The Altreian Enigma (Rho Agenda Assimilation Book 2)

by Richard Phillips

  Watching General Zherdev turn to issue the orders, Prokorov smiled. The Smythes had just made their first big mistake.

  Robby felt sick to his stomach. The fact that his mom hadn’t torn into him for modifying the robots’ mission statement only made him feel worse. Now he had to find a way to fix the mission before Mark and Heather were killed.

  He felt Eos scan the data being provided by the robots in the southern swarms, looking for a new way to bypass the protection protocols preventing any changes to the locked-in mission. Eos wasn’t finding squat.

  “What about feeding them bad sensor data, making them think that the Smythes are located inside the gateway cavern? Maybe that would cause them to go back to where they’re supposed to be.”

  “Negative. After I was able to hack the robot sensors in the capture-the-flag trial run, I created an upgrade that prevents that from happening. And since they calculate their positions within the swarm without reliance on GPS, I can’t get in that way either.”

  Robby bit his lip. Damn it! Think, Robby. Think.

  The status of the robots fighting the enemy armored convoy just north of Hanau didn’t look good. Despite creating heavy casualties in the opposing force, the robots were vastly outnumbered and their losses were mounting.

  Suddenly one of the swarms shifted strategy, abandoning the fight and sprinting cross-country toward the outskirts of Hanau, with enemy heavy armor in hot pursuit.

  “Eos, what’s happening?”

  “Checking.”

  “Can you show me what the leading robots are seeing and doing?”

  “Passive viewing isn’t a problem. Establishing a link now.”

  The vision that was piped into his mind startled Robby so badly that his body jerked in his chair. He felt like he had been transported inside the running robot’s body as it crashed through a section of woods only to rush into a neighborhood of two- and three-story half-timbered homes.

  Other robots broke from the woods on his left and right, the swarm sharing a vision of where its functional members were, optimizing the path of each to achieve what the swarm had determined was its optimal course of action: to create a diversion that their human foes could not ignore. If it could not defeat the massed enemy tanks, the swarm would attack their civilians, many of whom would be military family members.

  Robby watched in horror as the robot crashed through the door of the nearest apartment building, racing room to room, ripping apart the people it found there or burning them down with laser fire. In the final seconds before leaving the apartment house, the robot ripped out the gas line, igniting the gas with a laser blast before rushing back out into the street.

  “No!” Robby screamed. “Eos, please stop this!”

  “I am working on the problem.”

  As Robby watched the metallic body race toward its next assigned target, German screams of terror filled the night. All around him houses burst into flames, painting the river of fog that flowed between them bright orange. On his left, a burning girl ran out through an open door only to be crushed beneath the feet of another metal monster.

  “Kill the link,” Robby gasped. “I can’t watch anymore.”

  As the link dissolved, Robby gagged and vomited in his lap. The whole operation had been transformed into a chaotic maelstrom of violence against innocent men, women, and children. The robots didn’t care who they killed so long as the action scored higher on their mission-accomplishment value scale. And they would adjust their destructive path toward Frankfurt, one of the most densely populated cities in Europe.

  The headset allowed the supercomputer to project him into the scene representing that scenario’s most likely outcome. The destruction that even a handful of these metal monsters could inflict on the city would make human terrorist attacks pale in comparison. And the bots would attempt to optimize the problem, maximizing the impact of their attacks. The supercomputer projected those targets: hospitals, nursing homes, apartment buildings—any place where people congregated would fit the swarm’s killing agenda.

  Robby pulled off his headset, his hands shaking so badly from the visions that he dropped it on the floor.

  “What have I done?”

  Colonel Herzog, the commander of Task Force Bayern, looked at the aerial imagery his intelligence officer had just transferred to the command vehicle. He shook his head in disbelief. Just when he had thought he could transition his armored force into a mop-up mission, a swarm of robots had broken off from direct combat and had raced into Hanau’s northern outskirts. Despite the limitations imposed by the fog, this imagery confirmed the reports he had received of the ongoing destruction the monsters were inflicting on the city’s civilian population.

