Zone War

by John Conroe

  She stopped at the edge of the metal framework, looking at her watch intently.

  I glanced at Rikki, who hovered two feet to my right and about four feet off the ground.

  “Units present?” I asked him.

  “None,” he said, as she said, “None,” at exactly the same time.

  “Then why are we waiting?”

  “ A Google satellite is passing over right now. They tap it for Zone images.”

  “Who does?”

  She ignored the question, nodding at whatever time she now saw and heading across the street, ducking under the next layer of construction framework.

  “So you can sense drones in the network?” I asked.

  She gave me a quick, sour glance as if the answer was patently obvious. Which, in hindsight, it kinda was. She just told me that her mom had worked on the Spiders. She told me she could redirect drones. And she had known there was no drone activity at the same time as Rikki. Ergo—yes, she could sense them. Maybe I should just keep my mouth shut for the moment and try to preserve some illusion of intelligence.

  Across the street, we entered the ground-level door of the massive building and immediately headed into the stairwell. She led me down into the basement and through two more doors. Big panels of wire mesh fencing lay down across the floor, with panels on both walls and even the ceiling forming a short, two-meter tunnel of metal. Heavy wires led off into the walls ahead of us. Nope, that wasn’t standard building code for New York. Somebody had built a trap.

  “How do you know it’s safe?”

  She pointed at a small green plastic light on the right wall. It was dark. Clever to use a normal all-clear signal as a danger telltale.

  “Drones would sense the power if it was on. So when it’s armed, there is just a very minimal charge flowing through it. But it triggers if anything comes near the fencing. You know… passive sensing like a high security fence at a military base. Soon as it senses any object, it turns up the juice and fries it.”

  On the other side of the mesh tunnel, we came to a heavy steel fire door that looked like someone had thoroughly reinforced it with more steel. The plates were bolted on, not welded. She walked to the left side of the door and pulled on the plastic switch plate. It opened, revealing an empty space bereft of a single wire. She reached her finger in and did something, which resulted in a clicking sound at the door itself. Her right hand gave the door a pull and it opened right up. Some kind of mechanical latch.

  The other side of the door was a mini-wall of concrete blocks, cemented together, reaching a third of a meter off the floor. We had to step over it and our feet landed on a heavy cement backer board that had a cable running from its far end up to over the doorway above us. I paused to look at it, realizing that the room was lit with electric lights, twelve-volt version by the look of the string of them suspended overhead.

  “Secondary defense. To give us more time. Cable is attached to a stretched garage door spring. Triggering it will yank the panels up into place against the cinder block frame I made around the door, and then that wooden beam drops down behind it, wedging it against the blocks,” she said.

  The concrete block wall was actually a frame all up both sides of the door. The top was headed with a heavy piece of steel that I wondered how she’d lifted. Against the inside wall, about a meter up, was a square beam of wood, a four by four, whose end had a bolt through it, and the top was held from falling by a rope. So the cement panels (and I now saw there were two of them together) would cover the block frame opening and then the four-by-four would drop into brackets.

  “It won’t hold for long, but it will buy us some time,” a new voice said.

  I turned and found myself looking at an older version of Harper, rolling up to us in a wheelchair. Same brown, upward tilted eyes, same dark hair, but streaked with gray and thinning to the point of exposing some of her scalp. All of her exposed skin was covered in blotchy patches of thick, hardened tissue.

  “I’m Dr. Theodora Wilks.”

  I only paused for a heartbeat, then stepped forward with a hand out, holding the package of prescription drugs. “Nice to meet you, ma’am. I’m Ajaya Gurung.”

  “Of course you are. Not like you haven’t been plastered all over the Internet these past few weeks. We have access to that, you know? What’s that?” she asked, not making any move to reach for the drugs.

  Harper stepped up and took the package from me.

  “Fresh methotrexate, Mother,” she said, holding the package up for her mother to read. “High dosage, too.”

  “Ah, Harper told you about the systemic scleroderma,” Dr. Wilks said.

  “No, Mother. He asked if he could bring us anything… I told him this,” Harper said. “Didn’t think he’d actually do it.”

  “Will it help? The medicine? Will it help your scleroderma?” I asked.

  “It’s a Band-Aid. Helps with the skin tightening, but there is no cure for what I have. I’m hardening from the inside out,” she said, a fierce light in her eyes. “It’s part of the reason we stay in here. Too hard to move me.”

  “We could get you out, ma’am. Harper and me. Or I could maybe arrange a lift in an LAV?”

