The Phlebotomist

by Chris Panatier

  Lock blew a curl of toasted orange from her face and surveyed the room. “Well, unless you know how to shoot, I’d guess you’re gonna have to pilot the relay over to Central City.”

  “Fly… the drone? To the Heart?”

  “Yeah, we can’t hijack Patriot’s signal from here.”

  “I don’t know how to fly a drone!”

  “It’s easy. Like I told you before, you just pull the stick wherever you want to go. Pull slowly, go slowly, pull faster, go faster. It ain’t the Blue Angels.”

  “Uh.”

  Lock took up a box from the counter. “So look, everybody is on PatriotNet – ’cause it’s the only NSP. And like I told you before, their infrastructure is built on layers of ancient tech. They still use beta-beam, can you even believe that? So we’re gonna intercept and retransmit it. MitM stuff.” She grabbed a dusty piece of equipment from a shelf.

  “What?” said Willa, head swimming.

  “Man-in-the-middle hijack. Classic hacker move,” Lock answered. “This here is our wireless hub. I’ll be talking to it from Hawaii–”

  “Hawaii?”

  “Oh, yeah, we’ll relay a signal from there later on. Our broadcast should be short enough to prevent detection for a spell, but a signal that big will eventually be noticed. Anyway, I can’t give up Jamaica. I got less resources on the Big Island. Patriot can have it once we’re done.”

  Willa tried to visualize the logistics. “So, you’re talking to the hub from Hawaii. What does the hub do?”

  “OK, right, so this box is our hub. It will sniff for Patriot’s signal, and then spoof it.”

  “I’m sorry, I’m confused.”

  “Patriot’s server will think our hub is the client. The client is, well, everybody watching on the other end – everyone in the blood districts. The client thinks our hub is the Patriot server. Nobody notices anything until our content goes out instead of The Patriot Report.”

  “Won’t Patriot notice?”

  “Well, yeah. They’ll have the signal down in a minute, maybe two. But that’s all we need.”

  Willa just shook her head in disbelief. At the same time she noted her admiration for the lady.

  Lock hefted a brick-sized chunk of hardware onto the desk and stacked the hub on top. “And this guy right here is your battery.” A roll of duct-tape appeared from somewhere and she bound them together in an overkill of taping.

  “What are you doing?”

  “You’re going to drop it straight out of Llydia, fly-by style,” said Lock. “Return to the nest, you know, lay a malignant little egg.”

  “Drop it?” asked Willa. “Won’t it break?”

  Lock grinned as she went back to work affixing large chunks of polyfoam to the already bulging package. “I don’t know if the kids still do it, maybe up in O Minus, but remember the egg project you did as a little girl? Where you had to keep your egg unbroken for a week?”

  Oh, Willa remembered. Having to cradle an egg in a padded box of her own design and construction, never letting it out of her sight for an entire week, while the boys got to launch rockets and play sports. “Mmhmm. I remember.”

  “Well, this is our egg,” Lock said, thumbing the hub. “And this right here, is our box.” She clapped a pair of foam blocks and set to taping them.

  This went on for some time with Willa helping Lock handle the growing ball of foam and duct tape, until they had a silver egg two feet in diameter. A small hole burrowed from the surface to the signal-box inside so it could be switched on when deployed.

  In the late afternoon, Willa and Lock piled into Llydia along with the MK13 and the egg. “You drive,” said Lock. Willa opened her mouth to object, but Lock cut her off, saying, “This is the only practice you’re getting before you drop me in my spot. Best make good use of it.”

  Willa’s hands went clammy and she wiped them on her reaper’s black.

  “Anytime now.”

  She strapped into the pilot’s chair and took the stick. A gentle upward tug and Llydia lifted from the shed. Willa pressed forward and they angled away from Jamaica.

  “Stick to the roofline – ugh!” Lock bounced and grunted as they slammed into the bricks of a leaning chimney.

  “I’m sorry,” said Willa, concentrating intently. “Do you want to take over?”

  “Nope. No, I fully support you here. You have my full support,” said Lock, fastening the seatbelt on the little bench and pulling it tight. “How are you doing navigation-wise?”

