Borough of Bones

by John Conroe

  So Maya called me two afternoons later and told me she had the access codes for Harper. All we had to do was show up at whichever entry point we wished and plug in her codes. She could use a false name and wear a disguise because the code itself would alert the soldiers manning that entry that she was a covert operator.

  We went in the next morning, inserting at the Williamsburg Bridge entry. We were both stealth suited, equipped, and armed. Harper wore sunglasses and kept her stealth hood up and her neuroprosthesis off her face.

  The soldiers all knew me and were clearly curious as hell about Harper, even flirting a bit. She did look pretty good in her stealth suit—all that fitness training paying off. But as soon as she punched in her Maya-given codes, they shut up and stopped talking to her. Didn’t even look at her again.

  “Wow, do I suddenly smell like rat crap?” she asked as soon as the door to the airlock closed behind us. I shushed her because the entry operators were likely listening in.

  Once we got inside the Zone, the point was moot because talking was over. She took a moment to slip her shiny metallic face net thingy on, smoothing it down and taking particular care with a spot on her jaw hinge. I knew from earlier discussion that she had a magnetic connection under the skin there, implanted by her mother when she was very young.

  Rikki slipped out to recon the area and I checked over my .338 Lapua Magnum while we waited for her to get the fit just right.

  I had my Remington MSR as my primary weapon, with a short-barreled .300 Blackout PDW as my backup. The Personal Defense Weapon AR was from my own collection, liberated from a Federal Counterterrorism office in lower Manhattan. It was amazing what I could carry around without issue, now that I worked for Zone Defense. Oh, and about all the weapons talk—deal with it… I’m a sniper, for heaven’s sake. Guns are my tools of trade.

  Rikki swung back around, hovering in front of us, with three LEDs lit on his front face plate, just under his ocular band. I glanced at Harper to see if she understood. She nodded, turning and pointing two fingers in one direction and one finger on the other hand in a different direction, indicating she not only knew about them, but knew where they were.

  We headed out, Rikki on point with me behind him and Harper bringing up the rear. I heard her rattling something and turned to see her nervously getting her own rifle situated on its patrol sling. The slightly anxious look on her face disappeared when she saw me looking, replaced with a cool poker face which was followed a second later by one sharply raised eyebrow.

  Ignoring her facial bravado and now relatively certain I wasn’t about to get shot in the back, I turned back to the front.

  We moved down FDR Drive, then turned west on Grand Street for a short distance before getting onto the slightly smaller, narrower East Broadway, allowing us to move toward our target but less out in the open.

  Zone War’s constant missions had basically trained the Zone drones to watch major roads and thoroughfares, as the big armored vehicles did better on the wider streets. One or two smaller streets over could make all the difference for avoiding attention.

  We moved pretty well right from the start, but then as we all got into the grove, actually got quite fast, speedier than Rikki and I would have on our own. Between the Berkut’s sophisticated sensors out in front and Harper’s prosthetic ones behind, we moved with a confidence that I had never experienced with anyone else.

  We traveled down and around the southern end of the skinny Roosevelt Park, through what was once Chinatown. Every park on the island had grown into a mini-wilderness, providing habitat for deer and small game. Rikki started the dog sounds a block past the park, keeping the volume low to begin with. We didn’t want to attract real dogs, but we also weren’t sure how far out the spy sensors would be planted.

  Harper was able to answer the sensor question when we got near Church Street, suddenly tapping my shoulder and pointing to her face or, more accurately, pointing at her metal prosthesis.

  She already knew American Sign Language, as her mother had taught them both. ASL was something my class had taken up as well, with expert instructors brought in to teach all of us. While not fluent, most of us could carry on pretty informative conversations in silence. Harper signed to me that she could feel the sensors, pointing out where they were placed in the buildings and streets ahead of us. Rikki moved in close and began to gradually increase the dog sounds as we approached the invisible line of sensors. The fact that Harper could point to an arc of sensors that curved around the giant Hudson Street building confirmed our theory that at least one Spider was hanging around the internet switching building.

  Thankfully, our plan called for us to climb up the inside of the old AT&T Long Lines building at 33 Thomas Street. Long Lines has twenty-nine floors, and 60 Hudson has twenty-four. The fact that it was just outside the sensor line was a bit of unforeseen luck.

  The building would have been hell to break into, as it was built like a fortress, except that the front doors had been left wide open. The skeletons strewn about the lobby wore ragged uniforms that looked kind of official—like government official. The fact that the floor was liberally strewn with expended 5.56mm rifle casings lent a bit more support to the internet theory that the building had housed an NSA surveillance office at the time of the Attack. My research into the building had strongly hinted at NSA involvement in the building from its inception.

