Gods of Olympus

(Author Note: A different take on remotely piloted systems and pervasive surveillance.)

 

“Final Readiness check on my mark. Sound off in order. Skinny 1, all systems green. Ready for launch.” Captain Jason Dix, ODA detachment commander, scanned his system screens in the bubble as he listened to his team each indicate their individual ROARs’ readiness to launch. It was quick and precise. They were good to go.

“Colonel Moore, Captain Beam, ODA 326 ready for launch.” He was surprisingly calm considering what was about to happen. Trust your training. Trust your men.

Lieutenant Colonel Moore, 3^rd Special Forces Group, 2^nd Battalion commander, spoke into the command net from his spot in the operations center sky box at Ft. Bragg.

“Captain Beam, passing TACON to the Haldeman for launch. ODA 326 will assume TACON once confirmed payload bus separation.”

“Copy that JSOC. We’ll launch on my mark.” There was a pause then his voice came back on line. “XO, sound the missile launch alarm.” There was a series of piecing ship horn blasts in the background. “On my count, turn key and fire. Three, two, one, launch!”

A video of the bow of the cruiser USS Haldeman showed a VLS-L canister door fly open and flames vent outward, followed by a common modular missile (CMM) shooting up into the darkness. In less than 20 seconds, another eleven of the six-meter-tall missiles launched into the night above a stormy Atlantic Ocean, 640 kilometers off the coast of Africa.

The video shifted to a tracking camera from the USS Spratly Islands amphibious assault ship two kilometers to port, which was launching a FAST team in a trio of Quad rotors. Smoke enveloped the Haldeman as the missiles raced at astonishing speed up and to the southeast out of sight. Everyone’s screens flipped to the Haldeman’s 3D missile tracking radar. A countdown timer in bold numbers showed how long until the boosters cut off and a second counter displayed how long until the payload buses on the missiles separated.

Inside his bubble, Captain Dix casually chewed on an energy bar as he watched the countdown timers. Skinny 1 was holding together well according to telemetry. He flipped the display and scanned the status of Skinny’s 2-12. Everything was checking out. He conferred briefly with his ADC, CW2 Tillerman, then continued eating. At the 20 second mark on the booster clock, he brushed the crumbs off his hands and spoke to the team on the tactical net.

“Prepare for booster cutoff and drag maneuvers. Keep things tight and watch your horizon.” A chorus of “yes sirs,” answered him.

“If your telemetry starts to go to shit, hit the emergency punch out and try and save it. Otherwise, let the computer take you in but be ready to override if needed.”

The boosters cut out and the missiles continued to plow through the atmosphere. Without the booster propelling them, drag quickly began to slow them down, helped by drag panels deployed from the sides of the missiles. As the missiles reached apogee, they had slowed to just over the speed of sound. 

The missiles arched over, and the fairings popped, revealing the payload bus for each missile.

The launch was designed to release TF Skinny just as they crossed the African coast. At 45 kilometers above the earth, and traveling at Mach 1.3, the 12 payloads all separated cleanly from their boosters. The payload buses launched their payloads in a way to give them a short pop-up maneuver to obtain better lift. Composite wings, attached to large, vaguely humanoid forms, deployed in milliseconds, turning each payload into a faster than sound glider.

Captain Dix heard LTC Moore in his headpiece, “Good launch Haldeman. JSOC thanks you for the smooth delivery. Captain Dix it’s your show. Go get our Ambassador.”

“Copy that sir.” Time to break things and hurt people. He flexed his hands in the VR gloves and gripped his joysticks to start piloting Skinny 1 if needed.

Captain Dix kept his hand lightly on the left joystick as the glider’s AI kept him within the projected race track on his view screen. ODA 326 formed up in a line 20 kilometers long in the stratosphere and followed the virtual paths on their screens in a shallow glide towards their target, massive sonic booms punching the night sky as they zipped along at 1500 kph.

