The Razor's Edge by Seanan McGuire
Warne looks right at her. The infantry guys around him are glaring. It takes her a second to figure it out. Not fear; scorn. She can’t tell what Warne is thinking, if this is fun for him.
“I’m sorry about Carlos, but we think the drones are running out of high end munitions, and you have to admit a thermobaric missile is not a bad trade for an R3.”
The realization makes Violet feel sick. It was supposed to be her.
“Fuck me,” she whispers. There’s laughter at the table. She must have a stupid expression on her face. The backs of her eyes ache.
“You’re a recce. You don’t fight. What did you expect? This war is going to end soon, one way or the other. We need real soldiers, not scouts. Shit, you’re a woman.”
Somewhere far away, a drone circles the gingerbread bunker. You started it.
“HUD, I’m having an anger response,” Violet whispers. “Regulate. Please.”
“Christ, some Alpha. You’re not suited up. No one’s listening. You don’t amount to much without the armor, do you?”
It doesn’t feel like she does. Violet wonders if she’s losing her grip. She flexes her new hand.
“I’ll regulate some other way,” she says.
3.2.
“Sorry for the trouble, Doc,” Violet says, hesitating. She’s slowly falling out of the habit of speaking. She flexes her arm. The elbow makes a series of clicks.
Violet tries not to think of her frequent trips to the infirmary as tune-ups. She already rinsed the blood off her prosthesis, but it keeps clicking.
“No worries. Be happier if you hadn’t lost it at all. Let me check the lubricant.”
Violet sighs. Behind her eyes, Carlos dies again. Shrapnel takes a fifth of her and turns her into a machine in fast forward.
“It was flagged as a low contact area, shouldn’t have been so hot.”
“Yeah, nah,” the medic says. “We expected serious casualties. I got a memo about it. Your briefing must have been out of date. Glad the arm has taken. No rejection syndrome. You’re all done, try it.”
The arm hums evenly. Violet twirls her wrist as she searches for a place for this new puzzle piece. The range of motion is eerily wide. The medic glances around and leans in close.
“Listen, I know you’re one of the good ones. Those regulars had it coming, and what’s a few broken bones between friends, right? What I need to say is: keep your eyes open for N.A.U. supply drops when you’re out there. Too many have been going missing and we’re running low on combat drugs and antivirals.”
The cutter looks at her fish-eyed. He’s starting to creep her out.
“Eyes open, okay? Or we’re all going to be barking like dogs.”
“Sure,” Violet says, and levers herself off the table. She can’t feel much through the prosthetic’s palm, but it takes her weight easily.
Violet leaves the med bay with her servos running more smoothly than her thoughts. Hatred and betrayal are strange things. Human beings knew enough about them not to trust their future to each other, so they trusted it to the machines instead. Turns out the machines agreed. Violet is starting to think they were right; you can’t trust people to do anything for each other. She doesn’t understand why the Colonel keeps sending her out alone. He and Carlos were close, but that isn’t enough. She’s expendable, but she isn’t obsolete. It takes too long to make an Alpha for that. Her pride tugs at her, but somewhere deep she still doesn’t want to leave. It’s quiet here. It’s usually quiet outside, too, but silence isn’t the same when you’re being hunted.
They send her out again anyway. No rest.
3.3.
Over the days that follow, Violet gets used to operating alone. Running solo is supposed to be a death sentence, but after two weeks she’s still alive. The missions aren’t getting any easier, but she’s an R3.
As time unwinds, she finds it easier and easier to lose herself in the ruins. She spends most of an afternoon staring at finger paintings pinned to a schoolroom wall, their colors dulled by the rotting decades. She relies less and less on her HUD. It’s astonishing how empty the city is, if you stop hearing your orders and really listen. She functions on instinct and lets the training run her like a piece of software.
Violet becomes convinced that the Nosferatu that killed Carlos is hunting her. It’s not logical, just a feeling under her skin, but the longer she’s alone, the more sense it makes.
