We rendezvoused by Francis. His right hand was gone and his face and neck were shredded but he was still alive. We hooked him up to a pack of artificial blood and sprayed dressing on his wounds.
The mission was fucked. We had failed. No way to recover. The CCA would have picked up the explosions, the gunfire. Saomong was aware of us. They would be coming, and we needed to get out. Out from under their radio interference so we could call for a ride.
There was no way we could carry Hector’s body with us, not through the maze of that sapling forest. So we took his tags and his electronics and left him where he fell.
I got Francis onto my shoulders and we went to find Jesse.
Diego and Mason broke trees, pulled branches out of the way, tried to make it easier for me. We were getting close to the place where Jesse had to be, when Diego found a broken mech lying in the leaf litter. It must have been one that Jesse shot down. Diego moved in on it.
“Don’t touch that thing, D!” I warned him.
“I don’t need to touch it.” He stopped a couple meters away and scoped it. “Put a light on it, Mason. I need to see the details.”
Mason didn’t like that idea at all. “We can’t use a light,” he growled.
Like the CCA didn’t already know where we were? I came down on Diego’s side. “Get a light on it, tight beam,” I ordered. “We need to know what it is, where it came from.”
Mason fished in a pocket for his LED. He illuminated the target.
Diego took pictures through his scope. Mason pulled out a smart phone and took a couple more.
I still had Francis draped over my shoulders, so I just asked them, “What have you got?”
Mason came over to show me. We hunched over the screen to hide the light. It showed a clear, magnified picture of the mech. It was lying there, belly up. Its wings and its landing gear were broken but the fuselage was intact. A flattened diamond shape, maybe eight inches, nose to tail. Fucking kamikaze killer mech. First time I ever saw one. Color was light gray. Looked like aluminum or titanium, but it could have been plastic.
“You see those markings?” Diego asked, still studying it through his scope.
I saw them. There was a label with Western-style numerals alongside several columns of Chinese characters. The characters didn’t bother me. Those are used in a lot of Asian countries—Japan, Korea, Vietnam. No, it was the logo that burned. Lotus flower, four petals shaped like curved swords. I knew that design. Diego knew it too.
“That’s Kai Yun,” he said.
Kai Yun. The agency that was supposed to be assisting with oversight on our mission.
“Enough,” I said. “Kill the light.”
Mason switched off the display. He was still cool. He was always cool. But Diego was winding up. “What the fuck? Kai Yun is supposed to be on our side. And they blew Hector’s head off? Blew off Francis’s arm? And Jesse?”
“Yeah, and now the CCA knows we’re here,” Mason reminded us, unnecessarily.
“That too,” Diego growled.
Kai Yun had killed us. We all knew it. The question was, on purpose or by accident? That we didn’t know—but we had more immediate concerns.
“We gotta get out of here,” I told them. “That’s the only way we are going to get us some righteous justice. We get out of here, and I promise you I will see to it that someone hangs for this.”
They liked that. It settled them down. But we still needed to confirm Jesse’s status. We pushed on, leaving the mech where it lay. We couldn’t risk recovering it and having it blow up in our hands.
Later, though, I wondered—was it as dead as it looked? Or was it still playing spy bot, recording everything it heard around it? I imagined some technician in a secure facility somewhere in Shanghai hearing those words I’d said—I will see to it that someone hangs for this. And I knew we were fucked.
No Unwinding It
There in the shadows of the courtyard, beneath a distant, dark-blue sky pearlescent with dawn, the past reshapes itself, taking on a new definition, a new truth. Past the filters of her anxiety, her regret, her horror, her exhaustion, True sees at last the process that brought about Diego’s tortured death… if not yet the reason.
The mission Rogue Lightning was tasked to carry out was an almost-routine action in a war that had been ongoing for decades and whose battles usually passed unspoken. The mission plan was based on cooperative intelligence from both Chinese and American sources. The plan denoted a precise time and place where critical leadership elements of the Saomong Cooperative Cybernetic Army could be found isolated and vulnerable—a precision that implied a spy deep within enemy councils, with ready access to outside communications.
In retrospect such a spy seems unlikely. Far more credible to believe that Kai Yun quietly deployed an autonomous combat swarm to monitor the region, with individual elements situated to eavesdrop on Saomong councils.
The swarm would have been experimental—every ACS was experimental then—but it must have been successful at first. True imagines the little mechs present but unnoticed in the villages and the forest for days ahead of the mission, gathering the intelligence that eventually guides Rogue Lightning to the planned site of the ambush. Then something goes wrong.
“You know what was funny about that mission?” Shaw asks her.
True looks past the fountain, gaze drawn to a point high on the wall at the mouth of the passage where she left a surveillance beetle. Colt will have heard Shaw’s story. She’s glad for that. He’ll follow up on it, if she’s not able to. She tells Shaw, “There was nothing funny about the mission.”
“No, you’re missing the point. The funny part, the laugh-out-loud part, was that none of us needed to be there. Not me, not Diego, not Mason or Francis or Hector or Jesse. None of us were needed because Kai Yun had made us obsolete. They had better fighters in place. More efficient soldiers. Kai Yun could have targeted the CCA leadership with that swarm and done our job for us. I think that’s what they meant to do. Show us up, show off what could be done while we were wandering around like bozos lost in the woods. But we fooled them. We were better than they thought. We got there—late, but still in time to execute the mission.”
True feels dizzy. Had Rogue Lightning been meant to arrive late? The mission plan had woefully underestimated the difficulty of the terrain. Was that on purpose? She summarizes it, needing to understand: “The swarm was there ahead of you, ready to execute the ambush… but things went wrong and Rogue Lightning was taken down by friendly fire.” It’s the conclusion True reached just a couple of days ago, after she’d met Daniel, heard his story.
“So it happens, right?” Shaw works hard to compress his voice into a casual tone, but she’s not fooled. She hears the underlying agony. “You gotta expect mistakes with an experimental system. The swarm was operating on its own, doing what it was designed to do. It just picked the wrong enemy. Those algorithms needed a little work.” He draws in a deep breath. “But that wasn’t the end of it. After Saomong captured us, when they were marching us on this trail to Nungsan, I saw another mech. I saw it twice, following us. Watching. Someone at Kai Yun watching us through its camera eyes.”
A shudder runs through him. He stands up abruptly as if to escape it. The rifle falls naturally into the crook of his arm. “That last time I saw the mech, I screamed at it to send help.” He touches the scar on his lip. “Saomong knocked a couple of teeth loose for that one.” He presses his lips together, shakes his head. “Fuck me, anyway. Fuck them all. Because the truth is that we were abandoned to the enemy to save a black mark showing up on someone’s resume. And what happened to D… it didn’t have to happen. But there’s no taking it back. No unwinding it. Shit. I’m gonna go make coffee.”