“Look at this,” he says. He zooms until the words fill the screen.
MAY THE FREE CONSTITUTION WHICH IS THE WORK OF OUR ANCESTORS BE SACREDLY MAINTAINED AND ITS ADMINISTRATION BE STAMPED WITH WISDOM AND VIRTUE.
“What the hell is that?” Alexei says.
“A prayer from the city of Baltimore.”
“Don’t you think you should be playing rather than sightseeing?”
“I am playing,” Dre says. “Just wait.”
There’s a massive explosion somewhere below, at which point the boy instantly fires a .50-caliber round directly through the brick with the inscription, repositions, and fires a second round through the brick underneath. The screen is filled with mortar dust from the shock of the detonation down below.
“What the hell was that?” Alexei asks.
“That was the first kill of the game,” Dre says, “and the diversion I needed to poke some holes in this thing without drawing attention.”
Through the top hole, Alexei and Dre can see a black mushroom cloud above the reflecting pool against the backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial. The boy makes a slight adjustment to bring the World War II Memorial into view, and the two massive mechs—a Requiem and a Hammerhead—circling each other within the confines of the pillars, all four 7.62mm miniguns exploding with muzzle flash and the phosphor of tracer rounds. Dre waits until the Requiem is moving toward him in order to minimize its lateral movement, then fires a .50-caliber round into the side of the machine’s head, then two more into its torso. As the mech falls to its knees, the Hammerhead makes the mistake of pausing while it attempts to locate the direction of fire. The Mako has already repositioned, and the Hammerhead is knocked backwards into the shallow water by three successive rounds through its head. Dre does not wait for them to self-destruct before turning and negotiating back down the stairs.
“Fucking brilliant!” Alexei blurts out. “Wait. Don’t you want to make sure they’re down?”
“Hells no,” the boy says with urgency in this voice. “I just attracted a lot of attention.”
The two nuclear self-destruct detonations are nearly simultaneous. The Mako exits the memorial’s lobby using the same hole through which it entered and is no more than a dozen long strides away when there is a massive explosion overhead. As Dre continues to distance himself from the structure, he rotates the mech’s torso in time to watch all 555 feet of the tallest obelisk in the world collapse into a massive white plume of dust and debris.
“What the fuck?” Alexei says.
“Drone attack. See why I had to get the hell out of there?”
“Whose drone?”
“Don’t know, don’t care—as long as I wasn’t inside.”
“Why did those two go down so easily? Shouldn’t it have taken more than just sniper fire?”
“Their armor isn’t that heavy,” Dre explains. “To compensate, it’s reactive. That means it uses electromagnetic pulses to dampen and deflect impacts. But when you’re a retarded dumbass punk and you go toe-to-toe right out in the open even though you know damn well there are other mechs around, your capacitors are going to run down, and Don’t Blink’s going to snipe your sorry ass.”
“Fucking brilliant,” Alexei says again.
“Actually, it’s called slop,” the boy says. “But that don’t make them any less dead, so I’ll take that shit.”
The Mako starts moving east down the lawn toward the Capitol. The dome has been rendered in meticulous detail right down to the gradual deformation caused by season after season of water freezing and thawing inside the thousands of cracks in the roughly nine million pounds of cast iron. The Statue of Freedom pitches a few degrees to the right as though perpetually caught in the moment between regaining her balance and cascading over the edge. Dre is instinctively piloting the machine in an erratic pattern impossible for a sniper to lead when the sound of intense battle erupts from the north.
The boy turns toward McPherson Square and passes at top speed between the White House and Freedom Plaza. There’s another thermonuclear detonation to the northwest and Dre scans until he finds the mushroom cloud. When he glances at his aerial view, he sees that the Dark Sword has identified all five of the remaining operational mechs and pinpointed their locations. All of them are up ahead.
Dre turns west on M Street towards Georgetown, then south on Wisconsin. With the number of drones in the air and the amount of movement and engagement on the ground, it’s safe to assume that everyone is fully situationally aware at this point. Although he has slowed down and moved from the middle of the street to the brick sidewalk beside the empty shops and restaurants in order to minimize his exposure, he knows damn well that the stationary red dot he’s approaching sees him coming.
“What the hell are you up to?” Dre wants to know.
The Mako stops beside the Thai embassy. Dre still does not have a visual on the red dot which his aerial view clearly shows as almost directly in front of him, so he is hesitant to continue until he understands what’s happening. When the Mako’s missile warning system lights up, however, and he sees two contrails originating from the elevated Whitehurst Freeway above him, it all makes sense. The Thresher he’s been hunting is ghosting; after emanating enough heat to make sure it burned an impression on everyone’s aerial view, it used an array of copper, silver alloy, and diamond powder heat sinks to collect its thermal energy and mask its signature while it moved into a more strategic position. It’s such an obvious and amateurism maneuver—easily defeated by even the most basic pixel-comparison motion detection algorithms, had Dre thought to apply the proper overlay to his aerial view—that he had not seen it coming.
