by Todd McAulty
“No. But whatever it is, it’s paralyzed them.”
“What about you? Are you paralyzed?”
Black Winter met my gaze with a fixed stare. “Absolutely not.”
“You want to go look for her.”
“Yes.”
“Is the Consulate looking over your shoulder? Or limiting your actions?”
“With my security clearance revoked, some parts of the Consulate are off-limits. But otherwise I can come and go.”
“Then I think I may be able to help,” I said.
“How?” Black Winter asked.
“My friend Martin works for an urban survey team. They’re busy getting a count of the survivors in Chicago. They have access to most of the buildings in the city, all the nooks and crannies where there are still residents. It’s possible they could get us access to the Continental.”
“That’s great news. But access to the building isn’t the only hurdle. The Continental is on the border of the Exclusion Zone. Off-limits to civilian personnel.”
“I don’t think that’s a problem these days. From what I hear, the AGRT is more lax about enforcing the old Exclusion Zones than the SCC was.”
“It’s not the AGRT I’m worried about,” Black Winter said. “There are . . . machines that patrol the border as well. And some of them have their own agenda.”
“Now you’re just being paranoid. Everybody who’s been in the hotel more than a day or two has heard those stories. That there are sinister machines of unknown origin near the Exclusion Zones. Strange devices that slither through alleys after dark. That’s just stories they tell to scare the tourists. Don’t tell me you believe them.”
“Not all of them, no. I know what kinds of rumors spread during wartime, same as you. But I hear reports, and some have the ring of truth.”
I opened my mouth, about to say something reassuring and trite, then shut it again. Black Winter was trying to tell me something. “What do you know?” I asked.
“Nothing solid,” he admitted. “But there are dangers. To traveling that close to an Exclusion Zone. As the Union began to gain ground, especially near the end of the war, the SCC began fielding a number of experimental machine horrors to counter the threat. Not all of them proved . . . completely obedient. Don’t dismiss all the rumors. There are things out there you don’t want to meet in a dark alley, and they are very real. Believe me.”
“Well, that sounds horrifying,” I said. “And I plan to avoid dark alleys of any kind, thank you. Look, I didn’t assume a trip to look for Machine Dance would be completely without risk. But folks travel to the Continental every week. As risks go, a brief trip there seems manageable enough. Do you agree?”
Black Winter pondered that. “Yes,” he said after a moment. “But I didn’t mean to obligate you. If you can get me access to the hotel, that will be more than enough.”
“Yeah, well, don’t get too excited. I don’t even know if I can do that yet. But I’ll give it a try.”
“I am becoming accustomed,” said Black Winter, “to being in your debt.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’m sure we’ll balance things out.”
“How do you propose I do that?”
I smiled and raised my glass. “Keep buying me lunch.”
IV
Tuesday, March 9th, 2083
Posted 11:11 pm by Barry Simcoe
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A little after eight I remembered that I had an engagement this evening—with a very attractive woman, in fact. I felt much more grounded after my lunch with Black Winter and a day of working, and frankly a little embarrassed at how awkward I’d been with Mac at breakfast this morning.
I was relieved to have a second shot with her, and determined not to blow it. I showered and shaved, and then stood in front of my closet, trying to decide between jeans and dress pants. It seemed a little strange that she’d asked me to meet her in the lobby at 9:00 . . . Perhaps I should be ready in case she suggested we go out afterwards? With that in mind, I selected a dinner jacket and matching pants, splashed on some cologne, and was in the lobby by 8:45.
If you’re not particularly observant, a few minutes in the lobby could have you believing that things have returned to normal in Chicago. Management has done an impressive job making it look good. There’s fresh-cut flowers, contemporary music playing softly on hidden speakers—and most reassuring of all, a constant buzz of activity. Guests coming and going, bellboys carrying luggage, a concierge handing out maps. You could even hear an occasional ringing telephone at the front desk—in-house calls only, of course, but still. It added to the ambiance.
Naturally, to make the illusion work, you had to ignore the armed guards stationed near the entrance. And the seven-foot machine, torpedo-like and almost featureless, that stood sentinel at the escalator, blocking off the second floor to civilians. And the concrete blast barriers the Venezuelans had dragged in front of the doors the morning after the mech attack. Not to mention countless smaller details, like the way guests glanced nervously over their shoulder every few minutes, or the complete absence of children.
My gaze kept straying out the window, to the place where Corporal Maldonado had bled to death. Would there still be a bloodstain? Did blood wash off concrete? I didn’t want to see it. Jesus, I didn’t even want to get close to it.
By 8:55, as I paced back and forth in the lobby, I realized coming down early had been a mistake. I’m not an anxious person by nature, but at that moment I felt a great, formless anxiety. I felt sweaty and uncomfortable, hypersensitive, and terribly exposed standing next to the windows.
I considered just leaving the food for Mac with a note. What did this woman need with dog food, anyway? If she lived in the hotel, she didn’t have a dog. For all I knew, Nguyen’s assumption was right. Maybe she wanted to barter it.
