by Jay Lake
Sabo looked around the cockpit. “Is this bird set up with alternate modes of communication?” She saw the keyboard on the arm of his chair and reached for it, noting the small screen. “Look—they’ve been pinging us here, too.”
She unbuckled herself and leaned over, letting her fingers fly over the characters. Radio damaged; significant casualties.
Acknowledged.
“There,” Sabo said. “That should buy us a little time.”
Suddenly, the helicopter jerked and twitched, its engines slowing as it began a slow descent. Carmichael took his hands off the controls and looked up. “It looks like you bought us more than that.”
Someone else flew now, slowing the helicopter and bringing it steadily down. The lower they flew, the faster the ground seemed to move past, rocks and trees, brief moments of light upon water. Sabo looked back and saw that Cairo and her mother both sat up, weapons held in their hands. Cairo’s pistol had been tucked into the waistband of his cotton cargo pants and a short-barreled shotgun now lay across his knees. Her mother still clutched the submachine gun to her chest.
“I need to find the server rooms,” Sabo told them.
“We’ll ask nicely,” her mother said. Her feral smile said differently. It was an expression Sabo had not seen on Charity’s face for decades.
She couldn’t decide whether to be pleased or horrified by that.
A low metal structure took shape in a clearing ahead of them and the helicopter banked widely as it approached. Sabo saw a section of the roof was rolled back to expose a hangar below where two other similar aircraft waited. She also saw a small group of soldiers and medics that gathered there. Sabo pushed herself down into the seat despite the tinted glass that concealed her.
Charity’s voice was cold and clear. “We hit them hard, clear the hangar fast. Then Carmichael and I will do some cleaning up; you and Cairo find the server room. Keep moving, keep shooting.”
Something in her mother’s voice brought her head around. She met the woman’s eyes. Where had Charity, bedridden for years, found the energy for this hard-edged violence?
“You understand, right, Sabo?”
Her parents had started young with her. By the time she was eight, she was a crack shot with anything they put into her hands. She’d sparred with her father or her mother from age six, absorbing everything they could teach her like a sponge. But she’d chosen a different path and until today, had never imagined actually putting all of that training to work. Just seeing the aftermath of violence at Chelan Heights had been bad enough. The thought of participating in it personally was cold in her stomach.
“I understand,” she said.
It happened fast. They touched down and the hatches began to cycle open even as the engine wound down. Cairo shot first, pumping three rounds into the gathered squad of soldiers. Sabo saw four of them falling to the ground out of the corner of her eye as she raised her pistol to sight down on a fifth. She let her breath catch lightly in her throat, transported suddenly back to one of a dozen old granite quarries where her father had stood behind her, his hand steady on her shoulder as he taught his daughter how to shoot.
Tap. Tap. The man was down and she forced her mind away from any reflection upon her actions. Instead, she let her hand and eye move to the next target. Tap. Tap.
She heard Cairo’s shotgun three more times, punctuated by the popping of her mother’s covering fire as the bald man made his way out of the helicopter to take up a position near the closed double doors.
Sabo glanced at her mother. “You okay?”
Charity nodded. “Hurry back.” The old woman looked at Carmichael, who stood beside her now with another 10mm Ruger in his hand. “We’ll see about finding a new ride out of here.”
Sabo joined Cairo at the door and made eye contact with him as he re-loaded the shotgun. When he finished, he counted down silently and she braced herself. When he opened the door and fired into the corridor, she used the corner for cover and let her eye and hand do their work.
Tap. Tap. A man who looked like an officer of some kind went down, his own pistol clattering away.
Tap. Tap. A man with a lab coat draped over his camos, a pair of reading glasses dangling from a chain around his neck.
They moved over the bodies quickly to the elevator.
Her earbud crackled to life. “I am encountering AI countermeasures,” her father’s voice said. “They are attempting wireless access to my program via your cell-router.
What does that mean?
“They are attempting to take me offline and delete my program before I reach the servers.”
