Zone War

by John Conroe

  From there, it was belly worming all the way, crossing between vehicles only when I was sure the skies were clear and the streets were empty. And they mostly weren’t—empty, that is. I counted eleven aerial units and four ground drones during my three-block trip. That’s way more activity than normal. Thanks, Zone War and Johnson Recovery. The result was that it was even slower going than getting out of that fiber optic tunnel. Crawl, stop, listen, look, drag, listen, look, wait, repeat. Occasionally stand up under a scaffold tunnel.

  But at least the sun was out and fresh air blew across my face. Most of my cover was vehicle-related, and most lined up nearly end to end. There were some gaps, however, and those were dangerous. The worst was a ten-meter gap between a city bus and a UPS delivery truck. I looked, I listened. Hell, I even smelled the air for oil or the smell of electric motors. Nothing. So I started across. Inch by slow inch. Smack dab in the middle of the open street and that’s when I hear it. A whirring—soft—so soft. Most people wouldn’t notice it. Most would die right there. But my father had been a thorough teacher. I froze.

  There were seventeen models of flying drone released into Manhattan. Most were armed, and all of them could call for deadlier backup if needed. That’s not counting some of the parasitic microdrones that a few of the land drones could launch.

  The one above me was the smallest and quietist of the aerials. An Indian Kite. Eight inches in diameter with six small, ultraquiet turbo fans. The Kite was unarmed; it worked with other aerial UAVs and land UGVs, primarily with Indian Tigers. Which meant an eight-foot-long mechanical killing machine was likely somewhere nearby.

  Tiger drones don’t have any standoff weapons—no guns or lasers. They were built for close-quarters butchery only. And they had way more weapons than their namesakes. Side mounted body blades that scissored together, scythe-like claws for ripping, spring-loaded broad-bladed spears that shot out from their shoulders, and razors lining their mouths. Their designers created them to fall upon an enemy and shred them to bloody ruin in micro-seconds. So fast, enormously strong, they had inflicted the worst nightmares on the American psyche. Personally, I sniped them every single time I could.

  Now I was lying on my stomach, listening to the aerial eyes and ears of a Tiger hovering just above me. Frozen, I listened to it buzz softly over the road, stopping just behind me. Then the sound dropped closer to the ground. It was right there, over my pack, my rifle and… Rikki. Of course—it was curious about the motionless Berkut. Rikki probably still had some power somewhere, and the Kite would easily be able to detect it. So it would likely send for… rocks suddenly tumbled, seven or eight meters away. Then the scraping of steel on stone, closer.

  Me on my stomach, rifle behind me on my pack, and a freaking Tiger bot coming to investigate a stunned Berkut.

  The sun was out and both the street and my stealth suit were close to the same temperature, so I had that going. But my heartbeat would be unmistakable if it got close enough to poke at Rikki.

  I have little pieces of mirror sewn into the wristbands of my suit, just tiny little bits of highly polished metal. I use them to look ahead without lifting my head, because crawling is something I do a lot of. Currently, my right hand was by my face, which was turned so that my left cheek was pressed to the ground. The view in the bit of mirror was almost straight ahead. I twisted the wrist a millimeter. A monster came into view. The fucking Tiger was right there. Striped, like its namesake, only in gray and black, it prowled closer, big head with black ocular band swiveling left and right. It would pass right by me on its way to Rikki. I was dead. My Five-Seven was only a slim possibility, but those light-armor-piercing 5.7 millimeter bullets were never gonna do much to a hundred and eighty kilo monster of steel, scandium, titanium, and carbon fiber.

  A stone bounced on pavement, fifteen meters or so down the road. The Tiger snapped around and the Kite immediately buzzed across the intervening space. I twisted the mirror in that direction and found the little recon drone hovering over a small chunk of red brick, right in the middle of the road. Suddenly, another piece landed almost next to the first, almost hitting the Kite. The drone whipped around at the same time that I moved my wrist. In my tiny, tiny view of life, the corner of a building came into sight, an odd shape disrupting its straight lines. It took me three heartbeats to recognize that shape. Half a human face, one black eye watching and black hair hanging, silver metal on her cheek. Then it was gone and the Kite shot after it. A grey and black streak flew through my line of sight, the Tiger leaping fifteen meters with a flick of its servos, skidding on rubble as it tried to corner around the building. Then it too was gone. A person? Here? In the Zone? Throwing rocks at fucking Tiger bots?

  Three more heartbeats to listen and then I fast crawled under a city bus, then out alongside a Toyota sedan, then rolled under a panel van, out the other side and into the shadows of a tow truck, the corner sign telling me I was now on Rector Street. Almost safe. My brain settled a bit and the image of that face popped unbidden into my head along with another thought—female. Somehow, a young girl had just saved my life.

  My nearest hide was in the basement of a bar and grill on Rector Street, inside the old keg cooler. It took me twenty-six more minutes to get a hundred meters till I was at the door. This one was smaller than many of my others, but I could have cared less when I finally thumped down the staircase behind the bar and was able to latch the heavy metal refrigerator door behind me.

