NightRacer

Chapter 9

"There is no way in hell I'm getting in a bunny suit!" Racer said, pointing at the two oversized backpacks Enforcer pulled out of her car.

"I'm sorry, sir, but we need to get out of here now and, well, we need to improvise."

"And you want me to hop like a bunny, dodging rockets?" Racer asked.

"Like a Grasshopper, sir. These are Grasshopper suits," Enforcer said, showing him an emblem on the side of a backpack.

"We used to call them bunny suits, but that doesn't change the issue. Hopping away from rockets and laser beams is not my idea of tactical advantage over invisible drones. What we need is tanks and shuttles, and that ship in orbit targeting this whole area. Fill the canyon with dust or vapors to get a visual on the drone, and pummel that device into a cloud of atoms."

"Sir, we don't have tanks. The base has a few, but they don't even know we exist. We have some shuttles, and the ship will probably help, but they don't know where we're hiding." Enforcer's face was aglow with enthusiasm. "And this is actually from an exercise we had at the academy last year-to come up with a new solution for avoiding drone attack. My team got second place with the Grasshoppers."

"What was the winning idea, running fast and screaming?"

"The fireworks-you saw it a little earlier. A car drives into a covered area, and ten cars emerge on the other side, driving in different directions. They won because cars can fight back, and that's a great advantage. Grasshopping is more of a passive solution. You have to get to a safe area. Considering this terrain and our limited time frame, it's our best option right now."

"Why can't we call for an extraction team?"

"Time, sir. Time. Once we reveal our location, we'll have an hour, maybe an hour and a half to get extracted. In two hours, that drone making factory will spew another batch of aircraft, and they'll all come to this location. While we're hiding now from one drone, in another two hours we may be facing a lot of them."

"How many?"

"Ten, maybe twelve."

"Twelve? Really? That's a hell of a printing shop," Racer said.

"First we had two drones, one of them with cloaking technology, and we shot them down. Next, there were three, smaller, all of them stealthy, herding horses. Then we had six, and we took them down, but the next nine we faced this morning already changed their tactics. I think they can add three more drones every six hours. So, twelve. And they're a little smarter."

"I'll be damned. This is printers printing printers."

"That's our assessment too, sir. They have two or three high precision 3D printing machines, which printed a number of lesser accuracy printers, but adequate enough to make some of the low precision parts. If they continue to print printers, we're going to have a lot of drones."

"Do you know how much time we have?"

"They didn't find us in the last four hours, so we got two hours max."

"Any ideas where the facility may be located?"

"Not a clue. The drones show up at small intervals in very different places."

"That's weird. And you have no idea who's behind these attacks, right?"

"No, sir, but I can tell you one thing. These people are good at automated war. I bet if you find that facility, it wouldn't even have a door. It's probably one big integrated cube, or something."

***

The suits reminded Racer of the bunny suits teens used to have in the old times. A light exoskeleton was attached to the knees, legs, and hips, morphing into a set of back straps and shoulder fasteners and ending with a helmet with head support to lighten the stress on the body. A pair of metal-sole boots, worn on top of regular boots, had a spring mechanism to augment the step. A normal jump would thrust a person ten to fifteen meters. A "bunny hop" with both legs would take someone close to thirty meters. You also had a pair of wings attached to your arms, which could automatically deploy and take you a hundred to two hundred meters, depending on your jump and the wind conditions. On landing, a breaking mechanism would harness the energy in the springs and store it in a battery. You had the data on your helmet display. One camera was mounted on the front of the helmet and another on the back. To fly, you had to say "fly" into the helmet's microphone, and the battery would spin a pair of light propellers on your back, giving you a push up and forward. There were also some redundant controls in the gloves to control the gliding and to change modes. The three basic modes were auto, mostly for running and short hopping; semiauto, for long distance hopping and flying; and freestyle, for those hooked on adrenaline.