The map was wrong.

The information displayed on the chunky brown battle tablet didn’t make sense, and I puffed out my cheeks in frustration as I contemplated how far I could fling the device.

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“Parker,” Lieutenant Jacobs’ voice buzzed in my earpiece. “I need an update.” I decided not to toss it.

“TION is still giving me pushback,” I reported, pinching the screen to zoom the view out a bit on the combat AI’s interface. “I’m trying another couple of queries to see if I can’t get some better info. Stand by.”

It wasn’t quite a fuck you, but it was close enough. Having a platoon leader breathing down my neck for directions reminded me all too much of the stressful family road trips when my mother adamantly refused to slow down while driving through crowded cities. I turned my attention to the digital map and began tracing the route it was assigning to our mission. “TION,” I said into my helmet’s microphone, “backtrack today’s route through grid 3H ER 3425 8263 and identify anomalies from prior runs.”

Ever since we began picking up rocks and blindly throwing them at one another, the fog of war has plagued soldiers. The introduction of the telegraph, the hot-air balloon, the radio, radar, and satellites have lifted the fog a bit, but it remains a pernicious foe. Even the most formidable of armies still encounter the acrid taste of surprise when an unexpected bullet snaps past their heads.

The Marines’ Tactical Intelligence Optimization and Navigation system was designed to be the solution to that problem. TION is a curious agent; it seeks out comms networks, internet posts, satellite images, reconnaissance data, and the endless reports generated by good old-fashioned human intelligence, then mashes it all together in its stateside, black-racked server farms to identify patterns and spit out actionable orders and directions that even the greenest recruits can follow. It was sold to the Pentagon as the silver bullet that would transform warfare forever, making wars cheaper and safer.

In reality, it’s a glorified GPS. It sends directions and suggestions to our helmet visors and vehicle touch screens, pointing out everything from enemy combatants to hidden landmines to rough roads, and provides everyone in the field with up-to-the-second tactical plans and orders. It’s extremely useful, but that doesn’t stop it from getting in its own way as it parses the mass of often conflicting information from the battle space.

Case in point, the directions it’s provided Blue-6 platoon of Charlie Company don’t make sense to me. Our mission has been to provide security for the automated resupply trucks for our peacekeeping operations in the region, and today’s task is to mind a small robotic convoy headed from Main Operating Base Fox to a busy Forward Operating Base called Anvil, which sits over a well trafficked zone a couple of hours away. We’ve run dozens of these resupply missions since we touched down a couple months ago, and they usually go off without a hitch: TION gives us our directions, and we dutifully follow the line on the map. This time, it’s thrown us a truly convoluted route that takes us along some dicey roads far away from what we conventionally know as safe territory.

“I’ve checked over grid 3H ER 3425 8263 again, Specialist Parker,” TION’s voice was calm and neutral, almost like I was talking to someone on the other end of the phone, with only a hint that it was artificial. “And I can’t find any anomalies that would necessitate a change to what we’ve used before. We haven’t used this route recently, and I haven’t picked up any threat indicators that would bar its use.”

I sighed at the nonanswer. I’d already pointed out that the route added unnecessary time and miles, but the machine was stuck on it.

“Parker,” Jacobs broke back into my earpiece. I checked my field watch and saw that we were coming up on our time to leave. The lieutenant had only arrived in the field a couple of days ago, and from my initial meeting with him this morning, I could tell he was the impatient type. I jabbed the screen with my gloved hand and tucked the device away in the slot on my chest rig.

“It’s sticking with this new route,” I told him. “I’ve run through a couple of times and it’s not providing me with any good reason for shifting from what we usually use.”

“What’s the problem?”

“Unclear.” I hesitated. That was literally true. TION was a black box artificial intelligence that doesn’t give a ton of context for the information that it provides us. “When I pressed it for a reason for the switch, it kept saying that it was fine. It’s probably this enormous pile of tiny rationalizations that would take more time than we had to fully go through. The only thing I can think of is that it wants to get some updated vehicle and helmet cam footage from this particular road, and figures that sending us on a scenic route is the easiest way to get it.”

“And you don’t agree with him?” the lieutenant asked. I could feel judgment in the way he voiced the question. I knew from his file that he was fresh out of officer candidate school at Quantico, where I knew they were largely teaching a hands-off approach when it came to systems like TION. Trust the equipment and it’ll take care of you. If it says to go left, you go left.

