The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  Chapter 17

  THE LIGHTS TURNED on with a faint hum, revealing the floor space of what had once been a huge industrial cold-storage unit. Although the fans and ducts which had once brought the temperature in the unit to around minus fifteen degrees Celsius were no longer functioning, the stained concrete walls and sharp white lighting gave the place a strange chill independent of actual temperature. The room was located in the back of one of the largest meat-processing facilities in the city. It was soundproof, secure and easily accessible. Against one wall, piled high, were bags filled with sand, each of which had a paper target stapled to it. Along another wall were around two dozen Franz Geller Kaufer Mark 25 combat rifles and several crates of ammunition. When Maalik was deciding where to train potential New Cairo Liberation Corps personnel, this had been the logical choice.

  Alice got the distinct impression that Maalik was very proud of this place as he led her to it for the first time. They had brought thirteen new recruits, all eager to become involved in the revolution. News coverage of NCLC rebels taking over a tower block, emptying its data banks and leaving undetected through crowds of civilians and SecForce officers had made the group legendary and had greatly increased their allure to many young people. Almost all the thirteen newcomers were students, excited by the NCLC’s social agenda. They lined up in front of Maalik and Alice, shaven-headed and in ill-fitting combat fatigues, to begin their training. Maalik ran them through their paces.

  Their enthusiasm was short-lived. Maalik’s training methods were harsh: they were made to run until they collapsed; they paired off and were taught hand to hand combat in full-contact sparring; and they fired seemingly endless rounds into the targets stapled to the sandbags against the wall. Every time they underperformed, Maalik would scream tirades of abuse at them; even at his nicest he referred to them all as ‘maggots’, ‘filth’, or ‘scum’ and kept calling them ‘worthless’ or ‘disgusting’. If they talked to one another at all, they were hit. If they attempted to help one another, they were hit harder. This kind of deliberate, systematic dehumanization was not something Alice had ever gone through as a police officer – it resembled the socialization techniques of the military. Soldiers needed to have their regular social norms broken down, then reformatted around unit cohesiveness, obedience and a willingness to hurt or kill when told to.

  It lasted for hours without break. Alice’s portable terminal was the only time-keeping device available in the building and with no windows to the outside world the room was divorced from the regular pattern of the day. Despite their having started at five in the morning, it was almost three in the afternoon before stomachs began to growl. At that point Maalik set the trainees a deal. He brought out new paper targets, each printed with the image of a gun-wielding Security Force officer. The recruits were to pick up their rifles and set them to three-shot burst. If, having exhausted a magazine, a recruit had at least two dozen shots within the targets’ kill zones, he or she could have a small piece of meat.

  Maalik then brought out cut-out targets of a teary-eyed child. He set the same goal of two dozen shots within the kill zones of this new target, the reward in this case being a sandwich and a drink.

  Upon hearing this, many of the recruits looked at him as though he was insane, their eyes flicking backwards and forwards between the target and Maalik. It made sense, Alice realized. The instinct not to kill had once been paramount, especially not to kill or even harm children. But Maalik and the NCLC needed a new instinct to take precedence: the instinct to not care about doing terrible things. If they did what they were told to do, the recruits would get food. If it was good enough to get a rat through a maze, it was good enough for them.

  The first few took the option of shooting at the adult target. Those who did well were rewarded with a single piece of cold chicken, or a quarter of a beefburger, and those who didn’t got nothing. Maalik ruled that they couldn’t try again until everyone had shot, so they grew hungrier and hungrier.

  A young woman stood up next to shoot, shaven-headed and stony-faced. She raised her rifle to eye level, lining up the sights. She was aiming for the child. At first her hands shook, but they steadied with a few deep breaths. She squeezed the trigger, and three shots landed in the kill zone.

  ‘Again,’ said Maalik.

