by John Conroe
The biggest downside to the whole program lay in the Kestrel drones that also formed the backbone of it. Rikki was a Russian Berkut, and for years had been able to fudge the IFF transponder codes used among the Zone’s killer bots. Lotus had ruined the IFF part, but Rikki still appeared to match the visual and flight characteristics of a regular Berkut.
But the Kestrels were the enemies of the Zone drones and nothing would hide that fact. Each Kestrel would be identified on sight, and each would draw out attackers. We’d done what we could about that, Yoshida’s dream team layering a complex software program into the Kestrels’ own IFFs. The result was a projection that didn’t match the Zone bots but also didn’t match anything in the US drone arsenal. An obfuscation, Eric had called it, projected at short range only, to confuse any Zone device long enough for the Kestrel and/or its soldier to kill it. At least, that was the theory.
We’d also completely enclosed the Kestrels in carbon fiber cladding to block out their radio signatures when they weren’t broadcasting through extruded antennas. Many military drones have carbon fiber in their structures, but either used exterior antennas or didn’t have enough CF to block all signals. Otherwise the human or computer operators wouldn’t be able to direct them from back at base. Early in the Zone’s history, the military sent fully enclosed drones in to hunt the terrorist devices. They were all completely autonomous, as they had to be. None of them ever returned on their own. Dad and I pulled a few wrecked ones out, as there were big rewards for their retrieval. All of the ones we found were shot to shit.
But the Kestrels going in with my newly trained snake eaters were fully covered with carbon fiber. Since they had their operators with them, able to communicate with verbal and visual signals, they could pull their antennas inside and operate off the grid, so to speak, when necessary.
It made them rather hard to find electronically when they went radio silent. Rikki had had to use his extremely sensitive sound and visual sensors to find them when we had hunted them in practice. I didn’t think any Raptor, Kite, or Skyhawk was going to figure that trick out without a Spider’s guidance. Even the few remaining Berkuts in existence would be at a disadvantage for a while till their own AI networks worked it out. And call me biased but I personally think Rikki’s abilities leave even other Death Eagles in the dust. Overconfident, you say? Maybe, but every time we had tangled with a Berkut, Rikki and I had won.
So I was still worried, but they were better equipped technologically and experientially than any previous force of human infiltrators. And I needed to concentrate on my own situation.
We had about nine blocks to travel on Hudson Street before we hit the huge internet hub. The drones found us at block two.
As often is the case, my first indication of trouble was Rikki swooping back up the street in my direction. Instantly, I ducked down behind a rusting Dodge Ram pickup truck, pulling the tailgate open as a kind of roof over my hiding spot. There was a parked food truck behind me, adding cover. I ignored the bleached white skeletal arm poking out of the food truck’s open service window.
Rikki kept going north, back the way we had come, never slowing or even waggling his wings as he shot past.
Three seconds later, a mixed trio of two Raptors and a Kite came at full speed right behind him.
Of the three, it was the tiny unarmed Kite that bothered me the most. Rikki could eat the Raptors for breakfast, but as I might have mentioned before, Indian Kites almost always pair with Tigers. My .458 was set up with the suppressor on and subsonic ammo in the magazine and chamber. A perfect load-out for knocking UAVs out of the air, but nowhere near optimum for a 180-kilo monster.
Hunkering low, tucked under the tailgate, I stayed frozen. The primary temptation was to change out magazines and get loaded for Tiger. It was like a palpable need, one that I resisted with every iota of willpower. I had harped about it to my students time and time again. You don’t have near the time to react that you think you have inside the Zone. Any movement on my part could either register with the sensitive little air drone that followed a couple of meters behind the bigger UAVs or it could trip the sensors of the massive killer that was guaranteed to be following in the gloomy early dawn light.
I prefer to shoot Tigers from two hundred meters out and several floors up, using armor piercing .338 magnum rounds. Facing one on the ground with even full-powered .458 Socom rounds was way, way less appealing. The best bet was to freeze in place, let my stealth suit do its job and go undetected by the Tiger—and pray like crazy.
The sounds of the UAVs faded but I stayed still, doing my best to impersonate concrete, while the images of Primmer getting torn in half replayed over and over in my head. The air was still cool but I could feel myself sweating under the expensive suit and could almost hear my own heart hammering inside my chest. The dystopian streets fell dead quiet, only the sound of a plane way up high, droning through the air. Then I heard it—a soft rustle. Then a click, like stone on stone, or maybe more like metal on stone.
That was it. Just a soft sound, then the lightest of pings. Across and down the street. I was kneeling on one folded leg, rifle angled vertically across my body, muzzle down, head bent over, eyes on my left wrist, where a tiny piece of shiny metal reflected the width of the street to my side.
