by Andrew Post
“It snowed last night,” Brody said. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
“Yeah, that’s the corner of the Hanson farm over there, so this must be it. This is right where Seb bumped us and sent us through the ditch. We were about here when I chucked the bag at that Artificial, and now I don’t see anything.”
Brody felt the vehicle fighting to keep itself straight. He gripped the worry bar so tight he thought his hands might lock that way permanently, the sonar feeling around inside the cockpit but unable to see anything beyond the tempered glass. The rumble bouncing off the ground ahead of them changed, grew closer, telling him Thorp had just inched them a bit farther down. He muttered, “Maybe you should pull up.”
Thorp gave the joystick minor corrections, nudged the Darter forward, and Brody’s stomach responded by mimicking the sensation of what it might feel like to house a bag full of displeased snakes inside his body. Without breaking his gaze, Thorp reached over and hit the double-time function for the wings. The vehicle responded at once, and the four wings started beating furiously at twice the rate.
“I’m trying to blow some of this snow out of the way. I think I got some tracks here.”
“Pull up,” Brody said, sure he was about to hear the nose of the Darter scrape dirt at any second. “We need this thing in working order. Pull up.”
“There it is,” Thorp said. “Hold on. Let me see if I can grab it.”
The sound exploded into the cockpit. Out of Thorp’s side of the cockpit, with the glass hatch open, the sonar threw out its ping—rumpled, flat land. Brody could see the shape of the rucksack lift out of the snow as Thorp carefully kept one hand on the joystick and leaned out with the other to grab the bag from the ground.
“Okay, if we haven’t landed, I’m sure we shouldn’t be this close to the ground.”
There was a heavy slap and a shatter of glass.
Brody whipped around, and the sonar felt at the break in the glass at the cockpit window directly beside him.
One of the farmer Artificials, clinging to the side of the Darter, twisted its arm into the cockpit through the new opening. Finding nothing, it retracted, craning back and throwing its fist against the cockpit window again to widen the gap.
Thorp wrenched back on the stick. He gave the Artifical a side-to-side shimmy, and it was pitched off. It hit the ground below silently in a puff of white.
“Fuck off, robot.”
He closed his cockpit hatch, but snow still rushed in through the jagged hole on Brody’s side accompanied by the deafening shriek of the Darter’s engines. Thorp switched off the double-time setting, and they lowered their pitch to just tolerably loud. Angling back on the stick, they ascended more, rotated in place, and veered toward the farmstead, the soggy rucksack crammed between them.
They barely had the wheels down before Brody had his hatch open and was walking away from the Darter in quick, short strides. He suddenly recalled copilot training as well as how much time he spent in the restroom following each lesson.
A thick cable ran from the open panel on the underside of the Darter into the barn to the generator. The generator now had a hose running from its tank, out of the barn, across the lawn, into the house, down the stairs, and to the basement where it was hooked up with a coupling to the buried gasoline reservoir.
“Ironic,” Thorp said, looking over the various hoses and cables, some of which had been patched with tape or rubber swatches and epoxy.
“What’s that?” Brody plugged in his lens charger at the only available outlet. The generator had been busy, powering not only the radio but the hot plate and now the Darter.
“When it first came out, the Darter ran on gas. Like everything else. And this one was refitted with a battery. So we’re taking gas, putting it through the generator to make electricity to fuel an aircraft that used to run on gas.”
“Speaking of charge,” Brody said, “I’m going to run in and get a pot of coffee made.”
Thorp tried every square inch of the property, crunching the legs of his lawn chair down into the snow until they hit more solid earth, taking a seat, and listening to the ether. He’d shake his head, the straps of the flight helmet swinging back and forth, say, “Nope,” and move on to a new spot. He returned to a section of the side yard that seemed to be less bad than the rest, and that was where he wheeled the steel fire pit.
After getting the fire started and taking a seat, sudden movement at the corner of the house startled Thorp to the point that his hand nearly went to his hip.
