by Toby Weston
As he runs, Anosh steps back along the chain of trust that transported him across Europe. He doesn’t want to think the faces that now march across the stage of his mind have betrayed him, but with resignation and without malice, he accepts that at least one of them probably has.
Economics is trust. A breach of trust bleeds reputation from the system. It is a zero sum game and, although the negative impact will percolate back in the form of bad ratings or lost points, his betrayer must have calculated that exchanging trust for wealth was a rational course of action: wealth will flow to him, while negative impact will be spread along the web of trust.
A strident rising sequence of cracking percussions reintroduces the hunter’s song to the orchestra of the night. The sound is carried on the wind, echoing between land and the thermoclines of cooling night air, lensing and surging, a dread beating.
Perhaps it was the junior prison guard, who had smuggled him into port, or one of the riggers on the boat to Latakia. It doesn’t make him angry; it doesn’t even make him sad. It is just disappointing.
He finds himself crying, then, picturing his family so close, waiting for him to scrabble out of the scrub and into their arms.
A row of bushes appears ahead; it marks the edge of a dirt road. A pair of faint lights flicker into existence over the crest of a low hill. Shining into the dusty night, the beams are visible only intermittently as they flash skyward.
He can hear the copters getting closer. He squats back from the road next to a large, wedge-shaped boulder. He pulls the camouflaged Mylar thermal blanket back over himself and waits. The material crinkles and rustles. It becomes clammy with his condensed breath and sweat. As the helicopters move overhead, the car, a battered-looking Land Rover, dashes by. It’s too dark and dusty to get a view of the occupants, so he stays hunkered down and invisible beneath his camouflage.
***
The helicopters are back again. Ayşe is driving with her scarf pulled across her face to keep out the dust. The windows are open. Anosh should be around here somewhere, and they don’t want to miss him. Segi is on the back seat. From under a blanket, he is listening hard to pick up any chatter from the radios. From the scraps they can intercept, it’s not looking good. The Osmani know there is at least one person trying to sneak across their border tonight.
Zaki is sitting in the passenger seat, scanning the scrub on either side of the road. A jeep is approaching, still a couple of kilometres away, but visible from its headlights as it crawls along another dirt track on the opposite side of the shallow valley.
The closest helicopter, about five hundred metres away behind them, is dropping down and lifting a thick boiling plume of dust, backlit by the lights of the approaching jeep. Ayşe eases off the accelerator and lets the rough terrain slow them down.
Zaki watches something detach from the helicopter. A few moments later, he sees the unmistakable silhouettes of bodies abseiling down lines and dropping into the seething maelstrom of dust.
***
Anosh had known the game was up when the choppers returned. They criss-crossed the night in a deliberate patient grid. They seemed to know he was somewhere below, and they weren’t going anywhere. He had followed advice and physically turned off all his kit and now sat huddled, motionless, under his Mylar blanket.
Suddenly, his Spex ear buds crackle. He pulls them out of his ears to double check they are off. They crackle again, and this time there is a simultaneous thread of pain that pulses briefly at his temple and inside his head.
The other helicopter swings around, orienting itself towards him like a hunting thing. He feels like a rabbit in the long grass, crouching motionless while the lynx approaches, its ears swivelling first as it picks up some tiny betraying sound, then its head follows to bring its awful gaze and deadly intent to bare.
He knows they have found him, pulsed him with enough EM radiation that all the wires and aerials in his equipment resonate in sympathy, sending back faint involuntary responses, modulated with identifying and incriminating information proclaiming him as not goat-herder.
It is practically above him now. At this range, they can probably detect his heartbeat with their Doppler radar, despite his vest sown through with metal threads. The air is full of dust, and it is appallingly loud. Through the orange confusion, a bundle of rope drops into a clear area between the olive trees. It starts to jerk and then the dark form of a body appears through the dust, only about twenty metres away from where he is hiding.
He can barely breathe with all the dust and the mind-numbing waves of pressure that wash in from the helicopter’s rotors. He is trapped between the thick trunk of an ancient olive and a large boulder. More shapes are moving between the trees; they are black and menacing and cast long, sharp shadows with distorted arms which grope out through the orange, translucent air. He can hear the crackle of radios. Blinding lights strobe across the now alien countryside. Suddenly he is blind. The sharp shadows of the bush he is crouched inside become skeletal fingers against the light. The black shapes have all turned in his direction now and are approaching.
The rabbit bolts, fight or flight. Standing up, letting the camouflage blanket get ripped off by branches, he is incapable of conscious thought. He stumbles through the bushes, away from the lights. A small voice is trying to insist they have found him, despite everything, and one man stumbling in the dark is not going to give them the slip; but the voice is submerged by panic and sensory overload.
