Going Dark (3 page)

The controversial platform was towed into place last summer when the ice was in retreat. Its presence is an opening shot in a still-incubating territorial war.

Sigil
is a spar platform. It floats on the ocean’s surface, its superstructure rising above a huge, hollow cylinder that extends seven hundred feet into the deep to keep the
platform stabilized. Underwater cables, attached to the bottom of the cylinder, drop down another three thousand feet to an oceanic ridge, anchoring
Sigil
even against the pressure of the ice—so far, anyway.

Whether there’s oil in that ridge, no one really knows. Initial drilling on the first exploratory well stopped at the onset of winter. But a small crew of technicians and scientists remained aboard—until mid-October when the staff of technicians was reduced by half, electronic communications went on lockdown, and a private security company was hired to protect the facility and the staff, ostensibly from potential piracy and sabotage.

If our intelligence is accurate, the drilling platform now hosts a force of ten experienced mercenaries. Maybe those mercs are the good guys in this coming conflict and maybe we’re the bad guys. Maybe the scientists aboard
Deep Winter Sigil
really are there to study the dynamics of the polar ice pack and the winter habits of passing polar bears.

But I fucking doubt it.

•  •  •  •

We wait while the angel’s tether spins out. I still can’t see the line of spider silk, but I can hear it hum with tension. The hum shifts in tone as the angel initiates a turn across the wind, obeying a standard instruction set that directs it to fly in a quartering pattern that will let it survey a wide swath of terrain. But that’s not going to work in this weather.

Sigil
can generate energy to keep the lights on, but our own power supplies are time-limited. The power packs that supply our dead sisters can hold out for twelve to fourteen hours of use; the angel has a shorter lifespan.

“Kanoa, the angel doesn’t have the power reserves to sustain a standard search pattern against this wind.”

“Roger that. Canceling the algorithm. I’ll try to reinitiate the standard search pattern as you approach the target.”

Until then, we’ll have only a narrow view of the terrain ahead, and we’re lucky to have that. If the wind was blowing in the opposite direction, the angel would be blown behind us, instead of ahead.

Dunahee grunts and staggers a step as the angel hits the end of its tether.

“You doing okay, Dunahee?” I ask over gen-com.

“Roger that, sir.”

It’s a shit assignment to be tethered to the angel, but in this wind the angel would be gone over the horizon and useless to us in minutes if it wasn’t tied down.

My gaze sweeps the squad icons. All remain green. We should be ready. I confirm it with my lieutenant. “Logan, status?”

“Squad is rigged and ready, Captain Shelley.”

That’s it, then.

I turn to the sub. The lieutenant is no longer in sight. The hatch is closed. I hold my right arm straight out from my shoulder and give a thumbs-up. Seconds later, the sub drops away beneath the ice, and we are on our own.

“Logan, I want Dunahee on point so no one gets tangled in the tether.”

“Roger that, Captain.”

“Dunahee, you should see a designated path displayed on your visor.”

“I’ve got it, sir.”

The path is a blue line drawn on the map, but it’s also projected on our heads-up displays, where it looks like a faintly luminous trail laid out on the ice. “Follow it, but use your judgment. The angel will red-alert if it detects the thermal signature of thin ice or open water, but angel
sight is going to be limited, so proceed with caution. If you break through, it’s a fucking long way to the bottom.”

A fully rigged light infantry soldier will sink like a stone. That’s not theory. I’ve seen it happen.

Dunahee moves out. Logan falls in behind and one by one the others follow: Fadul, Escamilla, Tran, Julian, Roman, and then me.

The footplates of our exoskeletons are fitted with tiny triangular teeth that bite the ice, reducing slippage. We go in single file across terrain that Dunahee has already proven safe, separated from one another by a standard interval of thirty meters to reduce casualties in the event of an RPG attack.

Soon, the smooth ice of the freshly frozen channel is behind us. Chaos lies ahead.

Last summer’s fractured ice floes froze together in a tumult of autumn storms, leaving a jagged surface of broken blocks and pinnacles, some rising two meters into the air. It’s challenging terrain, but we make steady progress because Dunahee leads us on a path of least resistance plotted from satellite imagery by the battle AI that coordinates the squad’s activities—and because the powered leg struts of our dead sisters reduce the work load while propelling us over the uneven ice in long, efficient strides.

