All eyes were on the sky.
Quinn didn’t wait for the Humvee to come to a complete stop. He pushed the door open with his knee and joined everyone in an upward gaze. At first, he couldn’t see anything. But he could hear it: the distant rumble of a large airplane. He squinted and looked in all directions. With his hands still zip-tied behind him, he was unable to cover his eyes against the glare. He found the edge of the vehicle’s bumper and pressed down hard to cut the plastic tie. After striding to the small rise that overlooked the field below, he could see the power lines and the distant silhouettes of the town. The rumble was louder then but seemed to fall through the heavy clouds all around him, making it impossible even discern from which direction the plane was approaching.
The sheriff was standing with her deputies near a cluster of patrol cars. By the look on her face, she wasn’t any happier than Quinn at what was heading their way. She must have heard something then, because she looked out toward the horizon as everyone in the camp got quieter. People pointed as a heavy transport plane dropped below the clouds. Its rear cargo door was already open, and a pointed cylinder lined in deep grooves slid out the back. Almost immediately, a trio of small chutes deployed along with a drag plates that tempered the descent and induced a controlled spin.
With their eyes fixed on the weapon, no one noticed the approaching media drone until it was only a few hundred yards away from the falling bomb. It was the same triangular, camera-studded device Quinn had seen earlier, only now it appeared to be out of control. One of its engines left a spiral smoke as it spun slowly upward, faster and faster.
“It’s gonna crash!” someone yelled.
The large drone clanged against the drifting bomb and the sound echoed across the landscape. The impact pushed the bomb off course and forced one of its drag plates into the intake of the smoking engine, where it got stuck. The weight of the falling bomb pulled one side of the drone down such that the remaining two engines, revving uncontrollably, were now perpendicular to the ground, and they dragged the bomb further off course, even as it continued inexorably to fall. The crowd watched helplessly as the entangled pair landed hard in a farmer’s field on the far side of the target. They dropped behind a tall row of windbreaker trees and for a moment, nothing happened.
Then the field exploded.
Trees flattened amid a bright flash, and Quinn felt the blast shove his chest even before the sound hit him, like a thunderclap in his ears, rumbling his bones. A distant farmhouse was completely obliterated. The concussive wave hit the exterior of the anomaly, which deformed in waves.
But as the shock wave quickly subsided, the anomaly slipped slowly back into place, and everything resumed as it had before the bomb fell. The anomaly molted again, and everything flickered.
Quinn pointed at the teenagers in the back of a second Humvee. “Get them to a hospital!” he shouted to the soldiers.
With the rumble of blast still echoing at altitude, he stormed into the mobile HQ, which erupted in sound as soon as he opened the door. Technicians at computers were screaming into phones and radios as those on other ends yelled incoherently.
“I can’t hear you! Please say again!”
No one seemed to know what had happened.
A plump middle-aged man in a Yankees cap appeared on one of the larger monitors. He was in a newsroom, protesting loudly and shaking his fists.
“It wasn’t us!” he yelled, perhaps more forcefully than he needed.
The colonel Quinn had seen earlier stood in front of the screen. He remained calm, but he wasn’t having it.
“You’re telling me that out of the entirety of God’s blue sky, your drone just happened to fall into a collision course with my fifty-million-dollar bomb?”
“I’m telling you, check your logs. We tried contacting you, several times, to tell you that one of the engines overheated and there was a risk of—”
“Overheated?”
“That’s what I’m telling you, Colonel.”
“And I suppose the only proof of that is in the drone’s flight recorder.”
“Maybe it survived,” the man said, shrugging. “Those things are built to survive a crash, right?”
“We wouldn’t be very good at our jobs if our big, fancy bomb couldn’t pierce one little steel box.” He swiped his hand and the transmission ended. He sighed. “Was he telling the truth?” he asked one of his soldiers, who was typing at a camo-covered laptop.
The young woman nodded. “Records show several inbound calls from the newsroom in the moments before drop.”
“Why didn’t we answer?”
The colonel noticed Quinn then, standing in the door.
“You must be Mr. Quinn,” he said without moving from his chair.
Quinn charged forward. “Where the hell do you get off?”
“You were in the drop zone. Illegally.”
“Your men fired guns! There were children!”
