The Last Mayor Box Set

by Michael John Grist

  THUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUMP

  The stink of burnt paint and atomized metal filled the inside of the cab, everything vibrated and Anna could barely hear herself shouting into the radio.

  "Did you get a read, Ollie?"

  "Maybe!" he shouted back.

  "So light it up."

  "Aye aye!" Feargal shouted from his Humvee in back, well out of range. "Loading, programming, firing."

  There was no sound of the artillery load ejecting or whining by overhead, as there was no sound other than the endless THUUUUUUUUUUUUMP of the autocannons drilling into their armor, but some ten seconds later there was an almighty-

  BANG

  Which didn't stop the pummeling of the power drill on the hood plate, but did lessen the noise some.

  "Ours has gone down!" Wanda shouted from her Humvee, one hundred twenty degrees to Anna's right.

  "Hit it with everything you've got," Anna shouted. "Feargal, again! And Jake?"

  "I'm on radar," Jake called back, "like we thought, they've just launched somewhere to the east. I'm reading three drones in the air now, already circling for height."

  "Feargal?"

  There was another BANG and the THUUUUUUMP of the autocannon against Anna's front hood faded to nothing.

  "Switching over to ground-to-air," he answered. "Targeting the lead drone now. Damn, they're so damn small."

  "Ollie can you target them with the laser?"

  RATATATATATAT THUMP

  "We're under fire again," Ollie called back. "The thing's revolved, it's got us pinned down with one of the reverse heads."

  "Wanda!"

  "On it."

  This time Anna heard the whoosh of the rocket shoot out of the tube through the radio, followed by an answering BANG that didn't diminish the RATATATAT THUMP.

  "It's revolved on us too," Wanda called. "Two heads still up, I missed."

  Anna cursed.

  "I've got a drone in sights, maybe," Feargal called. "Shall I take it or the autocannon?"

  "Take it, I'll deal with the cannon."

  "Roger that."

  Anna reached back and Jake put an RPG in her hand. "Three in the belt, one in the tube," he said, before turning back to his radar screen, beeping still and feeding live information to Feargal.

  Anna snagged the RPG and kicked open the side door, snapping a vine and squeezing out of the gap. Outside the noise of shells firing and hitting solid metal plate to left and right felt like the total chaos of being inside a hurricane. The two remaining autocannons were pinning down the two other Humvees, steadily boring through their armored hoods. Only she was free to move, but if the cannons were to strafe over and just one slug hit her?

  Hydrostatic shock would kill her in seconds, yanking the blood from her body and out through the wound, even if the wound was not itself fatal.

  No time like the present. She kicked her foot onto the ladder on the Humvee's flank and yelled into the radio mounted on her shoulder.

  "Humvees advance!"

  Wanda and Peters rogered back, and Anna pointed at Jake through the window as he lurched forward to drive the engine on. It coughed back to life and began to roll forwards.

  Anna clung on to the side. Everywhere was the RATATATATAT. A brief foray cut over toward her Humvee, slugs THUMPed off the front screen, and she barely swung round to the back and into shelter in time, clinging to the Humvee's back rail.

  RATATATATATATATATAT

  THUMP THUMP THUMP

  Ollie and Wanda were pinned down, and they were the best shots. Only Ollie could hit the mark at two hundred yards. But at one hundred?

  Anna counted and waited as the Humvee forced a path through the vineyard. Peeking over the top she saw the autocannon tip, where the four guns were sheltered by four leaf-like hoods, revolving to keep fire on all three Humvees.

  RATATATATATAT

  THUMP

  RATATATATATAT

  They were all pinned down. The guns were working in concert, aiming to hold them there long enough for the drones to cycle up, so they could rain chaos from on high. There was no more time.

  "Feargal, come on!" she shouted, then yanked on the railing and vaulted herself bodily up to the Humvee roof. Instantly the battlefield transformed, and she saw the muzzle flashes of the two dazzling autocannon, saw the two other Humvees, now each blazing under heavy fire like a welder's torch.

