Unity code, p.27
Unity Code, page 27
“The fucking Alamo?” he asked. “Really?”
“You two! Stop right there, lower your weapon, and identify yourselves!”
That was a cop, a tall, rawboned woman striding out of the main building. It was supposed to be a chapel or something, right? Argo’s last military history class had been a decade ago.
“Lower. Your. Weapon.”
She had a gun trained on him now. He put the sheer weirdness of this crap aside and held up one hand, lowering the barrel of his shotgun with the other.
“I’m Daelia Hall,” Daelia said. “This is Captain, uhh…”
“Irvington.”
“Right, Captain Irvington. We’re with the Texas Air National Guard.”
Argo wasn’t sure what protocol in situations like this was. The unit hadn’t exactly covered it in the indoc briefings. But Daelia’s words seemed to do the trick. The cop visibly relaxed, holstering her gun and waving them in.
“Got any ID?” she asked.
Argo handed her his DOD common access card instead. She looked that over, nodding, and led them into the grounds.
“Officer Baldoni,” the female cop said by way of introduction. “Did anybody send you? Can we expect some reinforcements?”
“Nobody sent us, ma’am,” Argo informed her.
“Wrong place, wrong time, unfortunately,” Daelia added.
The cop was visibly upset. “Shit. We could use some support.”
They rounded the back of the chapel, headed toward a building that was marked as the visitors’ center. The grounds were immaculate, Argo thought, pale stone and brick draped with sage green foliage, fall wildflowers blooming in artfully rustic planters. “What’s the situation here?”
“I noticed these kugus were grabbing people,” Baldoni explained. “Me and my partner fought a few off, linked up with a few other patrols here in downtown, and found ourselves herded this way. We’ve got a few dozen civilians with us. Need to keep them safe.”
“Shit.”
“Could be worse,” the cop said, and then they were at the doors. “Could be a normal day. I’d have hundreds of people in here.”
Argo thought dozens was a low estimate. There seemed to be people everywhere in here: families, elderly couples, even what looked like a high school group. Everybody was huddled under display tables or behind cabinets, in between stacks of T-shirts and coffee mugs. Some looked up as they came in. He counted five, maybe six cops.
Argo had no idea what the kugus out there wanted with them, or what they would do if they got in. This plan of Emily’s was going to have every single one of those fuckers in the downtown area descending on this location. He wasn’t sure what the outcome would be. He didn’t think they had enough firepower here to hold them off.
As if reading his mind, Baldoni looked at him. “What are you thinking?”
“I’m in contact with one of our air assets. She’s inbound in”—Argo checked his watch—“five and a half minutes. She can take care of this, but we need as many kugus to converge on this location as possible.”
“They seem to come when we make noise, but—”
“Then we’re going to need to make some noise.” Argo nodded.
“All these people—”
“I know.”
Baldoni didn’t look happy about it, but nodded, signaling to the others.
Daelia held up the sustainment unit. “I need something metallic. A safe, tinfoil, anything.”
“I don’t know. This isn’t my building.”
“Anything!”
One of the other cops pointed. “There are some food trucks, out there on the street on the other side of the plaza by the main museum, but—”
“Okay,” she said, and looked at Argo. “I’m going.”
He wanted to tell her to be careful. He wanted to tell her not to go. She wasn’t going to listen, though; she wasn’t going to stay.
And Argo understood that. Pranav was dead, dead for reasons nobody rightly understood, and Daelia had something that might help clear some of that up. Seemed cruel to not at least try to protect that evidence, after he’d paid that kind of price.
Besides, if they were at war with Unity now, they needed to know what they were fighting.
So instead of a lecture, he gave her his 9mm. “Run.”
Gun holster and sustainment unit clutched tight, Daelia worked her way through the gift shop, to the back exit. The cop had said the trucks were out on the south plaza. She grabbed a few books on her way out, bundling everything into Argo’s backpack. Paper was nonconductive. She needed that.
The guns were already firing as she made her way outside, into the gardens. The sound was deafening, but then, it needed to be. They needed to get every kugu in the area down here. Zap all of them at once.
Daelia stayed low and ran. Through the shaded desert garden, across the pale pavers and white gravel. The edge of the street was in view, the huge glass facade of the museum rising beyond it. And there, yes, there, there were food trucks.
She banged on the door of the first, with no answer. At the second, a bullet came through the door at her, missing by a wide margin, still close enough to scare her senseless for a moment. But she needed this rudiment core, she needed to know what the hell was in it, what was going on, why Pranav had died, and she forced herself back to her feet, half running, half crawling to the next truck.
This door wasn’t locked. But when she forced her way through it, she found herself face-to-face with two very scared guys, not much older than she was.
“Tinfoil,” Daelia said.
“What?”
“I need tinfoil.”
“That’s going to have to be enough,” Officer Baldoni said as the last of the firing stopped. “We grabbed the ammo that we could, but we don’t have an endless supply, and—”
“They’re coming!” one of her men yelled down from the roof. He’d climbed up one of the huge, twisted oak trees to get up there, and was perched on the edge of the red tiles now. Nobody’s radio was working, and there was no point in subtlety right now. “I can see movement!”
