Mind of a Child: Sentient Serpents (OMEGA FORCE and ALPHA UNIT Book 1)

by Dean C. Moore

  Finally he found the suitcase he was looking for, tore it open. He held the item up before Tobor and shook it. “See, this right here is why I don’t pack light.”

  “I’d be more impressed if you could manage a screwdriver in all that,” Tobor said, seated on his duff on a rock in the dirt road, pulling out one of the loose screws from his foot. He examined its top; yep, he was definitely going to need a Philip’s head.

  Leon hiked up to Natty. “What are you so excited about?”

  “My sentiments exactly,” Tobor said, sighing as he pulled out the last of the two loose screws.

  “It’s for my de-cloaking device. In case anyone tried to turn one of my own toys against me. This should give us all the extra amplification we need to unmask just about anything.”

  “You never even built the cloaking device, just drew out the plans for it,” Leon said, grabbing hold of the instrumentation and turning it over in his hands as if he could possibly make sense of it.

  Natty grabbed it back. “That’s the whole point of being paranoid. Making sure the other guy is never ever two steps ahead of you.”

  “If you want to stay two steps ahead of me, pal,” Tobor interjected, “be my guest.” He gestured up the trail.

  ***

  Natty, apparently finished tinkering with his de-cloaking device, ran up to Leon and gave him the thumbs-up. It was just possible that if Leon had been clearer about what he wanted from Natty to begin with, Natty would have had ALPHA UNIT cart up the amplifier to go with the de-cloaking device when he was showing him the way around Jacko’s cloaking cape.

  Leon signaled his troops to advance the off-road vehicles to the drop off point.

  FIFTY-SEVEN

  Once the off-road vehicles were backed up against the precipice, their drivers took a moment to focus the magnetic field they were preparing to generate. Then they gave each other the thumbs-up. The strange noise the trucks were making, courtesy of Natty’s latest device, was incidental. The field exposed the compound, neutralizing the invisible cloaking shield.

  The compound was vast, looking a bit like those medieval monasteries built by monks high up on inaccessible sheer cliffs to ward off invaders. Only this one had a distinctly metal, not stone, character, Leon thought. And while the superstructure rose along the entire length of the sheer cliff, it ultimately rested on the part of the mountain not eaten away by erosion or other forces. He was beginning to suspect those “other forces” might be a mining operation of some kind to get at rare-earth elements for Truman’s hi-tech ventures. Perhaps siting the lab to end all labs here was just an afterthought.

  Natty looked down at the complex. “I guess if you want to be out in front of the learning curve for biotech warfare, siting a compound in the Amazon rainforest makes sense. Does make you wonder, though, who or what he was experimenting on before he hit on the idea of sentient serpents.”

  Cassandra grunted. Natty figured that remark must have hit a little too close to home.

  Natty’s eyes shifted their focus inwards. “Wait a second!”

  Leon caught the distant eyes. “What is it?”

  Natty refocused his attention on him. “It’s FORESCO. I designed this place to protect the Amazon rainforest region, not to declare war against it! The cloaking device was added because I figured it would become a target eventually for unscrupulous types who had raping rather than preservation of the forest in mind.”

  Leon sighed. “The secret to life, kid, is turning negatives into positives. Like the addict who directs all that compulsive behavior to saving lost souls, like Sister Theresa. It’s not about turning positives into negatives.”

  “Hey, don’t tell me that, tell Truman.”

  He watched as the self-replicating robots continued to add to the compound. They made it bigger and built out its fortifications even as he talked. “Oh yeah, those self-replicating robots I designed. Forgot about those.”

  Cronos regarded Natty with a mixture of awe and anger.

  Natty responded to the look he was giving him. “Hey, my step-father was a historian. He just wanted to do civil war reenactments. I rebelled. The further into the past he went, the further into the future I absconded.”

  “Don't look now, pal, but you're still playing war games.” Returning his attention to the robots, he said, “You owe more to him than you care to admit.”

