The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (21 page)

Except there was nowhere for her to go, no escape, no refuge, no way home.

No way to survive for long.

Reid found it easy to imagine Sakai as suicidal, but why hadn’t Guidance known or even suspected?

Because Sakai had only worn the skullcap on patrol
.

Until tonight, Sakai had been okay on patrol.

Some people were like that. They were fine so long as they were working, fulfilling whatever regimented role life had handed them, but leave them on their own and they could disappear down rabbit holes.

What twisted passage had Sakai wandered down?

Reid caught her breath, hit by a new worry: what if Sakai hadn’t run away?

The night was warm and Reid’s uniform had shed the rain so she was barely damp, but she shuddered anyway as the fine hairs on the back of her neck stood up. She looked over her shoulder, scanning the surrounding terrain, searching for motion in the brush or beneath the trees.

Tyrant noticed. “You see something?”

The drone had been sent to search from Sakai’s last known position. “Tyrant, bring the angel back. Make sure Sakai isn’t here, hunting us.”

“Roger that.” A few seconds later: “You really think she’s turned on you?”

“I don’t know. I just want to make sure.” She switched to gen-com. “Everyone, stay low. Keep alert.”

They all dropped into a crouch.

“Somebody out there?” Juarez wanted to know.

“We’ll let the angel answer that.”

The drone searched, but it picked up no sign of Sakai anywhere nearby. So Reid sent it south, toward the fort, but Sakai wasn’t there either.

“Let her go,” Faraci muttered. “Who gives a shit? She didn’t do anything for Wicks when he went down.”

“We don’t abandon our own, Faraci,” Reid snapped. “Remember that, next time you get in a tight spot.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“This is now a search and rescue, and speed is critical.” Alone, without her helmet, it was just a question of time and distance, not chance, until Sakai was found by some insurgent group. Maybe that was her goal, to get far enough away that there could be no rescue, no first aid, no helicopter evacuation while her heart was still beating.

Only four remained in the squad—Reid, Juarez, Faraci, Phan—but they still assumed their standard two-hundred meter interval, sweeping the terrain until they converged again on Sakai’s last known position. Reid got there first and found Sakai’s skullcap hanging from a branch. It felt like a message meant just for her. She shoved the skullcap into a pocket. Phan recovered Sakai’s helmet from a thicket, finding it upside down and half-full of rain. Juarez located her pack. But her MCL1a didn’t turn up. Neither did her stock of grenades, or her dead sister.

“We have two possibilities,” Reid told the squad. “She’s been taken prisoner, in which case we are obligated to effect a rescue and to recover her equipment. Or she’s gone rogue. If so, we must assume she is mentally unstable. Without her helmet she doesn’t have night vision, but she’ll be able to see well enough by moonlight to be dangerous. Use extreme caution.”

The rain had washed away any tracks that might have indicated the direction Sakai had taken, but it seemed logical to Reid that she would have headed west to northwest. “Either direction would allow her to avoid the angel’s eyes while it was monitoring the firefight, but west means following tonight’s patrol route and I don’t think that’s what she had in mind.”

“Northwest then,” Juarez said in disgust.

Reid nodded. “She’s heading for the border.”

They set off, moving fast on a no-choice mission. They had to find Sakai. Personnel did not go missing anymore. And they had to get the dead sister and the MCL1a back. That equipment could not be allowed to enter the black market. It had to be recovered, even if they took heavy casualties in the process.

“Tyrant.”

“Here.”

“Something happened when Sakai was on leave.”

“No incident in her record.”

“Go beyond the record! Something else happened just a few days ago. That’s when she stopped wearing her skullcap. Something was going on inside her head. Something she didn’t want the skullcap to fix.”

“Stand by.”

A figure of speech. Reid loped north, while her AI analyzed the feeds from her helmet cams. Every few minutes it highlighted a potential hazard: a shining thread that could have been a tripwire but turned out to be a spiderweb; a metallic sheen that might have been a cheap sensor but was only a foil wrapper, blown in from God knows where; an area of disturbed ground washed by the rain where there might be a buried IED. Reid skirted it, though she suspected it was just a resting place for cattle.

