by Nick Thacker
Finding himself nearing the end of his daily energy drink supply, he sat up in his chair — he’d found one that was high enough to sit in, even though his desk was standing height — and again the pain in his back reminded him that it had been over a decade since he’d worked out. He stood up, stretched, and began to click through menu options, saving his work out of habit, even though everything he did was backed up twice a minute to a cloud server running on the lowest accessible level of the station.
His finger hovered over the last window, and he paused. His mind was alerting him to something, but he wasn’t consciously aware of what it was yet.
Jonathan leaned closer again and shook his head abruptly, trying to push away the tiredness bleeding in from the edges of his eyes. He stared at the code, trying to make sense of it.
Why is it in a different syntax? he wondered. The lines of code in the direct center of the window were all written in a slightly different format than the surrounding lines, using the same overall language, but clearly meant to stand out from the rest.
What the hell?
He clicked the metadata file for the larger subroutine the code was in, to make sure he wasn’t spying on someone else’s work from a completely different department.
He wasn’t. He had verified the code himself, read through every line, concatenated a few snippets together to save space and clean up the subroutine, and even moved around a few pieces of the puzzle. The strange script he was looking at now wasn’t something he’d noticed before.
I need to sleep, he thought. He was quickly losing his edge, and he had the sudden urge to recheck all his previous work, to ensure he hadn’t missed anything else in his haste to meet the new deadline.
Instead, he continued staring at the code. It was oddly familiar to him, but completely unrecognizable at the same time. He couldn’t see what it was intended to do, and he wondered who its original transcriber had been. He flicked around the screen a bit, reading the snippets and logic chains directly above and below the foreign code. Finding nothing that helped him contextually, he closed his eyes, forced himself to relax, and pictured the code in his mind.
The script stared back at him, beckoning. He shook his head, not knowing what he was missing.
It’s like it’s written to be a mess, jargon. Or a jumble of —
His eyes snapped open.
Oh, God.
He felt his heartbeat quickening. It has to be a mistake. There’s no possible way —
Colson opened the metadata file that was associated with this subroutine once more, and browsed through the records for the contact information of the developer who had originally transcribed this file. He saw the record he was searching for after a minute.
Nessef, Hasan. Surabaya.
Jonathan Colson immediately left his standing desk and walked to the industrial elevator at the edge of the room. He stepped inside, then pressed the button for Level 3.
This is it, he thought. If I’m wrong…
He knew he wasn’t wrong.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Julie
HENDRICKS HAD POINTED OUT THEIR destination, and it sat directly in front of them. At the very tip of a line of mountain peaks that jutted out into the frozen Ross Ice Shelf was a lone mountain, barely taller than the flat land around it. Their truck was bearing down on it, and they would be on it in half an hour. Julie watched it grow closer to them as they danced across the ice, bouncing as they hit hidden snowbanks and massive crater-like holes. She felt like they were driving over the surface of the moon, and the odd super-truck they were in only helped the analogy. They had turned off the ‘highway’ of flattened and pressed snow a while ago, aiming for the coordinates Mr. E had given them.
Julie was resting her head on Ben’s shoulder, but she still couldn’t sleep. The rocking, bouncing vehicle didn’t help, but she mainly blamed her nerves. Since receiving Mr. E’s mission parameters, and hearing what he intended her role to be in it, she had been thinking about Draconis Industries’ goal here in Antarctica. She wondered what they were planning, and how far along they were. Mr. and Mrs. E seemed to think they were nearing completion, which only gave her more anxiety.
Whatever it is, it’s not good.
She couldn’t push down the ominous feeling no matter what she forced her mind to focus on.
“Eyes up,” Hendricks said, a little too loud. Julie jerked her head up and saw that everyone else was already focusing on the man sitting in the front row of the truck’s passenger cabin. “We’re getting close to the edge of the search radius, so be looking for anything that seems man-made. If they’re hoping to stay under the radar, they’ll have camouflaged any buildings or communications gear.”
