by A J McKeep
“You can protect me from the war lords and gangsters of Great China, I believe that. Maybe from the AI’s, too.” He handed back the tablet. The app on the screen had a single red button marked ‘Isolate.’ “You couldn’t protect me from The Gabriel, though. Anyway,” he stepped back, “There’s something here that I have to do.”
Quietly, Garrison asked him, “He made you a deal, then. You have a quest of your own?”
“Kind of. But I really do want to help him find the girl if I can.”
“Do you know who she is?”
Dean shook his head. “I have an idea, but it’s only my hunch.”
Garrison checked the charge on the pod-bike. It was ninety-two percent. He went to the exo. At the back of the container were a pile of charged up storage cells with solar and wind collectors. He carried four into the pod. That was about as many as he could fit inside and still have room for a passenger.
“Are you certain you won’t come?” Dean shook his head.
He collected two more storage cells and put them on the couch inside the pod. His charge was up to ninety six percent. “The thing to isolate the exo’s AI, could that really stop it from being tracked? Prevent it from reporting back?”
“No guarantee. Terms and conditions apply.” Dean smiled, “Objects in the mirror may be way more fucking lethal that they appear. But I hope so.”
Garrison woke the exo. Immediately it told him, “Specialist Caine, I have revised orders for you.” Garrison pulled up the tablet and panicked as he hunted for the app. “You are released forthwith from your mission to guard Dean Cranston.”
Garrison had the app. He asked Dean, “Do I just point and press the button?”
Dean nodded. Hurrying, Garrison pointed the tablet at the exo as he pressed the red button. He stabbed it with his thumb. Again, and again. The exo fell silent. Garrison asked it, “I want to go for a drive. Are you ready to come?”
The frame turned its back. It told him, “Of course,” as it waited for him to climb in.
When he was up in the saddle, strapped in with the engines fired up, he called to Dean, “Are you sure?”
Dean shook his head. “You better go.” He raised a hand to wave. “And, thanks.”
“Thank you, too.” Garrison rode the pod-bike out of the container and across the clearing.
Distance
MISTY GREEN HILLS, MOUNTAINS, and valleys rolled by and behind him. All the way, Garrison looked over his shoulder, scanned the horizon, peered hard into every bush, every clump of trees. Still the only indications of any humanity were the few roads, which he mostly avoided, and some columns of smoke, which he steered well away from.
First, putting some distance behind him was the whole of his plan. He rolled the miles under him, determined. Fixated. Just the other side of this valley, he thought, only one more hill, then I’ll stop and take a break. Over and over. Each time, while he still had the energy he pressed on. It grew dark and the temperature plunged.
Under a pale and misty moon, finally he found cover in a wood and rested up. It wasn’t until he stopped that he realized how far the jet engine must have been visible in the darkness. By then he was too tired to worry or second guess. He left the exo standing up behind the pods saddle as a lookout and guard. Then he hauled out the cells from the couch, and he climbed inside to sleep.
He lay in the comforting cradle of the couch. Sleep began to drift over him when he remembered the oneline on his phone that he still hadn’t had a chance to check. And that’s when the noise all started up.
Explosives
STANDING TALL ATOP THE pod-bike, the exo fired out wide arcs of mini grenades. Garrison pulled a thermic rifle out of the pod and climbed up next to the exo. Scanning the horizon through the sight he didn’t spot any targets.
The exo’s calm voice in his earphones told him, “Incoming message.” And then it played him an audio.
“Stop your defensive fire.” Garrison couldn’t place the voice right away, but he recognized it. He raised a hand. The exo informed him, “Two intruders approaching. Both highly combat equipped. Made their initial approach by stealth.”
“Might that have anything to do with the barrage of explosives you’re sending out to greet them?”
The exo didn’t respond. That was probably too conversational for him. Garrison asked him, “Have they returned fire?”
“No.”
“Is there a channel you can open for me to respond to them?”
“Channel open now.” If he didn’t know better, Garrison might have thought the exo was sulking.
“Identify yourselves.”
