Chris took note of the face. Ray Scutter was an interesting story. Fifteen years ago he had been a prominent critic of astrobiology, “the science of wishful thinking.” The Martian disappointment had lent Ray’s point of view a great deal of credibility, at least until the Terrestrial Planet Finders began to yield interesting results. The Crossbank/Blind Lake breakthroughs had made his pessimism look shortsighted and mean-spirited, but Ray Scutter had survived through a combination of graceful backpedalling and a convert’s enthusiasm. The genuinely solid contributions he made to the first wave of geological and atmospheric surveys had not only rescued his career but allowed him to move up through the bureaucracy to important administrative positions at Crossbank and now the Lake. Ray Scutter would have made an interesting subject, Chris thought, but he was supposed to be hard to approach, and his public pronouncements were so predictably banal that better journalists than Chris had written him off as a lost cause.
Right now he was scowling, butting heads with the Security chief. Chris couldn’t hear the conversation but he zoomed in his pocket recorder and archived a few seconds of video. Just a few, though. He was saving the bulk of the memory for the apparently inevitable collision of the robotic truck with the gate.
The truck had crept to within a hundred yards of the guardhouse. It looked unstoppably massive.
Elaine shaded her eyes and stared intently along the line of the fence. The setting sun had come under a rack of cloud and spilled a raking light across the prairie. She put her mouth against Chris’s ear: “Am I seeing things, or are there pocket drones out there?”
Startled, Chris followed her line of sight.
Bob Krafft, a contractor who had come into Blind Lake with a team of engineers to survey the high ground east of the Alley for the construction of new housing, had spotted the truck shortly after noon, when it was still a pea-sized dot on the wide southern horizon.
He had done some time in the Turkish wars and he recognized it as the kind of driverless resupply vehicle more commonly found in a combat zone. But the truck didn’t alarm him. Quite the opposite. Incongruous as it might be, the truck was still inbound traffic. Which meant the south gate would have to swing open to admit it. And that was a golden opportunity. He knew immediately what he had to do.
He found his wife Courtney among the cots set up in the Blind Lake gymnasium where they had languished for most of a week. He told her to wait right here but be ready to travel. She looked at him nervously—Courtney was nervous at the best of times—but kept her mouth shut and gave him a terse nod.
Bob walked two blocks (quickly, but not quickly enough to attract attention) to his car in the visitors’ lot under Hubble Plaza. He got in, double-checked the charge gauge, sparked the motor, and drove at a deliberate speed back to the rec center. His pulse was up but his palms were dry. Courtney, wandering through the big front doors even though he had told her stay put, spotted him and climbed into the passenger seat. “Are we going somewheres?” she asked.
He had always hated this about her, her Missouri trailer-park grammar. There were days when he loved Courtney more than anything in the world, but there were also days when he wondered what had possessed him to marry a woman with no more culture than the raccoons who used to raid her trash. “I don’t think we have a choice, Court.”
“Well, I don’t see what the hurry is.”
With any luck she never would. Bob was quarter-owner of a respectably successful landscaping and foundation business operating out of Constance. Thursday morning—tomorrow morning—he was supposed to meet Ella Raeburn, a nineteen-year-old high school dropout who worked in reception, and drive her to the Women’s Clinic in Bixby for a D&C. Although it was not Bob’s fault that the vacuous Ella had neglected to use any form of birth-control or morning-after pill—unless you considered his predilection for brick-stupid women a fault—he did have to own up to responsibility for the condition she was in. So Thursday morning he would drive her to Bixby, buy her a few days in a motel to recuperate, write her a check for five thousand dollars, and that would be the end of it.
If he refused—or if this government-inspired Blind Lake fuck-up kept him confined here another day—Ella Raeburn would FedEx a certain video recording to Bob’s wife Courtney. He doubted Courtney would divorce him over it—the marriage wasn’t a bad deal for her, all in all—but she would hold it over his head for the rest of his life, the fact that she’d been treated to the sight of her own husband with his face buried between Ella Raeburn’s generous young thighs. The video had been his own half-baked idea. He hadn’t realized Ella would burn a copy for herself.
