Chapter 23
On duty for twenty-six hours and counting, special officer Xiao Chu was listed as missing in action. He no longer took orders from Millipol, but still served their interests. Only by being unpredictable could he hope to approach Anonymous. If this was a suicide mission, he would make it count.
He had expected an attack at the highway exit, and again on the main street, but instead found a stylish, well-ordered town with no noticeable symptoms of the madness at its core. Short streets in non-repeating patterns, creative architecture with many public spaces. A symbol of Asia's new creativity, Qiyuan could be everybody's hometown.
The afternoon sunshine gave him a slight headache, but Xiao could no longer be disqualified. Soon the blitzkrieg graphics would become real. He expected special effects at every intersection.
Strapped securely inside his triple-axis gyroball, floating in a separate realm like an insect embryo, he drove a seven ton armored truck from a privately owned interservice depot (almost half a ton was high explosives). It was effectively camouflaged by a false parcel system with removable signs. The multi-segment crane concealed a 20 mm cannon. The shock absorbers were too smooth for his taste.
Except for the occasional control movement and motion exercise, Xiao barely seemed conscious. He had rough, exaggerated features, but rarely showed emotion, and almost never got angry. His main obsession was Anonymous's nerve gas attack on Shanghai, which had killed 1% of the population. He loved many things he had never experienced.
Now she was part of this town. Six months ago, everyone had "known" she lived in Russia. Qiyuan would be too proud to accept outside help. They wouldn't even know he existed for another five minutes.
He ran his checklists, and finally spoke the codeword. After a block of silence, swarms of tiny robots whirred out of the roof. The launcher zapped two laggards. No time to resuscitate a defective butterfly.
Xiao had worn his battle armor since midnight, a silver and porcelain exoskeleton over a thermal mesh, with built-in waste recycling. Under the layered armor he breathed pure oxygen, with IV's for epinephrine and focal drugs. The plan was too big to visualize whole.
The truck veered through a half-empty parking lot, stopping at a smooth water wall. The shimmer was an illusion.
"Stop One," he spoke in his microphone. Fifty kilometers away, the circling communications plane didn't respond. The UN-registered former airliner was operated by Millipol Bombay under extra-territorial jurisdiction. To them, Xiao had become as remote as a space probe.
He stared at the quiet parking lot. A wasp-sized helicopter glittered stupidly in the sun, as other shadows dispersed. The solid-fuel bots could handle any job, but they lasted not much longer than windup toys.
A local asset had penetrated the town's Core Room, and caused a surge of traffic jams. Busses and taxis suddenly had minds of their own. Some citizens sensed they were being watched. The planners had spent a lifetime getting him this far, but for the next twenty minutes he would be on his own.
Different skills were activated, each step easy to execute. The hardest part would be to stop. Life was target practice.
He slid out the side door, landing like a leaf. Ten K-mines also rebounded, one-legged weapons deadlier than the wasps. They hopped away, programmed to seek out people. A larger robot descended on flexible legs.
Thirty seconds later, Xiao turned the corner, his gun at its lowest setting. Walking in a motorized suit was like sitting down.
No civilians within ten meters. "Fire," he said, squeezing the glove.
The gun strummed like God's guitar. It fired a torus of charged plasma in a boundary layer of air. Hydrogen was easy to accelerate, but the glowing donut was as poorly understood as ball lightning. One millisecond to the entrance, too fast for human eyes, but not for the cameras.
The flash was spectacular. Crystals showered both ways, steam rebounding against his armor. Everyone in the building was stunned, those closest to the entrance temporarily incapacitated. The big robot spidered inside, hollow sounds as it discharged its gas canisters. Its noisemaker fired sound bullets that bounced from floor to floor. Xiao's boots crunched plastic into paste as he entered Town Hall.
Narrow-bandwidth infrared showed random motion, people stumbling and falling. Unable to sense the fog in which they were trapped, the town workers thought they had gone blind. Alarms blared. Riot control chemicals could knock out selected parts of the nervous system.
"Emergency!" Xiao shouted through his amplifier. "Stand against the wall."
They moved predictably, raising their hands, bumping into furniture. "Don't shoot!" Some would fight.
"Quiet!" Xiao shouted. "Everything will be OK! Stand against the wall!" He pointed his laser.
People tried to hide in the fog. A cough, and a man emerged from a crowded anteroom. "What do you want?" he asked with welcome authority.
Xiao raised his blast modem. "I represent the federal government," he said. "We need to access your secure network. Your citizens' privacy will be respected."
The man's face was a stone mask. He also held a device, and released the dead-man's switch. It was the mayor.
"Too late," he said. "I fragmented our system. You won't recover any data for months."
Behind the mask, Xiao's frown relaxed slightly. Part One of the plan to weaken Qiyuan's defenses had succeeded. He pocketed his modem and pulled out a disk, pincers retracting from his gloves. Xiao held the disk before the mayor's unblinking eyes. "You will broadcast this message on your emergency network." With his other hand he pushed him out of the entrance hall toward his office.
