Less than two minutes after we started, we passed the last camera. At the pipe’s terminus, we stood facing muddy cinder-block-colored wall. Above us, instead of pipe surface, was a large metal grating with security lights and night sky far beyond. Just above the grating was the exterior wall of Kresh Assemblies, with a beautiful drainage flue just over our heads. In rainy times, the flue would receive rainwater from the drainage gutters on the building’s roof and channel them down to our pipe.
I carefully raised my head up through the grate and took a long look around, cycling my vision through human-standard, light-amplification, and infrared, with motion enhancement analysis activated. There was no sign of new sensor equipment, no evidence of a drone overhead. So I pulled myself up through the grate, then hauled Malibu and BeeBee up. I watched them clamber into the drainage flue, then followed them in.
We had on multi-mode climbing gear for that climb. One set of such gear consisted of six items—two wrist cuffs, two knee pads, and two boots—each of which could extrude several different sorts of climbing tools. Hooked claws were appropriate for surfaces like trees. Battery-powered electromagnets were best for ferrous metal surfaces such as building supports. We were now in a shaft of smooth, unpainted plastic, so we used the gecko-pads—surfaces that extruded microscopic cilia that clung to a seemingly smooth surface the way a gecko lizard’s paws cling to glass. We went up that flue like we were climbing a ladder.
But we only climbed three stories of the five-story building. That’s when we reached the portal I’d cut into the flue’s wall-side interior six weeks earlier. The portal wasn’t visible to the naked eye: I’d run my cutter along the flue’s existing join lines and it looked no different.
Malibu braced himself against the other side of the flue interior and pushed. The portal gave way with a moist shluck noise, the sound of a seal breaking. It swung open, revealing darkness beyond. He scrambled through. BeeBee climbed up and followed, and I went last, turning in the dark space beyond to shove the portal closed. Then I checked, by hand, to make sure the gummy material lining the portal’s edges still made an airtight seal; fortunately, it did.
Only then could we rest, catching our breath—which Dollgangers don’t need to do from a physiological perspective, but the mentalities we’d inherited from our human originals meant we did anyway.
That’s when the lights came on.
We stood in a rough gap laboriously dug through cinderstone wall by me and BeeBee weeks earlier. On the side opposite the drainage flue portal, this hole opened into a wide corridor—wide by Dollganger standards. To humans, it was nothing but a gap between a dryplast interior wall and the cinderstone exterior wall, 25cm of open space. The dryplast surface ahead of us was gray, marked with manufacturers’ preprinted measurements.
And in that corridor, under a bare-diode light I’d strung, stood Parfait, also in a nightsuit, unmasked, smiling.
We three pulled our stretchy masks off. Malibu bounded out of the wall hole to embrace Parfait. BeeBee and I followed, and Parfait also had hugs for us, embracing me for seconds longer than she had the others. Then she looked up at me. “Is it still a go for tonight?”
I nodded. “We’re even almost on schedule. Though with me supposed to be on an all-night sentry shift back at the Nest, if anything happens in my sentry area—”
Malibu shook his head. “Kieran will cover for you.”
Parfait looked at him and BeeBee. “And you two—are you also supposed to be on sentry duty?”
“No.” BeeBee took a careful look around. “We’re off-duty. We left by the Gopher Hole. They think Malibu’s trying to convert me to outdoor sex.” She gave a little shudder.
We didn’t have to ask about Parfait’s alibi. She was, after all, dead.
Have you ever heard of the Scrap-Walk? It’s a form of suicide. Dollganger suicide.
I had heard of it back when I lived with Doc Chiang, but I hadn’t known at the time how common it was. A Dollganger who had decided for whatever reason that life was just too painful would cut himself open, digging around in his components until he found the transponder by which his owner could find him. Since the transponder could be anywhere—neck, guts, arm, foot—a ’ganger might mutilate himself horribly, suffering the same pain a human would from slicing skin and organs, before finding and yanking the device.
