Zone War

by John Conroe

  Chapter 10

  The coffee shop was just a couple of blocks and my ankle seemed better, but I humored Mom and ordered an Ublyft self-driver. The car was outside by the time I got out of our building and I arrived only four minutes late. Not bad for Brooklyn.

  Honest Bean coffee was doing a brisk business, with a line at the counter five deep. Two men sitting at a table facing the door spotted me instantly, one of them lifting a hand to wave me over. Several other people took notice of me as well, recognition flaring on faces that I was certain I had never met.

  “Ajaya, I’m Calvin Shussman and this is Josh Devasagayam,” the shorter one said. Blond hair, pale skin, ice blue eyes that seemed cold and calculating despite his smile. His partner was taller but still a few centimeters shorter than my own hundred eighty-eight centimeters, with skin as brown as my own and dark brown eyes. He seemed excited and maybe a little nervous.

  Shussman was the CFO of Zeus Global and back in the day had apparently worked for Rocon Financial. “Show me the unit,” he said. It was an out-and-out command. Not really digging that tone.

  I raised one eyebrow at him.

  “I need to verify it before I will authorize payment,” he said, not at all repentant.

  Moving at my own speed, which in this case was snail slow, I opened my backpack and pulled out the bubble-wrapped PC. Shussman reached for it but I held it back while I snicked open my folding knife and cut the tape holding the bubble wrap closed. I shut the knife and handed him the PC, holding his eyes as I did so.

  The man was confident but I had seen a flicker cross his face when I opened my blade. His hands flipped the notebook computer over and he checked the serial number carefully. Then he looked at the big Rocon sticker on the front and the two IT department stickers on the underside. Finally he nodded and handed the unit to Josh.

  Eagerly accepting the notebook unit, Josh lifted his left hand and I spotted a reader glove over the back of his hand, hooked to his index, middle, and ring fingers. He waved it over the PC and frowned. That’s right, you bastards. Not gonna let you scan the drive and pull the goods without paying.

  “Not getting anything,” he said, now his turn to flip it over. He opened the battery compartment and found it empty.

  “You’ve verified the PC. My payment please,” I said to Shussman.

  “We haven’t verified the data.”

  “Not my problem. You hired me to retrieve this unit from that building. Done. What’s on it is your issue. Battery is back in the Zone. I don’t move electronics around that might give off an EM signal.”

  “That battery was ten years old,” Shussman protested. “There’s no way it had power left.”

  “Oh, you’re an expert on the Zone?” I asked, my right hand snatching the PC from Josh before he could react. “I’ll just take back my property and be on my way.”

  “That’s our property!” Shussman said. People turned to look at our table.

  “Anything I retrieve from the Zone is mine until I transfer ownership. State law. Tested up through the Supreme Court. This is the PC you wanted, so pay me and it’s yours.”

  He studied me coldly for a moment but then nodded, a bit sullenly. He touched the hearing unit behind his ear to activate his AI. His right eye lit red as he flicked fingers in the air in front of himself. The red light died about the same time my own AI spoke through my own earpiece.

  “Payment received, Ajaya.”

  I handed the PC back to Josh and stood up. “Right. Have a nice day, gentlemen.”

  Turning to leave, I came face to face with staring blue eyes. A boy, maybe ten, almost right in my face… but lower.

  “You’re him! You’re the one who saved the Johnsons!” he said, very loudly. Really loudly. Loud enough to stop most of the activity around the shop. Now everyone was staring at me and fingers were reaching up to touch the side of eyes or ears as contact lenses began to take pictures.

  “Who? Never heard of them, kid,” I said, moving past him. His mother was frowning at me instead of him. Come on, lady. Teach your kid manners.

  I made it out the door, sliding through a group of four who were entering. They stopped, bewildered, by all the people staring their way with eye cams clicking, but I was outside now. Hobbling down the street, I faded into the masses.

  Four blocks later, a break was desperately needed. My ankle was killing me so I slipped into a sports-bar-type restaurant and got myself a table. Never did get any coffee at the meet. Definitely time for a mid-morning nosh.

  Sixteen wall projections and at least and half of them were showing Zone War. Again with the morning show? The banner at the bottom of the screen said it was Drone Destroyers and they were entering the East Side over the Queensboro Bridge. Trinity had found a team stupid enough to go in.

  “When did it start?” I asked my waitress, who was middle-aged and looked bored with everything.

  The show had been consistent with its afternoon scheduling, for the most part, but there had been exceptions. Sudden changes that pretty much shut down work and sometimes even schools, right at any hour of the day. Just the day though, never the night, no one went in after dark. Nighttime was reserved for replays of the earlier daytime episode.

