Extinction

by Mark Alpert

  He lingered at the edge of the woods, unsure what to do. Although it was only 5:00 P.M., the sun had already sunk behind the high peaks of the mountain range. He knew that waiting for nightfall wouldn’t help; Supreme Harmony’s surveillance network included infrared cameras, and the thermal image of Jim’s body would shine like a beacon against the cold mountainside. He peered around the trunk of a large pine tree, trying to determine where the cameras were, but he spotted nothing on the bare gray slope above him. Then he saw something move beside another tree at the timberline, a figure in an olive-green uniform, about a hundred yards away. An instant later he heard the rapid-fire bursts from the soldier’s AK-47.

  Jim ducked behind the pine trunk as the bullets whistled past. The soldier had to be a Module—his marksmanship was too damn good. The AK rounds slammed into the tree, ripping off slabs of bark and pulp. Jim crouched low and raised his Glock, but he was badly outgunned. When he snaked his prosthesis around the pine to return fire, the barrage from the AK gouged the trunk and showered him with splinters. The Module circled to the right, shooting as he ran, and Jim scuttled around the tree to stay behind cover. Sooner or later, he knew, one of the bullets would hit him. It was just a matter of time.

  Thinking fast, he pulled his satellite phone out of his pocket and displayed the image of Medusa on the screen. “All right, I give up!” he yelled. “I’m throwing down my gun.” He tossed aside his Glock, which landed on the pine needles that blanketed the ground. “Now hold your fire! I’m unarmed!”

  It was risky. He didn’t know if Supreme Harmony would want to take him alive. But even if it had no interest in incorporating him into its network, he assumed it would want to interrogate him. Out of curiosity, if nothing else. After a few seconds the Module ceased firing, and the woods fell silent.

  Jim raised his hands in the air, holding the satellite phone in his prosthesis. Then he stepped out from behind the pine trunk. “Don’t shoot! I have something you want.”

  The Module came forward, keeping his AK braced against his shoulder and the muzzle pointed at Jim’s chest. He was thirty feet away, close enough that Jim could see the stitches in the young soldier’s shaved head.

  Jim held out his sat phone, making sure the screen was pointed at the Module. “It’s in here,” he said. “The information from Arvin Conway.”

  The Module lifted his head from the gun sights and stared directly at the sat phone’s screen. But he kept advancing. The image of Medusa seemed to have no effect on him. He was coming in for the kill.

  “No, wait!” Desperate, Jim glanced at his Glock, but it was too far away. The Module would blast him before he could dive for it.

  The soldier stepped closer, coming within ten feet. “We’ve confirmed your identity,” he said in perfect English. “You are—”

  He stumbled in midsentence. His body went slack, and the momentum of his last step pitched him forward. He dropped the AK and landed face-first in the pine needles.

  Jim grabbed his Glock and trained it on the inert Module. The trick had worked, but not as well as he’d hoped. Viewing Medusa from afar hadn’t stopped the Module; apparently, his ocular cameras had to see the image head-on and up close to deliver the correct sequence of data that would shut down the implants. Worse, Jim couldn’t use the trick again. Supreme Harmony would figure out what he’d done and make sure that none of its Modules came too close. The only way to defeat the network was to broadcast the shutdown code from the radio tower, but now he had no hope of surprising Supreme Harmony. The network knew where he was.

  Muttering curses, he tucked the Glock in his pants and picked up the Module’s AK-47. Then he started running up the mountainside. Although his plan might be hopeless, he couldn’t turn around. He left the woods behind and climbed the barren slope as fast as he could, leaning forward and pumping his arms.

  The cold mountain air seared his lungs. He saw the glacier up ahead, a tattered blanket of dirty ice, ravaged by global warming. Its surface was etched with countless cracks and crevasses, and rivulets of meltwater leaked from its receding edge. Near the mountain’s summit, now less than a mile away, was the radio tower, a steel-lattice antenna rising hundreds of feet above the glacier. The tower’s control station was a simple aluminum-sided trailer resting on the ice sheet next to the antenna’s base. Jim focused all his will on that trailer. It was his goal, his target. He stared so hard at the thing, his eyes watered. Then four figures emerged from behind the trailer, running in lockstep across the ice. Jim could barely see the Modules—they were more than a thousand yards away—but he was willing to bet they carried assault rifles. Although they were beyond the maximum effective range of an AK, they were closing in fast. They’d obviously spotted him.

