Los Angeles 2170, page 11
Now the fun began.
This time, Annamae didn’t bother suppressing the growl that wanted to come out. There was a deep and ugly rage boiling in her belly as she sat at the edge of the trees and looked down from her hiding spot.
It had been a mountain once, that gap before her. Her old map showed it with elevations, terrain, and roads. It had even had a small glacier atop it, but that was two hundred years ago, when the world was colder and wetter.
In the nineteenth century, men would have bored tunnels to get to the valuable metals underneath. Here, it was cheaper to just remove the mountain. They had blown the top off it off with explosives. Scoured that with earth-movers the size of small villages. Leveled it and dumped junk into a valley next to where a mountain had been.
Today, a few dozen men could run all the equipment, so the mine didn’t even provide all that much employment to the town where she had eaten breakfast yesterday. Their cyberware was identical to what she used to link to Chappie, a vehicle rig that let her soar through the clouds like a bird, or become a dragline excavator like using a giant hand to pick up sand on the beach.
It was all just radio waves linked to artificially-grown nerves in her skull.
She had already skirted another valley where they had dumped the first bunch of excess rock taken to get this low. A new lake was forming there where the creek had gotten damned, but nothing would grow in it as the tailings leached toxins into the water and killed all the birds and fish.
Just like the runoff from this place was slowly killing things as it made its way out of the mountains. Three-eyed fish. Bears with mange. Chicks that never hatched.
Annamae had paused at the verge of trees, several hundred feet above the valley floor, where this had once been a pass connecting peaks. She supposed that the snows would make the scene prettier, once winter set in and everything was just white. For now, it was ugly.
Two big excavators, almost like dancers across the floor from each other, just as the tango music started. Dump trucks with wheels bigger than her car was long waited patiently as each bucket filled and then got emptied into the back.
The bulldozers working the edges of the field with backhoes like scorpion tails looked like children’s sandbox toys, moving carefully around the big machines.
At the mid-field line, across from her, Annamae could see a tower, like they had at medium-sized airports that weren’t important enough to bury the whole thing and just use cameras. That was where the rigger-drivers would be working. Climb into the comfortable seat, close your eyes, and let your conscious mind merge with the controls of the machine.
Things were going swimmingly well for the mine owner today.
The big truck was nearly full. It would rumble over to the edge of the mine field and dump itself onto conveyors that would transfer the load to smaller trucks. The kind that could drive down winding, mountain roads to a processing refinery that would take all the ore and magically spin it into gold.
She pulled the sensor pod from her belt pouch and pointed it at the valley floor. Currently, she didn’t see any drones flying overhead, but that was because the command rigger down there hadn’t launched one today. There was nothing wrong.
Yet.
She counted live control signals, like the one she used when flying Chappie. There were enough of them that one more shouldn’t stand out on anybody’s screens as an anomaly.
Nobody had done anything to this mine to generate that level of abject paranoia, after all.
At least not yet.
She turned to Chappie and gave the little robot a kiss on the beak for luck, activating her rig.
Annamae leapt into the sky and flapped her wings hard to gain elevation. One field of rubble and dirt, half a mile wide and nearly two long. From up here, a sandbox filled with toys.
She banked over and rode thermals down-valley, picking out all the interesting places. A building near the tower that suggested a barracks for drivers and riggers. A second looked like an office block. Someone had buried a small atomic reactor at the back of the field. Thorium-based, it could handle all the recharging needs for the big machines, and still keep the building warm on cold nights for half a century. Once upon a time, all of it had been petrochemical. Internal combustion. Primitive and inefficient. Replaced in the modern era by electrical motors for everything and battery banks.
A motor pool stood at one end of the buildings. The place for repairing things that had broken. That had a dozen personal trucks of different sizes parked nearby, so those were probably all locals.
Her kind of headware was too expensive just have handy. You had to have a desire for someone to invade your skull, and the cash to afford it.
Riggers on a corporate contract, like the folks in that tower below her. Rich parents from Braintree, Mass, who thought their youngest daughter would grow up to be a biologist, in her case.
And she had, sort of. Made that career. Maybe.
It wasn’t their fault that her roommate had talked her into taking a class in bio-robotics. Or that she had fallen in love with electronic tinkering. These days, as much biology field work required ornithopters and drones as it did time in the lab. A Bachelors in Biology had led the way to a Masters in Bio-Robotics.
It was only in the field, doing research, that things had gotten…ugly.
Personal. Vindictive, even.
The tribes technically owned this land, but lacked the money to enforce the contract terms. Especially when the feds backed the mine owner and issued insignificant parking tickets for fines, when they could have shut it down completely, after the fifth or eighth time the rules had been ignored.
That was when you hired people like Annamae.
And why.
She continued her surveillance. Satellite images had been blurred, like this was a military installation or something. You could do that, when you had enough money. Bribe or threaten the right people to have your way.
