The Debt Collectors War

by Tess Mackenzie

  Behind her, Sameh’s sidearm suddenly fired twice, and then Sameh said, “Clear.”

  That was all, just “clear.”

  Ellie didn’t look around. Someone must have come up behind them, and Sameh had taken care of the problem. Ellie didn’t need to check, not once Sameh had said it was clear. She and Sameh trusted one another, and knew one another, and didn’t need to waste time or risk further distractions by checking on each other, not any more. Sameh had dealt with the problem, whatever it was, and had told Ellie they were clear, so Ellie kept looking where she was meant to be looking, covering their straight ahead, maintaining their perimeter, so no-one else got a chance to sneak up while she was looking the other way.

  It was important, that trust, as important as anything else for making them effective in combat. Sameh watched Ellie’s back, and Ellie watched Sameh’s front, and they could both rely on that. They each knew the other would be where she ought to be, doing what she ought to do, and that mattered a lot.

  It stopped them both being distracted, and wasting time.

  Ellie watched ahead of them, where Sameh was walking, and she also watched all around them whenever Sameh stopped to fiddle with her tablet.

  That happened quite often. It was probably happening behind her right now.

  “I’m moving,” she said, without looking back.

  “Hold on,” Sameh said.

  Ellie glanced back. Sameh was doing something with the tablet, guiding the sensor drones as they built their networks, Ellie assumed.

  “Do you need us to stop?” she asked.

  Sameh shook her head, but didn’t look up from the tablet. “Not yet. It’s fine. Just go slow.”

  “Are we close?” Ellie said, meaning was the sensor net ready. “Is it nearly working?”

  “Not long,” Sameh said.

  By now, the tiny sensor drones Sameh had deployed a few minutes ago would have spread out through the compound and formed a floating, drifting grid of tiny data-gathering pinpricks. If Ellie squinted upwards, carefully, she would probably see some glinting as they caught the sunlight.

  She didn’t look up. She kept covering windows, covering corners.

  “Soon?” she asked, hopefully.

  Sameh grinned. “Close. Soon. Not yet.”

  “How close?”

  “Soon. It’s the wind.”

  Ellie sighed. Wind was always a problem.

  The sensor drones were small and very light, so small that several thousand fitted into a hand-sized package, and delicate enough that, once they unfurled themselves, they floated in the air like dandelion seeds, drifting, pushing themselves about with only their tiny propellers.

  That lightness made deployment slow, because the drones moved extremely erratically in breezes. As well, many got broken by being bumped against things, and many more ended up in places that weren’t very useful, too high or low or behind obstructions. As the drones spread out, the network had to keep rebuilding itself around the damage it incurred. Taking that damage was designed in, though. There were a great many drones, and many could fail before the sensor net itself did.

  The initial deployment still took time, though.

  The drones were spreading out, hovering in the air, or anchoring themselves onto walls and roofs, clinging to the surfaces using tiny magnets or a static charge. They were floating over the battlefield, settling onto it, preparing to watch over Ellie and Sameh, and begin feeding them data.

  There were several different types of drones. The mix was what made them especially useful. Some captured thermal data, others visual video, or millimeter-wavelength radar images, or audio, or wireless and radio signals. The radio drones captured signals, and also performed basic counter-intelligence and jamming, attempting to block the communications of any unfriendly drones they found, and to mask the location of Ellie and Sameh as much as was possible. As well, the drones completely jammed unfriendly macro-electronic signals, entirely blocking enemy tactical radio communications, and outbound internet and phone links too, preventing anyone hostile within the net calling for help or using satellite or drone data themselves.

  The drones were positioning themselves carefully, moving into different places in the overall network depending on which model each was, and what role it had. Each drone was just smart enough to work out what types of drones its neighbors were and organize itself accordingly. All had infrared laser and wireless comms links, links to one another and to Sameh and Ellie’s tablets, so once positioned they would begin building data connections, through each other, constantly re-routing as Ellie and Sameh moved about.

  Once they were positioned, the drones would begin feeding Ellie and Sameh tactical data, which their tablets would model into useful information and display.

  It was a beautiful, intricate, complicated system, and Ellie was so used to it she hardly noticed, and simply became impatient when it wasn’t ready to use right away.

  She made herself be patient, and not pester Sameh. She kept covering windows, and kept moving slowly, as Sameh fiddled with her tablet and glanced around.

  They moved to the next corner. Ellie looked around it, and saw no-one.

  “All right,” Sameh said. “I’ve got an image.”

  Ellie stopped, and took out her e-glasses, and put them on. She should already have contact lenses in, but she didn’t like using lenses. She didn’t like trying to put them in, poking herself in the eye, and she didn’t like the way her eyes felt dry once she’d succeeded. She preferred the glasses, even though they could get broken, or fall off. She put them on, and as she did, they activated, realizing they were being worn, and synced themselves to the video feed from Sameh’s tablet. As Ellie looked around, they tracked her head movements, and worked out the direction she was facing, and pulled data from the map app on Sameh’s tablet to overlay onto her field of view.

