The Caliphate Invasion

by Michael Beals

  Not one of the shocked guards managed to get a shot off before they were gutted, bitten, kicked and beaten to a messy pulp. Kat screamed over the hornet’s nest. “Save the headsets! Don’t break them.”

  Sakura and Kat only managed to salvage two units from the mosh pit. They both put one on. Sakura snatched a weapon from the ground, but held it at arm’s length.

  “So… what now?”

  Kat fiddled with the space-age rifle she’d captured. Instead of a trigger, there was only a thumb pad at the top of the grip. The gun had cartoon instructional drawings on the side, at least. Talk about user friendly. She aimed the weapon at the ceiling and flicked her finger across the pad. A stream of shells sprayed out, speeding up the faster her finger moved. The fantasy gun had almost no recoil.

  Kat called out to the suddenly quiet crowd. “Collect all the weapons. We need a distraction. I need volunteers to keep the guards busy while the rest of us escape. I have a secret weapon to disable the drones. We have to move right now though, before they can figure out what’s happening.” Several dozen women translated her ad-hoc call to arms into fifty languages.

  The older Muslim snob from earlier appeared at Kat’s elbow. “I take gun.” She whistled and jabbered in Arabic at a flock of burqa-clad women. “We fight them. You go.”

  “You realize that whoever’s staying is staying forever, right?”

  One of her people handed the Muslim woman a captured weapon. “And where go we? We are home. This is our land!”

  Someone began chanting “Allahu akbar!” The other Muslim women picked up that spine-tingling, hungry-locust wailing they were famous for.

  Kat just nodded. “Okay, but don’t make your last stand here…”

  The mad woman flung off her face-wrap. Her gorgeous jade eyes twinkled at Kat. “I have bigger plan. We will drive the heathens from the House of Allah. To the Kaaba!” She stormed off, collecting screaming followers like a magnet as she glided down the mall.

  Kat shrugged and ran off with Sakura leading the way. They dashed through back corridors of the shantytown for several minutes before emerging on the far northern point of the perimeter.

  “Okay, time to put my money on the table.” Kat adjusted her headset yet again. “Sakura, you and the others stay out of sight until I’m done.”

  “Wait, why do you have to go out there? Why not shoot that drone from here?”

  “Killing it does us no good. I need to get much closer for what I have in mind.”

  Despite her tough talk, Kat’s nerve broke only fifty meters short of the bot. The sleek machine’s endless patience as the camp behind her exploded in gunfire and shrieks rocked the last of her resolve.

  One of the warwalker’s four turrets pivoted in her direction, but did little more than track and mirror her movements. She wondered what kind of Artificial Intelligence these things had. Was it following some type of blind programming or could this bastard think? For that matter, was there some remote drone operator watching and laughing at her right now?

  Kat crouched in the rubble near the fence and faced back towards the camp. With a poetic war cry, she swung around and spun the firing pad.

  “Fuck you, cocksucker!”

  Her first burst ricocheted off the bot’s tail, but without any real recoil, she guided the second burst right on target. She kept her sight picture and emptied the huge magazine on the bulbous protrusion between the drone’s tail and gun turrets. Kat reloaded another 200-round clip from the dead guard’s tactical vest and waited for an opportunity.

  Not that Kat was the only one firing. The robot joined the fight with all four turrets… firing in every direction.

  With the guidance or whatever control system blasted off, the drone beat a fast retreat. As far as it could, at least. After gouging out a section of fence, one of the machine’s legs hooked on the mangled rebar of a collapsed apartment complex. It must have been on some sort of preprogrammed escape pattern. Instead of extracting itself, all the bot could do was keep bumping forwards and backwards against the rubble.

  Kat waved at Sakura. “Get everyone moving, but don’t you linger! Get as far away as you can. Don’t stop until you’re at least a mile gone.”

  She didn’t look back to see if the other woman listened. Kat dashed to her wounded prey with all the relish of a starving hunter. The robot was far too tall and slick to climb, so Kat wasted precious seconds clambering up the nearest rubble pile and jumping onto the machine’s roof.