“So look for stuff that’s been painted white?” Reggie asked.
Hendricks looked like he had no idea it was a joke. “Right, exactly. Painted white, gray, whatever. It could be that they —“
Crack!
The sound of a rock hitting one of the windows of the truck reverberated through the interior. The sound seemed to bounce throughout and never end, even though Julie knew it was a single shot.
A shot.
She had the realization at the same time Hendricks did. “Everyone get down! We’re being shot at. Kyle, Crosby, get your eyes on that back window, see if you can see who hit us.”
Julie had already slouched down as low as possible into the hard seat, but she wasn’t about to close her eyes and wait for the attack to subside. She watched the soldiers named Kyle and Crosby shift in their seats and aim their assault rifles out the wide back window they were facing.
“Don’t fire unless you’ve got eyes-on and a can’t-miss shot,” Hendricks said. “You’ll blow our eardrums out from in here.”
In response, Kyle reached forward and opened one of the gate doors to the truck, immediately allowing in a blast of frigid air that made Julie suck in a breath.
“Kyle, you see something?”
“I might,” Kyle mumbled, “but I can’t exactly —“
Crack — crack! Again the sound smacked around Julie’s ears, playing with her. This time she saw one of the bullets hit. It left a tiny circle of shattered glass on the window just to Ben’s left, but didn’t puncture through.
“It’s — some sort of BB gun, I think,” she whispered to Ben. “Those bullets are way too small for anything else.”
“Well look what it did to the window,” Ben replied, rubbing the spot on the glass with his thumb. “I’d hate to see what it would do to my neck.”
Three more bullets pinged the outside of the truck, then four more on the opposite side. Julie heard a faint buzzing sound, then a rapid succession of shots landed on the truck, each sound a split-second apart but the impacts landing a few inches apart on the roof.
“Boss,” Crosby shouted. “It’s a drone.”
“A drone?” Hendricks yelled back, fighting the noise of the buzzing and wind from outside. Julie felt the truck pick up speed, and she wondered if it had the maneuverability to swerve. Whatever good that would do, she thought.
“Yeah, I think it’s a little quadcopter or something.”
Julie watched Crosby train his gun on an unseen target and follow it through the sky. He didn’t fire, but the gun’s tip moved rapidly left to right as he tried to keep the target in his sights. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a small shape barrel past the window.
“Another one over here!” she yelled. Reggie, sitting in the seat in front of them, swiveled around and brought his pistol up to eye level.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Reggie said. He had shoved his gloved hand onto the trigger and had the gun pointed straight up. “We need to get out. No way we’re hitting anything moving at this speed, and from inside the truck.”
“Not a chance, Red,” Hendricks said. “We have to keep moving —“
A soldier in front of Reggie screamed and grabbed his shoulder a second after another miniature bullet impact sounded. “I’m hit!”
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The driver seemed to sense that they were sitting ducks if they continued moving in a straight line, so he pulled the truck’s steering wheel to the left. Hard. The soldier who had been shot in the shoulder screamed in agony as his wound was pummeled against the side of the vehicle.
“Hey!” Hendricks shouted as he hit the butt of his rifle against the window separating the cabin from the passenger area. “Keep it steady. Don’t kill us before they do!”
The driver nodded, but continued jerking the wheel left and right, albeit in a slightly more controlled manner.
Julie watched Kyle and Crosby tracking the drones from the back seat with their assault rifles. Neither man had taken a shot yet, but she braced herself for the explosive sound she knew was coming.
Instead, Kyle dove sideways as two drones suddenly dropped into sight, opening fire with the tiny machine guns mounted beneath their bodies. A curved magazine hung from the bottom of each drone behind their guns, like the stinger on a wasp. The line of bullets swept left to right from Julie’s perspective, narrowly missing Kyle.
