“The hiss was some of the latches disengaging.” The EI glanced around quickly. “Activating x-ray. Oh, not good.”
“What?”
“There are barriers that hold the pod in place before launch, but the one on the left isn’t in place.”
“What does that mean?” Kaiden asked and immediately looked for a way to contact the pilot.
“It means this ship needs something more detailed than TLC,” Chief grunted. “Also, it means that instead of a perfectly vertical drop… Did you ever do one of those experiments in school where you put an egg in a basket and drop it from a tall building to see if it doesn’t crack?”
“Get me the hell out of this thing,” he fumed and shook his harness.
“That would be inadvisable at this time, buddy. Hopefully, this has orientation jets or safety chutes. About that making your peace with God thing…maybe you might want to make a deal instead?”
Before he could respond, three quick clicks sounded and the force of gravity took over and sent him into a spiraled descent.
“That bastard will get one star!” he swore. His curse became a yell as he careened helplessly to the hard landing that waited below.
Chapter Eight
Kaiden kicked against the door of his pod. It took several hard blows before the door righted and slid open. He crawled out and rolled his neck and left shoulder as he peered upward to watch the zep fly away in the distance.
“Chief, put him on the list,” he muttered as he turned to retrieve his container from the pod.
“Which one, specifically?” the EI asked and his eye blinked in and out. “The hit list, jerk list…you have so many lists. Most of them are negative now that I look at them.”
“Pick one. I’ll sort the details out later.” He grunted, heaved the case out of the compartment, and tossed it on the ground.
“It’s a good thing you put the helmet on,” Chief noted. “It’s also a good thing the pod did have orientation jets, although they could have activated a little sooner. If it had landed with the door facing the ground… Well, considering that the only people around here are those you’re potentially here to kill, it would make for an awkward introduction.”
“I may not have to kill them. I could simply avoid a full-on confrontation and try to steal the droid back,” Kaiden pointed out, popped the case open, and drew Sire out to check it for damage.
“Saying you’re not going to do this violently while spit-shining a big-ass gun makes it seem like it’s not your primary concern,” the EI commented. “And about that droid—how exactly will you carry it back? We might not have the specific measurements and weight but even the lightest of Defense and Battle droids clock in at a few hundred pounds. This thing is supposed to be the latest in wartime nightmare machines. Whatever they might have done to make it more maneuverable and all, that is probably undone slightly by whatever firepower is strapped to it.”
“I won’t carry it,” Kaiden replied as he attached Debonair to the magnetic strip on his belt before he loaded his thermal and shock grenade canisters. “You’ll drive it.”
“Come again?”
“The droid’s OS wasn’t completely finished, so they used another Defense droid’s coding to fill in the gaps until it was. Since it was stolen, that didn’t happen.” He clipped the canisters to his belt. “I ain't a technician or engineer, but I know a little about the process. The makers of these things usually use a series of chips or an older model ‘brain’ from a different droid to house the OS while they test it. That way, they can work on the chassis and weapons and the programming simultaneously—it’s different divisions and all that.”
“And this relates to me how?”
“You’re the brains, smartass. I’ll cast you into droid when we find it. If this thing had whatever fancy OS they were planned to install… Well, they could probably simply have activated it when it was stolen in the first place and killed all the Halo members before they even left the room. But my thought is that if they used an older model, you’ll have an easier time getting into it before whatever defenses it might have in place try to keep you out.” He finished his statement by strapping a box of medical items to his leg.
Chief looked up to the corner for a moment in thought. “A rather well-formed plan. I’m impressed. But I see a slight issue.”
“And that would be?”
“Do you really think they didn’t install updated internal defenses as soon as they could power the thing on?” he retorted. “Sure, they might have used older devices to hold it in place until they got the shiny stuff to work. But if they already had some of the stuff in place, the firewall and security measures would be top priority.”
“Well, if the Azure Halo hackers haven’t already fucked with it, I did hope for incompetence on the creators’ part, considering how they lost it in the first place,” Kaiden confessed. “They made it capable of firing but didn’t install a proper threat detector?”
“They have droids hooked up directly into their computers during the creation process. It doesn’t make a move without proper input and is basically a glorified puppet for months or years,” Chief explained.
“So this thing might not even be functional?” he inquired. “That makes this way easier.”
“Assuming the hackers didn’t mess with it. If they gave it a power source and command chip, it’s perfectly functional.” Chief’s color became a worried blue. “And also, the technological equivalent of psychotic.”
“Faaantastic,” Kaiden muttered. He turned his attention to the terrain, which was mostly flat land with only a few scattered trees. In the distance was the junk town the Halos called home. Even from there, Kaiden could tell they hadn’t done much, at least on the outside, to dissuade anyone from thinking it might be anything but junk.
“You know, we didn’t exactly land with grace.”
“Not even thinkin’ liberally.”
He continued his scrutiny of the town and rested his rifle against his shoulder. “You would think they would want to know what the hell just crashed in their backyard.”