  “A few minutes ago,” she said with a shrug, then her eyes narrowed at me a bit but she said nothing else as I ordered a three-egg ham and spinach omelet and coffee, with bacon on the side.

  The coffee came immediately, so I sipped it and watched the show. Heading back across the room, my waitress put in my order and started talking with another waitress, this one younger. They both glanced my way. Great.

  On screen, Mike Destin was at the wheel of the heavily modified Oshkosh Joint Light Tactical Vehicle that was named the Drone Des-Troyer, while his partner, Connor Troyer was manning the remote weapons turret. Get it—Des-troyer? Clever, right? Oh well, the show was popular because of the action, not the brains of the teams involved.

  Drone Destroyers always seemed to be trying to catch up to the others. The show, if you don’t know, lists the weekly salvage profits recovered by each team and ranks the teams by gross total. Team Johnson, a.k.a Johnson Recovery, was always on top. Bone Shakers usually was second and sometimes put real pressure on Brad Johnson, while Team Rumble (a.k.a. Egorov) and the badass ladies of Team Up Town Girls mixed it up well for third and fourth with occasional jumps to second. Drone Destroyers was almost always dead last. Poor Mike and Connor ended up doing stupider and stupider salvage missions in an effort to move off the bottom. But the fans liked them because they were such good old boys. At least, that’s how they came across, humble at times, brag talking a bit here and there, but they always had the worst luck, never quite executed the plan. Every once in a while they’d make a small score, enough to catch up on their repair bills, maintenance costs, stuff like that.

  The road was mostly cleared, at least the main entry points, as various teams had run heavy vehicles in, clearing abandoned vehicles out the way. In an early episode, Team Johnson had armored up an old city garbage truck, welded a snowplow blade to the front, and used it to slam cars and trucks off the Madison Avenue Bridge. From that point on, all the teams, and there were more than five in the first season, copied their actions, clearing other entry points with heavy equipment with makeshift armor.

  So Mike was driving and Connor had the weapons turret spinning, looking for drones, thermal and electromagnetic scanners seeking signals.

  They cleared the bridge easy, but then entries weren’t usually the problem. Deeper into the city was usually the issue, although the Johnsons barely made it a few blocks before their trap got sprung.

  They turned down onto 59th, going the wrong way, but who cares, right? Deadlocked had a whole new meaning in today’s Manhattan.

  Then they went the wrong way down 3rd Ave, passed right by 58th, and took a right on 57th street, headed west.

  The waitress brought my omelet, setting a smaller side plate with extra bacon next to it.

  �
�What’s their target?” I asked her.

  She was eyeing me, super curious-like. She shrugged. “Hey, Mitch? What’s today’s target?” she asked the guy watching from behind the bar. He occasionally polished a glass or two.

  “Trump Tower,” he said.

  “Really? Thought the Up Town Girls hit that a few months ago?” I asked.

  “They did, but they got bum rushed out by a combined unit of Cranes, Wolves, and a mess of aerials. Still lots of swag to grab,” the guy, Mitch, said.

  “You’re him,” my waitress said, still staring at me. “The shooter guy who saved Team Johnson, right?”

  “What? Don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. Stupid. Okay, so I’m not always fast with words.

  She smiled in a knowing way. “Yeah? Guy like you that knows all ‘bout the show, don’t know about the biggest episode of all. Pull my other leg, honey.”

  “Shit!” Mitch the bartender said loudly. We looked away from our awkward eye lock and at him, then at the screen he was focused on.

  Team Destroyer had come to a screeching halt, the path forward completely blocked side to side by a city bus across the street. It was one of those big double buses with the accordion middle. An armored car on the sidewalk was jammed against a building wall and the front of the bus, while some kind of delivery truck was holding down the same spot at the other end.

  “Where the *bleep* did that *bleeping* thing come from?” Mike said on camera, face going white against the collar of his dark gray combat shirt.

  “It wasn’t there two hours ago when we checked the satellite footage,” Connor said, voice rising. “Turn around. Quick… turn us the *bleep* around, Mikey.”

  The screen split, showing both team members’ faces while simultaneously showing exterior shots ahead and behind them. It was a jumbled rush of images as Mike expertly put the big vehicle through a tight multi-point turn. He got it around and both their faces brightened as the way ahead showed a clear street.

  “Go man, go,” Connor yelled, pumping his left fist, his right still locked on the gun controls.

  Mike accelerated forward, expression tight with concentration. The brightly lit street ahead of them suddenly darkened and something huge slammed into the road—tons of machinery and metal crushing cars and lampposts. Debris flew in all directions.

