by James Wilks
Once we understood what we were dealing with, things went more smoothly. Njubigbo and I moved left first and cleared the observation lounge. Nobody was there. We traveled down the hallways quickly, but took the corners slowly and carefully. We didn’t think those eight guards were all of the private security, and we were right. It wasn’t hard to see where the woman Njubigbo had hit in the leg had gone. She left a trail of blood droplets floating in the air behind her. We followed them for three more hallways before we found the rest of the guards.
The hallway we were in had a wide door on the left. The blood continued further down the hallway, but I had to check the room since the door was open. I stuck my head into the doorway for just a second to get a view, and I nearly got it blown off for my trouble.
They really knew what they were doing. They had set up more barricades in a large open room, the cafeteria by the looks of it, and our entrance was a single doorway about a meter wide. It was a great chokepoint. More problematic was the fact that they had two high-caliber sniper rifles, the kind of thing we used to shoot people through walls from a quarter mile out. They were armored and clipped in place, and in the second I had glanced around the corner, I had counted about a dozen of them.
Each one of us, and there were three more of us standing by, could have taken out three or four of them under normal circumstances, but this was a prime spot for defense. Their armor would protect them from concussion and probably fragmentation grenades. Tear gas wouldn’t do any good, and neither would vacuum, at least not quickly. Njubigbo suggested blowing out the air and letting them suffocate in an hour or so, but I pointed out that if we made them desperate, they’d likely just charge us. Better to make the battle happen on our terms.
I respected them. They maybe weren’t good people, but they were doing their jobs well in a really bad situation. They outnumbered us and had the home field advantage as well as the defensive position, but we had our powered armor. Unfortunately for them, that wasn’t the only advantage we had. It might seem unfair, but superior technology almost always wins a fight. Once I radioed, it only took Cook three minutes to bring me the Kittie.
The idea of the corner shot rifle goes back to the early 2000s, and though it never really caught on, it has its uses. The Kittie bends ninety degrees in the middle, and it has a camera and can effectively allow a soldier to shoot around corners without exposing any part of their body. The bullets weren’t high enough caliber to pierce their armor, but that wasn’t what I wanted it for. I made a few test sorties, sticking the rifle out quickly and pulling it back. Each time the doorway got peppered with small arms fire, but the Kittie could take a few hits. It wouldn’t be much good if it couldn’t stand up to enemy fire for a bit.
Once they figured out that I was just testing them, the shots died down when I stuck the barrel out. If any of them knew their weapons, they knew it wasn’t a real threat. They just hunkered down behind their barricades and got ready. I spotted my targets and lined them up the best I could. Once I started firing and they figured out what I was up to, they were going to start shooting back for real. I managed to shoot each of the four overhead lights in about four seconds flat.
After the third light went out, they really opened up on the doorway. The Kittie took several hits, and I just managed to hit that last light when two concussion grenades rolled through the door. Njubigbo, Cook, and I shielded our eyes, and the suits absorbed the blasts. They just didn’t have the tools to deal with us. It was now completely dark in the cafeteria. I didn’t know if they had brought flashlights, and I wasn’t going to wait for them to find them. I shot out the lights in the hallway we were in with my rifle, engaged thermal imaging on my visor, and ran into the room. The other two were right behind me.
I don’t know if they had thermal imaging, but it wouldn’t have mattered. The powered armor masked our heat signatures. Apart from muzzle fire, the room was completely dark. They might have been able to track us by sound since we were still using our magnetic boots, but that would have required them ceasing fire for a minute. They weren’t panicking yet, but they were on their way, and really, it was over right then. We moved to the sides and back of the room, taking the occasional hit from random fire, and then we opened up on them. They never really had a chance. They were all dead two minutes later.
We figured that was the rest of the security detail, but we moved quietly and cautiously through the rest of the base anyway. There were a half a dozen programming rooms walled with consoles, surfaces, and chairs. If they were working on asteroid engines, it was only the theoretical side; we didn’t find a single foundry or machine room past the mainframes.