And that wasn’t the worst of it. Not by half. If Bob failed to arrange for an abortion, Ella would be forced to throw herself on the mercy of her father. Her father was Toby Raeburn, a hardware salesman, a deacon at the Lutheran church, and a part-time basketball coach. His nickname was “Teeth,” because he had once knocked out the left bicuspid of a would-be car thief and then had the souvenir embedded in Lucite so he could carry it around as a good-luck charm. Toby “Teeth” Raeburn might be willing to extend Christian forgiveness to his daughter, but surely not to a middle-aged contractor who (as Ella would mention) had introduced her to the barbiturates that always put her in a cooperative mood.
He didn’t bear Ella Raeburn any particular grudge over the matter. He was more than willing to pay for her D&C. She was dumb as a bag of hammers, but she knew how to look out for herself. He kind of admired that.
Courtney had been one of those before he married her. She had dulled down into a perpetual sullen snit, though, and that wasn’t the same.
“Did they call off the siege or something?” Courtney asked.
“Not exactly.” He headed toward the south gate, reminding himself to maintain an inconspicuous speed. Certainly the black transport was in no hurry. It hadn’t crept more than a quarter of a mile since he’d first spotted it, judging by the view from the rise past the Plaza.
“Well, what, then? We can’t just leave.”
“Technically, no, but—”
“Technically?”
“You want to let me finish a thought? They shut down places like this for security reasons, Court. They don’t want the bad guys getting in. People aren’t allowed to just come and go because that would make it hard to enforce. But basically they don’t care about us. All we want to do is go home, right? If we break the rules we get, what, a lecture?” More likely a fine, and probably an expensive one, but he couldn’t tell Courtney why it was worth taking that risk. “They don’t care about us,” he repeated.
“The gate’s locked, dummy.”
“Won’t be in a little while.”
“Who says?”
“I say.”
“How do you know?”
“I’m psychic. I have psychic powers of prediction.”
There was already a crowd gathering. Bob drove off the road onto the trimmed grass of the verge and parked as close as possible to the right side of the gate. He turned the motor off. Suddenly he could hear the wind whistling through gaps in the bodywork. The wind was getting colder—winter cold—and Courtney shivered pointedly. She hadn’t brought winter clothes to Blind Lake. Bob had, and he was punished for that foresight: he had to lend his jacket to whining Courtney and sit behind the wheel in a short-sleeve cotton shirt. The sun dropped down below a big raft of turbulent gray clouds, casting a sickly light over everything. A couple of months and all this prairie would be balls-deep in snow. It was melancholy weather. This kind of weather always made him feel sad and somehow bereft, as if something he loved had been carried away by the wind.
“Are we just going to sit here?”
“Till the gate opens,” he said.
“What makes you think they’ll let us through?”
“You’ll see.”
“See what?”
“You’ll see.”
“Huh,” Courtney said.
She had dozed off—warm, he guessed, with her arms lost in
his oversized leather jacket and her chin tucked down into the collar—when the immense black truck paused in its crawl not more than ten yard from the gate. It was past dusk now, and the truck’s headlights pivoted to sweep the ground ahead of it in restless arcs.
The crowd had grown considerably. Just before Courtney fell asleep a couple of on-campus Security vehicles had come from town with their sirens howling. Now guys in what looked like rent-a-cop uniforms were waving the crowd back. Courtney was motionless and Bob hunkered down in the driver’s seat, and in all the commotion and darkness the car passed for an empty vehicle someone had parked and left. Within moments, Bob was delighted to see, the bulk of the crowd was actually behind him.
And the gate began to open. On some command from the truck, he guessed. But it was a beautiful sight. That nine-foot-tall reinforced barrier began to swing outward with an oiled ease so smooth it looked digitally rendered. Jackpot, Bob thought. “Buckle your seat belt,” he told Courtney.
