Desperate Measures Chapter 46

Chapter Forty-Four

With a clank, a jet-black metal leg cleared the corner, followed by another, then another. Rather than an exoskeleton, a spindly six-legged metal construct turned into the hallway.

The machine was far larger than normal security bots but more compact than a King Sentry. The central body was thin, with a bulbous protrusion in the back and two large cylinders connected underneath.

Jia really hoped those didn’t turn out to be rocket launchers.

The bot carried no other obvious weapons unless someone counted its legs, but the air shimmered a couple of meters in front of the bot. Whatever that was didn’t bode well for the team’s future.

A stun field was one possibility. The bot might charge people and knock them unconscious with an area attack, but the Elite moved slowly, its legs clanking on the floor with each heavy step. Clever undercarriage attacks aside, even Erik didn’t try to take on large security bots at close range.

Once her mind was done sorting through the tactical possibilities, the Elite’s appearance surprised Jia. Given Luca’s big speech, she’d been assuming some new breed of half-Leem super-agent would run around the corner, or something more perverse—maybe a Zitark crossed with a human, a Leem, and a Hunter.

All bots, large or small, were unimpressive, nothing more than simple machines that were easy to defeat once one understood their weakness. She might not recognize the bot’s design and hadn’t studied it, but that didn’t make her more afraid.

They would not fall to this lumbering beast.

The Elite continued its advance. There was no reason to wait for the enemy to open fire. They had given Luca his chance to surrender, and his solution was to hide around the corner and send a bot after them.

He needed to understand who he was dealing with.

Jia hurled her plasma grenade as the team opened fire. Erik’s TR-7 spat fire and lead, its four barrels creating a deadly storm of rounds. They crashed into the Elite, creating a shower of sparks. A person or a normal bot would have fallen from a single burst, but the Elite continued its slow advance.

A mocking laugh sounded from the machine. The conspiracy must have paid some scientist a lot to come up with the best ways to intimidate people during an attack. Too bad it wasn’t working on Jia.

Erik’s bullets gouged a chunk out of the advancing machine, leaving damaged but not destroyed armor. Anne and Kant concentrated on different parts of the bot, their bullets created neat pockmarks but no holes.

Jia didn’t have to worry as the grenade tumbled toward the advancing Elite. The grenade struck the shimmer and exploded early with a blinding blue-white flash, scorching the walls and floor.

She squinted and switched to her rifle, ready to fire at the smoky remnants.

The Elite emerged from the smoke scorched, and cracked in a few places, but not showing any distress. It laughed again, this time louder.

“Have to admit that’s creepy,” Kant complained.

“Ignore it,” Anne snapped.

Jia ground her teeth. The Elite was tougher than she expected, but a slow machine with no weapons wasn’t a weapon. It was target practice.

Panels retracted, and rotary gun barrels extended from the Elite. Jia had been right about target practice, just not right about the targets.

The laughter got louder and rang out continuously.

“Oh, shit,” Erik offered with a grunt. “This could get annoying.”

The gun barrels roared to life, their rounds forcing the team back around the corner on both sides and shredding the wall in a shower of sparks and metal chunks. Bullets passed through, striking the walls behind them and knocking more chunks out, leaving a hole-and crack-covered mess.

Jia’s safe corner disappeared under the withering barrage, forcing her back, but the laughing machine ripped enough of the corner away to give her a new firing position.

“What does that thing have around it?” Kant asked, selecting a plasma grenade. His earlier joy had vanished from his voice. “A shield? Jia’s grenade blew up a couple of meters early.”

“Some sort of energy field, but not a shield,” Jia shouted over the endless gunfire, grateful no one had challenged her throwing accuracy. “The bullets are getting through to the armor fine. It must set off most explosives.”

“A lot of good that does us,” Anne complained as a piece of shrapnel from the wall sliced her cheek. Her head jerked back. “It’s going to take a lot more than a couple of bursts to get through that armor.”

With the Elite concentrating on perforating Jia and Anne, Erik took his chance and cleared the corner with his barrel to fire at the bulbous portion near the back. The rounds didn’t penetrate the armor, but they ripped a chunk off the top.

The Elite stopped laughing and shuffled to the side, aiming its guns at Erik’s and Kant’s side.

It started riddling that side with bullets.

“Had to piss it off,” Kant muttered as the two men jumped backward, avoiding the huge bullets ripped through the wall. Jia wouldn’t have trusted a ballistic shield to protect her against the attack, let alone their vests.

Kant stumbled but righted himself. “We either need a plan in the next minute, or we need to get our asses out of here.”

