Into the Light Read online

  “Keep moving!” Staff Sergeant Tyson barked, but the speed of his own advance faltered as he and Kyle Boyd, Barbeau’s wing, tried to link their “armor” systems now that each of them had lost his original partner.

  It should have been almost instantaneous, Palazzola knew, but once again there was a minor difference between executing a simple function in a classroom and in the midst of howling chaos.

  “Parker, you and Michaels cover left!” he ordered. “Try to find the bastards, but if you can’t, at least keep them pinned down!”

  “Roger,” Corporal Parker acknowledged, and Palazzola finally heard return fire ripping back at someone. From his own HUD, he figured that Parker and his partner, Jadiel Michaels, were firing blind, but despite the mortar and despite the LAWs, he was damn sure there wasn’t any Heinlein armor out there in the bushes. So they might just get lucky. They damned well deserved to get lucky about something, anyway!

  “Got ’em!” Ollie Watson announced suddenly, and Palazzola’s HUD was suddenly even more complicated as the tac window switched from a single icon indicating the mortar’s predicted position to an entire cluster of icons, showing the mortar tube and its five-man crew.

  Watson and his wing, Declan Buck, never stopped moving as they opened fire on their tormentors. At least part of the simulation worked perfectly, probably because it required no conscious input from the operators. The training lasers fitted to their M-16s synced with their visors, and precise aiming points flashed before them. They took down the mortar crew in a handful of seconds, and Palazzola allowed himself a deep breath of relief. Now, all they needed was—

  “Oh, fuck,” Cunningham groaned over the command link as the second mortar opened fire from the other end of the clearing. “What the hell else are they gonna do to us?!”

  And why didn’t you think to look in the other direction, too, rocket scientist? Palazzola asked himself harshly. If you had, then maybe—

  A crimson visor code flashed as Elliott Timmons took a direct hit from the third incoming “mortar round.” Unlike Simpson and Barbeau, he was technically still alive, but the computer monitoring the exercise had decided to completely disable his armor. And a moment later, two more LAWs took down Declan Buck and Mariah Johnson. According to the computer umpire, Buck was still alive, although badly wounded. Johnson’s exoskeleton locked as she became a fatal casualty.

  That was five out of the two platoons’ combined starting strength of twenty-four. Palazzola doubted that a twenty-one percent casualty ratio against legacy-armed opponents was going to look very good in the after-action analysis. And they weren’t done yet.

  “Found the bastards!” Ryan Murphy, Timmons partner, announced, and Palazzola heard more outgoing fire. His visor showed him everything, relaying the tactical feeds from each of his people currently engaging the enemy, which he suddenly discovered was not a good thing. There was simply too much data on too small a display. He needed to reduce it, switch back to a display which showed only the cursors of his own forces, but yet again, he had to stop, think his way through the command steps, and while he was doing that, Corey Lawson and Guillermo Jolson joined the incapacitated list.

  At least the platoons’ survivors managed to take down the second mortar and both of the remaining LAW ambush parties while he was trying to sort things out. Unfortunately, that accounted for less than half of Brian Hilton’s op force, and neither Elinor Simpson nor Jackie Walsham were among them. That meant Palazzola’s battered and chastened Marines had to go find them, too, and—knowing those two redoubtable ladies—the worst was yet to come.

  For some reason, Aleandro Palazzola found that thought less than exhilarating.

  “Christ, I am so not looking forward to hearing from the Old Man about this,” he moaned to Cunningham over their private link as the single reorganized, oversized platoon he had left headed with exemplary caution into the pine woods.

  “Gotta get better, Sir, right?” Palazzola looked at his habitually pessimistic platoon sergeant in disbelief, and Cunningham shrugged. “I mean, we’re already so screwed our efficiency curve has to go up from here, doesn’t it?”

  “As in from ‘total cluster fuck’ to simply ‘screwed the pooch,’ you mean?”

  “Exactly.” Cunningham actually grinned, and Palazzola shook his head.