There’s no evidence to support it, but my personal belief is that certain poses either look less human or at least present less readily identifiable body parts. My folded pose was one that I had adopted many times before, especially around cars, walls, and other physical objects. With the Tiger on the other side of the street, it effectively hid the obvious lines of my rifle, while the rounded back, shoulders, and tucked head gave my shape a lump-like silhouette. And odd lumps were as common as dirt on the streets of modern day Manhattan. Rotten clothing and old bones, garbage bags rolled by the wind like apocalyptic tumble weeds, leaves and sticks blown into piles against man-made windbreaks.
The rusted rear wheel with its flattened tire gave me a bit of additional cover, as my body was canted slightly forward, putting my head out in front of my knee, slightly behind the tire. My wrist was down alongside my folded left leg, shiny metal mirror peering under the arc of the truck’s ruined wheel.
Another click sounded, followed by a sound that most people never had cause to hear—the hollow rattle of bone tumbling across cement. It was almost even with my hiding spot.
My suit was absorbing the sweat that I could feel trickling down my back and under my arms and I had to trust it to reduce my IR and thermal signatures. Then I felt a drop form between my eyes. Another scrape of metal, parallel to my position or maybe just past. More sweat beaded, crawling down to the bridge of my nose. I kept my eyes locked on my mirrored cuff links.
In my tiny metal window to the street, a dark shape suddenly filled the view. The morning was still dim, a fact that favored me, not so much because any absence of light could hide me from the Tiger’s electronic ocular band, but because its power had to be low after the long, cold night. Only Rikki’s disturbance of the Kite would have induced the UGV to move about before daylight could begin recharging its depleted capacitors.
I was on the west side of Hudson. The metal monster was on the east. The wind was blowing through the streets of the dead borough from the west. The building next to me blocked a direct gust, but swirling air moved in odd eddies about the street. All I needed was for the chemical sensors on the Tiger to pick up the human pheromones in my perspiration.
I’m pretty sure a brand-new Indian bot would have already picked it up, but ten years had dirtied and dulled even the best sensors and the heavy kill machines had no way to clean or recalibrate them. Add to that the low power reserves and I was probably okay. Still, it made me realize why my father had never let us try to hide from Wolves, Leopards, or Tigers in the early days. We always either fled along predetermined escape routes with preset booby traps behind us, or we shot them to literal pieces with heavy rifles. And now that I thought about it, Dad only
chose to fight when I was old enough to wield a large caliber rifle alongside him. The two of us, shooting with the kind of accuracy he had drilled into me, always came out on top. But generally at the first sign of a big UGV, we would beat feet. They were all still fairly new back then and had much better sensors and batteries that held a charge throughout the night.
The dark shadow moved slowly past, only the dimly visible black and gray stripes providing any sense of motion. It was near silent, hunting much, much slower than its little flying scout, conserving energy, searching for signs of life.
It would be tempting to think of the Tiger like it was just a metal version of the natural flesh and blood version, but that was a deadly mistake. My father had been familiar with most of the Indian drone arsenal when the attack happened. He made me read every spec sheet and every piece of drone application protocol that he got his hands on. So I remember distinctly his admonition to never think of a drone as an animal. “Think of the robot as an extension of a man, Ajaya, for it was programmed by men to hunt men.”
In other words, it would not react like a real tiger, but instead as a soldier might. Its programming contained all of the psychological knowledge that its human creators could cram into it. The slow movements, the swinging of the massive head were as much for generating fear as they were for efficient power use and sensor application. The unprepared civilians of Manhattan had fallen victim to that fear, bolting from hiding spots, running in vain attempts to escape machines that could move at forty kilometers per hour or faster, for long periods of time. Nowadays, without fair warning, your best bet was to hide, not fight. With warning, fleeing was best unless you had some kind of edge, like tons of armored vehicle or advanced explosive devices.
The metal beast continued down the street and I felt secure enough to turn my wrist ever so slowly, keeping it in view until it was a good fifteen or so meters away.
My muscles cramped but I stayed in my crouch, knowing that the Tiger’s rear end had motion detectors that could pick up movement up to thirty meters or more behind the metal cat. The road behind us was straight for quite a distance, so I let it get beyond its ass detector range and then I moved, very very slowly and ultra careful.
Ever watch a movie where someone is being hunted by something, or someone, in the dark? And they invariably knock into an object, make a noise, and either die right away or have to suddenly go full on into fight or flight mode? Yeah, well, it’s best to just flat out avoid all that by being super careful. After I started helping Dad in the Zone, he made me go to the twins’ ballet class for a few lessons and to Mom’s yoga class for some movement training. I hated it back then but the first time I used what I had learned to move through a space inhabited by a dormant Crab, I realized the value.
So I unfolded with careful, precise movements and stepped sideways onto the sidewalk to my right, keeping the parked food truck with the skeletal hand between me and the Tiger’s position.
