Gemini [WIP]

Chapter VIII

(Theres an interstitial chapter that needs to be added in here, I'll get there. It's not a linear process.)

We returned to find the compound in a state of alarm. The sentries posted at the gate hurriedly waved us in and closed the gate behind us. Jo and I shared a look, and she rode off to the stables to return her horse. Everyone had a role in the compound, and during emergencies, the women's job was to gather the children and hide. The men and boys twelve or older were to grab guns and meet at the central rally point in the town square. I rode my horse at a quick trot over to the armory building, dismounted, and ducked inside to grab a rifle. I was surprised to see Duncan in there, sweaty and red faced as ever, awkwardly holding a rifle. He heard me walk in and swung around, carelessly pointing the barrel at me.

"Hey! Where have you been? There was a flyover, they're mustering everyone."

I gently pushed the end of the rifle away from me, down towards the ground.

"Just got back, what happened?"

"A f***ing flyover!" he cut me off breathlessly. "If that was one of their scouts, we're painted again. This valley is defensible, but-"

"Who saw it? Were there any visible colors, insignia?" I grabbed a rifle from the rack and pulled the charging handle, checking to make sure it was clear, then grabbed a few of the preloaded magazines from the crate nearby.

"No, do you think this is WW2?" He actually said 'double you double you two', which I suppressed a giggle at. "Plus it was a scout, where are you going to put anything big enough to see? It's all skeletonized carbon fiber."

"I was hoping it was some kid's toy or a weather monitoring drone that got off course. Shit." I slapped the magazine home into the rifle, securing it with a satisfying mechanical click, and pulled the charging handle. "How fast was it moving?"

"They said pretty fast, looked like a four rotor. So probably very limited telemetry, but if it's one of theirs, the others won't be far behind."

I looked at Duncan's rifle, which he was holding like it might bite him. He was a desk job guy, but after the losses and attrition of the last years we didn't have the luxury of not arming everyone in the event of a crisis. The safety was off on his rifle, and he had wedged the magazine halfway in, backwards. Checking that the safety was on, I held mine out to him.

"Here, take this one. Be careful, it's loaded, just take the safety off. Take these too." I handed him the magazines after trading rifles. "I'm gonna grab some stuff, I'll meet you out there." I could hear the general hubbub and confusion of several dozen men milling around, trying to organize themselves outside.

"Thanks." Duncan looked at the magazine in the rifle he'd just been handed versus the one I'd taken from him and furrowed his brow, then darted outside with a speed that belied his size. I sighed and placed the weapon, damp with his sweat, back in the rack, flicked the safety on, and un-wedged the magazine.

A scout drone was typically followed by a swarm of Hunter drones and, if you were unlucky, a Lurker. Scouts were light, extremely fast, and usually didn't have much more equipment than a transmitter and a hyperspectral camera. By themselves, they weren't a threat, but they played Chihuahua to the Hunter's Doberman and Lurker's Mastiff. Hunters carried a 9mm gun, a bouquet of various grenades, and could easily keep pace with a vehicle moving at highway speeds. The Lurkers were the real problem, however. Slow and cumbersome, they usually hung out well outside the engagement, and used the telemetry of the smaller drones to provide indirect fire on their targets from a seemingly endless magazine of recoilless projectiles.

This was bad enough by itself, but they also housed an advanced neural net that interfaced with all of the drones in range. Single Scouts and Hunters, while autonomous, were usually somewhere on the intelligence scale between a cockroach and a goldfish. Once a Lurker showed up, however, it was able to coordinate their actions and use parallel processing to vastly increase the individual intelligence of each unit. It took a Hunter from being stymied by a closed window, thumping against it mindlessly, to being able to shoot it out, fly into the room, drop an incendiary grenade and swing back out without slowing down.

I didn't have a good feeling about the situation, so I walked a little further into the armory which was now empty, and grabbed a pump shotgun off the wall. The boys in the compound here liked their rifles and were damn accurate with them, but I always preferred the spread of a shotgun. Drones were deadly, but fairly fragile when you got down to it. Their lifting capability limited the amount of armor that they could feasibly have. I grabbed several boxes of shells loaded with birdshot and was loading the shotgun when I heard the tenor of the yelling outside change. I jammed a few more shells into my pockets and ran out, fumbling the last few shells into the gun while running.

