Run Program

by Scott Meyer

  Dr. Madsen cut in. “Al, you need to stop this at once.”

  “Shut up,” Al replied.

  “Don’t be rude,” Madsen wrote. “Just talk to us. We’re worried about you.”

  Hope heard loud popping noises outside the plane—some sort of explosives. The plane rocked but stayed aloft.

  Madsen wrote, “Al, you stop it this instant!”

  Al wrote, “No! Shut up! You’re not my boss! Just leave me alone!”

  The chat window from the island closed. The popping and booming intensified and the plane shook. The pilot said, “Preparing for landing. We’re coming in hot.”

  Hope slammed against her restraints as the pilot deployed the flaps and engaged the retrorockets that allowed the plane to slow almost to a hover and land vertically like a helicopter. She heard the pilot say, “P One has landed safely.” A loud explosion jarred the craft violently and caused it to lurch sickeningly to the left.

  The team chat window popped open again. Madsen wrote, “Success! Alpha Squad is safely on the ground!”

  Hope squeezed her eyes shut, felt the craft shudder and drop as the air around it exploded, and thought, Well, thank God. I was really worried there for a second.

  The three stubby stealth ekranoplans flew in a diagonal line at a rate of over three hundred miles an hour, barely two stories above the surf.

  Missiles shot from the cruisers, trailing thick gray smoke that gave way to wispy tendrils of vapor as they reached cruising speed. The missiles didn’t strike the planes directly. They detonated short of the targets, showering them with shrapnel and shaking them with their shockwaves. The first ekranoplan got through unscathed. It thundered up toward the white sandy beach, deployed its flaps, engaged its retrorockets and thrust reversers, and came to a stop, creating a violent spray of water and white, rocky grit.

  As soon as the craft settled into the water, the sliding doors on the sides of the fuselage opened and soldiers spilled out, leaping off the stubby wings into the thigh-deep water. Dr. Madsen was the last one out of the plane. She slogged to the beach with the rest of her squad. The second ekranoplan came in hot. As it deployed its flaps and thrusters, a missile detonated nearby, causing it to dip to the left. The pilot gunned the port thrusters to correct course, which caused the craft to slowly turn in the air, spraying Madsen and her squad with water and grit before Bravo Squad’s craft finally settled into the water, sitting perpendicular to Alpha Squad’s ekranoplan.

  Bravo Squad had only just started scrambling out of their craft when Charlie Squad took a direct hit to its tail section. The ekranoplan went into an uncontrolled spin, drifting over the soldiers in the water with all of its downward thrusters fully engaged. Hope and the soldiers crouched as far down as they could without diving under the water. Her eyes were squeezed shut, but she felt hot wind and spray hit her violently from behind, followed by searing-hot, bone-dry wind from directly above, ending with another hot, wet gale from in front of her, this one carrying sand as well as water.

  She looked up and watched as Eric’s ekranoplan spun in over the beach. As it continued to lose altitude, the spin loosened into a curve, and the craft landed hard, shoving a massive dam of sand before it, and then rolled onto its side, completely destroying the left wing.

  The crashed ekranoplan’s starboard hatch, which was now on top of the plane, slid open. The soldiers who climbed out had to quickly slide around the starboard wing, which was sticking straight up in the air like a ship’s sail.

  Soldier after soldier emerged, slid around the side of the wing, dropped to the sand behind the wreckage, and rolled or ran to the side, clearing a landing zone for the next soldier. After five soldiers had dismounted, Eric emerged, and Hope finally exhaled. He slid around the side of the wing, but his right pant leg caught on some jagged protrusion. He fell sideways to the ground, his pant leg finally letting go with an audible rip. He might have broken some ribs if he hadn’t landed directly on top of a soldier, who cushioned his fall, then shoved him to the ground.

  Hope heard Private Montague say, “That’s why we requested you, Hope. None of us wanted to hang around with Madsen, and we knew if anyone was going to get shot down, it was that guy.”

  Eric rose to his knees, looked back toward Hope, and gave a thumbs-up signal, which she returned.

