by CG Blade
“Boy he doesn’t do anything small,” Petra said
“Maybe he’s lacking somewhere?”
“Now that you can file Ter,” Petra said with a smirk climbing the building adjacent to Nelson’s Company on a ladder bolted to the side.
“I will do that immediately Petra.”
The new glasses Jackie had her staff construct were an addition to her arsenal and allowed Petra to see better through walls and get a more defined thermal image. The glasses were a project the staff was developing while Petra was in her tank so the permanent augmentation would be delayed until she could get back for a microchip upgrade.
“I’m going to get a microchip upgrade?” Ter asked.
“Yes Ter. You haven’t you heard that? The scuttlebutt on the Med Lab sat link is that we may get a brontobyte microchip package.”
“That would free up some much needed allocated memory.”
Petra adjusted her glasses and got a good look inside the building. The entire layout was one of a ‘U’ shape and she could see a set of heat signatures in a circular configuration in the back half of the building. Cooper’s vital monitor was still energized at the right side of the factory in the back, not moving but still active.
“Are they having a poker game back there?” she asked.
“Maybe you could win some credits and buy some stock in Twinkies.”
“No Ter. I’m done playing games” Petra climbed back down the ladder and proceeded walking towards the back of the plant. She looked towards the left side of the street and saw a small boy standing there in the shadows drenched in moonlight watching her every move with big wide eyes. “Hi there shouldn’t you be home in bed?” Petra asked as she walked up to him and squatted down to his level.
“No. I’m afraid to go home. My mom’s new boyfriend is mean to me and I don’t want to go back there when he’s there with her. He’s an Old Beatnik,” he told her in a thick Arabic dialect. The boy was dirty and his propeller beanie and clothes were tattered and worn. He couldn’t have been any more than nine or ten.
“Here I want you to have these.” Petra took off her black glasses and handed them to the boy.
“Oh boy wow! What—what are they, like super glasses or something?”
“You’ll see. Now run along. There’s going to be some explosions and I don’t want your mom mad at me because you witnessed wanton violence.”
“OKAY! Thanks lady you’re the best!” The boy ran off towards the harbor and Petra’s boots began to click faster on the stone pavement as she continued her walk towards the back of Nelsons building.
“You’re getting a little ‘creamy’ on the inside Petra.”
“Maybe I am Ter, maybe I am.”
There was a cracked window on the left side of the factory that hadn’t been cleaned for a while and Petra peeked over the bottom of it for a better look. She couldn’t tell if they were workers or soldiers playing cards while talking loudly and drinking. There were six of them and they seemed very engaged in their game unaware of their surroundings.
Petra entered a steel door quietly at the back of the building that for some reason was not guarded or locked. Standing in the shadows, she could see the men two rooms in front of her. She made a cobalt skin change quickly and walked towards them. “Hey fellas you guys need a seventh?” she was now standing against a door arms crossed at her chest.
The six men who were in the middle of a drink set the alcohol down with care on the table in front of them. The men with cards in their hands laid them down slowly. All six bearded heads turned simultaneously to look at Petra adorned with her cobalt glistening armor standing there with both Colts now at the sides of her hips pointed straight at them.
“What? Cat got your tongues?” she asked.
“Who—or what the hell are you supposed to be?” one of them asked in low broken English-Arabic looking her up and down and slowly admiring her magnificent curves.
“Haven’t you heard?” she asked, “The United States of America is cleaning up the world’s trash, and we thought we’d start here!” Petra’s HUD was now up calculating the percentages. The numbers were reeling in front of her eyes. Everything moved in slow motion as all six men reached for their weapons either at their side or on the table in front of them. She had summed the total calculations of all six moving targets and fired the Colts with precision and accuracy. Six loud pops occurred as all the men suddenly fell over backwards. They were lying face up on the floor still in their chairs forming their own morbid cartwheel. Cards and broken bottles leaking liquid were strewn about the men who never got a shot off. The Colts smoked as she blew on the ends of them towards the bloody, mist-filled air.
“Nice shootin Tex.”
“They were all bad—very bad Ter”.
She made her way across the carnage and into the next room. There was a plethora of boxes, wooden crates and various electronic components piled high next to the walls. Most of them had ‘Rayson Industries’ and the shield logos stamped on them and were clean and neatly stacked and ready for shipment.
Petra dug around in one of the boxes through straw batting and pulled out a tube in a metallic silver cylinder containing a warm red liquid inside. “Wonder what this is. This doesn’t look like the normal brown propulsion unit tube that Nelson manufactures.” Petra said quietly, trying not to alert anyone.
“Not sure Petra. It does not exist in my database and we should get it analyzed. Regardless, you should be careful with it. You never know what Nelson is up to.”
Petra moved swiftly across the front of the factory to a large assembly room of some type. There were worker bots of all sizes with miles of conveyor and pallets of boxes stacked up around various stations. Most of the room seemed to be an automated process and right now, everything was dark and quiet. No lights. No power. Just moonlight tunneled down from the upper windows at the top of the plant showering the top of tall vats and pieces of equipment in the room with a white glow. Petra squatted down behind a worker bot with multiple arms. “I don’t see why this factory isn’t running right now Ter why would it be shut down? He loves money. What is he up to?”