  Jim stopped in his tracks and looked for cover. There was nothing but bare rock to his left and right, and the woods were more than half a mile behind him. But just a hundred yards ahead was the melting edge of the glacier, which rose almost twenty feet above the granite slope. He could take cover behind the wall of ice if he could make it there in time. Summoning all his remaining strength, he dashed toward the glacier’s edge, running headlong toward the Modules. He was dizzy from exhaustion, but he managed to stumble behind the cover of the ice sheet just as the first gunshots echoed against the mountain.

  On his hands and knees, he gulped the thin air. The altitude made it excruciating—he was 16,000 feet above sea level and seriously short on oxygen. Once he caught his breath, he surveyed the jagged wall of ice in front of him. A stream of meltwater flowed from a gap in the wall, and the gap led to a crevasse, a trench within the glacier. Jim decided to enter the crevasse and see where it went. It was better than walking on top of the ice sheet, where the Modules could take another shot at him.

  The trench zigzagged through the ice, sometimes widening to the breadth of a street and sometimes narrowing to a foot-wide fissure that Jim could barely squeeze through. He moved swiftly and silently for several minutes, but he couldn’t tell whether he was getting any closer to the radio tower. He assumed the Modules had reached the edge of the glacier by now and discovered he wasn’t there. But they were sure to notice the crevasse, and their next logical move was to follow the trench and track him down. Jim supposed he could try to ambush the Modules, but he didn’t like his chances. He might be able to pick off one or two with his AK, but then the others would blow him away.

  It was infuriating—he’d come all this way just to get stymied at the end. In frustration, he slammed his prosthetic hand against the side of the crevasse and a chunk of ice the size of a sofa broke off the wall and tumbled into the trench. It shattered at Jim’s feet, nearly flattening him.

  He took a deep breath, cursing his stupidity. Then he had an idea.

  He raced ahead, examining the ice walls on either side of the crevasse. After two minutes, he found what he was looking for: a break in the ice wall to his left, where a smaller crevasse branched off from the bigger one. The smaller trench went only twenty feet before dead-ending, but it made a good position for an ambush. Better still, at the branching point between the two trenches was a twenty-foot-high promontory of ice. Shaped like a ship’s prow, it was weakened by meltwater at its base and looked ready to collapse.

  Jim ran past the branching point, advancing fifty feet farther along the bigger trench. Extending the knife from his prosthesis, he climbed the ice wall to his left and peeked over the top. The four Modules were several hundred yards away, moving synchronously across the glacier. Jim popped his head up and waited until they spotted him. As the Modules raised their rifles, he yelled, “Oh shit!” and ducked. Then, while their bullets streaked overhead, he jumped back into the crevasse and turned on the transmitter of his satellite phone.

  “Kirsten!” he shouted into the phone. “They got me cornered! Come help!”

  Leaving the transmitter on, he placed the sat phone on the icy floor of the crevasse. Its radio signal revealed its precise GPS location to anyone monitoring the wireless band
s. Then Jim ran back to the branching point and entered the smaller crevasse. He climbed the ice wall and crouched on a ledge just below the lip of the trench.

  He held his breath and listened. Within ten seconds he heard the clomping of the Modules’ boots on the ice sheet. Five seconds later they reached the edge of the larger crevasse and automatically fired down into the trench, aiming their rifles at the sat phone. At the same moment, Jim popped up behind them and started shooting.

  He downed two of the Modules, but the other two dodged out of the line of fire. They wheeled around and sprayed bullets at him, but Jim had already dropped back into the smaller crevasse. For a second time he held his breath, listening carefully as the Modules rushed toward the promontory of ice at the branching point. Then he slammed his prosthetic hand into the promontory’s weakened base, and tons of ice came tumbling down.