  Natty squirmed at the revelation.

  ***

  “Hawk Eyes,” Cronos teased, “now’s probably not the best time for the close-up view.” He gestured with a nod toward the big picture.

  Leon shifted his attention from what was going on on the roof to what was taking shape around the FORESCO compound. Truman’s elusive spaceship had apparently redeposited the Goliath-Bots onto the field of action. Though that had clearly been some time ago. Coming out of hiding, both the Ubuku-manned and self-piloting Goliath-Bots—the latter courtesy of Natty’s tweaks—were setting up dual perimeters around FORESCO, each about a hundred acres deep. The self-piloting Goliath-Bots apparently reprogrammed to service the enemy.

  Each rind of the onion was further subdivided into pie-shaped wedges by how the Goliath-Bots positioned themselves. Filling in the mandala pattern they were drawing about the perimeter were the hundred-foot-Nomads, the ones under Truman’s influence.

  The Goliath-Bots, with their feathered Indian costuming, and the largest of the Nomads, fighting side by side, made it appear as if the Ubuku had called in the markers on their gods, summoning them into being. Their gods being a combination of animal deities and their ancestors, to whom they prayed, reborn.

  No doubt the mandala pattern hadn’t been idly chosen.

  The Ubuku would draw strength from and find it all the easier to hold on to the altered state of consciousness in which they fought with the mind-centering qualities of the mandala shape.

  But poetic and mystical nonsense aside, all the mandala really did was break up one big killing field into smaller, bite-size bits to enhance the lethality of those killing fields.

  Leon’s hundred watchtowers of light, each a pair of ALPHA UNIT cadets spread throughout the area, were now boxed in. Their only protection, short of their many unique vantage points on the war which would lend them unique insights, was whatever equipment had gotten boxed in with them. Pray that included a few Nomads and Umbrage, and some AI-enabled combat vehicles.

  Tapping the COM in his ear, Leon said, “Those of you in the inner and outer perimeters about the compound, see what you can do to commandeer some of those Goliath-Bots and get them working for our side. Satellite, I suggest you hack as many of the self-piloting ones as you can from a distance.”

  Leon took a breath. “Relax, guys. Just think of it as two opponents setting up the final pieces on the chessboard. All that’s left is to paint the colors ‘black’ and ‘white’ on them.”

  Cronos chortled. “There’s simply no reality that won’t bend before Leon DiSparta’s spin-control analogies.” He did Leon the service of making that crack off the party-line.

  Leon ignored him, keener on knowing if his chaos-theory approach to war was going to hold up against Truman’s clearly more bent-on-order methodology. Regrettably, Leon wouldn’t get to remain in the spectator’s seat for this one to find out. And in moving in to the field of action he was about to surrender his big picture view.

  Alas…. Sometimes the most reasoned of men have to surrender the approach and lean on faith instead.

  ***

  Leon's men rappelled down from the cliff above to the FORESCO superstructure below.

  Some of the 4 x 4 vehicles drove themselves off the precipice at full speed to land on the roof of the compound, bouncing atop their giant all-terrain tires.

  Others of the all-terrain vehicles climbed down the drop-off like insects, using the same hydraulic-arm, robot-driven technology, and the same flexibility that had been demonstrated earlier on crawling over the boulders after the avalanche on the road.

  Once on the roof of the
compound, Natty examined the self-replicating robots from up-close, where they were even more impressive.

  Leon grabbed Natty’s hand. “Let's forget about shaping the future for a minute. And try and exercise some influence over the present.”

  Natty shook off the trance of looking at one of his creations come to life and nodded. He regarded the rest of the sweeping vista and how the building contrasted with it. “This place is an eye sore. No wonder they threw an invisibility cloak over it. For the record, my unmodified design was a lot more aesthetically pleasing.”

  He gazed up to watch the young Nomads jumping down on the compound roof.