Brody came around, holding the coffeepot fresh from a spell on the hot plate in the barn. He took a seat next to Thorp and admired the fire.
Poking at the balled-up newspaper to wedge it under one of the logs, Thorp asked, “Feeling any better?”
“Yeah, stomach’s doing enthusiastic somersaults now instead of triple axels.” He poured them coffee, the stream of black stuff hemorrhaging steam. “How cold do you suppose it is?”
Shrugging, Thorp said, “Twenty-five, thirty tops.”
“You really think it’s better out here than inside the house?”
Thorp propped the log up on another one. “I’d like to think it is.” He could feel Brody looking at him.
“Does that help?” Brody asked, knocking on Thorp’s flight helmet with the visor screwed up, the loose straps, leads, and connectors draping his shoulders. It clacked inside, loud.
“Hell, I don’t know. Go get yours and see.”
Without another word, Brody sprang to his feet, his strides confident despite walking face-first into pitch black. Sometimes Thorp envied Brody’s sonar. Never need to buy another flashlight again with that thing around.
A moment later, Brody returned to the orange glow of the fire with his helmet on. He took his seat at the steel fire pit and threw back the visor to let the sonar do more than what it probably could in there, ringing about inside the helmet, only mapping the contours of his own head.
He must’ve felt Thorp watching, because he turned toward him. “You know, we might as well break out the Reynolds Wrap.” He glanced over his shoulder at the road. “It’s probably a good thing not too many people drive by this place. I’m sure we look like a couple of loonies right now.”
“I’m surprised the cops never came by,” Thorp said. “I kept pausing between code lines to listen for cars coming up the driveway.”
“They’re probably busy,” Brody said, easing down in the lawn chair, the rubbery noodles that made up the seat squeaking like hands aggressively petting balloon skin. “That law reform coming up, a lot of people are probably out trying to take advantage of stuff they won’t be able to do in about a month.”
“What exactly is going to happen, anyway? What’re they changing?” Thorp asked, watching as the intricate palace of ash that the newspaper had become crumbled soundlessly under its own weight.
“Besides rewording what is technically theft and what’s sometimes argued as just ‘pre-apocalypse emergency ration-gathering,’ a law that had been passed that says if a couple has a dispute and there’s a third party involved and something should happen between the couple, violence or otherwise, the third party cannot be held accountable.”
“Are you saying you’re some kind of gigolo, too?”
Brody smirked. “It was written that way so governors and mayors and councilmen could steal whoever’s wives they wanted and not get in trouble when the other guy found out and attempted to get even. Government guy throws a punch in self-defense, maybe ruins a carpet while being chased out—no harm can come to him so long as he’s the third party in an extramarital affair. Of course, with me, that loophole meant that as long as I said in court that I was merely an unknowing adulterer who gave the husband or boyfriend a shiner in selfdefense, then off the hook I remain.”
Thorp paused. “So, again: you’re a gigolo?”
“I never did anything with any of the women. It was just a way to knock some sense into the guys they were shacked up with an
d—you know what? Never mind. They’re changing the law, and I’m going to be taken by the coattails and thrown into the pen by an all-too-enthusiastic, old-fashioned-headwear-enthusiast detective I happen to know. That’s it.”
“I thought he was the one you’re going to e-mail all this stuff to.”
“I am,” Brody said. “Just because I trust him with our research doesn’t mean I’m best friends with the guy.”
Thorp nodded, poked. “Oh, I almost forgot. Happy Thanksgiving. We missed it yesterday.” He produced two tin cans and a crank-operated opener. “Making today Friday.”
Thorp tossed Brody one can, and Brody laughed when he saw it was cranberry sauce. “Sure was.”
“You were supposed to be back today. For your probation thing.”
Brody accepted the can opener, wedged the cranberry sauce between his knees, and cranked the can opener around the perimeter of the lid. “That I was.”
“Oh shit, man.”
“It’s all right.” Brody waved him off. “My probation officer’s a very understanding woman.”
