The Beauty of Destruction (26 page)

‘So the machines went mad? Because they were connected to the net?’ Beth shouted from the cab.

‘Stop the truck,’ du Bois said. Beth pulled the pickup over. Both of them climbed out and du Bois handed off the
LMG
. Beth immediately started checking all around them.

‘It looks like the air force personnel attacked the perimeter,’ du Bois said and then shook his head. ‘But they didn’t do it well. Looks like they just sort of charged it.’

‘There,’ Beth said, pointing. A quadrocopter, a four-rotor drone, was hovering high above the centre of the Boneyard. It looked to have a number of camera lenses on it, multiple antennae, small parabolic dishes and it was armoured. ‘Can you hear music?’

Their weapons were up and both of them were moving towards the closest cover, a bullet-riddled
SUV
, as a small, low, angular tank moved out between two extensively cannibalised B-52s and then turned rapidly in a cloud of dirt. It had loudspeakers mounted on it. They were playing music that du Bois’s internal systems identified as ‘Halls of Karma’ by a band called Black Oak Arkansas. He didn’t like how heavily armoured the drone tank looked, or how little cover they had against the M2 .50-calibre machine gun that swivelled to point at them.

‘Du Bois?’ Beth asked.

‘I’m not sure we have the tools for the job,’ du Bois muttered. The music cut out, much to his relief.

‘So are you guys loonies as well?’ the voice from the tank’s loudspeaker asked in a broad Essex accent.

‘You have to be kidding,’ Beth muttered. Du Bois couldn’t help but smile at the figure trundling towards them on a motorised off-road skateboard. His skin was tanned from time out in the desert sun. He was easily over six feet tall. He had a thick, black, slightly unkempt beard that made it difficult to gauge his age. He looked to be somewhere between his mid-30s and mid-50s, though du Bois knew him to be a lot older. He wore a white cassock with body armour over the top. The body armour carried ammo for the Mossberg 590 tactical shotgun that was hung horizontally across his chest, as well as for the nasty little FN57 he held, a pistol that fired a round that had more in common with rifle ammunition than handgun ammunition. He was also sporting an eighteen-inch-tall pink mohican.

‘According to my files you come from a similar sub-culture,’ du Bois said to Beth as the skateboard came to a halt in front of them and the mohicaned figure spilled off it.

‘Big Malky!’ the man cried.

‘Please, don’t ever call me that.’

He came to give du Bois a hug but the amount of ordnance hanging off them both got in the way. He settled for a hearty handshake.

‘Do you know anyone who isn’t a London arms dealer?’ Beth asked.

The figure with the mohican looked mock offended. ‘
Moi
? From London?’

‘He’s from Essex,’ du Bois told her.

‘Oh, that’s much better,’ Beth muttered. Du Bois assumed there was some sort of north/south divide thing going on.

‘Canvey, darlin’,’ he told her. ‘And I’m a consultant
otaku
for the good old
USAF
, not an arms dealer.’

‘But you still like your toys, right?’ du Bois asked. He was aware of a number of tracked and armed drones in the vicinity. They weren’t exactly covering Beth and himself.

‘Always have, always will,’ the odd-looking figure said. He turned to Beth. ‘The first time a bit of the tech washed up on shore it was like …’ He made an exploding gesture with both his hands by his head and an accompanying sound effect. He looked somewhat manic. ‘Like electric …’ He tapped his head. ‘Y’know?’ Beth was looking at him as if she had found a new, exotic, and not entirely safe animal.

‘Beth, may I introduce you to Karma,’ du Bois said. Beth somewhat reluctantly shook his hand.

‘Is he one of yours?’ she asked.

‘Independent, darlin’,’ Karma said. ‘Always have been, always will be. Hasn’t stopped this bad boy from trying to recruit me more than once.’

Beth looked over at Malcolm.

‘Karma was a wrecker. Born in the sixteenth century?’ du Bois asked. Karma nodded. ‘He found his first piece of L-tech after he and his friends lured a ship carrying it onto the rocks.’

Beth frowned. ‘Nice.’

‘I’m a changed man now. Let’s get out of the sun, shall we?’ Karma climbed back up onto his skateboard and started trundling deeper into the Boneyard between rows of stripped down helicopters covered in a white vinyl/plastic compound. A number of the tracked drones fell in with him, all of them kicking up clouds of red dust. Some of the other drones accompanied Beth and du Bois. Du Bois tried not to think of them as armed guards.

