Turner had found them maps, and geosyncs, and the usual boy-scout toys, and even though they stayed mostly in sight of each other over the next four days, they had picked out a rendezvous in the foothills to gear up, down their anti-rads, spend the night throwing up, and head up into the Anthill at dawn. Disco had a heavy foot and the van with the best suspension, and she was the first to arrive. Having brought most of the support gear, she had the tent up and the three-tower Geiger imager going by the time the others arrived. She’d brought her civvies and luggage for a quick departure—nobody expected to stick around for a drink when it was done—and they found her hunched over the Geiger’s central display, drenched in sweat with a lavender floral print shirt draped over her head to keep the sun off.
“How are we doing?” asked Valentine.
“Not too shabby,” she said, tweaking the dials. “It’s too windy to get a sharp image right off the bat, but we should have more detail over the next couple of hours.” She pointed up into the mountains to the southeast. “Our big gamma bloom is that way. More or less, give or take a mile or two, everything’s exactly where it’s supposed to be.”
“Is that pink?” Terry asked, grinning.
Disco didn’t look up from her dials. “Fuck you, it’s purple,” she snapped.
“Are those little flowers?”
“Oleanders,” she said. “They’re poisonous.” She pulled the shirt off her head, wiped down her neck, and threw it back into her van. “What’s for dinner?”
Turner slammed the squeaking door of his own van and tossed her an orange bottle of pills. “For dessert, Love,” he said, “the finest in gourmet nanotherapeutic anti-rads.”
“Tasty,” she said.
He set down his duffle bag, rummaged through it, pulled out a few glossy brown packages and started handing them out.
“And for your main course dining pleasure,” he said, “you blokes are treated to—looks like Number Four. Cheese and Vegetable Omelet.”
Disco cracked up. Terry shot him a look that could peel the paint off a tank.
“Seriously?” he said. “Ten years out, I come back to a Vomelet?”
“Mister Valentine’s getting on in years,” said Turner. “Thought he might appreciate a little bit of the old country.”
Valentine shook his head with masochistic fondness. “They haven’t made these in twenty-five years. I didn’t know they started making ‘em again.”
“Oh, they haven’t,” said Turner. “You can’t reboot a classic.”
Valentine opened his package, revelling grimly in the stink of it. “Where did you even find these?”
Turner smiled. “Let us just say that I know a guy, who knows a guy, who knows another guy, who knows someone who hates you and wants you to suffer.”
Disco leaned against the bumper of her van and downed her anti-rads as she tore open her dinner. Terry sat down beside her.
“You’re a braver man than I, Lady,” he said.
She shrugged. “It’s all gonna be in the dirt in a couple hours anyway. Better not to waste the pizza.”
Terry nodded. “I do like the pizza.”
She cracked her water bottle and leaned in, lowering her voice. “We stayed with Turner for a week while Valentine tracked you down. This stuff is all he ever eats.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Whole cupboards full of the stuff. No wonder he’s so lean.”
“Well, we’ve all gotta do something to keep in shape, once we hit his age.”
Disco looked at him. “You’re his age,” she said.
Terry shrugged. “Yeah, but carrying weight’s what I do. You’re wired as infiltrators. Targeting systems, collapsible joints, modular weapons. All that James Bond shit. I’ve got one job—hauling freight at speed. I’ve put on twenty-five pounds easy since the last time we did this. Doesn’t matter. My fat ass is rated to sixteen hundred kilos sustained carry. Three thousands of burst weight. I’m basically a superhero.”
Disco shook her ration bag in earnest. “You will be,” she said, “after this much gamma radiation. You want my apple butter?”
He took it, obligingly, though nothing in the whole bag tasted good. He didn’t care who ate it; neither did she. That wasn’t the point.
“Six years I worked in that factory,” he said. “Did you get to see it?”
“I stayed with the ship,” she replied.
“I never know where you are. Six years I worked in there. Fifty weeks a year. Thirty-five hours a week. Two hundred flats an hour. D’you know how much beer I shovelled?”
“I’m not the one with the calculator in my head,” she said. “Ask Valentine.”
“Don’t have to,” said Terry. “I did it once. Six billion, forty-eight million, give or take. The greatest advancement of my age, the greatest military cybernetic field unit ever engineered, dedicated to the most sensitive and important operations ever conducted on foreign soil. And where did I end up? Where did all this tech end up? In a warehouse. Moving six billion bottles of cheap Japanese lager.”
Her armor shimmered as she shrugged. “That’s a lot of beer,” she said.
He nodded absently.
“I don’t know what it takes a civilian to get their drink on,” she said. “Three beers, maybe four. But six years of that—I imagine you made a lot of people very happy.”
Terry almost smiled. But she opened her ration pouch and there was nowhere in that whole hellish desert to hide from the stink.
“I imagine so,” he said as he downed his pills.
