Gary Gibson - Final Days

There was another detonation as he moved, and he looked out across the cityscape to see smoke and flames rising from yet another building adjacent to the Array. He glanced up at the overhead canopy and wondered if there was any way of discerning whether or not it had been damaged. If by any chance it had, a very great number of people were going to die.

Picking up his pace, he crossed a street, heading for an elevated transit station a couple kilometres further down the slope. As a shadow fitted past his feet, Saul looked up in time to glimpse an observation drone flying overhead. He watched as it banked right, following the road and ignoring him.

Before long he came to a row of stalls beneath an awning running down the middle of a city block. By the look of things, the owners had left in a considerable hurry, leaving food and fruit scattered all across the street. He passed on down the road and caught sight of an abandoned trike with a kebab cart hooked up to the rear.

He looked around, but whoever owned the trike had clearly gone to ground along with everyone else. He bent down and pulled out the pin to uncouple the cart. As soon as he climbed on, the dashboard sprang to life. He twisted the throttle and guided the trike out on to the street, noting simultaneously that the battery had just about enough juice to get him as far as the Array.

He rode gingerly at first, feeling somewhat less than comfortable on anything with less than four wheels. He saw very few people, though the evidence of ongoing combat echoed loudly through the air. He came to an intersection and guided the trike on to a main thoroughfare, passing several cars and vans shooting at high speed in the opposite direction, away from the city centre.

Saul opened up the throttle, gathering speed and making his way down a second thoroughfare, as he followed the course of an elevated rail line back towards the Array.

The closer he got to the Array, the more ASI drones he saw. One passed him in the opposite direction, broadcasting a message warning people to stay off the streets, but whoever was operating it had failed to spot him hidden beneath the elevated train track. A few minutes later, however, he nearly came flying off the trike when another drone fired on him. He jumped off and dashed for the relative cover of a nearby doorway, then waited and watched till the drone buzzed away over the rooftops.

He glanced across the street and noticed three other men hiding in the open doorway of a shuttered shop. One waved to Saul and beckoned him to come closer. He approached them warily, keeping his borrowed coat pulled tight around him, the Agnessa pressing against his thigh where he’d tucked it into his waistband.

The oldest-looking of the three had a carefully trimmed, greying beard, and he addressed Saul in Arabic. Saul’s contacts instantly gave him a rough-and-ready live translation.

‘What the hell are you up to?’ the old man demanded. ‘You’ll get yourself killed riding around in the open like that. You don’t see anyone else out on the streets, do you?’

‘I don’t know what’s going on here,’ Saul replied in English.

From the way the old man squinted at him in confusion, it was clear he wasn’t wearing contacts.

‘He’s not from around here,’ one of the younger men informed the old man, before turning to Saul. ‘Amid doesn’t like technology, but you can speak to me. You’re from Earth, right?’

Saul nodded, glad that at least one of them had active translation enabled in his contacts. ‘I was at the other end of town, doing some business, and now I’m just trying to find my way to the Array, so I can get back home.’

Amid’s younger companion nodded thoughtfully. ‘Must have been quite some business to get yourself knocked about like that.’ He gestured towards Saul’s bruised face. ‘You’ll have a hard time getting anywhere near the Array, I can tell you. Haven’t you heard? We’re being invaded.’

‘By the Coalition?’

Amid started at mention of the word, then spat out a string of invectives that Saul’s contacts struggled to comprehend.

‘Their tanks came through just over a day ago,’ said one of them. ‘Soldiers, too, appearing like ants out of an anthill. They took over the Legislature, and now there’s fighting on the streets all around the colonial government building, with Al Hurr taking on Black Dogs and drones.’ Maz shook his head. ‘A lot of dead people already.’

Sudden shouting from nearby was followed by gunshots, and then an explosion that shook the ground beneath their feet. Several men with scarves or T-shirts covering their faces came running along the street. One of them carried an assault rifle, while another brandished a rusty-looking axe. They soon disappeared around a corner, followed a minute later by a heavily armed drone.

‘I’m not hanging around out here any longer,’ said one of the men, disappearing back inside the shuttered premises, as smoke started drifting above the rooftops of a neighbouring street. ‘You’ll all get your heads blown off if you stay out here.’

His companions followed him inside, the old man giving Saul an angry glance, as if he were somehow responsible.

Saul continued in the direction the fighters had emerged from, abandoning the trike now it seemed likely to draw too much attention. He soon came to an intersection, where a truck lay on its side, with broken bodies scattered all around. The rear of the vehicle still smouldered, while every window in the surrounding buildings appeared to have been shattered.

A targeted hit, Saul guessed, almost certainly from the drone that had passed by just a few minutes before. He started moving again, then froze when he heard that familiar buzz-saw rattle from behind. He turned to hear a mechanized voice shouting at him in Arabic.

A drone hovered just a few metres away, its central rotor scattering a blizzard of dust and debris outwards from beneath it. Twin gun turrets were mounted on either side of its primary sensors.

‘I’m ASI!’ Saul yelled over the din it made, raising his hands slowly. His Agnessa, momentarily forgotten, clattered to the ground at his feet.

‘ASI!’ Saul screamed again, dropping to his knees.

Dear God, please let it have a human operator , thought Saul, wondering how many seconds he had left before the bullets started ripping into him.

The drone wobbled slightly, light glinting from one of its lenses as a genuinely human voice emerged from it a moment later.

‘Hey, you’re ASI! I’m picking up on your UP.’

Saul let his breath out in a juddering rush. ‘Fine, can I take my hands down now?’ he yelled up at the machine.

‘Wait a second,’ the operator replied, almost certainly speaking from some temporary command post deep inside the Newton Array. ‘I need to run further verification on your ID, sir. You could have stolen those contacts, for al I know. Please wait just there.’

There was a click and a hiss of static as the operator went offline, presumably so he could consult with some superior officer. Saul bent down to pick up the Agnessa, keeping his eye on the drone the whole time. He kept the barrel pointing downwards as he waited.

The operator came back. ‘Sorry, sir, you check out fine. If you want to rendezvous with a clean-up squad, you can—’

Saul heard the sound of running feet once again, voices calling to each other in Arabic. Ignoring the drone, Saul crawled underneath a bus parked nearby, before turning to look back on to the street.

Two armed men appeared around a corner, and the drone wobbled around to face them. One of the two dropped face-forward as the machine fired several rounds into his body, while the second leaped back around the same corner. Saul heard a subtle change in the sound of the drone’s rotors as it moved to follow the fugitive.