Cook and Staite found the programmers hiding in one of the rooms. I wasn’t with them when they executed them, but I’d seen it before, and it wasn’t pretty. Njubigbo and I went searching for stragglers. I had noticed that trail of blood from the blonde woman that she had wounded, so I followed it. It led to a storage room at the end of a series of dusty hallways. The blood trail floating in the air stopped, but it was obvious she was in there somewhere. I flipped up my visor and scanned the room. Storage crates were magnetically fastened to the floor, and at the back of the room was a steel door set into the asteroid stone.
I crossed the room, circled around the crates, and came to the storage room door. It wasn’t even locked. I flicked to thermal imaging quickly, and I could see the figure crouched and shaking on the other side of the door. She didn’t look armed, but I couldn’t be sure. I could hear her breathing through the armor’s audio pickups. I opened the door, and there she was. I looked at her for a moment, then took out my pistol and shot her in the chest.
You have to understand that we had every reason to believe that these people were enemies of humanity. People don’t build secret facilities on asteroids to invent new flavors of cotton candy. I had been on a dozen missions where the realities on the ground matched the intelligence exactly. To this day, I honestly believe that on those missions we saved several major cities from destruction at the hands of terrorist cells and religious cultists determined to bring about some version of the apocalypse. And just because they were unarmed scientists doesn’t mean they weren’t dangerous. In fact, they were a hell of a lot more dangerous than a fanatic with a gun. A soldier I can handle. I can understand that, and the destruction he can cause is limited in the grand scheme of things. But a scientist? I don’t know if there are limits to the destructive power of the weapons that we can invent, but I know that people are looking for those limits every day. Oppenheimer might have never fired a gun in his life, I don’t know, but he was still one of the most dangerous men of his time.
After mop up, it was time to go. As we did a final sweep of the facility, I thought about the lack of machine workshops and the abundance of computer techs. A few screens were still functioning, and though I’m no computer programmer, it was clear they were doing high-level programming. I wasn’t blind to what I saw around me, but it just wasn’t enough to make me question orders. Cameron, our CO, ordered us to set the charges, wrap up, and head back to the boat. Njubigbo and I were just checking the last of a few storage bays when we found it.
There was a locked room. The access door labeled it storage room 21, but we thought maybe we had missed a few survivors and they had holed up in there. Thermal imaging didn’t show anything, but we played it safe anyway. I cut the lock while she provided cover. Once the torch on my suit had burned through the lock, the door came free and we moved inside. The room wasn’t that big, maybe seven by seven meters, and we could see that there wasn’t anybody inside. What we did find were three dormant automatons.
They were painted blue and silver, with round blank faces. All three were sitting against the back wall. Just sitting, even in zero-G. They weren’t strapped down, which meant they had to be magnetized. I couldn’t figure out why someone would bother to keep the magnetic pads on their feet powered when they could just strap them to the floor, but it didn’t really matter. We were five
minutes from blowing the whole place anyway.
The way those things sat there, feet flat, knees bent, arms loose and heads down, it was weird. Like three monks waiting for worship. There wasn’t anything else in the room at all, and we were just turning to leave when I remembered that the room had been locked from the inside.
I turned back to look at them again, and suddenly they were moving. Their black camera eyes focused and they jumped up. I brought my rifle up and opened fire on one of them. The shots shredded it; pieces of plastic and metal went everywhere. Oil and hydraulic fluid filled the air, but the other two were on Njubigbo before she or I could stop them. They jumped on her like spiders and their fingers found the joints in her armor. I took aim, but she was spinning around, trying to get them off her. I couldn’t get a clear shot, and my rife was powerful enough to kill her if I missed.