  “I’ll need help once we cross out of the diagonal.” A reference to the line that ran southwest to northeast through the center of town and stood as a rough demarcation between lowbloods and highbloods.

  “Not a problem. I’ll give you a visual on the Heart and then you take me to Crosstown Distribution for Drone-Murder-Three-Point-Zero.” She unfurled a piece of cloth to reveal a small camera with a homemade adapter and secured it to the rifle’s Pic rail. “Bring us up now, Willa.”

  Willa pulled up hard and the drone rocketed silently skyward.

  “Aaaaand hover, good. Just let the stick free. Alright, see over there?” She pointed to a spot out west, where the buildings and homes gave way to an area forested by towering redwoods. Miles within, at the center of the heavy green sat a large and brilliant white parallelepiped, a crisp cube cantered and twisted to one side. It was alien, otherworldly. The low sun cast its sides in gentle pastels of cream, rose and gold. Willa felt the breath rushing from her lungs as she could not believe that something so beautiful could still exist. She’d lived in the city her entire life and had only glimpsed the thing a handful of times, and then fleetingly and from a great distance. It simply wasn’t visible from street level or the low altitudes of taxi drones.

  “Hey?” asked Lock. “You got your bearings, then?”

  “Yeah.” She brought Llydia around and descended to the rooftops back at the center of Crosstown. Willa could feel Lock tensing as she took them over a building and threaded the drone between a pair of condensers. They landed hard on the roof. Lock hefted the rifle and exited, then scrambled up a ladder behind one of the environmental units with youthful agility. She checked her equipment and gave Willa the thumbs up, hollered, “Stay low!”

  Willa closed the door and eased up on the stick, careful not to scrape the sides of the narrow gap into which she’d landed. Pressing the controls forward, she skipped over the landscape and toward the giant urban forest at the center of it. Soon, the homes, buildings, and other scraps of derelict infrastructure became less dense, broken by the nature surrounding the Heart like a veil that shielded it from the dystopia it had created. She slowed some and wove her way into the Redwoods. Neither she nor Lock had access to intelligence on the security surrounding Central City and so she cautiously felt her way in. At the same time, she knew she had to hustle to get back and retrieve Lock.

  The trees were biblical. Old. Enormous. Majestic. Thick and more alive than anything else in the entire city; cultivated and cared for as if to guard what lay at their center. Willa proceeded slowly, feeling almost like her passage came at their pleasure. Weaving between them gave her some feel for Llydia and she began to intuit the drone’s movements and propensities. Soon she was handling instead of just steering. As her confidence grew, she applied greater pressure to the joystick, and felt the old familiar rush of acceleration. She swung Llydia around and between the trunks as memories rekindled of her first car and driving too fast. The blistering speed and wild shifts in inertia made her heart race.

  A break in the forest ahead showed the white monolith on fire in the sun’s waning beams. Around it sat a variety of temporary modules, placed there no doubt in anticipation of the Patrioteer Conference. She relaxed her grip and allowed the drone to settle into a static position a few meters above the ground. She triggered the door open and surveyed the expanse. The air was quiet and fragrant with pine straw, and Willa marveled at the very existence of such a woodland paradise in the midst of the gray and desolate city. />
  All around was virgin wilderness. No sign of security, much less any type of technology – above ground anyway. She kept from landing, as Lock had warned her about the possibility of ground sensors. Being offline, Llydia was invisible to Patriot’s monitoring software. They could only be detected by sight, and the Heart, for all its beauty, had no windows. The sun dipped below the trees. She had ten minutes to lay the egg and return to Lock. Her nerves calmed when she retook control of the drone and thrust the stick ahead.

  Llydia dashed from the primordial wood, low over the thick clover lawn, then full throttle to the crown of the building. Rather than hover and drop the egg, Willa set down on the building so as not to stay airborne and visible. A lip around the roof’s perimeter concealed her from below. She released the door again, took up the egg in both arms like a beach ball, and trotted across the roof toward the center where a spire of technology rose like the Eiffel Tower. The signal generator. The surface of the roof had a crisp waffle pattern and she teetered along a shoulder-width strip of concrete, almost spilling into one of the deep squares as she ran.

