The Enemy had hit Red like a ballpeen hammer through soft butter. Even at this distance, Marine Captain Ishiri Matsuro could tell Red was a mess. The sight made him want to cry. Red, oh, Red, what’ve they done to you, girl? He blinked rapidly, fighting emotion he would have sooner died than admit. Ish’s wife, reconciled to the loneliness any career officer’s wife must endure—particularly in wartime—would never have understood the battle inside her husband as he closed distance to the battered little Bolo.
Could anything be done to save her? Anything at all?
The tech clomping beside him whistled—a long, low sound of awe. “When they run starkers, they really do it right, don’t they?”
Ish didn’t answer. He swallowed hard several times, nerving himself to transmit the code Red was programmed to recognize. He hoped she didn’t open fire. Not that she appeared to have much fighting capability left. . . . Her one small infinite repeater, barely light-machine-gun sized, had been blown nearly off its turret-mounted articulated arm. The intelligence-gathering arrays affixed to her were likewise damaged or missing entirely. Gaping holes in her hull showed where she’d borne the brunt of heavy fighting she’d never been designed to withstand. One of her forward armatures, designed for delicate external manipulation on stealth missions, had been blown out of its socket. It dangled obscenely from trailing cables. The other armature was intact but bent and probably inoperative.
Ish had to clear his throat several times before he could speak into his helmet mike. He wanted to say, “Red, honey, I told you to duck. . . .” Instead, he mastered his grief and said only, “Light Reconnaissance Headquarters Unit 1313, respond to code Baked Bread.”
“LRH-1313 responding,” a voice in his headset said. “Welcome, Commander. May I know your name?”
“Captain Ishiri Matsuro.”
“Welcome, Captain Matsuro. I am in need of a Situation Update and Depot Maintenance.”
Ish’s viscera dropped into nothingness. She didn’t remember him. The Red he’d known—had commanded for nearly seven years—would’ve cried, “Hello, Ish! What kept you? I’ve been waiting!”
What the hell happened out here? She fights a pitched battle she isn’t programmed for, then forgets eight years of programmed Experience Data?
It couldn’t be simple battle damage. If her psychotronic net had been damaged that severely, she’d have exhibited other signs. Instead, she’d recognized his authority; then asked for a briefing and maintenance, just as though nothing had happened. A chill touched Ish’s spine. Maybe Space Force had been right? Maybe Red had run mad. . . .
Bad as she looked outside, the sight which greeted him in her Command and Crew Compartments was infinitely worse. Her Command Team was still aboard. They’d died hard. Ish closed a gloved hand on the edge of the bulkhead door frame separating the tiny Command Compartment from the slightly bigger Crew Compartment, trying not to look at the gaping holes in Red’s hull or at the bodies sprawled inside her. One of those bodies had been a friend he’d gotten drunk with and fought beside for nearly seven years.
“Barkley, you ready for that test?” Ish snapped to hide the emotion gripping him.
“Yeah.” The rail-thin tech was staring at another of the bodies, clearly fighting his own battle with shock and grief. Barkley and DeVries had worked together aboard the Bonaventure. Barkley cleared his throat roughly; then stepped gingerly around the remains of Doug Hart and bent over Red’s Action/Command center console. Barkley looked thin and pale inside the bulk of the enviro-suit designed to protect from hard radiation like Red had absorbed; but after the first shock of seeing his friend, he settled down, apparently more than competent. He ran a few diagnostics with his equipment. “Huh.”
“What?”
“She ain’t got no memory, for one thing,” he said, sending Ish’s hopes crashing. “Search me if I know why not. It’s been wiped clean’s a whistle right back to her commissioning, looks like.”
No memory at all? How could that have happened? Why would it have been done?
“I don’t understand,” he muttered aloud.
The tech moved his equipment to another connection. Thinly veiled impatience creased his brow through his faceplate. “Don’t understand what? She’s been brain wiped. What’s hard to understand about that?”
That’s grief talking, not insubordination . . .
