Trial by Fire - eARC (36 page)

The light and sound increased dramatically as he turned that corner and emerged into a funnel-shaped chamber roofed by a grate: a catch tank for flood control. A workman’s hardhat lay in a corner, along with several tools, a pair of shredded work gloves, and rat-gnawed candy-bar wrappers. Either the construction crew assigned to this part of Jakarta’s intermittently expanding sewer system hadn’t tidied up, or had been swept away into the same bureaucratic limbo that perpetually undermined Indonesia’s waste management efforts.

Rusted rungs fixed in the sides of the poured concrete hole led up to the surface. One of the abandoned tools, a long-handled pry-bar, was just the right lever to lift up a small section of the grate. Which Caine did, before peeking out onto the streets of Jakarta.

Burning vehicles hemmed him in, one of which was the source of the relentless alarm that he had started hearing long before. A fast patter of explosions rumbled in the distance, followed by a rush of VTOLs overhead, their fans screeching as they accelerated. In the narrow bar of gray, premonsoon sky over the street, a dozen ragged columns of smoke communed with the lowering rain clouds. Across the roadway, one storefront was burnt out, another was still aflame. The tar-stinking macadam was littered with broken glass, scorched roofing tiles, abandoned bicycles, shopping bags—and was utterly devoid of people.

Whatever else might have happened during Caine’s long underground crawl, one thing was quite clear: Jakarta was now fully and ferociously at war. Which was certainly bad for Jakarta, but might be good for Caine Riordan. Before, he had anticipated emerging into a merely turbulent city where, as a foreigner—a
bule
—he might still have stood out. Now, he was in an urban war zone where order was deteriorating with frightening speed. A good environment in which to stay very, very lost. He levered the grate up enough to wriggle out. He just might manage to elude the clones and soldiers and Arat Kur and Hkh’Rkh long enough to get away—

But as soon as he stood up, he heard hissed exclamations from the buildings behind him:

“Look! Quick, aim at the—”

“No, don’t shoot.”

“He’s wearing gray; he’s a clone!”

“No, idiot! That’s dust!”

“Hey! He’s a
bule
!”

Louder: “Hey,
bule
! Get down! You stupid or sumthin’?”

Caine dropped, looked around, didn’t see anything, starting crawling toward where he had heard the voices.

“No,
bule
, over here. More to your left. Yeh, that’s right. We’re in the hardware store.”

Caine glanced up, still couldn’t see anything.
How the hell are they seeing me when—?

Then he saw a glint, through the hardware store’s shattered display window: the fragment of a mirror, propped up on a display rack.
Huh, pretty clever.
And for the first time in many hours, Caine smiled. As a military analyst, he knew his history, and from this one sign—from the hasty innovation of using a mirror to watch for the approach of enemies while remaining hidden—he felt fairly certain that the invaders would soon learn just how difficult it was to be an occupation force trying to control a nation in Southeast Asia.

Of the five Indonesians in the store, the oldest, middle-aged Teguh, spoke fair English. Two of the others had a smattering of it. They were all nervous, angry, and—surprisingly—armed. The weapons were old, cartridge-firing rifles. Caine stared, frowned, and suddenly recognized the manufacture—but not due to his years reviewing international weaponry for
Jane
’s. Rather, he recalled the gun from images he had flipped through while researching military history. “That’s—” he said, pointing in surprise, “—that’s a, a—Kalashnikov. An AK-47. How’d you get that? Indonesia never—”

“Lissen,
bule
. I don’ know why you so interested in the gun, but it says ‘Type 56.’ Right here, see?”

“That’s just a Chinese AK. Where did you—?”

“
Bule
, pay attention. You in a war, here. Where we got these guns don’ matter—”

“Actually, it does matter.” Something in Riordan’s voice made them look at him differently, like there was now a better than even chance that he wasn’t crazy. “Let me guess. Someone gave the guns to you. Passed them out from the back of a truck or up from a cellar or something. Was giving them out to whoever wanted them. Am I right?”

The Indonesians looked at him askance again, but now it was as if he had pulled a rabbit out of a previously unseen top hat. “How you know that,
bule
?” Although no one raised their guns, Caine noticed their hands had grown more tense, stayed very near the trigger guards.

