Then he remembered an article he’d read about native warriors once upon a time. Their ability to hold on to control even when most of their brains were shut down by driving themselves off their medulla oblongatas, which ordinarily regulated autonomic breathing and any body function not requiring conscious regulation. Apparently they could train themselves to implant a singular directive to this primitive lower brain in the back of their skulls to drive them when their higher brains were no longer accessible. Yet other tribes had mastered how to do something similar with their limbic system. Not sure what man into superman method these guys subscribed to, he targeted both those regions of their brains.
That slowed them down.
Forget that much of their skulls had been blown away already by the .9mm. Note to self, DeWitt. Switch to .45 caliber slugs that require less precision and philosophizing about where to target the damn bullets.
The legs of the two natives gave out under them. They crawled a bit his direction before shutting down entirely. Their movements like those infants born without a higher brain, just a brain stem, who were also capable of such primeval crawling.
Their stopped hearts would have brought them down a few seconds later as their bodies locked up from lactic acid buildup and lack of oxygen. Regrettably, in up-close exchanges like this, a few seconds was all you needed to turn the tide.
DeWitt’s only explanation for how natives without heartbeats could keep chasing him went back to the medulla oblongata training the bird men must have had that allowed them to continue to use the nervous system to power the body even without the cooperation of the circulatory system, if only for the short-term.
Shaken, DeWitt, took a few seconds to shrug off what had just happened to him. If he didn’t know better, he’d say those guys were nano-enhanced or chip-enhanced or both. But according to the rules of engagement, Truman wouldn’t have given them those advantages. Their little nano war was behind them, and the natives that were chip-enhanced would have had those chips shut down as well. No, this was just good old fashioned, tough-as-nails types, just like Leon and his men. Only, with that something extra that bordered on paranormal abilities only because Westerners just didn’t have the patience to commit to the years of esoteric training required to master these practices.
Letting the incident go, DeWitt returned to his robot hunting.
***
“How are you supposed to do one of your signature, character-defining bank shots in a field of giants, DeWitt?” he said out loud, his hands on his hips, and his eyes on the Goliath-Bot battle unfolding before him.
He scouted about for an opportunity. Ten minutes later he heard the words escape his lips, but he still didn’t believe it, “Jackpot!”
“Oh, yeah, that works.” He aimed his scoped sniper rifle at the field of Goliath-Bots still loading up, standing in formation, awaiting their pilots. As the Ubuku natives climbed up the giant legs and torsos en route to the cockpit cabins in the Goliath-Bots’ heads, he took his first shot. It ricocheted off of at least six Goliath-Bots before hitting the Ubuku native who thought he’d actually made it into the cockpit ahead of the menacing “bee” that wouldn’t stop chasing them.
“Really need to challenge yourself to do better, DeWitt.” He took another shot. Five ricochets before he hit a human target this time. “That’s five! You’re getting worse!”
Impatient with himself he loaded another shell and fired. Four ricochets this time before an Ubuku native fell. “Four, just four! And the bastard’s just wounded in the leg, to boot. Must be battle fatigue. This is embarrassing. Thank God no one’s around to see. Too busy holding up their end of the battle.”
“Four ricochets, DeWitt?” Patent said, marching by. “To think you were such a promising ALPHA UNIT protégé once.”
Patent lumbered on.
“You’re not going to stay long enough to give me a chance to redeem myself?”
Patent didn’t slow or respond, as if he hadn’t heard.
“You’d think there’d be some tarnish on those brass balls after all these years,” DeWitt mumbled as he loaded the next shell. And fired. Seven ricochets off of the housings of several Goliath-Bots this time before registering a kill. “Seven that time!” he shouted at Patent who could no longer be seen. “What are you screaming about, DeWitt. Even seven is pretty pathetic.”
Despite his provocation, none of the Ubuku natives could be bothered to climb the Goliath-Bots the way they were meant to be climbed, from the stairwells inside the legs. As with OMEGA FORCE, they’d learned that there were far faster ways to get up top, if a bit riskier. All the more risky now that DeWitt had found a new pastime for himself and a way to shed battlefield stress at the same time.