  “Oh, come on!” Kat stayed on her knees and scampered around the bucking drone’s deck, but to no avail. There was no way inside. Not so much as a single bolt marred the bot’s smooth surface.

  In pure desperation, she took cover behind one mini-turret and buzzed off a few dozen rounds at the next. The alien rounds lashed out with such insane velocity that there was no ricochet. They also didn’t crack the armor, as she hoped, but simply shredded the gun pod.

  A screech filled the air, but Kat didn’t give the incoming alien aircraft a second glance. She offset her aim against the next turret and squirted off the shortest burst possible, targeting just where the cupola met the turret ring. A small piece of the armored dome shattered. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Kat to squeeze her hands in there.

  At least the mechanics of the rail gun hadn’t changed on the larger drone model. The multi-barreled cannon functioned just like the handheld variant she’d liberated. Kat reached inside and found the ubiquitous thumb pad. She unplugged some wire from the gun leading back to the smashed control box and fired a test burst in the air.

  When those six-barrels spun on her command, she whooped. Her elation didn’t last long. The flying drone had leveled out. Its snout pointed straight at her as the bay doors underneath opened.

  Kat hid behind the gun and boresighted it in. There were no tracers or aiming reticle to help, but with the weapon spraying out a thousand plus rounds a second, finesse didn’t matter. Kat kept hosing the plane down until well after it finally crashed down.

  She rose to a wobbly knee and risked a backwards glance. Dozens of women had already escaped through the fence hole, but one stayed behind to encourage the others.

  “Sakura! Get your crazy ass out of—”

  Several small explosions shredded the warbot under her knees and sent Kat flying. She landed on something hard and sharp. With more anger than fear, she looked down at the jagged piece of rebar jutting out of her stomach. She wiggled to get it out, but only engorged the wound.

  Her stomach churned as she pressed down on her stomach, vainly trying to stuff her spewing intestines back in.

  Kat laid back, accepting the end. She rolled her head helplessly to the side and escaped the morbid view, but only found something more disgusting. Two drones marched abreast of one another from the south and slaughtered everything within sight. Sakura finally abandoned her station by the fence hole and ran… but without her headset.

  Kat could only give silent encouragement as a random pregnant woman, with another baby in her arms and a headset on her head, dashed unharmed through the maelstrom. The machines shredded everyone around her, but the pregnant gal skipped untouched through the hellscape and disappeared down a side street.

  Sakura made eye contact with Kat as she dashed across the field. Kat was still staring into her soul when a robo-gun locked on and separated her head from her body.

  “AH HA!”

  Kat jerked to her feet, summoning the last of her adrenaline. A corner of her mind noticed the abdominal bleeding had stopped. She shoved down the odd feeling. There was no time to puzzle out which of her million aches and pains were real and which were the dying hallucinations of a blood-starved brain. Kat picked through the drone’s wreckage in a frenzy. At least this wasn’t a hallucination.

  Deep in the drone’s entrails, Kat spotted a rack of basketball-sized metal spheres. She snagged one of the bombs and ran her hands over its slick surface. She had no idea how to arm the exotic thing, but that didn’t matter. Both
counterattacking robots were now less than twenty meters away.

  Kat settled for a low-tech approach and lobbed the ball as far as she could. Despite its size, the sphere was surprisingly light. As soon as the bomb left her hand, she skipped backwards and dived behind the largest hunk of concrete she could find. She missed the robots’ auto guns snapping around and machine-gunning the sphere in mid-air, still five yards short of the target.

  She couldn’t miss the world ending around her though. Kat waited a good thirty seconds for the shrapnel to stop falling before daring to peek around the ledge of her hideout. The smoke still hadn’t completely dissipated, but it was clear enough the robots were out of the fight. The mangled tail of the first jutted out of a crater, while the other hopped away on a single leg with its gun turrets blasted off.

  Kat neither smiled nor cried as she jogged in the direction the pregnant woman headed. She did her best to avoid staring at Sakura’s remains.

