Zone War Read online

  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 five-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 seventy-five 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 UAV works with a land-based UGV, especially out here in the open. But my homemade screamers are pitched so high that they mostly fail to trip the human-based parameters that drones hunted by. There are always exceptions, as the Wolf was demonstrating.

  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-sized 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 four 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 V wings shifting and collapsing as the segmented body rolled up like a grapefruit-sized carbon-fiber pill bug, the whole thing hovering on four powerful 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 and a soft ticking sound came from its speakers. My clenched stomach relaxed. Part of me always expects it to shoot me dead. “Voice recognition complete. Facial recognition complete. Hello AJ,” it said in a quiet, slightly tinny British voice. I had wanted to change that to a Nepali-accented voice, but there was only so much reprogramming I could do without messing up Rikki Tikki’s best features.

  Oh and yes, I know about Kipling. I hate much of what he wrote, as did my father. We also loved some of what he wrote. Both feelings are possible with one writer. “All things come with both good and bad, Ajaya,” my father used to say. “It is up to us to find and polish the good and push away the bad.”

  Rikki hovered, waiting.

  “Target is 55 Broadway,” I said, keeping my voice just above a whisper.

  “Currently seven drone units between this location and target. Sensor override ninety-six percent likely to succeed. Distance point-four-eight kilometers.”

  Rikki Tikki is my ace in the hole. A reprogrammed drone whose upgraded processor was sophisticated and powerful enough to override the base programming of many of the drones still in the Zone. At least, within ranges that were up close and personal.

  I rose from my crouch, the hovering killer drone now leading me through the Zone to my target destination like a pet dog. Eat that, Johnson Recovery.

  I caught Rikki when my father died. I’d been obsessed with the drones since the night my family evacuated Manhattan, with me carrying Monique and Astrid carrying Gabby. I helped my father study the units that inhabited the Zone and even got my hands on some of the units that he and Brad Johnson brought out in the early years. The Berkuts fascinated me as much as the Spiders scared me. They were designed to hunt soldiers and law enforcement. Silent, swift, and armed with a powerful nine millimeter weapon whose steel-cored bullets were created to defeat body armor. I almost destroyed Rikki—came mere micro seconds from pounding his fantastically engineered frame into scrap. My father’s words stopped me. Now Rikki helped me provide for the family. And survive the Zone.

  My high school had a drone technicians college credit course, offered through a local community college, and I got hooked. The two-year degree from the same college gave me the tools I eventually used when I captured Rikki. Core code rewrite of the CPU, upgrade a bunch of components here and there, tweak the batteries and capacitors, repair the damage that happened during his capture, and voila… my own drone escort. Perhaps I’m oversimplifying everything I did, especially the software work. Ma
ybe, but that’s part of my secret. An escort that could still talk to every other drone in the Zone and convince most of them that the human target their sensors reported in Rikki’s proximity was an anomaly. A sensor phantom, erroneous data to be overridden by the Berkut’s much closer sensors and more powerful processor.

  We moved at a pretty good pace, still as stealthy as possible. Rikki’s subterfuge depends on me giving as little concrete evidence as possible. Every bit of my stealth suit technology and sniper stalking skill is required, but the complete knowledge Rikki has of the drones around us allowed me to move faster for bursts, between the drones. When we got close to a patrolling or stationary drone, I had to really be careful, and that’s when our pace slowed way down.

  Mostly we looped around the deadly machines, but at times that was impossible and we had to pass close to them. In the two years I’ve had Rikki, the sensor suppression gig has failed only a handful of times. Those episodes resulted in sudden gunfire, me with my full-auto, suppressed Five-Seven and Rikki with his internal nine millimeter. Rikki would then report to the greater drone net that the human intruder was killed at the cost of one drone. So far it had worked, but I avoided those situations like plague. Gunfights with drones are terrifying. They have machine-quick reaction times and computer-corrected aim. My only chance is overwhelming firepower from both myself and my guardian Berkut. That and the fact that most drones are either ammo depleted or shoot lightweight flechettes or underpowered lasers.

  As you might imagine, Rikki’s ammo hoppers are the only regularly refilled magazines in the Zone. I scavenged, hand loaded, and mail ordered the odd Russian ammo wherever and whenever I could to keep him topped up with both full power and subsonic rounds. My pack was always inspected upon entering the Zone, but no one ever looked at the odd-caliber rounds I was packing. Ammo was ammo and frankly, the huge .338 Lapua armor-piercing rounds my rifle ate usually got the most attention.

  55 Broadway was only half a klick from Battery Park. Back in the day, it would have taken less than ten minutes to walk there. Now it took an hour and ten minutes. Still not bad, but then the thirty-seven-story office building was looming over me, taunting me with the knowledge that I had seventeen floors to climb with a full pack that went over twenty-five kilos even though much of my gear was aluminum, plastic, or titanium. Nothing to it but to do it.

  Rikki scanned the building lobby through the two revolving doors. No drones. Lots of skeletons, but no drones. One of the lobby spinning doors was jammed open by the skeleton of a man in a security uniform. I stepped over him, foot coming down carefully so as not to snap any bones. That would be disrespectful—and noisy. Noisy is bad.

  Moving deeper into the building, I looked everywhere. What looked like four more skeletons were spread in pieces all across the floor. Just based on that, I would have guessed dogs, but the big piles of dried dog shit absolutely confirmed it.

