by John Conroe
Dr. Wilk’s stiff, patchy face scrunched up with emotion as she hugged Harper back. Then her right arm came up from a pouch on the side of the chair and plunged a small hypodermic syringe into her daughter’s back. Harper had time to raise her head and stare at her mother with shocked, betrayed eyes, which then slipped shut as she collapsed across her mother’s lap.
“Stubborn girl,” Dr. Wilks said, trembling arms holding Harper in a feeble clasp. “Now,” she said, raising her face to look me in the eye, “you must take her and put her in the escape pod.” She pointed at the far wall, which had an unassuming door in its center.
“Pod?”
“That generator is also powering a pressure pump that’s forcing carbon dioxide into a rather large piston. When triggered, it will push a wheeled sled of sorts through a one-block tunnel at an estimated fifteen to twenty miles an hour. You will coast to a stop just about directly under the Trump building.”
“What?”
“The tunnel was built in secret for a rich man to come here for clandestine assignations. I’ll leave it to your imagination as to what happened here. Now hurry. You don’t have time,” she said.
“Dr. Wilks, I’m not in the habit of leaving people behind,” I said.
“No, you are in the habit of surviving the most dangerous land on the planet. You will get Harper out of here, you will take her out of the Zone, and you will help her start her life. Please?” she asked, her self-assured confidence cracking at the end.
I heard steel tearing behind the cement panel.
“Tiger unit has breached the outer door, Ajaya. Additional units have entered behind it. Evacuation is advised,” Rikki said.
“Go! I will wait and trigger a final defense. I promise you, and you can assure Harper when she wakes, that I won’t feel a thing. She built the bomb, so she should understand. I have only a few weeks or maybe a month or two of this life at best anyway. Better to die fighting… protecting that which I love most, rather than fade away, soiling myself in a camp cot. Now hurry! Open that door!”
She still cradled her daughter in her weak arms as I crossed the room and pulled open the door. A battery-powered LED came on, casting a white light on a small tunnel. Maybe three feet tall, it was round except the floor, which was flat and embedded with a single piece of rail. The sled that waited was a very professional piece of work, looking like the bastard child of a bobsled and a giant kids’ wagon. Constructed of carbon fiber, aluminum, and plastic, it was locked onto the monorail with a mutant set of wheels.
“Quickly. Take Harper, your stuff, and your drone. You’ll have to lay down with her on top of you. The original design carried one large adult human in the compartment, using electrically powered motors to turn the wheels. Not enough power, nor will the generator last that long. Hence the piston. Now come get her.”
I took the unconscious girl from her mother’s still clinging arms, the crippled doctor giving her a last kiss on the top of her head. Tears streaked the woman’s face but her eyes were hard and bright. She handed me a small data drive as I hefted the girl. “This is for later.”
Carrying Harper in my arms, I got to the cart and awkwardly set her down, leaning her against the side of the thing. My rifle went into the partially protected space that was shaped like a human form. Then I climbed in, pulling the surprisingly heavy girl in on top of me. Rikki hovered nearby, carrying my pack in his extruded talons. Harper’s gear was between my feet, leaving room for Rikki to settle on the girl’s back while I held her warm body in my arms. Dr. Wilks had, in the meantime, somehow wheeled herself to a panel next to the tunnel door.
“Your cart can’t come off the rail, but you could fall off, or worse, drop my daughter. Don’t drop my daughter, Ajaya Gurung, or I will find a way to haunt you. The ride should be quick. The tunnel will be caved in by a small charge after the piston propels you. Then the main charge will go off. With luck, I’ll take Lotus with me. Goodbye,” she said, only now she wasn’t looking at me but the form of her daughter in my arms. A single tear trickled out of the corner of her eye. Then her hand pushed sharply forward. A giant’s hammer slammed into the sled, the lights went out, and we were rocketing through the darkness.
Chapter 33
The sled made a hell of a racket as it went, but not enough to drown out the boom behind us. Two seconds later, the ground bounced, the rail flexing under us as the ground shook and a much greater, much more serious thunder announced the doctor’s trap had been sprung.
When we bounced, I felt like we might both get thrown off, but the slightly curving half walls of the sled’s travel compartment gave my feet and elbows something to lever against. The wave of energy passed and we settled back down on the metal rail, our speed starting to drop off rapidly. Ten or twelve seconds later, we slowly rolled to a stop, still in complete Stygian blackness.
“Rikki,” I said.
“Lights—action,” my drone said, a pair of LEDs on his front lighting up enough to show me my surroundings.
“What?”
“Immediate vicinity is clear. Drone network access not available, likely due to depth below ground and thickness of building materials.”