“Maybe it’s a holiday like World Cup Robotics?”
Suddenly the lights came on. They were blinding as pops of brilliant white light went off everywhere throughout the plant like millions of tiny flashbulbs being set off at once. Petra stood up and quickly focused her eyes to the new surroundings. She could see a yellow railing wrapping around a mezzanine in front of three offices on the floor above her. Leaning against the mezzanine’s four-foot high yellow railing on the steel floor overlooking her was Ray Nelson dressed in his usual attire with Kirk at his side, wearing his typical cheap black suit and a white tie. She quickly squatted back down behind the yellow and red striped square bot that gave her cover.
“So how’s your night going, Judith or should I say—Cobalt—or whatever it is now? Ray was now flexing his hands over the railing, moving from side to side and trying to get a better look at her.
“I’m good. And you?”
“Oh you know, just trying to do some home repairs and remodeling. Maybe take a little cruise on my yacht you know the usual.” Ray was now laying on the sarcasm thick.
“Yeah I know how it is. Where’s Cooper?” she asked not expecting an answer.
“Cooper is getting an upgrade my dear kitty. He’s going to be a little more—shall we say—compliant in his next life.”
Petra thought she heard Kirk number two or three or whichever one exhale a weird laugh.
“I just want you to know that you are going to suffer greatly and die slowly,” Petra told him now leaping into the air over the bot onto a small steel conveyor about four feet off the ground. It echoed through the room as her body planted on top of the flexible steel frame. Her HUD was now up, calculating the numbers. “I’m going to need big boys Ter,” she said out of the corner of her mouth.
“Yes Petra.”
“Who in the world are you talking to
? Are you like schizophrenic or something? Is that like OCD or some weird thing you’ve got? I watched the video of the mansion scuffle with Kirk and you are quite amazing. Was it Cooper that did that to you, made you into that thing?”
“Here’s your thing you son-of-a-bitch!”
“Should I add son-of-a—?” Ter asked interrupting their banter.
“Yes Ter!” Petra held up two fully loaded ‘Puff the Magic Dragons’. They were 20mm Vulcan Mini Guns resembling Gatling guns used on Helicopters in the late twentieth century. Each gun held six-thousand rounds of ammunition and was nicknamed for the flames and billowing smoke emitting from the muzzle during use.
She pulled both the triggers simultaneously destroying everything in front of her in a blaze of flash and sparks. The spraying circular bullets started from the opposite direction on the mezzanine’s yellow railing and were starting to move towards each other to the center where Nelson was now squatting. Pieces of railing, steel, vats of hot red liquid and building materials bounced and chinked in all directions. Nelson tried to outrun the fodder, dodging and ducking, pushing Kirk out of his way as the projectiles pierced Nelson’s right arm and leg. An escaping Nelson had shoved Kirk into a doorway in the center office. Kirk landed on the floor face down in a thunderous thud that rocked the offices and rafters. Nelson ran through a door in the back of the office stepping on Kirk on his way out.
Petra held up the massive cannons to blow the smoke off the barrels but she couldn’t reach the top due to their length. “We have got to make these shorter”
“Yes Petra I will make a note of it and file it in a folder called:
‘Guns_that_are_too_long_for_me_to_blow_the_smoke_off_the_ends_of_the_barrels_once_I’ve_killed_someone’.”
“Nice Ter, very nice.”
Quietly Petra moved towards the back of the building stepping over smoking pieces of bot parts on her way up the stairs to the offices on the mezzanine of the factory. She had destroyed a lot of equipment and there was a haze of blue warm smoke in the building and hot red liquid everywhere. Chunks of the building were still falling apart and dropping onto the workroom and conveyors below. Kirk was lying face down on the office floor. A dirty footprint mark lay on his back mixed with red splashes throughout. There were big drops of red liquid in two single file lines on the floor and some of the liquid had been flung on the walls heading towards the back of the offices. I hit him she thought. Petra could hear a faint conversation coming from the backside of the offices. She turned towards the back office door and stepped through it to find an old wrinkled longhaired balding doctor in a dirty white lab coat leaning over a man in a chair with a black hood on his drooping head. The room looked like a laboratory with medical equipment stuffed and turned on in every corner. Shelves were laden with tools, books, and beakers of hot liquid but there was no sign of Nelson.
“You’re too late honey,” the old man told her in a squeaky and creaky voice as he turned and tried to back away from the chair slowly hugging the wall and knocking things over as he retreated staring her down with an evil grin.
Standing in the doorway the only thing that was moving on Petra was her eyes. They shifted back and forth from the old doctor to the man in the chair. Back and forth repeatedly only her eyes moved. A Colt rose up and she pulled the trigger. The old doctor flew against the back wall of the room with the force of an invisible fist to the temple. The white wall behind where he was now slouched over some equipment was splattered with blood and fragments of bone. Cobalt colored smoke rose from the hole between his eye sockets.
Petra ran over picked up the man’s head and quickly removed the black hood.
“Jim!”