Dre is careful not to react too quickly. If he maneuvers too soon, the missiles’ targeting systems will have time to adjust. The trick is to wait long enough that the tracking mechanisms cannot course-correct, but also react quickly enough as to be as far away from the point of impact as possible in order to minimize splash damage.
The Mako launches itself in a direction perpendicular to the path of the two projectiles and avoids a direct hit. It still sustains some residual damage as it is knocked to the ground, but nothing that the boy cannot easily compensate for. The Thresher has made the decision to close in rather than risk wasting additional munitions, which gives Dre time to get his feet beneath him again and move east down South Street. Threshers are medium-sized mechs which can cover short distances with surprising speed, so even with a head start, Dre cannot be assured there won’t be additional contact. The boy is trying to balance the need to move fast enough to delay the confrontation with the need to save enough power for his active armor to be effective in case he can’t. He turns north on Thirty-First Street, but before he can find a storefront or an alley in which to conceal himself, he is under fire again, this time from up ahead. The Thresher’s attack attracted the attention of a nearby Silvertip who probably sensed an easy kill and rightly anticipated Dre’s route.
“Mother. Fucker,” Dre says.
There is a pause while the Silvertip’s two hypervelocity miniguns reload, and then they erupt with extreme violence and ferocity. Dre’s active armor is effectively minimizing the impact of the depleted uranium and tungsten carbide rounds, but as the Mako was designed more for speed than sustained engagement, its power is draining fast. Long streams of rounds begin to miss as the boy dodges and returns fire, but he knows he is only buying himself a small amount of time. Even without the Thresher coming up behind him, Dre knows that a direct confrontation with a Silvertip will not end in his favor.
Whatever rounds Dre is managing to evade are more than replaced by a fresh dual stream of minigun fire from the Thresher behind him. Dre is trapped between the two mechs who have absolutely nothing to lose by sending every round they have downrange as fast as they possibly can. Rather than panicking, however, the boy only becomes more focused.
His fingers are playing frantically over the keypads while he does his best to avoid as much fire as he can. He paus
es long enough to launch an entire battery of missiles toward the Silvertip, turn, and empty the second battery toward the Thresher. In the span of only a few milliseconds, both mechs’ active protection systems have computed the trajectories of the incoming projectiles and launched countermeasures. All eight missiles are destroyed well before they can reach their targets, but the Mako’s batteries have already been reloaded, and before the machine gun fire can commence, Dre repeats the sequence: four missiles up the street toward the Silvertip, and four down the street toward the Thresher. This time, he does not wait to see what happens. The boy turns to his aerial view, targets the Silvertip, and launches one of the Dark Sword’s two air-to-surface missiles. Before the missile has reached its top speed of mach 2.5, he has also targeted the Thresher and let the second missile go. All eight of Dre’s repeat barrage were again effectively destroyed, but with no more countermeasures remaining, there is nothing to stop the two solid-rocket, precision-strike, Thunderbolt missiles from scoring direct hits. The moment the one hundred pounds of antitank shaped charges inside the armor-piercing tips have reached an effective depth, they rip both the Thresher and the Silvertip so thoroughly apart that their thermonuclear self-destruct mechanisms do not even bother to arm.
Alexei punches the air. “Yes!” he shouts behind the boy. “You’re a fucking genius, Dre!”
“Not so fast,” the boy says. He takes his hands off the controls and his fingers pop as he makes fists. “I’m alive, but I just used up all my heavy ordnance. There are three more mechs out there, and all I got left is my fifty cal and miniguns.”
“Can you still win?”
“Not if I don’t reload.”
Dre checks his aerial view. The closest ammunition depot is about a mile and half north at the Naval Observatory. He puts his hands back on the control pads and continues up Thirty-First Street rather than cutting back over to Wisconsin. When the road ends at R Street, he continues straight ahead through Montrose Park.
Alexei is squinting at the aerial view. “Where did everyone go?”
“They’re not moving and they’re capturing their heat.”
“Why?”
“Because they want to see what I do next.”
Alexei smiles. “They’re afraid of you,” he says.
“They ain’t afraid,” Andre says. “They’re adapting.”
The boy does not approach the observatory directly, but instead turns east at the New Zealand embassy and follows the northeast direction of the road marking the perimeter of the observatory grounds.
“Where are you going?” Alexei asks.
“Just taking a little look around first,” Dre says.
He passes the British embassy, then turns west toward the former home of the vice president. Everything but the concrete and steel blast bunker was destroyed decades ago by some sort of cyclonic weapon developed by domestic terrorists, and the game designers have re-created the ruins faithfully. The ammunition depot is just beyond in the observatory’s telescope dome—an iconic but otherwise empty structure since the historic 26-inch refractor was sold to a private collector.
Dre pauses at the edge of the lawn and conducts what he suspects is a largely futile visual sweep. The Dark Sword is still not picking up any heat or movement. The boy knows that the ammunition depot is a risk, but he also knows that without replacement ordnance and fresh fuel cells, he might be able to prolong the game, but he cannot win it. He suspects the other mechs will not attack each other so long as they know that there is one among them at such a significant disadvantage—one who represents such easy prey.
