by S. J. Morden
The closest hot skirmish was down on Carlos’s right. In Dagenham, tank units of the London Metropolitan Police battled robotic land-crawlers suborned by one or more of the enemy’s basement warriors. Like a thundercloud on the horizon tensing the air, an awareness of the strategic situation loomed at the back of Carlos’s mind.
Executive summary: looking good for his side, bad for the enemy.
But only for the moment.
The enemy—the Reaction, the Rack, the Rax—had at last provoked a response from the serious players. Government forces on three continents were now smacking down hard. Carlos’s side—the Acceleration, the Axle, the Ax—had taken this turn of circumstance as an oblique invitation to collaborate with these governments against the common foe. Certain state forces had reciprocated. The arrangement was less an alliance than a mutual offer with a known expiry date. There were no illusions. Everyone who mattered had studied the same insurgency and counter-insurgency textbooks.
In today’s fight Carlos had a designated handler, a deep-state operative who called him-, her- or itself Innovator, and who (to personalise it, as Carlos did, for politeness and the sake of argument) now and then murmured suggestions that made their way to Carlos’s hearing via a warily accepted hack in the spike that someday soon he really would have to do something about.
Carlos stood above Greenhithe. He sighted along a virtual outstretched arm and upraised thumb at a Rax hellfire drone above Purfleet, and made his throw. An air-to-air missile streaked from behind his POV towards the enemy fighter. It left a corkscrew trail of evasive manoeuvres and delivered a viscerally satisfying flash and a shower of blazing debris when it hit.
“Nice one,” said Innovator, in an admiring tone and feminine voice.
Somebody in GCHQ had been fine-tuning the psychology, Carlos reckoned.
“Uh-huh,” he grunted, looking around in a frenzy of target acquisition and not needing the distraction. He sighted again, this time at a tracked vehicle clambering from the river into the Rainham marshes, and threw again. Flash and splash.
“Very neat,” said Innovator, still admiring but with a grudging undertone. “But … we have a bigger job for you. Urgent. Upriver.”
“Oh yes?” “Jaunt your POV ten klicks forward, now!”
The sudden sharper tone jolted Carlos into compliance. With a convulsive twitch of the cheek and a kick of his right leg he shifted his viewpoint to a camera drone array, 9.7 kilometres to the west. What felt like a single stride of his gigantic body image took him to the stubby runways of London City Airport, face-to-face with Docklands. A gleaming cluster of spires of glass. From emergency exits, office workers streamed like black and white ants. Anyone left in the towers would be hardcore Rax. The place was notorious.
“What now?” Carlos asked. “That plane on approach,” said Innovator. It flagged up a dot above central London. “Take it down.”
Carlos read off the flight number. “Shanghai Airlines Cargo? That’s civilian!”
“It’s chartered to the Kong, bringing in aid to the Rax. We’ve cleared the hit with Beijing through back-channels, they’re cheering us on. Take it down.”
Carlos had one high-value asset not yet in play, a stealthed drone platform with a heavy-duty air-to-air missile. A quick survey showed him three others like it in the sky, all RAF.
“Do it yourselves,” he said. “No time. Nothing available.”
This was a lie. Carlos suspected Innovator knew he knew.
It was all about diplomacy and deniability: shooting down a Chinese civilian jet, even a cargo one and suborned to China’s version of the Rax, was unlikely to sit well in Beijing. The Chinese government might have given a covert go-ahead, but in public their response would have to be stern. How convenient for the crime to be committed by a non-state actor! Especially as the Axle was the next on every government’s list to suppress …
The plane’s descent continued, fast and steep. Carlos ran calculations.
“The only way I can take the shot is right over Docklands. The collateral will be fucking atrocious.”
“That,” said Innovator grimly, “is the general idea.”
Carlos prepped the platform, then balked again. “No.” “You must!” Innovator’s voice became a shrill gabble in his head. “This is ethically acceptable on all parameters utilitarian consequential deontological just war theoretical and …”
So Innovator was an AI after all. That figured.
