Zero State

by Jameson Kowalczyk

  He watched another minute and saw no movement. His motion sensor was blank. Snow and hail continued to fall. Once again, he was out here alone.

  He stood and got to work.

  ***

  From this height and distance, the valley floor was an endless expanse of white. But there was a base down there. And an army.

  The summit was a long, narrow ridge. The mules climbed up and met him. The time spent standing still hadn't been enough to sabotage their joints. He led them away from the tower and gave a command that put them each into a squat.

  The handle of each ice ax had a forked wedge, so that each tool doubled as a pry bar. Logan pried open the crates the robots had carried all the way here.

  Each crate contained a launcher. Each launcher was a block made of black tubes. There were twenty-five tubes to a block. Fifty in total. The tubes looked like lengths of pipe ready to be installed under a city street. Loaded inside each was a self-piloted aircraft called a swarm drone.

  Logan gave a voice command and the mules adjusted their positions, straightening their front legs while leaving their back legs crouched, like big metal dogs ordered to sit. The launchers pointed up and over the valley.

  He opened a panel on the back of each launcher and threw a switch. Then he gave another voice command. There was the hollow thunk of a projectile moving through a barrel and a white spear shot into the sky. Thin, blade-like wings snapped into place and the projectile seemed to hang in the air for a half-second before it glided away, disappearing above the valley.

  Another hollow thunk and another drone shot out. Followed by another. And another. One every ten seconds.

  Logan opened his pack and found a black armored case and popped the lid. The interior was padded with insulation.

  The object inside the case was shaped like a gun, in the sense that you looked at it and understood one end was meant to be pointed at the enemy. It was about the length of an assault rifle. It was bulky like a shotgun. It had two grips, one in front of the stock, one underneath the barrel. It had two triggers. It had sights mounted on top.

  More noticeable were the things it didn't have. There was no place to insert a magazine and no port where empty shells would be ejected. The barrel had no opening, just a black lens.

  He lifted the object out of the case. It had weight to it, which was good. It felt like a weapon. He didn't want to walk onto the battlefield aiming something that felt like a toy.

  The weapon was called a marker. A pull of the trigger would aim a laser, and the swarm drones would open fire from above on whatever that laser touched.

  Each drone was loaded with two thousand rounds of high-velocity ammunition and three miniaturized air-to-surface missiles. A hundred thousand bullets and a hundred and fifty high-explosive projectiles were circling the air above the valley, waiting to rain down at the pull of a trigger.

  ***

  Logan climbed down the first third of the descent and then skied the rest. The mules ran ahead of him, hooves biting into the hard-packed snow.

  He passed the bodies of the four people he'd shot, and at the base of the mountain, he passed their vehicle, an armored tank painted a dull white.

  The swarm was invisible in the sky overhead. Information scrolled on the inside of Logan's goggles like a stock market ticker, showing him battery life and ammunition counts. A voice command brought up an overhead map that showed the swarm as a constellation of tiny green dots. The drones were on pre-programmed flight paths, continuously circling the air above the valley.

  He was on a flat plain now. The mules walked ahead of him. He'd traded his skis for snowshoes, favoring a slow approach. Zoe unmuted her comm line and broke radio silence.

  "Be safe," she said.

  "I'll see you soon."

  The channel went back to mute.

  Logan looked across the white desert and saw nothing but empty white space and thin curtains of falling snow. The motion sensor was blank. Nothing within fifty meters was moving.

  He muttered a voice command and activated the thermal optics on his goggles. His vision changed to a dark blue. He could see swirls of darker blue, swirls of lighter blue—air currents, some colder, some warmer.

  And he could see something else. A vehicle. It looked like a single-cell organism under a microscope. Its outer dimensions were a dull yellow membrane; the engine, a glowing red nucleus; and the people crowded inside, pink organelles.

  Logan ordered the mules to stand still. He kept the broadside of the robots between himself and his enemy. They'd provide more cover that way, absorb any gunfire directed at him.

  The vehicle's heat signature swelled as the distance shortened. The marker had a mile-long reach and the drones could hit anything on the ground underneath the swarm. The vehicle was already in range, but Logan held back, waiting to see if anyone or anything followed behind it, or if it was out here alone.

  It was out here alone.

  He aimed behind the glowing red heart of the engine. At the cluster of bodies piled in back.

  He squeezed the trigger for an air-to-surface missile.

  Through the thermal optics it looked like a lightning strike. A red bolt shooting from the sky followed by a bright explosion on the ground.

  The vehicle burst open like a splitting atom, its metal body torn apart by the ball of expanding energy that bloomed inside it.

  When the explosion faded, the landscape was littered with glowing scraps of hot metal. Fires pulsed inside the shredded remains of the vehicle, and the surrounding air was stained pink with heat.

  ***

  They came for him in force.

  Logan saw the red hearts of engines and the small pink stars of warm bodies moving out in the open. A mix of tanks, armored personnel carriers, and soldiers on skis. An entire army spread out over the white desert.

