19
A voice boomed down through the rain: “Officer Arnett. Lieutenant Matthew Domanski. You are both ordered to stop. Stop now. You have been duped into cooperating with a highly skilled enemy agent. Do not continue. Turn yourselves in voluntarily, and all possible consideration—”
A gun went off behind Ava. She dropped into a crouch, looking over her shoulder. Another shot. Another. The muzzle flashes revealing Matt, firing slowly and deliberately in the direction of the voice as it continued to boom.
“—will be given to your motive for involving yourselves in this affair.”
The low hum surrounded them now, a vibration in the rain, in the impenetrable darkness. At least three quad-copters, Ava judged. Their lights off, utterly invisible.
“Don’t stop,” she urged Matt. “Keep moving. Keep under the vegetation.”
The tall cane and the rain would obscure their profiles, making it harder for thermal imaging cameras to track them, but even so, they were far from invisible. And it didn’t help that the blue sparks of the beetle lights advertised their escape route through the entangling vegetation. The only real question: How soon before the quad-copters started shooting?
The answer arrived without delay. A low buzz, a wet thwop! as if a water-logged towel had been dropped in a sink, and she heard Matt go down with a grunt.
“Knives out!” he barked. “They’re shooting webs.”
Instead, as a glint in the sky drew her gaze, she raised her pistol. Holding it in a two-handed grip, she fired three swift shots, each a few degrees apart. The second and third threw sparks and changed the frequency of the surrounding hum—but the quad-copter she’d targeted did not go down.
Thwop!
A painful slap against the back of her right hand, across her exposed wrist, and halfway up her forearm. The sleeve of her shirt did nothing to soften the blow. Sticky webbing: It writhed like a living thing, random motion meant to bind and seal. She yanked her left hand away, an instant before the webbing locked it down.
Ava had trained with webbing, both in the army and with the police. Keep a hand free and you could cut away the tendrils as they hardened. Right now, the tendrils were binding the pistol, keeping it secure in her right hand. Probably not the outcome the drone’s overseer had wanted.
She heard Matt moving, grunting. “You free?” she asked, shifting her position, moving a few more steps along the path to get deeper into the cane.
“I’m up. Run.”
A challenge, given the darkness, the rain, the mud, the downdraft from hovering quad-copters—or was that just the swirling wind? She fixed her gaze on the next blue light and bounded toward it, arms raised to protect her face in case there were low-hanging branches. She prayed she would not twist an ankle, break a leg, or impale herself on a broken branch.
Thwop! Thwop!
“You hit?” she yelled without turning back.
“No, the veg is shielding us!”
For now. But how long before the quad-copters shifted to hard ammo? The vegetation would be no defense against that, and with Huko coming in, no one need ever know that four bodies had been left behind in this swamp.
She made it to the next pinpoint of blue light, and the one after that. Then the lights went out. “Damn it, Gideon!” she shouted.
“I’m re-mapping!” he yelled back, startlingly close.
Then she saw him, his down-turned face and dancing fingers faintly lit by the screen of his tablet. She pulled up sharply so she wouldn’t run into him, at the same time yelling at Matt, “Hold up!”
An incoherent oath as Matt bumped up against her. His hand gripped her shoulder.
Panting, her heart racing, she tried to pinpoint the quad-copters by sound, but the wind-combed rattling and rustling of the cane drowned out their engine noise. “Where’s Akasha?” she asked.
“I’m here.” Her voice placed her on the other side of Gideon. “They went after the bikes, shot them full of webbing. So we’re on foot.”
Maybe it was better that way. Headlights would give them away, and riding fast in the dark was a damn good way to kill yourself.
“Where are they now?” Ava wondered as she worked to pry away the strands of webbing on her gun hand.
“Probably surveying the peninsula,” Matt answered. “They know they’ve got us trapped, but they don’t know who else might be out here, and they don’t want anyone slipping away.”
“We’re not trapped,” Gideon said as the tablet’s light went out.
The blue beetle lights came back on at the same time, marking a path beneath the trees that angled away from the direction they’d been going.
“Go!” Matt barked.
Ava wrenched her gun free, though her arm still trailed strands of hardening gunk. With the tablet dark, she couldn’t see Gideon anymore—but she heard him up ahead: “You owe me big, Akasha!”
Akasha already sounded distant when she answered, “We’ll settle it after the storm!”
“Rain’s backing off,” Ava observed as she lingered in place, gazing up into the sky.
“Yeah.” Matt stood rooted beside her. “And here they come.”
The rain had eased enough that Ava could see low cloud bellies brushed with the gleam of city lights. Outlined against the clouds, two circular shapes moved slowly, black and humming, no more than ten feet above the trees. Fricking flying saucers.
