She wants to scream, tells herself she must scream, thinking... still without knowing why... that it might somehow bring her ordeal to an end. But it refuses to come, it is trapped in her throat, and all she can do is produce a small cry of anguish that is torn to shreds by her vocal cords even as she wrings it out of them—
Annie awakened with a jolt, her heart knocking in her chest, the trailing edge of a moan on her mouth. She had broken out in a cold sweat, her T-shirt plastered to her body.
She looked around, taking a series of deep breaths, shaking her head as if to cast off the lacy remnants of her dream.
She was home. In Houston, in her living room, on her sofa. From the TV in the kids’ room she could hear the Teletubbies carrying on with manic effervescence. On the carpet at her feet, her newspaper was still folded to the article she’d been reading when she’d fallen into an exhausted sleep. Its headline read: “AFTERMATH OF TRAGEDY.” Above the columns of text was a photo of Orion in its catastrophic final moments.
Annie bent her head and covered her stinging eyes with her palm.
She’d flown back from the Center after having been there since very early that morning and attended meeting after meeting in which the participants—NASA executives, government officials, and representatives of the various shuttle and ISS contractors—had ostensibly been trying to sift through what they knew about the accident and lay out a preliminary framework for an investigation into its causes. Instead, they had spent the majority of the time staring at one another in dazed silence.
Perhaps, Annie thought, it had been a mistake to expect anything more constructive so soon after the explosion. At any rate, she had felt nothing but a sense of leaden futility by the end of the final session, and been grateful for the chance to go home.
Home sweet home, where she could take her mind off what had happened, enjoy some light reading and a refreshing nap before getting started on dinner.
Her hand still clapped over her eyes, she felt a small, bleak smile touch her lips.
An instant later the tears began streaming between her fingers.
The Barrett rifle against his shoulder, his cheek to its stock, Antonio aligned his target in the crosshairs of its high-magnification sight.
Moments after leaving Kuhl’s vehicle, he had scurried up a tree that afforded a direct line of fire with the guard station, and was now half-sitting, half-squatting in the fork of its trunk, his feet braced on two strong branches. The thirty-pound weapon ordinarily required a bipod for support, but here on his treetop perch he’d been able to rest its barrel over his upraised knees.
He inhaled, exhaled, gathering his concentration. A series of dry trigger pulls had helped him find a comfortable body position and make minor adjustments to his aim. He would be shooting across a distance of over nine hundred yards, and could not afford to be even slightly off balance.
There were two guards inside the booth. One stood at a coffeemaker, pouring from its glass pot into a cup. The other sat over some papers at a small metal desk. He would be the second kill. The man on his feet would have greater mobility, and a mobile target always had the best chance of escape, requiring that it be the first to be taken out.
Antonio took another inhalation, held it. The guard at the coffee machine had filled his cup and was putting the pot back on its warming pad. He raised the coffee to his lips, but would never get a chance to drink it. In a practical sense he was already dead. The booth’s bullet-resistant window would be easily penetrated by the tungston-carbide SLAP rounds chambered in Antonio’s weapon, doing the men behind it no good at all.
“Mi mano, su vida,” he whispered, releasing his breath. As always before a kill, he felt very close to God.
He pulled smoothly on the trigger of his weapon, his eye and forefinger welded in seamless action.
His gun bucked. A bullet split the air. The window shattered. The guard spun where he stood and went down, the coffee cup flying from his hand.
Antonio breathed again, took aim again.
Still behind his desk, the second guard barely had the time to turn toward his crumpled partner before another bullet whistled in from the night and caught him in the left temple, tearing through his skull and snapping him up and out of his seat.
The sniper remained in position a short while longer, wanting to be thorough, watchful of any hint of movement in the sentry booth. Nothing stirred in the pale yellow light spilling from its blown-out window. Satisfied he’d gotten two clean kills, he shouldered the rifle, and was about to slip from the tree when a fluttering sound overhead gave him momentary pause.
A glance up through the foliage revealed that he’d been none too hasty in executing his task.
The jump team had arrived and was descending from the darkness.
FOUR
MATO GROSSO DO SUL SOUTHERN BRAZIL APRIL 17, 2001
CLEARING THE PERIMETER FENCE BY A HUNDRED METERS, Manuel dropped his gear bag on a tether and continued his descent into the compound. He was aware of his teammates floating in behind him, aware of the ground rushing up.
Now he pulled his left toggle to turn into the slight westerly wind, trimmed more altitude, waited until he felt the bag land below him with a thump, and hit the quick-release snap to disengage it. An instant later, he drew both toggles evenly down to his waist to flare the chute. It collapsed in on itself, spilling air.
He landed softly on the balls of his feet.
His chin low to his chest, Manuel let himself move forward in a kind of loose-legged trot, remaining upright, checking his momentum as he separated himself from the canopy. The others, meanwhile, had come rustling to the ground on either side of him. Most of them were also on their feet, but one or two had dropped a little harder, tumbling onto their backs and sides in fluid parachute landing falls.
