The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (3 page)

CODENAME: DELPHI

by Linda Nagata

Karin Larsen is a handler. For eight hours a day, she sits in front of a bank of monitors, overseeing battlefield activity remotely with a series of drones, and directs military personnel half a world away. At times, it feels like a video game. Only when she makes a mistake, people die—and there’s no reset button on reality.

“
VALDEZ,
you need to slow down,” Karin Larsen warned, each syllable crisply pronounced into a mic. “Stay behind the seekers. If you overrun them, you’re going to walk into a booby trap.”

Five thousand miles away from Karin’s control station, Second Lieutenant Valdez was jacked up on adrenaline and in a defiant mood. 
“Negative!”
 she said, her voice arriving over Karin’s headphones. 
“Delphi, we’ve got personnel down and need to move fast. This route scans clear. I am not waiting for the seekers to clear it again.”

The battleground was an ancient desert city. Beginning at sunset, firefights had flared up all across its tangled neighborhoods and Valdez was right that her squad needed to advance—but not so fast that they ran into a trap.

“The route is 
not
 clear,” Karin insisted. “The last overflight to scan this alley was forty minutes ago. Anything could have happened since then.”

Karin’s worksite was an elevated chair within a little room inside a secure building. She faced a curved monitor a meter-and-a-half high, set an easy reach away. Windows checkered its screen, grouped by color-codes representing different clients. The windows could slide, change sequence, and overlap, but they could never completely hide one another; the system wouldn’t allow it. This was Karin’s interface to the war.

Presently centered onscreen were two gold-rimmed windows, each displaying a video feed captured by an aerial seeker: palm-sized drones equipped with camera eyes, audio pickups, and chemical sensors. The seekers flew ahead of Valdez and her urban infantry squad, one at eye level and the other at an elevation of six meters, scouting a route between brick-and-stucco tenements. They flew too slowly for Valdez.

The lieutenant was out of sight of the seekers’ camera eyes, but Karin could hear the soft patter of her boot plates as she advanced at a hurried trot, and the tread of the rest of the squad trailing behind her. Echoing off the buildings, there came the pepper of distant rifle fire and a heavier caliber weapon answering.

Onscreen, positioned above the two video feeds, was a third window that held the squad map—a display actively tracking the position and status of each soldier.

Outfitted in bulletproof vests and rigged in the titanium struts of light-infantry exoskeletons—“armor and bones”—the squad advanced through the alley at a mandated ten-meter interval, a regulation that reduced the odds of multiple casualties if they encountered an IED or a grenade. Only Lieutenant Valdez failed to maintain the proper distance, crowding within two meters of the seekers in her rush to answer the call for backup.

“Valdez, this is not a simple firefight. It’s a widespread, well-planned insurgent offensive. Every kid with a grudge—”

“No lectures, Delphi. Just get these seekers moving faster.”

Any faster, and the little drones could miss something critical.

Local time was past midnight and no lights shone in the alley, but in night vision the walls of the buildings and the trash-strewn brick pavement gleamed in crisp, green detail. Karin wasn’t the only one monitoring the seekers’ feeds; a battle AI watched them too. It generated an ongoing report, displayed alongside the windows. She glanced at it and saw an alert for trace scents of explosives—but with a battle in progress that didn’t mean anything. Otherwise the report was good: no suspicious heat signatures or whispering voices or inexplicable motion within the apartments.

Her gaze shifted back to the video feed. A faint gleam caught her attention; a hair-thin line close to the ground that justified her caution. “Tripwire,” she announced. She reached out to the screen; dragged her finger across the line. The gesture created a fleeting highlight on the display screen of Valdez’s visor, clearly marking the tripwire’s position. “Six meters ahead.”

“Shit.”
 Valdez pulled up sharply. A faint background tone sounded as she switched her audio to gen-com. 
“Tripwire,”
 she said, addressing her squad. 
“Move back.”

The tone dropped out, and Valdez was talking again solely to Karin. 
“Ambush?”

“Searching.” It was a good bet someone was monitoring the tripwire.

A set of windows bordered in blue glided to the center of Karin’s screen: Lieutenant Deng’s color code. The insurgent offensive had erupted all along the northern border, striking hard at Deng’s rural district. At approximately 2200 she’d been lured into an ambush. The resulting firefight had left one of her soldiers seriously wounded.

Distance did not mute the impatience—or the frustration—in Deng’s voice as she spoke over the headphones, 
“Delphi, where’s my medevac helicopter?”

On nights like this, a big part of Karin’s job was triage. Deng’s situation was no longer “hot.” The insurgents had fled, and the helicopter had already been requested. Determining an ETA would not get it there faster. So she told Deng, “Stand by.”

Then she swiped the blue windows out of the way and returned her attention to the feeds from the seekers, directing one to fly higher. The angle of view shifted, and Karin spied a figure crouched on the sloping, clay-tiled roof of a low building not far ahead. She drew a highlight around it. “Valdez, see that?”

A glance at the squad map showed that Valdez had retreated a few meters from the tripwire. One specialist remained with her, while the rest of the squad had dropped back under the supervision of a sergeant.

“I see him,”
 Valdez said. 
“Target confirmed?”

“Negative. Twenty seconds.”

Karin sent a seeker buzzing toward the figure on the rooftop and then she switched her focus back to Deng’s blue-coded windows, fanning them open so she could see the one that tracked the status of the medevac helicopter. The offensive was unprecedented and air support was in high demand. Deng’s wounded soldier was third on the list for pickup. “Deng, ETA on the medevac is forty-plus minutes,” Karin warned; that was assuming the helicopter stayed in the air. She slid the blue windows away again, switching back to Valdez.

