Borough of Bones Read online

  Eros nodded, reluctantly, but Primmer just kept pounding ahead, awkward and jerky yet maintaining a steady pace.

  Behind us, I could hear a soft whirring. Then came the crunch-crunch of steel on asphalt. They were gaining—rapidly. Time for another new trick or two. “Rikki, sweep left. Prep for Boomer two.”

  My Berkut ticked four times fast to acknowledge the command and then shot off to the west, heading to the right of the path behind us.

  I pulled a soda-can-sized grenade from my left leg pocket, primed it, and set it down on the street, backing away swiftly but carefully. The cylinder sat still for a second, then sprouted four little legs that proceeded to lift it up about two centimeters off the ground. It beeped softly, letting me—its operator—know that it was armed, then it started a slow creep down the street, headed back the way we came. I turned and ran to catch up with the others, who had moved about forty meters ahead.

  As soon as I got to them, I spun around, covering our six, and just in time as a hundred and fifty meters away, a new cloud of drones shot into sight. My rifle was already up and sighted their way so I tapped off two rounds, not expecting to hit anything but just to focus their threat identification protocols. Even as I fired, I kept up a fast backward shuffle.

  One drone spun away, clipped by a lucky .458 bullet, leaving only a dozen to maybe a dozen and a half to seal our doom. The little mobile grenade kept up its slow steady crawl down the street, now fifty or so meters away from us.

  I fired two more shots at the drones as I continued to tread carefully backward, following my trainees. Both shots missed as the drones engaged in wild looping evasive movements that maybe slowed their forward progress a teeny bit and possibly bought us a second or two, but more importantly kept their focus on me.

  The aerial drones shot forward and at least two had laser weapons, as my visor suddenly darkened. The military stealth suits we were wearing were state-of-the-art and the eye protection was rated for most hand and drone-mounted laser weapons. The drones were trying to blind me.

  The little grenade stopped walking and crouched down.

  “Open your mouths,” I yelled ahead to Eros and Primmer.

  The Zone drones were already halfway to us when the grenade suddenly jumped a full meter off the ground and then exploded with enough force to knock me backward and down. The XM-2080 Multi-purpose Urban Novel Explosive grenade was the thermobaric weapon for the modern warfighter. You could set it behind or send it on a path, ready to fire its air fuel explosive at the first motion it sensed. You could also theoretically throw it, but you better have an arm like a major league pitcher or an NFL quarterback, because the blast radius was much, much greater than a normal hand-thrown ASM hand grenade. And the thing about big blasts in urban areas is the shockwave propagation factor of houses and buildings. The damage effects of bouncing concussive waves off flat walls is enormous.

  My ears rang despite the automatic noise dampeners in my suit’s hood, while pieces of debris fell all around me. I glanced at the sergeants, saw Eros pulling Primmer back to his feet, and then looked back at our pursuers.

  Only four drones were still flying, and all four were wobbly at best, with bits and pieces of the other drones strewn all about the ground below them. That’s when Rikki swept in from their flank, firing six times to kill all four of the survivors. Perfectly executed tactical maneuver we had titled Boomer Two.

  I turned and ran, quickly catching up to the trainees and then past them, getting fifteen meters out ahead.

  “Where the fuck are you going?” Primmer demanded, even as I slowed and brought my rifle up, fiber optic gunsight locked to my eye.

  I held out my left hand out and back in the military small unit stop signal. My ears were still ringing and I really needed to hear. Even when the two professional soldiers instantly stopped and stayed quiet, I was still having trouble hearing anything. Then a pair of pigeons took off from the corner of a building sixty meters ahead and I swung around to cover the spot with my rifle. Nothing happened. Suddenly a gray and brown spotted metal and synthetic monster exploded through the front window of the defunct business, landing and jumping at almost the same time. My first shot missed the Leopard, a big divot of exploding asphalt telling me I was low and left.

  Then it was in the air, hurtling straight at me, seventy-five kilos of steel and carbon fiber death coming at me at twenty meters a second. My trigger finger flexed all on its own, with no conscious decision on my part. A triple tap, with the first round shooting under the bot and the last over it, but the middle round was the Goldilocks bullet—just right. Hit dead center where the neck collar met the torso of the mechanical beast.

  My supply guy, Egan, somehow found a cache of these old .458 caliber dangerous game bullets from Speer Corporation. With a heavy core of tungsten carbide, they had been deemed an expensive overkill for hunters thirty years ago, especially when all African big game hunting was aggressively outlawed, but they were absolutely perfect for armored land drones. The big, heavy bullets either punched right through the armor or imparted so much kinetic energy that they could literally stun a UGV the size of an Indian Leopard, especially with the borderline excessive charge of smokeless powder that I hand loaded under them.