Her eyes blinked open. “What?”
He made a mental estimate of the clearance ahead of him. “Nothing.” He sparked the engine and stepped hard on the accelerator.
Pocket drones, Elaine explained, were self-guided flying weapons about the size of a Florida grapefruit. She had seen them in use during the Turkish crisis, where they had patrolled no-go lines and contested borders. But she had never heard of them being deployed outside of a war zone.
“They’re simple and pretty dumb,” she told Chris, “but they’re cheap and you can use lots of them and they don’t sit in the ground forever like land mines, blowing legs off kids.”
“What do they do?”
“Mostly they just lie there conserving energy. They’re motion-sensitive and they have a few logic templates to identify likely targets. Walk into a no-go zone and they’ll fly up like locusts, target you, spit out small but lethal explosives.”
Chris looked where Elaine had pointed, but in the gathering dusk he could see nothing suspicious. You had to be quick to catch them, Elaine said. They were camouflaged, and if they hopped up without finding an allowed target—disturbed, say, by the rumbling of that huge automated truck on the pavement—they went dormant again very quickly.
Chris thought about that as the truck approached and the increasingly nervous security men shooed gawkers farther back from the road. Made no sense, he decided. The innermost fence around Blind Lake was only one of dozens of security measures already in place. What threat was so formidable that it would require wartime ordnance to keep it out?
Unless the idea was to keep people in.
But that made no sense either.
Which didn’t mean the pocket drones hadn’t been deployed. Only that he couldn’t figure out why.
The crowd grew quieter as darkness fell and the truck crawled up within range of the gate and idled for a moment. Some few began to drift away, apparently feeling more vulnerable, or cold, than curious. But a number remained, pressed against the rope restraints the Security people had thrown up. They seemed not to mind the increasingly cutting wind or the unseasonable snowflakes that began to swirl into the truck’s high beams. But they gasped and withdrew a few feet when the gate itself began to swing silently open.
Chris looked behind him at Elaine and caught a passing glimpse of Blind Lake beginning to light up in a mist of flurries, the concentric slabs of Hubble Plaza, the blinking navigation lights on the towers of Eyeball Alley, the warmer light of resident housing in neat, logical rows.
He turned back at the sudden sound of an electric motor much closer than the rumble of the idling truck.
“Video,” Elaine barked. “Chris!”
He fumbled with the little personal-server accessory. His fingers were cold and the controls were the size of flyspecks and fleabites. He had only ever really used the thing for dictation. At last he managed to trigger the RECORD VID function and point the device approximately toward the gate.
A car sprang forward onto the tarmac from somewhere down by the guardhouse. Its lights were out, its occupants invisible. But the intention was clear. The vehicle was making a run for the half-opened gate.
“Somebody wants to go home and feed the dog,” Elaine said, and then her eyes went wide. “Oh, Jesus, this is bad.”
The drones, Chris thought.
It seemed that the vehicle might not make it past the guardhouse, but the driver had estimated the widening gap pretty well. The car—it looked to Chris like a late-model Ford or Tesla—squeezed through the space with millimeters of clearance and swerved hard left to avoid the grille of the robotic truck. The car’s headlights came on as it bounced onto the margin of the road and began to pick up serious speed.
“Are you getting this?” Elaine demanded.
“Yes.” At least, he hoped so. It was too late to check. Too late to look away.
“Home free!” Bob Krafft yelled as his rear bumper swung past the bulk of the black truck. It wasn’t true, of course. Probably they’d be intercepted by a military vehicle, maybe even spend the night getting lectured and threatened and charged with violating small-print regulations, but he wasn’t an enlisted man and he’d never signed an agreement to spend a fucking eternity in Blind Lake. Anyway, the open land rolling out beyond his headlights was a welcome sight. “Home free,” he said again, mostly to drown out the sound of Courtney’s breathless screeches of fear.
