The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  It all came back to her so quickly, muscle memory she thought she’d lost years before.

  As the rebel operatives closed in on the target house, she selected Group C and set a waypoint around the front, attaching a small text instruction for them to act casually. The other four were sent into an alley which ran along the side of the house between Bajil and Freja. There was a 70-degree bend in the middle of the alley, which kept them hidden them from the SecForce patrol.

  On command, Groups A and B moved up to the large concrete wall separating the property itself from the alleyway. Alice watched as Group B boosted Group A over the wall. Group B then walked on and stood at the bend in the alley, giving them good views either way; they lit cigarettes and talked in low voices, trying not to appear as if they were doing anything out of the ordinary.

  Alice focused on the windows relaying audio-visual feeds from the operatives now within the house. She turned on her cochlear implant and heard a voice come through, the screen in front of her indicating that it was Operative A-2. ‘Okay, the downstairs I’m seeing looks like a regular family home. But it’s strange. I’m probably being paranoid but it feels a little too normal, a little too conspicuously lived-in.’

  ‘It’s so unsuspicious it’s making you suspicious?’ said Alice.

  The operative laughed. ‘Yeah, something along those lines,’ she said. ‘Living room clear. Not seeing anything SecForce-issue. No unusual tech …’ She trailed off. ‘If you don’t mind me asking, who is this?’

  ‘Alice Amirmoez. Suman’s taking some rest.’

  ‘Amirmoez …’ Operative A-2 repeated. Alice wondered if she’d ever known Jacob or had just recognized the name.

  Alice watched as the video feed swept along the downstairs. The camera was clipped to the operative’s shoulder and the feed streaming back to the main screen was bumpy, over-compressed and only showed bits at a time, but a deflated feeling set in as she became increasingly convinced that all she was seeing was the normal downstairs of a normal house.

  ‘All right, guys, check upstairs.’

  Alice sat back in her chair and tried to release the tension in her shoulders. It was as if no time had passed at all. When she was first assigned her mission coordinator role in the New Cairo police, she’d resented no longer being in the field. But the timing worked for her – the better pay and far greater safety suited a mother – and after a while, she grew into it. She came to appreciate that while in the field there was the satisfaction to be had from concrete, assigned objectives, being a coordinator presented more of an intellectual challenge. It involved strategy and deduction, an understanding of the bigger picture and an ability to lead. And there was a power to it. When Alice ran an operation, she played it like a chess game against whoever, if anyone, was coordinating the other side. And she not only won, she dominated. She toyed with and then punished her enemies. She manipulated and tricked. No one under her command would have wanted to ignore her instructions. They knew that the reward for obedience was victory. In the field, a soldier’s tool is their gun. Alice’s tool was the soldiers themselves.

  Now the opponents were the military police force and she was on the side of the criminals. For years, the police had been protectors of her family’s safety, now they were what she was hiding from. It was a mental quandary she wasn’t quite ready to resolve yet.

  ‘Ma’am?’

  Alice snapped to attention. Operative A-2 was calling to her. ‘Talk to me.’

  ‘We’re upstairs, on the landing. We’ve got something. There are two rooms. The one next to the bathroom has a heavy bolted metal door with biometric locks,’ the operative whispered, ‘This is not normal bedroom security, this is not within a Naj-Pur budget and this is definitely not civilian tech.’

  Alice’s heart leapt. ‘Is there anyone in there?’

  ‘No idea. Can’t tell from this side of the door.’

  Alice thought for a moment. There was no other way.

  ‘Take cover in the bathroom and try to stay out of sight of anyone coming through. I’m not sure what’ll happen next, but I need you guys to be in place to do whatever I say needs doing when I say it. Get ready for my signal.’

  The team had thirty minutes before the curfew started.

