Damn if Donnie’s not right; who the hell genetically engineers hawks? Not only is gene modification an inexact science—any body’s a complex meld of factors, so you’re way more likely to cause an avian cancer than you are to create a supereagle—but animals are slow.
“Yeah!” Kiva shouts, laughing manically as she goes into auto-fire, mowing the birds down as they approach. “Take that! And that! And that!”
“Slow down, goddammit!” I scream. “Donnie! Switch to high-impact explosives!”
“Look at ’em!” He laughs, switching to tracers to demonstrate how many bullets he’s putting into the air, a great neon fan-dance display that rains blood down upon the grass. “They go up like piñatas! Ha! You little fuckers!”
“Switch to grenades and make them go up like fireworks!” I yell.
Defcon interrupts, a high-priority signal: “Sir, the shrapnel from any explosives overhead could harm the package—”
“Couple massive bursts never hurt anyone,” Donnie says. “Let’s put on a show for the crowd!”
The surrounding traffic has triangulated the gunfire’s source, and they’ve either sped up to get away from it or slowed down to stay away from it. Which is good; we’re firing into the air, but our collective fire-to-disable ratio hovers in the low 60 percents. Every miss sends a stray bullet arcing out that risks killing someone half a mile away.
Yet those misses are our enemy’s genius: humans are slow, but these birds are fast. Not quite as fast as our capture-target-and-fire times, but we didn’t program our weaponry to know what a bird’s idealized kill zones are—so our guns are firing at wings, at talons, at blurs.
Even if I didn’t care about shooting innocent vacationers huddling in the trucks, logistics will throttle us. Seconds into the fight, and our shared ammunition supplies have dropped by 42.6 percent. We’re not equipped to fight swarms, which is doubtless what our enemy counted on; if we don’t adjust strategy, we’ll be down to using harsh language.
God forbid this is their opening salvo.
Donnie lobs a couple of terrifying fireballs into the air; they go up in a whoomph, taking out massive numbers of birds and shattering windows up and down I-78. But more hawks are charging in, and I don’t have time to check the satellite feeds to see how many are left because I’ve assembled a bird–kill zone profile that’s boosted my fire-to-disable ratio to 96.2 percent.
I’d prefer to run some test cases, but occasionally you just gotta live-deploy to production—so I save the profile as HITCHCOCK.KZP and push it out to the network.
That’ll keep our defense zone clean until the second wave arrives. I don’t know how many birds they’ve got—maybe the plan is to run us out of bullets before sending in the heavy hitters, but this will slow our ammo expenditure as Kiva, Marcy, and Defcon defend the package.
I check the newsnets; sure enough, the cops are inbound, the trucks having called them the moment their audial processors noted gunfire. ETA is ten minutes, and I’m not sure whether I’m looking forward to their arrival or dreading it.
“Donnie, Saladin, cut fire and move in,” I say, squeegeeing bird blood off my helmet. “We’ll let them defend the package while we plan our exit—”
“What the shit?”
The volume dims as guns stop shooting. The birds swarm in towards Kiva as she stares down at her arms, making frantic punching motions as she tries to get her gunports active again—
She was supposed to add the HITCHCOCK.KZP enemy profile to her response package as a hot-patch.
Except instead of adding a new enemy to her existing threat profile, she told her system to replace the active profile with HITCHCOCK.KZP—which caused a combat cessation as her systems imported the data from scratch.
I curse as she curses: “Reboot, you piece of shit, reboot! You—”
A taloned blur rockets towards her, pulling up in the last second to extend its claws.
Spiked metallic nails punch through her body armor.
A crackle of blue electricity flares through her as the bird falls down dead.
Her neck snaps back, her prosthetics jerking into auto-target mode as her protective seizure-filters kick in. But more raptors dive-bomb her, soaring in to jab their claws through her helmet, unleashing torrents of currents into her before dying.
Her flesh sizzles.
Crazily, I think: Man, her corporate sponsors are gonna be angry her last words were spent trashing their product.