  “*Bleeeeeeeep*!” Connor yelled as both men stared in shock. They turned to each other, then, almost as one, turned to the gun sight monitor. Connor moved his hand and the gun up top tilted back and up, the in-vehicle production camera zooming in on the monitor. Blue sky with a dot in the middle. The dot grew, doubling in size, then quadrupling, then recognizable as a giant double fan, tower-top HVAC unit. And then it hit.

  The screen feeds all died simultaneously and an instant later, the show logo popped up to replace the picture. Four seconds after that, an ad for a nano heart disease treatment filled the screen.

  The restaurant was dead silent, every person locked on the stupid ad.

  “Incoming call, AJ. General Davis,” my AI said in my ear.

  “I’ll take the general’s call,” I said, eyes locking with the waitress’s.

  Chapter 11

  They picked me up out front, a new black government sedan, a driver, who was a corporal, and a staff sergeant. Neither said a word, just moved us efficiently through traffic as they headed for the Queensboro Bridge.

  Forty minutes later, we got through to the checkpoint on the Brooklyn side of the bridge and crossed on to Roosevelt Island, where Zone Defense HQ was housed.

  After Drone Night, the military worked frantically to quarantine the island. One of the greatest engineering feats in the history of the world. Setting up walls, steel netting, and knocking down buildings as fast as possible. In the rush to evacuate, Cornell had abandoned its Tech campus on Roosevelt Island, rightfully thinking that having college kiddies so close to the Zone might be bad for enrollment. The government bought the campus from the university and turned it into Zone command. The hospital at the north end of the island remained in operation, even after the horrific numbers of wounded had finally finished treatment and been sent home.

  So I was met at the steps of one of the old university buildings by another sergeant, name tagged as Nico, who led me deeper into the building.

  My palm and retina were scanned four times through just as many checkpoints until Sergeant Nico led me into an auditorium where a cluster of officers studied video on a giant screen while flunkies swarmed around them like bees servicing a fat, bloated queen. The walls of the room had massive recruiting posters, loaded with badass images of army tech and weapons systems.

  Davis was at the center, along with at least two colonels, five majors, including Yoshida, and more lieutenants than I could count, ‘cause they kept moving and scurrying and butt kissing. There were civilians as well, including Agents White and Black, as well as some folks who looked like attorneys and a big, white-haired, older white guy who I happened to recognize as Chester Flottercot himself.

  A tall major with darker skin than my own held the floor and most of the brass’s attention. The big screen held several simultaneous live images of the JTLV, smashed with tons of debris on top. Other images were focused on the tops of nearby towers. The major pointed at one.

  “Render UAV footage shows the rooftop HVAC units came from these buildings just east of Trump Tower. As you can see in this close-up, the metal infrastructure holding the cooling units has been systematically cut with lasers. The amount of time and power needed to do that is still being calculated, but initial estimates are enormous. It must have been done much, much earlier: days, weeks, perhaps months ago. Then we don’t know how the drones pushed them off the roof. Each unit weighed in excess of ten tons and had to be moved eight to ten meters to the edge of the roof,” he said.

  “Wolf drones could do that easy,” I said to Sergeant Nico as he led me down the stairs to the front of the auditorium.

  “What was that, young man?” a nearby lawyer looking dude in an expensive suit asked, loudly enough that everyone turned to look. “What did you say? You have something to add?” the suit continued.

  General Davis locked eyes with me and nodded.

  “I said Wolf drones could do that easy. Same way they moved the bus and armored car,” I said, raising my voice.

  “How is that done, Ajaya?” Major Yoshida asked, interested.

  “Each Wolf drone is basically a four-legged hydraulic jack. They can fold themselves down to less than a foot in height and press more than a half-ton each. Tigers can do even more although they can’t get quite so low. Put twenty or thirty Wolves and Tigers under one of those units and they could pick it up and walk it over,” I said.

  “How would they tilt it over the edge?” a colonel asked.

  “They can stack on top of each other.”

  “You’ve seen this, Ajaya?” General Davis asked.

  “Yes. I’ve seen them move cars and trucks that way. I’ve seen as many as three stack up to lift a beam that I had used trap a Tiger.”

  “You’re the sniper’s boy, right?” the same colonel asked.

  “Everybody, this is Ajaya Gurung. His father was SAS, four tours in Afghanistan as a sniper. Co-founded Johnson Gurung with Brad Johnson. Went independent eight years ago. Killed by drone fire two years ago. Ajaya has followed his footsteps since, what? Age twelve?” Davis asked.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “As you all know, Ajaya’s shooting saved the Johnsons from a trap two days ago. He has more time in the Zone than anyone else alive,” Davis explained.