  While Group A waited in the bathroom for further instructions, Alice ordered Group C to move from their lookout position around the front of the house and regroup with Group B in the alleyway. Like trained performers, the operatives in Group B quickly got into position and boosted Group C into the back garden. Operative B-1 then took up his old position in the bend of the alley while Alice sent Operative B-2 out front, with instructions to knock on the neighbours’ door and ask about whether the noise from the recent refurbishments had bothered them.

  In the meantime, it was the turn of Group C to get to work. Nodding to his companion, Operative C-1 cupped his hands low, providing a foothold, and C-2 stepped onto them, leaning against the building for balance. Reaching up to the first-floor window, he knocked twice, firm raps that shook the glass. No response from within.

  C-1 widened his stance as C-2 stepped up onto his shoulders. Both were tall men, and with their combined height:

  ‘I can see through the window,’ came C-2’s voice from the terminal. Alice leaned forward in her chair, trying to see into the window through C-2’s mounted camera. ‘It’s a regular master bedroom, but something’s wrong. Either their architect is M. C. Escher or the floor plan Group A scanned is wrong, because these walls aren’t lining up with the walls they’re seeing on this end, and there’s no big heavy door or anything either.’

  Alice paused and tried to make sense of this. Juri took the opportunity to send over a security camera feed, showing the SecForce patrol too far off to see or hear any commotion. Alice looked round at her and nodded in acknowledgement, then turned back to her terminal.

  ‘C-2, can you open the window or break the glass?’ she asked.

  ‘Neither without attracting attention.’

  A message from Operative B-2 came through.

  ‘The neighbours are apparently used to lots of noise from this house as of late. There have been a whole load of renovations, and they’ve not met the occupants, so they’re all pretty suspicious already. Don’t make too much noise but some is fine.’

  C-2 got out a thin stiletto knife from a pocket inside his jacket, and slid the point under the window, before pulling down on the handle. C-1 braced and prepared to catch his colleague if need be.

  The window lifted up.

  Alice heard laughter.

  ‘What’s up?’ she said.

  ‘It’s a membrane monitor. There’s a big flexible physical monitor over the window, so anyone looking in from adjacent houses will just see a regular bedroom.’

  ‘Group A isn’t reporting any activity on their end. I guess it’s empty,’ said Alice. ‘Now get back over that wall and out of there. We need you ready for action if we’re going to get this finished before the curfew.’

  She turned her attention back to Group A, who she could see had moved out of the bathroom and were positioned in front of the reinforced bedroom door. ‘How long will it take you to hack the door?’

  ‘The code itself will be encrypted, but it’s only a few days since we got the last lot of encryption codes from a compromised SecForce account. Assuming they haven’t changed them, it shouldn’t be long. Once we’re in, it’s a different story. Bugs, network info, drive copying, tracking software, and then deleting all the logs telling them what we did? That might take a while.’

  ‘Do it. We’re pretty sure it’s empty in there.’

  Alice watched as, within thirty seconds, Group A were through the door and Groups B and C were back in their original positions. Alice kept tracking Group A’s video feeds on the screen, completely engrossed. The operatives’ cameras revealed a large room – banks of computers and a cache of weapons and body armour, and the windows with the huge membrane monitors draped over them, displaying the image
of the master bedroom out into the world. Alice momentarily regretted that they couldn’t steal or at least sabotage the guns, but this was potentially a goldmine of valuable data and intelligence, not to mention a precious network they had easy access to. Restraint was advisable here.

  ‘Ma’am, this looks to us like an unmanned safe house. No regular inhabitants. Any SecForce personnel under heavy fire could hide in here, or just refuel.’

  ‘And what do we say to that, A-1?’

  The operative laughed darkly. ‘We say that there’s nowhere they can hide from us, ma’am. In times of war you can’t give your enemy any quarter.’

  And with that they set to work, installing malicious software and cloning contents of hard drives.

  ‘Alice, we’ve got a problem,’ a small voice came from behind her.

