The notorious Technician strolls into our clearing, and his drones, still in formation, fill the air with their soft deadly humming song.
“Ugh, what an awful sound,” I mutter, barely breathing, as I stare at the display.
“Learn to love it,” Kateb says.
“At least no one will engage him now, so no more sniper gunfire for now,” Vidam the Artist says.
“ . . . And he’s here, Grail Games worshippers!” the main commentator exclaims. “Looks like things are really heating up right now! Will anyone take on this unbeatable Contender directly?”
“Impossible to say!” a second commentator breaks in. “We’re watching countless drones race to occupy the air space so near Hedj Kukkait himself, up on the third level, but he and his team haven’t fired a single shot!”
“Not to mention, dead silence from Team Irtiu below! One false move, and the drones will activate and start to kill at random! What a fatal dilemma! What an unbelievable predicament—”
The Drone Master looks up at the various structures surrounding the clearing. He notes where Thalassa’s group is hiding and ignores them completely. He also sees Hedj and his group up on the scaffolding on one end, then turns his back to them insolently and instead looks up at our Safe Base.
“Bashtooh! He found us!” Vidam exhales loudly.
“Well, yes, considering he’s been here before. And here he comes again . . .” Kateb says, as the Drone Master walks toward our structure.
When he reaches our building’s ground level, the Drone Master pauses, to enter something on the small control gadget, then puts it away in his pocket. Overhead, the drones, locked in perfect formation, follow him. Their relentless hum is now directly below us. . . .
The Drone Master tests the low roof overhang with his hands, then begins his leisurely climb. His movements are methodical and unhurried, a little stiff. And as I watch, it occurs to me, he’s not particularly athletic. But then, he doesn’t have to be—not with this drone hive under his control.
“Once he gets here, what then?” I say. “What can he really do? The last time he was here he only dispatched four drones to guard our door and left.”
“We still don’t know the full extent of his drones’ capabilities,” Kateb replies. “And that bothers me.”
The Drone Master is now on second level, beginning his climb on scaffolding up to level three. The drones rise with him, keeping the proportional height distance, which means that now they’re directly at the level of our walkway. . . . Their dire hum right outside our door is now overwhelming. . . .
“Can they breach this door if they fire directly at it?” Vidam says.
Kateb shakes his head. “I don’t know. In theory, no, but—”
“What if he programs all of his drones to fire continuously at the door, will it hold?” I muse.
Vidam cusses again and again. “Soon we might find out.”
“O-sha-ha-rat! O-sha-ha-rat!” the audience begins to chant.
The Technician reaches the walkway of level three, takes hold of the nearest metal rung, and begins to climb up toward level four. . . .
“O-sha-ha-rat! O-sha-ha-rat!”
The drones rise equidistantly in perfect rows, and now they’re just above the level of our roof.
It seems the whole world has slowed down to watch, focusing on each one of the Drone Master’s climbing movements. He is now shown in close-up on several of the huge stadium screens.
“We’re screwed, aren’t we?” I say, glancing at my two companions.
Kateb snorts. “On the positive side—soon we’ll learn for a fact what’s stronger—a Safe Base door or a drone army.”
The Drone Master is now on level four, directly below us. And his drones are hovering high above our roof, almost at level six that sits on a shelf above us.
He pulls himself up with his arms, grasps various nearby support rungs, then takes the first careful step onto the walkway. . . .
Suddenly the strap of his equipment bag catches on something—a beam of scaffolding, part of a rung that sticks out. It snags, pulling him backward—just enough that he loses his precise, meticulous footing.
He teeters momentarily. His arms and hands flail out in an attempt to compensate for the slip and regain the balance. . . .
And then the stadium screams as the Drone Master falls backward over the walkway precipice.
Seconds later, his body slams on the ground four stories below.
Holy crap!
We stare with dropped jaws at the view on ground level, at what remains of the invincible Technician Oshaharat Feveh.