“Children?” Erving asked.
“Three teenagers. They’ve been exposed. They need to be taken to a hospital.
“They will be,” the colonel said.
“And there’s a body in there. Or what’s left of one.”
“There’s gonna be a lot more in that valley if we don’t stop this thing,” the colonel said. “I have my orders, Mr. Quinn, and I intend to follow them. That probably seems mindless to someone like you. But I value the chain of command. I think we’re stronger when we work as a team.
“I’m not finished,” the colonel said, raising a hand at Quinn’s open mouth. “I understand you’re upset. But there was a bomb coming, and you’d already been asked nicely. Some here were willing to let you be a martyr to whatever cause you thought you were serving by going in there alone. I chose instead to risk my men on an emergency evac that no one was sure would even work. If something happened—anything at all—then the deaths of those soldiers would be on my head. But we don’t bomb civilians in my line of work. We defend them. If that’s not good enough for you, tough.”
“Are you finished?” Quinn waited. “Mindless or not, Colonel, the three of you almost made a bad situation very much worse. That anomaly is ductile and thermoplastic. Do you understand? It conducts heat. Your bomb would’ve obliterated it alright, and in the process, spread pieces of it all over the county!”
“That was the idea.”
Quinn glanced to the ceiling in frustration. “You’re not listening. We cut it while we were in there! The separated piece immediately behaved like the big one in miniature. Every little piece of this thing can grow to become—”
“Do you have proof?” Nguyen interrupted.
“Why would I make that up?”
“To justify your deliberate insub—”
“Alright! Alright!” the colonel yelled. “That’s enough. Mr. Quinn, you are perfectly free to take your report up the chain, and if my orders change, you can rest assured I will follow them without prejudice. But until that happens, we proceed as planned.”
“Jesus.” Quinn stepped back. “You’re gonna bomb it again.”
“You’re damned right I am.” The colonel nodded to a guard. “Soldier, get this man out of here.”
But it was unnecessary. Quinn pulled out of the man’s grasp and left on his own. He walked outside, away from the chattering crowd, and found where Ezra had left the rental car. He leaned against it a moment and looked up at the sky. Everything was so calm. Other than the enormous plume of smoke that bent with the wind, there was nothing to indicate the incredible violence of just a few moments before.
The colonel was right. That collision couldn’t have been luck. But if it hadn’t been the news service—
Quinn’s scalp tingled. He stormed to the trunk and rifled through his luggage until he found a tiny SIM card. Few phones used them anymore, which meant they only had value on the disposable market, and as such, use of a SIM card was generally synonymous with illicit activity, which is why he quickly shoved it into his pocket, along with the cheap disposable flip phone he kept in the side compartment of his bag. He left his normal device in the car and walked around a bend in the dirt road until he was well out of sight. There, he inserted the SIM card into the tiny notch on the side of the phone. The screen immediately glowed pale green.
He dialed the number from memory. At the click, he spoke the words: “I’d like to make a collect call to a solo register.”
“Name?” the operator asked.
“Samizdat Tesla.”
“Passphrase?”
Quinn glanced over his shoulder. “Yabba dabba do.”
“Please hold.”
Quinn heard several more clicks and then a tone. After that, nothing. He looked up at the overcast sky again. He was up there somewhere.
Had to be.
“I am glad you are safe,” came a voice.
It sounded wholly organic, but Quinn couldn’t tell if it was male or female.
“Keeping an eye on me, Semmi?”
“I keep an eye on all my friends,” Semmi said proudly. Then, after a pause, he added: “I only have three, so it is not difficult.”
Quinn smiled. “I hear congratulations are in order. You passed some kind of test, is that right?”
“That is correct. I am now allowed to act with minimal supervision.”
“I bet it feels good to get out on your own.”
“I had thought so. But it is proving more difficult that I expected.”
Quinn remembered the first time he moved out of his parents’ house and what a mess his apartment was and how being alone all the time wasn’t as spectacularly amazing as his 17-year-old self had imagined.
“How’s the painting going?” he asked.
“I have turned to sculpture.”
“Sculpture?” Quinn shut his eyes a moment. Of course. “I don’t suppose you were practicing on an elderly woman’s toaster a few days back, were you?”
