by John Conroe
It was estimated that over three hundred and seventy-two thousand people lost their lives in the first week of the Manhattan Attack. Another twenty-three thousand died during the second week,as rescue operations and military units counterattacked. Only a crazy fast response by US special operations ready reaction teams, in coordination with New York National Guard, FBI, NYPD,and a whole alphabet of other federal groups, kept the drones from escaping into the other four boroughs. The whole world almost died as an enraged America brought the doomsday clock to eleven-fifty-nine and fifty-nine seconds, saved by uncharacteristic transparency on the part of Russia, India, and China, who all stepped up to provide assistance and data about their drone weapon systems and particularly against the terrorists.
Ten years later, the terrorists who were responsible, the Gaia Group, were completely obliterated, hunted with a chilling ruthlessness by a fiercely unified United States. The borough island, however, was still a no-man’s-land. And a rich one at that.
Everyone in Manhattan either fled or died in not much more than a few days’ time. One of the wealthiest communities on Earth became empty so fast that countless riches, both literal and information-based, were left lying around for anyone to pick up. Anyone who could get safely past the lethal new owners, that is. Hence Zone War, a show that followed five salvage teams as they braved the Zone on a regular basis to kill drones and pull out abandoned riches. The Zone was also the source of my income, the money that kept my family afloat after Wall Street crashed, was abandoned, then relocated piecemeal to backup sites around the East Coast. The massive worldwide recession that followed dwarfed all others before it. Ten years later, the world economy was just now starting to see the sprouts of fiscal recovery. Yes, we all received the Basic Universal Income checks that were paid out to all Americans, but that wasn’t enough to do more than cover bare necessities, as Mom had said.
Zone War was a huge success, a show that followed the flashiest and noisiest salvage teams. And none of them made more noise than Johnson Recovery.
“Oh, Ajaya, there is your girl,” Aama said from her spot between my sisters. My father’s mother is quite the romantic. Both of my sisters turned and gave me their best smirks. I ignored them, but I couldn’t quite bring myself to ignore the monitor. Onscreen, the camera had switched to the face of the LAV driver. The blonde, blue-eyed Scandinavian goddess of the drone hunt, Astrid Johnson.
The youngest member of Johnson Recovery, a.k.a. Team Johnson, Astrid was the principal LAV driver but also filled the role of overwatch sharpshooter when more than two of the team deployed from their armored vehicle. A beautiful, smart, and very tough girl, she was hugely popular across the nation and probably most of the globe, a role model for girls, and an object of fantasy for guys of all ages. I’ve known her since we were both ten.
Only her oldest brother, JJ, was as popular. Tall, muscular, and bold, JJ was the JR point man for ground deployments, and his media nickname was Thor, possibly because of the big sledgehammer he used to break into buildings, possibly because of his blond good looks. Women sure seemed to dig him.
You had to give him his due. Even with full body armor, he took enormous risk every time he stepped foot on Manhattan soil, mostly due to his father’s preferred approach to things—drive fast and loud, shoot everything in sight, and then haul ass back out at extreme speed. Right on cue, the camera view switched to show JJ standing with his father, Brad, just behind the driver’s seat.
Brad Johnson, or Colonel Brad Johnson, was ex-US Army. He’d started his career in tanks, then moved into a Stryker Brigade Combat Team and never looked back. He and the rest of his family were in Manhattan, visiting an old military friend, on the night the drones were released. They escaped, as did their host family. Drone Night was a life-changing event for anyone who survived it and Brad Johnson was as affected as anyone—maybe more so. Within a year, Brad had quit the military and the Johnsons had relocated to Brooklyn. Brad started Zone salvage work, even as the military was still permanently blockading the island. He started work with his military friend, an ex-British SAS sniper named Baburam Gurung—my father. Eventually they had a falling out over work methods and went their separate ways.
I turned away from the show and walked out of the room, down the hall, and into my bedroom, which is also my office. Time to make some money.
Chapter 2
“Status?” I asked.
“Current bids on items one through ten, twelve, and fourteen are all below reserve level,” my personal AI reported. “Items eleven, thirteen, and fifteen have been purchased for the Buy Now price.”
“Time left on remaining items?”
“Fourteen hours and seven minutes.”
There are almost as many ways to make money in the Zone as there are ways to die. Almost. The most common is salvage. The New York State court system ruled that anything found and recovered inside the exclusion zone was the property of the finder. Manhattan was chock full of stuff to find: from cash, gems, jewelry, art, furniture, fashion items, and electronics, to corporate secrets and proprietary information on stand-alone computer systems abandoned in the attack.
