by John Conroe
The horde stayed that way for an hour, then suddenly the entire battle group of drones activated all at once and flew, crawled, or rolled off to the east, leaving me in a pile of sweat and maybe a little urine. Maybe more than a little.
I bring out dead drones fairly regularly, but mostly just small ones, or I yank the CPUs and ID plates from bigger ones. I don’t have a heavy, electro-powered hybrid LAV to haul my catches, so my recorded kills are kinda low. My actual kill numbers are a different story. The Zone is my real office and salvage my work—and work is good.
Tomorrow I’d head into the Manhattan Drone Zone.
Chapter 3
I inserted the next day, calling for an Ublyft car to transport me and my gear to the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. Self-drivers aren’t allowed in the tunnel, only military or salvage company vehicles, and they have to be manually driven ones at that.
Catching a ride with a Zone military driver that I knew, I tried going over my plan as I rode. Fat chance. My driver turned out to be quite a Chatty Cathy.
“Yo Gunga Din, whatcha got going today?” Corporal Links asked. I had quoted the final line of the old Kipling poem once to him and since that day, he’d called me Gunga Din. Racist bastard didn’t even know that the fictional Gunga was Indian while I’m Nepali-American.
“You know, just thought I’d go skipping around Wall Street and find some old stock certificates I can forge my name on,” I said.
“You can do that?” he asked, brows raised, looking at me and not the road.
“Nobody has used certificates in decades,” I said, shaking my head and pointing at the left-hand tunnel wall that we were about to slam into.
“Oh, not spilling it, huh?” he said, swerving back to center. “You don’t trust me,” he stated, now pissy.
“Confidentiality agreements in my contracts. My clients don’t want me giving out any of their secrets,” I said, which was true. I wouldn’t have told him any way: op sec—operational security. Dad was huge on that one. Any mission information you gave out would travel faster than a bullet and could be just as deadly.
Links kept silent, not speaking for the rest of the trip, which was fine with me.
We arrived at the Zone Checkpoint-Battery Park, which actually lies under the park in what used to be the old Battery Underpass. Links let me off before taking his load of supplies to the Zone Quartermaster. I thanked him but he just gave me a nod and drove away. I know for a fact that a lot of the Zone guards collect under the table money from reporters about any juicy salvage gossip and Corporal Links was definitely one of them. The fact that I didn’t give much of anything informational was a sore point for him, like I was shorting him his additional pay. Nevermind that it was part and parcel of my Zone protocol and one that helped keep me alive. Soldiers, like all people, talk, and often by phone. Drones can hear phones. Nuff said.
“Ah, Mr. Gurung, what brings you to our little slice of Heaven here in the Battery?” the entrance sergeant asked, holding out his hand for my pack.
“You know, Sergeant Alonso, just looking for my personal pot-o’-gold. Heard the rainbow came down on the other side of those steel doors,” I said as I carefully watched him give my gear a casual, but professional once over. Weapons, ammo, first aid, breaking and entering gear, distraction devices, booby trap gear, food and water, but no commo gear and no batteries. That was the rule unless you were going in as part of a team, and then only on an armored vehicle. Even the military special forces units that used the Zone for training went commo free.
Most Manhattanites lost their lives during the Attack because they lacked all the right instincts. Modern humans were both totally reliant on electronics and so self-absorbed by them that they missed the danger cues all around them. They completely failed to react usefully to the drone threat, or once they realized it, called their own doom down upon themselves with those same phones. I’ve seen hundreds of bodies of people who died looking at their cell phones, which everyone seemed to have back then, before personal AI’s.
Many people died because they ran over each other, blocked up escape routes, or simply froze in place. People often failed each other as the veneer of civilization was ripped away, and it became every man or woman for themselves. The majority of people tried to shelter in place. Then they called for help on those damned phones. Instead of rescue, they called the drones right to them. Even when the military tried overflights with speakers announcing to any survivors to leave their phones and attempt escape on their own, most still tried to call for help.
Combat drones were built by humans to kill humans, and they built them very well. Almost every model in the invasion group had the capacity to detect and track electromagnetic signals. Most could find ways into buildings, open doors, or hack electronic locks and alarms. And drones generally work in swarms or at least pairs. One would bang on the door while a flier would drop down and shoot you through the window.
So we weren’t supposed to bring electronic stuff in. Weapons galore, no problem. Personal comp and commo, no way. As if I needed to. I had a city of stuff to use and I had been combing it for eight years, and I certainly knew enough to avoid electronics, even electronic sights on my weapons.
“Just your personal side arm and your rifle, which you aren’t even carrying?” Alonso asked.
“Yup, and I don’t usually need either of them,” I said truthfully. Picking a fight with machines built for war was a really, really fast way to meet your maker. My weapons were either last ditch, as in the case of my Ruger Wesson Five-Seven pistol, or for harvesting particularly juicy drones, which was the purpose of my heavy caliber suppressed rifle.
“How the hell do you do it, kid?” Alonso wondered. I’d heard the same question a thousand times before. I shrugged, collecting my gear and stepping up to the entrance line.