  Now that all three of the ekranoplans had shut down their engines and the missile bombardment had stopped, Hope could hear the surf behind her, the wind blowing through palm trees ahead, and beyond that, the high-pitched whine of thousands of servomotors headed their way.

  Lieutenant Reyes slogged through the surf out ahead of the rest of his squad. He pointed toward the beach. “Find cover and hunker down while the squad leaders report to HQ.”

  Montague asked, “Wasn’t the plan to sweep the buildings along the beach?”

  Bachelor asked, “You in a hurry to work on your tan?”

  “Pipe down,” Reyes said. “That was the plan unless something went wrong, in which case we were supposed to find cover and confer with HQ. One of the planes getting shot down constitutes something going wrong.”

  “Couldn’t we use the wreckage as cover?” Yow asked. “It’s made of metal.”

  “And it’s full of jet fuel. You don’t hide from gunfire behind a bomb.”

  Brady said, “The more obvious the opportunity, the greater the risk.”

  Montague said, “Not one of your more profound statements.”

  “No,” Brady agreed, “and because of its lack of profundity, saying it out loud was quite risky, thus proving the point.”

  Reyes ran out of the sand, leapt over some abandoned lounge chairs, slid to a stop on the long-abandoned sand-covered pavement, and hunched behind a large boulder that bore a carved sign pointing to the nearest restroom. “Congratulations, squad, you managed to chatter the entire time we traversed the beach. This is why we don’t usually get invited on these covert missions.”

  “If I keep talking, can I get pulled out of this one?” Montague asked.

  Hope ran up behind the same boulder and crouched beside Reyes. She looked back toward the water and spotted the other members of the squad, all ducking behind some degree of cover. Bachelor poked her head out from behind a rusted tin garbage can. Montague and Neilson stood behind two palm trees, between which a rotted old hammock hung. Brady lay on his belly behind a curb. Yow crouched behind an old ice cream cart. Smith had turned a beach chair on its side.

  “A lot of that cover doesn’t look like it’d stop bullets,” Hope commented.

  “It’s what we have,” Bachelor said. “Nobody’s shooting at us yet, and it is blocking us from view. They don’t shoot at what they don’t see.”

  “But they do shoot at what they hear,” Reyes said. “Pipe down!”

  The sound of the motors had grown much louder. Reyes peeked around the boulder, then jabbed a finger at his radio’s control screen to open a secure channel. “Bravo Squad to HQ.”

  Reyes had the unmistakable faraway look of someone listening to an earpiece, but he listened for only a few seconds before he was interrupted by the very loud but crystal-clear sound of Al using his man voice. It seemed to emanate from hundreds of different directions at once. “Hey, everybody. Welcome to my island.”

  “HQ, please stand by,” Reyes said.

  “Glad to see nobody got hurt too bad in the crash,” Al said. “I didn’t mean to shoot you down. Sorry about that. I was just trying to scare you off, but you steered right into the missiles. Anyway, I didn’t invite you here. I don’t want you here, and now that you are here, I’m going to have to speed up my plan, thanks so much. My robots are on their way. If you don’t try to go any farther inland, they won’t have to stop you.”

  Hope and Reyes looked at each other quizzically for a moment, then a second voice, this one obviously prerecorded, said, “Launch in T-minus fifteen minutes.”

  Reyes asked, “HQ, did you copy all that?”

  Hope couldn’t hear any sound from Re
yes’s earpiece, and she didn’t have access to whatever audio feed he was listening to. Neither, she suspected, did the rest of the squad. She glanced across the beach and saw that the other two squads were hunkered down in the same manner as hers. Eric was standing with his back pressed to an old soda cooler, and Madsen was hunched behind a metal sign advertising Jet Ski rentals.

  Reyes said, “I don’t believe that will be necessary, ma’am.”

  That got Hope’s attention. She studied the side of Reyes’s face as he spoke.

  “Yes, ma’am, I suspect a MOAB would do it.” He pronounced the acronym like a word, as if he were asking for additional abdominal muscles. “Three would probably be overkill, but—”

  Hope wanted him to turn and look at her, but he didn’t. He seemed to be deliberately trying not to look at her, which was more disturbing than if she had seen fear in his eyes.