Equipment can break and technology can be unreliable, and that’s where I come in. TION is an expensive software platform, and rather than spend the time and money to take it down to studs and build it back up properly, someone at a desk decided it was cheaper and easier to stick a person into the decision loop as a sort of interpreter. Thus, I’m technically not part of Charlie Company or the Blue-6 platoon; I’m a 3SO, a Surface Systems Support Officer, attached to field units to be in the loop and root out any weirdness the AI might spit out.

Folks like Jacobs are generally suspicious of us 3SOs who swoop in to tinker with TION’s instructions and prefer it when we just stick to playing passenger. When they think I’m out of earshot, I’m a “deficiency,” just there to slow things down.

So here I am in the middle of a dry landscape, holding the hand of a 20-something graduate who doesn’t know anything about these systems and who resents my presence, taking up the space of one of his Marines.

“I don’t,” I admitted. “I sat in on the resupply run with Blue-3 last week, and everything was fine. We pulled out all the stops along the way—flew an anti-mine drone, ran a check through the local comms chatter, and everything was quiet. I can’t see anything from SIGINT that indicates things have changed, and TION isn’t telling me why it’s sending us this way today, which makes me think that it’s just a data-fishing run that puts us out in the field longer than we need to be.”

There was a pause over the comm as Jacobs mulled things over. “Our priority is to resupply FOB Anvil,” he finally said. “If TION’s saying this is the way to go and wants to get some extra camera footage, then we’ll just go along with it. Maybe the system has a reason for needing it, but that’s not my call.”

I knew that Jacobs’ instincts to trust the system weren’t wrong, but I’ve also seen what happens when one of the self-driving Clydesdale trucks gets confused in a village and blown to bits by an opportunistic militant when we get a weird, counterintuitive order.

“Understood,” I told him.

“Good. Let’s double check with DroneOps and see if they have any eyes in the air right now to give us some updates.”

While Jacobs marshaled our six-vehicle convoy with the rest of Blue-6 and waited for the report from the network of high-altitude drones watching the region, I checked over my gear. Chest rig, sidearm, battle tablet, batteries, multi-tool, body armor, all strapped down over my MARPAT combat utility uniform. I spun my helmet in my hands, making sure that the visor and the embedded cameras on the forehead and sides were clear of dust before I strapped it on.

Stevens took up the wheel of the lightly armored Rockford Light Tactical Vehicle Lynx, providing forward security for the convoy, with Yakubu monitoring the top turret fitted with a quick-response microwave cannon to take care of drones and an M2 .50-caliber machine gun for anything else.

Then came a quartet of hulking Heavy Cargo Tactical Vehicles – Autonomous (Clydesdales) loaded with shipping containers full of food, water, and ammunition for FOB Anvil. The Clydes were plugged directly into TION and would follow whatever route it laid down for them. They could operate on their own when problems arose, but they weren’t particularly smart for autonomous vehicles. I’ve seen them misjudge their surroundings and drive into flooded rivers or tip over, but they were tough and sturdy and generally did the job.

Jacobs, Simms, Charles, Mann, and I climbed onto the Rockford Light Combat Personnel Carrier Catamount’s open crew compartment. It was essentially a semiautonomous armored bus, designed to ferry Marines in and out of combat zones, and could take on anything from high caliber rounds to landmines. Jacobs and I took the front seats to keep an eye on the video screens, while the rest strapped into the seats in the back. TION helpfully switched over its feeds from my tablet and helmet visor to the laptop-sized screen in the center of the console.

The vehicles make up a bunch of TION’s eyes and ears on the battlefield. They’re studded with sensors that take high-definition footage of everything along our routes, use LIDAR to map our surroundings down to the millimeter, run facial recognition of everyone we encounter, and tap into any cell phones or radios operating in the area, all of which gets processed in some server farm back stateside. If ever deployed there, they’d be mobile Orwellian nightmares.

“All good?” Jacobs asked. TION relayed a report from DroneOps: No obvious issues or threat indicators detected.

I gave him a thumbs up. “We’re good to go,” I told him. Charles, Mann, and Simms finished checking over their body armor and chest rigs, double-checking their AidPacks, magazines, knives, water, rations, radios, and batteries before confirming in a series of clipped reports. “B6-1, B6-2, check,” Stevens called in from the Lynx.

