Zone War

by John Conroe

  “How do you have assets?”

  “Same way you do, hotshot. I looted cash registers, office safes, emptied pockets. Methotrexate costs money. So I funded a bank account. Dropped deposits in an ATM near the pharmacy whose prescription system we had hacked. There are still a few places to get rid of cash. I have resources,” she sniffed.

  “That’s awesome. So was I right about Manhattan Bridge?”

  “Not much of a leap of logic, but yes, you were correct. Not sure how it would work in daylight, though.”

  “We’ll find out. But I’m gonna be a massive distraction on the upper level, so you’ll have that to work with.”

  “Massive, huh?” she asked, clearly not seeing the big picture.

  “Oh, just ‘cause I have mad stealth skills, don’t think I can’t capture the limelight when I need to,” I said, giving her a smile. “You wait. It’ll be huge.”

  I was more right than either of us could possibly guess.

  Chapter 34

  I gave her a ration bar to choke down while I did the same, and then pushed her to drink lots of water. The same went for me. Get fueled up. We had some big shocks to our systems, her more than me, and we absolutely had to get geared up, mentally and physically, for the coming battle. And I was pretty sure there would be a fair amount of battling involved.

  “Can you disrupt a drone? Interfere with its processing, even for a second?” I asked her. Keep her focused on the here and now, continue grieving later.

  “I guess. I haven’t done it, but I can sort of surge at the lesser ones. Shove data and protocol processes all at once. It might slow them down a bit. But I can fight, too. I have a gun.”

  “One, have you ever shot a drone before? And two, you have anything larger than a handgun? Armor-piercing ammo?”

  “You went through my bag, I can see that, so you know the answer to the second question,” she said, tone unhappy at the invasion. “And no, I haven’t shot it out with one. Seems like a bad idea.”

  “You’re exactly right. I did go through your bag… I’ve never been responsible for getting anyone out of the Zone before, and yes, it is monumental idiocy to fight it out. They were designed to kill armed soldiers on a battlefield. They are, almost all of them, armored to some degree, and very hard to kill. Add machine response time and computer aiming and it’s bad. We avoid it,” I said, pointing to Rikki, then back at myself. “But it happens, and when it does, it’s a blur, all reflex action, no time for slow, human thought. One on one, I could hope for about fifty-fifty percent. With Rikki, we move to high seventies. If that happens, anything you can do to slow the opposition down, without slowing Rikki, will be a huge help. Oh, and you can’t go out with your sensors or whatever you have, active. You and Rikki are both compromised. We have to go mostly blind.”

  If her face had been looking pale before she started eating, my words now washed away any color that had returned to her. “What? That’s a recipe for death. They have all the advantages with their sensors.”

  “Correction, they have advantages over us, not him.” Again, I pointed at Rikki. “We’ve done this before. Again, it’s not fun and we don’t do it unless there’s no other choice. There’s no other choice.”

  She looked at Rikki, who was still sitting quiescent, but I could see her really look this time. “You’ve made changes?”

  “Rikki has better processing and storage hardware, his batteries and capacitors are far beyond his originals and brand new, all of his high-wear parts are replaced with brand new ones regularly, and his sensor suite is completely upgraded,” I said. “In contrast, unless a drone was held back in reserve some how, they’ve all taken enormous wear and tear over the last decade. They squeak, whistle, rattle, and whir very loudly to Rikki’s auditory receptors, they give off more electromag signals than they used to, and their response times have been slowing steadily for the last few years. Freezing New York winters followed by hot, humid summers has beat them up something fierce. They’re no cakewalk, but neither are we.”

  She looked at Rikki, her brow furrowed. “You charged him back up?”

  “Power is at ninety-three percent of optimal. Current usage is minimal. Operating in airplane mode reduces active usage.”

  “Airplane mode?”

  I didn’t know if she’d ever been on an airplane, but her tone seemed more amused than curious.

  “We had to call it something short and sweet. Seems to cover it.”

  She nodded. “I only flew once, back when Mom was first hired. We came from California. I thought airplane mode was the stupidest thing ever invented.”

  “I wasn’t sure how much effect the strong ones, particularly the Spiders, could have on him. Airplane mode was a safety precaution.”

  “You say that as if the question has been answered.”

  “Lotus instructed him to kill all three of us when we were in your place. He said no.”

  She looked impressed, eyebrows raised. “Mom would have been interested to hear that. It would have both fascinated her and probably piqued her professional pride that your homespun job stood up to hers.”

  “Ten years is a lifetime in tech hardware. Rikki has the best chips money could buy.”

  “Still, one of the top AI experts in the world versus a rogue college kid,” she said, holding hands up like balance scales. “No offense.”

