Burning Bright

by Nick Petrie

  He said, “June told me the view was great up here, and she was right.” He extended his hand to the bulky man. “I’m Peter.”

  The bulky man took a step back and glanced at Sally. Which answered one question. Now Peter knew who was in charge. And they were a little afraid of him.

  The outcrop was a jumble of rocks with a group of wide stones in the middle and a large flat cantilevered boulder at the outer edge. Peter stepped past the man to the top of the last boulder and looked down at the valley. He was hoping to see Lewis, or Manny and his people.

  Instead he saw Oliver climbing silently up the path Peter had taken a few minutes before. Oliver made it look easy. Peter’s leg had begun to ache with a low, steady throb, and the scramble up the rocks hadn’t helped his ribs any, either.

  He turned back to look at Sally.

  She now held a small matte-gray automatic pointed thoughtfully at his chest. He saw the greenhouse dirt on her strong, capable hands. She still looked very comfortable on her rock perch.

  She gave Peter a pleasant smile.

  “Here’s an idea,” she said. “Take that hand cannon out, nice and slow, and toss it off the cliff.”

  53

  JUNE

  She hadn’t seen him for fifteen years, but she’d loved him and feared him for most of her life.

  Laptop under her arm, she followed the Yeti into the black barn.

  No, she told herself. Not the Yeti. The Yeti is a monster, or maybe a myth.

  He’s my dad. Let’s try that for a while.

  He led her through the big open work bay where the golden drone had parked itself. Two more drones could have fit comfortably in there, even with all the other stuff. Large boxy equipment filled two walls, plastic and stainless steel with hatches that opened. Wheeled tables occupied most of the rest of the space, holding sections of an articulated assembly that looked like the partial skeleton of a giant bird, either extinct or not yet in existence. The room smelled like her new computer had when she’d taken it out of the box, the pleasing chemical tang of new technology.

  “I make the parts for the airframes on 3-D printers,” he said, waving his hand at the machines. “Some plastic, some titanium. That extra-wide one prints the skin, it’s only a few molecules thick.”

  “I thought I didn’t have the clearance for this,” she said, only partly joking.

  “No more secrets,” he said gently, his craggy face sad. “I kept too many, for too long. Now I can’t remember half of them.” He pushed buttons on a security panel, then opened the door to a stairwell and held it for her. “My office is up here.”

  The second floor was a warren of high industrial shelving loaded with outdated equipment and seeping car batteries and crumpled golden drone skin and cracked propeller blades and plastic crates holding fractured shards of failed parts. Maybe there was a system of organization, but if so, she couldn’t discern it. The smell here was of burned electrical insulation and dust, the whole place a fire just waiting for a point of ignition. While she stared at the accumulated detritus of years of experiments, her dad walked into the maze ahead of her. She hurried to catch up.

  Rounding a corner, she saw an open space at the end of the barn. Her dad stood at the wide windows, looking out at the pocket valley spread out before him. He turned at her footsteps, his expression that of a man whose thoughts were elsewhere, his piercing blue eyes looking inward.

  June knew that look. It was the look of her childhood.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What were we doing?”

  “We were trying to get control of the drone,” she said gently.

  “Oh,” he said. “Yes.” He sat at a makeshift plywood desk, something intended to be temporary that looked like it had been there for years. It held a barricade of computer monitors and a tangled scatter of hard drives and cables. “Give me a minute.” His hands clattered on the keyboard. The central monitor lit up, new windows appearing.

  She looked above the monitors and saw, held to the wall with pushpins, the watercolor of a frog she’d made when she was eight.

  She remembered thinking it was the best thing she’d ever made, and knocking on the door of his old lab to show it to him. He’d opened the door and taken the paper from her hand, frowning down at it, saying, “Now isn’t a good time, Juniper.” She’d never seen it again.