Outside, the crowd bristled with a phalanx of rifle barrels pointed to the sky, aiming at a complex knot of shapes whirling in the sky above. The noise from the swarm was incredible, like a swarm of very angry, very large bees all trying to talk over each other. The knot broke suddenly and my heart sank.

"To glory, men! Fire!" Brother Samuel's voice cut through the cacophony, sounding genuinely afraid. I was, too. For a moment, surrounded on all sides by guns firing, the noise was too much to think over. I pumped shot after shot into the sky, not knowing if I hit anything. The drones began to dance a graceful aerial ballet, dodging and feinting in strange patterns, occasionally halting or changing direction unpredictably, yet somehow staying coherent with the movement of the whole swarm. As the hunters dove in and began to open fire, the men scattered, seeking cover underneath or inside anything they could. A few of our shots hit, one even hitting a hunter's grenade magazine, the resulting explosion taking out a couple of nearby units.

I slid under a rusting pickup parked nearby and began reloading my shotgun, ears ringing. This was bad. The coordinated moves and scouts hanging out at high altitude meant there was a Lurker out there, somewhere well out of sight, orchestrating our slaughter.

It's strange the way extreme chaos can lead to moments of personal clarity. Suddenly my mind's eye was filled with the memories of when I'd first joined the Flock, back in Utah. At the time, their enclave encompassed the entire city of Provo, tucked up in the mountains and eminently defensible against conventional forces, with a population of over twenty thousand. I'd come in under my alias Paul Demarchand, a defecting researcher from the Lawrence Livermore Labs on the outskirts of the City, who'd gotten on the wrong side of Central for not toeing the ever-moving party line. I was put to work in the small tech lab they maintained there, not because they trusted me, but because it was one of the most closely watched units due to their inherent distrust of modern technology.

One of the first projects I'd been assigned to was developing a jamming system for the weaponized drones that Central were using to surveil the city. We initially wired up the university's radio systems to do this, and once we had the proof of concept we were able to condense it into a backpack-sized, man-portable device. The backpack jammers quickly fell out of use, however, as Central caught on and hardened their drone's radio systems. The second project, though, never made it past prototype stage, as its development was interrupted by the first true battle between the Flock and Central. It was my baby, however, and I had ensured it came with us through all the subsequent routs and "tactical retreats" we'd suffered on the way to Missouri. I knew exactly where it was, though getting there would be difficult. I would need a diversion.

Snapping back to reality, I looked out from underneath the truck, unable to see the sky above. I could still hear the warbling drone of the swarm however, and across the square, over a few unlucky men who'd been hit before they could get to cover, I saw Duncan, leaning out from the window of the chapel. Duncan had been with me on the research team in Provo and had been instrumental in the jammer project. I waved my arms and screamed his name, hoping he would hear me over the chaos.

My waving got the wrong kind of attention, however, and a Hunter dropped down to a foot above the ground, kicking up dust from its rotors. That dust saved me, as it obscured me enough that the drone couldn't see me while I fumbled with the unwieldy shotgun in the narrow area under the truck. I could hear the grenade magazine cycling as I brought the gun to bear, but then suddenly it was shot out of the air and skidded to a halt a few feet away, smoking and crackling. I looked back out into the battle and saw Duncan waving at me, face plastered with a goofy grin. Using the adrenaline surge rushing through me, I wriggled out from under the truck and dashed across the edge of the square, keeping to the building overhangs where I could.

Pumping my arms and breathing smoke, I sprinted across the last few meters of open space separating me from Duncan. I heard bullets smack into the dirt and building behind me, trailing my steps, and leapt into a full dive through the broken window Duncan had taken up as a firing position. I crashed into the floor beyond, scraping myself all over as I slid through a mess of broken glass, shrapnel, and spent bullet casings. Duncan walked over and extended a hand to me.

"Jeez, Rambo, what was that all about? You were pretty safe under that truck until you started waving at me like an idiot. You all right?"

I pulled myself up with his help and brushed myself off. I had several freely bleeding cuts on my forearms and discovered jagged tear on my left calf I hadn't even felt happen. The adrenaline was still pumping though, so I ignored it.

"Yeah, I'm okay, thanks." I took a moment to breathe and straightened up. "Have you noticed? They're just circling, keeping us penned in. Why aren't they coming through the windows or using the grenades?"

Duncan rubbed his ample chin. "I hadn't really thought about that, but you're right. Think they're waiting for backup?"

