by Sean McFate
The team had moved all the furniture out of one corner and were now measuring distances from the walls with laser range finders. Another was taking the measurements and drawing a perfect circle on the Brazilian hardwood floor with indelible marker.
“Lava, we’re here,” said Tye.
“Roger. Tye, on me. Locke, on demo.”
Demolitions. I liked demo. One of Lava’s team was pulling out thick plastic tubes from his rucksack and screwing them together. As I approached, he didn’t look up; he only held out a roll of 100 mph tape.
“Take it, rook,” he said.
“Ain’t no rookie,” I responded, snatching the black duct tape from his hand. “I was leading an Apollo team when you were still a Bat Boy.” It was a term for an army ranger. Rangers were my friends and I had gone through ranger school, but they were not known for subtlety, just like this guy.
“You watch yourself down there,” he said coolly.
“Placement area ready,” said the guy holding the marker in a deep bass. The ex-ranger and I carried over the tube, which was surprisingly heavy. On the floor, the trooper had drawn a four-foot diameter circle, noting distances and angles to various side walls.
“Ready the tape,” said the ex-ranger, laying down the tube on the circle while I taped it to the floor. It fit perfectly. The tube looked like thick det cord, but it was something else.
“What is this stuff?” I asked.
“Been a while, eh, rook?” he said smugly while fastening the blasting caps. “It’s Apollo proprietary: two parts CL-20 and one part HMX. Make big boom.”
“Omega, we are preparing to breach,” said Lava, and we scurried for cover.
“You are green,” responded Omega.
“Fire in the hole!” cried the ex-ranger, and I muted my helmet’s enhanced hearing. The explosion’s shock wave walloped me in the chest, and shook the floor and windows. The marble man statue tottered and crashed to the floor with another loud boom, decapitating him. I sidestepped the chrome cloud head as it rolled by, adding a sense of surrealism. No alarms sounded, due to Apollo’s building hack. But some security measures cannot be hacked, and my HUD indicated fire teams a few floors below us moving up the stairs.
“Valhalla, you are red. Security mobilized,” said Omega. “Engaging countermeasures. You have sixty seconds before contact.”
“Roger, Omega,” said Lava, not surprised, as the team vanished down the newly made hole. In the background, I could hear automatic gunfire on the floors below, but not from small arms. They sounded heavier, like crew-served machine guns. But here? It could only mean one thing.
“Are those automated turrets?” I asked Tye.
“Affirmative. Retractable ceiling turrets on the floors above and below. They’re controlled by the building’s automated defense system, but Omega hacked them when we were in freefall. Now Omega is using the turrets against the enemy’s quick reaction force, but it won’t take long for the QRF to take them out.”
“Fifty-five seconds,” said Lava as he disappeared down the hole. Tye dropped down and I followed, tucking my arms and weapon to my chest. The room below was dark and warm.
“Don’t touch nothing,” said Tye as he moved forward. It was a computer room. Actually, it was a computer floor. Rows of black computer racks the size of refrigerators lined a raised floor, presumably for cabling. The only entrance was a twenty-ton, circular bank vault door—sealed and locked—explaining why Lava chose to breach through the ceiling. The ex-ranger was already placing C4 charges in its guts.
“Find Alpha three-one-three-five,” commanded Lava, and the team fanned out and searched the server rows.
I flipped on my point-to-point comms with Tye. “What are we looking for?”
“A specific node board, in a specific rack, in a specific server, in a specific quadrant. Alpha three-one-three-five,” he said as I followed.
“This has gotta be the most expensive server farm on the planet, given the real estate prices around here,” I quipped.
“Ain’t no server farm, it’s a supercomputer. And it ain’t no ordinary supercomputer; it’s a Frontier Super-AI, the fastest in the world. Even faster than its twin at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and smarter too. It runs our enemy’s everything.”
Impressed, I asked: “And we’re hacking it?”
“No,” said Tye, stopping to face me. Multicolor computer lights reflected off his black visor, giving him a robotic look. “No one hacks Elektra, and she would fight back if they tried.”
“Wait, it has a name?”
