Fear the Survivors (34 page)

At certain points Amadeu slowed the experience, reviewing particularly complex and fast maneuvers, and the antagonistic response times of Hektor’s subordinates. Hektor was one of the rare ones. Hektor got it. He felt rather than looked. He sensed his surroundings through radar eyes rather than trying to interpret it back to sight and sound. Hektor’s heart sang with the music of the interface.

And he was getting better. One hundred thirty-five milliseconds. That was the best yet. When Hektor’s team had him pinned down, the lone CO had been fending off five highly trained shock troops at once. And he had nearly won. He had been on fire. The suit had been forced to limit his heart rate to two hundred twenty beats per minute. His brain had been a swarm of activity, pure adrenalin had pumped like joy through him, and he had almost become one with the suit.

Almost.

Minnie:

Amadeu:
‘yes … our best … but not good enough, not yet.’

Minnie:

Amadeu:
‘i know, i know, i am not trying to be defeatist. but even then the problem remains, we don’t need one person who can do this, we need hundreds.’

Minnie:

Amadeu:
‘i know. it is unlikely she will reach much below 140.’

There were only three people who could consistently get below one hundred fifty milliseconds: Hektor, Amadeu, and another scientist on Amadeu’s team, William Baerwistwyth. When engaged in their respective areas of expertise, they had all registered phenomenal interaction times.

Amadeu thought he knew why
he
could do it. He was the man who had conceived of the software, he understood it at its most fundamental level, like an architect understands every corner and nook of a house. Naturally he could navigate its corridors on an intuitive level.

Amadeu’s colleague William was a different matter. William Baerwistwyth had been born with many disadvantages in life, not least of which being his last name. But the greatest of which was a rare form of muscular dystrophy which had stunted his muscular development and eventually forced it to regress, confining him to a wheelchair.

At eight, he had been able to use only his arms and hands. By twelve, only his neck had been responsive. By twenty, he had only his speech and the movement of his eyes as his skeletal musculature finally all but failed him. But the mind that had been driven into isolation by misfortune had been a strong one, and he had flourished as a doctorate student in advanced robotics, writing and cowriting several pivotal papers on speech recognition and synthetic senses via the primitive eye-flick-based GUIs available to him.

William’s scientific excellence no doubt qualified him for a place on one of Madeline’s research teams, but it had not been the reason Amadeu had requested that Madeline recruit William.

Though Amadeu would never tell William the truth, Amadeu had actually been motivated by a desire to see how an advanced mind, limited by circumstance to intellectual, instead of physical pursuits, might react to the spinal interface. William’s disease was not neurological, and his nervous system was almost cruelly unaffected. It simply had no functioning muscles to instruct. The truth was that Amadeu hoped William’s lack of preconceptions about how his nerves should inform his body’s movements might leave him open to interact with the machine more efficiently.

In return for being an unwitting participant in this rather cold-blooded experiment, William had been granted something fantastic, for in the machine world, he had once again enjoyed the gift of movement. He was able to experience sensations an able-bodied person would be jealous of, and, not surprisingly, he had flourished.

It had nearly worked, as well. William had learned to commune with the system even faster than Amadeu had. He had quickly surged up to meet the well-practiced Amadeu as one of the fastest users of the interface.

But it had not been enough, for even William had begun to plateau at the same level Amadeu had. And so they had come up against the wall once more.

Amadeu screamed silently at the frustration of it all. He had not been logged in for very long, but he needed to be out, to be alone, and the one thing that the pervasive feel of being jacked in could not provide was a sense of solitude.

And so he bid farewell to Minnie for a moment and opened his eyes. His connection severed, his link silent, he remained lying there, staring at the ceiling.

He felt the familiar sense of loss at the sudden reduction of his world once more to the four beige walls of his office. The inflexibility of his senses. So mundane when compared to the ebb and flow of pure information when he swam in the ether.

Of course, where Amadeu experienced a sense of loss when he unplugged from the system, William experienced a sense closer to imprisonment as he was returned to the cell of his traitorous body. So where everyone else had limiters on their time in system, Amadeu had covertly disabled the limits on William, a fact that Madeline and Birgit had both discovered independently, and both ignored with just as little consultation.

But Amadeu wanted that isolation. He felt he deserved it.