  Battery-powered light was a major upgrade from my long-depleted chem stick, and thanks to upgrades in battery tech in the years just before Drone Night, I had lots of power, shielded by the metal refrigerator walls.

  After drinking at least a liter of water and shoving a couple of long-term-survival food bars down my throat, I got up the courage to unwrap my ankle, unlace the boot, and try to wrestle it off. I had to stop and down some stronger painkillers before I could get the boot off.

  It still sucked, but when I finally got it free, I popped some first aid instant freeze packs and re-wrapped the ankle with the chillers right under the bandage. Then I placed a call home.

  Radio, cell, or satellite calls will get you killed super quick. Using an old-fashioned landline low-voltage rig will dial right out, at least right out to a computerized answering system in Brooklyn that in turn sends a text to my mother’s AI. It’s a one-way system, with no way for me to get a response or answer from home. But at least it would tell them that I was alive, safe, and prepping for egress. If Rikki was up and running, I could have just had him send a burst transmission. Four letters in a text to my family’s AIs. TTFN. Ta-ta-for-now. A phrase from my sisters’ favorite childhood book series.

  Too bad it couldn’t go both ways because I would have loved to ask some questions. By now, they would have all seen the replay of today’s episode, and the long, lonesome crawl to my safe site had left me plenty of time to wonder about things that had nothing to do with young, exotic, female faces peering around corners.

  Like why Johnson Recovery would shift to Battery Park all of a sudden, and why they would insert so early in the day. Prime time for the show was early afternoon, and it was a rare thing for any of the show’s salvage teams to deviate from the production schedule. In fact, despite all their vaunted bravery and bravado, Team Johnson toed the producer’s line, being as Brad really liked those fat Flottercot checks. The stuff they went after nowadays had caused me to scratch my head on multiple occasions. Simple smash and grabs, stuff that looked flashy on screen, like ramming the LAV through the windows and glass doors of a Fifth Avenue Prada or Louis Vuitton and auctioning the rescued goods after autographing it for added value. Or the time the JR rig was outbound and screeched to a sudden halt outside a cigar shop so that JJ could grab a couple of boxes of ancient high-end cigars that the three Johnson men smoked in the open top hatches, puffing away like hotshots. Idiots.

  Something weird was going down, and it had almost killed them. The Spider had them dead to rights, which also begged the
question about how it knew they were coming. I had walked right past that area and none of those units had been there. Rikki would have warned me.

  Speaking of Rikki, I gave him a once over. Nothing seemed broken, which was a shock. His carbon fiber exterior protected his internals pretty well, but the fan blades were plastic and prone to breaking. At home, I make extras on my 3D printer and pack them as part of my Rikki repair kit.

  But nothing external looked damaged. Blasts are fairly common in a war zone and the Russian designers had built Rikki with that in mind. There is a safety program that will trigger if a Berkut’s accelerometer detects wildly excessive cross-vector bursts of speed. The drone will pill-bug up for protection, then the CPU gets shut off. According to the helpful specs provided by the Russians after thousands of their kill machines ended up in downtown Manhattan, the idea is that the drone will go into stasis. When next the sun comes out and powers up the solar film coating the whole back of the Berkut, it will come back online.

  Down in my basement lair, I had to improvise, hooking him up to a battery-powered recharger, then changing the batteries every hour or so. Good time to clean my rifle.

  No sleep till the rifle is clean. Those were my rules growing up. Take care of the weapon and it will take care of you. Rikki was one of my primary weapons, so I think Dad would agree that taking care of him was as important as the Remington.

  Dragging my rifle around behind me all day hadn’t done it any favors, but other than scratches on its exterior, it was okay. My body must have cushioned its fall down the elevator shaft. I cleaned it, oiled it, reloaded the mags, and put the suppressor back in my pack.

  Then I lay back and thought about the shots. And Astrid’s face in the windshield of the LAV. And the face peering around the corner… and the horrible speed of the Tiger as it too went around the corner.

  A hum woke me sometime later. Rikki was hovering in front of me, gun pointed right at my face. It was unloaded but the titanium spear point above the barrel was still deadly.

  “Hello Ajaya,” my drone said. Odd. He’s never called me Ajaya. I programmed him for AJ, but his files, of course, include my full name.

  “Status?”

  “Airplane mode engaged. Number three prop functioning at impaired level. Sensors nominal. Weapon system depleted.”

  “Transform and disengage hover function,” I said.

  Rikki’s protective ball shape opened out, his eight primary segments unrolling, then snicking smoothly into his flight shape. Rikki looks like the love child of an old Northrup Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bomber and the even older Lockheed F-117 Nighthawk attack aircraft. His wings can tuck in tight when speed is required, and his gun barrel looks like a stubby mouth under a titanium beak. Two of his fans move into the wings to provide mainly hover and lift, but also propulsion if he tilts them, while the other two turbofans slide to the back to provide linear propulsion, both forward and back.