“Not what. Why.” Ish gestured a little helplessly. “Battle damage wouldn’t have wiped her whole memory. Which means someone had to do it. And I knew this crew. Hart wouldn’t have done this to Red, not unless she were about to be captured. And she wasn’t. That much, we do know. She made it to the pickup point without any Deng escorts. Banjo certainly wouldn’t have done this. DeVries, maybe . . .”
Guilt tugged at him. DeVries wouldn’t have done something like this, either, for all he’d been aboard Red only a few days. Ish had known DeVries, too, had personally ordered Bonaventure’s engineer into this mission. It never grew easier, ordering men into battle, often knowing they weren’t likely to come back. But DeVries should’ve come back. Red and her whole crew should’ve come back. What had happened to cause one of these three men—either Willum DeVries or Doug Hart or Aduwa “Banjo” Banjul—to destroy Red’s memory?
The positions of the bodies gave no clue. First Lieutenant Banjul had left the Command Compartment. Banjo had been flung against a bulkhead in crew quarters opposite a terrible rent in the Bolo’s hull. Burns and lacerations across his face and upper torso might have been inflicted before death or might have contributed to it.
DeVries slumped on the deckplates near the head. Red had tongue-tilted down the door in its emergency-medical-station configuration. DeVries either hadn’t been able to crawl all the way to the makeshift “bed” or he’d been thrown clear. The young engineer was dead of radiation poisoning. Ish’s enviro-suit protected him from the still-lethal dosages inside the Bolo’s breached hull. DeVries had been badly injured even before receiving the lethal dose of radiation which had ultimately killed him. Ish checked Red’s medications log. It indicated a final, massive dose of painkillers administered to the dying engineer. Ish’s throat tightened. So like Red, to try and ease him through it.
As for Marine Captain Doug Hart . . .
One of Ish’s closest friends lay in a tangle of broken bones and the remains of his command chair. He’d taken a direct hit from whatever had breached the hull up here. He hadn’t had a chance. None of the Command Team had. But the question remained: why had Red engaged the enemy at all, charging against a vastly superior force when she knew it was hopeless?
And why had Doug Hart allowed what amounted to suicide?
“Dammit, I knew Red. I don’t care what FleetCom says. She wasn’t crazy!”
The technician’s glance begged to disagree. Ish had to turn away. Red’s behavior certainly argued otherwise. But he couldn’t bring himself to admit it, not after what he and Red had been through together.
“Yeah,” the tech muttered, “this whole operation’s a stinking louse. But . . . whoever did it, they missed the backup mission record.”
The sounds coming from beneath the console made him wince. Broken connections dangled under the main Action/Command center console, causing another inward flinch. Ish had commanded a lot of Bolos, had relinquished command of Red only a year previously, taking a commission in Space Force that would give him options commanding Red couldn’t. He’d taken a lot of backup mission record modules out of Bolos, both combat and special units. Designed to provide a duplicate of the Bolo’s current mission records should anything happen to the Bolo’s main data banks during battle, the modules had occasionally proven to be of incalculable worth. Ish knew they had to have that backup mission module.
But the dangling connections and broken seals were obscene. The tech was a butcher, gutting Red’s mind.
Or what the real butcher had left of it.
The rail-thin technician emerged holding a dense, heavy-looking casing. “Maybe this’ll explain why she went starkers.”
Ish didn’t respond. He couldn’t. He just accepted the module from the suited technician. It was heavier than it looked, which was very. Ish—cursing his shakiness—nearly dropped it. Whatever had really happened during those last few minutes of battle, it would be recorded in this module. Without the data it contained, Red would never remember . . .
. . . anything.
The last eight years were gone, as it was.
Red didn’t remember him. Would never remember him.
The pain that caused ran so deep he couldn’t get his breath for a moment. Maybe he could run a Restore. . . . Ish seriously doubted Space Force Command would authorize anyone to run a Restore command from any of Red’s backup mission modules to reintegrate missing memory data. She was so badly damaged she would be retired anyway, and now there was the serious question of inadvertently reinstalling whatever had caused her to go mad.