It took 12 minutes to travel the 260 kilometers until they were over their target. They had slowly descended the entire time. Now that they had reached the immediate target area, the gliders’ AI systems performed aggressive banking maneuvers to bleed off speed and height. When they hit 120 kilometers per hour, the AI handed off glider control to the SF operators, who continued circling as they prepared their final approach, riding thermals from the massive fires below them to stay aloft.

If it were daylight and people had bothered to look up, they would have seen 12 giant vultures circling like the city below was a wounded animal. Captain Dix took a moment to view the city below Skinny 1 and absorb the vision. His team was similarly awed by what they saw as they prepared to land. Kinshasa, a megacity of over 20 million people on the banks of the Congo river, and the Capital of the Democratic Republic of Congo, was burning.

#

12 hours’ earlier long simmering political tension had exploded in an attempted coup. Fighting had erupted in Kinshasa along multiple tribal and political party lines. The city saw hundreds of armed gangs boil out of the shanties south of the urban core armed with guns, machetes, and pangas. The speed and scale of the violence belied the publicly spontaneous nature of what was happening.

Kinshasa spiraled towards a Rwandan-style massacre with stunning speed. Tallies from smart-news aggregators suggested more than 100,000 dead in half a day, even when statistically adjusting for at least three different online covert influence campaigns JSOC’s Zeus team identified hiding in the data.

Coup leaders were vilifying westerners as part of their campaign and there had been dozens of expatriates killed. Due to the chaos, 3^rd Group had been put on standby for a potential AFRICOM NEO. The US Embassy was placed on lockdown after staff and the few dependents were brought inside from their nearby housing complexes. Almost 100 Americans were currently holed up inside the embassy.

Six hours after the coup started, the first shots were fired at the embassy. AFRICOM raced to put assets in place while the NSC decided whether to intervene. A 3^rd Group ODA in Conakry was attempting to get to Brazzaville via commercial air, and a Global Strike Command UAV package had departed Rota. Still, all those assets were 8+ hours from being on-site, until then the embassy was on its own. The MSG detachment and the RSO team were keeping the attackers at bay for now, but only because the attacks were not well organized.

That’s when the EXORD came down to launch ODA 326. They could get to the embassy from the Haldeman, over 900 kilometers away, in just 20 minutes. Supporting them would be a pair of F-35s from the USS Spratly Island MEU, and JSOC’s Zeus team at Ft. Bragg. 

The President gave the “Go” order during a break in an event at an elementary school in Vermont. ODA 326’s EXORD was simple. Secure the US Embassy, the Ambassador and the embassy staff. Safely escort them to one of the designated emergency LZs secured by the follow-on FAST team. Load up on the quads and get the hell out of Dodge.

#

As they prepared to land, Captain Dix made contact with the RSO on the embassy guard frequency.

“US Embassy do you read me? This is Skinny 1, US Special Forces. Do you read me?”

“Skinny 1, this is Jose Montoya, embassy RSO. I read you. What’s your 20?” In the background, Captain Dix could hear sporadic rifle fire.

“We’re over the embassy now and are about to insert at LZ Charlie. Do you have any friendlies there?” The emergency LZs were mapped years in advance so both sides knew Captain Dix meant the rail yard two blocks north of the embassy.

“Negative Skinny 1, we are all inside the compound. We are receiving sniper fire from adjacent buildings, and periodic probes with dismounted troops and technicals.” There was a pause and an explosion in the background. “I have the marines linking you into their VR feeds now. They can designate targets for you as you close on us.” A blinking icon appeared on their viewfinders.

“Thanks, got it. We’re going to land, then move towards your position in parallel teams down Avenue Cataractes and Avenue de Hotel. We’ll put a perimeter box around you and converge on the front gate.” He tapped locations on the map in front of him, detailing for the RSO/MSG Det team and his unit the planned movement. “See you in a few. TF Skinny, prepare to land.” He tipped his glider over for final approach.

In front of him he saw the rail yard. To his left was cut timber staged for transport. To his right was the main riverfront boulevard, eerily deserted. He could not detect any heat signs in the rail yard as he came in for a landing. Zeus had done a good job scaring everyone off.

