Zone War

by John Conroe

  “Yes, ma-, er, Sergeant.”

  “That thing points my way and I’ll blast its ass,” she said.

  “Rikki won’t attack humans. Probably won’t even see him unless it all goes to shit. Then he’ll be shooting drones, not soldiers.”

  That reminded me that I needed some of my own stuff before we went in. I moved over to the locker Rift had assigned me and dug out my backpack with clumsy armor-gloved hands. I always carry some basic stuff with me. I found three thirty-round blocks of Rikki’s 9x21mm ammo and my kukri.

  More soldiers were coming in, all of them already armored and armed. I got a lot of curious glances, frowns, and headshakes. I couldn’t figure out how to store the ammo or the knife and the new soldiers looked disgusted.

  “You got collapsible pouches here and here. Leave the sheath off the knife and it’ll stick to the magnetic tool point here,” Rift said, suddenly right beside me. “What you gonna cut with that knife anyway?”

  “I always have it with me. Kinda a family thing,” I said.

  “Gonna try and cut a drone, newbie?” a soldier I hadn’t met asked. Another female, shorter than Rift, but still tough-looking. Pretty face though. Short black hair and brown eyes. Hard to guess her ethnicity.

  A tall, lean guy was right behind her, sneering.

  “It’s made of differentially hardened D2 tool steel. I’ve taken the head right off a Crane before,” I said.

  Both looked at me like I might be lying.

  “AJ here is the sniper that shot up those TKs and saved Johnson ass,” Rift said.

  “Made it through the blast?” the female soldier asked. Her nameplate on her boob bump said K. Jossom. Her rank tabs said corporal.

  “I set it off. I was in the elevator shaft when it blew.”

  “In the shaft or falling down it, kid?” Major Yoshida asked, moving past us.

  “Controlled descent, Major. Barely,” I said.

  He snorted and kept going to the other side of the ready room.

  Jossom and her partner, who was B. Boyle, also a corporal, were looking at me a little differently. Like judgement had been revised and pulled back for review.

  “That ammo for your bird?” Rift asked. “Thought it wasn’t gonna be needed.”

  “I like having and not needing over needing and not having.”

  “Bird?” Boyle asked.

  “Fucking pet Death Eagle,” Rift said, enjoying herself.

  “Bullshit,” Boyle said, looking at me in a challenging way.

  “Just don’t shoot any Berkut you see loitering about,” I said.

  “You don’t see a Berkut until it’s too damn late,” Jossom said, head tilted like she was still waiting for the joke to be on her.

  “Exactly. So if you do see one… it’s mine.”

  “Time to saddle up,” Thompson said, looming over me.

  “Roger that,” I said, following as he moved toward another doorway.

  Chapter 13

  We went in style—a huge Quad tilt-rotor, big enough for a hundred people, kind of cavernous with just eighteen of us. I sat across from Yoshida, sandwiched between Thompson and Rift. No real window to see out of so I occupied myself with my AI, its mobile unit having fit nicely in yet another hidden storage compartment in my armor.

  “Status of file Ghost?”

  “Initial results indicated 2,139 hits meeting basic criteria. Filtered for credibility of observer as well as key words indicating person, female, and young resulted in one hundred two possibilities. Further filtering for just the last six years narrowed results to forty-seven.”

  I had added some parameters before getting to Roosevelt Island and now seemed like a good time to check in on the project. See just how crazy I was. My AI had added an additional set of its own, discarding the sightings from the two years immediately after Drone Night.

  “Rolling view of sighting summaries,” I murmured. Immediately my eye contact went live, a list of sightings screening past.

  “Freeze. Open top item.”

  The one that grabbed me was a newspaper article talking about ghosts in the Zone. Kinda close to the title I chose for the file, so maybe that’s what caught my eye.

  The reporter wrote about crazy sightings by Zone Defense personnel, things tourists thought they saw when flying perimeter helicopter tours, and stories from salvage operators.

  All kinds of crap, from walking skeletons to glowing apparitions to women in white dresses. Two parts of the story caught my attention. The first was a former Zone Defense auto-gun technician who was replacing a barrel on a weapons system one evening in the spring, two years ago, when he saw a slight, humanoid figure picking its way around the corner of a building. Thing was, the guy was working lower Zone, not far from Wall Street. Also, it was early evening, in June, when daylight is lasting longer and longer.

  The second story was told right after, kind of a supporting piece. Previous team on Zone War, City Slammers, now retired, had been deep in a fighting retreat, working their way toward the Brooklyn Bridge, when the turret gunner on the old Russian BMP had seen a face peering out of a first-floor window at him. A female, young, and… wearing something silvery on her face.