He was unresponsive and had wiring and cables hooked to his body from all directions. Bags of hanging red fluid were dripping slowly into tubes coming out of his blood-soaked chest. Petra disconnected the cables and liquid filled bags and tried to wake him up but was unsuccessful.
“You—move—now,” a low deep voice said from the office floor behind her.
“Uh—oh” Petra said under her breath
Petra, who was now standing over Cooper trying to free him from his bindings, turned her head in slow motion to see Kirk behind her attempting to stand like a spinning top that had lost momentum. He was weaving back and forth trying to regain his balance forcing himself up slowly from the dirty floor with his giant hands out in front of him.
Petra turned quickly to face him. “I need the Hydroar now Ter!”
“I’m sorry Petra. I deleted that from your files.”
“You did what!?” Petra screamed aloud.
“I had to delete some of your older files to make room for your bigger guns. Those weapons you think up take up millions of bytes of physical memory and a lot more physics to bend light, create your Cobalt polymers, mold your armor, and provide the necessary real world functionality. The bigger the weapon the more memory I need to produce them and hold them in storage. I think I may need that brontobyte memory upgrade now.”
Kirk had regained his composure and started walking clumsily towards them from across the office.
“I need something Ter—NOW!” Petra was now backing up against Cooper to shield him in the chair.
Petra looked down to see an old ancient Indian bow and arrow in her right hand. “What am I supposed to do with this?” The bow and arrow was made of tree branches with a tattered string a grey stone arrowhead and a multi-colored feather quill.
“That is all I could produce right now. Shoot him in the visual cortex,” Ter suggested.
Petra’s HUD now up and running provided her with the best solution to an arrow shot thirty degrees upward with no wind. She pulled back on the tight string pressed against her cheek with the back notch of the arrow stem. Petra held the bow with her left hand and cradled the arrow quill and shaft with her two right forefingers. She let go of the arrow and let it fly over the bow as the feathers straightened out backwards by the force of the shot, which caused the arrow to wobble slightly towards its target. There was a ‘tink’ sound, as Kirk stood there, stunned, as the eyelid of his right eye could no longer flip down to its destination. It was blocked by a grey stone arrowhead tip sticking straight out of the middle of his brown metallic covered pupil through his white eyeball.
“I need one more arrow Ter!”
“Yes Petra.”
Petra let the second shot fly from the bow. Again, a metallic ‘tink’ sound followed.
Kirk pulled on both the arrows with each hand and gave them a mighty tug. He was holding both his ‘eyeballs’ in his hands at the ends of the bark stripped arrows like marshmallows over a campfire. Wiring fell to his cheeks and dangled out of the metal eye sockets. White smoke billowed out of his optical cavities as he tried to search for Petra like a kid playing Marco Polo in a swimming pool. His outstretched hands still clutched the arrows that pierced his point of view. Kirk was destroying the furniture beams and doorways thrashing about. Pieces of the office and tiled ceiling came down on top of him as he tried to frantically feel his way around the room in need of a Seeing-Eye dog or at least a white red tipped cane.
“It looks like he believes in an eye for an eye!”
“If I could laugh I would Petra.”
Petra now from the feet up was slowly changing from cobalt back into black armor. She scooped up Cooper in her arms from the red and dirty stained patient chair as Kirk’s frame finally tipped over the yellow mezzanine railing crashing on top of liquid covered conveyors and bots below. She backed into the same door Nelson went out of and pushed the door open with her elbows cradling a blood-soaked limp Cooper. There was a set of metal steps strapped to the side of the factory that led to a stone covered moonlit back alley two floors below her. She noticed drops of liquid in two single file lines that were covering the top of the steps on her way down to the street below.
Chapter 21
TERMINATION
The alley in the back of the factory was filled with trash and refuse from
the daily work routines at Nelson’s plant. The street was paved stone and a cruiser would have a hard time fitting down the narrow passage that had an abandoned building adjacent to it. Petra could see the same door she used to go into the plant now as she made her way to the corner of the building. There was a faint whining noise as she quietly peeked around the dirty factory eyeing the street and heading south. There stood the silhouette of a man in the middle of the street bathed in moonlight and dimly lit street lights further south. She could tell he was ‘listing’ to the left trying to stand up straight but swaying back and forth slightly. His left hand was near his cheek up in the air and he was gripping something tightly.
“Judith—or Cobalt is it?” I can hear you rustling around like vermin. What are you doing back there? Why don’t you come out so we can talk?” It was Nelson. His voice was barely coherent and high pitched at times.
Petra set Cooper’s limp body down on top of some old cardboard boxes and rags. His vital monitor was still active but she knew he was running out of precious time.
“You know what curiosity killed don’t you Ray? How are the wounds doing? Any clue when you’re going to fall over and die?” she asked trying to figure out why he was still upright.
“Cute. You’re very cute my dear and you’re very witty. Stop with the feline references already. You’ve been a pain in my ass and now I’m getting rid of that pain once and for all.”
“I thought you loved the—kitty—references Ray.” Petra’s HUD catalog was up in front of her eyes with a lot of blank pages now. The larger weapons were being replaced with smaller ones. “Ter what do we have left?”
“Try this Petra.”
Petra looked down and saw a Jim Bowie knife in her right hand.