“Just watch your six in here,” he said with impatience, and continued down the row. Looking, I noticed every other rack had an enormous but subdued letter on it in an ultramodern font spelling E-L-E-K-T-R-A across the entire row, with a silver lightning bolt through the A. I wondered if bullets would do any good against a foe like Elektra.
“Thirty seconds,” said Lava. Tye and I were zigzagging, looking for the magic number.
“Valhalla, enemy on your floor,” said Omega.
“Copy. Come on people, find me that rack!” yelled Lava.
My head was a volcano of questions, as I scanned for Alpha 3135. “Tye, if Elektra can’t be hacked, then how did Apollo hack the building?”
“Because the building is not Elektra, and the enemy is not the only one with a Super AI.”
“Wait, Apollo has an AI too?” I asked, flabbergasted. Apollo was many things, but not that.
Tye turned to me. “Who says it’s ours? It’s our client’s. Now shut your pie hole and search.”
Who was the client? Who was the enemy? What were we doing here? It reminded me why I left Apollo: ask a question and get two more in return.
“Omega, status?” asked Lava.
“Helicopter extraction on standby. Ground recovery team ready,” replied Omega.
Lava paced. I had never seen him pace before. Perhaps he was nervous because he knew how Elektra would fight back. “Any new breach points?”
“Negative. Just the main entrance.”
Lava turned to face that direction. “Is the vault door prepped and demoed?”
“Affirmative,” said the ex-ranger over the comms. “Once the tangos touch it, the internal stanchions will blow and render it an unmovable hunk of junk. It will be impassable.”
No sooner had he said that when a muffled explosion came from the enormous vault door, followed by a dull thud. We were sealed in, but not for long. The enemy would somehow find another way in; we sure would.
“Omega, update!” said Lava.
“Main entrance sabotaged. Tangos moving to points here and here,” said Omega, and my HUD showed red dots massing at opposite ends of the floor. “They must be secret breach points, where the walls are thin, for contingencies like this. We estimate you have one minute before they breach, maybe less.”
Silence as Lava weighed his options. Abort was one of them, but I’ve never known him to give up. Ever. Finally, he spoke: “Tye, Locke on breach point one. Hernandez, Kim on breach point two. The rest find me our node board!”
Tye and I sprinted to the other side of the floor and took up fighting positions, pointing our weapons at the breach point. At present, it was a wall. Soon it would be a hole with tangos swarming out. We each took cover behind a computer rack, laying in the prone position. By my side were two grenades, ready to throw, while Tye’s weapon had an integrated 40 mm launcher. I could hear Tye controlling his breathing, readying for what came next.
“Found it. Cover down on me,” said one of the commandos. Peering behind me, I saw two commandos far down the row pulling out a tray from the rack; inside were vertical rows of circuit boards, about twenty in all. Another unpacked a flat ballistic case he parachuted in with him.
“Omega, confirming node board Alpha three-one-three-five,” said Lava.
“Good copy. You are green to proceed,” said Omega.
“Careful now, we get only one shot at this,” said the Israeli operator. One of the commando
s inspected the contents of Alpha 3135, pulling out five large circuit boards and dumping them on the floor.
“Now hand me the replacements,” he said. The other commando opened the ballistic case and took out five nearly identical boards.
“The swaps must be flawless,” said the Israeli, “or Elektra will know.”
“Preparing to insert new cards,” said Lava.
“Copy, Valhalla. We are standing by for network penetration,” replied Omega.
As I listened to the radio chatter, I grew confused. “Tye, you said it was impossible to hack Elektra. But it sounds like we’re hacking her. What’s going on?”
A pause. “Locke, you’re a real burr in my ass, you know that?”
“I’m risking my life for this. You can at least tell me why.”
Another pause. “It’s true, you can’t hack Elektra. We’ve tried. But there is another way, and it took months to figure out. People died.”
“New compute cards inserted. Performing electrical tests on the PCBs,” said the Israeli. Somewhere beyond the wall, I heard a loud clang. They were getting closer.
“Tye, what’s the other way? What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Elektra can only be hacked from the inside. Someone has to physically swap out good circuit boards with bad ones inside the artificial neural network. But it can’t be any circuit board; it has to be five specific boards within a critical control node.”
“Alpha three-one-three-five,” I said.
