Mark Alpert - Extinction

The trench zigzagged through the ice, sometimes widening to the breadth of a street and sometimes narrowing to a foot-wide fissure that Jim could barely squeeze through. He moved swiftly and silently for several minutes, but he couldn’t tell whether he was getting any closer to the radio tower. He assumed the Modules had reached the edge of the glacier by now and discovered he wasn’t there. But they were sure to notice the crevasse, and their next logical move was to follow the trench and track him down. Jim supposed he could try to ambush the Modules, but he didn’t like his chances. He might be able to pick off one or two with his AK, but then the others would blow him away.

It was infuriating—he’d come all this way just to get stymied at the end. In frustration, he slammed his prosthetic hand against the side of the crevasse and a chunk of ice the size of a sofa broke off the wall and tumbled into the trench. It shattered at Jim’s feet, nearly flattening him.

He took a deep breath, cursing his stupidity. Then he had an idea.

He raced ahead, examining the ice walls on either side of the crevasse. After two minutes, he found what he was looking for: a break in the ice wall to his left, where a smaller crevasse branched off from the bigger one. The smaller trench went only twenty feet before dead-ending, but it made a good position for an ambush. Better still, at the branching point between the two trenches was a twenty-foot-high promontory of ice. Shaped like a ship’s prow, it was weakened by meltwater at its base and looked ready to collapse.

Jim ran past the branching point, advancing fifty feet farther along the bigger trench. Extending the knife from his prosthesis, he climbed the ice wall to his left and peeked over the top. The four Modules were several hundred yards away, moving synchronously across the glacier. Jim popped his head up and waited until they spotted him. As the Modules raised their rifles, he yelled, “Oh shit!” and ducked. Then, while their bullets streaked overhead, he jumped back into the crevasse and turned on the transmitter of his satellite phone.

“Kirsten!” he shouted into the phone. “They got me cornered! Come help!”

Leaving the transmitter on, he placed the sat phone on the icy floor of the crevasse. Its radio signal revealed its precise GPS location to anyone monitoring the wireless bands. Then Jim ran back to the branching point and entered the smaller crevasse. He climbed the ice wall and crouched on a ledge just below the lip of the trench.

He held his breath and listened. Within ten seconds he heard the clomping of the Modules’ boots on the ice sheet. Five seconds later they reached the edge of the larger crevasse and automatically fired down into the trench, aiming their rifles at the sat phone. At the same moment, Jim popped up behind them and started shooting.

He downed two of the Modules, but the other two dodged out of the line of fire. They wheeled around and sprayed bullets at him, but Jim had already dropped back into the smaller crevasse. For a second time he held his breath, listening carefully as the Modules rushed toward the promontory of ice at the branching point. Then he slammed his prosthetic hand into the promontory’s weakened base, and tons of ice came tumbling down.

While Jim leaped backward, the Modules toppled into the crevasse. One of them landed hard and lay motionless at the bottom of the trench, clearly dead. But the other was still moving, sliding on his belly toward where his rifle had fallen. Jim pointed his AK at the Module and shot him in the head.

Before leaving the crevasse, Jim went to retrieve his satellite phone, but the thing was in pieces. As he’d already noticed, the Modules were damn good shots.

Five minutes later Jim burst into the aluminum-sided trailer next to the radio tower. At one end of the control station were three rows of server racks, and at the other end were two computer terminals and a bank of video monitors, at least two dozen. The screens reminded Jim of the Monitor Room at Camp Whiplash. They displayed a dizzying array of video from Supreme Harmony’s surveillance cameras, showing all the slopes and peaks and mountain trails of Yulong Xueshan. The images on the screens were in constant flux—each monitor displayed the feed from one surveillance camera for ten seconds, then switched to another. Jim was surprised that the monitors and terminals were still running. Supreme Harmony must’ve known he’d disabled the Modules guarding the tower, so why hadn’t it cut the power to the control station? The only explanation was that this communications hub was critical to the network’s operations. And that made it an excellent place to insert the shutdown code.

Jim sat down in front of one of the terminals and turned it on. The characters Tài Hé came on the terminal’s screen. Then the log-on screen appeared and the cursor blinked on the line where Jim was supposed to type the password for accessing the network. This was one piece of information that Jim hadn’t been able to find on Arvin’s flash drive. He’d searched all the categories of visual memories associated with Supreme Harmony but saw nothing resembling a password. In all likelihood, the Guoanbu hadn’t revealed it to Arvin when he came to inspect the Yunnan Operations Center.

Jim had no choice except to try a slow, manual attack. First he typed TAIHE, the romanized spelling of the Mandarin characters, on the terminal’s keyboard. Next he tried THAEI, which was the interleaving of the letters in Tai and He . Then he tried 81443, which were the numbers corresponding to TAIHE on the standard phone keyboard. Then he tried similar guesses using the romanized spelling of Yulong Xueshan. Jim knew from long experience that even intelligence agents sometimes chose passwords that were ridiculously easy to guess. Given enough time, he felt confident that he could crack it. The big question was when Supreme Harmony would launch its counterassault against him. He suspected that a whole platoon of Modules was already marching up the slope toward the radio tower.

Then, while Jim was typing another guess on the password line, he glanced at one of the video monitors, which had just started displaying a new surveillance feed. The image on the screen took his breath away. He had no time left. He had to leave now.

The gray cloud swirled thirty feet behind them, close enough that Layla could hear it buzzing. At first the schoolboys, propelled by their terror, dashed about a hundred feet ahead of the swarm, and Layla thought they would outrun it. But as the drones followed them down the mountain trail, the boys couldn’t keep up the pace. Running beside them, Layla remembered the dead drone she’d seen in Tom Ottersley’s lab, the housefly with the electronics embedded in its body. Those implants enabled Supreme Harmony to guide the drones to their targets. Layla assumed from the way the swarm had paralyzed the old man and woman that the drones carried heat-seeking darts like the one that had stung Tom. And though the flies weren’t particularly fast—Layla estimated they moved about five miles per hour—she knew they could keep going for hours. The boys, in contrast, were ready to drop.

Li Tung, the nine-year-old, was having the most trouble. Panting and weeping, he could barely lift his feet off the ground. Layla took his hand and tried to pull him along, but it didn’t do much good. Wu Dan, the older boy, looked over his shoulder at the approaching swarm and screamed in Mandarin at his schoolmate, who started sobbing hysterically. Layla’s heart constricted as she stared at Li Tung’s red face—it wasn’t his fault, none of this was his fault! It was difficult for anyone to run at this altitude. Maybe it was even difficult for the flies, although they didn’t seem to be slowing down. Perhaps they didn’t need as much oxygen because they were cold-blooded.