thirty-six
To Holly’s surprise, the autonomous vehicle responsible for shooting down several of the group’s drones didn’t look anywhere near as alien as she had imagined. On reflection she considered that this made sense given that it had, after all, been designed by human minds; twisted minds, but human ones nonetheless.
It was, in essence, a scaled-up version of the kind of armoured vehicles familiar from military applications on Earth, with the primary difference being its wholly autonomous nature.
The vehicle approached at a slower pace than expected, allowing Grav to liaise with both Peter and Bo, who had now thankfully reached the safety of the second rover. Bo confirmed the accuracy of Grav’s memory regarding how to launch the rover’s powerful missiles.
Before it came time for Grav to launch the projectiles, he and Holly were both greatly relieved to hear that Sakura had also safely reached the second rover.
With no idea of the enemy vehicle’s offensive range, Grav had no option but to cross his fingers and wait until it came within the rover’s. As soon as it did, he launched the rover’s full array of explosives in a careful pattern designed to ensure that the target would be hit regardless of any efforts to avoid the blasts. “Just like a video game,” he said with a forced grin. “I am firing RPGs at a tank, Hollywood. Pretty much.”
The rover had shielding abilities which Grav would greatly prefer not to test, and once again the only thing he could do was cross his fingers and hope that his attack would succeed.
“It’s stopping,” Peter said, commentating on live drone footage of the vehicle which Grav and Holly were also watching in their own rover. “It’s going to turn around and try to flee.”
“Too late, asshole,” Grav muttered as a rain of fire hailed down upon the autonomous vehicle.
When the dust settled and further live drone images revealed the result of the barrage, Holly considered the wild cheers from the other rover to be premature.
“You did it!” Bo yelled. “No way is that thing coming back… it’s in a hundred pieces!”
There was no denying that — the vehicle in question was indeed decisively defeated — but Holly saw no reason to confidently assume that there wouldn’t be another.
She pulled at Grav’s arm, urging him to hurry up.
“We’ll watch like hawks and take out anything else that comes close,” Bo insisted. “You guys will make it here, no problem.”
“We are on the way, junior,” Grav said. He then turned to Holly, who was already making her way towards the broken ladder.
“I’ll catch as much of your weight as I can,” Holly said. “Do you think you should engage your C-Suit, just for the landing? It might reduce some of the impact.”
Grav raised his finger in a ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ kind of way and quickly engaged his C-Suit to firm up his suit’s exterior and lessen the potential for injury. This wouldn’t soften his landing in the truest sense of the word, but it would at least limit the stress on his already agonised leg.
“And Grav, whatever you do… just clear the moat, okay? I don’t want to have to slice off a chunk of your ass with that blade.”
He laughed, composed himself, and safely leapt to the ground. Holly broke the worst of his fall, stumbling backwards herself as he landed, but both were ready to get moving within a second or two of his feet hitting the ground.
Grav disengaged his C-Suit to enable faster movement but Holly left hers engaged; as before, Grav’s movement was already restricted and since she wouldn’t leave him behind it made sense for her to enjoy the added protection of the C-Suit given that it wouldn’t slow her down any more than Grav would.
The second rover lay mercifully close, and the trio inside it were as delighted to see Holly and Grav arrive within a few minutes as they were to get there.
Sakura was on the ground outside when they arrived, once again ready to wrap her arms around Holly and thank her for saving her life at great personal risk.
When Holly climbed inside, Peter Ospanov rose from his chair to greet her. He thanked her for saving Bo and apologised for not leaving the rover to do so himself. “I had an order,” he said, hoping she would understand.
“Absolutely,” Holly said, although she couldn’t help but feel like Peter was almost too by the book when it came to doing whatever Grav said. Deep down she knew it wasn’t fair to hold this against Peter given that he had been following a direct order from his superior, particularly when the superior in question was Goran Vuletic. She also knew that staying inside while Sakura went to help couldn’t have been easy for Peter, not least because of his relationship with Viola as well as his obvious fondness for Bo.
As if reading Holly’s mind, Grav ensured that the very first thing he said upon entering the rover was in open praise of Peter’s action. “Peter, I want to offer my deepest praise for your following of an important order that went against your own desires and personal emotions,” he said. “You did what was required of a responsible team member and what I expect of a future leader. If you had not acted so responsibly then you would not have been here to spot the incoming enemy, and perhaps none of us would be here now. This will not go unrewarded.”
Let alone one hand, Holly could count on one finger the number of times she had heard Grav praise someone for a job well done in such strong terms. Peter’s surprised expression and delayed reply — a simple “thank you” — suggested that he was similarly unaccustomed.
“We sent some drones up to a higher altitude to see what they’d spot beyond the areas we’ve already mapped,” Bo said, breaking a very brief silence, “and we should get something back any second now. If there’s another one of those things coming the same way, we’ll see it.”
“Start heading back to the Karrier while we wait for the new images,” Holly said, calmly dispersing the orders with no complaint from Grav.
