The Hive Construct

by Alexander Maskill

  ‘I just want to go, place my vote and try and stop the quarantine bill. You’ve taken me prisoner and are ransoming me off,’ Ryan said. ‘We do not want the same thing.’

  ‘Of course we do. Our ultimate goal here is the reinstatement of freedoms we had six weeks ago. They took away the right of people from around here to leave the city. They took away the right to be out after nine at night. And they’re coming for whatever other rights they can get their hands on.’ She took another deep drag of the cigarette. ‘You know why I voted for you? You look out for the little guy. I look at the Council and I see people who’ve only lived at the top and who think that the worst it gets, the people that need protecting, are somewhere around the middle. Or I see people from the bottom who’ll climb on everyone from where they came from to get to the top, and then promptly forget us. They all pretend that the city was some utopia, that it was all fine until the virus came along. Hell, at this point I wouldn’t be surprised if some of them genuinely believed it.’ Matron shrugged. ‘They don’t know how bad we had it here in Naj-Pur, or over in Surja. All the inequalities that have been brought up to the light of day with the Soucouyant were always there. They’re just being exposed now. But you seemed to get it. You have more of a silver spoon than anyone else in this city. You’re the prince of New Cairo, the heir to both a great political dynasty and the city’s most powerful conglomerate.’ She paused, then snorted derisively. ‘You don’t really know what the hell you’re talking about when you’re addressing the privilege you were born with. But you want to know. You care more about the vulnerable people in this city than the rest of those other ones combined. It helps that you’re the only one who butts heads with your father and leaves with a political career still intact.’

  ‘I appreciate the approval. I’ve seen how bad it gets around here,’ said Ryan, trying to treat the woman like she was just another constituent, ‘and I’m glad that you think I’m doing a good job fighting for you.’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t say that. Your heart’s in the right place, but right now you’re of more use to us as a hostage than as a representative. It’s those others, the rich who serve the rich. Against them, you don’t stand much of a chance. So we’re repurposing you into something that’ll get things done more efficiently.’

  Ryan didn’t know what to say to that. As he mulled over responses in his head, a woman came through the doorway the bald man had disappeared down. With her was a young boy of about seven who hung around in the doorway, allowing Ryan another quick glance down a long corridor. He noted a number of doors to add to his mental map of the building.

  ‘We need more medicine; Lya’s fever is still as high as it was,’ said the woman, who was visibly distressed.

  ‘Calm down, Kanak,’ Matron replied. ‘The medicine won’t even have kicked in yet. Give it some time.’

  The woman looked as though she was about to say something more, but then she spotted Ryan. Glancing back at Matron without turning away from Ryan, she said, ‘He’s out of the room he was left in, I see.’

  ‘Oh really, Kanak? I hadn’t noticed,’ said Matron, rolling her eyes. ‘He’s no threat, he’s a bureaucrat. And he can barely move.’

  The child had abandoned his post in the doorway, and had made his way over to Ryan, eyeing him up suspiciously. He looked to be the same age as Ryan’s own youngest son. ‘Who’re you?’ he asked, in an accusing tone.

  Ryan turned to face the child and said, ‘I’m Councillor Ryan Granier. I’m a guest here.’

  ‘And why’re your hands all tied up?’

  ‘Because your mother’s friends want me to keep being a guest here, and I don’t.’

  The boy looked confused. His mother, Kanak, came up behind him and said, ‘We’re looking after him so that the bad person won’t close down the city.’

  This didn’t help the boy’s bewilderment. ‘Is he a bad person?’

  Kanak hesitated. ‘No, but he needs to be here. It’s complicated.’

  The acknowledgement that the situation was difficult to understand appeared to vindicate the boy’s trouble doing so and he nodded. ‘I’m Vikenti, and my friends call me Vik,’ he proclaimed.

  Kanak strode over and pulled him away from Ryan. ‘Don’t tell him that!’

  ‘But Mum,’ said the confused boy, ‘you always say to tell people your name when they’ve told you theirs.’

