by John Conroe
“No, I’m certain you already have. You saw how the whole Spider thing went down. If you’re aware of these anomalies, don’t you think anyone else in the government is?”
“I don’t really ever assign any competence to any government agencies, Major. With the exception of your group, of course!” I rushed to cover my ass.
“Hmmpf,” he grunted. “And that’s how you get tagged by the system. You’re assuming, and as you know, that gets you killed in the Zone. It also can get you killed out of the Zone,” he said.
I got a sudden chill as I thought about how blunt he was being. “Should we even be talking in here?” I asked, glancing around.
“Now you ask?” He shook his head. “You have plenty of paranoia and respect for the Zone, but nowhere near enough for out here. The answer is yes, that’s why I put you off till we got in here. This room is completely shielded. Only Maya, Aaron, or Eric operate it, and they’re all clued in on opsec. Something I assumed you would understand.”
“Holy shit! What if the accident wasn’t Peony’s work, but these other factions?” I asked, still thinking about his earlier words.
He clapped his hands. “There it is, Maya! The light bulb finally went off.”
“Shit, I gotta wipe everything. Shit. They almost killed Astrid because of me!”
“Whoa. Stop. Calm down, Sniper. We don’t know what caused that accident. But we have to be ultra-cautious, right, Maya?”
“Yes, Major. We’ll use all the deep cover protocols to dig into this,” she said. She glanced my way and noted my look of intense confusion. “We have developed lots of ways of researching things without being noticed. NSA and other parts of the government have been tracking online searches for decades, even before the September 11 attack at the turn of the century. There are ways around them. Just takes longer and takes a whole bunch of steps and cut outs.”
“You’ve been dealing with these factions for a long time, eh, Major?” I asked.
“Kid, I’ve been in special operations my entire military career. Those special factions are all through the spec ops community . All those Zone newbies out there,” he said, waving a hand at the wall monitors that showed the candidates lining up for the simulator, “have known this forever. So as you teach them to survive the Zone, remember that they know more than you about surviving out of the Zone.”
I felt a fool. Easy to get all superior feeling when I was the expert, but I had just been schooled in an equally deadly discipline and it sort of shook me to the core.
“Frankly, you shouldn’t have even come to me about this, but… I’m glad you did. Maya, send the next one in.”
“Chief Thomas, you’re up. Head into the airlock and follow the computer’s instructions,” Maya said, voice all cheery as she sent a Navy SEAL off to his virtual reality doom.
He did pretty well though; made it halfway across the room before a Crane bot pegged him with a flechette, not a lethal wound, but it alerted a virtual Tiger that jumped on him with horrific holographic realism. The computer-generated killer disappeared on contact with the actual soldier but his reflexive crouch and shocked expression were very, very real. The involuntary shudder that ran through me was pretty real too.
The goal of the exercise was to make it across the course, which was actually just a huge empty gymnasium most of the time but right now looked exactly like lower Manhattan. When we set it up, I had measured the floor space at twenty-five meters by thirty. The contenders entered in one corner and had to cross the diagonal length to the far corner. When the simulator was off, the walls, doorways, and other obstacles were just plain white, featureless props, although they were all self-mobile and controlled by the AI. When powered up, the realism was fantastic.
If someone knocked me out and left me to wake up inside the ZD simulator, I’d have no idea it wasn’t the real deal, at least not right away. Based on the swearing, the bitching that I heard, and the shocked expressions I was seeing, our little pseudo-Zone was having a telling effect on our trainees.
Yoshida’s initial guess was close. Lunchtime arrived and we only had five people left to go through. The major chose to push the midday meal break back and finish off our trainees so they didn’t have to sweat it out over lunch.
“Okay, that’s all of you. We’ll take an hour for food and facilities, then meet back in the auditorium right at 1300 hours. You’ll get a chance to watch Ajaya run the course, then we’ll do a group debrief and a critique. I’ll want your feedback too, so think about what you just experienced, add that to what you see during our little demo, and then make your notes on your issued tablets. Dismissed,” he told them.
I watched them leave, the whole group displaying a mixed bag of frustration, dismay, self-consciousness, and skepticism. Highly trained, super-competitive special operators with years of combat experience were not used to failure.
“They think the whole thing was rigged,” Yoshida said, coming up as I checked over my gear for my after-lunch run. “They’ll talk over lunch and by the time you step in there, they’ll be convinced they were set up to fail.”
I set aside the slightly modified training stealth suit and double-checked the training rifle. We all used the same model, which was modified to simultaneously fire blanks and invisible laser pulses for the AI to track. The military had been using versions of it for like over thirty years or more. The weapon recoiled (a little bit), required magazine changes, could be set to fire with a loud bang or a suppressed cough, and was as reliable as any modern war weapon out there.