Carefully I sat up, straining my stomach muscles a little to shove up Harper’s dead weight. Right arm now free, I pulled another chem-stick from my suit and cracked it into bright blue light.
This room which, according to Harper’s mother, was under the Trump building, was more function than form. A polished cement floor and a door much like the one in Harper’s hideout. Setting the unconscious girl back into the sled compartment, I tried the doorknob.
The space on the other side looked like something building management might use. A metal desk, a few filing cabinets, shelves with various cleaning supplies, a rack with what looked like maintenance tickets on it for repair jobs. Another door in another wall. I opened that one, looking out into a long hallway with a bank of closed elevator doors, and further down, an unlit EXIT sign above another closed door.
I ignored the stairwell for now. Too risky. On my way back in, I stopped at the rack of cleaning stuff and took stock. Two separate bottles caught my eye. A cleaner my sisters used on their fingernails all the time and a disinfectant that my mom used on all of our cuts and scrapes. Smallish bottles, the both of them, and they fit together inside the bottom of a cut-off empty bleach jug. I grabbed the lot and went back inside the secret tunnel room.
Harper was still out, so I looked in her pack first to see what useful stuff she might have. There was cash, a pair of data chips much like the one I now had in my pocket, clothes, makeup, a small electronics repair kit, a picture that showed a much younger Harper and her mother, a baggie of gold coins, a few platinum ones, some diamond jewelry, a good multi-tool, a flashlight, a folding knife, more chem sticks, water in a collapsible bottle, first aid kit, what looked like a do-it-yourself personal AI mocked up from commercial parts, and a small 9mm pistol with several magazines of ammo. Survival and relocation stuff. My kind of kit.
Then I went through my own pack. It was light on entry tools, having just one lightweight titanium pry bar and my lockpick set. My mini first aid kit, lots of chem sticks, a few Rikki repair parts, ammo for the rifle, ammo for Rikki, six flashbangs, trip cord, compressed ration bars, a boobytrap kit of my own design, and a plastic aerial flare gun with one flare. At the bottom of the pack was a wind-up, self-generator flashlight with charging ports. I put the jug and bottles inside the pack and pulled out the self-charging flashlight.
I glanced at Rikki. He was settled on the edge of the sled, in ball form, just a few lights lit on his front. Energy conservation mode.
“Battery status?”
“Twenty-one percent.”
“Come over here and present a plug,” I said, starting to wind up the foldout arm on the flashlight. It made a whirring noise that sounded especially loud in the quiet of the basement. Rikki hovered over, setting down on my pack, a plug extruding from his round form. I plugged it into the port on t
he flashlight and dug my detailed city map out of my stealth suit pocket, spreading it in front of me to review while I spun the handle of the light.
The quick answer was to head for the Battery Park tunnel. But it wasn’t necessarily the best answer. Should I appear at Zone Defense with an unknown survivor of Drone Night, ten years after the fact, there would be government questions, huge media interest, and Harper’s immediate exposure to the people who hired her mother. Not to mention the data drives. Dr. Wilks hadn’t given one to me at the last moment because it held her family’s cooking recipes. No, whatever was on that drive, as well as Harper’s two drives, was likely a really big deal.
“Mmmm,” sounded from the sled.
Harper was about to wake up, have to face the fact her mother, who had to be the very center of her world, was dead, and that her Zone defenses weren’t going to protect her any longer. I won’t pretend to understand the female of the species, despite living with four of them, but I had some experience with children grieving a lost parent. This was gonna suck.
I stopped charging and took Harper’s bag over, setting it back between her feet. Still not awake, but moving a bit here and there. Back to my spot and back to charging while thinking things through. We needed to stay here a bit. I had no way of knowing how much damage the other building had sustained without poking my head above ground, but based on the shockwave that shook us like a rat in a terrier’s mouth, it was significant.
“Estimated damage to building and living quarters just vacated?” I asked Rikki.
“Blast attributes suggestive of a fuel-air explosion. Living quarters have a high probability of complete destruction. Building structure likely still intact but with severe structural integrity issues.”
“Probability of Unit Lotus calculating for no survivors?”
“Variables numerous and some unknown. If initial blast successfully erased exposure of evacuation tunnel, probability is estimated at over seventy percent. On face data, fifty-eight percent likely.”
“Discoverability of Rikki unit and Harper through drone network sensors here in present location?”
“Approaching zero.”
“Likelihood of Rikki-assumed drone identity remaining intact?”
“Zero. Rikki unit was queried by Lotus and commanded to kill human targets Harper, Ajaya, and Wilks. Command was refused.”
How about that… he stood up to a direct command by a CThree.
“Which human target was assigned highest priority?”
