“Hell yeah,” Craig replied. He turned to Robbie. “Robbie, you stay on my six until we reach the surface, understand?”
“I understand, Captain Emilson,” Robbie replied.
Craig turned back and faced the same direction as the rest of the team. In only ten seconds, the bottom of the ship would open up in trap-door fashion, and they would begin their descent.
“Remember, Doc,” Wilson barked, “when the door opens, you won’t even feel like you’re falling for the first thirty seconds, but keep an eye on your time gauge. If you aren’t in the delta position by then, you’re a goner.”
The count reached zero.
“Away!” announced the crackling, radio voice of the pilot.
The doors swung open and the small pressure vacuum sucked the six figures out into space in their triangle formation. Craig was the far man on the left.
The silence was perfect—not even the familiar sound of his own breathing accompanied him. Wilson had been right: As the seconds ticked by on his HUD, Craig didn’t feel as though he were falling at all. The formation seemed to be a tableau, hanging in the blackness of space, the azure blue of the Earth mixed with the warm brown of the Asian continent below. The other members of the SOLO team expertly adjusted their trajectories, each man putting himself into the critical twenty-five-degree angle to control his speed and drag when they hit the atmosphere. Craig awkwardly performed the maneuvers needed to match their delta positions—movements much more difficult to perform in a supersonic spacesuit that felt like a sleeping bag with arms than they were in his familiar HALO suit.
The seconds continued to tick by as the telemetry, communications, and pressure readouts flashed on the OLED of his HUD. The thirty-second mark was reached, and the aneroids in his suit reacted to the atmospheric pressure as they began to hit the outer rim of the atmosphere, the psi remaining at 3.5 to keep him comfortable and conscious.
“Good work, Doc. You’re doing fine,” said the reassuring voice of Commander Wilson over the radio. Craig looked down at the commander, just a couple of meters below him, still the point of their formation. “Keep those arms tucked. The pressure won’t feel like much at first, but when we hit Mach 1, the turbulence will be powerful. Even a little twitch can send you into a fatal tailspin.”
“Noted,” Craig replied. He wanted to gulp a nervous breath of air but resisted the urge. The HUD read just over four minutes remaining on their descent. Their altitude was dropping dramatically as their speed approached Mach 1.
“Sonic boom is imminent, boys! Steady!” Wilson shouted.
The SOLO suits were equipped with sound dampeners in the helmets to dull the thunderous clap of the sonic boom, but they couldn’t do much to curtail the turbulence. Craig braced every muscle in his body as the speedometer continued to climb. He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw.
The sonic boom percussion felt like the explosion of a nearby landmine. The members of the team were seemingly all able to ride it out, and Craig’s eyes flew back open when the turbulence seemed to settle. The position of the four others in the triangle formation remained perfect, but the green dot signifying Robbie’s position on Craig’s HUD was suddenly dropping away behind him, moving further and further from the team.
“Doc, did you just lose your robot friend?” Wilson shouted.
“Looks like it,” Craig confirmed. There was no way to turn his head to get a visual confirmation, but it appeared the boom had sent Robbie into a tailspin behind them. “It’s okay. If he recovers from the spin and lands all right, he’ll double-time it to our target and meet us.”
“All right,” Wilson replied.
A second later, Craig’s HUD suddenly went blank, before briefly turning back on and then going blank once again.
“Uh, my HUD just went down,” Weddell stated in controlled alarm.
“Mine too,” Craig replied.
“We’re all down,” Wilson quickly realized. “We’re gonna have to open high and do it manually!”
Then, just as suddenly as they had flashed off, the HUDs came back online.
“I’m back up!” Craig shouted.
“Is everyone back up?” Wilson shouted.
Each member of the team confirmed.
“Okay! Then we stick to the original plan. Adjust to thirty-five degrees!”
Craig watched the time to opening tick down on his HUD. They were now only a minute away from their computer-controlled low opening. Their speed was slowing, but something didn’t feel right.
“Commander, have the onboard SOLO systems ever glitched like this before?” Craig asked.
“No. This is a first,” Wilson replied.
