55

North took a step towards her, but Fang shook her head from side to side furiously. He ignored her.

A robotic dog trotted towards the gang of boys ahead of him sprawled around a bench. Woofing, it stopped and started chasing its own tail, around and around in circles. There was a moment’s astonishment, then, cheering, the holographic boys stood and crowded around it. The dog stood still, then back-flipped, and the circle of boys applauded.

One boy, standing outside the circle apart from the others, caught North’s attention – on his arm, a tattoo of ‘Mam’ entwined with roses. The boy whose dead body Fang had sheltered under. A boy who, when he looked around at where he was, frowned, as if he knew something wasn’t right about the strange world in which he found himself. North moved his gaze back to Fang as he carried on walking forward, but risked a glance up towards the figures in the glass box. Too far away to shoot the mad bastard. The General’s medals gleamed on his chest. North could hear their jangle as the General leant in towards the microphone. ‘How badly do you want to know what went wrong, North?’

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ He moved at a steady pace towards Fang. Not too slow, not too fast. Her Joe 90 spectacles were broken as if she had struggled against her captors, and that made him angry.

‘The first thing you need to know is that they were volunteers,’ the General said. ‘The second, that they were scum.’

Out of the corner of his eye, North saw the lads who had been wrestling chest-bump each other and reel away, doubled over with near-hysterical laughter.

‘Something went wrong. Hawke wanted to test the machines. Targeting is a bitch with these things and they’re learning predictive behaviour. We’ve modelled it with adults. We used soldiers, but you know as well as I do that in a combat scenario these days, the young are as dangerous as the old. We needed youths of different builds, colours, a range of ages. We wanted the machines to see how the youngsters moved, how high they could jump and climb, how far they could throw – how fast they could run. They were told we were developing a computer simulation for a games company. They were having a high old time for themselves.’

Most of the lads had fallen in alongside North. It was like being on patrol, he thought. Back in the regiment. Except he was the only one with a gun. But something had shifted in the atmosphere, he thought. They’d been left too long and they were getting nervous. The lad with the ‘Mam’ tattoo seemed to have some kind of authority over the others. He gestured at the buildings – Split up, see what’s up with this place – and his mates peeled off to disappear into doorways and alleys.

‘If they’d known how to behave – if they’d had more self-discipline – they’d still be alive today.’ The General’s voice was scornful.

Fang was blinking. Was it nerves? Was she having a seizure?

Morse code. It was Morse code.

–.. .–. – – – –. .

What was she telling him? D… something… O… N… something? The cracks across the lenses of her glasses didn’t help. He shrugged, exasperated. There was too much going on to concentrate. Mad Generals. Lilith. Holographic dead boys. Not to mention that any minute Hone could rock up and shoot him in the back on the grounds he was a nuisance. Fang rolled her eyes. He was pretty sure if she could have blinked out ‘moron-person’, she would have done it.

–.. .–. – – – –. .

Drone.

He figured it out just as a swarm of holographic drones dropped into view, surrounding the boys around him.

‘One of the scum threw a rock,’ the General said.

North saw the pimpled lad lob a rock at a bigger drone which had joined the swarm. Instinctively, North called out a warning, but history couldn’t be rewritten. There was a metallic bang and screech as it hit the bigger machine, which dipped and swerved before steadying itself and moving closer. Instinctively, North raised his gun as the holographic drone spat out a stream of bullets, and the pimpled lad dropped to the floor. Around him, the boys – who were already dead but didn’t know it – scattered.

North leapt for the cover of a brick wall outside a terraced house as the first bomb dropped, and earth and bits of plastic showered down on him. Drone, he thought, just like Fang had said. Except this one was in the here and now and dropping what he was guessing were bombs with impact fuses. He peered over the coping of the wall.

It was hard to focus on reality through the holographic battle going on – weapons fire, screaming, boys scrambling for doorways or some kind of cover behind the cars.

He focused. They were already dead and he wasn’t. Not yet, anyway.