THIRTY
“Is it me, or are we just not making the inroads I expected to make?” Leon said, stomping the face of a fallen robot with his monster robot foot. Pretty much crushing the pilots inside and putting that toy they were playing with to rest.
“These are not your ordinary natives, Leon. Even without the boost of the mindchips and the nanonets.” She pivoted their robot at the torso, drove an elbow into the face plate of another robot, shattering it. Used one of the hands under her control to yank the two pilots out of their roost. “You see their eyes?” After their little stare down of one another, she flung the two natives across the forest. Tree-landing to break the fall or no, they were done for.
“Yeah, they’re in some kind of trance.”
“The same trance those shaolin monks use when they let you swing a bat at their Adam’s apple just to watch your bat break.”
“F-me,” Leon mumbled. “It’s not the first time we’re seeing this, but how does it benefit them when wielding technology? You need access to the rational mind and to critical thinking abilities.”
“Regular humans work from a whole-brain state, with both hemispheres perfectly coordinated, for just two minutes of every twenty-eight. The rest of the time you could say they’re working with half a brain, alternating between left and right hemispheres. Now imagine you could lock in whole brain thinking? Their approach starting to make sense to you yet?”
“I’m not sure which is worse, the truth, or your sarcasm.”
Leon tackled the next robot to get near them. Pinned it between his robot’s legs and punched the other robot’s face into scrap iron. “But we’re still the superior fighters, right?”
“If you’re looking for false assurances from me, we’re doing worse than I thought.”
“This would go a lot better if we were psychically connected to each other the way you and your sister are connected,” he said.
“We are. We’re learning to read one another’s minds through the shifting pressures each other is applying to the hand and foot pedals. Give us some credit.”
“Try reading this,” he said as he reached for a tree trunk, one of the ones reaching up to form the canopy. Working together they stripped it down and used it as a bat against their opponents who had been increasing in number the whole time, not decreasing, despite all the ones they’d put down already.
The bat worked quite effectively at clobbering any robot stupid enough to get within range. All the bat did though was knock the pilots senseless for a bit, causing them to stagger and run interference for the good guys against the bad guy robots coming at Leon and his boys.
Leon noticed all the salvage work taking place on the ground, headed by Natty and Crumley. “Hate to put an end to your specimen collecting, guys, but we could use a little help up here,” Leon said over their party line.
“Is that Leon calling for help?” Ajax said over the COM.
“Will wonders never cease.” That was DeWitt.
“Yeah, we got what we need down here. Suppose we can lend a hand,” Crumley said.
“I don’t know, maybe Crumley can, he’s the only one around here Leon deems irreplaceable,” Cronos said. “I say the rest of us hang back and test the truth of that.”
“Ha-ha. Very fun
ny, guys.” Leon found himself pushed into the face of another robot as one of the bad guy bots kicked him in the back. “You want me to keep laughing at your bad jokes, get your asses in gear!”
Cassandra took the punch from the robot coming at them, grabbed the arm, ripped it off, and sent the robot flying into another one of their attackers on his own momentum. Meanwhile, she used the new bat in their hands, with its jagged edges, to cut off the latest attackers at the knees. Severing their hydraulic cables.
“Hey! I thought we were done with the specimen collection!” he heard Crumley squawk over their party line from ground level.
Leon’s face hardened. “Chaos of war, Crumley. Try and not get distracted.”
“Guys,” Satellite cut in. “I’ve managed to re-encrypt our chatter, for now. Don’t know how long it’ll last. Their self-evolving algorithms are pretty good.”
“You mean my self-evolving algorithms,” Natty cut in.
Satellite sighed. “Yeah, I mean his self-evolving algorithms.” Another sigh. “Great job, Satellite! I’m sure that’ll make all the difference!” He mumbled, “They’re probably just pissed because I made their jobs easier on them. This is one whacked group of soldiers.”
“It occurs to me that they can’t fire at us this close in, not without risking taking one another out,” Cassandra said.
“We on the other hand,” Leon said nodding. He brought up the schematics on the projectile launchers embedded in the robots’ arms and legs. Throwing their diagrams across their faceplate. “You know I’d forgotten we even had these things.”
“You and me both.”
