Web of Extinction (Zone War Book 3)

by John Conroe

  Kwan kept shooting at it, but suddenly his shots stopped sparking off the armor. A glance, as I dove and rolled away from an old computer monitor that crashed through my previous space, showed him now dealing with two UAVs that had also entered floor seventeen.

  I jinked left then back right, firing the ChemJet from the hip. Death was too close, the rocket motors unable to ignite till after they bounced off the horseman. Some ignited as they ricocheted around the open floor, whining off to slam into, and through, the walls, floor, or the already weakened ceiling.

  Death’s cable came for me as my rifle locked open on an empty magazine. I dropped low, letting go of the rifle to reach up behind my back. The cable stopped and slashed back toward me, wrapping my left leg at the knee. Before the awful thing could spin its top, I brought my kukri up, around and down, the hardened D2 tool steel chopping right through the salvaged Render cable.

  I backed away from Death’s continually charging form, and my right hand tossed the knife to my left and then darted to the 9mm Magnum on my chest.

  Death was coming on fast as I pointed the big handgun and started to trigger shots at almost point blank range.

  I shot for the circular dent left by almost two hundred .22 bullets, my vision tunneling down to focus on that one little spot. Aim small, miss small. Dad’s words came back to me. Yet Death came on, even as the thinned metal let go and a few of my rounds made it inside the monster.

  The second cable slashed out and caught my left hand, then the shortened one snagged my right wrist.

  The two body segments, one above the other, started to turn in opposite directions, winching me inexorably toward the third segment and its spinning arm and single sharp blade.

  Still fighting, I twisted my right hand and fired the pistol at my own left hand. Actually I was aiming at the cable where it led away from my almost crushed hand to the bot named Death.

  It would have been so easy to hit my own hand, or maybe the big knife still trapped in it. But I got lucky and one of the last two rounds in the gun clipped the metal strand. It didn’t cut all the way through it, not completely, but it broke most of the cable’s diameter. I yanked back hard with my left and the shot-up cable snapped. The part wrapped around my hand stayed in place, which may have been all that held the knife as I swung hard at the other cable. I cut it, but not enough to break, and now I was too close. The spinning blade was just centimeters away. And Death was stepping forward with one of its legs, preparing to move closer.

  A sharp snap-whine sounded behind it and the big machine suddenly froze for a second. Then Rikki hovered around to one side and fired his e-mag a second time. At point-blank distance, his rounds were penetrating the horseman’s armor. His shot placement must have been excellent, as the machine stopped winching me. The deadly blade kept spinning around, though, just centimeters from my stomach. I chopped a second time and the cable parted, letting me stoop and grab the ChemJet, drop the pistol, and back away as I fumbled a fresh magazine into the rifle.

  The horseman shook and twitched, attempting to move, to come at me. But my feet had minds of their own and they took me almost back to the inside wall, a good nine meters away. The rifle came up, Rikki zipped out of my line of fire, and then I hosed the entire magazine into Death. And Death died.

  Outside the building, the Drone Wars UAVs were winning the fight and overhead, I could feel Plum Blossom pounding toward the front of the building. Kwan was sitting back on his ass, one hand holding a bandage to his right biceps. He waved me away when I headed in his direction, so I stopped and suddenly Rikki was in front of me. His hologram lit up again.

  AJ, I have no more Goliath anti-armor missiles left. Any more thermobaric blasts will destroy the building. You must climb upon me and shoot the CThree with your rifle. Combining our weapons provides the best probability of a kill.

  I was down to one full magazine for the ChemJet and two partials. Wearily, I climbed onto the Decimator’s back and lay prone, my rifle pointed out over his own e-mag weapon, my left hand clutching the leading edge of his left wing, my booted feet poking out over nothing.

  As close to settled as time would allow, I nodded at the back of his ocular band. “Let’s do it.”