“You fucking—” Donnie moves to take her position, so angry he actually screams instead of subvocalizing over the encrypted channel. “You fucking cyborg birds!”
I don’t know what I’d call them, but I do know that poor Saladin—who obediently cut fire—got hit by one, and his medical readouts show his heart stuttering with defibrillation before his connection shorts out.
Then he’s obscured by a ball of smoking feathers.
“Close up, people!” I yell, thankful Donnie’s already moving into position to seal up Kiva’s fire zone—
—except Donnie’s screaming, “Jesus fucking shit, how dare you make me look bad, how the fuck will I explain two casualties to my contact?” at the birds, unleashing such a fusillade that his ammunition drops 10 percent in a single second. He’s plowing right into their center mass as they regroup to lead him away from the truck, maimed birds tumbling from the air like a gory hurricane, sacrificing themselves—
—which is terrifying, they have a strategy—
—sacrificing themselves so a squadron of bio-falcons can swoop low past Kiva’s body and punch their curved claws into the side of our truck, unloading voltage into the frame.
The faked video-windows that provide an illusory interior fuzz and go black.
Something inside the containers clicks off.
“Marcy, Defcon!” I yell. “Get over here, I’m wiring you into the shipping container!”
“What?”
“These fucking birds overloaded the container’s deep-well batteries—which means whatever’s inside the package powered down! I’ve gotta get your power supplies feeding this thing until we can fend off these psycho falcons and hook the container over to the other truck!”
I’m thankful they move over, even though they’re confused. “You can’t just hook us in—we don’t have plugs—”
“I have converters.” I pop my leg-compartments open and start the wiring process.
I don’t tell them this will drain their power to emergency combat levels; their legs will shut down, and they’ll be reduced to armed turrets. I could take the hit and power this myself—but after watching Kiva and Donnie in action, I would not trust this crew to wipe my nose.
Donnie’s running up and down the freeway shoulder like a six-year-old chasing seagulls at the beach, albeit with far more screaming of “Take that, motherfuckers!” and aerial explosions. Yet he’s chewed his way through a significant portion of the flock, which means I can handle defending the package on my own.
I’m praying the IAC was smart enough to install a backup generator to maintain whatever’s in there—though the scorched claw marks on the shipping container’s sides indicate the electrohawks may have shorted that out as well.
Did we let the enemy destroy the IAC’s secret package?
No. No. It’s only been fifty seconds since the truck went dead, fifty long seconds because I have to do the connection with clumsy manual control since I have to jury-rig the adapter to handle both Marcy and Defcon, and the current’s back on.
I freeze, knowing whatever systems are inside have been returned to functionality—but have you ever seen what happens to a sophisticated software kernel when you crash it without warning?
Scylla and Charybdis’s active fire has slowed to a shot every two seconds, most of the birds dead, the remaining ones dispersed. They flap away like drunkards from a bar. I feel a weird sympathy: given how much electricity they pumped out, I doubt they were engineered to live long.
Quietly, I think: Self, take ei
ther side of this bet for a thousand dollars: Have the birds accomplished their mission, and whatever’s inside that container is toast? Or have they succeeded in softening us up, and now our enemy’s sending in the big guns to retrieve the package?
I check the satellite feeds again. But my attention’s plastered to my audio pickups, which detect the subtle hum of equipment clicking back on again, servers warming up—
And the anguished screams of someone waking up inside the container.
* * *
“Mama?” the woman inside the IAC’s container yells, her voice rising with each syllable. “Vala? Can you hear me? What’s happening?”
Her trust is heartbreaking. I can’t think of anyone I’d call out to if I woke up kidnapped, but she sounds like a woman who phones her mother after every date.
I didn’t need to know who she was.
“Where are y—”
My sensors pick up her choked gurgle. Then the real screams start:
“What did they do to my body?”
My heart rate spikes in sympathy with her so quickly that my biological-response packages administer antianxiety medication. Something’s been done to her that, judging from the way she can’t stop screaming, is not something I ever want to see.
