Going Dark (7 page)

He uses GPS to position us in the path of our quarry.

The swirling snow thins, revealing an expanse of ice as smooth as a frozen pond, with no cover in any direction. “Standard interval,” I whisper, gesturing to Roman and Tran to take up positions on either side of me. They spread out, so that we stand thirty meters apart.

The wind slows. Night vision shows me a handful of stars overhead. I brace my feet, bring my HITR to my shoulder, and will myself to see past the lingering scatter of wind-driven snow.

“There,” Roman whispers. “Seventy meters.”

I see them: three soldiers rigged in dead sisters and night vision goggles. The one in front carries an RPG launcher; the other two are assisting the civilian, half-carrying Dr. Parris as they support her by her arms.

“Drop your weapons!” I bellow, not really expecting them to.

And they don’t. They don’t even take time to process my request. I might as well have yelled
Game on!

My tactical AI puts up a target. I cover it and fire a three-round burst, dropping the merc with the RPG launcher as he heaves it to his shoulder. There’s a spray of panicked gunfire from one of the other mercs—shots fired without taking the time to aim. Tran hits him twice. Blood flies on the second shot, proving that at least one bullet got past armor, into flesh.

Two of three are down—but Roman hasn’t taken a shot yet.

She is standing motionless, the wind at her back and her HITR steady, braced by her arm strut as she targets the last mercenary. He has his arm around the throat of the civilian; he’s holding a pistol pressed to her head.

Dr. Parris is bundled up in a parka with a fur-lined hood and a thermal mask that hides her face. She’s a tall woman, which makes her a good human shield. All I can see of the merc is his arm and the left side of his hooded head.

“You’ll want her alive!” he shouts.

My overlay gets a voice ID, tags him as Vincent Glover.

I don’t argue with him because he’s right. I do want Parris alive. I have questions I want to ask her.

I’d like to take him alive too, but I think the odds are against it.

Quietly, I tell Roman, “Take him.”

Bam!

One shot. The bullet buzzes in past the civilian’s ear, cracks Glover’s goggles, and drills him in the left eye.

•  •  •  •

Dr. Parris is in bad shape. She’s sitting on the ice, shaking, exhausted, incoherent. Whether she’s suffering from psychological shock or hypothermia, I don’t know, but we need to get her out of the weather—and we’re still six kilometers from Tuvalu Station.

I consider my options, and then I pop the cinches on my dead sister. “Escamilla, you’ve run slaved rigs before, right?”

“Not something I want to remember, Shelley.”

“Sorry. I need you to do it again.”

Exoskeletons are expensive. When soldiers die wearing them, the army wants them back. It’s a sergeant’s responsibility to recover both the body and the dead sister—which is why it’s possible to slave one dead sister to another, so it can be walked off the battlefield even if the soldier strapped into it is dead.

“You’re going to strap the civilian into your rig?” Tran asks.

“Yes.” Parris is tall, at least six-one. Close enough to my height. I’d rather put her into Glover’s rig, but we don’t have the control codes for his equipment.

I crouch beside Parris. She’s not using night vision, but the clouds have opened up, admitting an auroral light that shimmers across the ice—enough for her to see me, if only as a silhouette. She squints at me past frost-covered lashes as I explain to her what we’re going to do. She seems to understand; at any rate, she cooperates while Escamilla helps me strap her to the rig.

Roman stands watch while we handle Parris. Logan
and Tran search the bodies. They empty pockets and packs, strip off hoods and masks, and then lay each soldier out on the ice and take portrait shots so Kanoa can use facial recognition to identify them. We need to know who the enemy is.

Parris waits quietly, strapped into my exoskeleton, but as she begins to recover a little strength, she gets anxious. “Who are you people?” she asks, her voice hoarse, wind-burned. And when no one answers, her tone ratchets up: “Vince killed everyone! You know that, don’t you?”

“We know it.” I finish strapping into Glover’s rig. It feels small and awkward, but a few experimental steps convince me I can make it work. I walk over to Parris. “What were you working on in your lab, Dr. Parris?”

“Who are you?” she asks again. “Are you Canadian special forces?”

