by Mark Harritt
Rob stood back and looked at his handy work. He stood there for a moment, letting gravity work, checking to see if anything was going to come undone. Nothing sagged, so he was happy with it. He checked the detonator, flipped up the cover, and clicked the button. He gave a satisfied grunt as a small green LED light lit up on the receiver. He took the blasting cap, and wired it to the receiver. He pressed the blasting cap into the chunk of C4 on the right side of the door, and then he started walking back towards the bend in the fissure.
“Ah, one second. I want to make sure that nobody’s back there,” Mike said.
Rob stopped and Mike walked over to the door and hammered on it. He waited a second. Nothing happened. The door remained closed, and there was no noise to indicate that it would open. Mike turned around and walked toward Rob. Rob turned and walked back toward the bend in the fissure. Mike caught up and they both stepped around the bend so they would be away from the blast.
Rob stood there for a moment, “Hell, this isn’t going to work.”
Mike stepped past Rob, further away from the bend. Rob extended the antenna on the detonator. He looked at Mike, “Ready to breech?”
Mike nodded. Rob pulled out his ear plugs and put them in his ears. Mike put his hands up over his ears. Rob extended the antenna, and lifted the detonator so that the antenna was past the bend. He flipped up the cover and hit the button.
The over pressure wave from the explosion surged through the fissure, lifting dust in its wake. They coughed as the dust started to settle. Rob moved to step out, but Mike put his hand on Rob’s shoulder, “Let’s wait until we can see things better. If the door’s down, no telling what might come out of there.”
Rob nodded, and settled back into his previous position. It took a few minutes for the dust to settle, then Rob did a quick peek around the bend.
“What do you see?” Mike asked.
“Well, the door’s gone,” Rob answered.
“See anything else?”
Rob shook his head, “No, too dark.”
“Alright, let’s go take a look,” Mike stepped around Rob. He shifted his rifle to the low ready. Rocks crunched under foot. Rob took position to his right, slightly behind him. They walked towards the opening where the door used to be, prepared for trouble. They stopped just short of the doorway.
Daylight barely penetrated into the opening, the dust still settling. He pulled out a flashlight, and clicked it on. The bright light from the LED flashlight penetrated better than the daylight did, but it still wasn’t enough to reveal what was in there. He put the flashlight back into his pocket, and clicked on the light attached to his rifle. It wasn’t as bright, but he didn’t want to compromise his capability to engage anything that came at him. He held his rifle at low ready. Rob did the same.
The door had been ripped from the frame and thrown forward into the room beyond. The frame was warped from the explosion. Mike approached the open doorway. The light played over the floor. There wasn’t anything there, just the detritus of the metal door frame that had been shredded by the explosion, plus the warped door. As he stepped past the frame, the light exposed more of the room ahead of him. The floor was roughhewn, as were the walls. The gouges in the wall betrayed the fact that these walls had been created using hammers and chisels. At eye level, that changed. The rock was smooth, and looked almost like glass. Two very different processes had been used here.
Rob stepped forward, the light on his rifle on as well. He flashed it around, looking at the walls, “Hey, this looks like a mine. Only, old school. Like Roman or Greek old school.”
Mike could imagine the men of the necropolis coming here day after day to chisel away at the stone of the walls, “I wonder what they were mining here?”
“Well, could be iron, I guess. The dark, black rock and red layers indicate it could be iron. That, plus the pyrite is an iron sulfide.”
Mike looked back at Rob, “How the hell do you know that?”
Rob shrugged, “Engineering, a little chemistry, some geology. You never know what you’re going to end up doing. I was thinking about mine engineering for a little while.”
Mike pointed at the smooth surface of the roof and the upper walls, “What do you think about that?”
Rob studied the differences between the chiseled walls and the smoothness of the upper walls and ceiling, “Definitely a different technology. Looks more like what our pulse laser does.”
Mike nodded, “Yeah, I was afraid of that.”
The tunnel stretched before them, the darkness shrouding anything that might be down there. Their lights did nothing to dispel the shadows.
“What do you think, Mike, call the team?”
Mike shook his head, “No, not yet. I want to make sure that we have as little exposure as possible. We don’t know what’s down here. I think you and I can do a little exploring before we go back to get them.”
They walked forward, keyed up, waiting for the next shoe to drop, whatever it may be. Mike carefully placed his feet as he walked to ensure nothing tripped him up. There was no way they could sneak up on anything, not with the explosion that had ripped the door off of the frame. Still, they could be first on the trigger if it came to a fight.
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The loud explosion almost overwhelmed the A.I.’s sensors. Now, it sensed hominids, much like the primitives in the area, walking down the tunnel towards its location. Logic trees hadn’t been programmed for this situation. The primitives in this area didn’t have the technology to breech the door. Now, the simple A.I.’s programming kept coming back to the same place that it started, a continuous loop.
It had no way to protect itself. A hundred and twenty of the smaller hunter killers had been destroyed, as well as the one working warrior robot. The A.I. needed to preserve itself so that it could send out a data packet. As it prepared the data packet for burst transmission, it tried to solve the problem at hand.
