Ember (3 page)

FOUR

Three days later I sat at a desk studying the three holoscreens that floated above it, looking through the satellite images for anything new that might have emerged in the past few days. In the widest shot the curve of the haan force field covered the top right corner, while the curve of the security wall covered the lower left. In between were the ruins, the sections of Hangfei that had been wiped out when the haan arrived. Illegal operations sometimes hid in there to stay under the radar, and these guys had burrowed in pretty deep, about halfway between the wall and the force field.

Closer shots showed the plant itself, or what could be seen of it. Most of it had been cleared out underneath the wreckage of toppled buildings, in what survived of the bottom floors, but three separate clearings were being used as landing pads to get in and out. Markups on the images called out the exits, and based on old zoning maps the site they'd holed up in had once been a fiber optic cable plant. I pulled the blueprints up on the brain band, and laid a scaled image of them over the satellite picture. It fit well enough that you could almost see the factory's outline in the wreckage. The landing areas surrounding it had probably once been parking lots.

I saw Chief Inspector Ling step out of his office and signal to me from across the room. I switched off the displays and the others at the desks surrounding mine watched with interest as I rose, then headed down the row to join him. Everyone knew about the raid, and knew that the new guy had been given a position on the team. The rumors of my work in Lobnya, including the isolated recon missions of meat processing plants I'd taken part in, had begun to circulate, and voices muttered back and forth as I left the group to follow Ling down the hall.

“Kill one for me,” someone said as I passed.

I caught up to Ling, who had his tablet tucked under one arm and a steaming paper cup of instant tea in his hand.

“This is it, Shao,” he said. “You ready to get back in the game?”

“Yes, sir.”

He pushed open the door to one of the briefing rooms and I followed him in. Sitting scattered among the formation of folding chairs were a group of twelve men. I'd sat with them before on three different occasions while the logistics of the raid had been hashed out, but they had a different set about them now. They knew that after this quick briefing we would be deployed to the security wall, and from there into the rim. Some strained at the bit, while others sat still and unreadable. One, a younger gung-ho type named Shen Liao who'd latched onto me, grinned as he watched us enter. His buddy Xing Su sat next to him looking a bit more serious, while Officer Lo Heng, the man running point on the mission, sat up front with his arms crossed in front of him. He nodded at me, and I took a seat next to him as Ling approached a video screen mounted on the wall and waved a small remote at it.

“You'll be leaving shortly,” he said. “Before you do, I want you all to take a look at this. Last night the satellite took a deep scan, and got some last-minute intel.”

The satellite images that were familiar to all of us by then appeared on the screen, this time overlaid with thermal imagery. There were groups of faint dots visible, and several larger blobs. One big one in particular also had the highest temperature.

“There's the cooker,” I said, pointing. Ling nodded.

“Yes. The other large signatures are generators, we think. The smaller points are people.”

I scanned the image, counting seventeen dots. Most of them were clustered together in a group, while the others were more scattered. Ling advanced the frames, and the large group stayed still while the others moved around.

“Captives,” I said, pointing at the group. “They never move. They're stuck somewhere.”

“That's from last night,” Su said. “They could also be hostiles bunked down for the night.”

I looked at the cluster. They were arranged almost in a circle. Not what you'd normally expect to see in a bunkhouse.

“If they're captives, then that makes only seven hostiles.”

“And seventeen if they're not,” Ling said. “The satellites are still scanning. We hope to have more information by the time you arrive but for now assume the worst case and that you'll meet with maximum resistance. Either way you should expect to begin your assault soon.”

“Why would they even keep the captives alive?” Su asked. “That's just more trouble for them, isn't it? Plus food, water . . . why bother?”

“No refrigeration,” I told him. “Meat won't spoil if it's alive, so they don't butcher until right before they cook. They don't keep them around long enough for them to starve, so they just have to give them the bare minimum of water.”

Ling looked at the images for a long while.

“That's your assessment, Shao?” he asked.

“I've seen it before, sir.”

“Okay,” Ling said. “We'll keep an eye on those thermals. If they don't move by the time you're ready to go in, then work on the assumption that there are survivors inside and they'll need to be recovered,” he said. “You'll all get brain band links to the new images, and we'll keep it updated from here as best we can. Any other questions?”

There weren't.

“Then the transport is waiting,” Ling said. “It will take you to the rim's security wall. They'll provide you with everything you need to go into the impact zone, so get geared up and wait for word that it's clear to go in. Remember: When you hit, hit hard. I want that plant out of commission. If there are captives inside, then get them out safe, but anyone else, you know what to do. Once the site is secure, make sure no one ever uses it again. Understood?”

“Understood, sir,” Heng said.