Chief’s eye widened and the scanner in Kaiden’s HUD activated to trace the horizon. “I can’t pick anything up—not even a Scout drone or some bastard with a pair of binoculars.”
He tapped his fingers on Sire. “Either we’re lucky, they are waiting for us, or…”
The two were silent for a moment as each considered the implications. Chief’s eye widened and looked directly into Kaiden’s. “It looks like all that planning might get tossed out, huh?”
“It’s moments like these that make me tune out when Chiyo or Jaxon try to lecture me on the importance of working on things like strategy and subterfuge.” He sighed, slid his rifle off his shoulder, and grasped it with both hands. “I’d usually say something like let’s have some fun, but that would require knowing what we’re up against.”
With that, he set off toward the town and hoped that for once, his enemies were on the smarter side. If not, that might make things more complicated than he wanted.
As Kaiden reached a point only a few hundred yards from the town, he saw a ramshackle wall and a gate on the perimeter. He walked up to the door, alert for guards or bots, but nothing approached. He moved closer but paused when he saw a terminal near the door. “Hey, Chief, could you get in there and open this thing up for me?”
“I can try, but if they have it trapped or bugged, we could potentially set off an alarm or any hidden defenses,” he warned.
“Maybe, but even if we did, I almost feel like no one would come,” Kaiden said quietly with another furtive look at their surroundings. “Besides, the wall seems to encompass the entire town. I can’t jump over it and I don’t have any scorpion wire or claws so I would have to blow my way in anyway.”
“You could use explosives instead of propositioning your way in.”
“Get in the damn box,” he ordered. Chief glowed an amused pink before he disappeared from the HUD. Kaiden tapped his fing
er lightly on Sire’s trigger and looked around once again. Aside from the wind and a few distant hums from the cicadas, he couldn’t hear anything from behind the walls. He glanced at his gun and the energy that pulsed within. The sight reassured him somewhat. He had seen the damage it could do and knew it could evaporate flesh and metal with ease. At full power, it was essentially a miniature version of a Tesla cannon and even Marlo was impressed. Despite that, he began to wonder if he neeed something even more visceral.
“I’m in. Opening the gate,” Chief announced. The doors slid apart slowly and Chief once again took his place in the HUD as Kaiden walked toward them. He stood at the entrance and surveyed the scene ahead of him. Dozens of shacks, some tents, and several buildings left from when the town was abandoned filled the area, but no bodies littered the streets. He felt more unease at this than if laser blasts had fired on him as soon he walked in.
“Are we in the right place, Chief?” he asked as his confused gaze scrutinized the vacated space once more.
“According to the mission location, yes,” the EI answered and his eye shrunk. “But from the looks of things, you would think this town was washed.”
“The whole point of sending mercs in was the hope that they wouldn’t have to do something like drop an organic incinerator bomb on the place. That’s not exactly a good look.” Kaiden took a few steps inside and listened intently for movement or any sound of life. This time, he couldn’t even hear the cicadas. “Although, to be fair, that would seem like the kind of thing the WC would do in this situation. I’m not sure it would be cheaper than sending in a TAC team, but it would provide an opportunity for them to use their weapons catalog.”
“I agree with the sentiment, but if you’re knocking someone else for taking joy in destruction, it does seem like calling the kettle black.”
“At least I have enough tact to be personable, even if it’s only for a few seconds,” Kaiden countered. He continued down the street and peered into some of the buildings and shacks. It quickly became apparent where the Halos spent all their money. While the exterior of the buildings might have been questionable, the interior of many were filled with tech and equipment. He identified an enormous variety of stolen tech, weapons, devices, armor, and parts for droids and ships. Consoles and holoscreens hummed faintly within some of the structures, but it only made the scene more unnerving as no one actually manned them.
“Kaiden—blood,” Chief stated and an arrow on his screen pointed him in the direction of what the EI had found. He walked cautiously to the entrance of one of the buildings—one a few stories tall that had probably been used as an office at one point. The glass at the entrance was shattered, chunks of linoleum were scattered along the street, and amongst it all were a few spots of dried blood.
“Oh, hell,” Chief rasped and Kaiden looked up.
“Wha— Good God!” He yelped and staggered back reflexively as he looked inside the building. He saw only three bodies but dozens of parts. The only light came from the sun outside. The interior was dark but what he could see was enough to classify this as a massacre. The bodies that were whole seemed to have fallen to either laser or gunfire, but the various appendages and mutilated bodies seemed to have been torn apart by physical strength.
“It doesn’t look like a retrieval mission anymore,” Chief cautioned unnecessarily. “Keep your gun close.”
He walked inside and activated the lights on his helmet as he approached one of the more intact bodies to examine the wounds. “These are wounds from an energy projectile—plasma or electric.” He turned the body and studied the front of the wound. “Definitely plasma. If this is the droid, its weapons are working.”
“Who or what else could it be? There aren’t any mutants in this area.”