Around it, the mechanical spiders slowly moved up and down in a pulsating rhythm which eerily mimicked life as their hydraulics cycled. They waited for a command to repair . . . something, anything. The A.I. made a decision. The A.I. manipulated and corrupted their original programming. Now, they were programmed to perform maintenance on organics. The two hominids were identified as organics that needed maintenance. The soldering irons on the maintenance spiders started to heat up.
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The tunnel ahead widened. Eventually, it could no longer be called a tunnel. Their lights played over a large open space in front of them. Across from them, a single red light gleamed dully.
“What’s that?” Rob asked.
“What, the red light? I don’t know,” Mike answered.
“No, there’s something on the floor.”
Mike shined his light onto the floor. There was something there which seemed to be moving slightly. He moved forward slowly. His light shined down on one of the moving objects. It was large, about a foot across the body. He recoiled slightly as he saw the shape. It looked like a six legged spider, with a multitude of different arms. Each arm had a different type of appendage on it. Suddenly, one of the appendages began to glow dully, a dark red. The red quickly shifted from dark red, to red, to orange, then proceeded to turn white as the tip heated up.
“Ah, Mike.”
Mike looked up. Across the room, hundreds of lights were shifting from red to white. Mike cursed. He pulled out his flashlight, clicked it on, and the multitude of small robots were revealed. As one, they all turned and started moving towards toward Rob and Mike.
Mike started shooting, shattering the automaton. Rob’s rifle started barking death as well. The M203 thumped and a forty millimeter flechette round tore into the scuttling spider shapes. Mike hadn’t even heard Rob load the weapon. They shot many of the the spiders close to them, but they were picking up speed. They were going to be overwhelmed.
“Run!” Mike yelled. He tur
ned, and Rob was already moving. The lights on their rifles bobbed up and down as they ran. Mike could hear the skitter of their feet on the floor as the spiders ran after him. At least he thought he heard it. Whether it was an actual noise, or just in his mind, it propelled him forward into a sprint.
They burst into the fissure running at full tilt. They saw Everett, Tom, and Mickey at the bend in the fissure, heading their way at full speed. If their lives hadn’t been in danger, Mike could have laughed at the expressions on their faces as they saw Mike and Rob in full stride coming out of the opening of the mine. They skidded to a stop, and then bounced off of each other as they tried to turn to run back to the opening of the fissure. The rest of the team started running in front of Mike and Rob. They didn’t even have to know what was back there. They just knew something bad was coming.
Mike didn’t look back. He hated not knowing how close they were, but he didn’t want to lose speed checking. Ahead, Everett, Mickey, and Tom disappeared around the bend. Rob made the turn cleanly, but Mike hit the far wall and staggered as he rebounded, his momentum shifting his weight too far to make the turn cleanly.
Mike was the last one to make the opening of the fissure. Matki saw everybody come boiling out of the fissure, and he was running away, leaving everybody else in his dust. Mike had to leap to clear the backpacks that were laying in front of the fissure.
The team ran about a hundred yards, then turned, ready for whatever it was that had been on Mike’s heels. They stood at the low ready. Then they waited. It was a good two minutes before the first of the robots came out of the fissure. Mickey shot it.
He turned to Mike and Rob, “That’s it? That’s what you were running from?” He saw the eyes of everybody else grow wide, and he turned back just in time to see an army of robotic spiders roll out like a tide from the fissure.
They started shooting. The spiders weren’t moving as fast as Mike had thought they were, but there were a damned lot of them. Not as many as it had first seemed. They weren’t quite as scary out here in the daylight either.
They dealt with them efficiently. When the spiders got too close, the team fell back to give some distance, and started dealing death again. Rob killed the last three with a ‘203 flechette round.
“That wasn’t too bad,” Mickey grumbled.
“Well, maybe not out here, but seeing all those little bastards running at us in the dark can light your heels on fire,” Mike replied, his eyes still on the crevasse.
They waited to see if there were any more surprises. Nothing else came out of the fissure.
“What do you guys think?” Mike asked.
“I think we should all go back this time, just to make sure there’s no more big surprises,” Everett answered.
They entered the fissure and walked back to the mine. They entered, all of them with flashlights on. They walked down the corridor, back to where Mike and Rob found the mechanical spiders. They played their lights around the room. A curse from Everett drew everybody’s eyes to the large construct that his light revealed. It was another one of the giant robots. They watched it, but it didn’t move. Uneasily, they started exploring the rest of the room.
A platform sat across from the main entrance. A series of dark boxes sat on the platform.
“Man! That looks familiar.”
Mike agreed with Tom, “Yeah, except for that red light, it looks like the computer that we have back at the colony, doesn’t it?”
Everett nodded, “And that, right beside it. That could be a twin to the quantum battery we have.”
Mike walked over and put his hand on the console, “Looks like we’re going to have to haul our electrical engineers up here to take a look at it.”
