by Toby Weston
Keith was welcome to stay on board. His presence would even contribute to the success of the mission by adding one more decoy-mangled human body, but they had already distributed enough bits and pieces of human chaff around the cabin to fool DNA analysis. They didn’t really need any more help creating the illusion that the plane had been packed with passengers on the way to Cancun.
Presented with these two alternatives, Keith had started to undress.
All the passengers, nine with Keith included, are dressed in black Kevlar now. Keith feels the vertigo of déjà vu as he reaches behind his back to tug on the parachute capsule strapped there.
On one of the seats, arranged like a rose on a handkerchief, Keith’s favourite artificial foot rests on the sweaty t-shirt he has just taken off. One of the athletic-looking guys had handed Keith a crude pink plastic replacement that looked Victorian, all rusty springs and leather straps.
“Sorry, best we could do at short notice. We’ll get you a better one back at base,” the guy had explained earnestly.
***
Air traffic control had received a Mayday distress call from AN767 to Houston, while the plane was still over Mexican airspace. The pilot had informed ground control they had suffered a collision and explosion and had shut down number two port engine. They were descending to compensate for a loss of cabin pressure.
The flight was re-routed to San Antonio, where the emergency response teams were put on standby.
Forty minutes later, an explosion in the other port engine forces the pilot to take emergency action, turning the plane around to head back to Cotulla, where there is an airfield that might suffice.
They will never make it. The pilot—running out of options as the plane struggles to maintain altitude, fires burning throughout its cabin, shedding debris like dandruff—will try to make an emergency landing on the highway. With full thrust on the starboard engines and flaps and rudder fully locked to compensate for the port drag, the plane will be virtually un-flyable. Unable to keep the disintegrating mass of burning metal under control, the tumbling vehicle will crash into an industrial estate, destroying several buildings and incinerating the surroundings in a spectacular fireball. There will be no survivors.
Keith is second to last. All the nasty things that are likely to happen in the next few minutes present themselves for his conscious inspection. He considers them all, visualising them incarnate as violent fates circling the plane, waiting to take his frail body and rip it into fleshy strips.
‘Fuck ’em,’ he thinks to himself, steeling for action. How bad can it be? He has done worse, seen worse, been worse. He smiles. It must be adrenalin or endorphins, but he actually feels pretty cool.
They are in the luggage hold, surrounded by containers stuffed with suitcases and bags. The hatch is open, and the door long gone, ripped off by the screeching hurricane outside. Half a dozen black, boxy objects with fins, are pushed out first. Then, one after another, the crew departs through the sucking hole. Dee gives him the thumbs-up before it’s her turn to exit. When Keith is up, he crouches in the opening, feeling the wind tugging at his arms and head. Car headlights move along the freeway, and grids of streets are visible, picked out with orange or white street lighting. His military goggles—Spex, but harder core—show him airspeed, pick out his colleagues, and show a helpful green cross where he is expected to land.
Hands on his shoulders and he is out, tumbling through the night. In the first split second of chaotic confusion, the plane’s tail passes way too close for comfort, scything through the black only metres away. He could clearly see the rivets and splattered insects frozen in the strobe light as it passed. The buffeting sends him cartwheeling and spinning, but instincts and unconscious muscle memory take over and he finds himself gliding. With a few adjustments, he is heading for his target. There is very little sound; active noise-cancelling buds take care of most of it and only a deep roar remains. He has difficulty finding the plane he recently departed. It is already over a kilometre away, but it will be back in twenty minutes to obliterate all traces of whatever it is they are here to do.
Keith watches the lead crew. The articulated, oversized, carbon-fibre feathers of their wings flare out, then a few dozen metres above the dessert their rocket boots fire. With augmented sight, he is able to follow their swoop and jogging landing.
Two nondescript office buildings are surrounded by a three-metre fence. There is a single guard post. The first two landers touch down around the corner of the building. They dash silently to the hut, where the guard is presumed to be watching late-night TV. The next four repeat the procedure, but instead of heading to the guard’s hut, they go straight in through a side door and disappear into the building.
Keith has been paying too much attention to the action and is shocked when a shape looms out of the darkness next to him. He has been ignoring his target marker and needs to pull some mild aerobatics to point himself back in the right direction. He is heading for a cleared space a few hundred metres away from the fence, coming in at over a hundred miles per hour. The distance vanishes in an instant; just at the point where there is no doubt the chute has failed and he will be splattered on impact, he feels a huge surge of deceleration. Only fifty metres above the rapidly approaching ground, the high-tech active canopy deploys. The onboard computer dynamically changes the membrane’s profile; it subjects him to an initial 5Gs, but this rapidly reduces—by the time he lands, the floor arrives with barely a nudge.
His chute whirs back into its lozenge. Drawing on years of training, he flicks into action, crossing the twenty or so metres to where the others are unpacking the boxy missiles that have landed safely. The finned boxes contain rucksacks and five folding electric dirt bikes. Keith gets straight to work assembling the bikes. His Spex display a large countdown in the top left-hand corner of his vision; it is showing a little over fourteen minutes by the time he joins the others.
