Butcher Block Green

by Eric Kramer

  It was a risk she’d have to take. Either way, she wasn’t planning to stay long enough to be discovered.

  “Rounds are ready, Heme. Reading hot. Biometrics check out.”

  Heme sighted through Gun’s optics. Over a kilometer below, the target started walking, moving north of the coffee shop. Gun projected an overlay on the target, anticipating where he’d be when the rounds hit.

  Heme took a final pause, waiting.

  “Okay, I want you to release the Heavy, hold two secs, then release the Needle at will. On my mark.”

  Here we go.

  Heme took a breath, holding it with lungs that existed only in her mind, a holdover from her days as a regular-duty sniper. She gripped the firing controls with her remaining hand, fingers resting lightly on the trigger.

  “Firing.”

  Heme squeezed.

  A slight recoil, and Gun fired. The Heavy round exploded out, horizontal stabilizers springing open. Gun, augmented by the cat brain’s reflexes, maneuvered the round with the hyper-reactive twitch adjustments that no human mind could accomplish. Keeping one eye on the target, Heme’s mind danced over the HUD’s virtual controls, slaving sequential network sensors to track the Heavy’s progress.

  Three hundred yards out, a microscopic blast of white puffed out of the Heavy’s left side, starting its rotation. Heme smiled.

  Perfect. Now the Needle

  As if hearing her thought, Gun fired the thin projectile, the chrysalis shaking from the recoil. As soon as the round cleared the barrel, the chrysalis released the cable they perched on, and they dropped like a stone, screaming towards the city street below. The chrysalis’ wings flared open, catching the wind tunnel’s updraft and rocketing them forward, into the flow of traffic. Heme wove them through it, looping underneath the shadow of a transport pod. She followed it as long as she could, throwing out a fabricated taxi ID before peeling off and whispering to a landing on the side of another building.

  As the chrysalis made contact with their new perch, Gun pulled the Heavy’s optics into Heme’s vision, just in time for her to see the projectile slam into the synth-steel, boring a clean hole through it. One hundred and fifty meters behind, the Needle followed the Heavy’s path, guided by Gun.

  The network immediately responded to the Heavy’s assault, as though New Philadelphia were a living thing that had just been shot. Heme watched as Gun threaded the Needle into the hole left by the Heavy, coasting in on the jet stream of a nanobot swarm headed towards the breach. The Needle slipped through, undetected, as the nanobots clotted over the hole.

  Their gamble had paid off. The Needle now had a clear shot.

  She glanced at readings coming from the target’s drone swarm. In the interim, her implant was doing an excellent job with new renderings of the target. Despite the distance, each microdrone within the cloud was tracked and visible, with only a microsecond’s delay from real-time.

  Movement around their objective caused her to switch focus. The target’s cloud was aware of the activity around the injured building, twitching and shifting in response to the Heavy’s impact. No sign of countermeasures against the Needle, though.

  Good.

  “Gun, third stage now. Full power. Get that Needle through that net. I think the swarm realizes something’s up.”

  “Roger. Projectile telemetry is solid. All systems green. I am initiating final stage separation now.”

  Heme threw her processing capacity behind Gun’s, augmenting the weapon as she made final modifications to the Needle’s flight computer, all in less than a millisecond.

  The Needle’s casing pulled away, and its dome opened like a flower. A submicroscopic reaction ignited a chemical engine at the Needle’s core. The final stage jetted out, angling for the target at hypersonic speeds. No more flight computer, no more control—just their best final target anticipation and release. The subdermal barb was only two millimeters long and about a thousand angstroms wide, making it impossible to track. Looking through Gun’s imaging reticle, Heme saw the glow emanating from the barb—visible only via visual decryption algorithms.

  The glow rocketed into the drone swarm. Their calculations were perfect. Heme watched as the barb glided down the projected flight path towards the target’s left ear.

  The glow vanished, but there was no confirmation of a hit on her screen.

  “Gun, what happened? Contact?”

