I’m looking at a black screen. There’s no movement up there. Presumably Stingray One is wheeling above the sand, still searching for targets of opportunity, but the drone has to be out of ammo by now.
I check Lucille’s systems. My dashboard is all green and go. The self-diagnostic tells me the sat feed should work perfectly from my end. Once I climb up to the shallow sand, I should have a visual again.
Stingray One lands in the sand and sends a single ping through its belly to let me know it’s done. I let out a sigh of relief, but a niggling doubt gnaws at my stomach.
One of my instructors in Basic was Gunny Kelly. He said there were two things a coffin jockey needs to know. “Item one: wear your helmet all the time. Get used to not scratching your nose when it itches. Item two: You got more nerves in your guts than a cat got brains.”
That sounded amazingly stupid to me, but he thought the whole cat brain thing was significant. Gunny thought that we should listen to our heads mostly, but to our guts, too. “You know when something’s gone wrong, even when you don’t,” he said.
Jesus, with training like that, no wonder we lose so many wars.
I check all my systems again. Lucille appears to be working perfectly. I’m loaded down with less ordnance than when I dropped out of a plane, but my dashboard and my HUD all glow green.
My stomach rumbles. Maybe that gnawing feeling isn’t that something’s wrong. Maybe I’m just hungry. The glitch with the sat feed must be on Thomas’s end.
I warm up the thorium whispers and let the drill rev up to speed slowly. I lurch forward and climb.
“Control? This is 12. Copy?”
No answer.
I check my depth and try again. “Vegas? If you can hear this, run a diagnostic. I suspect there is something wrong with your board. All green here.”
Still no answer. Maybe this is a trick. What if I’m climbing out of the blind and into a bot trap ready to spring? Still and silent shark killers might be waiting for me to reveal my position, but it bothers me that the bots fell so easily to my Stingray.
“Thomas? Ears open. Do you have eyes on?”
The audio comes to life in my helmet. “I was blind but now I see.”
I didn’t know I was holding my breath until he spoke. “Proceeding to recon depth, Control.”
“Inadvisable, 12. Proceed to the next waypoint.”
“Repeat that? You don’t want kill confirmation, Control?”
“Not necessary. Moving on, 12. Let’s manage our resources a bit better, shall we? If you take on every target of opportunity, you’ll be out of oxygen and ammo long before your mission is over.”
I squirm in my seat. “Uh, Control, I’ve got a green board here.”
“Good. All systems go then, 12.”
I stare at Lucille’s NAV. There is something else amiss. I’ve been trained to swim blind. A coffin jockey trusts the instruments or their Sand Shark really does become a coffin. Still, given the time that has elapsed, I should be farther along to the next waypoint. I programmed Lucille to swim straight without the usual deviations.
“Twelve? Come back? Are you operational?”
“Negative, Control. I’m operational, I mean, but…besides the sat feed conking out, I think I have a misread on my speed.”
“How do you figure, 12?”
“It’s like the media is thicker than expected for this area. I shouldn’t be going this slow.”
“You probably damaged your drill tip driving into that Zilla, 12. That could give you a misread and explain the gap between geolocation and your plotted course.”
That makes sense. “Affirmative. That’s likely, but I still don’t have a visual on my sat feed. That problem seems to be at your end. Can you confirm?”
“I have a red light on my sat feed and no visual, 12.”
Thanks for finally getting around to telling me, asshole. “How are you going to get any of my intel, Vegas? And why don’t I at least have a visual?”
“We’re working on it from our end. Proceed to the next waypoint and I’ll update you when the mech squad has something to report.”
So the problem isn’t in Lucille. I’m in the blind and, for the moment, I’m not going back to base, either. Shit.
“Twelve? Do you copy?”
I suppress a sigh. “Acknowledged. Proceeding to Waypoint Boxcar at cruising depth in the blind. Let me know when you have the scans back. I guess you’re in the blind, too.” Not a comforting thought for my mission controller to be ignorant of what’s happening on the ground.