“You’re going to need to bring Weitz and Bobby up here as well, to explore the software,” Everett pointed out.
Mike’s face screwed up at the thought of having to spend time with Weitz. No way around it though, “Yeah, I guess so.”
They walked around to see what else was there. Past the main room there were more tunnels that led back into the mountain. One tunnel had a large amount of parts in it. Mike picked them up and looked at them. They looked like replacement parts for the different robots. There were sensor nodules, different types of servos and motors, computer boards. You could pretty much make a new robot complete from what was in these supplies. The techs were going to have fun exploring these. They’d be in nerd heaven.
A voice, muffled by the bends in the tunnels, called out, “Hey guys, back here.”
Mike yelled out, “Marco!”
A voice answered, “Polo!”
They kept that up until Mike found the correct tunnel and followed it back. He found Tom, Rob and Mickey there. More skeletons lay at their feet. Men had been herded back here and killed, their bones and mining tools the only thing to tell their sad tale.
“So, it was a mine,” Mike observed.
Rob nodded, “Looks like.”
Mike shook his head, “This doesn’t make any sense. Why would they kill miners, then just sit on the mine?”
Tom spit to the side, “Sometimes, things just don’t make sense.” He turned to look at the bones, “Sometimes evil men do evil deeds. Usually just because there wasn’t anybody around to keep them from doing it.”
Mike couldn’t argue with that.
The team met back up in the main room. They told Everett and Matki what they’d found.
Everett was just as puzzled as Mike, “I don’t get it. They kill men for this place, then they abandon it, and post guards to make sure that nobody else can use it?”
Mike shrugged, “Don’t know. We’ll probably never know.”
Rob pointed at the main frame, “I wonder if they’re still around?”
Mike shrugged again, “Who knows.”
Mickey looked around, “We finished here?”
Mike nodded, “Yeah, we don’t want to break anything else. We need everything intact so the techs can do some investigation.”
They walked back out of the mine. The day was headed towards early evening. Mike looked at the sun, starting to track behind the mountains, “Well, I don’t think we’re going to get too far away from here tonight.”
The guys groaned. Mike chuckled, “What’s the matter? Tired of being here?”
Rob pointed back towards the fissure, “Killer robots.” He pointed back at the town, “Killer robots.” He looked at Mike, “Not too sure I want to spend more time around here.”
Mike pointed down the valley, “How about we head in that direction and go as far as we can go before the sun goes down. I’d kind of like to put this place behind me as well.”
Mickey nodded, “Yeah, good idea. Let’s get the hell out of here.”
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Chapter Eight
Mike and the team walked down the valley, trying to get as far from the ruined city and mine as possible before nightfall. The walk down the valley was fairly steep, making Mike think they were dropping in elevation pretty quickly. His suspicion was confirmed as evergreen trees started dotting the landscape. They were stunted trees, none of them higher than six feet, but it was a good indication that they were headed lower.
Mike turned to Matki. “So, you think we’ll be able to get you home soon?” he asked.
Matki looked at the low trees around him. A look of yearning crossed his face. A wistful smile was there when he looked at Mike, “I surely do hope so, Mike.”
“Don’t worry, we’ll find a way back there,” Everett said.
Matki pointed down the valley, “At least this valley is heading in the right direction.”
The mountains were painting the valley in lengthening shadows as the sun tracked down. Tom pointed towards the northern side of the valley, “We might be able to find a place to laager up over in that direction.”
“Lead on, Tom,” Mike said.
They followed Tom into the meager tree line. The trees weren’t thick, and they were
able to walk through the foliage without any problems. Tom led them close to the mountain ridge that delineated the side of the valley. They found a location with several standing rocks to give them a little more cover. They were still very aware of the ghost cat attack they endured previously. The rocks weren’t the best protection, but better than nothing at all. The team started looking for sleep positions and backpacks hit the ground as they each decided where they were going to sleep.
Mickey and Rob chose positions close to each other, but Mickey, being a big man, was taking up a lot of real estate.
“Hey, move that big ass over, Mickey,” Rob complained.
This brought chortles from the rest of the team. Mickey glanced over at Roberto, “Big ass?”
Rob grinned. “Well, you have to admit, Mickey, baby got back,” Rob said.
“I’ll have you know, Tracy likes my big ass.”
“Good thing. Not a whole lot of women like a man with a bigger butt than they have,” Tom observed.
“Hey, Tracy may be thinner than your girls, but she’s got the curves that I like. Some of your girls got some big butts,” Mickey looked at Tom when he said that.
“Not bigger than that butt,” Tom said, pointing at Mickey.
Everett called out, “Mickey, if you run into any woman with a butt bigger than yours, she probably hangs out at the elephant enclosure at the Barnum and Bailey circus.”
Mickey stood up and did a double bicep pose, “You guys are just jealous of my manly physique.”
The catcalls and taunts continued as the team unpacked their gear, settling in for the night. Suddenly, Matki grew very still. Mike looked over when he realized that something was wrong. Matki was motionless, listening.