“Good news all around,” Jacobs said as he tapped the control on the dash for the comms. “MOB Fox, Blue-6 Lead. We’re departing for FOB Anvil.”

“Copy, B6 lead, safe travels. We’ll leave the lights on for you,” the comms specialist on the other side said. With that, Stevens took off with the Lynx, spraying dirt and gravel up in the air. The Clydes lurched to life when they realized their leader was on the move, and Jacobs tapped the controls to get the Cat moving.

I pushed down the unease I was feeling. I’ve ridden shotgun on plenty of these types of cargo runs, and everyone dreads them, even the easy ones. I know we’re always being watched. The militants who’ve been operating in the area have gotten very good at surveilling the landscape, dropping microdrones that activate and loiter when they sense movement or seeding the area with cheap, tiny sensors that pick up our radio traffic. It’s not all bad—TION’s good at tapping into those feeds, meaning that their eyes are also ours—but it feels like we’re giving up data that we otherwise wouldn’t have to.

The information TION’s been feeding us updates on the Cat’s screens, a glorified map of the region with our recommended route marked in green. You’d be forgiven at first glance for thinking it was like any of the civilian map apps for your car or phone, but if you took a closer look, the differences leap out. Lines crisscross the surface, filled with minute dots. I tapped on a grid square as we sped down the highway, and they expanded into hi-res satellite images of the ground, each point representing some bit of data that TION thinks will be useful to us.

Most of those indicators aren’t all that interesting. A detected camera. The origin of a text message or phone call. The location of a village’s residents. A person detected on a satellite image. I could spend days crawling down each rabbit hole, but that’s what TION was designed to do: wade through that data and make it useful. Tap the figures on the screen, and the system will generate a profile of the person, summarizing their lives in tidy text biographies. Almost nobody bothers with that level of detail: They just rely on TION to give them a heads-up if someone wanders onto the road for a suspicious amount of time. But I’ve gotten into the habit of poking through villages, person-by-person, to get a sense of who’s around us.

The locals don’t lead rich lives: They were born here, wake up, and do the same thing they did yesterday. TION has a good sense of who’s been inducted into the local militia groups, and it keeps an eye on them, but for the most part we’re happy to eyeball one another as we run our convoys and keep raids to a minimum. The folks here have dealt with invaders for centuries; they know we can inflict a lot of pain, but that if they put their heads down, we’ll be gone at some point.

“First village, two klicks,” Jacobs reported. I looked up from the map to see a smattering of buildings dotting the base of some wrinkled hills. The landscape was bare and dry, but I picked out some green scrub-brush and low fruit trees in the outskirts, the morning sunlight reflecting off the whitewashed stone buildings clustered around a handful of streets. TION began projecting some landmarks on the interior of the truck’s windscreen, thin lines snaking to text labels that IDed buildings and streets and sketched out a line over the route through the settlement. “Stevens, Yakubu, eyes up.”

I tapped out a couple of queries into TION. “List known priority threat individuals in the vicinity” came back with only a local politician with ties to some of the local militia groups, but he was across town. “Highlight recently placed packages or suspicious activity alongside the route” was also short: Nobody had spent the average 10 or so minutes it took to bury an explosive in the middle of the dirt road since the last time we had troops in the area.

“What’s the local attitude?” was more worrisome. TION peppered the village with dots, compiling the sentiment of the intercepted texts and conversations. It had run all of them through translation software, looking for keywords and sentiments about our presence, figuring out if what they were saying was good or bad. The spread of yellow and orange dots wasn’t terrible, but it made us feel as though we were walking into a bar where we weren’t welcome. Nobody was going to throw a punch at us for coming through the door, but it wouldn’t take much to encourage the first one.

“Not a friendly bunch,” I murmured into my mic to Jacobs, who was scanning the increasingly crowded sides of the roads. Children stopped playing as they caught sight of our tan trucks. A couple waved, but they mostly just stared. A group of women carried baskets and bags on their backs, and men stopped whatever chores or errands they were doing to watch as we passed by. Stevens navigated the Lynx down the center of the street, and the handful of dilapidated cars and trucks that started to show up eased out of the way. They knew from experience that we assumed the right of way.

