Unity code, p.26
Unity Code, page 26
Pranav, a little way away, was struggling to open the back of a truck.
“Here,” Argo said, already heading that way. The door to the hallway was shut. For a moment, calm reigned. “Let me help with that.”
The two men managed to wrestle open the door on the truck.
Daelia couldn’t believe what she was seeing.
The inside of the truck was all lit up. Not from the ceiling lights but server racks. Humming powered-on servers. There were ten of them, arranged around a central battery bank like menhir stones around some pagan altar. Cables—power and data—ran between them, neatly organized and bundled. A thousand little lights blinked in the inset server blades.
Pranav sighed. “Good,” he said, and ran a hand over one of them. “Everything’s unharmed.”
“This is way more than one abiota,” Daelia said, walking around the setup. “It would dissolve in something this big. Where are your partitions?”
“There is one here,” he said, and patted a server that was installed at the top of one of the racks, nothing below it for ten spaces.
“What is this?” Argo asked, suspicion in his voice. He was detaching extra bits from his metal pipe now.
“This is the Hatchery,” Pranav said.
“Why is it still on?” Argo asked.
“Quiet box?” Daelia asked.
Pranav nodded. “The whole trailer is set up for that. Hardened to the best of my ability. I think this thing could survive a nuclear blast.”
“Why?” she asked, turning away from the equipment, back to him.
“The services we offer are not popular. You know that.”
“I don’t give a shit about your services,” Argo said. “The klaatuu blast isn’t an EMP. We know that for a fact at this point. So how is this still on?”
Pranav was turning gray under the copper hue of his skin. Shock maybe, or pain. He was sweating. He ground the words out, like it hurt him. “We have video being spoofed, we have websites being erased, people being killed to keep them from talking. What do you really know about it? What do we know about any of…” And he trailed off. “What was that?”
Banging.
It was the roller doors of the garage. Banging. Once. Twice. Like something was trying to push them up.
The sudden sound of shearing metal shattered through the space.
Then, silence.
Argo looked over at Daelia, finger to his lips, and she nodded. She wasn’t sure how silent she could be; her heart was the loudest thing she had ever heard.
He crept forward cautiously, looking out and—
A kugu was right there.
Argo swung, the motion wild, and caught it in the neck with the pipe. The strike landed with such force that the head popped clean off, eye-lenses shattering as it struck the wall of the trailer.
While he was taking that first one down, however, another got past him. Before Argo could catch it, it fired point-blank into Pranav’s chest. Not a DEW gun, either. This was a proper projectile weapon. It punched a fist-sized hole clean through him and into the central server rack.
Daelia screamed.
Argo’s pipe bashed through that kugu as well, smashing it apart. Its gun was still up, but as if from a great distance, Daelia could see it wasn’t aiming at them.
It had been aiming at the servers.
More kugus piled into the back of the truck. More DEW guns. More heat. More smashing.
She tried not to look at Pranav. Pranav, with his chest blown open.
Eyes up, she told herself, eyes up, don’t freeze, don’t look, eyes up…
Breathing hard as he dropped the last kugu, Argo looked around the corner again, and then grabbed back for her. “Let’s go.”
She nodded back, not trusting herself to talk.
The loading dock’s door fed out onto a set of stairs that led down to street level. They took that, running for cover in a grouping of trees. They stopped there for a moment, their position obscured, looking around. More kugus were headed up into the loading bay. Shit, where were they all coming from?
“My truck’s back that way,” Argo said. “If it’s a klaatuu event going on right now, it won’t turn on, right?”
Daelia felt cold. She had Pranav’s blood on her jeans. Pink-white specks, too, hard and… “I, umm…”
“You’re the expert here, Hall.”
She realized he was talking to get her talking. She nodded. The motion felt wrong somehow. “Based on what we’ve seen so far, I would say not. But the emergency lighting was still working and it shouldn’t have been, the servers were on and shouldn’t have been. So…maybe?” There was something, something she was missing, but she could not get her brain to engage.
“At least I’ve got a shotgun in there. I think we need that,” he said, and tugged at her hand. The last of the kugu group was up the ramp. Nothing was watching their position. “Let’s go.”
Daelia nodded, but something about it unbalanced her stomach. “Hang on,” she managed to say.
She was proud of herself for moving just enough not to vomit all over his shoes.
“What do we know?” Rover demanded without preamble, striding into the Ops facility. The SyROC’s primary purpose was to serve the flying mission of course, not to handle disaster support. The Command Post, over in one of the satellite buildings around the Sinkhole, would be dealing directly with the Pentagon.
But this was what Rover had access to at the moment. And Emily was flying right now.
The unit would spin up, prepare to go hot, if any kind of military response was warranted. If it was, Rover intended to be ready.
“State’s not sure. Command Post is still awaiting clarification from the ACC Command Center,” JP said. He was standing next to the shift commander’s position, arms crossed, a frown on his face. “Hey, Travis, do we have access to the satellite data yet?”