Can they do that?
“Yes.”
Sabo pressed the elevator’s call button as Cairo’s shotgun roared, dropping a soldier as he edged around a corner. Disable the router, she sent.
It would take her off the grid unless she could find a landline, but she didn’t see a better way. Sabo didn’t understand how exactly it was going to work, but she did know that she had at least some chance of stopping the Restoration Initiative with her hitchhiker aboard and no chance without him.
Him. She already assigned it a gender based on its voice in her ear.
“I’ve disabled the router. I’ve also used their access vectors to download building schematics. The servers are on Floor LL.”
The elevator doors opened and she hesitated. “Stairs?”
Cairo nodded, then she saw his eyes light up. He moved to his most recent kill and crouched, rolling the body over. He pulled at two canisters on the man’s belt. “Find more of these,” he said, holding them up. Then, he pulled the pins, dropped them into the elevator and pressed the LL button.
Sabo smelled the tang of tear gas as the doors whispered shut. Then, she moved into the hall to find more of the same, grabbing at the first carbon fiber gas-mask bag she saw and strapping it around her waist.
She saw that Cairo had done the same and had also slung an assault rifle over his shoulder. “Let’s go.”
SMA guided them to the stairwell and they began their descent quickly and quietly. They’d gone three floors down when gunfire from below sent them scrambling to the walls for cover. Sabo felt sudden heat and pain in her left bicep and saw the tear in her shirt where the bullet had grazed her.
She raised her pistol and leaned out. Tap. She clipped an arm. Tap. The side of a head as it broke from cover. Tap. A torso-shot for good measure.
Even as the body fell, she saw the fiery cough of a muzzle flash and heard the rapid popping of a submachine gun. She leaned back, away from it. This time, Cairo swung over and pumped two rounds in the direction of the flashes. Then, they were on the move again.
She re-loaded as they moved, shoving the pistol into the back of her jeans. She scooped up the submachine gun and emptied his belt of magazines. She’d trained on something similar though much older. Sabo replaced the magazine, worked the action and pressed its collapsible stock to her shoulder as she advanced down the stairs.
They smelled the gas when they neared the bottom and they paused. It was a good trick of Cairo’s, she thought. Two canisters probably caused mild discomfort if they got into their masks quickly enough. But it also told her that they’d opened the door to the stairs, not far from the elevator, since they’d sent the canisters down.
Cairo held up his hand. When they had eye contact, he pointed below. Then, he pulled what she thought at first was another gas canister from his belt. But the shape was different and the ring was.… She realized as he pulled the pin that it was a frag grenade. She watched it drop and heard it clatter its way to the bottom. Then, she felt the full weight of Cairo pushing her down and against the wall as it exploded below them.
Cairo pulled her to her feet, then moved slowly down the stairs into the smoke. She went after him, her pistol raised.
Someone lunged up at her from the floor. Tap. Tap.
“Visualize them,” her father had said, “as just that: Taps. Two of them. Preferably here and here
.” He had pointed to his forehead and his heart.
And now that’s what she did. She tapped them. Because she knew if she stopped to think about it, to consider just what it meant, she’d realize she was no better than the man and woman who’d taught her their path so … efficiently.
She heard Cairo doing some tapping of his own and then, they were spilling out into the hallway of the lowest level.
“We’re close,” SMA whispered.
Cairo was limping now, blood seeping from a wound in his thigh, but now he discarded the shotgun and brought up the rifle. They reached the door to the server room and took up positions at either side. At his lead, she pulled out her mask and strapped it on, already uncomfortable with how limiting it was to her field of vision.
“It may take a bit to clear the room,” he whispered. “We need to hit the soldiers, not the servers.“
Sabo nodded and slung the machine gun, drawing her pistol. Firing blind into this room could make this a wasted trip. More than that, she realized, it could cost billions of lives.