  “I think…”

  Almost as soon as she asked, data flooded back at her. The swarm reconfigured, spinning in layered stacks of clockwise and counterclockwise movement, save for one small area, a turbulent hub of activity like Jupiter’s eye. The area where her Needle had penetrated.

  Somehow, they’d intercepted it. But to intercept it, they’d have to track its flight, which was impossible.

  How???

  “Gun—”

  An implosive thud shook the building. The feedback overwhelmed the chrysalis’ dampers, shutting it down.

  Frantic, Heme did an emergency restart, slicing through the layered protocols and bringing the chrysalis back into full awareness. A dozen critical warnings and errors pounded into her skull. The chrysalis reconnected with the network just as the identical crescents of the building’s spires evaporated in the heat of a molten detonation, lighting up the sky—right where the chrysalis had perched on the cable seconds before.

  Without thinking, Heme released the chrysalis, allowing it to drop another hundred meters before jetting forward, aiming for an open window on the other side of the flow of traffic. The chrysalis contracted and squeezed as they corkscrewed in. A thud from a near miss shook Heme as they dove into oncoming vessels and aircraft. She silenced the alarms, focused on their flight path.

  We’re not going to fit!

  Mind racing, Heme accessed the building’s mainframe and broke into the eightieth floor’s northwest wall control module.

  Less than a second to impact … no time for finesse…

  The chrysalis, grafted into her own nervous system, responded without hesitation, hacking into the local network and isolating the building around their area of impact. Heme rode in through the chrysalis’ data breach, shutting down the wall and creating a sensory anesthesia.

  The building felt nothing when they cannonballed through, taking out the window and part of the wall. Their deceleration force would have crushed a human into a paste, but Heme’s biomods absorbed the shock as she focused on deploying a chameleon. The small device popped through the chrysalis’ skin, replicating and patching the wall before the building’s already reawakening systems could trigger a breach alert.

  “Okay, Gun. We need a hole. Prep a Bouquet … The target knows we’re here, so we may as well take out the cloud before he finds us.”

  “Heme, the Needle telemetry is bouncing back. Do you see it? Here, I will pull it up for you.”

  Gun pushed a crystalline blossom into her central vision: a single data pulse, entangled in background radiation, tattooed with the Needle’s ID. Stunned, Heme decrypted the pulse. Data flowed through her implant, saturating her display.

  The barb had penetrated the drone cloud after all, and had broadcast once before biodegrading. The target had been resistant to the toxin … another impossibility, unless he knew the attack was coming and had encoded the specific immunoglobulin production into his own cells.

  Which meant a leak. One or more of the three people who worked on the toxin. She had to let Franklin command know.

  “HEME! BREACH!!!” Gun screamed at her, wiping away her context screen and blowing up the Needle’s pulse analysis. Heme recognized the problem right away, but it was too late. Corrupted code was leaking out of the pulse, attacking the chrysalis’ neural core.

  No … not corrupted … rewritten.

  Heme swore, her mind flying in a million directions as she analyzed the pulse.

  The target’s drones had discovered them. Somehow the target had captured the Needle, cracked the decryption, re-encoded it, and piggyb
acked the pulse as it ping-ponged through the proxies. No wonder there had been a delay.

  Stupid. Rookie move to not quarantine the pulse first.

  She pulled up the pulse breakdown. Twenty seconds estimated until their target had a lock on them. Heme ordered the chrysalis to strengthen its connection with the apartment building, and then refocused on the target. There wasn’t time.

  “Gun, stack an EMP round with the Bouquet. Dial the Bouquet mitosis to a one to one ratio, priority to that drone cloud defense matrix. Set the EMP to broad spectrum. Count of five to release. I want all the survivors down. What’s our best shot after this? I need a high-percentile kill option.”

  “I will try. Difficult to take a shot from this angle. Take a look at ballistics.”

  Trajectory analysis scrolled across her vision. Heme scanned it, feeling the clock ticking inside her head.

