Borough of Bones

by John Conroe

  I ignored her rhetorical question, my scope reticle on the metal roof door, about where I expected the Spider’s body to be. It was a normal door, not the overbuilt bastard of a vault door that was on our building. The heavy .338 bullets would zip through that door like tissue paper. The sight settled into what I felt was the best spot, my breathing slowed, and my finger slipped into the trigger guard, found the little metal lever that could unleash near instant death, and almost on its own, started to apply pressure.

  The massive leg suddenly pulled back behind the door and my finger came off the trigger instantly. Shit. So close. But, like every hunter, patience was required. I waited, barely breathing.

  Seconds clicked by, turning to minutes. Harper moved around on the roof, bored.

  “Ajaya?” she asked, sounding further away. I turned and glanced at her. She was staring at one of the really big satellite dishes.

  “Yeah?”

  “You said this is an AT&T building?”

  “Yup. Why?”

  “Well, this is a really unusual dish. More government than I’d expect. Almost NASA or military. And those lobby guards must have had assault rifles. Not very Ma Bell,” she said.

  “Yeah, well, there were some rumors that this building was really used by the NSA, with AT&T providing cover for them. Did you know that there’s a couple of floors that have nothing but backup batteries on them? That there’s enough fuel and food stored here to keep fifteen hundred people going for two weeks?”

  “WHAT?” she asked, her tone that sort of incredulous one that seems to imply I’m stupid.

  Suddenly something new moved out of the door, into the open. Several somethings. Vertical cylinders, like a tube of tennis balls but with a rotor on top and coated in sky blue paint. Hairspray units, four of them. The bomber units of the Zone. Slow, awkward, but almost invisible when seen against the open sky. Usually carrying golf-ball-sized bomblets.

  “Shit, look at those,” I said. Harper moved over and climbed up till she could peer over the edge. My binoculars were in her right hand as she glassed the roof I was watching.

  There were just the four of the little aerial bombers and they just hovered out from behind the door, floated over across the roof to land right on the mothership I had been watching earlier. Small charging probes extruded from the little bombers, which then plugged themselves into ports on the back of the mothership. They were powering up, getting the benefit of the bigger drone’s solar panel.

  Then something else stepped out from behind the door, a Russian Wolf, its jaws clamped on a plastic milk crate, the heavy duty kind that city delivery trucks used to leave at restaurants and diners throughout Manhattan every day. The crate had woven plastic sides, and I could see something inside through the little gaps in the plastic mesh.

  “What is that? Inside the crate?” I asked, reaching to dial up the magnification on my scope.

  “I don’t know. There’s some kind of red and yellow symbol?” she asked. “I can’t quite make it out.”

  I could see what she was talking about. Just visible through the milk crate’s porous sides. Yellow and some blotches of red. I dialed up again.

  “Can’t see it clearly. I can see part of a word:c—o—b—a—l,” I spelled.

  “Cobalt. Cobalt-60. That’s a radioactivity symbol!” she said.

  “What?”

  “Hospitals use that isotope for tests and stuff,” she said, her voice rising in urgency. “Holy shit! Do you know how many hospitals are in Manhattan?”

  “I don’t know… like more than ten, maybe?”

  “Probably more like twenty. Ajaya, if you collected all the medical radioactive isotopes from Manhattan’s hospitals, you’d have quite a lot… like a dangerous amount.”

  Another Wolf came out the open door, this one carrying a metal box with the radioactive symbol right on its side.

  “Ajaya, if they load that material into those bombers, they might try to get it out into the rest of the city,” Harper said.

  “They’ll never get past the Renders, Harper. They’ll get blown to dust,” I said.

  “And then the winds would blow radioactive dust all over Brooklyn,” she replied.

  “Is that really enough to do much damage?”

  “I have no idea, but it can’t be good to have radioactive dust floating through the most heavily populated borough in New York,” she said.

  The Wolves set the boxes down and then returned to the building’s interior. A moment later, two of the Spider’s feet moved back into view, the rest of it again hidden behind the door.

  One of the hairspray units unplugged itself and then hovered over the milk crate. It settled down into the box and began some kind of activity with tiny manipulators on the bottom of its spray-can-shaped body.

  “It’s loading the Cobalt-60,” Harper said, turning to look at me.

  “So what do I do? I can kill that Spider right now, but if I shoot one of those hairsprays, I’ll blast radioactive material all over the place, not to mention losing the Spider.”

  “No, it would just spatter around on the roof. A Render missile would vaporize it; your bullet would just spill it. Big difference. Ajaya, your family is downwind,” she said.