Crosby wasn’t so lucky, and he yelped once as a few bullets hit their mark on the man. Just when the first drone finished its quick expulsion of rounds, the second started. This one finished the job, and Julie saw Crosby’s head fall backwards as eight or ten more rapidly fired BB-sized bullets fell into his chest.
Kyle sat back up in the seat and leaned as far out of the truck as he could, then fired. The assault rifle was impossibly loud in the tight quarters of the moving vehicle, but he held the gun far enough out the back door that the noise didn’t make Julie go deaf. Reggie and Mrs. E were sitting closer to it, and they both instinctively put hands over their ears.
The two drones responded to the attack simultaneously, both dropping straight down, then splitting apart and flying opposite directions. Their motion was fluid, controlled, and — Julie couldn’t help but notice — perfectly in sync.
“Crosby!” Hendricks yelled, clambering over the seats to get to the back of the truck. “Crosby, you hear me?”
The truck swerved again, and Crosby’s head lolled to the side. Kyle, still staring out the open back door at the white nothingness, shook his head.
“Dammit!” Hendricks roared. He turned back around and yelled up to the driver, raising the volume of his voice even more. “Stop! Stop moving!”
The truck driver slammed the brakes, and Julie felt herself thrown back against the backwards-facing seat. Ben had her wrist in his hand, and she realized how hard he had been squeezing. He looked at her with fire in his eyes, but the rest of his face was stoic. She knew exactly what he was thinking. What are we doing here?
She shook her head as Kyle pushed Crosby’s limp body out of the vehicle and onto the ice. He followed, kneeling on the packed snow as he searched the skies for the two drones. Joshua and the remaining six soldiers, including Hendricks and the injured man, fell out onto the snow as well and took up a semi-circle perimeter around the back of the truck.
Reggie and Mrs. E followed, and Julie felt Ben release her wrist and stand up to leave.
“You’re not really going out there, are you?” she asked.
Ben shrugged.
“It wasn’t a question, Ben,” Julie said, her voice shaking. “They’re going to kill us out —“
The buzzing sound returned, and Julie stopped talking mid-sentence. Ben was already over the seat in front of him and heading for the row at the opposite edge of the truck that led to the exit, and Julie, against every rational thought in her head, found herself following. She frantically reached around to her pack she had slung over one shoulder as she crouched toward the doors, fumbling for the gun.
She found it, and the cold, hard steel felt like it would freeze her hand to it. She gripped the barrel of it inside the pack, not wanting to fully pull it out, as if it would somehow solidify her decision to leave the relative safety of the truck and start shooting.
The snow felt different here than it had when they’d disembarked the plane. Harder, crunchier even, and hollow-sounding. She could almost feel the mile of ice beneath her feet, and imagined a wide-open cavity beneath that. An unimaginable depth of blackness, hidden under an endless amount of white.
The buzzing grew in intensity even more, and her head darted around to try to pick out the white quadcopters bearing down on them.
“There!” Hendricks yelled, turning slightly to the right to take aim.
“Also over here, boss,” another soldier said, this time from Julie’s left.
“Dead-center,” Kyle muttered, his gun already trained on the three flying weapons.
“Looks like eight total this time,” someone called out.
“Fine,” Hendricks said. Everyone pick one, and for God’s sake — and ours — don’t miss. Fire when —“
The area around Julie exploded in cacophonous noise as assault rifles rattled their anger out toward the descending choppers. The two-foot-wide drones screamed down, seemingly oblivious to the deathly hail of gunfire hurtling toward them. Julie, covering her ears, watched as two of the drones fell from the sky.
It wasn’t enough, however, and the drones echoed the attack with their own deadly accurate assault. Three soldiers, all on Julie’s left, fell. One was clearly dead, the others appeared critically wounded.
She wanted to scream. Or she might have already been screaming, but it was too loud to tell. She watched Ben popping off shots with his USP in vain, Reggie, Joshua, and Mrs. E doing the same. None of the shots landed.