“Because I worked as a military analyst. And here’s what I know about that gun you’re holding. Indonesia never adopted the AK. Your country used—er, Pindad assault rifles. And I also know that no major power has used an AK for fifty, maybe sixty years. They’re still used by some backwater warlords, but most of them are just gathering dust in reserve armories for national militias.” He smiled. “Until now. When they just happened to be here to arm a resistance movement.”

“Why you smilin’ like that,
bule
?”

“It’s not important. Not compared to what’s going on around here. About which I know nothing.”

Teguh swept a hand at the street. “Is like a crazy house, man. It was pretty bad before. Lots of rioting ever since the president was killed and that
keparat
Ruap took over and brought in these clones. More when these aliens showed up. Not a lot of them at first. Mostly the Roaches. But since yesterday, we been seeing these big Sloths, and they jus’ as bad as the clones. Maybe worse. If someone shoots at them, they kill everyone around. Unless you lie down in the road. An’ who stupid enough to do that? You run ’way! But when you run, that’s when they kill you. And if you do lay down in the road, a lot of times the clones kill you. It’s crazy, man, pure crazy.”

“Did the clones and, er, Sloths, just start killing people for no reason?”

“No,” said one of the younger ones. “That started after the power went out. Everything stopped working. They warned people not to use anything electric but, you know how it is: no one paid a lot of attention. And hey,
everything
is electric. So all ’a sudden, there are elevators falling down in buildings, cars going out of control. No phones, no computers, no way to buy anything.” He shook his head. “And after the massacres over the past few days, well—people had enough. They went a little crazy. That’s when the clones came out, along with their new friends. And the army just stood by while those
tukang ngentots
shot anyone who protested, anyone who got angry.”

The older man nodded. “Yeah—and then, the word started going ’round there were free guns being given out by soldiers who deserted when the real president was killed. Most just showed up on trucks. People took them, took ammunition.” He hung his head. “Not everyone shot the clones or the aliens. At first, a few held up stores for money. But then more and more started stealing food, ’cause there’s not much left. It was bad, very bad.”

The youngest one nodded his head. “Yeh, but mostly, people started attacking the clones and the aliens and any soldiers who helped them.”

“All that in just two or three hours?” Caine asked.

“Well,” said Teguh, “more like seven or eight hours.”

Caine found it hard to believe he’d been underground that long, but looking at the darkening sky, realized his error.

“And then, about an hour ago, they started bombing neighborhoods. Anyplace there was fighting they couldn’t control, they just—” Teguh shook his head. There were tears in his eyes. “I don’t know who’s left. My family, my neighbors, my friends, I know a lot are dead. But that’s
all
I know.”

Caine nodded slowly, spoke softly. “I’ve seen them bombing, even before the power went off.” He looked around the group. “But why are you here?”

Teguh looked even more distraught. “Because they trapped some of my friends—rebels,
real
rebels for a week already—in a building. We were looking for a way to help them, maybe get around behind the Roaches and draw them off—long enough for our friends to find a way out. But—” His voice failed.

The next oldest picked up the tale. “We had to hide in here. There were aerial ROVs—small ones—going up and down the street, looking for anyone with guns. Some people shot at them from the store across the road—”

Caine nodded. “So the ROVs backed off. And about twenty seconds later, a couple of rockets slammed down into the store and blew it to pieces.”

“Yeah. Like you say. Hey, you a soldier?”

Caine hoped he didn’t blush. What was the truth? Was he a soldier? A piece of paper, probably reduced to ashes now floating in orbit around Barney Deucy, said he was. But the real truth was that he wasn’t: that had just been a bit of legitimated theater to ensure that he’d have a rank if he needed one. “No, I’m not a soldier. I’ve just had a little bit of training,” Caine explained. “A very little bit.”

“Hey, dat’s better than us,” said Teguh, looking up eagerly. “Maybe you can figure something out, hey? Help my friends?”

If the day had been any less absurd, any less surreal, Caine might have demurred. But with a city burning down around his ears, and surrounded by five eager faces that were, for the first time since he had met them, illuminated with something like a faint glow of hope, he could only say, “Let’s go take a look.”