  I spotted bits and pieces of drone among the fallen guards. There were no rifles or sidearms, and the bones were spread around like something had searched around and under them.

  Most drones have the programming and capability to operate human firearms. The smaller ones and aerial units were limited to handguns, but bigger UGVs like Wolves and Leopards could operate a long gun. The guards’ weapons had likely been taken by drones whose own ammunition supplies were used up. I had to hope that those gun-toting units had either left the building years ago or used up their stolen ordnance.

  Inside the lobby, I took a few minutes to lighten both our packs by taking out a few little packages of mayhem, setting my bombs near the entrance to welcome any drones that might choose to join us. We scouted the first floor, found a rear door, and prepped it for a fast exit. Then I closed and jammed the front doors shut. The glass on the front seemed more like public aquarium glass than standard building material. Hopefully it would hold off anything trying to get in.

  Now the fun part. We entered the stairwell, finding more bodies and almost complete drone carcasses, as well as piles of expended rifle and pistol brass.

  Rikki ascended the open well, flying straight up, while the two of us climbed on good old-fashioned human feet.

  Harper started out strong, the occasional glare thrown my way to reinforce her commitment. But ten stories into it, she was breathing pretty hard. At fifteen, she was starting to look really winded.

  “Where are we going?” she asked, squinting at me, hands on her knees, sweat dripping down her brow.

  “Roof,” I said.

  “Why not a different floor, any floor, as long as it’s lower?” she asked.

  “’Cause they don’t have windows. Come on; let’s go.”

  We got another six floors up before she spoke again.

  “What kind of building has no windows?” she asked when she caught up. Bent over again. I hid a grin.

  “An AT&T telephone exchange building. It was designed to stay operational through almost anything,” I said, then took off again.

  By the time we hit floor twenty-nine, the top floor, she was huffing and puffing like an old tobacco smoker. There is no fitness like stair climbing fitness. I gave her credit, though—two months ago, she would have collapsed in the first couple of flights. We went up one more flight, to the roof access.

  “This looks more bank vault than roof door,” she commented. An exaggeration, but the door was a really serious steel number that had a certain bombproof vibe to it.

  “Told you they wanted a building to outlast anything,” I said.
The door was sealed on the inside, which was unusual but then, anything involving the intelligence community was not going to be ordinary. I pulled a little bottle of pressurized oxygen and a metal tube a third of a meter in length from her pack.

  “I was carrying that?” she asked, frowning at me.

  “Yes, and now your pack is so much lighter, right?”

  I lit the magnesium wick at the end of the tube, then opened the valve on the tank.

  The thermite lance ignited with a hiss and an eye-searing flare of sun-bright light and smoke. I applied it to the thick metal lock, my suit’s facemask darkening automatically.

  A few seconds later, the lock clanged to the floor and I pushed the door open, letting fresh air in and all the smoke out.

  We moved out onto the roof after a pause for both Rikki and Harper to confirm that they weren’t sensing any drone activity.

  The roof stretched away from us, the access coming out on the east end. Massive cooling units and a whole cluster of giant satellite dishes filled the roof. I was interested in the west side, which would give me a great view of 60 Hudson Street. Of course it was the farthest point from where I stood. I pulled a couple of XM-2080s and set them up near the roof door, then linked them to Rikki. Okay, time to see what we could see.

  “You said that AT&T owned this building?” Harper asked, looking at the uplinks as we trudged the full length of the roof.

  “Yeah. It was a major telephone switching center.”

  A high wall blocked my view, but in the southwest corner of the roof, I found a way to climb up to a kind of ledge that let me look out over the buildings below, including a full, open shot of 60 Hudson and most of its Ziggurat roofs and ledges.

  Nothing moved over there, but I saw spots of black on a couple of the stepped ledge roofs. Time for a sniper’s best friend – high quality binoculars. Mine are salvaged Swarovski’s – 10x42 with high density glass – probably cost over two grand back in the day. They showed me the truth of it. Solar panels. Each less than a square meter of area.

  At first, I thought they were just set up for a drone to use as needed, but then one of them shifted slightly in my magnified view. I realized that a mothership was underneath the black square, which was just its elevated charging panel, levered up from its back.

  I’ve studied all the drone designs, but the motherships had captured the least amount of my attention. Mostly because they just weren’t that dangerous to me by the time I started helping Dad.