  Her other watercolors were there, too, trees and frogs, a few landscapes, her attempts at capturing the ridges that contained the valley. Pencil drawings of the house they’d lived in, the old shed that was his first lab. Scribbles in crayon and bright Magic Marker, construction paper, notebook paper, legal paper, scraps. They covered the wall completely. June was not a gifted artist. But here they were.

  She turned to look at the rest of the room. Photos of June and her mother, a row of Father’s Day cards she’d made, a half-dozen computer renderings of the evolving drone, and on the other side of the room, on a small wooden table, a thirty-gallon terrarium. It held a few sticks and rocks, some bark, and a plastic pan in which lay a snapping turtle.

  Absurdly, June recognized the turtle. Her name was Mrs. Turtle. She had a distinctive marking on the center of her shell, three lighter green triangles in a dark green circle. The terrarium was one of June’s home-school projects when she was eleven, after her mom had left. June had put all kinds of things in there, frogs and insects and worms, and Mrs. Turtle had eaten them all. She blinked up at June, deadly perfection after 300 million years of evolution. She’d gotten bigger since June had left, maybe too big for the terrarium.

  June walked back to her father sitting at the computer and put her hands lightly on his enormous shoulders. Somehow it felt okay to touch him now. She wasn’t scared of him anymore. Maybe it was Mrs. Turtle, still alive. “How’s it going?”

  He shook his head, still focused on the monitors. “The new security protocols are pretty robust. I can’t get a toehold.”

  “I don’t get it,” said June. “If you’re not in charge of this, who is?”

  “You haven’t guessed already?” He turned to look at her over his shoulder. “Who stepped in when your mother left? Who was always running the show around here?”

  It hit her like a slap. She shook her head. “That can’t be true. I don’t believe it.”

  “You don’t want to believe it,” said the Yeti, turning back to the monitor. “I didn’t want to, either. Now I think she always worked for them. She came as an agricultural researcher as an excuse to see what else we were doing. She’s the reason they offered the funding. To take us over.”

  June thought of the slender young man with the pitchfork. “Who’s Oliver?”

  “I don’t know who you mean. One of the security men? I don’t know any of them anymore. Maybe it’s my memory, or maybe they rotate people in and out more often now. They do some farm work and some carpentry, but they also run patrols in the valley. A few came in just a few days ago. That’s when the encryption changed.”

  His voice got louder. “And I’m getting nowhere.” He hit the plywood desk with his giant clenched fist. Everything on the desk jumped six inches in the air. It took an act of will for June not to jump, too. This was more like how he used to be. Scary, a force of nature. The Yeti.

  But she was an adult now. “Relax, Dad. Maybe I can help.” She hooked the leg of a spare chair with her foot and pulled it over, opening her laptop. “Do you have Wi-Fi?”

  He closed his eyes, breathing deeply, and visibly calmed himself. “Of course. You want to go online?”

  “I have a friend who’s really good with security,” she said. “His name is Tyg3r.”

  54

  PETER

  Sally looked utterly at home with the gray automatic in her hand, as if she’d held one in her crib as a child. It was one of the small Glocks, powerful but designed for concealment. Peter thought it suited her, whoever she really was, hiding inside the
skin of a cheerful agricultural researcher.

  “Or you’ll shoot me?” asked Peter. He kept his elbows down but held his hands up and out to the sides, floating in the air.

  Oliver’s head appeared, then the rest of him, as he finished the climb up from the valley floor. He didn’t appear to be breathing hard. His youthful face showed nothing. He’d left the pitchfork behind.

  “Oh, shooting you is definitely an option,” said Sally. She angled her head at the bulky man in the camo pants and buzz cut. “Wilkes throwing you off the cliff is another.”

  Wilkes glanced quickly at Oliver, whose expression was unchanged, then back to Peter. Wilkes’s weight remained on his toes, his arms akimbo, hands open. His fingers twitched slightly.

  Sally smiled then, her teeth white in her mouth, the wrinkles hard around her eyes. She was still motherly and cheerful, but now the other thing inside her was more visible. Her true self, Peter figured. Her professional self.

