by Dean M. Cole
Shaking his head, Rourke ground his teeth together. Captain Singleton had been right. What else could they do? They were out of options. If the robots stopped them now, that was it, game over. Any chance they had of defeating the Necks would die and the whole of humanity with it.
Understanding there was no alternative, Rourke raised his assault rifle and began to spray and pray, firing dozens of rounds at the two Taters.
Lightning-like beams danced through the air, eradicating all of his bullets. None of them reached their target.
Looking around, Rourke realized he could no longer see Monique.
Where had she gone? The Taters hadn’t gotten close enough to beam her out.
The alien machines pressed on.
Firing while falling back, Rourke, followed by Bill and Teddy, fought to stay ahead of the two Taters.
As the machines continued to advance, bluish-white light flickered from the emitters on their bellies.
Lieutenant Gheist popped up right next to the enemy ships.
She must have hidden, waiting for the Taters to overfly her position.
Rourke skidded to a stop and aimed at the onrushing vessels.
Monique fired twice in rapid succession.
At the same time, Rourke poured fire into the noses of the Taters.
The first few rounds vanished, but Monique’s bullets found their targets. The emitters shattered and the twinned beams of blue-white light extinguished.
Bullets from the rifles of all three men tore into the Taters.
The two white ovoids fell to the floor and tumbled to a stop.
Monique looked at Rourke and pumped a fist into the air.
She never saw the third Tater round the corner behind her.
Rourke raised his rifle. “Get down!”
Before he could squeeze off a shot, a wide, white arc reached out from the new Tater and swept across Monique.
Rourke blinked, suddenly unable to breathe as he watched her disappear.
Chapter 31
Rourke’s eyes flared. “No!” He raised his gun and began to fire it on full auto. “Die, you son of a bitch!”
None of the bullets reached the Tater.
Behind him, the high-pitched discharge of BOb’s modified EMP cannon echoed off the tunnel walls, pouring over Rourke’s shoulders like a crashing wave. The staccato reports of multiple rifle and grenade shots also peppered the air, echoing crazily within the confined space.
His gaze returned to the spot where Monique had been. Dragging his eyes from it, he looked at the now slowed advance of the third Tater.
In a sudden epiphany, Rourke understood that their counterattack was the only thing that had prevented the bastards from already beaming them all to Hell. From the descriptions relayed by Captain Singleton and Commander Brown, he believed they were already within range of the new one’s light wave emitter.
Regardless, Monique’s sacrifice had proven they needed to change their tactics. If not, they would fail. All of them would join her and the others in Hell.
Narrowing eyes and gnashing teeth, Rourke toggled his grenade launcher.
He moved to stand between Bill and Teddy. “We need to overwhelm its defenses. We’ll fire our grenades in unison and then switch to auto.”
The two men nodded.
“On one,” Rourke said.
Major Peterson and the cosmonaut sighted down their weapons.
Accelerating, the third Tater closed to within fifty meters.
Rourke raised the launcher and aimed it.
“Three, two, one!”
The triple womp of simultaneous discharges concussed the air.
In the fraction of a second that it took for their gently arcing grenades to cross the narrowing distance, all three men loosed a fusillade of bullets.
In his dilated perception of time, Rourke imagined he could see the hundreds of 5.56mm rounds zip past the wobbling grenades.
White light flickered from the belly of the Tater, strobing manically.
Two of the explosives winked out of existence.
An instant later, the nose of the alien vessel burst open, rupturing as the third grenade found its target.
The explosion pushed all three men back and set Rourke’s ears to ringing.
He watched in surreally muffled silence as the shredded remnant of the Tater slammed into the white-striped pavement. Its inertia carried the thing to a grinding halt a mere dozen feet ahead of them.
Someone grabbed him by the collar. Captain Singleton shouted into his ear. “Move it, Doctor Geller!” Then the man shoved him toward the opposite end of the tunnel, in the direction of ATLAS.