  She reached the spire and stopped to consider where the best place for the egg would be. She could stab it onto one of its metal juts or she could drop it into one of the surrounding squares. The signal might be stronger on the spire, but the egg would be visible. The problem was reversed if she dropped it. Lock hadn’t given her any guidance on this. She reached into the egg and activated the signal.

  A vibration in the air caught her off guard. She looked toward the far end of the building.

  A security drone breached the roof’s lip. Willa glanced to Llydia. Too far to run. She dumped the egg into the closest waffle square and half climbed, half tumbled into another, hoping she’d not been seen. The drone’s approach brought a cloud of dust that filled her cutout. She stretched the cloth of her reaper’s black over her mouth and watched the sky. The drone passed overhead but gave no indication that she had been spotted. Once it cleared, Willa peeked over the edge. It was headed right toward Llydia.

  Out from the hole, she sprinted down the line, feet skipping along the roof like a roadrunner. The patrol drone slowed as it reached the limit of the roof and hovered just feet from Llydia. Willa cast about for something, anything she might use to distract it before Llydia was blown to kingdom come and she was left stranded.

  The drone panned side to side, its four lacegun barrels protruding from its shell like noses, sniffing the air for trespassers. Realizing she couldn’t make it back into Llydia without being seen, she scooted underneath and huddled down into another waffle square, waited for the drone to fire its guns.

  No sound came. Instead, the drone banked over the roof and flew noiselessly back toward the opposite side. Why hadn’t it fired?

  Llydia was steps away. Willa peered out from the hole. The patrol drone reached the spire then flew in a slow circle around it. What was it doing? Had it detected the egg? She had to act.

  Willa burst from her hideaway and hurled herself into Llydia, falling hard onto her ribs. She righted herself, grabbed the stick and yanked it up and to the side. She whipped the drone in a tight loop, screaming over the roof and darted directly in front of the Patriot drone.

  Inexplicably, it showed no interest. Why not? Willa wove back and forth before it, doing her best to distract it before the egg was discovered. “Come on! Are you blind?”

  And then she remembered the smudge. Llydia was cloaked. The patrol unit couldn’t see her if it didn’t know what to look for. It closed in on the hot square.

  Willa nudged the joystick just as the other drone came around, effectively shouldering Llydia right into it.

  The drone twitched to her as if it’d been startled from a lazy daydream. Halt! came a woman’s voice through the open hailing frequency.

  Willa yanked Llydia to the heavens. The jolt of momentum pushed her into the captain’s chair. Through the display she saw the Patriot drone enter the same steep climb. Its pilot must have been able to follow the visual signature left by the smudge given that she now knew where to look. A stream of Trespasser and Identify and Will Shoot came blasting over the comm.

  She wheeled Llydia into a dive. An alarm flashed red on the display just as a fusillade of lace bullets punched through Llydia’s skin. Meters above the ground, she pulled hard on the yoke then thrust it toward the towering trees who before had let her pass. With no digital signature for the security drone to lock onto, its pilot would have to fly by hand to give chase through the forest. So instead of slowing among the redwoods, Willa accelerated, pressing the stick as far forward as it would go. The motors whined their stress. She felt taken back in time to the black vinyl seat of her old Camaro, sliding back and forth as she carved tight corners on splashy tires. She dipped and zigged, galloped over branches, and rounded trunks. The patrol drone followed, but Willa could tell by its movement that the pilot was struggling to navigate the gauntlet while staying on her. Ahead, through the last margin of forest, were the anemic lights of B Plus. More ordnance pocked her mount.

  The patrol unit was faster, nimbler than Llydia. Once they were out in the open, it would have little trouble bringing her down. Willa kept the throttle at one hundred percent as they crossed into the blood districts. Down streets and lanes, between row houses and shuttered storefronts, she raced, weaving hither and to while the Patriot drone closed in, spinning out streams of steel-cutting lace.