  Suddenly, Ellie saw a lot of useful information. She saw moving blips in the far distance showing where people were. She saw fuzzy-sided thermal outlines of people who were closer, giving a sense of perspective and scale, and anyone who was very close she saw outlined in red or green, depending whether the millimeter radar could see a metal shape it identified as a weapon in their hands or clothing. The intensity of the red grew deeper as the weapon became more dangerous, too. A sheathed boot-knife was barely pink, an assault rifle a rich crimson.

  Ellie could also choose to see a great deal of other data, most of it selectable and operation-dependent. At the moment she was seeing green outlines around the doors and windows of rooms which were empty of people, so she didn’t need to pay as much attention to them, and she was also seeing thin red lines superimposed over doors that were locked. She could pick other tactical data to display, if she wished, blue lines for linked enemy comm nets, or numerical overlays estimating an enemy’s ammunition reserves or the rounds left in their current clip. There was also a mechanism to indicate an enemy’s state of mind, showing whether their pulse and skin-temperature and the rapidity of their movement implied they were high and hyped, or scared and ready to run away. Ellie usually kept the psych profiling off, because it was guesswork as much as data and could be unreliable, but it was there if she needed it, and sometimes it was useful.

  It was a good system, she thought. It was intuitive and quick to learn to use, and fairly unadventurous about its warnings. Most of the information it gave was trustworthy, and easy to understand, and it didn’t get in the way of the actual fighting like some of the more complicated tactical overlay systems did.

  “You have a map?” Ellie asked.

  Sameh touched her tablet. “I do now.”

  Ellie stopped, and Sameh handed her the tablet. It had a more complete picture of the same data as Ellie’s glasses were showing. The display was a top-down line-outline map of the compound, which Ellie found gave her a better overview. She looked at it quickly. There were thicker, darker lines marking the more substantial walls inside buildings, and colored dots moving around, marking all t
he people the sensors could find. The software had tagged those people with lists of the weapons they were holding and whether they were moving a lot, or were mostly still. It had tagged them with everything it could work out about each of them, and especially, whether any were in enclosed, locked spaces.

  None of them were.

  None of them seemed to fit the pattern of a hostage.

  There was no-one who was both unarmed and in a thick-walled room.

  There was also no-one who matched the biometric profile they had on file for the kid, which had been sent from Shanghai.

  It was what Ellie had expected. She hadn’t thought the kid was still here, but it was useful to have the confirmation.

  “He’s not here,” she said.

  “No,” Sameh said.

  “Could you check again?” Ellie asked. She wasn’t as confident with the tablet’s tactical battlefield software as Sameh was.

  “Yep,” Sameh said. “I already did.”

  “A complete second sweep? In case it missed something?”

  “I know,” Sameh said. “I did. It keeps scanning after the first pass. It’s still scanning and it’s still saying no.”

  “Oh,” Ellie said, and looked at the tablet. “Could he be underground?”

  Sameh shook her head. She reached over, past Ellie, and tapped the screen. It changed to a mottled grey overlaid with colored lines. “That’s underground,” she said. “Those are pipes.”

  “There’s no bunker?”

  “Nope. Not even a stairway down to a bunker. Not even an arms cache under a house.”

  Ellie nodded, disappointed, even though she’d expected it. The kid wasn’t here, so now this just became an everyday prisoner grab, her and Sameh moving around erratically, causing trouble, until the militia gave up fighting and Ellie could starting asking them questions.

  “We can stop being so careful what we shoot at,” she said.

  Sameh grinned. “Good.”

  “Yeah,” Ellie said, and grinned back. “I thought you might think so.”

  “Can I?” Sameh asked, and held up her submachine gun, sounding hopeful. Could she swap her ammo around and stop using the hostage-rescue rounds, Ellie assumed she meant.

  “Go on,” Ellie said. “But remember we still need some of them alive…”

  Sameh didn’t answer, almost as if she was ignoring Ellie. Gleefully ignoring her, Ellie thought, on purpose, but it had probably still been worth saying. Sameh unloaded the magazine from her submachine gun, and put in another. Things were about to start catching on fire, Ellie assumed.

  Sameh turned, and looked toward a building. Through a building, really. She had contact lenses in, and saw the same data as Ellie did through her e-glasses. There was a man with a rifle on the other side of the building. Sameh aimed, and fired a short burst, and the man fell over. Sameh must have some kind of exotic armor-piercing ammunition in that magazine, Ellie assumed, something with depleted reactor-fuel alloys on the bullet tips.

  Sameh glanced around, checking there was no-one else nearby, and then changed the magazine she had just used for a different one. She was often like this, carefully conserving her more interesting bullets, picking her ammo carefully, using her quirky rounds when they were each most useful, like then, to shoot someone through a house.

  Ellie glanced around too. They had been standing in one place for a while, probably for too long, but no-one had come close to them, and none of the militia were nearby, so they were probably fine.

  The situation was less urgent now. The kid wasn’t here. They didn’t need to break down any doors inside the first sixty seconds to save him from an executioner. And more importantly, now their sensor net was up and operational, the militia’s outgoing communications were being blocked, so the compound was on its own and couldn’t send out a panic signal to other militia, elsewhere, saying they had been attacked and to kill hostages being held off-site.