Shells were falling directly above him now, blasting the ruined refinery yet further and sending shockwaves through its underground levels. Carlos could feel the thuds of the incoming fire through his own real body, in that buried basement miles back behind his POV. He could vividly imagine some pasty-faced banker running military code through a screen of financials, directing the artillery from one of the towers right in front of him. The aircraft was now more than a dot. Flaps dug in to screaming air. The undercarriage lowered. If he’d zoomed, Carlos could have seen the faces in the cockpit.
“No,” he said. “You must,” Innovator insisted. “Do your own dirty work.” “Like yours hasn’t been?” The machine’s voice was now sardonic. “Well, not to worry. We can do our own dirty work if we have to.”
From behind Carlos’s virtual shoulder a rocket streaked. His gaze followed it all the way to the jet.
It was as if Docklands had blown up in his face. Carlos reeled back, jaunting his POV sharply to the east. The aircraft hadn’t just been blown up. Its cargo had blown up too. One tower was already down. A dozen others were on fire. The smoke blocked his view of the rest of London. He’d expected collateral damage, reckoned it in the balance, but this weight of destruction was off the scale. If there was any glass or skin unbroken in Docklands, Carlos hadn’t the time or the heart to look for it.
“You didn’t tell me the aid was ordnance!” His protest sounded feeble even to himself.
“We took your understanding of that for granted,” said Innovator. “You have permission to stand down now.”
“I’ll stand down when I want,” said Carlos. “I’m not one of your soldiers.”
“Damn right you’re not one of our soldiers. You’re a terrorist under investigation for a war crime. I would advise you to surrender to the nearest available—”
“What!” “Sorry,” said Innovator, sounding genuinely regretful. “We’re pulling the plug on you now. Bye, and all that.”
“You can’t fucking do that.”
Carlos didn’t mean he thought them incapable of such perfidy. He meant he didn’t think they had the software capability to pull it off.
They did.
The next thing he knew his POV was right back behind his eyes, back in the refinery basement. He blinked hard. The spike was still active, but no longer pulling down remote data. He clenched a fist. The spike wasn’t sending anything either. He was out of the battle and hors de combat.
Oh well. He sighed, opened his eyes with some difficulty—his long-closed eyelids were sticky—and sat up. His mouth was parched. He reached for the can of cola on the floor beside the recliner, and gulped. His hand shook as he put the drained can down on the frayed sisal matting. A shell exploded on the ground directly above him, the closest yet. Carlos guessed the army or police artillery were adding their more precise targeting to the ongoing bombardment from the Rax. Another deep breath brought a faint trace of his own sour stink on the stuffy air. He’d been in this small room for days—how many he couldn’t be sure without checking, but he guessed almost a week. Not all the invisible toil of his clothes’ molecular machinery could keep unwashed skin clean that long.
Another thump overhead. The whole room shook. Sinister cracking noises followed, then a hiss. Carlos began to think of fleeing to a deeper level. He reached for his emergency backpack of kit and supplies. The ceiling fell on him. Carlos struggled under an I-beam and a shower of fractured concrete. He couldn’t move any of it. The hiss became a torrential roar. White vapour filled the room, freezing all it to
uched. Carlos’s eyes frosted over. His last breath was so unbearably cold it cracked his throat. He choked on frothing blood. After a few seconds of convulsive reflex thrashing, he lost consciousness. Brain death followed within minutes.
if you enjoyed
ONE WAY
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ANNEX
The Violet Wars
by
Rich Larson
At first it is a nightmare. When the invaders arrive, the world as they know it is destroyed. Their friends are kidnapped. Their families are changed.
Then it is a dream. With no adults left to run things, Violet and the others who have escaped capture are truly free for the first time. They can do whatever they want to do. They can be whoever they want to be.