No snow is actually falling, but visibility is limited anyway because the gale is keeping loose snow aloft, whirling it through the air in a veil that blocks the ambient light used by night vision. The angel sees in night vision, but it’s equipped with a near-infrared camera too, and IR wavelengths easily penetrate snow. So my first look at
Deep Winter Sigil
’s glittering superstructure comes via a crisp, digitally translated black-and-white video feed.

The platform is a stack of three decks perched on a round pedestal surrounded by ice. The first two levels hold
a maze of pipes and cylindrical tanks lit by bright lights and caged by cross-struts. The third deck is uncovered. The north side—the side we’re approaching—supports a tangle of industrial equipment, along with a crane. A drilling gantry rises from the center of the deck. The angel is viewing it from a low angle that doesn’t let me see the two-story complex of offices, labs, and dormitory rooms I know is on the southern side, but I can see lights from those facilities shining on the ice and reflected in the swirling, wind-blown snow. More lights stud the gantry, some of them aimed down at a helicopter pad built on top of the living quarters and extending out over the ice.

To my surprise, there’s a wind tent erected on the pad. Most of the tent is hidden by
Sigil
’s superstructure. Only its rounded peak is visible, but that’s enough to tell me there’s a helicopter in residence.

“Kanoa, what’s a helicopter doing here? Have additional personnel been brought in?”

“Intelligence is looking into it.”

We continue to advance. I’m not ready to suggest that we call off the mission, but the anomaly of the helicopter bothers me even more than Oscar-
1
’s delay. Our intelligence team should not have missed something so obvious. The Red should not have missed it.

Seven minutes later Kanoa comes back with an answer. “We’ve found a flight plan indicating a supply run only. No additional personnel. Given the distance back to civilization, the pilot probably decided to wait out the weather.”

•  •  •  •

We advance without incident until we’re just over two klicks from the target, and then the angel red-alerts. It marks an electromagnetic source point on the map—a potential enemy—one hundred thirty meters south and
east of Dunahee. We all drop into a crouch. This puts a low ridge of ice between me and the source point, eliminating any line-of-sight visibility. So I look through the angel’s eyes—but nothing is out there. Night vision and thermal both fail to reveal an enemy.

“We just crashed a sensor field,” I conclude. “Assume the enemy knows we’re coming.”

Roman’s whispered answer comes through first.
“Fuck.”

“Roger that,” I growl. From this point forward there is an excellent chance the mission will degrade into a slugfest on the ice. If it does, I don’t want the enemy to be able to harvest our position data from a constellation of motion sensors spread across the battlefield.

“Fadul, go after the device. Destroy it. Then sweep west. Look for more.”

“Roger that, Captain.”

She’s a hundred fifty meters ahead of me. I glimpse her as she departs our line, bent low, her weight and the weight of her pack supported by the struts of her dead sister.

“Julian, you sweep farther east. See what you can find.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Dunahee, I need the angel forward.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Stick to the plotted path. I’ll be following behind you. The rest of you spread out. Pick your own paths. Move with speed. We need to close with the target as soon as we can—and for fuck’s sake, watch the map for thin ice.
Go
.
”

Dunahee moves out at almost double his prior pace, scrambling and slipping, his dead sister powering him around the blocks and over the ridges. Behind him, Logan and Tran take off, angling west, while Escamilla moves east after Fadul. Roman stays close to Dunahee.

“Kanoa, you got anything?”

“Negative, Shelley.”

The angel red alerts twice more as we set off two more sensors.

“Closest personnel, go after them!”

The enemy has marked our positions, but the locations of their sensors are revealed to us by their EM transmissions.

Kanoa is still analyzing the angel’s video feed. “No external activity on the platform,” he reports with unflappable calm. “No indication of live enemy on the ice. Satellite surveillance does not indicate gun emplacements—”

“RPG!” I shout over gen-com, reacting to the small, explosive flash of a rocket launch, five hundred meters east of the platform. It’s a useless warning. The rocket moves so fast it finds its target before I get the last syllable out. I drop to my belly while my visor goes briefly black, shielding my eyes from the glare of an aerial fireball. The thunder of the concussion booms through the air and vibrates in the ice.