  His fury threatened to consume him. This was exactly the kind of bullshit that had led to a worldwide ban on autonomous combat robots. From what he could tell, the Smythes had unleashed robots that were making their own kill decisions without any human involvement.

  If Colonel Herzog hesitated to act, the robot swarm would continue their Hanau rampage unopposed. No police could contain what was spreading through the city, and the massacre would likely spread from Hanau into Frankfurt. Right now, unless the warning sirens had awakened them, his wife and four kids were sleeping inside his house in the Hanau suburb of Klein-Auheim. He’d be damned before he let these abominations continue their atrocities.

  In quick, clipped tones, he spoke the orders that would send the bulk of his task force hurtling back south along Highway 45, leaving two companies to fight a rearguard action. Herzog would have to get ahead of the swarm. Then he would hunt down and destroy every single robot. If luck was with him, God would deliver the Smythes into his hands before this night ended. He prayed that would happen. Court-martial or no, his Heckler & Koch had two bullets with their names on them.

  CHAPTER 40

  “We have micro-bot release.”

  Mark heard Heather’s excited announcement and then saw her eyes go milky white, knowing that she had gone deep in order to control the thousands of flea-sized bots that would scurry along the conduits, electrical lines, and support structures toward the wormhole gateway. From this point forward the tiny swarm would all be directed by Heather.

  The bots’ small size had placed severe limitations on their communications and computing capabilities, which was why Heather needed to set up within a fifty-thousand-nanosecond communication radius of her army. Since this abandoned structure was slightly over eight and a half miles from the Frankfurt Gateway cavern, the round-trip communication latency of ninety microseconds met that requirement.

  Mark watched her for several seconds as he continued to receive status updates through his SRT headset. He hadn’t told her of all the things that had gone wrong with the ongoing combat operation. She needed to focus on the daunting task that faced her.

  Three of the combat-robot swarms that had been ordered to attack the Frankfurt Gateway had gone off mission to attack a convoy of reinforcements. Then, in an apparent attempt to draw off the enemy, the bots had rampaged into Hanau, killing civilians by the thousands and setting the northern part of the city ablaze. Mark felt his teeth grind thinking of the surrounding death caused by machine minds failing to understand their creators’ intentions.

  Now Janet had just informed him that a fleet of helicopters was dropping U.S. Army Rangers across a wide zone. Jamal and Eileen had also intercepted communications that indicated that the mission of these Ranger units was wide-area reconnaissance.

  There was little doubt what they were searching for: Mark and Heather. And if they found this hideout before Heather finished her task, despite the thirty combat robots and Aaden Bauer’s twenty-two Safe Earth resistance fighters, the two would be in deep trouble.

  Hefting his SCAR-L assault rifle, he turned and made his way toward the stairwell that would take him to ground level. Now that Heather had gone deep, his immediate presence would serve no purpose, but up there he might be able to buy her extra time.

&nb
sp; Thousands upon thousands of images blossomed in Heather’s head, threatening to knock her out of the trance into which she had descended. But she let it wash over her, allowing her mind to process the legion of perspective microviews into one coherent vision.

  She willed the bots forward and, when some branches reached dead ends or encountered pathways that led away from their objective, redirected them along different paths. As the swarm advanced, a detailed 3-D map formed in her mind.

  The first group entered the gateway cavern through a ceiling vent, followed almost immediately by another branch of the swarm entering through electrical outlets along the north wall. A rapidly expanding view of the cavern opened up before her. The size of three football fields, the monstrous equipment that formed the matter disrupter filled the western half of the facility. Thick supercooled power cables snaked through a latticework support structure toward the inverted horseshoe that formed the wormhole gate, while others were routed to what could only be the stasis field generator that Heather had seen when scanning the facility blueprints Nikina had provided.

