by Joshua Guess
Something had changed in her. As she barreled toward the enemy, guided by the drone feeds, she understood that it was not a sudden lack of concern for the welfare of her friends, but a reassuring certainty that they could handle themselves. Or that if something did happen to them, it was not because she wasn’t there to save them. Their work was dangerous. The rest of the team functioned and survived without her for a six weeks.
With a deep sense of guilt, she realized it had taken that injury for her to truly trust them to handle themselves without her fretting over their shoulders. Today, leadership meant making sure the human enemies didn’t get away just so they could come back later to catch a less prepared patrol off guard.
She burst through a dense thicket of tall bushes to find two men standing with rifles raised. They made obvious targets. Too obvious. Their guns were leveled at head height.
Beck dropped on instinct, letting her forward momentum carry her into the man on her left. The move saved her life; a pair of rifle rounds deflected off the top of her helmet. It didn’t go so well for her opponent, however. The full weight of her suited body crashed into his hips and knees, shattering bone and ripping sinew with careless ease. Her leg whipped out and caught the other man—who must have thought he was safe—in the elbow. It broke with the sound of a green branch succumbing to the weight of ice and snow, a wet ripping and a hard snap blending together.
More bullets pelted her suit from above. These registered as painfully loud noises from inside its protection but no more dangerous than hail. The primal drive to stop her enemies was in full control, but it didn’t stop the analytical part of her from recognizing she’d wandered into a hasty and poor trap. The men on the ground had been bait. The rest of their friends were in the lower branches of trees and kneeling on rooftops.
Smart of them to spread out. The Watch was known for its reliance on close quarters combat, after all. Going directly after one of them would necessarily mean moving away from another.
“Not today, assholes,” she muttered, and activated her targeting system.
Red brackets latched on to every face as she saw them, a move made easier thanks to the hovering drone less than a dozen yards away. It kept easy tabs on the entire enemy group and sent that information to her in real time.
Beck raised her gauntlets and let the computer do the work. In the space of five seconds, eight men and women cried out as stun darts took them in whatever visible flesh the computer could identify and aim at. For two of them these were shots to the cheek. Others got it in the neck. One unlucky soul was hit in the eye, causing a shriek of such elemental pain and fury that Beck was sure she’d hear it in her nightmares. The massive jolt of electricity from the dart ended his life in short order as the needle directed the flow into the back of his eye socket directly into the brain.
A ninth Remnant got lucky. His dart bounced off the metal gorget around his neck. Beck noted this with clinical detachment as the man’s eyes widened. He raised the weapon slung across his chest with the smooth movement of someone who knew guns intimately. There was no break in the motion as he raised and aimed it, simply a flow from one position to another.
Cold. Practiced and cold. The guy didn’t blink even though a projectile had nearly caught him in the trachea. Didn’t look scared, either. Which meant that gun was likely packing something she’d regret if that trigger got its pound of flesh.
Beck took the half second he needed to orient on her to crouch, and the suit obliged with almost comical speed. She felt its electro-fiber muscles bunch across every surface of her legs before releasing the tension as a superhuman leap.
To the man’s credit, he got halfway through reacquiring her as a target before she slammed into him. She couldn’t blame his failure to fire on him—who the hell expected four hundred pounds or more of metal to soar through the air so easily. So fast.
Beck took no risks. Her armored palm struck the point of his chin and took a grip, relentless metal fingers latching onto his jaw with every ounce of force available. When she pulled, the noise was not only the worst thing she heard that day, but possibly in her entire life.
The other Remnants were starting to shake off the stunners when her Team began filtering in one by one. Though hate burned in the eyes of those strange Remnants, furious at being bested by the detestable Watch, they offered little resistance.
They had prisoners. Which meant they might, if the team was very lucky, also get some answers about why they wanted to attack the Watch and how the hell they were able to work with Pales.
18
The lights dimmed noticeably. Keene sat at his desk studying every scrap of the limited information they were able to glean from the outside world. He had overplayed his hand in sending out teams, that much was plain now. Stirring up trouble by encouraging the factions had been dangerous enough. Communicating with agents who still lived among the other citizens in Rezzes put those assets in danger, but the opportunity the sudden political upheaval presented was too good to pass up.
Adding assault teams passing themselves off as Deathwatch had seemed like such a good idea at the time. The consequences, in hindsight, were not worth the potential gains.
He tapped the screen of his terminal. “Joseph, what’s going on with the lights?”
“I’m not sure, sir,” the aide replied. “According to the status screen on my system, power reserves have been dropping for the last two hours. I didn’t get a notification about it. We’re now below fifty percent of our total storage capacity.”
Keene blinked in surprise. “Below half? How is that possible?”
There was a long pause before Joseph’s voice wafted out of the tiny speaker once again. “Sir, you should look at the external feeds.”
Annoyed, Keene flipped on the surveillance application on his terminal. It took him a few seconds to understand what he was seeing.
