by John Conroe
“We killed the other drone. It took some doing,” I said, just as loudly.
“And alerted every drone everywhere,” Kwan said, glancing over his shoulder at me. The two operators had stopped on a landing, crouching with weapons pointed up.
“Well, surprise was already lost, so I figured we ought to go for shock and awe,” I said.
Out of habit, I glanced over at Rikki to gauge what he might be sensing. You learn to read people’s body language from the time you’re a baby. Turns out that drones have it too. “They made it through the door,” I guessed, speaking to my drone.
Kwan answered me before Rikki could. “That’s what we think.”
“Gunnery Sergeant Kwan is correct. By expending the full charge of four laser-equipped UAVs, the enemy cut through all of the steel hinges. They then crashed more units into the door to push it out of the frame,” Rikki said.
“Freaking know-it-all drone,” Tyson said, but there wasn’t any anger in his tone.
Overhead, I heard the angry super bee buzz of a swarm of drones. “What’s your plan?”
“We’re going to toss an anti-UAV grenade up there when they get closer, then shoot like crazed maniacs,” Tyson said. “We’ll call it the Gurung maneuver.”
“Nice,” was all I had time to say before Rikki suddenly tilted back so that his nose pointed up the stairwell, one of his under-wing missile pods rotating out and then firing a micro missile, all in the time it took for me to draw a breath for my next comment. Immediately after the shot, he went back to horizontal and shot out of the well space, moving to take up a position directly over my head.
A split-second later, an explosion came from overhead and parts of drones rained down along with bits of concrete and dust. Ignoring the debris, Rikki zipped back out into the well, rotated vertical again, and fired his e-mag twice, rapid fire. Then he swung back over top of me as two mostly intact Skyhawks fell down the well.
Tyson and Kwan exchanged a glance as they straightened up from their protective crouches.
“His plan is better,” Tyson said, deadpan. The crash of the drones hitting ground floor echoed up from below.
“Currently path to floor eighteen is clear. Be advised large numbers of UAVs inbound to seventeenth floor.”
“Let’s hustle,” Kwan said and we raced up the stairs.
Two flights up, we found the steel door lying across the landing. Tyson fumbled an XM-2080 NE from a pocket and stuck its magnetic base to the metal door. “Shove it back into place,” he said as he fiddled with the settings. Kwan and I grabbed the edges of the heavy door and lifted it back up, then crammed it into the doorway. It didn’t fit perfectly and I pulled back to smack it, but Tyson caught my arm. “I set it to arm for vibration in ten seconds… sometimes they arm a little faster.”
“Roger that,” I said, stepping back.
“I must advise that selected thermobaric munition is potentially overpowered for this application.”
“Go big or go home, drone,” Tyson replied.
“Roughly analogous to the phrase—bring enough gun. However, in this instance, it may potentially destabilize the floor structure.”
“We’ll take that chance,” Gunny Kwan said.
“AJ, if the building structure becomes dangerous, I will carry you down.”
“Hey, what about us?” Tyson protested.
Rikki stayed silent.
“Let’s go find Plum Blossom and its two playmates,” I said to change up the awkward silence.
“Playmates?” Kwan asked.
“Rikki says that the remaining horsemen bots, Famine and Death, are with it up on eighteen.”
“Awesome,” Tyson said with a bite to his voice.
Kwan, ever the professional, just started to climb the stairs to the next landing. When he got there, he crouched down and looked at me for a few seconds, his mind clearly at work.
“Okay, we need a plan,” he said, looking back and forth between us as we crouched next to him, looking up at the door to floor eighteen. We waited for it, but he didn’t say anything. Then his head snapped around to look at my drone. “Rikki? What have you got?”
“Target CThree is occupying the middle of the floor space above us. One horseman bot is just outside the stairwell door. I am unable to ascertain exactly where the other one is, except that it is on the other side of the floor space and too close for arming distance. Optic cloaks have not come back online and Zone network is likely aware of EMP tactic used on ground floor.