“Route update recommendation.” I turned my attention to the screen and saw an arrow. “Additional traffic detected along our route. Here’s an alternative that gets around it.”

The map shifted to a top-down view, showing our route had changed from a green line to a bright red one. A light blue line snaked around the area, taking us down a series of side streets before looping back onto the main road. I frowned, and began tapping the screen, zooming in on the affected area. The joke was that a traffic jam here was livestock sitting in the road, but when I started poking at dots, TION showed that there was a lot of cell phone activity taking place. I tapped a button on the screen and scanned through the results.

“What’s going on, 3SO?” Mills asked from the back as the LCPC slowed. He and the other three Marines were scanning the sidelines as we passed.  

“TION says it’s a traffic jam,” I told them.

“What, two cows decided to take a break?” Charles joked.

“You see a lot of cows out there?”

The Marine grimaced. We hadn’t seen any livestock. “Is this another one of those weird things you 3SOs look for?”

“Maybe,” I said. “TION doesn’t always tell us how it comes to its decisions, so we look for unusual things that stand out. Folks aren’t usually out and about at this time of the day, but maybe there’s something going on in town that’s blocking things up.”

As I spoke, Jacobs muttered into his helmet mic and tapped the screen, shifting us onto the alternate route. Up ahead, Stevens stomped on the brakes and veered down the street TION was now recommending. We dutifully followed suit. I unstrapped from my seat, made my way into the back of the Cat, and pulled down an olive-green pelican case from the storage rack. “What are you doing?” Jacobs asked.

“Looking for weirdness,” I told him as I unclipped the fasteners. “If TION’s sent us out here to do some sightseeing, we might as well do just that.” I flipped the lid of the case open to reveal a pair of hand-sized drones nestled into a sheet of foam. I pulled one out and held down the button to turn it on. Lights snapped on, and it began syncing with my helmet as I returned to the truck’s cockpit.

Jacobs nodded in silent assent, and I tossed the device out of the open window. It fell for half a second before taking off into the blue-grey sky. A dot popped up on the vehicle’s screen, and I tapped out some directions to send it over our original route.

Our new route took us from the village’s main streets into a residential neighborhood, full of low, concrete and masonry homes, painted in a wild array of colors, their windows flung open to take in the cooler morning air. The dusty streets narrowed and the foot traffic dropped.

I got a ping from the drone; it reached our original route and began flying in a grid pattern. I pulled up its camera feed and my stomach immediately plunged: It showed a nearly empty street, not one plugged with traffic, as TION was reporting.

“Something’s up,” I told Jacobs, and pointed him to the screen.

His eyes narrowed as he turned around and smacked the side of the equipment rack. The trio in back looked up from whatever they were discussing off mic. “Eyes up,” he told them. Wordlessly, Charles, Mann, and Simms picked up their rifles and checked their magazines.

I turned my attention back to the screen with the drone footage, scanning the street from person to person. A glimpse of movement caught my eye, and I poked the screen to turn the camera around after it. It was a kid, no more than eight or nine, pulling a small wagon. Whatever she was pulling was wrapped in a blanket, but when the drone passed overhead, it caught a whiff of electromagnetic chatter. I leaned closer and pinched the screen.

One corner of the cover wasn’t tucked in all the way, and as the drone circled, I realized what I was looking at: a pile of phones. Old ones, by the look of it, and a lot of them, probably dumped into charity bins from well-intentioned Westerners, but still good enough to run a script that spoofed calls, text messages, and map usage. They painted a picture for TION of a crowded street full of people. The street was empty.

“Shit,” I said. “Someone’s messing with our route.”

TION wasn’t exactly a state secret. There were the usual announcements and coverage in tech media that explained the rough boundaries of what it was intended to do when it was rolled out, though TION’s exact capabilities and functions remained classified. But that didn’t stop folks from putting two and two together.

For the first time, Jacobs looked concerned. “How?”

I pointed to the screen and showed him the zoomed-in view. “Someone’s realized that if they make it look like the street is full of people, we’ll change our route. We’re rolling exactly where they want us.

