The Covert Academy (9 page)

‘You mean this?’ Joshua said. He held up General Withers’ eye, s
till moist and dripping from its recent departure from the General’s skull.

‘My God, is that...’ The doctor bent over and dry retched. Case
y and Sarah exchanged a glance.

‘Doc,’ Sarah said, ‘Can anyone else follow your work, without this?’

She tapped the eye, sending it swinging in Joshua’s grip. It caught Casey directly in his iPC. For a second it looked as though someone was trying to communicate with him. Then he grunted, and the distraction passed.

Dr. Prewett composed himself and looked up at Sarah. ‘Of course, yes, eventually my work could be emulated.
But it will take time.’

He took the metal eye from Joshua’s
hand, suppressing another gag. ‘With my help, we can unlock the data in this bio-ID, and bring down the Confederacy. I promise.’

With a hand signal from Casey, the three other Academy members tucked their weapons away. Richard put an arm around the doctor’s shoulder and led him back into the silver buggy. They drove off in the direction of the student housing without another word.

‘It’s time we explained some things,’ said Casey. He walked off toward the faculty buildings, leaving the others to catch up.

As they walked through the main courtyard, students around them paused to watch, their eyes following Joshua. In return, he gave a few of them a wave, warming to his sudden popularity. Several girls rushed up to him and he broke into a grin, but most ran past him to the man who had come with Richard and the doctor.

They chased after him calling out, ‘
Ryan! You’re back, how did your mission go?’ and ‘Chalk another one up eh?’, and the occasional, ‘Take me with you next time!’

Ryan
tried not to notice; instead he stared off into the distance, in the direction Richard had driven off with Prewett.

T
hey caught up to Casey at the entrance to the largest building in the underground base, and Ryan finally faced his fans to ask for some privacy. Joshua strode past into the building, suddenly incensed at his being upstaged by this show-off.

To his credit,
Ryan caught up with Joshua. ‘Hey mate, sorry about all that. I tried to get them to leave us alone.’

‘Forget it, it’s fin
e,’ Joshua left him there and entered the auditorium at the top of the stairs. It led down to a stage where Casey and Sarah waited. He took a seat at the bottom.

Casey stood next to a table, and as he spoke, lifelike 3D holograms appeared projected above the surface, illustrating his speech in detail. He began by addressing Joshua.

‘The iPC device you gave to the doctor will
do as an entry fee for yer admission to the Academy, should you choose to stay with us. Frankly, if the device is all the doc says it is, it puts us in yer debt.

‘What we can offer you here is a place to live, work, and study for up to six years of tuition, safe from the control of the Confederacy. Perhaps even equip you with the skills you need to find
yer sister.’ He paused to give Joshua time to process the idea, while Ryan took a seat nearby Sarah.

‘Here comes the history lesson,’
Ryan whispered.

‘
Around twenty years before you were born,’ Casey continued, ‘there was a third world war, both civil and between nations. The world had just recovered from the numerous wars of the savage 20
th
Century, causing a gigantic population boom directly afterward and then again at the turn of the century.

‘Folks’ eyes grew bigger than their wallets, and they took out loans they knew they could never pay back. A huge market for cheap quality goods sprang up, and suddenly China controlled the global economy. Eventually, western governments defaulted on their loans unable to pay them back. China suddenly had no source of income for cheap labourers, and the westerners were unable to pay their public servants or beneficiaries. With no paid-up police force to stop them, people revolted against their governments, leading to mob rule and total anarchy worldwide.’

Throughout his speech, motion graphics summarised his points from the projection table. It began with charts and graphs showing the mounting debt, but eventually showed newsreels and video clips from during the war. Joshua had never seen anything like it. Images of sleepy suburban neighbourhoods were displayed, and then devastated by 3D mobs of angry people. He saw a group storming a small bank branch in a rural community, and tear apart those unlucky enough to be caught inside. It was brutal.

Casey indicated the
display, nodding. ‘The banks were the first to be targeted. It wasn’t long before weapon stockpiles were raided. Many of the police force even helped the mob. Near the end, it was each nation’s army versus its own people.’

The image zoomed out to show pitched battles between hundreds of thousands of
ordinary citizens against the tight orderly lines of an army. Joshua could see where the army’s defences would fail – tanks, planes and transports broke down without engineers to fix them, soldiers ran out of bullets without enough factory workers to make them, medics had nothing with which to heal the wounded. It was total anarchy.

The display ended and Casey resumed.

‘After eight years, a number of people who had holed themselves up in self-sustaining facilities arranged to meet each other. They held a public conference. It was mostly made up of essential military personnel, Generals and the like, but there were also some of the top scientific minds, and a few clever billionaires. They announced the abolishment of national identities and granted themselves sole control over state functions, effectively forming a single planetary government. They called it the Confederacy.’

He paused, but the table hologram showed nothing.

‘Apart from the two men who made the announcement, we have only guesses as to who is a member of the Confederacy.’

The table hologram popped up again with two spinning heads.

‘General Withers,
you’re already familiar with him,’ said Casey, with a grim smile. A new “deceased” label appeared over the General’s face.

‘...And this man, Simeon Warner.’ The display enlarged the second head. ‘He seems to be the spokesperson for the Confederacy, since it’s his face we see on those public speaker drones everywhere.’

Joshua remembered the drones they’d seen before he and Sarah made it to the lake. That was the first time he had heard of Simeon Warner. So those drones weren’t just in Chicago then? Joshua found the idea chilling.