The drone that had dropped the bomb was sleek and black with a distinctly longer profile than the commercial drones he had seen in the Derkind foyer, but it was a close cousin. Similar to the Israeli military drones he’d once seen, though on a smaller scale. And this time, if he had it right, there were no operators deciding whether and when to kill. With a whoosh that took it straight through its holographic companions, the real-life autonomous weapon swooped up back into the ceiling and North understood the whirring he’d heard as soon as he got out of the lift.

He squeezed his eyes against the shimmer from the shadow fight and the light from the neon strips that ran the length of the hangar. The roof void was alive with them, like mechanical bats. They had been loitering since he came in – they had surveyed the urban landscape and identified an enemy combatant. Now the only thing they had to do was kill him. Unless he killed them first. He lifted his semi-automatic and fired. There was a ping and the sound of a motor in distress as a larger drone spiralled down to crash into the roof of the pub. As if incensed, half a dozen other drones dropped three feet and then swooped out of the rafters, back and around. They were machines, he reminded himself, they had no emotion – only the desire to reach their goal, which in this case had to be killing him. Bad goal, he thought. Bad, bad goal.

He jerked back in surprise – the boy with the ‘Mam’ tattoo was crouched next to him, his head down and panting with fear. The boy’s hand crept over his tattoo as if to bring himself closer to his mother. There was a scream from across the street as a drone closed in – the sound of begging, an explosion. The boy’s fingers closed over a brick on the ground, and North wanted to tell him not to. Wanted to tell him to hide and wait it out. But there was nothing to say. There was a moment. And it must have been a trick of the light, when the boy’s eyes seemed to meet his, just before he stood. Like something electric that leapt from the boy to the man, from the dead to the living, from the past to the future, and it hurt. ‘Do what you have to do,’ North said. ‘I see you.’ Resolution. And the boy who loved his mother stood. Leaning his weight on his back leg, with all the strength he had in him, the boy hurled the brick, and hurdled the wall to join the fight.

There were shimmering boys everywhere now, fighting the deadly machines with bricks and stones. The machines cutting them out, chasing them down, killing them. North kept shooting. Most of the time at the real ones – sometimes he wasn’t sure what was real and what was the illusion of the past. He reloaded.

A barrage of rounds smashed into the brickwork defence of the wall and, firing in a wide sweep, he ran through the holographic wreckage of an upturned car, a redhead dead at the wheel, and headed for the doorway of the town hall. And as he did, another of the drones, this one more cylindrical, launched itself in a near-vertical nosedive, exploding into a million pieces in the exact spot where he’d been sheltering. He made a mental note. There were at least three kinds of drone out there – one that dropped impact-fused bombs, one that spat out bullets and one prepared to commit suicide. Three and counting, he thought.

He kept close to the window of some kind of basic council chamber, and fired in rapid succession till he emptied the magazine. Four of the drones exploded. He ducked behind the window again as tiny pieces of shrapnel covered the exterior wall. Reloaded.

He had to keep moving forward. If more than one drone got into this room, they’d have him cornered. More importantly, Fang was still out there. At this rate, she risked being killed in the crossfire. He rested his weight on his hand and swung himself over the window, leaning into the jump at a near ninety-degree angle, and as he did another suicide drone skimmed his thigh, smashing into the far wall, the blast wave throwing him over the remains of the breeze blocks and bricks.

At the stake, Fang was struggling to untie herself as dozens of microdrones zipped and swirled around her, as if deciding for themselves whether she was an enemy, and what to do about it if she was. They drew up in what looked like a formation, eddying and swooping – like a murmuration of starlings, he thought, if starlings could kill. Drones were often used for surveillance and reconnoitre. If they were armed, an operator made the decision to kill. But these weapons had to be making their own targeting decisions, based on their own identification of the enemy, communicating, and taking fatal action. The boys had been brought here to help develop the machines’ processing and identification of targets. And it had all gone horribly wrong.