Then he’d go walking, typically out into the forests surrounding Zhou City, and keep going until his battery gave out. He’d freeze in place or fall over, perhaps remaining there for years, until the elements turned him into a pile of corroded, irreparable junk.
The Dollgangers who’d joined the Revolution had chosen to be implanted with capacitors that would, on a mental command, fry their cognitive and memory circuitry, an instant, painless form of suicide appropriate to fighters willing to die rather than give up the secrets of the Nest. But prior to the formation of the Revolution, Scrap-Walks were one of the few means of self-termination available.
And it was well known that Parfait had performed the Scrap-Walk ... twice.
The first time, unable to cope with her role as an unwilling whore for human-controlled remotes, she’d dug out her transponder and done the walk. Unfortunately for her, she’d been found only six weeks later by a human camper. He had returned her to her owner and she had been fully repaired, restored.
That owner had force-fed some artificial happiness and anti-suicide coding into her psychological makeup. He had also, unknown to Parfait, not just restored her transponder, but had installed a second one.
Across the years, the mental conditioning wore off, returning her to her depressed state, and she’d done it again ... but, because of that second transponder, had been found by her owner before her battery had even run down.
The second bout of mental conditioning had mostly worn off at the time the Dollganger Revolution was coming together, and it had not been surprising that she’d been an avid recruit to the cause.
Nor had it been surprising, at our first Operation Coffee and Cream meeting, when she’d volunteered to become a new Scrap-Walk victim. We needed a ’ganger who could be away from the Nest for weeks at a time. People would be saddened by, but not surprised by, Parfait’s third attempt. So she’d let herself be caught on camera leaving the Nest, with unobtrusive but detectable wires and other interior components hanging out of her cumbersome dress. They weren’t hers, of course; BeeBee had supplied them. But they were convincing. When Parfait had not returned days later, Scrap-Walk was the conclusion. The ’gangers mourned her, but also hoped she’d fried out her brains before her battery had failed completely.
I joined BeeBee in looking around. This little safe haven was a few meters long, two and a half high, and every surface glistened with a transparent brown coating—a sealing resin we’d brought in bottles on our backs. Parfait had used it to seal every hole, every join providing access into the hidey-hole, making sure that insect drones couldn’t stumble into it.
The space was pretty plain; a foam-rubber square with cloth napkins on it served as Parfait’s bed, exposed alternating-current wires with an adapter spliced into them served as her recharging station. There were piles of human goods: pass-cards, keys, meters, a couple of not-fully-assembled preying-mantis drones with wires still trailing out of the sockets where their heads should be, bits of food wrapped in scraps of paper, a human-scale plastic bowl with water in it.
I gave Parfait a curious look.
She shrugged. “I like taking baths. Something I must have gotten from my deep-down human psych layer.”
“I guess so.” Dollgangers did occasionally need to sponge off when dirty, and some wore body-paint designs that needed to be cleaned off and replaced, but we don’t sweat, so bathing constituted a fetish.
Nor did I need to be thinking about Parfait’s bathing rituals right then. “The cameras facing the exterior hauler lot?”
Parfait glanced upward. “I have put the chip-frying capacitors on all of them. Issue the command, and the
security room will not be able to see the parking area.” An alphanumeric string popped into my mind’s receiving area; she’d sent it via microwave burst, not radio, so radio receivers could not pick it up.
“Thanks. All right, let’s get to work.”
5: Disassembly/Reassembly
Before our arrival, Parfait had set up the factory’s final assembly chamber for Stage One.
How had she known what to do, where to sabotage and subvert? It wasn’t just from her own explorations of the plant. Dollgangers worked here, had worked here for years, and some of them had fled with us during the Escape. Ever since that event, BeeBee, in her role as a Director, had been debriefing ’gangers who had worked at important government offices, factories, military bases, and infrastructure sites. She had assembled a database of maps and security data, an invaluable resource for the Nest’s tacticians. When we’d settled on Kresh Assemblies for Stage One, she’d merely pulled all recorded maps and other data on the facility and given them to us.