  Kanak sighed with frustration and strode back over to Matron’s desk.

  A heavy knock came at the huge main door into the building, across the room from where Ryan sat.

  Matron pushed herself up from her chair and walked slowly and warily towards the heavily secured entrance, pistol drawn.

  Another knock.

  Matron looked through a spyhole in the wall and muttered ‘Shit’ under her breath. She pulled open the door and three people in dark clothes stumbled into the room. They carried a slumped fourth between them, arms draped over his comrades. Something was very wrong. They laid the man on the ground face up, and Ryan realized he was bleeding heavily from the left side of his stomach. Kanak covered Vik’s eyes and led him out of the room, slamming the door to the passageway behind them. Ryan diverted his gaze, trying as hard as he could not to look at the dark red pumping from the man’s abdomen.

  Matron strode across the room, head turned to keep her gaze on the wounded man, and grabbed a large green polymer case. She opened it up, and pulled out a big pair of scissors.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ she yelled.

  ‘A couple of SecForce troops came out of nowhere, command didn’t even see them until it was too late. Yosef got hit. We only just made it out.’

  ‘Command had better have a damn good explanation for this,’ Matron growled, more to herself than to any of the others.

  She cut his shirt upwards from the hem and pulled the soaked material aside to reveal a gaping red-black puncture wound sunk low into the man’s ribcage, blood oozing out. One of the other black-clad newcomers peeled off the blood-soaked carapace of light body armour and pushed his whole weight over the wound, trying to stop the blood flow, but the wounded man groaned at the pressure.

  ‘Is there an exit wound?’ said Matron.

  The man pressing down on the wound quickly leaned down and examined the rest of the wounded man’s torso, rolling him onto his side to check his back. ‘No, from what I can see the bullet’s still in him. It was just a pistol shot. Small calibre, pretty sure regular patrols only carry nine-millimetre rounds.’

  Matron nodded, and jabbed a small green-black pad onto the wounded man’s skin, an inch or so above the gunshot wound. It deflated onto his skin, leaking a haemostatic gel into the area around the wound. The blood stopped flowing so heavily; the skin around the wound turned paler. She ran one hand across the man’s neck and another over his mouth and nose. Seeming satisfied there was a pulse and the man was breathing, she then attached a small silver thread to a port in the side of her terminal, and inserted the other end into the wound. The terminal projected in front of her what appeared to be a video feed coming from the other end of the thread. ‘I can’t see any major ruptures, but I can’t see the bullet either. His body armour must have taken a lot of the momentum out of the bullet; I’m mostly just seeing muscle damage. I can sew up the arteries it’s nicked and take more of a look around in the med room here. Hear that, Yosef? You didn’t screw up getting shot so badly.’

  The man grunted in response. This seemed to satisfy Matron. ‘Just lift him onto the table in there and give me a second to turn on my bio-augs.’

  She looked again at her terminal and flicked through a few menus. From where he was sitting, Ryan could make out the words ‘stabilizer’ and ‘precision’. The three newcomers carefully lifted the wounded, groaning man and carried him into an adjacent room – a makeshift medical room, he ascertained, with a red cross newly painted on the door. Matron then threw her equipment back into the case and followed them out.

  And Ryan was alone.

  He’d
never seen anyone with a gunshot wound, or really anyone in a state of mortal injury, he realized. He’d fought to end the violence in these areas for years, working with business leaders and lobbyists – including some who would go on to become the founders of the New Cairo Liberation Corps – to lower crime in the area. They’d done a lot. But the violence itself was an abstraction, a word written in a pleasingly formal font in a newscast. He’d never seen that – a human body, ripped and punctured, failing and leaking like a punctured bag of liquid. He’d never smelt blood so strongly.

  He felt a visceral sense of horror spread from his gut out through the rest of his body. It was as though he could sense his every vein and artery and organ, and he found himself instinctively pressing his bound hands against his back, as though the veins criss-crossing them were too perilously exposed and in need of protection.