‘Anyway,’ said Casey, ‘t
hey soon forced everyone to work in low wage jobs, which got a crude economy up and running again. You’ve seen how well that worked in Chicago. No middle class to hold everything together. Just the poor majority surviving on a barter system, a tiny minority with trade jobs, and the Confederacy at the top of the food chain. The world was on the brink of erupting into war again.

‘Then someone in the Confederacy came up with the idea
of forcing anyone with the right set of skills into working for their armed forces. Only they weren’t building more tanks and planes, they built the drones.’

The hologram changed to an image of an attack drone of the same type that
had chased Joshua yesterday. It was actually just a few short hours ago, and suddenly Joshua felt incredibly weary. He pushed the feeling down as Casey switched off the display. Sarah and Ryan went to stand next to him on the platform.

‘The Confederacy was initially promised as a temporary measure until individual nations could rebuild themselves. That was
over twenty years ago. They’ll never give up their power. We’re here to make sure it happens, starting by finding and eliminating the Confederate board members.’

Ryan
spoke up. ‘You’ll be trained how to become invisible, take them all down one at a time.’

‘And th
ose drones won’t know what hit ‘em,’ Sarah added.

The three of them fell silent. The sales pitch was over.

Joshua hesitated over his next words. He wasn’t sure whether these people saw him as their saviour or their sacrificial goat. But if he could just get one of those suits like Sarah had, it wouldn’t matter what the Academy wanted to use him for.

He could play along. He could be invisible. He could find Lucia. He didn’t even blink.

‘Sign me up.’

The fleet of drones flew up out of one of the many deep fissures in the Colonnade, keeping low to the ground as they zipped between the ruined hulks of what had once been lofty skyscrapers equal in majesty to the Tower.

They moved with a singular purpose, not content to patrol the network of soaring airways as thousands of their brethren did.

While they flew, one drone protruded a small weapon from a concealed utility compartment, and fired a single shot down toward the doors of an apartment building. The unlucky soul that had been walking out to the street was instantly burned to a crisp. Pieces of scorched flesh fell and blew away in the wind.

Another drone fired at the roof of a low building, sending people scrambling for cover. Not all of them made it.

Each of the six drones was now firing off a few shots at random targets, just warming up their guns.

The formation tightened up as the drones came to a dense area of the city. They flew through a narrow gap between two buildings, and burst out into a wide courtyard filled with people.

This particular courtyard was once a popular spot for local politicians or celebrities to gather a crowd for press announcements. In another lifetime. Now it could have passed for any old junkyard from before the war, except the crowds remained, making use of the debris for makeshift homes or shop stalls.

The only thing the drones knew was that there was a crowd of people greater than a predetermined number. In fact there were over a hundred souls scratching a living amongst the filth.
But the drones didn’t care. They weren’t programmed to. The arbitrary value written in their code for this mission determined the value of the peoples’ lives below, and their number was up.

Four drones drifted to each corner of the courtyard, and the last two hovered back to back in the centre, revolving on the spot. Weapons and scanners disappeared inside their chassis’ as they rearranged their front facing armour plates to reveal display monitors hidden beneath.

Simeon appeared, his face projecting from each of the six drones in the courtyard. When he cleared his throat, the noise boomed out and echoed off the building walls, magnifying
its effect.

‘Attention,’ he began, ‘Attention citizens of the Confederacy. I have been informed of a small minority who are itching to distribute their stockpile of illegal weapons amongst
you. For your own safety, we do not want you getting any... distressing ideas. Therefore, I have no choice but to outlaw any congregation with over twenty people. You have 30 seconds to disperse.’

The image of Simeon separated into chunks as the drones packed away their displays.

No one moved. But then, no one cared.

Simeon’s words simply bounced off the crowd, too immured to notice. People shuffled around as aimlessly as they always had, lost in their own worlds. A small child buried in his mother’s clothing tugged on her rags and pointed up, trying to get her to notice the drones. Despair hung in the air like a fog, while the people sat and waited for death to come.

But they weren’t expecting it to be today.

The drones finished packing away the monitors and whipped out their cannons, like gunslingers from a Western.

They fired mercilessly into the crowd.

Simeon switched control of the drones over to their built-in artificial intelligence program and tore himself away from his desk. Controlling his drones manually was just too much fun, but he had had little luck in locating the General’s iPC with the bio-ID in this way. He couldn’t see everything. Not yet.

He walked over to General Withers’ liquor cabinet and fetched a fine bottle of Scotch whiskey. They didn’t make these any more. Another relic.

The man knew how to relax
, Simeon thought, as he poured a drink and leaned back on the counter. He surveyed the gigantic living quarters that had once been the General’s, right at the very top of the Tower.

A rich mahogany desk, with spare iPCs, networked AI hard drives, and built in wireless chargers occupied the centre of the room. Plush carpets that massaged his feet with low currents of static electricity. It might have been pleasant to someone else, but not to Simeon. He’d rearrange the room to his liking soon enough. It was prime real estate after all, and he couldn’t let it go to waste.

An entire wall dedicated to banks of monitors showed areas in and around the Tower, with a special section for the private rooms of the rest of the Confederacy’s High Council members.

So Withers was as paranoid as the rest of us
, he thought.
Not paranoid enough apparently
. He could only watch the Council members while they relaxed in their rooms. A mistake Simeon would not repeat.