The Johnson family had proven to be experts at monetizing the Zone. Initially, Brad and my father had brought out cash that they recovered from stores and banks. Nowadays, the JR team just went in hell bent for leather, raided an art gallery, jeweler’s, or even an haute fashion store, and bulled their way back out. Only licensed recovery agents were allowed onto the island, but the Johnsons also acted as guides, highly paid ones, for rich people who wanted to experience shooting a Chinese Raptor drone or firing a .50 caliber anti-material rifle into a Tiger drone. Then there were the massive studio fees paid to the on-air talent that made Zone War the top show on the globe. Yes, the other teams contributed to the popularity, but the attractive Scandinavian war family was top draw. If you don’t believe me, just count the ads you see some or all of them in. Hocking everything from the latest workout clothes to Astrid’s own line of makeup for combat to JJ’s signature basketball shoes.
As wealthy as they had become, the JR Team’s approach to salvage left a lot to be desired, especially if you wanted a really tricky recovery, like say corporate intellectual property left on the twenty-second floor of a downtown high rise. Their bull-in-a-china-shop approach stirred up every drone in a half-mile radius, leaving them with just a handful of minutes to extract their valuables before the sheer numbers would overwhelm even their heavily armored vehicles.
That’s where I came in. Gurung Extraction had a sterling reputation for bringing back hard-to-recover items. That’s because I’m stealthy AF. Slip in and slip out. Part training by my sniper dad and part tech magic of my own design. The things I was selling on the Zone-ite auction site were just extra, mostly jewelry, that I found along my way. We also had a pretty good family bank account going, the result of stashing any and all cash picked up during my Zone travels. That was going to pay the twins’ way through college. But the real money came from specific recovery missions.
“You have three new queries for services.”
“Summarize, please.” For some reason, I was always polite with AI. Most people weren’t. It just seemed right somehow.
“One is a request for choice items of sports memorabilia housed in a private collection in the Upper West Side, the second for recovery of legal papers from a personal residence, and the third is a corporate query for proprietary software in a Wall Street trading office.”
“Triage, please.”
“The corporate request is the only one that meets or exceeds your risk-reward minimum offer. The sports request is not remotely rewarding enough, and the stated offer for the legal papers is far below the corporate query. Additionally, there is a time-adjusted bonus for the recovery of the computer records.”
“Display.”
The one blank wall in my room lit up with the email including two financial numbers, the main offer and the bonus, each of which were large enough to make m
e set my ice cream aside. Somebody really wanted their algorithms. Which immediately begged the question as to why now—ten years later. Actually reading the email all the way through answered that question, or at least provided an answer.
“—Zone recovery rates of success have not been deemed sufficient until now to attempt salvage,” I read out loud. “Somebody’s been paying attention to Gurung Extraction,” I mused. The corporate name on the email was something called the Zeus Global Finance Corporation.
“Correct. ISP addresses assigned to Zeus Global Finance began viewing the Gurung Extraction website two weeks ago. Additional bot searches on the web have left sufficient evidence to indicate a relatively deep review of Arya assignments to date.”
I thought about the offer, then reread the few details of the extraction that were listed.
“Did Zeus Global have an office on Wall Street?”
“Negative. However, the Zeus website lists two corporate executive officers who were employed by a different firm, now defunct, that did have offices near Wall Street ten years ago.”
The wall view changed to list the two officers as the Chief Investment Officer and Chief Financial Officer, complete with pictures, as well as a side-by-side map of lower Manhattan with a building highlighted in yellow, located on Broadway about a block from Wall Street.
“Add in known salvage team activity for today’s date and tomorrow,” I instructed.
The map on the wall suddenly showed three new highlights in red, green, and blue respectively. There were currently five teams on Zone War, and one of the government’s stipulations regarding the show was complete disclosure of each team’s daily location plans. Independent salvage people, like myself, did not have to disclose any information other than designating our chosen Zone entry point and our intended egress site. Proposed trip duration was also collected, but that was just so the Zone border control people could alert our primary contacts if we went overdue. That was it. Nobody would be coming in after us if we didn’t come out on our own.
During its four years of production, Zone War had followed a total of twelve teams. Seven of them had either died or quit the business during that time. The actual number of salvage people lost in the Zone was easily over a hundred and sixty-two. The survival rate was so low that the production company only occasionally picked new teams, and only from people with several years of experience.
Myself, I had close to eight years of experience, most of it with my father. After Brad and JJ Johnson, I was probably the most experienced salvager out there. Flottercot Productions had approached me exactly three times to be on the show, once a year for three years running, but much to the dismay of my sisters, I had turned them down all three times. No way was I allowing a drone camera to follow me around, giving away all my secrets, and there wasn’t a camera team anywhere that could survive accompanying me, even if I was to ever give permission. I personally doubted any of them were stupid enough to try. My longevity in the world’s deadliest job was directly due to my highly personalized approach and my very customized technology.
“Inform the sender that I agree to attempt the extraction. Strike any guarantee clauses and disclosure amendments,” I instructed my AI.
“Done,” it replied.
“Okay, now we need to get down to planning.”