  It had taken them a while, but upon detecting the presence of the turned Nomads and the rest of Leon’s entourage, the self-replicating robots changed their programming. Instead of erecting another floor to the building, they constructed self-governing, robotic Gatling guns, mortars, .50 caliber machine guns, and rapid-fire laser cannons. Possibly, up until now, they weren’t particularly impressed by the presence of Leon and his people. Maybe they figured they could just entomb him and his armored vehicles inside the many rooms they were making. The Nomads presence changed that.

  The rate at which the self-replicating robots could extrude these wartime items was truly terrifying. As if the ink used in their 3-D printers was nothing more than zero-point energy converted to whatever matter they desired. Natty couldn’t recall having resolved that technical challenge. Maybe their tech magic was on account of something else. Natty racked his brains, but there just wasn’t enough time to puzzle out the mystery.

  Leon and his men hit the deck as the blasting started. For now, their only cover was the unfinished template of a new floor being constructed, and the few items laid down on the template.

  Realizing he was not going to move in time, Leon dragged the still stunned Natty to the ground. “If you need to take one of your anti-paranoia meds, now'd be a good time.”

  “Yeah, well, they say paranoia is born of a guilty conscience. Not sure there are enough pills in the bottle to ameliorate my guilt.”

  “There’s something you need to keep in mind,” Cassandra said, talking to Leon as she slid into place to cover Natty’s other flank. “They’ll try to separate Laney from us so the lizard men aren’t quieted by her presence. She’s our one best defense right now, even if she won’t stop the most hardened of the Umbrage and Nomad troops.”

  Leon used his lungs like a plunger to scoop in the air he needed to think, held the breath, and nodded. “Better stay by her…”

  Cassandra was already moving to Laney’s side to provide protection for her to make sure she wasn’t squirreled away from them. And to make sure errant fire not intended for her didn’t reach her anyway.

  Grabbing one of Leon's pistols off him, Natty joined in with the shooting at the robots.

  ***

  Laney regarded Cassandra as she slid beside her on protection detail. Cassandra was back in camo mode, looking as silver as the rooftop they were lying on. She was hiding her body a lot better than she was hiding her feelings. “You’re the best of both of us, you know?” Laney said. “That’s why you look at Natty and I with such ambiguous eyes. Torn between thinking of us as parents and hating me because Natty chose me over you.

  “At least now that you’ve found your soulmate in Leon, you can stop using us as an excuse for why you’re so emotionally scarred and start dealing with your sociopathy in earnest.”

  Cassandra fired her single-shot sniper rifle, took out one of the replicating bots. “I saw the way Leon looks at you,” she said to Laney taking her eye away from the scope.

  “He looks at me that way because for all your shapeshifting abilities, and all the acting in the world when you go under cover, you still can’t replicate the one essential quality that matters in a relationship.”

  Cassandra sat with the thought long enough to load another sniper shell into her rifle. “Everybody needs something to work on,” she said, before taking the shot.

  After blowing one of the rooftop robots to shrapnel with a .50 caliber shot from her sniper’s rifle, she chuckled. “Even if things work out between Leon and I, you’ll never be rid of me. You’re the only two people I can’t entirely condescend to. Well, besides Leon, anyway.”

  She fired off another round, having to load one shell at a time, but making each one count by ensuring the shrapnel from any robot she hit exploded in such a way as to take out several others.

  The calculations alone… Laney let the thought go. It wasn’t helping their bonding any. It was too tempting to think of her as nothing more than efficient killer. “Maybe you should come over for dinner when this is all over and we can interact like normal people.”

  Cassandra snorted. “Thanks for that. I always feel better when I can’t tell who’s more psychotic and out of touch with reality, you or me.” She fired off another shot, taking out the robot aimed at and a few surrounding ones as well.

  They didn’t have much by way of cover. Just an eighteen-inch high curving lip of metal, which was perhaps meant to be the base of a reception desk or some other office fixture. Cassandra was making the most of it to steady her rifle.

  “Is it me, or does all this just seem like a stall tactic?” Laney said, glancing over the lip.