Then I began moving with consummate care down the sidewalk, slow and silent.
Chapter 25
Rikki caught up three and a half blocks later, and as soon as I saw him floating down the street, I knew I could pick up speed. Good thing because I had been moving at a snail’s pace by myself and we still had over four blocks to go before we hit the block-sized internet hub building.
Rikki continued hovering down the middle of the street like he owned it and I felt my stomach settle a bit. Truth be told, I had been uncharacteristically nervous all morning. Yes, the obvious answer is that the loss of Primmer had left me twitchy. But it wasn’t like I hadn’t been back to the Zone—Hell, I had taken the entire class of special operators in multiple trips through different parts of the borough. Why so shaky now?
Focus, Ajaya—the Zone is jealous of your attention. Give it its due or die. Something Dad used to say. I tucked my fears, doubts, and self-analysis away for another time and extended my senses. The sun was rising and the borough was waking up. The humans might be gone, but Manhattan was still alive. Birds, in particular, have colonized the empty buildings as great nesting sites. Because they can fly in and out without restriction, they can find food in the bustling neighboring boroughs and return to the quiet one for roosting. Pigeons and songbirds were already flying about the concrete canyons of the city. High overhead, I saw the soaring silhouette of a hawk or maybe a falcon floating on thermals, probably hunting its smaller cousins or maybe the ever-present rodents or the abundant squirrels of Central Park.
As if called by the thought, a huge rat scuttled out of a broken basement window, stopping to study me, its biological sensors catching what the drone had failed to.
Without people around, most animals in the Zone either have no fear of humans or, in some cases, like feral dogs and rats, had developed a real taste for mankind. This rat started my way and I pulled an expandable baton from my belt with my left hand, snapping it open while I unsheathed the kukri with my right.
An aggressive rat could expose me to prowling drones almost as fast as me just shouting my name out loud. A sixty-centimeter steel rod and a razor-sharp chopper as long as my forearm were just the medicine for aggressive rodents, which apparently occurred to the rat, too, because it stopped in place, whiskers twitching.
My belt held a number of items that had confused my students: expanding steel baton, pepper spray, and fox urine. I had had to spend a couple of hours expounding on the other dangers of the Zone. None of my spec ops combat types had considered the threat of feral man-eating dogs or packs of carnivorous rats.
The rat decided I wasn’t worth the trouble, turning and waddling across the road to disappear into another building. After checking Rikki’s position, I rapped the bottom of the baton on the remains of a car tire. It took two smacks to get it to close, but the rubber made way less noise than metal on concrete. The kukri disappeared back into its kydex sheath. More than a couple of my killer commandos had questioned the use of both the baton and the big knife. My explanation that rats are fast had met some blank expressions, although a few people had nodded.
“You’ve never chased a rodent before?” I asked back.
“Sure. They’re really hard to catch,” one of the more vocal warriors had allowed.
“Well, that same speed makes them difficult to kill or disable, with just a single weapon, when they come at you. The baton is deadly, quiet, extends my reach considerably, and is fast in use. Instead of flailing with an empty vulnerable hand that could get bit by a disease-ridden rat, I have a handy steel rod. It has other secondary uses, as well, in an urban environment. Prodding downed drones to make sure they’re really defunct, pushing open doors, windows, and cupboards without putting oneself too close to the opening, lifting ceiling tiles, reaching through narrow gaps to retrieve something my hand can’t reach, and on and on.”
A few looked unconvinced but many of the rest wore thoughtful expressions, and after that class, I started to see batons appear in their gear, adding to the blades or tomahawks that they already carried.
With my rodent problem done for the moment, I continued on down Hudson, keeping one eye on Rikki while watching everywhere else, all at the same time. We made progress, getting close enough that I could now see the massive building that had started life as the Western Union building in the late 1920s. It loomed several hundred meters down the street, filling the entire block it rested on. It was huge and imposing, rising in stepped floors like some gigantic Mayan pyramid built to worship the god of information. Perfect place for a Spider nest.
I clicked my tongue softly, a little sound that would hardly travel more than a handful of meters. Rikki stopped and spun, bringing his ocular sensors around to focus on me. I turned my left hand palm up, one half of a questioning shrug. He waggled his wings up and down, still hovering in place.
All clear. I held my index and middle fingers up and spun them in a circle, clockwise. Instantly, he shot off over my head, back the way we came. I didn’t need to turn to know that he would have q
uickly turned off to the east, flying between buildings to start a circular recon of the immediate two blocks. Meanwhile, I hunkered down beside a car whose damaged and weathered roof-mounted sign proclaimed something about hot pizza. Pulling my monocular from my suit, I spent the next few minutes looking over the building and every building around it.