  “You’re always such a comfort to me, Ezra.”

  “What I’m here for, Sir. What I’m here for.”

  * * *

  “SO WE ROUNDED up the prisoners and made it back to the LZ for recovery,” Lieutenant Palazzola said, six hours later.

  A steaming mug of coffee sat on the table in front of him, he had a dry towel wrapped around his neck, and his hair was still slightly damp from the shower. The promised rain and sleet pounded the high-tech Quonset hut—that was how Wilson thought of it, anyway—drumming on its domed roof, but it was toasty warm inside.

  He suspected Palazzola and his bedraggled Marines were even more grateful for that than he was.

  To Palazzola’s credit, there hadn’t been any complaints about “cheating” where the mortars were concerned. Possibly because he’d ended up losing just under two thirds of his people—dead, wounded, or combat ineffective because of armor damage—and he wasn’t about to sound like he was making excuses to cover his ass. He wasn’t that kind of officer. More probably, though, it was because he’d already digested one of Wilson’s little lessons.

  Plainly, it had never occurred to any of the assault force’s innocent souls that their designated battalion commander might not have been fully forthcoming with them when he structured their pre-op intelligence briefing, but that was scarcely his fault. The battalion S-2 had even stressed that their intelligence was incomplete, but they’d made the mistake of assuming that anyone equipped with Hegemony-level recon assets would have to be pretty much on the money. Which meant they’d forgotten that from the day he’d finally agreed to be a—shudder—officer, Rob Wilson had hammered away at the fact that the one totally expectable thing about combat operations was that something un-expectable was bound to happen.

  Apparently, they hadn’t thought he meant it, he reflected dryly. Or possibly they just hadn’t realized what a nasty, sneaky SOB he truly was.

  That’s what happens when you take a devious old master sergeant and turn him into an officer, he thought.

  “All right.” Captain Bratton Mills, the company XO who’d conducted the immediate after-action analysis, glanced down the length of the table to Wilson and raised his eyebrows. “Any comment, Sir?”

  “Actually, yeah,” Wilson replied. He paused to take a long sip from his own coffee mug, then set it on the table in front of him.

  “Good news first. You accomplished every one of your mission objectives. If the Heinlein armor turns out to be as good as projected and the simulation was accurate, it’s going to be harder than hell to actually kill one of our people. Unfortunately,” he smiled slightly at Palazzola, “that’s about it on the positive side. On the negative side, killing one of us isn’t going to be outright impossible, and you lost over sixty percent of your people, either dead or mission killed, despite the armor. That’s not what people usually call a ‘sustainable loss rate.’ Now, it would be fair—if perhaps unwise—of you to point out that no one warned you about the mortars, but even with them, if the full capabilities of your ‘armor’ had been used properly from the outset, Brian and Elinor wouldn’t have had the advantage of total surprise, which would almost certainly have affected the final outcome.

  “However,” he leaned forward, laying his forearms on the table and cradling his mug between his hands, and his expression was suddenly very serious, “the real point of the exercise was exactly that—to test not just the capabilities of the ‘armor’ but to test your ability to utilize them. The fact that you accepted the intelligence brief at face value was a big part of what went wrong, too, of course. I’d like to think that if it had been an actual combat op you would’ve been at least a little more hesi
tant about accepting just how comprehensive its accuracy truly was, but we can discuss that aspect of it later. The point right now is that you and your people went in relying on your NET, and it let you down. Not because it didn’t give you the skills and the information you needed, but because you’d been … inadequately drilled in using those skills and that information.”

  He turned his head slowly, letting his gaze travel around the officers and senior noncoms seated around the table.

  “I deliberately put you in a position where you’d need to react quickly, instantly—instinctively—with the skill set you’d been given. And that skill set failed you, because it isn’t really ‘yours’ yet. My brother-in-law’s fond of saying that it’s like looking something up on a wiki page before the war. It’s all there, but it’s like a nested series of drop-down menus. When you’re not under pressure, when nobody’s actually shooting at you, you can click right through it to what you want. Not as quickly as you think you’re getting through it, but pretty damned quickly.

