Myth Gods Tech - Omnibus Edition: Science Fiction Meets Greek Mythology In The God Complex Universe (41 page)

The van
circled the antenna tower and came close to us. Alkinoe shushed us.
“Keep it down, I could hear you from a kilometer away,” and got off
the van.

“
Relax, we are in the middle of nowhere and you just checked
the perimeter,” said Thomas between breaths. As she moved I
triple-checked to see if her breasts were there, under the kevlar.
It was instinctive, I couldn’t stop it. She was an ex-Amazon and I
always wanted to know if they cut off their right breast. They
didn’t, but I always felt the need to check.

I
couldn’t take it anymore. I yelled, “Hey kid, what the skata is
happening, are we gonna talk to someone anytime soon?” and propped
my rifle on my shoulder menacingly. Then I felt bad. Here I was,
acting tough to a fifteen year-old. The kid was just doing its job,
and damn finely at that.

His eyes
never stopped flipping from his monitor and his overlays to look at
us. He just said, “They are in. We are secure, calling. Mr Thomas,
you can now talk to the client.”

Thomas
looked a bit surprised to see the vidcall suddenly pop up on his
field of vision, made a gesture to protest against hacking but then
gathered his professional demeanor and talked to the client. Then
we all heard the client’s reply, cause the kid patched us all in.
We did hire a hacker, after all.

The
voice was scrambled to avoid recognition, with varying modulations.
I can only assume the image was more of the same. “If you have
followed our specific instructions, you will now be present at the
secure logon site and be armed and ready for the job. Do you have
the SSD at hand to begin the download?”

Thomas
raised his bag and gave it to the kid. “Right here, ready to accept
the data in a moment,” he said and waited for the kid’s
signal.

The kid
waived ok and the client simply said, “Sending.”

More
waiting. Great.

Thomas
finally said, “How time-sensitive is this? We are on schedule of
course but anything can happen.”

The
client replied, “The job can be done only tonight. Events have
taken place, planned months in advance to create this narrow window
of opportunity. People have been talked to look away, switches
turned just the right amount, vulnerabilities exploited for this
single chance. It must be done tonight, whatever it
takes.”

Spare me
the drama man, you are lucky you are paying us a ton of money. I
turned to Alkinoe and mimed the word malaka with my lips. She tried
to show me her strictest face but I saw a glimpse of smile in there
somewhere.

“
Of course, it is best to make the gravity of the situation
clear, that is all,” my brother said with the tone of voice that
gets him all the girls in the bar.

The
client said, “I expect you to arrive at the factory in under an
hour. Your hacker has already received the access codes and the
instructions to start the printing. Under no circumstances are you
to merge the stolen parts and the printed object. Do not fail, and
you will receive the rest of the payment.” The call was
terminated.

I
cheered as if my team had scored a goal. Half a million bitcoins is
a lot of money after all.

Thomas
said with decisiveness, “Ok team, let’s go do this thing and get
paid. Last one in the van pays for drinks at Jenny’s.” The kid and
I went in the back, Alkinoe drove and Thomas sat next to
her.

I
checked them both out. Was that mere comradery or was there
something between those two?

Chapter
2

No more
than five minutes in the kid raised the alarm. “Skata, we got
drones incoming!”

“
Yes!” I said raising my rifle, “Time for some
duck-hunting.”

“
No, they are land based, parallel to us, closing in at our
front vector,” the kid said.

Alkinoe
went pale. “Landmines. They are landmines. Thomas grab the wheel,”
she told him and lifted her torso out of the window. She pivoted
her body outside the car and peeked in again. “It’s standard
Amazonian tactic, two drones come firing for distraction and two
faster ones get in front and deploy,” she said and looked at
me.

“
Got it,” I said and opened the van’s back door. The poor kid
was distracted on his monitors and almost fell out so I grabbed his
arm and hauled him back on his seat. He held on tighter after that
scare. The ex-Amazon climbed in front of the speeding van, lowered
herself at near asphalt-level and took out her spear. The thing is
retractable, she carries it all the time, but she doesn’t let me
touch it.