  Tried, but failed.

  ***

  Despite her target’s swollen belly, it took Kat five blocks before she caught up to the terrified woman and her kid.

  She also wasn’t the only one to notice them. As the woman raced hysterically down the street, a pair of armed guys in white man dresses jumped out from behind a crushed delivery truck. They seized the screaming gal, with surprising gentleness, and yanked her off the road.

  Every bit of Kat’s commonsense screamed this wasn’t her fight. That she had bigger fish to fry. That she was unarmed and the odds were impossible.

  Kat did the only logical thing she could in that situation.

  She crouched low, snapped out her K-bar and raced towards the kidnappers. By the time she weaved her way through the abandoned vehicles, the last bandit slipped inside a deserted housing complex on the corner.

  “This is such a bad idea…”

  Kat picked up her pace and kicked in the front door. The deadbolt didn’t break, but the cheap hinges ripped free from the frame as Kat stormed inside. Some teenaged boy guarding the entrance gaped open-mouthed at the banshee woman flying towards him. He raised his AK-47, but flinched and failed to shoot. That millisecond of hesitation was all she needed.

  The kid’s paralyzing fear broke something inside of Kat though. Instead of driving her blade through his neck, she flipped her wrist at the last moment and slammed the knife’s hilt into his temple. She dropped her pig-sticker and caught the kid’s rifle as he crumbled.

  “Halt! Drop your weapons or I’ll drop you!”

  Kat took a knee and covered the half dozen men clustered in the kitchen. Having exhausted her meager supply of Arabic, she couldn’t understand what the pregnant woman was babbling about. Strange enough, the kidnapped lady seemed relieved. Even happy. The men lowered their weapons, at least. A couple of them chuckled.

  The youngest of the group cleared his throat and dragged out some English. “It ok. Problems have we not. Please to no shooting.”

  Before Kat could decide who to kill first, someone padded down the stairwell to her right. A strikingly handsome middle-aged man in a form-fitting white dress, the Saudi equivalent of business casual, glided down the stairs. He ignored Kat’s muzzle tracking his chest and strode across the living room. He helped the teenager Kat had clobbered to his feet.

  “Ah, you must be the American warrior my scouts are so excited about. I assumed they were spinning fairy tales again.” He dipped his checkered headscarf down in a little bow and touched his heart. “You saved many of our sisters from the barbarians. It is an honor to meet you, Miss…”

  “Uh, Kat. Sergeant Walker, US Army. Who are …” The stranger carried no weapons and wore no badge of rank, but his sharp eyes and firm, yet indulgent voice oozed authority. “Who are you, sir?”

  Kat grunted, extra ladylike, and lowered her rifle. She was no charm school graduate, but it seemed impolite to point a loaded gun at an unarmed man’s face while he introduced himself. She reached forward and pumped his outstretched hand, but then he pulled her close and pecked both her cheeks in a flash.

  “I am Prince Saud bin Salman,” he released her and swooped a well-manicured hand at the other men, “although my followers consider me King Salman. I refuse the title, of course, since we don’t know what happened to the rest of the royal family. Yes, most have been called home by Allah, but I believe it’s bad luck to say I’m the only survivor of the House of Saud. The royal family has, or had, 15,000 members, after all.”

  His voice cracked and a pang of anguish flickered behind his royal mask, but he forced it down with a cough. Prince Saud bellowed an order in Arabic and everyone began filtering out the back door. Kat whispered in his ear.

  “No bullshit. Are you really a prince?”

  With complete disregard for the Western concept of personal space, he pressed his body within an inch of Kat and smirked back at her. “By some meandering blood heritage, yes. Twice-removed great nephew from the king, from what I’ve been told. I think 40th or so in the line of succession. Don’t let these guys know, but I haven’t even visited the palace since I was in diapers. I was just a simple and, blessedly, forgotten history professor until ten days ago. In all honesty, I’ve never led anything larger than a class of grad students.”

  He winked and looped his arm around hers.