  “Not good enough, Gun. Thirty percent fail rate is the least I’ll accept. Do it again.”

  A notice flashed in her retinal HUD: the chrysalis had completed binding with the building. She scanned its work and nodded, satisfied. The building thought the chrysalis was part of the existing structure—for now. With luck, that would buy them a minute.

  “Okay, Heme. I have a better firing solution. Take a look.” New flight paths blossomed in Heme’s eye, spiraling towards the target. It was a complex path, relying on wind patterns more that she liked, but it was less risky.

  “Okay. The only thing we have capable of that kind of in-flight maneuverability is our 20 mm round, yes? You have fifteen seconds to modify it with a micronuke. Stack it after the EMP. Pause a quarter second to release. I don’t want them to have time to recover.”

  A small piece of the wall blew inward, sending dust and debris into the room. Heme froze Gun in place and shoved the chrysalis’s non-essentials into hibernation.

  The drone cloud had found them.

  For a few moments, nothing appeared to happen, and then a small black clot, the size of a pinhead, oozed through. It paused, hovering in front of the hole. It shuddered and grew, shifting into a complex, multifaceted geode the size of a small fist.

  The drone wafted forward, settling on a chair. It extended a silver-black proboscis and sampled a piece of the table before moving forward again. It repeated the procedure, sampling the floor, then a piece of the wall, making its way over to the chrysalis.

  Aware of the time draining away until the target backtracked to them through the corrupted pulse, Heme continued to hold, watching and waiting.

  The drone floated over to them, as though gliding on a summer breeze. It hesitated and descended, proboscis first, onto the chrysalis’ skin. The proboscis bored in, and the drone took a sample.

  Now.

  Heme’s lips formed the word as she shot the order to the chrysalis. The drone jumped as it sensed the chrysalis move, but it was too late. The chrysalis engulfed it like an ameba, consuming it.

  Immediately, the chrysalis began to assimilate and replicate the drone’s signal. Heme willed herself to wait, watching precious microseconds bleed out as the chrysalis struggled to get a lock on the drone, which thrashed around inside a containment cell. After a moment, the drone’s “OK” signal pulsed out … a perfect mimic. It was almost seamless in real-time, but eons had passed inside Heme’s head. With the signal replicated, Heme’s entire body relaxed.

  “Gun, get a lock. Light the rounds.”

  “Rounds are hot. I have the 20 mm round augmented with a micronuke warhead. EMP bomb is loaded ahead of it. Targeting the electronics of the drone cloud.”

  In the corner of her vision, Heme saw the confirmation of each round’s active status tick. She glanced at her clock. Thirty seconds until the pulse had them painted and ID’d, dead to rights.

  Just enough time for me to flash interrogate the drone.

  “Gun, we fire in fifteen, right before the target reaches that building. Final flight check. As soon as you release the micronuke, I want you to load our last Heavy; set it for five-yard burst, antegrade thermal pattern.”

  “You sure about that, Heme? The safety mechanism will not let the round fire that close to us.”

  “Override the safety block. I know, we’ll be in the blast zone. That’s the idea. We’re going to fake our own death.”

  Heme turned to the drone. She queued up a series of commands and the chrysalis extended itself into the building’s network, completely overwhelming what remained of the apartment building’s security and inserting itself into the superstructure’s computing core.

  Heme allowed herself a microsecond of self-satisfaction.

  One of the benefits of military hardware … the brute force option.

  She slaved the building’s computing capacity to the chrysalis and bored into the drone. Another second dropped off the clock, but the intensity of her focus made it an abstract concept.

  The drone lay before her, a tangled mass of data and networked connections. Focusing through the lens of the building’s computing power, she cut into the drone, separating its protocols from its defense matrices.

  And then … there it was. The answer to the drone’s perfect camouflage: their total adaptability.

  The computational power of the entire local area was integrated into the drone network, from the largest skyscrapers down to an individual’s personal augments. Every last iota of data was manipulated through the drone swarm, using whatever computational ability lay within a block’s radius of the target.