“
Can’t you hack them or something kid?” I asked him while
steadying my rifle.

“
Nah, its fail man, not in time. I can only make them show on
your smartlink, here,” he said gulping down his fear.

I looked
at the bushes whizzing past us in the dark. Lousy place to make an
ambush if you are a man, great place if you are a land drone. I
could see pitch black skata for a long couple of seconds, and then
a red target appeared on my overlay. Nice.

“
When you fire make sur-“ the kid tried to say but I was
already BANG WHIZ BLAM broken drone. Bullets fell on the van like
hailstorm from the flanking side and we both fell on the floor.
Thomas did some evasive maneuvers and we thought we lost Alkinoe
for a second.

Then she
raised her hand in an “ok” thumbs up and held her place.

Bullets
ripped the top of the van into a cheese-grater and the kid was
holding down his head.

“
MAKE SURE OF WHAT?” I screamed over the bullets.

“
MAKE SURE IT IS THE FARTHEST ONE CAUSE THE OTHER WILL BREAK
CAMO MODE,” the kid screamed back.

“
GEE THANKS FOR THE WARNING,” I yelled back to him and propped
my rifle to take the drone down. The red target was moving around,
something was wrong. I fired but nothing seemed to go blowie.
Thomas was obviously trying to keep the van steady, but was that
the right strategic decision or was he going to get us killed in
order to protect his girlfriend?

Alkinoe
held the tip of her spear in front of the van, adjusted it when she
saw the mine-drone in the headlights and gritted her
teeth.

Contact.
She had placed the tip at the side of the drone, tripping it over
to our side. It bounced like a football and got lost into the
darkness.

No
explosion.

I was
trying to find the second drone that was at the moment not firing
at us but was sure to do so soon. The overlay targeting was all
over the place. Bah, that’s why I don’t trust these
things.

Muzzle
flash, metal torn into bits. I instinctively ducked for cover. I
had to do this the old way. I put as much metal as I could between
me and the drone but I knew that if a smartbullet was to come for
me, it would be as much protection as a pile of napkins.

I
gritted my teeth. One shot at this. Maybe not even that. But even
if the drone shoots my right arm away, I would take it down with
the other. For Thomas. For my brother. I had to do this, there was
no escape.

Well,
there was actually. I thought of the ground racing below me. I
could fall down. The drone might shoot me, or might not. Who knows?
The drone-mine in front would blast the van but not me. I could get
away with some broken bones. Better chances of that than counting
on a drone missing his shot. Or there might be Amazons behind us,
coming in on their bikes. Would they capture me? Kill me? Force me
to impregnate them all? Did they still do that or had they upgraded
to artificial insemination?

The kid
was waving his hand in the air. I thought he wanted to tell me
something but then I realized he was just controlling his computer,
doing his thing, little dots of overlay data running around his
face.

We are
gonna die and the son of a poutana is checking his
emails.

Muzzle
flash. Bullets tearing a line on the side of the van, on a neat
straight line towards my face. I held still. The shots were moving
alongside us. We were moving at relative speeds. The drone brain
would choose a perfectly parallel path. Aim. The drone fired again,
its bullets whizzing at random directions. One little smartbullet
refused the jamming and changed course, right on my chest armor. No
matter, I was holding my breath anyway. Who needs lungs? Fire.
Direct hit.

And then
I emptied the clip just to be sure.

I heard
a clang at the front as Alkinoe forced the second drone-mine to
bounce around the van and hit a rock. It came back at us and
exploded on the road behind. The shockwave slammed the van doors at
me and threw me on my back.

The
whole van wobbled and stopped. I guess Thomas was worried about
running over our girl. “Are you ok? Are there any more?” he asked
her.

“
No, that’s it for now. Let’s run,” she said, some scratches
on her arm but otherwise in one piece.