It happened so fast. They dug their metallic fingers into her shoulder joints and ripped her apart. I mean literally ripped her apart. She screamed and it was horrible. Once it started, I opened fire; I knew she was dead anyway. I put a bunch of rounds through one of them, but it just kept working on my partner, and then I felt something on my leg. It was that first one I had shot. My rifle had torn it in half, but it had used its magnetic hands to crawl to me and get hold of my leg. Its fingers were tearing into my armor at the knee joint, and the third one, the only one I hadn’t shot, dropped Njubigbo’s arm and came for me.
I was a stationary target, and they moved so fast, like insects. The undamaged one jumped, sailing the two meters right for me in a second. Even if I shot it, whatever was left of it was going to hit me. I disengaged my mag boots and punched it right in the face. Without grounding, when the robot and my fist hit each other, we both bounced back. That bought me a few seconds. It was lighter than I was, and so it flew away faster, and I had the other one still working at my leg. It was tearing a strip of the armor away from my calf even while I went flying backwards.
But now I had a second, and I put my rifle right in the thing’s face and pulled the trigger. I was low on ammo, but I knew I had to get it off me. The rifle tore it apart, and bits and pieces of it flew everywhere, bouncing off the walls, ceiling, and floor. The one I had punched had a cracked faceplate, but it landed expertly in a crouch on the far wall, magnetized for a second, and then it looked at me. I was drifting free, about to hit the wall behind me, and I needed to get hold of something or get my feet back on the ground or it was going to grab me and tear me apart too. To make matters worse, the other one that had attacked Njubigbo was still moving; it had lost an arm and a leg, but it was righting itself and looking at me.
I figured I had time to either reload my rifle or grab the wall, but not both. I reached for my spare clip on my belt, and that’s when both of them launched themselves at me, just like I thought they would. I didn’t know what I was dealing with; automatons weren’t supposed to be able to hurt people, something about laws for robots, but anything that could be programmed could be reprogrammed. Either way, whatever they were, it was comforting to know that I could fool them.
I dropped the clip and rifle and pushed off the back wall and towards the door. They must have immediately realized what I was doing, but there wasn’t anything they could do until they could get a hand or foot on a solid surface. I pushed off at an angle for the door, and the one with the damaged faceplate sailed right by me, almost close enough to touch. I looked it right in that spider web of cracks, and it looked just as passive, as docile as it had when we first entered that room and I had assumed that they were shut down.
I managed to grab the doorway and pull myself through. I was tempted to magnetize my boots and run down the hallway. I moved and felt much more comfortable with my feet under me, but I could move faster down hallways in zero-G, and if I hit a wall because I was moving too fast, my armor would protect me. I launched myself down the hallway. The strength of the powered armor gave me a real boost, and I was probably moving at fifteen or twenty KPH through those halls.
I could hear them right behind me, the clicking of the hands as they pushed off a grab bar, then the silence as they sailed after me, quiet and precise. I risked a few glances behind me, and they were maybe ten meters back. The intact one was in the lead, and every time it pushed off a wall or corner, it closed the distance a little more. All of its pushes were perfect. I had my pistol still, and only one round was spent, but I knew if I stopped to fire they’d tear me apart. I had already seen how much damage they could take, and it didn’t seem to slow them down too much. The one with only one arm and one leg was keeping pace with the other just fine. Fortunately, that wasn’t the only weapon I had in the base.
I radioed ahead to my squad and told them, as quickly as I could, that I was headed their way with two robotic hostiles right behind me. I was virtually unarmed and my armor was damaged. I’m sure they were confused as I was by the idea of robots attacking humans, but they didn’t question me. Cook was the only one still in the station. Everyone else was on the ship ready to go, but Gingerich and Cameron said they’d be there in just a minute. Cook said he’d set up an ambush, and I told him there wasn’t time. I had maybe thirty seconds before those things caught me, so he headed to me.
