They are not equipped to deal with the IAC’s secret weapon.
The drones are coming within range, tranq-dart rifles twitching as they take aim at Silvia. Once they fire at her, even if they miss, she’ll automatically leap at them, at which point she’ll be easy pickings for their nets.
If the cop cars would stop firing, she could run away, or—
No.
No, I can’t think about that.
I can’t take down the cops—not with my existing armaments, anyway. Donnie carried some obscene weaponry, but he also had obscene lawyer bills. What I have are several handguns with pinpoint accuracy—good enough to take out unwired humans, yet helpless in the face of the NJPD’s military hardware.
But I could subvert the hardware.
The moment I consider hacking the NJPD’s OS, the preprogrammed disclaimer I put in place in case I seriously considered doing this damned fool thing pops up:
Intentionally accessing a protected police network via forged credentials or other tampering attempts that grant unauthorized access is a class B felony, punishable by up to 20 years in prison, a fine of up to $250,000, or both.
I know what operating system the NJPD cars run on, have stockpiled several zero-day vulnerabilities nobody has patched. Maybe the courts will forgive me once I explain how I was stopping the police from hurting an innocent woman, but …
Who am I kidding? You tackle a cop to prevent them from hurting someone, you get your ass kicked harder.
If I hack the cop cars, I better hope they never find out who I am, because that’s my life in jail as a quadruple amputee, my limbs seized as evidence.
I can’t do that. I can’t be carried around like a prison package, sodomized by guards and prisoners alike. I can’t take that—
Except I see Silvia.
The cops are trapped in the cars, either covering their eyes so they don’t see what the green fibrous monster with the stitched-on head will do to them, or wide-eyed, grabbing their guns, calling for backup. She’s punching through the cars’ armored plating, yanking out tear gas canisters—
Yet she’s reassuring them, whispering apologies that she doesn’t mean to hurt them, she’s been to therapy for this, she’s trying to get better.
I shut my eyes and start the auto-hack procedure.
My left calf heats up five degrees as the anti-jammer technology there fires up, my HUD dimming as my battery levels plummet. There are elaborate ways to dance around wi-fi flooding, but they involve time—my calf contains pure brute force, a broadcast so loud it drowns out everything else for the forty-five seconds I can keep it active. I’m my own pirate radio station, so loud I’m scrambling signals on Long Island.
The cars’ communications are encrypted, of course; I cracked police chat months ago. Yet that only allows me to talk to the car’s operating system; it does not grant me credentials. The several buffer overrides I manage, however, let me create a fake account, escalating access …
I drive the cars into the forest and shut them down.
Yet the cops are smashing out the remaining windows, shooting at Silvia from cover. She slaps the guns from their hands as the drones move into position—
“Silvia!” I yell. “Run to me! We’ve got to get away!”
“I’m—” Another rookie aims at her; she breaks his wrist. “I’m trying, I’m trying, tell me how to stop this!”
Oh God.
There’s only one way to get her to me before the drones get in range.
I program in five shots to hit her in center mass, each a kill shot on a normal human. I go to hit the “confirm” button—
And freeze.
My prosthetic armaments shoot people all the time. Yet that’s automatic; a computerized reading falls within certain parameters, and the gun fires. I spend time improving those settings to ensure innocents don’t get hit, but I don’t make the decision to fire; my software does.
This time, I have to pull the trigger.
I remember the last time I did this: viewing the café through my drone’s camera-reticle, deciding that small blur had to be a dog, and we had a confirmed meeting of three terrorist targets so a dog was an acceptable sacrifice to save American lives, and then realizing after I fired that it wasn’t a dog, and—
My guns can’t hurt Silvia. That’s what I tell myself. But I’m about to fire five high-impact .45 bullets at a terrified woman. I know my weapons too intimately: Scylla will pulp her intestines, then burst her heart from hydrostatic shock.
Her face is an ordinary woman weeping with panic, and even though I’m watching bullets ricochet off her cheekbones I can’t believe my gunfire won’t puncture her lungs.