  Now, Ellie had time to think about what to do next.

  She decided she needed to see the map again, to study it more carefully, and work out what their best target was.

  She could have just displayed it on the inside of her glasses, but she didn’t like doing that. She preferred to hold an actual tablet and look at the display, so she could drop it if she was surprised. She preferred to look down onto maps too. Looking downwards seemed to help her understand what she was seeing. As well, she didn’t like flipping her glasses from one display mode to another. It disorientated her for a second, seeing the overlays change, which wasn’t a good thing in the middle of combat. She was better off just looking at Sameh’s tablet.

  She glanced around again, making sure she and Sameh were alone, and there were no militia nearby. She decided to be careful anyway. She took a couple of flash-drones from her thigh pocket and threw them into the air. She had them set already, programmed to float above her, and if someone who wasn’t Sameh came too close, to start pulsing their disorientating strobe-lights and emitting high-pitched sounds. Ellie and Sameh’s ears would be protected by the comm earpieces they were wearing. The earpieces only passed mid-volume and mid-frequency sounds, and no others, so they could talk easily and hear approaching footsteps while not being deafened by loud noises like gunshots. Their glasses and lenses were synched with the flash-drones too, and would darken in series of microsecond pulses as the drone’s strobes fired, so they ought not to actually see the flashes, even while everyone else nearby was being blinded. The drones were a little extra cover, a little extra protection, to keep them safe while they stood there looking at the map.

  First, though, Ellie glanced around again, making sure they were alone with her actual eyes, not completely trusting all the technology.

  Only then did she look at the tablet.

  *

  Ellie looked at the battlefield map the sensor net was displaying.

  There were about fifty people in the compound, and slightly less than half of them were in a single large building, all at the end furthest from the door, and all but two were unarmed. At least as far as the millimeter radar and magnetism-detector sensors could tell from outside, anyway.

  Ellie looked at that building, and said to Sameh, “There is some kind of a bunker. A building, anyway, where all the non-combatants go in an attack.”

  Sameh nodded, still looking around them. They had both seen bunkers like that before. The same kind of thing happened in the MidEast.

  There were twenty people in the bunker, and another thirty scattered through the compound. Four or five others were down by the front gate, too, perhaps fleeing, or guarding the gate, or a medical team trying to help the first two people Ellie had shot. The rest of the people were moving around the compound erratically, spread out in ones, twos, and fours, probably searching for intruders. Ellie and Sameh would have to incapacitate quite a few more, Ellie thought, until they weren’t so badly outnumbered. That probably meant killing them, because that was simplest, but they might be able to gas or stun some, and spare them. She would try, if it worked out that way, but she got a lot less concerned about sparing other people’s lives in the middle of combat.

  She looked up and glanced around, despite the map showing no militia nearby, making certain with her eyes. She glanced around, then tapped an icon at the edge of the display so it would show movement vectors as well as people’s current fixed positions. The map flickered, resetting itself, and then Ellie saw lines trailing behind each data point, marking where each person had moved over the past thirty seconds. They all seemed to be moving randomly, cautiously, either searching for her and Sameh, or just wandering around, unsure what to do.

  They were all moving, all except a group of four near the central bunker building.

  Ellie tapped again, and blue circles appeared around each data point. The blue marked failed communications attempts that the sensor net had intercepted, and became a deeper shade the more attempts that had been made. Most of the people on the map were only faintly hazed with blue. Some of t
hose walking around were colored slightly deeper, the nervous ones, who kept retrying their failed comms. The four at the bunker were a deep, thick, rich shade of blue that had to be failed data links as well as actual voice calls.

  Ellie was pleased. Those would be the decision makers, she thought. The leaders or commanders. They were staying put, assessing the situation, guarding the non-combatants, and trying to work out what to do next.

  Ellie was happy she’d found them so quickly. Now, she knew what to do. She and Sameh needed to incapacitate a few more of the rank-and-file, and then they would go and point guns at those four people. Those four would know where the kid was, if anyone did, and those four were also probably the ones who could decide when the militia surrendered, and who could tell all the others to do so.

  First though, she thought, she and Sameh had to move. They had been in the same place too long now. She didn’t want the militia working out where they were.

  “We’ll circle around to the halfway point of the fence, opposite the gate,” she said. “Then work our way inwards to that bunker. We probably need to deal with another ten or fifteen.”

  “Yep,” Sameh said. “Okay. But cover me for a sec.”

  Ellie hesitated, worried about how long they’d been in one place. She hesitated, then decided Sameh knew they’d been stationary too, and that she ought to trust Sameh’s judgment.

  “Okay,” she said. “I am.” She began to look both directions, past Sameh as well as ahead of herself.

  Sameh took her tablet back, and bent over it. She began tapping at it. Then she took a slim, stubby tube out of the flat-pack bag on her back, and laid it on the ground beside herself.

  Ellie didn’t ask what it was. She didn’t want to distract either of them. She had half-expected something like this, though. Sameh had a way of finding exciting equipment to play with, even when Ellie had been standing right beside her for hours, and was certain she hadn’t picked up anything.