Zone War

by John Conroe

  I dropped down the ladder, which thankfully was only about six and a half feet long. Grabbing the guns, I dragged them and myself downstairs and to the lockers. All three went into one locker and I snapped the big padlock shut. No heavy caliber weapons in drone hands today… or claws?

  My right armed throbbed really painfully, but I had some use of it so I set the pain aside and picked up the special little AR-15. When I had found the AR six months ago in a police station gun room, an NYPD armored vest with mag pouches was sitting next to it. The name tag read A. Goldman on the vest and I wondered if Officer Goldman had lived or died on Drone Night. Maybe I’d have my AI do a search when I got out. If I got out.

  The vest was the kind called a plate carrier. It wasn’t ballistic armor itself, but it held big armor plates on the front and back, the sort that can stop rifle bullets. Magazine pouches held six standard mags; but these could only hold ten of the special rounds rather than the normal thirty. That’s because each was twice as big as a 5.56 mm round, being as they were .458 SOCOM rounds.

  I researched the caliber after I found it. The idea was to pack as much power into a cartridge that could fit and run through a standard AR with a new barrel, chamber, and bolt assembly. This round was probably close to that. Basically the same as an old Wild West .45-70 buffalo round, moderned up for the twenty-first century. Over a metric ton of energy at the muzzle. Big heavy bullets that could bulldoze through armor and solid cover with ease. Sounds like drone medicine to me.

  I struggled into the vest, ignoring the sounds of the access hatch getting yanked and tugged on. Then I slung the shotgun bandoleer over my shoulder. The shotgun itself went over the left shoulder while the AR was kept in my arms.

  Gunshots sounded up on the roof, then the whine of flechettes. Rikki was engaging the Wolf. I went back upstairs, pointed the muzzle of the rifle at the hatch, and yelled, “Back off, Rikki. Fire in the hole.”

  The gunfire stopped and after a moment, so did the flechettes. The Wolf, who didn’t know what my words meant, went back to worrying the hatch. Right up until I fired a round through the metal hatch and through the drone’s metal head. A loud metallic thump followed the echoing boom of the shot. Wolf down. Time to go.

  Chapter 25

  It looked like a freakin’ drone reunion outside. Peeking out a window in the Zone is a great way to get a laser through the skull, as almost every drone is programmed to look for exactly that kind of behavior from humans.

  Instead, I used a makeup compact I found in the receptionist’s desk. Don’t know what happened to its owner, but the building was remarkably free of skeletons, so I had hopes she’d made it out okay.

  Keeping to the shadows prevented flashes of light that would bring the same deadly response as poking my face up against the glass, but it was frustrating trying to get a full picture of what was happening. I’d already mirrored Pier 11 and my storage container, but the Johnson LAV was long gone. That’s what we’d agreed upon. If and when things got dicey, they’d go their way and I’d go mine.

  Except, mine looked full of drones and theirs looked pretty empty. Scoping around with the mirror eventually found the reason why. Clinging to the side of a building across the street was a seven-legged horror with a cracked ocular lens. A Spider… apparently my Spider. Like it wanted payback or something.

  At least that’s how my primitive, superstitious side wanted to look at it. Logic told me that the Spider had simply identified me as a bigger problem that might be easier to kill than an armored LAV. So easy, in fact, that I wondered why the assembled drones hadn’t simply stormed the building already. A fast-moving, swooping shadow gave me the most likely answer.

  Rikki was distracting them. But probably not for long. Time to get to work. Staying back in the shadows, I built a little shooter’s hide. The reception counter gave me a structure. Desks and shelves shoved in front of it gave me thicker cover. A stool behind gave me a seat and I laid the .458 on top of the counter, looking through the Trijicon optic. Using a combination of fiber optics and tritium illumination, the Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight didn’t generate any electromagnetic signature for dronedom to pick up on.

  I put the reticle on my greatest immediate danger, which, believe it or not wasn’t the Spider CThree. It also wasn’t the two close combat Tigers or the half-dozen Wolves milling about. It was the Raptor UAVs flying around with their line-of-sight laser weapons and machine reflexes. There were at least three of them, maybe four. Hard to tell, what with all the zooming about as they tried to shoot my Berkut.

  One hovered in place for an extra long moment and I didn’t hesitate. The SOCOM boomed and the Raptor was snatched from the sky like it was tied to a jet-powered getaway car.

  Of course, the gun blast and the blown-out office window meant my element of surprise was gone. I switched targets to the Spider, but it was gone. Jamming the sight back down on the Tigers revealed both of them bounding at me in full, horrible glory. I put the reticle on the lead one and stroked the trigger, absorbing the recoil, then twisting and firing at its companion.