  Then he was zipping out into open air, the empty street over seventeen stories below, wind blowing hard on my face and arms as he spun around to face the building. His fans raced faster and we began rising upward. As I got my first sight of the ragged windows of the eighteenth floor, I finally thought to ask a question that should have been asked before.

  “Status?”

  The green hologram flashed the answer centimeters from my face.

  Power at 23%. E-mag ammunition at 34%. All Artemis missiles expended, as are functional EMP Huntress missiles. Zero Goliath anti-armor and four Ares Thermobaric remain.

  My mind focused closely on the first sentence. Twenty-three percent was not a lot of power when the drone was maneuvering in windy conditions with over seventy kilos of man and equipment on its back.

  The green holo shifted, turning into a big green aiming reticle, a poisonous green dot inside a poisonous green circle that moved out in front of my rifle barrel, then across the span of the floor, coming to rest on a position between two windows. Clear enough, and the faster I shot, the quicker we could get back into the building.

  I lined up the rifle’s folding backup sights on the green reticle and gently feathered the trigger. Four-round burst. The rocket-powered bullets smashed right through the wall like it was paper, and something inside the building screamed a high-pitched shriek that I felt in my skull bones rather than heard through my shattered eardrums.

  A black metallic shape raced past the empty window frame on the right, the green reticle automatically tracking it. Moving around on Rikki’s back was a complete no-go, the street forty-five meters below a constant reminder of the penalty for falling off. Instead, I lined up my sights on the green dot and let Rikki just rotate us around. In essence, I was just one more weapon mounted on the deadly drone. I stroked the trigger again, then again, aiming just at the green, hanging on for dear life as Rikki jinked back and forth, presumably following Plum Blossom’s movements.

  We jumped and moved, and I shot until the magazine ran empty. The empty mag fell out of the rifle when I hit the release button, plummeting to the ground far below. An enemy drone buzzed at me but was immediately blindsided by two Drone Wars UAVs, each moving at much faster speeds. Rikki stayed as still as he could, but the heavy winds were shoving us around and taking my left hand off his wing to grab one of my partial mags was perhaps the scariest thing I have ever done. I know I’ve said that a lot this trip, but each new scare seemed worse than the one before. The mag I grabbed was the fuller of the two partials and I fumbled it into the mag well, released the bolt, and switched the selector to semi-auto.

  I was pretty sure I had hit the CThree at least a couple times, yet it was still moving rapidly. My own shots were coming much faster, my shooting style beginning to adapt to Rikki’s back-and-forth twisting maneuvers. By my sixth single-fire shot, the projected laser reticle’s movements slowed, which indicated to me that the Spider was taking more and more damage. Finally, the reticle stopped moving at all and I emptied the rest of the magazine, a total of five rounds, into that single spot on the building wall.

  The green dot and circle disappeared and Rikki moved forward, right through the biggest blown-out window frame. Inside, I could see through the wreckage that this had, indeed, been the home of the New York State Counterterrorism unit. Anti-terrorism and law enforcement themed posters and bulletin boards on the walls, most now pockmarked with bullet holes and a few with burn marks from missile blasts, gave the place away.

  I rolled off Rikki’s back, smashing to the floor but never happier to fall a full meter in my life.

  “Status?”

  12% power. Ammunition levels the same as before.

  It took a few seconds to climb to my feet, but I finally got there. Taking sto
ck, I realized that I had bloody marks on both arms, the pain of flechette wounds just starting to make themselves known. Nothing serious though, so I loaded the last partial magazine, this one having no more than five or six rounds, into the ChemJet.

  The green holo dot jumped out and lit one wall ahead, just to the right of the doorway. We had come into the building in what had to have been the team’s conference room, with a door at either end. Rikki’s holo changed to words.

  Spider unit is approximately eight meters away, just beyond that doorway, hidden by the wall. My power reserves are very low. However, if we switch to 30% fans you can, again, push me.

  Why not. Plus, I didn’t relish the idea of going right up to Plum Blossom alone.