But the invaders won’t leave them alone for long.…
1
The pharmacy’s sign was burnt out and the windows all smashed in—Violet had done one herself—but there were still three customers standing gamely in line. She stepped around them, shoes squealing on the broken glass, and headed for the counter. None of the three wasters noticed her butting in. They didn’t notice much of anything, not their torn clothes or singed hair or bloody feet. The slick black clamp at the base of their skulls saw to that. Violet tried not to look too closely at wasters. Peripherals only, was her rule. If she looked too closely, she was liable to see someone she recognized.
Of course, she made an exception for the pharmacist. “Oh, hi!” she said, feigning surprise. “I think you helped me last week, right?”
The pharmacist said nothing, moving his hands in the air a foot over from the register, his glazed-over eyes trained on something that wasn’t there. His beard was hugely overgrown, but Violet had sort of a thing for the mountain man look. He was still tall and muscly, though in a wiry way now, because wasters forgot to eat more often than not. Still handsome.
“Well, if I’m an addict, you’re my dealer, jerk,” Violet said, cocking her hips and trying to flutter her eyelashes without looking like she’d detached a retina. She was getting better at it. Maybe she would try it on Wyatt soon.
The pharmacist said nothing, now pulling imaginary pill bottles out of an empty metal cupboard Violet had already ransacked. His vacant half smile didn’t seem as charming today. Violet gave a sour shrug and tossed her duffel bag over the counter, then nimbly followed.
“That’s our problem … Dennis,” she said, leaning in to read the red plastic name tag stuck through his shirt. “You’re a shitty communicator. We’re not going to last.”
Violet gave the pharmacist a consoling pat on the arm, then unzipped her duffel and set to work. Wyatt had told her to get antibiotics and painkillers, and since Violet knew her way around from last time, it didn’t take her long to fill the duffel with Tylenol-4s, ibuprofen, three rattling canisters of Cipro, and a bottle of liquid codeine. Wyatt was strict about who got the medicine ever since one of the younger Lost Boys made himself sick chugging cough syrup, and he never used it himself, never took a single pill, even though Violet knew the scar along his hips made him wince sometimes.
Violet wasn’t interested in painkillers. She had more important drugs to look for. She rifled through the birth control until she found her estradiol—Estrofem this time—then emptied the tablets into her own private ziplock stash. She hunted for more Aldactone but didn’t find any. The spiro would have to wait.
She rattled the plastic baggie, eyeing the candy-shop assortment of pills and counting days, then pincered a pale green Estrofem and swallowed it dry. Her Parasite rippled in response, whether with pleasure or revulsion, Violet never knew. She folded the baggie carefully into the bottom of her duffel bag with the other meds and dragged the zipper shut.
“Well, I might be free for coffee this weekend,” Violet told the pharmacist, slinging the duffel over her bony shoulder. “But I can’t give you my number because, you know, an alien invasion fried all the phones. No, I swear to God. Maybe next time, handsome.”
She scooted across the counter and dropped down on the other side, brushing a slice of dark hair out of her face. The wasters ignored her on her way out, all of them still standing patiently in line.
Violet kept them in her peripherals.
2
Bo was hiding behind a powerjack, only meters from the fire door and the emergency exit sign glowing above it through the gloom. The Parasite in his stomach wriggled madly. He held his hand to the icy concrete floor; when the flesh of his palm was stinging cold, he pressed it against his stomach. That helped soothe it a bit.
The electricity had gone out earlier that day, dropping the grimy corridors and sleeping rooms into darkness, and Bo wasn’t going to waste his chance. He’d snuck out of his bed while a boy named James was wailing and weeping loud enough to make the whirlybird drift over to him with its sleep-inducing syringe. A few of the other kids had watched Bo slip away, but he’d put a fierce finger to his lips and none of them had seemed particularly interested anyways. Most of them drank the water.
His older sister, Lia, was the one who’d realized that they put something in the water that made you feel dull and happy, and that it was better to collect drips off pipes in the bathroom. She was thirteen to Bo’s eleven and she usually did the thinking. But she was gone now.