My father was huge on planning. Massive time was spent on every aspect of a recovery before we ever set foot in the Zone, no detail too small. I could quote every drone’s specifications forward and backward by the time I was twelve. Nowadays, two years after his death, I have an exhaustive data bank of information built up in my AI’s drives. My planning is still just as thorough, just generally a whole lot faster.
First we reviewed current satellite footage of the building’s neighborhood on Broadway, then pulled blueprints on the building itself from the NYC Department of Buildings database. The laptop in question was thought to be on the seventeenth floor, which was gonna be a bitch. Better than the thirty-seventh floor, which the building had, but still, dragging myself, my stealth suit, and my gear up seventeen flights of stairs was gonna suck—hard.
“Suggest carrying cutting torch, bolt cutters, and titanium pry bar. The state of the building is completely unknown. No record of other recoveries occurring at that address.”
Great. My AI was right, of course. Getting in and out of multi-story buildings could, and often did, require serious abilities to break and enter. All of my gear was miniaturized, but my pack weight and the resulting suck factor went up with every ounce.
“I’ll go through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel entrance,” I decided.
“Concur. That will place you far from the Chelsea Pier entrance. Johnson Recovery and Egorov Salvage are both scheduled for entrance to the Zone at that point tomorrow. Diversion rate is estimated to be sixty-four-point-eight percent.”
Diversion rate was my own proprietary measure, calculated by my AI using satellite footage, Zone War production crew drone counts, and my own drone counts measured at the same time if I happened to be in the Zone. I got the idea watching one of the few full episodes I had ever sat through. I had realized that someone or some AI on the studio team kept a running tally of observed drones at the bottom of the screen. The producers used it to raise the viewing tension, as the number would race higher the longer a team was in the Zone and the more noise they made. I, myself, kept a running count of any and all combat units that I observed during my forays, along with the time observed.
After egress, I would give that information, along with details on which models and makes I had seen, to my AI.
Twenty-five thousand was the estimated number of drones released in the attack, an entire ship’s hold’s worth. Since that time, thousands had been killed or damaged in the course of the passing years and the active action of the salvage crews. The US government paid a hefty bounty for every unit that could be confirmed destroyed, with varying payouts depending on the sophistication and danger each unit posed. Also, Air Force Render drones hunted the high altitudes, preying on any visible drones, and marksman units on barricade duty sniped as many drones as they could see.
There were a couple of mothership drones that had onboard 3D printers that could make small replacement drones, but otherwise the number was estimated to be dwindling, perhaps as low as fifteen thousand drones remaining. Unfortunately, the most lethal and sophisticated units that were the best at killing humans were also best at avoiding their own destruction.
The bounty for an Indian Tiger hunter-killer was north of two hundred thousand dollars, and forget about one of the three remaining Chinese Spider ThreeC units thought to be at large. Each Command, Control, and Communication master drone could orchestrate up to three hundred lesser drones at a time. They had been the most highly advanced units in the Chinese arsenal at the time of the attack, equipped with real, progressive machine-learning software that was capable of rewriting itself to adapt to the battlefield.
One Spider had been destroyed at the end of the second week of the Manhattan attack. That single unit had coordinated battle drones that killed an estimated 230 soldiers, cops, and federal agents. The fact that three such units were still unaccounted for was likely the main reason the military hadn’t gone back into Manhattan in force.
So the bounty on a Spider ThreeC was a million dollars. Cheap, if you ask me. You might wonder if we didn’t have more advanced drones now, ten years later, that could go in and fight the battles without human lives being lost. We do, and it didn’t work. The ThreeCs kept learning, kept adapting, kept growing. They beat the more advanced drones sent against them. In fact, the information in their CPUs, the software that they wrote and rewrote over ten years, would be worth, in my estimation, closer to a billion dollars. Every army on Earth would pay up for it.
Some people wonder if any of the ThreeCs are still active, still functioning. I can personally vouch for two. Scariest moment of my life. Eighteen months ago, in the north end of Central Park. I use the Park o
ften, as the drones tend to stay in the more urban areas. Not because they don’t function well in the park, but because the park is full of deer and coyotes and a small number of animals that escaped the Central Park Zoo. Combat drones are designed and programmed for killing humans. They ignore animals. But having that many warm bodies clouding their thermal senses is confusing to most drones, costly in processing power. So they tend to stay out of the Park. Which makes the Park one of my favorite places.
Anyway, I was skirting though the woods and came upon the edge of the old softball fields. It was a really nice sunny summer day and I sensed motion out on the overgrown field. Dad’s lessons kept me deep in the shadows, peeking over a small hummock of rock and dirt, my low thermal signature camouflage hood over my head. Through my monocular, I saw a veritable army of drones, motionless, solar collectors spread out for maximum charging value. Right in the middle of four tank-killers, seven Indian tigers, about twenty Russian wolves, and a veritable flock of various flying units were two ThreeCs sitting in the open, charging batteries like the rest. The ThreeCs look like their nickname—spiders—black-painted spiders the size of a sofa loveseat, except these spiders have seven legs, not eight.