What did just happen?
In that moment the drones overhead plummet downward, still in formation, still perfectly lined up. They remain at a short distance above his motionless body for ten seconds. . . . It’s as if they’re waiting for his next living motion or his next command.
. . . Which does not come.
The drones must be tuned in to some kind of biological sensor system that tells them the condition of their master in a constant feedback loop. Since the specific living feedback does not come—a stopped heart or no respiration—the drones process the next command in their pre-programmed control sequence.
The nature of that next command is not difficult to guess. It is either a complete shutdown of the program, or the beginning of another.
In the turbulent noise of the stadium, it’s almost impossible to hear their steady humming sound.
Until suddenly it goes ultrasonic, and then comes screeching back down, this time in a much lower frequency. Now the drones are giving forth a deep unpleasant buzz—a vibration so powerful that it’s sending out palpable waves along the surface of my skin. It can be felt here indoors, penetrating through the walls of the Safe Base, past the closed door. . . .
And in the next instant, there is complete chaos.
The drones break out of formation into a mad roiling stream. . . . Suddenly they’re flying all over the place, firing randomly in all directions, at anything and everything, regardless of proximity or aggressive movement. Thin bursts of laser fire scorch holes and burn lines in the floor of the arena, the walls of buildings. . . . In seconds, the extreme heat starts to melt portions of scaffolding. . . .
Next, come human screams. Contenders on various teams scatter in every direction, as Thalassa’s team tries to find ground cover and hide from the drones. Meanwhile Hedj Kukkait and his group take shelter the best they can in the upper levels of scaffolding structures.
Luckily for all of them, the drones no longer relentlessly pursue an individual target until it is dead. Instead, their sheer randomness and disordered movement causes only incidental harm to anything in their path and perimeter. It’s as if a bunch of short-term program subroutines have gone into play—randomized “terminate” sequences with minor variants—and the drones enact them in fevered mindless bursts, each one doing something a little different. Some of them even hit each other with unintentional friendly fire, and as a result a few drones explode and fall in charred pieces. . . .
Soon the air in the clearing is filled with the buzzing, wildly flying drones and their fiery projectiles. It becomes clear that they are still keeping to a very wide but undeniable perimeter around the body of the fallen Drone Master, so obviously some kind of secondary program is still in play. Defend the body, maybe.
Fire randomly.
Kill anything that moves.
Okay, whatever it is, I think, it’s bad.
“What is happening out there?” Vidam says, cussing in Atlanteo every few seconds. “What—what? The drone chazuf just fell down like a clumsy idiot and got himself killed! And now, what? Those damn drones! What the hell are they doing?”
Kateb frowns, deeply furrowing his brow, breathing fast with tension. For long moments he says nothing, only watches the insane scene outside.
“. . . Unbelievable! He’s down! I repeat, the Technician is down!” the leading arena commentator rattles on in an e
xcited voice. “It’s official, Oshaharat Feveh has fallen to his death, literally, and his drone arsenal is out of control over a significant section of the arena! But wait! With his Favorite Kill points unclaimed by anyone, his death being a self-inflicted accident, what do we know of the rules under such circumstances?”
“Apparently,” another commentator replies, “we’re being told by the judges—the points are reassigned to the Contender next in line for Favorite Kill, who happens to be Ujaste Naat, the original Technician crowd favorite who, up to this point, has been eclipsed by Oshaharat Feveh’s amazing performance in this opening stage of the Games—”
“Good to know! Meanwhile, let’s return to the drones and the sight of so much destruction! Can they be stopped? And how? Who will attempt this feat that now seems absolutely impossible? Will it be the blue-haired goddess Thalassa and her crew, or Hedj Kukkait—”
I stand frozen with shock, holding my hand over my mouth.
“There has to be a way to turn them off.” Kateb finally speaks.
“There is—that control device he has on him, either in the bag or in his pocket,” Vidam says. “Want to open the door and step outside to retrieve it?”