Look at the drones, I tell myself. They’re almost in range. You have to—
“Silvia!” I scream. “I’m sorry about this!”
I mash the button. Five shots hit her dead center.
She squawks in surprise—and instead of dropping dead to the ground, she leaps high into the air to close the distance between us, reflexively rebounding back towards the latest threat.
I depolarize my helmet, showing her how sorry I am at having to shoot her. I hold my arms open like I hope to catch her in a great big hug, realizing if she’s still angry when she lands she’ll punch me out and end this—
Except as she looks at down, something in me must look ridiculously earnest because she starts giggling.
This is absurd: what kind of relationship turns shooting her in the belly into an act of compassion? The closer she gets the more ridiculous this all seems, until we’re breaking down in laughter by the time she lands in my arms.
“Either I’m going to die,” she tells me, “or this will be a legendary worst first date.”
“I can make this date worse.” I bring Charybdis up, pop open the industrial-strength handcuffs I installed to restrain something stronger than a base-level human. “Let’s stop you from jumping away.”
She covers her face, blushing. “I promised Mama I wasn’t that kind of girl.”
I let her snap the cuff around her wrist as I retreat back into the shipping container—
“No NO! No we are NOT going back in there we are NOT—”
My airbags hit my face as I’m slammed into the shipping container at concussion-inducing speeds, my bulletproof visor cracking. Then she yanks me out of the head-shaped dent, cradling me in her arms. “Oh my God I’m sorry what did I do I panicked I didn’t mean to hurt you—”
In retrospect, handcuffing myself to a gorilla-strong woman with panic disorder had some obvious drawbacks.
Thank God she’s a caretaker: the only thing that seems to snap her out of panic is her concern for someone else.
“We need to get to cover,” I croak, running my tongue over a cracked tooth. “I won’t send you back to prison, I promise, but those—”
The drones open fire. Silvia hauls me back into the shipping container so fast that another of Charybdis’s nuBone hardpoints cracks.
She crouches down in the fragments of bulletproof glass, wrapping her human arms around her green-gray knees. She jerks Charybdis—who is rated at an eight-hundred-pound lift strength—down with her.
“Okay,” she says, bobbing her head as she talks herself down. “He’s going to shoot the drones down, Silvia, he’ll blow them out of the sky and then we’ll get out of here before they send something else—”
“Silvia—”
“—and you’re not going to think about what happens next, Silvia, that’s too much. You’re not going to think about how people will react once they see this hideous body. Don’t think about Mama, don’t think about Vala, concentrate on escaping, one step at a time, one step—”
“Silvia.”
“I’m sorry.” She blinks at her arm, tugging experimentally, as if she still can’t believe her own strength. “I’m—I’m holding you back, aren’t I? You can’t destroy the drones from back here.” She uncurls herself slowly, analyzing how she stood up. “Let’s get you where y
ou can down them—”
I don’t want to destroy her illusions, not least because if she freaks out she might punch my face in. I creep to the doors and slam them shut. “I’m sorry, Silvia. But … I don’t have anything onboard to down those drones. They’re hi-tech. Armored. With shielded rotors.”
“You’re a body-hacker! You have bazookas in your forearms!”
“Common misconception. I don’t have anything worse than what you can pick up at the local military surplus store.”
“So we run!”
I grab her shoulder. “Silvia. We have to assume they came armed with weaponry designed to shut you down—you woke up within a minute after we cut the electricity, so there’s clearly some signal that can … deactivate you.” I don’t like talking about her like she’s a computer program, but I can’t find better words. “And you can’t control yourself yet when they shoot at you. You’re gonna leap right up to take them down, and … they’ll take you down.”
“I’m not surrendering.”
“Not to them, no.”
“Then to who?”
She doesn’t think of the NJPD as someone she needs to surrender to. Which is kind of charming, considering there’s four cops nursing shattered metacarpals.