What was different?

Why could Hektor do it so well when others struggled?

Why could even the very best of his team still not achieve the hypothetical perfection they sought?

These questions bounced around in his mind, almost as though they wished to escape down the spinal tap that he had closed at the back of his neck. And as they rebounded around in his brain for the thousandth time, a voice told him he knew the answer.

A voice told him that he simply needed to be willing to hear it.

For it was not something these soldiers lacked that stopped them from interfacing perfectly with the machine, it was something they
had
. Amadeu knew that, deep down he knew that.

Amadeu took a deep breath and closed his eyes. A feeling of shame at what he was about to do came over him even deeper than it had when he had requested the recruitment of William. For where it could be said that William had benefited from being part of the mental experiments Amadeu was conducting, what he was about to do had no such upside.

With a sigh of resignation and a sense of self-loathing at his inability to find another way, Amadeu opened up his link once more. He did not step wholly into the ether, but instead sent a closed signal to another mind. This mind was also tapped into the network that connected Neal’s global triptych of Research, Construction and Military Groups. As always, the link to this mind was open, for this link was actually built into the mind of its host, one of only four such links on Earth.

Amadeu:
‘lord mantil, if you have a moment, i have a request to make of you.’

Quavoce:
‘greetings, amadeu. how may i be of service?’

Amadeu:
‘it’s complicated, quavoce. I want to talk to you about your ward. I want to talk to you about banu.’

Chapter
30: Drop Zone – Part One

The craft left without ceremony just after sunset. With barely a word
, Hektor and his team of Spezialists stepped up to the strange plane and were guided by Captain Falster into their respective cubbies. As they climbed aboard, the ship grasped them in its black embrace, and one by one the six slots sealed their now unconscious bodies into its wings. Jennifer then walked over to the last remaining open cubby and stepped up into it, feeling the ship reach out to her, and latch into her consciousness as it also sealed her into its secure grasp.

With everyone safely stowed, Jennifer opened her machine eyes and flexed her black muscles. Inside her mind, the biometrics of her six passengers confirmed all her wards were in the computer-induced hibernation known as cybernation, and all had been ready.

At a signal from Jennifer, two other members of Ayala’s team opened the big hangar doors, exposing the Slink to the recently fallen night. Engaging the esoteric engine, a tall, invisible magnetic corkscrew formed at the center of her plane’s hollow discus heart. As the corkscrew began to whirl, the resulting downdraft lifted the big black wheel off the ground.

Outside the darkened hangar, the ground crew stared, somewhat awed, as the strange object floated quietly out into the warm equatorial night on a cushion of downthrust air. Their hair was being brushed this way and that as though by a helicopter’s vortex, but no noise came with the power. The magnetic blades whirling at the center of the wide disc made no sound as they spun, and only the powerful gust of wind on their faces gave the ground crew any clue as to how the machine was able to glide so easily out of the hangar.

Once free of its confines, Jennifer did not waste time. She did not need to receive clearance from central traffic control to pass through the heavily guarded airspace over SpacePort One; they would barely register her passage anyway. And so she ramped up the ship’s engine, thrusting the air down toward the ground with massive torque, and launched the ship skyward into the night sky.

Spiraling upward, the Slink vanished into the night, out of the SpacePort’s gun range, and up to its relatively low cruising altitude to begin their long flight to Russia. From his office in the very bowels of SpacePort One’s concrete mass, Neal monitored their departure from his desk, Jennifer’s flight control feeding directly into his spinal interface via the hub’s tweeter.

He watched them fly out into the darkness. He did not say good-bye, he did not even let Jennifer know he was watching.

- - -

That had been four hours ago. With Romania and Moldova behind them, and the Ukraine flying by beneath them at just over a thousand miles per hour, they were now fast approaching the zero hour, and Jennifer notified her passengers.

Captain Falster:
‘hektor, spezialists, we are seven minutes from the border. if you can begin your preparations. the sensor feed is available, should you want to track our progress, and I have marked our destination and made the flight data available should you want to accept that input. I’ll initiate the drop timer once we’re within range.’