One major road in and out. The big equipment had been trucked in and assembled on site. It would be torn down in another few years and hauled to the next pillaging, once this place was utterly destroyed and the field left to poison all the streams for generations.
The important people would ride in and out on an auto-copter. Spokane wasn’t that far away, if you needed a weekend in a casino. Seattle and Vancouver not that much farther, if good food and live entertainment was more your style.
Annamae let go of Chappie’s mind and told him to make one more pass before returning to her. Standing, she pulled a small camera from her backpack and stuck it a handy tree, walking around behind to eyeball the view. It would snap one image every second, and had enough memory and power onboard to go for about four years.
She withdrew into the trees and set up a small camp. With Chappie on a handy branch watching, and the camera establishing the pattern of movement, she was safe as long as she stayed quiet.
Nightfall came early in the mountains in September. The rest of the world would just be finishing up afternoon tea as two massive banks of lights came on, illuminating the field. Both excavators worked like stevedores until 6pm, and then both machines shut down. It was almost as if the power had failed. Half the big lights shut down at once.
But no, good union contracts were enforced ruthlessly, when you had a small industry of experts trained and licensed to operate these beasts.
Annamae moved to a spot where she could watch the tower. Her artificial eyes had a significant amount of magnification built in, so she could watch a man and a woman emerge from the tower holding hands, followed quickly by several others, all making their way to the building she figured was the barracks.
Dinner time. Work day was done, removing another handful of monster dump truck loads of rock to make someone rich.
Her sensor noted a single signal in the sky overhead. Commercial surveillance drone, when she spotted it against the fading light. Tiny. Invisible, if you weren’t looking, as it was no larger than a Northern Flicker flying.
Fortunately, she had the right tools to track it, even at night.
This was a Tuesday, so everyone should be settled in after dinner. She waited, munching on jerky and dried fruit and nuts, trying not to focus too intently on that pie she had avoided, back in town.
Thunderthighs and extra butt.
Right on time, several people emerged from the motor pool and piled into their personal trucks, driving down the mountain to spend the night at home. Cheaper that way, since you only fed and housed the important people.
As full night draped darkness across the valley, she spotted the first group of folks out for an evening smoke after dinner. The man and woman from the tower went for a walk, still holding hands, before returning to the building.
Things fell quiet.
No coyotes or wolves called. She wasn’t surprised, as the security riggers down there probably had a couple of armed drones on standby, just waiting for their chance to shoot anything that might provide them sport.
Regardless of what might be actually legal.
Annamae would do just as well as a coyote, so she needed to move with all the efficiency of a ghost.
She let nightfall stretch into full darkness and then some. After a couple of hours on duty, the night security rigger would probably get lazy and let the algorithms handle threat identification. She hadn’t spotted any security around the mine itself, but not many people were capable of the ten mile hike through heavy back country that she had just done.
Fewer still would want to.
She packed up all evidence that she had ever been here and swept the clearing with a branch to make sure.
It was tempting to sneak directly across the field, trusting that nobody would expect something so obvious, but she would only get one shot at this, and it needed to be perfect. She turned her optics to the lowlight range that made the lighting from the field almost daylight, and set out to her left, away from the driveway down to town.
Chappie rode on her shoulder, and she had an arrow on the bow, just in case.
Not having berries didn’t mean no bears. It just meant that they wouldn’t be tracking on her as a food source. Hopefully.
She was willing to trust that all the bears who had gotten over their fear of humans had been hunted out around here by the city folks with flying guns. That was about the only redeeming quality she could find about the invaders right now.
In her perfect world, the first arrow would go into one of the mine managers. Two of them if she could line up the shot from close enough.
Use their blood and bone to fertilize the soil. Or at least please Artemis.
Clockwise around the open field, staying well back into the trees and showing these city folk what good trailcraft looked like.
Every fifteen minutes or so, she paused to listen with her little sensor pod, but no new signals had joined the one flying drone watching the field. Why would anyone worry?
Finally, she stopped, close to a meter-tall wire fence that marked a wilderness boundary more than keeping out anything. Deer could squeeze through, but that extra wire was charged, so most creatures would kiss it once and learn not to pee on an electric fence.
It was almost midnight by now. Most of the building lights had gone out as the crew had gone to bed. Annamae was close to the tower, and back out of sight. The trees and underbrush stuck out like a thumb here, so the chances of someone seeing her out a window were almost nil.
She waited, her little sensor pointed at the sky as the drone made wide circles.
Sure enough. Autopilot engaged and watching the perimeter, but without a human in the loop until it saw something worth chirping over.
Annamae studied that fence, glad that the thunderthighs were part of really long legs. She found a fence post, braced a foot atop it, and hopped up, hanging in the air like a stork for a moment and only slightly wavering before she jumped down on the other side.
Without getting zapped by something mean enough to brush off cattle.
Deep breath. Not fully committed now, but the stakes just went way up, should someone spot her. Then they’d all be playing ninja games in the wilderness, with her starring as the fox to their hounds.