Realization dawned on his face, and he swung around in his seat. “6-1, 6-2, eyes up. Someone’s trying to shuffle us into a kill box. Stop, stop, st—”

There was a flash up ahead: A white tail of exhaust from a rocket-propelled grenade streaked across the windscreen, narrowly missing one of the Clydes, and vanished between the buildings before exploding in a sharp crack. Shrapnel rattled against the truck’s exterior.

“Contact 3 o’clock,” Stevens radioed in, calmer than I would have expected from someone who’d just gotten shot at with a rocket. In a second, TION flashed directions into my helmet’s visor, extrapolating where the round had come from to pinpoint the shooter’s location, highlighting an upper window of one of the taller residences in red for us. Stevens was already tapping the brakes on the Lynx, and I could see Yakubu whipping the .50-cal around to where the RPG came from. I heard a quick brap-brap-brap as he shot a burst of rounds into the window. Dust kicked up around the truck.

The Clydes stopped on their own, trapped between the Lynx and us. I could see their wheels turning as they tried to figure where to go to get out of the line of fire. I could hear Jacobs reporting the attack to the folks back at MOB Fox somewhere in the background.

TION flashed another alert and a second crack-hiss from an RPG erupted from one of the buildings, this time from the roof, slamming into the building next to us. I could make out the outline of a gunman’s head and shoulders as they worked to reload. I heard a series of cracks, and a cloud of dust blew out from the masonry. Charles and Mann dismounted from the LCPC and were returning fire, with Simms covering the rear with her carbine. There was another series of shots, and I heard rounds slam into the side of the vehicles like someone hitting the armor plating with a sledgehammer.

Another alert popped onto my screens as TION worked the problem. It highlighted another window where the gunfire was coming from and dropped a series of recommendations: Back up to one of the cross-streets and watch for anyone coming up from behind us while the Clydes backed up and went down a different side street.

“Hang on,” I radioed Simms. She took a step back from the rear hatch and grabbed one of the ceiling handholds as I took over the Cat’s controls and threw it into reverse. Outside, Charles and Mann peppered the building with another series of rounds, keeping whoever was there out of sight. They jumped back as the Clydes began backing up, following us. At the head of the convoy, Yakubu let out another burst that took hand-sized chunks out of the building’s exterior and kicked up another cloud of dust.

I realized that only a handful of seconds had elapsed since the shooting started. I didn’t have time to pull my sidearm out of its holster. Jacobs moved automatically, his rifle already out the window and pointed down the street toward our unseen assailants. He fired off a round, and my helmet muffled the sound in the enclosed space.

I glanced at the screen and saw that TION was laying out next steps for us: Stevens and Yakubu were to take the Lynx through the space between two of the houses and provide forward security for the Clydes that were now shuffling their way through the alleyway. I saw that Charles and Mann had climbed aboard the last autonomous truck in the line and were scanning the tops of the buildings for any further threats.

There was another crack from the buildings, and another series of hammer-blows across the side of the LCPC. Jacobs swore and ducked back from the door window. “One down the street,” he reported. TION flashed up another highlight. Simms leaned out the door and let off a controlled burst from her M4. She pulled the magazine, tossed it back into the truck, and deftly replaced it before letting off another burst.

Up ahead, the Lynx vanished between the buildings, Stevens taking off to head up the Clydes. I threw the Cat back into motion as the trio cleared the alleyway and followed them. Jacobs slid from his seat and dropped into the crew compartment, joining Simms at the rear hatch. I glanced at the overhead map on the screen again. We’d fallen back in line as a convoy, now on a different, narrow street that led along the edge of the neighborhood, the way we came before looping back around the city. I recognized that TION was doing something clever: plotting out a route that looked counterintuitive, looping back in a way that a human driver wouldn’t. Because of that, I realized, nobody’s lying in wait for us. 

I took a breath and saw that TION flashed a casualty alert. I looked up from the screen and saw Charles and Mann had vanished from where they’d climbed up on the last Clyde. I slammed on the brakes.

“Get moving!” Jacobs yelled from the rear of the LCPC. He and Simms had stopped shooting but were still covering the rear. I opened the door and jumped down. “What are you doing?”

I didn’t answer; TION was giving him the same alerts and he’d realize what I was doing in a moment. I stumbled; the Cat was still moving along the street on its own, and I realized that I’d tripped over Mann.