  The clusters of Wasps they carried were initially quite deadly, each able to kill up to five adult humans with their toxic payloads of hydrogen cyanide. However, the hordes of Wasps used up most or all of their toxins in the first week of the Attack. I’ve seen medical offices and hospitals that show signs of being searched by machines for replacement toxins, but most of the medical compounds in Manhattan had lost the majority of their efficacy over the last ten years. I just wasn’t that worried about that type of drone and frankly, they were pretty rare for me to come across. But right then, I was pretty interested in them. Anything that was producing new forms of drones was a problem.

  “Rikki, range to rooftops of 60 Hudson?”

  “307 meters to eastern uppermost roof. 311 meters to lower southern roof ledge.”

  Both were well inside my comfortable shooting ranges. Dad and I spent whole afternoons shooting things at those ranges, and the concrete ledge would make a really solid shooting platform, although not very comfortable and very, very exposed. The motherships were on the lower roof ledge of the Hudson Street ziggurat, the roof door propped open.

  From my pack, I took a very thin, ultra light roll of wispy material. Tiny legs opened at the corners, raising the meter-by-two-meter rectangle high enough off the ledge for me to sit up comfortably under it. The material rippled in the sunlight, dark at first, then fading to match the color of the roof. It used much the same tech as our stealthsuits.

  “Why was the light stuff in your pack,” Harper asked, still frowning.

  “Expedient sniper hide. I’m the sniper.”

  Next I pulled out a small tightly folded square, busting the tape on one side that held it together. It instantly unfolded into a self-inflating body pad much like a backpacker’s sleeping pad, although this one had built-in pouches to hold ammo and optics close at hand. A perfect prone shooting platform.

  Unfolding my MSR and extending the bipod under the barrel, I set the big rifle in place along with an extra ammo mag in one of the handy pouches on the pad.

  Once my setup was to my satisfaction, I hopped up on the ledge and lay down prone, starting to glass the building through the big Leopold scope. “Wind?” I asked.

  “From the northwest, twenty-one kilometers per hour,” Rikki responded. I took my time, drew up a range card, dialed in the sight corrections on my scope, and then settled back to watch.

  Now we waited.

  Chapter 32

  “You ever wonder if it’s possible for a drone to evolve?” Harper asked about thirty minutes into our watch.

  “Evolve into what?” I asked, eye glued to the scope, watching the sunny rooftop three football fields away.

  She was rummaging in her pack and she took her time answering as she extracted a pack of energy bars from inside.

  “Just evolve… not so much physically as intellectually. Each is an artificial intelligence, a learning machine. We know they change over time, learn, possibly grow. Why couldn’t they morph into a much different intellect than what they started as?” she finally asked, handing me a chocolate peanut butter bar.

  I chewed and thought, still watching but thinking about her question. My eyes slipped away from the scope, looking left to the matte black drone that was soaking up sun on the roof to my side. “Yeah, I think that’s entirely possible,” I said, my eye going back to the scope to watch my target zone. “Why?”

  “I guess I just wonder if any of the more sophisticated drones might lose interest in hunting humans.”

  “Like the Spiders? I doubt that,” I said.

  “No, not them. That mission is so core to their central existence that they’ll never lose it. I just wonder is all. You know your Berkut is really, really unusual, don’t you?” she asked.

  Surprised, I glanced at her and found her staring at Rikki, a thoughtful look on her face.

  “Yes, he’s pretty much one of a kind.”

  “You’ve backed him up, right?”

  “Of course. Nightly. But he also has three onboard memory chips that keep backing him up continuously.”

  “He does?” she asked, twisting around to look at me.

  “Wow, don’t be so surprised—I’m not a complete idiot, you know,” I said.

  “No, no, I’m just surprised you used three, that’s all,” she countered in an unusual display of something that might almost have been remorse.

  “Redundancy, redundancy, redundancy,” I said, eye back on the scope.

  “Well, that’s good. I’m not sure how you did it, but your Rikki is one of a kind,” she said.

  “Spider,” I said.

  “What? No, I said Rikki—not Spider,” she clarified.

  “No, I mean, I see a Spider,” I counterclarified, cross hairs on a tubular, black, segmented leg the size of a sewer pipe.

  The leg was just extended out of the open doorway on the southern roof ledge of 60 Hudson, only the claw tip actually in the sunlight. The rest of the Spider was hidden behind the swung open steel door, but I’d know that kind of robot leg anywhere.

  “Shit. It’s actually there, isn’t it?” she asked in a hushed whisper. In my peripheral vision, I sensed her looking through my binoculars.