“Westside’s mine,” she said quickly.
“I got east.”
They both fired multiple times. The low elevation made the quad-copters easy targets. Sparks fountained as bullets connected with the vulnerable rotor blades. The even hum became high pitched and discordant. One quad see-sawed erratically; the other wisely chose to retreat. No sign of a third drone.
“Let’s go,” Matt ordered.
Ava moved out, holstering her pistol as she did. Without breaking stride, she grabbed her flashlight and switched on the red beam. No time for groping in the dark. They needed to get out from under the foundering quad-copter and get off the peninsula before the navy shifted to more lethal options. Navy jurisdiction was limited. If they could make it to suburbia, they ought to be okay—for the next few minutes anyway.
Something popped in the air behind them, followed closely by a high-pitched shrieking whine and a double flash of golden light. Then shrapnel came flying, ripping through the brush. Ava shifted to a run, hearing the bulk of the damaged quad-copter hit ground with a crunching, grating noise. A final splash placed it at the water’s edge.
Thwop!
Ava’s legs tangled. She went down hard, landing on her elbows, dirty rainwater splashing into her mouth and her flashlight rolling away, its red beam dulled by mud.
That hum. Singular now, and not so close.
“I’ve got you covered,” Matt said.
She groped for her folding knife. Snapped it open. Felt for the shape of the webbing that bound her feet together. Slid the blade under a strand. Jerked hard to slice through it. Once. Twice. And again. Ripped the rest of the webbing off. “I’m good.”
The hum sounding closer now.
“Incoming,” Matt said softly.
Ava snapped the knife shut. Holstered it. Drew her pistol. Then looked up. A pale white light crept across a kiawe branch overhead.
The monkey bot.
As the quad-copter closed in, the little bot leaped at it, found a grip somewhere, and in the space of three seconds, swung itself up, over, and into one of the propellers. A horrible crunch. Debris showered the forest as the quad-copter wobbled and rotated, lifting away.
With a whispered thank-you to Gideon, Ava grabbed her flashlight from where it had fallen in the mud. Then she picked herself up, and ran.
Matt kept pace behind her.
◇
The blue beetle lights led them on until they came to a wide break in the vegetation that turned out to be an unpaved road. Lights from the elevated freeway, two-tenths of a mile ahead, glinted against the wind-rippled pools of rainwater that filled the road’s deep ruts.
On the other side of the road, Ava could just make out what had to be a tree nursery. Some brave soul, believing in the future, had planted rows of coconut and Alexander palms. None had yet grown even six-feet high. Their fronds thrashed and rattled in the gusting wind.
“We’re over here!” Akasha shouted from the edge of the palm plantation.
Ava sprinted through the open to join her. “Injuries?”
“We’re good,” Akasha assured her.
Ava played her light over them anyway. Akasha looked surprisingly clean. Gideon looked stone-cold angry.
“Thank you for sending the monkey bot,” Ava told him.
He nodded shortly. Then he jerked his chin in Matt’s direction. “I lost my moped, my trailer, and the fucking monkey bot because seal-team-six here didn’t stick to our deal and keep his comms off.”
“There’s more at stake tonight than just your gear,” Matt said, no apology in his voice. “Have you got a status on your jellyfish?”
Gideon gave him a dark look. “Okay, so it’s having a hard time,” he admitted. “The tide, the storm surge—”
“But it’s still in play?”
“Sure. It can go all night if it needs to.”
“It needs to get inside the security perimeter before Denali leaves.”
“I know that! I understand. I’m doing what I can. More than you’re doing.”
“Yeah, sorry. You didn’t sign up for this, but if it doesn’t work—”
“We find another way,” Ava said. “That’s all. Now let’s move. Navy’s not going to be in a good mood tonight, and I don’t want to be here when some stealth unit shows up.”
“You mean real navy seals?” Gideon asked with a sneer.
“Roger that.”
◇
The rain persisted as they followed the dirt road. It washed away the mud from Ava’s face, her hands, even her clothing. But the constant wet left her skin shriveled and fragile, rubbed raw under the weight of her duty belt, with blisters forming on her heels.
She didn’t slow down. Not until they’d gained a little elevation, enough that she could look back, out over the wind-lashed waters of East Loch. No boats out tonight. No traffic on the freeway. Everyone else had gone to shelter.
But we’re still here! Still trying to save the world! The wretched world. My world.
She wished to God she could get back to yesterday. But there was no way back. There never would be, no matter what happened.
From up ahead, Gideon shouted. “Ah, fuck.” He turned around, his thin figure backlit by streetlights. “They got it! They got it!”