"If they are, we've gotta stop them. You remember our first project together in Provo?"

"What, the jammer? They adapted to that a long time ago, plus we don't have one."

"I've got an idea, but I need a distraction. I don't need them shut down, just confused long enough for me to get to the storehouse."

"We don't have an antenna though..."

I mimed holding up a large trumpet in a triumphant pose. "That big metal statue on the roof is sure to have a grounding wire for lightning strikes, what if we -" I stopped, seeing the gears start to turn in his head.

"I think we'll go to hell for electrocuting Moroni, but if we get the PA equipment from the chapel... Ok, I'm on this. Give me 10."

Duncan ran off, his speed surprising me again. Taking a beat, I evaluated my condition. I'd left my shotgun under the truck, and it seems my pistol had gotten lost somewhere under there as well. The slash on my calf was starting to hurt, so I limped through the chapel lobby to the bathrooms, looking for a first aid kit. After patching up what I could with the old gauze and tape I found in there, and rinsing off the blood on my arms, I went back out to find Duncan waiting for me with a very ramshackle apparatus, trailing wires to the wall and out the window.

"Got it figured out?" I asked, knowing he had.

"Yep, it's pretty basic, just a jumped-up spark gap transmitter, but it should knock 'em out long enough for you to get over there. You sure about this? They'll still be able to shoot, you know, they just won't be as coordinated."
"They'll be stunned for a few seconds, and that'll give me the edge. You ready?"

"Ready. I'll pop it and then cover you from here."

"All right, let's do this."

"Godspeed, Brother Paul."

"Godspeed, Brother Duncan."

Duncan closed the connection and the spark crackled loudly; I took off but could hear a weird buzz from the roof behind me. I chanced a look back over my shoulder as I wove through the chaos of the town and could see the iconic golden statue holding a trumpet mounted on the spire of the church building arcing with electricity before bursting with a loud electrical pop. The drones, dancing in their elegant knots high overhead, suddenly broke apart and began scattering in random directions. I took the chance and ran as hard as I could to the storehouse where my crate was stowed.

The jamming pulse threw off the drones just long enough to get me to the storehouse. I burst through the door and slammed it shut behind me, hearing the whine of several Hunters behind me. One crashed through the window belly-first and wobbled at face height for a moment, orienting itself before turning its array of gleaming lenses and the black maw of its gun barrel towards me. Pressed against the wall by the door, I groped blindly with my left hand, unable to break eye contact with the arachnid face of the drone, until I found something cold and hard leaned against the wall. I closed my hand around the object and leapt forward, screaming, and swinging hard in a roundhouse at the drone.

Just before the drone could fire, my improvised club smashed into the arms holding its right-side fans, shattering the carbon fiber. The adrenaline pumping through my veins slowed time and I saw the black shards glittering as they spun through the air, the still-spinning fans arcing away in their housings. I noticed what I had picked up for the first time as the hooked end of a crowbar, carried by the momentum of my swing, passed through the cloud of debris. The drone, still trying to aim at my face, fired a burst from its gun as it tipped over sideways. The bullets passed in front of my face, close enough I could feel the breeze of their passing and the heat of the muzzle flash.
The drone crashed to the floor, skittering and spinning for a moment as it fired its propellers ineffectually. The crowbar, strangely, had dropped from my suddenly lifeless left hand. I stomped the drone repeatedly out of pure instinct before I had a chance to wonder about my arm. I looked down at the scattered components of the drone, electronic components crunching under my boot. Breathing raggedly, I looked over at my left shoulder to see a ragged hole torn in my shirt and livid crimson blood seeping out and beginning to run down the sleeve. I dropped to my knees and put my hand over the hole. My left arm dangled uselessly below, the back of my hand resting on the floor amid the shards of carbon fiber.

Rapid footsteps thumped towards me across the wooden floor, and I looked up to see Jo, face pale, running towards me with a pistol in hand.

"Oh my god, are you hurt?"

She kicked the still sparking carcass of the drone away and knelt in front of me. "I got trapped in here on my way to the cellars. I saw everything, but you hit it before I could do anything. Let me see your shoulder." She dropped the pistol and it clattered on the floor as she reached out and I moved my hand away to let her examine the wound, hissing in pain when she probed it with her fingers. "Looks like the bullet's still in there. We'll need to get it removed, but here, let me bind it first." Delicately, Jo tore my sleeve off at the shoulder and slid it off my lifeless arm. She produced a pocketknife from somewhere in her gingham dress and opened it in a practiced one-handed movement. She slit the fabric lengthwise with the blade, making it into two strips of fabric.