“Then let's go.”

Heng stood and addressed the rest of us.

“You heard him,” he said. “Transport pad 54B. Let's move.”

When I stood and we began to file out, Liao and Su made their way over to me.

“Ready to take care of some bad guys?” Liao asked.

“Ready.”

“He's going to show us how they do things in the borderlands,” he said to Su.

“Take no prisoners,” Su said. “Right?”

“Right,” I said, and Liao grinned.

“I should have joined,” he said.

“You still can,” I told him, but he just shrugged. He wouldn't join.

It felt like soldiering, though. Watching the younger men file through the door, watching them get psyched up for the promise of action to come, it reminded me of the border zone. For one of the first times since I'd returned, I felt at home.

When I followed them out, the situation felt black and white, like Ling had said. No conflicting orders, no turning a blind eye . . . just stopping the bad guys from hurting the good guys.

Simple.

FIVE

Stationed on the security wall at the impact rim, a day passed with no word from command. The men's excitement turned to frustration, until they'd holed up in the barracks below to alternate between watching the brain band feed and complaining. Without so much as an update from Ling, a second day passed, and with Fangwenzhe burning in the dark blue sky, the order to go in still had not come.

Scanning . . .

The word pulsed in one corner of my brain band's holoscreen as it had for the past hour. I'd been searching for a remote node, any node that might belong to a captive inside the factory. No doubt the farmers had disabled any implants they found, but if I did catch a signal I could use a security override to access the device. If I could do that, I'd be able to switch it back on, but after a long stretch of silence I thought I might have to concede soon that there was nothing to find.

Just one signal. Anything at all.

“What the hell are you doing up here?”

I glanced back and saw Liao had come up to join me.

“Killing time.”

“Killing time?” He approached and leaned against the rail next to me.

“Scanning the brain band for nodes.”

“Why? You think if you find proof someone's in there they'll give the order for us to go in?”

“No. They know they're in there.”

Liao shrugged. When he didn't say anything, I pressed him. “What's the deal, Liao? Ling was primed for this. Hell, for a second I thought he was going to grab a sword and lead the charge. Then nothing?”

Liao took a black cigarette out of his pack and lit it. The wind made the end flare bright red as he took a drag.

“Heng said no word at all from Ling,” he said. “Someone above him must have stepped in.”

“Why?”

“Who knows?” Liao said. “Make sure their name gets attached to it? Take credit?”

“Are you serious?”

He made a face. “I don't know why. Who knows? They tell me to go, and I go.”

I looked out over the rail.

“There's innocent people in there,” I said.

“Maybe.”

“They're there.”

“Yeah, well, you shouldn't be messing around on the brain band. You pick up any node it'll just belong to a scrapper. You'll just warn them we're here.”

“I'll be careful.”

Liao wrinkled his forehead, and let a short laugh out through his nose.

“You're pushing it, you know?”

“I know.”

“Command says stay put and wait.”

“I know.”

“You ever been inside the rim?” he asked.

I shook my head. “You?”

“Twice. These places are dangerous on many levels, Shao. You could get killed in the rim before you ever even find the place. You could never find the place, and get lost in there and never get out. Once you get in, these guys are heavily armed psychos creeping around in abandoned factories that half the time are ready to collapse on your head if you're not careful. It doesn't pay to rush in.”

“We've been watching the site for two days.”

“You border zone guys probably just stormed in, huh?”

“Not exactly,” I said, and sighed. There had been plenty of waiting there, too. “At least it's warm here.”

“I heard it snows up there.”

“Yeah.”

“How do they not freeze?”

“They have power in Lobnya, off and on. If they lose it and they can't get sterno, they burn furniture.”

“Are you serious?”

I nodded.

“What do they eat?”

“They're on the fringe, so their feedlots got carved up by toughs from the splinter states to the north along with most of their fuel and heavy weapons. If they can get government rations they eat those, or if they can't they scrounge for anything left behind by the refugees that got out before the border closed. Lots of them starve.”

“Damn.”

“If they get desperate enough, they find one of our barricades to try and get food.”

“Sounds like a form of suicide,” Liao said.

“You get hungry enough, what are you going to do?”

Liao gestured toward the closest graviton lens, one of the hulks that sat at regular intervals around the wall, pointing in toward the haan ship.

“You ever think we should just trigger the damn things?” he asked.

“What, wipe out the haan?”

“Seventy percent,” he said. “That's a lot of food we send their way. With them gone, it could feed a lot of people. You think?”

