“You aren’t worried we’ll be followed here?”
He studies her in turn through the gleaming transparent screen of his AR visor. A wary gaze, but coolly rational. “I’m expecting it. I like to know who my enemies are.”
“Then you do have someone watching over us?”
“Not someone.”
She recalls his description of Variant Forces as a modern company relying on automation. “Autonomous surveillance, sure. But you’ve got someone in the control room?”
“Autonomous response, too. You sound worried, True.”
Of course she’s worried. She’s remembering the Sibolt, and she thinks of Renata, too. “You’re saying you trust your mechs with a lethal response?”
“No qualms,” he reminds her.
Lincoln believes Shaw to be behind the car bomb at ReqOps headquarters. True would like to hear Shaw deny it—but does it matter?
Not tonight, she decides. She is the first to look away, reminding herself she’s not here to judge his guilt or innocence. But he’s good at reading people. She knows that when he asks, “Are you my enemy, True?”
She answers honestly, “Maybe later. Not tonight.”
“Good. I need a drink. Come on.”
A door opens as if in response to his gaze. The whispering of electronic machinery jumps in volume.
She follows him onto a factory floor that is only a little larger than a backyard swimming pool. Four midsize factory printers hum pleasantly, but she can’t see what they’re producing because their work stages are shielded—which means it’s hot work, involving lasers. At the back of the factory floor, a stairway takes them to a loft that must have been intended as an office, but it’s set up as a Spartan apartment with a cot, a couple of folding chairs, a small refrigerator, a few glasses, and a bottle of vodka, barely touched. “You’re not here much,” she says.
“No.” He pours a shot. Gives her an inquiring look. “One for you?”
She shakes her head. Moves to the window to look out over the factory floor. A trolley is in the aisle. With precise movements of its robotic arms, it extracts a product from one of the printers: the narrow, matte-gray barrel of a rifle.
Where to start? Maybe he’s wondering the same thing. He moves up beside her, making no noise so that she startles at his unexpected proximity. She smells the vodka, feels the heat of his skin, senses his gravity. Instinct warns her to retreat. But she ignores instinct’s good advice.
Moving slowly, deliberately, hoping not to startle either him or the centipede bracelet into a defensive reaction, she turns and touches the back of his left hand, his scarred hand—not the hand with the centipede.
He doesn’t like it. He pulls away but she grasps his wrist—her grip firm, insistent—while she watches his face, watches the corded muscles of his neck, ready to dodge a blow if it comes to that, although she’s not sure she could move fast enough. His skin is warm, slightly damp beneath coarse hair.
She feels him give in, the tension in his arm easing just a little. She releases a breath she wasn’t aware of holding and turns his arm over, pushes his sleeve up. He growls, “Who the fuck told you?”
There on his forearm is the tattoo exactly as Miles described it: the cross, the flames, the banner inscribed with her son’s name and the epithet The Last Good Man. In a husky voice she says, “Tell me a story, Shaw Walker. The story of what really happened in that Burmese forest. All these years, I thought it was just a mission gone bad. But it was worse than that.” She looks up again, her gaze meeting his through the screen of his AR visor. “Wasn’t it?”
“Shit,” he whispers. Gently, he reclaims his arm, moves away. She steps back too, leans against the glass, crosses her arms. Waiting.
He retreats into a corner at the opposite end of the window. “Short version,” he says, pulling his sleeve back down. “We were caught by surprise and we got hammered. When we tried to retreat, we were outnumbered, outmaneuvered, and they killed us.”
A perfect summary of what True has been told but she knows there’s more. “The plot is in the details.”
He looks out across the factory floor. “You ever go there?” he asks. “After?”
“No.”
His chest rises and falls in a long sigh. “We were left there to die. That’s the first truth you need to know.”
“I’ve learned that much already.”
He looks surprised at these words, almost grateful… as if he had not expected her to believe it.
“Tell me the rest,” she urges. “Tell me what really happened. Tell me why Diego had to die.”
In the Forest
We were on a punitive mission.
The Saomong Cooperative Cybernetic Army had claimed responsibility for the shoot-down of Flight 137, and the president decided to believe them. No one wanted a trial. So Rogue Lightning was tasked with rendering justice. No prisoners. Just take out Saomong CCA’s leadership quickly, quietly, with minimal collateral damage.
We went in on a dark night under heavy clouds. Lightning on the horizon and no lights at all visible on the ground. We came in low, across contested territory, on a stealthed bird—crewed in those days, not autonomous. I was sitting in the open door, ready to drop when we reached our insertion point, with my team set to follow. There were six of us. Diego was behind me, his hand a solid weight on my shoulder. After him were Francis Hue, Jesse Powers, Hector Chapin, and Mason Abanov.
We slowed, drifted, went into a hover. The crew chief trying to sell me on the idea that we’d reached the drop point. I couldn’t see a damn thing. Not until I pulled down my night vision lenses, and that was worse.
We were twenty meters above a tangled regrowth forest—all bamboo and spindly trees—weedy shit that had popped up after the old forest was logged out. Under the rotor wash it looked like a seething, rain-blurred, bottomless chaos. The rain was coming down like nails. A gust hit us and rocked the ship. Diego’s hand tightened on my shoulder. He wanted to make sure I didn’t go over the edge before we had a rope.
The crew chief pitched the rope out and signaled me. Time to bail.
I must have weighed close to three hundred pounds with my armor, my pack, my weapon, but I was riding the adrenaline of the mission and I felt good. I grabbed onto the rope, hands and feet, and dropped into the night. Hard rain. Like static against my helmet. I was soaked before I was halfway to the ground but it didn’t matter.
I wanted that mission. I’d told myself it was going to be like reliving history. We’d be on our own, going in under radio silence because we knew if we made noise, Saomong would detect it and come looking. We carried the comm equipment anyway, of course—even if we weren’t talking, we were going to try to listen for updates from Command—but no calls home until we were done.
The CCA was vicious, no question, but they were smart bastards. Better at electronic warfare than us and this was their home territory. We knew they had aerial assets in place. Sophisticated UAV platforms, equipped for detection, jamming, spoofing. Quality toys that were probably going to prevent Command from easily talking to us.
We could have sent in fighters to take them out, but if we did that, Saomong would know we were coming. The brain trust we were after would disappear, and we’d be escalating a hidden war into something visible—so that wasn’t going to happen.
It was up to us to infiltrate, catch their leadership in the open, and take care of things quietly. If we couldn’t get an incoming signal, that meant we wouldn’t have even a surveillance drone to watch the activity around us. I was okay with that. The mission was going to test our skills and I was looking forward to it.