“Then I recommend we do a high manual—”
“Cut the chatter, Doc!” Wilson shouted. “Concentrate!”
The yellow dust covering the ground was closing in below them, its surface gleaming in the sunlight as it crawled like a yellow, living fog. The impact crater into which they were supposed to be touching down wasn’t visible.
A horrifying possibility suddenly reached into Craig’s skull and drummed its frozen fingers over his brain. The time readout was now below twenty seconds. “Oh no,” he whispered. “I’m taking command!” Craig suddenly shouted, nearly screaming in desperation. “Open your chutes now! Override! Override!”
“Belay that order!” Commander Wilson shouted back.
“Override! Override!”
Ten seconds...
“Follow protocol, SOLO!” Wilson screamed.
“The telemetry’s wrong! Open! Open!” Craig bellowed furiously. He opened his chute, the wind catching it hard as it unfurled, tugging him into a dramatic deceleration. The other members of his team fell away into the yellow dust, disappearing as though they’d been figments of his imagination.
Craig continued to float downward for several seconds, the yellow dust reaching upward to envelop his boots. “SOLO team, do you copy? Commander Wilson? Do you copy?”
The silence continued for a few seconds more before, finally, Weddell’s voice crackled through the interference. “Doc! Commander Wilson is...he’s dead, sir.”
10
Craig touched down in a thick yellow cloud of dust. His parachute ejected automatically so he wouldn’t be dragged away into the dust storm. Above, the sun’s rays were nearly visible, suggesting that the dust cloud was abating, as predicted, but for now, he was blinded, with only his HUD to guide him. “Weddell, I’m on your three o’clock,” Craig said, “fifteen meters away.”
“Copy.”
The green dot on Craig’s HUD that signified Wilson was also still active, and Weddell’s dot was next to it. Cheng and Klein had vanished. Craig strode in his exoskeleton, only a few steps taking him most of the way to the quickly materializing silhouette of Weddell, leaning over the crumpled form of Wilson. A couple strides more, and the image came into focus, the stark reality of Wilson’s nearly pulverized body emerging.
“You were right, Doc,” Weddell said as he turned his head to look up at Craig. “The telemetry was all wrong. I played it safe and followed your orders at the last second. My chute opened in time, but I hit the surface hard.” He turned and looked down at his fallen officer-in-charge. “Commander Wilson didn’t even open his chute. He...God, he hit the ground at terminal velocity.” He shook his head. “I saw him hit.”
Craig dropped to his knees and tried to get a view of Wilson’s face, but the commander had fallen face down, and his helmet had burrowed into an impact crater of its own creation. Craig could read Wilson’s absent vitals on his HUD, so it seemed true that the commander was, indeed, dead. But the SOLO team were super soldiers. “There might still be hope,” Craig said to Weddell.
“What? What are you talking about? I saw him hit the ground myself. He’s dead as dead, Doc.”
Craig pushed Wilson’s pulverized body so that it turned over, revealing the golden reflective facemask. He popped Wilson’s mask up so he could see inside the helmet; the visor was splashed with blood, but Wilson’s h
ead appeared to be intact. “The respirocytes,” Craig replied. “His brain is still getting oxygen. If I can get him into suspended animation fast enough—”
“I understand,” Weddell quickly said. “SOLO team, do you copy?” The radio crackled for a few moments, but there were periodic pops and chirps, and one sounded like it might be a voice. “Did you hear that?” Weddell asked Craig.
“Yes. Weddell, they were on the far right of the formation.” Craig stood to his feet and stepped a few paces through the yellow dust before he quickly stumbled over a ledge, tumbling onto his stomach, digging hard with his exoskeleton’s strength into the earth to keep from tumbling further down the steep incline. “Damn it! Weddell, we just missed the crater! It was to the south! If Klein and Cheng opened manually, they might have made it!”
“That makes sense,” Weddell replied excitedly. “The crater goes down one kilometer. If they’re far enough down there, that would explain why we can’t get radio contact through all the interference.”