  Cassandra did a double take, craning her neck towards her sister. “You aren’t entirely useless from a military perspective. That’s exactly what this is,” she said, putting two and two together, somewhat behind her sister. “They’re buying time to come up with some weapons that will actually work if we breach the compound with too many of the lizard men still more responsive to you than to the triple threat.”

  ***

  As the robot weapons fired on the Nomads under Laney’s influence, the human hybrids used their tails to bat the weapons off the roof of the compound and over the precipice.

  As quickly as the weapons plummeted into the abyss they were remade by helper robots into miniature jet fighters. They flew back up, just as armored and just as pissy as before, to take their potshots at the Nomads.

  Leon and his men lent cover to the Nomads from their prone positions on the roof, shooting at anything firing on them or the Nomads.

  After having no luck with their gunplay, Leon changed ammo. He realized he was able to melt one of the robo-guns with a high-tech incendiary, which burned so hot the flames were blue-white. The rest of his men followed suit.

  Leon's men were able to do some damage with shells that were really small rockets, burning at high temperatures, melting the robots, and defying their ability to reshape themselves.

  But it was fast turning into a numbers game. And the numbers just weren’t on the side of the good guys.

  Cronos dashed over to Leon, sliding in beside him, both men with their bellies to the roof of the FORESCO compound, trying to lie as prone as they could to make the smallest target possible. “Are you seeing this?” he said.

  “Seeing what?”

  Cronos gestured to the AI-ATVs. They had decided they were too big a target in their current, wheeled configuration, so had morphed into biped robot form, and were also lying prone on the roof. The “rubber” of their tires redeployed and used like Kevlar vests to protect their more sensitive areas. Their weapons, pretty much the cannon-sized barrels they had mounted on them prior to shapeshifting, fired selectively at far more mobile and far more shapeshifting-capable bots belonging to the enemy.

  One of the AI-ATVs said, “There’s too many of the buggers to target individually. You have to calculate how to blow up one in such a way that the shrapnel takes out at least six others.”

  The other AI-ATVs adjusted their marksmanship accordingly. And they were indeed taking out more bad-guy bots now.

  “You think you should go over and say something?” Cronos said.

  “Like what?”

  “I don’t know, like something leaderly.”

  “I don’t like to micromanage. I have my hands full with keeping you guys aliv
e. Besides, they look like they’re handling themselves pretty well.”

  “Yeah, I guess. I tell you, I don’t know if I’m going to be as open-minded as you if I find you promoted an AI glorified-all-terrain-attack-vehicle ahead of me.”

  Leon smiled and returned his attention to keeping his head from getting blown off.

  “Don’t you wonder why more of the perimeter defense troops haven’t been recalled to the compound?” Natty said, speaking from Leon’s right flank, as Cronos had been speaking from his left flank earlier.

  Leon cracked his neck craning it towards Natty so fast. The truth is he had been too distracted with the immediate situation to give the problem much thought. “Probably just not sure how many of his troops will be responsive too him or to Laney.”

  “That or…”

  “That or what?” Leon switched out clips as a measure of his insecurity waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  “Just look at what’s before you. This is a whole other campaign. Autonomous, rapidly self-replicating, self-morphing robots. We called the earlier go-around, The Goliath-Bot Wars, but it was really The Robo-Suit Wars. This, this actually is The Robot Wars. And it doesn’t just involve goliaths. Or…”

  “No more ‘Or’s’, okay?! They’re giving me dyspepsia.”

  “Or it’s a mixed asset deployment.” He turned away from facing the action and looked Leon directly in the eyes. “A little bit of everything.”

  The lights went on in Leon’s eyes. “Meaning all that other stuff was just preamble. This is where the real fun begins.”

  He reflexively took a deep breath. It always seemed to help him think. “Wait a second. We’ve got every asset but one. Assuming we’ve managed to commandeer some of those Golaith-Bots. We didn’t exactly come stocked with nano.”