She sucked in enough air to call him an asshole. He said, “We’re out of there, aren’t we?”
“Jesus, yeah, but—”
Something out the side window caught her eye. Bob caught a glimpse of it, too. Some small thing leaping out of the tall grass.
Probably a bird, he thought, but suddenly the car was full of cold air and hard little flakes of snow, and his ears hurt, and there was window glass everywhere, and it seemed like Courtney was bleeding: he saw blood on the dashboard, blood all over his good leather jacket….
“Court?” he said. His own voice sounded strange and underwatery.
His foot stabbed the brake, but the road was slippery and the Tesla began to swerve despite the best efforts of its overworked servos. Something caused the engine to explode in a gout of blue fire. The body of the car rose from the road. Bob was pressed against his seat, watching the tarmac and the tall grass and the dark sky revolve around him, and for a fraction of a second he thought, Why, we’re flying! Then the car came down on its right front fender and he was thrown into Courtney. Into the sticky ruin of her, at least: into Courtney gone all red and licked with flames.
“The fuck?” Ray Scutter asked when he saw the fireball. Dimitry Shulgin, the Civilian Security chief, could only mumble something about “ordnance.” Ordnance! Ray tried to grasp the significance of that. A car had run the fence. The car had caught fire and rolled over. It came to a stop, top-down. Then everything was still. Even the crowd at the gate was momentarily silent. It was like a photograph. A frozen image. Halted time. He blinked. Pellet snow blew into his face, stinging.
“Drones,” Shulgin pronounced. It was as if he had broken the crust of the silence. Several people in the crowd began to scream.
Drones: those objects hovering over the burning automobile? Winged softballs? “What does that mean?” Ray asked. He had to shout the question twice. Spectators began to dash for their cars. Headlights sprang on, raking the prairie. Suddenly everybody wanted to go home.
Heedless as a bad dream, the gate continued gliding open until it was parallel to the road.
The black robotic truck inched forward again, past the barrier and into the Lake.
“Nothing good,” Shulgin replied—Ray, by this time, had forgotten the question. The Security chief edged away from the tarmac, seeming to fight his own urge to run. “Look.”
Out beyond the gate, in the hostile emptiness, the driver’s-side door of the burning car groaned open.
Now that the car had come to rest Bob registered little more than the need to escape from it—to escape the flames and the bloody, blackened obje
ct Courtney had somehow become. At the back of his mind was the need to get help, but there was also, dwelling in the same place, the unwelcome knowledge that Court was beyond all human help. He loved Courtney, or at least he liked to tell himself so, and he often felt a genuine affection for her, but what he needed now more than anything else in the world was to put some distance between himself and her ravaged body, between himself and the burning car. There was no gasoline in the motor, but there were other flammable fluids, and something had ignited all of them at once.
He scrambled away from Courtney to the driver’s-side door. The door was crumpled and didn’t want to open; the latch-handle came off in his hand. He braced himself against the steering wheel and the seatback and kicked outward, and though it hurt his feet hellishly, the door did at last creak and groan a little way open on its damaged hinges. Bob forced it wider and then tumbled out, gasping at the cold air. He rose to his knees. Then, shaking, he stood upright.
This time he saw quite clearly the device that popped out of the tall grass at the verge of the road. He happened to be looking in the right direction, happened to catch sight of it in a moment of frozen hyperclarity, this small, incongruous object that was in all likelihood the last thing he would ever see. It was round and camouflage-brown and it flew on buzzing pinwheel wings. It hovered at a height of about six feet—level with Bob’s head. He looked at it, eyeball to eyeball, assuming some of those small dents or divots were equivalent to eyes. He recognized it as a piece of military equipment, though it was like nothing he had ever encountered in his weekends with the Reserves. He didn’t even think about running from it. One doesn’t run from such things. He stiffened his spine and began, but had no time to finish, the act of closing his eyes. He felt the sting of snow against his skin. Then a brief, fiery weight on his chest, then nothing at all.
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