Baroonah’s not just about drawing the Jacks. It’s about seeing how they come. What army and armour and aircraft we’re up against. But now, watching the Tiger helicopter fly in on the tablet, I realise it’s not just how but when they come that I need to record.
I’ve been assuming Jack’s range of control over his Minions is the same as the limits of our telepathy: a radius of about thirty-five kilometres. But I know there are Jacks with choppers about that distance north of me so the Tiger should’ve gotten here sooner if it was inside a circle that size. I’ve made it my business to read up on all the aircraft Jack’s likely to have liberated and I know the Tiger’s maximum airspeed is three hundred kilometres an hour. It’s been twenty minutes since I freed Gangly and Stocky from their maker. Assuming the Tiger was on the ground, and it took them five minutes to scramble a crew and get airborne, they’ve had fifteen minutes of flying time. Which means it could’ve just covered ninety kilometres from the south. There’s plenty of room for error in my guesstimates but I’ve got a sinking feeling that the Radius works differently since Jack 1.0 died and was upgraded to whatever the hell he is now.
From cam to cam, I follow the Tiger as it swoops low over the town, nosing briefly over the dead riders before sliding down the street to circle over the mansion, big calibre guns trained on the house, buzzing rotors thinning the chimney smoke.
Another chopper comes into view at 1.20 p.m., also seemingly arriving at top speed from the south. Best I can tell, it’s a Viper—just as fast and deadly as its companion. If it’s been making top speed, it just covered more than a hundred kilometres. It skims the town and continues north, presumably checking the road out of Baroonah for getaway vehicles.
I wonder whether the Jacks in the Tiger hovering over the mansion have noticed that one body is missing from the bloodbath in the main street. I guess that depends on whether Gangly and Stocky actually paid any hivemind to my corpse in the first place. If they did, they might be seeing this for the staged scene that it is. They used to say it took ten thousand hours to get really good at something. I’ve managed nearly a quarter of that time since the Snap. But I guess I qualify as a survival expert just by virtue of not being dead. What’s really freaky is trying to calculate how many hours Jack has racked up in that same time. I laugh in the cellar when I consider that his megamind might’ve accumulated expertise across hundreds of disciplines by now. I imagine him as this army of Einsteins, Mozarts and Picassos, rolling across the wasteland, looking for me as they solve physics mysteries, compose sonatas and leave art masterpieces in their wake. But surely if the Jacks were that smart they would’ve found me and the others by now. Stocky and Gangly’s brains didn’t look bigger than normal as they sprayed out the front of their faces. And there’s the muttering. What the hell was that gibberish about?
On the tablet, the chopper prowls over the mansion. I scroll through the screens but see no movement except the slow drift of clouds, the shining silver of leaves shifting in the breeze and a black-winged kite diving for a rodent out in the paddocks behind the pub.
At 13:26:13 there’s a tremble in the wall and I hear the distant clatter of another chopper. I really have to peer hard at the screens to see it: a little bulb coming in from the south. A civilian model. Like the ones that used to monitor traffic. The chopper’s too far off to know exactly which make it is. But if it’s, say, a Robinson, its maximum speed’s two hundred clicks an hour, meaning if it got airborne at the same time as the Tiger it has just flown a hundred and thirty kilometres to be here.
The hits just keep on coming. First to arrive on the road is another pair of motorbikes that burn into the main street from the highway. They weave around obstacles and pull up at the intersection. These riders, wearing camouflaged body armour the same as Stocky and Gangly, jump off their bikes, and, bent double with their assault rifles, hustle behind an old Ford opposite the mansion. The men take up firing positions—one over the bonnet, one by the boot—and they’re still in their frozen stances when the next motorbikes arrive a few minutes later and peel off along the side street so they can cover the rear of the mansion.
I keep watching and jotting down arrival times in my notebook. It’s all being recorded to the tablet’s hard drive but my thoughts are always clearer after I’ve written them down. I feel sick at the picture that’s emerging of Jacks stretched all along the coast and maybe even inland, now able to spread themselves out across thousands of square kilometres as they scour the earth for me and lay waste to whoever else they find. If they’ve enlarged the Radius—or freed themselves from it entirely—and can share a mind over enormous or unlimited territory then there’s no place for us to run and hide. It’s game over.
‘Crap,’ I say to Rat.
An armoured vehicle—I identify it as a LAV-25—rumbles along Baroonah’s main street, shoving cars aside and grinding bodies old and new to pulp and dust under its heavy tyres. The LAV goes over the intersection, stops outside the mansion and swings its turret so its massive M242 autocannon is aimed at the front door. In the armoured vehicle’s wake come other motorbikes, a fleet of four-wheel drives and a block of broad Humvees. Men and women, some in army uniforms, others in civilian clothes, pour from vehicles with weapons at the ready as they add themselves to the siege. More choppers arrive to hover around the town and its outskirts.
No one moves on the mansion. Surely they can’t be that chicken shit. They must have a hundred assault rifles trained on the place. The LAV’s autocannon could rip the building to pieces. Same goes for the Tiger’s sixty-millimetre miniguns. Then it dawns. They’re not waiting because they’re afraid. They’re waiting for something. Or someone.