Rourke nodded and started running. Ahead of him, BOb was waving them on and shouting something, but Rourke couldn’t discern the words over the ringing in his ears. The robot had stopped firing in that direction, and they weren’t dead yet, so they had that going for them.
He released a short, manic laugh, surprised by his ability to joke at the moment.
Looking over his shoulder, he saw Captain Singleton urging Major Peterson and Cosmonaut Petrovich onward, the man’s message clear even above the ringing. “Go! Go! Go!”
Rourke turned his attention back to front and soon caught up with Colonel Hennessy.
As they advanced down the tunnel, following the once again running battlebot, he saw divots dug out of the curved concrete ceiling. The light beam from BOb’s cannon had also scooped out parts of the cables and racks that lined the top of the passageway. Their stunted raw ends, some of them sparking, terminated in sharp edges where the light beam had cut clean through them.
Seeing this, Rourke ran a hand across the top of the wide metal tube. The ringing in his ears made it impossible for him to hear whether or not it was still humming. However, the conduit thrummed smoothly under his sliding fingertips. Thankfully, the damaged cabling hadn’t been part of the collider’s power supply or control system. It was still running.
Looking up, Rourke saw that he’d fallen a few strides behind Colonel Hennessy. Ahead, the man followed the robot into a widening section of the tunnel.
Had they reached the ATLAS facility?
Captain Singleton pulled up next to him and confirmed it. Running, Vaughn pointed ahead and shouted breathlessly, “We’re almost to ATLAS! You’re my only computer geek.” He paused for air and then added, “Be ready. First terminal I see, we’re stopping.”
The screech of another approaching Tater suddenly penetrated Rourke’s muffled senses.
He exchanged a horrified glance with Captain Singleton.
The howling wails quickly rose to painful levels. Then the sound began to warble once more but with more intensity than last time.
The enemy vessels were coming from both directions again, but now, there were more of them.
Rourke couldn’t see the Tater ahead, but when he looked over his shoulder, he saw three of the cow-sized alien vessels slide into view at the far end of the curving tunnel. Rapidly approaching from the team’s six, each of the Taters jostled for position in the limited space afforded within the equipment-choked passageway.
BOb’s cannon barked to life ahead.
Another howling drive fell silent.
Running with an awkward sideways gate, Rourke dragged his gaze from the Taters behind them and glanced forward.
Hennessy followed the robot deeper into the facility.
Running behind Captain Singleton, Rourke again saw damaged cables and pipes where BOb’s gun had eaten into them.
Rourke’s ears had recovered enough that he could hear the thrum of the still functioning collider.
BOb fired his cannon again.
Vaughn and Mark sprinted ahead.
Dropping back, Rourke added his gun to those of the major and the cosmonaut. Using the same tactic that they'd employed against the previous enemy vessel, they soon overwhelmed the defenses of the trio of flying bots, but not before the last one got dangerously close.
The final Tater collapsed to
the floor. The smoking ruin slid to a stop at their feet.
Rourke turned and saw that they had reached the widening section of the tunnel. It appeared to delineate the beginning of the ATLAS facility.
Ahead, BOb’s cannon fell silent, as did the last of the Taters. The robot must have cleared out the enemy crafts before Mark or Vaughn had needed to add their rifles to the effort.
Rourke continued deeper into ATLAS. He heard Bill and Teddy running a few meters behind him.
Craning his neck as he ran, Rourke searched desperately, trying to spot a workstation or computer terminal.
He saw none.
The tunnel opened further, revealing a starburst of large pipes radiating out from a central point.
They’d reached the backside of the ATLAS experiment’s iconic works.
Even after being chased by a pack of killer robots, Rourke marveled at the scale of it. As he ran toward the back of the assembly, he stared at it with reverent awe.
The thing was huge.
Pictures had done it no justice. He’d heard it contained more metal than the Eiffel Tower, but that still hadn’t prepared Rourke for this.