“I just called down the entire police force upon us, Silvia. We’ll be swarmed in ten minutes. Our best bet’s to hunker down, let them arrest us, and explain what happened, and—”
“Jesus.” I can hear the drones taking up position around us—not entering the container, they’re too big, but waiting. “You think the cops will protect us? They can’t even protect themselves from me! Whatever those drones are, they’ll—they’ll chew through the cops’ defenses, even if the cops put me in jail these guys will smash through the walls and kidnap me again, this is not a good plan—”
“No. No, it isn’t, Silvia. This plan sucks.”
Silvia-handling-process note number two: agreeing with her also helps deflect her panic attacks.
“But I don’t have better plans. I didn’t prepare anything to take out high-level combat drones.” That was supposed to be Donnie’s job—and honestly, I hadn’t thought anything could take Donnie out.
“Okay.” She licks her lips. “You can’t do it. So maybe…”
I shut her down. “And you can’t either. They’re designed to capture you, remember?” I swallow, tasting the grit from the airbags’ explosive charges. “I’m sorry, Silvia. I don’t like our odds. But I think our best bet’s to hope the NJPD comes to the rescue.”
She leans down to whisper: “What if I chuck things at the drones?”
“What?”
She keeps her voice muffled. Brilliant: she must know military drones come with high-quality microphones. She flips a hand at the shot-up hard drives strewn around the room.
“I can—I can leap twenty feet in the air, right? And I punched—I punched him into a wall.” She shakes her head as she flicks her gaze past Donnie, trying to absorb her newfound talent for violence. “So I can fling something fast and high. I sucked at high-school softball, but I’m betting this body makes me a helluva pitcher—”
“That’s crazy.”
“Why?”
“That’s—it’s just flinging stuff and hoping—it’s crude. Like using trebuchets to take down helicopters.”
“I’m sorry?” She cocks her head at me, frowning like I’m insane. “Is war won on style points?”
I am not used to civilians correcting me on military tactics.
“All right,” I admit. “It’s … we can try it. But there’s three of them out there, and they have computerized reflexes. If you only hit one, the other two will fly out of range once they realize what’s happening. So you’ve gotta hit all three at once.”
“I—I’m not sure if I can do that.”
“One’s likely to stay at a distance. It’s what I’d do; they sent three, so I’d keep the third as far out of the line of fire as possible while still keeping it close enough to intercept you if you run. You’ll have to throw hard; they’ll have calculated your attack’s angle and velocity before the projectile leaves your hand. You need to throw faster than they can dodge.”
“Is that possible?”
I chuckle. “I don’t know what you can do, Silvia. But those are weighty drones; they’re designed to carry you, so I don’t think they’re nimble. Our biggest problem is that we need to locate the three of them before we attack or else you’ll be too slow.”
A heavy clunk from above as something massive settles onto the shipping container, followed by a high-pitched whine as a torch cuts a molten line through the roof.
“Well,” she says. “We know where one of them is.”
* * *
I can feel Silvia trembling through the handcuff that connects us. Her eyes flick between the ever-increasing cut in the ceiling and the shut doors, wanting to attack something.
She needs a plan or she’ll fly apart.
Fortunately, planning’s what I do.
I bring up Scylla’s onboard screen, show her how my scanners are measuring the cutting torch’s progress—then I lean down to whisper in her ear.
“That drone will take one minute and forty-nine seconds to cut a hole in the roof. Can I tell you a secret about warfare, Silvia?”
She’s desperate to listen to someone who can tell her what’s going on. “Yes.”
“All combat comes down to preparation. We have that long to make a plan.” I point at Scylla, who now reads 1:41. “Your idea to throw heavy equipment at the drones—that was a good plan, Silvia. Now we have to figure out where the drones are, without going out and looking around. Can you do that?”
1:32 left, and literally 35.9 percent of the words I’ve spoken are intended to keep Silvia from panicking. Yet those are words well spent. She’s my equipment, at least for the remaining ninety seconds, and I need to maintain her.