He flared, his feet hit the ground, and the glider wings detached with a “psst” of compressed gas. He detached his battle rifle from his leg and ran to the edge of a rail car to cover the rest of his team. His missile box deployed and swung up into position over his left shoulder. He activated his RSTA mast, which rose out of its housing four meters into the air to scan the electronic ether for hostiles. He immediately used two of his ten short range surveillance drones to establish a roving perimeter 100 meters out. The 2 inch drones deployed with a near silent buzzing from his left arm.

Behind and around him, the eleven remaining mechs of ODA 326 came in for a landing among the train cars, and that’s when they suffered their only casualty. There was an explosion 90 meters to Captain Dix’s left. He turned to look, but a line of rail cars blocked his view.

“What the fuck was that? What hit Hirata?” asked Captain Dix. Skinny 9, his junior medical sergeant, was showing off-line.

“I don’t think it was hostile fire sir,” reported his ADC. “I saw him come in for a weird landing and then there was the explosion.”

“Scan for hostiles and establish a perimeter around him. Move!”

Eleven humanoid, heavily armed robots raced at high speed to form a perimeter around Skinny 9, which lay crumpled in a smoldering heap against a train car. Each bi-pedal mech was just under two meters high and weighed roughly 150 kilos. They were armed with a variety of 7.62mm battle rifles, precision sniper rifles, or light machine guns. Captain Dix’s weapons sergeants each sported a support arm jutting from the mechs’ waists, mounting a minigun or 40mm auto-launcher on a pintle mount.

Heavy weapons pods pivoted back and forth over their left shoulders scanning for targets. Half sported four pre-packaged AT rounds like Skinny 1, the other half a combined high-energy laser (HEL) / .223 LMG weapons station. Conformal battery packs lined their limbs and lower backs. Sensor nodes dotted their heads, which had sloped, smooth tops that swept down to their shoulders and had smoke grenade clusters on the edges.

Mini drones formed a protective layer over the group. Active, adaptive camouflage flickered across their metamaterial bodies, matching their colors to the terrain. Small SF Patches and American flags were etched into their arms.

“Sgt. Hirata, report! What happened?” Captain Dix stood over the remains of Skinny 9, looking at the twisted metal of Sgt. Hirata’s ROAR unit.

“I’m dead sir. I came down in between these two trains, and hit an unexpected thermal. It stood me up and before I could recover, tipped me into this train. I think the impact detonated one of my Carl Gustav rounds.” Captain Dix saw the jagged metal and exposed electronics where the rocket pod used to be and realized Sgt. Hirata was right.

“OK, Sgt. Hirata, what’s done is done. Report to Zeus and give us an extra pair of eyes. Everyone else form up. We’re moving out.”

“Yes sir. Sorry. Sir.” With that Sgt. Hirata powered down his Remote Operated Assault Robot (ROAR) and hit the door release on his flight control station. The remaining eleven ROARs formed into two groups and stacked up behind a series of rail cars, ready to move out to secure the Embassy.

“Colonel Moore, at phase line Red. Permission to engage,” reported Captain Dix.

“Permission granted. Move out.” With that Captain Dix made the forward motion with his hand and two stacks of combat robots in tight CQB formations advanced out of the rail yard.

#

From the skybox, Colonel Moore watched the ninth ROAR control station door open as the rest of the team advanced across the riverfront boulevard on the huge screens in front of him, sweeping their weapons left and right as they went.

Sgt. Hirata stepped out of his control station and punched the door in frustration. Eleven more stations lay in a line adjacent to him, with another set of twelve behind them, which were used for dual missions, or as backups for single team missions like today.

The building they were in was known as the Vault. It was a huge, warehouse sized operations center in the most secure portion of Ft. Bragg. There were two others in the world just like it, one at Ft. Campbell in Kentucky, and another in Norfolk, Virginia. Between them, JSOC could deploy up to six ODA teams using ROAR mechs, although no mission had ever used more than two.