“Can you call in your air support package now?” the cop asked.
He gave her a look. “Army?”
She grinned back. “Marines. Did two tours over in the Bathtub.”
“Even better,” he said. “And no, she’s only got voice contact with Daelia back there. But she’ll come. MQ-9. Orcinus-class.”
“Beautiful,” the cop said, focused on the edge of their area, a maze of low masonry walls and arched doorways. “Crazy fucker. They always get their target.”
“That they do,” Argo said, thinking of the air show.
The first kugu poked around the wall a few moments later.
The shooting began.
The truck was some kind of upmarket barbecue joint. The inside smelled like smoke and spice to the point of suffocation, but they had tinfoil aplenty.
“What are you doing?” one of the guys asked her. They hadn’t even shut their window yet either. The other one was working on it now.
“Building a quiet box,” she said as she worked. Book, sustainment unit, book, books on the sides. Tinfoil. Tinfoil around it all. “This whole area is about to get zapped, courtesy of the Texas Air Guard.”
“Zapped?”
The first layer of tinfoil ripped, but Daelia didn’t care. Enough layers and it wouldn’t matter. She laid another huge sheet down on the immaculate floor of the food truck and kept wrapping. “Non-nuclear EMP pod, detonated low over Alamo Plaza. Should kill anything with an electrical circuit within a ten-block radius.”
The guy who just cranked down the window looked worried. “The power’s already out.”
“Not like this,” she said.
FINAL APPROACH, Emily warned.
Daelia blinked it away.
“What about our abiota?” one of the guys asked.
Shit. “What abiota?”
“In our business laptop. She’s part of the team, and…”
Shit. Shit, shit, shit. “Go get her core. I’ll wrap her up for you.”
“She’s in the cab,” the first guy said. “Only accessible from the outside.”
They were both looking at her. Like she was going to do any better with this? Shit.
“Fine,” Daelia said, and pointed at the bundle of tinfoil, heading for the back of the truck. “You, keep wrapping that. You, find something nonconductive, umm, cutting boards, maybe.”
“Why—”
“Just do it!” she yelled, and, grabbing Argo’s gun, hopped out of the truck.
Where this flood of kugus had come from, Argo had no idea.
It wasn’t just that there were a lot of them. Because there were. Like something out of one of his little brother’s first-person shooting games. The fucking things just kept coming.
But where were they coming from? Surely not even Numina had this many mining models up in orbit, and even if they did, how had they landed so many on the planet? There hadn’t been additional landings, at least, not that anybody had notified them of… and why was this violent here? Now? None of the intel indicated this at all.
Across the plaza, another police unit showed up. On foot, both of them. A group of four kugus broke off and headed their way. Baldoni squeezed off a lucky shot, felling one, but the other three reached them.
They weren’t combat kugus. Argo realized that instantly. Those were optimized for quick, clean kills. They broke a neck or shattered a skull and moved on. Hell, they could be set to nonlethal takedowns, depending on how the AOR commander felt about things that month.
But these? These weren’t designed for killing.
They just grabbed and pushed, pinched and tore, until the cop started to come apart.
“Motherfucker,” Argo breathed.
But a fresh group of the things came around from the south, and there was nothing they could do but protect their own location.
The gun was too big for her hands. She’d always had smaller hands, and even the 9mm felt huge, clunky.
Or maybe that was just nerves.
Daelia looked around the edge of the truck carefully, then committed to it. Stepped around and hurried for the cab.
There was a laptop bag on the seat. She checked it. The computer was inside. She pulled the entire thing toward her, then turned around again.
Right into the unblinking eyes of one of those kugus.
She couldn’t stop her scream.
It stared at her for a moment. Just stared. It had one of those DEW guns but didn’t raise it.
“Spawn,” it finally said.
That moment’s hesitation was all she needed. She lifted the heavy-ass pistol up and put three bullets through the CPU in its chest. It fell, a puppet without strings, and she rushed back inside.
One of the food truck owners helped pull her in. The other held up a boulder of tinfoil for her approval. “Good?” he asked.
“Yeah, let’s do it again,” she said, and jerked the laptop out of the bag. “Tinfoil, cutting board on top, then this, then another cutting board. Like you’re wrapping up a sandwich. Don’t let the metal touch. You got any dry rags?”
“Yeah.”
“Stuff those in,” she said, and made to help, but the other guy stopped her.
“You going to be okay?” he asked.
He was pointing at her arm.
Shit.
“Should be fine,” she said, not really thinking. “It’s got a capacitor in it, and—”
But the capacitor was in the top cap, the area over her left shoulder.
The part that had gotten damaged.
There was no way to get it off. Not without her tool kit. Some of the connection points screwed into bone.
Argo could hear engine noise now. She was close, Emily. She was close. And not a second too soon.
He was out of ammo, as was Baldoni. In anticipation of this, maybe, she’d grabbed herself one of the heavy wood muskets out of the display cases inside, and was laying about with it like it was a club. Some of the civilians had followed suit, as others pulled the kids further into the center of the space.