I don’t answer. I just watch her through the anonymous black screen of my visor. Without night vision, I must appear to her as a looming shadow with mechanical edges; nothing to separate me from a walking machine. I intend it to rattle her, and it does. The pace of her breathing picks up. “You’re going to kill me, aren’t you?”

“No.”

“Because you think I’m part of it.”

“Are you?”

“No! Vince stole my work. He had it with him. The microbial cultures were in a black sample case.” She tries to move, to turn, but the exoskeleton holds her in place. “I need to recover it.”

“Lieutenant?” I ask.

“Got it, Captain.”

Logan comes over, carrying a frost-covered, molded-plastic case. I shine an LED light on it so Parris can see. “This it?”

“Yes.”

“How deadly is it?”

She’s cold, scared, exhausted, sinking into hypothermia. Her earlier confusion returns. “Deadly? I don’t understand. What are you asking?”

I rephrase my question. “How fast does it spread? How many will die?”

I’m watching her eyes past the frost that clings to her lashes; they widen as understanding kicks in. “You think it’s a bioweapon.
Oh my God!
Is that why you came? You thought I was running a biowarfare lab?”

“What else would you be doing behind all that security?”

“Bioprospecting.”

She says it like it’s the most obvious thing in the world.

“You want to explain what that means?”

She’s strapped into my dead sister so she can’t really gesture, but she moves her fingers to indicate the ice below our feet. “That world down there, it’s barely explored. The microorganisms on the seafloor—most can’t be cultured in a lab. So we analyze them
in situ
. In place. It’s a robotic system. Microlabs. Little automated pods with nutrient chips. We grow the bacteria, test it, sequence the DNA.”

“All on the seafloor?”

“Yes, but—”

I spotlight the case. “Then what the fuck’s in there?”

I swear I see guilt in her eyes. “Well, you see, once we have the DNA sequences, we can synthesize genes. We do that in the lab. And those synthetic genes get implanted into lab-stable microbe strains. But the legal requirements for . . . working with synthetic organisms . . .”

Yeah, now I understand. The only thing they brought up from the seafloor was data. She could have been doing the lab work in Toronto or Vancouver or anywhere else. But there was an advantage to doing it aboard
Sigil
. “You’ve
been sidestepping the rules. You wanted to do the work out here where the jurisdiction is open to question.”

“You have to understand. We’re in competition with the Chinese, the Russians. If we waited to get permits—”

“You found something worth protecting.”

She nods; her bloodless lips crack as she presses them together. “We’ve been running simulations. We may have an effective treatment for several degenerative brain diseases.”

“And that’s worth a lot of money?”

“Potential billions. Enough to tempt pirates. The company sent in extra security while we go through the permit process.” Her voice goes soft. “Vince knew what we had. We didn’t tell him, but he knew. He wanted to sell the synthetic strain. He said he had a buyer.”

ETM 7-1 does not exist to referee shares in dragon treasure. “I need you to be straight with me, Dr. Parris. Do the contents of that case have biowarfare applications?”

“
No.
It has nothing to do with biowarfare. I would never work in a field like that. War is immoral. Killing people is immoral. I can’t believe what Vince did.”

“Goddamn it, Kanoa, is she telling the truth?”

My emotional analysis program, FaceValue, refuses to pass judgment because her face is masked, but Kanoa has more resources. “Voice and pupil analysis indicate yes.”

And that means this mission has been a waste of time and lives. All those slaughtered at
Sigil
are dead because we moved in—our presence triggered this disaster—and the only thing that was ever at stake was money.

I hate fucking look-and-see missions.

“Why are you still alive?” I ask her.

“Because it was my project! Vince thought I might be useful. That’s the only reason.”

“It parses as truth,” Kanoa says.

I have another question. “Did he try to call his contact? Ask for support?”

She nods. “After they had to land the helicopter, he made a call.”

“And what happened?”

“They were angry. From the things he said, I think they were Chinese. And then they wouldn’t talk to him. And we started walking.”

I take the case from Logan and step away. “Kanoa, you picking up anything on the military networks?”

“Negative. Nothing so far.”

“So what do you think?” I ask him.

