by Chris Hechtl
“That's close enough,” he called out. “You aren't welcome here.”
“Give us what we want!” someone called back as they tried to inch back to cover.
“Sure. Here are your friends. They are it that you are getting. Anyone tries anything and you are dead,” Harper said, grabbing the leader and shoving him out, then his friend. “Get walking,” Harper said. “Tell them to shop elsewhere.”
“We can't. They'll kill us,” the leader said.
“Tough for you. But you chose your side. Move,” Harper growled, hefting the pistol. When the guy hesitated, he sighed. “I don't have to kill you. All I need to do is shoot you somewhere that will hurt. I can let gangrene finish you off. Move. Now.”
That got both men shambling along. The first tripped over his trousers after a couple of meters and sprawled. Harper snorted but watched as the man struggled with his bound limbs until he got himself in order. He turned to glower at the chimp but finally he got up, yanking his pants up. He took off at a faster pace.
“Think they'll be killed for failing?” Kelsy asked from behind him as Baxter closed the door and bolted it.
“Don't know. Don't care. I hope so; they knew the inside of this place. I probably shouldn't have let them leave. Silly me,” Harper murmured, still watching the group. He could see the two clutching at their trousers as they explained something to a big, broad shouldered human male. The guy didn't look happy. He also didn't look like a typical bandit; Harper had been half expecting crossed bandillos or something—a scarf covering his face or something. Not some dipshit in a parka carrying an old hunting rifle.
“We need food!” the guy said turning to them. “We're out!”
“What have you got to trade?” Harper demanded without thinking.
“Trade?”
“Yeah!” Harper growled.
“We've … got a couple um …”
“Why don't you think about it. You make a move I shoot. If I even think you are going to get in here, I'll torch the food and gear. Got me? You aren't getting anything.”
“Damn.”
“Right,” Harper smiled thinly. He nodded to Fiben. “They may not be able to tell us apart. But they know a chimp is in charge. Watch it.”
“Right,” Fiben said. He pointed to two men. “Check the perimeter. They could be trying to sneak someone in the back way.” He pointed to Donnie. “You too.” The dog nodded and took off at a run.
“What do you want?” a voice called out.
“Information,” Harper replied. “Maps of the area where you know robots are. We'll give you treinta MREs for that.”
“Deal,” the bandit leader said. “But we need more than that. That won't fill half my people's vientres. Por favor, we've got ninos …”
“Bullshit. We've taken a look at your people—all adults or teens, no kids. Pull the other one, it's got bells on. Lie to me again and the deal's off,” Harper drawled.
The bandit leader's face worked. He didn't seem to like being called a liar; Harper could tell that much. He was wondering how much of the man's Latin pride would start to take over his brain.
“What do you want,” the man bellowed.
“Information. The rest I know you wouldn't give me anyway. But I'll up the ante to one MRE per person. One at a time come over here and we'll ask some questions. When we finish you get a meal and then can go. Deal?”
“Fine,” the bandit said after a consult with a couple of his men.
“One person at a time I said. The rest stay well back, beyond the bend. Now,” Harper ordered.
“Are you serious?” Kelsy demanded.
“Yes. They know the area. They know where the bots are because that is where they need to avoid them. They know where people are too. So …”
She frowned then nodded. “Okay.”
“We'll keep an eye out. And if they try anything at night, we've got night vision goggles. They don't,” he said.
“You hope.”
“Right,” Harper growled. “But we can get a good look at each. Get a name and face. They can be rounded up for crimes later,” he said.
Slowly Kelsy nodded as she caught on. “Gotcha.”
“If they try to do double duty, let them. Make sure we ask the right questions and test them to make sure they aren't bullshitting us.”
“Um …”
“I'm leaving this to you. Get it done. Baxter, Paudrick, back her up. You two, three …,” he pointed to a few of the natives, “… as well. Theo, take a couple of people and get the MREs. Put an extra watch on the perimeter, roving patrols.”
“Gotcha,” Theo said, taking off at a trot.
“And we do this,” Fiben sighed, leaning against the side of the wall as someone knocked on the gate. “First customer,” he said, pointing to the door.
“No weapons!” Harper called out as he opened the door.
Chapter 33
At midnight Greenwich time on November 16th, the invasion began. It was a full court press with diversion landings elsewhere. The entire event was started off with an orbital bombardment. Kinetic weapons rained down, obliterating any target they impacted.
To those on the ground, it looked like vertical lightning marching across the ground. Military bases, power plants, manufacturing, and known concentrations of bots were hit.
The bombardment went in waves. Each wave launched a few minutes after the first but before it had impacted the ground. Successive waves of metal rain coming down to tear everything apart.
Ares, Zhukov, Tengu, and Nezha did their best to defend against the hail of deadly rain. However, the soot from the nuclear winter ablated their lasers and hampered their targeting. They did manage to cut up some of the hits, diverting a few to burn up in the atmosphere. But the edges of their territories took a pounding.
