Humble Beginnings

by KA Hopkins

  They were six hundred yards from our position, driving what appeared to be hovercraft roughly the size of a large SUV. There were no breaks in the surface other than the cockpit which was located on the very top. It appeared to be made out of some sort of polymer material in-lieu of metal. The surface was mirror smooth and polished to a brilliant shine. Instead of an emergency light-bar on top or lights in the grill, the whole surface of the vehicle flashed a rainbow of colors so brightly it made your eyes water - nothing subtle here. With the light-show there was no need for sirens.

  The craft moved silently several inches above the floor in a loose echelon right formation and demonstrated good maneuverability as they changed from echelon right to left and back at speeds approaching 50 mph. Unlike hovercraft I had experience with, these were whisper quiet and able to move in any direction without having to pivot and direct the rear drive fan in the opposite direction.

  The police officers were dressed in one-piece combat uniforms, over six feet tall, broad shouldered, heavily muscled with seemingly no body fat. Guess these guys didn’t believe in donuts; come to think of it, I hadn’t seen anything resembling a coffee shop since we had arrived. Judging on looks alone, these cops had the same professional appearance as the state troopers back home. They projected an attitude of, “Do what you’re told, answer politely and give the uniform the proper respect it deserves. If you want to act stupid I will take a professional interest in making your life hell.” They looked like they would sooner “bag and tag” and let headquarters deal with you than take any attitude. Long gone were the good old days when you could get in a bit of a tussle with a police officer, spend the night in jail and leave the next day, sober with no hard feelings. Lawyers and Tasers killed that form of entertainment.

  Marc broke the tension by stating the obvious: “This doesn’t look good. Judging by the readiness of their weapons, they’re not here for some friendly community policing.”

  “My guess is our cover is blown and that’s why our transport died. We have at most a minute and then this party is over.” I said.

  “Seems to me we have two choices. Here, hold my rifle.” Marc dropped his rucksack and started to tear through it, throwing pieces of kit on the ground as he rooted around looking for something in the bottom compartment. “Got it. I was afraid I might have left it at home. This has never failed to solve a problem in the past.”

  I looked at what he was holding - it appeared to be a large block of gray children’s plasticine. What he actually had in his hands was something a lot more dangerous. It was ten pounds of plastic explosive better known as Composition 4 (C4). C4 is a chemical miracle that looks like children’s plasticine, but has other interesting properties. It’s so stable that you can burn it, shoot it, drop it and nothing happens - however, put a mercury blasting cap into it and you want to be standing more than a hundred feet away when it goes off. With our course of action decided, I never asked him what option B was.

  Marc smiled giving me a devil may care expression, “Jake, do me a favor and stop that transport truck coming up behind us.”

  Given the police presence, the transport truck was already slowing down. I helped it slow down significantly faster by taking aim with my 7.62mm M14 suppressed automatic rifle and put several three-round bursts of armor piercing shells through the engine compartment. The suppressor definitely helped to reduce the noise of the rifle bullet - but supersonic bullets travel faster than 1300 ft/s which no suppressor can dampen a hundred percent. As a result, the sound shockwaves echoed off the tunnel walls and all but deafened us. The rifle fire definitely got the full attention of the police patrol and they increased their speed towards us. As the transport ground to a halt, Marc ran to one side of the vehicle, inserted a remote detonator into the plastic explosive and placed it just behind the driver compartment.

  With more than a bit of sarcasm I shouted, “Come on dude, no one is going to be that dumb and chase us around the transport so that you can catch them in a blast.”

  “Got any better ideas, asshole? If you haven’t noticed, there’s zero cover in this tunnel for the next twenty miles. With our ride disabled we are making a stand here, whether we like it or not!”

  Caught off guard I gave him my catch-all reply when at a loss for words, “Fuck you!”