Ava’s heart skipped as she turned to look again out over the Loch. Two small boats had appeared, their navigation lights on. They raced past Ford Island, heading for the peninsula.
“How do you know they got it?” Matt demanded.
“No signal! Signal’s gone. It’s not there.”
“Could have been a sea serpent,” Ava said. Like it was better to lose the jellyfish to an accident of nature, than a deliberate attack? “Shit, it doesn’t matter. Can you still trigger the swarm?”
“Don’t have to. If they lose the mothership, they go. But they’re still outside the security perimeter! And they don’t have the battery power for evasive—”
Far away, a cluster of eight tiny white geysers silently erupted from the black water. The robot tuna had found their prey and induced the entire swarm to detonate.
“Fuck!” Gideon screamed. “Fuck these assholes. I’m going to get the word out. Get people away from here.”
“Sigrún is ready for that,” Matt told him. “They’ll scrub anything you post online.”
“You think I don’t know that? I know how this works. It’s word-of-mouth. The coconut wireless.”
“You can try, but it’ll get online in a heartbeat, and then Sigrún will issue counter rumors claiming it’s a hoax meant to start a panic so people will go running out into the storm. And which interpretation sounds more plausible to you?”
“So what?” Gideon demanded. “What do you want me to do? Just sit here and wait for it to happen?”
Ava groped for an answer. It was surely too late for anyone not already booked on a flight to get a seat out. If they didn’t find some way to keep Denali in port, they would all be left waiting for the light. No, not just waiting.
She turned to Akasha. “What I want you both to do is to survive. Go with Gideon. Take him to headquarters. Convince Ivan this is all real. Convince him to convince the navy. And ride out the storm there.”
Akasha was shaking her head even before Ava finished. “No way. I’m in until this is done.”
“No, Ava’s right,” Matt said. “There’s nothing more you can do here. Lyric fucked up when she brought you into this. And Gideon needs you.”
To Ava’s surprise, Gideon was agreeable. “Come on, Akasha. Let’s go. If they use a low-yield device, and Pearl is the real target, then we might be able to survive the blast over there.”
“No, that’s not good enough,” Akasha insisted. “We can’t let it happen at all.”
Ava answered, her voice breaking. “Then convince Ivan to persuade his navy contacts that they’re being conned into a war they don’t want and that they’re not ready to fight. The chain of command could still stop this with a word . . .” She trailed off as she wondered if that was true—or had it gone beyond that?
Kaden was at the dock with a hand-picked skeleton crew loyal to him, loyal to his cause. If ordered to stay in port, would he obey?
“Hell, it’s worth a try,” Ava concluded. “What time is it, anyway?” She’d left her gear powered down, worried it had been hacked along with Matt’s.
“Two twenty-eight AM,” Gideon said.
“Way too late for a taxi then, but you can get the train.” Ava gripped Akasha’s shoulders. “You’ll be okay. HADAFA will tag you, but it won’t matter, because there’s nothing to link you to what just went down. Navy security is not going to be looking for you, and HPD has promised to look the other way.”
The tears glistening in the younger officer’s eyes reflected Ava’s own, and maybe they shared the same thought, too: Will we ever see each other again?
They traded a quick hug. Then Akasha and Gideon headed off through a ghost neighborhood, where the broken asphalt streets and cracked concrete sidewalks still enforced a rough geometrical order on the brush and the small trees.
Matt said, “I would have asked you to go with them—”
“Not possible. Navy security knows my name.”
“Yeah. That, and I’m going to need you as a distraction.”
Her pulse quickened, wary of some desperate last measure. “What are you thinking?”
“Back to the basics. Get on the base. Sabotage the sub.”
“You’re dreaming.”
A bitter edge to his voice. “It’s what I should have done when we left the stadium, but Lyric wanted to be clever.”
“No, she didn’t want to waste you on a brute force solution. A non-solution. She gave the scenario to HADAFA to analyze—”
“And the AI said it couldn’t work! I know that. So she gambled on Gideon.” His lip curled, revealing a flash of white teeth in the dark. “But HADAFA isn’t always right—and neither is Lyric. She overestimated Hōkū Ala. It’s not often she gets played.” He wiped at the accumulated rainwater on his face, then stared down at Ava. “You willing to cause a distraction?”
Fatigue and frustration shortened her temper. “Like what? Steal a car? Drive it through Makalapa Gate? Do something stupid, just to do something? How is that going to help you?”
“It won’t. I need you to go over the wire. Full stealth. Like you’re trying to make the hit yourself. My window of opportunity happens when the hammer comes down on you.”