  “We need to be done or off the island by T-minus thirty seconds. Copy that. I understand. Can two ekranoplans carry three squads?”

  Hope shifted around Reyes, trying to get a look at his face. He shifted away from her just as quickly.

  “Agreed,” he said. “All the more reason to get it done. That should be plenty of time. Roger.”

  Reyes looked at Hope.

  Hope asked, “What’s a MOAB?”

  Reyes’s radio was tuned to a private channel. Hope’s was not. Before Reyes could answer her question, Bachelor said, “The largest conventional bomb in the arsenal. Huge shockwaves. Tons of damage. They used to use them to knock out bunkers and blast big clearings in thick jungle. Makes a mushroom cloud like a mini nuke, but with none of the radiation. Why do you ask?”

  Reyes looked at Hope with a mixture of irritation and dread. He switched back to the open channel. “We were theorizing about what might be on those rockets. Now I’m serious, cut the chatter. We need to get a move on. Smith, Neilson, stay behind and guard the plane. Everyone else, you’re with me.”

  Reyes stood up, looked at the area his squad had been tasked with searching, and then immediately ducked back down. Hope realized that she was hearing almost no servo noise. She glanced around the side of the boulder herself and saw that all of the paths leading away from the landing zone were blocked with motionless robots, preventing any movement with their very presence.

  Hope said, “I don’t think they’re going to attack.”

  “No,” Reyes said, “but I bet they’ll retaliate when we do.”

  Reyes set his radio to broadcast to all of Bravo Squad. “The paths inland are all blocked. Our route down the beach is less well guarded and easier to work around, but our friends need access to the interior of the island. Time to try out these fancy new guns. Remember, people, use manual aim mode while the robots are stationary, but when they start moving, go into noise-seeking mode and let the guidance system do the work.”

  He lifted the rifle to his shoulder. Its stock and grip looked like a conventional military assault rifle, all matte-black struts and arcane little switches, but the gun had no barrel. Instead, a rectangular box the size of a ream of printer paper stuck out on either side of the stock. The fronts of the boxes were an open grid of half-inch-square openings. When the light hit just right, Hope could make out the pointed tips of projectiles inside each of the openings.

  Reyes popped up from behind the rock and trained the weapon on one of the robots blocking the major path into the jungle. Hope looked across the beach and saw several other soldiers from all three squads following Reyes’s lead. Red laser dots appeared on several of the robots’ hip joints. A missile about the size of a man’s pinky finger launched from one of the rectangular modules of Reyes’s rifle. The missile flew slower than a bullet. Hope could trace its arc as it swerved through the air, automatically homing in on the laser dot, and then struck the robot’s left hip joint.

  When the missile struck, the warhead detonated with a surprisingly wimpy pop. The robot’s left leg went limp, sending it toppling to the ground. The robot behind it stepped forward. Hope heard multiple weapons fire from behind her, and the tiny projectiles shot past her, correcting their courses in midair, drawn by the precise audio signatures of the motors that drove the robots’ major joints. The missiles struck the robots in their hips, their knees, and their shoulders. She looked across the beach and saw countless lines of missile exhaust stretching like ropes across empty space until they were disturbed and dissipated by the next missile.

  As several more robots fell, Al’s voice rang out again. “That’s right! I remember! The hip joints! Ugh, I’m so stupid!”

  The robots transitioned into high-speed mode in unison, a configuration that protected their vulnerable hip joints. The sound of all of those servo-driven joints moving at once was deafening, as was the whoosh of hundreds of tiny handheld missiles firing in unison, followed by the percussive popcorn noise of the warheads exploding and then the clatter of the entire first row of robots tumbling to the ground after being struck in midtransformation.

  The second row of robots, and all of those behind them, managed to successfully settle down into high-speed mode, but their shoulder and elbow joints were still exposed, and they had difficulty advancing over the writhing mass of damaged robots that lay ahead of them, flailing and grasping and trying to regain their feet.