He followed BOb and the two Army pilots down stairs that hugged the floor of the widening tunnel.
Rourke felt his hopes rising at the prospect that they might be gaining the upper hand. They had reached ATLAS. Soon, he would activate the commands that would undo all of this, bringing back Monique, Rachel and the whole of humanity. They would—
The stairs deposited Rourke onto an exposed, elevated landing, and his short-lived hope suffered a quick death.
Standing motionlessly atop their lofty perch, Rourke, Mark, and Vaughn, along with BOb, stared across the open facility.
Breathing heavily, Teddy came running up behind them. “What are you waiting for, El Capi—?” The man seized and slid to a stop next to Rourke.
Bill landed heavily on the metal deck. “What the hell are we …? Oh, fuck me …!”
Transfixed atop the elevated landing, BOb and the five humans stared across ATLAS.
The wormhole hung suspended at its geometric center, directly across from them. It looked exactly as Vaughn and Angela had described.
However, the silvery sphere was not the source of their shared trepidation.
Behind the mercurial orb, hundreds of Necks lined the far side of ATLAS.
The enemy robots stood on catwalks, balconies, corridors, and walkways. They covered every surface of the facility’s opposite side.
With ominous menace, the veritable army of multi-armed, white-bodied Necks silently glared at the last vestiges of Earth’s life and their pet robot.
Chapter 32
Unlike Vaughn and Angela’s descriptions, these robots were not waving their arms about or conversing animatedly. They simply stared back at the group.
However, the wormhole perfectly matched the accounts of Captain Singleton and Commander Brown. The sphere hung suspended at the facility’s central focal point. The perfectly smooth surface reflected a fish-eyed, wide-angle rendition of the ATLAS detector’s radiating network of conduits. Rourke knew his shocked visage hung somewhere in that image, but from a hundred meters away, he couldn’t see more than the starburst pattern of the overall structure.
In the moment it took him to take in all of this, nothing moved. The opposing forces merely stared at each other in a surreally stretched out motionless stand-off.
The men winced, and, too late, Rourke threw up a shielding hand as brilliant light flared from the orb.
He had just enough time to register the fact that it hadn’t beamed them to Hell, that the flash was instead the prelude to another arrival when the solid-looking sphere suddenly liquefied.
According to Angela and Vaughn, the flash of ethereal light seemed to precede the passage of something through the wormhole.
Concentric rings raced across its curved surface.
Rourke remained rooted in place. He worried the next thing to come from the sphere might be an arc of white light with designs of beaming them all to Hell. Angela had said she didn’t think the Necks could fire the beam through the wormhole while they were on this side of it, but Rourke wasn't ready to bet all their lives on that unproven theory.
Yet, he still couldn’t move his seemingly anchored feet. The utterly alien situation held him transfixed, trapped between fight or flight.
The top of the mercurial orb began to distend, stretching upward. Then the disc-shaped head and broad shoulders of a neckless Neck popped through the wormhole’s oscillating surface.
Halfway through the act of emergence, the robot seized up as it appeared to see the biological interlopers.
It stopped rising. Only the upper portion of its white body protruded from the top of the four-foot-wide sphere.
Turning, the half-buried Neck joined its peers in staring at the humans.
Its hanging arms began to rise, drawing its four hands from the still undulating wormhole.
Behind the new arrival, each of the Necks in attendance raised all four of their arms and pointed at the team accusingly.
Rourke started to duck, thinking the Necks were bringing weapons to bear, that each hand surely clutched a gun. However, nothing but an accusingly pointed finger extended from each of the thousands of arms.
Most of the remaining team members flinched as a siren wail rose. Only BOb and Captain Singleton didn’t react.
It took Rourke a moment to realize the sound was coming from the Necks.
“Enough of that shit!” Vaughn said through a growl.
The captain raised his weapon.
The rifle barked out a shot.
The disc-shaped head of the Neck protruding from the wormhole flew from its body.