Craig finished crawling back up over the lip of the crater and returned to see Weddell standing, having retrieved his twin machine guns from his backpack. The guns were gigantic, and the armor-piercing bullets made them far too heavy to be carried by a regular human; fortunately the exoskeleton did 100 percent of the heavy lifting.
“I can head down there,” Weddell said determinedly. “If they’re already there, I’ll establish contact, and we can still finish the mission. You should stay here and wait for Robbie to return. We might need that thing after all.”
“There’s a problem with that plan,” Craig replied.
“What?”
“I don’t think that was just a glitch with our telemetry. I think we were sabotaged. New coordinates were fed to us at the last minute, pushing us off target so we’d miss the crater and hit the outer surface.”
“Are you saying—”
“The A.I. is still functioning. Somehow, it detected us and tried to defend itself.”
Weddell’s face was ghost white. “That’s bad news, Doc.”
“If you get down there and don’t make contact with Cheng and Klein, my advice is that you toss as much Semtex down that hole as you can and haul your ass back up. We’ll head back to the extraction point and report what we know.”
“Agreed,” Weddell replied. “Stay here. I’m going to go dark pretty quick with all this interference, but I’ll contact you ASAP, when I’m making my way back up.”
“Good luck,” Craig replied as he watched Weddell jog into the yellow fog and disappear over the lip of the crater.
He turned back to Wilson and got down to his knees. The commander’s face was pale and lifeless—a horrific sight. Only minutes ago, he had been alive and in his element, guiding his team and helping the rookie make it safely to the surface. Now he was nothing. Just a bag of tenderized meat.
Or was he? The respirocytes had changed the game. Craig knew if his brain continued getting oxygen until the S.A. bags arrived, Wilson might just have a slim chance. His body had been destroyed, but as long as he could get to a hospital before he suffered brain death, survival was still possible.
“Robbie? Robbie, do you copy?” Craig asked over the radio. Robbie’s signal wasn’t appearing. The robot could run three times the speed of a human sprinter and sustain that pace for hours until his lithium air battery finally gave out. As long as Robbie was able to open his chute in time to avoid being pulverized on a rock somewhere, he should be rapidly approaching, but would he make it in time? “Robbie?” Craig said again, forlornly. It was unlikely that his communication would carry further than the Wi-Fi signal that detected his location.
Suddenly, Robbie’s green dot appeared on Craig’s HUD. Robbie was less than 200 meters away and approaching with supernatural swiftness. He’d be there in less than five seconds. “Robbie! Thank God! We’ve got a man down!”
The dot continued its rapid approach. The dust was beginning to settle, and Craig could peer further through the yellow storm. Robbie’s uncanny robotic run emerged as a dark brown silhouette, accented by the blue lights on his joints. The strange form quickly became larger.
It didn’t appear to be slowing down.
“Robbie?” Craig said one last time before the MAD bot leapt into the air and came crashing down upon him.
At the very last instant, Craig managed to put his arm up and block the attack, but the blow still knocked him hard to the ground. He kicked at the robot and knocked it away from him, sending it crashing to the ground a few meters away. “Robbie! Stand down!” he commanded.
The robot didn’t obey. Instead, it charged at him again, appearing from out of the yellow dust, barreling toward Craig’s chest.
“Goddamn it!” Craig shouted as he blocked the attack, backhanding Robbie to the side, sending the robot tumbling as it struggled to stay on its feet. The machine was faster than Craig, but its balance, although serviceable, was still inferior to that of a human. Craig used this advantage, along with the strength of his exoskeleton, which was equal to Robbie’s, to stay in the fight. “Sleep, Robbie! Sleep mode!” he commanded desperately.
Robbie had tumbled onto his side but he quickly snapped back up to his feet and began charging.
It was clear that the robot was no longer Robbie; the Chinese A.I. had somehow taken control of the MAD bot. Craig’s only chance was to terminate the unit before it terminated him. With no time to pull out one of his guns, he would have to repel one last attack and get Robbie onto the ground again. He punched the robot as it reached him, badly denting its face and driving it backward into the dust. It fell to the ground once more, and Craig immediately stood atop it, planting his heels on its chest. He reached for his backpack and began to withdraw one of his guns so he could blast the machine in the head and chest to disable it.