I took another corner and pushed myself through a room full of dead and floating bodies: the scientists. The computer screens flickered at me from either side, and all of my doubts about what we were doing there disappeared. They weren’t making asteroid engines. They were making killer robots, and that might have been worse. Automatons aren’t used for much more than mindless tasks like picking up laundry and vacuuming the carpet, but they’re everywhere. People barely notice them anymore. If someone could reprogram them, especially from a distance, they could assassinate just about anyone at any time.
When I got to the other side of the room, I seized a bar on the wall and tore the door open. It cost me a few more seconds of my narrow lead, and at the next corner, the one with the damaged faceplate caught up to me. As I pushed off the wall at a corner, I felt its metallic hands grip my foot, the same one that was already missing some armor. I tried to kick it in the face, but it just grabbed my other foot with its other hand. In a second it clawed its way up my legs.
I pulled out my pistol and tried to get a bead on it, but it was on my back now. I flailed, trying to dislodge it, and my foot caught a nearby wall. That gave me a new vector and sent us into the wall at an angle. The robot got slammed between the armor and the wall, but it wasn’t enough to shake it loose or damage it. It did move its arm around my leg to get a better grip, though, and I tried to pry it off with my free hand. It was strong; really strong. We bounced down the hallway like that for a few seconds, careening off walls, my armored hand locked around its mechanical one. I tried to shake its grip, and it was trying to dig into my armor, and neither of us could win. Then I lowered my gun and shot it in the forearm.
It took three shots, but the hand came loose, and I threw it at the other one, which was right behind me at this point. It just batted it aside and kept coming. By the time I finally reached the end of the hallway, I was completely out of control and still trying to shake the thing on my back. I could hear my armor creaking as the other hand dug into my left shoulder joint. Fortunately, I glanced down the new hallway and saw Cook. His boots were magnetized to the ceiling and he was aiming his rifle right at me.
When you work with a group like K Squad for a year, you learn to trust each other. Sometimes that even means overriding instinct. I stopped fighting the robot on my back. I didn’t even try to make the turn to avoid the second one behind me. I just curled up in a fetal position and tried not to move. Cook was a good shot. We all were, and a few well-placed shots splintered those things into a million pieces. He only grazed my armor once.
A few seconds later I managed to find my feet, which was upside down from Cook. Gingerich and Cameron came running up behind him and found a hallway full of pieces of robot, large and small, pinging off one another and floating
everywhere. Black and clear fluids drifted around as well, some splattering against my armor. The four of us stood there for a second taking in the situation, then I started to explain. They had seen Njubigbo flatline, of course, but they didn’t know what had happened. Gingerich had a hard time buying it, even with all of the evidence there in front of her and Cook telling them how I had come flying around the corner with a murderous robot on my back and another one in tow.
I started to tell the whole story from the start, but Cameron ordered us onto the ship in his cockney accent. Debrief later, he said, and I realized he was right. Something was very wrong with that station. None of the intel matched, and even though we had been through every room in the facility, I wasn’t sure there weren’t more of those things hiding somewhere ready to tear my squad mates and me apart. A dozen missions we had been on without taking a single casualty. We had lost two people in fifteen minutes on AR-559.
Cameron led us back to the ship. We were in one of the surface hallways, coming up on the bodies of the security we had downed when we first breached the facility. I looked up through a skylight and saw the small interceptor ship we had used for the past year. It wasn’t comfortable, but it was well made: fast, light, and reliable. I had just looked away from it when it exploded.
I don’t know how long I was out, maybe twenty or thirty minutes. When I came to, everything was quiet. The hallway I was in was ruined, and the skylight above me was destroyed. I was in vacuum, and my suit was the only thing keeping me alive. The hallway itself had collapsed in front of me, and I could see most of Cameron’s body jutting out from under pieces of the ceiling and the ship that had been embedded in the asteroid by the explosion. There was no question about him being alive. The powered armor was tough, but it couldn’t keep a man alive with a twenty-foot beam through his chest. Pieces of Cook’s armor were visible, and Gingerich floated nearby. Her armor was shredded.