Rourke watched it tumble backward like a flipped coin. In his time-dilated perceptions, the disembodied robotic head appeared to move in slow motion.
The siren wails stopped. The collider’s thrumming cadence reclaimed its dominance over the enormous facility.
At the same time, the central robot’s arms went slack. They dropped, pulling the Neck’s now inanimate body forward. It toppled out of the wormhole and fell to the floor four stories beneath the levitating mercurial orb, crumpling into a heap and then moving no more.
On the floor some distance away, its disc-shaped head spiraled down noisily like a spinning dinner plate.
Finally, it, too, stilled.
Behind the robot’s now lifeless remains, the crowd of attending Necks stared down at their fallen comrade with seeming incomprehension.
Then the bots erupted into action. Flailing their arms and gesticulating wildly, they shouted at the humans accusingly.
Narrowing his eyes, Vaughn smiled menacingly. “Goddamn, that felt good!” He gave Rourke and the remaining members of the team a sideward glance. “What the hell are you waiting for, gentlemen?”
The captain switched his assault rifle’s selector to full auto and raised the weapon, aiming at the screaming crowd of Necks. “Light ‘em up!” Before pulling the trigger, he gave the men a meaningful glance. “Just don’t hit anything important.”
Then Vaughn fired a short burst into a line of the Necks, strafing them from left to right.
Pandemonium erupted from the gallery. Finally understanding what was happening to them, the Necks began to crawl over each other as bodies fell like dominoes. Several leaped into the air, flying six feet or more over the heads of their brethren.
BOb and the other members of the team opened fire, raising the mechanical carnage another level.
Shattered carapaces and dismembered arms flew into the air.
Rourke raised his rifle. He still had full auto selected. He fingered the trigger and then hesitated.
The seemingly sentient robots were dying by the dozen.
It was a massacre.
Then images of his lost family and friends streamed through Rourke’s mind.
These bastards hadn’t hesitated, hadn’t paused to consider what lives th
ey were snuffing out when they’d swept the planet clean of all animal life.
Rourke added his weapon to the effort. Opening fire, he swept the jittering muzzle of his M4 across a scrambling swarm of the robots. Several dropped instantly. However, many stumbled as parts of their bodies flew off, exposing shadowed interstices laced with twinkling lights.
He took no solace in the act. It sickened him, but in Earth’s bloody history, there had never been a more clear case of it's-us-or-them. Either Rourke and the Merry Band of Pirates would succeed, or humanity would cease to exist.
As equations went, it didn’t get much more straightforward than that.
After firing another burst, Rourke watched as a group of the scrambling robots reached the floor on the right side of the facility. Instead of fleeing as he'd expected, the Necks turned and ran full-tilt straight at him and the rest of the humans.
“Oh shit!” He fired into them. “They’re coming this way!”
Vaughn, who was shooting in a different direction, looked at Rourke and then followed his line of sight. The man spun right, shifting his fire toward the new threat. “Incoming!”
Rourke’s eyes went wide as he continued to shoot the leaping Necks. “Goddamn, they're fast!” Now that the things were running, their jumps reached new heights. The leaps would easily clear an entire house.
He fired a short burst that caught a Neck mid-flight. One of its arms flew off. The other three went limp as the remaining rounds slammed into the center of the bot’s white torso. The robot crashed to the floor and slid to a stop. Then it moved no more.
Vaughn’s hand slammed into his chest plate. “Keep firing, or they're going to overrun us!”
Rourke tore his eyes from the dead Neck and looked up in time to see another volley of robots flying through the air. Beneath them, several others were racing up the criss-crossing stairway that led up to the landing occupied by the humans.
The decking lurched beneath his boots as a Neck slammed down right in front of Rourke. In a blur, two of the robot’s arms drew back lightning-fast, but before the machine could land the twinned blow that surely would've killed Rourke, the lower half of the Neck’s body and a section of railing behind it vanished, sent to Hell by a flash of light from BOb’s BFG.
