Zone War

by John Conroe

I was still right on the edge of the building and at his words, a targeting reticle appeared in my HUD. The red dot inside a green circle swung down and locked onto the roof in front of me. On the level above me, Thompson held out his left arm, pointed down.

  I copied him and as soon as my palm was pointed at the same spot as the reticle, I felt a vibration and a line so thin, it was like fishing line shot out of my forearm, blasting deep into the roof.

  “It will hold. It would hold you, me, and two others all day long,” Thompson said, still watching me in between his visual sweeps.

  I backed up, the line feeding out automatically, then put my heels on the edge.

  “Descend,” a voice said in my ear.

  With a mental shrug, I leaned back and the damned thing slowly powered out enough super strong cable to let me swing perpendicular to the wall, feet standing on the side of the building.

  “On belay,” the suit AI said.

  “On rappel,” came my automatic reply. Then I bent my legs into a crouch and jumped off. The suit automatically fed out just enough line that I made a perfect bound down the side of the wall. Seven more jumps and I was on the ground. The line up top somehow released and zipped back into my forearm like an automatic dog leash.

  “Cool,” I said. Then the street mines went off in successive waves and all hell broke loose.

  Chapter 14

  Both sections of street on either side of us disappeared in a cloud of debris and superheated gases. When it began to clear, I could see the road surface had collapsed into huge manmade sinkholes. A sound overhead brought my attention upward, the world around me falling into shade, as if a storm cloud had rolled in.

  Hundreds of aerial drones filled the sky, all of them coming straight for us. The Spider was triggering its trap.

  “Grenades,” Yoshida’s voice said in my ears and ten arms flexed almost simultaneously. Round objects shot upward at inhuman speeds, the grenades thrown harder and higher than any pitcher could ever hope to match.

  They went off like fireworks, staggered across the sky, the concussions pounding my suit with physical force.

  Then it began to rain—bits and pieces of metal, carbon fiber, and plastic. Flechettes bounced off my armor and my facemask darkened on its own.

  I found myself looking upward through the weapon sight on my SCAR, and when the first intact drone appeared, my gun fired, almost by itself. Then I acquired another target, and another.

  Three Raptors came in a cluster. I shot two. The third exploded on its own, the bottom blasting out like it had been shot from above.

  A shadow dropped to the earth, a second UAV exploding as the delta shape shot past.

  “Rikki,” I said before I realized my words were more likely heard by the soldiers than by my drone. I was still shooting drones out of the air, the mental counter in my head telling me my magazine was half gone.

  But Rikki already knew where I was, pulling up out of his dive so hard and fast that anything organic would have been crushed by the g-forces. “Ajaya, I am your six,” sounded in my ear. I felt him hovering behind me.

  Above us, I spotted something new: Hairspray units, a dozen or more, coming overhead. Cylindrical, just like the cans of hairspray or bug spray they were nicknamed after, with a single big rotor on top, they were the bomber units of the Zone. Inside each canister were ten to twelve golf-ball-sized bombs, each with enough power to completely destroy a car. Suddenly I had a new target. I missed my first two shots, but my third resulted in a spectacular explosion that immediately triggered five more just like it. The shock waves drove even the armored soldiers to the ground, but it really cleared most of the air for a moment. Then another wave of UAVs came over the rooftops.

  I spun, slowly, counterclockwise, shooting drones as fast as I could acquire them in my sights. Behind me, the flat boom of Rikki’s 9mm beat a counterpoint to my firing. Part of me was aware of the sharp crack of M-45 e-mag rounds breaking the sound barrier, the occasional Hairspray bomb going off, and my faceplate showing red figures dancing all around me, but I ignored them. I was in my zone. My shooting zone, the space in my head and awareness where the world is simply targets and firing solutions to be solved.

  My magazine went empty exactly as my internal count reached zero, my left hand pulling a fresh mag while my right thumb dumped the empty from the rifle.

  “Rounds dropping to six, five, four, three, two, one,” Rikki’s voice said, my left hand grabbing one of his three ammo packs and tossing it up into the air behind me. I didn’t look, couldn’t spare a glance, but I knew the agile Berkut would execute an incredible aeronautic spin, flip, or twist to eject his empty ammunition carousel while snagging the full one in midflight.

  A plastic box-like object bounced off the ground by my feet, confirming his actions.

  “UAV count down to three. Incoming Wolf at your four.”

  I spun right, toward my four o’clock, and put three thirty caliber rounds into the head and neck of the Wolf UGV that was bounding my way. Into an ocular lens, the open-mouth mandible, and the flex steel mesh neck that couldn’t stop rifle rounds. Three flat reports above and behind me announced the demise of the UAVs.