The truck’s exterior popped as it received a barrage of bullets, and Hendricks shouted over his shoulder. “They’re aiming for the truck now, to try to take away our escape plan.” He turned around and started shouting the driver’s name, but then stopped. Julie followed his gaze and saw the broken glass shimmering on the surface of the snow. The driver lay facedown nearby, red stains starkly outlining his head. The driver’s-side door to the truck was open wide, the engine still running.
“Okay,” Hendricks said. “Change of plans. Everyone group up on —“ He stopped, staring up into the sky. “Never mind! Get down!”
The drones had finished their wide arcing circle and were descending for another attack. Kyle and another soldier were still facing two oncoming drones, and Joshua and Reggie had grabbed two assault rifles from the dead soldiers. Mrs. E seemed to be moving toward the third fallen man to do the same, so Julie did what she thought best. She dove to the ground, the layers of clothing cushioning her fall.
Ben was there.
“Get under the truck, Jules!” he shouted, almost pushing her back himself. He crouched down to make sure she had heard him, and she slid backwards on the ice until she was halfway hidden beneath the truck’s rear end. The truck rode five feet off the ground, so she still felt quite exposed, but she knew it was better than nothing. She waited for Ben to follow her under, but he never came.
The attack came and went. She heard the bullets from the drones landing on the truck, Hendricks shouting orders, and a few soldiers yelling curses and unintelligible responses in return. There were a few retorts from the assault rifles, but not enough to convince Julie that the drones had been taken down. She strained to hear Ben’s voice over the shouts and buzzing sounds, but it proved an impossible task.
Hendricks cursed. “They’re aiming for the front of the truck! Quick — get around to the other side before they circle back.”
Feet crunched in the snow and Julie saw the sets of matching boots running around both sides toward the front of the vehicle. She pushed herself up and crawled around, traveling down the underside of the truck toward the front end. More drone bullets hit their mark, but she heard the much louder sound of assault rifle fire at the same time.
“Got one!” she heard Kyle’s voice yell.
“Bogey down!” Reggie shouted.
Two more drones were downed that attack, but Julie could only see boots. Bullets ricocheted down into the engine compartment, the bouncing noise too c
lose for comfort. She reared back into a sitting position, away from the engine.
The drones descended once more, and this time Julie screamed as a few shots pierced the rest of the way into the engine, causing a fuel line to burst and begin spewing gasoline onto the snow and ice. She looked toward the engine compartment and saw the sparks as more bullets landed.
This thing is going to explode, she realized. And I’m underneath it.
The terrifying reality struck her. Stay here, I explode. Go out there, I get ripped apart.
She chose to get ripped apart. Something deep within her longed to be next to Ben, at the very least, when she died. She pulled herself forward again, this time aiming for the area she thought Ben was standing in.
He was now part of a smaller semi-circle of soldiers, men, and women, all aiming upward at their marks. The four remaining drones were still flying in perfect synchronization, but it was clear a few of their comrades were missing. The sections of airspace those drones had been assigned to remained empty, as if the commander of the tiny air force hadn’t bothered to regroup its units to fill in the gaps.
Three more drones fell to the much larger assault rifles, but one more soldier slumped sideways as a BB found its mark in the man’s neck.
Reggie’s gun moved, silently tracking the last drone circling the area. Man and machine squared off, and Julie watched the tense moment as the copter flew toward the truck. Reggie fired, and Julie saw the drone lurch backwards in the air, smoke spilling out of some cavity in its side. It fell, but not before sprinkling the area with one last burst of gunfire.
In the corner of her eye and in a deep, recessed part of Julie’s mind, she noticed two things — the leaking fuel, and the quick spark of a stray bullet landing on the truck.
“Run!” Reggie yelled, already moving forward. “It hit a fuel line!”
Julie felt herself launched forward, pushed hard by Ben, then everything went black.