So Bo had found his way through the dark corridor alone, running one hand along the pitted concrete wall and its retrofitted wires, making his way toward the emergency exit that led outside. Now he was waiting for the last group of kids to go from supper to bed, trying to breathe slowly and keep the Parasite in check.
A familiar whine filled the air, then a whirlybird emerged from the corridor. It was as big around the middle as Bo and drifted along at head height, like a balloon, except made of slick rubbery flesh and gleaming black metal and other things he couldn’t guess at. A tangle of spidery multi-jointed arms dangled down from its underbelly, flexing slowly in the air, and there was a bright acid-yellow lantern set into the top of its car-apace that illuminated the kids plodding behind it.
As always, Bo scanned their faces. Everyone’s eyes were turned to deep dark shadows by the sickly yellow glow, and everyone was stepping slow and dreamy-like. For a moment he fooled himself into thinking he saw Lia near the back of the file, faking the effects of the water, because there was no way she’d started drinking it, but it was a different black girl. Shorter, and lighter-skinned.
He knew Lia was in some other facility. They’d been split up weeks ago. But it didn’t stop him from looking.
The whirlybird floated past and Bo imagined himself springing at it, seizing one of its trailing limbs, smashing it against the floor, and stomping until it cracked open. The Parasite in his stomach stirred at the thought. But his wrists and hands were still crisscrossed with feather-white scars from the first and last time he’d tried that.
Instead, he waited until the glow of the whirlybird receded into the dark and the last of the kids got swallowed up in the shadows.
Bo was alone. His heart hammered his ribs and the Parasite gave another twitch. He levered himself upright, crept out from behind the powerjack. Three surreal strides and he was at the door, hands gripping the bar.
A girl named Ferris had tried to open it before, and the wailing of the alarm had drawn the whirlybirds in an instant. But with the electricity out, there would be no alarm and no fifteen-second delay on the crash bar. Bo still made himself pause for an instant to listen, to be sure there wasn’t a whirlybird drifting on the other side of the paint-flaking metal. He heard nothing except the toddlers who’d been crying ever since the lights went out. With a tight feeling in his throat, Bo pushed.
The door swung open with a clunk and a screech, and cold clean air rushed into his lungs like the first breath after a storm. He’d been in the chemical-smelling warehouse for so long he’d forgotten how fresh air tasted. Bo gasped at it.
He took a shaky step forward, only just remembering to catch the door before it slammed behind him. He tried
to focus. He was in a long narrow alley, garbage whipping around his feet and graffiti marching along the soot-stained walls. Bo knew, dimly, that the warehouses they’d been put in were near the docks. The briny sea-smell confirmed that much. He was far, far from their old neighborhood, and he didn’t know if it even existed anymore.
Bo looked up. The dusk sky seemed impossibly wide after months of fluorescent-lit ceilings, but it wasn’t empty. Unfurling over the city like an enormous black umbrella, all moving spars and flanges, was the ship. It didn’t look like a spaceship to Bo, not how he’d seen them in movies. It didn’t look like it should even be able to fly.
But it drifted there overhead, light as air. Bo remembered it spitting a rain of sizzling blue bombs down on the city, burning the park behind their house to white ash, toppling the skyscrapers downtown. And up there with the ship, wheeling slow circles, Bo saw the mechanical whale-like things that had snatched up him and his sister and all the other kids and taken them to the warehouses. Remembering it put a shock of sweat in his armpits, and his stomach gave a fearful churn. The Parasite churned with it.
Bo started down the alley at a trot before the panic could paralyze him. He didn’t know where to go, but he knew he needed to put distance between himself and the warehouse. As much distance as possible. Then he would find somewhere to hide. Find something to eat—real food, not the gray glue they ate in the warehouses. He had been fantasizing about pepperoni pizza lately, or, even better, his mom’s cooking, the things she made for special occasions: shinkafa da wake, with oily onions and the spicy yaji powder that made Lia’s eyes water so bad, and fried plantains.
