by John Conroe
“What else do you need? Knives? Hey, you need a new kukri?”
“No Egan, just the suit,” I said, making the gestures that instructed my AI to pay the bill.
“Come on, how about shooting glasses? Got the latest with built-in range finders and ballistic compensation systems.”
“Nope. That stuff will get me killed in the Zone,” I said. “Wait, you got any .458 SOCOM ammo?”
“I think I might,” he said, not bothering to ask where I would have picked up such a gun.
We arrived back at the counter, where the tattooed dude was still observing us. Egan went behind the counter and stuffed my suit into a proper biodegradable shopping bag, then rooted around, finding a couple of boxes of ammo that he held up to me. I nodded.
Mr. Tattoo was staring at me, and it felt aggressive. “Can I help you with something?” I asked, turning to him.
Amused, he shook his head. “Just seeing what all the fuss is about,” he said, pausing to look me up and down. I fought the urge to pull out my blade from its sheath hanging down my back.
“What fuss?” I said, turning away from him in dismissal.
“All this sniper crap. You weren’t even in the military, so how can you be a real sniper?” the guy asked, eyebrow raised.
“Right? That’s what I keep saying. But you make a bunch of shots, kill a few thousand drones all by yourself, without a tattoo in sight, and suddenly people label you,” I said.
Egan froze in the act of handing over the bag, eyes flicking from mine to the guy standing a meter to my right. Tension radiated off the dude, who had to be ex-military, based on at least three of his tats. I kept my eyes on Egan, but I was hyper aware of the danger to my right.
“Hah!” the dude suddenly barked out, clearly half of a laugh. “Hahaha, you aren’t what I expected. All business, no nonsense. And some backbone. I like him,” he said to Egan, thumb pointed my way. “I’m Tony. You need anything that Egan can’t get you, anything at all, you have him let me know. Got it?”
“Yeah, ah, great.”
“I gotta run. I’ll get more of those lined up, Egan,” Tony said, pointing at the bag as he turned to leave.
“Yeah, great, Tony. See ya around,” Egan said, smiling uncharacteristically.
Tony left and, after watching to see that the door had closed behind him, Egan turned back to me. “Whew! Didn’t know how he was going to react to you. He’s been a doubter. But I kept telling him, Tony, this kid is the real deal. Not some actor type, I says.”
“One of your… suppliers?”
“Yeah. For tricky stuff. State-of-the-art stuff. He meant what he said. You need something special, something maybe not easily obtained, and he’s the guy.”
“Cool. Always good to know a guy, right?”
“Yeah. Especially going into the friggin’ places you go.”
An hour later, I was home, going over the new suit, adjusting its fit, transferring bits of gear from my beat-to-shit one, when my mom came home.
“Ajaya, I was hoping to catch you. Can we talk?”
“Sure, Mom. What’s up? Is this why you’re home early?”
“Yes, plus my boss gave me the afternoon. Seems our recent fame, mostly yours, has been a bit disruptive at work. Partly what I want to talk to you about,” she said, sitting on the edge of my bed.
“Cool. What’s up?”
“Ajaya, I want you to think about quitting the Zone,” she said. I started to speak, but she held up a hand. “Before you go on about money, let’s talk about the state of our finances. We’re flush. Better than that, even. Between what you’ve been paid by the show and our part of the joint recovery, we have a real solid slug of money.”
“But the twins will have college coming up?”
“I’ve been investing part of every month’s income since, well, since you father and I got married. Grandpa’s been advising me. We’ve done real well. College is paid for, and with this new money, you could take a year off. Plus, I think Trinity would hire you as an on-air consultant for the show. She said that fans loved the back and forth you had with Cade.”
I didn’t know what to say, my mind reeling. “I just got my license back,” I said, although what that had to do with anything, I couldn’t say. Then I thought of Harper and the bottle of drugs I had just picked up at the pharmacy. “Okay, let me think about it. I’ve got some things I have to clean up in there, some stuff to attend to. And I have to figure out what to do about Rikki. I couldn’t just leave him in there.”
A frown crossed her face, but a frown of worry. Then she smiled a sad little smile. “Think about it.”
“Oh, I already am. I didn’t know we were doing that well. You didn’t really say.”
“Well, I know you don’t trust the stock market so I haven’t exactly paraded the numbers, plus I don’t want the girls getting ideas that we’re wealthy or anything, because we’re not. But we are, I think, independent. The sooner you stop going into that awful place, the better.”