"One of these days you're going to tell me what you did before you wound up here."

Not looking up at me, Jo smiled tightly and began to bind my shoulder. "Sure, someday. If we make it out of this. Now, we need to immobilize your arm." She tightened the knot under my armpit, and I grunted with the flare of pain. "Can you stand? Come on, the medical stuff's over here." I got my feet under me and began to stand but was immediately hit with a wave of dizziness and began to fall over. Jo grabbed me and put my right arm over her shoulder, supporting me while my tunnel vision cleared. I felt like I might throw up.

"Okay, big boy, come on." She walked me over to the far corner of the space and sat me down in a nearby chair.
"I had a plan, you know. There's a weapon I built back in Utah that I've never been able to deploy. It's in a crate up in the loft. We need it to take out the Lurker. Except I don't think I'm going to be able to use it now."

Jo was elbow deep in a crate, throwing out plastic wrapped bits of medical paraphernalia. "Ah, here we go." She held up a cloth sling and tore off the plastic bag. "Let's get you into this." She took my arm, gently worked it into the sling and tightened the straps. It still hurt, but having my arm immobilized helped. "Now," she said, standing up, hands on her hips, "tell me about this weapon."

...

Jo and I crept through the woods outside the compound, following an overgrown walking path from when this had been a Mormon temple site. We were following the low throb of sound generated by the Lurker. I had a messenger bag slung over my good shoulder, weighted down by several power tool batteries. They clacked together more noisily than I would have liked, but there hadn't been time to do much besides grab what we needed and bail. Suddenly, Jo dropped into a crouch, cradling the bulky device we had taken from the crate.

"Shh! Get down. Look up there." About 100 meters ahead I could see the treetops thrashing in the wash of the huge drone's fans hovering just over the canopy. I couldn't see the Lurker itself through the thick spring foliage, but the low hypnotic thrum it generated couldn't have been mistaken for anything else.

"We need a clear line of sight; it'll get blocked by all these leaves. Lasers have limitations, even microwave ones."
"Ok, ok, we can figure this out." Jo looked around, and then up to the canopy. "I got this, give me a battery." I fished one out of the bag one handed and tossed it to her.

"It goes in there, in the stock behind the handle." She turned the unwieldy mechanism over, looking for the port. Finding it, she drove the battery home with a click. "It operates like a normal rifle but remember it's line of sight. Don't try to compensate for distance or wind. You'll get about 4 shots from the battery. Flick the safety up to arm it, and you're ready to fire when the green light by the back sight comes on."

"There's no recoil, right? Or sound?" She looked critically down the long rectangular waveguide that made up the barrel of the weapon. "So if I miss with the first shot, it won't notice?"

"In theory, yes, unless it's got a microwave sensor. But try not to miss."

"I don't miss."

"Let's hope. I'll try and get to it when you down it and make sure it's dead. Take another one of these though, just in case." I tossed her another battery and she caught it one handed.

"I'm not sure I can carry a second" she said, placing the gun on the ground. "I can't do this in a dress." She reached behind her neck and undid a clasp, then shimmied out of the dress. I looked at the ground, embarrassed.

"Don't be a prude, I just can't climb in this thing." She walked over and took my elbow, standing me up. Still
blushing, I tried to keep my eyes on her face. She leaned in pecked me on the cheek. "For luck." She then stooped and picked up the gun, slinging it over her back. I studiously looked anywhere but the strap running between her breasts.

"Good luck. To both of us." I slid the crowbar out of my belt and hefted it in my good hand. "See you on the other side."

"See ya." She winked and ran to a tree with a low crotch a few feet off the path and began to clamber up. I caught myself looking at her ass as she did, clad as it was in large white bloomers. Shaking my head at my ability to think about sex even in a life-or-death situation, I crept further towards the shaking trees ahead, readying myself to attack the drone when it fell.

