Going Dark (43 page)

“Go, Escamilla. Fadul, move up.”

Escamilla takes a few seconds to reload. Then he uses his footplate to sweep away shards of glass along the windowsill. Fadul moves in as he climbs through. Together we keep watch over the street as Escamilla drops to the pavement below. No one shoots at him, but in the distance I hear a shout of excitement, of discovery. Someone has seen us. Reported our position. Probably posted a photo on the locally preferred social media.

“Go, Fadul.”

She scrambles outside, dropping to the ground just as Jaynie speaks over gen-com. “I’m triggering the explosives.”

The concussion follows in less than a second, a low swift
boom!
The floor of the old building shudders more than I expect. Hairline cracks dart up the plaster walls. The woman in the bedroom cries out in terror; the kids wail. But the building stands. It was a measured blast, enough to destroy the lab equipment, not the building itself.

By this time, Roman is with me at the window and Tran is coming into the apartment. Outside, two gunshots echo between the buildings. Escamilla is across the street; Fadul is below me. Neither cries out, swears, goes down. We’re okay. Then more shots. I think they’re coming from the roof above us. Escamilla confirms it when he turns, aims his HITR high, and shoots two short bursts. Someone screams.

“Roman, go.”

“Enemy knows your position,” Kanoa warns as I gesture for Tran to follow Roman out the window. Flynn shows up, so I send her too. “Militia of twenty-two about to round the corner at the east end of the block.”

“Cover the east end of the street!” I shout.

I lean out the window to get a line of fire.

It’s not a militia that charges around the corner; it’s a mob. There is no discipline, no organization to their attack. They are all men, dressed in street clothes, clutching assault rifles which go off almost on their own, spewing bullets in random directions. The leaders gesture at those behind them to seek cover, but it’s too late for that. We hit them with a fusillade of gunfire.

On some higher, abstract level, I know these people should not be our enemies. Every kill we make tonight is a wasted life, gone for nothing—but nuance doesn’t work in the middle of a firefight. My only goal now is to get my squad out alive, and we’ll do what we have to do to achieve that.

At least three of the civilian militia fall. The rest pull back, or try to, but they run into their friends who are still coming in from behind. More go down. Some of them panic, but others stand their ground and return fire. I think Flynn is hit. She staggers and then dives for the cover of a chunk of concrete rubble. Tran and Roman keep shooting in a calm, steady rhythm, picking off the enemy or driving them behind cover.

“Coming behind you, Captain!” Dunahee calls.

I clear the window, gesturing with the muzzle of my HITR. “Climb out.” I glance at Flynn’s icon. It’s shifted to yellow.

“Go, Shelley!” Jaynie says as she charges into the room. “Follow Dunahee.”

“Where’s Logan?”

He pops in through the apartment door. “Right here.
Go
.”

Dunahee is already out, so I squeeze through the window. Drop to the ground. My dead sister absorbs the shock. I turn to rejoin the fray—but the defenders have withdrawn behind the building. The battle AI gives me a targeting circle anyway, placing it over an upper-story window a block away. A live target: I see a muzzle flash as I fire. And then Jaynie and Logan drop down to the street, and we are ready to go.

“Logan, take point!” Jaynie barks.

Any hope of a quiet withdrawal ended in the first two minutes of this mission. The goal now is to get to a safe house, ditch our gear, and hope that Papa can evacuate us as anonymous civilians.

A projected path pops up in my visor. Logan moves out on it at a fast run, passing close to one of the burning cars. Escamilla follows a few steps behind him. The rest of us advance in teams, covering each other. Jaynie is paired with Fadul. Roman and Dunahee are a few meters behind. I go last, teamed up with Tran and Flynn. Bullets chase us. Not many, but they pass way too close. I hear them whizzing past my head, bouncing off concrete walls.

It’s a long block. The path directs us to turn right at the end of it, onto a wide cross street. I’m happy to do it since it will get us out of the line of fire. But as Logan reaches the corner, the path changes directions, diving straight ahead.

“Barricades are going up,” Kanoa says. “We’ve got armed defenders organizing on all sides.”