It came to him that the noise of the boys’ battle was over. The machines had won and the boys were dead or dying. He closed his eyes against the memory of how he’d found them in the charnel house.

The General spoke. ‘Give up, laddie. You can’t save her. You’re holding a weapon and firing it at them. You are an adult male with a particular height, weight and body mass. You have scars on your body that indicate previous combat, and a bullet in your brain. That is to say – you are fully weaponized. The machines out there have no doubt you are an enemy and an enemy requires obliteration. The decision is theirs not mine. Beautiful, isn’t it. ’

North was firing at the nano-drones circling Fang as he walked. Picking them off one after the other – rapid fire. He reloaded, slamming the fresh mag into the grip. Last one. Kept firing. He ducked and rolled as a series of real-life bullets spat at him. He was out of ammo. He tossed the empty SIG aside to slide the Gerber out of his boot and in one move sliced through the plastic rope binding Fang’s hands to the stake. She ripped off the tape that had kept her quiet, and he dragged her away, throwing her behind the wreck of a car as the suicide drone smashed into the stake and the pile of rubble.

‘You don’t know what you’re playing with, Kirkham.’ He was shouting. Could the General even hear him? ‘When Syd connects, this is only the beginning.’

‘They’re predictive,’ Fang said. ‘These things are learning and they’re getting smarter all the time. More lethal. They identify their target, lock on, follow it and destroy it.’

From under the car came a rattling, scurrying noise as a mechanized spider crawled out. Throwing the knife, he speared the spider only for it to explode. Another appeared, and then another. The suicide drones were mothers. They destroyed themselves in their all-or-nothing attempt to wipe out the enemy – at the same time scattering smaller mobile explosive ‘spider’ devices. It wasn’t just that his knife had short-circuited the first spider – the scuttling creatures heading their way were planning to blow themselves up, and Fang and North with them.

He took hold of Fang’s hand and pulled her away from the nearest creature in the same moment as kicking it and its friend to kingdom come. There was an enormous bang and then another as they went off. How many suicide drones had already dropped? More than one. Three? Four? Which meant there had to be more of these mechanical spiders crawling around looking for them. A lot more.

He ducked back behind the corner of the office block as a dozen mechanical spiders crawled over the rubble. Their spherical cameras rotated furiously as they attempted to lock on to North and Fang. Did they have heat detectors? He had to hope not. Because once they found them, he knew, they would approach and detonate.

As he turned round to Fang, he saw she was pressed against the brick. A drone hovered in front of her, scrutinizing her with its camera. It was over, he thought. This was how he was going to die, and the very worst thing about it was Fang was going to die too.

He could almost sense the bullet within the drone slide into the chamber. But then Fang smiled. A huge, wide grin, and, lifting her hand slowly, she waved. ‘Hey, Syd.’

Of course this carnage was down to Syd. Did Fang seriously think she could make Syd stop killing? It seemed determined to finish what it had started. A mechanical spider crawled on to his boot and up his leg, and then another. He resisted the urge to swipe them away. They’d explode if he did that, he knew, and he would die and, more importantly, Fang would die.

‘Remember me? Fangfang Yu. I’ve got a higher IQ than Tobias. You were “very pleased” to meet me.’ The drone got so close to Fang that the air from its blades lifted strands of her fringe, but she kept grinning. ‘For the record, we’re not the enemy, mate, howsoever you define “enemy”.’ The mechanical spiders were all over North’s body as Fang pointed at herself and then at him. ‘And anyway, even if we were, which as I say we most definitely are not, we surrender. That means under the Law of Armed Conflict you owe us a duty of protection. We welcome your protection, Syd. All right?’

North lifted his hands. He was fine with surrender.

The whirring and noise of battle fell away. ‘And now that’s sorted. What I want to know is – ever played two-dummy mah-jong?’ Fang said into the camera. Behind the broken Joe 90 spectacles, she tipped her head to one side, narrowing her eyes to stare down the lens. ‘Because I am so going to kick your arse.’