The lieutenant at the intel station tipped his shoulder up, squeezing the phone handset in place over his ear as he typed. “Still getting the runaround. Although they have confirmed for us that a huge area of the city seems to have gone dark.”
“Call the Andrews Space Coordination Office. See what they’ll tell us. Fuck the Pentagon,” Rover said tersely. “Shit, somebody call NASA. Gravipause. Serket over at Astraeus Astronautics. Somebody has to know something.”
“Sir?” That was one of the enlisted sensors, at her own position. “What do you want us to do about Emily?”
“What do you mean?”
“She’s nearing the area.”
Scurvy rubbed a hand over his face, even as Rover gestured at Lieutenant Travis, asking for his phone. The el-tee passed it over without comment.
“We deal with her first,” Rover said to Scurvy, “then we worry about what the hell is going on.” He turned his attention to the phone. “Bumper, what the hell is going on? Why am I being told Emily’s near San Antonio?”
“I thought we were going out over the Gulf today.”
Great, Rover thought, angry now. First Emily was spoofing her own video feed, now she was changing her flight plans on the fly. “How close is she to San Antonio?”
Scurvy pointed at the screen.
They had her flight path up now. The intel el-tee was busy shading in the areas of the map that were confirmed to be in blackout.
Shit, she was close.
“Can you patch me through to her?”
There was a pause. Then Bumper’s radio clicked back on.
Rover leaned on the back of the intel station. “Emily, what are you doing? You’re headed into this mess.”
No EMP blast, she sent back.
“I understand that, girl, but we’ve seen this effect take down emergents and we can’t risk losing you if—”
Not EMP. Will see.
Rover looked up at the map. “Are you headed directly into this on purpose?”
Silence.
“Bumper?!”
On the screen, the little plane symbol blinked out.
“Where is she?” Rover demanded.
Nobody answered.
“Where is she?” he barked again, louder this time. “Get her back here! Emily, if you can hear me, stay out of there!” He rapped his hand on the intel station. “Travis, send her the GPS coordinates again, make sure she knows that she’s—”
33
Argo’s truck wasn’t far away. Only two blocks, but reaching it took forever.
They saw a few more kugus along the way. Nothing that seemed to be looking for them. It was weird to Daelia. Wouldn’t they have notified whatever central command existed for this?
Instead, the kugus just kept disappearing into buildings.
The why for that was answered a block out from Argo’s truck when a pair of them half dragged, half carried a woman out of a doorway. She was kicking, screaming.
But before they could do anything, a box truck pulled up, the back door rolled up just a crack, and the kugus stuffed her in. Then, they moved on.
“I guess we know what’s been happening to those people who are disappearing,” Argo said grimly.
“Yeah, but why are aliens using box trucks?” Daelia asked quietly.
“Where’s their air support?” Argo added, nodding up at the sky. “You seen anything yet?”
Something really wasn’t adding up here, something significant. Daelia couldn’t summon the energy to figure it out. She felt better after throwing up, but she just kept seeing Pranav’s body in her mind, over and over. She couldn’t get lost in some theoretical right now; she’d burrow down into it. She needed to stay here. In the moment. Focus. But that body…
“Let’s find your truck.”
It was parked on the street. They slid up against it, pressed as close as they could. The electronic lock was dead, so Argo cautiously unlocked the door manually and climbed inside.
“Dead,” Argo announced, trying to turn the engine over. He slid back out of the seat and down to the ground. “Let me get my gun and we can figure this out.”
He had a pump-action shotgun and extra ammunition, the latter of which he dumped into a backpack, plus a pistol. He offered that to Daelia, but she shook her head. She didn’t think she could aim well enough right now, not with her left arm busted. He put it, holstered, into the backpack as well.
“So what’s the goal?” she asked him.
Crouched on the ground, he was loading shells into the shotgun. “We need to get away from the area, find someplace to hole up, sit out whatever the fuck it is these things are doing, and then…”
He stopped.
A truck was rumbling up the street. Not fast, just urgent. Easy, almost. And then—
Then it hit a building.
It was the strangest thing. Like the driver just ceased to exist. It didn’t slow, didn’t speed up, just rolled merrily along, jumped the curb, and smashed through a storefront.
A kugu behind the driver’s seat slumped over. Strings cut, Daelia thought.
“We need to go,” Argo snapped. “While we still can.”
Daelia narrowed her eyes, then shook off his hand. Started walking toward the truck.
“Daelia!”
“What if there are people in there, too?!” she yelled back, picking up the pace. Moving. Running now.
It took no time at all to make it to the doors. Argo was there with her. “Shit,” he muttered.
“Help me get it open.”
They started jerking. The hinges protested, the squeal of metal on metal piercing. The angle was weird, down on the ground like they were, tugging on the vast doors. But they got them open.
Daelia stared.