  Tigers weigh over twice what I do. No regular rifle round, even as powerful as the .458, was going to physically stop them in mid-bound. But the cop whose rifle I had appropriated, had packed all his magazines with a carbide core bullet designed for extreme penetration. Actually, I think the bullet itself was made for .458 caliber elephant guns, to shoot, you know, elephants. Not much call for that these days, at least not here in New York. Maybe out West in that Mammoth Park where they had lab-grown prehistoric pachyderms that might break out and go rogue, but otherwise no. But the product name of the ammo said exactly that, right on the ammo box. Extreme penetrators. They lived up to their billing.

  The first round punched through the shoulder armor of the lead Tiger, right about where the killing bot’s stabilizing gyro was. It crashed and sprawled, rolling up into a spastic, twitching mess of lethal legs and head.

  The second Tiger caught the heavy bullet right in the head, an admittedly less damaging target, but Tigers, like Wolves, use their optic bands to gather essential environmental information just like flesh-and-blood tigers do. Loss of its vision caused it to veer slightly to one side, which gave me enough time and a decent-enough sight picture to put round three through its chest and deep into the ultracapacitor stored there. A new Tiger, fresh off the assembly line, would have been working on battery power. After ten years, most drones had cycled their batteries through too many recharges for them to be of use. Nowadays, most of the drones depended on their capacitors to store each day’s electricity from solar chargers. My bullet ruined that big storage cell and the resulting flash of man-made lightning almost blinded me. It definitely ruined the Tiger’s day.

  A metal face filled the window as a Wolf hit the opening. I shot it out of the window frame with the SOCOM and then exchanged the rifle for the shorty shotgun. Two Wolves hit the side-by-side windows to the right of the first. Hardened buckshot might not be an instant kill, but two fast shots of it blasted the Wolves clean out of sight.

  More drones were arriving by the second: Wolves, Leopards, Cranes on the street, Crabs on the buildings, and a whole swirling flock of hovering UAVs. I whistled, once, loud. A second went by, then another. Suddenly, Rikki came shooting in through the broken window, a couple smaller, slower aerial units right on his tail feathers. Buckshot does even better on flying drones, wreaks absolute hell with rotors and stuff.

  The smoke from my three fast shots cleared as I stuffed more shells into the shotgun, the broken UAVs twitching on the ground. Reloaded with fresh ammo, I slung the shotgun behind my back and pulled the SOCOM AR to my shoulder. There had to be thirty ground units out on the road and unless I missed my guess, that had to be getting close to the right number. At least I hoped it was. My life depended right now on just how much provocation and temptation old Uncle Sam could take.

  I lined up the ACOG on a Leopard, shot it in the chest, then shot a Crane right off its feet. The tall, skinny
bipedal units are just a flechette gun on a metal neck with a small body and two long legs. Three more just like it came out of the streets feeding into FDR Drive.

  There were still thousands of drones in the Zone, but you never see them in huge numbers and clusters, especially out in the open like this. The reason was the US Air Force.

  “Incoming Renders,” Rikki announced. Yup, the right number was here.

  A sharp sonic whistle started from far away, quickly becoming very loud. On the street, drones turned to run. Me, I chose to duck behind the counter and curl into a tight ball. Rikki joined me, both behind the counter and in choosing a ball shape.

  Light flashed as I squeezed both eyelids tightly shut, hands over my ears as an angel roared and the ground bounced me like a basketball. The shockwave was massive, the blast overwhelming in sound and violence. Eventually it ended.

  I was covered in debris and papers, bits of glass, and small pieces of particle board. Rikki had some junk on him too. I brushed us both off and stood up. The pointy head of a Crane drone was jammed into the wall above us.

  Beyond the counter, the whole front of the terminal building was mostly gone. The street was blackened and smoking. Not a single drone was in sight. At least not a whole drone. Bits and pieces were everywhere. Stepping around the counter and to the wide open front, I glanced up at the sky. The only thing flying was a Render circling back through for a first glance at the damage. I stepped out and gave it a wave. Its big wings rocked side to side, then it was gone.

  That had to be the biggest single kill strike by the Air Force in the last ten years. Between aerial and ground units, at minimum fifty drones had suddenly ceased to exist. Not sure what ordinance the Render had dropped, but it had been massively effective.

  “Alright Rikki?”

  “Systems nominal. No damage sustained.”

  “Let’s get hoofing it,” I said, turning left toward the Battery. The Johnson rig had likely exited via the Brooklyn Bridge. The building the Spider had been on (which was now almost completely windowless) was more in that direction. Never saw which way it ran, but it seemed likely it went north, so I figured south would be best. Wall Street was that way and my intention was to swing through on my way out and look for any sign of the ghost girl. Nothing to it but to do it.

  Chapter 26

  An hour later found me stuck inside another building. This one was at 11 Wall Street and used to be known as the New York Stock Exchange. My guess had been horribly wrong. I ended up going in exactly the same direction that the Spider had gone. I know that because it was now sitting right outside the Exchange, along with a small pack of Wolves, a Leopard, and a horde of fliers.