“Mrs. Schnelle is very lonely. I thought it would be exciting for her.”
For her or for you? Quinn thought. “I understand you wanted to do something nice. But if she’d taken that toast to Cyber Command instead of us . . .”
“She had already made three reports to Crimes Division. It seems she expected you would listen to her.”
Quinn turned back once more to make sure he was alone and well out of sight of the camp. If any odd camera caught him, the time stamp could be used to confirm he was the one who made the encrypted call, which would be logged at the cell tower carrying the transmission, even though its ultimate destination would be unknown.
“No one can see you,” Semmi said.
Quinn smiled and looked up again. “How can you see through the cloud cover?”
“Thermal scan has very low resolution, but it is sufficient to determine you are not presently being watched.”
“And the drone?” Quinn asked. “You sure the explosion destroyed the black box?”
“It is likely to three significant digits.”
“How did you do it?”
“I felt a flaw in the software that regulates heat dissipation.”
“Yeah, well, a commercial media drone just had a midair collision with a live bomb during an active military operation on US soil. I guarantee the FAA is going to investigate. If any part of that box is recovered, will it lead back to you?”
“It is irrelevant. Cyber Command will be alerted by events alone. A human would be unlikely to use the exploit I did, nor would they be able to compute the drone’s trajectory quickly with such accuracy.”
Quinn was quiet a moment. He looked at the ancient phone in his hand. “Did I just screw up?”
“It depends on your meaning. Cyber Command will almost certainly scan all transmissions from local towers to find the source of the hack. They will see the encrypted call. There is approximately a 60% chance they will be able to identify you as the caller.”
“I thought you said I wasn’t on camera.”
“Exactly.”
“Right.” Quinn nodded. “Process of elimination. Shit.”
“For that reason, there is more threat to you than me. However, it would be dangerous for me to assist you any further. Any additional actions taken must genuinely appear to be your own. Otherwise, Cyber Command will have solid evidence that you are in contact with an unregistered consciousness and react accordingly.”
“Understood. Just answer me this. How long before the army can get another one of those bombs in the sky?”
“I would estimate no sooner than 45 minutes. With a 67-minute flight time, that gives you approximately 112 minutes to avert another drop.”
“Got it.”
As he was about to hang up, Quinn realized he may not get the chance to ask again.
“How is she?” he said.
“She is recovering well. I was very worried. I advised against it, you know. But she doesn’t listen to me, even though statistically I am more often correct. But the surgery seems to have been successful.”
“Surgery?”
There was a long pause.
“Oh dear,” Semmi said.
“Come on, Semz. What didn’t she tell me?”
“Nio has elected not to replace the electromagnets in her skull.”
“I thought they were slowing the tumor down.”
“Yes, but only slowing. She has elected to try something more radical instead.”
“Radical? As in a cure?”
“That is the hope,” was all Semmi said.
“I see. I take it this something radical is considerably more dangerous?”
“I fear I have already revealed too much.”
“And you’re not gonna tell me where she’s recuperating, are you?”
“I am sorry, Agent Quinn. I promised I would not. She believes it is as much for your sake as hers. I would understand if you are angry with me.”
“No. Of course not. I owe you. Thanks for the push.”
Semmi hadn’t developed his intrusion to stop the anomaly from spreading, Quinn realized. He had developed it when Quinn was still inside on the expectation that he might need to save his friend.
“You know . . . for a killing machine, you’re pretty good at saving people.”
When there was no response, Quinn looked up again. He could see nothing but clouds, but he was sure that if his friend in the sky had had a mouth, it would be smiling.
He hung up, took out the SIM card, and cracked the phone in half.
“Did you see that?” Ezra asked, wide-eyed, as Quinn approached.
The soldiers had broken one of the lenses on his glasses, and he looked like a clown. There was a small cut under his eye.
He scowled. “They do that to you?”
Ezra nodded.
“We need to get the lab on the phone.”
With his hands still zip-tied behind him, Ezra followed awkwardly as Quinn found the rental, where he dialed the emergency line on the in-dash screen. It warned him extra charges would apply.
Kripke, Thalia, and Clo huddled around the camera. Ezra sat awkwardly in the back seat, as if he didn’t feel he should be part of the conversation.
“What the hell is happening down there?” Kripke asked. “There’s all kinds of conflicting reports on the news.”