  Three more shots tore at the cut-out, leaving great gashes in the paper. The recruit fired her magazine into the child’s form. Twenty-eight of thirty-six shots had landed within kill zones. Maalik smiled and threw her a packaged sandwich and a bottle of soft drink, then brought out a fresh cut-out to replace the old one. ‘Enjoy,’ he told the woman. ‘You earned it.’ She tore the packaging apart and wolfed the sandwich down.

  The tension broken, the rest of the recruits without exception lined up to fire at the cut-out of the little boy.

  Within thirty minutes, all the trainees had shredded a cut-out of a crying child and were sitting on the ground hunched over sandwiches and drinks, plus extra food Maalik provided once they had all gone through with their trial. He and Alice watched from the other side of the room as they ate.

  ‘I’m very impressed,’ said Alice. ‘They really seem to be taking to this. I had no idea they’d come this far so quickly.’

  ‘They’d better; I’ve only got today to get them through this,’ he replied stiffly.

  Alice’s jaw dropped. ‘They only get one day of training?’

  Maalik shrugged. ‘It’s all the time we can spare. We’re ramping up for a new series of riots. We need manpower and we need it with minimal resources. It’s not great, sure, but it’s good enough.’

  ‘How on earth did the Yu twins or your backup unit get to where they are on a day of training?’

  ‘Most of the heavy hitters in our organization are ex-police or ex-military. I can only speak for myself, but I spent forty years trying to make sure that this city was stable and that the vulnerable people were safe. That was something that mattered to me, it’s what got me out of bed in the morning, or got me to sleep when I had to hurt someone. And I think that’s why other people did it.’

  ‘And Serhiy?’

  ‘He’s … difficult, but I’m working with him.’

  Alice turned towards him. ‘He used my child as a human shield, Maalik.’

  Maalik nodded. ‘Hence the difficulty. There’s a good kid in there somewhere, he’s just angry, like the rest of us.’

  Alice couldn’t bring herself to agree. ‘So it’s either police training or one day’s worth?’

  Maalik shifted in his seat and looked down at the ground. ‘Well, these guys are only getting training because they’re in good physical shape and they have potential to be useful in operations. If they do well, they’ll get more training down the line, but until then – like I say, we’re making up numbers with people who are young and fit. We’ve got about four hundred people this well trained and this well armed. Apart from that, there are the technical people, like Suman or Juri, who didn’t get any training at all: they got in because they had skill with computers and were sympathetic to our cause. Then there’s people who want in but aren’t suited to being full-time operatives. We just give them small arms and ammo and let them know when we want something done. We’ve got about a thousand people willing to kill for us, but only our four hundred ready to die for us.’

  Alice thought for a moment. ‘When do the next riots start?’

  ‘Six days from now, if nothing forces our hand.’

  ‘Then these guys need to get at least another two days of training. Have them running drills, get them more conditioning. They need to be able to do damage. You’re not going to be able to rely on my skills when the big day comes. You’ll need to sharpen up any way you can.’

  Maalik raised an eyebrow. ‘So it’s not that you want them to be safer?’

  Alice thought for a second. ‘What I meant to say was that I wanted them to be safer so that they could be more effective.’

  A sly grin crossed Maalik’s face. ‘I
heard a story a long time ago, from back in the Age of Nations. Back when this was all called Egypt, they worshipped a whole pantheon of animal gods and there was one called Hathor. She was the cow-horned goddess of happiness, motherhood and music. She was one of the most important gods the ancient Egyptians had, beloved by all.’ Maalik leaned in closer, a glint in his eye. His voice quietened. ‘Yet they say that, when war came, she turned into something quite different. She became Sekhmet, the bloodthirsty lion-headed goddess of war, a side to her no one had seen coming. She laid waste to their enemies. The urge to slaughter was so great that, even after all her enemies had been destroyed, she kept on killing. At that point, it was no longer about the cause, or the original grievance. It was about the killing itself, and the thrill of sating her rage. She even drank the blood of her enemies.’

