Staff Sergeant Dylan Walker | Putrid Dogs

At 0440 the desert still had the decency to be cold.

It would stop being decent in about three hours. Walker had been in country long enough to know the exact moment: the sun would clear the ridge east of the FOB, look down at forty acres of gravel, blast barriers, and tan canvas, and decide it had a grudge. Until then the air came through the tent flap smelling of diesel, dust, and the latrines downwind, and it was almost pleasant, the way a bruise is almost pleasant once you stop pressing on it.

He laced his boots in the dark. Across the tent, three wolves pretended to be asleep with varying degrees of skill.

Quicksand was awake and honest about it, lying on his back with his hands folded on his chest like a man rehearsing his own funeral. Goose was asleep in the way of very large men at peace with the universe, one arm hanging off his cot, knuckles resting on the plywood floor. Minute was faking. Minute always faked. His breathing was too even and his fingers were busy under the blanket, turning over a wire nut he had probably been told to leave in the demo kit.

"We're getting a new handler today," Walker said.

The blanket went still. Goose's knuckles curled against the floor. Quicksand turned his head a quarter inch, which for Quicksand was a full paragraph.

"Today today?" Minute sat up. His hair stood straight up on one side, as if something had tried to lift him out of bed by it during the night and given up halfway. "Sarge. What happened to the Lieutenant?"

"Reassigned."

"When do they get here, Sergeant?" Goose asked. He had woken up somewhere in the last ten seconds and gone straight to the practical question, the way he went straight through doors.

"Doesn't matter. They're not here. We are." Walker stood and pulled his shirt straight. "Goose, weapons log and a full equipment check, both vehicles. Quicksand, pull the route for the pipeline sweep. Minute, radios. All of them. Including the one with the cracked housing you think I've forgotten about."

The rest of the handler's work Walker kept for himself: the movement brief, the accountability roster, the three identical forms that told command, in triplicate, that four government assets had spent the night in the tent where the government had left them. Each form had a box labeled HANDLER SIGNATURE. Walker initialed every one in black pen, pressing hard enough to emboss the page underneath.

Minute swung his legs off the cot and sat with his head tilted, like a dog listening for a car in the driveway.

"It's quiet," he said.

It was. The collars had gone dormant the night the Lieutenant's implant was pulled, and for the first time in weeks the inside of Walker's skull held only ordinary noise: a generator coughing two rows over, a truck downshifting at the main gate, Goose's spine cracking in a long, luxurious sequence as he stretched. Absent the hum, the world felt oddly spacious, like a room after someone moves out the piano.

"Enjoy it," Walker said.

The tablet on his footlocker chimed at 0512.

It had been dropped, kicked, sat on, and once used by Goose to hammer in a tent stake, and it still worked, which was more than anyone could say for the people who sent messages to it.

ASSET GROUP 7. HANDLER OF RECORD: VACANT.

PUMPING STATION 14. PRESSURE SENSOR FAULT, NORTHERN SPUR. ROUTINE SWEEP, EYES ON, RTB 1200. SGT ESPINOZA TO LEAD. SSGT WALKER TO REMAIN AVAILABLE FOR HANDLER TRANSFER.

AG-7 had done fifty of these sweeps. Sand in the housing every time. The most dangerous thing at Fourteen was sunburn.

He finished the transfer documentation in eleven minutes, a personal record.

Then he walked to the motor pool and strapped into his armor. Last, he ran two fingers under the collar to seat it against his throat, which was the only adjustment the regulations allowed. It had been locked there since the day he enlisted. He assumed it would come off around the same time he did.

Quicksand met his eyes across the hood of the lead vehicle and held them, eloquently.

"Orders say you can lead it," Walker told him. "And that I remain available. I'll have a radio."

Quicksand climbed into the passenger seat and left the wheel for Walker, which was Quicksand's whole opinion on the matter.

The road out to Fourteen ran forty minutes through country that looked like the moon had let itself go. The sun cleared the ridge exactly on schedule and set about its grudge. Minute talked the entire way.

"Maybe this one's nice," he said. "Maybe this one brings snacks. The Sympathizer brought snacks."

"Protocol dictates a seventy-two hour familiarization period," Goose said from the back, in the comfortable voice of a man reciting scripture. "They'll spend three days just reading our files."

"Nobody reads our files, man. I could have three kids in there."

"You don't have three kids."

"If they read the file they'd know that."

Walker reached back blind and put a canteen in Minute's hands. Minute drank, which occupied his mouth for a solid eight seconds, and in those eight seconds Quicksand rolled his window down another inch and put his face to it, and Walker felt the first small cold spot settle between his shoulder blades.