Xiao's laser cut a tunnel through the fog, away from the noise. Footsteps drummed past, more shouting in the distance. The alarms stopped suddenly. Xiao kicked open office doors in passing. The scripted non-lethal battle reminded him of the stylized confrontations of prehistory.
As their footsteps receded, a man's head rose from behind a desk. He got up, only three steps to the door. Glancing around the corner, he saw his own face bulging back. Xiao's mirrored facemask was as motionless as a video screen. Behind him, the robot aimed its gun into the mayor's office.
The man spun around. A hand grabbed his neck and pushed him into a couch. The door slammed shut, and they were alone.
Xiao said: "The Magistrate offers you a full pardon for your cooperation."
"Who are you?" the man asked. A civil engineer in his mid-forties, he was comfortably ensconced in Qiyuan's administration. There was no conflict at his level.
"You are Ken Zheng." Xiao said. "You stole five million Class-2 credits this past year. To do so, you needed a copy of the town records. I need that copy now!" He sounded suitably maniacal.
The gun barrel stopped at Zheng's forehead. Pincers unfolded and slid up his nostril. He didn't move a centimeter as the claws extracted a tiny chip from his head. Daily security sweeps had forced Zheng to hide his records inside his own body.
"You can keep your pants on," Xiao said contemptuously.
"How did you know?" Zheng asked.
"We know everything. You should be ashamed of yourself."
Millipol was a sponge. Zheng could not be prosecuted without revealing their sources. For a moment, it looked as if he would cry. Then he began to chuckle.
Xiao attached his laser modem to the office window with an electrostatic pad, faster and stronger than glue. Air was a worse medium than glass, and it took almost five seconds to beam the town records to the waiting plane. It was traveling a figure-eight pattern thirty degrees above the horizon, ready to provide radio support as needed. The mission was so complex it even had an AI inside. Earlier, the plane had tested its radar by bouncing an echo off the sun.
Millipol had long ago mastered the art of disruption. During the next minute, local police received thousands of emergency calls. By the time Xiao stepped through the window into his truck, the K-mines counted eight cops around Town Hall. Four helped with the evacuation inside, while two others were installing the barrel on an automated truck-mounted assault rifle. He drove off the sidewalk and through a row of newly planted trees.
The first alert came at an intersection half a kilometer down the road. "Unmarked police car," a voice interjected, "Inbound nine o'clock, fifty meters." The tone changed for clarity. On the map, danger gradients flowed like ink.
"Clear ahead," he told the oracle AI monitoring the police net.
Millipol had no agents here. There was nothing for them to do. In its ads, the town evoked the fictional American 1950's (not the terrible Chinese version of that decade, still better than the one that had followed). They emphasized the social networks and low crime rate. Surrounding area residents considered it a boring place. Even Zheng stole only to finance his political campaigns.
The truck's microphones could detect someone walking a block away. A car door drummed shut, and tires screeched. Xiao's mind leapt ahead. A patrol car with diagonal stripes blocked his path, lights flashing, sirens tooting in a way he found infuriating. The truck's brakes hit a wall, and he stopped with room to spare. The cops drove a sensible light car. He quickly nudged it aside.
A cop leaned out and aimed his gun. Xiao saw a white flash, as the bullet pebbled a false side window, leaving a smudge on the plastex. No, a syringe; non-lethal weapons. He accelerated like a fist, the roar lingering in the narrow street.
In the control room, all the town's traffic signals were switched to red. Xiao saw the passing wave. Cars stopped and double-parked even with empty curbside ahead. Swerving around them, he felt contempt. Doors opened ahead and behind him. He started his 140-decibel siren and colorful windshield lights.
Xiao found a gap, and pulled onto the sidewalk, barely clearing a wall. The active camouflage came on and copied the wall's texture. From the next street, the truck briefly appeared as a moving bulge on the building, actually making it more noticeable. He scraped a vending machine in a storm of sparks. People shouted as he fish-tailed across the intersection, and then the lane ahead was clear.
Roadblocks were going up at random. To his left he glimpsed the main road, Tiananmen Boulevard. This street was narrower, with row houses and small businesses already half in shade.
The oracle used chaos theory to analyze Qiyuan, treating Xiao as a strange attractor. It counted connections: power, influence, money. As part of the "Open Windows" program, TRAC money remembered where it had been. New currencies tended to stimulate the economy when first introduced.
With primary jurisdiction over the Net, Millipol preferred to act from a distance. Every device in town was contacted for a network test. Xiao broadcast over the town's emergency band: "This is a message for Anonymous. We are ready to negotiate your surrender. The death penalty does not apply in your case."
A fire engine pulled out of a covered alley and blocked the street, its suspension sighing. Xiao stopped and studied the roadblock. Firefighters didn't fight. Residents came and watched from behind their blinds. He reversed at high speed, and entered another alley. Qiyuan was a big maze.