“So how do we get them past all that?” I asked.
“First of all, we don’t get them to do anything,” he said, tilting his head down to look at me like he was looking over invisible glasses. “They’re going to have to get it on their own, but we will give them reason to believe it’s valid. But don’t worry about that. You just worry about not blowing it in there, got it? Worst thing in the world if you and your pal step in there and get tagged instantly,” he said, waiting for assurances.
Mentally I cringed a little, thinking how embarrassing that would be. No way, not going to happen, I decided. If we had to kill every damned imaginary drone in the AI’s imaginary arsenal, we’d do it.
“Don’t worry, Major. We’re ready,” I said, nodding over at Rikki, who was sitting on the gear-out table, already loaded with blanks.
“Exactly what I want to hear,” he said with a nod and a heavy swat on my shoulder. “Coming to lunch?”
“Nah, I don’t ever eat a lot right before heading into the Zone, real or imaginary,” I said.
“Right, stay loose. We’ll see you in an hour.” With that, he left me alone with Rikki and the training gear.
Truth be told, I was now kind of nervous. All these super soldiers waiting to see us run the Room and I could just about feel the failure factor ramping up.
“Heart rate and respiratory emissions indicate nervousness. Is this condition referred to as performance anxiety, Ajaya?” Rikki suddenly asked.
“In a way. This isn’t life or death like the real Zone, but the ramifications of failure are serious. If I screw this run up, the trainees won’t respect me, won’t listen to me, and it’ll be Sergeant Primmer all over again.”
“That is a single potential extrapolation of possible events. There are twenty-four current trainees, each of whom might have a different reaction to seeing a Rikki-Ajaya failure. Control of their responses is beyond this unit or Ajaya Gurung. Only Rikki-Ajaya responses are controllable.”
My drone was giving me a pep talk. Un-freaking-believable. Completely unprecedented behavior, and it made me want to dive into his diagnostics badly, but there wasn’t time and I’d been checking him almost religiously since we beat Lotus. Rikki had changed greatly over the last few months and I couldn’t figure out exactly why. Harper was fascinated by him but even though I think she had some ideas about what was going on with him, she refused to share them. Said they were too speculative—just wild-ass guesses.
/> “Alright, buddy. You are right. All we can do is make our plan, plan for it to fail, and adapt on the fly. Right?”
“That, and Ajaya should hydrate. Hydration is proven to improve performance of the soldier, athlete, or individual in almost all physical endeavors.”
“Right,” I said, shaking my head. Still, I picked up my water bottle and took a long pull. Right was right.
Chapter 12
“Enter at will, Ajaya,” Maya’s soft voice said over the ready room’s speakers.
We moved instantly, me opening the Room’s entrance door wide enough for Rikki to shoot through, giving him a three count before I slid through. Stepping sideways twice, I crouched with the training rifle up and ready, listening and looking.
Mostly it was about what I hadn’t heard. I hadn’t heard Rikki open fire immediately, so I felt comfortable clearing the doorframe. I didn’t hear his fans nearby, which told me that he had cleared the entrance and moved out further to recon for drones.
The scene was different than any of the scenarios that the AI had run earlier with any of the trainees. At first guess, we were Midtown West. I could hear seagulls, smell water, and when I looked over my left shoulder, there was enough clear blue on the skyline to indicate open air space. And the rusted sign on the corner ahead might have said 46th at one point in its past.
Didn’t really matter, as I just needed to concentrate on clearing roughly forty meters of combat zone. And the AI wasn’t going to let me get through without detection. Rikki had dutifully reported the maximum time before what I was calling forced detection from every one of the morning runs, plus the five other times that we had stepped into the Room. At most, I had two minutes before a drone would be generated somewhere near my position. Just how the game was played.
Ostensibly, I had just come out of a building on the corner of what I thought was 11th and West 46th. I had a big open area to transit, and the clearest path was diagonally across that intersection. Wide open and nothing moving, flying, or making any noise whatsoever.
Nope. Not buying it. I moved behind a derelict city bus, dropping low to sweep under it, then took a slow three-sixty before moving with a careful heel and toe across 46th Street and into a parking lot of a long-abandoned used car dealership. A real soft whirring announced Rikki coming down 11th Avenue from the north. Crouching between a faded black Cadillac and a Honda CRV, I put my back to him while I scanned everywhere he wasn’t. Nothing.
Rikki continued through the intersection as if I wasn’t there, holding about five meters off the ground, staying in the shadows of the buildings on the opposite side of the street from me.
It was probably late morning, based on how close to overhead the sun was. The whole section of 11th Avenue in front of me was heavily shadowed, but would soon be lit up like MetLife Stadium when the sun reached high noon.
