“I don’t know,” says Alyssa.
Now that she thinks of it, Aminat sees the mist hanging low over everything. Chemical weapon? Nobody was writhing or dying. Nobody’s skin was bubbling with blisters or coming off in sheets. Nobody having a seizure. Nobody coughing.
“We need to get out of this,” says Aminat. She turns to the boatman. “Can you go faster?”
He shakes his head, not to refuse, but because he does not understand. She says it again in Yoruba. She makes him head for the nearest shore, which is a muddy bank close to a copse of trees. They get off and plash through until they reach firm land. The boatman stays still until he sees that they have good footing, then he eases back in the direction from which they came.
A hyena man stands watching them from the timberline, holding a leashed, muzzled hyena. The man is lanky and starved, dressed in a tattered dashiki. Aminat is not a fan of hyenas—that walk, the sounds they make, their diet. The man says something in a language Aminat does not understand, but the receding boatman yells, “He said something is coming, and that you are going in the wrong direction.”
Yeah, wide berth when walking past him.
They have to find the nearest pump and wash the filth off their skin and hair, then see about getting it analysed. The coordinates for their pick-up arrive. Aminat activates the locator program, a reassuring pulse with a glowing arrowhead on her palm. They have to go through the woods.
“Are you all right?” asks Alyssa.
“Yes, why?” It seems like the first time she’s seen Alyssa smile.
“You’ve been through a lot, done a lot. I just wanted to let you know that we can rest if you want.”
“That’s nice, and thank you, but we’re not anywhere near a place where we can rest just yet. You just follow me and do what I say, Alien Jesus, then we’ll be fine.”
The forest is full of footpaths and Aminat tries to match their vector with the arrow.
Between the trees there are reanimates, covered in caked mud, moving with purpose, all in the same direction, as if towards a beacon. That never happens. They are probably just fleeing flood water like any other living creature. Aminat puts it out of her mind.
Her forearm glistens with the unknown chemical. She has an instinct to contact Olalekan, then experiences a sharp acid jolt in the heart when she remembers his death. She calls Kaaro, mission protocol be damned. One phone call does not mean S45 is running shit again. Kaaro’s phone is out of service or switched off. She calls the house, no answer. She calls the house AI, gives her code and waits.
“Occupants, human,” says Aminat.
“Zero vital signs.”
“Occupants, human, deceased?”
“Nil.”
“Security.”
“Integrity intact. Nil house breaches. Multiple ground breaches.”
The fear is back. “Number of breaches.”
“Sixty-eight.”
???
“Casualties.”
“Six.”
“Visual to my phone.”
She can barely breathe while waiting for the feed. Alyssa says something but Aminat ignores it. The feed shows six dead and dismembered… special forces? They are in grotesque positions, unnatural, difficult to look at. Kaaro is not among them, but then where is he? Oh, my baby.
“Aminat.”
“What do you want?”
“Look.”
In the direction of her finger, looming slowly but surely, a line of seven automatons, loaded for war, aimed at the city. Aminat brings the rifle scope to her eye and examines the bots. Egg-shaped trunk, no treads, quadruped, each just over six feet, with no sign of embossed stars and stripes. China made, which means they have centralised software servers wirelessly transmitted to them. No chance of local disruption. The American ones at least had old firmware and on-board operating systems. You could paralyse the bot by disrupting the code, assuming it didn’t riddle you with bullets or blow you up first. The bots in these woods only have enough RAM to run the transmitted software. It also means the Chinese signed off on this excursion, which isn’t great for Rosewater.
Shit.
Aminat has trained to fight automatons, but has never used that skill, nor does she have the equipment she trained with. That was just one, and in a controlled environment. Right now, all she has is a conventional firearm, which cannot harm the bots. Short bursts of fire cut the random reanimates in half. The undergrowth may be slowing the bots down, but they’re still clocking twenty miles per hour easy. Even if she and Alyssa try to run, the machines will catch up.