A narrow tunnel with an empty courtyard ahead. His signal returned. ". . . trapped!" he heard. "At least ten vehicles blocking your escape routes."
To his right, a gap in the square opened on the street. There was that fire engine again. Flashing lights in his rearview screen. The plaza had one big tree, and several greenhouses on stilts. A resident extended a camera on a stick.
The police car reversed behind him, and was replaced by a heavy truck.
"Who controls them?" Xiao asked the oracle.
"The town's Emergency Manager. They have disconnected from the Federal grid," the voice said.
"May I fight?"
"We're updating the script." Their term for a lie. "You're authorized to use defensive force. Scorp-1 15 min ETA."
The truck had plugged the alley. He heard the rumble of a nearby copter. Even if they believed him, the cops would never let him go.
He activated his megaphone. "Everyone listen," he said. There was something wrong with his voice. "This is a medical alert. You are all in danger." His words echoed for emphasis.
Another loudspeaker replied: "Come out with your hands up and lie down."
"I can't," Xiao said. "We would all die."
He explained his problem, ignoring all interruptions. He didn't use a recording, because he wanted Anonymous to hear his real voice. Within seconds, the watchers stepped back from their windows. Engines started on the other side of the block. The fleeing residents would end up in a fenced field outside town.
One of Anonymous's experiments had failed, Xiao explained. He'd stolen a 10 cc vial of bio-active serum from the Life Extension Center near Town Hall, and injected himself on the spot. While searching Town Hall for the citizens' medical records, he felt the RNA solution spread through his body as if he were porous, penetrating every cell. Colors intensified and brightened, and the world seemed to get LOUDER.
Then his skin started to flake and crumble. The single gram of DNA that his body contained had begun to break down. It was easier to live without a skeleton than without DNA, but his cells didn't know it yet.
"I feel wonderful," he said. "Better than I ever have. I won't remain rational much longer." His vital signs were erratic.
He was a living biohazard. Loose RNA could recombine into viruses or killer cells that could infect an entire city. He had to reach an open area, where his body could be safely incinerated.
"Check the Life Extension Center," he said. "You'll find a package in the morning mail with one ampul missing."
Xiao had delivered the box himself, a pretext to later seize the building. It contained inert gene delivery viruses in powdered and gel forms.
Almost all the cops had relatives living nearby. Xiao imagined hesitant arguments breaking out. All decisions in Qiyuan were made by committee. Dog licenses were as hard to get as jobs. As yet there were no restrictions on babies.
The chief of police had a rugged, tormented face. The only member of his force allowed to have a stubble, he looked like someone who ran a much larger department. Qiyuan had no time for this mess. Their only pressure was conformity. Even rivalries were planned in advance. He hoped there would be many recriminations.
"You win," the chief said over the loudspeaker, "we're going for a ride. Call Emergency-009 to contact me for instructions."
His phone beeped a second later, and the chief explained the procedure. Xiao would have to drive three kilometers on automatic, in reverse, between two large trucks. Then things got complicated.
Xiao agreed in a strange monotone.
The first military units approached Qiyuan under federal emergency authority. Three tracked infantry transporters that appeared to have triangular wheels, carrying three squads and a dozen officers from nearby Qian Xuesen base. They were no longer called the People's Liberation Army. The unit met Xiao's convoy on the black earth of a freshly tilled field, where the soldiers poured out of their carriers. The colonel counted eleven police vehicles, meaning less of them in town.
"We will escort the patient to the quarantine area," the colonel recited over the emergency band. "You are to remain here for task force integration."
Xiao maneuvered out from between the trucks, and parked behind an olive-drab personnel carrier. He would return to town well ahead of the cops.
One of them stared at the camouflaged troops, wrapped in plastic like garbage, covered with boxes and sensor stalks. He couldn't see their faces. They looked unfinished.
"Death Masks!" he shouted. Time stopped as he drew his service pistol.
Barely moving, a soldier shot him in the shoulder, and the cop dropped like a towel. The others outnumbered the soldiers two to one.
Flying at treetop level, troop lander Moby 02 was three minutes out, glowing gray with variable brightness. On board were thirty commandos, plus an equal weight of equipment. Four more vertols followed at sixty second intervals, with unmanned fighter cover overhead.
The Constitution was deliberately vague about emergency jurisdiction. This operation would shift the edges of the law. The pilot/navigator, a remote extension of the control room, spotted the landing zone, a small public square. Cars were parked along its rim, and the center was flooded.
"Going to Alternate One," she shouted.
The vertol banked over steep rooftops. It had reactive armor, and a cannon that could shoot down its own shells. The sergeant saw traffic on outbound roads. After the landing, he would take command. A light blinked in the pilot's visor.
"Small arms fire," she said. "Tracking cameras."
In the distance, three APCs and a truck rolled over a plowed field, a dozen police cars bumping behind. There was a brief flash, and a car hurled end over end, sliding along in a cloud.
"Super," the sergeant said. "The locals won't listen."
Moments later the combat codes arrived. Deterrence had failed.