by Hugo Huesca
The dying groan of the guard on the ground reminded me we were in a race against time.
“We need to reach the civilian housing,” I told Francis. “Can you shut down the drones in our path? Wait, can you shut them all down?”
“Not all at once,” said Francis. “I have to go one by one unless you happen to have a supercomputer stuffed in your pocket. I’ll start with the ones near your phone, and then work my way out from there.”
I nodded automatically, even if the AI couldn’t see it. Behind me, the two surviving guards were carrying their fallen comrade next to the corpse of their captain.
“Get the medkit and inject some ICE in their veins,” ordered Foreman. “Then go to the EP like everyone else. If you hurry they can avoid brain damage. Go!”
“What about you?” one of them asked. He was covered head to toe in blood.
“There’s a kill-switch for the entire base in High Command. If it hasn’t been pressed by now it means no one who knows about it is alive or close enough to activate it.”
“That’s on the other side of the base, no way you can make it.”
The gunfire intensified as if to underscore the point.
“He’ll make it,” I told them. “I can get us a path.”
I got the guard’s attention, while the fourth one returned from his original post with a medkit. “You shut them down. Our drones run on military encryption. How…”
I realized his eyes were narrowing with suspicion. I could follow the train of thought by myself:
If someone goes running around controlling drones just as controlled drones start killing everyone, chances are they’re the guilty party.
“I’m a script kiddie,” I told him. “I have all kinds of shit on my phone.”
It was the dumbest half-truth ever, but sometimes people are only looking for an excuse not to follow a train of thought. The guard was worried about keeping his friends from suffering brain damage, and I wasn’t his problem.
“I vouch for him. Report it to the first officer you see, anyway,” Foreman told him. “Now, go!”
The fourth guard finished injecting the fallen soldiers with a bright blue syringe. The liquid had to reach the brain for it to work, which meant injecting it into the eye sockets if the heart wasn’t pumping.
As the guards left for the extraction point, carrying their friends as best as they could, Foreman turned to me. “I assume you aren’t a traitor because Madam Caputi showed me your file. But this looks very bad on you.”
“Can we talk about it after we stop more people from dying?”
My family was near the civilian housing. I hoped Van and Irene were still raiding Rune. They were the closest to the field—if they followed protocol at all, they’d reach the Extraction Point first. Mom and Harrison were next, followed by Beard’s family and Beard himself. Everyone was accounted for.
Protocol dictated the soldiers kept the fight away from the civilians. I had no doubt in my mind the base garrison was willing to give their lives to keep danger away from my family. It was only fair I risked mine to help them out. So, I grabbed my mindjack (leaving a bloody hand-print on the paint), clipped it to my belt, made sure the connection to my phone would hold, then nodded to Foreman.
We ran as fast as we could towards the emergency exit. Command Center was by the middle of the base, where the heaviest tank-drone presence would be centered. No way we could reach it by ourselves.
“Anyone near the Center?” Foreman demanded on his radio as we exited the laboratory. In front of us, hell on Earth was displayed in terrifying glory. We could see buildings on fire. Jeeps in the distance rushing in all directions. No signs of tank-drones yet, but I caught a glimpse of spy-drones hovering above the battlefield.
A soldier acknowledged Foreman over the radio.
“There’s a kill—” started Foreman.
I had the worst suspicion, all my instincts screaming at me at the same time—the way a fly feels when it struts into a spider’s lair.
I swatted Foreman’s hand away from the radio’s button. “Wait a second! Keles isn’t a robot. He’s listening. Mention the switch on the radio and he’ll throw everything at it.”
“Christ, Dorsett, you’re making it very hard to trust you!”
In the sky overhead, a spy-drone got too close to us and it suddenly fell down. No bullet had hit it, so Francis was doing his job.
My teeth pulsed with pain when my jaw clenched too tight. We needed to reach the Center without letting Keles know we wanted to be there. We could never get there on our own.