“In approximately thirty-two seconds, additional UAVs will arrive via the seventeenth floor. Providing that XM-2080 Novel Explosive does not destabilize the building, that floor will become temporarily free of UAVs. This unit is equipped with Artemis high explosive air-to-air, Goliath anti-armor, and Ares thermobaric micro missiles. Rikki unit will exit building via open building structure on floor seventeen. Cover fire from additional UAVs will be provided by Sergeant Perry, Gunnery Sergeant Kwan, and AJ. This unit will target Spider and horseman drones with appropriate missiles. Upon successful destruction of Plum Blossom and horseman drones, this team will egress building utilizing rappelling equipment currently in both sergeants’ packs via the stairwell.
“Evasion from Zone is low probability, but highest chances occurs if unit Plum Blossom is destroyed.”
“Shit, that could work,” Tyson Perry said grudgingly.
“Yeah, from outside the building he’d have the necessary standoff distance to arm his missiles,” Kwan agreed, turning to look at me. “What?”
“He’s going to be a sitting duck for any and all UAVs that swarm in. We’re going to have to shoot like we’ve never shot before if we’re going to have a chance of keeping them off him,” I said.
“Worried you’re not up to the mission, Gurung?” Tyson challenged.
“I’m worried that you’re not up to the task,” I said.
He snorted. “Hear that, Gunny?”
“He’s right. If you recall, he had the highest scores of everyone he trained. We’re going to have to be on our game or we’ll lose our biggest weapon,” Kwan said with a nod at Rikki.
Suddenly the world ended. I mean, that’s what it felt like when the stairwell below us erupted into explosion and fire, while the whole building shook like it was caught in a massive earthquake. A huge pressure wave blasted up the well, shoving me so hard into the wall that I blacked out for a second.
Chapter 19
Luckily we’d all been crouching on the stairs, so when my vision cleared, my skull was only lying across Sergeant Perry’s legs, instead of on a concrete and metal stair edge with my head caved in. But I couldn’t seem to get a breath.
The other two came into focus, both looking as dazed as I was. Tyson had a bleeding nose, and dust was falling into both of their faces. My face was clear and when I looked up, I spotted Rikki hovering right over top of me. All three of us were sucking air like lowlanders on Everest. Then I noticed blood coming from both soldiers’ ears and when I touched my own ear, it came away sticky and red.
Rikki rumbled something but I couldn’t make out the words. He moved out over the well so that all of us could see his upper surface and the holo display that lit up.
Oxygen levels have been dangerously depleted by air-fuel explosion of XM-2080 Novel Explosive. I am using my fans to bring oxygenated air down from above.
Immediately he took up station over all three of us, half of his fans pushing air down on us while the other half kept pushing back upward to hold his position.
It took at least ten or fifteen seconds before I could stop gulping like a fish out of water and sit up to take stock. My ears were filled with a steady ringing sound and the side of my head hurt from its impact with the wall. But my brain was coming back online and I could see the other two were in similar conditions.
“Ssstatus?” I asked, shaking my head. Rikki didn’t move for about five seconds, just continuing to blow air on us, but then he moved back out over the open stairwell and his ho
logram lit back up.
Power at 55% percent. Number four fan operating at 83% of capacity. All other systems are nominal. Floor 17 currently empty of UAVs. Suggest proceeding with plan.
I looked at the other two. Kwan nodded, but Tyson looked a little bit out of it. The Gunny and I climbed to our feet, then each took an arm to help the Ranger up. He got upright, then shook his arms for us to let go.
Without a word, we checked our weapons and gear. When the other two looked up, I signed “Let’s go.”
Both men nodded and we started down the stairs, Rikki first, followed by me, then Tyson, with the Gunny taking the six position and watching over his shoulder as we descended. A single flight of stairs brought us to a scene of complete destruction. It wasn’t just that the door was gone; the whole doorframe had been blown out of the wall by the blast. Beyond that, it looked like floor seventeen had been eviscerated. No paper, no intact furniture, nothing left on the walls of the hall, just black soot.
Rikki led us smoothly through the empty devastation of the hallway and as we got further onto the floor, a welcome breeze blew in on our faces. When we were far enough in, we could see that the windows were gone—completely. Of course, this was the second time I’d had a hand in blowing up poor floor seventeen. But not only were the windows and their frames gone, the whole wall was ripped open to the outside world. Surprisingly, this far from the thermobaric grenade’s explosion point, there was still office debris and furniture.