  The gunner, Pasha Gachev, was still alive and living in Brooklyn, as of the time of the article, two and a half years ago. Maybe I could look him up—if I survived the next few hours.

  I looked through the rest but there was nothing as good as that one article, so I cancelled the list. My vision cleared and I found myself eye to eye with Corporal Jossom, who was studying me like a bug under a magnifier.

  “Ghost?” she asked.

  “Just some research I’m doing.”

  “We’re flying into the fucking Zone and you’re doing research?” she asked, eyebrow raised.

  I shrugged. “Got all you hardasses to watch over me, big ole Quad and like twenty Renders escorting. Not much to worry about till we get there. Plus, you know, cool armor and shit,” I said.

  “How you know my ass is hard?” she asked, quirking a brow.

  “’Cause he studied the shit out mine and assumed we’re all the same. Know what they say about ass-umptions, right, kid?” Rift asked.

  “If you can’t make them about asses, you can’t make them at all, now can you, Sarge?” I shot back.

  Rift’s eyes opened wide.

  “Oh shit, newbie,” Boyle said, a nasty smile on his face, like I had just stepped into something.

  “No, he’s right,” Thompson rumbled, which dropped Boyle’s jaw open, snapped Jossom’s head around, and earned him an incredulous look from Rift. “And I know about asses,” he said, then leaned back and closed his eyes. I got the feeling Thompson didn’t talk much and that this outburst was unusual.

  Jossom looked at Rift and mouthed, “What the fuck?”

  Rift shrugged, then turned my way and tapped a spot on each of my shoulders. My armor made mechanical noises and I felt something rise up around the back of my head, then a transparent face guard slid down over my face. All around me, soldiers were activating helmets that segmented out of the back of their armor, reminding me of Rikki when he transforms from ball to delta-shaped terror. A heads-up display lit up inside my helmet, feeding me information on every soldier I looked at, direction, air temp, altitude, and a whole bunch of other information I didn’t really need.

  “Look sharp, people,” Yoshida said from the rear of the aircraft. Our forward flight was slowing. One of the tilt-rotor’s crew hit a button and the big ramp at the back opened. A high-pitched, fast thrum sounded suddenly from multiple points around us. Thompson held me back at the end of the queue that formed at Yoshida’s words. I found myself right next to one of the few windows on the aircraft and looked outside.

  Automatic e-mag guns on exterior pods of the tilt-rotor were firing streams of magnetically accelerated carbide bullets at what seemed like over a hundred assorted drones in building windows, on rooftops, the ground, and in the air. We were hovering downward, the pile of rubble an
d HVAC equipment that marked the Destroyer’s JTLV just becoming visible.

  “Come on. You’re with me,” Thompson rumbled. Ahead of us, the line of armored operators had already diminished to half, and another one jumped lightly out the back as the big Quad turned a tight circle.

  Boyle went out, then Jossom, who turned and gave me a snappy little mock salute as she dropped casually off the edge. She wasn’t on a rope; there was no parachute; she just jumped.

  The plane continued to turn and people continued to drop and then we were last, just us and the crew chief. Said chief hit another control and twin ropes shot down out of the upper aircraft hatch, forcibly ejected from what I could now see were launchers.

  “Grab a line and step off the ramp. You aren’t trained for jumping and your suit isn’t set for that. So we rappel. Your suit will control the descent,” Thompson said, grabbing a line and holding it out to me. I reached out to snag it with my left hand but was startled when my glove automatically clamped down on it without my direction or control. Somehow the suit recognized the cable on its own.

  “Step off now,” Thompson said, a determined and reluctant look in his eye. I did as he said without hesitation and saw his expression change to surprise. Then I was falling down the line. Well, descending down the line. It was actually slower than my epic elevator shaft adventure, my left fist opening and closing on its own to keep me at a steady speed.

  I had time to look up and see Thompson just a couple of meters above me, then looked down to see the street and the ring of armored combat soldiers who were shooting every drone in sight, my HUD showing me who each armored figure was and what model drones were trying to kill them. The ground rose up suddenly and I was landing, the suit automatically absorbing the impact by bending our legs. Much better than the elevator shaft.

  The whine and crack of supersonic e-mag rounds whipping out at ridiculous speeds and the lighter snap of flechettes coming back surrounded me.

  My gun was up and aiming but Yoshida’s soldiers were handling the attackers smoothly. Above and around us, Cranes and Wolves were poking their heads over roofs and window ledges to fire streams of hypersonic three, four, and five-centimeter-long wire flechettes. Most were getting hosed by the Quad guns and the troopers on the ground. But high speed wire was pinging off the ground all around us and occasionally off my armor.

