Black Horizons: Unbound

SOMEWHERE IN THE AUSTRALIAN OUTBACK MARCH 7TH, 2282 The Geiger counter crackled slightly in Quincy's hand, its needle jumping a bit from the far left with a sudden movement. Selvan, walking alongside with his eyes glued to the device, felt his heart give an equally abrupt jump in his chest. "Um," He said. "Relax, kid." Barnes chuckled as he kept going without breaking stride. "It's just trace radiation. If the needle ever goes past red, that's when you need to watch out or your balls get fried." "Oh. Good to know." "Shouldn't be any radiation around here anyway. Oh, hell." Barnes paused, slung his AK47 back over his shoulder, and bent down on one knee to examine the ground. Now that his attention was drawn to it, Selvan noticed it, too: there was a perfectly round mark on the dirt, as if something huge and circular had come down. Which, he realized, was more or less the case. "Looks like it came down here." Barnes twisted to look at him. "What's the doochikey say?" Selvan, who was already checking his tablet, set aside the resentment he felt at the use of the word doochikey and continued tapping the screen, looking through the data. "Huh. That's weird. It's not here anymore." "You needed your little computer to tell ya that?" Quincy didn't bother hiding the condescension in her voice. "No," He snapped, a little bit offended, "I mean the signal. It's not here anymore; it just cut out." "Any idea why?" "Not sure. The locator's got double-backup power, it's not supposed to just go dark like that, even if the drone malfunctions." "So you don't know." Before he could think of a retort Barnes had interrupted, "I do. Take a look." The four of them looked up to see that the burly man had walked away from them, following what he saw was the drone's tracks as it had bounced and rolled in the wind: large intends and drag marks on the dirt indicated it had been tossed around, which meant that whatever had happened, the mine's balloon still held enough gas to maintain buoyancy. That would have been good news, but as the three of them walked over to Barnes he saw what had drawn attention, and Selvan found himself swearing. Footprints. There were several sets of them, at least three that he could make out, and this was confirmed as Barnes added, "Three people. One of them got a limp in his left leg." Further drag marks led away from the site. These were immediately distinguishable from the drag marks made by the wind - unlike the intermittently broken track made as the balloon went up and down in the air, these were continuous and accompanied on either side by the footprints of whoever had pulled it away. "That explains why the signal disappeared, then." No, it doesn't, he thought. The locator was housed inside the sealed drone, and it didn't have a conspicuous little beeping LED that screamed "I'm a tracking device!". Only someone who knew exactly where to look would have been able to find the tag. It wouldn't be the first time someone had stolen a downed drone; after all, it had parts that could be scavenged - explosives, helium, motion sensors... the powerful solar panel alone made it valuable enough to risk incurring the wrath of New Sydney's authorities. But what was worrying was how quickly the tracker had been disabled. Disturbing, to say the least. He didn't voice his thoughts out loud though, instead turned around to return to the jeep. "Where're you going?" "Need to call it in." My first day, he thought, rubbing the bridge of his nose as he walked, they couldn't have given me an easy one? In all fairness though, it had been supposed to be easy. Two hours ago one of the mines in the skies around New Sydney had gone dark, and he'd been sent out with a security team to find it. It was supposed to be completely routine: the bombs were held up in the air by hanging them under helium balloons, with a cheap drone attached to them that used its sensors to compensate for any movement caused by wind, so that the device did not just blow away and take the mine with it. The drone synced with the computer at the City's Hub, and in theory it was supposed to last for years out here without any upkeep. In practice, however, drones needed maintenance just like every other machine. Their sensors shorted out, they got damaged by birds flying into them, their solar arrays got clogged up and they came down from lack of proper charging, and a hundred other things. So sending him out into the desert under the scorching noon sun this close to the radiation zone, and making him sweat about whether or not his testicles were getting cooked had just been the maintenance team's idea of welcoming the rookie. Barnes walked further away, examining the ground and then taking out his binoculars to peer into the distance. Quincy, having followed him, slung her rifle back and leaned against the hood of the jeep with her arms crossed as he grabbed the jeep's large radio pack. "Charlie-Five-Echo to Central Command, come in, please, over?" "Central Command to Charlie-Five-Echo, go ahead, over." A harsh female voice greeted him. "Request patch-through to Supervisor Hill, over." "Standby." A few seconds of static, then a voice that sounded like it was smiling said, "Hey, how's it going? Nice refreshing afternoon walk?" He ignored the jibe and skipped to the point, "Sir, we