  This bot hit the ground two meters in front of me and skidded almost to my feet even as I hopped, skipped, and jumped backward, putting two more bullets into it to keep it down. The killing machine twitched and spasmed, steel claws raking white lines in the faded pavement.

  “Tiger unit has circled ahead and ceased broadcasting its transponder signal,” Rikki reported from overhead. “Distance to barrier approximately .7 kilometers.”

  Great. More than halfway to safety and we only had to get by the most feared land drone ever fielded.

  Chapter 3

  We hit the corner of W 207th and Seaman Ave, immediately turning right onto Seaman. “Stay away from the forest. It’s not your friend today,” I said, eyes on Primmer in particular. Neither said a word, just kept moving as steadily as they could. Primmer was pale, extra pale, but Eros only looked a little better by comparison. Still, they were professionals and they kept up the pace. Overhead, Rikki moved in circular sweeps, watching but otherwise quiet. Bird sound in the woods reassured me, and the only other noises were the huffing of exhausted bodies and the scrape of boots and a chair-back crutch.

  I moved myself to the middle of the road, between the sergeants and the forest, with Eros and Primmer on the developed side of the street. That was all well and good right up until the buildings stopped and the park took over both sides of the road, right at the corner of Isham Street. A big pit formed in my stomach. This was prime ambush territory.

  I was still on the left side of my soldiers, watching the trees, with Eros covering the right side with his HK 417 7.62mm. Yoshida had dug up some great older guns when I insisted on only cartridge weapons, no electro mag rifles. Zone Defense now had a whole cache of these Heckler & Koch rifles.

  Suddenly the vegetation on my side thinned and I could see an open area. A second later, I realized it was a set of old ball fields, the tree cover thinning to almost nothing. I glanced to the right, to a forest much thicker than I was facing. And both men were crowding close to that side. The pit in my stomach ballooned.

  “Watch the tre—” was all I got out before the Tiger exploded from the upper branches of a big maple.

  Leaves, branches, and bark flew as the metal monster launched itself in a close approximation to a real tiger. Time slowed to a crawl, my rifle barrel weighing a metric ton as I tried to yank it around to the Tiger. Small bullets from Rikki smacked into the leaping bot with no appreciable effect.

  Eros’s rifle fired twice, missing once and getting a glancing shot off the armored back of the drone. Then the Tiger piled into Primmer, rolling him up like a rag doll, razor-bladed jaws clamping onto his neck and shoulder. He screamed, briefly, then grunted as the weight of the machine slammed into his stomach.

  Eros waved his rif
le around, trying to get a clear shot, but I just started firing, focusing on the gray and black wherever I could. The machine’s hind feet came up to its metal underside, the long steel claws sank into Primmer’s belly, and the bot flexed both hydraulically driven legs, ripping Primmer into two pieces with a wet tearing sound.

  My gun fired and fired till it clicked empty and the Tiger shook in jerky tremors, processors dying, its metal body wearing the bloody remains of my trainee.

  Chapter 4

  “Take us through it again,” Yoshida said for like the fifth time.

  Wearily, I restarted the same awful tale I had told over and over. The first three times, I hadn’t been interrupted, but the fourth time, he started asking questions halfway through. This time, I didn’t make it to the first quarter of the story.

  “What exactly did you tell them?”

  “I said Stay here, hydrate and eat, but don’t touch anything.”

  “Why?”

  “What do you mean why? So that they wouldn’t blunder into a drone and get killed.”

  “But you said earlier that Primmer felt he had to clear the building?”

  “We weren’t staying there longer than a rest stop. You don’t overextend in situations like that. Minimal activity, minimal disturbance.”

  “And you were upstairs?”

  “Yes, glassing the area from the bedroom windows.”

  “And it was okay for you to go up there because…”

  “I had Rikki clear it first. That’s how I do it. I use the drone as much as possible.”

  “What if you didn’t have the drone, like Primmer didn’t because you had the Kestrels outside the building?”

  “First of all, I showed them how I do it with Rikki and had them use the same commands with the Kestrels. When our immediate area was clear, I sent the drones outside. Rikki was on scouting duty and the two Kestrels were half hidden, sensors looking for any incoming bots.

  “Second, if I had to do it by myself, without a drone, it would take a couple of hours to do it right. It’s a painfully slow process. You wanted a short in-and-out training run to get them started. So we were going to be leaving that house in like twenty more minutes.”

  “So Primmer went into the basement and what? Woke up the Crab?”

  “I was upstairs. I only know that I heard a pair of .22 shots and then we had to kill the Crab, which had already sent out an alert.”