‘Out of the sun’ was sitting on garden furniture under a parasol on the wing of an old B-1 bomber. Karma had put on sunglasses and was lounging in one of the chairs, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette, having poured them both a glass of homemade lemonade from a frosty jug.

Beth and du Bois had divested themselves of enough of their gear to be comfortable but both of them still had their sidearms. They had tried to position themselves so that between them they had three-hundred-and-sixty degree coverage. For Karma’s part a number of the tracked
SWORD
drones nearby had line-of-sight to Beth and du Bois, and there were a few more rotor drones in the air. They looked like they were homemade but they had personnel defence weapons mounted underneath them.

‘So what happened?’ du Bois asked. ‘The people went mad, started bombing the city? Then you sent the Reapers up after them?’

‘Oh no, that would have been too easy,’ Karma said. ‘First all the active drones went mental, turned on everyone. Meanwhile I’m lying on the floor because whatever’s hit the internet has caused me to have a fucking fit. So things get tense for a while. I manage to hit the backdoor kill switches I’ve installed on everything I’ve made. I junk some really nice computer tech. Isolate the systems on the second team and fire them up, by which point all the Warthogs are up in the air …’ Something passed over Karma’s face. ‘Full on military suicide, man. Shock and awe.’ He swallowed hard. ‘So me and the girls,’ he nodded towards the closest drone, ‘engage in a bit of a Charge of the Light Brigade. Fucking nightmare. Over and across the runway. I got fucking shot, man! I do a bit of work on the Reapers and then they’re up in the air …’ He looked down. ‘Some of those guys, the A-10 jockeys, they were friends of mine.’

‘At the point they were dropping bombs on the city, there was nothing left of your friends,’ du Bois told him gently.

‘Yeah, but it didn’t do them much good did it?’ Karma asked quietly. ‘I mean, I don’t know; I should go into the city, start looking for survivors or something … Bring them back here, a little community in the planes or something.’ It was obvious to du Bois that Karma hadn’t got much further than that with his plan, but on the other hand it sounded like he’d had a busy few days.

‘How’d you control them all if those things fucked the comms?’ Beth asked suspiciously.

Karma nodded to the rotor drone hovering over the centre of the Boneyard with all the cameras, antennae and small parabolas.

‘Tight-beam microwave transmission,’ Karma told them. ‘It goes up pretty high but it’s still line-of-sight. Plus I upgraded their autonomous functions. Little something I wasn’t going to share with US of AF. This shit was not going to the military-industrial complex. All the drones are basically dumb AIs.’

Du Bois was impressed despite himself. Single-handed, Karma had tried to stop the A-10s from bombing the city.

‘Then the soldiers attacked you?’ Beth asked.

Karma shrugged. ‘The drones did most of the damage to them.’ Du Bois could see that he was wrestling with something.

‘That’s got to require a lot of power,’ du Bois said, pointing at the rotor drone acting as a communications conduit.

‘It gets tired I send up another one, so they overlap, drop it down, recharge, repeat and rinse,’ Karma told him, but du Bois could tell he didn’t want to explain further. Du Bois assumed that Karma had a command post around here, he suspected it would be mobile, probably something the size of a lorry.

‘What happened?’ Karma asked after a few moments.

‘The Seeders woke up,’ du Bois told him. Karma nodded, a grim expression on his face.

‘So just like that, then?’ Karma snapped his fingers. ‘We’re gone.’

‘What are you going to do?’ Beth asked quietly.

‘Well, it’s all gone a bit
Mad Max
, hasn’t it?’ Karma said. Du Bois was now sure the mohicaned tech was trying to suppress strong emotion.

‘We could use your help,’ du Bois said. ‘We might even have an out.’

Karma looked at him. ‘They took my internet away. I really liked the internet. Besides, and no offence, I don’t want to have anything to do with the Circle and that arsehole, Mr Brown. You and … you were just about the most tolerable of the whole lot.’ Du Bois frowned. He was sure Karma had been about to mention this Grace person, the partner he couldn’t remember. ‘I’m going to try and contact the Brass City. It’s a virtual life for me. You can try and assassinate me if you want.’ Karma was looking straight at him. The smile gone. There was just a moment of tension. Du Bois was suddenly aware of the drones around him and the weight of the .45 on his hip.

‘We’re out of favour,’ du Bois said.

‘That’s putting it mildly,’ Beth muttered. ‘I was never a member; they want me dead, and they shot us down.’

