Linda Nagata: The Last Good Man

He experiments, moving each finger, tapping them against the thumb in a pattern he learned during physical therapy. “Not broken,” he concludes.

Renata rises to her feet. “Come on, boss,” she says in disgust. “This is why no one else will spar with you. You know you can’t play that hard anymore.”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

His physical therapist had explained it bluntly: You have fine motor control and even a limited sense of touch because, through its socket, the hand is wired into your truncated peripheral nerves. But if you stress the junction, it’s going to hurt like hell. The pain’s a signal to tell you to back off. To be careful. Because the prosthetic is not nearly as rugged as your natural hand .

Truth.

He’s broken the hand twice already.

He tells Renata, “Next time, I’ll take the hand off. Cap the end to protect it.”

“I’ve heard that before.” She glares down at him, hands on her hips, pale cheeks flushed, eyes bright, blond hair escaping from her ponytail. Her gi is pulled open to reveal a flat belly and full breasts corralled by a lavender sports bra, white skin shining with sweat.

And it hits him again: God, she is a beautiful woman .

Early in her tenure as Director of Air Operations at ReqOps they’d twice spent the night together, curiosity on both sides, but she was a free spirit and he needed fidelity.

Just a brief liaison, but still a mistake.

He gets up. She straightens her gi and they bow to one another.

He asks, “You got time this afternoon to sit down and go over your flight schedule?”

“Fourteen hundred?” she suggests.

“That’ll work.” He tells her about Fatima Atwan and the bounty on Hussam El-Hashem.

This makes her smile. “Ooh, nice mission. I like everything about it. Action instead of flying another tedious escort job. And a damsel in distress. And money .”

“Mercenary,” he accuses.

A bold smile, a flash of white teeth. “All of us together,” she agrees.

He offers no argument. ReqOps provides services that include intelligence acquisition and assessment, regional reports, personal security, equipment leasing, and specialized training of US military, foreign military, and law enforcement personnel—in security, assault, targeting, interrogation, evasion, surveillance, and negotiation. Offensive missions are the least of what they do, but as a PMC—a private military company—they are still mercenaries by most people’s definition, no matter how carefully they select their jobs and vet their clients.

Lincoln doesn’t like the term. It carries too much historical scar tissue. But Renata happily wears the label. She’s a pirate at heart. A top fighter pilot, she’s cool and efficient, but most of all, guilt doesn’t stick to her.

Or maybe there’s just nothing she’d undo.

Lincoln wishes he could make that claim, but during his clandestine service he was asked more than once to do dirty work—someone had to do it—and he’s made some poor choices too. No setting things right after the fact. What you do, you own. What you witness, you get to live with.

As a counterbalance, he tries to run ReqOps on a philosophy of “right action”—a principle of ethical service that encompasses power and responsibility and an obligation to act at need, and to do so in the best manner possible.

Renata gives him a half-assed salute like she knows what he’s thinking. “Make this happen, boss,” she says. “I want to be in competition again, even if it’s only virtual.”

“I’ll do what I can.”

They part, heading for separate showers.

With hot water sluicing over him, he tests the hand again. It’s amazingly dexterous. A biomechanical miracle of engineering, but it’s weak. It’s not good enough to get him back in the field. And for that, he hates the damn thing.

True stands in the middle of a great enclosed space within ReqOps’ Robotics Center, her arms crossed, eyes narrowed in an impatient expression, watching—from a distance—the final preparations for a robot brawl.

The Robotics Center is housed in a two-story, dusky-green warehouse. A third of the building is subdivided into offices, lab space, and a 3-D printing facility, but the majority of the interior is open, uncluttered space, suitable for small-scale aerial battles or the testing of ground-to-air defenses. Curtains and inflatable barriers simulate more complex environments and to test navigational algorithms, but none are in use today.

Aside from True, the room contains a few pallets of supplies arranged in a neat line outside the printing facility, and two cluttered workbenches alongside the pallets. The engineering team is also present. It’s made up of Tamara Thomas, Director of Software and Engineering, and her two young assistants, Michelle and Naomi. All three are busy loading lead weights into the ammunition rack of an experimental mini ARV—an armed robotic vehicle—to simulate the mass of live rounds.

“Just in time,” Tamara declared when True first walked in. “You can be the enemy. Take a gun and go stand on the red X.”

True had helped develop the specs for the new ARV—unofficially known as “Roach”—and she was eager to see the test. She wanted to know how fast and how smoothly it could deploy. But today she was here for a different purpose and time was short. She told Tamara, “It can wait. We’ve got a priority task. I need to set up multiple surveillance operations in the TEZ. A manhunt—”

She broke off when Naomi caught her eye. From behind Tamara, Naomi was holding up an open hand and mouthing the words five minutes .

True scowled at the request, but realistically, five minutes wasn’t going to matter—and she really did want to see what Roach could do. So she took a battered Fortuna assault rifle from the workbench, one that had been rigged to shoot harmless laser pulses instead of bullets, and walked to the red X, where she now stands, waiting to learn if she will live or die in a mock battle involving allied helicopter drones, pitted against the mini ARV.

Tamara moves away from the workbench. She is a few years younger than True, but fitness is not her passion, and middle age has given a sturdy substance to her full figure. Freckles dot a dark-brown complexion that contrasts with the light hazel eyes peering over the frame of her reading glasses. Steel-gray coils are infiltrating the black of her tightly curled hair. Today, like most days, she’s dressed in industrial colors: a simple charcoal blouse over gray slacks.

She watches as Michelle and Naomi—both young, not even thirty—lift the ARV, moving it to an empty pallet. Folded into transport mode, Roach is a rectangular gray lozenge, compact enough to be carried on a pack frame. Fully loaded with ammunition, it weighs around ninety pounds.

Chains attach the pallet to a winch, which begins to hum, lifting Roach into the air. The ARV is engineered for hard entry: tough enough to be heaved, pushed, or dropped inside an enemy compound, where it will deploy, autonomously distinguishing and removing threats before the entry of assault troops.

The pallet is hauled up twenty feet. The winch slides horizontally until the pallet is over the open floor. Michelle and Naomi walk out on the floor, bright-eyed and excited as they flank True, less than a meter away. Roach will need to distinguish them as unarmed civilians and leave them unharmed. Michelle says, “It’s going to be a surprise attack.”

She’s right. With no word of warning, Tamara triggers the pallet to tip, dropping the folded ARV. It hits the concrete floor with a dull thud that True can feel through her boots.

At the same time, True’s two mechanical allies drop from the ceiling. They’re starburst helicopter drones, a meter in diameter, made of eight adjustable booms radiating from a central pod. The low-noise rotors at the end of each boom are powered by electric motors. Starburst copters are fast, and agile enough to compensate for recoil from the rifle barrel mounted at the base of the pod, but they can only carry about fifty rounds, so their best use is in facility defense where they can be kept ready to launch against individual intruders, or as the first wave of a stealth assault backed up by human soldiers.