  She set her feet as the Humvee rumbled on, raised the RPG to her shoulder, and sighted down the tube. Was it one hundred yards yet? The gun turret revolved and to her right and left the autocannons strafed over, cutting lines through the vine foliage.

  RATATATATATATAT

  She pulled the trigger.

  WHOOSH went the rocket. The Humvee trundled on as if in slow motion.

  RATATATATATAT

  THUMP

  A slug chewed into the Humvee roof by her foot, sending out flecks of metal that scored her calf.

  THUMP went another, spraying her face with heat and tiny paint particles, then

  BOOM

  The head of the gun turret burst in a blazing red and orange fireball. The roar of incoming bullets stopped at once, followed by a host of firecracker explosions as the munitions in the autocannon train down the turret shot off like popcorn.

  In the sky overhead, as if mirroring the explosions on earth, another explosion bloomed like a second sun. Peering against the sun, as the Humvee rolled on toward the concrete block, Anna tracked the missile's smoke trail back to Feargal kneeling atop his Humvee.

  "Hell yeah!" Jake called through the radio. "Did you see that?"

  "Two more, Feargal!" Anna called back. Her legs trembled. She stared up at the sky, but the drones were too small and too high already.

  A second fireball burst, smaller and higher, from which the sound was a muted BANG. Anna watched for the third.

  "Almost," Feargal said.

  "Get it."

  "Sending you the telemetry," said Ollie, now also kneeling on his roof and aiming the laser-targeter.

  "Got it," Feargal said, and out shot another missile on a string of black smoke. They all watched it jet up into the bright sky, until-

  BANG

  A third fire mushroomed, the highest of all.

  Cheers broke out across the assault squad. Anna let the RPG tube slide to clank against the Humvee's roof, and took a deep breath of cold and cordite smoke.

  Phase one complete.

  13. HYDROGEN LINE

  Anna stood with Feargal, Wanda and Ollie atop the concrete block, looking up at the blackened pole of the gun turret. The hooded 'leaves' had fallen away now and lay on the rich brown loam below, leaving the warped barrels of the autocannons exposed to the sky, like stunted branches.

  Julio had seen this same sight, she realized. He'd taken out the Maine gun turret and the drones alone. Now she was here, facing the same decision. She wanted to talk to Ravi about it, not because he'd understand but because he'd listen. But Ravi wasn't here.

  She looked out.

  Jake was out there now with Lucas, surveying the vineyard. They didn't know where the bunker access points were, not with any more precision than the general radar sweep had given them from above, so they were mapping it now with the hydrogen line scanner.

  Feargal held his rifle across his chest, alert and on watch. Wanda and Ollie too. Peters and Macy were taking care of logistics; bringing the Humvees up into a protective circle round the block, getting out the camp stoves and heating up some rations.

  They had less than a day now before the demon from this bunker came back, along with any friends it had managed to convert as it roamed for the last three months, looking for survivors. In addition, at any minute the manhole to the bunker could pop open and people could emerge in shielded suits, shooting first and asking questions later.

  "I'm going up," she said.

  Feargal frowned. "Up where?"

  Anna pointed, then laid her hands on the gun turret. It was much wider around than the mast of her catamaran,
but irregular joints in the pole provided handholds enough for her to climb.

  "Are you sure-?" Ollie began, always cautious, but by that point Anna was already climbing. She dug her fingertips in, balanced on her toes, and ascended. Soon she was above head height, and already the metal was growing warmer to the touch as she closed on where the rocket had blasted it.

  At the top sixty-odd feet high, she hooked an elbow around one of the thick, twisted autocannon barrels and rested her feet in an alcove dug into the metal.

  Apparently these turrets were designed to go up and down. It was how they got the demon out; she'd learned that from diagrams in the Maine Command. She tried to imagine the people in their bunker somewhere nearby, underground. They wouldn't know what she was doing now, with all their cameras and drones knocked out. Probably they were desperate. They wouldn't know the ocean were coming. They only knew their demon was coming to save them.