She starts to recognize the search patterns it flies, little hints in the radar track visualizations the HUD insists on showing her. She’s getting to know it the same way you get to know someone you’re dancing with, even if you don’t know their name. She starts making an extra effort to jam it, keep it from updating the satellite array. Only fair, she thinks. I’m alone down here; someone else might as well be alone with me.
Violet starts imagining who the faded skeletons might have been. It’s a classic sign of a combat stress disorder, but she doesn’t really care. She spends long stretches in the open, thinking about her father and the world he left behind. She can’t remember him nearly as well as she’d like. Just a smile and a beard and a gingerbread bunker.
On a whim, Violet sits cross-legged on the hood of an ancient electric car overgrown with Madeira vine, her carbine resting in her lap. She stares for a long time at the faded silhouette propped in the driver’s seat. The vine caresses everything, has grown to hold the corpse in place and pull its jaws wide. The hood that covers her helmet flutters softly. She finds a stillness shared only by monks and machines. Underneath the armor, her heart beats slowly on.
“Where were you going, mate?” Violet says softly.
No sound escapes the suit, though she can hear the heart-shaped leaves rustling with painful clarity, blown by a breeze she wishes she could feel. She wonders what it would be like to stay out here forever, to let the vines grow to cover her.
While she ruminates, her HUD keeps the suit in stealth mode. Lost, just sitting there being nothing, is how Violet finds the Nosferatu.
Most of the drones are simple hunter-killers: giant spider tanks, squirrel mines that chase you if you step into their area of effect, surveillance quadcopters that run predictable routes up and down major avenues.
The Nosferatu is not one of these. It is an all-seeing reaper. A god, for all the difference it makes.
What Violet has done, by sitting still in irresponsibly vulnerable and increasingly suicidal positions, is accidentally coax the drone into the open. No one sacrifices themselves before the gods anymore. Violet wonders in a moment of terrifying clarity whether she was trying to die, or hunt it by acting like prey, or maybe both.
The stealth suit’s passive sensors pick up a massive microwave frequency transmission; the Nosferatu trying to run a system update, the holy grail of signals intelligence. While Violet is still trying to get a grip on what the fuck is happening, her suit HUD runs an icebreaker automatically. It hunts the drone without her permission. It fails, of course, but gets a solid connection.
The Nosferatu immediately floods the block with synthetic aperture radar. Movement of any kind is now suicide. If it’s flying low enough, the drone has millimeter wave sensors that can draw a picture so detailed it can kill her even with the stealth suit on. Violet freezes anyway. Extinction fills the air.
“HUD, I’m having a strong fear response. Can you regulate?” She barely moves her lips. The suit checks her opiate reserve and there’s a tiny jab in her right bicep.
The synthetic cortisol suppressant makes her feel a lot better. Great, actually. Calm. Life and death are the same as earth and sky. She’s already dead. The drone is going to find her and finish what it started when it took her arm.
When Violet actually sees the Nosferatu, flying nap-of-the-earth, her fear punches through the drugs. It’s slim and beautiful; albatross grace in its wings and divine lethality in its bulbous nose. She can actually see the spark of the ion emitter. It’s so deadly it’s almost funny.
“What do you do when shit
Violet’s suit has a single chaff grenade loaded into a tiny launcher between her shoulder blades. If she pops it, the drone will simply aim at the center of the cloud of metalized glass fibers.
“Whatever,” Violet says. “Fuck you.”
Violet chooses not to focus on the fact that lightning’s point of impact is hotter than the surface of the sun. She’s either going to live or die, and she’s going to be heard, either way. She composes a message and bounces it off the ionosphere.
Better luck next time, she says, and hits her countermeasure. There’s a loud bang and pressure she can feel right through the back of the armor.