  She shook her head. “I can’t move fast enough to evade my fate either outside or here.” She waved a hand around at the room and I noticed it was decorated in a glitzy, gaudy manner. Red velvet and lots of gold paint, but all faded like it was that way from before the Zone. Like a high-class brothel.

  “What does that mean, ma’am? Harper mentioned a them. Who would be out to get you?” I asked, putting the question of the garish room’s purpose out of my mind.

  “The people who caused all this,” she said, her right hand moving slightly off the arm of the chair in what might have been a wave.

  “The Gaia Group? They’re all dead,” I said.

  She gave me a tight little smirk of a smile. “That old obfuscation? Garbage, rubbish, misdirection. A bunch of overzealous fanatics who got caught up in bigger plots.”

  I couldn’t stop the frown that I felt form on my face. “You’re saying the Gaia Group didn’t release the drones?”

  “Oh, they did. At least, a small faction of them did. But the bulk of the group had no part in it. They didn’t have anywhere near the funding to purchase state-of-the-art autonomous combat units,” she said. “And certainly not twenty-five thousand of them. Pull up a seat, young warrior, and listen to the truth of the matter.”

  I looked around for a stool or something, but Harper was already bringing over a couple of folding chairs. I sat down and Rikki hovered over and latched onto my shoulder, pausing his fans to conserve power.

  Dr. Wilks’ eyes zeroed in on him and she studied the Berkut with fierce focus. “An excellent choice for a guard dog. The Russians achieved a subtle blend of efficiency and art when they designed it. Most of their other stuff was meh. But the Berkut is surprisingly elegant. I would love to have you tell me about how and what you did to bring it into the light, so to speak. But there isn’t time. Where was I?” she asked Harper.

  “About to reveal the real people behind Drone Night,” her daughter said.

  “Right. So, Ajaya, I worked here on Wall Street, employed by the New York Stock Exchange. I’m an expert on machine learning and AI systems, and my job was to keep the Exchange up with the latest changes and advances in the field. Several of the Exchange members approached me after I had been here for several years. They had a side venture involving drone technology and offered me a ridiculous amount of money if I could upgrade four Chinese units.”

  “The Spider CThrees,” I said.

  “Yes, you know this part already,” she said with a frown at her daughter. Harpers only shrugged, busy getting a glass of water and some of the new pills ready.

  “It was a challenge, you see. Mostly theoretical, but they gave me the four units to work on, and I did. Harmless venture, with limitless applications, plus, you know, the money. Single mom with an eight-year-old daughter l
iving in the expensive Big Apple. Who wouldn’t? Especially if you’d just been diagnosed with terminal systemic scleroderma.”

  “You had to provide for your daughter.”

  “Yes, and you can’t really buy life insurance after you get that kind of diagnosis. So I needed to build assets quickly.”

  “You improved the Spiders beyond original specifications?”

  “Oh, Ajaya, I improved them beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. I’m the one who named them and built their neural nets.”

  “You named them for Chinese flowers?”

  Her eyes widened. “You know their names?” Her eyes flicked to Rikki. “Ah, but your double agent there would have known them, wouldn’t it?”

  “It’s how they designate themselves. I’ve only had run-ins with Lotus, but the other two are out there.”

  “Oh yes they are, and nasty pieces of work, like Lotus is. Anyway, I had all but finished the work, with just a bit to go when my employers came and demanded the drones. I needed more time. They wouldn’t hear of it. I knew they were businessmen; I didn’t know they were killers too. We argued, one of their goons hit me with a baton and knocked me out. Harper was here that day, her babysitter sick. She was playing in my office and they didn’t know. I shudder to think how differently things could have gone if they had found her. Anyway, when I woke up, Harper was crying and trying to rouse me. I cleaned up the head wound and we almost left but, at the last minute, I decided to check the news for maybe some grand announcement about new technology or something. Imagine my surprise when I heard that Manhattan was under attack by drones.”

  “Why? And who were they?”

  “I’ll answer the second first. They were a mixture of the wealthy elite. Many Americans, but I think quite a few from all over the world. The point-one percent. Mega rich who wanted to be even richer.”

  “They shorted the market?” I guessed.

  “They did. Society was having a lot of conversations at the time about income and wealth inequality. Socialists were making inroads on the Democrat side, mostly by talking about redistributing wealth, taxing the rich, breaking up the mega-techs, even bringing up the idea of government seizure of the biggest companies. Fringe groups popped up, talking about revolting against the new world order. So this group decided to pop the pimple themselves, knock the markets into the dirt, making money all the way down, then buying back in at the bottom.”

  “But weren’t they already at the top? Why go through all that and kill hundreds of thousands of people?”