  Marc replied, “Yo’ Mama!" and sprinted around the front and down the far side of the transport, with me on his heels. He placed a three-round burst in the front windshield of the lead hovercraft, just in case they did not see us, causing the crew to abandon their vehicle and close with us on foot. We dashed back around the front of the transport, only to run directly into the gun sights of the second hovercraft crew. We both dropped to the ground and started sending single-shot harassing fire downrange.

  In a real fire fight, unlike the movies, you can shoot a tremendous amount of ammunition on full automatic and not hit a target twenty five yards in front of you. Amateurs emulating their favorite movie action hero will always fire on full auto, which is impressive for noise and smoke, but little else. The second police patrol, taken by surprise at our accurate fire coming through their windshield, ducked for cover, pinned inside their hovercraft.

  Marc grabbed my shoulder and pointed to the top of the transport. “Move now - covering!”

  The transport blocked the direct line of sight for the police officers on foot; Marc’s carefully placed covering fire prevented the police team still in their hovercraft from seeing me perform a tactical withdrawal. A tactical withdrawal allows you to extract yourself from a fire fight in a controlled fashion. Given how scared I was, if it had not been for Marc’s leadership, I was tempted to drop my weapon, turn tail and run. Instead, more afraid of letting Marc down than getting shot at by the police, I did what I was told - crawled up the ladder on the side of the transport and threw myself down on top.

  I yelled, “Covering!” and started to lay down single-shot aimed fire at the police officers still in the second hovercraft. Because their heads were still down, the slight change in the bullet trajectories between Marc’s position on the ground and mine on top of the transport, went unnoticed by the police. Marc, seeing I was in place, pulled the pin on a smoke grenade and dropped it where we had laid only seconds before. To help sell the diversion, he dropped both a Simufire sound maker and Simubody thermal simulator in the smoke cloud.

  Simufire sound makers sound like old fashioned Chinese firecrackers, but have been modified to closely approximate the supersonic sound of high-power rifle fire. They can be programmed for single or automatic fire with a battery life of up to several days and respond to the sound caused by weapon fire. The effect is simple, yet effective. When the enemy fires their weapons, after a random delay, the Simufire will respond with both single and automatic simulated fire. The Simubody is a thermal simulator that can replicate the heat signature of four people for up to twenty-four hours.

  Under the right circumstances the Simufire and the Simubody simulators can sound and give off a heat signature nearly indistinguishable from a half-section of infantry randomly firing automatic weapons. In this case the circumstances were perfect: no wind and the enemy thought they knew exactly where we were positioned. With the smoke, thermal and Simufire decoys active, Marc and I went silent on top of the transport.

  Taking advantage of the lull the police officers jumped out of their vehicle and proceeded to fire an impressive amount of bullets into the smoke. The shotgun-looking weapon was much more than a shotgun. It fired what appeared to be a continuous stream of flechette rounds that impressively ripped the air as they passed beside us. Each flechette round is composed of several tiny dart like projectiles designed to shred targets, unlike bullets which are designed to poke holes in them.

  While one police team assaulted the smoke and decoys from the front, their partners came up the far side of the transport to catch the position we had vacated seconds before, in a cross fire from the rear. Overall, the cops used solid doctrine; their tactics of setting
up a firebase and flanking a stationary enemy position in an unprepared defense that had minimal cover were perfect. Only, we were not stationary and had better situational awareness with continuous observation on the police, while they had lost visual contact due to the smoke screen and simulated thermal images.

  In the fog of battle, neither police team noticed that their sensors were not one hundred percent accurate, as both teams blindly rushed into the smoke, firing their weapons on full automatic. One would have thought that their orders were to capture us alive, but given the volume of weapons fire they had a pretty flexible interpretation of, “apprehend dead or alive." With the police focused on the sound and thermal decoys, we ran the length of the transport and jumped off the far end, putting the bulk of the truck between us and the police. As we hit the ground, Marc hit the remote detonator trigger. I have to admit he was right - ten pounds of plastic can solve a lot of problems. The explosion and accompanying flash were spectacular, lighting up the tunnel for several hundred yards in every direction. As Marc had hoped, the two police teams had run directly through the smoke screen into the blast zone.