And then they were up and slipping free of their harnesses. They hurried to recover their bags and collect the equipment inside them—grenades, plastic explosive charges, and upgraded FAMAS rifles like those that would be used by the extraction team. Exchanging their jump helmets and goggles for combat helmets with optical display units, they donned dark special-purpose visors, coupled the electronic gunsights on their rifles to the helmet-mounted displays, lowered their monocular eyepieces, and then stealthily moved out at their leader’s command, splitting into three groups of four.
If the information they had obtained was correct, it would only be seconds, at most minutes, before their presence was detected.
Along with other things of vital interest to their employer, that information would be well tested as the night ran its course.
The employees at the facility mostly called them “hedgehogs.”
Rollie Thibodeau, who headed the night security detail, preferred the term “li’l bastards,” grumbling that the way they responded to certain situations resembled human behavior a bit too closely for comfort. But Rollie was technophobic to an extreme degree, and being a Louisiana Cajun, felt an inborn obligation to be both voluble and contrary.
Still, when he was in a generous mood, he would acknowledge their value by adding that they were “smart li’l bastards.”
In fact, the mobile security robots weren’t very bright at all, possessing the approximate intelligence of the beetles and other insects that hedgehogs of the living, mammalian variety preferred to dine upon. And while they could function as surrogates for human beings in performing a host of physical tasks, scientific experts of an Asimovean bent would have contended it was improper, or at the very least imprecise, to even define them as robots, since they were incapable of autonomous thought and action, slaved to remote computers, and ultimately monitored and controlled by human guards.
True robots, these experts might assert, would have the ability to make independent decisions and act upon them without any help from their creators, and were perhaps twenty or thirty years from actual development. What existed now, and what laymen wrongly considered to be robots, were actually robotlike machines.
The hedgehogs unarguably made looking out for themselves easier. “R2D2 on steroids” is how Thibodeau described them, and in its own way that was an apt representation. Their omnidirectional color video cameras were encased in rounded turrets atop vertical racks or “necks,” giving them a vaguely anthropomorphic appearance that many female staffers found cute—as did quite a few of the plant’s male employees, though rarely by open admission. Mounted on tracked 6x6 drive platforms, they were quick, quiet, and capable of maneuvering across everything from narrow corridors and stairwells to rugged, heavily obstacled outdoor terrain. Products of UpLink’s own R&D, they boasted a wide range of proprietary hardware-and-software-based systems. Their hazard/intruder detection array included broad-spectrum gas, smoke, temperature, optical flame, microwave radar, vehicular sonar, passive infrared, seismic, and ambient light sensors. Their clawed, retractable gripper arms were strong enough to lift twenty-five-pound objects and precise enough to pick the smallest coins up off the ground.
Nor were the hedgehogs limited to merely sounding the alarm should they find something amiss. They were, rather, midnight riders and first-wave militia rolled into one, ready to neutralize threats ranging from chemical fires to trespassers on command. Packed aboard their chassis were fluid cannons that could unleash highpressure jets of water, polymer superglues, and anti-traction superlubricants; 12-gauge sidewinder shotguns loaded with disabling aerosol cartridges; laser-dazzler and visual stimulus and illusion banks; and other fruits of UpLink’s ambitious nonlethal weapons program.
There were a total of six hedgehogs at the Brazilian compound, four posted near the borders of its approximately rectangular grounds, an additional pair safeguarding its central buildings. Each of the ground patrols encompassed an entire perimeter line and a parallel sector reaching inward for one hundred meters, and each mechanical sentry on that beat had been given a nickname whose first initial corresponded with the first letter of the direction it covered: Ned toured the northern perimeter, Sammy the compound’s south side, Ed its eastern margin, Wally its western. The two indoor sentries were Felix and Oscar, assigned to the factory and office complexes respectively. On average, a hedgehog would patrol for eight to ten hours at a stretch before having to recharge its nickel-cadmium batteries at one of the docking stations along its route, with more frequent pauses in the event of an increased task load.
And so they went about their rounds, smooth-running and tireless, responding to an anomalous motion here, an unusual variation in temperature there, investigating whatever seemed not to belong, relaying a stream of environmental data to monitoring stations attended by their human supervisors, and alerting them to any sign of danger or unauthorized entry along the fenced-in margins of the compound.
An invasion from above, however, was another matter altogether.
The hedgehog was midway through its third tour of the facility’s western quadrant when its infrared sensors picked up a wavelength reading of twelve to fourteen microns—the distinctive heat signature of a human being—some fifty yards in front of it.
The robot paused, tracking the emission source, but it had quickly backed out of sensor range.
Its computers triangulating the object’s line of movement to project its likely path of retreat, the hedgehog gave chase, slinging across the rocky soil on its all-terrain carrier.
