Web of Extinction (Zone War Book 3)

by John Conroe

  “You mean it could result in a Rikki copy that doesn’t guard?”

  “Perhaps. Usually something that big would just cause a complete failure. It would more likely be something more subtle.”

  “What about Plum Blossom? Could it change enough to stop killing humans?”

  “Possibly, although again, I think that might introduce too much conflict in the logic tree and would just cause failure. But if, say, the program started to kill animals or plants in addition to humans, that would be a change from the original. That’s the kind of thing we’re looking for.”

  “So it might change to try and kill everything on earth?”

  “Who knows, Cade. The drones in the Zone never attacked animals without cause, as it was an inefficient use of resources and a distraction from the primary mission of killing humans. Such a change might weaken it enough for the Rikki AI to defeat it in that instance.”

  “How do we combat this thing, Doctor? It seems like Rikki is doing all the work right now.”

  “That’s not exactly true, Cade. We are inoculating, if you will, every expert system we can think of, and that appears to be working. We’re also removing expert systems from the chain of vital or dangerous services everywhere we can. But all that takes time, and these programs work much faster than we do.”

  “Is it hopeless?”

  “We will eventually isolate the rogue AIs, Cade. How much damage is done before then, I can’t begin to say.”

  “It’s the consequences of that damage that worries me, Doctor. How long until we reach a point of no return?”

  “I’m not an expert on chaos theory or system collapse, Cade, so I have no idea what that kind of thing looks like or if it would even ever happen.”

  “Thank you, Doctor. I’m afraid we’re out of time, but thank you so very much for your insights.”

  “My pleasure, Cade.”

  I turned it back to the regular news channel and turned to find both Sarah and Hannah staring at me, both clearly scared.

  “See what I mean, AJ?” Astrid asked over the phone I was holding to my ear. So weird—holding a phone.

  “Yeah, I get your point. Listen, let me talk to Sarah and her wife for a bit, then I’ll call you back and we can get our act together.”

  “Oh, they have to come with us, AJ. Tell them there is plenty of room.”

  “Yes, I know and I will.”

  I hung up and spent the next few hours talking with the two women hosting me. Hannah was concerned about the idea that Plum Blossom was actively tracking me and trying to kill me. I wasn’t thrilled with that idea either, but I reassured her as best I could. Sarah had questions about where and how they would live, how they could just up and leave everything. I explained that leaving the city for safety might be just a first step. That their belongings could be shipped north at a later date, provided that there was a later date.

  In the end, they agreed to leave and then frantically set about packing what they would be able to fit into Sarah’s Lexus SUV. I was ready to retreat to the guest room if they got really upset about the choices they had to make, but oddly, they were pretty damned pragmatic. I guess being an emergency room doctor makes triaging your personal possessions relatively easy. And Sarah had always been tough. So I offered to help but they assured me that they had it under control, and both of them took a look at my face and ordered me to bed. I thought I might have trouble sleeping, might have a lot of thoughts whirling around my brain all night, but I was out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

  Chapter 33

  We hit the road early the next morning, a small convoy of vehicles exiting the city and heading north on I-91. JJ and Martin drove the big electric tractor trailer with the LAV cabled down on a low-boy trailer, while Astrid and I rode with Brad in his Mercedes SUV, although it was Astrid doing the driving. Sarah and Hanna followed in Sarah’s Lexus, the tail end of the little lineup.

  Brad had the news playing on the vehicle’s sound and information system, which was great with me because I don’t have a great deal to talk about with Astrid’s father. Things were a bit better between us, but Brad Johnson was a complicated man. And my history with him was long and mostly negative.

  So instead of talking, we listened to multiple stations as they recounted the firestorm in Washington that threatened to incinerate the rest of the country along with it.