  For the first five years after Drone Night, dogs were a huge issue. Left behind by panicking New Yorkers and ignored by the drones, dogs were everywhere. And they really only had one ready food source to work with. For a time, they were well fed. But as that primary food supply disappeared down the throats of rats, roaches, ants, foxes, more roaches, cats, raccoons, skunks, vultures, crows, ravens, and the dogs themselves, man’s abandoned best friend grew hungry. Feral and hungry, with a taste for their former masters. I’ve shot more dogs than anyone should ever have to. Some days, Dad and I would have to post up on the edge of the Zone and cull a pack with suppressed NYPD M4 carbines liberated from empty police stations. I hated those days. In those early years, the packs often kept us from getting more than a few blocks into the Zone. Worse, the drones learned to pay attention when a pack was following us. Only proximity to the containment wall and its automatic anti-drone guns kept us alive some days.

  I like dogs, a lot, but I’ll be honest. After seeing packs of thirty or forty feral mutts tear apart a Central Park deer, then follow our scent trail because they were still starving, well, let’s just say I have a trust issue. And it’s not the dogs’ fault. Abandoned and surviving as best as they could, they became what nature always intended.

  There are a lot fewer now. The easy food lying in the streets is gone, and New York winters are still harsh, so only the strongest have survived. Which means they’re much better hunters and killers than the early packs, just fewer and more spread out. It’s one of the major reasons I spray my boots with fox piss. In case you’re wondering, I buy the commercial stuff like regular hunters. I wouldn’t have a clue on how to harvest it myself. The global recession brought sustenance hunting back in a big way, as people found old ways to feed their families, and these days, the overpopulations of suburban deer are a thing of the past.

  One of the eight elevators had its door jammed open on a briefcase and what looked like a femur. The others were shut, but of course, there was no power in the building. City Maintenance shut the whole borough off when satellite and Air Force drone surveillance showed the terrorist drones tapping into the power grid to recharge.

  So it was the stairwell and seventeen stories of stairs. My father always insisted on constant physical conditioning. But at least I was smarter these days. “Rikki, scout,” I said, pointing up.

  My drone rose up the stairwell, disappearing from view for seven or eight minutes, then returning to report no collapsed stairs or blocked doors, and most importantly, no drones. That meant I could leave much of my breaking and entering gear behind. I could bring one titanium pry bar, small acetylene cutter, lockpicks, water, snacks, escape and evasion gear, and, of course, my rifle. Eight kilos of sniper rifle and ammo is a lot, but you never know what you’ll see when you’re seventeen stories high. My MSR always went with me.

  The Remington MSR might be a bit old-school for current snipers, but it was still a solid piece of ordinance. And entirely without any easily detected power sources, unlike a modern 11 millimeter electromagnetic Gauss rifle. There is also the not-insignificant fact that it was free. I found it absolutely mind-boggling that a weapon system that had cost well over $16,000 ten years ago was now mine, again courtesy of the NYPD, for free. I had two of them, at least that anyone knew of. Inside the Zone, I had stockpiles of guns, gear, and explosives like to outfit a small army, cached all over the island. But outside the Zone, I had just my DoD-issued Ruger Wesson and my two personal MSRs, all of which had to be kept at the local precinct near our apartment, checked out for each and every Zone incursion.

  My pack was lighter but still not light and I started the climb, step by step, one foot in front of the other, Rikki alternating between hovering or clinging to my pack to save power.

  I’ll skip a replay. Suffice to say, it sucked. But it also wasn’t filled with sudden death and heart-wrenching terror. No AI killing machines.

  The seventeenth floor had six financial offices on it. The one I was looking for was Rocon Financial Associates, and of course it was located on the opposite side of the building. I took my time, checking each office for surprises, of both the happy and the scary kind. My stealth suit was unzipped and pulled down to cool off my sweating torso. There was only so much the internal coolers could handle. Turns out they couldn’t cool much after floor four.

  I found bodies in three offices, being careful not to disturb them in any way. Family photos, memorabilia, and advertising swag were everywhere, on every desk. Before I went too much further, I made sure that Rikki was parked by the windows at the southeast corner of the floor, carbon nano-fiber wings spread to collect the sun on their photovoltaic surfaces.

  When I finally got to Rocon, it took fifteen minutes to scope out the office and find a total of sixteen laptops. Another five minutes identified my target. Zeus Global had provided the make, model, and serial number so I could be absolutely certain of recovery even without any way to power the PC up. Bingo.

  I would never try to turn on any piece of electronics here in Manhattan. Bringing it to life inside the Zone would result in an auto
matic query for Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, or both. Might as well stand on the roof and wave a flag.

  It wasn’t even mid-morning and my job was well over half done. Now to go down seventeen floors, sneak half a kilometer to Battery Park, and home free, baby. Shit, I’d probably beat the twins home before they were done with school. They didn’t even know I had gone in today.

  I wrapped the laptop in bubble wrap, slipped it into a Faraday net, and then packed the bundle deep in my pack. My rifle came out of the carry sling built into my pack, leaving my back a net six kilos lighter. Holding the MSR in my arms would be easier going down, and I always carried my rifle for at least part of every ingress and egress, if only to keep my arms conditioned to its weight. Mission accomplished, I went to collect Rikki.