Nobody said a word. We just spread out, Tyson Perry to the left, me in the middle, and Gunny Kwan on the right, each of us dragging furniture wreckage into some form of cover to shoot from. There wasn’t much intact, but we really just needed protection from flechettes and lasers. As a sniper hide, mine wasn’t much, just some ripped countertop from a cubicle desk laid on its side, perpendicular to the melted carpet. I could kneel or sit cross-legged behind it, resting my rifle on the single still-smooth square edge. Leaning the ChemJet against the barrier, I took the .22 submachine gun from my back, pulled it from its case, and loaded it with the first drum. Then I placed the other two drums on the ground by my feet.
I glanced at Kwan, who nodded, his own setup similar. Tyson was still shifting broken desk chairs and a cubicle wall board to his satisfaction, but he quickly got it done and gave a thumb-to-index-finger okay sign. None of us talked because I don’t think any of us could hear much yet. I don’t know if our eardrums were popped, but in the unlikely chance that mine weren’t, I put my earplugs in. It was about to get noisy—again.
“Rikki, we are ready,” I said, my own voice so muffled, it was like I had spoken from under a lake.
He zipped out in front of the three of us, spinning around so that his gun barrel pointed back at us. The green holo on his back lit up with a big three, then a two, then a one, and off he went, zooming backward out of the opening, out over Broadway. He pulled all the way back about thirty meters from the building before lifting straight up as all four of his missile pods rotated into firing position.
Immediately an object shot out from the eighteenth floor, right at him, but he easily swerved out of its path, his answering micro missile jumping from its cradle like a flash of light. Another projectile came from the other end of the floor and almost simultaneously, a beam of blue light shot up from below. The Tank-Killer was still in business.
Rikki’s first missile exploded above us, shaking the floor, debris and dust falling from the ruined ceiling. When I looked back at him, he suddenly danced sideways, avoiding another laser beam while simultaneously rotating vertical, nose down, launching a second missile toward what had to be the Tank-Killer. He swiveled back to horizontal and began sliding on an invisible column of fan-driven air, first to one side, then the other, dodging mechanically catapulted chunks of concrete, office equipment, and in one case a chair while simultaneously looking to line up another missile shot.
Zone UAVs appeared, seemingly like magic, from almost every direction, from between every building on the street, all focused on Rikki. Some were shooting lasers at him, some were shooting magnetically accelerated bits of wire, others came diving straight at him like WWII kamikaze fighters. Instantly the three of us were firing, picking off drones as best we could, as fast as we could. The steady semi-auto fire from the HK 7.62mm rifles on either side of me mixed with the much softer buzz of my .22 submachine gun as we started to shoot down enemy drones.
My little weapon had just basic sights, but with no recoil to speak of and easy burst firing, I was knocking drones out the air with every squeeze of the trigger. It was an awesome little weapon, perfect for killing UAV drones.
Sergeants Perry and Kwan might not have had NYPD anti-riot weapons to work with, but there was nothing wrong with their combined shooting skills. We were killing drones by the handful, yet still Rikki was forced to give up his side shuffle and, instead, engage in true dogfighting aerial acrobatics. And all the while, we were taking fire from hovering drones whose flechettes or lasers would do much more damage to our soft human bodies than to the Decimator’s carbon-fiber-armored one.
Rikki was now launching missiles in almost every direction, simultaneously firing his e-mag as he zipped in and out of the crazy dance of UAVs. My companions fired at drones on the edges of what fighter pilots used to call the furball, while I followed Rikki closely with my own sights, picking off drones as they moved in on him. His Artemis air-to-air missiles were killing the most agile UAVs by locking micro radar onto them and hunting them down no matter where they dodged. The enemy was dying in droves, yet they were accomplishing their mission—distracting Rikki from killing Plum Blossom.