  Alice swivelled her chair to face Juri, whose silver socket-eye was still uncovered. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Up the end of Freja, at the crossroads? I’m seeing a large group of kids, maybe forty or fifty, pelting the security patrol with stones, trying to send them running back down Freja. I don’t know who put them up to it, but I’d be looking for a safe house right about now if I were those soldiers.’

  Alice felt a chill go through her.

  She took a deep breath, holding it for a moment, before exhaling heavily. She turned back to the terminal, and the huge map monitor. In the lower part of the screen, pertinent security camera feeds and communication feeds were sent in. The words RETREAT TO BASE NO.52 were repeating over and over again.

  ‘How’re you doing, Group A?’

  ‘This is going to take maybe another fifteen minutes. What’s more – fuck – this door can’t open for another ten. The entire thing shuts down for fifteen minutes after it closes, inoperable from either side. Just clams up.’

  ‘Why the hell does it do that?’ exclaimed Alice. The curfew was in twenty-five minutes, and it’d take them five minutes to reach a neighbourhood SecForce considered unsafe to patrol. If the SecForce troops couldn’t get the aggressive crowd under control before then, they’d be forced back towards the house prematurely and the entire mission could be compromised.

  ‘It’s a security measure against hackers,’ Operative A-2 replied sheepishly.

  A low-resolution security camera image showed four SecForce troops aiming their weapons above the heads of the children as they backed off. They couldn’t shoot at them, and the kids knew it, pressing the troops back down Freja with thrown stones and bottles.

  Alice saw her opportunity. They’d be coming down the alleyway rather than straight through the front door.

  ‘Group C, the SecForce patrol is coming your way fast. They’re being chased by a mob of kids throwing rocks and bottles. Hold them up and buy some time, but make it look unintended. Group B, get across the road and keep an eye out for the backup.’

  Alice then typed and sent the attached reserve combat unit a simple message: ALLEY OUTSIDE 264 BAJIL. SUPPRESSIVE FIRE ONLY. LEAD AWAY, KEEP EXITS OPEN. DELAY FOR 10 MINS, 15 IF POSSIBLE.

  It would take them two minutes to find a good position, and the SecForce troops about that to emerge from the alleyway. Alice enlarged Group C’s hidden camera feeds and watched the chaos unfold on the screen in front of her.

  The four SecForce troops were shuffling fast down the alleyway, at this point batting stones and chunks of brick away with the butts of their rifles. As they neared the Group C operatives, now sitting casually in the alley and blocking the way, the lead SecForce trooper roared, ‘Move!’

  The two men looked surprised but feigned intoxication and delayed getting up just long enough that one of the troopers stumbled and fell over them. The others dragged their fallen comrade upright, then, with the angry crowd still advancing on them, pulled the NCLC pair to their feet and shoved them ahead down the alleyway. The Group C operatives protested the whole way, screaming about ‘police brutality’ and digging in their heels, while debris and rubbish bounced off the troops’ body armour in an increasingly percussive fashion. Eventually, the troops gave up and pushed past the operatives. The crowd of children, uninterested in civilians, began to barge past too, but the operatives stood in their path, yelling, ‘Stay back, they’re gonna start shooting!’ Faced with bellowed orders from two tall, powerfully built men, the youths lost their bravado and obeyed, continuing to throw their missiles from a distance.

  From the alleyways across the road, Group B saw men in long coats begin to appear seemingly out of nowhere, hiding behind dumpsters, cars and low walls. The leader of the heavily armed combat unit, Maalik Moushian, gave Group B the signal to hide, and seconds later the four Security Force troops spilled out of the alley. Maalik’s backup squad opened fire on them, bullets burying themselves into the thick walls of the mass-produced Naj-Pur houses and ricocheting off the pavement – hitting everything but the troops themselves, until the magazines ran dry. The backup squad then turned tail and ran, and the SecForce troops, at last faced with an enemy they could shoot at, gave pursuit.