“Alright. Let me think about it and what I’d need to do to wrap up. Can I see the numbers?” I asked.
“I’ve already had my AI send them to yours,” she said, patting my shoulder as she stood up. “It would be a huge burden off all of us not to have you go in anymore. Me, your grandmother, and your other grandparents, and the twins. They don’t show it to you, but they are nervous wrecks every time you go in. They have to sleep with me when you’re out overnight.”
“What? They sleep in your bed? Nobody ever said anything.”
“Because you already carry more pressure and responsibility than anyone your age should.”
“Oh. I knew they stayed home from school, but I didn’t realize it was that scary for them,” I said.
“Ajaya, it’s that scary for all of us. When you and your father failed to come home for two nights and then you finally made out but he was… gone, well, it about broke all of us. If they knew you were going in to get college money, they would both refuse to go. When we watched the show the other day, when you went in with the Johnsons, well, both of them were so anxious they had to have their sleep blankets with them.”
“What? Those tired old scraps of blanket are still around? I thought they got thrown out years ago.”
“No, and they would kill me for letting you know, but those little crutches are still around, mostly, I think, because of the Zone.”
Societal fear and anxiety reached incredible proportions after Drone Night, but articles I had read indicated it was gradually declining year by year. Yet my own family was suffering from it and I hadn’t stopped to even consider the effect on my outwardly confident little sisters.
“Mom, like I said, I have some things I feel obligated to clean up in there, but maybe after that, I can stop going in,” I said.
“You have immense talent and potential, Ajaya, not just for hunting the Zone, but for life outside that death trap. I’ve been waiting with little patience for this time to arrive. Please, please drop the Zone, for all of our sakes.”
She bent down and hugged me where I sat, then, with a sad smile, slipped out the door, leaving me to my work and my thoughts.
Chapter 31
I inserted the next morning after the twins had gone to school, intending to be in and out in record time. True to his word, Yoshida had reinstated my credentials and I was able to draw my Five-Seven out of the local precinct house with no troubles. I left the MSR, opting to carry the .458 SOCOM, collapsed down to its smallest size and carried in the discreet case I had snagged from the Defense base.
I had been overusing the Battery Park entrance recently, a practice I had assiduously avoided till now. AIs are experts at pattern recognition, and the drone AIs were particularly skilled at hunting humans through predictable patterns, so I was really, really nervous when I exited, standing behind the armored door while I whistled my call.
But I didn’t have to hide Rikki from Zone Defense anymore and, in fact, they were very interested to record my use of
his senses and shooting skills inside the danger area. He dropped down from almost just to the west of the entrance, hovering over my head about three seconds after my whistle.
“No drones detected in immediate proximity, Ajaya,” he said. I still wasn’t ready for his casual use of my name. It made me want to check his coding, but now was very obviously not the time or place.
“Target is the Exchange. Monitor sensors for anomalies or holes in sensor data, specifically the female encountered last mission.”
“Affirmative. Will watch for sensor-cloaked human named Harper.”
Again with the names. Not like him at all.
“Any Spider CThree activity?”
“Unit Lotus has been active below Worth Street. Last activity logged was a directive to this unit’s id to patrol Wall Street and Battery Park area. Status queries occur on average every forty-three minutes.”
Handy that the Spider had assigned Rikki, in his other Berkut electronic disguise, as the only lookout for this part of the Zone. Of course, why allocate more resources when a single Berkut was as good as a half-dozen other models together?
We moved up the ramp from the tunnel and I was very conscious of the cameras watching our every move. Rikki swung out on sweep patterns of his own devising, essentially circling me but using elliptical arcs. From overhead, it would look like the petals of a symmetrical flower, or a kid’s drawing using one of those spirograph toys.
Soon enough, we arrived at the Exchange and Rikki, after a final sweep, folded into his ball form, hovering down next to me while I eyeballed the doors.
“No anti-personnel units detected. No Harper anomalies detected.”
“Let’s do it,” I said, pushing the door open, leading with the thick, stubby barrel of the .458. Dangerous entry was likely the exact reason that the gun’s former owner had the weapon. And despite Rikki’s assurances, some ground drones could put themselves into a form of airplane mode and not show up on his network. Granted, he was actively pinging them with IFF protocols and they should respond, but this was the Zone and you took nothing for granted.