“Switch off your ID,” says Aminat.
“How?”
“Use the file Bad Fish sent to the phone. It deactivates both the real chip and the cloned ghost chip. Those bots always start from locator chips, before they use motion detection or visual data. That’s how they stay away from animals, and that’s why they’re killing the reanimates. These are extermination bots; they’ll kill any humans in their path.”
Aminat tests the laser guide from the rifle on her palm.
The bots are going to sense Aminat and Alyssa, no matter what their mission, at this range. Hiding would just be a shorter way to die. Running away would get them shot in the back or grenaded. And the bots’ path intersects the route to the landing zone.
“Alyssa, I’m going to try something. If it doesn’t work, we’re screwed. If there’s a manual override, we’re screwed. I’m going to draw their attention away from you. If I fall, if I get shot or blown up, run in the opposite direction to the landing zone. I’ve sent coordinates to your phone.” She hands her sidearm to Alyssa. “Don’t worry, it won’t explode. It’ll weigh me down, and I need to sprint. Do you understand?”
“Yes.”
“Good. Engage or die, Alyssa. No middle ground.”
“Engage or die.”
The points of articulation of the bots are vulnerable, but you need a rocket launcher for that. They are about fifty yards out, and there are no reanimates in between. The forest is silent but for the crushed leaves and twigs in their path.
Aminat breaks cover and the three bots closest to her turn antennae in her direction, but the heads still point to the city. The carpet of fallen leaves does not protect and the mud sucks at her feet, which changes the speed Aminat can run at compared with what her plan demands. Run, run. She remembers track and field and her coach. It is not in your muscles or your trainers or the tarmac or the crowd. It is in your head. Aminat pushes herself, and pushes further, but it is still like running in a dream. She hears the air displacement as the bot fires a ranging grenade that falls short, but still knocks her over. A shower of wet leaves and clumps of earth fall to the ground around her.
Lucky.
It wasn’t aiming yet, dummy, it was finding you.
Aminat aims the laser at the bot and prays she has enough time to send the signal. Three short pulses, three long pulses, then three short ones again.
dot dot dot, dash dash dash, dot dot dot
At first nothing happens and Aminat is sure she has fucked it up. It splits apart three seconds later and she is able to duck before part of its forelimb swishes past and smashes into a tree. The blast takes out the bot next to it, but the other five start firing. From Aminat’s left she hears gunfire. Alyssa shoots at the bots, bullets bouncing uselessly off their hulls, and a second or two later they decide to split forces. Aminat aims her laser and the one that stayed focused on her blows up, this time the head going high towards the canopy, while shrapnel embeds in trees. The others are heading for Alyssa. What the fuck is wrong with her? Aminat told her to go the other way.
Aminat tries to send the same self-destruct signal to the leading automaton, dot dot dot, dash—But it weaves, and the others block the beam, although it’s impossible to tell if they do this being wise to the trick. When it looks like they might open fire, the ground rises and bursts open, flinging soil and rocks in every direction, and uprooting tress. Both Aminat and Alyssa cover t
heir heads. A bough hits Aminat’s arm, knocking away the laser sight.
The roll-up springs free, rears up to a height rivalling the trees, and shakes itself from side to side to remove debris. The bots do not hesitate, but redeploy around the new target, ignoring Aminat and Alyssa. They spread out, surrounding the alien. The roll-up directly falls on one, smashing it into spare parts. The others open fire, focusing on the same spot, and the roll-up twitches with pain and its mouth yawns open, though it does not scream.
“No, don’t hurt it!” says Alyssa. She leaps up from the defensive crouch, narrowly missed by a tangle of flaming wires flying through the air.
What the fuck, we should be running. “Alyssa, get the fuck out of the way. We are leaving!”
But of course a part of Aminat feels that if Alyssa dies, a large part of the problem goes away. She feels along her path, searching for the laser sight. She finds her gun where Alyssa seems to have dropped it.