  The dark red smear on the concrete floor across the room seemed so unnaturally vibrant to him.

  Chapter 6

  SUMAN CHAUDHRI SLAMMED his fists down on the desktop and screamed ‘Dammit!’ at the screen. The other operators around him were too focused on their tasks to pay attention, and Suman Chaudhri was left to stare alone at the monitor. He was seated at the central command station of the New Cairo Liberation Corps’s main base, where he had spent the last hour directing an operation a few miles away. From a damaged, uncomfortable chair across the room, Alice Amirmoez leaned to the left and saw red words scrolling along the bottom of his holographic terminal screen.

  USER Y. J. KLEIN VITAL SIGNS UNDETECTED.

  The personnel monitoring system the NCLC were using was different in its layout from the equivalent she had used years ago, but that message had always come in the same shade of red. Instinctively, she leapt up from her seat and ran across the room towards the man slumped at the massive terminal.

  ‘What happened?’ she said urgently to Suman, who turned round in his chair and gawped at her. She grabbed him by the shoulders and pulled him up to look her in the eye. ‘Suman, I can help you. I did this for years. But you have to tell me what went wrong.’

  Suman’s voice was low and hoarse with anxiety. ‘One of the smaller armed units was doing a sweep of a building that seemed suspicious. The New Cairo Security Force have been setting up safe houses in civilian areas to support a bigger push into Naj-Pur and Surja, and we thought we might have found one. The building was empty, but a Security Force team caught them leaving. One of them got shot, and they ran, dragging him with them. His vitals have been erratic for a few minutes, but they just completely cut out as the group got to Safe House Two.’

  ‘How did you not see the Security Force team coming?’ Alice asked incredulously, without even thinking about it and with more force than was probably necessary.

  ‘I don’t know, I must have missed them! I thought I had all the security cameras in network, but something must have happened to one of them,’ said Suman, half sobbing.

  Juri Dajili, the heavily bio-auged operator sitting on Suman’s left, unjacked the cable from her eye and turned towards the two of them. ‘If there was a security camera that spotted them in network, I’d have seen them. There must have been a malfunction. It’s not his fault, Alice.’

  Staring into the smooth metal sphere in Juri’s eye socket Alice couldn’t help but lose her train of thought. She nodded and turned back to Suman. ‘Don’t fall apart on me. You don’t know what happened. Maybe when he got shot, the vitals sensor got damaged. Hell, maybe it just fell off. You can track the location of the sensor, right? Where is it now?’

  ‘Outside the safe house.’

  ‘And the rest of the group?’

  ‘They’re in the safe house.’

  Alice could feel him trembling. ‘Then there’s no way his squad mates left him out there,’ she said. ‘The sensor may not be responding because it’s not attached to him any more. It’s probably fine.’

  ‘Either way, we need someone coordinating another sweep right now,’ said Juri.

  Alice nodded. ‘Let me take over from you. You go have a break, I’ll handle this next operation and then I’ll let you know when there’s word on the injured man.’

  Suman looked momentarily confused. ‘What do you mean, you’ll take over?’

  ‘Suman, you practised for this with, what, a week of virtual training? I worked a field patrol for the Detroit Security Force for half a decade and was a mission coordinator for the police here in New Cairo for eight years. I did this for a living, and I was good, and right now you’re in no shape to be sitting at this monitor making life-or-death decisions. So when I say I’ll take over, what I mean is that I can run the next mission so you have a chance to get your head straight. Now get up.’

  After a few moments, Suman nodded and went over to the makeshift kitchen on the far side of the room. Alice took his place at the central command station in the middle of the huge array of terminals. She looked over her shoulder at the nearest operator. ‘So what’s happening, Juri?’

  ‘A regular bug plant,’ Juri replied, reinserting the cable from her terminal into her eye. ‘We’re pretty sure the Security Force is setting up camp all around the Naj-Pur area, so we send a few people in plain clothes and lightly armed to go do some scouting. You’re directing them, telling them where to go and what to do, but they’re experienced operatives – ex-military or police for the most part, just like you – so they’re more than capable of taking initiative if need be. If they find something they’re briefed to break in and install some malware, something that’ll let us see what SecForce is doing.’