***
Two flashes are followed by loud muted cracks, light and sound dissociated through distance. Somebody in the car screams. Ayşe stops with a skid that throws up another thick ball of dust. As it rises and floats forward, it temporarily masks everything outside its perimeter. The dread within the car settles. Nobody speaks. They are all looking off, through the dusty soup, towards the still-hovering helicopter. The jeep is much closer, but has also stopped a few hundred metres away around a bend.
After two or three minutes, shapes begin to appear on the ropes again. This time, they ascend, one after another, smoothly sliding up into the belly of the hunter. There is another pause, and then a last silhouette ascends. As soon as the last shape is inside, the helicopter begins to climb and bank away from them.
Zaki is pretty sure that none of the shapes he watched entering the helicopter were his father. Ascending a rope, into a hovering helicopter, even with some form of powered climbing assist, is not a skill he could imagine Anosh secretly acquiring.
The jeep in front is coming around the corner now. The helicopter has risen another ten metres.
Perhaps, it was a false alarm. Perhaps, the soldiers shot and missed. Or perhaps, Anosh is lying out there somewhere, bleeding into the stony earth.
Zaki watches the rope swinging slowly, like a pendulum below the wasp shape of the rising black copter. There is something hanging from its end.
The jeep is black. It has lights on its roof. They are flashing. It pulls up next to them, rolling slowly to a halt. Its driver is obviously familiar with the local conditions and keen to avoid adding to the excessive amount of dust already suspended in the air.
Ayşe and Segi are watching it as it draws level with them. Zaki is still intent on the departing evil. The rope is disappearing back into its body. It is now a winged spider drawing in its lines. A limp, wrapped shape is tangled in the final length of web.
As the helicopter swings around to a new heading, the bundle on the end, the weight on the pendulum, traces a lazy arc in the sky, a segment of circumference. Neither Ayşe nor Siegfried have noticed.
The policeman has wound down his window, and he is shouting something to Ayşe above the noise. Zaki is calm. With a few discreet taps, his Companion translates the sounds, printing words on its screen and whispering to him through his ear buds.
“What are you doing here?” it translates.
Ayşe is staring at the policeman, terrified, frozen.
“What are you doing here?” the cop repeats the sounds
again.
Zaki leans over awkwardly and answers, parroting the words his earbuds speak into his ear: “Going home.”
The policeman looks past the insensitive Ayşe to Zaki, craning over from the passenger seat.
“What’s wrong with your mother?” the cop asks, taking in Zaki’s twisted hand and contorted posture.
Zaki’s other hand is hidden by his mother’s body. He types his response and then repeats aloud his Companion’s translation, hoping he is making some kind of sense in Turkic, hoping the policeman will assume they are just a family of imbeciles and cripples.
“She’s deaf.”
The policeman scans the interior of the car, mentally fitting the occupants to his preconceptions of a family unit. “Where is your father?”
The doll, tiny and far away now, is fastened at the waist and hangs face up. Its arms and legs are splayed awkwardly. It swings and turns in the wind as it dangles below the departing chopper.
Zaki types words and then repeats sounds that have no meaning.
“Our father is dead.”
End of Book One
Postscript
CLV2 is lying in the sun waiting amongst the sand and scrub.
No bogies detected.
Situation nominal.
No orders in queue.
Time passes.
Unfriendly units approaching.
CLV2 stirs, jacks vis chassis into drive mode and tracks the coordinates.
‘So there are,’ ve thinks to verself. ‘Where did they come from?’
Two Main Battle Tanks are thundering across the dunes towards ver. Range 1800M.
The nuclear fire at CLV2's heart swells and power surges into ultra-capacitors and momentum stores.
Ve simulates the situation for a few milliseconds then fires two shots from each of the large coil gun barrels on vis main turret. HEAP rounds arc away on ballistic trajectories, on target…
…but the rounds never make contact, detonating instead a few metres out, dousing the two enemy tanks with nothing more substantial than clouds of smoke.
Security compromised.
CLV2 checks the magazine; the rounds are correctly signed. The certificates all check out as High Explosive Armour Piercing. Yet, empirical observation contradicts this received knowledge.
Error.
Data consistency compromised.
Probable result of hostile electronic warfare attack.
CLV2 performs a scan of the area. 200m West is a glass wall; sitting behind it on tiers of wooden benches are a group of humans holding optical devices and mobile communication gear. They are not assisting ver, nor displaying any of the usual human physiological fear or panic indicators.
CLV2, confused and under attack, incorrectly concludes that they must be part of the enemy deployment.
How did they penetrate so far inside the homeland battle space?
CLV2 fires a fusillade of shells from vis 30mm cannon towards the stands. Vis microwave radar cannot find the departing rounds and ve quickly shuts off the guns. Blanks, more electronic warfare corruption!