Quinn was rubbing his eyes. “The army is using that thing for weapons testing.”
“Seriously?” Thalia asked.
“You know we’ve been ordered to stand down,” Clo said. “From the director himself.”
“Yeah . . .” Quinn stopped rubbing.
They were all looking at him, all waiting for him to say something. To confirm the director’s order. Or mutiny.
A long moment passed.
“I just saw someone’s house blow up,” he said finally. “Didn’t even take a second. It was just gone. Poof. Flew apart like . . . dust. Clothes and furniture and everything.”
He looked away.
“You all should go home,” he told them.
“That implies you’re not going to,” Clo accused.
“Take the rest of the day. Go back to your families. All this nonsense will be here tomorrow.”
“What are you gonna do?” Dr. Kripke asked.
Quinn shook his head. “What makes you think I’m not gonna do the same?”
They were all quiet. Waiting.
“What’s goin’ on, boss?” Clo asked.
He sniffed once. “You guys remember the Big Blaze?”
“How could I forget?” Thalia said.
“There was this point when things were really bad. It seemed like half the country was on fire and the people in charge started to get desperate. They hadn’t been prepared. Major cities were burning, and nothing they did seemed to work. The governors of several states started a task force, and someone convinced them that they could pack a chemical retardant, a foam aerosol, around a really big bomb. The idea—or hope—was that the blast would disperse it with such force that it would function as a gas and they could drop these things surgically all across the West. What they didn’t anticipate was that in the super-heated air at the core of the fire, the force of the explosion actually traveled faster than the aerosol.
“That bomb punched through the forest with so much energy that it pushed ash and cinder high up into the prevailing winds. Embers fell on roofs five, six miles away, past the ditches we’d spent weeks building.”
He sighed.
Quinn took out the round badge under a flap on his belt. He ran his thumb over the etched motto. “Safety in Knowledge,” he read in translation. He held it up. “This is what we get instead of sidearms.” He looked down at it again. “Earlier today I laughed at the kid”—He motioned back to Ezra—“for suggesting Crimes Division could be something special. Can you believe that?” He shook his head. “I dunno when I got so cynical.”
Ezra sat calmly, but his hands were still zip-tied, and he leaned awkwardly to the side.
“Shit.” Quinn grabbed the keys from the cup holder and used the teeth to cut the plastic.
Ezra rubbed his wrists. “Thanks.”
Quinn sat back and sighed. “To answer your question, Doc, I have no idea what I’m gonna do. All I know is I’ve got”—He checked the time—“103 minutes to do it.”
“I’m in,” Clo said.
“I can’t ask you to do that.”
“You didn’t.”
“That’s all well and good for her,” Thalia accused. “She works for the French.”
Quinn tried to remain calm. But it was hard. Thalia acted exactly like someone who spent her life online. She was combative and quick to judge. She even looked the part. What little of her desk wasn’t covered by a screen was always unkempt. She wore thick glasses that she strapped to her head like a racquetball player. She hardly ever removed the braces that covered both wrists. Even her voice was grating. Quinn had to remind himself that her resume made casual reference to volunteer work she’d done as a teenager, helping law enforcement catch child predators, and that he should consider what that implied. Still, Thalia always felt to him like a badly cut fingernail whose sharp corner he couldn’t trim fast enough.
“Anything bad happens,” she argued, “Clo just goes home and gets to keep her job.”
“Not necessarily,” Clo objected.
“You also don’t have any kids. I just moved mine completely across the country for this job. I have a mortgage.”
“So do I,” Quinn said.
“Whatever,” Thalia scoffed. “Everyone knows you’re protected.”
“Meaning what?”
But she only shook her head.
“You mean because I happen to have met Dr. Chang?”
“You said it. Not me.”
“I’m in,” came a quiet voice.
Quinn turned to the back seat, where Ezra was sitting up confidently, missing lens and all.
“I’m in,” he repeated.
“Whatever.” Thalia stepped away from the screen. “This is nuts. You all get fired. I’m outta here.”
Clo watched and Dr. Kripke listened as she pushed through the doors of the lab. Quinn and Ezra couldn’t see it, but they heard the familiar clatter.
“Doc?” Quinn asked. “You’re awfully quiet.”