  ‘Do we have a backup plan, in case our guys get compromised?’

  ‘If necessary, we send a reserve unit, heavily armed and with all the gear we can load on them, to tail the scouts as backup.’ Juri tapped the metallic eye. ‘Meanwhile, I scan the security camera network we’ve hacked and reroute any pertinent information to you. That way, whatever decisions you make will be as well informed as they possibly can be. The others keep their eyes on police or civilian communications in the area, and again, send you anything you need to know.’

  ‘And I take all that and tell our people where to go, what to do and so on.’

  Juri nodded. ‘That’s right. Now, you’ll be doing so from a big map with everyone’s locations and video feeds superimposed, and specific details at the bottom. We’ve got a pretty simple shorthand if you need to yell something – our guys in the NCLC are “operatives” and the Security Force people are “SecForce” or just “troops”. We’ll know who you mean straight away if you use that.’ Juri looked round at Alice again, the head of the cable jack pointing towards her. ‘You say you worked with the police doing this same thing, right? Well this is similar. All these guys have optical implants, hand stabilizers, stuff like that. They’re as capable as anyone we have at our disposal and they’re kitted out well enough that you don’t need to worry about being outgunned. Just tell them where to go and they’ll go there.’

  Alice settled down into her seat and looked up at the program spread out on the main monitor of the command terminal. Dominating the huge holographic screen in front of her was a simple map, outlining in white on a black background a bird’s-eye image of the area. Augmenting this otherwise Spartan approach were small floating windows depicting video feeds from hijacked CCTV cameras and harness-mounted wireless cameras belonging to the NCLC operatives. The effect was a simultaneous stripped-down geographical abstraction and borderline-cubist presentation of huge quantities of information. She at once knew where everything was in an immediate sense and, if she wanted it, what everything looked like, precise positions, and other such information the video windows imparted to her. It felt natural to her, like coming home.

  The map detailed a portion of the lower-west end of Naj-Pur: two main streets crossing towards the top of the screen at a tight acute angle, with a wedge of terraced houses between them. One road, Bajil, went from north to south along the right third of the screen, and the other, Freja, ran diagonally
from near the bottom left to the top right. Alleyways ran between the two. Of the buildings in the wedge, the computer coloured several green, a few blue, and one in particular – 264 Bajil – was coloured red. This, Alice assumed, must be the target house.

  She saw the NCLC operatives, represented as white teardrop shapes, advancing north along Bajil. The video feeds showed a small group of men and women in plain clothes and apparently unarmed. The curfew was less than an hour away.

  A regular patrol of SecForce troops were moving up and down Freja, towards the top right. The video feed showed that they were equipped for business, clad in typical military-style armoured helmets and visors which completely obscured their faces, with heavy body armour over the top of standard overalls. They carried high-calibre rifles, though they were slung low. It was an intimidating sight, as it was meant to be, but they looked like a pacifying force, there to make a presence felt within a potentially volatile community. Alice couldn’t remember seeing this area on the news during the riots or any of the subsequent fighting, but all it took was for her to look at the relaxed stance and easy gait of the SecForce troops to know that they weren’t expecting any real activity. Maybe they would glance down Bajil before passing the crossroads and continuing up Freja. Attention from the major forces should be focused on the other side of the district, following the evening’s earlier fire-fight.

  She looked over at the NCLC unit list to the right of the screen. She had control of six operatives, all of whom had whatever instructions were sent their way fed into their optic implants, allowing them to be directed discreetly wherever necessary. They could be sent commands by text, voice or contextual waypoints selected on the map. They could be commanded as a group, individually, or assigned to smaller units, typically of two or three. As well as being less conspicuous than a large mob all moving around together, smaller groups were more versatile, while standing a better chance in a fight than individual soldiers. Alice split them into three units of two, assigning each group a letter and an individual number to each operative within those groups.