“
Let me bandage that arm for you,” he told her, trying to hide
his worry from us.

“
I’ll do it myself, drive. The operators could be after us,”
she said and climbed in the back. What was left of it
anyway.

“
Pfft. The operators could be driving the drones from halfway
around the world,” said the kid, giving the medkit to
Alkinoe.

The look
she gave him made him whip his hand back. “Amazons like to get up
close and personal. Remote presence doesn’t cut it when it comes to
the thrill of the kill,” she told us demonstrating a thrust with
her retracted spear and then snatched the medkit from the boy’s
hand.

“
Strap yourselves in, I’m punching it,” Thomas said, and we
blasted through the night towards Hephaistos Heavy Industries. I
looked through the broken glass at the darkness behind us and
imagined a gang of angry little ladies riding their bikes towards
us.

Chapter
3

The calm is
what gets to you. Those quiet minutes between a fight and the next,
which you know for certain that it’s coming since you are the
vlakas speeding towards it.

I could
see the kid was shaking. Had he even been in a firefight before? I
know his computing was seriously impressive, but a shaky
team-member can get you killed. After he gets himself killed first.
Or captured. I hate it when my team-mates get captured. I have to
go all the way there and get them, there is sooo much drama and
hostage situations and headshots and blood spatter on their face
and ungrateful things like, “Oh my god you could have killed me.”
We can’t have that.

I needed
him to focus his mind, so I said, “Hey Uberkid, let’s go over the
plan again with the added info the client gave you.”

He was
staring at nothing, obviously in shock and was totally quiet. I
could see his overlay was whizzing with text and arrows and info,
much more than I could ever handle constantly having on my face. He
wasn’t looking at any of that.

I
slapped him a bit and said, “Hey, kid. Added info. Tell me the
plan.”

He
responded, shook his head and gestured in the air to pull data to
our overlays. “Yeah, on it. The client needs the SSD drive plugged
into…”

“
Oh skata, is it okay?” said Thomas fumbling his jacket. “It’s
okay. No bullets. Everything is o-kay.”

Everybody sighed with relief about the stupid SSD. Wasn’t I
forgetting something? Oh yeah, bullet hit to the chest. I looked at
my chestpiece. Nope, it penetrated but got caught before my lung.
Might be a slight burn but I was too bored to take the armor off.
Then I sighed along with the others.

“
The drive needs to be plugged into the industrial grade 3D
printer. Those are the manufacturing specs. I will start the
process, got all the instructions here, not really that difficult,
could have managed it on my own,” the kid said.

“
It saves time, it’s called professionalism. Then what?” I
asked.

“
We just wait for the thing to get printed man, I mathed it
and will take about six minutes, and then we need to find three
more parts that are locked in a safe. The instructions have a
humongous warning on them to not insert the three parts in the
printed object.”

“
What
are
we
printing?” said Alkinoe, the thought that swam around in all of our
minds.

“
Now-now, that’s unprofessional. We are getting paid a pile of
cash to do this anonymously, without asking questions, with no-one
to track us when we are done and nothing to lead back to the
client,” said Thomas. Then he added, “And we all owe that privacy
to UberToxic’s skills.”

“
I don’t get it, can’t you see what it is on the designs?” she
asked.

The kid
said, “No ma’am, it’s encrypted. We will know when we see it
getting printed layer by layer.”

“
Ok. But what is so special about that factory in particular?
Did the client have to choose the most heavily guarded one?” she
asked and bandaged herself.

Thomas said, “There is some chatter at certain,
information places
,
about a hybrid industrial 3D-printer that polishes the product with
nanotech. It’s a direct contrast to the crude 3D printed stuff that
comes out rough and ugly, this tech can print stuff with etched
integrated circuits on it and all kinds of intricate structure like
hydraulics, optical fibres, anything really, even fractals for fun,
down to the nanoscale. If it exists, it is a well-kept corporate
secret and it must be precisely where we are going.”