The synthetic pilot, following the script, will have realised there is no chance of reaching San Antonio and will turn around, back to Cotulla, for its final fateful leg. Keith knows the next bit of the plan.
At eleven minutes, two of the crew return, dragging a stumbling guard. One of the guys—Brian, Keith thinks he is called—pulls on a pair of jeans over his spandex suit trousers and pulls on a biker jacket. The guard is given a puffy red jacket and pink helmet. He is either a complete cretin or drugged, because he seems perfectly content to go while having his hands cuffed around Brian’s waist. Both straddle the first of the newly assembled bikes. Brian gives a casual salute and they set off to the south.
At six minutes, the remaining four sprint back from the office building carrying several large, heavy black bags. The fence has already been carefully cut—links heated and stretched apart in a way consistent with participation in a tragic air disaster—allowing them to make straight for the rendezvous. Two more bikes head off after the first. Now, there are less than three minutes.
“Go now?” Keith hears a high-pitched synthesised voice squeak through his buds.
“Yeah, come here, you two,” someone says affectionately. Two large black rats, apparently belonging to the inventory liberated from the office, are transferred into one of the rucksacks. The remaining crew get on bikes. Somehow, Keith gets to ride behind Dee, who is one of the final four.
“Did good? Get treat?” The squeaky voice coming in through Keith’s Spex is politely synthetic—which, according to convention, indicates it belongs either to a machine or to an animal that doesn’t mind sounding like a machine. Keith guesses it belongs to one of the rats.
“Very good, Freckles. You get a big treat!”
“Give treat.”
“You need to wait; treat is not here. We will get the treat, okay?”
“Get treat now.”
Keith looks around for some explanation, but the rats are clearly part of the team, and the others are too focused to chat. They set off at a sensible speed through the scrub, acutely aware of the moun
ting roar from the approaching airliner. Nothing showy, nothing risky, they still have a minute, and they only need to cover five hundred metres.
Chapter 12 – Brown Noise
Zaki was at a critical point in his haggling, a heated vocal exchange, which had drawn in spectators from the neighbouring workshops. His opponent was a wiry, bearded man in filthy overalls.
“A thousand MeshCoins, Kemal! Come on, you’ve had them for months, what are you going to do with them anyway?”
“Zaki Kardesim, this is valuable resources. I sell in Constantinople for ten times what you say.”
“One thousand five hundred then!”
“Why you want? Kaput, no more walk you say me.”
They were in Kemal’s workshop, a steel-framed polyhedron, walled with corrugated iron on the outskirts of the town’s Sani. Dusty piles of wire and broken electronics were heaped around the walls. A small, formerly white caravan in one corner served as an office and, more often than not, also performed duty as Kemal’s bedroom. A disassembled 4x4 was laid out carefully, like an exploded technical drawing. It shared the swept area in the middle of the workshop with a tangled, lifeless heap of limbs and bodies.
“Parts mostly. Good bits in them,” Zaki attempted half-heartedly.
“Ha! No way, Zaki little brother,” the man laughed, looking genuinely amused. “You are trying to scam your old friend Kemal!”
“Come on, Kemal. How about if Zaki manages to fix one up? How about if he gives it to you?”
Kemal raised an eyebrow. Zaki turned to glare at Siegfried, who was standing by the garage doors, where he had been told to wait and not interfere.
“They are broken. I told you. There is nothing I can do!” Zaki tried to rally, but he knew the damage was done. To be fair to Segi, Kemal was no fool and knew Zaki wouldn’t be offering this much for spares.
Kemal sensed he had won and moved in for the kill. “Okay, it’s a deal. Three thousand MeshCoin, and you give me one fixed suit!”
Zaki, grumbling, shook the grimy outstretched hand to seal the deal. They were invited for another tea, but decided to head off instead. Kemal, now humming a cheerful little ditty, would deliver the suits to their farm later in the day.
Segi and Zaki walked back up the narrow, sloping alley in silence, Zaki refusing to let his brother off the hook for screwing things up. However, despite acting annoyed, he was secretly thrilled to have managed to buy the heap of scrap he hoped to turn into half a dozen functional, bipedal automatons.
More than anything else, he had been afraid Kemal wouldn’t take him seriously. Haggling in Osmanian at the bazaar felt like something of a rite of passage. He had originally thought about asking Granny to come and lurk menacingly in the background to add a dose of authenticity, but had decided it was time for him to man up.
Another reason for acting pissed off with Segi was to cover up his fear of explaining to his kinmates that he had blown a huge chunk of liquid assets on what, all grand schemes aside, was still a mound of scrap.
This was partly why he hadn’t roped his great aunt or mother into the enterprise. When they tried to explain the Clan to their mother, they always described it as a sort of club for kids interested in computers or messing around with hardware. This was vaguely true but, depending on one’s point of view, it could equally well be seen as an organised crime syndicate or paramilitary organisation.