  Four troopers, led by Estevez, were on the mound of rubble that was the JTLV, digging out the massive rooftop cable attachment points and connecting heavy-duty snap rings to them.

  Other troopers were moving in teams of two, one soldier firing while the other emplaced coffee-can-sized cylinders on the open street to either side of the JTLV.

  When the Gaia group announced responsibility for the Manhattan Attack, the United States moved to a war footing not seen since WWII.

  Even the 9-11 response was muted compared to this. Military enrollment shot through the roof and new weapons streamed out of government and defense contractor labs. The option of hiding out from US fury in mountainous tunnels went extinct along with the terrorists.

  The poster I had pointed to in the auditorium was a scene depicting a soldier emplacing the very same M-982 anti-tunnel, shaped-charge, plasma mines that Yoshida’s teams were laying out. They were nicknamed Mole Traps.

  I remember seeing a news story on them. The top of the cylinder has a readout that showed a ground radar scan of the earth below the mine. Tunnels were easy to pick out. Once you found one, you set the mine in place, hit the anchor button to fire four piton-tipped legs into the ground, and let it adjust itself.

  When next someone or something traversed the tunnel, boom, a jet of sun-hot plasma, along with cannon-force-accelerated stone and dirt, would cut across the entire tunnel. No more moles.

  Yoshida’s people were emplacing them in clusters over the subway and utility tunnels below the street.

  This was going too smoothly. I looked around at the buildings on either side. Then I looked back at the most obvious target, the Quad. A lot of the buildings were straight-sided, flat-walled edifices climbing into the sky. But some were stepped, like the difference between South American pyramids and Egyptian pyramids: the base wider than the next layer, which was wider than the one above it, and so on.

  Each stepped layer created flat, elevated sniper hides, perfect positions to shoot down on an enemy. But from down where we were, you couldn’t tell, and the Quad was now so low, it had no observation ability either. Plus, the big aircraft’s gun pods couldn’t elevate that far up.

  Thompson and I were on the south side of the street. I didn’t like a building on the north side that was set up like a big square wedding cake. Lots of shooting sites on that sucker.

  I patted Thompson on the arm, taking his attention from a constant scanning swivel. Pointing at the building, I said, “I don’t like that one. I want to get up there before any big nasty does.”

  “Major said to follow your gut,” he said. “Now follow me.”

  He slung the big Cerberus and jogged across the street, me on his heels. Right up to the building’s side and then he just started to jam his feet and hands into the material of the wall. Concrete hard siding just caved in like snow when his suit punched it. He climbed it like a ladder. He wasn’t much taller than me, but he was a lot bigger, so it was easy to step into the holes he made and follow him up the side.

  SCAR banging around on my back, I climbed as fast as I could. The suit helped, but his was helping him more. He quickly pulled away, reaching the first level at least twenty seconds before I did. My right hand just hit the edge of the roof when I heard the hard whining snarl of his 20mm e-mag barrel going off and as I stumbled to my feet, I saw a drone I’d never seen before. Recognized it instantly, but there’s never, to my knowledge, been a sighting of one in the Zone.

  Putin’s Sabre, an eight-legged walking rail gun that fired 30mm chunks of depleted uranium at speeds almost fast enough to leave the Earth’s gravitational field. A combat artillery drone that was reserved for real, open country warfare. Where the fuck had that thing been hiding for the last ten years?

  One round from one of those autonomous artillery units would swat the Quad from the sky like a mosquito. A second rail barrel caught my eye. There were two of them on the roof level above us.

  Thompson’s round hit the thing in the lower back end, spinning it sideways. The second one instantly scuttled backward, hiding from our view.

  “Shoot the rail gun or breach if you can,” I suggested. He did both, his next round tearing apart the rail barrel right where it met the chamber of the weapon.

  “We gotta get that other one—” I started to say but he just snorted and fired the grenade barrel. The big fat weapon stuttered like a jammed 3D printer. Four fat grenades lofted over the edge of the building, exploding so close together, it sounded like a one huge blast.

  I ducked down and crouched as chunks of drone and pieces of building rained down on us. The level above us, and the ones above that, looked suddenly unstable.

  “I’ll check the roof. You stay here,” he said, then ran and jumped, landing halfway to the top, arms and legs swarming so fast, I knew he had held back on the previous climb. Three seconds later, he was standing among the ruins of the Sabres.

  “Building clear,” he said over the suit comm.

  “Stay on overwatch,” Yoshida’s voice came instantly. “Ajaya, you come back down here. Use the built-in descender in your left arm vambrace.”