  Anna sighed. They had to be scared, deep down in their nest. They would have seen her plane above, and they'd just experienced their two main lines of defense destroyed in less than a minute. If that didn't put them in the mood to talk, she didn't know what would. She hadn't wanted to talk, hadn't wanted to give them that much chance, but Amo's orders had been clear, and Lucas' logic was undeniable.

  The Bordeaux countryside was beautiful from up here, where the lingering fog of gunpowder and powdered metal was already blowing away in a warm breeze. The heavy scent of rotting grapes rose up to replace it, enough to make her feel drowsy and a little drunk. Vineyards stretched away in all directions; gnarly brown boughs slathered with verdant green foliage and clumps of budding spring grapes. The sun was falling, though the air felt balmy on her skin.

  "Anna, I'm reading something," Jake came through on the radio.

  It startled her from a daze. That was a mistake. Falling from this high would kill her, without a doubt. She'd learned better on her long months at sea, but those lessons had since been eclipsed by other concerns.

  She rubbed her eyes awake. "Go on," she said, scanning the fields below to find some sign of them.

  "Is that you on the gun turret?"

  He sounded incredulous. She smiled. Ah, Jake; she loved him like a slightly mad older brother. She'd always regretted not being able to protect him better. He'd recovered from his concussion in the plane crash five months ago, but he wasn't exactly the same. He stammered at times, and odd tics occasionally worked their way round his face, like hesitant butterflies looking for a place to land.

  "I'm up here, yeah. What did you find?"

  "It was Lucas. He thinks he's found the demon's corridor. The signal's faint, we think because the demon's gone and the shield's off, but there's a residual charge still. We can go in and talk to the cameras."

  Anna cursed softly. They'd planned that little message thoroughly between them. "You're supposed to be looking for the Habitat."

  "We need to talk to them," Lucas replied. Jake had handed it over. "We agreed that with Amo. We've secured the area, so we should talk to them, and there are cameras and audio down there, we know that."

  Anna gritted her teeth. Yes, she'd agreed. It hadn't made her trust Lucas, but she couldn't deny the benefits his knowledge had brought them. It had been his idea to retrofit the Maine bunker shield mechanism into a kind of X-ray scanner. None of them understood how the hydrogen line worked, not even after reading all the data in the Command bunker, as it was some highly specific combination of deep physics with genetics, but Lucas at least grasped the outline.

  He'd theorized that there was a great range of triggers built-in to the T4, which responded to various signals transmitted on the hydrogen line, which in turn could cause it to interact with its host organism in any number of unpredictable ways. It had been his idea too to dig up the corpse of the primary demon from where they'd buried it in cement near Pittsburgh, and drag it back to the airport where they drilled in to uncover its secrets.

  The snow outside Pittsburgh had preserved it well. The main secret it held was a surprise. Within every cell of decaying red tissue, there looked to be the remnants of a T4 bacteriophage. Anna had studied it through the electron microscope herself, between training exercises to take out gun turrets and drones.

  "It looks the same as the one in us," she'd said. "How is that possible?"

  Lucas had shrugged. She hated having to trust him, to listen to his explanations, but she couldn't argue with his obvious depth of knowledge.

  "It would take a lifetime to unpack all the coding in just one T4," he'd said. In those days he'd just recovered his voice, and it seemed he was drawing every scratchy breath in a labored way as reminder of the damage she'd done. "It contains more information than most libraries, and could dictate behavior and gene-expression in ways we've never seen before. Given the correct signal on the hydrogen line, the demons could change their behavior entirely. Getting them to switch off is just one possible pathway. I can imagine hundreds of others."

  Anna had frowned. The only pathway she was interested in was getting them to die. But still, she needed to know. "Like what?"

  "Like stand down. Like sleep. Like access the human brain inside and hand control back over. I think, from everything we've learned about Cerulean in his last moments, that he managed to somehow hot-wire that signal from within, allowing him time to fight off the main programming."