The Marine was sprawled on the side of the road, gasping in pain. I turned him over and realized what had happened: One of the incoming rounds had pierced his leg and left behind a massive exit wound. “Shit, shit, shit.” I swore. “I got you,” I told him as I fumbled with my AidPack. A pool of bright red blood was growing under him, and I pressed the anticoagulant bandage against it.  

Charles appeared from somewhere. “Oh fuck.” He was covered in a thick coating of dust and grime, and I realized he must have fallen off the Clyde when Mann was hit. “Move out of the way,” he ordered as he fumbled with the AidPack, pulled out a Combat Application Tourniquet, and tore open an Israeli Bandage from its wrapper. “Sorry buddy, this is gonna hurt.” He slipped the CAT over Mann’s leg and began twisting the rod to tighten it up. The Marine screamed.

The LCPC slammed on its brakes next to us. Another round of gunfire clattered above our heads as Simms emptied a magazine down the street. Jacobs appeared. “Get him into the Cat,” he ordered. “We need to get out of here.” Charles and I grabbed the straps on Mann’s chest rig and pulled. He cried out as we hauled him up and dragged him onto the back of the carrier. Someone slammed the rear hatch closed and the truck leaped into motion.

The truck kicked up a plume of dust behind us as we sped away. It was clear the road wasn’t regularly maintained, and the truck’s suspension barely absorbed the washboard and potholes that we flew over. The bumps hardly registered as I pushed down on the compress over Mann’s leg to stanch the bleeding.

He lost consciousness as we took off, his face turning a deathly shade of white. The tourniquet tamped down the bleeding, but I could tell it wasn’t enough. Simms rummaged through the equipment rack and pulled out a packet of artificial blood. It wasn’t a long-term solution, but it would at least buy us time. I looked over at Jacobs. “What’s the word from Fox?”

He opened his mouth and was interrupted by a ping from the front of the vehicle. “Route alert,” TION droned.

“What the fuck now?” Jacobs swore as he got up and moved to the front. “Parker, need you here.”

Charles took my place, keeping pressure on the bandage. My hands and cammies were soaked in blood and I tried not to touch anything as I made my way to the front. Jacobs was leaning over the console screen, looking like he was about to smash it.

I could see why: The route marker had changed, directing us to head back toward our original route with a priority designation. “The fuck?”

“He knows Mann’s wounded, right?” Jacobs asked. His officer’s attitude was slipping, and I could see the worry on his face.

“Yes. It should be giving us guidance on how to get him to safety. Is Fox sending out an evac?” I didn’t need to say that even without TION’s guidance, I could tell that Mann didn’t have a lot of time.

He shook his head. “They’re waiting on instructions from TION.”

I felt a chill. “It should know that his condition is dire, and it wouldn’t be suggesting that we press on unless … fucker.”

“What?”

“It’s figuring that he’s not going to make it, even if an evac gets to us, so it’s just telling us to proceed as if nothing happened.”

Jacobs’ eyes flashed and for a moment, I thought he was going to smash the screen. Instead, he turned around to the controls and slapped a button. The truck slowed and eased over to the side of the road. “B61, B62,” he called out on the radio. “We’re stopping, keep an eye out.” Ahead of us, I saw the Lynx slow and turn. Yakubu popped back up into the turret and swiveled around to cover our rear. Jacobs turned to me. “Get TION to understand that I’m not driving another foot until we get confirmation that someone’s coming to grab Mann.”

I looked up at the cockpit camera. “I think it knows that now.” I tapped out a command into the screen.

A minute later, Jacobs put his hand to his ear and listened. He nodded and muttered into his helmet mic.

“Confirmed. We’ll be ready.” He turned to me and pulled a flare off his chest rig. “Fox is sending a flier. Go mark a spot.”

I grabbed the flare and jumped down from the LCPC. We’d come to a stop in a wide, rocky flat in the middle of a series of hills. I walked off the road, found a clear spot, and activated the flare, sending up a thick cloud of red smoke.

We didn’t have to wait long. “Friendly incoming,” TION hummed in my earpiece, and I heard a slight rumble from the distance. After a couple minutes, I picked out a dot in the sky. The flier was a spindly-looking autonomous aircraft: a low-slung body mounted under a quartet of wings. Its rotors swiveled upward and it blew out a huge cloud of dust and sand as it descended. The crew compartment popped open and a helmeted figure jumped out and ran toward us.

