Gunfire everywhere, from everyone. Asante remembers being blind and shitting bricks, wondering what kind of aboa would make such an idiot mistake until the Rann-Seti came up in his own hands, until he felt the recoil and heard the sound of his own shot echoing like a 130-decibel bullseye on his back. He wondered, at the time, how and why someone had sabotaged everyone’s silencers like that.
Maddox is still deep in the play. “The bad guys have heard the commotion and are starting to reposition. By now Asante and Silano have picked up the shitty-shot bug and the BoDyn’s still running around tearing up the guys on its own side. All this opens a hole that Kalmus breezes through—anyone want to guess the odds she’d just happen to be so perfectly positioned?— which buys her a clean shot at the guy with the deadman switch. Who she drops with a perfect cervical shot. Completely paralyzes the poor bastard but leaves his heart beating strong and steady. Here we see Kalmus checking him over and disabling his now-useless doomsday machine.
“This all took less than five minutes, people. I mean, it was eighteen from In to Out but you’re basically mopping up after five. And just before the credits roll, Kalmus strolls up to the wolfhound calm as you please and pets the fucker. Puts him right to sleep. Galveston PD gets their robot back without a scratch. Five minutes. Fucking magic.”
“So, um.” Garin looks around. “How’d we do it?”
“Show ‘em, Kally.”
Kalmus holds up a cuff-link. “Apparently I took this off deadman guy.”
“Dog whistles, Ars and Kays.” Maddox grins. “50KHz, inaudible to pilot or passenger. You don’t put your robot into rabid mode without some way of telling friend from foe, right? Wear one of these pins, Wolfie doesn’t look at you twice. Lose that pin and it rips your throat out in a fucking instant.
“Your better halves could’ve gone for clean, quiet kills that would’ve left the remaining forces still dug-in, still fortified, and not going anywhere. But one of the things that fortified them was BoDyn’s baddest battlebot. So your better halves didn’t go for clean quiet kills. They went for noise and panic. They shot the dog whistles, drew in the dog, let it attack its own masters. Other side changes position in response. You herded the robot, and the robot herded the insurgents right into your crosshairs. It was precision out of chaos, and it’s even more impressive because you had no comms except for the occasional optical sync when you happened to be LOS. Gotta be the messiest, spottiest network you could imagine, and if I hadn’t seen it myself I’d say it was impossible. But somehow you zombies kept updated on each other’s sitreps. Each one knew what it had to do to achieve an optimal outcome assuming all the others did likewise, and the group strategy just kind of— emerged. Nobody giving orders. Nobody saying a goddamn word.”
Asante sees it now, as the replay loops and restarts. There’s a kind of beauty to it; the movement of nodes, the intermittent web of laser light flickering between them, the smooth coalescence of signal from noise. It’s more than a dance, more than teamwork. It’s more like a … a distributed organism. Like the digits of a hand, moving together.
“Mind you, this is not what we say if anyone asks,” Maddox adds. “What we say is that every scenario in which the Galveston plant went down predicted a tipping point across the whole Post-TExit landscape. We point to 95% odds of wide-spread rioting and social unrest on WestHem’s very doorstep—a fate which ZeroS has, nice and quietly, prevented. Not bad for your first field deployment.”
Tiwana raises a hand. “Who would ask, exactly?”
It’s a good question. In the thirteen months since Asante joined Zero Sum, no outsider has ever appeared on the grounds of CFB Côté. Which isn’t especially surprising, given that—according to the public records search he did a few weeks back, anyway—CFB Côté has been closed for over twenty years.
Maddox smiles faintly. “Anyone with a vested interest in the traditional chain of command.”
Where Are We Now
Asante awakens in the Infirmary, standing at the foot of Carlos Acosta’s bed. To his right a half-open door spills dim light into the darkness beyond: a wedge of worn linoleum fading out from the doorway, a tiny red EXIT sign glowing in the void above a stairwell. To his left, a glass wall looks into Neurosurgery. Jointed teleops hang from the ceiling in there, like mantis limbs with impossibly fragile fingers. Lasers. Needles and nanotubes. Atomic-force manipulators delicate enough to coax individual atoms apart. ZeroS have gone under those knives more times than any of them can count. Surgery by software, mostly. Occasionally by human doctors phoning it in from undisclosed locations, old-school cutters who never visit in the flesh for all the times they’ve cut into Asante’s.
Acosta’s on his back, eyes closed. He looks almost at peace. Even his facial tic has quieted. He’s been here three days now, ever since losing his right arm to a swarm of smart flechettes over in Heraklion. It’s no big deal. He’s growing it back with a little help from some imported salamander DNA and a steroid-infused aminoglucose drip. He’ll be good as new in three weeks—as good as he’s ever been since ZeroS got him, anyway—back in his rack in half that time. Meanwhile it’s a tricky balance: his metabolism may be boosted into the jet stream but it’s all for tissue growth. There’s barely enough left