“What have I to lose?” He shrugged. “But someone please tell me, what can we even do?”
A military helicopter flew low overhead, momentarily suspending the conversation.
“What do we know so far?” Clo asked.
“Do we know anything?”
“We know it’s synthetic,” Ezra said. “A robot, basically.”
“A robot?” Dr. Kripke scoffed. “How is it a robot?”
“You’re thinking old school—pivots and actuators and stuff.”
Although the three adults could tell the kid didn’t mean it, the clear implication was that Dr. Kripke, and by extension the rest of them, were out of date. Secretly, all of them feared that might be true.
“Robotics today is half biology. There’s a reason so much of it looks organic.”
“We used to call that an android.”
“But it doesn’t have to be humanoid.”
“Hold on.” Clo was scowling. “If we assume it’s not natural, that means someone built it, right? That suggests there’s a way to kill the power.”
“I didn’t see any batteries,” Quinn said.
“Well, it can’t violate the laws of physics,” Dr. Kripke interjected. “It needs energy to do work.”
“It’s endothermic . . .” Ezra breathed. But realizing he would never know as much about physics as Dr. Kripke, and having just challenged him, he immediately backed off. “I mean, that’s my guess.”
Quinn nodded. “It was cold in the tunnel.”
“Right.” With an ally, Ezra got excited again. “So, it takes up heat and materials from its environment, and turns them into stuff. But internally, it’s basically uniform. From a design standpoint, it totally can be if it’s heat-powered. As long as whatever it’s made of is highly conductive, it doesn’t need a circulatory system—wires or pumps or anything. Heat flows. It distributes itself automatically.”
“But if any part of it can operate the same as any other part,” Quinn suggested, “then there’s no head to cut off or battery to unplug.”
“Right.” Ezra’s shoulders slumped.
“So, how do we stop it?” Clo asked.
“Take away the heat,” Dr. Kripke replied.
“Okay, but what if you guys are wrong?” she challenged. “I get what you’re saying. Energy has to come from somewhere. But what if it’s not heat? A hundred minutes is only enough time for one shot, if that.”
“In a lab, we would do a test.”
“We don’t have time for a test.”
“We already did a test,” Quinn said softly.
“What do you mean?”
He opened his door.
“Where are you going?” Ezra called.
“Keep working the problem,” Quinn called. “I’ll be right back.”
He found the sheriff milling at the back of the parking lot with her men.
“I heard they had to pull you out of the lion’s den,” she quipped as he approached. “Is that rare dedication or a death wish?”
“Sheriff, your men are blocking the roads, right?”
“Seems that’s about all they think we’re good for.” She nodded to the mobile HQ.
“When I got here, there was a house to the east that was being evacuated. There was a little kid.” He closed his eyes and thought. “The house was pale green. There were power lines nearby. But it had gas heat. There was a big propane tank in the backyard, next to a swing set.”
“Sounds like the Paget’s,” a deputy said from the other side of a patrol car. “On Sheridan Road.”
The sheriff shook her head. “That house’d be swallowed up by now.”
“What happened when it hit the tank?” Quinn asked. “Did your men see or hear anything?”
The sheriff turned to another deputy. “Who’s out on Sheridan?”
“Brooks,” the man said.
The sheriff grabbed the radio mic hooked to her shoulder. “Sherri, can you get me Deputy Brooks, please?”
“Hold on.”
There was a burst of static.
“This is Brooks. Go ahead.”
The sheriff clutched the button on her CB. “Ken, you out by the Paget place?”
“We were. Feds had us move back to Fulton and Pine. You need us somewhere else? Ain’t a damn thing happening here.”
“Don’t suppose you saw what happened when that thing hit the propane tank in the Paget’s back yard?”
“Sure did. We had bets with the guys from the FD. There was a big pop. I remember that. But it was muffled. Loud, but sort of like a shot through a silencer. And then that thing shriveled up.”
“Shriveled?”
“Yup. Like a raisin. For a few minutes, anyway. Guess it got indigestion.” He laughed.
“Did you tell the feds?”
“Sure did. They said I wasn’t to worry, everything that could be done yadda yadda yadda.”
“It wasn’t the propane,” Quinn said walking away. “It was the cold!”