The Mako begins taking slow and deliberate steps across the lawn, and it isn’t until the missile warning system lights up that Dre realizes what is happening. The other three mechs appear around him on his aerial view just as six missiles from three different positions slam directly into the Mako’s hull. Alexei screams something that Dre cannot understand, but the boy makes no attempt to evade or counter the attack. As the screen goes white and the Mako is incinerated by a thermonuclear blast of its own creation, the boy takes his hands off the control pads. The heavy watch on his wrist slides down his arm as he covers his face with his hands.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Alexei and Dre are making excellent time this morning as they are blindly conveyed through the city in the preposterously bulbous Cherry Brilliance. Rush hour is actually the best time to be on the road in LA these days; the entire city is auto-drive enabled, which not only means that the flow of traffic is algorithmically and holistically optimized, but that there hasn’t been a severe accident not associated with suicide or sabotage in almost a decade. The general principle is that the more cars there are on the road, the more sensors there are providing the system with input, and the more effectively and accurately everyone’s route can be calculated. With nonpneumatic tires (a stiff and open polymer honeycomb structure inside a thin, steel-reinforced rubber tread), it’s impossible to get a flat, and with Predictive Diagnostic Modeling technology standard in all vehicles, it’s exceedingly rare for a car to malfunction before it can either figure out a way to compensate, or locate and automatically navigate to the nearest qualified service center.
Dre has communicated little since getting knocked out of the tournament except to express that he wants to return to Baltimore. Alexei agreed to take the boy back as promised, but after receiving an unexpected call from a man introducing himself as Noah Fielding of Pearl Knight Holdings, he convinced Andre to postpone any decisions until after the three of them had an opportunity to meet. Fielding did not say why he was interested in the boy, but he insisted that it would be well worth the time of everyone involved.
“So what’s your theory?” Alexei asks the boy.
The glass begins to clear up and they see that they are in the heart of downtown LA. The two seats in the Brilliance are close enough together that it’s difficult for Dre to isolate himself and to appear as withdrawn as he would doubtlessly like, but that isn’t stopping him from doing his very best. He is turned as far as possible away from Alexei, watching the congestion on the sidewalk. “I don’t know. Probably just a sponsorship offer.”
“What does that mean?”
“It basically means they’ll pay me to play.”
“That doesn’t sound so bad,” Alexei says. “How much?”
“Not very much,” the boys says. “Definitely not enough to overthrow a government, that’s for sure.”
“You never know,” Alexei says. “But even if it’s not, it might be a good way to train for the next tournament.”
“That’s two years away,” Dre says. “Those people need my help now.”
Alexei is trying to think of something constructive to say when all four wheels of the Brilliance pivot and the vehicle carves a smooth arc into a garage entrance. The auto-drive navigation system chimes.
“Arrival time: eight fifty-six. You are four minutes early.”
The hatch in front of them swings open and Alexei and Dre step out. Smiling at them from the carpeted curb is a petite brown-eyed and raven-haired woman in a sheer charcoal blouse and a pair of impeccably fitted white pants that somehow manage to be almost obscenely seductive while still maintaining the requisite modicum of corporate professionalism. Alexei tries not to leer as the woman attempts to identify her guests by checking her handset.
“Mr. Strasser and Mr. Drovosek?”
She pronounces Alexei’s name almost flawlessly and with a fairly convincing Russian accent. Alexei gives Dre a chance to respond, but the boy is looking down at his shoes. “Yes, that’s us,” Alexei finally says.
“Just follow the hall,” the woman tells them, gesturing to the glass door behind her, “and take the escalator at the end. Mr. Fielding is waiting for you upstairs.”
“Thank you.”
“Dobro pozhalovat,” the woman says with a smile that, under different circumstances, would have Alexei clearing his calendar all the way through sunrise the next morning. When she touches her
handset, the hatch on the Brilliance swings closed and the vehicle begins rolling forward to find the spot in which it has just been instructed to park.
The escalator ascends in a spiral clearly designed to conceal what’s at the top, and hence to build up a little suspense and anticipation. Even as he is sulking, Dre cannot help but turn and look above and behind him. As the lobby opens up, they see that it is several stories tall, and although the building appears opaque from the street, from the inside, all the outer walls are transparent. The ceiling consists of dozens of irregular cuts of mirrored glass from which dangle intricate, interlocking, and slowly rotating mobiles. There are at least a dozen multicopter drones negotiating the obstacles with incredible precision—darting through diminishing gaps, rolling and banking through opening slits, and occasionally yielding to one another when their paths cross. In the center of the room, there is a giant concrete cylinder with several glass screens curved perfectly along the base of the column, each one showing the perspective of a different drone. Where the screens end, there are thick glass risers embedded in the concrete which form an almost invisible spiral staircase leading up to a glass catwalk suspended by thin cables and providing passage into the constantly metamorphosing world of the drones.
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