So Parfait had spliced capture boxes into all the cameras overlooking the final assembly chamber, where we’d now be working. I’d taught her everything she’d needed to know to do to those cameras what I’d done to the ones in the drain pipe, and she’d been eager to learn.
Now, in Parfait’s safe chamber, we all donned our masks, unsealed the door that gave access into the final assembly chamber, and began our own wall-climbing to scope out the situation.
Below, even at this late hour, the chamber was still very active. Kresh Assemblies ran day-in and day-out, but the graveyard shift was all robotic, with the only human oversight coming in the form of supervisors and security people watching remotely on their office monitors.
Now, below us as we hung from ceiling supports by the magnets in our wrist cuffs, we could see the four assembly lines we’d come to destroy. Most of the lights in the chamber were off, but with our light-amplification options up, we could see the whole situation from the glows of monitor screens and gleaming status lights on control surfaces.
Two of the lines, occupying three-quarters of the manufacturing space in the chamber, were devoted to HummingHawk sky drones.
Picture an oval matte-black payload compartment about a meter long, half a meter wide and high at its broadest. A small hatch on the forward portion of the top surface and a large one, most of the length of the bottom surface, permit access to the pod’s interior. A total of eight struts stretch up and out from the top surface, attaching two each to four ducted fan assemblies, also matte black. Three meters long and wide, these drones could haul a payload of about ten kilograms. That payload was usually some combination of sensor package and weapons—such as a bomb or a rack of four heat-seeking missiles, such as Bale explosives or Faust thermite burners.
The third assembly line below us was for Twitch dragonfly drones, and the last for Miya praying mantis drones. Shaped like insects and easy to mistake for organic creatures at a distance, those camera drones were the bane of our existence, a daily threat to the secrecy of the Nest.
The whole area was awash in constant noise: the hum of conveyors, the clicks and thumps of servos, the whine of powered tools used to assemble components, musical tones from status boards.
I concentrated on the HummingHawk lines. They were the only ones we were concerned with. At one end of each line, in the distance to my right, were the component stations where pre-assembled ducted-fans, payload-pod-and-strut assemblies, and main computer system waited. Mechanisms gliding by overhead on ceiling-mounted rails used segmented waldo arms to snatch up components and place them with millimeter precision on assembly tables along the line. Other fixed robot systems used their own armatures to assemble the drones into recognizable HummingHawk shapes. Then the overhead arms moved them to the next station. Some stations installed main payloads such as bombs or enhanced sensor packages, some added auxiliary systems, some performed fast systems or computer checks, some fired sound or X-rays into the assemblies to test for defects. Finally, the overhead arms lifted each assembled HummingHawk and place it in its own plastic crate at the near end of the line—just a few meters to my right and ten meters below. The crates’ interiors, occupied mostly by molded foam inserts, protected the drones from damage. A robot arm at the end of the line flipped each crate’s lid shut and made sure that its catch engaged.
Once a stack of crates grew to five in number, making it about six meters tall, automated forklifts picked up the stack and carefully carried it into the vast, shadowy receiving area to my left. There the forklift placed the stack on a shipping pallet. In the morning, humans would strap the stacks down to the pallets, securing them for transportation, and then more forklifts would carry those pallets off to the hauler lot outside. Ultimately, a few drones would go to Chiron’s military, while most would go to the spaceport for export.
This whole setup was one rare occurrence of the humans’ increased paranoia working in our favor. HummingHawks were costly goods, and before the Escape, Dollgangers driving megas carried the stacks to the pallets and strapped them down for shipping. Now, forklifts repurposed from lower-security businesses, like processed-food manufacturers, did the carrying. They could be trusted where ’gangers now could not. Some of the megas waited, unused for months, against the wall of the holding area.
While all this assembly and preparation was going on, other automated forklifts hauled away empty component bins from the start of the assembly line and brought in full bins. At irregular intervals, a large door on the wall far to my right would slide up to allow one of those lifters to enter or exit.
And not a human in sight. But they’d be watching.