have a problem." "Go on." The voice got serious. "Drone came down about fifteen miles out, tracks indicate it's been dragged away by persons unknown. We'll follow the tracks, but the locator signal went dark." "What? That's not supposed to happen." "I know, please advise." It sounded less whiny than asking, What do I do? "Standby." Selvan waited. He felt beads of sweat run down his face and wiped his forehead with a shirt sleeve. It was his first day on duty, working maintenance for the city. Tense as it was to be out here, it was a good gig: anyone who knew how to fix things was an asset, whether a mechanic or engineer, and now that he was sixteen he could ask for work with the city, which paid well for smart people like him. In a year he'd have his own quarters and wouldn't need to live on rations. It was better than farming, which he didn't have the skill for, and definitely better than the myriad of drug-related underground businesses that were popular in the slum district where he had grown up. Out here, technically, he was the one in charge of the squad - two security guards, a driver and a mechanic. Standard maintenance check crew. He chanced a glance at Quincy. In the days of past, when there had still been beauty contests in the world, most people's idea of a beautiful lady had apparently been the same - thin, not overtly muscular, pearly-white teeth and bushy, well-maintained hair. Compared to that, the woman he was looking at would not have been considered attractive: she was in shape but nearly as large as a man, her head was almost bald - most people who worked security in this heat shaved their heads, to minimize "hair-care", which apparently was still a thing, no matter how stupid it sounded to Selvan - and she had clearly defined muscles which she liked to show off by rolling up her sleeves all the way to her biceps. People in the past must've been morons, however, because he felt something stir in him as he let his eyes wander over her curves. The fact that she was at least ten years older than him (and completely unimpressed by the newbie teenager who was in charge of the crew) did not diminish his longing. Unaware of the storm she'd been causing inside his head since they'd met this morning, Quincy yawned, stretched, and scratched her ass. "Supervisor Hill to Charlie-Five Echo, do you read me, over?" The squawk of the radio made him jump as it brought him out of his fantasies. "Charlie-Five Echo to Supervisor Hill, go ahead please, over." "I've got two crews on the way. Hold position and wait, over." He felt relief flooding through him. "Roger that sir, over and out." Turning to Quincy he added, "Hill's sending someone out here, tell Barnes to - " She pulled the rifle from behind her shoulder, frowning at something behind him. Selvan turned in his seat and saw that in the distance, Barnes was waving his left hand frantically, moving backwards as fast as he could and pointing over his shoulder. He spotted it right away. Far away, at a cluster of trees and ferns, something was moving. And, even further than that, something was raising a cloud of dust as it moved towards the trees. Bill, the driver, jumped back behind the wheel as Quincy climbed on, and Selvan grabbed his own binoculars. A quick glance told him everything he needed to know. Three people among the trees, running out to greet an ATV pickup that was speeding towards them. The vehicle stopped, and the figures dragged something huge to the pickup... "They're taking the drone," He said, speaking to no one in particular. The engine rumbled to life and the jeep started forward; ahead of them, Barnes' AK47 spit fire. The gunshots rang in the emptiness of the desert, single shot after single shot - Barnes was trying for precision rather than a barrage. To Selvan's horror, answering fire suddenly erupted from the trees - this time fully-automatic, sounding like a distant jackhammer. Barnes went down and for one second he thought the worst, but then he saw that the guard had just hit the ground to avoid the shots, and was now aiming from a prone firing position. More single shots erupted. "Leave him to cover us, keep going." Quincy snapped. As they went past without stopping, she raised her hand made a waving motion with the palm held flat over her head. Apparently some sort of signal. "And you keep your head down," She added at Selvan, who nodded and crouched low in his seat. Bill mimicked the movement as much as he could while still keeping half an eye ahead, and Quincy unshouldered her gun, pulled the lever to lean the seat back and used the space to go to a semi-prone position that let her lean out and aim without shooting the windshield, and clicked the safety off. Unlike Barnes she fired in controlled bursts, making him cover his ears. "Ah s**t," Bill didn't wait to explain before adding, "Hold on!" The swerve of the vehicle nearly unseated Selvan, and he heard the whoosh of air as something bright went flying past them trailing smoke like a missile. "Hate those things!" Bill declared. He was inclined to agree, even if he didn't know what they were. A second one then went past with another whoosh, and this time he heard the explosion behind them as the thing went off. What the hell was that? He didn't voice the question out loud though, because his companions clearly