While Bo drove, Peter cleared his throat and asked Holly and Grav if they had noticed how little damage the powerful explosions which destroyed the hostile vehicle had done to Netherdox’s surface. They hadn’t, so he pulled the relevant image up again on one of the rover’s screens. This image was exactly as he had described and was certainly interesting in an abstract sense, but of far greater importance was the notification which then popped up informing them that the new drone images were ready.
Peter tapped to bring the first image into view. He immediately asked the question on everyone’s lips: “What the hell are those?”
The image, taken far beyond the bunker, revealed three smaller robotic vehicles moving in a triangular formation. But the closer Holly looked, the less that “vehicles” seemed like an appropriate term.
“Are they running?” Bo asked, briefly taking his eye from the rover’s uneventful path to look at the image. “It looks like they have two legs.”
A second and clearer image quickly confirmed this, as little sense as it made.
“Robotic guard dogs?” Peter said, the tone suggesting that he knew how crazy this terminology sounded despite it seeming like an appropriate way to describe what he was looking at.
“Bipedal,” Grav said. “Almost humanoid.”
“So humanoid robo-guards,” Peter replied. “Man… what is this place?”
“This is bad,” Sakura chimed in.
“You think?” Peter said.
Sakura brought her hands to her helmet as though instinctively trying to cover her mouth and nose in uncomfortable thought. “I know that sounds obvious, but I think I know what those things are. I think they’re pack-defence romodroids.”
“Romodroids?” Bo asked.
Peter was next to speak, his voice considerably less gentle than before: “Sakura… how the hell do you know this?”
“Because,” Sakura said, slowly lowering her hands and breathing deeply. “I’m pretty sure I developed the basis of their operating software.”
thirty-seven
“You designed these things?” Bo shrieked, almost
physically recoiling at Sakura’s revelation that she believed she had developed the operating software of the rapidly approaching pack-defence romodroids.
“You knew about this?” Peter Ospanov chimed in. “You knew about this and you did not say anything?”
Sakura looked only at Holly. “I disclosed everything I worked on, everything I knew about, and everything I suspected,” she insisted. “The idea that Morrison was implementing defensive intelligence into humanoid guards was only ever a third-hand rumour, but I disclosed it along with everything else. Ask Grav. And for the record: I didn’t design any romodroids, I only designed some of the software used by teams of guard vehicles with no offensive capabilities. But if these things have that group intelligence with a few offensive tweaks and weapons added on, they become seriously dangerous. One thing that might save us is that the stuff I worked on was nowhere near ready for applied use… it was early-stage work. If it’s been implemented into test models without much refinement, these things will be nowhere near as smart as they could be.”
“All of this is true,” Grav confirmed without hesitation. “Sakura told us about the AI and related things she worked on, as well as the persistent rumours she had heard. When I first raised the idea of coming here, one of Rusev’s firmest reasons for opposition was her fear that there might be intelligent and aggressive romodroids guarding key sites. When I warned you all that we may not be alone here, and when I instructed you all on how to engage your C-Suits, this is what I had in mind.”
“Do you think these things went rogue and messed with the controls in the bunker?” Bo asked, evidently satisfied with Sakura’s explanation and now keen for more insights.
“No way,” she replied. “Zero chance.”
“Agreed,” Grav added. “They could not open the door or operate the controls. It is a sensible idea to raise, but it is not grounded in reality. My strong belief is that someone loyal to Morrison made the changes remotely, quickening the expansion and thickening the cloud coverage to block us from remotely correcting the changes. When we find the group responsi—”
“They’ll pay,” Holly butted in. “Fine. But right now we have a different problem. Sakura, what are these things going to do and how do we stop them?”
Sakura moved closer to the screen which displayed the images of the trio of pack-defence romodroids. “They’re going to check if their alpha is truly finished,” she said. “If the software is largely the same as it used to be, each trio has an alpha and will follow its orders until it can’t give any more, at which point they’ll look for a new one. Until they find one, they’re extremely vulnerable.”
“So you think there’s going to be more than one group and more than one alpha? More than one of those giant vehicles?”
“I would bet on it. There’s a chance, maybe a good chance, that these things aren’t armed; they may just be guards feeding the alpha the information they gather. That’s how we set things up for the original pack-defence tests, which were supposed to be undertaken with an eye on applications for guarding prisons and military bases and places like that. These are intimidating machines and at the time there were a lot of political issues about arming autonomous robots. People have a bigger problem with things that look like robots being armed than they do with something that looks like a tank. I’m not saying that makes sense, but that’s what we were told. And as for what we do now, all I know is that if there is another alpha here, we really want to take this trio out before they tell it about us and before it starts giving them fresh orders. Does that make sense?”
No one said it did, but no one said it didn’t.
“So we strike when they are close to the dead alpha?” Grav asked. “When they are almost there, we strike?”
“We’re not in range,” Peter said. “You fired from the first rover as soon as it was in range, so we would have to drive this one as close to it as we could without hitting the moat that got you into trouble in the first place. Is that safe?”