The exterior of the Block, normally flat gray from the photovoltaic coating that turned sunlight into electricity, was bright white. Over the line, he asked, “What is that?”
His question was answered before Joseph could respond. On the screen, a small swarm of drones flickered past one camera. Each sprayed a fine mist onto a patch of gray. “Oh, I see. They’re covering the solar paint. Send a crew out to start cleaning it off. Make sure they have cover from snipers.”
“A few already tried, sir,” the aide replied. “Whatever that stuff is, it bonds pretty much instantly. They scraped at it and the paint came off with it.”
Keene leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Fine. Put us on low power mode and see if the engineers can coax more out of the algae tanks for the fuel cells.”
“Yes, sir,” Joseph said.
There was not much hope for any immediate increase in hydrogen production from the tanks. The genetically modified algae that produced the gas as a waste product were already set to work at peak efficiency. Adding new tanks would take time and the process required tricky balancing and specialized equipment to stop any room housing them from becoming a bomb.
Still, the tanks could provide enough energy to keep them going, if only at a limp. There was still time to prepare. To get things right. This was a possibility Keene had planned for.
Deciding to make his own contribution to the cause, he turned off power to his office and swept through the door at its rear. His sleeping quarters ran on their own Brick, which could be recharged through its wall mount. Keene disconnected the cable leading to the main power system to make sure it wouldn’t draw automatically. The Brick was fully charged, and he would be hard pressed to use even a fraction of its storage with the minimal requirements of the room.
Setting the lights on low, Keene snatched a meal bar from the stack on his bedside table and ate as he worked.
At one point in his career, even he had believed the misconception that his strength lay entirely in reading the tea leaves of facts and figures. In a society where death continually broke against the walls and video of warrio
rs in black armor dominated what passed for news, the idea that faceless drones working at desks could have a vital role in society was often laughable.
The thing people forgot—that even Bowers had overlooked—was that those people were the gears which made the machine work. Without someone crunching through the engineering numbers, new sets of armor could not be produced. Without men like Keene measuring how much water was needed, what food could be produced by the bioreactors on hand, how to make the systems which carried power and heat and every other function needed to sustain life, the Protectorate would have crumbled to dust before it had the chance to expand past Manhattan’s walls.
The dragonfly manufacturing platforms, for example, made new Rezzes possible. And this was what Keene focused on as he dug through the data.
Here his talent was in full effect. Other men might have the ability to quickly work through data and find a solution to a problem fully within the parameters of that data—such as working out a clever solution to a water shortage caused by broken mains—but his insight went far beyond. It was how he had risen to the height of power in his society to become the Protector. Taking numerous pieces of unrelated data and, using the strange cognitive alchemy developed over years of work, finding solutions for problems completely unrelated to the information in front of him.
Using that water shortage to force a particularly unruly slice of the population into submission when the opportunity presented itself—that had been an obvious first step all those years ago. The next logical progression was creating problems and solutions to carefully sculpt public sentiment and reaction. True, he had by that point been fully briefed on Fade B and had even taken inspiration from it, but the mass destruction of whole populations was a gross use of the principle.
Keene had been eager to enact more subtle controls. To nudge instead of push. To shape instead of hack away with a saw. That, of course, was then.
This was now. The dragonflies were coarse tools to work with, but they were what he had. Fear was still the most powerful tool at his disposal, and no one knew the giant machines and their transport platforms were within his admittedly limited sphere of control. Why would they? His enemies, all students of Bowers, thought in terms of open warfare and direct conflict.
Keene would give them plenty of that, but only on his terms.
*
Life inside the Block carried on as normal. Research and development within it ground to a halt.
“We just can’t squeeze much more out of the tanks,” said Anders Zalk, the engineer responsible for keeping the place running. “Our total generation capacity is about twenty percent lower now. That wouldn’t be a problem except we didn’t know what was happening until way too late. We drained a lot of our reserves.”
Keene studied the complex readouts on the monitor lining Zalk’s office wall. “Can we run on what we have?”
Valk shrugged. “Depends on what you want to do. We can keep the lab working—it’s the biggest draw by far—but we’ll have to clamp down on power consumption everywhere else. That’s if we want to be able to refill the batteries. Which we should do, because if we have to go into lock down I want to know the environmental systems will hold out.”
Keene glanced at the older man, who had been a prisoner before the slow metamorphosis of this place into a stronghold. “You think they’ll attack us here?”
“I would,” Zalk said. “I don’t know strategy, but as long as we’re holed up in one place we have to make an easy target. Even with the walls as thick as they are. One gas bomb without the lockdown filtration system running and we’re all dead.”
Keene shook his head. “No, they won’t do that. The Tenets are clear on weapons of mass destruction, especially used against living humans. They could manufacture them, certainly, but I don’t believe Stein would want to weather the storm that would follow.”
Zalk was not convinced. “You seem pretty sure about that. Uh, sir.”