had more pressing concerns than answering questions at the moment. He chanced a look and was just in time to see a man with a large pistol go down from almost simultaneous shots by Quincy and Barnes. Quincy's rifle dropped another one who was holding a big rifle, and the rest - who only had pistols - tossed their weapons, raising hands in surrender. She was out of the jeep and in their faces almost before they had screeched to a halt. "On your knees. On your knees, you piece of s**t! NOW!" Selvan wasn't the only who'd noticed how her voice had changed into something scary, because the three men who were left alive obeyed without hesitation. Billy stepped out of the driver's seat with an SMG, and Barnes's silhouette approached, moving fast. A couple of minutes later all three were zip-cuffed to their own worn-down car, Barnes was checking through their weapons while Billy held his gun on them, when Quincy asked, "You okay?" It was only then that Selvan realized he was still holding on to the side of the jeep, his knuckles white from the effort. "What?" The voice sounded like it came from someone else. "You okay?" She repeated. "You hit?" "No." He let his body relax, and was happy to sense that everything worked as it should. "What - what was that back there?" "Improvised grenade launcher." She jerked a thumb towards Barnes, who was examining what looked like a flare gun. "Some i***t made a shitload of them in an abandoned factory in Russia a few years back. Cheap. Bloomin' pain in the neck these days." "Oh." "Check the drone." "They have any tags?" She directed the question at Billy as he stepped out. "No. They're not from New Sydney." "We're not from around here." One of the three, barely older than Selvan himself, said weakly. "Guess that explains why you're stupid enough to steal from us." "You've got enough to spare." An older, heavily scarred man snapped in a hissing voice. "New Sydney's got everything, and you lot don't share any of it." Quincy snorted. Selvan shook his head as he stepped out of the jeep. The city, already having enough refugees to take care of, didn't allow outsiders to enter - which had created a lot of ill will among many communities. It amazed him that people would refer to his life in the slum district as "having everything", but, since he'd never been too far from New Sydney Limits, he had nothing to compare it to. Are things really that bad out there? "That excuses stealing our mines?" Billy wouldn't let it go. "You can spare one." "If every areshole who came along decided that and helped themselves to the perimeter drones, we'd be sittin' ducks the next time some pirate ship comes calling." "Serve you right." Billy smacked Scarface across the cheek with the butt of his gun, sending him sprawling to the ground. "I lost my brother in an attack when I was thirteen, shithead. Some of these newer pirate airships come with mortars. You have any idea what they can do to someone? Why d'you think we mined the skies around the city, even this far out?" "All right," Quincy ordered, "Let it go." "How did you disable the locator?" Selvan interrupted in as steady a voice as he could muster. "What?" The younger one looked puzzled. "The locator beacon inside the drone. How did you know how to find and disable it?" Scarface sat up and spit out blood from his mount. "Don't know what you're talking about." He declared. "We was just draggin' it out under the trees to call in the truck." "You lying?" Billy asked. "Because if you are - " "Look," He interrupted again before things escalated, "whoever disabled the beacon knew what they were doing. Show me how you did it, and maybe we could find a place for you in New Sydney. City's always looking for smart people." The three prisoners looked at each other. "You disable a beacon?" Scarface asked the other two. Both shook their heads. A long silence reigned. "You don't have to lie. If we were going to kill you, we'd've done it already." "Not lying." "If I check that thing and see the tracking device turned off inside - " "Not lying." The man insisted, jerking his head towards the dead bodies. "Maybe it was those two, and they did it when I wasn't lookin'." Selvan sighed, gave up, and went to the drone. As he knelt by the thing to take off his bag full of tools, he paused, frowning. "What is it?" Barnes had appeared by his side. "They didn't open this thing." "You sure?" "Yes. See?" He pointed at the intact chassis. The little code-lock that held it shut was unbroken. "So how did...?" "Don't know. Let me check." He twisted the combination into place and the lock clicked open. The insides seemed more or less intact. He methodically opened the inner chamber, and got to the tracker. It seemed intact, as well. He chose not to pull it out - trackers sent out a danger signal if they were disconnected from the drone - and instead pulled his tablet out the bag once again, along with a couple of data cables. A few seconds later he was connected to the drone, running a diagnostic. Okay, this was definitely weird. "Huh." It had shut itself down. Now why would you do that, all by yourself? He checked the power levels - they weren't empty. Not much chance they would be, with the solar arrays under this scorching sun. He ran a system check and everything read fine. Maybe it's just a bug. The tablet threw up