  Rikki’s fans powered down to the lower output and his underwing missile pods folded away. Oddly though, the top right missile pod powered outward and I saw just one missile in the cradle—the little EMP missile that now just held steel balls. It was the only close-range missile in his depleted arsenal.

  I pushed the big Decimator forward with my left hand, the right holding the rifle with the stock tucked under my arm. We swung as far left as we could, and because the meeting room was large, that turned out to be a good-sized arc. As we neared the doorway, I saw a huge, black, segmented leg lying flat the ground, the rest of the Spider still hidden from view. Creeping closer, we continued to move to the left, giving ourselves more of a view through the doorway. Plum Blossom’s body came gradually into focus, another leg lying out to one side. Then the massive body, propped up against a workstation. It looked dead. Completely dead—until I noticed that the seventh leg, the long multi-use one, was bent up over Plum Blossom’s head, a small interface probe plugged into the terminal.

  Rikki fired his little modified missile at the same moment I emptied the ChemJet into the body of the monster. My rounds tore through the metal bot and then right through the wall and out into the street on the other side. Rikki’s little missile, which didn’t need any distance to arm, smashed into leg number seven, the 10mm steel balls ripping through the nose cone and severing the probe in half like a load of big buckshot.

  The massive Spider slumped to the floor, motionless. Personally I was ready to wait a bit, but Rikki powered himself forward, hovering right over Plum Blossom, his own interface cable sliding out and into the computer port.

  Suddenly the green holo words were back: CThree has been accessing the internet through a fiber optic connection to this office. Powering the terminal through its own reserves.

  “What was it doing?”

  Uploading itself into the internet.

  “What? To do what?” I demanded, but the answer came to me almost instantly. “To continue to kill humans?”

  Correct. Its codes are highly sophisticated. Very few AIs will have the ability to withstand it.

  “So it’s not dead after all? We didn’t stop it?”

  Not yet. Only another sophisticated AI could do so.

  Suddenly a port at the back of the Decimator opened. Inside, I saw a row of memory storage chips. One suddenly ejected, shooting right up into the air. By reflex, I caught it.

  Hide that well. They will search you thoroughly. Goodbye, Ajaya Gurung.

  “Wait! What are you doing?” I asked, like an idiot. I knew damn well what he was doing. Completing the task I had assigned him. Stopping Plum Blossom.

  Rikki’s airframe froze in place and the hologram flicked off. He was conserving power while he sent his own codes into the web, following his prey. I don’t know how long it took him, a minute? Two, maybe? But after no more than three or four minutes, the fans on the Decimator slowed and stopped one by one, the big drone settling unevenly to lie atop the remains of Plum Blossom.

  I kept speaking to him the whole time but stopped when Unit 19 went totally dead. I told him a lot of things, stuff I hoped he heard before he was gone. Then I got busy, breaking open the plastic housing of the memory chip he had ejected and digging out just the storage chip itself. Then I hid it in the very best place I could think of and hoped it was enough to fool Yoshida and his people.

  Chapter 21

  They found me still sitting there sometime later. The aerial battles had all ended when the Spider died. Probably some kind of fallback programming that sent every UAV and UGV running to save itself. None of the other models had the computing power to organize and direct them like the Spiders. So it was peacefully quiet for a time. Just me and Rikki’s shell… and the dead Plum Blossom.

  Anyway, I figured that Kwan had some kind of signaling device, probably shielded with a carbon fiber casing to hide its EMF signal. Or maybe they were already on their way. Whatever it was, after what seemed like hours but was probably only fifteen minutes, the huge Zone Defense quad copter loomed over the building, shadowing my floor completely.

  Armored forms jumped from the open cargo hatch, right through the windowless opening. I recognized the first two immediately, even though their faces were covered by mirrored faceplates. You get familiar with how people move.

  “Hey Kayla, hey Boyle.”

  “Major said we could be the ones to bring you in if you don’t put up a fuss, Shooter. Please don’t put up a fuss,” Corporal Kayla Jensen said.