  I thought about it, thought my way through the shots. Time slowed and my brain sped up, firing solutions presenting themselves like a series of steps on a recipe card. I could just about do it.

  “Get ready to move! Rikki, prep XM-2080s. Harper, grab both packs and both carbines, then get in the stairwell. As soon as I shoot, we’re out of here.”

  She started moving but my trigger finger was already taking up the slack, the ballistic computer of my brain taking over. The rifle suddenly went off, thumping my shoulder. In my side vision, I saw Harper jump, but I was focused and in my shooting zone, my right hand running the bolt, my left moving the rifle to its new target, the right hand back on the pistol grip. The big rifle fired again, and again, and then a final time.

  I pulled away from the scope, shifted my body back and off the ledge, folding the rifle’s stock and grabbing the extra mag as I turned to run.

  The last images in the scope popped up as my mind automatically ran through the shots. In my mind’s eye, I saw that the metal door on that other roof now had a big round hole in its center, that the Spider legs were gone, that the two boxes of radioactive material were exploded all over the rooftop, and that the two of the hairspray bombers had just become piles of parts. I think the mothership drone was damaged too.

  I dropped the partial mag, inserting the full one as I ran for the roof access door. Rikki hovered behind me, floating backward, gun still covering the open air behind us.

  “Six UAVs inbound. Correction, now seventeen. Additional units responding on the network.”

  “Activate motion sensors on XM-2080s,” I said as we hustled through the open stairwell door.

  Harper shoved the door shut while I grabbed the broken lock bar and jammed it into the frame. She handed me my pack and my PDW, which I slung on my back, as the big MSR was in my arms.

  Then we raced down the stairs.

  Chapter 33

  “Ajaya, you should have told me this was an NSA building,” Harper said, her footsteps sounding right behind me.

  Going down is so much faster.

  “Ah, you think this is a good time to chat about gaps in my pre-mission briefing?” I asked over my shoulder.

  We only made two flights down before the building shook like a giant had smacked it and a thunderclap boomed over our heads. The UAVs had met my XM-2080 welcoming committee.

  We picked ourselves up and kept going, jumping down three, four, and five sets of stair treads at a time. Fast, but brutal on the knees. I think we both should have fallen, more than once, but something—adrenaline maybe or just good old-fashioned fear—kept our feet on the dust-covered treads. Rikki hovered straight down the center of the stairwell, floating gracefully while we thumped, grunted, and stumbled our way back down.


  “Yes, this is the time, you moron,” she continued two floors further down. “Did you ever wonder if a building with extensive battery and generator power facilities and its own military satellite uplink might be useful to a Spider CThree?”

  Realization struck and I understood her point. The bottom of my stomach started to fall out, but then I remembered the massive Spider feet poking out the door at 60 Hudson.

  “The Spider was in the other building. In fact, I think I might have put a round right through it,” I said.

  “There are two Spiders,” she said.

  The door to floor twenty-five exploded off its hinges, a huge black, segmented leg pulling back and a gray-green monster leaping through.

  The overwhelming report of my .338 hurt every bit as much as the recoil did, and that almost tore the big rifle from my hands as I fired from the hip. The bullet didn’t knock the machine back but it sure paused its forward motion for a moment.

  Rikki’s 9mm burped a long stuttering string of automatic fire, bullets tearing into the same spot my magnum round had already pierced. I’m a really good shot, but only a machine could successfully target the hole my bullet had created.

  The Tiger stopped and shuddered in place, the sound of high-speed ricochets coming from inside its metal body.

  I racked the bolt on the MSR but the Spider was gone, pulling its horrid cluster of legs back down the hall and around a corner so fast, it was like someone hit rewind.

  Ears ringing, I waved Harper to go down the stairs, tossed a new block of ammo to Rikki, then pulled an MSLAM out and set it in the torn-open doorway, set for motion activation.

  We doubled our speed down the stairs, moving so fast that we both should have fallen multiple times over. Yet I don’t remember my feet even touching the stairs. Floors flew by and then suddenly we were down.

  Breathless, we both paused, listening, trying to hear over the rasp of air and thud of our heartbeats. Not a single sound came from above. Rikki floated over to the stairwell door, waiting patiently for me to open it. When I complied, he moved slowly through, pausing to scan with his much stronger electronic senses. A glance at Harper showed her standing still, head tilted as she did her own electronic scan, the metal mesh of her neuroprosthesis gleaming on her cheek. As my breathing slowed, I started to hear a rhythmic pounding sound coming from outside the stairwell.