  “None taken. You’re right. I got tremendously lucky with Rikki. Somehow, everything went right. I like to think my dad was helping from the other side.”

  Her eyes went wide, then went moist in an alarming fashion. But other than a quick head drop to recover herself, she held it together. I started packing up my gear, putting stuff back into my pack or stealth suit.

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “It has the benefit of being simple. We’re going to sneak and peek. Lotus won’t likely know if we survived the explosion. We won’t tell it. But if we get found, we’ll have to go from snail slow to all out. We need to get as close to the East Side Zone wall as possible without tripping anyone to the fact that you exist. We’ll scoot along parallel to it, but if it goes to hell, we get right up on it. If everything goes to plan, we’ll sneak all the way up to the Manhattan Bridge. You go your route through the subway section. I’ll take the top deck. At this point, Rikki will go with you. I gotta sneak him out. He won’t survive Lotus searching for him with all of its assets. He might also be a help to you getting through there, especially if Lotus sends any drones after you.”

  She stared at me. “That’s… disturbingly simple. Can’t we just stay here for a few days?”

  “Lotus is looking for confirmation of our deaths. Wolves and Tiger drones will be burrowing through the wreckage looking for our bodies. When they don’t find us, Lotus will go all out.”

  She nodded. “Lotus is a nasty bitch. She’d do exactly that.”

  “She?”

  “You call that thing him,” she said. “The Spiders have a female feeling to them. Probably some imprint or personality flavoring from my mom.”

  “Hmm, I agree. There is sort of an evil queen bee thing going on there. Anyway, we have a short window to haul ass. Let’s get going. Rikki, recon please.”

  His fans instantly whirred to life and he shot up and out the door I had left propped open. I checked my rifle one more time and turned to Harper. She was staring at me with a new expression—surprise.

  “What?”

  “You used please with your order?”

  “So?”

  “He’s a machine.”

  “Again, so? Should I treat machines like shit?”

  She shook her head, then picked up her pack and swung it onto her back. I gave one more glance at her but she just looked back, alert and ready, even if her eyes were red and puffy.

  Rikki shot into the blackness of the stairwell, the soft hum of his turbines the only thing I could hear. The sound rose up into the darkness, fading completely after a few moments. I waited, my rifle ready, chamber loaded and
safety off, finger indexed above and along the trigger guard. Moments that felt like full minutes ticked by. Then I felt a breeze, soft and familiar. The sound returned next.

  Lights lit up the space, my drone hovering in place, facing away to avoid blinding us.

  “Stairwell clear to the fifth floor. No sensory input at all. No air currents, no EM leakage. Audio review of first floor resulted in no sounds observed.”

  I turned to Harper. She raised both eyebrows. “That’s his ‘coast is clear,’” I said. She nodded and followed me up the stair, Rikki’s lights bright enough to avoid tripping.

  At the first floor door, I listened for a second or two, then cracked the door. Two skeletons, splayed out all over the floor. No sounds. I pushed the door open and let Rikki out, then held the door for Harper. She glanced at my chivalry, eyebrows raised. I shook my head and then shut the door with careful precision, making not a single sound. My turn to raise my eyebrows at her. She blushed, then glared, hands on hips. She mouthed “No duh.”

  Okay, so she already knew that doors must be shut with exacting care. Pardon me for not being used to moving through the Zone with someone I didn’t know but who’d grown up here.

  The lobby was dusty but the marble reception counter that occupied one wall still looked pristine. Too bad one of the monitors on top of it had three flechette holes through it.

  Rikki hovered silently across the big open space, the small breeze from his fans fluttering clothing that held the skeletons of those who had died here. I stepped carefully over them, not bothering to check on Harper. This was her stomping grounds and she must have seen thousands of skeletons. These two, a man and woman by their clothes, weren’t going to shock her.

  Rikki froze in place ahead of me and I held up a closed fist, realizing even as I did so that I had not gone over hand signals with Harper. The fact that no sound came from behind me indicated she’d figured it out.

  Slowly Rikki hovered back toward me, his motion so slow it almost didn’t look like he was moving at all. Outside the glass doors, the sun shone brightly, shadows indicating afternoon. I suddenly saw motion. A Tiger, pacing with slow, lethal steps up the street. It disappeared from view but Rikki stayed motionless for another five heartbeats. Then he moved up to the doors, sweeping across the arc of the windows, round body turning to look and listen in every direction. Finally he hovered in place by a door, and that was my cue to let him out.

  We three slid out of the building, Rikki leading. After a moment of scanning, he spun in place and four LEDs lit up on his front. Two close together on the left part of his face, two spread apart on the right side. I turned to a puzzled Harper. I held up four fingers, then waved my other hand around to indicate four drones around us. Two fingers close together toward the left side. Two far apart on the right. I led the way back into the building.