  “Why didn’t Rikki find the Crab when it scanned the building?”

  He knew this, I was certain, but he waited for me to answer. “Crabs are hideaway drones. Mobile long-term anti-personnel units. They find a spot and go dormant. Often they drop an arc of little miniature passive sensors around themselves, on thin wires, then power down to the barest minimum. Almost no EM output. If I had to guess, it was likely hunkered on the sill of basement window, so that it would get at least a little solar power each day. If Primmer stepped onto the stairs without fully clearing them, then he would likely have tripped a sensor. That’s why fully clearing a building is so slow.”

  Yoshida frowned at me, clearly unhappy with my words.

  “Tell me how you would have cleared the basement—using your drone.”

  “I’d crack the door from well behind it. Rikki would be rolled up in ball form, sitting on the floor so he wasn’t making any hovering sounds. I’d let him sense the space till he was ready to lift off and hover down. He finds Crabs usually within the first ten seconds. If not right away, once he goes in, he trips their sensors and then they ping him for his transponder code.”

  “So you find them, then what next?”

  “Depends on where they are, what I have with me, and what’s available in the house.”

  “Explain?”

  “Well, I’ve flooded them with water, especially when they’re in a basement. But sniping them with a suppressed round is usually the safest and cleanest way to clear them. They don’t have much armor, so even a handgun round will do it. One time, I sprayed one with a fire extinguisher, then smashed it with the empty canister.”

  He frowned again and flicked his fingers through the air in front of him. Immediately his left eye lit up with a reddish light as he scanned some information on his contact lens feed.

  “You’ve turned in only fifteen Crabs in your entire career, and most were early on?”

  “You guys pay almost nothing for Crabs. What, like fifty bucks or something? Not worth the weight of hauling them anywhere. I kill ‘em and leave them near the doorway so that if I ever come through that building again, I’m reminded I was already there.”

  “So, it was Primmer’s fault?”

  I sighed. “No, it was mine. I should have sat on both of them. Primmer was a bit argumentative, always questioning my decisions. I should have realized he wouldn’t stay still.”

  “Ah, but Sergeant Primmer was a professional US Army sniper. He had years of experience and countless hours of training. According to Eros, he didn’t listen to his instructor.”

  “Eros said that?”

  “He did. He said that both of them were put off by your age and the fact you weren’t even military. But Eros followed the chain of command, despite his misgivings. Primmer didn’t.”

  “Still my fault. Four trainees into the Zone and one is already dead. I can’t do this anymore. But then, you’re cancelling this program, right?”

  Yoshida’s eyebrows had gone up as I spoke. When I was done, he smiled, just ever so slightly, then shook his head. “No, Ajaya. We don’t give up because we have setbacks and losses. We review, study, plan, and adapt new tactics.”

  “But they aren’t going to listen to me. They don’t have any respect for me. I haven’t earned it in their eyes,” I said.

  His own brown eyes widened as though something was occurring to him. “Ah, then we change our orientation program. We show them all the reasons why they need to listen, why they should respect you, why they have to obey. Every single one of them is a volunteer. We go over the risks but maybe we can do it in a more graphic manner. I have some ideas about that. Now, we’re done here for the moment. You should head back to your family. Losing a soldier weighs on a leader like nothing else. You did the best you could do, which in my estimation was likely better than anyone else could do. But soldiers are people and people have their own minds. We will use this a teachable moment.”

  “Why is Zone Defense doing this? Are you looking to clear the northern part of the borough? Trying to move the barrier south? Reclaiming something to show progress?”

  His eyes narrowed. “The mission parameters are on a need-to-know basis. But you, my friend, are pretty sharp. Go home, Ajaya. We’ll talk about your training program tomorrow.”

  So I found myself back at the family apartment after securing my weapons at the precinct house around the corner. Aama was there, and for a change, so was my mother. Our recent work with the Zone War show, as well as our portion of the proceeds from my dead drone caches that we had shared with Johnson Recovery, had put us in a pretty good financial condition and so Mom wasn’t having to work as many hours, teaching language or doing translation work.

  I opened the door quietly, hearing their voices immediately. Not sure if I wanted to face them, I headed to my room to drop off the rest of my gear. As I came back out, Mom was waiting in the hallway. Her eyes did a quick eval, scanning me head to toe before focusing on my face.

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “I, ah… ah, well one of my guys, he didn’t—Mom—it’s all my fault,” I said, dropping my eyes from hers.

  Instantly I was wrapped in a tight hug and when I lifted my head, I found my grandmother standing just behind Mom, worry and sympathy mixed in her expression.

  “Was there a death?” Mom asked gently.

  I nodded. “He didn’t listen, but I should have known.”