I looked to the huge five story orbs with trailing pipes and cables at the back of each. They always made me think of eyeballs with hanging nerves. Their lenses pointed in at the haan ship. If they were ever all activated, the focused graviton fields would pass right through the haan force field and collapse their ship into a dense blob of slag no bigger than an aircar. Though really, the failsafe remained in place mainly for the purpose of keeping the protesters comfortable. Neither Hwong, nor his superiors, had any intention of harming the haan and stopping that flow of technology.

“I think without the haan and their tech, there'd be less food and it would be controlled by an elite few. Most people would just starve anyway.”

He laughed. “You're a cynic.”

“Have you seen the updated thermals?” I asked him.

Liao's smile faded, and his laugh dried up.

“Yeah.”

“The cooker's heating back up. They'll be ready for a new batch soon.”

Liao glanced back over his shoulder, then leaned in and lowered his voice.

“Hey, just take it easy,” he said. “I want to save them too but I don't want to get killed doing it. Another night won't change anything.”

“A night could change everything. It could mean the difference between some of them getting killed, and all of them.”

“Look, maybe you don't like the timetable, but that site is going down, that's the important thing. After that, they won't be grabbing anyone else. This isn't the border zone, you can't just call in an air strike or something here and—”

“You've got it wrong,” I said. “I got sent to recon three processing plants, just like now. Every time, we got called back once we determined none of our soldiers were in there with the rest. That's how we handled it at the border. We knew there were people in there—knew it, just like now, and we left them there. Three different times.”

Liao didn't say anything. I don't think he knew what to say. His face had fallen a bit, and he'd taken a step back from the rail. I took a breath, and made myself calm down.

“You know I asked an officer why, once,” I said. “I asked him what the official policy on that was, and you know what he told me? He said that command's feeling was that the less hungry the locals were, the less trouble they'd be.”

“We won't get called back,” Liao said. “I can promise that. I don't know what the holdup is, but this isn't normal. Something has to be up, something we don't know. Have a little faith.”

“This was supposed to be different.”

“It is, trust me.”

A
CTIVE
N
ODE
D
ETECTED.

The alert splashed up on the holoscreen.

“Hang on, I've got something.”

“Shao, you've got to run that by Heng. He's running this show.”

“I will.”

I polled the device and pulled up its info. The node was a 2i model, several years old. They were popular with kids, used mainly for social networking. The main transmitter had been switched off, but not the backdoor police band.

I established a link and sifted through the data sitting in the 2i's storage. There were a lot of social contacts, music files, and videos all wrapped in a bubblegum-pink theme. When I pulled the 2i's serial numbers and ran a lookup on the purchase and installation, I got a full name—Xiao-Xing Zheng, a twelve year old girl whose address was in the system as “unknown.”

“It's a kid,” I said.

Using a security override code, I switched her transmitter back on.

Xiao-Xing?

A few seconds passed, then she responded.

who r u?

I'm here to help.

u can help me?

“Tell me you're not initiating contact,” Liao said.

What is your situation?
I asked.

Another pause.

they r going 2 kill us

Who is?

butchers

I turned back to Liao.

“It's a little girl,” I said.

He sighed. “You're going to take heat for this. We were told to hold our position.”

“I did.”

“Initiating communication is an overt move.”

“It's a gray area.”

“Gray area,” he said, shaking his head. “You hang out here in your gray area. I'm going to go hold my position. Let me know when it's either time to shoot bad guys or they shitcan you.”

“A little girl, Liao.”

He left, and I heard him start back across the wall to the stairwell door. I wondered if he'd report it to Heng, or if he'd just stay out of it.

who r u?
she asked.

My name is Dragan Shao. I'm with security.

really?

Yes. We know you're there and we're going to help you.

I looked her up and found her in the system as the daughter of Jin Zheng and Shuang Zheng, both of them flagged names. When I brought up the details, I found that the three had lived in a crash tube assembly, a dump called Baishan Park that rented out fiberglass coffins you couldn't even sit up in. Four years ago her mother, Shuang, had been found bludgeoned to death in the park just outside their unit. Witnesses fingered the father, Jin, who had fled only to be found dead of an overdose two months later. The daughter had never been found. They'd canvased the area, but in the end the case was closed and she'd slipped through the cracks. She must have been on the street ever since.

Xiao-Xing, are you alone?

no

How many others are with you?

10

Where are you?

in a pit, chained to the wall

A circular pit, like a well?

yes

That fit the thermal imagery. The heat markers were arranged in a circle, not moving.

How many scrappers are there?

6.
No hesitation there.

Are they armed?

yes

With what?

i've seen pistols, shotguns, and blades. big ones.

For a kid, she wasn't half bad. She'd been paying attention.

Are there any scrappers there now?

no but they r coming back

When?

i don't know.
Pause.
i don't want 2 die

You won't. Hang in there okay?

k

Help is coming.