  “Both sides covered. We’ll go out a back door.”

  “How did you come up with the light thing?”

  “We just did. I don’t remember. Why? It’s minor.”

  “Hmm,” was all she said.

  We headed through the ground floor and found a back exit onto Pine Street. Rikki went back out. This time, the way was clear. We crossed the street and cut through the next building rather than go up either Nassau Street or William Street. I had to pick the door lock, but it was pretty easy.

  The four drones Rikki had detected would have pretty clear lines of sight. We couldn’t go out on the side streets yet. We cut through the building behind as well. They were big buildings and it took at least twenty minutes to get through both of them.

  Finally, we caught a break. A set of crashed cars at the corner of William and Liberty gave us cover to crouch low and move across William Street, heading east. We followed Liberty till it merged with Maiden, then followed that. Rikki stopped us and pulled back fast to a building we had just passed. I grabbed Harper’s arm and hustled her after him. We ducked through the doorway, catching a break that it was unlocked, and dropped down low. Two lights lit up on Rikki’s front, then went out as another two lit up. His symbol for two approaching. Then I heard them outside. Metal on stone, a whirring motor that was long past its tune-up date.

  The sounds clinked and clanked past us. Then stopped. Something had tripped their sensors. Could have been a lingering infrared image from one of us touching something. Could have been drops of sweat. The sounds came back. I pulled Harper deeper into the building, Rikki hovering backward, gun pointed to cover us. The sound of a scraping door came from far behind us.

  I pulled off my pack, put it into Harper’s hands while we kept walking. Pulled out my booby trap kit, selected a precut tripwire attached to a collapsible beer koozie. Plucked a flashbang from the pack. Slid it into the koozie; it was a tight fit. Tied a cord to the top of the grenade. At the next door, I stopped. It was a pull-to-open kind of door. I tied the koozie to the door, tied the cord from the flashbang to a wall fixture. Checked the tension, then pulled the pin. The koozie kept the spoon from flying off… till it was pulled off the grenade.

  We kept moving, through halls and doors, backtracking twice, before finally getting to the street. Rikki had time to check for drones. Then the flashbang went off behind us.

  “Run!” I said, demonstrating proper technique from the front. Rikki sped up, still in his round shape, but easily able to leave us in the dust. Harper, I discovered, was not a runner.

  She was sort of walk-running, like it was something to figure out. Faster than a walk but nowhere near fast enough. Probably hadn’t really done any running her whole life. It wasn’t a lack of coordination, just a lack of practice. You normally don’t run in the Zone. Drones are generally faster and drawn to noise and commotion. You move slow and steady, sometimes snail slow.

  I dropped back and grabbed her arm, pulling her along faster. Rikki turned up another street. I didn’t see any street signs and we were moving too fast to really look around. We made it a block and turned right, onto another street, now back heading east. We came around that corner fast, then skidded to a stop, my left hand dropping Harper’s arm and coming up to meet the forearm of my rifle as it rose on target.

  Rikki fired first, twice, his bullets knocking the Kite UAV out of the air, then I fired, my heavy .458 caliber bullet smacking the Tiger that had turned our way the instant we had appeared. The bullet hit it right in its face as it crouched to spring. My immediate second round blew through its chest, putting it down and out of the game, if not dead.

  We ran to the far left side of the road, far from the twitching, sputtering butcher machine, its aerial companion completely dead and silent on the street behind it. “Come on, run!” I yelled to Harper as I did a moving magazine swap on the rifle.

  Chapter 35

  “I am running,” she protested.

  “Well, run faster,” I said, not wasting time by telling her that the awkward, shambling jog thing she was doing was not a run. Behind us, I couldn’t hear anything, but that didn’t matter at all. We were pegged with the first gunshot.

  I remember reading about an early twenty-first century anti-sniper technology that triangulated gunshots using a system of microphones spread out across a town or city. It never took off because police drones instantly replaced it. A networked group of drones could triangulate gunfire faster and better than a static set of microphones. Each of them immediately moving toward the shot, communicating with each other and command central, each getting better data with each subsequent shot.

  Two aerials units came zipping into our street from opposite corners in front of us, and a whirring sounded behind us. Rikki spun backward to engage the rear attacker. I shot the first of the forward drones even as all three opened fire. Something tugged on my left shoulder, but the recoil of my short, powerful, modern-day buffalo gun distracted me. My round swatted the Raptor from the sky even as I swung the barrel and fired another round at the other UAV. Missed. Its own flechette gun snapped out a sharp reply that I felt on my left forearm. Then I fired a
gain and this time got to see the Indian Falcon unit basically explode in midair.