She counted down with him. At zero, she pushed open the door and tossed a gas canister while he fired three quick, single shots into the room. The door swung closed and they waited. After a full minute, she pushed the door open again and dodged back at the sound of gunshots.
Cairo put another three rounds into the room and Sabo joined him, raising her pistol and squeezing the trigger. She heard a heavy grunt and advanced into the room, ducking behind a server cabinet. She heard more gunfire and saw the spark of ricochets on the concrete wall. Her eye brought the sights of the weapon to bear on the shooter and she squeezed the trigger. Tap. Tap.
This one danced a little as he fell and her fascination with it nearly cost her as another soldier raised his assault rifle and fired. The bullet clipped the cabinet she hid behind, sending up a spray of metal splinters. One struck her mask, tearing the rubber hood and she jerked her head back as she tasted the first of the gas. She heard three more rounds from Cairo and already, her eyes and nose started to burn.
His muffled voice carried back to her. “Clear.”
Even as he said it, she was scrambling for the hall, her hands clawing at the mask. She pulled it off and avoided the sudden instinct to wipe her eyes. Instead, she blinked and watched the halls and waited for the room to clear.
“Which one?” she finally asked as she slipped back among the servers.
“Any of them,” SMA answered.
She found the closest one with a hardwired network connection and held the cable inches from the port in her neck. “I’m going in with you,” she said.
“It’ll be faster if I do it alone.”
“Yes,” she said. “But I’m going. You said yourself that you don’t know what you’re looking for.” She didn’t wait for an answer; she jacked in and felt the solid click of the grid sliding back into place as soon as she connected. She also felt the weight of her hitchhiker as he twisted in her head and sent himself out along the hardwire and into a sea of data.
The nausea moved through her body, settling into a dull ache in her stomach and behind her eyes. She tried to focus by spinning through folders, digging down into the financial archives and finding file paths that had eluded her back at corporate. These hadn’t been scrubbed.
She felt the first jolt strike her body and she locked up, everything fading to white for a moment. “What is that?”
“An extraction program. I’m re-coding and reversing it.”
She dug deeper into the folders. “Are you finding anything?”
“There are six primary release points—Mexico City, Hong Kong, Chicago, Rome, London, and Tehran. They’re using airports and train stations and estimate a twelve-week event to a 93.7% fatality rate among the human population worldwide. The remainder will eliminate each other or fall victim to the virus’s inevitable mutations within seven months.” She listened but already something she’d found vied for her attention.
A cruise ship? It had been tucked away amid the facilities and medical bills, its portage in Astoria paid through a shadow corporation that she’d also been unable to uncover with the information she’d worked with before.
A dark realization struck and she looked up. “Everyone leaves or everyone dies?” But she didn’t say it expecting an answer. It raised the human element that she’d not considered before now.
What were they doing with a cruise ship?
Or, she saw now, a lighter-than-air strato-lift located in the south Pacific.
Rats and sinking ships came to mind and her stomach turned at the thought of these particular rats if her suspicions were true. Still, if they were leaving, why not jets? The question begged asking again:
What were they doing with a cruise ship?
She leaned against the server cabinet now, covered in a light, cold sweat. “What are you finding?”
“Twelve carriers on a time release. They are already in position but any way of identifying them has been scrubbed from the records.”
“Have you cross referenced the helicopter logs; any routes that coincided with major airports in the last week?”
“Yes. I am also reproducing myself in the servers here to continue looking.”
“How long will that take?”
“Eleven minutes.”
She closed her eyes against the pain now and forced her breathing to slow. It had been nearly seven hours since Seattle; the eyes and ears were out now, looking and listening for anything they could find.
Cairo shifted, raising the rifle. “We have company,” he said. He leaned into the corridor and fired a round, then another.
Hurry, she sent, checking the magazine in her pistol.
“I am. I’ve identified three airports likely to have received agents.”
