Zone War Read online

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. At some point during the episode, I 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 CThree 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 two hundred thirty 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 CThree was approaching 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 CThrees 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 CThrees 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 often, 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 Tigers, about twenty Russian Wolves, and a veritable flock of various flying units were two CThrees sitting in the open, charging batteries like the rest. The CThrees look like their nickname—Spiders—black-painted, armored spiders, each the size of a sofa loveseat, except these Spiders have seven legs, not eight.

  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 paid kills are kinda low. My actual tagged 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. Ignorant 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 your real deal, 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 anyway—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 guard
s 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 away 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 AIs.

  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 that I had been combing 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 weasel’s 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 Wars teams used to file plans with the Zone Authority. 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 that 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 six years older than me 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 clusterfuck that was JR in action. My area of operation would be knee-deep in drones for the rest of the day once they began 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 soles of 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 telltales 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 arm
or 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.