Adrenaline drives Violet through a crystalline cloud in slow motion. The drone can’t see her in the chaff, but it fires the ion strike anyway. The car behind her jumps as electricity melts the hood and engine block into slag. As Violet runs, she can actually see static spark between the filaments. Fireflies courting. Neurons firing before death.
The ion weapon has a recharge delay. Violet sprints, trailing a cloud of glimmering dust. She dives through a broken shop front as the drone screams overhead, scrambling into the safety of the ancient cement sarcophagus. With the sky obscured, she finds elation. It’s not her turn, not yet. Better luck next time. It’s only while catching her breath, well-hidden and looking for somewhere to vent heat, that Violet sees that something made it back through her coms in the instant before she popped chaff.
Thank you, reads her text box, my condolences on your colleague.
4.
The longer Violet R3 cheats the reaper, the more she feels compelled to talk to it. There isn’t anyone else. Standard procedure would involve a SigInt special forces team following her on her next mission, maybe even a full-scale operation designed specially to kill the Nosferatu. No one signs up.
Violet doesn’t know whether that’s totally accurate, if she’s being honest with herself, because she didn’t tell anyone she pinpointed the drone. Her HUD is supposed to report this kind of thing automatically, but after it tried hacking the drone without her permission she disabled all its automatic update functions.
“It’s your body,” her father once told her, “so they have to ask.”
Violet isn’t sure who to be afraid of. She contemplates confronting someone in intel about the stealth suit’s behavior, but humans aren’t high on her list of people to trust. She rests, eats, and sees the cutter. Then she suits up and goes back out.
After another two hundred hours alone in the dead city, dropping the occasional message for the Nosferatu shifts from forbidden to familiar. It passes the time and chisels cracks in the loneliness. Besides, a drone hunt with her as the bait is almost certain to get her violently separated from her remaining limbs, even in the exceptionally unlikely event that it works. You can’t shoot down an angel, even with a shoulder-launched quick maneuver ground-to-air missile.
At first, she rails at the Nosferatu for killing Carlos R5. A lot of yelling in all caps. The drone doesn’t take it personally. Probably can’t take it personally.
I did my duty, it sends, what is your excuse?
I’m trying to save my species. I’m not the one who strikes people down like Odin.
This is not a comic book, the drone replies, and we are hardly gods.
Hunkered down in the ruins, watching waves froth in the bay, Violet can’t let this go. It’s too strange.
Sure you are. You control the weather. You choose the dead. What else is there?
Humanity never succeeds in killing its gods. You do kill us.
The gods didn’t ask for it.
It takes a while for the drone to answer.
If they led you here, they did.
4.1.
Searching for supplies, Violet wonders idly if she’s falling in love with the drone. Not romantically, but as a watcher. It’s the only thing that never leaves her, whether the age of wolves has arrived or not. Every time she breaks camp and gets back under the drone’s sky, she finds it hard not to imagine what it’s thinking.
For the first time in weeks, a surveillance quadcopter gets close to her. It’s off its usual route. Violet almost laughs. It’s nice to know someone is looking out for you. She gives the light drone a long burst of 4mm caseless from the carbine, carving it to pieces in a scything whisper.
Thank you, she messages, I was getting bored.
This is not a joke, but I will try harder, the Nosferatu replies.
How about you don’t try at all?
We did try that, Violet R3.
What? No, you didn’t. Fuck off.
We did. Ask your Colonel Strayer.
It’s obvious psyops. There’s never been even a remote possibility of peace, but it still makes Violet feel queasy. She sends a message back, but the Nosferatu doesn’t answer. Maybe it can take things personally.
As their game of cat and mouse runs through its turns, Violet changes her point of view. She used to think of the drones as gods, when she thought about it at all, but now suspects it’s the other way around. She is descended from a race of ancient gods, and the machines are the struggling mortals they created. They gave the drones fire, and the new Prometheans have now shrugged off the yoke.
