by M. D. Cooper
As it was, he had to rely on the cloak to conceal him as best it could as he crept into the clearing. He kept to the shadows, inserting the shuttle between himself and the humans that were loading it.
Jason was close enough to hear one of the crew joking about ‘losing’ one or two of the isolation tubes on the way back to the base.
Just keep the conversation flowing a few more seconds, people….
“Lose it? You mean after your sticky little fingers lifted it, Johnson? What would you know about how to use an AI, anyway, huh?” another scoffed.
“Don’t you be throwing shade my way like that, sister. I know exactly what I’d do. I’d have it run the tables for me. Counting me some caaaaaards.” Jason heard the sound of one palm striking the other, mimicking the slap of gaming cards hitting a table. “Score myself a few million easy creds.”
“Not me,” another chimed in. “I’d set it loose on my ex. Have it arrange an untraceable ‘accident’.”
“Shut it, assholes. Mack finds anything missing—anything—and it’s all our asses. Got it?”
As much as it sickened Jason to hear AIs being referred to as ‘things’ and not people, it had been just the kind of conversational diversion he needed to reach the shuttle undetected. He slid under the fuselage just as two people rounded the far side.
Jason reached up to touch the belly of the craft, depositing a snowflake micro drone onto its surface. Each snowflake, like its namesake, had a unique geometric signature. That signature was contained in the database of an app loaded into Jason's HUD.
The app registered the negative space created by the snowflake on whatever surface it resided. Once a snowflake was tagged as ‘in use’, the search app would keep track of the void that particular snowflake made, pinpointing its location while it remained in range.
Jason kept a handful of these in his kit for the times he went exploring. They were his own personal, electronic bread crumb trail, an invention he had whipped up to ensure he never got lost out in the wilderness.
Now he hoped it would help lead him to wherever these AIs were being sent.
He heard the ringing slap of a hand against metal, and a voice a meter away from his head announced, “That's it. We're out of here. All aboard, ladies.”
Okay, smartass, Jason said to himself as the shuttle's doors sealed shut behind its pilot and crew. Now how are you going to get yourself out of this?
He figured he had one chance to escape without detection: hang onto the shuttle's frame during takeoff, and then drop after the craft had moved over terrain that could more easily hide him. If the shuttle’s crew chose to depart by rotating their engines and taking off vertically—which he was pretty sure they were planning to do, since the clearing didn’t allow for much of a rollout, and it was the flight plan that made the most sense—he would be able to get away without being fried to a crisp.
Jason was banking on more than that, though.
He was betting the pilot was just a little bit lazy—lazy enough not to bother compensating for drift. Lazy enough that the shuttle would rise to a hover and then drift over the scrub that bordered the landing strip before getting too high.
He chose not to think about the altitude the shuttle might attain before it reached the tall plains grasses that would conceal him from sight.
Yeah, it would hurt, but he’d survive. He might not have military-grade nano like Ben, but he did have other augmentations. This wouldn’t be the first time he’d mentally thanked his mother for the carbon nanotube lattice she’d injected into his bones.
Jason wrapped his hands firmly around one of the tie-down rings molded into the craft’s undercarriage as the shuttle began its runup. He was as far aft of the engines as he could get. As the transport lifted, Jason curled his body into a horizontal position, his arms and core taut from the strain of holding himself close against the skin of the shuttle.
One meter, two. The shuttle was three meters above the ground when Jason let go, tucking his body and rolling into a quick crouch as he landed. He froze, taking stock of the situation. It was as he’d hoped: the engine wash had masked his fall from the cartel’s sensor net.
Now, however, there was very little chance he could make it beyond the sensor grid before Ben’s override ended.
Once the sensors came back online, Jason doubted the cloak would be able to fool them long enough for him to get to the rim. He could drop heat eggs for a while, but the NSAI that surely ran the net would detect an abnormally large number of small wildlife suddenly populating the area.
And if he went from active to passive stealth, the large figure that might initially be tagged as local wildlife by its scans would eventually be seen as something that wasn’t behaving like wildlife, but rather a sentient being with a destination in mind.
Jason mentally ran through various options, from remaining stealthed and undetected for as long as he could, to making a run for it.
Given his mods, he had a better than average chance of making it to the rim without being caught simply because he could move faster than the top speeds of most modded humans.
A human with common muscle augmentations could run forty-five kilometers per hour, flat out. Though classified, Jason had heard that the latest military mods allowed a soldier to run at a velocity better than seventy kilometers per hour.
Jason could do eighty-five, but he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of letting anyone know he was capable of that kind of speed. Unless it was life or death. His life or death.