“He’s clear,” Alonso yelled, giving the door operator a wave.
I heard another voice then, one I instantly recognized.
“Hey look, the diaper boy is slinking away.” I turned and met the eyes of Martin Johnson, second born and middle child of the Johnson clan. He held a tablet out toward Alonso, the kind of thing the Zone War teams used to file plans with the Zone Authority. A long time ago I had said that I had heard that some snipers wore adult diapers on missions and he’d never let it go. But the massive steel door had begun to open and I turned away from the middle Johnson and walked into the clean room chamber.
Just what I needed. Instant distraction at the worst possible moment, as all of my attention should be focused on the Zone outside the next door. There was a flatscreen mounted on the wall next to the outer door and it showed three separate camera views and a diagram listing electromagnetic scan results. Nothing on screen and the scan was clear of dots representing drones. Normal. Drones didn’t hang out near the entrances we use because the auto cannons and laser weapons mounted above them tended to make short work of killer machines. No, the dangerous ground would be the area just outside of the guns’ kill zones.
I hit the outer door control (the one for the smaller human-sized door, not the big vehicle door) and waited for it to cycle open, taking at least that time to consider Martin’s presence. Astrid I had always liked, while JJ was much older and had been a bit of a hero of mine when I was a kid. Martin, though, was always an asshole. Middle child with attention issues and more than a bit of Narcissism. Couldn’t compete with Astrid’s beauty or his older, bigger brother’s handsome sex appeal, so he was bitter and petty to all those he could be… which had often been me back in the day.
Nowadays our interactions were rare but usually consisted of trading insults. But more important than his being a giant douche was the fact that his presence meant that there must have been a change of plans regarding Johnson Recovery’s intended incursion for the day. And that wasn’t good for me. The very last place I needed or wanted to be was anywhere near the cluster fuck that was JR in action. My area of operation would be knee deep in drones for the rest of the day once
they arrived to begin slamming their way around the Zone.
The door opened enough for me to slip out and that’s just what I did, putting my retrospection on Team Johnson on hold for the moment and instead concentrating on my surroundings. Behind me, the door reversed and closed almost silently. When Team Johnson came through, they’d use the giant vehicle doors and make all kinds of racket. I had better be far, far away by then.
Like any driving tunnel in a city, the road rose up at an angle to meet the surface streets, concrete retaining walls rising up on either side. Ahead of me, the center of the road was open, husks of abandoned cars shoved against either retaining wall.
I crouched, listening, smelling, and watching, my only motion the act of pulling up the hood on my stealth suit.
Let’s talk about stealth suits for a moment. Mine is pretty good, maybe not state-of-the-art, like active soldiers are issued, but still pretty good. It better be, ‘cause it cost like crazy.
The outer layer is optically reactive, like a chameleon’s skin, changing colors to blend in with the immediate environment. In fact, it was closely copied from nature, using nano-chemistry instead of electronics to provide the best camouflage available short of a Potter cloak. Those, which I leave you to guess why they are so named, used electro-optics to bend light around an object and thus hide it perfectly. Worked great for humans but not so well with drones. The electromagnetic signature was low but still detectable by drone sensors. Stealth suits had no such problem. The energy for the chemical changes in a stealth suit came from the wearer’s own body heat, which had the secondary effect of reducing the wearer’s thermal signature. Additional thermal reduction came from the internal cooling system, activated by muscle movement to circulate coolant throughout the suit. Accumulated heat was stored in insulated heat sinks in the soles of the boots that were attached to the suit.
Overall, the thermal effectiveness depended a great deal upon the weather and environment you found yourself in. Cold weather, rain storms, puddles of water or actual streams were my best friends, because of the small ports that I could dial open in the boots, allowing a really rapid dispersion of heat. Dry, hot summer weather was harder. Not impossible, but it really took a whole different approach to move about the Zone in the dog days of July and August.
Stealth suits also had a charcoal layer to absorb odors and biological tell tales that could also alert drones. Additionally, there was a thin layer of Kevlar just under the optical layer to stop some of the shrapnel tracking tags that some drones used, and it could even slow down flechettes. Not armor like JJ Johnson wears, but way better than regular clothing.
I moved down the open road slowly and carefully, head swiveling as I opened up all of my senses, feeling the breeze and getting into my own zone… in the Zone. No pun intended.
I stayed tight up to the left side retaining wall. I’ve noticed a tendency of drones to cluster on the left side of passageways, roads, and hallways, although not all do it. I don’t know if that’s deliberate programming or not. I think it is. There is a perception that people tend to turn right or stay right more than left (not sure if that’s actually a true thing) and I think the programmers plugged that into their algorithms. It doesn’t really matter if it’s true human nature or not, as long as I can use that trait to my advantage. If drones were hanging in and on the high rises to my left, then the defiladed area against the left wall was dead space that couldn’t be engaged from the left side. I used the smashed cars to give me cover from the right.