Chapter Twenty-Four

West-Central Jakarta, Earth

Caine leaned the fragment of mirror around the dangling remains of the window frame, resolved to get a better look.

The Arat Kur ROV was a ground-pounder. It was far too heavy to go airborne, and improperly shaped to have a live operator inside. Its narrowest point was much thinner than an Arat Kur was wide.

“Is it a robot?” asked Teguh.

“No, I think it’s an ROV with an expert-system back up.”

“What’s that mean?” asked one of the younger Indonesians whose long, mellifluous name Caine had learned, and promptly forgotten, three times now.

“Yeah,” answered Caine, watching the slow, cautious advance of the Arat Kur unit, its two microturrets rotating protectively through rear- and flank-covering arcs. “Reporters like to call ground-drones like this ‘AIs,’ but there’s no intelligence involved. Just very sophisticated algorithms that allow the machine to operate independently for a short period of time.”

“Huh,” nodded Teguh. “Yeh. I can believe that.”

“Why?” Caine asked.

“Well, these, eh, expert systems don’t like to go into stone or concrete buildings. They won’t chase anyone inside. Which makes sense.”

Caine smiled at Teguh. “You’re right. Stone and other dense construction materials block signals. And the machine shouldn’t stay where it has to rely upon its own very limited expert system.”

Teguh shrugged. “Sounds like a weakness, to me.”

Caine smiled. “Me, too. Let’s go. I have a plan.”

* * *

“You sure this a good idea,
bule
?”

Caine wanted to answer
hell, no!
but instead said, “I’m pretty sure it will work, as long as you’re certain these expert systems don’t shoot at unarmed humans.”

“Haven’t seen them do it yet, and they’ve had plenty of opportunities since this afternoon.”

“And you’re sure they have a capture mode?”

“Yeah. Like I told you, we’ve seen these robo-Roaches come into areas where rebels or rioters have been making trouble. They find some older kids, do a spider-sprint, and grab them. Then they carry ’em back to the Roach motel—”

“The what?”

“The aliens’ compound. They took over the Presidential Palace. So, the Roaches ask the kids questions about anyone they know who might be a rebel. Always with an officer from the army standing there”—Teguh spat—“but then they let ’em go. Scares the shit out of the kids, but they’ve never been hurt.”

Well, that’s reassuring. Sort of
. “Okay, then. Are your people ready?”

“Sure they are. Question is: are
you
ready?”

Again: “hell no!”
“Yeah. Here goes.” Caine ducked low and scooted out, under the level of the cars parked along the street. He peeked out at the Arat Kur ROV. It was still creeping forward, aware that its prey—Teguh’s trapped friends—had moved farther down the dead end street and were now unable to escape. But precisely where was that prey hiding?

Well, here’s something new to think about.
Caine rose slowly from his hiding place. He walked, hands open, closer to the Arat Kur ROV but also angled toward the looted and gutted stone bank across the street.

The Arat Kur unit’s rear sensors detected him immediately. One of the miniturrets fixed upon him, the other began sweeping the unit’s rear, laboring to keep nearby upper stories and rooftops in its defense footprint.

C’mon. Call your boss, and find out what to do. And who
I
am.

The Arat Kur unit was utterly motionless for two seconds, and then—so suddenly that Caine’s stomach clenched and plummeted—the multilegged device whirled about and came at him with startling speed.

Caine had been expecting the charge, but still felt terribly slow as he turned and sprinted into the bank, sure that, at any second, he would feel the Arat Kur equivalent of a taser probe dig into his back and sprawl him, twitching, across the debris-littered sidewalk.

But he made it through the doors into the bank and heard, just behind, the clatter of the ROV’s legs break stride. Caine didn’t stop: the unit’s apparent indecision was merely a split-second pause as it waited for an override signal.

Caine, now in the hall leading into the bank’s interior offices, was glad he hadn’t broken his own stride. He heard the ROV resume its skittering approach, the bank’s broken picture windows scraping and screeching as the spiderlike legs smashed and dashed them aside in its crazed pursuit. Riordan reached the yawning freight elevator shaft at the end of the hall, grabbed the knotted rope that was hanging there, heard the ROV right behind him. He turned, saw the taser-dart dispenser on the front of the robotic arthropod snap open—