* * *
They camped early, soon as their stomachs had settled, and started upward at three in the morning to make the most of the chill. You had to go up before you could go down, but up was nothing. Up was child’s play. Terry’s incredible atomic exoskeleton did most of the heavy lifting—literally, as they’d emptied all three vans onto him before making the climb. Living at sea level for so long, he found himself breathless and gasping in the thin air as he went, even with his augments doing the hardest of the work. Disco and Turner were both supremely conditioned and made their way in silence and easy grace. Valentine, owing to the sophisticated powers of his Class 6 internals, led the way without so much as breaking a sweat.
Terry thought back to his days before the augments, to the rock climbing at Devil’s Lake, a lifetime ago. He recalled the burning thrill of hauling himself up with his own natural strength, the effort with which he scaled a mere four hundred metres above sea level. He would fly up those rocks today—Mules were built to take any terrain under any weight. He would do it effortlessly, like Superman beneath a hot yellow sun. Even now, as he swooped back down to sort out Disco’s climbing harness, the heroic trumpets rang in the back of his mind. But his muscles really never ached with delicious strain anymore, and he did not feel heroic.
Having summited the outer wall of the mountains, they came down into the Byzantine trenches of the Anthill, and the moving parts of Terry’s arms and shoulders slotted themselves tightly against his bioflesh as he squeezed through passages barely wide enough for an ordinary man. He moved as fast as the others—even faster, maybe—with only seven or eight hundred pounds of kit to slow him down. But no matter how strong they made him, there was only so much he could do against the tight fit of the rocky channels. His pack towered over his head and came down to his calves; it was twice as wide as his shoulders, and when he reached the top he had a set of ski poles to walk with—not because the weight was too much, but because it was harder than it sounded to balance with a pair of Harley road bikes strapped to your exoframe.
Before they’d gone a mile in, Terry could see the problem. The Anthill was littered with what must have been mercenary encampments at one time. Stray barricades, shelters, utility stations, and bits of gear littered the trenches wherever they had fallen. Whole walls had collapsed; the place had been blown to hell. Someone had been through for things of value, at some point—either Karpov’s mercs, in the early days, or intrepid villagers w
ho’d cut their lives short in the deadly hills for a chance at a heavy Russian gun. They understood, well enough, that the hills made you sick—but a life cut short by ten years was a fair trade for a Russian cannon that would bring you fifteen years’ pay on the black market, if you were poor enough and desperate enough. More than once, he passed the skeletons of those who hadn’t made it home.
The damage got more extensive the farther in they climbed. If there had been open caves, they were so much rubble now, and that’s why they needed him. In a different world, the Anthill was a living maze, stationed throughout with mercenaries and fanatics, cult soldiers to Karpov’s mad sectarian ambitions. Ghost and Valentine would have come alone, done this whole thing their way, gotten in and out without a shot fired. But it wasn’t their world anymore: it was a dead land, a land of emptiness and broken promises, and those were Terry’s specialty.
They caught sight of the first drone six miles in, a shimmering black and silver bug fluttering its rotary wings against the light of a rapidly approaching dawn. Valentine pressed his back against the rock wall and motioned Turner to point, signalling the takedown.
“About a hundred and ten yards,” he said. “Have you got something in a nine iron?”
Terry set down one of his packs and hauled out the scrambler. “Make it count,” he said.
Turner shouldered the scrambler and made some final adjustments. Disco engaged her cloak as she moved up: for a moment, Terry’s eyes were the closest and she seemed to disappear entirely. Then, as she dialled in the drone as her main threat, her primary cloaking sensors targeted the drone alone, and a few buggy traces of her body and poorly reflected rock came and went as her less exact secondary systems took over for all other onlookers.
“One shot,” whispered Turner. “Do it right.”
He shouldered the scrambler, locked on and hit the drone with a burst of interference that took out its comms. The weapon was silent, seemed to do almost nothing, and the drone’s antennae twitched as it searched for a satellite connection, darting upward and turning sideways as if to reach for a signal.
“Hit it,” whispered Valentine.
The deep, muffled pop of Disco’s rifle went off as she hit the drone. The thing sparked brightly in the light of dawn, but did not fall. It came about. She fired again, twice more.
“Cover!” shouted Valentine.
Terry’s rig wasn’t suited to heroic dives, but the trench walls were deep and the drone was at a tough angle. It didn’t seem to have tagged Disco; it went straight for the largest moving object and spat out a grenade. The blast echoed in the trenches and reverberated throughout the mountains. Its flight pattern shifted, rising fast as it came toward them.
“Heavy fire!” called Valentine. “Give me heavy!”
Terry was out of practice and slow to disentangle from the rubble. A couple hundred pounds of rock had come down on top of him and he had to jerk one arm free while he covered his vulnerable head with the other. Disco shouted something at him, but his ears were ringing and he was in no mood to give them time to clear.
The Baby Vulcan prototype looked absurd in his hand as he drew it off his rig and locked it into his shoulder. It felt more like a grenade launcher than a carbine, and beneath the Mule Rig and the heavy cargo on his back, Terry felt like one of those absurd, stylized space soldiers with a tiny head and enormous, clumsy hands as he engaged the forearm support. But the assist engaged as the gun came to life, and it read him as he raised it, and it wasn’t bad for kick as he pumped an anti-material round square through the drone’s armored fuselage, tearing a chunk off it and spinning it almost out of the air.