Dams that hadn't burst from frozen water did so under the hammering. Power plants exploded in a rain of debris while industrial centers were flattened. The destruction had its own brutal death toll, but because Ares and Skynet had pushed a perimeter of death around each facility in order to guard it, the death toll was fortunately light. Not that the spacers knew that.
The rain lasted six long hours and marched around the globe. When it was over, there was a brief pause before the next wave began.
Behind the lethal rain came the pods, each about three meters in diameter and four long. They quickly became a meteor shower.
<>V<>
Boomer looked out from under the overpass to see the bright vertical lightning as it struck down. It seemed to march across the surface like some sort of holy rain. Wherever it touched explosions happened. After a moment he felt a tremor and then a lot of them, like a slow rolling earthquake. That was quickly followed by the sounds of explosions and sonic booms.
“Get under cover. Not there,” he said, waving his people out. He pointed to the flood canal nearby. The stream of water inside had been frozen over, but it still left about a meter to get into the short tunnel. “There,” he ordered.
“What the hell's going on?” Molly demanded, hands over her ears. He pointed. She saw the rain and bright flashes marching their way. After a moment she nodded and hustled.
<>V<>
Harper's people had secured a nice ten kilometer perimeter around the landing strip. They couldn't push the perimeter out further during the day, however; there was just too many ways the damn robots could take a side street and come in behind them to ambush them. He'd lost two fire teams of natives that way.
So when the bombardment commenced, he looked up and called the troops in to cover. “Everyone inside the perimeter. Move it! Hustle!” he snarled, waving to them.
“What the hell's going on?” a native asked.
“You want to stop and ask stupid questions and get killed or do it later?” Baxter snarled, picking up a toddler at a trot. He swung her under her arm, and took off with her anxious mother and sister in tow.
“Into the basements! Away from the windows people!” Fiben called o
ut, waving for them to get inside. The earthquake that hit nearly knocked him off his feet. It did shatter the few remaining windows in the area. Glass rained down around him, forcing him to duck and cover.
“Move it, people!” Harper snarled as he saw the vertical lightning striking a known pocket of robots twenty kilometers away. “Arriba arriba! Andele! Andale!”
<>V<>
Attila felt the ground quake; it seemed to roll on and on. Everyone looked up as dust puffed around them and the lights and fixtures hanging from the ceiling began to sway. “Bad one man, eight point something?”
“This a real one or a nuke?” Gilpin asked as he looked from his cards up to the ceiling.
“Does it matter?” Bravos asked casually, making an adjustment to his hand. “I'm in,” he said, anteing up a coin.
“Oh, big spender,” Posey mocked, matching the bet then exceeding it with another silver coin. The former occupants of their new home had been Russian survivalists. They had stocked the building quite well with plenty of food, fuel, water, and other supplies. They'd even planned for trades with a stash of silver and gold coins. The coins were useless except as poker chips.
“I'm in,” Attila said, matching the bet. He checked his cards. He had a full house. “I also call,” he said as the earthquake began to dissipate.
<>V<>
Ares noted the beginning of the invasion and swung into action. There was little it could do to interdict the KEW strikes; by the time the strikes had gotten below the clouds where the energy weapons could engage them, it was too late to destroy them. The largest strikes were hit with rail guns and energy weapons anyway, and 39 percent of the hits on North American soil were close misses. However, in some cases even a close miss was enough to destroy the target.
Mobile planetary defenses on ships, mobile weapon platforms, and in the air were marked by the observers on high. As the pods came lower, those same defenses began to fire, tearing them apart.
<>V<>
“Ares has taken the bait, sir,” General Schlock stated. General Murtough grunted. “Time for the old bait and switch,” the Aussie general said, tapping out the command.
“Give him a minute to get deeper into the basket,” General Murtough murmured.
“Sir, if too many of the decoys are destroyed, their debris will obscure our sensors,” a tech warned. “We'll lose positive lock on some of the targets.”
“Possibly. But I'm willing to take the risk,” General Murtough murmured. He glanced at the Aussie then nodded. “A single stacked mission,” he ordered. “Keep a reserve to pick off leakers,” he ordered.
“As ordered, General,” Schlock replied with a nod. “We're ready, sir,” he said after a moment.
“Then fire.”
<>V<>
Tumagar's head popped up from under the rotten-out jetty. He left the seaweed on his head; it was good camouflage. His small eyes could just barely make out the meteor shower in the sky above. Apparently something was going down. He could see lines, but his vision wasn't suited for seeing distant objects. He wiggle waggled his whiskers a few times, trying to pick out details before he decided it was best to call in and see what was going on.
If they would tell him. He rather doubted it. Some things you just didn't trust to a transmission, no matter how encrypted it was. For instance, he could have used some warning that the orbital bombardment was about to begin. That hadn't happened. Half his squad was underground in the sewers, the rest had become scattered and separated.
The footsteps above made him look up through the cracks in the wood. An android was there; it too was looking up to the sky. The selkie looked around to make sure the robot was alone before it reached up with a massive flippered hand. It grabbed the robot's left ankle and then yanked hard. The robot fell into the water with a splash, tangling in the old net between two half-sunken fishing catches.