  She said, “We don’t need to do this the hard way, do we, Peter? We both want the same thing. We both want June to be safe. And we want June to be happy. Right?”

  “How do you propose to make that happen?” asked Peter.

  “She’s reunited with her father,” said Sally. “Whether she knows it or not, this is what her whole life has been about. Understanding her relationship with her father. Then there’s you. Maybe she likes you, maybe it’s more than that, I don’t much care. But I’ll tell you this, kiddo. The only reason you’re still alive is because our June has taken a shine to you.”

  “And what’s your piece of this?” Peter asked. But he already knew.

  “Simple,” said Sally. “I’m fond of that girl, but I want the algorithm. I believe that she has it somewhere, and I’m going to get it, one way or another. So it’s up to you. Protect the girl by providing that algorithm, or die here.”

  Under Sally’s professional eye, Peter deliberately unsnapped his holster, put two fingers on the butt of the trucker’s .357, and eased it out. Then held it over the edge and let it go. He heard it bounce a few times on the way down. “Now what?”

  “Now we wait,” Sally said, and nodded to Wilkes, who took the Browning automatic from his shoulder rig and held it against his leg. Sally tucked her own gun away into the pocket of her barn jacket. “And watch.”

  She retrieved a shoulder bag from behind her rock and pulled out a computer tablet. Tapped it and the screen came alive. “It’s amazing what technology can do, isn’t it? I’m seeing a drone’s-eye view of a vehicle convoy. Wilkes, they just turned off Highway 12 at Lyle.”

  “Let me guess,” said Peter. “A big Mercedes SUV and a few Ford Explorers?”

  “We have a subcontractor who has a misplaced sense of his own importance. He’s coming to make a fuss.” Her eyes were still on the screen. “I should thank you,” she said. “Between California and Seattle, you reduced his personnel significantly. It will make things easier today. Less likely our people will get hurt.”

  “Chip Dawes,” said Peter. “He was working for you.”

  “He thought he was working for Sasha Kolodny,” said Sally. “The famous Mad Billionaire.” She gave Peter a small smile of genuine pleasure. “I might have contributed to that misunderstanding. With Chip and a few other people. We spoofed Sasha’s email account. There are drawbacks to being a recluse, not wanting to do business in person. We actually track and control his entire online experience. That’s how we figured out Hazel was building the algorithm in the first place. Sasha hacked into his wife’s laptop and we went along for the ride.”

  Peter thought about June and what she’d be trying to do. What it would mean if Sally’s people could see everything going in and out through the Yeti’s Web connection. Without knowing it, June might have handed over the algorithm already.

  “What’s in it for you?” he asked. “Money?”

  She laughed. “I’m a government employee, Peter. Not officially, of course, but I do work for Uncle Sam. I’ve got a good salary and a retirement account and that suits me just fine. Just like Wilkes here, and young Oliver. We’re trying to keep up with the Chinese and the Russians and the other information powers. This algorithm has the potential to leapfrog us several jumps ahead of them.”

  “And what would you do with that?”

  She shook her head. “Not my department,” she said. “That’s up to Washington. Although I can think of a few things.”

  Peter could think of a few things, too. Some of them good, he supposed. Many more of them bad. And who got to make the decisions? The same kind of idiots who started the Iraq war, and screwed up Afghanistan?

  He really hoped June wasn’t using the algorithm right now.

  He looked at Wilkes, the Browning easy in his hand, regarding Peter with watchful indifference. Peter’s leg throbbed and his ribs ached and Wilkes looked entirely competent. Peter had nothing to gain but a few new holes.

  Oliver observed the proceedings with neutral interest, keeping one eye on the path up to the outcrop. Lewis wouldn’t make it up unobserved.

  There was nothing Peter could do. Not yet.

  “How do you control the drone?” asked Peter. “You’re not flying it.”

  “It flies itself,” said Sally. “I click on a target and the drone follows. The software’s pattern recognition is excellent. If the target gets lost, the software has very robust strategies for reacquisition. Of course, we already have some improvements in the works. That’s why we want the algorithm. We think it has the potential to allow the drones to make decisions, to become independent. Add a few Hellfire missiles and you can just imagine the possibilities.”