“Damnit,” the voice was very familiar, “Don’t you know who it is, you ass?”
“I might be able to identify you from your burning remains. Or you could just fucking tell me.”
A different voice this time, “Do you not have a screen?”
Garrison’s eyes widened. “Coke?”
“You going to stop your mech trying to blow us up now or what?”
He told the exo, “Let them approach. Ok? Treat as friendly.” But he added, “Unless I say otherwise.”
The exo lowered its weapons, all except for a miniature shoulder-mounted machine-gun turret. Garrison held the rifle ready as he moved forward. The exo climbed down to stand by him.
The noise of two engines approached from a distance. Coke and Hershey bounced out of the shrubbery on huge, fat-tired bikes with high frames. Both men wore lightweight battle armor. The bikes carried racks of counter-insurgency, sniper and urban suppression weapons.
Coke skidded his bike and leaned it as he swung his leg over and lumbered toward Garrison. The man-eating snarl on his face couldn’t completely disguise the twinkle in his eye.
Garrison frowned, and his head shook. “How the ever-loving fuck did you find me?”
Coke dismounted and gave him a hard stare. “We expected it to be tough.” Hershey said, “Yeah, but you left your phone on.”
“And why are you all the way out here, of all places?”
“Oh,” Hershey shook his head as he pulled off the helmet, “We heard the shopping’s good. How funny, us running into you like this.”
Coke said, “We got a message from this guy. Said his name was Psycho.”
Hershey laughed, “And he says you’re an ass.”
Garrison’s brow knotted but he said, “Si Kho. That really is his name. Or at least, it’s what he’s gone by as long as I knew him.”
Coke sat on two of the cells. “You do actually know the ass then?”
Hershey pulled out the other two to perch on. Garrison sent the exo to get sticks of beer from the pod’s fridge. He handed them out as Garrison perched himself on the edge of the pod door.
Coke scowled at the exo. “Damn mechs still give me the creeps. Look at it. It’s like the opposite of a fucking skeleton, walking about.”
Hershey laughed. “That’s why he wound up a specialist sniper. Only way he can comfortable look at a bot is through a gun sight. Maybe the beer’s going to creep you out too, Coke. Maybe I should drink it for you.”
Coke said that he’d cope. With the beers open, Garrison said, “I can’t think why Si would bother to send you after me, unless he wanted you to kill me.” He took a pull on his stick. It felt like a long time since his last taste of a beer. “Are you aiming to kill me?”
Hershey chuckled, “You’re a suspicious son of a bitch.”
“Morbid, too,” Coke’s eyebrows lifted, “You don’t mind my saying. Too much time in the company of mechs, I’d say.”
“Yeah, go figure, right?” Garrison said, “Two illegal fugitives, desperados weighed down with enough arms for a revolution, seek me out and arrive out of nowhere in the jungle lands deep in the middle of Great China.” They all raised their sticks in salute to one another, “What ever could be suspicious about that?”
Hershey told him, “Si said you were looking for a place.”
Coke said, “We located it and we came t
o help you get there.”
Garrison shook his head, “Has to be some more to it than that. First, you didn’t have to cross the middle of Great China to give me an address in virtu, however deep the web layer is,” and he said to Coke, “and it was you told me it’s not a place to be asking questions about anyway.”
“What virtu?” Coke said, “We’re talking about a meat locker.”
“What?”
Hershey frowned, “A sweat hangar. Si Kho said you were looking for a girl in a sweat hangar and this Murphy guy located it.”
“Yeah,” Coke told him, “Si Kho said, wait, let me remember, he said you were an asshole, I think that’s how he put it. But he said this Murphy guy loved you, so there must be something about you that wasn’t totally asshole. It was Murphy sent this bit of intel about the meat locker. And he said to tell you that you’re an asshole again. Si. Not Murphy. As far as I know. That about right?” he looked to Hershey.
Hershey nodded.
Garrison’s eyes were wide. “You have a location?”
“Yeah.” Hershey said.
Coke added, “It’s not even all that far.”
