The Sheriff snorts. “Folks always make sense where you come from, Lieutenant?”
They reviewed the plant specs down to the rivets on the way here. Or at least their zombies did, utterly silent, borrowed eyes flickering across video feeds and backgrounders that Asante probably wouldn’t have grasped even if he had been able to see them. All Asante knows—by way of the impoverished briefings Metzinger doles out to those back in Tourist Class—is that the facility was bought from Qatar back when paint still peeled and metal still rusted, when digging viscous fossils from the ground left you rich enough to buy the planet. And that it’s falling into disrepair, now that none of those things are true anymore.
Pretty much a microcosm of the whole TExit experience, he reflects.
“They planned it out,” the Sheriff admits. “Packed a shitload of capacitors in there with ‘em, hooked ‘em to jennies, banked ‘em in all the right places. We send in quads, EMP just drops ‘em.” He glances back over his shoulder, to where—if you squint hard enough—a heat-shimmer rising from the asphalt might almost assume the outline of a resting Chinook transport. “Probably risky using exos, unless they’re hardened.”
“We won’t be using exos.”
“Far as we can tell some of ‘em are dug in by the condensers, others right next to the heat exchangers. We try to microwave ‘em out, all the pipes explode. Might as well blow the place ourselves.”
“Firepower?”
“You name it. Sig Saurs, Heckler-Kochs, Maesushis. I think one of ‘em has a Skorp. All kinetic, far as we know. Nothing you could fry.”
“Got anything on legs?”
“They’ve got a Wolfhound in there. 46-G.”
“I meant you,” Metzinger says.
The Sheriff winces. “Nearest’s three hours away. Gimped leg.” And at Metzinger’s look: “BoDyn pulled out a few years back. We’ve been having trouble getting replacement parts.”
“What about local law enforcement? You can’t be the only—”
“Half of them are law enforcement. How’d you think they got the Wolfhound?” The Sheriff lowers his voice, although there aren’t any other patriots within earshot. “Son, you don’t think we’d have invited you in if we’d had any other choice? I mean Jayzuz, we’ve got enough trouble maintaining lawnorder as it is. If word ever got out we had to bring in outside help over a goddamn domestic dispute …”
“Don’t sweat it. We don’t wear name tags.” Metzinger turns to Silano. “Take it away, Sergeant-Major.”
Silano addresses the troops as Metzinger disappears into the cloaked Chinook: “Say your goodbyes, everybody. Autopilots in thirty.”
Asante sighs to himself. Those poor bastards don’t stand a chance. He can’t even bring himself to blame them: driven by desperation, hunger, the lack of any other options. Like the who murdered him, back at the end of another life: damned, ultimately, by the sin of being born into a wasteland that could no longer feed them.
Silano raises one hand. “Mark”
Asante calls forth his mandala. The world goes to gray. His bad hand calms and steadies on the forestalk of his weapon.
This is going to be ugly.
He’s glad he won’t be around to see it.
Heroes
He does afterward, of course. They all do, as soon as they get back to Côté. They’re still learning. The world is their classroom.
“Back in the Cenozoic all anybody cared about was reflexes.” Second-Lieutenant Oliver Maddox—sorcerer’s apprentice to the rarely-seen Major Emma Rossiter, of the Holy Order of Neuroengineering—speaks with the excitement of a nine-year-old at his own birthday party. “Double-tap, dash, down, crawl, observe fire—all that stuff your body learns to do without thinking when someone yells Contact. The whole program was originally just about speeding up those macros. They never really appreciated that the subconscious mind thinks as well as reacts. It analyzes. I was telling them that years ago but they never really got it until now.”
Asante has never met Them. They never write, They never call. They certainly never visit. Presumably They sign a lot of checks.
“Here, though, we have a perfect example of the tactical genius of the zombie mind.”
Their BUDs recorded everything. Maddox has put it all together post-mortem, a greatest-hits mix with remote thermal and PEA and a smattering of extraporential algorithms to fill in the gaps. Now he sets up the game board—walls, floors, industrial viscera all magically translucent—and initializes the people inside.
“So you’ve got eighteen heavily-armed hostiles dug in at all the right choke points.” Homunculi glow red at critical junctures. “You’ve got a jamming field in effect, so you can’t share telemetry unless you’re line-of-sight. You’ve got an EMP-hardened robot programmed to attack anything so much as squeaks, deafened along the whole spectrum so even if we had the backdoor codes it wouldn’t hear them.” The Wolfhound icon is especially glossy: probably lifted from BoDyn’s promotional archive. “And you’ve got some crazy fucker with a deadman switch that’ll send the whole place sky-high the moment his heart stops—or even if he just thinks you’re getting too close to the flag. You don’t even know about that going in.
“And yet.”
Maddox starts the clock. Inside the labyrinth, icons begin to dance in fast-forward.
“Garin’s first up, and he completely blows it. Not only does he barely graze the target—probably doesn’t even draw blood—but he leaves his silencer disengaged. Way to go, Garin. You failed to neutralize your target, and now the whole building knows where you are.”
Asante remembers that gunshot echoing through the facility. He remembers his stomach dropping away.
“Now here comes one of Bubba’s buddies around the corner and—Garin misses again! Nick to the shoulder this time. And here comes the real bad-ass of the bunch, that Wolfhound’s been homing in on Garin’s shots and that motherfucker is armed and hot and …”
The 46-G rounds the corner. It does not target Garin; it lights up the insurgents. Bubba and his buddy collapse into little red piles of pixel dust.
“They did not see that coming!” Maddox exults. “Fragged by their own robot! How do you suppose that happened?”
Asante frowns.
“So two baddies down, Garin’s already up the ladder and onto