  Unbelievable.

  And then the solution hit her.

  “Gun … the drones don’t have any sensors themselves. They’re tapping into New Philadelphia! They’re slaving every sensor and building around them to do the processing! That´s how they can pull off that level of camouflage!”

  “So. How do we get around that? With that kind of ability, the target will see us coming as soon as we fire.”

  “Okay, here’s what I want you to do: reverse the order. Fire the EMP first, but I want a double shot. We have three of them, right? Load two, each set at a forty-five-degree complementary dispersion field—ninety degrees total pulse spread. I want to hit as much around the target as possible. I don’t care about the drones. Follow it with the Bouquet, immediately. Pause three seconds, release the 20 mm micronuke, fastest trajectory to get it on the target. I don’t care what you have to bounce off. Skip preflight. Light the rounds. Give me a green when ready.”

  “Got it. Hang on. Loading the second EMP. I am reprogramming their dispersal pattern.”

  Another thump shook her chest as the rounds woke up. The icons lit up again on her heads up display, ticking green one by one as Gun chambered them in her barrel.

  Good girl. Way to adapt to my impulsive changes. Not bad for a young AI.

  “Rounds are hot. Fire when ready.”

  Heme sighted through the optics. Took in a mental breath. Held it.

  “Firing.”

  She squeezed the trigger.

  The first EMP rocketed out, with the second pressed against it. Heme watched as the two rounds separated, flying parallel to each other as they wove through the midday traffic.

  The noses split, spreading wide, engines flaring as wind resistance increased.

  Heme held her breath, watching Gun twist and curve the projectiles around buildings and obstacles, trying to bring the EMP arrays to bear.

  Her HUD flashed red.

  The target had found her. Heme ignored it, focusing on ballistics.

  “Firing.”

  The familiar tremor of recoil raced through her body as Gun launched the Bouquet.

  The EMPs streaked head on towards the target. The drone cloud began to respond, forming a wall in front of the target.

  Too late, suckers…

  “Activating the EMP.”

  Gun triggered the projectiles, and the devices exploded. A shockwave sizzled out in a wide cone pattern, knocking out every electrical device in its path. Three full city blocks died. Lights went black, scre
ens went dark, and vehicles dropped out of the air mid-flight, like a shower of man-made meteors. Heme tried not to think about who was inside as they went crashing into the ground below—hundreds of balls of fire, lighting up the darkened lower city.

  Shaking it off, Heme refocused on the targeting reticle. There was no time to mourn strangers. She saw the drone cloud shifting, morphing as it pivoted to face her location. Somehow, they had resisted the EMP.

  “Firing the micronuke.”

  Another tremor as the projectile shot out of Gun’s barrel.

  The datastream told her the cloud was about to shoot at her. Time was up. The drones fired. Billions of tiny particles shot out, fusing into a molten mass that plowed through everything in front of it. Heme winced as it crashed through a residential building, bursting out the other side, right towards them.

  Heme braced herself for the hit, and then frowned as the chrysalis projected the impact point.

  A fraction of a second later, the mass exploded three hundred yards away from her. A two-hundred-and-forty-story office structure folded in two as the mass struck it halfway down.

  They really are blind. They’re guessing based on where the EMP came from.

  The drone cloud adjusted its aim. Gun ran impact calculations, projecting the results on Heme’s HUD. She was right in the center of the projected impact.

  “I see it, Gun. Hold position. Wait for our rounds to hit…”

  Just then, the Bouquet split apart, each piece undergoing mitosis and mushrooming into a glistening sheet of particles streaking towards the target.

  Impact.

  Millions of tiny slivers of shrapnel impaled the drone cloud. Countless microscopic explosions burst around the target as the drones’ fission drives overloaded. Standing at the center, as ash fell around him, a thin, small man squinted out to where Heme was hidden somewhere in the jungle of the cityscape.

  She saw him moving his hands, twisting and manipulating, the movements telegraphing his panic.