He decided to thread the needle: he’d begin by dropping heat eggs and meandering in a way that suggested an animal’s path, until it took him to the edge of the valley and the grade became steeper. Or until he knew he’d been made.
He carefully examined the sentry outposts nearest him as he began his random, slow movement toward the tree line. One of the outposts was close enough for him to make out a lone soldier, if he zoomed in his vision. The soldier appeared bored, and was sitting with a projectile weapon across his lap, his chair tilted back on two legs.
So far, so good.
Jason made it to the tree line just as his internal chronometer signaled the sensor override was offline. Five hundred vertical meters to go. Slowly, he began to creep forward, his eyes on the single sentry he could see.
Any moment now, the NSAI would tag him as a cougar, or maybe one of the northern black bears that roamed the area.
Unfortunately, they were rare enough to draw attention his way. Not what he needed. He kept up the lumbering pace he’d adopted, making as much upward progress as he could, and waited for the sentry to react.
Jason was surprised he’d made it a quarter of the way up the slope before the sentry stirred. Still, he maintained the lumbering pace, pausing here and there before continuing upward—then he saw drones approaching.
Abandoning all pretense, he poured on a burst of speed, hauling himself toward the rim of the bowl. The first drone zipped after him, just as floodlights from the sentry outposts snapped on, fully exposing him to the soldiers.
A crack sounded, and the rock just above his left shoulder exploded, fragments showering down on him. Now fully in his altered state, Jason easily evaded the flying projectiles. He began jinking erratically, hoping the NSAIs they were using to target him were programmed to anticipate normal human reaction times, and not his.
Shots were raining down around him, debris was flying at him from all directions. Jason launched himself across the last two meters of open space, rolling to one knee behind the rocky outcropping where he and Ben had crouched less than half an hour earlier.
He needed a plan. Now that he’d been spotted, those cartel soldiers weren’t going to stop at some electronic line marked by the sensor net. They would follow, either to take him out or to capture and interrogate him.
That meant he needed to outmaneuver them.
There was a ranger’s station down the other side of the slope, not too far from here—a dead-end branch off the trail he an
d Ben had taken up the mountain.
He had heard his sister mention that the parks were stocking explosives to use as preemptive detonations to generate controlled rock falls. It was an effort implemented by the government to mitigate unexpected, naturally-occurring rockfalls and avalanches.
A rockfall might come in handy about now.
* * * * *
Ben had watched as Jason disappeared under the shuttle, then divided his attention between it and the chronometer that was counting down the seconds until the sensor net reset.
When he could wait no longer, he'd sent the detonation code to the kinetic EMP in the warehouse, and retraced his steps back to the rocky outcropping just beyond the digital demarcation line. The creepy, double-shadowed terrain did weird things to his depth perception, and he ended up tripping, then skidding most of the way down the scree-covered slope to the groomed trail that had led them up the mountain.
Now he stood consternated as a sudden, diffuse glow from the direction of the bowl told Ben that the cartel had discovered Jason. If the light hadn't given it away, the soft pings of projectile fire surely would have.
Ben clenched his jaw. How could he go back to his wife and tell her that he’d abandoned her brother to the kind of fate the cartel would mete out?
Figuring there was little reason to remain EM-silent, he reached out to Jason over the Link.
A pin appeared, highlighting a spot very close by. Then a second one appeared.
The staccato order galvanized Ben, and he began racing down the trail, headed for the location where the trail branched off on a spur he hadn’t noticed on the way up.
Some spy I turned out to be, he mocked himself.
As he barreled around the corner, he saw that Jason had already arrived, and was reaching for the door to a low building bearing a sign that read ‘Muzhavi Ridge South Fork Ranger Station’.
Ben watched, astonished, as Jason ripped the door off its hinges, the material soaring back into the brush.
No normal human would have that kind of strength. Seriously, who is my brother-in-law?
* * * * *
Jason spotted a crate on the far side of the ranger station. A ‘Danger Explosives’ label identified it as his target, and he raced past a desk and table to find the crate locked. He deployed another drone, sending it into the locking mechanism, and gave it instructions to release the hasp.
He pulled off the now-useless stealth cloak and swung his pack around, unzipping the large outer pocket. As he did so, the crate’s lock opened, and he reached inside, grabbing several kilograms of explosives.
Next to them sat micronized detonators in two different flavors: smart ones, that could be triggered remotely, and 'dumb' ones. The dumb ones could either be set to trigger mechanically upon impact, or they would use a simple countdown timer. He grabbed a handful of each and stuffed them into his pack next to the explosives.
Ben had just made it to the door when Jason reappeared.