Tyrant spoke again, “Intelligence took a look at her email. She split with her boyfriend a few days ago, told him she wasn’t coming back and not to worry about money, that she’d take care of him.”

“Oh
fuck
,” Reid said as enlightenment hit. “This is about her life insurance.”

“It’s about more than that. The boyfriend has a six-year-old kid. Sakai got crazy on leave, had a meltdown, slammed the kid against a wall—”

Reid didn’t want to hear anymore. “That’s bullshit. Sakai passed her psych quals. She’s not like that.
None
of us are like that.”

“Intelligence believes the boyfriend’s story. He’s been out of work a long time. Sakai’s been sending him money. He didn’t report the incident because he can’t afford to break up with her. So he kept telling her everything was okay.”

Sakai was not the kind of person who could do something like that and ever imagine it was okay; Reid didn’t have to like her to know that. The life insurance was Sakai’s apology, a way to make amends and to ensure she never harmed the child again.

A few minutes later Tyrant announced, “The angel has found her.” He marked the position on Reid’s map. Three kilometers east-northeast. Reid switched to gen-com. “Hold up.”

A new window opened in her display, a feed from the angel that showed Sakai rigged in her dead sister, with her MCL1a in hand. Sakai surely presented a danger, yet without her helmet and her skullcap she looked fragile, her bare scalp like a gray eggshell in the sideways light of the westering moon.

“You got her, LT?” Juarez asked.

Reid sent him the feed and the location.

The map updated.

“
Shit
,” Juarez breathed. “She’s not alone.”

Scanning the ground with its infrared camera, the angel had found three figures less than a hundred-thirty meters from Sakai—a distance rapidly closing as she advanced.

Half-hidden beneath the spreading branches of a thorn tree, they appeared at first as flashes and chips of bright heat. Then they emerged draped in infrared-blocking fabric that did not hide them completely but gave them the vagueness of ghosts as they passed through tall grass, moving in a line toward Sakai. The angel identified them from profiles compiled during the firefight: they were the three insurgents who had escaped alive.

They probably couldn’t see Sakai past the vegetation, but they would be able to hear her. She was using her dead sister to trot at a careless pace, rustling grass and snapping twigs, with no way to know what lay in wait for her. They would gun her down before she knew anyone was there.

And wasn’t that what she’d gone looking for?

Reid wondered if she’d fight back; wanted her to; resolved to force her to, if she could. Reid would not let death take Sakai by surprise. She would make her face it, and facing it, maybe Sakai would choose life instead.

Fuck the insurance.

Speaking over gen-com, Reid said, “Faraci, you’ve only used one grenade. Fire another, maximum range. In Sakai’s direction.”

“LT?” Faraci sounded perplexed. “Sakai’s way out of range.”

“Shit, Faraci, I don’t want you to kill her. I just want you to put her on alert.
Now
, if that’s all right with you.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

The grenade shot above the tree tops, hurtling northeast, to burst above the brush. The
boom
rolled past while through the angel’s eyes, Reid watched Sakai drop flat, her training taking over despite the guilt and despair that had sent her north.

The insurgents took cover inside a thicket, no doubt trying to guess what the distant explosion meant for them. Caution should have made them retreat, but they wanted Sakai’s weapon and dead sister.

“Let’s go!” Reid barked. “Now, while they’re confused. Fast as we fucking can.
Go, go, go!
”

Tyrant posted a path. Reid jumped on it, running flat out. The joints of her dead sister multiplied the power of every stride. She crunched through grass, slid sideways in mud, bounded over deadfalls and, carrying her tactical rifle one-handed, she used the struts on her other arm as a hammer to batter aside branches.

“Sakai’s taken cover in the brush,” Tyrant said.

It was hard to look death in the face.

Tyrant spoke again. “The insurgents are moving. They’re closing on Sakai’s position.”

“Good.”

Sakai would see them, she would know what death looked like, and she would fight back. She had to.

With two kilometers behind her, Reid heard the slow
tap, tap, tap
of small arms fire. “Tyrant?”

“They’re trying to flush her from cover.”

Reid ducked under a tree and then battered her way along a cattle trail between two thickets. The terrain was so monotonous she felt like she was getting nowhere.

A larger-caliber weapon spoke. Reid well knew the sound of an MCL1a.