“Correct. We corrupted Alpha three-one-three-five with vulnerabilities our AI can exploit—”
“A back door,” I interrupted again.
“Yeah, if you want to call it that. If all goes well, our AI will hack their AI and we win. If not . . . improvise.”
Improvise. It was the Apollo way, and not my favorite strategy for dealing with mortality, even though I was good at it.
“Omega, swap complete. We are ready to integrate node board back into the system. Proceed?” said Lava. I saw the team’s collective heart rates spike on my HUD.
“Proceed.”
Sirens blared and floodlights lit the entire floor.
“Emergency. Oxygen levels dropping,” warned my onboard AI, although “AI” seemed a misnomer in the presence of Elektra. The comms channels went static. Even the polite female AI voice began distorting into a grotesque baritone as a massive electronic tidal wave jammed our systems. My head pounded, too.
“Guess it didn’t go well,” I shouted to Tye over the shriek of the sirens.
“Mission fail,” confirmed Tye.
The wall in front of us blew inward, spraying our armor with concrete and steel. Elite mercenaries wearing advanced body armor and oxygen masks assaulted through the breach, shooting. Tye and I threw grenades into the hole, and the concussive blast threw them against the wall. But one got up, his body armor unbelievably strong. Then a second.
You gotta be kidding me, I thought, as a third sat upright. I had never seen grenade-proof armor, unless it was those turtled-up Explosive Ordnance Disposal guys who looked like a Kevlar Michelin Man.
Let’s see how good your armor is, I thought. My SCAR fired high-velocity 7.62 mm cartridges with tungsten-carbide bullets, specifically designed to penetrate body armor. In rapid succession, I shot the three in the face, where body armor is weakest. They dropped instantly, but others swarmed in.
“There are too many. Let’s go!” screamed Tye, but I knew he was wrong.
I have to thin the herd, or we won’t make it five steps, I thought. Switching tactics, I shot three in the leg. They crumbled on impact, and their buddies swooped in and pulled them to safety, ridding me of nine enemies with three bullets in two seconds. The enemy had temporarily ceded the battlefield.
Tye yanked my boot. “E and E!” he shouted through his face mask, telling me to escape and evade. The enemy mercs were gathering on the other side of the breach, readying for another assault.
“Let’s go-o-o!” yelled Tye. I pulled a grenade from my vest and threw it into the breach. The enemy mercs scattered instantly, but were too late. The explosion caught two in the chest, blowing them into the wall, killing them. The rest recovered, but they would not throw grenades back as we were in the guts of Elektra.
“Triple time!!” he shouted. I ran but grew dizzy from the depleted oxygen. We ditched our HALO oxygen bottles with the wingsuits on the 101st floor, but kept our reserve chutes and harnesses.
Tye staggered then collapsed, succumbing to the lack of oxygen. I grabbed him by the arms and lifted up, doing the fireman’s carry, and stumbled toward the ceiling hole.
“We’re surrounded,” yelled Lava, as he grabbed Tye and lifted him up like a rag doll. Four hands reached down and pulled him up. I followed, then Lava. We were the last.
“Fire in the hole!” shouted Lava, pulling out a shiny steel cannister from his pack. He flipped open the control pad and armed it, then stuck his head down the hole and chucked the bomb into Elektra and the other mercs.
“Away! Away!” he screamed, as he stumbled backward from the hole. I turned to run and felt my ears compress like a skydive, then the shock wave blew me sideways through a glass wall. I heard and felt nothing, just blackness.
“Get up!”
Gunfire.
“Get up!!”
Explosions.
“Wake up!” It was Tye, crouching above me and firing, empty cartridges bouncing off my visor. I rolled over, disoriented from being knocked out by the blast. Flames licked up from the hole in the ground and black smoke filled the atrium. So much for Elektra.
Tye bolted away, but I felt too woozy to move. The rest of the team moved out, firing in short controlled bursts as they retrograded. Glass flew everywhere, as the firefight exploded the crystal office and modern art. Simultaneously, the sprinkler system rained on us, creating a surreal battlespace.
“Watch the left flank!” shouted Lava, followed by the buzz of a mini-Gatling gun and a waterfall of glass shards.