  Willa knew the streets from her youth, running and climbing through them with her companions, hiding from bullies when provoked. As a child she’d mostly escaped them, but had sometimes found herself cornered into unforgiving dead ends. It was the bricked-in alleys, the places with no way free, that she was certain to never forget; and decades on, they still glowed like beacons across the geography of her mind. An idea sparked.

  She executed a series of breakneck left turns. Into narrow alleyways she flew, over and over, establishing a pattern that the Patriot drone began to emulate, even anticipate. Left-left-left, left-left-left. When she’d done it three or four times, she hesitated, swung left down a different lane, and pulled up on the stick as hard as she could.

  Llydia leapt, narrowly dodging the patrol drone as it blasted around the corner and into the dead-end wall that blocked egress from the lane – a heavy bulwark of brick and mortar. The drone’s aluminum-air battery pulsed like an exploding star and the shockwave carried Llydia skyward, motors sputtering from the pressure change. Willa righted the drone and checked the wreckage through the display – for survivors, she guessed, then wondered what she would have done had she spotted any. The explosion had been so powerful, so complete, that she saw nothing of the drone or any hint it had existed except for a wall that had been reduced to rubble. With no time to spare, she sped off for Crosstown Distribution and her sniper accomplice.

  “What in the name of Pete took you so long?” hollered Lock as she clambered into the drone from behind the condenser on the rooftop.

  “I was chased.”

  Lock examined the smudge. “This looks good, how’d they follow?”

  “They were about to find the egg. I, uh, let them know I was there.”

  Lock gazed out through two of the many holes torn through Llydia’s flank. “Did he getcha?” she chortled.

  “Her,” said Willa as they lifted off. “She chased me for a while until she stopped chasing me.”

  Lock set down the rifle. “So you got her. How?”

  “Dead end. I pulled up,” said Willa, weakly miming the chase’s final seconds, a note of regret in her voice.

  “Well, it was you or her, sweetie,” said Lock. “I’m glad it was her.”

  They rose into the air. A mile or so away, the sky above Crosstown Distribution swarmed. Willa flew the drone in the opposite direction and leaned into the throttle. “Did you get your footage?” she asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” Lock exclaimed. “I wish Olden could’ve seen it. He’d have been piiiiissed. I dropped two more of those bad boys. Al
l empty, of course.”

  “We’re going to have to repaint Llydia again, I think.”

  “Oh sure. Now that they’re looking for taxi-Llydia, we should turn her back into Patriot-Llydia.”

  Willa raced them back to AB Plus and brought the drone to a hover. “Where’s Hawaii?”

  “Oh, right,” said Lock. She pointed to a street on the display. “Follow this one here for the next couple of clicks.”

  Hawaii was particularly dilapidated. It was a creamed-corn colored clapboard home with all but one window boarded over. With no shed, Willa put Llydia near its backside and killed the motors.

  Lock unclipped the camera from the MK and leapt toward the house, then wheeled around as she rummaged for the right key. “I’ll upload the footage, you cloak the drone.”

  Willa collected some chipped PVC panels from against a chain link fence and began layering them on top of Llydia so she’d be invisible from above. A worthless old spool of T-9 ethernet line and some moldy carpet padding finished the roof. Lastly, she scooted a dilapidated chicken coop into abutment with the drone’s door. Satisfied that Llydia now looked like every other pile of junk behind every other house in the district, she went inside.

  “Lock?” she called. “Hello?” She played with the light switch but there was either no electricity or no bulb in the fixture. It was too dark to say which. “Lock?”

  “Yeah Willa! In here!” The call came from only a few feet away. Willa looked with confusion at the old refrigerator. “Open the door!”

  Willa did and could see the back of the main compartment cracked open, exposing a secret passage. The irony of finding herself in such intimate contact with yet another refrigerator failed to amuse.

  The door led to a void behind the wall, where one might have expected to find a pantry – and if this had been a normal home before Lock got hold of it, it wasn’t any more. The space was cramped, but unlike the rest of the house, it hummed with electricity, the walls plastered with technology. It was the attic at Jamaica, only cozier.