The ROARs were the logical evolution from the TALOS series armored suits. Removing the operator entirely eliminated the threat of combat deaths on the most dangerous missions, and allowed for humanoid operators to be deployed in previously unimaginable ways. DoD mandated a human always have a finger on the trigger, hence the ROAR’s remote control like a UAV. But otherwise the ROAR design allowed for more weapons, more armor, more sensors, greater situational awareness, and the ability to operate at greater extremes.

ROARs could be deployed ballistically via CMMs from ships, submarines, or ground units – launched thousands of kilometers in minutes. They could be mounted on torpedoes covertly launched hundreds of kilometers’ away. They had been dropped from B-21s. They were sent overland in artic climates too cold for human survival. Once they were even sent in a sealed cargo container by ship, patiently sitting in their CONEX box for two months, twenty deep in the hold until their CONEX was unloaded, placed on a tractor trailer, and driven directly into their target by an unknowing adversary.

Sgt. Hirata took off at a jog to head over to the Zeus operations room. They had been preparing the battlefield for the last few hours and were busy unleashing their own version of hell.

#

The Zeus team was run by a full bird Colonel. Colonel Dos Santos wore a patch with a giant lightning bolt on her left shoulder indicative of the 217^th special mission unit, known as ‘The Olympians.’ Direct commissioned out of Silicon Valley two years before, she had matching PhDs in computer network design and cognitive psychology. She had built two different computers which had passed the Turing test – the first one, after passing the test, had been pitted against the second. Right now, her and her team of 120 system engineers, access operators, intelligence analysts, linguists, and supercomputers, were taking over Kinshasa.

When the coup broke in Kinshasa, Zeus had gone to work. Target development network analysts using automated scanning tools mapped the Congolese Internet and cell phone networks. From there they drilled down to connected devices, routers and wi-fi networks, scanning for vulnerabilities, and running massive cracking libraries against every end point to compromise as many devices as possible. They were very successful.

By 2050, the average ratio for any given urban area was approximately 40 connected devices for every person. This included phones, computers, wearable tech, cars, all the IOT devices, security cameras, VR glasses, RFID transmitters, and innumerable other connected devices which permeated the everyday world. Kinshasa was a target rich ecosystem of roughly 800,000,000 connected devices. Zeus compromised them by the tens of millions.

The F-35’s flying CAP over Kinshasa reinforced Zeus’s efforts. In addition to world class sensor payloads, each F-35 carried two drop tanks filled with swarm bots – tiny drones which operated as a cooperative, programmable mesh network. Each tank held 50,000 bots. Without anyone in the city knowing it, 200,000 tiny bots settled over the commercial and government district on rooftops and in trees, cataloging wireless networks, acting as cell site emulators, and measuring data volume through local networks to help with crowd analysis.

The Zeus team focused active SIGINT collection on a ten-block radius around the embassy. Linguists targeted hot phones, flipping through conversations in French, Lingala, and Swahili, and identifying members of the gangs attacking the embassy. They tagged these phones and from there expanded through phone lists and cell records to other phones of interest. They then jumped to social media, mapping and cross referencing friends lists with cell phone contacts.

By the time TF Skinny landed in the rail yard, Zeus had a god-like view of the city, and had pwned over 350,000,000 devices. They knew 90% of everyone surrounding the embassy by name, including where they lived, their families, and where they were standing at that very moment. Linguists listened in on their phone calls in real time.

Zeus inserted fake news and VR videos into the social stream, claiming that there were armed gangs near the rail yard slaughtering everyone, and then boosted the signal by resending the messages to targeted individuals, driving crowds away. That had effectively cleared the LZ for TF Skinny. With the ODA moving out, Zeus now targeted the armed gangs attacking the embassy itself.

#

The fight to clear the perimeter was short and lopsided. Just as the ODA moved out, all the attackers’ cell phones received text messages. Some were from superiors ordering retreats, while others warned the recipients were targeted for death. Mass confusion resulted just as the ODA hit phase line green and started dropping targets.