As I approached the downdraft, I looked up through the gaps in the foliage to see the heavy drone hovering overhead. Unlike it's smaller counterparts, the Lurker was heavily armored. Plates of black ceramic with a bluish sheen caught the light as the drone turned. The plates covered the belly and arms of the craft, as well as the drum-shaped munitions magazines on either side. The maser wasn't capable of effectively punching through that armor, but would wreak havoc on the delicate sensor array and cameras scattered around it's body. If Jo could nail one of those, the focused beam of microwaves would drill through and melt anything they hit in less than a second. We'd learned the hard way that anything short of an anti-tank round couldn't take one of these down, and the now-pissed off unit would triangulate in on the sound instantly, bringing swift and fiery retaliation.

I gripped the crowbar tighter in my sweaty palm and took shelter behind the wide trunk of a sycamore, my heart beating in my throat. It was probably my imagination, but I swear could hear the high whine of the capacitor charging up as she turned the gun on and took aim. We were at an oblique angle to the Lurker, so she had a fairly clear shot to the main cluster of cameras, behind which was its primary computer core.

After a few pregnant moments, one of the lenses began to glow, going from hot orange to blinding white in a flash. The glass and housing burst and a rush of thick black smoke began to pour out of the hole. The fans faltered and it tipped momentarily in the air before righting itself and turning towards Jo's position in the tree. A port opened in its belly and a wicked looking gun dropped down, tracking independently of the body.

I heard Jo yell from the top of the tree and I realized I had forgotten to tell her a crucial quirk of the gun - it took about five seconds between shots to recharge the capacitor. Panicking, I watched as the Lurker's belly gun fixate on its target, the mechanism beginning to move. I screamed, surprising myself, and flung the crowbar as hard as I could towards the drone. I must have accessed some deep well of athleticism I was unaware of because the crowbar struck the gun fifty feet overhead with a clang, ringing as it fell somewhere into the woods beyond. It hit right before the gun fired, just hard enough to knock the aim off a few degrees. The high caliber shots ripped into the trees and exploded when they hit branches, trunks, or the ground below. I hoped that I'd bought Jo enough time for a second shot.

As the gun corrected itself, another camera, one of the main ones, shattered and flames licked out of the melting electronics behind it. Acrid black smoke roiled out of the hole and began to seep out of the seams in the rest of the housing. The drone twitched a few times and shuddered, hovering still for a moment before it passed overhead towards Jo's position behind me, gathering speed.

I screamed primally and ran as best I could, hugging my bad arm to myself and willing my leg to stop hurting. The Lurker, still speeding up, began to skim the treetops and then plunged through them before smashing into the canopy of the tree Jo was in with an almighty crash. The branches gave way and the whole tree plunged to the ground along with the smoking wreckage of the Lurker. Running purely on instinct, I ran to the pickup-sized machine, picked up a nearby rock and began bashing at the remaining eyes of the drone. My vision went red and I lost myself in smashing the machine. I came back a few moments later, surrounded by shattered pieces of machinery and glass. My hand was bleeding from numerous cuts and I was struggling to breathe in the cloud of black smoke.

Rising, I backed away from the carnage and began to look around, hoping I wouldn't find Jo's body. I was looking around what was left of her tree, kicking limbs over, when I heard her curse. I whipped around to look behind me, but all I saw was the now-quiet forest.

"Hey, up here!" I looked up to the sound of her voice and saw her crouching on a limb 20 feet up an adjacent tree. She was covered in scratches all over her body, and I could see a bruise starting to form on her abdomen. "This thing got smashed when that f***er tried to dive bomb me. Watch out." She held out the maser by it's strap and I could see that the waveguide had a major bend in it about halfway. She dropped it to the ground below with a crash and a few components flew off when it landed.

"Shit, that thing was my baby. It made it all the way here from Provo."

"Hey, it worked, didn't it? You'll just have to make another." Jo slid off the branch and hung by her hands for a moment, dangling and looking fairly ridiculous in bra, panties, and sneakers, before dropping to the ground and landing in a graceful crouch. I ran over and hugged her out of relief before pulling back to inspect her wounds.

"I thought you were dead for a minute, when I saw that thing plow into you-"

She gently pushed my hands away and brushed herself off. "I thought I was too when I realized that first shot didn't kill it. Why didn't you tell me about the recharge? It felt like an hour before I got the second shot off."

"I-I forgot, I only ever got to test it once. I should've remembered. How did you dodge that thing?"

"I didn't, it hit the tree under me and I got thrown clear into the next tree over. Pure luck. Now," she straightened and pushed her hair back from her face. "How about you go find my dress?"