  Alice nodded. ‘And it’s that side of these people that you’re trying to bring out, is it?’

  Maalik paused for a second, then nodded and said, ‘Exactly, that’s precisely what I mean to say. But Sekhmet wasn’t a bad person. She was a mythic representation of the pharaoh’s armies, who regained a part of the country which had rebelled. For the people who wrote the story, her violence, joyous and manic as it was, had a good cause behind it. That violence was the only way to achieve what they felt needed to be done. It was the best tool for the job.’

  ‘And once she’d killed sufficiently, how did the other gods stop Sekhmet?’

  Maalik’s grin widened. ‘They replaced the blood she drank with alcohol and they drank her under the table.’

  It was coming up to ten at night. The training was over until five the next morning. Alice was seated at a table with Juri, Anisa Yu, Maalik and Suman and they all had open bottles of beer in front of them. They talked and laughed, and Maalik told them about the looks on the new recruits’ faces when he’d informed them that, for the first time in weeks, their day of training was to be just one of many. This made a rather drunk Juri squirt a mouthful of beer out through her nose, though even that didn’t stop her giggling. In front of them, some old comedy vidcast was playing on the wall, though none of them were really paying attention. They were simply enjoying one another’s company, while they still could.

  The comedy show ended and, absent-mindedly, Alice flicked over to a newscast. The headline ran across the bottom of the monitor, below a picture of a young woman’s face.

  MURDEROUS HACKER ZALA ULORA FOUND BACK IN CITY, it read.

  Suman sat bolt upright. ‘Oh my god, Selina!’

  Everyone else turned to look at him. ‘I read about this story before but I hadn’t seen a picture. That woman, Selina Mullur – or Zala Ulora, I guess – was the hacker who got us the intelligence that linked the Soucouyant virus back to GeniSec.’ He waved his hand, still clutching a bottle, at the screen for emphasis. ‘Then, on what I thought was an unrelated note, a couple of days later some of our freelancers were breaking into the lab where the virus came from to find evidence, based on her intel. They found someone else sneaking around the place, so they shot her. She ends up in hospital, and somehow the administrators find out who they’ve got in their care, so she runs off. Apparently they’re the same person!’ He slumped back in his chair. ‘That really sucks, I quite liked her. Now I find out she killed a bunch of people.’

  ‘I bet you liked her, she’s cute!’ slurred Maalik, nudging Suman with his elbow. ‘And a hacker! I bet you thought all your dreams had come true.’

  Alice looked uneasily at the screen.

  ‘Any chance we could help her?’ said Anisa, her scratchy voice unaffected by the four beers she’d downed. ‘A new hacker is always welcome, especially if she’s good. She could be an asset.’

  Maalik nodded at Alice. ‘I defer to the lioness.’

  Alice had already made her mind up. ‘Look, I’m going to be out of here in a few days. This doesn’t affect me. But we’re doing fine for hackers as we are. If she’s a fugitive wanted for murder—’

  ‘We’re all wanted for or in connection with murders. Murders of police and military, no less,’ Anisa interrupted.

  ‘Bullshit. We’re fighting a civil war, not hurting innocent people. Not like this Zala woman. She’s clearly dangerous; she’s attracted police attention. If she’s unstable and she knows things about us and the information we’re working with, she could be a liability. We don’t know what she’ll do if she’s backed into a corner. Sell us out? Cooperate with the Council?’ Alice turned towards Suman. ‘See what you can dig up on her. Get back in touch. If at all possible we need to get to her before the police do.’

  Suman’s face dropped. ‘But I can’t—’

  ‘I’m just saying, see what you can find out. She’s a loose end. She presents a danger. What we’re doing here matters too much. If we get the chance to take her out of the picture, we should. If nothing else, we can’t afford to have someone in this city who knows more about hacking than you, can we?’

  Suman and Juri shared a brief look, which Alice caught. ‘What?’