The team started their checks. It was a relatively moot exercise, partially because they had checked and double-checked their systems before takeoff, and partially because they were about to attempt something never before even imagined. There was only so much you could do to prepare for something that was essentially only theoretically possible. But prepared they had, and now they went over their plans once more as the disc flew onward through the night, its long magnetic drive tube parallel to the ground now, though invisible, so that the hollow disc, with its stubby wings, looked like crosshairs slicing through the air.

As they had accelerated upward from Sao Tome, Jennifer had begun to angle them toward the northeast, the ship’s stubby wings giving her the lift she needed as she angled the ship’s magnetic thrusters bodily toward their destination. Then they had accelerated up to over a thousand miles an hour as they streaked across Northern Africa, out over Cypress toward southern Greece, and onward toward Eastern Europe.

But now they were nearing their destination, and as they breached the Russian border, the Slink’s passive sensor suite felt the wash of radar coming from Russia’s dense border controls. Though it was a tense few minutes, the craft did indeed pass unnoticed, the ground radar blissfully ignorant of the Slink’s silent puncturing of Russian airspace. As they cleared the initial border defenses, Jennifer tilted the ship slightly earthward and began their brief descent, the countdown timer starting as she did so.

The team felt the timer begin, and they sensed the plane start to descend. It was a minute, drawn out by the speed of their unified spinal links, as they watched every second tick by in minute detail. But the time did pass, and soon their drop zone was approaching. As they drew close, the ship began to transition control of their bodily functions back to their battleskins, and thus to them, and their universes shrank back into the black cocoon-like compartments they were interned in for the flight.

At twenty seconds, the slink was plummeting at nearly a thousand miles per hour toward the ground, the blanketed deciduous forest south of Bryansk rushing up to meet them. They were still in the sweep of the border radar and would need to get below that radar’s horizon before opening their capsules and deploying. The farther they got from the border’s radar cordon, the higher they would be able to deploy in secret, but if they went too far, they would enter the even denser radar of Bryansk air traffic control, and the ever-strengthening Russian air and ground forces that called it home.

As they approached the optimal distance between both radar points, Jennifer turned her wings to face the ground, using them as brakes, and allowing her to reverse her engines and decelerate hard. Jennifer and the team were driven into their harnesses, G-forces surpassing seven and eight gravities as their suits worked to absorb the force. Even pushing such hard limits, it took five more seconds of hard deceleration to slow the Slink to their target speed. As the ship dropped to a relatively slow speed of two hundred fifty miles per hour, they hit their drop height.

At one second prior to the drop, they were nestled in their cocoons, a protective layer of black wing plating between them and the fall ahead, gravity wrenching them forward in their suits. A quarter of a second prior to drop, the doors ahead of each soldier began to swing open, the momentum of the Slink’s deceleration throwing them forward. As they opened, the harnesses holding the six members of Hektor Gruler’s team released, and they were instantly catapulted out of the wing at two hundred fifty miles per hour, straight at the ground below. They were two thousand feet above ground when they were released. At their deploy speed that ground was only four seconds away.

Six black-suited men plummeting toward the soil in the dead of night, even as the ship they had come on banked hard and accelerated back up into the night sky, carrying Jennifer Falster with it. After two seconds of blistering freefall, packs bound to the team’s shoulders released the leads on six vast parachutes. The chutes followed almost instantaneously, ripped from their casings by the whirlwind of air flowing over each Spezialist. The chutes were black as the moonless night, and they went some way to halting the six men’s ballistic plummet.

With only moments to go, their suits tensed in preprogrammed spear-like positions. Their toes pointed toward the ground, their arms clamped at their side, their heads back, every spar and bionic muscle tensed against the coming impact as they came at the ground at just under a hundred twenty miles per hour. At the last second, a series of tiny engines along the carbon nanotubing by which they were attached to their parachutes wrenched on the drawstrings, dragging the chutes down with violent force, and taking a final dose out of their speed, before they slammed into the ground.

The team hit the soil with six deep, dull thuds, like shells impacting the soft ground. Unarmored bodies would have pancaked by such an impact, not only breaking but shattering bones and leaving them as gruesome burst sacks of flesh, a host of red splats on the damp earth. But the suits held true, and the six men lanced into the ground like javelins, sinking waist deep in the soil.