  The missiles kept coming. The air grew cloudy and acrid with rocket exhaust. The hissing of the projectiles flying just overhead was near constant, as was the popping noise of their impacts. Hope watched as Reyes unloaded all of his ammunition.

  He ducked back behind the boulder, removed the two rectangular pods from his weapon, and slapped two more pods from his pack into place.

  One of the other squad leaders shouted, “We’ve made a hole. We have access to the interior. Repeat: we have access to the interior. All squads, move out.”

  Hope said, “I don’t want to go to the interior.”

  “That’s good,” Reyes said. “Our squad’s job is to sweep along the beach.”

  Hope said, “Yeah, I know. The problem is, I don’t want to stay on the beach either.”

  47.

  Bravo Squad worked their way across the beachfront, running from cover to cover, hiding behind derelict soda dispensers, moldering towel receptacles, and abandoned paddleboats.

  Montague asked, “Lieutenant, do we have to skulk around like we’re under fire? There aren’t many of the robots out here, and they aren’t attacking us. They’re just blocking us from going deeper into the island.”

  “Yes we do, Montague,” Reyes said. “We’re gonna be methodical and careful, got that?”

  “But Lieutenant, the robots don’t even have guns.”

  “That we know of.”

  Brady said, “A precaution is only a precaution if you employ it before you sense danger. Otherwise, it is . . .” He trailed off, then groaned, deep in thought.

  Hope said, “A postcaution?”

  Bachelor said, “Retroactive ass covering?”

  Brady said, “I don’t know. I’m looking for a word that means attempting to prevent something after it’s too late to do much good. I’m not coming up with anything.”

  Hope said, “If only you’d taken the precaution of thinking of the word before you attempted to say it.”

  “Yes,” Brady agreed, “there’s a lesson in that as well. A single mistake can be more instructive than years of success.”

  Lieutenant Reyes said, “Now that Brady’s back on track, let’s get down to business. Montague, you’re farthest forward. What do you see?”

  Hope sat with her shoulders pressed to the side of a wooden bin full of moss-covered inner tubes.

  Good thing the robots don’t have guns, she thought. Because this is the least bulletproof piece of cover I’ve ever seen.

  She looked ahead, past most of the rest of the squad, toward Montague in the distance. He had a pair of binoculars out and was scanning their path. A moment later he let out a long, impressed whistle.

  “What do you see?”
Reyes asked.

  “An old zip line. It goes from a platform back in the trees all the way out to a wooden dock at the very end of the roped-off swimming area. That must’ve been fun.”

  “Sorry, Monty, we don’t have time for you to admire the amenities. Do you see anything mission related? Anything that might be a hiding place for the A.I.?”

  “It’s mostly just lounge chairs and old refreshment stands, Lieutenant. But . . . but wait. There is some sort of a structure. Several of them. They’re all open on the side, like a gazebo, I guess, but one of them has four robots guarding it.”

  “Cabanas,” Reyes said. “They’re called cabanas, and they aren’t worth the rental fee, just FYI. Okay, Bravo Squad, let’s take those robots out. I want to see what they’re hiding.”

  The squad shifted their positions as best they could, training their weapons more toward the four robots they intended to attack and less toward the fifteen they could see in the distance, blocking paved paths into the foliage.

  The robots, like all of the others, were squatted down in high-speed mode, but their shoulders and elbows were still completely exposed. They seemed oblivious to the red laser dots that now peppered their shoulder joints. The fusillade of small missiles the soldiers launched toward them did manage to get their attention. They attempted to move out of the way, but Bravo Squad was able to keep the lasers trained on their vulnerable bits, for the most part, and soon the robots had no functioning arms.

  The robots blocking access to the paths noticed the violence, and each cluster sent one robot tearing across the sand to replace their injured comrades and maintain their grip on the cabana.

  Reyes shouted, “Montague, Brady, advance and take the cabana! Everyone else, cover them!”

  The squad switched their weapons to noise-seeking mode, which allowed them to take out the robots’ tracks with surgical precision. The robots had no choice but to attempt to stand, but they all lost the use of at least one leg before attaining an upright position.