  Juri sobered. ‘There’s more than one major hacker in this city. A large portion of our intelligence has been coming from a benefactor who can pretty much only be getting the intel they’re providing by using really advanced hacking abilities and utilities. Whoever it is, they’re certainly above my technical level – I don’t know about Suman.’

  Alice shook her head. ‘So who is this, and what do they want?’

  ‘I don’t know motives, I don’t know location. They hide themselves exceptionally,’ said Juri. ‘And they use a weird name. It’s one of the old mythological figures from way back, a trickster god. Fitting for a high-level hacker. They’re called Anansi.’

  It was around midnight and the others had gone to bed, but Alice was still up. Juri had made her something quite extraordinary for her portable terminal: a low-powered version of her coordination software. If she so desired, she could control an entire operation from the front lines, with all the usual feeds coming straight to her over a heavily encrypted channel. She was increasingly tempted to try out this capability in practice. It had been so long since she’d gone out on patrol. Some other side to her, the side that came out when she was off-duty, disliked knowing what she was going to do, but during a patrol or a combat situation, there was a comfort and a thrill to be found. It had been so long that the other side of her had quite forgotten the rush.

  The previous head of the safe house, an exhausted Ava Ferreira, appeared next to her. ‘You seem rather the worse for wear.’

  Alice laughed and pulled the collar of her shirt up to her nose. ‘I don’t stink of booze or anything, do I?’

  ‘It’s not you, it’s pretty much this whole place. From what I saw, the girl with the eye aug got more beer on the table than in her mouth.’

  ‘I’m glad they could unwind,’ said Alice. ‘It’s been pretty intense. Everyone trying to take this movement in their own direction. Things have been really hard to keep together. I feel like I’m holding this whole thing together on my own, and I never even wanted to be involved in this. It was Jacob’s big cause. I haven’t even told the kids about what has happened to him yet.’

  ‘I hear a lot of that going around. We’ve got another woman right here. Her husband died defending civilians in a curfew dispute. It was after a mission, his team was heading back to a safe house. A fight broke out with SecForce troops. His son still doesn’t know. He thinks his dad’s off in an undercover unit or something.’ Ava pulled a tin from her pocket. She took out a cigarette, brought it up to her lips and lit it. ‘If Suman had been watching the coordination software, he could have kept them on track, but he thought the mission was over, you know how it is. He blamed himself for ages.’

  Alice nodded. ‘We had that happen once back when I was working in SecForce. Someone stopped paying attention to the environmental interface, thought they were done. A guy got shot. After that, we never took our eyes off our guys’ surroundings until they were back through the door.’

 
‘Well, most of us are still largely amateurs at this,’ said Ava.

  Alice sighed. ‘It’s horrible that you guys had to learn the hard way too.’

  ‘I guess that pretty soon none of this will be your problem though, right?’

  Alice’s brow furrowed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘The reason I came to find you. Message just came through from Kahleed. You and the kids are good to go. You’re getting out of here.’

  It took a moment for Alice to grasp what Ava was saying. She squinted at her, slowly computing what she’d heard. It was time to go. She had forgotten about that.

  ‘It’s … when?’

  Ava shrugged. ‘The plan is to get you over to Kahleed’s people at about ten tomorrow. We can set off for the main base now, or in the morning. Whenever works for you is fine.’

  Alice didn’t know what to say.

  She had wanted out of this city, somewhere her children could be safe, away from the violence and the terror and the death and the revolution, the revolution she had wanted no part in. The revolution she’d been a tremendous help in, that had put her once-proud skills to good use and made her feel powerful and stable. The revolution that would get them all killed for the sake of a dying city. A city she had loved. A city that had turned on her, inhabited by the institutions she’d worked for and believed in, which had killed Jacob and threatened her freedom and the freedom of her children. And the family of people who had supported and protected her in the face of these injustices.

  She could get away from all that, to a safe new life. A life she didn’t know and didn’t have any real control over, where she would have to live knowing she had abandoned the cause Jacob died for.