a prompt asking if he wanted to reboot, and he chose yes. The insides of the drone whirred into life, and text scrolled up on his screen. The drone's A.I was basic - all it did was sync to the Central Computer at the city's Control Hub, reporting its position in the sky. The Hub's System did all the numbers, told it how to move to compensate for wind, and what to do if anything hostile approached their airspace. The mines could swarm like a single-minded hive, homing in on radar signatures that the Hub picked up, bombarding aircraft in the very sky. It was a very effective defense against airships in particular, which tended to be slow and not easily maneuverable. That meant it didn't have any complex programming which could've made a decision to shut down. Only a hardware problem could have made it do that without manual instruction. While on the subject, there was no immediate explanation for why the thing had come down, either. He had initially assumed a gas leak in the balloon, but that didn't appear to be the case either. The only way the drone could've been downed was if the A.I had actually let the gas out and sealed it back up again. But, again, why would you do that? Unless... Unless it was taking instructions from something other than the New Sydney Hub. His eyebrows narrowed as his eyes sped over the screen. It couldn't be... He brought up the diagnostic interface in his tablet, and went to the internal history of the mine. The malfunctions were clear: the electronic seal of the balloon had turned on and off at first, which brought the thing down, then the tracking device had shut down, followed by the drone system itself... "Oh, god." "What?" Barnes and Quincy both sounded worried at the panic in his voice. "It's a virus." "What?" "The firmware couldn't handle off the infection, so it went haywire and then the safety protocols kicked in to shut the system down. It's the malware that turned off the locator." "Wait a second, does that mean - " "Someone's inside the drone network." Selvan was already at the jeep, pulling the radio transmitter out, "Charlie-Five-Echo to Central Command, Code Red, I say again, Code Red - " The roar of the Cessna came so fast and so loud that he almost missed it, but the explosion that followed made sure to be noticed. Whatever hit the pickup truck turned it into thousands of kilograms of shrapnel, metal flying everywhere. The shockwave sent him flying several feet, landing on his stomach in the gravel, the wind getting knocked out of him and half his face losing its skin as he skidded to a halt. Only after almost a whole minute of silence and unnatural, peaceful calm had passed did he realize that he had gone deaf. His left cheek felt numb. Something warm was trickling down the side of his head. A cloud of dust had billowed up around them like a sandstorm, and he couldn't see anything. When he tried to stand up, he screamed in silence and felt the three-foot-long piece of steel sticking out of his ribs. A staggering silhouette emerged from the brown mist, Barnes, stumbling around with only one arm attached to his shoulders. He felt rather than heard the Cessna come back. In its heyday, Cessnas had been the most popular civilian aircraft in the world, and today they were used by anyone for anything. The machine thundering towards them was an armed instrument of death, painted grey in the sky with a skull and crossed swords in red paint pictured under the wings. The Redbones. Dirt fountained up from the ground around him. The plane was firing its machineguns. Somewhere in the back of his head he knew he had to move, but his leg wouldn't respond. Barnes fell, his torso exploding in a mist of red. The roar went past once more. He had started crawling and, with some measure of consciousness returned, aimed himself at the trees the thieves had been trying to escape from. Maybe they'd go by without noticing him. Maybe they'd think he was dead. Maybe... Maybe I'll live, had been the thought he had been about to hang on to, when suddenly he knew all the maybe he could've had in the future were gone, and he was going to die. Something had blocked out the sun. The size of the shadow was obvious enough that he knew what he'd be looking at when he rolled over. Only the biggest airships could own the sky like that. The gigantic black vessel hung in the air; a lumbering black leviathan of death and destruction, an eldritch titan that had no mercy. It was shaped like a huge sphere, with curved wings on either side. A white, octopus-like creature was painted on the front. Selvan had never seen that ship before, but he knew its name. It had been part of the pirate flotilla that had attacked New Sydney so long ago - in the same event that Billy had just spoken of. It was also the only one of the attackers that had evaded the city's retribution all these years. The Sky Kraken had returned to finish its conquest. Of the numerous weapons along its wings, Selvan never saw which one it was that turned to point at him. The last thing he thought of was I wonder if Quincy got away, and then a 20mmm cannon round ripped through his chest, almost cutting him in half. He never felt the pain or heard the sound of the shot that killed him. Far away, the white balloons and their mines began to fall down from the sky, like the tears of angels.