She’s got family. I don’t want to think about that either.
Donnie grips my shoulder hard enough that my haptic feedback registers it as pain.
“Get in there.” Donnie shoves me towards the container. “Get in there and shut that bitch up.”
I shoot him a glare more intense than a laser. “Don’t you have some birds to chase?”
He shakes his head as if he can’t believe I’m not keeping up with him. “I have a mission to salvage. The cops will arrive in seven minutes and forty-five seconds, and I need to be out here to have my lawyers explain this firefight was a legal defense of a private transport vehicle. Saladin and Kiva are charcoal briquettes, Defcon and Marcy can’t move, which leaves you to go inside and put the kibosh on Miss Yappers.”
It finally dawns on me: he’s speaking verbally. He’s shut down the mission’s audio recorders—this is off the record.
“No,” I say, realizing what he’s asking. “I am not breaking into an IAC secret container. Stealing secrets from the Yak is a guaranteed route to assassination.”
Donnie’s so furious he fires twenty rounds into the air for emphasis. “Come on, man! If their equipment was online, Scream Queen there wouldn’t say a word. The gates are down! Which makes it perfect for you—the famed cyber-espionage expert—to sneak in and knock her out. Clearly, this is a prisoner transfer, so if we deliver the prisoner—”
“—prisoners are made by governments, Donnie, this is a kidnapping—”
“Yes! Yes! It’s a three-million-dollar kidnapping! Which you are being paid to anesthetize any moral quandaries you might have had! Spend a million on therapy—you’ve still got two million left over to get every upgrade you ever wanted! Go to fucking Disney World!”
“That’s not the way it works—”
“The way it works is this.” He turns his wrist towards me to display a red cop-countdown clock. “I have six minutes and forty-five seconds before the cops show up. My lawyerbots inform me that if the cops hear a woman screaming in the back of our truck, there will be no amount of law in the world I can throw at them to stop the NJPD from breaking into the Yak’s private vehicle. At which point our contract’s null and void and I will never get to fight anything near as cool as these weirdo electrobirds again.”
I look over at Kiva’s and Saladin’s smoking bodies—charred torsos hanging between blackened artificial limbs. “You thought this was fun?”
His laugh would be infectious if it weren’t so psychotic. “This was the shit! You know you’ll be telling this story to your buddies—haven’t you been subvocalizing this narrative the whole time? You’re always muttering to yourself.”
“I don’t—wait, do I?” I know I constantly subvocalize, half syllables my language modules clean up into full text—but do I mutter? I thought I—
“We both record for posterity, bro. And you, you monstrous electronic cat burglar you.” Donnie sweeps one arm across the shipping container as though it’s a grand set of mountains to be explored. “You will break into the IAC’s lab and cover up anything that happened so I can keep getting sweet contracts like this.”
“I’m good at what I do because I research, Donnie. We know nothing about that container’s interior. An improv break-in against the best security in the world has almost zero chance of—”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I thought this mission would be a lot more fun with you on board.”
I make a strangled noise. “Missions aren’t fun. They’re the opposite of fun. You—”
“Did you notice how I made sure nobody used your name or your call sign today?”
He looks up as though he’s reading skywriting, his words so light that it’s impossible not to sense him tap-dancing around the threat.
“Or maybe you noticed how I covered up your hardware addresses and masked your voice?” he continues, hopping from foot to foot in a frightened mocking dance. “Trish told me, ‘Ooo, he doesn’t want the IAC chiefs to know he’s there!’ and fuck if I didn’t do my best to conceal your presence—even though we both know these Yak missions are the only way to get your hands on their advanced equipment.”
I should have known that. Trish surely knew, but I stay out of hacker gossip, so … I didn’t.
But yeah. If I put myself in the IAC’s pocket, I’ll get access to cutting-edge technology that even the US military doesn’t get to play with unless the IAC bosses approve the sale. I look around at the dismembered birds, which are deliquescing into goo—the IAC’s enemies have made secret advances in genetic technology.