Kateb shakes his head, ignoring the sarcasm. “What else?”
I bite my lips. “If that Taboo Rule wasn’t still in effect, we could use voice commands to control them easily.”
“We know, My Imperial Lady Vocalist, no need to bring up the obvious.” Vidam sneers at me. “If not for the infernal Taboo Rule, Oshaharat Feveh and his drone army could’ve been taken out days ago. Yes, even by someone such as yourself—although your vocal skills are probably not as powerful as your pants-pulling skills.”
Kateb takes a deep breath. “There has to be something else.”
“Agreed,” I say, watching the drones spin and fire every which way. There’s at least half a dozen of them whizzing by the Safe Base door every few seconds. Their perimeter includes our structure, which means that as they continue to fire, there’s a good chance they could cause us damage. Already, several random blasts have been fired in our direction, burning the exterior of the door and the outside walls of the shelter.
Vidam returns his attention to the several screens showing the carnage and chaos outside. “If you come up with something, be sure to share it with the rest of us. Because now, we’re stuck here. And Deneb and the others cannot return here even if they tried.”
We grow silent for a few minutes, watching the drones, barely listening to the crazed commentator babble.
“On the bright side,” I say, “the drones are keeping all those others from attacking this Safe Base. Maybe we can just sit it out for tonight and all of tomorrow? Think about it, we’re reasonably safe here, and we have the drones to keep things as they are—”
An extended sound of metal being scorched outside our door interrupts me.
“Not as safe as you think,” Kateb says, quickly zooming in on a view that shows us the walkway outside, where a drone is discharging a long stream of fire directly at our lock. “This safe Base is solid, but it cannot take on this much relentless firepower. There’s a good chance that in a few hours they will cut through the door and the walls. It’ll happen sooner than later. I doubt we’ll last until midnight tonight, much less all of tomorrow.”
“You’re right. Look,” Vidam says, pointing at the view that shows the smoking, blackened ground level outside. “The base structure and the scaffolding holding up all the levels including our own are badly charred already. They’re going to collapse even sooner than the Safe Base. And then we’ll get fried as we fall down.”
I nod sadly.
Yes, the comfy “bright side” scenario I’ve envisioned is just not feasible.
Someone or something has to stop the drones, and soon.
Chapter 51
While the drones rage outside, the stadium crowds roar, and the commentators stumble on their enthusiastic flow of words, we focus and try to brainstorm our options.
“The obvious solution is to get the drones to fire at each other,” Kateb says. “We know that they can deflect gunfire and other hostile attacks from regular Contenders, but they are vulnerable to each other. The ones that got hit by fellow drones have been destroyed.”
“I don’t think I understand how that works,” I say. “Do they have some kind of special shielding only they themselves can bypass? Or is it a part of their programming somehow? Maybe when one drone fires at another it creates a false self-destruct?”
“We don’t know, and we have no time to speculate,” Vidam says.
But Kateb raises his hand. “Wait, you might have something there . . . self-destruct, keep talking.”
“Well,” I say, pushing back the package with the Red Grail that’s been sitting at my feet. “I’m not sure where I’m going with this, actually, just that there has to be a self-destruct and a way to trigger it.”
“There probably is,” Vidam reminds us. “On that control gadget. Which happens to be on the drone guy’s corpse.”
We grow silent while minutes tick.
“How about driving the drones away from here?” I say. “Making them follow some object that’s magnetized, so that they—I don’t know—stick to it?”
Vidam widens his eyes at me. “What object? We cannot use voice commands, we cannot open the door, we cannot use other tools. Our team Technician, the guy who got fried by the drones, had all kinds of useful electromagnetic generator devices in his equipment bag. But he’s not here, and I’ve got nothing.”
“I’ve got nothing either,” Kateb says. “My primary weapon—” he points at the long, folded trident-helicopter weapon lying on the floor near his feet—“has a magnetic setting, but it cannot be used at such a distance to attract all the drones. It has a magnetic range that’s barely the length of my hand.”