  “Intelligent self-powered armed robotic aircraft,” said Peter. “What could possibly go wrong?”

  “This is the future,” she said. “It’s coming whether you like it or not.”

  “I thought you were an agricultural scientist.”

  “I grew up on a farm,” she said. “You’d be surprised the places you can go as an agricultural researcher. I do like to get my hands in the dirt. But I was trained in intelligence.” The little tablet chimed. “Okay,” she said. “They just hit the turnoff. Mr. Wilkes, it’s your show.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” Wilkes touched something in his far ear. Peter realized he’d never seen that side of Wilkes’s face. “All teams, look alive. Target has left the paved road. Repeat, target has left the paved road.”

  “Take the binoculars,” said Sally. “Get a good close look.” She tossed Peter the heavy glasses. He picked them out of the air and walked out to the end of the cantilevered boulder.

  It was a spectacular viewpoint. He glassed the entire valley. He didn’t see any other people. He imagined Chip’s Mercedes barreling along the river, trailing the Ford Explorers and a cloud of dust from the gravel road. The ridge blocked his view. They’d be coming across the one-lane bridge in a few minutes.

  “Where are the carpenters?” he asked Sally. “What about the farm help, the other researchers? Are they someplace safe?”

  “Mr. Wilkes is our security chief, but he’s also our farm foreman,” she said. “He grew up in Iowa. His people work in the greenhouses and fields, and also on the buildings. We’re expanding the facility, but we can’t afford to have people here without security clearances. This is a unique place. Sasha Kolodny has become a significant national security asset. You would not believe what that man is carrying around in his head. As for the research fellows, we sent them home a few days ago, anticipating what’s about to happen. They’ll be back once we’re all cleaned up.” Her tablet chimed again. “Mr. Wilkes, they’re approaching the gate.”

  Wilkes touched his ear again. “All teams, target is at the gate. Repeat, target is at the gate. We are hot.”

  Peter watched as the boxy Mercedes SUV emerged from the narrow defile, slowed by the narrowness of the passage. He wondered if Chip was at the wh
eel, or if his big bodyguard had decided to reenlist. The Mercedes coasted forward as a black Explorer nosed through behind it, then a second, then a third. At least eight people, maybe up to sixteen. A full squad, heavily armed, probably armored.

  When the last Explorer had cleared the passage, all four vehicles surged ahead up the arrow-straight road, keeping three car lengths between them. It could have been a diplomatic convoy, but it wasn’t. Chip thought he was coming to take over the Mad Billionaire’s research compound with a show of force, a bunch of hard men with assault rifles, like taking candy from a baby.

  Peter figured he should have brought a couple of Toyota technicals, heavy machine guns mounted in the back. Maybe an MRAP or Bradley and some air support.

  Because he was pretty sure Sally didn’t fuck around.

  The Mercedes passed the bottom edge of the lower orchard, the Explorers in formation behind. The rumble of their engines echoed off the valley walls. When the last vehicle came even with the trees, Peter saw a long silent flicker of red reach out from the orchard and touch the Mercedes’s front tire and engine compartment. The big SUV puckered silver in a hundred places, slumping and slowing before Peter even heard the distinctive long burp of the minigun.

  The Mercedes had to be heavily armored to survive a five-second burst from a high-volume electric machine gun. The minigun Peter had trained on could fire three thousand 7.62 rounds a minute, or fifty rounds per second, and was usually mounted on helicopters and assault boats. But even with heavy armor, the SUV wasn’t a tank, and the sheer volume of even a short burst had easily shredded the Mercedes’s front tire and found something mechanically crucial to destroy.

  The first Explorer pulled off the road to shelter from the minigun fire behind the crippled hulk of the Mercedes, spilling armed men from the off-side doors to hunker behind the front wheel and engine block. They appeared to be wearing armored vests over street clothes.