What gifts does the IAC have for its loyal squadrons?
Assuming I can let the kidnappings slide.
Donnie breathes a sigh of relief, taking my disgruntled concern for tech-lust. “So,” he says with the calmness of a man who believes the matter’s settled. “You sneak in there. You shut her up. You seal the case and hope nobody notices. We have five minutes and forty-five seconds to quiet the evidence before the cops arrive.”
“She’s not evidence, she’s a person. And if I botch the break-in? Three million is not enough to risk pissing off the IAC.”
“Or I tell my IAC contacts that you were the reason this mission failed.”
So there it is.
“Play along, man.” He hunkers down to whisper. “Everyone here has a good reason to keep this quiet. But if we don’t all have a good reason, well, I’ll tell them the reason for our mission failure was a last-minute hire who, I don’t know, was a saboteur. Wonder what the IAC’s deep analysts would find if they rooted through your background?”
He sees the disgust on my face, takes a hurt step back—I remember that he still thinks we’re friends. He shakes his head, trying to figure out how to apologize for this, but Donnie’s not a man who apologizes for much.
“Look. I wanna give you three million dollars and a spotless win-record. Just … make everything work. When it’s done, I will buy you the best box of cigars in existence and you and I will run rampant through the Yak’s secret prosthetic technology. Okay?” He pats my shoulder. “Gotta talk to my lawyerbots.”
He could have a private communiqué without moving an inch, but instead he walks over to the other side of the trucks, making exaggerated cell-phone gestures.
Leaving me alone to listen to the poor woman, still panicking inside the truck.
“—how am I moving what is happening no it’s okay break it down one step at time don’t hyperventilate I can’t control my lungs I don’t control my breath no okay you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do Silvia remember what Mama told you you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do so please God help and God provides so what you’ve got to do is get out of here so get it together Silvia get it together…”
I didn’t need to know her name was Silvia. Silvia’s moved onto a running monologue of incoherent prayers.
She’s talking to herself because that’s better than being alone.
Whereas I’m headed towards the shipping container’s doors, unable to tell my audio-filters to mask her voice.
Whoever sent in the electrobirds knew we were coming, so I’m pretty sure they disabled the IAC’s defenses. It’s in their interests not to leave evidence in the IAC’s hands—so maybe I can walk in and not have them know I was there.
Donnie’s right: we probably can slip in.
The trick is, Silvia—the package—can’t know I was there either. Covertly cracking open the seal on the container’s back doors so it can be repaired without detection is a cinch. I set Charybdis to disable anyone inside, squeezing my eyes shut as I poke her in through the door.
“Hello?” I hear, just as Charybdis informs me there’s a humanlike figure—but she’s trapped, spread-eagle, behind a transparent barrier, so my tasers can’t reach her. “Please, my name is Silvia Maldonado, they kidnapped me, you have to get me out.”
She’s struggling to keep her dignity now that she knows someone else can hear her.
Don’t reply, I think, keeping my head down, letting my HUD guide me around the stacks of equipment to the lock on her bulletproof cage. Don’t engage with her. The IAC will fucking kill you. Just take the three million dollars and run, you can buy the best psychiatrists.
“Please,” she whispers. “Tell me what they did to me. I can’t see my body.”
I look up.
I shouldn’t, but I look up.
I gasp.
It’d be bad enough if she’d just been manacled, naked, to the table—and she’s racked up like a car on a hydraulic lift, roughly at chest height. She’s a medical marionette, her arms flowering with bruises from the multiple IV sites hanging from the ceiling. Her head’s clamped back, her arms and legs shackled so every inch of her is available for viewing, the cage wide enough for doctors to hold conferences over her restrained body.
It isn’t sexy; it’s gynecological. And if that medical violation were the only thing, well, I’ve seen worse in war, but …
Automatic Reload: A Novel Page 8