  But the focus of her attention was the extensive banks of equipment that formed the wormhole-gateway controller. Despite what she had seen and read in the design documents, the view startled her. Instead of gazing upon a futuristic layout, she was looking into the distant past.

  Whereas, eight years ago, the Stephenson Gateway controller had been a hive of state-of-the-art computers, this was a monstrosity consisting of racks of wires and switches around which hundreds of scientists and technicians scurried, working through the checklists that would ensure everything was a go for the scheduled activation. The scene reminded Heather of the photographs she had seen of the crowd of old-school telephone operators, back when every call had to be manually switched.

  A new vision formed in her mind of what the activation sequence would look like, dozens of scientists sitting in front of a long line of racks, each plugging the correctly colored cables into sockets whenever the LEDs beneath each of those sockets changed color. Toward those racks she sent her swarm, adjusting many paths so as to keep the scurrying micro-bots from attracting workers’ attention.

  She updated her estimate on how long it would take for a critical mass of micro-bots to reach the racks she was targeting. Thirteen minutes. Then another twenty-two to make the circuit modifications—if nothing went wrong. Heather started to slip into one of her near-future visions but forcibly extracted herself. The micro-bots needed all her attention.

  Tonight the future would have to fend for itself.

  Mark walked up to the spot where Aaden and Nikina stood in conversation by the motorcycles, his eyes making out their shrouded forms backlit by the orange glow the fires of Hanau gave to the fog-shrouded sky. They turned to meet him, and he saw that, unlike him, they both wore IR night-vision goggles.

  “How’s the perimeter looking?”

  “No problem so far.”

  “I’ve got bad news. Prokorov has dropped in several companies from the Third Ranger Battalion to perform area reconnaissance. They’ll be widely spread out, hunting us in relatively small patrols in order to cover as much area as possible.”

  Aaden cursed, but Nikina retained her stoicism.

  “How much longer is Heather going to need?” Aaden asked.

  “Maybe forty-five minutes.”

  “Do you mind telling me what she’s doing down there?”

  “Screwing with the Frankfurt Gateway’s control system.”

  Mark was grateful when the crackle of distant gunfire interrupted the conversation. He trusted Aaden, and Nikina had proved herself to be valuable, but the fewer people who knew the specifics of what Heather was doing the better. When the gunfire was answered by a much closer burst, Mark’s gratitude faded.

  Without a word, Aaden broke into a run through the skeletal structure, Mark and Nikina following. To his right, Mark could see one of the doglike robots bolt into the darkness, followed by six of its larger bipedal cousins.

  Aaden brought them to a halt at the southeastern corner outpost. “Who was firing?” he yelled at the four men who crouched behind a low concrete wall.

  “None of us,” came the answer from the man in the center. “I think one of the robot patrols must have run into some bad guys.”

  As if to confirm his statement, a new round of firing erupted from the east, accompanied by the thump of grenades and an explosion that must have come from a shoulder-fired antitank weapon. That firing was answered by the glow of laser fire slicing through the fog. The distant yells of hard-fighting men and the screams of the dying echoed through the night.

  One of the Ranger patrols had indeed stumbled onto some of the combat robots. And even though a single patrol wouldn’t threaten this position, Mark knew that one or more of those Rangers was already reporting the engagement.

  Mark focused on his SRT headset, sending the details of what was happening to Janet, who had no doubt already been informed by Robby what the telemetry from the engaged robots was telling him.

  She didn’t directly respond, but there was a sudden rush of movement as a half-dozen robots raced toward the fighting. Mark understood what she had just ordered: an attack to kill this patrol and then confront their inbound reinforcements before they could get closer to the Smythes.

  “Spread out in groups of two!” Mark yelled, moving to a covered firing position several yards from the others.

  He heard Nikina’s distinctive Latvian accent as she settled in on the other side of the abutment where he lay prone.

  “I think we’re about to become very popular.”