Jia finally understood what the Elite was: a terror weapon. The laughter and the slow, methodical advance. Luca wanted them to be scared. The bastard might even be using this battle as a test.

She took slow, deep breaths, ignoring the Elite as it returned to pelting her side. They couldn’t get a grenade close enough, and the field appeared to extend in a dome, meaning a good throw couldn’t save them.

Bullets, particularly AP rounds, were working, but it was like trying to hack at a tree with a pocketknife. They needed time.

Her eyes widened. “We should blow some of the ceiling onto it. Anticipate its movements so it doesn’t set the grenades off early. We might get lucky and bury the thing.”

If anyone wanted to argue, they didn’t take the offered opportunity. Jia risked a lull in the fire on her side to check around the corner, yanking her head back as the Elite blasted the edge off the corner. At the rate it was demolishing the wall, they wouldn’t have much cover left, and the teams would be too far apart for her plan to work.

The bot was advancing slower than before, but there was no sign of damage to the legs. It was almost as if it was taunting them, but it had stopped laughing. Luca must have been controlling it directly. That would make the most sense.

He could have used a laser relay system, despite the jamming.

“Bounce near the ceiling at about five meters on my zero,” Jia shouted, estimating the rough distance of the enemy based on its current rate of advance. She’d gone through this kind of training with Erik, but she’d never thought she’d be using it in this sort of situation.

There was no fear, only uncertainty. What human hands had built, human hands could destroy.

She wouldn’t deny she missed her exoskeleton, though.

Everyone switched their rifles into their left hands before tugging plasma grenades from their vests and priming them. They couldn’t risk exposing themselves, so they would have to rely on blind corner throws.

If Anne or Kant panicked, they could end up bouncing their grenades off too close to the opposite side and killing half the team. It was time to test everyone’s skill level and see if Alina had picked competent partners.

Heart thundering, Jia shouted her count. “Three, two, one,

zero

!”

The team released their grenades in unison as if they’d been working closely for years. They tossed the grenades around the corner before jumping away from the wretched remnants of what were once corners.

The thunderous roar of the Elite’s cannon and her pounding heart grew distant as seconds seemed to stretch into eternity. They had no choice. If they tried to run, half of them would be gunned down, and the other two wouldn’t make it to the exit.

When there was no choice left but victory, which made the chosen path easy. The combined explosions shook the hallway, the flash so bright it was like they were around the corner from the sun. Heavy thuds followed, and a plume of flaming debris and smoke billowed out of the corridor.

Harsh tinging ricochets followed for a couple of seconds, the rotary cannons no longer demolishing the walls near the team. Then the guns fell silent.

No one waited for orders. They reloaded, shifted their guns back over, and spun around the corner to empty their magazines into the smoke. Kant yelled the entire time, with bright eyes and a huge smile. Jia thought he was enjoying the fight too much, but better that than the opposite.

Erik’s TR-7 ran empty first. He ejected his magazine to replace it with a new one while the others finished firing. They ducked, also taking the chance to reload, unsure if they’d destroyed the Elite and killed Luca.

Four plasma grenades were enough to take down a lot of things, but if the last two years of Jia’s life had taught her anything, it was that the wildest, most unexpected things could happen at any time. If she didn’t run into an alien or alien DNA-infused human, it’d be a step up from recent missions.

Jia took short, ragged breaths, the acrid smoke burning her lungs. She missed being able to swap to thermal mode. She was used to having sensors from Emma or an exoskeleton.

Engaging a man and his bot in this environment didn’t bother her, but she would have liked to confirm the destruction of the target without looking around the corner and risking her head. She was rather attached to it.

She snorted. Being around Erik was changing her sense of humor.

Dying in an obvious way would be embarrassing. At this point in her life, dying peacefully in her sleep wasn’t obvious, so that was how she supposed she would go.

Kant solved the problem of personal risk in a practical if dangerous way. He poked his barrel around the corner, smoke drifting past.

“You destroyed yet, metal brother?” he asked in a mocking tone. “What about you, Luca? Because we’re still here, and after all that big talk, I figured you’d recruited the Devil himself to help you, not some souped-up bot that couldn’t take grenades and a little ceiling. Poor showing, brother. Poor showing.”

There was no response to the taunt.

Jia coughed and waved smoke out of her face. If Agent Dalton hadn’t been such an ass, she might have supported Anne’s idea of a local team to supplement their forces, but it didn’t matter. They would have to take out the new bots themselves.

A building growl sounded from the passage, along with loud scratching and grinding.