Hershey nodded, “Especially if we can take command of a heavy lift chopper. There’s one not too far that Coke has his eye on.”
Garrison grinned and shook his head, “Were those all the times Si Kho said that I was an asshole?”
“No,” Hershey told him, “Coke was paraphrasing. He does that. His first posting was in signals, so he tends to edit.”
“How come you guys are out here anyway? You haven’t gone AWOL?”
“Ah, no.” Coke said, “We tend to get short-term engagements with what you might call a wide-ranging remit in the interims.”
Hershey smiled, “He means we do big dangerous shit, pretty fast. Mostly it’s very illegal, and completely deniable. We operate as and when needed. The rest of the time, they tend to kind of leave us alone.”
Coke agreed. “USMilCorps like to act like we don’t exist.”
Hershey chuckled, “And that we’re nothing to do with them, even if we do.”
“So, how far is this chopper?” Garrison was starting to think about Faith and what kind of a situation she might be in.
“Easy, tiger,” Coke raised a hand.
Hershey gave Garrison a nod, “We’ll eat. Then sleep. Then eat again. And after that we’ll travel fresh.”
Garrison’s mouth tightened. “I’m kind of anxious to get going,”
Coke nodded. “All the more reason to get food and rest first.”
“Whoever she is, you and her must have something pretty big going on.” Hershey was probing. Coke watched Garrison.
“I hardly know her at all. You couldn’t really say we’d even met. She spent a lot of the time we were together trying to convince me that she didn’t exist. That she really was a bot.”
“Oh,” Hershey said, “You met her in a pet warehouse? An electric hen farm?”
“Hershey.” Coke squinted and showed his palms, “Have a heart.” Then, gently, “What my indelicate friend means, she’s a fuckbot, right?”
Bee bots
THROUGH EARLY MORNING MIST, two layers of chainlink fence separated Garrison and Coke from a small army of bots that guarded the airfield. The ground was flattened and bare for half a mile outside the fence in every direction. Static gun and artillery turrets were spaced a hundred yards apart along the perimeter.
Crouched under camo mesh behind rocks and bushes Coke passed the field glasses to Garrison. Hershey was back a couple of hundred yards, hidden in scrub with their bikes, the exo, and the pod-bike. The big, black four rotor heavy lift chopper lurked in the shadow of one of eight large hangars. Tank bots sat outside each one. A black camo mesh covered a huge shape in the middle of the airfield.
Garrison let out a slow breath. “You do like a challenge. I have to give you that.”
Coke whispered back, “Your exo got any stealth?”
“Not much,” Garrison’s head shook. “Some for radio, radar, microwave, and RF, but not much visual stealth. Only jammers and pattern disruptors. Same on the pod-bike, only the disruptors are more powerful. I could get the bike into the perimeter. Any closer than a few hundred feet to those bots though and I’d have to start shooting. Anything on your bikes?”
“Mesh cloaks for the bikes and on our body armor. But like yours it’s not good close up.”
Garrison spotted something to the left. He whipped around with the glasses then passed them to Coke. “We’ve drawn a crowd.”
A swarm of fuzzy micro bots was buzzing toward them. “Oh, fuck.” Coke sighed. Garrison put a hand on his shoulder as he spoke into his mic to the exo. “Some of those bots with the fabric. Come quick and neutralize them.”
The exo travelled lay flat and drifted a couple of inches above the ground. Staying flat and low, it slid along and sited itself between Garrison and the incoming swarm. The fanned microwaves were invisible but Garrison knew what was happening as the fuzzy bots dropped to the ground.
“Oh, fuck.” Coke shuddered.
“They need to be contained.” Garrison crawled forward, taking the camo mesh. Coke had to follow.
Garrison scooped up the bots in his hands. There were about three dozen bots, draped in a fine black fabric and the size of big bees. Smaller than the ones he’d seen before, these were shaped differently, too. “Look,” he showed them to Coke. “They’re like tiny, six-fingered hands.”
“Aw, fuck, man.” Coke’s eyes bulged.