  All of the accused ringleaders were going to ground, lawyering up and hiring PR firms to try and muddy the waters of the charges. I say try because even though spinning the truth had become a political super sport, this time was different. The overwhelming evidence had torn open the national wound of the worst loss of life the country had ever seen, opened it as if ten years had never gone by. The ruling party had had little threat from other parties, special interest groups, and political action organizations over the last decade. That all changed overnight. There was blood in the water and the sharks were circling for the kill. So much so that the party in power was tearing itself apart; politicians who might, possibly, have not been involved in the conspiracy were leaping forward to demand justice, and judges were signing warrants left and right. The result was a series of rapid and dramatic arrests. Two of the accused tried to flee in vehicles and were taken down by law enforcement while another was arrested at the airport just before his private jet was set to take off for someplace foreign.

  During a brief quiet moment between stations, Astrid spoke up.

  “Dad, you think they can save the government?”

  “Oh, they’ll cobble it together if they have to. This country is resilient.”

  “But you believe we’re still in trouble?”

  “Don’t you, pumpkin? The country is focused on this clusterfuck to the exclusion of all else. Meanwhile that Spider program is doing everything it can to kill off our food, energy, medicine, and water. It doesn’t have to get everything, just enough to tip us over. Once people in other countries start dying, they’ll go for the countries that still have resources. Ajaya has been correct all along. Horribly so in fact,” he said, turning to glance back at me. He was in the front passenger seat, which left me the whole back for me. His gaze shifted off me and onto something behind us. A microfrown twitched across his face. Instantly, I turned and looked out the back window.

  Two self-driving tractor trailers were powering up behind us, one in each lane, back behind the truck JJ was driving, and they were closing in on Sarah’s Lexus.

  “Why are there any vehicles still AI operated?” I asked. “Didn’t the governor pass an emergency measure?”

  “Yes, Ajaya. Yes he did,” Brad said, reaching out to touch a button on the dash. On the floor between the rear bucket seats, a long section flipped over, revealing a full set of weapons held firmly in clamps, like Christmas morning at my feet. There were four Sig Sauer P656 pistols, each with an extended twenty-eight round magazine already loaded. The four pistols were clamped two to either side of a single long gun that took up much of the short space on the spinning panel. And what a gun it was. It was an AR of some type, but with an ultrashort barrel, a fat suppressor at the business end, and an arm brace instead of a regular adjustable stock.

  “7.62mm?” I asked Brad, noting the wide magazine already locked in place as I handed a pair of Sigs forward to him.

  “Bingo. AR-10 pistol. Had it from before Drone Night. It stays out of the Zone for emergencies just like this. Not strictly legal. Loaded with NATO armor piercing, the black-tipped stuff,” Brad said. Astrid pulled the Mercedes over to the left, into the hammer lane, and slowed while her father radioed the boys to move the team’s heavy hauling truck up ahead, first in line. Behind the LAV-laden tractor trailer, Sarah and Hannah were looking at us wide-eyed from inside their Lexus.

  Brad waved them forward too, and then his daughter pulled the Mercedes over, tucking in behind them, leaving us in last place.

  I snapped the magazine out of the AR-10 while the barrel was down against the rubber floor mats, saw the black po
int on the end of the topmost cartridge, checked that the chamber was empty, and then stuffed the mag right back in.

  Only then did I turn to look behind us at the self-driving tractor trailers. They were almost up to us, side by side, taking up the entire width of the highway.

  Astrid let off the accelerator and the SUV slowed right down, the robot trucks seeming to almost leap forward at us. She let them get well within range of our back end, closer than was safe, and yet neither changed speed. She reaccelerated to keep ahead of them.

  “They should have slowed themselves; that’s way too close,” Astrid said, catching my eyes in her rearview. I made sure the weapon’s safety was engaged, then pulled the charging handle back, or in this case up, because the muzzle was still down, on the floor mat. First round chambered, weapon hot.

  Brad was now studying the trucks with military grade binoculars. He pulled them down and looked at me. “Front tires, Ajaya. Both trucks please.”

  Hmm, very polite of him. Could have knocked me over with a feather. Astrid powered down both back passenger windows and I unbuckled my seat belt, leaning out the window behind her.