“Y’all called for a pickup?” The corpsman was a younger woman with a sergeant’s patch on her sleeve. Charles and Simms had moved Mann onto a stretcher and were on their way from the Cat, Jacobs holding a fresh bag of blood over him. The corpsman opened a hatch on the side of the airframe and helped secure Mann inside while Jacobs listed off what we’d done to save his life. He grabbed Mann’s hand and squeezed before stepping back. The woman closed the hatch. “We’ve got a trauma team waiting back at the MOB,” she explained as she circled back toward the cockpit. “TION’s forwarded all his vitals, so they’re ready. We’ll get him patched up.” With a quick nod farewell, she climbed back up. We backed up as the electric rotors spun up and the vehicle leapt into the air.

“Why did TION let something like this happen?” Jacobs asked as we trudged back. “He’s supposed to prevent these scenarios.”

“AI doesn’t think like us,” I told him. “It sounds like a person, and it’s easy to think that it is one, but it isn’t. It’s just a system pulling in and processing a whole lot of information. There’s a reason why it only talks to me: People got too attached to thinking that it was a real person that cared about them. That’s why I call it ‘it’ and not ‘him.’ It’s a valuable tool, and as far as it is concerned, that’s all we are as well: tools on the battlefield to be moved around.”

Jacobs was silent. We got back in the trucks and took stock. They were battered from where the shrapnel and bullets had hit their sides. The AI chattered away in my earpiece, providing me with a rundown on each of the trucks as we walked around them to inspect the damage. The four Clydes had taken some damage from the gunfire; one had a flat tire from shrapnel and another courtesy of the road’s many potholes. The Cat had taken the brunt of the gunfire: It was peppered with dents and bullet holes, but the batteries and tires were fine. Somehow, Stevens and Yakubo and their rig had avoided taking damage. And we were now a couple hours behind schedule, but TION was updating FOB Anvil as to our progress.

Jacobs directed Simms and Charles to work on fixing the damaged tires on the Clyde, and I retreated to the Cat to take stock of our next steps. I pulled up the map on my tablet and began tracing our route, inch by inch. A shadow fell over me, and I saw Jacobs reflected on the screen.

“So, what’s our next step?” he asked, plopping down beside me, that morning’s belligerence completely gone.

“That’s what I’m double-checking,” I said. “It’s shifting us back to the original route, but it now makes even less sense to me.” I tilted the tablet toward him and zoomed out. “It had us go through the village, right? We figured that it was sending us through there because that just happened to be the most effective way, like, maybe there was something in the other routes that was sending up a red flag, and we’d get it some updated footage of the area along the way, yeah?”

The officer nodded, staring intently at the map.

“Well, when we burned out of town, we ended up here,” I pointed to a spot on the map and traced my finger over a squiggly line. “It’s actually quicker if we were to head to Anvil on this route. But it’s having us go all the way over here, back to the original route.”

“Doesn’t make a lot of sense.”

“Right,” I confirmed. I traced my finger along the fat green line on the map. “The route runs all the way over here, then turns and runs back. It doesn’t look like anything if we stayed on the route as planned, but now it’s clear that it’s trying to get us to go by this spot.” I pointed to the place the route crooked at a sharper angle.

“What’s out there?”

I shrugged. “No villages or buildings for miles as far as I can see, just an equipment notation, but no details associated with it. I have no idea what that could be, but whatever it is, TION really wants us to head over there.”

“I don’t like the idea of this thing jerking us around,” Jacobs said as he stared at the screen. “I just want to get this run over with and get everyone back home.”

“No disagreement there,” I told him. “And I’m a bit reluctant to side with TION on this, but I think we should check it out.”

“Why?”

I pointed to the map. “It’s been trying to nudge us over in this direction all day. It redesignated the route through the village, despite the red flags that I know it was aware of. It’s not the most efficient or fastest or even safest road, and getting updated footage is one of those ‘if we can get it, great’ things, all of which tells me that it’s trying to get someone out there for a good reason, even at the risk of some lives.” My finger landed on the dot on the screen. “It’s not telling us what’s there, which makes me think that it’s something that really doesn’t want to be found, but definitely needs our attention.”