“You’ll have to come with me. I need the camo and I have to get these to the bike. They may only be out of action for a few minutes at most.”
As they crawled back to the pod-bike, Coke asked him, “What are you going to do with them?”
“There’s a container on the bike. It’s got a stack of them in there already. I only hope there’s enough room for all these, too.”
“Oh, shit.”
Garrison kept moving as he scowled back at Coke. “These are enemy assets and they have weapons capability. Get a fucking grip, man.”
The pod-bike was behind a camo mesh, strung between two trees. Hershey had draped more mesh over his bike and Coke’s. Garrison showed the bots to Hershey. “You seen anything like these?”
“Not the bot pattern. I’ve seen the fabric.”
As quickly as he could, Garrison clambered up to the pod-bike saddle, still holding the bots cupped in both hands. He struggled to push the button to open the container. In his hands he felt some of the bots begin to stir. Jamming his elbow on the button got the container open and he hurried to shove the bots inside.
While Garrison forced the lid shut, one of the bee-shaped bots escaped.
The bot buzzed in a circle over Garrisons head, then headed toward the airfield. Coke’s face colored as he reached behind him and drew a long, thin rifle.
“No!” Garrison shouted as loud as he dared. Too late, Coke got two shots off. The second hit the bot. A white flash was followed by a rising whisp of thick black smoke.
Claw
GARRISON LOOKED AT HERSHEY. Hershey shook his head.
Coke said, “It was still behind the camo.”
Garrison’s head shook. “I doubt it.”
“Well, the bot’s dead.” Coke reasoned. “It wasn’t one from the airfield, so it probably didn’t communicate.”
“Mm. So that’s probably a coincidence, then.”
Garrison pointed through the camo mesh to the airfield. The shape in the middle of the tarmac was rising. Still draped in black camo mesh, it lifted off the ground. It was fifteen feet high, thirty feet across and about eight feet off the ground. The shape under the mesh looked to Garrison like a bigger version of the tiny bots he just captured. Garrison watched in fascination for a moment. He decided not to share his hunch with Coke.
It headed directly toward them.
Garrison thought fast. There has to be a way in. It’s camouflaged all the way around and across the top. He told the exo, “Ge
t four drones up from the pod. Send them about forty feet up and away, not too fast.” He asked Hershey, “Can you organize some things to explode, loud and bright, about two hundred yards behind us?” Hershey was moving.
Coke looked like he’d gotten himself under control. Sill, Garrison told him, “Maybe you’d better stay under a sheet. I don’t think you’re going to like what’s coming.”
With the camo mesh over him, Garrison crawled as fast as he could to the exo. He told it to turn face down. That way he could at least slide into the frame without having to stand. By the time Garrison had maneuvered into the frame and slid his fingers into the exo’s, the huge bot had risen over the perimeter fences.
Turning over to lie face up, Garrison told the exo, “Whatever you can do for pattern disruption, visual camo, heat, radio, anything, do it all now.” Then he lay still. As the blanketed shape came near, he felt more sympathy for Coke’s dread of bots. The mesh shroud over the hulk rippled as the six huge fingers flexed and wriggled. Probably sensors, Garrison thought.
Watching the big bot through the visor with infra-red enhancement, he could make out the shape under the camo. The massive, six-fingered hand had rotors and jets underneath. The exo’s visor showed microwave sensors that swept ahead of the huge claw as it moved closer.
Some of Hershey’s fireworks started up. Garrison knew it would be a distraction only for a limited time. “Self destruct one of the drones.” He told the exo. The drone exploded and the huge bot steered in its direction. On his back, he craned his neck to watch the bot approach. The sweep of its microwave was a slow, regular pattern.
Garrison timed the sweep and held his breath. I hope I’ve guessed this right, he thought as he slid the exo frame as fast as he could, right under the claw. The underside was exposed pipes, motors, and shafts. As he’d guessed, it looked unprotected. In the center was a small door in the middle of a larger one. The exo lifted him to the door. It wasn’t even locked. As it fell open he lost his grip. The door flapped down and released a ladder.