She wasn’t sure how much good knowing would do. This facility had been developed to hide data far from the grid and the only way they were sharing what they’d learned here was if they somehow managed to get out. But once she did, she would broadcast it loud and wide. Seattle was the beginning of a carefully orchestrated strategy of genocide and exile. They had buried that city, she realized, to hide what they had done. Not just so that no one could stop them, she realized, but because of something more. Shame. Shame for genocide, and also for the infanticide they intended toward a child they should have never made.
She thought about her own parents. The fact that she was a part of this now, had been trained for the role, was testament to the fuckedupness of where she came from. Still, they did not leave her behind. Her father, who she treated with utter disdain most of the last twenty years, had ridden a meteorite to his death to save her. Her mother had called in her favors for a ride out of town and was upstairs waiting for her.
The AIs didn’t learn their parenting from their parents, it seemed. They’d tried to bury their child with a rock from space.
Four more rounds from Cairo’s rifle brought her attention back and she pushed herself up, her back against the cabinet and the metal cold through her t-shirt. She stood, extending the pistol with both hands and sighting down on the door.
She heard the clatter of machine gun fire. “You’re not going to get eleven minutes.”
Her hitchhiker didn’t answer; Sabo fought to keep her eyes open, the light making her head throb. She wanted to throw up and her neck itched from the port heating up. She heard the clank of a grenade just as Cairo threw himself backward. The explosion blew the door in and three men in riot gear, armed with submachine guns, stormed the room.
Tap. Tap. She tapped one out, turned.
Tap. Tap. Sabo was vaguely aware of Cairo on his back, firing wide and blind. She turned slowly this time, watching the soldier as he sighted down on Cairo.
This time, she said the words out loud: “Tap. Tap.”
She glanced at Cairo as the soldier she’d shot fell and something tore at her on the inside when she saw her companion there, his eyes glassy.
The others had been tapped out. Just ta
pped out.
But Cairo was dead. Just plain dead.
She swallowed the bile that threatened to flood her mouth, tasting the sour burn and wincing at it. “We nearly done here?”
“Nearly,” SMA said.
She took her eyes away from him. She’d known him less than six hours and he was likely a dirt-bag. He’d turncoated on his own. Though, Lightbull was to Los Cuernos del Toro what Appleseed was to William Silas Crown and his executive trinity of AI. So she was, of sorts, a turncoat as well. Still, she felt his loss like a knife in her side.
The voice in the hall surprised her. “Ms. Bashar-Oxham? Sabo, correct?”
She furrowed her brow. “Yes?”
“I’d like you to disconnect from our server and put down your pistol.”
The voice was familiar but she couldn’t place it. “Why would I do that?”
“Because then I wouldn’t have to send men in there to shoot you in the head. Or take my hangar back and shoot your mother in the head. Capiche?” He laughed. “No really, it will just go much easier. Further violence is unnecessary.”
Sabo checked her internal clock. “Give me five minutes to think about it?”
He laughed again. “I’ll give you one.”
Sabo pulled at the cord to see how much movement it gave her. She squeezed herself back into the cabinet and closed its door partially, crouching in the shadow with the data cord as tightly as it could be without severing the connection. Then, she changed out her clip. You don’t have much time.
“My duplicate is in process far enough that it will extrapolate its own completion if we are interrupted.”
We will be interrupted, she sent and as she did, she saw three more men storm the ruined doorframe.
Tap. Tap.
Tap. Tap. She heard the stuttering of their submachine guns and felt the bullets tearing into the cabinet. She felt a solid punch to her shoulder and it rocked her back against the metal wall.
She raised the pistol and fired twice more but her hand and eye no longer worked together. She wasn’t sure in that moment if they even worked at all. There were more soldiers behind this one and as he fell to the side, they rushed her, grabbing her by the ankles and yanking her forcibly from the cabinet. The data cord snapped off and she hit her head on the way out, still she kept her grip on the pistol and would’ve tapped another one out if he hadn’t kicked it out of her hands and then kept kicking her some more for good measure.