  “Multiple UGVs outside main entrance. Poly laminated bullet-resistant glass currently still holding. Exit in this direction is untenable.”

  I looked at Harper. She shook her head. “They’re trying to break through it. More units are responding,” she said.

  “What about the Spider above us?”

  “I don’t get anything. Never did. These floors must be shielded six ways from Sunday to contain random radio waves. The good news is that it can’t call for more help if it’s hiding up there.”

  An explosion above us sent concrete dust showering down. Then came the tick-tick-tick of multiple metal legs on stairs.

  “We’re out of here!” I said, slinging my MSR and unlimbering my PDW. We kept going down the stairs, heading to the first basement. The Long Lines building has three basements. During our recon of the ground level earlier, we figured out that the only other exit from the building was from the parking garage on basement one. We never went below that level, mostly because some seriously heavy duty locked doors blocked our access to whatever was underneath.

  Rikki’s light threw the shadow of my carbine across the mostly black interior as I led the way to the garage exit, my drone above and behind me. The underground garage exit turned right and ramped up to street level on Thomas Street, rising from underneath the front door. But unlike the front door, the vehicle entrance had been securely gated shut and the man-sized door in the metal garage door had been locked when we found it. Key word being had. We had fixed that little detail before climbing the tower stairs to the roof. Now, I didn’t even stop, just hit the metal door and stepped out onto the vehicle ramp.

  I was shooting immediately, Rikki flying up above my head, his own 9mm brass bouncing off my head as he too fired on the drones that awaited us further up the ramp. Flechettes stitched across the concrete behind us, ricocheted off the ramp itself, pain blossoming in my legs and torso, my suit face mask darkening to almost welder black.

  The little AAC Honey Badger spat out full auto bursts of .300 caliber bullets. Egan, my supply guy, had provided supersonic rounds with steel core bullets that I had loaded into the magazines of both my gun and Harper’s. While they had nowhere near the impact of .458, firing three, four, or five into a Wolf, Crane, or any of the Skyhawks and Raptors pretty much ruined the Zone drones’ day. But as fast as we knocked them out of the air or beat them into the ground, more appeared at the top of the ramp.

  “Pull back,” Rikki said. I listened, stepping into the garage and yanking the heavy steel door shut. A staccato rain of flechettes rang on the hardened exterior as Harper played her flashlight over my body.

  “You got some wires poking out of you. Hold still,” she said. Folding pliers appeared in her hand and without any other notice, she just started to yank bits of bent flechette out of my stealth suit and, oh yeah, me.

  “Ouch! We don’t have time for this. Ow! Damn it!”

  “Stop whining. There’s too many out there to get through. But something’s coming. Now move your arm!”

  “Shit! That shacking hurt! What something?”

  “I. Don’t. Know. Got it!” she yanked extra hard, actually tearing the tough material of my stealth suit. Most of the wire-thin flechettes had only gone halfway through the suit, bending over like poorly pounded nails, so my wounds were painful but not in any way life threatening. Unlike Harper, who was in increasing danger of meeting with violence.

  “Okay, okay. Stop already, “ I said, stepping backward. “Thank you. But Harper—what something are you talking about?”

  Then I heard the distinctive whine-thump of an electro-mag weapon firing outside the vehicle gate, further up the ramp, maybe on the street. The patter of flechettes against the steel exit door dropped off instantly. Another whump of e-mag fire, still outside but from a different direction. Then a set of angry hissing sounds, like a pack of mambas, followed a second later by multiple explosions.

  “Unit 19 has arrived,” Rikki said, moving back up over my head in front of the heavy man door. I moved over sideways, putting myself behind the door frame. New mag in the Badger—check. New ammo block tossed to Rikki—check. Harper somewhere way, way behind me—check. Kick door open and start shooting.

  Funny thing: There was nothing to shoot. Just a bunch of destroyed drones on the ramp, along with pieces of drone, as well as the big, matte black delta shape of the Decimator.

  “Unit 19 ready,” it said in its extremely mechanical voice. By comparison, Rikki’s has a much more humanlike tone.

  “Area status?”

  “Incoming units approaching down both ends of Thomas Street,” Unit 19 reported.

  “How many?”

  “Multiple.”

  Apparently Unit 19 wasn’t really one for details. What to do, what to do?

  A soft whir came from behind us and I whipped around, rifle rising. A sleek red car was ghosting toward us, almost silent, a sharp dagger-like T on the front hood and Harper grinning at me from behind the wheel. The car slowed but didn’t stop and I leapt back out of the way as it lightly crunched into the garage door.

  Harper’s grin was gone but she jumped out of the car, excited nonetheless.