After putting together and presenting a cool business case at Silicium’s most recent virtual meet-up, Zaki had been authorised to use funds from the Clan’s collective piggy bank for his project; but, in a slight departure from plan, he had just spent twice the agreed amount.
It was not quite stealing and would probably be okay—their clan had its fingers in many lucrative pies and, because it dealt mainly in Coin, it was always looking for ways to invest its capital in tangible assets. The two teenagers were established members, they had healthy reputation numbers from contributing to the BugNet codebase and from the thousands of MeshNodes they had distributed around the Anatolian countryside over the past few years.
They also had income from their ever-expanding bioreactor setup. Hydrogen gas, carbon-fibre ribbon and other products were grown within the trellises of transparent tubes that snaked their way around the smallholding. GliderKites delivered this production to faraway places, while dropping MeshNodes into black spots as they soared silently, kilometres up, above the skirmishes and confusion of the Caliphate’s perpetually changing borders. All this revenue made the brothers a good investment—but there was always a chance that somebody in the leadership would be more interested in the principle than the bottom line, and drop high-altitude ballistic penetrators through them as an example to others.
On Saturdays, the marketplace would be packed with vegetable stalls and cheese sellers. Today, it was mostly empty, and the big cobbled square was being used by a group of kids playing football. The brothers drank tea and ate baklava, seated at an old iron table at the edge of the marketplace.
They met Kemal again at 3 pm and drove in his old, battered truck to the Çiftlik house. Together, they awkwardly unloaded the suits from the back of the lorry, where they were hidden under a rubberised tarpaulin. As quickly as possible, considering the weight and the unpredictable way the limbs of the suits wildly swung, the boys lugged them across the yard to safe cover in the old barn. Zaki had checked the overhead times for satellites, but still wanted them out of sight as quickly as possible.
***
From the drone’s elevated vantage point, the approaching vehicles were almost obscured by billowing clouds of dust spewed up by their wheels. A modern auto leading, an ancient dolmush bouncing along behind. Zaki had pinged Siegfried and, together, they had frenetically hidden, or at least pulled tarpaulin over, anything considered contraband by either the ZKF or the Caliphate. Their mother had flatly refused to get into the cellar as a precaution, and they hadn’t even bothered asking Granny—even the suggestion would have been guaranteed a playful and agonising pinch of the cheek and an equally painful soul-baring glare. So, when the soldiers rolled up to the gate, they were greeted by two frosty, black-clad widows.
An olive-uniformed, middle-aged officer climbed out of the sleek auto. On the drive from the town, he had tried to recall the face of the old woman. He had explored the crumbling arches and overgrown orange groves as a boy. The woman had seemed terrifyingly old then, throwing her decomposing lemons at the trespassing kids. Now, she must be ancient.
A couple of scruffy soldiers jumped out of the knackered bus and immediately lit cigarettes. Kemal stayed sitting in the back, his hands cuffed. He had a nasty bruise covering the right side of his face and a smear of red across his lips and nose.
Zaki and Segi had shuttered the big barn and were monitoring things from their workshop, scanning the feeds from assets around the estate. They knew they existed precariously, neutral in the skirmishes that surrounded them. They were not helpless, but it was always better not to have to show your hand. Buying the junked combat armour had been a risk, and now it seemed the ZKF had somehow learnt of the transaction and wanted in on the battlesuit action.
Aal stood behind her gate, arms folded on top, frowning and glaring at the approaching soldiers. When he spoke, the officer was polite and deferential, as was correct when speaking to the lady of the house, but Aal wasn’t having any of whatever he was selling. Zaki couldn’t hear, but it wasn’t much of a leap to assume the conversation had something to do with his recent purchase. Aal had never seen the things, and Zaki was sure she wouldn’t have a clue what the man was talking about or why she should care. She was, however, sure they would not come onto her property.
Now, she was squinting and muttering, while pointing back and forth between the soldiers and the blue glass eye hanging off the gate. Zaki couldn’t help but smile. He almost clapped his hands. The old woman was going to curse them.
Ayşe, standing behind, had taken a bunch of herbs out of a pocket in her apron and passed them fo
rward. These were lit, and a thick yellow smoke, following a fortuitous wind, began to drift towards the vehicles. The continued bombardment of powerful and ancient curses seemed to be having an effect. The officer took a couple of steps back, while the soldiers flapped with their hands and moved clumsily away from the drifting smoke, which seemed to be capriciously following them.
Now was the perfect opportunity to use the ‘dread ray’, a device which caused terror, or, on lower settings, a smouldering dread. It was non-lethal and, if used correctly, enemies would not even know they had been attacked. Essentially, it was a powerful phased array transmitter and thousand-watt PA that could send a strong, pulsing electromagnetic field and accompanying wall of infrasound. The carefully modulated magnetic fields would mess with the head, while the infrasound could literally empty the bowels. It had been surprisingly easy to build from plans floating around the Mesh. When used on low power, it produced a creeping dread and sense of impending doom. Unless the victim was expecting the attack, or was familiar with the weapon, the resultant qualia were usually attributed to external, often supernatural, sources.