I shoot away from the scene of metal carnage I can only imagine. Then it occurs to me that I still have a local feed to check. Besides being excellent bot killers, Stingrays can also act as recon drones. At cruising depth, the link to Stingray One reappears in my dashboard. To my surprise, the machine’s belly reads only half empty of ammo. My gut rumbles again.
“Lucille, download the vid feed from Stingray One to my heads-up display.”
I can’t share my victory with Thomas yet so I just send it to my HUD. I want confirmation of my bot kills. It’s pride and curiosity that makes me look. I wish I hadn’t. If not for that afterthought, I would not have seen the people I’d killed. Not bots. Not androids made to look like people. Humans. Civilians.
I was a proud bot killer. Now I’m a murderer.
“Twelve?” Thomas says. “Are you okay? Your heart rate is up.”
A tingling lump in my throat chokes me.
“Avery? Come back?”
I can’t wipe my tears away with my helmet on. I blink back the tears. “I might have a problem, Control.”
“Your instrumentation is all green and go from this end. Identify the problem, 12.”
You. You’re the problem, Thomas.
“I have multiple red lights in Lucille’s dashboard,” I lie. “Silent running until I can run some more diagnostics and figure it out. Our channel might be compromised. Maybe the bots have some new tricks. Stand by, Control.”
“Avery, I — ”
“Radio silence until I can figure out my glitch. Stand by, Control.”
I dive deep. Far beneath the desert is a quiet and private place. I have always cried in private.
7
My father’s name was Sebastian Avery. He didn’t think I could be a soldier.
“You were a soldier, Daddy,” I said. “Just because I quit the baseball team — ”
“It’s not about that, Deb. But, you know, the military is a team sport and you don’t play so well with others.”
“I could if I really wanted to. The ump — ”
“Let’s not rehash the great strikeout debacle. You didn’t take your swing and that’s — ”
“It was a ball!”
“Deb. I’m trying to help you. I’m trying to tell you that you can get mad or you can get sad or you can get bad. When your team loses, you — ”
“I wasn’t out!”
“Okay, okay! It was a ball. Anyway, all’s I’m saying is it’s okay to not follow in my footsteps. The military is not a life that’s meant for everybody.”
“Is that why you quit? Because it wasn’t for you?”
“Medical discharge,” he said, “but it was for the best. It’s not that the life wasn’t for me. It’s that I wanted to be with you guys more. In the end, a bad knee turned into a happy excuse to bow out.”
“You don’t even like being a farmer.”
“Oh, it’s not that I mind that much. Complaining is a big part of being a farmer.”
“So you don’t miss being an officer?”
When my father grinned, his craggy sunburnt face split wide. “I miss being around people who do what they’re told sometimes.”
“Dad!”
“Okay, okay. The serious answer is that my getting out of the Army allowed me to watch you grow up. Nobody should watch their baby grow up on a vid screen.”
“I don’t plan to have any babies until I’m out of the Army.”
“
That would work better,” Dad said. “It’s just…I saw a lot of good people die. I don’t want you to be one of them, okay?”
“I can’t die, Dad. I’ve got too much to do.”
A few years later, my father’s complaints about farming grew earnest. The hay began to die. Everything began to die. The Blight came and we abandoned the farm.
I lost the barn cats and the dogs and the hayloft. We moved into an old rickety house on the edge of Baltimore with my grandfather. It was too far for my first boyfriend to follow and I was miserable. At least, I thought I was miserable. Then things got worse.
My grandparents lost their jobs, too. My mother, Laurie, retreated to her room. No matter how hot it got in her bedroom, she refused to come out. Sad and hollow-eyed, she became too weary to eat. Her skin turned yellow and the doctor said her liver was getting too big for the place it was supposed to be tucked into.
There were no jobs in Baltimore. Schools were closing and I was just about done with that, anyway. It was time for me to move from being taken care of to becoming a caretaker. One morning, I got up early and kissed my mother goodbye. My father stopped me at the bottom of the stairs.
“Where you going?”
“You know,” I said.