“I think Glover’s employer didn’t want to get caught with a bloody hand in the cookie jar, so they cut him loose.”

“Expecting him to die?”

“Yes.”

Whatever it is we’ve been looking for these past months, this wasn’t it.

I stash the case in my pack. Palehorse Keep has been a disaster, and it’s not over yet. I need to get Parris to shelter, and I need to get my squad safely home.

“What’s the status of Oscar-
1
?” I ask.

“Unknown. We’ve lost track of him. The base commander was questioning his credentials. It’s possible he’s been arrested.”

If that’s true, we are in a really bad position.

Every mission is subject to chance, but if the Red is behind us, mission support usually goes like clockwork. The Red makes sure of it, issuing orders, manipulating schedules, providing access, whatever it takes to let us move and move quietly to where we need to be—but not this time. “It’s like the Red pulled out of this mission. The action didn’t play out as expected, and we got dumped.”

“Something else may be going on,” he concedes.

Just a few hours ago, I was chewing out Tran for assuming we could rely on the Red—but that is exactly what we’ve been doing on this mission. We were relying on the Red to get Oscar-
1
past the military checkpoint on Ellesmere, without preparing any alternate means of refueling his aircraft.

Kanoa tries to reassure me. “There’s no evidence of an immediate threat.”

“Matter of time.”

“Roger that. Get to Tuvalu Station and we’ll have more options.”

•  •  •  •

I brief the squad, and then we move out. I’m exhausted; we all are. We ran a marathon today, but it’s not just the distance that weighs on us. The cold, the wind, the adrenaline—the doubt—each takes a toll. We push on anyway.

At least the ice is flat. The sky remains clear. Even the wind eases a little. Six kilometers isn’t far. That’s what I tell myself. But it’s far enough that I have time to envision new and dire worries.

“Kanoa.”

“Here.”

“Are we looking at flat ice like this all the way to Tuvalu Station?”

“Affirmative.”

“I don’t like it. We’ve got no cover. If we get surprised by a nest of mercenaries—”

“Negative. This is not
Sigil
. It’s not a petroleum company. There is no evidence of private security.”

“Why is it set up so close to
Sigil
? That’s suspicious, don’t you think?”

“No, it’s deliberate. There’s a mutual-support agreement on file that says in case of emergency, they help each other
out. Tuvalu is staffed only by a few scientists and pioneer types. Nothing to worry about.”

“Scientists aren’t harmless,” I point out. “They invented nukes, guns, bombs, toxins—”

“Your cerebral wiring.”

“Exactly. You can’t trust them.”

“I think we need to adjust your settings.”

Kanoa says it to shut me up and it works. But as I lope behind the squad, my footplates crunching against the ice, I wonder about it. “Kanoa.”

“Here.”

“Does that happen? Do you sit down with medical, assess the baseline, adjust it . . . change who we are?”

“You don’t have enough on your mind? Tie your shit down, Shelley. You’re on the easy leg of this mission. I called ahead to Tuvalu, let them know you’re coming.”

“You fucking
called
them? What did you tell them?”

“The truth.
Sigil
was attacked, the helicopter shot down, Dr. Parris is the sole survivor.”

“Are we the good guys or the bad guys in this story?”

“There are no good guys, but they don’t know that yet. They expect to treat Dr. Parris for hypothermia, and fly all of you out as soon as her condition improves.”

“So we leave her there and take the helicopter?”

“Roger that. I want you back at
Sigil
. There won’t be room on that helicopter for everyone in the squad, but you can at least fly the wounded out.”

•  •  •  •

We’ve been calling Tuvalu a research station, but that term implies a permanence and an importance that Tuvalu lacks.

Deep Winter Sigil
was a billion-dollar facility built to last decades and designed to be functional whether afloat in the open ocean or locked up in ice. But as we approach
Tuvalu, it becomes clear that nothing about it is permanent. The buildings I thought I saw in the satellite image are really just tents. Starlight falls in slick reflections against the metallic sheen of their fabric, making them shine in night vision. Two are shaped like Quonset huts. The third is an expansive yurt-like structure with a round footprint. Short tunnels link them together. None of the tents have windows or show any sign of artificial light leaking out. I see no movement.