Jon Evans - Swarm

“Drastic action like what?” I asked.

“You really haven’t left us much choice but a frontal assault.”

“A frontal assault? On the factory?” Lisa echoed disbelievingly. “There are hundreds of people in there!”

“Yes. Exactly. Against the two of you,” he said with relish. “Why, it’s almost unfair.”

Lisa and I watched the Greenwood Technologies drone factory from within the shadow cast by the wall of the construction site across the street. Through the cracks between the vertical slats I could see the vast and vertiginous pit from which the two huge cranes above us grew, and I couldn’t help but think of Tolkien’s Mines of Moria, where dwarves had dug too deep and awakened an ancient evil.

“Listen up.” LoTek’s voice crackled simultaneously from the phone in my pocket and Lisa’s on her hip. I started with surprise; they hadn’t rung, and we hadn’t called. I supposed to him such niceties were cosmetic irrelevancies. “Bit of a confabulation going on inside. I’m going to conference your phones in with Jesse’s so you can hear too. Speak freely, I’ll hear you but they won’t.”

I pulled the Android from my pocket just in time to hear Jesse’s voice, throbbing with fury: “You know what? I can believe you were just playing me the whole time. That’s actually remarkably easy to believe. Right from the beginning, hey? I can believe that. But I can’t believe you’re actually insane, because I know you’re not, but what you’re doing is . Anya, for God’s sake. You’re about to start fucking World War Three, and this is your very last chance to not jump into the abyss. Do you not see that?”

“When you look into the abyss, the abyss looks into you.” Anya sounded amused. “Do you know who said that, Jesse?”

“I need you to consider the possibility that the people you’re working for are out of their fucking minds.” I could hear the strain in his voice. “Please. Just consider that.”

“Perhaps should consider the possibility that they are not.”

“What do you think is going to happen? Fucking World War Three, for real.”

“Really? War on whom? There will be no proof. There will be many theories, us, the drug cartels, the North Koreans, Iranians, Venezuelans, Chinese, and much evidence for each theory, some real, some manufactured. And you know America has no stomach for war. They export it happily, but they cannot face it on their own streets. Even less when they’re already on their knees. No. They will swallow their pride and accept that they are not beyond judgment. That’s what this is. We’re not monsters. When the world rushes to their aid, Russia will be at its forefront, we will lead the reconstruction. It’s not America we want to destroy, only the American empire, America as hyperpower. This is only a balancing of the scales. Believe it or not but it’s truth, Jesse, we are doing this to make the world a better place.”

“America is a cancer on the world,” a male voice added. Dmitri’s voice. “Think of tonight as the first session of chemotherapy.”

Tonight. I went cold. They weren’t going to wait to attack the G8 first, they had changed their plan because of us. Twelve thousand Russian drones would launch from their hidden caches across the USA in a few hours, if they weren’t already in the air. Thousands of deadly kamikaze swarms were about to do their worst to bring America to ruin. Unless we could still somehow stop them.

“Enough.” Anya switched to Russian. A few scuffling noises followed, and then silence, interrupted when a car rolled up beside us. I started, fearing the police, or worse – but it was only a taxi.

The driver stuck out his head. “Lisa? James?”

“That’s us,” I said, relieved.

“I have a package for you.”

The boxes he brought contained two bulbous white helmets almost suitable for spacewalking; two sets of carefully folded thick white fabric made of some ultramodern material, greasy to the touch; two ID smartcards adorned with an impressive seal and covered in equal amounts of Arabic and English; two new fuel cells for our phones, and two tiny Bluetooth phone earpieces.

“Where did you get all this at this hour?” I asked, after inserting my earpiece.

“The Burj al-Arab is a seven-star hotel,” LoTek reminded me drily. The metal and plastic felt odd in my ear, as did the one-sided sound of his voice. “The concierges pride themselves on being able to fulfil their guests’ every request.”

“You didn’t really -“

“No. We knew before we got here we might want to make an incursion into the factory once we found it. Helps that most electronics are made in China and India and shipped to Europe via, you guessed it, Dubai. This is the new New York, you know. City that never sleeps. Nexus of the new world.”

“Very poetic,” Lisa said tartly. “Can we get things going now please?”

“They’re on their way already.”

Moments later we began to hear the sirens.

We knew what was coming but I was still taken aback by the size of the emergency-vehicle motorcade that howled to the front door of Greenwood Technologies: more than a dozen each of fire trucks, ambulances, and police cruisers. The guards at the gatehouse were obviously way out of their depth, faced with the authorities’ storm of swirling lights. Just as obviously, they had been ordered to let no one in under any circumstances. In the voluble standoff that developed it was easy for Lisa and I to walk straight up dressed in our brand-new full-body hazardous-material suits and helmets.

“CNRB Emergency Response,” Lisa said tartly to a policeman at the perimeter.

“We don’t have any -“

“Check my ID.”

He called over a superior officer, who brought a small portable card reader with him, and plugged Lisa’s ID into it. I tried not to be nervous about the fact that the police were Arabic and we were very obviously foreigners. About four-fifths of Dubai’s population was expatriate, after all; and like all civil servants, he would do what his computers told him to do.

LoTek had done his work well. The officer looked puzzled but not suspicious. “CNRB Emergency Response,” he read from her card. “Never heard of you. What is CNRB?”

Lisa said, “Chemical, Nuclear, Radiological, Biological.”

They stared at her aghast. Well, not at her, exactly – our helmet visors were tinted, and our suits bulky enough that they probably only knew she was a woman from her voice – but at the soul-devouring terrors she represented.

“Didn’t they tell you what this was?” I tried to affect harried exasperation. “You better let us in as soon as possible, and stay out of the complex yourselves.”

We were ushered to the gatehouse, where guards had finally allowed the police to enter. People kept their distance from us, as if we might already be contagious, while a stressed-out man in a nice suit spoke into the gatehouse intercom.

There was much for him to be stressed out about. As far as he knew, a fundamentalist Islamic group opposed to Dubai’s liberal attitudes had smuggled a “dirty bomb” full of genetically engineered smallpox and polonium into the Greenwood Technologies factory, one that would render this entire free-trade zone uninhabitable due to radiation, and infest Dubai with aerosolized smallpox likely to kill at least ten per cent of the population before the outbreak could be contained. As we waited I watched the news and rumours spread from policeman to fireman to emergency medical technician, saw bodies stiffen and faces go taut. Fear was even more contagious than smallpox.

Lisa and I were mostly afraid that Dubai’s real CNRB team would turn up, but our cyberspace force was on top of things. We waited stiffly at that gate for ten minutes for the factory to be evacuated. I felt like an extra on a movie set. I had understood that LoTek had spent years infiltrating military and government systems around the world, but I hadn’t really understood the influence he could wield until I stood there, surrounded by forty emergency vehicles, while a massive factory complex was evacuated purely on his say-so. It was suddenly easy to understand how Grassfire had grown so widely and so powerful.