Peter Watts. Collateral
They got Becker out in eight minutes flat, left the bodies on the sand for whatever scavengers the Sixth Extinction hadn’t yet managed to kill off. Munsin hauled her into the Sikorsky and tried to yank the augments manually, right on the spot; Wingman swung and locked and went hot in the pants-pissing half-second before its threat-recognition macros, booted late to the party, calmed it down. Someone jammed the plug-in home between Becker’s shoulders; wireless gates unlocked in her head and Blanch, way up in the cockpit, put her prosthetics to sleep from a safe distance. The miniguns sagged on her shoulders like anesthetized limbs, threads of smoke still wafting from the barrels.
“Corporal.” Fingers snapped in her face. “Corporal, you with me?”
Becker blinked. “They—they were human...” She thought they were, anyway. All she’d been able to see were the heat signatures: bright primary colors against the darkness. They’d started out with arms and legs but then they’d spread like dimming rainbows, like iridescent oil slicks.
Munson said nothing.
Abemama receded to stern, a strip of baked coral suffused in a glow of infrared: yesterday’s blackbodied sunshine bleeding back into the sky. Blanch hit a control and the halo vanished: night-eyes blinded, ears deafened to any wavelength past the range of human hearing, all senses crippled back down to flesh and blood.
The bearing, though. Before the darkness had closed in. It had seemed wrong.
“We’re not going to Bonriki?”
“We are,” the Sergeant said. “You’re going home. Rendezvous off Aranuka. We’re getting you out before this thing explodes.”
She could feel Blanch playing around in the back of her brain, draining the op logs from her head. She tried to access the stream but he’d locked her out. No telling what those machines were sucking out of her brain. No telling if any of it would still be there when he let her back in.
Not that it mattered. She wouldn’t have been able to scrub those images from her memory if she tried.
“They had to be hostiles,” she muttered. “How could they have just been there, I mean—what else could they be?” And then, a moment later: “Did any of them...?”
“You wouldn’t be much of a superhuman killing machine if they had,” Okoro said from across the cabin. “They weren’t even armed.”
“Private Okoro,” the Sergeant said mildly. “Shut your fucking mouth.”
They were all sitting across the cabin from her, in defiance of optimal in-flight weight distribution: Okoro, Perry, Flannery, Cole. None of them augged yet. There weren’t enough Beckers to go around, one every three or four companies if the budget was up for it and the politics were hot enough. Becker was used to the bitching whenever the subject came up, everyone playing the hard-ass, rolling their eyes at the cosmic injustice that out of all of them it was the farmer’s daughter from fucking Red Deer who’d won the lottery. It had never really bothered her. For all their trash-talking bullshit, she’d never seen anything but good-natured envy in their eyes.
She wasn’t sure what she saw there now.
***
Eight thousand kilometers to Canadian airspace. Another four to Trenton. Fourteen hours total on the KC-500 the brass had managed to scrounge from the UN on short notice. It seemed like forty: every moment relentlessly awake, every moment its own tortured post-mortem. Becker would have given anything to be able to shut down for just a little while—to sleep through the dull endless roar of the turbofans, the infinitesimal brightening of the sky from black to grey to cheerful, mocking blue—but she didn’t have that kind of augmentation.
Blanch, an appendage of a different sort, kept her company on the way home. Usually he couldn’t go five minutes without poking around inside her, tweaking this inhibitor or that BCI, always trying to shave latency down by another millisecond or two. This time he just sat and stared at the deck, or out the window, or over at some buckled cargo strap clanking against the fuselage. The tacpad that pulled Becker’s strings sat dormant on his lap. Maybe he’d been told to keep his hands off, leave the crime scene in pristine condition for Forensic IT.
Maybe he just wasn’t in the mood.
“Shit happens, you know?”
Becker looked at him. “What?”
“We’re lucky something like this didn’t happen months ago. Half those fucking islands underwater, the rest tearing each other’s throats out for a couple dry hectares and a few transgenics. Not to mention the fucking Chinese just waiting for an excuse to help out.” Blanch snorted. “Guess you could call it peacekeeping. If you’ve got a really warped sense of humor.”
“I guess.”
“Shame we’re not Americans. They don’t even sign on to those treaties, do anything they damn well please.” Blanch snorted. “It may be a fascist shithole down there but at least they don’t knuckle under every time someone starts talking about war crimes.”
He was just trying to make her feel better, she knew.
“Fucking rules of engagement,” he grumbled.
***
Eight hours in IT when they landed: every aug tested to melting, every prosthetic stripped to the bolts while the meat attached to it sat silent and still and kept all the screams inside. They gave her four hours’ rack time even though her clockwork could scrub the fatigue right out of her blood, regulate adenosine and melatonin so precisely she wouldn’t even yawn right up until the point she dropped dead of heart failure. Might as well, they said: other schedules to clear anyway, other people to bring back across other oceans.
They told her not to worry. They told her it wasn’t her fault. They gave her propranolol to help her believe them.
Four hours, flat on her back, staring at the ceiling.
Now here she was: soul half a world away, body stuck in a windowless room paneled in oak on three sides, the fourth crawling with luminous maps and tacticals. Learning just what the enemy had been doing, besides sneaking up on a military cyborg in the middle of the fucking night.
“They were fishing,” the PAO told her.
“No,” Becker said; some subconscious subroutine added an automatic “sir.”
The JAG lawyer—Eisbach, that was it—shook her head. “They had longlines in their outriggers, Corporal. They had hooks, a bait pail. No weapons.”
The general in the background—from NDHQ in Ottawa, Becker gathered, although there’d been no formal introduction—studied the tacpad in his hand and said nothing at all.
She shook her head. “There aren’t any fish. Every reef in the WTP’s been acidified for twenty years.”
“It’s definitely a point we’ll be making,” Eisbach said. “You can’t fault the system for not recognizing profiles that aren’t even supposed to exist in the zone.”
“But how could they be—”
“Tradition, maybe.” The PAO shrugged. “Some kind of cultural thing. We’re checking with the local NGOs, but so far none of them are accepting responsibility. Whatever they were doing, the UN never white-listed it.”
“They didn’t show on approach,” Becker remembered. “No visual, no sound—I mean, how could a couple of boats just sneak up like that? It had to be some kind of stealth tech, that must be what Wingman keyed—I mean, they were just there.” Why was this so hard? The augs were supposed keep her balanced, mix up just the right cocktail to keep her cool and crisp under the most lethal conditions.