The roll-up turns on its axis and takes one of the robots into its open mouth. The jaws crash down and a flurry of sparks escapes before the sound of a muted explosion forces smoke and scrap metal out of its mouth. The roll-up writhes, its legs twitch.
“No,” Alyssa says. There are tears streaming down her face.
The last bot releases what seems like all its ordnance at the roll-up, including machine guns and small explosives. The alien’s movements are disorganised, and some of its limbs have been cut off by bullets. It bleeds a dark green fluid. It is curiously silent.
In all this the bot is relatively stationary. Aminat finds the laser and, from a prone position, flashes out the Morse code on its hull. It explodes in a fireball that singes the canopy and sends a heatwave in all directions.
The roll-up falls and is still, a pool of its blood growing underneath it and mixing with the mud and leaves.
Alyssa starts towards the alien.
Aminat grabs her hand and drags her away. “The people who sent these will send more. Come with me now.”
The landing zone is the Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti Sports Centre, on the football field. Aminat doesn’t know if it’s Femi’s joke about her past as a sports medallist, but she’s past caring.
They flop on to the grass in the centre so that Aminat can see any attackers as long as they aren’t snipers. Her muscles are rigid as she pushed both of them hard on the hike away from the battlefield.
Lying flat beside her, Alyssa says, “Who is Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti?”
“Was. She was the person who fought, advocated and pushed for the women’s vote in Nigeria. We didn’t have universal adult suffrage back in colonial times. She also fought the British authority’s proxy ruler, the Alake of Egbaland, to abolish differential taxes for women and won. She got banned from travel during the Cold War because she used to visit the Eastern Bloc countries and was probably socialist. She won the Lenin Peace Prize, so that isn’t conjecture. She was the first Nigerian woman to drive a car, and she was the mother of the famed musician, Fela.”
“What was the Cold War?”
The sound of rotor blades cutting air interrupts, and a chopper arrives from the east.
Aminat won’t get in at first. She insists that all guns be thrown out. Then she asks that hunting knives and other items that could be improvised weapons be jettisoned. When she is satisfied she checks the helicopter before bringing Alyssa on board. Too many near-death experiences in a few days come with paranoia.
As they soar above the city, through the head mic, Alyssa asks, “How did you use that pointer to kill the robots?”
“It’s not a pointer, it’s a laser sight,” says Alyssa. “All the war bots have self-destruct sequences. The usual controllers don’t want their tech falling into enemy hands. There’s also on-board data that might implicate people in war crimes. There are sensors all over the bots. I sent them their sequence and they obeyed.”
“So it would never have worked without the roll-up?”
“It was never supposed to work, not really. I thought I would be able to take out two of them at the most. One blew up just because of proximity. It was a stunt. It was supposed to buy you time to get away.”
“You would die for me?”
“Don’t get out your engagement ring and propose, sunshine, it was orders.” Aminat looks out of the window. Yes, her orders are the opposite of what she just said, but it’s not like S45 or Femi have been either forthcoming or trustworthy. And working with Jack now. What the fuck was that? Aminat would kill for self-defence, but she did not like being put in a position where she would have to kill Alyssa in cold blood. Besides, she likes her alien Jesus. If nothing else, the girl was useful as a fly trap. No, fuck S45, fuck Femi and fuck Jack Jacques. She would deliver Alyssa, go get Kaaro and get the hell out of Rosewater. She’ll figure something out when she gets to Lagos.
“It was orders,” she repeats, maybe to Alyssa, maybe to herself.
Chapter Thirty
Jacques
Jack wants her to leave, but believes her to be essential, therefore he swallows the bile in the back of his throat and forces himself to smile. Smiles are cheap, and he has peddled them for years. He partakes of the glass of water, savours the cold fluid going down his throat, and closes his eyes for a few seconds, needing the peace.