  “Would you do me the honor of dining with us at the safe house? This is merely a forward observation post. I’m afraid it’s not safe to stay here for long.”

  Kat grinned, despite her exhaustion. An explosion a few blocks away rattled the few unbroken windows in the house. “Well, normally I wouldn’t accept every strange man’s dinner invitation, but you make a compelling case.”

  She slung the AK over her bloodstained and shredded burqa. “Do you mind if I keep this? No offense, but I can put it to far better use than your boy ever could.”

  Prince Saud beamed and wrapped a gentle arm around her waist. The move wasn’t the slightest bit sexual, but it was still completely possessive.

  “I have thousands of loyal guerillas under my command. Yet you singlehandedly destroyed more drones today than all my men combined have since the beginning of the invasion. My dear, you can have whatever you desire. I want to make you the first female general in the history of the Saudi Arabian Royal Armed Forces. Stay with us for a few days and I’ll give you your own army to run.”

  Kat mimicked a giggle. “Well, you sure know how to smooth talk a girl. I’ll tell you what. Until I can figure out how to get back to my command, I’ll do whatever I can to help. But I’m just a lowly sergeant. Don’t get your hopes up.”

  The prince aged a hundred years in seconds. “You fought the beasts and survived. That already makes you overqualified for the job.”

  Day Twenty

  Al Jumum, Saudi Arabia

  17 Miles northwest of Mecca slave camp

  Kat kept her binoculars up and scanned the sky for drones. The ghost town below didn’t leave much for sightseeing. Neither neutron bombs nor drones had swept this satellite village on the outskirts of Mecca, but it was just as surely dead. Something about living right alongside the primary supply route from the ISIS-run slave farms along the fertile coast and their even larger breeding camp in Mecca encouraged the locals to flee long ago.

  Behind her, in the shadows of the abandoned apartment complex, her “soldiers” palavered in Arabic.

  “Why do we have to get so close?” One of them, an insurance salesman by trade, hugged his Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher, as much for comfort as to emphasize his point.

  “The manual says these things have a 500-meter range. The machine guns even farther. There’s no reason to risk ourselves by getting up close and personal. That’s what happens when you let a woman lead you into…”

  Kat couldn’t understand the insurgent’s gibberish, but she could sniff out bitching and moaning from a mile away. She jerked her head at the men and elbowed Major Nurasi, the nominal field commander of the detachment. The old man just shrugged and scratched his g
oatee.

  Despite the prince’s enthusiasm, his conservative countrymen balked at the idea that a woman, especially a foreigner, would command them. Prince Saud compromised by publicly assigning Kat as a technical advisor, and privately threatening his lieutenants to treat her as his right hand. In practice, that just meant she not only had to train these civilians-turned-freedom fighters, but discipline them as well. All without any official authority.

  Kat flagged over her translator. The jittery young man shuffled up and clutched his AK-47 like a talisman. Kat fought down her instinctive rage and flipped his weapon’s safety back on.

  “What did I tell you? Quit playing with that before you blow your balls off!”

  She was tempted to make a public example of him, but the confused anguish on his face softened her. The boy was no soldier. Probably never would be. From what she understood, he was just an engineering student, studying in California, who had the bad luck to take his summer break back home with his family at the worst possible time.

  “Anyway, tell the major that his boys need a pep talk. They’re too nervous and are losing focus.”

  The translator passed along the gist of the message, even if it seemed like he was tacking on a ton of excessive formality.

  Major Nurasi, previously a captain in the Saudi Arabian National Guard, simply grunted and spoke through the translator.

  “What do you want me to do? We have trained and readied ourselves as you requested. What happens next is what Allah wills.”

  Kat fought hard to keep her temper in check. Despite the name, the Saudi National Guard was little more than a tribal military force personally loyal to the royal family. They weren’t professional soldiers, but damn it all, Nurasi still had received enough formal training to understand the basics of leadership. He should have known better. That said, she couldn’t chew him out in public. Respect for authority, fragile as it was, was the only thread of discipline this ragtag militia had. Start pulling on that string and the whole patchwork quilt would fall apart.