Get in the fight! I willed my legs to move, but they were kryptonite. As I lay sideways, I could see boots advancing along the floor, and they were not Apollo’s.
Get. In. The. Fight. Shaking, my hands reached into my med-pack and extracted an ampule. Opening my visor, I bit off the cap and stuck the ampule up a nostril, squeezed, and inhaled. Starbursts lit up behind my eyes as I felt my body power up. My heart turboed and each breath felt like a scuba tank of air. My senses buzzed and my limbs were itching to pounce. My brain turned predator.
The boots were approaching, but in slow motion now. I rolled to the prone position, SCAR up, and fired four shots. Three men tumbled to the ground, screaming as they clutched their blown-out ankles. Three more shots ended them.
I got up and saw I was alone, except for the enemy mercs twenty feet away. For a millisecond, we all paused, equally surprised. Then the gunfire erupted. I drew like lighting, capping one in the head as I dove sideways and slammed into the floor. A small, octagonal grenade bounced off a cubicle desk and rolled to a stop in front of me, and I sprint-rolled behind a steel filing cabinet. The explosion was deafening, even through my enclosed Apollo helmet, and propelled me into the next cubicle. But I felt nothing, other than the urge to kill. The chemical I snorted unlocked the primitive brain, and it was why everyone at Apollo called it “Mr. Hyde Dust.”
Taking a grenade from my vest, I pulled the pin, cooked it for three seconds, and lobbed it for an airburst. The shock wave blew shrapnel through the cubicles like paper. The enemy screamed, and I liked the sound.
Brrrrrrrrrrrr. I ducked and the cubicles around me exploded in splinters as a mini-gun shredded the area with six thousand rounds per minute. I could hear the multiple barrels spin to a stop, and a merc shouting at me in Russian. Poking my SCAR rifle around the corner, I could see the shooter from my muzzle camera. He was huge with a dense beard, and was so cocky that he stood straight up on a desk for all to see, like death itself.
Screw him, I thought. I knew I s
hould keep moving and find Lava, but I wanted to rectify this faux grim reaper. Low-crawling, I slipped under two cubicles and peeked over the rim with my muzzle-cam. Fake reaper still there, like a statue in the sprinkler rain.
Good, I thought. With adrenaline-crazed fury, I popped up, obtained a perfect sight picture of his skull, and squeezed. One shot, one kill. A hailstorm of lead responded to my surprise attack, and I rushed ahead. The enemy ran down a parallel hallway, and we fired at each other through the glass walls on full automatic. Glass blew everywhere.
Find Lava and Tye, I thought. Through multiple glass walls, on the other side of the floor, I could see muzzle flashes and explosions. Has to be them.
As I sprinted, two mercs followed. Like Tye, I used parkour to leap over furniture, and shot my way through glass doors. A bullet clipped my left scapula, ricocheting off my armor and making me stumble.
Enough! I sprint-leapt onto the thirty-foot mahogany table and flipped so I was skidding backward on my stomach with my weapon up and aimed at the door. The merc charged in and I shot him in the chest. A second merc dove in as I skidded off the table. We unloaded at each other under the table, but hit only chairs and table legs, sending splinters everywhere.
Keep moving or die! screamed my intuition. I ran out a different exit, toward Lava and the skyscraper’s windows.
“You are red,” said Omega, the signal improving as I got closer to the windows.
Not helpful! I thought as I emptied a magazine and swapped it out for a new one.
Ahead of me, I could see the team pinned down in a swank corner office. They turned a massive brazilwood desk on its side for cover as a ring of mercs fired into the office space. The glass windows were shot out, and the enemy was trying to drive Lava’s team over the edge. This was not a prisoners-of-war kind of war.
One of Lava’s team was frantically waving me off.
Why the wave-off? I was trying to rescue them, I thought, then the glass walls around me exploded with the brrrrrrrrrrrr of another mini-gun. Bits of ceiling were still collapsing on me as I snuck my muzzle-cam above the remnants of a desk. To my right was the gunner, tucked behind a weightbearing wall, its dry wall shot away to reveal steel and concrete. To my left was the drone in a perfect hover ten meters outside the windows. Its weapon pods were retracted, showing an M134 Minigun and two missiles, in case I made a jump for it. As if that were even an option.