And if I was going to be the bagman for a black market pet food transaction, after curfew, in the middle of a hotly disputed urban territory, I was probably overdressed. And much too Canadian.
I debated forgetting the whole thing and heading back to my room, getting some work done instead. But while I dithered, the elevator door opened and my date stepped out.
She was not dressed for a date. She wore loose-fitting clothing, dark, with flat shoes. She had work gloves tucked into her belt, and was clutching what looked like a Venezuelan travel visa. She had a distracted look on her face as she scanned the document.
“Hi,” I said, as she was about to walk past me.
She turned. “Oh—hi! Sorry, I didn’t see you.” She folded the document, tucked it into her jacket. She took in my formal attire with a questioning glance. “Why are you dressed like that?”
“Like this?” I said stupidly. Shit. “I was just going to . . . I had a business meeting. Here in the lobby.”
“Okay. Are you ready to go?”
“Sure,” I said.
“Do you have the food?”
“Yes,” I said, nodding toward the front desk. “It’s over there.” For the first time I wondered if it mattered that I had brought cat food. Should I bring that up? Maybe they fetched different prices on the black market. Or maybe we were just going to trade it for bullets, and it wouldn’t matter. That would be fun.
“Great,” she said, pulling on her gloves. She gave me a quick smile. “We should probably get moving.”
“Uh—hang on.” I crossed to the front desk, identified myself to the night clerk, and he helped me position a forty-pound bag of cat food on my shoulder. I left the other bag with the clerk and, feeling confused and a little stupid, rejoined Mac as she stood nervously by the front entrance.
“Where are we going?”
“The Hamilton,” she said, opening the door. She flashed her document to the guards.
“But—wait a minute, wait up. What about the curfe
w?” I followed her awkwardly onto the street.
“I’ve got a pass,” she said, holding up the visa. She was already striding purposefully across the concrete. Headed south.
I hurried to keep up. A pass? How did you get a pass to waive curfew? Could I get one?
I didn’t learn the answer to these questions. I did learn Mac wasn’t much of a talker. And that forty pounds is a lot of cat food to lug ten city blocks.
We were past the spot of concrete where Maldonado died before I knew it. When I realized, I turned around, walking backwards and scanning the ground morbidly. There was no sign of blood, but it was too dark to be sure.
It was also much too dark to be walking backwards. The soldiers had done a passable job cleaning the streets after the battle, but there was still just enough rubble for the unwary to trip on. I caught my foot on a sixty-pound chunk of rock as I turned around again and damn near face-planted right in the street. I righted myself and hurried after Mac.
“Hey, wait up!” I called.
Mac kept up a brisk pace as she led us south and west, onto Michigan Avenue. It’s unnerving to be walking Chicago at night. The streets are empty, of course, and power’s cut to most of the buildings, so virtually all of the streetlights are out. You’d be astonished how dark it can be in the shadow-filled canyons between skyscrapers.
But it was the lack of sound that unsettled me the most. I heard Mac’s shoes clicking on the pavement ahead, my own ragged breathing . . . and every once in a while, a high-pitched hum between the buildings, high off the ground. There were occasionally distant, faraway rumbles as well, and once a retort that echoed between the concrete canyons, somewhere far to the west.
But oddly, after getting past that bloody stretch of concrete, it seemed that the worst of the trip was already over. After walking for a few minutes, I felt a certain lightness of spirit, despite the growing ache in my shoulder. I lengthened my strides and started to catch up with her.
Mac heard the thing first, drifting down out of the darkness. I wasn’t sure why she’d stopped, just after stepping off the curb at Michigan and Randolph. There was no one to be seen in either direction, but it still seemed strange to me to stop dead in the middle of the street in Chicago. Call me old-fashioned.
I came up behind her and was about to ask what was wrong when she held up a gloved hand for silence. I heard it then, a sinister whrrrrrrrr above and to the right. Mac started digging in her jacket.
“Stand close to me,” she said.
I obeyed. “Closer,” she said.
I shuffled up until we were almost touching, glad for an excuse to drop the bag at my feet for a few seconds. Mac swore under her breath, hunting fruitlessly in her jacket.
I saw it then, and I swore too.
I’ve had plenty of experience with autonomous recon units, both military and civilian. Most are just flying communications devices of one sort or another, usually kitted out with a lot of optics.
This thing was nothing like that. For one thing, it was enormous—nearly the size of a sedan. And if it had any optics at all, I couldn’t see them. What I could see was at least three different weapons mounted to its undercarriage.
It dropped so close to us that the wind from its whispering rotors was kicking up invisible grit, blowing it all in my face.
Mac gave a relieved exclamation and pulled something out of her jacket. It was the curfew waiver. She held it up defiantly.
The thing came closer. It was barely forty feet off the ground, hovering. The whisper of its big rotors was now an aggressive hum.
“What are you doing?” I shouted.
“Showing it our waiver.”
“Mac . . . that thing can’t read your waiver.”
“It’s got an embedded chip.” She waved the transparent paper briefly at me, then turned back to face the drone. “It can read it from there.”
“No, I mean, your visa is Venezuelan.”
“So?”