  His top is all black, for better solar charging and also so that he is hard to see from above. His underside is a mottled blue and white, which helps hide him from ground observers. Rikki can lift straight up, then go either forward or backward, sideways, barrel loop, or spin end over end in some crazy wild maneuvers that no human-flown plane could or had ever managed.

  With his wings fully extended, he can float on city thermals for hours without using hardly any power. If a target is sighted below or a Render drone appears above, he can fold wings, tilt his wing fans toward the back, and arrow for the ground at speeds approaching four hundred kilometers per hour.

  My Berkut has plenty of scars, both old and new. There are two bullet gouges on him, one on the top of his left wing and one crossing his underside. Then there is a patched hole on his nose, where the cockpit would be on a human-flown aircraft. The scar is covered with a sticker of a beautiful woman, like the airplane nose art that crewmen used to decorate their war planes with. I did it in an odd moment one night, when I was camping out in one of my better-equipped lairs near the east side of Central Park. It was a modern sticker, of a current celebrity, and I almost immediately regretted doing it. But the adhesive was really strong and let’s face it, no one was ever going to see my Berkut. It would, however, be embarrassing on a life-ending scale if she ever saw it.

  The sticker did help me to forget how Rikki got those scars, and that was something. The bullet gouges were mine. But my dad’s last shot had cored the drone that had killed him. That’s what the sticker covered. I had congratulated Dad even as I plugged his bullet wound with one tampon in the front of his torso and another in the back, where the bullet had exited. All in all, a survivable wound. Then I had raised a foot to stomp the Berkut and he had stopped me.

  “Ajaya, we have never captured a Berkut intact. Think, son. If we could repair it? If you could repair it?” he had said.

  He died twenty minutes later. It took me two days to carry his body out of the Zone. The worst two days of my life. But we don’t leave anyone behind. That’s what he taught me.

  The autopsy had revealed a fragment of his rib, blasted apart by the armor-piercing bullet, had lacerated his abdominal aorta, just nicked it a little. Just enough. The internal bleeding had gone unnoticed… by me.

  Two weeks later, I went back in and found the Berkut where I had left it. I almost destroyed it that moment, and then again when I took it to a safe house. Instead, after staring at it for hours, I pulled the CPU and took it home. Three months later, I came back, reinstalled the CPU—rebuilt with upgraded features—then fixed the drone’s damaged parts, tied the thing down, and rebooted it with the muzzle of my Five-Seven pressed against the open CPU compartment. The drone had recognized me, as it was programmed to recognize anyone in my family and a few others, ticking loudly to itself as it did. I named it Rikki Tikki two missions later, after my favorite childhood story. Dad had told me that story every night he put me to bed, at least between his Afghan missions. He held off exposing me to the rest of Kipling’s work till I was older. Take the good with the bad, as he said. Rikki was definitely bad mixed with good.

  “Disengage airplane mode,” I said.

  “Airplane mode off. Unable to connect to network.”

  The beer cooler’s walls acted like a Faraday cage, blocking all signals, which was really good. I tinkered with his faulty fan blade, eventually replacing it with a 3D printed spare. Then I checked the time. Wee early morning. O dark hundred hours. A good time to move.

  All of the combat drones in the Zone used solar power to recharge, although some could harvest power from the electrical grid if it was up. The hours just before dawn were the point where they remained the most dormant. A few hours after dark, they might still patrol or at least stay alert, but in the cold, dark hours of morning, they would be mostly quiescent. Ten years was long past all of their designed lifespans, yet many were still going, but they were having some issues. Battery life was a biggie.

  I got my foot back into my boot but couldn’t lace it. Instead, I wrapped it with duct tape with a couple pieces of the leg of a bar stool taped in to act like a splint. My rifle, stock folded, went back in the pack sling next to the bubble-wrapped PC, and I made a cane from a piece of sturdy stair railing, also from the bar. With Rikki near full charge from a dozen exhausted batteries, we headed out.

  We made it back to Battery Park just as the sun came up. No Kites, no Tigers, and no human faces.

  I put Rikki into standby mode, sending him up into the skies above to await my next contact, be it sonic, reflected laser, or in cases where we are really far apart, I will sometimes dig out a cached police radio and rubber band the mike open, leaving it far enough away to avoid the other drones that inevitably arrive.

  My drone disappeared up into the sky and I shuffled into the auto-cannon protected space in front of the Battery tunnel entrance.

  The man-sized door let me into the security space, then cycled shut behind me.

  “Welcome back, Mr. Gurung. Put your weapons in the bin and then kneel o
n the white X, hands behind your head,” a voice said over the speaker.

  Alarm bells rang in my head as I stood stunned. Never in the history of the Zone have I heard of a salvage specialist being treated this way.

  “Now, Mr. Gurung. Let’s avoid the gas if we can, shall we?”

  Chapter 7