  “Tigers approaching soldiers K. Jossom and B. Boyle at the seven.”

  I twisted at the waist and acquired the lead Tiger of the pair that was leaping in thirty-meter bounds. The knowledge of the weak points in its side armor almost screamed in my mind as my reticle found each, rifle swing through led by gut estimation, as each trigger press released a copper and steel missile. Three out of five shots found the mechanical killer, even as my feet heel-and-toed me closer to the targeted pair of armored operators.

  The second Tiger was too fast to acquire until it crashed into Boyle, knocking him to the ground, his own fall pushing his partner off stride and into a stumble. The Tiger’s side blades snapped out and down to cut into the prone human as hooked claws ripped at laminate armor.

  I crouched, only five meters away, shooting into its heavily armored side, trusting that the range was so short, my bullets would penetrate.

  Jossom was still rolling to her feet as my gun clicked empty. I dropped the gun on its sling, grabbed the kukri in my suit glove, and smashed it down into the mesh neck of the robot.

  I might not have been dialed up to full armored combat power, but there was definitely something extra in the swing, the hardened tool-steel blade shearing through the steel chain link neck armor and through the jointed neck axle. The toothy head fell to one side, my booted foot kicked it over, and then K. Jossom fired a hypersonic carbide M-45 round through the length of its body, effectively spalling the internals through and out the tubular body of the bot.

  Boyle sat up, his armor slashed through with rents that showed the black of his silks. But no blood. He limped, the synthetic muscles of his left leg slashed completely through in several places.

  “Pull it in,” Yoshida said in my ear, sounding like he was just a meter away. “Our ride is leaving.”

  The Quad had cables linked to all four corners of the JTLV and was pulling it out of the debris and rubble. Yoshida’s operators were rising up on more ropes at the open back of the giant tilt-rotor, four at a time.

  We moved into line and when the time came, I copied Jossom and Boyle, reaching up to grab a cable with my left hand, the glove automatically locking down with a vise-like grip. Then we were lifted into the air, Rikki in ball form hovering up in front of us, gun pointed outward.

  “Bring it with you, Ajaya,” Yoshida ordered. I would have ignored him and sent Rikki away but I feared his double agent drone cover was now completely blown. I had no doubt that a Spider CThree had been directing that trap and Rikki would now be marked.

  “Stay with me, Rikki.” He hovered backward until he was almost against my armored chest and I grabbed him with my right arm.

  Then we were aboard the Quad and underway.

  Chapter 15

  Rikki sat at my feet, ammo carousel open and empty, my own SCAR n
ow in the care of Estevez. Yoshida sat across from me, staring at us both. He wasn’t the only one.

  “Did you see that freaking thing?” Rift asked Thompson.

  “I saw them both. Back to back. It was a thing of beauty,” the big sergeant answered.

  “You programmed all that?” Yoshida asked after a quick glance at Thompson and Rift.

  “No,” I answered. “That was… new. But we work together all the time, and like all the drones, Rikki learns and adapts on his own. We’ve been in gunfights with other drones before, just not so many at once.”

  “Rikki?” Jossom asked. She had been staring at us a lot.

  “Rikki Tikki Tavi. Rudyard Kipling?” I clarified.

  “The mongoose that killed the cobra,” Estevez said, snapping his fingers. “I always liked that story.”

  “But it’s a Death Eagle, not a ground bot?” Rift asked.

  I shrugged. “More about personality than looks.”

  “Personality? Drones?” Jossom, whose first name I had learned was Kayla, asked.

  “Oh they all got ‘em. Learning machines, remember? No two have exactly the same experiences, and thus they learn to be different. Subtle stuff among the less sophisticated, but pretty pronounced with the high-level ones.”

  “And the Berkut is the highest of the UAVs,” Yoshida said, nodding as he thought about it.

  “Hey, I know that sticker. That’s Astrid Johnson from Team Johnson,” Boyle said suddenly, pointing at Rikki’s nose cone. He’d been pretty quiet, but like his partner, his eyes hadn’t left us.

  “What?” Jossom said, leaning close. “Damned if it isn’t.” She wolf whistled and I came to the sudden understanding that she appreciated the sticker as much as any of the straight guys did.

  “Ajaya’s known Astrid since you were what? Twelve?” Yoshida asked.

  “Ten,” I admitted.

  “She know you got her on your bird?” Rift asked, eyebrow up.

  “How could she? No one but me has ever seen Rikki till now,” I said.

  “Got a thing for the celebrity, huh?” Rift asked, a knowing grin on her face.