Suddenly another source of human IR emissions appeared, this one behind the hedgehog.
Then a third on its right, and a fourth on the left.
The robot stopped again, boxed in. Its various turret sensors needed just an instant to perform a sweep extending for fifty meters in a full circle. At the same time, its infrared illuminator was casting a light field that enabled its night video equipment to scan for images in the pitch darkness.
Again the four anomalous radiation sources dashed into and out of range, still surrounding the robot, their pattern of motion keeping them roughly equidistant from it.
Its logical systems correlating the input from its probes, the hedgehog had definitively classified the circling objects as human entities and potential threats. But very much by design, its programming did not include any options for dealing with them.
Instead, it was transmitting the processed data to its monitoring site via an encrypted radio channel, leaving its flesh-and-blood handlers to decide what to do next.
“What’s up with Wally?” Jezoirski said. “You see how he’s sniffing around?”
“Yeah,” Delure replied with concern. “And I don’t like it a bit.”
Beside them, Cody, the senior man in the room, leaned pensively over his surveillance monitors and said nothing.
At their monitoring station in the bowels of the Brazilian ISS compound, the guards were studying a complex bank of dials, controls, and electronic displays that placed them at the informational heart of its security network. All three wore the indigo uniforms and newly issued shoulder patches—these depicting a broadsword surrounded by stylized satellite bandwidth lines—of UpLink’s global intelligence and threat countermeasure force, dubbed Sword as a reference to the legend of the Gordian knot, which Alexander the Great was supposed to have undone with a swift and decisive stroke of his blade. It was a method analogous to Roger Gordian’s no-nonsense approach to crisis management, making for some interesting word play, and forming the direct basis of the section name.
Jezoirski slid forward in his chair, his features limned by the pale green radiance of an infrared video display, his eyes on the IR meter directly beneath it.
“Shit,” he said. “Look at that heat emission. Somebody’s definitely out th—”
Jezoirski broke off midsentence as a warning indicator lit up on the panel. He glanced over at Delure, who took hurried note of this development and then pointed back at the video screen.
Green-on-green images flashed across the monitor—a group of human figures moving around the security robot, alternately closing in and backing away.
Cody thought of bloodhounds harrying their prey. But why would those sons of bitches play tag with the ’hog? The robots’ main effectiveness lay in their early alert and standoff capabilities against a perimeter attack. Their purpose was to buy time until human reinforcements arrived, to repel or delay an intrusion attempt while it was in progress. Their purpose was not to engage in close skirmishing once the grounds were already compromised. At that stage getting past them would be easy, and crippling or taking them out just slightly more difficult.
His forehead crunched with tension, he scanned the radar imagery in front of him. On screen, the hedgehog and the men surrounding it showed up as color-coded shapes positioned against a set of grid lines and numerical coordinates.
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jezoirski said. “There’s nothing to show the outer fence was breached—”
“We can worry about that later.” Cody was already reaching for the phone as he broke his silence. “Key the ’hogs for full gamut intruder suppression. I’m getting Thibodeau on the horn.”
On Jezoirski’s radioed command, Wally hit them with a barrage of light and sound.
Its first optical counterstrike was a burst fro
m the neodymium-YAG laser projector on its turret. To the four men around the robot, it seemed almost as if a small nova had ignited at ground level, momentarily filling the night with diamond-edged brilliance.
They scattered rapidly, fanning out over several yards—but the flash was something for which they had come prepared. They had known that a laser pulse could temporarily impair the vision or burn out the retina, dazzle or blind, depending on its power, intensity, and length. They had also known that the weapons used by Sword’s robotic defenders were calibrated to produce no lasting damage. And they had worn dark filters on their visors to shield them from the brightness, correctly betting this would make its effects tolerable.
The hedgehog’s sensory assault, however, was about to kick into overdrive. The laser flash had barely faded in the air when a group of red-and-blue halogen lights on Wally’s main equipment case began to strobe in a preprogrammed sequence, its pattern and frequency closely matching that of normal human brain waves. At precisely the same instant, the robot’s acoustic generator had begun transmitting 100-decibel soundwaves at a controlled rate of ten cycles per second. It was a resonance the invaders seemed to feel more than actually hear, a sour, abrasive humming that remained just below the level of audibility, working its way deep into their bodies, swelling thickly in their stomachs and intestines.
Each directed-energy weapon worked on the same principle, targeting specific areas within the human body, coupling the spectrum of its emission to characteristic waveforms within those areas, and manipulating them by hyperstimulation. The flashing lights attacked the visual receptors of the hindbrain, triggering a storm of electrical activity akin to the sort that occurred during a sudden attack of epilepsy. The acoustic generator had multiple targets—the inner ear, where abnormal vibrations of the fluid within its semicircular canals would throw the sense of balance into upheaval, and the soft organs of the abdomen, where similar vibrations would lead to convulsions of pain and nausea.
Shadow Watch (1999) Page 6