Escamilla stops at the corner, covering Logan as he charges across the exposed street. Shooters are active in multistory apartments on both sides, but none seem expert. Jaynie and Fadul take over, punching rounds through
windows where activity is detected. There’s no way to know what’s behind those windows; all we can do is shoot when the battle AI designates a target.

Escamilla crosses the street, followed by Roman and Dunahee. Then Jaynie and Fadul move.

The intersection is hot, and we’ve still got pressure behind us. As I send my team across I’m expecting the neighborhood militia to press their attack, but instead there’s a pause in the shooting. It’s like my audio has been suppressed. It’s weird enough that I look back—to see the squad dog standing guard in the ruined street. It’s positioned in the concrete rubble so it’s not fully exposed, but it’s visible to the militia at the east end of the block. It’s not shooting—not yet—and neither are they.

I think it’s spooked them. It’s covering our retreat by intimidation alone—but that can’t last. In a minute, maybe less, someone will bring an RPG to remove the threat.

We need to be long gone by then.

“Go, Shelley!” Jaynie says.

I take off after the squad, bounding across the intersection. For the scant seconds I’m in the open I glance up and down the street. In both directions, I glimpse crowds. They’re a couple hundred meters away, gathered around burning barricades that are sending clouds of black smoke boiling into the night sky. I get past the intersection, but it doesn’t look much better up ahead. Seventy meters away another barricade is going up, old cars being pushed into the street. Defensive fire starts buzzing through the air.

“Twenty-five meters ahead,” Kanoa says. “Cut left through the alley. You’ll have to go over the fence, but it’ll get you to the next block.”

The projected path shows the way.

This is a new neighborhood, composed of four-story housing projects, four buildings to a block, each identical
to its neighbors. The blocks are divided by wide streets. Narrow alleys run between the buildings.

Logan moves out first, with the squad following at tight intervals. We are camouflaged so that to an unenhanced eye, we must appear as shadows in motion, the suggestion of a presence passing through the solid shadows cast by walls and the buildings along the streets. But that’s enough to make us targets. Rounds zip through the air, but most pass over our heads or skip along the apartment walls.

Logan turns, darting into the designated alley. Escamilla follows. Dunahee is next, but he stumbles. Roman catches his arm, steadies him. They move together around the corner. Jaynie and Fadul follow, then Flynn and Tran.

I go last. That lets me keep an eye on every soldier in the squad, but I don’t linger. The rate of fire is picking up. As I cut around the corner a bullet hits the masonry, sending a spray of shrapnel against my visor. Another cracks into the back of my helmet, but it’s almost spent and doesn’t rattle me too badly.

The alley we’re in is barely two meters wide, with a chain-link fence at the back dividing it from the other buildings on the block. Logan is already over the fence. Escamilla jumps down beside him. They continue to the opposite end of the alley while the rest of us climb over.

“Straight through,” Kanoa says. “Across the street and into the next alley. Don’t slow down.” He can see all the streets, the lanes, the alleys, the rooftops. That lets him count down the time we have to cross the street before the pursuing militia catches up. He can even see inside some of the buildings using the seekers that follow us through the street.

“Target,” he tells me. “Forty degrees.”

Too bad the neighborhood has its own surveillance network.

I look up, see the targeting circle, cover it, and squeeze off a burst—but I’m not fast enough. A grenade has already been lobbed. It goes off in the street with a concussion that sends Flynn diving for the next alley.

“Go!”
Kanoa says, and Tran and I sprint to catch up.

The projected path takes us through the next alley, across the next street. We take intermittent fire. In the brief periods of silence between the shooting, my audio pickups feed me fragments of conversation in Arabic, grabbed from the apartments overhead. The fragments are automatically translated and echoed in English, but they don’t make any sense to me. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that this neighborhood is full of people. I don’t have to see them to know they’re looking for us, talking about us, working together to track us, using phones and farsights to report our position—to who? To the L-AI that watches over this district?

Probably not. Nashira is a security AI, trained to manipulate data. That’s how it hid the existence of the lab. It’s not a battle AI.

In the buildings ahead of us, lights go on as residents wake to the noise of shooting—and go off again when they get word of what’s going on.

“Kanoa,” I whisper, “do they have a drone? Can I take it out?”

“They’re using seekers.”

Just like us.