And by giving Silvia a narrow task, I’ve given her something to derail her from her next panic attack. If she can’t think up a way to triangulate the drones’ position she might enter another one—
But thinking up ways is my job.
I wish I was still connected to Donnie’s overhead satellite feed, but I lost that access when I opened fire upon him. Likewise, we might be able to get a rough position on the drones if I heard Marcy and Defcon opening fire on the overhead threats, but no shots have been fired. My guess is they wisely peace-tied themselves the moment the NJPD rumbled in.
The NJPD …
“Silvia,” I say as I broadcast orders to the police cars outside. “I’m going to crack open the door and fire ten shots in rapid succession. A minute later, those cars will explode. I don’t have time to explain right now, but just understand that it’s part of the plan, and the exploding cars will be far away, and they won’t hurt anyone. Are we clear?”
I speak calmly, giving her space to take in each word. She gives me tight nods as she does her best to understand. At 1:01, she says, “Yes. Yes, I’m clear.”
I walk to the door, switching to incendiary rounds, and snap off ten shots at four police cars, which I’ve lined up according to the holes Silvia’s punched in their sides.
Under normal circumstances, I’d never penetrate the armor to hit the vehicle-strength batteries underneath. But Silvia’s peeled away a lot of the protective plating, exposing internals—
And while the new deep-well batteries are better shielded and less likely to explode than gas tanks, that’s only because the manufacturers are smart enough to encase these volatile chemicals in extremely sturdy frames.
I drive the four cars into the trees, their frames already belching thick black smoke, the remaining cops inside diving to safety as I helpfully pop their doors open. I then wheel the remaining car into position. Its LADAR maps out where the drones are. Sure enough, one’s on the roof; the other two have taken up position high behind the shipping container’s exit, ready to ambush us if we flee.
I establish a connection to a holog
ram projector on my left leg, pop it out, prop it on the floor so it displays a live-time map of where the two flying drones are.
“There,” I whisper to Silvia as 0:49 clicks by. “Can you see them?”
“Yes.” She grabs a hard drive, chucks it into the ceiling at an angle that I’m certain would have hit a drone if the shipping container wasn’t in the way. It shatters into shrapnel that bounces off my helmet. “Sorry. I … I’m not sure what happened.”
“It’s okay, Silvia. Can you hit them?”
“I think so.” She frowns as she peers into the display. “I—I see the layout in my mind. I’m visualizing things in ways I never could before.”
She bites off more explanation—she’s seeing a lot more than most humans, I bet, now that she’s analyzing what her newfound body can do. But she sees the clock tick down to 0:38, flinching as the metal above us sags. No time left for self-reflection.
“I’ll take care of this one above,” I say. “But I can’t stay handcuffed to you and do that. May I handcuff you to this door so you don’t leap away?”
“Yes.”
Though Silvia’s vinegar stench of alien fear-sweat is sharper than the acrid stink of molten steel, she keeps her eyes on the map as I reattach her to the door. Those sharp eyes are watching the microshifts as the drones adjust themselves to the wind currents; her gaze darts across the heaped racks, marking what servers she’ll grab, what angles she’ll fling them at.
She’s shit-scared and shivering, and why not? She’s never been in a life-or-death fight. She’s a head grafted to a bioengineered body she’s not sure she can control.
Yet she’s magnificent—not despite her panic disorder, but because of it.
She is struggling so hard to surpass herself.
The clock ticks to 0:29, abruptly losing two seconds—the torch is cutting through faster than my prediction models anticipated. I squeeze her shoulder. “Hit ’em quick, Silvia. One, two. One, two.”
“One, two,” she mutters, almost in a trance. I recognize that trance: if she comprehends everything about to happen, she will break down. So she’s compartmentalizing, narrowing the world down like I do—I’m not about to engage a drone in hand-to-hand combat, I’m tuning a setting on one of my armaments. She’s not about to face down two drones engineered to kill her, she’s practicing her fastball.
Automatic Reload: A Novel Page 10