  He continued to push forward. He moved at a slow pace, letting the snowfall mask his movements. When he reached the top of a small hill he halted the mules and took a knee. From the slight elevation he could see the full battalion, spread out over the battlefield. The snow let up for a moment and he spotted his objective in the distance—the base, the research station, the lab, whatever the hell it was called. He thought of Barnes, the bleeding man he'd taken off that island, all the dead bodies he'd seen piled in the streets. The thing that had killed them had come from there.

  From the outside, it wasn't much to look at. The bulk of the structure was underground. He saw the dull glow of exterior lights marking lifelines, the kind you clipped into to stay on course if you needed to go outside. He saw red lights above cave-like entryways that were big enough to drive a tank through. He saw thin trails of warm air curling out from vents that glowed purple in the thermal optics.

  He looked at the army in the valley below. He counted at least a hundred bodies out in the open, and a dozen armored vehicles. He wondered how many of them were natural born humans and how many were the lab grown super soldiers. He thought about the things he'd encountered on the island. He thought of the battle in that nameless parking lot. He thought of the six he'd killed and the one Zoe had saved him from twice, and realized Zoe had killed many more than that with the antimatter bomb.

  He'd been standing still for over a minute and he was starting to get cold. His enemies were divided into four squads, each with three vehicles and two dozen men. A big enough net to find and catch anything hiding out here.

  He sighted on the second furthest squad and held down the trigger, dragging the laser across a cluster of pink bodies. An electric storm of gunfire flashed in the sky above. Through the thermal optics he saw brief splashes of heat as spraying blood flash-froze. He saw the tiny glowing silhouettes ground to mush like fireflies underneath a pestle.

  Three seconds of gunfire. Then he adjusted his aim, directed it at the second closest squad, and fired for another three seconds. A rain of bullets mixed with the falling snow and more bodies were torn apart.


  One advantage of the swarm weapons system—all the bullets came from above, making it almost impossible to gauge the direction the enemy was firing from. Logan was exploiting that feature now, firing upon one squad and then another, trying to cause as much confusion and chaos as possible. Trying to disorient and terrify his enemy. It was only a lone man on a hill and a bunch of robots in the sky, but on the battlefield it would seem like there was an entire army out here, hidden among the white landscape, pounding them with gunfire from all directions. He remembered the first time he'd studied these tactics and understanding why the words stage and theater were used to describe battlefronts in the wars of decades past.

  He let loose two high explosives, one at the far end of the battlefield, more than a half-mile away, another into the squad that was a mere hundred meters in front of him. Two red heat trails streaked from the sky and two armored vehicles erupted in sprays of fire and shrapnel. Bodies were knocked flat. Some stood up afterward, others didn't.

  Guns chattered below. Some had figured out that the bullets were coming from above and were aiming their rifles toward the sky. Others were firing into the white fray that surrounded them, at enemies that weren't there.

  Information scrolled inside Logan's goggles. He'd only used a fraction of his ammunition. He held down the trigger and ran the marker across one line of foot soldiers and then another, letting bullets smear them across the cold ground. At this rate, he would kill more people within the span of ten minutes than he had in his entire career. He might have done that already.

  There was a burst of light when one of the tanks fired, and the shell left a heat trail as it cut through the cold air. Logan realized too late that the shell was aimed at him.

  He turned and dove flat.

  The shell hit one of the mules, three meters away.

  The shockwave of the explosion was enough to knock Logan out cold. His body was unconscious as it was thrown from the small hill and skidded across the frozen ground.

  ***

  Zoe was screaming in his ear.

  "LOGAN!"

  Her voice sounded small and faraway.

  "LOGAN!"

  He opened his eyes and saw white.

  "LOOK UP!"

  He lifted his head. The thermal optics on his goggles had gone out and he was looking at the white continent's naked landscape. He saw motion ahead of him. Ten meters away.

  The marker was still held to his arm by a strap. He rolled onto his back and held down the trigger, raking the targeting laser back and forth, firing without aiming. Muzzles flashed in the clouds above as three or four drones let loose streams of gunfire. The ground underneath him shuddered and plumes of ice chips rose up around him.

  Zoe was talking, but his ears were ringing, and he couldn't hear anything less than a scream.

  He muttered a voice command. His vision flickered to blue stained with neon and then went back to white as the goggles malfunctioned and the thermal optics failed. But that half-second had shown him that his enemy was practically on top of him.

  And other things were working. His motion sensor was spotted with orbs, like a school of fish showing up on sonar.

  It took a few steps before his balance returned. Cold was bleeding into his suit under his left arm. The protective shell had been torn by shrapnel or ice.

  The world around him was a whiteout. He ran forward and saw a handful of dots drop off his radar as they fell outside the fifty meter range, so he kept running in that direction.

  He turned and spotted the swell of the hill he'd been standing on. A steaming mass of metal marked the top, the remains of one of the mules. He glanced at his radar and for a second it made sense—he was moving away from the hill, his enemies were moving over it.

  He aimed and pulled a trigger three times, firing three high-explosive projectiles. Three explosions lit up the whiteout. He saw bodies torn up in the blasts and others backlit by the flames. He held down the trigger and drew a zig-zag with the marker, turning the hill and anyone standing on it into mulch.

  Logan's eyes flickered to the radar. Nothing moved.