“Then why doesn’t it just tell us that? Or send some JSOC guys out to take care of it?” I could feel the frustration in Jacob’s voice.

“We’re probably not cleared to know about it,” I told him. “But it isn’t human; it doesn’t think like us. It ‘knows’ that it’s a priority, but it doesn’t know why.” I shrugged. “We won’t know for sure until we get there.”

The officer sighed, then clicked his mic. “Mount up. We’re moving out.”

TION directed us along the roadway until it abruptly veered us off onto what could only loosely be described as a dried riverbed. One look told us that the Clydes wouldn’t fare well there, and after conferring with TION, we decided to leave them behind. Stevens and Yakubu dismounted from the Lynx and joined Simms and Charles to keep them company while Jacobs and I took the vehicle.

Jacobs drove us, dodging rocks and the occasional ledge and outcropping as we plunged down the plateau. Eventually, the bed leveled and smoothed out, winding its way across another broad, dusty plain. I queried TION, which relayed that the entire region we were driving along had been the bottom of a shallow sea that had evaporated away. We skirted along the edge of the tall plateau walls.

“You’re approaching the target,” TION murmured in my ear, popping up a visual in my HUD.

I tapped Jacobs on the shoulder and pointed. In the distance, the cliff edge jutted out into a rocky wall. A couple dozen feet into the air was a wide ledge, and I could make out a metallic gleam. We parked the Lynx and stared up. It was steep, but not impossible to climb. We shouldered our guns and made our way up the rocky slope.

There was a device sitting in the middle of the ledge. Its modular frame was nearly 15 feet tall and outfitted with sensor packages: I picked out electromagnetic sensors, communications antennae, optical cameras, and a satellite uplink. It had clearly been sitting there for a while; it was coated in a fine layer of dust and grime.

“Sensor tower.” Jacobs grunted. “What the hell is it doing all the way out here?” It was a fair question. I’d seen similar equipment scattered around the battle zone, but nothing quite as complicated.

“TION, any clue to what we’re looking at here?” I asked.

“Optical and Electromagnetic Sensor tower,” the system said. “Mission scope and placement is designated TS/SCI, with an additional signifier. I can’t say what it’s for.”

“Have you heard of anything like that before?” Jacobs asked me when I relayed the information to him.

I shook my head. “Never.” TION was supposed to have complete access to everything in the battle space, no matter what the classification level. “But I’d bet that we’re not cleared to know what it is.”

Jacobs unslung his rifle and kept watch as I walked up to the tower, and TION fed me some instructions. “There’s a service panel on the right side of the installation,” it told me. “Access the panel by unscrewing the cover.”

I pulled my multi-tool from its pouch on my chest rig and undid the two screws that held the panel cover closed. A screen popped on and displayed a trippy, pixelated code. “It’s a verification prompt,” TION told me before I could ask. “Stand by.”

After a moment, the screen flashed green as TION worked its magic. It read: “Priority service bulletin.” I pulled off a glove and tapped the button on the screen.

Priority service bulletin: Optical sensor 4B has been obstructed. Clear lens and examine module.

Underneath was a diagram of the system. I walked around the tower and found the right one: a small, blocky metal system clamped onto one of the tower legs. It faced south with a clear view of the plateau below and was caked with a thick layer of dust. A small wiper was halfway engaged, and it was immediately clear what the problem was: The wiper was jammed and wasn’t clearing the lens.

I reached out with my gloved hand to grab hold of the wiper. After a little levering, the dust in the joint fell free, and it began moving back and forth. I wiped the layer of dust from the lens, then pulled out a cloth wipe to polish it before resetting the wiper. It cycled through another round and reset itself.

TION pinged in my ear. “OEST 3341 reports that the service bulletin has been cleared,” it told me. “Route updated.”

I pulled the battle tablet out of its pouch on my chest rig and powered on the screen. It had indeed updated: TION had cleared the rest of the route, indicating that we were allowed to proceed.

“Did we seriously risk our lives to clear a fucking lens?” I asked.

“What?” Jacobs asked in disbelief. “All of this was to make a service call?”

“Affirmative,” TION said in my earpiece. “OEST-3341 has been designated a top priority to ensure sensor coverage in this region. You’re now cleared to proceed on your resupply mission.”

I chucked the tablet as hard as I could off the cliff.