My visor clears. I scan my squad icons. All green, thank God. No alerts, no injuries . . . no angel sight.

“Angel down,” Kanoa informs us.

Fuck.

I get my feet under me, jam the teeth of my footplates into the ice, and get up again. I think,
map
, and the skullnet picks up the request. The map’s faded icon brightens and expands. Normally it’s updated by data from the angel, but it works on line of sight too—and it shows most of my soldiers hunkered down. Only Fadul and Escamilla are moving.

“Roman!” I need my best shooter active in this game. “Try to get a couple meters of elevation. We’ve got a merc on the ice. I want you to find that fucker and take him out.”

“Roger that.”

The map shows Roman seventy meters to the south. I make sure there is no thin ice between us. Then I sprint to
catch up with her, running in a bounding stride, hammering my footplates down to keep from slipping.

Fadul speaks over gen-com, her tone matter-of-fact. “Grenade.”

Boom!

Despite her warning, I flinch. That puts me into a skid and I almost go down.

“One sensor out of the way, Captain,” Fadul reports.

I see the flash of another RPG launch.
“Fadul—”

I want to tell her to take cover, but it’s already too late. The concussion shakes the ice. I don’t take time to see if she’s been hit. Instead, I take off again, running. The best thing I can do now is to help Roman take down the enemy.

Roman, at least, is still alive. I see her ahead of me, using the arm hooks of her dead sister to try to scramble up an angled block of ice that’s leaning two meters into the air. “Behind you,” I warn her.

“I’m losing my grip. I’m going to slide backward!”

“No you’re not.” I crouch under her footplates and boost her up, guiding her feet to rest on my shoulder struts. “Steady?”

“It’ll do.”

Belly down on the jagged surface of the block, she lines up her weapon. I tap into her visor’s display to see what she sees.

Kanoa is there ahead of me. “Mark,” he says, as a targeting circle appears in her field of view. The AI labels it as seven hundred meters out. Roman has the wind behind her. She lines up, takes three quick shots. All three hit a ridge of ice no more than a foot high. Something moves behind that ridge: a tiny figure wearing white camo, rigged in a dead sister, and equipped with night vision goggles. It jerks into sight and then falls back down.

“Target down,” Roman whispers.

“Confirmed,” Kanoa says.

Holding my breath, I scan my squad icons, trying to see who got hit by the RPG—but everything is green. “Confirm. No casualties?”

After a second, Kanoa echoes, “No casualties.”

I step out of the way to let Roman slide down. An RPG is damned intimidating ordnance, but it has lousy accuracy at a distance.

Dunahee is outraged all the same. “Fucker was shooting at me! Blew a black hole in the ice.”

“Fucker was already out on the ice before we got here,” I point out, “patrolling with an RPG launcher as a sidearm. Whatever they’re protecting in there, they are serious. So we move in and we move fast.
Go!
”

Hit hard before the enemy can fully prepare: That’s still our best option. So I run, closing the distance between me and the bright, cheery lights of
Deep Winter Sigil
. Partway to those lights is a massive block of ice looking like the remnant of an iceberg, with a sheer face rising four meters above the surrounding floe. I run toward it, using it for cover. We cannot afford to get bogged down in an extended firefight. Here, on our own, in the dark of the polar night, we have no means to recharge our dead sisters once their power packs run down. We have to withdraw before that happens, or we have to take control of the platform and tap into
Sigil
’s power grid. Otherwise, we lose.

•  •  •  •

As I run, I ask myself:
What would I do if I were in command of the mercenaries aboard
Deep Winter Sigil
?

An oil-drilling platform is an amazing piece of technology, but it is not a fortress. It’s not designed to withstand an assault team armed with grenades and automatic weapons. If I commanded the defense, I would not risk my clients by hunkering down inside. I would not stage a battle that was
certain to destroy what I’d been hired to protect. Instead, I would deploy my soldiers from the south side of the platform, out of sight of the enemy. I would divide them in two groups, sending one east and one west, instructing them to use the jagged ice as cover while they get into position to trap their assailants in crossfire.