  Anna had considered. "You say the T4 code changes?"

  "Expresses," Lucas had corrected. "The code in the virus remains the same, but which parts of it activate can change, and it's my theory that different messages on the hydrogen line can trigger them."

  It was a simple enough theory, as if the hydrogen line was a remote control changing channel on the demons. The real world impact could be immense.

  "So is that how you think you cured it? You activated a section that caused the T4 to erase itself completely."

  Lucas had shrugged. "I think something like that. It seems that the code to self-erase is in the T4 code somewhere, which is to say, I didn't actually kill the T4. With it so deeply ingrained in every cell, that kind of defeat is just impossible. It would lead to mass cell death, like using chemotherapy to kill a cancer but killing the human host first. Rather, what I did was more like a software uninstall. I accessed a part of it that was always there, triggered it somehow, and that part caused the T4 to let go."

  It was interesting. Fascinating, really. But fascinating wasn't enough.

  "Does it help with the cure?"

  "Not really. Not yet, at least. "

  "Is there any way to weaponize this code? To use it on the demons."

  He'd frowned. "I don't know. It's possible, if we knew what code to send, and what frequency, but that could be asking just as much as the cure."

  She'd sighed. "But you think you can make a scanner?"

  Lucas had looked to Jake. They'd been spending a lot of time together, working on various projects. She had to keep an eye on that.

  "It's the engineering side," Jake said. "With the bits of the shield I've managed to dig out, I think I can manipulate the hydrogen line enough to use it like a rudimentary radar. Or metal detector is a better analogy."

  "Go on."

  "I change the sensitivity, arrange a feedback loop, and that way I can detect another hydrogen line field. I don't understand it deeply, I couldn't make this scanner from nothing, in fact I don't understand the hydrogen particle emitter at all, but I can make a receiver that spots it, so I can make this work."

  "It works," Lucas agreed.

  "Like a metal detector?"

  "That's right."

  Sitting in the gun turret like a pirate in the crow's nest, she squeezed the walkie tight, as if she was squeezing Lucas' throat.

  "You've found the hallway."

  "Yes."

  Amo's orders were to try to talk. "Of course they'll try to attack you," he'd said. "They'll use their turret and their drones, but we can take them out. We have to give them a chance."

  She'd
argued that it was better to talk with their actions first, before they used their words, but he'd an answer for that too.

  "You think they'll become more likely to surrender after we kill a few more of them? Do you think they'll be more likely to listen then? No. They'll never trust us, and they'll see no benefit in trying. You have to try to talk to the first one, Anna. If they're communicating with each other, as we suspect they are, then they'll pass it on. Then even if you have to kill the first one, or the first few, it's certain one of them down the line will want to take the risk. They'll have nothing to lose."

  It made sense. It was her job then to minimize risks.

  "Peters, how long?" she called down.

  He looked up. "Twenty hours, give or take. It's just one demon, I think."

  Twenty hours. The ocean would be here by then, which covered them, and the next wave of demons was probably two or three days away. They had time, perhaps.

  "You sure the corridor down there is empty?"

  "I've felt nothing since we got here, only the one that is a day away. Wanda agrees."

  Wanda nodded.

  Anna looked at the pole beneath her; wide enough around to transport a demon from underground to the surface. There'd been no concrete block or turret in Maine, already destroyed by Julio, but there were schematics of the corridor in Command. They laid out the original plan: the freezer the demon was kept in for ten years, the long corridor that would give the experts in Command the chance to observe it in motion before admitting it to the pole-elevator.

  She could go in. She hadn't planned it, not on the first bunker, but everything had gone according to plan so far, better than to plan. They had the time, and now she had the chance to talk to them directly. She knew she shouldn't, that she should just kill them all, but where did that lead?

  Shit. It was a question of judgment. What if they agreed, and switched off their demon? There wasn't any danger, with the corridor standing empty. At worst she'd learn something, and maybe be able to offer a better pitch at the next bunker along, when these people were all dead.

  Shit. She decided.