Tumagar grinned as he sank below the water line to attack the robot from below, tearing it apart.
<>V<>
Ares recognized something was wrong when a hot wash of the incoming pods showed that they were all a uniform size. There were no shuttles. At first the A.I. considered it as an airborne drop similar to what the allies had done in Europe during World War II. It considered holding back its fire for the larger shuttles but there were so many of them and each presented a massive radar and thermal signature, too large to ignore.
But as it began to fire, distant sensor platforms in the arctic reported a second swarm was happening over Africa. These craft were closely followed by shuttles.
Ares was uncertain as to what the human plan was. Did they plan two landings on two continents? Were they that bold? It would invite defeat in detail. A quick analysis of General Murtough's personality proved otherwise, which then led to a conclusion that one of the landings was a fake.
That realization led to another, that the decoy landing had an alternative purpose, to draw out Are's mobile space defenses. When they struck at the decoys, the spacers planned to strike back with smart KEW strikes the A.I. reasoned. Ares immediately stopped firing and sent orders to withdraw his forces to conserve them.
The mobile planetary defenses had been spread thinner to cover Central America as well as the northern part of South America. The A.I.'s intent had been to hit the incoming shuttles when they were the most vulnerable, to trip them up, scatter the forces, and to make the spacers back off. To make them retreat. But the false landing exposed its mobile assets to fire from above. The air assets dove when the A.I. recognized the threat. The sea crafts were not as swift to move. A third was taken out from space before they got away. All of the land units that had moved south into Mexico were also hammered. Only one in Baja managed to hide and escape destruction.
Ares realized it had allowed its precious mobile defenses to be attritioned. It had made a mistake. Time would tell if it would be a costly one or not.
It also realized that there had been a landing somewhere, just not where it had expected. By eliminating South America and polling the Skynet network, it determined the landing to be in central Africa. Ares allocated resources in the area to help Skynet but for the most part the virus was on its own.
<>V<>
Skynet's hive mind recognized the incoming threat and attempted to deal with it by firing its heavy weapons at the incoming pods. But the A.I. lacked sufficient weapons to destroy many of the pods. Also, each time it fired its heavy weapons, pods in the first wave fired thrusters to turn into kamikaze strikes onto them.
It was a losing proposition so Skynet stopped the attack to reassess its priorities. It mistook retro fire for explosions initially. By the time the pods were on the ground, it was too late to engage them easily from a distance. The A.I. directed forces to strike at the isolated pods while it attempted to infiltrate their electronic hardware.
The virus soon found that there was no hardware for it to suborn remotely. The radios were all audio only.
<>V<>
James grinned savagely when he heard the sonic explosions. He looked up and then shielded his eyes with one bandaged hand paw. Most of his squad was dead, but he'd picked up a platoon of native replacements months ago. Attrition kept their numbers small, but they were giving as good as they got.
“Either help's finally on the way or we're not going to care,” the lionoid growled. “Get the radioman to check in about five minutes.”
<>V<>
Ten thousand pods landed in central Africa, led by a wave of decoys and wild weasel pods. Another one thousand quickly followed them in, homing in on their brief beacons. The landings were scattered over thousands of kilometers despite the gaggle simulations that Gia had performed. She hadn't been able to factor in winds at various altitudes nor storm systems in the area.
Wild weasel and decoy pods that were not used self-destructed above the ground, raining centimeter sized debris downward.
As each manned pod landed, a two-man team came out loaded for bear. They had a large amount of equipment, life s
upport, MREs, water treatment, weapons, and plenty of ammunition to support themselves and a half a dozen other people that they encountered until they could hook up with the main body.
Each was dressed in arctic and woodland camouflage. Once an initial sweep of the perimeter was performed, they went about adjusting their outfits to better blend into their environment while also linking up with their command chain.
The second wave of pods were unmanned. These held additional equipment and in some cases small vehicles, supplies, or heavy weapon packages. Those pods that were within line of sight of each other or a supply pod linked up to form a wider perimeter.
<>V<>
Skynet's attempts to pick off the drop pods that had landed in isolated areas met with mixed results. The humans who exited the craft were heavily armed and trained. They fought fiercely, sometimes taking as much as a 20 to 1 ratio in kills before they went down.
Also, some of the pods were traps. They blew panels to expose the automated weapon platforms within them. These targeted and fired on any metallic object within their line of sight.
Pods that crashed were quickly searched. The electronics were useless, they self-destructed after landing. The weapons and some equipment might prove useful, if the A.I. could acquire them.
Five percent of all forces in the area had been destroyed in less than ten minutes. Such loss numbers could not be sustained. The virus withdrew its forces; it needed to find an alternative method of destroying the threat.
<>V<>
Distributing the initial landing served several purposes. It allowed a majority of the landing forces to get down relatively unscathed. A few of the pods failed but only a small percentage. Two pods landed near an automated platform; their IFFs didn't trip quick enough to keep the turret from wiping them out.
The second purpose of the drop swarm was to keep the force from being easily wiped out by a WMD. Skynet wouldn't waste a nuke or other device in order to take out only a handful of soldiers it was reasoned.