The dust began to settle and Hektor wrestled his emotions under control, using his systems to bring his heart rate and breathing back down to acceptable levels. He surveyed his systems, and sent queries to his team’s suits to confirm all had survived the fall unharmed. Somehow they had, and the team commander resisted the urge to laugh at the ridiculous, giddy madness of what they had just done.

CO Gruler:
‘all right, enough lounging, let’s move. tomas, frederik, get these chutes buried. Bohdan, I want comms set up, and status confirmed with SP1 asap, then get the monitors up, and tell me what is going on out there. niels, cara, we’re on perimeter. get those weapons hot.’

Verbal replies were not required, as debate of such crucial and immediate orders would be moot. Pips back at Hektor confirmed his orders and they reacted as one, their suits releasing the vice-like grip on their bodies, their machine muscles becoming amplifiers rather than constrictors once more.

Hektor flexed his reinforced muscles, and drew up his left leg, the powerful engines augmenting him, and wrenching his leg through the compacted soil his fall had driven him into. The suction was large, and the earth held strong, giving only after a long, rending tug. With one leg free, he pushed with both arms and his free leg, pulling his right leg out of the soil as well, and then set off. Pings from his team told him that Cara and Niels were already fanning out, and he filled the gap in their pattern, making the tripod perimeter that would allow them to protect the core of their team from all sides while they got situated.

Tomas and Frederik, the most junior members of the team, carried the main supply packs, though these were supplemented by personal rations and survival equipment in the armored packs on the backs of every Spezialist.

Bohdan, the team’s communications and systems expert, carried the team’s bulky subspace tweeter, along with a host of other electronic hacking equipment given to him by Madeline and her team. They were mostly derivatives of the dangerous tools given to the eight Agents who had landed on Earth not three years beforehand in even more spectacular fashion than Hektor’s team had landed tonight. Tomas, Frederik, and Bohdan all also carried the barium lasers and the sonic pulse weapons that were now the standard, forearm-mounted armament of the battleskins, and were each very potent killing machines.

But it was Hektor, Niels and Cara that represented the real offensive arm of the team. Each carried large tri-barrel flechette guns mounted onto their left arms. The guns were essentially three, inch-wide black barrels that ran the length of their forearms, with three tiny holes on their ends a millimeter wide. At their elbows the barrels were attached to a bulbous box, which in turn was attached by two thick cables to the packs on the men’s backs.

With such tiny apertures in their barrels, the guns may have seemed harmless, and indeed they only fired tiny copper pellets a hundredth the size of an ordinary bullet. But the flechette guns relied not on scale, but on speed, as these were kinetic killers. Each barrel was a magnetic accelerator that turned the tiny pellets the gun fired into meteorically fast projectiles. When unleashed, the gun pulsed out the copper darts at over twenty thousand miles per hour. At that speed they went through flesh like a hot knife through butter, if said knife was fired out of a cannon.

One well-placed kinetic pellet could kill a man at over a mile, silently and thoroughly. When fired at harder targets, like vehicles or armor, the kinetic energy made the impact point instantaneously superheated, reducing even the most robust tank’s armor to slag in moments. And because the ammunition was so small, and because the gun propelled the bullet magnetically rather than via some brute combustive explosion, they could carry vastly more ammunition, and fire it faster and farther than any gun imagined before.

With tri-barrels trained on the night around them, the three warriors guarded the team as they worked through their post-jump procedures. Within a minute of landing Bohdan had established contact with SP1, and Quavoce had begun mapping their surroundings. Satellite images had been improving steadily since Madeline had started getting TASC’s upgraded satellite hardware into space and online. The most recent intelligence told them that there were at least three armed battalions operating in and around Bryansk. They were fifty miles from the nearest, and that would be their first objective.

Hektor:
‘ladies and gentlemen, we have two hours of darkness left. let’s use them. I want to be twenty miles from here before dawn. cara, you have point. coordinates as posted, route alpha five. Quarter-mile lead, then I want the rest of us to stay tight. cara, we leave on your mark.’

Cara:
‘copy, sir. setting off now.’

The sergeant left at a brisk jog, which translated to about twelve miles per hour with the suit’s augmentation, and soon she had her quarter-mile lead. Without further ado, the rest of the team set off in tow, more closely knit, with twenty meters between each team member. And so Hektor’s team began their cross-country trek toward Bryansk, and the mysterious Russian Federation forces gathering around it.