“Got the messages ready Lt?” Asked a major in Zeus’s effects section.

“Yes sir, we have messages ready to go in French and local languages.”

“Ok, make it happen.”

“Copy that sir.”

‘Put an always on live mic in every house’ they said. He chuckled to himself as he hit the send button and looked up to watch the results. ‘What could go wrong’ they said.

All across Kinshasa, dots lit up in homes and cafes. They started talking to surprised occupants in French and local dialects.

[In French] “Warning! Military action is underway by United States military personnel in Kinshasa. Stay indoors. Do not engage them or get in their way. Warning!...” People looked at the dots in fear. They started texting friends to get off the streets.

The ROARs made short work of the gangs surrounding the Embassy. Most fled, those who stood and fought, died. Two of the ROARs took hits from small arms fire, which didn’t even scratch the meta-materials of the mechs, but would have resulted in serious casualties if they had been human.

Captain Dix left teams of two ROARs on the back and front corners of the embassy to protect the perimeter, and he, his ADC, and remaining medical sergeant entered the front gate, hastily opened by two Marines in TALOS-V gear. Each perimeter team had their own swarms of mini-drones roaming out and keeping watch.

Waiting for Captain Dix in the compound on the front driveway of the embassy was the Regional Security Officer and his number two, both clad in old-style body armor and ballistic helmets, and pairs of last generation NVGs on their heads. Captain Dix clanked up to them and reported through the voice speakers.

“I’m Skinny 1, Captain Dix. You must be the RSO.” (Captain Dix had the RSO’s personnel profile picture up on his screen for comparison purposes.) He held out his arm to shake hands. The RSO, who had never seen a ROAR before, was staring at him a little slack jawed. “Don’t worry sir, the computer recognizes I’m trying to shake hands so limits the amount of force I can exert.”

With some hesitation, the RSO held out his hand and they shook. “I’m Jose Montoya, RSO. This is my 2^nd in command, Steve Green. Captain Henderson, MSG detachment commander, is up on the roof directing the snipers. Welcome to Kinshasa.” He paused and looked the ROAR up and down. “No offense, but what the fuck are you?”

“We’re remote operated combat mechs. I’m sitting in Ft. Bragg right now. My team are Special Forces operators trained to use mechanical combat robots.”

“That’s seriously badass.” Captain Dix nodded his ‘head’ in agreement. “How did you get here so fast, we were told it would be another eight hours until we got help – then you popped up on our net, seemingly overhead.”

“That’s classified actually, can’t go there. But the good news is we’ll stay until the FAST team gets here with the quads and then we can all pack up and go home.” He looked at the wall of the Embassy, pock marked with bullet holes. “Looks like you had a heck of a fight. Can you confirm the Ambassador is OK?”

“Yes, he is sealed in the safe room with some of the marines and the rest of the staff and dependents.” He showed Captain Dix a bio-sensor reading on his arm tablet. Captain Dix scanned it and confirmed it belonged to the Ambassador. “The rest of us are out here on the perimeter or on the roof. We have three wounded and no dead.”

“Very good. My medic here can assist in treating the wounded.” The RSO looked in skepticism at the hulking robot to his right. “My ADC will stay with you. I’m going to introduce myself to the Ambassador to put eyes on. Please let them know I’m headed inside. I’ll be back.”

The hulking robot to the left made a noise that sounded suspiciously like a smothered laugh. The RSO stared at Captain Dix’s back as the massive humanoid clanked to the front door of the embassy with a smoothness in the walk that almost made it look natural. The RSO leaned over to his number two and said sotto voce.

“He didn’t just go there, did he?”

“He did boss. He totally did.” Said Steve with a grin. The robot to the left let out another smothered laugh and quickly turned away when the RSO shot him a dirty look. Harry looked at the medic, standing there impassively. “Let’s go.”