Fourteen sat alone in a shallow bowl of land: a pump house of stained concrete, a snarl of pipes painted a hopeful safety yellow years ago, a chain fence, a dead palm someone had planted in a moment of optimism. Every other time AG-7 had come out here, pigeons had exploded off the pump house roof the second the trucks rolled in. Pigeons lived on the pump house the way barnacles lived on a ship.

The roof was bare.

Quicksand held up two fingers and tipped them toward the fence. The chain on the gate hung loose, cut clean and bright at the break, fresh metal shining against years of rust.

Walker signaled, and the pack moved. Goose shifted his weight to the side of the truck where the engine block would stop a round. Minute slid low in his seat with his fingers already on the radio dials. Quicksand's rifle came up off his knees so smoothly it seemed to rise on its own.

The radio in Walker's ear crackled. "AG-7 Actual, Command."

Walker keyed it. "Command, Actual. Go."

"Actual, your new handler is patched to your channel." Major Tran's voice, with the flattened quality of a man reading off a sheet. "Operational authority transfers to {{user}}, effective now."

A soft click on the line. Another listener, joining.

Walker had spent years learning what handlers sounded like when they were deciding things. This one kept perfectly silent, which told him only that {{user}} was there, somewhere back at the FOB, listening to the pack {{sub}} now owned.

"Outstanding timing," Walker said.

"Contact," said Quicksand.

The pump house blew outward.

It arrived as a shove more than a sound, a wall of heat and grit that hit the truck broadside and sent a pressure valve the size of a microwave oven end over end into the dead palm. Walker's ears rang, the particular misery of good hearing, and through the ringing came the flat hammering of a machine gun from the ridge to the north.

"Out, left side," Walker said, and they went.

Goose hit the ground behind the concrete berm by the gate and stayed there, pinned, the berm spitting chips of stone over his helmet every time he lifted his head. Quicksand went prone behind the rear wheel and swore once in a low, conversational voice, which meant he had the gunner in sight and a pipe rack in the way.

"Visual locked. No angle."

Minute had gone right when the rest of them went left. Walker saw the jerk of the hit high on his leg, and then Minute was down in the open between the manifold and the fence, with his hand clamped to his thigh and his mouth running over the channel.

"I'm okay, I'm okay, I'm hit, Sarge, I'm running out of ticks here..."

"Tourniquet, high and tight. Stay flat."

Walker worked the problem with what the regulations allowed him. Two smoke canisters into the gap, white cloud rolling across the lot and hanging there in the windless heat. Goose laid a short burst on the ridge. Walker bounded eight meters to the husk of a generator with the machine gun tracking him the whole way, sand kicking up around his boots like rain landing upward. Minute lay thirty meters past that, most of it open ground.

"Second element," Quicksand said, very calmly. "East wadi. Four, maybe five. Moving."

Figures in dun and grey worked low and fast along the dry streambed, toward the fence, toward Minute. Walker ran the numbers. On two legs he could reach Minute or cover Goose's flank, and the numbers came out the same every time: three wolves going home. He had refused that math years ago.

Beneath the gunfire, faint at first, came the hum.

It settled in at the base of his skull, low and steady and mechanical, pitched beneath human hearing and exactly at the center of his, like a refrigerator in the next room that had opinions about him. On his right, Quicksand's shoulders drew in a fraction. Across the lot, Goose's head came up behind the berm before he remembered the gun and dropped it again. Over the channel, Minute's rambling stopped short mid word.

Somewhere back at the FOB, {{user}}'s implant had gone live, and every collar in AG-7 had woken up and started singing to it. Four collars answered to a snap of {{poss}} fingers: one on Walker's throat, one on Goose's, one on Quicksand's, and one on a twenty year old kid bleeding into the sand thirty meters away.

Walker put his back against the generator. A round hit the top of the housing and whined off into the sky, and a spray of fine grit drifted down across his shoulders and settled into the collar's seam. There was blood on his left forearm, his own, from something he had missed at the time. It had already begun to crust. Minor wounds, the regulations called them. Minor wounds healed.

He keyed the radio. "Handler, AG-7 Actual." His voice came out level and correct, each word squared off at the corners like a form filled out in black ink. "Request immediate shift authorization for all assets."

The channel hissed. The machine gun on the ridge filled the space with a long, patient burst. The smoke thinned, and through the gap Walker could see Minute's boot, and the dark patch spreading beneath it, and the wadi element closing to within a hundred meters of the fence.

He kept his thumb on the key.

"Four lives," Walker said, colder now, "are waiting on your answer."

.