  Marc shot me a grin and leaned over to shout in my ear as we were both deaf from the explosion, “Never underestimate the power of stupid! These guys are great cops who never give up, but their tactics are pretty simple because bullets don’t hurt them much.”

  “Roger that, but your little light and sound show probably tripped every sensor for miles. They know we’re here for sure, so much for a quiet sneak-and-peak. Got any other bright ideas? I’d even settle for a dumb one.”

  Marc ran over to the nearest hovercraft and checked the tracker console where he could see a representation of all police units within twenty miles of our position. He started to play around with some of the buttons on the console, to see if he could change the tracking parameters. He looked for anything obvious that the Central Surveillance AI might use to find us. After a minute or so of watching Marc examine the tracking display and randomly try different buttons, I shouted out, “If you’re done fooling around we need to leave most ricky tick!”

  “Don’t get your hopes up, but it appears we have a couple of minutes, if I had to guess, it looks like their command and control center has never dealt with the idea that a field police unit - let alone two field police units - could be destroyed while on patrol, so real time monitoring is not what it should be. We’re not out of the woods, but near as I can tell, only the fire alarm was triggered.”

  As I looked at the burning transport lighting up the tunnel, I remarked, “Got to love technology - looks like the programmer missed this scenario in the surveillance routine.”

  Marc continued to change the scan perimeters when he uttered, “Ooh, that’s interesting.” I looked over his shoulder to what he was pointing out on the tracking display. “Here we are, and here’s all personnel within twenty miles. Notice anything?” Trying not to sound too stupid, I said, “Other than we’re in flashing red, nothing jumps out at me…how about a hint?”

  “The DNA transponder codes we’re using are from guys supposedly offsite to prevent duplicate codes. Any code duplications are immediately flagged by the Central Surveillance AI. Our plan was to impersonate a valid user to avoid the risk of inserting a fake code into the surveillance system.

  “If I’m reading this display correctly, the original owners of the DNA we stole are walking around the complex. In fact, they’re in the local cop shop right here.” Marc pointed out the location on the screen with his finger.

  Marc continued, “That would explain why we got through the first two checkpoints. It looks like everything Bob gave us worked after all, with one small exception: he was supposed to keep the donors on ice until we called him. Depending on how they got away and how well the autosuggestion memory implant took, there is a good chance the entire mission is blown. We’re going to need new DNA codes.”

  “Marc, wait one…” I jumped off the hovercraft and ran over to what was left of the police officers. Surprisingly, they were in relatively good shape considering the size of the blast they were caught in. Marc wandered over and watched as I removed several transponders from what was left of the police patrols. “I see where you’re going - we can borrow the police transponders since they are not DNA tagged.”

  “Bingo, we have a winner! These guys don’t have DNA and since they are nearly invulnerable to weapon fire, no one saw the need to physically link the transponder to the individual when the surveillance system was originally programmed. The scenario of a cop losing a transponder by force was thought to be impossible.”

  Killing police officers sets a bad precedent, but it is hard to get worked up over killing someone that had never been alive. What we had just destroyed were advanced autonomous machines called Sentinels.

  “Marc, as much as you like blowing stuff up, I still think the best option, if we run into any of these guy’s buddies, is to avoid contact altogether. We want to avoid any situation that might lead to a straight-up firefight.”

  “Agreed, straight-up fights are for pulp fiction. In real life you want to engage the enemy with as much decisive killing force as you can muster, preferably overwhelming their capability to shoot back. If that doesn’t work, running away to fight another day is always an option.

  “From the looks of the advanced technology in these Sentinels, someone took the concepts demonstrated by Boston Dynamics in their humanoid Atlas technology and put it on steroids. These machines appear to be several generations more advanced than what’s in the public domain.” I said.