  The little rifle fit out the window with clearance to spare. The electric red dot sight on the rifle had turned itself on when I picked it up and now I put the little dot of death on the front left tire of the massive tractor that was less than twenty meters from the back of our car. I stroked the trigger once and then transitioned the sight to the other front tire, even as the first tire disintegrated into shards and strands of reinforced rubber.

  The second tire suffered the same fate, leaving the truck skidding across the pavement, headed for the side of the road. I jumped sideways across the rear of the car, muzzle pointed toward the back of the SUV, right hand slipping forward as my left came back to the pistol grip. I slipped the rifle out the other window and tucked the arm brace of the weapon tight to my left shoulder. It felt slightly odd, but not as odd as the first time I shot a rifle left-handed—back when I was about seven.

  The red dot came to rest on the front tire of the other truck but the AI controlling it started to swerve the front-end back and forth. My first shot missed, as did my second and third shots. I took a breath, let it out, relaxed, and let the ballistic engine in my brain take care of the shooting math. My fourth shot hit home and did so right as the truck was swinging toward the shoulder of the road. The result was the tire giving up its round shape in a spectacular ruin of torn rubber, causing the massive truck to lose control of its steering.

  Now both vehicles were trying to regain control, and both were finally braking their forward momentum. The trucks slowed, front ends shaking and bouncing, streams of sparks visible from the steel rims now grinding flat on the hard asphalt.

  Our car pulled away as they came to a stop, one almost completely off the hammer lane side of the road, the other smack dab in the middle of the right-hand lane. Smoke rolled up in greasy black clouds from their wheel wells but there didn’t seem to be any fire.

  We were getting farther and farther away, the rest of our vehicles well ahead of us, when suddenly the hammer lane truck just seemed to sort of tuck back into itself, like a snapping turtle trying to pull its head into its shell. Just a split second of retraction and then an outward explosion of steel, glass, and rubber as the entire truck was shoved right off the road by a gargantuan yellow steel plow. The trailer of the crippled truck literally shattered into shards of aluminum and broken cardboard boxes.

  I recognized the plow instantly; any New Englander or New Yorker would, especially if they ever drove in the winter: a Vammas self-driving plow. New York had been the first state to adopt the AI-operated road plows, monstrous vehicles that could clear two lanes of highway at a time, all night long, never getting tired and never needing to see the road with mere human eyes. Connecticut, Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine had adopted them soon after.

  And so here we were, not a speck of snow in sight, temperature way above freezing, with a giant AI-driven snow-smashing machine accelerating right at us.

  Brad was on the radio instantly. “Pick it up, boys! Pedal down! We got more company.”

  A glance forward showed the low boy trailer and loaded LTV suddenly pulling away from the front of Sarah’s car. But Sarah wasn’t speeding up and the ladies didn’t have a radio, as we hadn’t planned for their joining our little road trip.

  “Ajaya, can you slow that thing?” Brad asked.

  I ignored him, instead flipping my throwaway phone open and hitting the button that would dial Sarah’s phone. As it rang, I handed it to Astrid’s dad before finally turning back to lean out the window.

  The machine was kind of crazy looking, a huge angled plow blade that had to be almost eight meters wide and over two two meters tall, angled to shove everything on the surface of the highway off to one side, like it had the tractor-trailer. Behind that was a big cab, then a long metal mid-section like an elongated road grader, but with a massive spinning brush underneath it, then at the back was another rear drive unit that provided another four sets of wheels, powered by a second drive motor.

  Couldn’t tell you any of the specs; I’m a machine geek, just not that kind of machine. But the thing was massive, powerful, and coming at us like yellow hell on a highway. I tried to get a bead on the front tires but the steel plow completely hid them from sight, the thick metal no doubt far too tough for my bullets to get through. I sighted the front of the truck, just below where a driver would sit, if a driver was needed, while part of me listened to Brad imploring Sarah to go faster and faster. Today that driver’s seat was empty, sending a chill down my spine. I’ve grown up with self-drivers, but until recently, they hadn’t started trying to run me down like something from a Stephen King novel.

