‘I’m not hanging around out here any longer,’ said one of the men, disappearing back inside the shuttered premises, as smoke started drifting above the rooftops of a neighbouring street. ‘You’ll all get your heads blown off if you stay out here.’
His companions followed him inside, the old man giving Saul an angry glance, as if he were somehow responsible.
Saul continued in the direction the fighters had emerged from, abandoning the trike now it seemed likely to draw too much attention. He soon came to an intersection, where a truck lay on its side, with broken bodies scattered all around. The rear of the vehicle still smouldered, while every window in the surrounding buildings appeared to have been shattered.
A targeted hit, Saul guessed, almost certainly from the drone that had passed by just a few minutes before. He started moving again, then froze when he heard that familiar buzz-saw rattle from behind. He turned to hear a mechanized voice shouting at him in Arabic.
A drone hovered just a few metres away, its central rotor scattering a blizzard of dust and debris outwards from beneath it. Twin gun turrets were mounted on either side of its primary sensors.
‘I’m ASI!’ Saul yelled over the din it made, raising his hands slowly. His Agnessa, momentarily forgotten, clattered to the ground at his feet.
‘ASI!’ Saul screamed again, dropping to his knees.
Dear God, please let it have a human operator, thought Saul, wondering how many seconds he had left before the bullets started ripping into him.
The drone wobbled slightly, light glinting from one of its lenses as a genuinely human voice emerged from it a moment later.
‘Hey, you’re ASI! I’m picking up on your UP.’
Saul let his breath out in a juddering rush. ‘Fine, can I take my hands down now?’ he yelled up at the machine.
‘Wait a second,’ the operator replied, almost certainly speaking from some temporary command post deep inside the Newton Array. ‘I need to run further verification on your ID, sir. You could have stolen those contacts, for al I know. Please wait just there.’
There was a click and a hiss of static as the operator went offline, presumably so he could consult with some superior officer. Saul bent down to pick up the Agnessa, keeping his eye on the drone the whole time. He kept the barrel pointing downwards as he waited.
The operator came back. ‘Sorry, sir, you check out fine. If you want to rendezvous with a clean-up squad, you can—’
Saul heard the sound of running feet once again, voices calling to each other in Arabic. Ignoring the drone, Saul crawled underneath a bus parked nearby, before turning to look back on to the street.
Two armed men appeared around a corner, and the drone wobbled around to face them. One of the two dropped face-forward as the machine fired several rounds into his body, while the second leaped back around the same corner. Saul heard a subtle change in the sound of the drone’s rotors as it moved to follow the fugitive.
A moment later, he heard a sound like a pop followed by a hiss. Something slammed into the drone, as it passed into the next street, engulfing it in flames. It spun wildly, its gyros obviously damaged.
A second rocket struck the drone, shattering it this time, and sent shards of metal spinning across the rubble-strewn roadway. There were shouts of jubilation and, a few moments later, more armed men came running towards Saul along the street.
He crouched low, hoping to stay invisible, but one of the resistance fighters, brandishing a meat cleaver, spotted him and yelled something that Saul’s contacts translated as a promise to kill him if he didn’t hurry the fuck up out of his hiding place.
Then things got really bad.
First, there was a bright eruption of light, and a deafening bass boom that Saul felt more than heard. The façade of the building opposite came tumbling down, burying most of the men now gathered triumphantly around the remains of the drone.
Saul closed his eyes, his ears still singing from the explosion, and when he opened them once more, the man threatening him had disappeared.
He crawled out from under the bus just as a Black Dog came pounding around the corner, bigger than any other he’d ever seen before, and with heavy cannons mounted between its metallic shoulders. Half a dozen armed Consortium troopers followed on foot, their outlines rendered indistinct by their active chameleon armour.
‘Hey, is your name Saul Dumont?’ one of them yelled, lowering his weapon to his side, as the rest of the squad moved past Saul towards the other end of the street. ‘We got word from one of our operators, so who you with?’
Saul shook his head. ‘I’m not with anyone.’ He stared down at his torn and filthy jacket, his skin now caked with dust, and realized he had no idea where the Agnessa had disappeared.
‘Right.’ The trooper looked around, his armour reflecting the smoking rubble, making it hard to focus on him. ‘You need transport?’
‘I’m trying to get back to Florida,’ said Saul, wondering if he was in shock.
The trooper turned around, in an indistinct motion, lines of colour streaking as he looked back in the direction from which he’d appeared. ‘Well, we’re about to head back that way, because we need to recharge the Dog. Just try not to attract any more attention, will you? I think you just lost us a drone.’
‘Right.’ Saul nodded, feeling actually sorry.
The trooper turned back to his men, who were recovering the weapons dropped by the insurgents. Saul followed after them, dazed, his head filled with visions of monolithic structures under starless skies.
TWENTY-TWO
Arizona, 5 February 2235
Olivia woke with a start.
At first she thought someone must be in the bathroom next door, and had just swept the soap dish and toothbrushes off their shelf and sent them clattering to the floor. But then she saw the window rattle in its casement, the mattress beneath her also trembling slightly.
There was the sound of glass breaking, somewhere outside, followed by the frenzied barking of a dog some way off in the distance. Fingers clenched around the quilt, she waited for the tremor to abate, while adrenalin sent spikes of fear racing up and down her spine.
As the tremors began to abate, Olivia closed her eyes and remained entirely still for a few moments, waiting for her heart to stop beating like a jackhammer. Finally she slid off the bed and peered inside the bathroom; a glass had fallen to the floor and smashed, leaving a pair of cheap plastic toothbrushes among the shards. She grabbed a wad of paper towels and started sweeping it all into a pile.
Suddenly she stopped. What was the point? The owners of this motel had already fled. People were clearly going to ground, or returning to their families, or else rioting in the streets when they failed to get answers from their governments and realized they had been abandoned. She stood up again, leaving the broken glass on the floor. It would be easier to move to another motel room instead.
A few minutes later Olivia stepped out on to the veranda fronting the adjacent room, squinting up into the bright Arizona morning as she continued brushing her teeth. A single car whipped along the highway, doing at least a hundred. They had otherwise seen very little traffic since pulling into the motel, though there were reports on the news feeds of a sharp hike in road banditry and improvised roadblocks along Mexical’s disputed border.
Olivia heard voices, and looked down to see Jeff and Mitch standing next to the truck they’d stolen. Jeff smiled up at her and waved.
She waved back, as she thought about their reunion a few nights before, and the things she had learned since. A wave of grief and despair washed over her, and she stepped back from the railing before he could see her tears.