“I see you down there, bitch! No negotiation, no tricks. You hear me? I’m ready to die, I’m ready to take everybody with me. Are you?”
Reading the concern on Zoey’s face, Andre said, “I think they all say that.”
Will said to her, “I’m in contact with a rapid entry team, they’re ninety percent sure they can take him out before he triggers whatever device he’s got, if he even has one at all. They don’t even want to get paid, they’ll do it for the exposure. Last chance.”
“Ninety percent? Would you board a plane that had a ten percent chance of crashing?”
“I once boarded a plane that barely had a ten percent chance of not crashing because, like now, my other options were worse.”
“And what are the odds the hostage makes it out of a raid intact?” Shae. That was her name. “I’ve seen what those ribbon guns do. No, this requires finesse. Andre, send in the giant robot monster.”
Andre tapped some icons on his phone and the shiny black thing in the truck blinked to life. It whirred and beeped and birthed itself from the cargo hold on unseen wheels. Once free, eight mechanical legs sprang from the sides, lifting its body six feet off the ground. Every inch was covered in that reflective black shielding, like it had been sculpted out of a moonless night. It was the most terrifying thing Zoey had ever seen.
Andre said, “It’s patched into your phone. It’s calling you now.”
Zoey dug out her phone, then physically recoiled when a full-color hologram of her face appeared where the spider’s head would be.
“Holy god.”
Andre said, “Whoa, that’s actually even creepier than I intended.”
“Private military groups also use these things to take out tanks,” said Will. “The two front legs have plasma cutters that will slice through two inches of armor. It can take a direct hit from a railgun. Skin will heal itself from damage, you could riddle it with fifty-caliber fire and watch the holes disappear in ten seconds.”
Zoey stared at the thing, transfixed. “Wait, where did you get this thing, again?”
Andre said, “Rented it from a friend. Though you wouldn’t know he was a friend based on the deposit he demanded.”
“Do I want to know how much?”
“Can you really put a price on something like this?”
“Oh god. All right. Let’s do it.”
2
The piano-black Zoey-ghost-face spider-drone monster clicked along the pavement to oohs and aahs from the crowd. It hopped onto the overturned food truck and then, without hesitation, skittered right up the building’s darkened facade, toward the ragged opening in the fourth floor. It pulled itself into the room with a quick, jerky movement that was much more arachnid than robot.
Zoey held her breath.
Even from street level, they could hear the terrified shriek of a young girl from inside. Well, Zoey thought, we’ve already traumatized the hostage.
She watched the machine’s camera feed from her phone, and saw a brief, blurry glimpse of a young woman before a figure stepped into view and the screen went dark.
“What happened?”
Andre said, “He covered the drone’s camera. Threw a blanket over it or somethin’.”
“Can we uncover it?” If not, Zoey thought that seemed like an inexcusable design flaw.
Will said, “We can, but won’t. We don’t need to see him, not yet. As long as he can hear us, go ahead and let him think he accomplished something. Open the line. I’ll do the talking.”
Zoey found a “Speak” icon and pointed the phone toward Will’s face. Drones swarmed around them and just about every bystander had a Blink camera pinned to their clothing. Everything they said was being streamed to an audience of maybe millions, from dozens of angles, everyone watching their follower counts tick upward. Zoey saw several people in the audience with Gadflies, the little drones everyone had been buying this year that hovered around their shoulders, livestreaming their lives in a way that could also get their face in the shot.
Will asked, “Can you hear me?”
From the phone, a normal human voice—the dumb skeleton filter only worked on Tilley’s own camera—said, “Who’s this? Put the cow on.”
“My name is Will Blackwater. I work for Zoey Ashe, solving the problems that aren’t worth her time. Listen closely, because I’m not going to repeat myself. Each breath you draw from this moment forward is a precious gift granted to you by Ms. Ashe. After each said breath, I want you to silently thank her and appreciate the grace she has bestowed upon you. Her patience, however, is not boundless. I am not here to listen to your demands. I already know your demands, your true demands, even if you do not. You demand to remain alive and to be forgiven for your trespasses.
“If you leave immediately, we will all return to our respective homes and I will plead to Zoey on your behalf for a reasonable punishment. I cannot offer any guarantees as to what her response will be. If you do not leave immediately, however, the machine before you will cut off your head and rip those implants off your bones. It will do it so quickly that you won’t even register the movement—the speed of its limbs is restricted only by air resistance. This is an A-8 Disruptor, made in Germany. It took exactly three of them to disable an entire division of Iranian tanks during the Blue Sky Raids. So let me be absolutely clear. You can still win here. But only if you define victory as leaving that building with your body intact.”
Will stopped talking and muted their end. No response. Zoey wondered if his attempt to paint her as a cruel, omnipotent overlord was undermined by her outfit. She had wanted to change clothes, but Will had advised against it for reasons that he hadn’t had time to explain. She needed to remind herself not to accidentally press the spot on the seam of her T-shirt that would make the cat start singing a sea shanty consisting entirely of meows.
Zoey said, “If he tries to detonate the sonic gadget, or do something else stupid, how are we going to fight back if we can’t see him?”
Andre said, “The Disruptor’s own AI will take over and kick his ass. A human operator would just slow it down anyway.”
In Zoey’s ear, Wu said, “I do not have a clear shot, the A-8 is between me and the target. I can just make out movement beyond the—whoa! I, uh, think the negotiation phase has ended.”
There were crashes from inside the building. The crowd gasped. Some people even backed away, realizing that there was, in fact, no reason this conflict couldn’t spill out of the building and wipe out a dozen of the gawkers before they even had time to crap their pants. Zoey, realizing she’d made their same mistake, took a step back from the noise.
“Uh, just to be clear, the brain-melting device he said he had, it can’t penetrate the walls of that building, can it? We’d be safe out here?”
Will looked surprised. “Who ever said that?”
From inside the building came a noise like a car being stomped down a manhole by an angry giant. The battered carcass of the 8-8 Disintegrator or whatever Will had called it came flying out of the hole in the wall. The crowd below screamed and scattered. Zoey ducked. The mangled black monstrosity crashed onto the sidewalk and rolled into the middle of the street. A self-driving bus detected the obstacle and braked in time, then a cherry-red human-driven convertible on monster truck tires rear-ended the bus.