I can’t shoot down a flock of seekers. They’re small and fly so low that any shot I take risks injuring noncombatants, and seekers are so cheap that backups are probably being held on standby, ready to launch if the first wave gets taken down.

It’s not going to be easy to shake our pursuers and just slip away.

“The only way we’re going to get out of here,” I whisper, relying on my audio system to boost the volume to a perceptible range, “is to convince the local militia it’s not worth their lives to pursue us.”

“Roger that,” Kanoa says, his voice an ominous dead calm.

•  •  •  •

We reload, and then we double back through the maze of alleys as Kanoa tries to get us to the nearest safe house. From all the time spent in simulation, I know we’re just a few blocks away from it, but between the barricades, the pursuing militia, and defensive fire directed at us from the neighborhood apartments, we haven’t been able to get close. And I’ve got three wounded soldiers, their icons showing yellow.

I call a time-out.

“Jaynie! We need to stop and treat.”

It’s a dangerous choice. We don’t want to get trapped. But Dunahee is bleeding from a thigh wound. Roman’s been shot in the hand and has lost a little finger. Flynn is cut up from shrapnel.

Jaynie agrees with me. So we break into a cinderblock store and hunker down. Outside, sirens are wailing, and I hear a distant rumbling of approaching helicopters. There’s shooting on at least three fronts. “What the hell is going on out there, Kanoa? All this shooting can’t be directed at us.”

“Peripheral fighting’s erupted.”

“Ah,
fuck
.”

“The local militias have been slugging it out for years.”

“We’ve started
another
war.”

“We did what we had to do.”

I think August-19 chose this site for their facility not
just because Nashira is here, but also because they knew that any provocation in this neighborhood would meet sudden and severe retaliation. It’s a cold-blooded but effective strategy, to hide behind a hair-trigger civilian militia. No need to pay for an army and the facility stays secret, hidden in plain sight. I don’t think our intelligence team understood that when they sent us in here.

A flurry of shots whizzes in. “Do not return fire,” Jaynie orders in a stern undertone. “Let them wonder if we’re really here.”

•  •  •  •

It takes just a few minutes to get Flynn and Roman glued up and stable. Dunahee worries me more. The wound in his thigh isn’t life-threatening, but he’s got a couple of serious dents in his helmet. “You cross-eyed?” I ask him.

“Maybe.”

If he’s got a concussion, he could go down without warning. “Roman, I want you to stick close to Dunahee.”

“Yes, sir.”

We redistribute the remaining ammo. We’re getting ready to go when Kanoa checks in with me again. “Mission update.”

Our goal has changed. We’re not trying to reach the safe house anymore. Out beyond this maze of housing projects is an oil storage field. Behind the tanks is a wide-open asphalt tarmac, laid out for future expansion. “Get there,” Kanoa says. “You’ll get picked up.”

“How? By who?”

He hesitates. “A local security company. They’ll be bringing in Z transports.”

Chinese helicopters, flown by mercenaries. The US Navy is just off the coast with a fleet of gunships, but to preserve the anonymity of this operation, we’re going to be
handed over to an outfit that works for the highest bidder. Hoo-yah.

“I hope they don’t get a better offer before they get us out of here.”

“I hope they haven’t gotten a better offer already.”

That shuts me up. For Kanoa to say something like that during an active operation—he’s got to be worried.

“Eyes open,” he adds.

“Roger that.”

•  •  •  •

Jaynie gets the news from her own handler. That would be Delphi—a thought that stirs a spike of regret. But it’s better this way.

Jaynie makes the announcement to the squad. “We’re heading out of this district. It’s just a few more blocks. Once we’re clear of the projects, we should leave the fighting behind. After that, we run an easy klick and a half to the pickup point. We’re going to be okay.”

She doesn’t mention the private security company. Neither do I.

A new route posts on the squad map. It shows our position, and known positions of the enemy. There’s a significant firefight several blocks north, but that doesn’t concern us—and it hasn’t distracted the militias that are hunting us. They know where we are. They’re setting up barricades to contain us, and though the map doesn’t show it, my guess is they’re bringing in heavier weapons. We will have to get past them, out of the projects, over a canal, through a neighborhood of family compounds, and across a wider canal before we reach the pickup site. It feels like a long way.