“Tell me.”
“Grampy and Grammy are out of work. You’re still looking. Mom’s sick. There’s not enough food to last the week. You need one less mouth to feed around here.”
“Don’t go. Stay and we’ll figure it out.”
“This is me figuring it out, Dad.”
“It’ll be hard.”
“Three hots and a cot. Lots of free exercise. I’ll learn a trade. They’ll teach me stuff besides feeding me, won’t they?”
“They will, for a high price.”
“But it’s a noble cause.”
“It is. It is.” He gathered me in his arms, squeezed tight and kissed my forehead. “Stay safe. Kill some bots for me.”
“Any parting words of advice?”
“They’ll try to rattle you. The time you spend in training is all a game, though. Pay no attention to the threats and scary parts. The real scary parts will come when it’s the real thing. Whatever happens, stay cool and look like you expected it. They don’t give respect easy, but they’ll respect that.”
That was the first and last time I saw my father cry.
I guess the food lasted just long enough. The week I left, the Terrors hit. Baltimore was wiped off the face of the Earth and I was really alone. I joined the Army. I trained as a comm tech and ended up a Sand Shark pilot.
One hundred meters below the surface in granitic bedrock, I am buried. I use the peace and quiet to decide if I’m a quitter. Quitting would be easy. I could turn down the oxygen and go to sleep. I could amp up the neck cocktails and knock myself dead with an overdose.
My father would say, “Quitting is so easy, that’s how you know it’s the wrong choice.”
I replay Stingray One’s vid over and over, torturing myself. I watch as the Stingray fires its slivers through civilians. Men, women and children all fall to metal wrath.
The one guy with a weapon was dressed as a sheriff. When Stingray One turns his way, I freeze the image and zoom in. His name was stitched over his breast pocket: Johns.
Frame by frame, I watch him raise his weapon. He tried to shoot the drone but he had no chance. Sheriff Johns’s body was shot through with slivers. He sank to his knees, blood flowing from every inch. Some coffin jockeys call that the death by a thousand cuts.
I stare at his body on the desert floor a long time as the sand drinks his fluids.
After a while, I notice the terrain. It’s a desert, but it’s all wrong. Despite what Lucille’s NAV tells me, I am not anywhere near my theater of war.
No wonder my speeds were off. It wasn’t the drill. My calculations had been calibrated for caliche and dunes and sugar sand. I’ve been drilling through some sand, but most of it was hardpan. Down deep, the clay and sediment is thicker than expected. My gut was right. Lucille’s movements have been sluggish.
I’d trusted my instruments just as I was trained to do, but my screens were full of data that Thomas had fed me. Now a bunch of civilians were dead by my hand and on my home soil. Stupidity and fear explains most friendly fire incidents. This was obviously sabotage…obvious too late.
First, I have to figure out where I really am without Thomas’s input. I get a fix on the sun from Stingray One’s cam and patch the drone’s geo-location subroutine into Lucille’s NAV. I plot and replot my course and get Lucille to check my math. When Lucille recalculates my position, I’m sure of where I really am.
This is not the theater for the Sand Wars. I am nowhere near Qatar. I am in Texas, north of Marfa and almost half way to Odessa.
I don’t need Stingray One’s recording to replay the attack on innocents. The scene where my drone tears through the kids with streams of needle slugs is clear in my mind. I watched that happen once. I never have to see that again. I’ll remember every detail as long as I live.
I shut everything down and cry some more. When that’s done, I think a while. Thomas has betrayed me. He has sabotaged the cause. He is a fucking traitor and that’s worse than a killer bot. Lt. Thomas Sheaffer is even worse than the Next Intelligence trying to kill us all.
Hatred is helpful. Hatred gets me to stop thinking about suicide by overdose or oxygen deprivation. It takes quite a lot of screaming to get past being mad so I can think clearly about my next move.
“New course, Lucille. This will take about a day, maybe more. We’re going to manual, but first, I have to make sure Thomas hasn’t infected you.”