Karma frowned. ‘Then why aren’t you dead?’

Du Bois had to admit that it was a good question. He didn’t have a good answer.

Karma looked between the pair of them and laughed. ‘Want an easier question? Given that resources are at an all-time premium, what do you need from me, brother?’

‘Do you know who the Do As You Please Clan are?’ du Bois asked.

‘Yeah, a bunch of arseholes. They’re a so-called uberguild bunch of crooked, bullying pricks. Rumour has it that they’re heavily involved in online money laundering, supposed to be responsible for a couple of real life player kills. I spent a lot of time making their griefing lives miserable on a couple of the multi-players we have … had in common. So? You going to tell me they’re in the know?’ Du Bois nodded. ‘Makes sense.’

‘It’s not just online,’ Beth said quietly. ‘Kidnap, murder, slavery and probably lots of other stuff I don’t really want to think about.’

Karma looked north towards central Tucson. Vast clouds of smoke were still rising into the sky.

‘Well, like I said they’re arseholes, but in the big scheme of things …’

‘They’ve taken something, something very important …’ du Bois started.

‘And you’re not going to tell me what that is?’

Du Bois sat back in his chair and looked at Karma. ‘Do you want to know?’

Karma gave this some thought. ‘Probably not,’ he decided.

‘If it’s any consolation, this will probably piss off Mr Brown as well,’ Beth told him.

‘So they’re making for LA,’ du Bois told him.

‘Big city,’ Karma said.

‘I need to know who they might know,’ du Bois said.

‘It’s a hollow place, man, there’s not much there and I thought your people had the Pacific Rim sewn up,’ Karma said.

Straight away du Bois knew it was a test. The
otaku
was suggesting that he knew about Kanamwayso, the Seeder city deep beneath the Pacific Ocean. If du Bois was still part of the Circle, he could expect a reaction. It wasn’t much of a play. Had du Bois still been working for them he would have got what he needed from Karma and then come back, killed him and wiped any information he might have.

‘Not really my sphere of operations,’ du Bois said.

‘Kept you all pretty compartmentalised, did they?’ Karma asked. Du Bois was growing more uncomfortable with how Karma was behaving.

‘Can you help us?’ Beth asked.

‘There’s a guy, came out of nowhere about six months ago, and he cuts a swathe across East LA. Unites the Hispanic gangs but all of a sudden I’m seeing his footprint in odd places. The feds are looking at him for serious stuff that should be way out of the reach for a bush league gangbanger. He’s got juice from one of the big Mexi cartels, in bed with the Russians, all sorts, and he’s doing things he shouldn’t be able to do … I mean there are things in the jungles and mountains down south, man, you know that?’

‘What’s his name?’ Beth asked.

‘La Calavera,’ Karma told her.

‘Original,’ Beth muttered. It meant skull in Spanish, but could also refer to the sugar skulls made for the
Día de Muertos
, the Day of the Dead, or a death’s head moth, or even a rake. As in an immoral male hedonist, not a gardening implement.

‘And you think he has access to the tech?’ du Bois said.

‘He was in all the wrong places, making all the wrong noises with a ridiculous amount of technical know-how,’ Karma told them. Beth looked less than pleased, and to be fair du Bois had been hoping for a bit more himself. ‘He’s supposed to be a hunchback as well. That’s all I’ve got. The West Coast has been quiet for years.’

‘Know where we can find him?’ Beth asked.

‘Well, assuming he’s not smearing his own shit in his hair like the rest of humanity, the last I heard he was setting up his own fiefdom in East LA. I don’t know the city that well.’

‘He sounds exactly like the sort of wanker that the
DAYP
would make friends with,’ Beth muttered. Du Bois wasn’t quite so sure. The
DAYP
struck him as wannabes who had got lucky. Karma knew his tech, if he was impressed then this La Calavera was probably the real deal. He wouldn’t have just come out of nowhere. He must have been biding his time. Planning. Even the name wasn’t as ridiculous as it sounded, he had tapped into the folk beliefs of what was presumably his community, and if he did have access to the tech then he could potentially have made their nightmares come true. Fear was the key to control.

‘Sorry I can’t help more,’ Karma said.

‘Well, that’s not entirely true,’ du Bois said. Karma sighed. ‘We’re going to need a ground vehicle. We can’t risk an aircraft but people are still using the roads. We need to lose ourselves. Something with a bit of speed but armoured, armed as well, supplies, ammunition.’