My drone got two buildings to the south with nothing behind him as I wormed my way between rusting auto bodies. The way looked and sounded clear, but my internal clock told me our two minutes was almost up.
Instead of running across the street, I shuffled across the parking lot, moving through the open space in the middle, maybe three meters of area, before diving back between cars. Instantly, the windshield of the Buick Enclave next to me exploded into spiderwebs as a string of flechettes stitched across it from my left.
In the real Zone, I defy a Raptor to get within a block of us without Rikki detecting it, but this was essentially a game and the AI had just spawned it twenty meters away, where it would have shot me in the back if I had run across the street.
I dropped to all fours, my rifle slung across the front of my body, banging into my left leg and right arm as I scurried like a rat, deeper into the rows of cars before cutting around the back end of a hulking Lincoln Navigator.
A soft whirring came from the cars I had just left behind. Rifle ready, I waited in place, head on a swivel.
The sound of Rikki’s suppressed gun firing a single round came seconds later. That was my signal to stand, acquire target, and fire one suppressed blank round of my own into the Raptor that had turned to take on my Berkut.
Now was the time to run for the street. I had just a handful of seconds before we estimated the AI would spawn new enemies. We were wrong, as I got four fast paces before motion on my periphery caused me to twist and fire two quick shots. Time slowed as one round clipped a landing strut on the little Kite that had simply popped into existence, knocking the tiny UAV spinning. Even in the simulator, the drones didn’t just spontaneously appear almost on top of you. At least, it hadn’t so far. This was entirely new. No fair. The major must have set the game for impossible and now the computer wasn’t even trying to make it seem real.
I dove into what Dad would have called a judo roll and turned around as I came up to fire at the massive Tiger that had leapt through the space I had almost run through. Rikki’s gun was firing without suppressor but I ignored whatever he was doing as I kept pumping rounds into the Tiger to make sure it stayed down.
Something tugged at my left arm and I spun into the shot, my right thumb clicking the selector to full auto. Again, I was feeling that weird sensory condition where everything seemed to move in slow motion. Rikki was engaging two more Raptors while a pair of Chinese Cranes stood on top of the black Caddie. A four-round burst removed them from the car top as one of the Raptors burst into spare parts, the other UAV trying to evade my more nimble Berkut.
The sun peeked over a building and a fast-moving shadow sent me diving under a Jeep Wrangler parked on the east side of 11th. A heavy 9mm sounded, steel-cored rounds banging into the Jeep, a couple ripping through the car to hit the pavement in front of me.
Part of me cried foul at this highly improbable, possibly impossible, amount of penetration while another part shrank at the realization that it was another Berkut that had entered the game, this one hunting for me.
“RIKKI, FADE FAST,” I yelled, pulling a training MSLAM from my leg pocket, clicking the setting to two seconds of delay, and tossing it out into the street behind me.
The bomb rolled three meters away, righted itself, and fired almost instantly, a narrow cone of shaped explosion shooting upward as the explosive projectile completely missed anything resembling a drone.
But the blast was impressive and served its purpose, sending the enemy Berkut out and away. Rikki’s 9mm sounded in a three-round burst from a new direction, and the bad Berkut smashed into the street two meters from my face.
Time to move. I rolled out from under the Jeep, coming out on my back, rifle lifting up and firing as a pair of Skyhawks targeted Rikki. The UAVs slid sideways to avoid my fire, zooming out of the intersection, disappearing right into the virtual side of a building as the AI gave up any pretense of reality.
A Leopard jumped onto a Ram pickup truck two and half meters away, falling away but still clawing at the metal when I emptied my rifle’s magazine. I jacked my body upright, dropping the mag and grabbing another as I ran for the far corner. More than halfway across the Room, by estimation, our best bet was to just run for it.
That’s when the Tank-Killer rolled out of the side of a building, its fully operational heavy machine gun spinning my way.
Aw come on!
Screw it. I fired the training rifle, one-handed and full auto, at the TK’s aiming module while I pulled an XM-2080 from my pocket, pressed the selector for impact detonation, and hurled it under the heavy Russian robot tank.
The explosion rolled out from under the armored bot, lifting the front, sending a tongue of fire shooting straight for me before reality blinked twice and the VR clicked off, revealing white walls and a set of rounded forms shaped roughly like cars, with gymnasium lighting high overhead instead of a sun.
“Ajaya, you’re dead,” Maya said from everywhere.
“From the moment I stepped in here,” I said, watching Rikki as he folded from delta to orb, hovering down to my side.
Chapter 13
“Glad you
could join us, Ajaya,” the major greeted me as I stepped into the auditorium. Everyone in the room turned to stare at me.