  While Jim leaped backward, the Modules toppled into the crevasse. One of them landed hard and lay motionless at the bottom of the trench, clearly dead. But the other was still moving, sliding on his belly toward where his rifle had fallen. Jim pointed his AK at the Module and shot him in the head.

  Before leaving the crevasse, Jim went to retrieve his satellite phone, but the thing was in pieces. As he’d already noticed, the Modules were damn good shots.

  * * *

  Five minutes later Jim burst into the aluminum-sided trailer next to the radio tower. At one end of the control station were three rows of server racks, and at the other end were two computer terminals and a bank of video monitors, at least two dozen. The screens reminded Jim of the Monitor Room at Camp Whiplash. They displayed a dizzying array of video from Supreme Harmony’s surveillance cameras, showing all the slopes and peaks and mountain trails of Yulong Xueshan. The images on the screens were in constant flux—each monitor displayed the feed from one surveillance camera for ten seconds, then switched to another. Jim was surprised that the monitors and terminals were still running. Supreme Harmony must’ve known he’d disabled the Modules guarding the tower, so why hadn’t it cut the power to the control station? The only explanation was that this communications hub was critical to the network’s operations. And that made it an excellent place to insert the shutdown code.

  Jim sat down in front of one of the terminals and turned it on. The characters Tài Hé came on the terminal’s screen. Then the log-on screen appeared and the cursor blinked on the line where Jim was supposed to type the password for accessing the network. This was one piece of information that Jim hadn’t been able to find on Arvin’s flash drive. He’d searched all the categories of visual memories associated with Supreme Harmony but saw nothing resembling a password. In all likelihood, the Guoanbu hadn’t revealed it to Arvin when he came to inspect the Yunnan Operations Center.

  Jim had no choice except to try a slow, manual attack. First he typed TAIHE, the romanized spelling of the Mandarin characters, on the terminal’s keyboard. Next he tried THAEI, which was the interleaving of the letters in Tai and He. Then he tried 81443, which were the numbers corresponding to TAIHE on the standard phone keyboard. Then he tried similar guesses using the romanized spelling of Yulong Xueshan. Jim knew from long experience that even intelligence agents sometimes chose passwords that were ridiculously easy to guess. Given enough time, he felt confident that he could crack it. The big question was when Supreme Harmony would launch its counterassault against him. He suspected that a whole platoon of Modules was already marching up the slope toward the radio tower.

  Then, while Jim was typing another guess on the password line, he glanced at one of the video monitors, which had just started displaying a new surveillance feed. The image on the screen took his breath away. He had no time left. He had to leave now.

  SIXTY-EIGHT

  The gray cloud swirled thirty feet behind them, close enough that Layla could hear it buzzing. At first the schoolboys, propelled by their terror, dashed about a hundred feet ahead of the swarm, and Layla thought they would outrun it. But as the drones followed them down the mountain trail, the boys couldn’t keep up the pace. Running beside them, Layla remembered the dead drone she’d seen in Tom Ottersley’s lab, the housefly with the electronics embedded in its body. Those implants enabled Supreme Harmony to guide the drones to their targets. Layla assumed from the way the swarm had paralyzed the old man and woman that the drones carried heat-seeking darts like the one that had stung Tom. And though the flies weren’t particularly fast—Layla estimated they moved about five miles per hour—she knew they could keep going for hours. The boys, in contrast, were ready to drop.

  Li Tung, the nine-year-old, was having the most trouble. Panting and weeping, he could barely lift his feet off the ground. Layla took his hand and tried to pull him along, but it didn’t do much good. Wu Dan, the older boy, looked over his shoulder at the approaching swarm and screamed in Mandarin at his schoolmate, who started sobbing hysterically. Layla’s heart constricted as she stared at Li Tung’s red face—it wasn’t his fault, none of this was his fault! It was difficult for anyone to run at this altitude. Maybe it was even difficult for the flies, although they didn’t seem to be slowing down. Perhaps they didn’t need as much oxygen because they were cold-blooded.