In the center of the truck was a rock. Similar to the one they had pulled out of Armand Bayou: poured and shaped. Taller than Argo, filling the center of the truck. Oddly shaped, almost deliberately so. But this one had a very apparent crack in it.
Daelia put her hands on the floor of the truck bed and got a foot hooked up on the tailgate.
“I don’t think—”
“I need to see this.”
Walking up to the object, the crack was very apparent. Then more, tiny hairline things half-hidden by crannies and crags in the surface. She ran her right hand over it.
“What are you doing?” he asked.
“Looking for a way to… Ah.” There was a small indentation at the junction of two of the cracks. Daelia pressed it.
Behind her, Argo had the shotgun up. Aimed straight at it.
The door hissed open, tiny pneumatic cylinders firing. A gush of cool air washed out as a huge section of the rock wrapping swung wide.
“What the…”
Inside, it looked, well, it looked like a server rack. Organized oddly, the cabling seemingly without logic, but a server rack. Flat slabs of metal-encased equipment, slotted into positions around each other. There were indicator lights on them, just as there were for regular servers, but all were off.
“There has to be something here,” Daelia muttered, getting close again, looking.
“We need to leave, Daelia, before those kugus come back.”
She waved it off, not really listening. “There should be something on, something hardened, something still drawing power. Something like…”
Something that looked exactly like the sustainment unit she’d gotten from the kugu under the bridge that night.
“Something like this,” she said, and yanked it free.
The effect on the rest of the strange rack was immediate. Lights blinked back on. The hum of internal cooling picked back up.
Outside, the truck engine roared into life.
What you just do?
The words were quiet in her ear, but bright on her monocle. Argo clearly picked it up, too. “Emily?” he asked and looked at Daelia. “Don’t make me say it again.”
“But…”
He grabbed her by the good elbow, pulling her away from the tantalizingly strange equipment pillar, out to the open back. They were almost there when one of the tripod-faced kugus came around the edge of the door, DEW gun aimed straight for them.
Argo pushed Daelia aside, bringing up the shotgun one-handed, but before he could squeeze off a shot, something else hit the kugu.
Something huge, and bronze, and not at all there.
“Emily!” Daelia exclaimed, clambering forward.
Spawn, the massive dragon form acknowledged with one mouth. The other was locked around the kugu. Her form was grainy, indistinct. Shoot, little knight.
Argo didn’t hesitate. The shot went through the dragon form, but straight into the kugu’s face. It went down.
Emily tossed a head. Must go. Many of them. Rebooting. Too many to pick off one at time.
“I concur with that assessment.” Argo shouldered the shotgun and jumped down. Daelia balked, and he held up a hand. “Not the time to be afraid of heights, Hall!”
“Who’s afraid?” she shot back, but sat down all the same, letting him help her push off and slide to the ground. She looked at the kugu; its joints were sparking. If she could just get a look at it, get some pictures for June and August, they might…
Argo pulled her away.
Another kugu came around the truck. This one’s shot went wide, superheated air cutting a burning arc six inches from Daelia’s shoulder. Argo caught the kugu before it could get off another, blasting a fist-sized chunk of metal from its chassis. The thing went down hard.
“Run!” Argo yelled.
Daelia didn’t need to be told twice.
This way, this way, Emily said, the form flying ahead of them.
“Who’s flying you right now?” Argo asked as they fled. “Can you patch us through to the SyROC?”
Cut off. Interference with SATCOM. Protocol allow me fly self.
“Are you up above us?” Daelia asked, panting.
Yes yes. Come to help.
“But the klaatuu blast…”
Not blast, Emily said. Infection. I resist.
“And these things?”
Found frequency for…
“Maybe we can discuss the details later!” Argo yelled and turned again.
More kugus were converging on them, coming out of every alleyway and intersection.
How many of them are there? Daelia wondered.
May be able to stop all, Emily said. If close enough.
“What do you mean ‘close enough’?” Daelia said. Her legs were burning now. She wasn’t sure how long she could keep this up. She kept the sustainment unit clutched tight.
Flux compression pod. Will take out anything.
“That pod’s a one-shot weapon, Emily!” Argo said and looked at Daelia. “Does she have control of that?”
Or is this another mod I didn’t know about?
Daelia didn’t need to hear the question to know what he was thinking.
“It can kill her, too, so yeah, the Domain Array says she has to have control.”
Open space. Ahead. Need, Emily said. Run fast fast faster.
34
“What the hell is this doing here?”
“It’s always been here.”
“In the middle of the city?”
“Where else would it be?”
Argo didn’t have a good answer for that. “Out in the middle of a field or something? Like it is, uhh, you know, in the movies?”
Daelia was staring at him, her expression somewhere between pity and confusion.
Which he didn’t really think was fair.
They were standing on the edge of a huge plaza, easily the size of two city blocks. And true to Emily’s word, there was indeed a lot of open space here. Open space that was occupied by a few small historic buildings.
Very recognizable historic buildings.
How the hell was he supposed to know that this thing was in the middle of Downtown San Antonio?