  “This group was near the top, but not quite at the top. And they had a certain set of shared beliefs, followed a particular manifesto. Many had been in politics, many near the top of Fortune 500 companies, some in the military, and others in powerful positions in the intelligence arm of the government. They disagreed with the folks at the very top, were tired of waiting for their turn to take over. They hated the tech billionaires, although many of them had ridden the coattails of the Bezos, Jobs, and Zuckerbergs to gain their own wealth and power. At the time, I thought they were all just greedy, but over the last ten years, I’ve gotten more figured out. They saw their own core members as people vital to the continuation of their countries, and conversely saw many of their peers as bloated ticks sucking the lifeblood of the world. Disliked most immigrants and almost all Wall Street fat cats equally. So they wanted to do some redistributing of their own. Mostly to themselves, but also to the poor. Knock the ultra rich power center of America’s biggest city on its ass, create a Super Recession, give the world a common enemy to band against, restructure an ailing political system that was too easy for outside forces to manipulate. Then they would step forward with ideas that had been thought out years in advance, with wealth preserved and created when the markets fell. Put themselves at the top.”

  “They created the Universal Basic Income,” I guessed.

  “Exactly. Paid for by the extra corporate tax on any company over five hundred billion dollars in market capitalization.”

  “And they would kill you?”

  “In a New York second. They think I’m dead, knocked out and left for Drone Night to finish off. But I programmed those Spiders. I had backdoor access. I kept them away from this area long enough for us to create shelters, gather supplies, and fortify our positions. I had been working on cybernetic interface devices on my own time for years. With my condition, I needed a way for us, but mostly Harper, to be safe in the Zone. She’s been wearing successive versions of that prosthesis for the last ten years.”

  “So the entire Attack was a false flag event, constructed by the people who should have prevented it. Wait, you said that you had backdoor codes to the Spiders? You don’t anymore?”

  “My adopted offspring are far too advanced to be put off by a little trick of coding. They self-corrected it within the first month. I only used it a couple of times, and even then I was ultra careful to avoid being blatant about it. Just some very, very subtle suggestions to stay away from the Exchange. They still found the weak spot and eliminated it. Luckily I implanted a deep suggestion to ignore the wearer of the prosthesis so they don’t see or sense Harper. No drones do.”

  “That one does,” Harper said, pointing to Rikki. She had been quietly moving about the room, getting meds and water for her mother, picking up and putting away clutter. Now she was focused on the conversation.

  “What do you mean?” Dr. Wilks asked, frowning.

  “It was expecting me before I opened the door,” Harper said, turning to me.

  “I asked Rikki to look for any real-time data holes in his sensor information. He found missing data and quickly learned that it was Harper. So he tracks her by a complete lack of data, rather than too much data. Seemed like an obvious trick. Wonder why your super Spiders didn’t figure it out?”

  A massive explosion rocked the room, bulging the steel door inward till it clanged against the short cement block wall.

  Chapter 32

  Dust fell and at least two of the twelve-volt lights on the overhead string were broken.

  “Spider unit Lotus has entered the building’s ground floor. Sensors indicate six ground units in next room. None of them are on the network,” Rikki said as Harper picked herself up and ran to the wall by the door. She hit a big lever and somewhere, a spring twanged. The cement panels lifted up and slapped into the block frame, the four-by-four falling down to brace it. She hit another switch and I heard a heavy motor start somewhere.

  “The building generator still functions. There’s enough natural gas in the lines to power the mesh tunnel for about ten minutes or so. We need to leave,” Harper said, running across the room to a pair of small backpacks on a shelf.

  “You two need to get out of here,” Dr. Wilks said. Her daughter spun around to stare at her, eyes wide with disbelief and fear. “No, I cannot go with you. I will not go with you. You have a very limited chance as it is if Lotus has found us. I will stay here and delay them. You will take the escape tunnel.”

  “No, Mother. I won’t leave you,” Harper said.

  “Harper darling, use your brain, not your heart. I didn’t hang on to life this long just to ensure a chance for you to live and then have you throw it away. You have an ally, one who owes you a debt.” Dr. Wilks looked me in the eye with a pointed stare, before turning back to Harper. “You have to seize this opportunity to live.”

  “No. No, I don’t want to,” Harper said, dropping the packs and rushing to her mother’s wheelchair. “We’ll either find a way to fight or die trying. Ajaya has killed thousands of drones before,” she said, hugging her mother.

  Outside, a steady, rhythmic, mechanical pounding started on the metal door.

  “A Tiger unit has succeeded in bypassing the electrocution barrier,” Rikki said.