“It could have been the previous mercs. They had to have made some headway.” Kaiden looked around again and frowned. “But unless the company hired Psychs or let loose a bunch of Neruosiks, I don’t think they would have taken the time to do this—or would have even been capable of it.”
“If its weapons are working, it would have been more efficient to simply shoot everything in sight,” Chief stated. “This is probably the most macabre math I’ve ever had to do but counting all the body parts, it ripped apart at least seven people in here. That’s over twice the amount it only shot.”
“Maybe it’s an issue of power.” Kaiden suggested. He noticed a stairway in the corner and shuffled carefully around the viscera to make his way over it. “According to the mission briefing, the robot shouldn’t have had anything more than a small cell—enough to turn it off and on. Whatever they used to give it more juice might not be enough for it to use its weapons for more than a few shots at a time.”
“That might be lucky for us,” Chief conceded. “But look at the damage and…everything. There are weapons on the ground, so they fought back. And yet it still went in for close combat. Unless it was stuck with a Fodder droid command chip, it would know to either retreat and bait them out or take one of their weapons if its own was compromised.”
“What are you trying to lead me to, Chief?” he asked as he began to ascend the stairs
“I think this droid is a literal killing machine,” the EI clarified. “And before you ask if I’m making a pun to cut the tension, no. I think they have designed this thing to be a killer. A Battle droid is a mechanical soldier—take out the target and move on. What this thing is doing is trying to make a statement.”
“Don’t fuck with me?”
“Don’t fuck with who bought me.”
Kaiden reached the top step and turned, immediately greeted by another gory scene. He ignored the violence and scrutinized the rest of the room. In the middle was a table surrounded by wires and cables. A number of them were ripped apart, several monitors and consoles were smashed, and pieces of the ceiling were cracked and lay on the ground.
“This where they must have worked on it,” he deduced as he approached it. “Chief, jump around to anything that’s working and see if you can find anything useful.”
“Acknowledged.” The EI vanished as Kaiden continued to search for signs of what the hackers were doing with the droid. His foot struck something and he looked down to see a small gray sphere. It appeared to be a power core, he decided as he picked it up and examined it, one used in most Defense droids. He glanced to the side to see a table with a couple more on it—different types for different droids. It looked like they tried to activate it but they didn’t take any care, more like frankensteining it together.
“Kaiden, I have something.”
“Details?” he questioned, tossing the core to the floor.
“There are some logs, but not much. I would guess they kept that information somewhere else. But they installed a tracker on the droid.”
“Where is it?” he demanded as Chief appeared in the HUD again. “Has it left the town?”
“No, which is odd. I rewound the time on the tracker, and it began to move forty-two hours ago. But it hasn’t moved for seventeen hours.” He added a dot to Kaiden’s map which detailed the droid’s position.
“Did it deactivate?”
Chief shook from side to side. “Also no, otherwise the tracker wouldn’t be live. It’s powered by the droid’s core so it’s simply idle. Without specific directive, I think its only command was to eliminate hostiles and with that busted threat detector, everything was hostile. My guess is that it’s killed every one of the Halos it saw and the rest ran off, so now, it’s waiting for a new target.”
“So it’ll wait there until we come to it?” Kaiden asked and hefted his rifle as he walked to the far side of the room to look out the window. “Then I’ll take care of it before it has a chance to see me.”
“I don’t think it’s using only sight. It probably has some sort of radar or detector that lets it— Kaiden, it’s found us.”
Chapter Nine
“It sure is taking its sweet time, isn’t it?” Kaiden huffed irritably. He stood at the
top of the building and looked down Sire’s scope as he waited for the approaching droid.
“While I can appreciate the gung-ho attitude, maybe you should use this time to find a more advantageous position than a rooftop,” Chief suggested. “It might not have your precise position. It might only have picked up a life sign and is now searching for it. The tracking signal shows it meandering around at the moment. We really don’t know much about this thing, do we?”
He sighed and lowered his rifle. “No, we don’t. The mission statement simply said there was a stolen droid that needed retrieval or destruction but didn’t say much else. I only know the backstory thanks to some digging by Julio.”
“It makes you wonder if you’re really supposed to destroy this thing.” The EI sounded thoughtful. “Maybe this is some sort of training or trial run for the droid disguised as a gig. That’s a thing, right?”
“Yeah, but that’s usually done by black markets or gangs who don’t have the millions of creds required to properly test things like this. Julio did a hell of a lot of leg work before he handed this off to me. He still feels a bit guilty about the whole Gin situation,” Kaiden explained. He surveyed the town again and shifted his gaze between the horizon and the map in his visor. “Besides, you would think, if that was the case, they would have had more than enough data considering this thing presumably took out most of a gang and at least a couple of merc groups.”
“Do you have any other plan besides shooting it?”
“It’s all I can do until we figure out what it’s capable of. Although, if you want to take a look around and see if there are any defenses left that we could potentially use, I’m all for it.”
“There are none in the immediate area that I can detect,” Chief informed him. “If you wanna take a quick walk around and gander, that could bring something up.”
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