of security cameras set up around the house and in the surrounding fields. The rest of the squad is off duty, presumably asleep.

I eat breakfast alone in the kitchen—eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, cooked up by Rawlings before he joined Shima and Delphi downstairs. I’m trying not to think about what’s going on in the basement.

The house we’ve occupied is climate controlled. A picture window looks out on green wheat fields and the approaching road. It’s a mistake to leave the window uncovered like that. Then again, maybe it’s not really a window. Maybe it’s a monitor set to display a view of what’s going on outside. Or maybe it’s not even showing me what’s out there now. I could be looking at yesterday or the day before.

God, I need more sleep.

Sleep is easy of course, thanks to the skullnet and the way it interacts with the neuromodulating microbeads implanted in my brain.

When I entered the army, I volunteered for LCS service. It was cutting edge, it promised excitement, and since it was a new specialty, the opportunity was there for fast advancement—so I thought,
Why not?
I went into the army with a chip on my shoulder, wanting to show anyone who doubted me—wanting to show myself—that I could pull it off. Give me a demanding job, because I could do it as well as anyone.

I volunteered. I knew what I was in for—but that didn’t kill the fear. The day I had to submit myself to the neurosurgeon to have my brain seeded with artificial control
points—the neuromodulating microbeads—I was scared shitless. Just thinking about it now ramps up the adrenaline . . . reporting at
0400
to the surgical center at the training base, being sent to the showers with a depilatory, washing away every hair on my scalp, and then dressing in paper pants, the cold hospital air making the skin on my back and chest prickle.

I walked into the surgery. I was to be conscious for the procedure, so instead of an operating table, a chair waited for me, equipped with straps to secure my arms and legs. As I sat in it, I questioned my own sanity. Why was I here? Why was I allowing this to be done to me?

A nurse secured the straps. He smiled at me, his brows raised. “Are you okay?”

I nodded. I didn’t want to show him how scared I was, but he knew.

He spread a topical anesthetic across my scalp. It felt cold at first, but after a few seconds I didn’t feel anything. “It’s important you keep your head still,” he reminded me. “The more you move, the longer the procedure will take.”

I nodded again.

“Don’t nod. If the doctor asks you a question, use words to answer. Okay?”

“Okay.”

Next came twenty minutes of cold waiting until the doctor finally came in. Her name was Dr. Karn. A civilian, midforties. She spent every day implanting control points in the brains of soldiers.

“There will be pain,” she assured me, “but nothing worse than a pricking sensation as the injection needle pierces the skull.”

She was right: It was a pinprick pain, but drawn out across the entire time it took her ultrathin needles to pass slowly through the barrier of my skull. There were a lot of
needles. Enough to keep the doctor busy over the next hour and a half. At each intrusion she would speak: “Position one, injecting. Position two, injecting. Position three . . .” And I would silently question myself:
Can you feel it? What’s changed?

Nothing.

Every few minutes, Dr. Karn would ask me if I was doing okay, and I would lie and answer, “Yes.”

During the whole procedure, she worked from behind me, with the instrument tray at her side.

Not once did she let me see those needles.

The memory of that day remains raw because it was burned into my head before I was fitted with a skullcap, which I wore until last September when the army upgraded me to a skullnet. The beads in my brain have no effect on their own. It’s the skullcap or the skullnet that triggers them to function. Ever since that day, every traumatic memory I’ve collected has been detoxified by the alchemy of a precisely engineered sequence of neurochemicals. I clearly remember the events of my past, I just don’t feel the full depth of the emotion behind them like any normal person would.

That’s why it’s easy to put my conscience away in a box.

That’s why it’s easy to sit here eating eggs and bacon while in the basement a physician forcibly installs control points in Carl Vanda’s brain. Pain is part of that process, but nothing he can’t handle. It isn’t pain that makes the procedure a kind of torture. Sometimes torture is just the shit that gets done to you without your consent.

•   •   •   •

I’m still staring at that window-that-might-not-be-a-window when Rawlings comes back into the kitchen. He sits across the table from me, blocking my view of the hypothetical outside. “Not stewing in regret, are you?”

I scowl, and shake my head. My plate is empty, so I push it aside. And then I think to ask him, “Is there a warrant out for me yet?”

“For shooting the merc?”

“And kidnapping Vanda, yeah.”

Rawlings looks coldly amused. “No one reported hearing gunshots. The incident was not brought to the attention of any legal authority. But there’s a team from Uther-Fen at the abandoned house right now, going over the site, looking for evidence.”

“So this is a private war?”

“You don’t want to sit in a courtroom again, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Nevertheless, you,
we
, are in a difficult position. In the eyes of the law, we are all compromised.”

“I understand that, sir.”

“It’s too late for you to walk away. Do you understand
that
?”

It’s beginning to sink in. I take a sip of coffee that’s gone cold.

“I’m not going to bullshit you, Shelley. You already belong to the organization. You’re part of it. That’s a decision you already made.”

I put my cup down, meet his gaze, and ask, “What is it you’re looking for, sir?”

“An oath of service.”

“I swore one of those already.”

“To support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Yes, I know.”

And that’s what I’ve tried to do, but the system is badly broken and things have not turned out all that well.

“We all swore that oath, Shelley. Everyone here, except the prisoner. And we’re still bound by it, even if our activities have become extraconstitutional. But we are a military
organization, and as such we have to know we have your loyalty, and that you accept your place in the ranks.”