Keene smiled. The men here held varying degrees of respect for him. That was fine. He was after all a refugee. There was a lower limit, however. A baseline men like Zalk, who had done this same job in Rez Manhattan a decade earlier before being sentenced over a drunken brawl that ended with another man paralyzed. They understood Keene’s role in changing their circumstances and making this place into something more like a Rez than a prison. “Oh, I am. If Stein was willing to give up the Tenets, she would be arming every Watchman with guns. We’ve seen no evidence of that. I doubt it’s any high moral ground keeping her from doing it. That woman is as pragmatic as they come. She knows the consequences would be beyond her control.”
Zalk considered this for a few seconds. “The riots. The factions. You think they’ll react badly.”
“I know they would,” Keene said. “We’ve used that to our advantage often enough over the last few months.” Inwardly he swore at how thoroughly they’d been cut off from their sympathetic agents in the Protectorate. The passive feeds, intermittent and broken as they often were, let enough news into the Block to make it clear the damned Watch had figured out some way to calm the worst of the factions without mass killing.
The goal had been to create a self-sustaining cycle. To force the hand of Stein and the Deathwatch in dealing with the more intractable faction leaders who were urged on by Keene’s agents. Martyrs were useful for hardening resistance. Another error on his part, it seemed. Counting on Stein to resort to the usual methods for putting down resistance had not gone the way he expected.
Now, instead of his people being able to stay on schedule and timing their eventual attack with political pressure inside the Protectorate reaching a boil, they were delayed and crippled while conditions in the Rezzes improved.
“Our timetable has to move up,” Keene muttered to himself.
Zalk, hearing this, frowned. “We’d be hard pressed to keep the original. The cuts we’d have to make just to maintain manufacturing would touch bone. Accelerating would mean making them even worse. We’d have almost no power for anything else. Those fabricators drink up a lot of juice.”
Keene nodded. “Yes, that’s correct. We’ll still have to do it. Do we have any options for generating more power?”
Zalk scratched at his beard thoughtfully. “Hard to see how we do. We have some more solar paint, you were smart to stock this place up as well as you did, but I’d bet as soon as we use it they’ll just send more drones to ruin it. That’s if they don’t shoot us down when we went onto the grounds. Same problem with putting up a wind turbine. They’ll destroy it—”
Keene raised a hand. “Wait. We have a wind turbine sitting around?”
“No,” Zalk admitted. “What we have is a shitload of raw materials and universal fabricators that can crank out parts for a generator if we had the space to put one that wouldn’t make it a target.”
Keene smiled slyly and reached for the terminal. He swept through menus, dragging up a library of technical schematics. The readouts and graph showing the power deficit hung on the right side of the screen as he did this, and when he had the specs he wanted pulled up, Keene spent a solid two minutes studying the entire thing. He worked out numbers in his head.
“Can you make this smaller?” Keene asked, pointing to the small electrical turbine he’d pulled up. “Small enough that a person could turn it somehow?”
Zalk tilted his head in mild confusion before the realization hit him. “Oh. Oh, that’s smart. Yeah, I can. In fact I can do you one better. I can work out a transmission system to let people run a turbine at high RPM without a ton of work. It won’t be pretty, but we have the bodies for it, that’s for sure. Damn good idea, sir.”
Keene could have let it go there, but decided a little humility never hurt when building trust among subordinates. “I’d like to pretend it was mine, but no. I read an intercepted report about that girl’s efforts in Canaan. She did something similar. Made a generator to win the people there over. She’s tricky that way.”
If Zalk was bothered
by the admission, he didn’t show it. “If it works, I don’t care who came up with it.”
A sentiment Keene understood completely. The human race was ten thousand years of victors writing the histories and winners claiming credit.
It was why he didn’t plan to lose.
19
“What do you mean they’re gone?” Beck asked in a deadly calm voice. “First you have us bring the prisoners to this shithole of a base camp with no real security, then you don’t let my people interrogate them, and now they’ve escaped on your watch? What the fuck kind of show are you running here?”
The rest of the team was off taking care of overdue suit maintenance, which was a small blessing. Had any of them but Eshton been in the command tent while she spoke to Reeves that way, there was no telling how they would have reacted. Not that it mattered. Showing shock or discomfort wouldn’t have slowed her down, but it might have planted doubts in Reeves’s head about her leadership. He was the man who’d trained them, after all—the team had an enduring respect for him.
Beck was no different. She just wasn’t one to stand on ceremony or nostalgia.
“They didn’t escape,” Reeves said placidly. “We let them go.”
“You let them go,” Beck replied in a flat voice.
Reeves nodded. “Yeah. I get that questioning prisoners isn’t something you were trained for, but I thought you knew enough Remnants to understand how hard they’ll dig their heels in against the Watch. The kinds of questions you want answers to, we already know. They can work alongside Pales because Pales are smart enough to keep their meal tickets alive. These particular Remnants aren’t like your friends in Canaan or the people they trade with. These are real exiles. People who stick with their tiny groups and push Pales our direction because they’re hardliners who hate the Protectorate with every fiber of their being.”