“Everything on this side of the first rover is safe,” Holly said. “Just don’t go past it and we’re fine. Any objections?”
No one spoke up.
“Good,” Sakura said, “because we really do want to get rid of these things as soon as we can.”
Bo carefully but quickly guided the second rover towards the first, which was still immobilised by the moat. The first rover acted as a safeguard, ensuring that Bo couldn’t go too far, and he stopped mere inches behind it, slightly to the side.
Grav asked Peter and Bo to move out of the way and give him some space to launch the crucial explosives. “Sakura, tell me when.”
Sakura watched the real-time drone footage unblinkingly, and when the pack-defence romodroids reached a certain point and began to slow she gave the go ahead. “Now!”
Grav tapped the right buttons and leaned back in his chair. “Everyone make sure your helmets are letting in atmospheric sound,” he said. “You are about to learn what victory sounds like.”
As the trio of pack-defence romodroids felt the force of the rover’s elite military grade weaponry, the sound of victory raised smiles on every face in the rover. Images on the screen confirmed the decisiveness of the attack, at which point Grav stood up and encouraged Bo to turn the rover around and set course for the Karrier.
A colossal explosion then filled the air, causing every head to spin towards it. This sound dwarfed those of the many explosions seconds earlier and gave rise to great concern.
In light of Sakura’s unwelcome confidence that there were likely to be more romodroids and more alphas posted on Netherdox, only one thought raced in circles through Holly’s mind as she looked out of the rover into the distance towards the origin of the explosive and clearly destructive shot:
That shot better have come from the Karrier…
thirty-eight
“Comm to Karrier,” Holly yelled, in unplanned unison with Grav. “Karrier, come in!”
“It’s still reporting full function,” Bo said, but Holly wouldn’t breathe easily until a voice from inside the Karrier confirmed as much.
When that voice came, it was Dimitar’s. “Holly! What the hell did I just blow up? It was huge!”
Holly bent her knees and crouched to the ground, putting her hands on the top of her helmet in a moment of overwhelming relief.
“What’s going on out there?” Robert Harrington chimed in. “Is everyone okay?”
Holly didn’t know what Robert had already been told so she left the answer to Peter, who had been in this rover all along. Those in the Karrier were able to see everyone else’s location and hence would have known that first Bo and then Sakura had been temporarily immobilised near the first rover, but it now became clear that Peter hadn’t had a spare moment to mention anything to them regarding the autonomous vehicle he had been so quick to warn Holly and Grav about.
“Did you just say robot?” Viola asked, confirming once and for all that all three of the Karrier’s current inhabitants were fine and well. “We’re being attacked by robots?”
“Were,” Grav said.
“Well…” Sakura chimed in. “If you just eliminated a large autonomous vehicle, that means there are at least three smaller pack-defence romodroids out there somewhere. They will briefly return to their alpha — the vehicle you just eliminated — and if you launch a series of strikes as they are about to arrive, you will eliminate them. You didn’t use up everything in that last strike, did you?”
“Nowhere close,” Dimitar said.
In the rover, Bo nodded his head several times at Dimitar’s words. “The Karrier has offensive abilities that make these rovers look like toys,” he added.
“We’ll be back at the Karrier in a matter of minutes,” Holly said. “Dimitar, what’s the communications situation? It looks like the clouds are starting to lift. Have you been able to establish any contact with Terradox or the station? We want to get off this place as soon as we can, but we need absolute confirmation that the romosphe
ric expansion has been reversed.”
That Dimitar’s answer on the communications front was negative came as no real surprise — Holly expected that he would have already informed her and the others of such positive news had there been anything to report — but there was at least some good news when Dimitar confirmed that observations from the Karrier suggested that Netherdox was now in the early stages of embryonic reversion and that the signal-blocking clouds had almost entirely cleared.
Holly sat as helplessly as everyone else in the rover for the rest of the short journey back to the Karrier, with peak helplessness arriving when Dimitar reported that he was about to launch the attack on the three pack-defence romodroids which were approaching their downed alpha.
One slip-up from Dimitar here could have greatly imperilled everyone on Netherdox by derailing the group’s only hope of escape, but in a very real sense the rover’s distance from the drama of the moment reduced the feeling of dread in Holly’s stomach. When she had been able to see Grav’s launching of the attack on the initial romodroid trio, the visual immediacy had made her heart race like a hare on a dog-track. But now, awaiting the result of Dimitar’s more distant action, she was far more aware of her breathing than her heartbeat.
The distinction was subtle but the difference was great, and Dimitar’s announcement of success — greeted with full-hearted if predictable cheers by everyone else in the rover — brought only an oddly blunt kind of relief to Holly. She didn’t know and didn’t particularly care why it felt so different, but the feelings were there and she was aware of them.
At one point, Bo jokingly asked Sakura — earlier critical of the fact that his rover development team had dabbled in research with potential military applications — whether her view had changed now that a weaponised rover had proven a necessary and effective defence against a potentially devastating enemy. Sakura saw the irony and took his comment in the jest he intended.
Terradox Quadrilogy Page 49