  “No shit. This entire facility makes no sense, everything we have seen so far is decades ahead of any technology commonly acknowledged. This place is so far beyond anything I have ever read about, or heard rumors of, even in my classified days when I had access to Top Secret Material. While I would love to chitchat on why nothing appears to make any sense in this facility, we need to go. What’s your plan to exfil (ex-filtrate) the area?”

  “Since deep thinking is not one of my strong points - especially when being shot at - best I can come up with has a whole lot of ifs involved,” I said. “If we can get rid of the police hovercraft and bodies, it might look like the patrols have yet to find anything. If the police DNA transponders work, we can be tracked but should not set off any alarms. If we figured out how to drive the police hovercraft we might be able to hide in one of the bio-domes.”

  “If...”

  Marc interrupted my train of ifs, “Stop already, this is not helping!”

  “I know it’s a lot of ifs, but we need to break contact for a couple of hours. Enough time to find someplace to hole up and plan something a little less reactive and more proactive. Our suit jammers and fiber optic camouflage create enough distortion we won’t show up on the surveillance tapes, but we are not home free by a long shot. The authorities will see through the confusion pretty quickly once someone starts a frame-by-frame review of the surveillance tapes.

  In the meantime, we need to get out of sight. I’m thinking the bio-domes are our best chance - there’s a risk of exposure because there are more people around, but it has to be better than these tunnels. The tunnels are death traps, all you have to do is block off both ends and there's no escape.” I could see by the dazed look in Marc’s eyes that he was not catching any of my comments.

  He said, “You know, I appreciate your effort to enlighten me and get my opinion, but a simple 'follow me' works. What about heading back to the surface?”

  “That’s the most likely place anyone will look for us. Only an idiot would hide deeper in enemy territory knowing all security forces are on the lookout.”

  Marc answered with a grin, “Then it's unanimous; we’re idiots.”

  Marc ran back to one of the hovercrafts, I ran to the other. I climbed up the stairs and dropped into the seat. In front of me was a large display, very much like our helmet heads-up display, that provided a multi-layer view of everything within a twenty mile radius. At the center of the ma
p was a little hovercraft icon, the equivalent of “you are here”. Driving the hovercraft was a pretty simple affair. A single control stick on a gimbal mount was centered between the two front seats. It had a gas pedal; missing were brake and clutch pedals. Since no one drives a manual anymore, not having a clutch was a minor problem; no brake pedal was a cause for concern!

  I grabbed the control handle and moved it forward against the stops, then applied a bit of pressure on the gas pedal. Acceleration was brisk despite only providing minimal control inputs. It took a couple of tries to get the hang of it. The trick was not to let off the gas too quickly, as the hovercraft went into maximum braking mode which was enough to pitch you out of your seat if you were not strapped in.

  I saw Marc had figured out the driving procedure in the other hovercraft and in short order we had both hovercraft parked beside the remains of the Sentinels and the still burning transport. Even with the masses of black smoke being thrown off by the burning vehicle, the air filtration system was able to keep up, yet there was no visible ventilation ducting or piping anywhere in the tunnel. When it touched the ceiling of the tunnel, the smoke just disappeared. Some interesting technology was at work.

  The hovercraft were designed to transport prisoners, so finding room for what was left of the Sentinels was easy - we simply picked up the pieces and threw them into the prisoner compartment. Afterwards we each picked out the best looking corpse and carried it up to the hovercraft cockpit. They were heavier than they looked and it took a bit of wrestling to get them strapped into the left hand driver seat. If you did not look too closely, the damage appeared superficial, apart from the burnt spots, assorted dings and missing paint. We disabled the panoramic camera in the dash, which could view the entire cockpit, by duct taping the motorized mount and locking the camera on the head of the driver.

  Before we left, I released the police hold on our transport and instructed it to ram the burning transport. The C4 explosion damage and bullet holes were nicely obscured by the collision damage and fire. With the area more or less dressed to look like the transport had blown up due to a collision that ruptured its fuel cells, we headed deeper into the complex.