  Jossom snorted. We all looked her way. “She goes out with movie stars and football players,” she said, dismissing the idea.

  “Big deal, Kayla. He saved her ass and most of her whole family. And they already know each other,” Boyle said, Rift nodding in agreement to his words.

  “Just friends,” I said. “Our families don’t exactly see eye to eye anymore,” I said.

  “They see things pretty damn quick when you’re pounding AP rounds into the robots that are killing them,” Rift said.

  “Major, both men are still alive. At least one is concussed, likely the other as well. Also a bit dehydrated, but other than that, they should be fine,” a voice said from speakers in our shoulders. Soldiers riding on the JTLV must have gotten inside.

  “Thank you, Lieutenant. We should be setting you all down within approximately seven minutes. We’ll disconnect from this end, so stay buttoned up till everything settles.”

  “Roger that, sir.”

  “Why?” I asked Yoshida.

  He raised both eyebrows, unclear on my question.

  “Why did Zone Defense send you all in? They’ve never rescued a team before. And why not go in and fight the drones in armor all the time?” I asked.

  “Armor is new. This generation is the best so far but it has limitations,” he said, waving an arm at the power cord that was plugged into his suit. We all had them, it being the first thing the special operators had all done as soon as we got settled. Rift had plugged mine in for me, like old-fashioned phone charger cords.

  “Until our power constraints are solved, we must limit the duration of our engagements. These suits are also, as I believe you know, enormously expensive. I had to get Pentagon-level approval just to put you in that training suit. Producing enough suits to outfit even a company-sized element will rock a few budgets. We need other methods, cost-effective methods. Like, say… partnered drones that fight alongside our operators,” he said, glancing meaningfully at Rikki.

  “So build them,” I said. “We gotta have stuff more advanced than ten-year-old Russian designs.”

  “Oh, we do. By specs, they beat the pants off that thing, but in real-life action? Well, I’ve never seen anything like that reload maneuver that your Berkut did.”

  “That has more to do with his software.”

  “Please. We already have the original software developers in Russia reviewing the footage of the fight we were just in and they’re baffled.”

  “Well of course,” I said. “His software probably looks almost nothing like it started out. He rewrote it as he went. Plus I added different parameters a couple of times. Then I worked with him.”

  “Worked with it?” Rift asked, earning herself a raised eyebrow from Yoshida. “Sorry, Major.”

  “Yeah. I show Rikki what I want to accomplish and let him figure out ways to do some of it. I don’t know shit about aeronautics, but he does. So that reload maneuver was something we developed through practice, but with him figuring out how to use his own systems and abilities to do it.”

  Yoshida frowned. “You’re talking neural net type stuff. Nobody has that yet, certainly not ten-year-old drones.”

  I shrugged.

  “We’ll know more after we reverse engineer yours,” he said, very matter-of-fact.

  “What?” I asked, almost coming out of my seat. Thompson, Rift, and Estevez all tensed. The major did not. He just smiled. I didn’t find it a comforting smile.

  “Did you really expect that we would allow you to keep a functioning military drone?” he said. “Of course, we will pay you the bounty on it.”

  That motherfucker. That’s exactly what I thought. Rikki was mine, by right of salvage.

  “Salvage law only extends to non-military equipment,” he said, reading my face.

  “Non-military, or non-US military? Zone War uses all kinds of military stuff,” I argued.

  He just smiled a thin-lipped smile and shook his head.

  “So let me get this straight. You’re going to take Rikki Tikki Tavi and destroy him with no regard for his self-preservation?” I asked.

  He frowned at my words, glancing quickly down at my drone. The Berkut still just sat there. Of course, the major couldn’t feel the thrum of power as Rikki came online, not like I could—it was my legs touching the Berkut. Rikki wakes up when I say his full name. Then he listens for commands. His ability to filter out extraneous words is pretty good.

  “Major, we are putting the JTLV down now,” a voice, presumably the pilot’s, said over our suit communicators.

  At the rear of the Quad, the crew chief was opening the big hatch in preparation for something as the aircraft dropped lower. The major spun around to see the heavy steel ramp already opened to a half meter. “Close that hatch!” he yelled.

  Too late. Rikki shot off the floor, straight across the compartment, and out the hatch before the chief could even turn to look at Yoshida.

  Many sets of stunned eyes looked at me, then out the hatch, then at the major. His eyes, however, were locked on me and I felt like if I moved, he’d kill me.

  “Get it back. Now!”

  “He’s operating on self-preservation mode. You’ve been identified as a threat. He will evade and escape. Nothing I can do will bring him back.”