  Cold-blooded. The word stuck in Layla’s mind. As she tugged Li Tung’s arm, she looked up the mountainside, staring in particular at the glacier that covered the peak. Part of the ice sheet extended down from the summit, like a long white tongue on the mountain’s gray face. The slope wasn’t so murderously steep here, and the edge of the glacier was just a thousand feet away. They wouldn’t be able to climb the slope as fast as they could run down the trail, but Layla decided to take the gamble.

  She stopped in her tracks and knelt in front of Li Tung. “Get on!” she yelled, gesturing for him to climb onto her back. She grabbed his thighs and slid them over her hips while the boy locked his arms around her neck. Carrying him piggyback, she left the trail and started running up the slope. Wu Dan followed her without hesitation.

  Li Tung weighed at least fifty pounds, but Layla was so full of adrenaline she barely felt it. She scrambled up the mountainside, lowering her head and tilting her body forward to keep her balance. The boy wrapped his legs tightly around her waist, allowing her to let go of his thighs and use her hands to speed their ascent, gripping the stone slabs that jutted from the slope. She climbed faster than she ever thought she could, and Wu Dan stayed right with her. But the buzzing of the swarm only grew louder, and when she dared a look over her shoulder she saw the gray cloud rising effortlessly, only fifteen feet behind them.

  She screamed, “Shit!” and faced forward, focusing on the mountain. She was angry at the drones and furious at herself, and the fury put new strength in her legs. She climbed even faster, clawing the ground, and yelled, “Come on!” at Wu Dan. But the edge of the glacier was still five hundred feet away, and she knew they wouldn’t make it. The drones would paralyze them all, and the Modules would collect their bodies and join them to Supreme Harmony. She felt a cold wind blowing down from the summit, and Li Tung’s weight suddenly became unbearable, a heavy stone pinning her to the slope. She kept struggling upward, but now it felt like she was watching herself in slow motion. At any second she expected the swarm to engulf them. Goddamn it, she muttered. What the hell was I thinking?

  But the worst didn’t happen. Although she was barely moving forward, the buzzing of the drones didn’t get any louder. She looked over her shoulder and saw the gray cloud still behind her, but it was a little farther behind now, maybe twenty feet. What’s more, the cloud’s shape was different—flatter, more like a miniature fog bank clinging to the ground.

  Layla let out a delighted “Ha!” and resumed running up the mountain. In less than a minute she and the boys reached the edge of the glacier and scrambled over the dirty ice. They didn’t stop until they reached a level patch of the ice sheet, a shelf overlooking the slope they’d just ascended. Then Layla turned around and watched the swarm die. Supreme Harmony was continuing to
send commands to the drones, and the implanted electrodes were still steering them up the mountain, but the insects couldn’t keep their wings beating. The winds passing over the glacier chilled the air above the slope, and the cold-blooded flies couldn’t stay airborne at temperatures this low. Some of the drones made it as far as the edge of the glacier, but most of them fell on the rocky slope below. Their implants pattered as they hit the ground.

  Layla sat down on the ice, even though her bare legs were covered with goose bumps. Li Tung and Wu Dan sat beside her, and for the first time since they’d escaped from the Operations Center she saw the boys smile. Their situation was still desperate, but Layla felt the joy of winning the battle. She leaned backward and took a deep breath of the cold mountain air.

  Then she heard the crunch of a pair of boots on the ice, coming from farther up the slope. She reached for the pistol in her down jacket, but before she could pull the gun out of her pocket she heard the intruder’s voice. “Don’t shoot! It’s me.”

  She spun around and saw a man cradling an AK-47. It was her father.

  “My God, Layla.” Smiling, he pointed at her shaved head. “What did you do to your hair?”

  SIXTY-NINE

  Supreme Harmony observed its enemies on the highest peak of Yulong Xueshan. Although the drones in the nearby swarm were dead or dying, the surveillance cameras implanted in the insects continued to transmit their video feeds, and some of those cameras pointed at the glacier on the mountain’s western slope. From these feeds, the network identified James T. Pierce and Layla A. Pierce. They stood on the ice sheet, about seven meters apart, staring at each other. Then they rushed together and embraced.