“I had a few magnetic items in my bag,” I say. “But you guys robbed me of them earlier. Well, not so much you two, but the others on this team.”
As I say it, I think of my magnetic shoelaces. And immediately I think of Aeson. Is he still watching me? What must he feel at this point . . . oh, God.
Since I cannot think of much use for the shoelaces right now, I don’t bother mentioning them.
We continue brainstorming.
Soon, the Games choir sings to indicate the beginning of Noon Ghost Time. We’re supposed to stop fighting, rest, and wait while the Games staff cleans the arena, but those of us stuck in the section with the out-of-control drones have no recourse to anything but staying in place.
“Are they going to try to clean up here?” Vidam wonders, as the rare sound of gunshots ceases and we stare at other parts of the Game Zone where the workers are moving around, taking away the bodies and cleaning the occasional bloody messes. There’s generally fewer such messes now, since most Contenders who survived up to this point are hiding or ranging in teams, so that the kills are more precise, carefully planned, and infrequent.
It’s only day three of Stage One, it occurs to me, and more than half of all Contenders have probably been killed already.
“Unless they neutralize the drones, at least temporarily, they can’t come here to do their cleanup,” Kateb says.
Sure enough, as we wait to see what happens, Noon Ghost Time passes without anyone coming to our section to clean. Looks like they decided to let the drones continue in their present condition. . . .
Vidam curses frequently and with gusto. And then, when the arrival of our meals and water is announced, he curses even harder.
“We’re stuck here, we can’t even try to get our food and water rations!” Vidam roars in anger, pointing to the surveillance view that shows floating platforms with water grails and ration packs in distant sections of the arena.
“That’s a shame. . . . But the drones will destroy them if they get near,” Kateb muses. “Of course it wouldn’t matter because this Safe Base will collapse very soon, and we’ll be dead long before they serve the next meal.�
�
“Damn you, Kateb Nuletat,” Vidam mutters tiredly. “In that case, I’m going to have my meal anyway. Since we’re going to die soon, how about we share what’s left of our rations. So open your bag. And you too, Imperial Lady.”
Kateb raises his brows, thinks for a moment, then opens his equipment bag in resignation. He gives me a tired glance, so I open mine also and look inside for rations.
Meanwhile Vidam has taken out two whole unopened ration packs—part of the winning loot that he won from Fadut and someone else earlier. He also has a flask of water and a water grail saved from an earlier meal.
I have no water, but dig out my own original water grail from the first day’s meal.
Kateb sets out his own smaller flask and grail, and then he and Vidam pour the water, filling the grails half-way.
I pick up my grail and take two careful controlled sips, even though my thirst is severe and my body tells me to gulp the water.
“A toast to a nice and quick death,” Kateb says with a rueful smile. Even as he speaks we hear the structure of our Safe Base groan and creak, as the scaffolding is “settling” underneath our weight. It’s still stable, but it won’t remain so for long.
“Sure, why not!” We raise our glasses and point them at each other in Atlantean fashion—unlike the Earth equivalent custom, there is no clinking involved.
We drink a few more sips, then set the grails down to eat a few bites of the meal rations.
More scorching sounds can be heard against various parts of the walls outside, and the deep hum of the drones is relentless.
“I didn’t think I’d go out this way,” Vidam mutters, stroking the rim of his grail. “Getting shot, getting cut down, exploding, maybe. Not collapsing in a pile of walls and scaffolding, and then getting fried by stupid robot gadgets belonging to a dead guy.”
Kateb shrugs and touches his own grail.
I watch the two Atlanteans, their fingers on the goblets, and examine my own cup. Moments race by in silence, except for the noise and chaos outside.
Then I hear a tiny little tone sound and look up, because this sound is different from the volleys of zings and the dull roar of scorching.
Win Page 60