“There’s your hole!” he shouted, half-deaf from his own cannon. He didn’t know if she heard.
Beneath the freakish underwater ringing of his ears, he could make out the little pops as her next couple of shots went off. Even his hand cannon didn’t down it, but its innards were more sensitive than the thick plating that covered them, and by the time she’d put four more rounds into it, the blades had stalled, and the thing was in free fall.
Turner winced and touched his ear. “There goes the bloody element of surprise.”
Valentine watched it fall as his eyes relayed calculations to his neural systems. “Terry, go get me that. The rest of us need to not be here. Now.”
Disco checked her watch; she had it synced to the imager rig at camp. “Fourteen hundred meters to the dig site,” she said. “Can we make that?”
“Piece of cake,” said Valentine. Turner hauled out the St. Christopher medal around his neck and kissed it for luck as he engaged cloak and took off.
“Catch up, Terry,” he said and took off running.
The drone had fallen about a hundred yards away, though it hadn’t tumbled neatly into the trenches. Terry had to leap up and out of the trenches to find it on the mountain’s original skin. The armor was thick—so thick that it had kept the innards together in the fall, and only the rotors were damaged. The grenade launcher had broken in the fall, and the 40mm shells had scattered across the rock like a half-dozen deadly eggs. These he scooped into one of the bags before he seized the drone and headed back toward the others, bounding across the tops of the rock. This far out, it wouldn’t have been easy to pick them out in the trenches below, especially moving in stealth. Even Valentine had a way of slipping through unseen, though he wasn’t specced as an Infiltrator like the others. But he knew more or less where they were headed and promised himself he’d set up comms as soon as they were inside.
From the top of his leaping arc, he could make them out against the sunrise. The shimmering silver would’ve looked nice at market, but out here in the field it was tactical stupidity. Then again, as he counted the drones closing in—ten, fifteen—he wondered about the value of stealth, and how much it weighed against the value of rank terror.
“Simple drop, he says,” Terry grunted as he dropped back down into the trenches. “Stupid easy, he says.”
In the trenches, Turner and Disco weaved in and out of each other’s steps with such slick precision that even Valentine had lost track of which shimmering figure was which. It was like a shell game with invisible shells.
“Where are we at?” he breathed.
“Three hundred metres to the dig site,” said one of the shimmering spectres with Disco’s voice.
“Friendly behind you,” Terry called out before darting into view. When his blood was up, he could run in the rig better than he thought.
“You got it?” Valentine asked. Terry nodded and held it up.
“There’s about twenty of those things headed this way,” he said. “Probably more I can’t see.”
“We didn’t have much choice,” said Valentine. “I wanted this to be quiet, but jeez, look at this plating. It’s next-level. They didn’t have drones like these ten years ago.”
“Later,” urged Terry. “We have to move.”
While they paused to catch their breath, Turner had unpacked a drone of his own. It looked laughable next to the military bots—a little plastic number with a cheap webcam mounted on the front—but he’d clearly done some aftermarket work on it.
“What’s that?”
“Mouse on a stick,” said Turner. “Buy us a little time, maybe.” He set the drone in his hand, accessed a little app on his phone, and frowned. “No signal,” he said. “It’s like some proper idjit just fired a scrambler, innit?”
“Come on, Turner,” Valentine ordered.
Turner kissed the drone, set it to random flight, and turned it loose before tearing off after the others. “Go with God, little man,” he said to it as it whirred away into the sky.
Disco had hit the dig site and was changing out her magazines when the others caught up to her.
“Going heavy?” Terry asked her. She tossed him her suppressor; it was still uncomfortably hot.
“Stow that,” she said. “Stow these, too. These lady farts aren’t going to put a dent in one of these things. She threw her subsonic
magazines to him, one at a time. He swung down his rig and found a place for them.
“What, you picked now to reorganize?” said Valentine, taking down his own rifle. “This is your moment, kid. Punch us a door right—”
He stopped. He got down on one knee.
“Jimmy?”
“Have a look at this,” said Valentine. “Who d’you suppose put a hole there?”
It wasn’t much of a hole, but it was enough. The mountain wall showed signs of erosion and water damage here; there was a cave mouth, or at least there had been at one time. The whole mountainside had been covered by a collapse, sometime after the trenches, but sometime before a thin layer of desert moss had started to come back to the soil. It was clear enough where Terry needed to carve them a path, but just below the cave-in, to the side of the main rockslide, an opening had been carved out in the lighter debris, barely wide enough for a man’s shoulders.
Terry squinted in the dim light. “What is that, it’s been braced?”
“Carbon fiber,” said Valentine. “Looks like a backpack frame.”
“Can you get in?”
The air was split by the sound of twenty sirens, howling in perfect dissonance, as the drones closed in. If there were any within a half-mile that hadn’t registered the gunshot, they were on their way now.
“I can. You can’t.”
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