  “The problem is that when you’re under pressure, you don’t think shit through, people. The worst mistake someone can make is to hope that when the shit hits the fan, his people will rise to the occasion. That’s not what happens. What happens is that instead of rising, they sink to the level of their training. They respond with the skills and the reactions which have been drilled so deeply into them they don’t need to think the shit through. They just do it. That’s the reason you make training problems as demanding as you can. Why you train harder than you expect to have to fight, if you can. And that’s why the NET concept let all of you down. It assumed you’d rise to the demands of the occasion and quickly and accurately access all the ‘book learning’ you’d been given. And you didn’t, because nobody could have. You made some mistakes that didn’t have anything to do with how automatic your skills had become, but they probably wouldn’t have mattered when it was time to dig your way out of the hole if you’d been able to use the capabilities of your armor the way we should have trained you to use them. So I have to say that the fact that you actually accomplished your mission objectives despite the curve I deliberately threw you and all of the training issues actually speaks very highly of you all. Probably doesn’t feel that way right this minute—” he sat back and flashed another smile “—but I’m not just blowing smoke up your collective ass on this one. So go find yourselves a hot meal—I understand they’ve got beef stew waiting for you—and write up your formal reports. I’m a nasty old SOB, but I’m your nasty old SOB, and I’m actually pretty proud of you all.”

  He looked around their faces one last time, then picked up his mug and waved it in dismissal.

  “Go, my children, and sin no more,” he said.

  . XXIV .

  SÃO SALVADOR DA BAHIA DE TODOS OS SANTOS,

  BAHIA, BRAZIL

  One nice thing about Hegemony technology, Dave Dvorak thought, was the lighting it made possible. The flag-draped podium on the raised stage at the end of the studio was as brilliantly illuminated as any producer or director could have desired, but without the radiant heat traditional studio lighting would have produced.

  He checked his watch again, but it persisted in telling him the same thing, and he leaned back against the wall, concentrating on staying out of the way of cameramen, sound technicians, and lighting specialists as they ran their final tests and made their final preparations. Like the studio’s illumination, the “cameras” in question were products of the steadily expanding orbital infrastructure. They were both smaller and lighter than pre-invasion cameras would have been, and each of them floated on its own independent counter-grav unit, obedient to joysticks on the control panels of the “cameramen” to whom they answered. They moved with completely independent motion and rock-steady smoothness in all axes, and the system was configured to generate three-dimensional imagery for the limited number of tridees in service while simultaneously feeding a signal to all the remaining pre-invasion TVs which had been returned to service.

  He watched them, and as he did, his thoughts drifted to the city outside this quiet, coolly air-conditioned studio’s soundproof walls.

  His first visit to Salvador had been sobering, after the devastation and ruin he’d seen throughout so much of the United States and Canada. Or the devastation much of the rest of Brazil had suffered, for that matter. The city and municipal area were astoundingly intact, aside from several sections which had burned in the civil unrest before Judson Howell’s assistance reached President Garçāo. Greensboro was even less badly damaged, of course, but Salvador’s pre-invasion population had been ten times that of Greensboro, and returning refugees—drawn by the restoration of order—had swelled its original population by as much as twenty or even thirty percent. That made it the largest surviving city in the world, and it was also far older than Greensboro—by a mere, oh, three hundred years or so—with a panorama of architecture which appealed to his historian’s soul.

  That combination of population and history was one of the reasons he stood in this studio, waiting so impatiently and nervously, but it wasn’t really the most important one. No, the most important reason he was here was that São Salvador da Bahia de Todos os Santos was the capital of a South American nation.