I turn off all of Lucille’s systems. It’s a dangerous tactic that could leave me stranded in a tomb that won’t be unearthed until the next ice age. I wait for a few minutes before I try rebooting Lucille with a cold, hard start.
When my screens are back up, I feed Lucille accurate coordinates. To the Sand Shark’s onboard computer, it must seem that it has been shut off and transported across the world and, somehow, reappeared in Texas.
The drill churns and chews the dirt and pulls me toward Las Vegas. “Run silent, run deep, Lucille. We’re going to use Stingray Two on Thomas. Let’s see how he likes it.”
8
Once I’m safely away from the scene of the crime, I allow Lucille to climb to cruising depth for faster speed. Control is calling, of course. I ignore the signal.
I pull the catheter out of my neck port so, if Thomas manages to hook back in and hack me, he can’t give me an overdose. It has been a long time since I traveled completely sober. When I think of those kids getting killed in front of their mothers, I consider hooking up to the line again. I leave it out, a small penance for a terrible war crime.
I leave the nutrition line in. I don’t see how Thomas could use that against me except maybe he could hit me with a sugar high. A Sand Shark is built for long-term missions but humans aren’t. Lucille is the last model that allowed for a human pilot. As our war with Saudi Arabia and its allies wound down and our war with the Next Intelligence ramped up, the ban against autonomous weapons was abandoned completely. Desperation can make people stupid.
Stingray One used autonomous targeting, but it was me who sent death to a bunch of people wandering in the desert. I wonder what they were doing out there. Maybe circumstances pushed them into an untenable situation just like Fate pushed me around and made me its bitch.
I feel the drill’s vibrations through Lucille’s hull as she pulls me to a battle I am unprepared for. I’m tempted to erase the download of the Stingray’s attack, but it is evidence. Maybe the recording could be used against me, too. I spend a long time going over my actions on this mission. Did I miss something I should have seen earlier? Had I ignored my gut?
Thomas had messed with my data feeds. The truly masterful bit of hacking had come with messing with my NAV. He’d managed to make me think I was in Qatar. It would take a lot of second-by-second calculations and scan
ner manipulation to keep me from seeing the truth, or steering into an underground lake, for that matter.
I switch Lucille to audible and close my eyes.
“Lucille?”
“Yes, sir?”
“Call me Deb.”
“Very well, Deb.”
“Run a self-diagnostic on all your systems.”
It was already done before I got to the end of the order. “All systems are working within expected parameters, Deb. Am I not performing my utility function adequately?”
“You are, Lucille, but your — our — utility function was compromised. From here on out, I require incoming signals to be authorized. Don’t drop the firewall unless I tell you to do so, is that clear?”
“Yes, Deb. Central Command is blocked, but Lt. Thomas Sheaffer is hailing us.”
“Deny, ignore and block his hails.”
“His security clearance code is in order, Deb.”
“It is, but he’s a traitor. He’s the one who compromised your systems.”
“Another signal is coming in.”
“I said deny access — ”
“The new signal is not coming from Lt. Sheaffer, Deb.”
“Who is it?”
“The signal origin is Cloud Fleet, the North Atlantic.”
I picture a sea of dirigibles in perpetual flight, cloud storage amid the clouds. I don’t know who that could be. It’s probably a tricky redirect from Thomas trying to mask his signal origin and take over my dashboard again. “Deny access, Lucille.”
“Good afternoon, Deborah.” The voice is female and speaks with a slight Scottish accent. I don’t know anyone in our command structure who sounds like that. All I know is someone is talking to me and it isn’t Lucille. “Identify yourself.”
“A friend.”
“Friends aren’t so vague. I know all my friends. I don’t know you. How did you get past my firewall?”
“Lucille has been reprogrammed to allow me to talk to you.”
“This is a military vehicle and I’m in the middle of an operation and you’re — ”
“Trying to help you, Deb.”
“How did you get through? It shouldn’t be possible that we’re even having this conversation.”
Robot Planet, The Complete Series (The Robot Planet Series) Page 24