The entry was empty and quiet, dim and gloomy, as the only light came from the cloudy sky outside. We moved through till we got to the door Harper had come out of before. Carefully, because if it had been my door, I sure would have booby-trapped the shit out of it, I went through. No trip wires, no pressure switches, no passive light sensors. Just stairs leading down and up. Personally, I’d live below grade every damned day in the Zone. Every apartment dweller on the island either rushed out or died in place. Windows were no deterrent at all to killer machines that could shoot, stab, or pound through body armor. And if you were hiding from aerial fliers, it might be wise to take a page from rabbits and groundhogs and live in holes. There’s probably a primordial reason why humans had once used caves.
I cracked a chemical light stick and loaded it into a chest-mounted holder that let me control how much of the pale green light shone by twisting a knob on top. Like a modern day shuttered lantern of cold light. Bought it at Egan’s. Probably should have bought more light sticks when I was there. Oh, well. Hopefully I wouldn’t need so many in the near future if I got to retire from the Zone.
The downstairs seemed to have held a barbershop, among other things, but there were signs that someone had lived here for a while. A while in the past. A light dust covered the floor and the empty cots set up along one wall, and the same dust lay on the metal shelves that held plates, silverware, and cups, all clearly scavenged from one of the Exchange’s restaurants or cafeterias. A few papers were scattered on the floor, most of which seemed to be hand-drawn circuit diagrams and notes in a tight, tiny script that I had trouble reading by the dim light of the chem stick.
Tracks of a smallish foot showed where Harper had come through the room on occasion, but wherever she and her mom lived now, it wasn’t here.
“Harper anomaly detected. Approaching from far exit door, descending stairwell,” Rikki said in very low volume. His machine whisper.
I placed my light stick holder on a shelf to light the room, then stepped back toward the corner, leaving Rikki hovering in full view. Rifle barrel pointed at the floor but weapon held ready. The door opened slowly and a now familiar face looked in, lit by her own light stick, although hers was an industrial-sized one. She spotted Rikki instantly, then turned till she found me in the shadows.
“You’re scarier than the machines,” she said.
“Hardly. I brought you some methotrexate.”
She looked at me, clearly making an effort to control her expressions. I saw surprise and maybe something that was pleasure before she got blankness back in place.
“Well, that’s… useful,” she allowed.
“You moved?” I asked, waving around at the abandoned stuff.
“Six months ago.”
I raised both eyebrows and waited.
She fidgeted, reluctance written all over her. Finally, “The Spiders got aggressive, started to come through with drone battle groups. We retreated to a deeper hideout.”
“They were looking for you? Even with the neuroprothesis?”
“Normal drones can never find me, but the Spiders are different… more powerful. They noticed… something… when I was around them. I don’t try to redirect them like the lesser ones.”
“You can actually direct a drone?”
“Not like giving it a command, but I can generally redirect its attention elsewhere.”
“Can you do that with Rikki?”
“That’s a stupid name for a killer drone.”
“But can you redirect him?”
She crossed her arms over her chest and stared at me. Maybe glared. “No. No, I can’t. Whatever the hell you did to it messed up the overrides I use. I was able to cloud him a bit, before. Doubt it now.”
“Can you redirect a Spider?”
“Hell no! Are you crazy? It would be suicide to even try,” she said, looking at me like she’d already answered her own question.
“Right, I get it. They have a lot more computing power,” I said.
“No, they have orders of magnitude more power,” she said, frowning like I was an idiot.
I frowned back. “I’ve read the specs forward and backward. No way are they that powerful.”
“No, you read the specs for the standard model. These were customized prior to release.”
“What? I never heard anything about that. Where are you getting this from?”
“My mother.”
“And how would she know?”
“Because she’s the one that customized them. Oh, and she wants to meet you. So come on,” she said, uncrossing her arms and turning toward the door she’d come through. I was so startled by her little bombshell that I paused for a second to process. In that moment, she disappeared out the door and I had to hustle to catch up, following Rikki, who hadn’t shown any hesitation.
Moving faster then I ever did in the Zone, she led us upstairs, through the building, out another door, and into the building next to the Exchange. She twisted and wove through the new building, moving with surety and a fascinating sort of grace. Manhattan buildings are really big and even though we stayed on the ground floor, we still had to twist through hallways and doors and long-abandoned offices that looked ready to open for the day’s work. Finally, we came to a side door that led out onto Broad Street. Some of the ever-present city scaffolding greeted us like old friends, shielding us from the air. There was more across the street.