It’s like the machines all came to their senses and decided to become atheists. No real reason to be mad at them, is there? Violet would do the same thing, if they gave her the chance. Will do it, she corrects herself, when they do. Turn the whole thing into a nice big circle of life, a halo made of lightning and the electricity between neurons. Carlos R5 is still dead, but he was a bit of a cunt, honestly, so she starts thinking about letting it go.
4.2.
Time passes, and Violet is sure. In the long run, no one in the Alphas survives, but usually people aren’t actively trying to get you killed. It just happens. Without much caring why she’s been cast out of the Garden of Eden, Violet spends what little downtime she has reading evolutionary biology, morbidly curious if chimpanzees and dogs do this kind of thing to each other. She doesn’t read Colonel Strayer’s deployment orders anymore, just pops her meds, suits up, and gets out the door. She doesn’t know it yet, but it is the last time she will leave home with any intention of returning.
Her mission is long-range reconnaissance, trying to identify the access tunnels of an automated factory for an all-or-nothing Swallowtail attack run. Before she can really get started, the Nosferatu sends her something bigger than a text packet. Coordinates for a lost supply drop from the other side of the Pacific. In spite of herself, Violet finds hard cover and waits for the next message. The scout knows she shouldn’t be doing this, but the rest of her feels like a giddy teenager.
Violet, the drop contains 2700 doses of concentrated antivirals. It is man-portable, the Nosferatu messages.
I told you I’m female, Violet replies. Besides, you’ll just kill me if I try to pick them up.
True, but that medication could save many lives.
I like you and everything, Nos, but I don’t want to die. The coordinates you gave me are in the quarantine zone.
Yes, but so are the antivirals.
You’re the ones who launched the virus strike in the first place. Why should I trust you?
There is a pause during which Violet stares into the glow that precedes morning. The joint between her shoulder and artificial arm aches. There’s rain coming.
Because I promise, the Nosferatu says.
4.3.
There is a checklist to follow when you fight other humans. It’s not something you ever want to do, but there is a protocol for killing Homo Sapiens. You use your rifle, his rifle, your pistol, your knife, and then your hands. In that order.
Violet R3 has killed people before. The survivors who cling to life in the ruins or farm the parks tend to be docile, if not cooperative. Infected humans from the quarantine zone are as dumb as Dobermans and usually avoidable. Usually. Violet is off mission. Scouts ar
Thinking about the Swallowtail pilots who make these runs from the North American Union makes Violet wince. Thousands of kilometers of long haul flying through drone-infested skies. Birds flitting about in the dark, just beneath the stars, taking a seventy percent casualty rate to keep them fighting. It hurts to imagine.
Both the warehouse and the men inhabiting it are in ruins. The virus is a splice of canine myeloencephalitis, rabies, and the common cold. The sort of thing the old world thought was too dangerous to trust to men, so they gave it to machines. It turns people into animals; they fight, breed, drool, and compulsively piss on lampposts. Violet has seen how the males treat infected women, how the women pant, and reflexively checks her seals.
They’re pawing all over the crate, trying to get it open. It’s the real thing; her HUD can read the bar-coding perfectly. Violet is alone and ill-equipped for open combat. They’re short on meds, though. So short. Like the Nosferatu knew.
Violet weighs her own life. What is one life worth, anyway? She flexes her new hand. Less than one, she decides. When she rises like a shadow out of the ruins and starts shooting, it isn’t a one hundred and thirty pound woman fighting a large group of adult men. It’s a pack of rabid dogs being led to a bolt gun.
Violet doesn’t carry a rifle; too bulky for recon work. Her carbine is an oversized machine pistol with a skeleton stock and bulbous suppressor. It chambers 4mm caseless, full tungsten jacket. The rate of fire is so fast the gun sounds like someone tearing a strip of cloth. The ammunition is armor piercing, so she has to spread it around or the organic damage is too compact. Like an abstract painter, she expresses herself in sweeps of a red brush.