“Tell the army to make a path elsewhere,” I said. “Where the Command Center is casually on the way. Don’t make it a priority.”
Foreman grunted in response, but relayed the appropriate orders. In the middle of an all-out war, there was no time for arguing. “—get boots into the interceptor’s hangar. We can’t allow the security drones to release the interceptors from their binds. Enemies in the air would be disastrous.”
“Roger that.”
Foreman put the radio away. “I hope you’re right about this.”
I shrugged. “It may not work and it may get us killed. Wanna grab a jeep?”
No way we were crossing the base on foot. Foreman nodded and we headed for the lab’s parking lot. We moved through the shrubbery, keeping our bodies close to the grass and away from the roads at all time. It was impossible to ignore the sound of combat blaring all around us.
When I had met Keles for the first time, I’d barely survived a storm of bullets from his Sleipnir mooks. The roar of the automatic rifles had been unlike anything I’d ever heard before, and I still had nightmares about it.
This was worse.
It wasn’t as loud, yet. But huge clouds of black smoke rose over a dozen different fires and turned the sky into the stuff of nightmares. Every now and again, a tank-drone exploded hundreds of yards away from us, and the explosion was like thunder. Almost solid.
More often, I heard the roar of the tanks’ cannons and how the ground shook with a slight, muted tremor. People were on the receiving end of those shots. The damage even a glancing hit from one of those shells caused devastation enough to ensure people couldn’t be brought back. Medicine can’t rebuild a brain.
A pack of security wolf-drones was scouring the lot for any stragglers. Some of them had blood in their metallic maws. They detected us the instant we crossed the bushes and landed in the almost-empty lot.
“Run for it!” called Foreman, but Francis beat him to the punch. One by one, the drones fell lifeless to the ground, fast enough that they never had time to reach us.
“Thanks, man,” I said to my phone. My AI was too busy to answer, and I saw the battery life was barely over 50% now. We had ten minutes left, at best. “That a jeep over there?”
Most of the cars were drones, so they’d joined the fray on Keles’ side. My mind provided the image of an SUV chasing Mom and Van down a dead-end alley—
“It’s an older model,” Foreman called as he reached the vehicle. He pointed his gun at the car’s computer and shot it out. “Get in, I’ll drive.”
I rushed into the copilot’s seat while he bent under the dashboard and hacked at the wiring. It wasn’t long until the engine roared to life.
We followed the main road, occasionally running into people and soldiers rushing the opposite direction towards the barracks. Some of them were wounded. Others were dead and being carried by friends or family. Some of those had their heads mangled beyond repair, even at a simple glance, but they were still hauled away.
“We need to hurry,” I said, more to steel myself than anything else.
As we left the civilian zone of the base, the battle around us intensified. The tanks were smaller than their non-drone predecessors, but faster and more maneuverable. Keles was ordering them around, chasing tiny human figures into the “safety” of buildings, where the security drones were surely waiting for them.
Other tiny drones, not built for c
ombat, rushed around in all directions, throwing themselves into anything, glad to annoy instead of kill. We ran over several roombas on our way.
The asphalt not ten yards in front of the jeep disappeared in a cloud of fire and smoke. The sound of the explosion followed closely behind, a boom that reverberated through my bones with enough force to drain the air out of my lungs like I’d been punched.
“Shit!” Foreman said as he swerved to avoid the incoming fire. “Hang on!” The jeep almost flipped at the violence of his steering.
“Francis!”
“On it, Master Cole—!”
No more explosions followed by. The jeep was now right in the middle of the battle.
Unlike Hollywood’s depictions, a firefight wasn’t flush with soldiers standing by, shooting at each other. Even with the tanks running around, most hid hundreds of yards away, or were in the middle of clearing buildings and securing choke points. The drones were more focused on chasing random positions (at least, random to me) than running down the dozen or so stray men and women gunning for the nearest resistance squad.