If this fight had happened ten, nine, maybe even eight years earlier, we wouldn’t have stood a chance, even with Rikki’s advanced systems and skills. But the enemy’s drones were old, tired, and mostly without munitions, although there were dozens, maybe hundreds of them. Rikki had, at a guess, seventy-five or eighty e-mag projectiles, and possibly less than ten Artemis air-to-air missiles left. I didn’t know all of his tricks, but usually the Zone Defense team outfitted him with thirty Artemis, six Goliath, and six Ares missiles. I had no idea how many of the little Huntress EMP or decoy missiles he carried, not to mention those magnetic incendiary mines like the one he dropped on War’s metal hide, but it couldn’t be a big number of any of them.
All this time I had felt, more than heard, three heavy sets of vibrations on the floor above, each moving rapidly around in response to Rikki’s shots. But the one on the far end of the floor suddenly stopped after one of Rikki’s Goliath micro missiles slammed into its position. Now there were just two massively heavy bots pounding away overhead and I was pretty sure Plum Blossom was still one of them.
With all the dogfighting going on, Rikki had only had a few opportunities to fire any of his precious Goliath anti-armor missiles, but between the Tank-Killer, which had stopped lasing, and at least two shots at the targets above us, I guessed he must have been down to three. Those were his best weapons for killing Plum Blossom and he couldn’t afford to waste any of them, not that he was getting many opportunities to shoot.
Dozens of new drones appeared on the outskirts of the dogfight just as I loaded my last drum of ammo into the American 180 and racked the bolt to chamber a round. I felt my heart drop in despair at the sheer numbers of them. Well over a hundred, maybe almost two hundred. And then they surprised me, by attacking the Zone drones instead of Rikki. A few flew closer to my position and I realized they were the modified commercial drones of the newest Flottercot production, Drone Wars. Suddenly the tide of the aerial battle turned, with the older Zone drones losing the fight as they were tag teamed by groups of two or three, sometimes even four, amateur drones.
With a sudden freedom from the fighting, Rikki must have come to the same conclusion about his missile supply because the next shot he took exploded with much more concussive force, so much, in fact, that part of the actual concrete ceiling above Tyson suddenly let go and fell right for him. I yel
led, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hear me, but there was nothing else I could do. He must have sensed it somehow because he took a dive left and the heavy chunk pounded into his shooting position, crushing an already beat-up desk chair. That missile had been thermobaric.
Both Kwan and I stopped shooting to look at the tough Ranger, but he simply waved our attention off. He was okay.
Until a silvery gray cable slashed through the air as a metal monster stenciled with DEATH swung down into the window opening, hanging from a second cable.
Chapter 20
The silver blur of the horseman’s cable snapped out and wound around Tyson’s ankle. Immediately, one of the cylindrical segments spun fast and Sergeant Perry was yanked out from his position, his body shooting out of the building opening, out over the street. At the end of the whipcord snap, the cable unwound and with his mouth open in a scream I couldn’t hear, Tyson fell out of view to the pavement below.
Kwan already had rounds sparking off Death’s metal hide by the time I swung my barrel onto the target, but the massive bot snapped its now freed cable at me. I ducked but the cable actually went to one side of me, missing by over a meter. I didn’t see what it connected with as I instinctively emptied the little submachine gun at the monster. Every round hit the same place and while they didn’t penetrate the armor, they put a big, deep dent in it by the time the drum clicked empty. Death spun up its cable, only it was the bot itself that was yanked, right onto the floor, bringing the metal killer into our space, up close and personal.
I found myself dropping one empty gun and grabbing the other while starting a roll backward from my kneeling position. Then I was coming upright, feet backing me away, left hand grabbing the ChemJet’s fore grip, lifting the rifle on target. The Gunny was farther away and he was firing at the killbot, his rounds chewing up the thing’s ocular band, blinding it.
My finger found the trigger and I yanked it, firing a burst of microrocket rounds that had no space to ignite, the bullets just bouncing off the armored robot. Then it was just there—right in front of me and I had no time to fire again as a barrage of office wreckage came flying from Death’s catapult arms. I dodged, ducked, and jumped, but even without its sight, the bot was still somehow able to focus on me and my position, either by sound or by some other sensor that Plum Blossom had equipped its deadly offspring with.