The next part was tricky. I was still in view of the Zone Authority cameras but getting really close to the end of the entrance’s kill zone, the part where the retaining walls were down to a meter in height, the tunnel exit ramp almost level with the street. I was going to be extremely exposed in short order and so I had to execute a bit of misdirection to keep my observers from learning my secrets, all while using those very same secrets to stay alive.
From a pocket on my stealth suit came a little spring-loaded device. It had started life as a mini flare launcher but was now modified to toss a little sonic package a distance of twenty-five meters. I did exactly that, lobbing the screamer over the wall and onto an open sidewalk, where it began to belt out a tone that would probably make me cringe if my human ears could have heard it. Pitched just above dog whistle range, it was actually a series of sound bursts in a complex pattern.
I know what you’re thinking. Ajaya, you lazy bastard! Are you so weak you can’t even throw a 5-gram object? Nah, I just don’t want to make a big, giant, attention-getting arm motion and maybe get laced with a couple of dozen flechettes, drilled through the skull by a laser, or blown up by a mini bomblet.
The sonic screamer activated a bit off to my side, so I hunkered down between the last wrecked car on the tunnel ramp and half a meter of retaining wall. Nothing to do now but wait, possibly anywhere from five minutes to maybe twenty or twenty-five.
The car next to me was a Kia, both windows on my side shattered, probably by kinetic fire from one of the bigger land drones during the first days of the attack. Most of the big units came ashore armed with full loads of ammo for their auto guns. Most, especially the Chinese ground raptors and the Indian Leopard units, had pretty complex ammunition usage programs that maximized the economical deployment of limited and irreplaceable rounds. During the initial attack, these units used automatic weapons fire, but most switched to single shot mode when they dropped to fifty percent of munitions load out. From there, the drone would calculate to optimize the effectiveness of their weapons use. Ten years later, these drones had almost all exhausted their ammo supplies. Only flechette shooters, which could fabricate raw ammo from any available wire stock, and laser-armed units were still capable of ranged fire. The empty gun shooters were still dangerous, adaptive combat programming allowing them to rearm with close quarters weapons like fire axes or anything that could bludgeon or cut. They also could use human firearms, which was one reason my father, myself, and every salvage person I knew policed up any stray weapons we came across.
A piece of fabric fluttered in the shattered car window, a tattered scrap of faded pinkish material that once might have been silk. It took a second before I realized it was the tip of a scarf. I felt no inclination to look into the car and see the scarf’s wearer.
You probably wonder about smell, but ten years after the attack, most bodies are now just weathered bone, which is where Kade and Kyle Bonnen had taken the inspiration for their team name: the Bone Shakers.
I sometimes find remains that have been completely desiccated, like an Egyptian mummy, usually in the upper floors of a high rise building where sunlight and intact windows worked to dry the body like jerky in an oven, but most of the dead are just bones.
My sonic screamer attracted just one drone, a long-bodied Russian wolf, its green camouflage paint chipped and scraped, but its motions still an eerie approximation of a real dog. I doubted it was alone. Usually an aerial unit works with a land-based unit, especially out here in the open. But my homemade screamers are pitched so high that they mostly fail to trip the human-based parameters most drones hunted by. There are always exceptions, as demonstrated by the hound.
A shadow shot across the road, cars, and buildings, a flier moving fast across the open sky. I looked up, but it had gone by too quick for me to see much more than a blur. Still, it was enough. My wait was over.
Keeping one eye on the wolf, I put an actual, antique dog whistle to my lips and gave a short, quick blast. The wolf lifted its coffee can metal head and turned visual sensor panels in my direction. The screamer kept screaming and I refrained from any more whistles, movements, or even deep breaths. The hound lifted one metal foot as if to investigate, but then its head abruptly tilted up, taking in an object that dropped from the sky like a meteor.
US Air Force Render drones own the high altitudes over Manhattan, but the undisputed master of the low-altitude urban airspace in the Zone was without question the Russian Berkut—the Death
Eagle. The Berkut was a sophisticated flying transformer whose shape could shift from a round hovering ball to a sleek, streamlined fighter-shaped missile that could drop on its prey at three hundred kilometers per hour and either skewer it on its spear-shaped front nose or shoot it with its 9mm x 21mm firearm.
The arrow-shaped object shot toward the ground like a bullet then suddenly pulled up, the straight spear nose shifting as the segmented body rolled up like a grapefruit-sized carbon-fiber pill bug, hovering on four turbo fans.
The wolf paused, silently communing with the Berkut, then turning and moving off to the north. The Berkut spun around slowly in place, scanning the area. It suddenly tilted two of its four hover fans and shot my way. Two seconds later, it was right in front me, gun barrel in my face.
“Hello Rikki Tikki,” I said softly, so the retreating hound wouldn’t hear.
Chapter 4
At the sound of my voice, LED lights lit up across the front of the deadly drone. My clenched stomach relaxed. Part of me always expects him to shoot me dead. “Voice recognition complete, facial recognition complete. Hello AJ,” it said in a quiet, slightly tinny voice. I had wanted to change that to an Nepali-accented voice, but there was only so much reprogramming I could do without messing up Rikki Tikki’s best features.