I looked over at Malibu. He hung from the ceiling just beside a camera pod overlooking the chamber. He was not in its field of view. His bare right hand gripped the capture box Parfait had patched into the camera. His eyes, the only parts of his face visible through his mask, had a dreamy look to them, not because he was enjoying what he was seeing, but because he was coping with too much data. He couldn’t completely govern his reactions.
I called out to him, a stage whisper: “How’s it looking?”
“Trying to find the perfect loop point.” His voice sounded dreamy as well. “I have an almost perfect one. But if we run that loop, then one ducted fan disappears from its component bin and then reappears at the start of the loop. So I’m cropping that part of the image and superimposing it on the bin as a still. And having to compensate for variations in the image caused by building vibrations.”
I returned my attention to the floor below. Malibu was better with audio-visual work than almost anyone in the Nest. Under these circumstances, not even he could give us perfection. We had to hope that a good-enough effort would keep the human observers from noticing.
Once that loop was playing, we’d be able to move around unmolested until—well, until we were noticed. We needed all the time we could get.
“Got it.” Malibu sounded more alert now. “As good as I can get without days and a lot of computing muscle. Perfect engagement point coming in fifteen seconds. Fourteen.”
BeeBee took one last look around. “Unless one of us says otherwise, engage at the right point.”
“... Four. Three. Two. One. Engaged.” Malibu darted a look around. “We’re okay to go.”
I breathed out a sigh, and then we really got to work.
BeeBee and I tied black cords from our backpacks to Malibu’s camera pod, then slid down to the concrete floor. We tied the ends of those cords off against an immobile assembly-line support leg on the dragonfly line. We didn’t intend to go up the way we’d descended, but we might have to abort the mission and improvise.
Malibu and Parfait didn’t descend with us. They climbed along the ceiling to a grate leading into the ventilation system. They used their belt tools to unscrew the grate, letting it hang at an angle from one screw. Then they climbed into the vent, disappearing from my sight.
BeeBee and I trotted into the receiving area where all th
e towering stacks of drone crates waited. She accompanied me to the line of three megas gathering dust beside one wall. And I almost became cheerful.
Two and a half meters tall, shaped roughly like a human but oversized, with fully articulated hands, with broad tread assemblies instead of legs, megas were perhaps my favorite vehicle to operate. I’d spent years working with them, all models. They were tough and versatile, and, as the humans had learned to their regret, easily adapted to machines of war. The three waiting here were forklift models, with upper arms that could extend hydraulically so their elbows reached the floor, with lower arms that could stretch to a length of two meters. Painted silver-gray, these three bore chestplate symbols in black, the Kresh Assemblies logo: two waldo arms shaking hands.
I picked the middle mega. BeeBee and I cracked the security keeping it locked. The security wasn’t bad—when the entry-code keypad was activated, it was supposed to query the plant’s security office wirelessly and wait for confirmation from a human before permitting access. Someone with a basic ’ganger skill with electronics and coding would have been thwarted. I spent minutes disengaging the vehicle’s radio system, then patching into the wires that ran from the antenna to the vehicle’s internal computer. Meanwhile, BeeBee analyzed the alphanumeric keypad on the side of the tread assembly for wear, calculated a series of probable passwords, and began entering them. She got the correct password on her third try; I supplied the correct authorization code on my fourth. The mega’s faceplate swung open, granting access to the ’ganger-scaled cockpit in the head, and I climbed in.
In the mega, I began unstacking stacks of HummingHawk drones. I laid nine drone crates in a line in an aisle the forklifts were not using tonight. I moved down the line, raising the crate lids and leaning them against the chamber wall. Then we began our campaign of modification.
Three of the drones I’d chosen were bombers. Each had a single bomb almost completely filling its payload pod. I used the mega to lift two of those drones out of their crates and set them upside down on the concrete floor. BeeBee ran external power to the pods and bypassed their locking mechanisms, allowing me to open their bomb bay hatches. I carefully removed the glossy red ovals within and was even more gentle when setting them on the floor. Then I set the two drones right side up on the floor. Now BeeBee could get to work on the drones’ control and guidance systems.
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