“Really?”
“No. I’m screwed.” He pried off the jagged lid of the can, dabbed three fingers into the shiny mass of burgundy gelatin, and tried it. “But at least we have cranberry sauce. And I’d rather be sitting here having cranberry sauce any day of the week than dealing with my probation officer.”
A moment passed.
“Thanks. Really. I mean it.”
Brody’s reply was a grin.
They both went back to their cans of cranberry sauce.
Quiet hours went by, more logs were burned, talk only occurring when one man thought of a possible snag in their plan. Each snag that arose was worked out among them, a plan would be set, and they’d go back to being quiet and watching the fire once more.
Brody retrieved cigars from his torn and dirty coat. They took turns using his lighter, puffed for a moment, and sat watching the fire. Brody toyed with the raw plugs on the end of his helmet’s leads.
A scream broke out of Thorp’s lungs, shrill and sudden. He flung himself out of the lawn chair and tore the helmet from his head, swung it high, and spiked it down against the snow where it bounced and rolled away. Thorp looked up at the three black-encased wires running directly above them. In the quiet night, beyond the crackling fire and the wind, their gentle humming din could be heard. Even more so now that Thorp had his helmet off.
“Why don’t they just do it and get it over with?” he screamed. “We can’t go anywhere, and they probably got us on satellite.”
Brody stared at the fire, arms crossed. “They’re not dumb. They’re doing what they did to Thomas Lake. Cut off the power, up the dosage in those things”—he jutted his chin at the wires—”and just hope we take care of ourselves.”
Thorp’s labored breath slowed. “You too?”
Brody nodded without looking up from their sad excuse of a fire.
“You think they can make us do that?”
Shrug. “Probably.”
Thorp raised his middle finger at them, and if that weren’t clear enough, explained what the gesture meant. When he turned back around, partly ashamed, he felt his nose running profusely, but after he touched it and looked at his fingers, he saw they weren’t bloody. “When can we get a move on? Can we leave tonight?”
Brody tossed the cigar butt into the fire pit. “We can’t just cowboy this thing.”
“That’s fine, but I don’t want to sit here under this shit anymore,” Thorp said. He stepped so that he was under the edge of the house’s roof, but it made little difference. It wasn’t so much an out-and-out sensation but just a niggling tease—like someone tickling the very back of his brain with the feathery end of a wheat stalk.
“Do you think you can get some blueprints of the Hark building online without picking up any suspicion?”
“I doubt it. That kind of activity screams red alert.” Thorp smoothed down his hair. “Getting into Probitas’s site was one thing, but Hark actually develops spyware protection software. I can’t imagine they’d leave anything to chance. Especially if they’re up to no good.”
“How high of a priority do you think research and development is within Hark?”
“Pretty high. It’s their bread and butter.”
“Do you suppose that would have any influence on its placement within the building?”
“It’s hard to say. There’re a lot of places now that have substructures and subbasements with walls that are ten feet thick to prevent remote hacks. So, if Hark plays stuff close to the vest, stuff they don’t want anyone to know about, they’d probably keep it down there. Hubert Ward’s a big cheese; he was the one who gave the order to keep the lower floors under a closer eye, according to the night watchmen. So maybe that’s where his office is. But then again, up higher is where they often keep the important people. I don’t know. It could be almost anywhere.”
To Brody, the logs were just throwing off heat as they slowly dissolved. The sonar saw no fire outside the pixels rising, the drifting cinder flakes. Ten minutes had passed when neither man had said anything. Brody sat, hunched, staring into the fire and running through endless scenarios on how their plan would turn out. He didn’t have to keep a tally of outcomes where they failed, were killed. It was obvious that an unfavorable result was better than likely.
“So, suffice it to say, we know absolutely nothing,” Brody said, breaking their long, pondering silence. “We’re going to be taking an illegal aircraft into city limits, parking it on a privately owned structure—which I guess could be considered trespassing, even though it sounds like there should be a term scarier than that—and we have only fifteen minutes to get in and find what we need in a building ninety stories tall with no idea where to start.”