“She got one,” Tyrant reported. “Damn good shot by moonlight alone.”

Half a kilometer to go.

“The survivors are retreating.”

Too soon.

Reid heard the worried bleat of a goat just ahead of her, the sound so unexpected she almost threw herself down and started shooting.

The goats were just as frightened. They must have been sleeping in a thicket. Startled at her approach, they fled straight toward Sakai.

“Reid, get down!” Tyrant shouted. “Get down! She’s got her weapon turned on you!”

Never before had Reid heard that level of emotion in Tyrant’s voice. It scared her but she kept running, because the goats were a distraction that she could use. They were cover. Sakai wouldn’t hear her coming past the noise of their stampede.

The goat herd funneled together as they raced between two tall thickets. Then they spilled into a grove of seven or eight trees with only bare ground beneath them. Branches filtered the moonlight into shards and polygons that painted the mud and flashed over the hides of the fleeing animals.

Hidden in shadow, unseen by the frantic goats but clear to Reid in night vision, was Sakai. Reid saw her in profile, crouched and trembling with her back to a tree trunk, weapon held close to her chest, shoulders heaving, her hairless head tipped back, and amazement on her exhausted face as she watched the goats dart past.

With no night vision to aid her, she didn’t see Reid.

Briefly, Reid considered a negotiation, verbal persuasion, but she didn’t want to have a conversation while Sakai held onto her MCL1a and her stock of grenades.

So Reid tackled her. Shoulder to shoulder: their arm struts clanged as they both went down. Reid got a hand on Sakai’s rifle, got it loose, heaved it away—but that was only step one in disarming her. She still had a full complement of grenades in her vest, and her dead sister was a lethal weapon in hand-to-hand combat—though Reid had no intention of letting it come to that.

Scrambling free, she came up on her knees in a patch of fractured moonlight, her MCL1a braced at her shoulder. “
Don’t move!
”

Sakai wasn’t there anymore. She wasn’t wearing her pack, and without it she was more agile than Reid expected. She had rolled away, rolled onto her feet. She stood looking down at Reid with a shocked expression.

What did she see with her unaided eyes? Gray bones and the negative space of Reid’s black visor? Maybe nothing more than that, blind in the night.

No.

This close, there would be a glimmer of light from the MCL1a’s targeting mechanism.

Reid corrected her aim. “Very slowly,” she said, “crouch, and release the cinches on your dead sister, starting at the ankles.”

Sakai frowned. She turned her head, perusing the shadows, wondering maybe if they were alone. “Come on, LT,” she said in a low voice as she looked back at Reid. “Do it now. No one’s watching.”

“Someone’s always watching. You know that. I’m not your ticket out.”

The goats had fled. The night had gone quiet. Reid had no idea where the insurgents were, but she trusted Tyrant to warn her if it looked like they would interfere.

“Do you have it with you?” Sakai asked. “My skullcap?”

“Do you want it?”

“No!
No.
I don’t want it.” As if trying to convince herself. “I don’t want to die with that thing on my head.”

“You mean that when you wear it, you don’t want to die at all . . . right?”

Sakai shook her head. “You know what I think? I think we all start off as light and shadow, but the light seeps away when we wear the skullcap. It moves out of us and into the wires, so when we take it off, there’s only darkness left in our heads.” Titanium struts gleamed in night vision as she brought her gloved hand up to tap the center of her forehead. “Punch it, LT. Or I’m going to take you out.”

Reid waited, and when Sakai sprang she squeezed the trigger. The round caught Sakai in the shoulder, pancaking in her armor. It didn’t penetrate, but the impact spun her around so that she landed face down, a rag doll mounted on a metal rack.

Juarez stepped out of the shadows with Phan behind him.

“Get her unstrapped,” Reid growled.

Sakai had tried to turn her into an executioner. Now, in the aftermath, fury kicked in.

Maybe I should have complied.

But Reid’s skullcap responded, modulating her outrage, defusing her brittle frustration, bringing her back to a logical center. Because that’s what it did, she decided. It didn’t control what she thought or who she was. It didn’t make her a different person. It kept her tied to who she really was. It was a shield against anger and guilt; against the emotional scar tissue that could consume a mind.