  I did do one thing right. Before I left the helipad terminal, I went back up on the roof to retrieve the ammo cans. No weapons and no ammo left behind, lest it be used against you or others. The unwritten rule of Zone Salvage.

  While I was up there, I spotted the dead Berkut and grabbed it. Spare parts for Rikki. But Rikki had other ideas. As soon as I brought it down the ladder, he descended upon it and extruded a connection arm. Plugged right into the dead drone.

  “Ajaya suggested identity swap successful. Rikki Tikki Tavi is now Berkut Unit A7-134. Unit reported active. Old identity, A9-125, reported terminated. Probability of assumed identity holding up to handshake interrogation is 87 percent.”

  Suggested identity swap? Sure, we can go with that. Not that I thought it would be a good idea to have backup flight motors or anything. Of course I thought Rikki could change electronic identities with the dead flyer and plug back into the network… I mean, I’m brilliant, right? At least my drone thinks so.

  So, sitting in the lobby of the Exchange, using a dental mirror from my pack to look out the window, I can stare at the Spider and not worry that it will detect Rikki and subvert him or attack us or what have you.

  Instead, the Spider had already queried Rikki’s sensors to ensure the building was empty of humans, particularly one pesky human sniper. In fact, Rikki reported that the Spider specifically was looking for a human named Ajaya Gurung, matching my description, which it, according to my drone, obtained from the Internet.

  “Tell me again what image it conveyed?” I whispered.

  “Time mark 3.21 of Zone War Interview with Cade Kallow, dated—”

  “It watched that damned TV show?” I interrupted.

  “Correct.”

  “Probability of other drones entering this building within the next two hours.”

  “Estimated at seventeen percent chance.”

  Good odds. I could live with that. Actually, I had to. That damned Spider was hunkered down, apparently directing the search for me.

  “CThree unit designated Lotus is redirecting assets from FDR Drive toward 55 Broadway as a previously known location for target.”

  “Its name is Lotus?”

  “Correct.”

  “What are the other two named?”

  “Peony and Plum Blossom.”

  “The Chinese military named their deadliest drones after flowers?”

  “Unknown. CThree units in Zone are so designated.”

  Must be some symbolic shit going on there. Maybe flowers are big in China. Not my thing.

  “Well, they’re not going to find me on Broadway.”

  “Aerial units have found equipment left in lobby. Contents of transport pack are consistent with operational methodology of target suspect. UGV Wolf unit dispatched to lowest levels of building to seek more data.”

  The bastards found my pack, the part I left behind before climbing all those frigging stairs to get that damned Rocon laptop computer. I didn’t like that. Nevermind that I wasn’t using it and hadn’t been near it in at least a week. That level of forensic detection bothered me.

  Here I was, less than half a kilometer from the Battery Park exit, and I was trapped by a deadly Chinese flower that knew my name and was now gathering information like some international assassin… or like those overly muscled killer robots in that old Terminator franchise. Actually, just like that movie.

  Of course I’d seen all of them. Astrid and I watched them all one winter in sixth grade. They were funny. Who the hell would try to build the ultimate killing machine and pattern it after a human being?

  Any of the machines out on the street was a more efficient design than a cybernetic copy of an Austrian bodybuilder. Four-legged machines were so much more stable than a bipedal design.

  But it was the searching and researching that reminded me of the movie. Drone night was indiscriminate slaughter… horrifying, but not personal. The drones killed everyone and anyone, even their own programmers, at least those on the ship.

  This was personal… Lotus knew my name. Lotus was targeting me specifically. I shuddered involuntarily. Then I shook it off. So be it. Hunt me all you want, here in the Zone. Once I was out, I was safe. It made entering the Zone more daunting, but I could deal. I had Rikki and he was back in the drone net, listening from within. Like every action movie ever, where the hero, who’s being hunted, gets a radio from one of the bad guys and then monitors their every move. Rikki was my radio… one with a gun of his own. So we’d keep moving, first through the Exchange, then out onto the streets beyond. Make it look like Rikki was sweeping first the building and then other areas where me, the hunted human, might be hiding.

  I turned and moved deeper into the building, Rikki hovering along at my shoulder. We found the trading floor, empty and clean, as it had closed on the afternoon of Drone Night and never reopened. Smaller than it looked in the old news clips and photos. Certainly a lot less messy. All my trips into the Zone and this was my first into the Exchange. Not sure why. Maybe because the damage done to Wall Street and the whole US economy—hell, the whole world’s economy—was so great that it left a scar on America’s psyche second only to the actual loss of life. We circled the room, then headed toward the area that I think used to be called the Ramp. The IT area of the Exchange that fueled the massive exchange. I
read once that it had been the largest exchange in the world by a massive measure—the capitalizations of its traded companies valued at over twenty-five trillion dollars at the time of Drone Night.