Femi does all her work standing up, on her phone, looking fabulous. He muses that she is different from his wife in that she lacks humanity. She could be a living doll, or a perfect statue, whereas Hannah is warm, with softer edges. Jack knows he can never love a person this ruthless, this calculating. Which is okay, because she would never prefer a person like him. Actually, it’s unclear if she even prefers anybody.
“Mr. Mayor.”
He opens his eyes and she is standing right in front of him, one hand on the desk.
“She’s on her way, and she has the Sutcliffe woman.”
“We need her because…?”
“Alyssa or Aminat?”
“Either. Both. Just tell me.”
“I already did, Mr. Mayor, try to keep up. We need Aminat to control Kaaro when he comes in. We need Kaaro to get the alien onside. And we need Alyssa to force the alien if that becomes necessary.”
Jack points to some papers to his left. “The British High Commission has something to say about Alyssa Sutcliffe. Her husband is kicking up dust and they want assurances. Why should the alien give a fuck about her?”
“Because she is, I believe, the first of—”
Dahun barges in, right hand full of semiautomatic, face grim. At first Jack wonders if the man has taken money from the president and is here to kill, but Dahun’s gaze is directed to Femi and she backs away from him, although her face shows no fear.
“Who is this Kaaro guy? You tell me now, or I swear to Ogun, I will fill you with metal.”
“I already told you who he is.”
“You said he was retired.”
“He is.”
“You said he was a coward.”
“He is.”
“You said he was harmless.”
“I didn’t say that. I said I’d tell you what to do to render him harmless.”
“Skin-tight rubber suits, oxygen tanks, antifungal cream.”
“Yes. He can’t access any of his abilities that way.”
“Then why are my men dead?”
Femi for the first time is speechless. “I… he’s… how many—”
“All of them. All of them are dead, you fucking idiot. What did you do? What kind of mistake is this? I have to call their spouses and children. I have to promise the families that they died for something. What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I don’t understand. Kaaro doesn’t use deadly force. He can cause pain, but… and he shouldn’t have been able to get through the defences.”
“He didn’t.”
“Then who—”
Dahun conjures a plasma video, the mission record from the cam of one of the men.
“Those are reanimates,” says Jack.
“I don’t understand. Why are they attacking the men?”
“Because your guy—your retired, coward, harmless guy?—he controls them.”
“Impossible.”
An alarm goes off.
Jack has never seen this many reanimates in one place, not when they first appeared in ’55, not after any of the yearly Openings since then, not even when he visited the sequestered ones in the prison. And yet, he is meant to believe the evidence of his own eyes: that the entire grounds of his mansion are full of reanimates, that they have surrounded the building and that, though they die at the extra defences Dahun has put up, they keep coming with that steady sacrifice, that stoic expression, that eternal indifference.
They have two feeds, one satellite and a second rotating feed from drones, both generated from plasma fields on Jack’s desk. They only had a few minutes of the satellite picture, but played on a loop it shows tiny figures gathering outside the gates and walls, sparse at first, then dense, increasing at an alarming speed. The drone feed on the right shows the current time, first from straight up, then from drones flying the perimeter.
From far out it looks like a protest, a million-man, million-woman march, with seething crowds all facing the gate, hammering on it, or just standing still, waiting. Budding off from the main mass at the gate are two arms making their way around the walls in each direction, but also trying to scale the barriers. From above it looks like the crowd is trying to hug the mansion. When the drones get closer the feed shows that when a turret or sniper kills one of the reanimates, the others lift the body out of the way and immediately someone from behind fills the gap. They shove against the gate in numbers, and they clamber over each other.
A few dozen make it through the barriers and the fusillade of rifle fire, but so far the flame-throwers have been able to stop them from getting into the building, but fuel supplies are not infinite. Bodies are piling up and forming their own barrier.
Another thing Jack observes is that even when shot, they continue unless their head is completely destroyed.
The Rosewater Insurrection Page 21