“That’s more or less it, yeah,” Thorp said.
“We’ll have to wing it, then. We can’t risk any more time.” He turned his head to ping the road for oncoming squad cars. Nothing. He took a second to give the wires crisscrossing the yard like shoelaces a sneer for putting the momentary focus-stealing thought in his head.
“We’ll have to work fast and try to get as much as we can while we can. We have the Darter, we have you and what you can do with hacking, and we have me and I’ll be timekeeper and lookout and run interference if need be.” He fingered the metal loops of the knuckleduster in his pocket like an old man worrying change.
“So that’s it? We’re going to head out soon?” Thorp plucked his helmet from the snow and upended it to empty it.
“Yep. We’ll leave tonight and grab what we can.” Brody drained his coffee to give himself a second to think of an appropriate way to word what he wanted to say next. “I don’t mean to be an asshole, but we can’t have you going off the rails again. What happened at the cubies … Spanky may have been going for a gun and you saved my life and I appreciate that, but—here’s the thing—we absolutely cannot hurt anybody this time around. Okay?”
Thorp nodded with downcast eyes. “Look, man, about that—”
“I understand,” Brody interrupted. “I do. But a bonk on the head, maybe a bit of the close-quarters stuff we learned back in the day, all right. A little diplomacy goes a long way. We can’t give Hark anything more. It’ll just make shit worse.”
“That’s suicide,” Thorp said. “If they find us, they’ll be armed. We need a way to protect ourselves.”
“Riot control stuff only,” Brody said. “They’d like us to shoot their employees. Then we’d be out of their way rotting in jail while they kick the dirt over everything.”
“Fine but I’m telling you it’s a bad idea. If Hark Telecom is aware of what Hubert Ward is doing, they aren’t going to fuck around with security. They’re going to have stopping power and then some.”
Brody said nothing. The fire continued to throw off tapering heat that in order to feel he had to lean his chair on the front legs. Everything inside the pit had now been reduced to what the sonar saw as latticed hills o
f powder.
“What time do you want to go?” Thorp asked.
Brody listened for the grumbling generator in the barn. “Whenever that thing shuts off.”
“Okay,” Thorp said quietly, “I’m going to get packed up.”
“Rubber bullets,” Brody reminded him.
After Thorp went around the house beyond the sonar’s reach, Brody heard the rumble of the sliding glass door followed by the slap of the rubber gasket when it was closed.
The lawn chair let out the rubbed-balloon sound again as he sat back. The aluminum frame of the chair against his neck burned it was so cold, but he kept it there anyway. He couldn’t help but notice the wires swaying in the chilled wind. He glared at them and listened to their innocuous thrum for a handful of minutes before he gave up and dropped the visor down on his helmet.
30
They passed over Chicago smoothly, one building after another sweeping underneath them. Brody felt his stomach turn each time another structure glided under his feet beyond the glass of the cockpit. The Trump International Hotel and Tower came and went. They had gotten nearly to the heart of the city, almost over the river. Angling around Aon Center, Hark Telecom came into view in front of the cockpit. Reflective glass threw their running lights back at them, as well as every other light surrounding the tower as if it were trying to remain invisible, even at ninety stories in height.
Almost as if it had been timed, as soon as Brody looked at the radio, it screeched once followed by a collected voice asking them for their call sign and destination.
Thorp, hand on the stick, spoke into the microphone, his voice sounding in Brody’s headphones, “This is X-Fifteen, headed to O’Hare for VIP drop-off.”
No response.
They were nearing Hark’s illuminated roof too quickly and Thorp cut the engines slightly and the Darter’s wings slowed a fraction. They hovered level with the seventieth floor of the Willis Tower. Brody watched a cleaning lady make quick work of a high-rise office, shoving a vacuum around a desk and under it, none the wiser to the man watching her.