“That thing’s not Venezuelan.”
She stared at it, not comprehending. I’d seen Venezuelan drones up close—all of them bore the tricolor flag, and had a compact chassis. This thing had neither. “Then what is it?” she said.
I stepped in front of her slowly, keeping my eye on it and remembering Black Winter’s warning over lunch. “I have no idea. But it’s not friendly.”
The thing did an end-over-end flip in the air. Its rear section—if it had a rear section—was now facing us, and from its sleek black hull it extruded a slender black rod. There was something gleaming at the end of it, but it was too dark to make it out.
Mac stepped closer, pressing her hands to my back. “Should we run?” she asked.
“If it wanted us dead, we’d be dead already.”
“Then what does it want?”
I had no idea. “It wants to know what we’re doing,” I guessed.
Very slowly, I raised my hands. Probably a meaningless gesture to a drone, but what can I tell you? Then I kicked the bag at my feet. “Just delivering dog food,” I told it.
There was a strange whisper in the air, like the buzz of a wasp.
“Get back,” I said.
“But—”
“Move.”
Something moving much too fast to be seen in the darkness buzzed past, between us and the hovering killer. I grabbed Mac and got her off the street, up onto the curb, where we hunched down behind the entirely inadequate shelter of a traffic pole.
“What was that?” Mac asked.
“That was a Venezuelan attack drone,” I said.
A second Venezuelan drone hurtled past, at higher altitude and just as invisible.
The heavy black drone was already moving. It flipped again, kicking its rotors on in a fast ascent. I watched it shoot up into the darkness. It vanished, but I could still hear it, gaining altitude and moving fast to the east.
Mac started to move. “Wait,” I told her.
“They’re gone.”
“Wait.”
A few seconds later I heard it. Farther away than I expected, but very distinct.
Mac listened for a few seconds. “What is that?” she said.
“They’re attacking each other. They’re fighting.”
“Who’s fighting the Venezuelans?” she asked, looking a little astonished.
“Someone with a lot of guts.”
“Was it American, you think?”
“No. The tech was all wrong for American.”
“Who then?”
“Machine.”
Mac had taken a few tentative steps east, gazing up into the darkness. Now she hesitated and looked back at me. “That was Machine?”
“Yeah, I think so. An unaligned probe, maybe. Owned by a Sovereign Intelligence.”
Mac had kept her head pretty well through the whole event, but for the first time she looked genuinely scared. She considered for a moment. “You should go back,” she said.
“Me? What about you?”
“I’ll be okay.”
I didn’t argue with her. I just grabbed the bag and lifted it onto my shoulder. “Come on,” I said.
We continued toward the Hamilton. Mac didn’t speak for the next few blocks. When she did, it was to ask me a very strange question.
“Have you ever been to the Burroughs Detention Center in Gary, Indiana?”
“No,” I said.
“I go there all the time. The AGRT has a civilian holding area. It’s an overflow for the Displaced Persons camp at Westhaven. There’s a hospital. They moved some of the injured there when Westhaven got shelled in January.”
I’d never been to Westhaven or Burroughs. But I knew the city sometimes organized food drives and other charitable efforts to assist those in the camps whose homes had been destroyed, or who had suffered other terrible losses in the war. The worst of the fighting had been over for weeks, but there were still tens of thousands of people in the camps. Many were too afraid to return. Many had no place left to return to.
�
�There are Venezuelan attack drones there,” she said, still watching the dark skies. “Nasty, ugly things. Hovering in the air, watching everything. Everyone is terrified of them.”
“Probably there to prevent riots,” I said.
“They don’t care about riots,” she said, her voice cold. “They’re just there to kill people.”
We reached our destination a few minutes later. The entrance, a grand glass foyer with half a dozen doors, was dim and looked abandoned. The doors were chained and padlocked from the inside, but Mac led me around to a side entrance, which she opened with a key.
She used a small flashlight to guide us down dark hallways, some strewn with unidentifiable trash. The place was creepy, my shoulder ached from carrying the heavy load, and I was starting to regret not turning back when I’d had the chance.
She led me up a wide stairway to a balcony that overlooked the foyer. I could see Michigan Avenue through the glass. It was dark and deserted . . . except for a shadow across the street, where no shadow should be. Before I could make out what it was, it was gone.
“This way,” she said.
I followed her to the elevators, still craning my neck to look back. What was that thing?
“These still work?” I asked, when she stopped in front of an elevator.
“This one does,” she said. “I think the others are out of commission.” She didn’t punch the button on the wall; instead she pulled out another key, this one on a small metal chain, and inserted it into a tiny slot on the wall. A second later the elevator opened. Once we were inside, she pushed the button for the seventeenth floor.
We rode up in silence for a while. “So,” I said, somewhere around the eleventh floor, “what’s on the seventeenth floor?”
“A dog,” she said.
That made sense.
We got out of the elevator. I expected offices, suites with a lot of mahogany and glass, but I stepped out onto thick carpet and a narrow corridor. Stretching left and right were numbered doors, widely spaced.
“What are these—condos?” I asked as we made our way to the right.