Ve is hobbled, compromised. CLV2 is classified ‘Top Secret’ and knows it. High priority standing orders compel ver to prevent the intelligence within vis systems from falling into enemy hands. CLV2 begins to feel the self-destruct itch.
Ve scans the humans again. They are certainly going to rake through the debris for intelligence once the tanks close and finish ver off.
CLV2 goes into simulation mode again, branching and pruning vast trees of possibilities; once the optimal course of action presents itself ve doesn't hesitate. Targeting lasers pushed to maximum power lance out and slash across the faces of the watching humans. Spex and eyeballs blacken or burst like popcorn. Before the humans have had time to start screaming, ve runs the lasers back, targeting all hands holding communication devices; Companions clatter to the floor and the air is filled with screams and the smell of roasting pork. Having hopefully bought verself some time, ve starts accelerating towards the closing tanks.
There are a further 37 seconds of peace before the enemy starts firing. CLV2 cannot account for this pause; ve doesn’t have time to crack the coms, so cannot hear the frenzied conversations between the tank pilots and the HQ. Ve doesn't know that live go-codes must be hastily requested and approved, cannot see the closing tanks ejecting blank rounds and replacing them with live munitions.
The autonomous point defence laser turrets start illuminating incoming shells, managing to detonate or deflect a few in mid-flight, but the shells are coming in thick and fast, and some inevitably get through.
CLV2 calls for support. There is one bird within range, a surveillance drone with its optics pointed towards the action. Despite repeated pings and valid identity tokens, it will not accept CLV2's go-codes. The electronic warfare infiltration must have scrambled those, too. Ve cannot persuade the drone to attack the tanks with its admittedly puny weapon systems. After a logical dance ending in some nasty buffer overflows and compromised sandboxes, CLV2's superior intellect eventually triumphs. The drone reluctantly accepts a new heading.
Half vis drive wheels are non-functioning. Large sections of armour and interior are missing or on fire. There is major damage to the reactor shielding. It needs a constant act of will now to suppress the self-destruct urge.
The nearest tank is only fifty metres away. The other is coming round to fire again and ve notices that the crew hatch is still open. Ve sends off an updated course to the drone and watches as it adjusts its heading.
Ve faints to the left then swings sharply to the right, breaking with vis front wheels and dropping the front suspension as much as possible. With a final burst of acceleration, the wedge-like front of CLV2's armour smashes into the ground and grinds under the enemy tank, ploughing towards it. CLV2 detonates the explosive bolts on vis forward maintenance hatch, which is now pointing up under the belly of the flailing enemy tank. The hatch flies up, doing very minor damage to the underside of the tank seesawing backwards and forwards on CLV2’s forward section.
One last time, CLV2 scans the surrounding area; everything is consistent with vis planning simulation: the tank wedged up on vis front section will not be able to free itself for several seconds; the 2nd tank, roaring in at top speed, will be able to fire again in 700 ms; the drone, grumbling with proximity and collision alerts, is approaching fast and will arrive shortly after CLV2 ceases to be.
With something like relief, ve finally triggers vis self-destruct charges.
An exploding ball of super-heated gas wallops through CLV2's interior spaces, purging and deleting. The explosion drives itself in a 60cm wide column out of the hole where the inspection hatch used to be. Like a rocket-powered plasma cutter, it punches through the vulnerable under armour of the tank above and fire rages through this second enclosed space, cleaning and killing.
Three seconds later and 800m away, back at the chaos of the viewing benches, the few guests who are still conscious are able to witness a flash screaming in from above. The drone, obeying its last orders, slams down at 600mph through the open hatch of the second tank and explodes spectacularly inside.
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Book Two - Disruption
From the back cover:
Disruption, Singularity’s Children Book Two, takes us deeper into an action-packed riot of haves and have-nots; a vivid alternate future filled with Buddhist commandos, stolen Femto-tech, AI Sages and Quantum Consciousness.
A decade after economic collapse sent the world’s governments toppling like dominoes, the corporations are back on top. Their Synthetic Cognition farms have rel
ieved society of the drudgery of work, leaving behind a broiling underclass precariat. The Forward governments pacify their rabbles with computer-generated titillation, while channelling legions of the desperate into overseas peacekeeping.
Keith’s reduced circumstances, following an impulsive experiment with corporate disobedience, leave him vulnerable to the Battlesuit which was always stalking him.
Niato’s island utopia is an experiment in pan-species cooperation and a beacon for the hacktivist kin assembling their alternate economy.
When Stella is drawn down into the human slime that underlies this new world order, can a vengeful cetacean, a wounded soldier and two exiled hackers save her from the darkness?
Disruption is subversive, fast-paced action. A provocative excursion into a near-future civilisation struggling to survive the maelstrom of post-human forces its technology is unleashing.