  "Logan," Zoe said, and he remembered she was listening, she was watching.

  "Still here," he said.

  ***

  He wasn't equipped for a close-quarters battle. Not against dozens of soldiers with armored vehicles. He was equipped for a firefight over distance. He needed to get to cover and hammer them with the drones.

  He had no skis or snowshoes and his head was still fuzzy with concussion. They were using night vision or thermal optics, which was probably how they'd spotted him. He'd never outrun them back to the mountain. They'd chase him down or shell the entire valley with artillery fire to kill him.

  "Zoe, how far to the base?"

  "Three kilometers. What are you thinking?"

  "They won't fire the tanks at their own shelter. If I can get there I'll take their heavy guns out of the equation. At least for a few minutes."

  A red waypoint appeared on the cracked interior of his goggles. Three kilometers was a little under two miles. He started running.

  Instinct pulled him toward the outskirts of the battlefield, away from his enemies. He fought that instinct. Out there he would be an easy target for the tanks and heavy machine guns. He'd be shot to pieces the instant he was spotted.

  As counterintuitive as it felt, his better option was to run the gauntlet, to cut through the crowds where they couldn't fire their heavy weapons at him without killing scores of themselves in the process.

  The swarm drone system was designed for fighting at a distance, but it still made a better close quarters weapon than a tank cannon.

  He saw them on his radar before their bodies came into view through the snowfall. Soldiers dressed in white camouflage and armor. He marked them with the laser and gunfire streamed from the clouds, aimed at targets as close as ten meters away from him. Close enough that Logan was sprayed with blood and gore. Close enough that bullets kicked up plumes of ice only steps ahead of him. He ran forward, laser held down, letting the gunfire clear a path. Bullets and shrapnel struck him, tearing up his suit but stopping at his body armor. He felt the cold reach in. He swept the laser from side to side, killing things in the distance and other things that were very close. The ground was littered with fallen bodies and limbs and bloodstains. When he saw bullets ricochet off of metal he pulled the other trigger and a ball of fire mushroomed out of the white.

  He'd covered half the distance to the base before the armored transport came rolling in at him. It wasn't moving very fast but it didn't need to—the thing must have weighed forty tons. It only needed to move faster than he was and catch him under the treads. This was something he'd overlooked—they wouldn't fire a tank at him, but they could still run him over with one.

  Bullets wouldn't punch through the armor and the vehicle was too close for a high explosive. That much exploding metal would kill him at this range.

  Logan ran in a tight circle and the massive vehicle turned to follow. The change in direction slowed it enough that he could step behind it. There was a ladder there, a series of metal rungs leading to the top. He grabbed on, the marker dangling from the shoulder strap, his feet dragging on the snow and ice.

  The armored vehicle had two entrances, a ramp that lowered in the back and a hatch up top. He pulled himself up the rungs and crouched on the roof of the vehicle. There were more rungs up top, so soldiers could ride on the outside if they needed to. Logan climbed up and held on. He alternated both triggers on the marker, spraying the surrounding battlefield with explosives and machine gun fire. He was down to less than a third of his ammo, but targets were scarce. The result of firing a devastating weapon indiscriminately: he'd killed nearly everything out here.

  The vehicle moved fast, swerving left and right. They knew he was on their back and they were trying to shake him loose. But they were carrying him closer to the base. Not in a direct line, but he'd have less ground to c
over when he jumped off. Which he was about a minute away from doing.

  There was a sudden loss of gravity, like they'd gone over a hill too fast and went airborne. Only they hadn't gone over a hill. The weightless feeling stretched on for several long seconds, the front of the vehicle tilting down, as if it were going to flip end over end. Logan tightened his hands on the rail, gripping it harder than he'd ever gripped anything in his life.

  The tilt stopped as the vehicle's nose smashed hard into a wall of blue ice. Logan felt the impact through every muscle and tendon and bone in his body. He was lifted up and slammed down on the uneven metal surface, his armor absorbing some of the impact but not all. He tasted blood. He held on.

  The backend of the vehicle started to drop. There was another long moment without gravity and another impact with another wall of blue ice.

  Logan looked up. They'd fallen into a crevasse, a deep crack in the valley's surface that had been hidden below a thin layer of snow and ice. They continued to fall, the vehicle's front and back ends scraping the frozen walls. Fast at first, then slower as the crevasse narrowed. The vehicle screeched to a halt with a sound Logan felt inside his teeth.

  He loosened his grip on the metal rung. He'd sprained his wrists and elbows. If it wasn't for the added strength of the exosuit the joints would have been torn apart completely.

  Two walls of blue ice rose around him. Empty space stretched out to either side. It was like standing at the bottom of a vertical cave, only it wasn't the bottom. Looking over the edge, Logan saw that the crevasse continued down, narrowing to a sharp black line and continuing beyond that. It looked bottomless.

  "Zoe?" He said. There was nothing, not even static. He tried it again. More nothing. The comm line was dead, the device's wires or electronics knocked loose or smashed during the fall.

  Logan looked up, trying to decide the best approach for climbing out. He had two ice axes. The pack strapped to his back held crampons, rope, and climbing gear.