It was like the entire battlefield was in motion, and the exchange of bullets was merely a formality. But it was there all right, and I saw people die in front of my eyes.
Shrapnel from a security turret’s explosion punched through the jeep’s board, leaving inch-sized holes through the glass. My chest burned with pain.
“Argh!” my white t-shirt was mixed with red and I couldn’t breathe. The jeep swerved hard again and threw me against the window. The door opened. For a brief instant, I saw the ground pass an arms-length away from my face.
A hand caught my mindjack hanging from my belt and propped me up.
“You hit?” asked Foreman.
I regained my breath. The PDF had also given us basic first-aid training asides from the marksmanship lessons. I looked at the wound in my chest trying to frantically remember how a punctured lung felt like.
If I had a punctured lung I guess I’d have no doubts about it, I decided. I could breathe better now. The jeep’s sides were now passing the army’s barracks like a blur. The cafeteria was full ablaze, and through the fire threaded the tanks. One of them moved to intercept us, but disappeared when someone nailed it with an RPG.
Blood wasn’t sputtering like a fountain. I vaguely recalled hearing about arterial blood being almost black—mine wasn’t at the moment. I even thought I could see the bent piece of metal protruding from the charred, inch-sized mess near my left nipple.
“Glancing hit,” I said, even if it was more a hopeful guess than a diagnostic.
“OK. We’ve reached the Center.”
I guessed our radio ruse had worked. The fighting was now focused ahead of us, not around us. A score of soldiers were holed up inside the hangars and had brained the interceptor’s drone-minds. This rendered them useless for flying or using missiles, but their high-caliber machine guns could still shoot. The tanks were trying to break the perimeter, but hadn’t made progress so far.
I was sure that to Irene, the frantic movement of drones and soldiers would mean more than it did to me. She’d know, for example, who the fuck was winning. Instead, I focused on what I could do right now: Ending this.
Caputi’s Command Center was a re-purposed meeting hall. She was technically a civilian, too, so the army structure of the base had had to bend to accommodate her. As it turned out, this helped Foreman and I. The hall wasn’t tagged in the Fort’s maps as anything more than a hall, so Keles was focused elsewhere.
“Duck!” called Foreman as we sprinted for the hall’s entrance. A fiery sphere of death roared over our heads and our Jeep vanished in a storm of fire. Pain shot through my body as tiny pieces of burning shrapnel scorched my skin, but went no deeper.
I screamed something too nasty to be recorded as anyone’s last words. Thankfully, whatever hit the jeep wasn’t explosive, or it would’ve been close enough to send me to hell with a nice tan.
The Center’s entrance was wide open, torn apart by a tank’s shell. As we went inside, we were received by a dozen soldiers (still dressed in fatigues and armed with rifles from the shooting range) holed up by the entrance.
“Who’s in charge?” exclaimed Foreman as he held his ID up high for them all to see. “We need to reach Caputi’s office, ASAP!”
Drill Sergeant Bradley sprang forward. The man was nursing a nasty wound by his abdomen, kidney-high. Blood was black near the wound, and I could smell the chemical coagulant covering it. One of the base’s many medkits had saved his life.
“I’m in charge. You’re Caputi’s lapdog, aren’t you? Security inside is stupid, we’re not getting past them. We’re waiting for reinforcements, or for someone to tell us why the fucking fuck our steel is killing us—”
“Hackers,” said Foreman. We both realized at the same time that Bradley’s soldiers were little more than rookies. “Doesn’t matter. Help will be coming soon, sarge. Hold this post, let nothing come inside until we’re back.”
“Fuck that and fuck you. Lopez, Erickson, Cameron, escort the civilians before they get themselves killed. Punch the drones out if you have to.”
“Yessir!” they screamed at the same time, and without hesitation.
Foreman and I exchanged worried glances before he shrugged and followed the three rookies down the hall.
Bradley’s group had barricaded themselves from the drones inside the center. The floor was cracked and blackened in circular spots all around us.