  My bullets hit every spot I aimed at but none of them had the slightest effect on the monster machine.

  “How did they all know where we were?” Astrid asked. I pulled back into the car, grabbing another magazine of armor piercers and glanced at her. Sarah’s car was just ahead of us, trying to keep ahead of us, ahead of the killing machine.

  “What do you mean?” Brad asked. “It’s got to be that Spider.”

  “No, I know that, Dad. I just wonder how first these trucks and then that plow found us on this road. Plum Blossom must be tracking us somehow,” she said, now holding her left hand out her own window to wave at Sarah to get moving. The other SUV wasn’t going as fast as she wanted it to. I, personally, was thinking it would have been good to have jets or rockets on our vehicles. Just give us the damned speed to beat this thing, but then her words penetrated.

  “You’re thinking a UAV?” Brad asked her as I leaned out the window and looked up. Nothing on that side.

  “Yes. It only makes sense,” she replied as I shifted across the back and looked out the window on Brad’s side. Nothing—wait. Way up there, high up in the sky, was a black dot. Too far away to make out, but it wasn’t moving across our path of travel and it wasn’t getting smaller, so ergo, it had to be moving with us. I was simultaneously alarmed at this presence and somewhat proud that I had found an actual use for the word ergo, if only in my own thoughts.

  “There’s a flier, high up and way back,” I said.

  “Any shot at it?” Brad asked, voice not overly hopeful.

  I shook my head. “Not with any conventional rifle. Maybe the ChemJet I had in the Zone could do it, but probably not. Just hanging too far away.”

  “And the Vammas?” he asked.

  “Can’t get to the tires and none of my center front rounds have done a damned thing.”

  “See if you can shoot the back unit. It has the most weight and if you disrupted its motors, it would become a serious drag on the whole thing,” he suggested.

  I leaned back out behind Astrid’s side, the wind whipping my hair all around my face. Probably time for a haircut, I thought, pushing strands of hair out of my face. Funny, I hadn’t noticed my hair or the wind or anything when I was shooting the trucks. But
now, with time to think, these odd distractions were popping up. Focus, Ajaya. You must focus.

  “Hey, ‘Trid, can you do a little weaving back and forth? See if that thing copies at all,” I asked, red dot on the driver’s side of the plow.

  Instantly we were swinging back and forth and sure enough, the big machine moved back and forth a little as the AI corrected its course just slightly. It wasn’t a lot, but with a machine that had to be fifteen meters long, it was enough to cause the rear unit to swerve into sight. Every single time it appeared, I shot some part of it. Anything that looked important to its operation, hoses, filter-looking things, wide sections of flat metal panel that covered hopefully vital and vulnerable stuff. My efforts were rewarded with sprays of pinkish hydraulic fluid and puffs of smoke, so being a creature of positive reinforcement, I kept shooting, emptying that mag and then the next one. With almost forty rounds of 7.62mm through it, the back unit seemed pretty much worse for wear. The shiny yellow now had more holes than a piece of Swiss cheese, with pink hydraulic fluid dripping over everything. The first small tendrils of smoke had become decent-sized plumes of black that promised this Finnish-made technology was in a bad way.

  “I think it’s finally slowing,” I said. “But why are we slowing too?” I asked, pulling back in and turning to the front. Ahead of us, Sarah’s Lexus was dropping speed almost as quickly as the Vammas, maybe faster.

  Brad had my phone in his ear and was talking fast. “Turn everything else off. What about the dashboard charging port? Can you plug any other power sources into it? What do you have?”

  “They’re losing power,” Astrid said, glancing at me in the rearview, her face showing the first signs of worry. “They have no idea why.”

  “Shit,” I said as I grabbed the final magazine of ammo for the rifle. A second’s longer glance showed the fancy SUV in front of us slowing even further. Back out the window I leaned, picking the best shots I could, and with the rear unit of the plow being damaged, it was swinging back and forth like a tractor trailer on icy roads, giving me additional glimpses and additional targets. I even got some glancing shots into the sides of the front drive unit.