#

With the embassy secured the rest of the mission was a babysitting gig. Captain Dix put his two snipers on the roof of the embassy, and they took care of the few probes which didn’t heed warnings from Zeus. Other than the occasional boom of a .338, the entire sector quieted.

The immediate threat at bay, Zeus sought to manage the crowds still roaming the city and see what they could do to stem the wider violence. It was a stretch of their mission orders, but Colonel Dos Santos argued it up the chain that keeping the violence in the city subdued was in direct support of the NEO. After considerable debate within JSOC, AFRICOM, and the NSC, she was given approval to continue full scale effects operations across the entire city.

Her compromise total was now over 500 million devices and she used them to play the city like a conductor directs an orchestra.

The team’s most effective tool was social crowd tracking. They could tell where crowds were based on cell pings and security cameras. Feeds from thousands of compromised cameras scanned the crowds and the super computers with their sophisticated algorithms measured their hostility by things like male-to-female ratios, facial recognition of emotions, and ratios of weapons to people. That was merged with real-time monitoring of social media and text messaging, which scored each transaction on a positive-to-negative scale.

Together, the team could visualize where crowds were benign or potentially violent. The computers mapped social threads and rated their impact and stickiness. Good threads were amplified. Negative threads were choked off. Zeus DDOSed the opposing influence campaigns they saw flowing across the networks.

Zeus patiently worked to separate rival gangs, clearly identifiable by violence fault lines on geospatial overlays. On a few occasions, they created cellular dead zones to separate factions, sometimes with the help of the F-35s conducting HEL kinetic strikes to fry cell sites. In addition, Zeus personnel contacted leaders of over two dozen rival gangs, and offered them and their men small payments via MPesa if they would stand down. Those who agreed received the money on their phones within minutes.

Word spread through the city somehow the Americans knew everything that was going on. More and more people felt it was safer to head indoors, where they were left alone, except for their dots which kept telling them everything was going to be OK.

By morning the city was relatively calm. Colonel Dos Santos and her team had successfully shut down a burgeoning genocide within six hours, and never fired a shot. (Two months later she received a DSC for her efforts in a classified ceremony, and multiple members of her team also received commendations.)

#

Not long after dawn, the quad rotors landed a few blocks away on the main traffic circle, designated as the evac LZ. The RSO and marines ferried the Ambassador, staff, and dependents in light armored vehicles the few blocks to the quads for evac. It took four trips. The entire time, the ROARs stood sentry along the route. With dawn the locals were drawn outside by curiosity. Despite repeated warnings, the crowds inched closer. Weapons weren’t visible, but Captain Dix was getting nervous they could be swamped by numbers alone.

“Zeus, this is Skinny 1. Any suggestions?”

“Well Captain, the crowds are all trending friendly, I don’t see indications of hostile intent. How about we try something different as a goodwill gesture?”

“What do you have in mind Colonel?” She told him and LTC Moore about the idea one of her one PFCs had suggested from the cultural team.

“Heh. That might work.” Responded Captain Dix with a smile on his face. “Colonel Moore, what do you think?”

LTC Moore sat there in the skybox with a cup of coffee and thought about it for a moment. He shrugged to nobody in particular.

“Why not, the Gods of Olympus haven’t been wrong so far.”

“Right then Captain. How about a little music until your team departs?” Captain Dix warned his team what was coming.

On people’s VR screens throughout the crowds, a vid appeared and music started blaring. The same music erupted from the speakers on the ROARs. The crowds, shocked at first, quickly realized what was going on. Smiles appeared and some people started dancing. A few of the ROARs waved to the crowds or gave thumbs up.

Zeus was piping videos from the PFC’s Nigerian Music Video app on his Roku.

As TF Skinny fell back to the last aircraft and they climbed up the quad’s ramp, hundreds of recorders captured video of the top secret American robots before a storm of dust blown up by the rotor blades caused people to turn away to shield themselves. Later, some of the people who watched the vids could swore they heard music in the background, and argued the second to last robot up the ramp was moving in a way that looked suspiciously like the Macarena.

JSOC had no comment.