  He checked his watch again. Another two minutes had ticked past. That was good. There were only thirteen more to go now, and he pulled out his “phone” to punch up the text of the formal statement. It was far too late to make any editorial changes, but he and Sarah Howell had sweated blood over the wording and rereading it was another way to eat up some of the remaining time. Of course, with his luck, he’d find something that absolutely needed to be changed now that they couldn’t change it. At least he wasn’t the one who had to present it, though. That was something. In fact, it was one hell of a lot. Besides—

  “Relax, Dave,” a voice said, and he looked up quickly. “It’s fine,” Judson Howell told him. “And if it isn’t, there’s nothing either of us can do about it at this point. Besides,” he grinned quickly, “I’m the one history’s going to blame if you got something wrong.”

  “Oh, thank you,” Dvorak replied. “You’ve made me feel so much better, Mister President!”

  “One of the things I’m here for,” Howell assured him with another smile. Then his expression sobered, and he gripped Dvorak’s shoulder. “Really, you’ve done fine. All I could have asked for. Tonight is as much your work as anyone else’s.”

  “Nice of you to say so, anyway,” Dvorak said.

  “Only said it because it’s true.”

  Howell squeezed his shoulder—the one Hosea MacMurdo’s nanites really had fixed “good as new” … finally—and continued across the studio to join Fernando Garçāo and Jeremiah Agamabichie at the podium. Dvorak watched the three of them shaking hands while he thought about what Howell had said. Maybe there was some truth to it, he reflected, and it was true he’d seen the need for something like this even before Howell recruited him. But it was Judson Howell’s vision and passion which had driven the entire process. No one would ever accuse Garçāo or Agamabichie of weakness or timidity—not after what the two of them had endured and achieved over the last eighteen months. Yet either of them would have been the first to acknowledge that this day was the result of Howell’s imagination and focus. And of his willingness to genuinely compromise, coupled with a steely refusal to yield a single inch on the core principles for which he’d first reached out to the other two men on the soundstage with him tonight.

  Did the man find his moment, or did the moment produce the man? Dvorak wondered, not for the first time. And the truth was, it didn’t really matter how it had happened. All that mattered was that it had happened, and that he’d been privileged to be on the inside. To see history being made, not just study it, and that was worth—

  He twitched as the alarm on his watch chimed.

  “Places, please, gentlemen,” the floor director said, and Howell, Garçāo, and Agamabichie looked up from thei
r conversation. If any of them were nervous, it didn’t show, and they shared another smile, then moved so that Garçāo stood directly behind the podium with Howell at his right shoulder and Agamabichie at his left. He and Howell were within half an inch of the same height, but Agamabichie was only an inch or so shorter than Dvorak, which made him the next best thing to five inches taller than either of the presidents. The flags of the United States and Canada flanked the flag of Brazil behind them, and Dvorak’s throat tightened as he looked at them, thought of the struggle and the blood and the refusal to lie down and die those bits of colored fabric represented, and wondered what the hell he was doing caught up in such a moment.

  “And everyone else, please,” the floor director continued, and a color guard marched smartly into place in front of the podium’s raised stage. It consisted of four uniformed military personnel from each of the three countries represented here, each armed with his or her nation’s service rifle. But there was also a thirteenth man, bearing a staff with a cased flag tightly furled around it, and he wore a uniform no one had ever before seen: a space-black jacket with sky-blue facings and dark green trousers. The first twelve formed into three short ranks of four, forming three sides of a hollow square before the soundstage as they found their marks on the studio floor, and the thirteenth man moved into the open space between them, directly in front of the podium.

  The floor director eyed them critically, then nodded in satisfaction.

  “Ninety seconds,” he warned everyone and stepped back.

  A digital display on a side wall flickered steadily downward while Howell, Garçāo, and Agamabichie focused their attention on the 3D “teleprompter” display floating behind the cameramen. Then it reached zero, and the floor director pointed at Garçāo and nodded sharply.

  “Good evening,” the President of Brazil said clearly. “For those who do not already recognize me, I am Fernando Garçāo, the President of Brazil. I am speaking to you tonight from the capital of my country, but I do not speak simply as a Brazilian. No. Tonight I speak to you as a citizen of the planet every one of us calls home.”