Anne’s brow lifted. “The bot is growling?”

“I’m sure they’ve programmed it to respond in this kind of situation,” Jia suggested. “Scare off enemy forces while it’s wounded.”

Kant risked a check and shook his head. “Tough son of a bitch, but that’s a design flaw. Growling’s not going to be enough.”

Jia and the others walked to the remains of the corner. Although acrid smoke filled the hallway, they could make out the outline of the Elite, half-buried under rubble. The source of the ricochets and the reason it had stopped firing became obvious: huge dents and cracks in the gun barrels. Additional firing risked damage to itself.

The Elite yanked a leg free of the rubble and growled again. “You maggots. You

insignificant

MAGGOTS!”

Jia frowned. It was a human voice, but it wasn’t Luca. The metal body was too small to accommodate a human, so it couldn’t be some sort of unusual attempt at redesigning an exoskeleton. Somebody had to be controlling the machine, but she didn’t understand how they were pulling it off, given the heavy jamming. Laser comms were one possibility, but heavy smoke made that doubtful. The shimmer from before was now a faint glowing wavy field in the smoke.

She could be wrong and it was additional terror programming, but something about the quality of the voice convinced her otherwise.

The rubble shook as the Elite attempted to pull itself free, but five of its legs remained stubbornly buried.

“More grenades,” Kant suggested. “It can’t dodge now.”

Anne pointed at the glowing field. “It still has its field.” She gestured at the smoking hole in the ceiling that led to ductwork and a high roof. “And it’s not like there’s a lot more to bury it with.”

Erik grinned and locked his TR-7 onto his carryaid before pulling down his laser rifle. “Lasers don’t explode.”

“You are lucky, maggots,” the Elite growled. “Nothing more. No matter what happens to me, you will die here.”

“You’d be surprised how often I hear that. Enough that I don’t believe it when people say it.” Erik knelt and lined up the laser rifle for a shot straight down the center of the bot’s body and through the protrusion in the back. He winked and pulled the trigger.

The Elite’s shield had made a mockery of direct explosives, and its thick armor had protected it from a fierce barrage of AP rounds, but the laser beam bored a hole from front to back, leaving sizzling metal and more smoke to fill the room. With a loud thumping clang, the Elite collapsed into the rubble.

Erik patted the laser rifle. “At least we know that works.”

Anne nodded at Jia with a respectful look on her face. “Good thinking, Lin.”

Jia advanced slowly toward the destroyed Elite, her eyes narrowed. “I manage good things on occasion.”

Anne, Erik, and Kant moved with her. Erik kept his laser rifle ready, though he favored his left arm. They continued through the smoke and rubble, kicking some aside as they watched for Luca and kept an eye out to make sure the destroyed machine wasn’t moving.

Jia sucked in a breath and blew it out. “I tried to convince myself that someone was controlling that thing, but there’s no way they could have done it through the jamming and smoke.”

Erik prodded the body with his boot as Anne and Kant continued toward the intersection. “What are you thinking?”

“The conspiracy has been more concerned about capturing the jump drive than Emma,” Jia replied. She crouched and peered through the clean tunnel dug by Erik’s rifle. “What if they developed a method of making self-aware AIs?”

“You think that’s what this is?” Erik looked dubious. “It doesn’t need to be alive like Emma to be programmed to send out threats. It’s like you said; it’s probably just them trying to be intimidating.”

Jia stood. “I hope that’s it.”

Kant and Anne arrived at the intersection before turning opposite ways.

“All that talk, and he’s gone,” Kant shouted.

“He probably ran once he sent his little toy after us and pinned us down.” Erik shouldered his laser rifle. “It was a stall, no worries. If they take off, Emma will shoot their asses down, and we’ll finish it that way.” He inclined his head down the hallway. “The hangar’s that way. We know the play now. Throw grenades to distract them, and I’ll finish them off.”

Anne gave the laser rifle a dubious look. “That thing doesn’t have a lot of shots.”

“Don’t worry, I brought extra cells,” he admitted.

“If they have a lot of those Elites, we might be in trouble.”

Erik shrugged. “Let’s hope that was the only one.” He looked over his shoulder for half a second. “If not, what’s life without a little risk?”

Jia stared into the distance, running her tongue along the inside of her mouth. She hoped she was wrong about what the Elites represented. An army of bots with Emma-like intelligence would be an army that could learn far faster than any human and be modified as quickly.

She looked over her shoulder at the destroyed Elite in the rubble. “Please be nothing more than a glorified tin can.”