Wind soughing between the buildings veiled the soft buzz of the seeker so that the figure on the roof didn’t hear it coming. Details emerged as the little drone got closer. One of those details was a rifle—aimed at Valdez. “Target confirmed,” Karin said without hesitation. “Shoot to kill.”

Valdez was watching the same feed. 
“That’s a kid!”

It 
was
 a kid. The battle AI estimated a male, fourteen years old. It didn’t matter. The boy was targeting Valdez and that made him the enemy.

“Take the shot.”

The boy fired first. He missed, but he squeezed the trigger again. His second shot caught Valdez in the shoulder, spinning her into the wall. 
“Fuck.”

“Valdez, get down!”

The lieutenant dropped to a crouch. The specialist was already hunkered down behind her. He aimed over her shoulder and shot—but too late. The kid had opened a roof-access door, retreating inside the building.

Karin checked Valdez’s biometrics: high stress, but no indication that the slug had penetrated. Her armor had protected her.

“A biometric ID on the shooter is in the system,” Karin told her. “You can hunt him down later.”

“Right. I’m going to drop back, rejoin the squad, and go around.”

While Valdez reorganized, Karin switched to her third client, Lieutenant Holder. The set of windows monitoring his squad was coded orange. Holder was assigned to a district just outside the city. Tonight his squad waited in ambush for a suspected small-arms shipment coming in from the west. She checked his status: nominal. Checked the squad: noted all seven soldiers in position on either side of an asphalt road. Checked the wide-field view from the infrared camera on the squad’s surveillance drone and noted the suspect truck, still at almost five kilometers away.

There was time.

Karin sighed, took a sip of chilled water from a bottle stashed in a pouch at the side of her chair, and for just a moment she squeezed her dry eyes shut. She’d already been six hours on-shift, with only one ten-minute break, and that was two hours ago. There would be hours more before she could rest. Most shifts went on until her clients were out of harm’s way—that’s just how it was, how it needed to be. She’d learned that early.

Karin had trained as a handler for the usual reason: money. She’d needed to pay off a student loan. Two years so far, with a fat savings account to show for it. The money was good, no argument, but the lifestyle? Some handlers joked that the job was like a video game—one so intense it left you shaking and exhausted at the end of every shift—but for her it had never been a game. The lives she handled were real. Slip up, and she could put a soldier in the grave. That was her nightmare. She’d had soldiers grievously wounded, but so far none had died on her shift. Lately, she’d started thinking that maybe she should quit before it happened. On a night like tonight, that thought was close to the surface.

The blue windows slid to center again. Karin popped the bottle back into its pouch as an irate Deng spoke through her headphones. 
“Delphi, I can’t wait forty minutes for the medevac. I’ve got six enemy at-large. They have their own wounded to worry about, but once they get organized, they’re going to move on the settlement. If we don’t get there first, there are going to be reprisals. I need approval from Command to split the squad.”

“Stand by.”

Karin captured a voice clip of Deng’s request and sent it to the Command queue, flagged highest priority. But before she could slide the blue windows aside, someone opened an emergency channel, an act that overrode the communications of every handler on-shift. 
“I need support!”
 a shrill voice yelled through Karin’s headphones. She flinched, even as she recognized Sarno, another handler. The panic in his voice told her that he had made a mistake. A critical mistake, maybe a fatal one. 
“I need support! Now. I just can’t
—”

His transmission cut out. The shift supervisor’s voice came on—calm, crisp, alert: the way handlers were trained to speak. 
“I’m on it.”

Karin’s hands shook. Sarno worked a chair just a few doors down from her. He was new, and new handlers sometimes got overwhelmed, but panic was always the wrong response. At the end of the shift, every handler got to go home, smoke a joint, collapse in a bed with soft sheets, get laid if they wanted to. Their clients didn’t have that option. Sarno needed to remember that. Sarno needed to remember that however rough it got in the control room, no one was trying to end 
his
 life.

Right now the supervisor would be assisting him, coaching him, getting him back on track. Karin refocused, striving to put the incident out of her mind.

Dragging the gold-rimmed windows to center, she checked on Valdez, confirming the lieutenant had safely exited the alley. There were no alerts from the battle AI, so Karin switched to Deng’s window-set. Rigged in armor and bones, the squad had formed a perimeter to protect their wounded soldier. Around them, dry grass rustled beneath spindly trees, and the stars glowed green in night vision. Karin switched to Holder. He was still hunkered down with his squad alongside the road. An infrared feed from Holder’s surveillance drone showed the target vehicle only a klick-and-a-half away, approaching fast without headlights.

Just as Karin brought her attention back to Valdez, the shift supervisor spoke.

“Karin, we’ve got an emergency situation. I need to transfer another client to you.”

“No way, Michael.”

“Karin
—”

“No.
 I’ve got three active operations and I can barely stay on top of them. If you give me one more client, I’m going to resign.”

“Fine, Karin! Resign. But just finish this shift first. I need you. Sarno walked. He fucking walked out and left his clients.”

Sarno walked? Karin lost track of her windows as she tried to make sense of it. How could he walk out? What they did here was not a video game. There was no pause button on this war. Every handler was responsible for the lives of real people.

Michael took her hesitation as agreement. 
“I’m splitting the load. You only have to take one. Incoming now.”

Her throat aching, she took another sip of water, a three-second interval when her mind could rove . . . this time back to the kickboxing session that started her day, every day: a fierce routine that involved every muscle—
strike, strike, strike
—defiantly physical, because a handler had to be in top form to do this kind of work, and Karin hated to make mistakes.

As she looked up again, a glowing green dot expanded into a new set of windows, with the client’s bio floating to the top. Shelley, James. A lieutenant with a stellar field rating. 
Good,
 Karin thought
. Less work for me.