“Follow me,” he said, and raced back to the main trail.
Ben had to run just to keep Jason in sight.
He was led back up the trail, past where they had turned off to access the security net and slip over the divide.
Jason didn’t answer, responding with a question of his own instead.
Jason felt more than heard the resulting rumble. Good, Jason thought to himself. That makes what I’m about to do a lot more plausible. But first… He glanced over at Ben.
Ben looked surprised, then nodded resolutely.
Jason pulled Ben off the trail as they approached a switchback. Crouching beside a boulder, he dug into his pack, grabbed a handful each of explosives and detonators, and then sent Ben the arming instructions over the Link. The two bent to the task of attaching impact detonators to their ersatz grenades.
Ben shot him a glance.
Jason didn't give much thought to the cryptic remark; his eyes had just caught a shadow moving in the trees. He snapped his arm out, pulling Ben down just as projectile fire pelted them from below.
With his other arm, he aimed for the shadow and let the miniature bomb fly. In the darkness, no one could tell that it was moving at almost two hundred and fifty kilometers per hour.
If the explosive hit its target, the jury-rigged bomb would do almost as much damage from the kinetic energy it held as from its detonation.
And Jason’s aim was very good.
Two seconds later, the explosive connected with the torso of the shooter.
The impact caused a thin membrane attached to the surface of the explosive to tear. That membrane had separated a volatile micronized substance from an electric current generated by a miniature battery.
With the barrier compromised, the battery's charge interacted with the volatile, igniting it, and this relatively small burst of energy was enough to set off the much larger, more stable explosive that it had been attached to.
The velocity the explosive had reached at the time of impact was sufficient to crack the ablative armor worn by the shooter. The weakened armor was subsequently no match for the force of the blast, and the shooter was torn in half.
Jason grabbed a stunned Ben by the arm, hauled him up and pushed him into a run. As the man stumbled forward, Jason recalled his previous words.
Ben’s mental voice sounded dazed, and then a bit embarrassed as he recovered.
Jason's stride broke for a moment, then resumed.
How did he—
Then his thoughts raced, factoring this new information into the plans he was developing on the fly.
Yes, this would work. Dude’s really going to hate what I’m about to do to him, though. Of course, he has it coming to him, given that he took my freaking airplane…
60 SECONDS
STELLAR DATE: 07.04.3189 (Adjusted Gregorian)
LOCATION: Cliff-face, Muzhavi Forest Preserve
REGION: El Dorado, Alpha Centauri System
“Overnight, a quake of magnitude 5.6 on the Revised FGT-Richter Scale was reported up at Scar Top Peak, along the Muzhavi Ridge. Reports show there were no casualties, and wildlife was only marginally affected….”
Jason had exactly sixty seconds to make it down the face of that cliff, or he and Ben were both dead. Rappelling was definitely out of the question.
He leapt back from a cluster of explosives, now armed with one of the timed detonators. They were barely visible, crammed into a fissure jutting fr
om the side of the cliff. As he sprinted towards the edge, Jason began a mental countdown, hands reaching up to run a quick check on the fasteners of his pack.
59…58…57….
Throwing a glance over his shoulder as he ran, he assessed the progress of the cartel soldiers. There was no time to waste. If he’d calculated everything accurately, the explosion would take out the men and women pursuing them.
He saw the moment it registered on Ben’s face that Jason had no intention of slowing down, nor of using their climbing gear to make their way to the flatlands below. Desperately, Ben lunged sideways, attempting to evade impact as Jason barreled toward him.
Ben overbalanced, teetering. That worked for Jason.
54…53…52….
Jason’s hand shot out and shoved the climbing gear Ben had begun to unpack over the cliff’s edge. With the other, he tackled Ben and launched them into freefall, his body forming a tracking posture to carry them safely away from the side of the cliff.
Ben let out a strangled shriek as the ground rushed up toward them. His arms flung out wide, then pulled back in a moment later to clutch reflexively at Jason, who still gripped him firmly.
Later, Jason was sure he’d find humor in the fact that Ben’s clutch had drawn him into the perfect ‘Mr. Bill’ configuration that base jumpers used: face to face, the passenger’s hands firmly latched onto the primary jumper’s harness. At the moment, he was simply thankful that Ben’s position was one less thing he had to worry about.
49…48…47….
If Ben's mind wasn’t frozen in abject terror, Jason figured the man probably would’ve thought his brother-in-law had just snapped. Hopefully, his next words would reassure him a bit.
Now deeply in his altered state, Jason took care to enunciate the words slowly. It was imperative that Ben understand what was needed from him.