Before he could retrieve his weapon, however, it deftly swung its metal legs up under Craig’s pelvis and used a super-fast, powerful kick to drive Craig’s very human body upward and off of it. The impact sent Craig nearly three meters into the air, but far worse, it shattered his pelvis and lower spine, instantly paralyzing him below the waist. Craig landed in the dirt, face down, in shock, barely able to move.
A second later, Robbie had him twisted around, tossing him onto his back. “No,” Craig said weakly as the machine drove its fist through the several layers of protection of the SOLO suit and grasped the front of his uniform, pulling his limp body, helmet and all, out of its protection as though he were a premature calf being roughly liberated from the dead body of its mother. Robbie tossed Craig roughly next to Wilson before quickly crawling into the SOLO suit and exoskeleton, assuming control and expertly retrieving the guns.
“No,” Craig whispered weakly again as he watched. He remembered what Wilson had said about being exposed to the fallout, but he was helpless. He couldn’t feel his legs, and he couldn’t defend himself. All he could do was lie there on his side and watch as Robbie leapt into the crater, undoubtedly in search of the rest of the SOLO team.
“SOLO team,” Craig said, mustering as much strength as possible as he tried to warn the rest of the men of the uncontrollable threat that was stalking them. “The A.I. has control of Robbie. Do you copy?” His voice barely crossed the threshold of a whisper. The radio returned only empty static. “No,” he said one last time.
Flashes of light popped in the dust cloud of the crater like sheet lightning on a summer evening back on the farm. Each flash was a cruel joke—an exclamation point on the A.I.’s victory.
“Not like this,” Craig whispered. “Not like this.” He tried to take a breath, but he couldn’t. “Samantha...” he began, his tone suddenly softening. “Sam. I don’t know if they’re going to let you see this, but just in case, I love you. I’m so sorry I couldn’t make it back to you. I wish...I wish we’d been born in a different time. You were the love of my life. You are the love of my life.” He looked back down at Wilson’s face, lifeless. The image was surreal. It seemed wrong. “Life is
the most important thing, Sam. Keep living. No matter what. Keep living.”
A few moments later, Robbie leapt preternaturally out of the crater and landed inches from where Craig remained, immobilized like an ant with its legs pulled off. The MAD bot aimed its gun, pointing the barrel squarely at Craig’s chest.
“If you don’t want to see the future,” the A.I. began in Robbie’s juvenile voice, “then you have to die.”
The gun thundered to life.
Craig died.
There wasn’t even blackness.
PART 2
1
WAKING UP wasn’t a choice. Even if one hoped to rest in peace, eternal sleep was no longer an option.
Craig opened his eyes, his head in a hazy stupor, but the picture quickly became understandable. He was in a bed, his wife nearby to the left, the room small and sterile. “I’m alive,” he whispered.
“Yes, you’re alive,” Samantha replied, her lips smiling while her eyes told an altogether different story.
“It was a trap,” Craig suddenly said. “The others—”
Samantha stepped to him and took his left hand, causing him to suddenly realize that his wrist was in a restraint. “Craig, you’re alive. You’re safe. I’ve missed you more than you can know.” She placed her head on his chest and put an open palm on his heart. “I never thought I’d see you again.”
He wanted to hold her, but the restraints made it impossible. He could only move his left thumb against the side of her hand. “It’s okay, baby. I’m alive. We’re going to be okay, no matter what. I won’t leave you again—not ever.”
She suddenly stood straight, her face tensed hard against some sort of hidden anguish. “But, Craig, there are things I have to tell you that won’t be easy to hear.”
Craig read the sympathetic expression on her face. She hadn’t been to war, and she didn’t realize the strength of a serviceman. To her, the news that his team was dead seemed beyond words—but he knew he could handle it. He’d seen it with his own eyes, and he remembered it in vivid detail. “I’m ready,” he said softly as he nodded to his wife. “I can take it. My team. They didn’t make it. Right?”
Post-Human Series Books 1-4 Page 5