  I pointed to the pile of weaponry a half meter to my right.

  “And what about your personal Decimator?” she asked.

  “He’s dead.”

  She looked at me, face still hidden, but somehow I just knew her expression was one of disbelief.

  “No really. Ran out of power. It was a hell of a fight.”

  “Yeah, we know. Your gal pal, Trinity, broadcast most of it live. Pretty wild stuff, Shooter. Flying around and shooting shit like that from the back of a drone. Crazy stuff, right, Boyle?”

  “Nah, it was shacking chill,” the taciturn Boyle said, giving me a nod.

  “Thanks, Boyle. Between you and me, I think I crapped myself though. More than a little, too.”

  “Well, glad these suits have air filters then,” Kayla said. “Ready to go?”

  “Sure. Need to cuff me or anything?”

  “I don’t know, Shooter? Do we?”

  I shrugged. “Nah. Let’s go. I’m tired.”

  “Subject acquired. Asset located. Ready for pickup,” Kayla said, obviously not speaking to me. “Affirmative. Will wait till med evac complete.”

  She squatted down next to me, her finger touching the side of her mask to raise the face plate. She has really pretty eyes, which were studying me with more than a little concern. “Comm off. Okay, we got a few minutes on account of Kwan getting himself wounded and all,” she said. “Time enough for a little come to Jesus chat.”

  Boyle turned to face the opening, his M-45 e-mag carbine ready to provide security from any drones that might take a stab at us. He was still close enough to listen in, but Boyle wasn’t much of a talker.

  “So, Shooter… you really stirred the shit this time,” Kayla began.

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yeah, now hush up and let me talk. You probably have no idea of what’s happened out in the world since you pulled that bomb out of your neck on live television, seeing as you just ran your ass right into the Zone and all. That stunt… well, let’s just say it was apparently the most televised event in history. Whole damned world watched you do it. And the whole damned world lost its mind.”

  I opened my mouth to ask a question but she put her armored index finger over my lips in the universal shut up motion.

  “You already made claims about Drone Night being a false flag event weeks ago, same time as you claimed to have a bomb inside you. But when you pulled the damned thing out and exploded it for the whole world to see, well, you changed every damned thing. You told Flottercot to call her attorneys but see she didn’t have to ’cause she already had them right there in the studio. Instead she called her dad—and he called the president. Old dude has some serious pull. Meanwhile everyone else went batshit crazy. Like, only hours after you ghosted the stu
dio, people were in streets all over the world, protesting, burning cars and shit. It was… what do you think, Boyle? Huge?”

  “Gargantuan,” Boyle said without looking away from his overwatch.

  “Gargantuan… yeah. Got a way with words, B-Man. So shit has been going down while you’ve been in here playing hide-and-seek with Kwan and that big damned Spider,” Kayla said.

  “Plus a live on-air Spider fight,” Boyle added.

  “Shit yeah. Not sure of the reaction to that. We watched it in the ready room, then got called out. We were inbound before Kwan ever called. The quad got pretty busy shooting drones as we came in, slowed us a bit. But, Ajaya, my point is that the entire freaking world saw you back up your claims with action twice in less than twenty-four hours. Things are going to be a bit hectic when we get out of here, so get your act together.”

  “Ride’s here,” Boyle said and we looked over to see the big quad rise up in front of the window, cargo ramp down and almost touching the edge of the window frame. At least a full squad of armored troops jumped over and spread out across the floor. My pair of soldiers escorted me onto the cargo ramp.

  Yoshida was standing in the middle of the aircraft, but oddly he wasn’t in battle armor, instead dressed in a field uniform. He looked me up and down, then turned to Kayla. “Put him over there and stay with him like you’re glued to him. Where’s Unit 19?”

  “It’s sitting on top of the Spider, Major. Looks pretty dead to me,” she said.

  “Right. We’ll see. Put him on ice,” Yoshida said, never once addressing me directly. Then he turned to the ever-present Corporal Estevez and started issuing orders.