Zero History

Pep, following instructions, hadn’t been wearing the messenger bag, and Hollis
assumed he’d deposited the other party favor, whatever it might be, in the car, that being
evidently the plan. And then he was gone, his dual-engined electric bicycle, utterly silent,
capable of an easy sixty miles per hour, never having intersected with the focal cones of
any of the cameras showing on the screen of Garreth’s laptop. Had it, Garreth said, the
resulting image of a riderless bicycle might have negated the whole exercise.
The camera-map, on Garreth’s laptop, was grayscale, the cones of camera-vision red,
each one fading to pink as it spread from its apex. Occasionally, one of them would move
as an actual given camera motored on its axis. She had no idea where this particular
display was being darknetted from, and she was glad that she didn’t.
The screen that offered Milgrim’s video feed, she thought, seemed entirely out of step
with the operation, and perhaps for that reason she found herself going back to it, though
it wasn’t very interesting. With Gracie still unaccounted for, she felt Garreth’s nerves. He
could have used someone who knew what they were doing, she guessed, on another
drone like Fiona’s.
Whatever Milgrim was flying, it seemed leisurely, almost comical, though capable of
invigorating bursts of sustained forward motion. Having been instructed, via Fiona, to
make a circuit of the area, looking for Gracie, he had, though Garreth had complained
that he was too high. Now he was cruising, she saw, above vegetation scrubby enough to
warrant the name, Garreth apparently having forgotten about him. But nothing had been
expected of Milgrim and his drone, she knew. He’d been given the job to keep him out of
Bigend’s hands.
The sound of a very long zipper being stealthily undone. She glanced to the right and
saw Heidi touch her upraised forefinger to her lips.
“Our two,” Garreth said to the headset, “are starting for point now. Put it down about
twenty meters west of point. We’ll have to run with the batteries you have.” That would
be Fiona.
As he spoke, Heidi slipped through the fly and slowly lowered the zipper, closing it
behind her.
Point, Hollis knew, would be the GPS coordinates that Gracie had specified as the site
of the exchange.
On Fiona’s screen, the perspective suddenly dropped to knee-height, then raced
forward over darkly blurred grass, as if from the viewpoint of a hyperkinetic child.
Milgrim, she saw, had reached the end of the scrub, and was turning slowly around for
more.
I hope she just had to pee, thought Hollis, glancing back at the long plastic zipper.