A chittering sound on her left nearly caused her to jump halfway across the sidewalk, drawing the bow taut and preparing to fight for her life.
Nothing.
The chittering sounded again.
Annamae relaxed, but still considered pinning that stupid squirrel to the tree with an arrow. Her heartrate slowed down from two hundred beats per second, and she drew a heavy breath.
Bastard.
Squirrel didn’t care. He flipped his tail at her and skittered back up the tree into the needles overhead.
Deep breaths. Be the ghost. Ignore the running commentary from the asshole wildlife.
The tower wasn’t a standard design, but there were only so many ways to do something like this. Wood walls covered over with a plastic siding that was probably fireproof and animal-proof enough for this place.
Four stories tall, but narrow, like staircases with a hollow center. Some of the old buildings in Boston had been that way, with stairs just far enough apart that you could drop something down the middle and watch it go all the way to the floor.
She assumed it was locked, and there was a keypad on the side, but she wasn’t going inside. The only actual room would be up on the top level, and the night security rigger would be inside, probably playing games while he waited for something to ring an alert.
Now, it got tricky.
Annamae went to the right, just because that side of the building wasn’t visible from the barracks. She stalked like there was a spooked deer, but this wall was smooth.
Damn.
She backtracked, staying away from the front of the tower, where the best view would be.
There was no shrubbery around here, just lawns where they had chewed off all the plants with a big machine, and then thrown grass seed down. Nothing pretty. Not even utilitarian. Just ragged dirt and growing weeds.
None of the windows facing this way had lights on. And they would be facing the lit field if curtains were open, so she had to hope everyone had curtains shut to sleep.
Annamae oozed around the corner and along the wall. Sudden movement drew the eye, so she had to be calm. Not jittery. Not spastic because a damned squirrel had made her nearly pee her pants in fright.
Calm.
There. Door handle. This one also had a keypad on the side, but the door had the words Riser Room sprayed on, so hopefully this was it. Otherwise, she would have to try to spoof the front door and maybe take out a guard.
And he might not deserve it.
She stuck the arrow point down in the dirt and rested the bow against the building. Up until now, many of her friends could have been hired for this job, since quietly crossing wilderness wasn’t all that rare a skill.
She pulled a screwdriver from her belt pouch and studied the system. It was always silliness incarnate that the people designing electronic security systems didn’t ever talk to the people responsible for securing doors.
The screwdriver was something her mentor had given her when she completed her MS degree. A thin shaft of hardened, stainless steel pressed flat at the end and ground into a square tip. The woman had explained the need to redneck solutions occasionally, even in the field of advanced bio-robotics.
Annamae slid the chisel tip into a gap on the side of the keypad box and twisted. The front popped right off into her hand, exposing the inner guts and boards. You would think that folks would put a complicated screwhead in there, just so folks like her couldn’t come along and get inside like that.
But why would anyone need to break into the riser room, anyway?
Okay. Standard board. Manufactured outside of what used to be the quaint port city of Portland, Oregon. Long ago, they all came from Asia, when those nations had been rising.
Before the ecological and demographic catastrophes of the mid-Twenty-First Century. Before the wars and the wastelands and the collapses that had killed hundreds of millions of people.
Not the time to bitch. She focused on the board at hand.
Contact here would signal someone that the door had opened. Opening that circuit would sound an alarm.
Annamae pulled out a small soldering welder from her backpack and made some modifications to the board. Nothing as complicated as fixing Chappie in the field, but enough to tell the systems attached that nothing was wrong and they should go pleasantly about their night.
Now, to test it.
Deep breath.
No, let’s prepare to run like hell, even if the thunderthighs weren’t all that fast.
She pulled the arrow and tucked it into her quiver. Stashed the soldering welder. Tucked the screwdriver into its holder. Grabbed the bow.
She took another deep breath and pressed the open button.
Nothing happened.
She pressed it again. Nothing.
Annamae felt the edge of panic take hold, and then realized she was pressing the close button instead.
Insert appropriate blond joke here.
She pressed the other button and heard the bolt inside the door snap open with a hollow thumb.
One down.
She put her hand on the handle and twisted slowly. It gave under the pressure, but she held it closed.
More deep breath.
She pulled the door open enough to peek in. Just enough ambient light leaked in to see the water pipes for the sprinklers that no rigger was going to let someone cut corners and miss, if they had to be outside of their body when a fire started.
And a massive set of patch panels, linked to a radio base unit.
Bingo.
Annamae turned to her assistant.
“Chappie,” she said in a quiet murmur, letting his brain identify her voice and unlock his security. “Stand guard outside this door and warn if anyone approaches.”
The robot chirped and hopped off her shoulder, taking up a stance in the low grass, where he kinda looked like a cat. Or a possum.
Annamae slid inside the room and pulled the door closed behind her. No alarms went off, and nothing was beeping angrily in red as she looked around.