“Human Wilks. Followed by Ajaya and Harper.”
So the Spider considered me a lesser threat than a disabled scientist in a wheelchair. I pulled out the data drive and pondered what it could contain.
“Where… where’s Mother?” a strained voice asked in a whisper. Harper was sitting up, one hand on the edge of the sled for support, the other on her head. I stopped winding the generator handle and plucked my first aid kit and water flask from my gear.
Harper saw my pack and instantly looked for her own, frantic till she spotted it between her feet. I handed her a pair of ibuprofen painkillers and my water bottle. She took them but looked at me, her question foremost on her expressive face.
I shook my head. Her eyes welled up with tears and she instantly dropped her face, short hair swinging forward. I backed away and went back to charging Rikki, leaving her to her grief.
When my dad died, everyone offered their condolences. Only natural and, I’m sure, heartfelt. Yet I was too deep in my own grieving to be able to process their words. My words would mean nothing to her, at least not yet. Better to give her room to begin to process.
The headache from whatever her mother had injected her with finally got the best of her, her hand coming up to her mouth and water bottle following. I watched her from the corner of my eye, trying to give her what privacy I could. With my sisters, I would have hugged Monique and given Gabby room for a bit. I didn’t know Harper at all and, more importantly, she didn’t know me. And now she was dependent on me, maybe more than she realized. Grieving, world upturned, and soon to be leaving the borough of bones for the world of the living. In my opinion, that was a perfect combination to turn to anger. Anger that could be directed at the world, at the drones, at me. I heard sniffling.
The map was laid out before me, but it wasn’t offering up answers. “She was very strong. Like she had steel in her spine instead of that disease,” I said.
She was silent, except for some soft sniffles. I looked at the map and spun the crank on the flashlight generator. Rikki sat unmoving, with one lit LED the only indication that he was alert.
“Harper?” I asked a minute later. “How did you get out of the Zone to get your mother’s medicine?”
More silence. The northern end of the island is heavily fortified, the river being very narrow. East, west, and south sides have wide water barriers with patrolling Coast Guard, Zone Defense drones, and automatic gun systems. But the island is over twenty-one kilometers long. Hell of a hike on foot in drone country, even with a cybernetic defense device. No, her passage in and out would most likely have to be near the south end.
“Methotrexate degrades after a year. So all the drugs here in the Zone would have been useless long ago. But you were using it, because you asked for it. And it’s not easy for you to get… but you did. How, Harper?”
More silence. More minutes. More winding the handle to power up Rikki.
“Tunnels are out. Too congested. Brooklyn Bridge is too visible. Manhattan Bridge… hmm.”
I was watching her from the corner of my eye. She twitched a little on that last one. The Manhattan Bridge had layers. Obviously not the upper car deck, but under that were four lanes of subway tracks and a pedestrian passage. All layers were heavily guarded.
“Top deck has troops, auto guns, tanks. But the subway level has armored anti-tank drones and more troops,” I mused.
“Not many troops. Mostly drones. Especially at night. Zone Defense is short on troops these days. They know most activity drops at night, so they use more drones at night, mostly on the subway track level,” she said.
“And you can voodoo your way past them?” I asked.
“It’s not voodoo, you moron. It’s a complicated cryptographic handshake protocol. It took me months to learn it and it’s very hard to do.”
I kinda of knew most of that but she seemed to be a lecture kind of girl so I thought she could use the distraction.
“But you’re good at it, right?”
“Yes, I’m good at it. Do you ever stop asking questions?”
“Not when I’m trying to get us all out of here. We’re going to be trying to exfiltrate around and past Lotus and its assets. If we get to the bridge, and that’s a big if, I can walk out. You, on the other hand, and probably Rikki, will need to slip by Zone Defense. Sure, we could walk you out, but there’s a lot of media coverage on me these days. You and your story will be front screen on every media feed in the world. How long till these Wall Street crasher bozos come looking to make you disappear?”
“They call themselves the New Hope. I hadn’t thought about leaving the Zone. I’ve got more hiding places,” she said.
“But Lotus is hip to your tricks. You aren’t invisible to them anymore. And you don’t have a stealth suit, Gurkha ninja training, or a Rikki. You’re gonna need to come with us.”
“And die as soon as my story gets out? You just explained that one.”
“No, I explained what happens if you walk out with me. If you sneak out, while I’m distracting everyone else, then we can get you hidden away. There are some empty rooms in my building that we can get you situated in while we build you an identity.”
She leaned forward and rummaged in her pack. “I have an identity. Right here,” she said, holding up one of the data chips. “Mother and I built complete digital IDs. Everything I need is on here: documents, assets, backstory.”