  ‘They’ll be in for some fun. Maalik and his boys know this area like the backs of their hands,’ said Juri, before muttering under her breath, ‘Oh, Maalik’s taking them that way? I’d have never thought of that …’

  The map lit up with Maalik’s men surging up the backstreets, alleyways and maze-like through paths – just slowly enough for the SecForce troops to keep up, but fast enough to confuse and disorient them. More than once they led them in circles, with the troops seeming more lost the second time than the first.

  A rough voice filled Alice’s ear implant. ‘It’s Maalik here. Sorry, but I’m going to have to disobey an order. Two of these guys are good shots. They’re making things too risky for my team.’

  Through the high-grade security camera feed, Alice watched Maalik stop for a moment and fire twice. Two of the four troops’ heads flew back, dark red spurting against the heavy impact of the bullets, and they slumped to the ground. ‘There,’ said Maalik, ‘hopefully that’ll make things easier.’

  Alice watched in horror as every gut-wrenching memory of officers under her command getting hurt came rushing back into her head.

  ‘What the fuck was that for?’ she screamed into her headset.

  ‘They were problems. The problems have been removed. I’ve got people shooting at me, trying to kill us. Why would I not shoot back?’

  Alice shook in her seat, trying to form some semblance of a response Maalik would respect. She couldn’t think straight. Loud, sharp images in her mind twisted and distorted every fragment of thought, a darker, fresher horror reviving beneath it. The blood, the slumped, wrecked body. Smell of iron in the air. Red stain on her sleeve.

  She did her best to push away the intruding memories and focus on Maalik. He’d been kind before, but if she didn’t have an undeniable reason for the moratorium on killing active, deadly threats, he’d laugh in her face. She was new, she wasn’t formally a member of the NCLC, she’d wanted no part in the movement until Jacob’s death. He might not even be willing to take orders from her.

  She straightened up in her chair and spoke into the headset microphone as calmly as she could.

  ‘You’re trying to keep them away from that safe house, not panicking and running home, and you shot their best people. Is having a few less bullets flying your way worth getting the operatives in the house killed?’

  There was silence.

  ‘All right, fine, but if this doesn’t work and one of my people gets hurt, you’d better believe I’m coming to you about it. What do you want from us now?’

  ‘Yell for retreat. Loud enough that the Security Force can hear.’

  When she was coordinating missions for the police, she’d only ever sent a kill order out against armed, dangerous criminals. That had been easier to rationalize. They were an immediate threat, to the police and to those around them. Many were already murderers. The dead SecForce troops had been a danger to her people, a threat to the mission, but they were men and wom
en doing a job, trying to make the city secure for their families and friends.

  Alice thought of Ria, and of Zeno.

  Those troops were the other side, but they were men and women who were running from a mob, in a part of the city which hated them for reasons they had little control over. Had they been scared?

  And there was a part of her, deeper down, that was appalled that someone had disobeyed her direct order for suppressive fire only, that they had disregarded her authority. But that was the part of her she kept to herself, and buried deep in the back of her mind.

  ‘Ma’am, if you’re not too busy, we’re done here.’ Operative A-1’s voice crackled in Alice’s ear. ‘Can we go?’

  Alice snapped to, and gave them the call to leave. They ran downstairs and out of the back door, where Group C helped them clamber over the wall. The backup operatives were given the signal to lose the remaining two troopers and retreat, and as quickly as they arrived, they had disappeared off into the city. The six plain-clothes operatives met in front of the house and ran back the way they had originally come, with just enough time to get to a safe area before the curfew started.

  Alice slumped down in her chair, breathing deeply. She felt calm. She felt strong. For the first time since she’d discovered Jacob’s body, she felt like she was in control. Spinning her chair round, she saw that the command room was now full of people, all of whom had their eyes on her. Suman looked at the screen with a mix of envy and nausea in his eyes, aware that he wouldn’t have been able to do anything close to what Alice had accomplished. Tal and Nataliya beamed at her. Kahleed simply smiled, nodding.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘No deaths, all the intelligence we could want and few signs we were ever there. I think a round of applause for Mrs Amirmoez is in order.’