Windows were being broken, kugus were coming through.
And then, he saw her. Faint. High up against the harsh afternoon sun.
Pod release, Emily reported.
It glinted, falling like a silver rock out of the sky.
The Siren A2/AD package had been grafted onto the underbelly of the MQ-9E in the wake of the Five Days War, when it became apparent that the DOD’s electronic warfare capabilities were sorely behind the times.
Under normal circumstances, the package served as targeted area denial, providing frequency jamming or interference capacity. It was, apparently, what Emily used to kill minor abiota she didn’t like. But the package also contained a compression flux pod. A scaled-down, stripped-down EMP.
Argo had only seen a live drop of a pod once, during a mission he was flying over Northern Vietnam. He and his MQ-9 had been shadowing a column of PLA-backed insurgents on one of the major highways. The unit had been on them for days, passing intelligence along up to the theater’s Air Operations Center, until the kill order finally came down. They’d taken out all but the lead vehicle, the catastrophic loss of power spreading chaos and death across the highway.
Dropping a pod was tricky. The range was necessarily limited, and it couldn’t be detonated remotely; the abiota had to prime it before releasing. The airframe was somewhat hardened against the effects, but nothing was better protection than distance.
The MQ-9 had not been built for bomb runs. It didn’t have the capability for steep dives, hard climbs, or high banking. The new MQ-13 took some of that into account, he’d heard, although that meant it sacrificed range and loiter time. No, the MQ-9 plane had to be positioned exactly right for release: low enough for the NNEMP to detonate for max effectiveness at ground level, high enough to escape.
Something that had always proven difficult in the mountains of North Vietnam.
But this was open country, with no enemy planes or anti-aircraft measures to worry about. And Emily, all on her own, executed a perfect drop.
Perfect.
Still grappling with one of the kugus, Argo watched the pod fall. Fall, fall, fall, until…
Every kugu in the plaza stopped.
Just stopped.
A split second later, the pod smashed through the roof of a parked car. Job done. Effects delivered.
Argo couldn’t stop his swing, though, and knocked over the kugu he was fighting, the chassis landing with a sick crunch on the pavers of the front entry. Silence fell, the sounds of the fight dying. Behind him, he heard a toddler crying.
Baldoni, face streaked with sweat, bleeding from a cut above her eye, took a deep breath. “Is it over?”
“Yeah,” Argo said. “I think it’s over.”
“Somebody tell me what the hell is happening!” Rover snapped.
“Emily’s on-site,” JP said calmly. “She says her cameras are working.”
“Well, shit, pull them up.”
Even with the weirdness of the last few days, Rover could hardly credit the scene that greeted him. Cars on fire in the street, bodies—a disturbing number of bodies, until the metadata indicated most of them were deactivated kugus—clear signs of fighting.
Looked like Manila on an average Saturday afternoon.
Except…
“Is that Alamo Plaza?” he demanded.
Good stand, better than last time, yes, I do better. Argo help but all me.
Scurvy started chuckling.
Argo?
Rover put his head in his hands, suddenly very tired. He could just see it now. He was going to get called up to Dallas, he was going to have to explain this, he was going to get shit-canned because one of his people decided to have a good old little shoot-out at some national heritage site.
Well.
He’d eat the paperwork on this one.
“Give me a better report than that, Emily.”
Pod drop.
Great. NNEMP strike on state soil. Against an adversary they were told specifically to not consider an adversary.
Dallas? Oh, no. No, no. He was going to get chewed out by Washington, D.C. Maybe up on Capitol Hill, maybe in some basement at the Pentagon.
Wouldn’t that be fun?
“Let’s get you home safe, girl,” Rover said. “And somebody get me Argo on the phone.”
Daelia had been expecting pain. She’d been expecting injury. With the capacitor blown, even the relatively small amount of energy put out by Emily’s Siren pod could have been damaging.
Instead, she felt… fine.
The guys whose food truck she had invaded were fussing over their abiota, as she nodded an awkward thank-you and pulled herself back out into the late afternoon. The sun was low over the city, and the entire plaza was awash in golden desert light. Their laptop had made it through, at least, and Daelia was fairly certain the rudiment core she’d grabbed had survived as well.
But why was her arm okay? She had screws in her bones, mechanical connection sockets, the fine filament wires of the interface nodes. Not to mention a significant amount of highly conductive metal. How had…
She looked up. Emily was loitering over the plaza, flying in a low, lazy circle. Daelia ripped the makeshift Faraday cage open, letting the layers of tinfoil and towel fall carelessly onto the rock of the plaza. She’d had the presence of mind to toss her monocle in there. Pulling it out and fitting it back to her ear now, Emily’s voice came through immediately. A direct link from the plane above.
Spawn. How are? Core intact?
“That should have at least shocked me, Emily,” Daelia said, craning her neck.
NNEMP, ach. Unpredictable.
Daelia thought about some of the weird shit that had been happening the last few weeks. How Emily had taken those Storm Gryphons down. The transmissions that couldn’t be identified or traced.
Had the pod fired at all?
And if it hadn’t…