Two of our rookies were men not much older than I was, and there was one woman a head taller than Foreman. She took point, kicking ruined doors as we tried to scurry our way from main corridors and by less traversed routes.
“Clear!”
We lasted an entire three minutes without running into anything that wanted to kill us.
The soldier kicked down another door, close to Caputi’s office, and breached into a wide room filled with computers and three-dozen holographic screens, from the looks of it.
“Intelligence,” Foreman explained with a curt whisper as the three soldiers hugged the walls and tried to secure all visible corners.
“Nasty spot for an ambush,” muttered one of the rookies. “All these damn holograms are fucking with my eyesight—”
All three of us saw the shadows move right behind our point-woman at the same time.
“Behind you!” I called, even if I knew it was too late. The soldiers raised their guns.
“On your six, Cameron!”
Francis? That’s your cue, buddy…
But nothing stopped the chrome-plated wolf from rushing the soldier’s legs, trip her and launch a brutal bite. Blood followed soon, more when she fell to the floor. She didn’t scream—she had had no time.
One of the rookies shot at the thing and sparks flew through its flank.
“Stop!” yelled Foreman. “You’ll hit her head!”
“I just want to get it off her—”
And he did. The wolf’s head snapped towards us, its red, LED eyes focused on us. Two more pairs of eyes appeared from the shadows next to the holograms.
“Francis?” I exclaimed on my phone. It still had battery. The phone lines were out, but not the connection to my mindjack. Why wasn’t he reacting?
“M-ms… Cole… He f-found me. Can’t fight him off. Nested deeper than m-me.” Francis’ voice was full of static, and it spasmed in the way a corrupted music file sometimes did.
“What? No! Francis, get out of there!”
I automatically grabbed at the mindjack in my belt. But logging on in the middle of a firefight would be insane to the point of suicide—
“I’m t-trying. Survive, b-bud.”
“Francis!”
Connection lost.
The drones disappeared among the holograms and the desks. I had played enough Rune to recognize a predator stalking its prey. They were closing in for the kill.
“One for each of us,” mused Foreman. He drew breath as he made his choice. He ra
ised his pistol and turned to me. “The kill-switch is in the next room, up ahead, by Cameron’s body. A red button behind the painting. Password’s ‘Angelica.’”
“What’re you going to do?” I asked, even if I already suspected it. I tried to think of a better idea—
“Find a medkit and pump us full of ICE if our heads are intact, otherwise don’t bother. Good luck, Cole, you get to play hero once more.”
He made a gesture to the two surviving rookies, who had their weapons trained at their flanks, trying to guess where the wolves would spring. “Get the kid an opening! The kill-switch ends this shit, nothing else matters—”
Foreman ran to the center of the room, screaming like a cowboy in a rodeo. He shot his pistol in the air, and the shots were a muted, far-away deal. I tried to scream at him to get the hell away from there, he was making himself such an easy target…
“So, he wants us to draw aggro, huh? Should have just said so,” one of the rookies told the other.
The soldiers followed him without even pausing to consider how they were throwing their lives away.
Only if you don’t reach the switch, I thought. I started running just as three shadows jumped towards Foreman and the two men at a blazing speed. The sound of gunfire was soon behind me, and it drowned the screams and the struggle. It soon died too.
7 CHAPTER SEVEN
THE BRIDGE
I KNEW something was wrong as soon as the bridge closed behind me. I’d Translated a thousand times already, and never had the bridge shown these weird orange streaks. Even though I had no idea how the Signal worked, it didn’t appear natural.
Focus, Cole. I told myself. The bridge won’t open back home until I’m done Translating. I’ll… pray to the Signal to run a diagnostic or something. Gods, I’m going crazy for sure.
As always, I didn’t feel the changes taking hold in my mind as the unfathomable process gradually happened. With enough practice, I’d discovered it was easier, and much less confusing, to just assume it was happening instead of trying to control it.