  Mark didn’t respond. His mental countdown told him the bad news. They had to hold here for at least another half hour. He let the stock of his SCAR-L settle into a firm cheek weld as his mind converted the battle echoes into imagery that penetrated the swirling fog far better than his enhanced eyesight could.

  Then he felt the breeze out of the northwest, and his heart froze. A stiff wind was the death of fog. Not a sign of good things to come.

  He took a deep breath and pulled forward the perfect memory of a favorite meditation, instantly acquiring the calm that dropped his heart rate to forty beats per minute.

  Easy, Mark. We’re not dead yet.

  Robby felt his desperation rising with every failed attempt by Eos to hack into the robots she had hardened against just such an intrusion. When his mom appeared through a virtual chat session, he jumped.

  “Any progress with Eos?”

  “None,” he said, trying to give a calmness to his voice that he didn’t feel.

  “Mark says they’ve just come in contact with a Ranger patrol. The weather update says the freshening breeze will cause the fog to dissipate in the Hanau area within the next thirty minutes. We’re out of time.”

  Great. What else could go wrong?

  “We’re doing our best,” he said. “If Mark and Heather are in trouble, why haven’t the robots turned around to go help them?”

  “All of the robots are too far away to get back in time to make a difference,” said Janet. “I want you and Eos to abandon the hack-a-robot attempt. Are there any attack aircraft in the area that you can take over?”

  “There are, but they are disconnected from any military data links that might be hackable and are taking care not to send telemetry that could give us accurate positional information. Without precise coordinates, Eos can’t target them with a subspace hack. Heather could probably do it, but she’s not available to us.”

  “What about ground-based artillery systems?”

  Robby could have kicked himself for not thinking of this. After all, the defenders had fired artillery at the robots during the early phase of the assault on the Frankfurt Gateway.

  “Checking now,” he said.

  Eos shifted her attention from the robots to the defenses around the gateway, rapidly scanning the electronic systems arrayed around the gateway cavern. Robby felt her come alert as she zeroed in on a particular set of c
oordinates.

  He felt his excitement rise as Eos identified the target.

  “We’ve located a GPS-guided multiple-launch-rocket-system cluster on the southeastern edge of the Frankfurt Gateway compound. The three launchers can each blanket a square mile with almost eight thousand M77 submunitions in under forty seconds.”

  “Can Eos hack those fire-control systems?” asked Janet.

  “I’ll tell you in a second,” Robby said, shifting his focus. “Eos, please tell me you can do this.”

  “They’re emplaced and aren’t moving. I have good coordinate locks. Taking charge of the fire control won’t be a problem.”

  “How long will it take you?” Robby asked.

  “Approximately three minutes fourteen seconds,” said Eos.

  Janet interrupted. “As soon as you’ve got all those MLRS launchers, I want the three grid squares, for which I’m sending you the coordinates, blanketed in steel. Mark and company will have to fend off the Rangers that are already too close, but we can put a hurt on any reinforcements from the east.”

  A new worry struck Robby. “Once we expend the missiles on those launchers, the crews won’t reload them. And they’ll try to manually cut the power to stop the volley of rockets once we start firing.”

  “It’s why we’ll only get one chance at this. Now get started.”

  “Already on it.”

  Robby felt Janet drop the link and shifted his attention to the work Eos was doing. In a few minutes he would be killing a bunch of America’s finest, all in the hopes of giving Mark and Heather a chance to finish and get out of there alive.

  Janet felt herself pulled into a memory of other times she had helped Heather kill American special operatives who were just doing their jobs. The first had been eight years ago at Jack’s Bolivian hacienda when they had killed a platoon from SEAL Team 10. Less than a year ago, Robby and Heather had used another aircraft to kill three dozen Delta Force operators. Now she was using her son to kill Army Rangers. She was practically swimming in the blood of innocents and of those tasked with protecting them. And she didn’t even have Jack at her side to reassure her that the ends justified such indiscriminate violence.