Coordinating the controls together, they made a hole with their arm and leg mounted rocket launchers. A big one. They took their robot charging straight down center field as they blew apart the resistance. Leon handled the precision shooting. Cassandra handled keeping them out of harm’s way as the opposition fired back at them. Twisting and turning their robot and utilizing the full range of its joints, and timing it so the near misses took out the oppositions’ Goliath-Bots instead.
This many robots, this close in, the holes tended to fill as rapidly as they made them with the in-charging Goliath-Bots. Cassandra took a forward dive, right off the “starting post” of the Goliath-Bot’s huge feet. Barreling into the “water”—a reflective pool of silver created in the mirrored reflections of the enemy Goliath-Bots surfaces, barely the size of their shoulders. As she pierced the “water’s surface” the “silvery liquid” closed about her. And the two shells fired at her from the front hit two Goliath-Bots closing in on them from behind instead. Opening a nice hole as their shrapnel pushed back the other giants. Unfortunately the hole was not in the direction they were headed.
That direction was blocked by the four that caught them as they made their way through the hole. A different Goliath-Bot had hold of each of their limbs; together, they were supporting them off the ground like the mat of a trampoline, their four limbs the springs anchoring “the mat” to the ring of Goliath-Bots around them. Making full use of the trampoline was a fifth Goliath-Bot being flung into the air by the four that had hold of Leon and Cassandra’s Goliath-Bot. The one enjoying the trampoline was doing aerial flips, and whatever else he could think of to land in some way that would tear the Goliath-Bot’s torso from its limbs.
“A fine predicament you’ve gotten us in,” Leon said.
“What are you complaining about? They turned us over, didn’t they? Now we get to enjoy his acrobatics as his feet, or his head, or…” she kept waiting to see what was going to land on them next. “His form sucks, for what it’s worth. My nine-year-old can do better.”
“You have a nine-year-old?”
“No. I just thought the joke needed a little something.”
“You’re making jokes? Let me guess, you’re not in sociopathic killer mode yet.” He’d read her files since she had made her presence known. “What does it take to get you to switch gears exactly?”
“Certainly not a bunch of pipe-head natives. Feel sorry for the bastards.”
Leon groaned. “Any suggestions from the pacifist in you?”
“Yeah, enjoy the ride.”
He thought she meant the trampoline ride, but apparently he was mistaken. She pressed a button on the dashboard and their Goliath-Bot’s feet folded themselves, origami fashion, into jet mode. Blasting the two grabbing hold of its ankles back so hard against the other Goliath-Bots anxious to give witness to their humiliation that it created a domino effect. Meanwhile, their own Goliath-Bot hurtled, missile-like, straight forward. Cassandra had morphed the hands into spears, which again unfolded origami like, the entire arms collapsing into long narrow shafts suitable for shish-kebabing the Goliath-Bots at the end of each arm. Straight through their gyroscopic center of gravity.
The added weight of the skewered Goliath-Bots shifted their center mass and pulled them down to the ground. Cassandra killed the jets in their feet so she could roll out of the handstand she found herself in and land on her feet. Essentially freeing her hands of the speared robots.
She continued tearing her way through the huddle, determined to get to open field, even though the number of robots showed no sign of thinning.
Leon checked “the rearview mirror”—a flat-screen monitor protecting their rear. Noticed the Goliath-Bots with the broken gyros weren’t getting back up. The broken gyroscopes, meant to stabilize the labs inside of them during scientific mode, apparently, in warrior mode, gave the combatants a sense of direction. It didn’t matter that the ones in the cockpit could sense up from down and right from left, the controls in their hands no longer associated those movements with up and down and right from left.
Just when Leon thought they might finally be in the clear, they got broadsided from several different directions at once. Once they were down on the ground, all the proximate Goliath-Bots just piled on. Leon and Cassandra didn’t have enough strength in their Goliath-Bot to crawl out, or enough arsenal to blast their way clear, assuming they could do that without blowing themselves up.
Cassandra, apparently, was two steps ahead of him on that assessment. She was already cutting a hole through their faceplate—with her fingernail. “I hope you’re not using nano because that’s against the rules.”
“Genetic alteration locked in a long time ago. Could just as easily punch through the bulletproof glass, but that might draw more attention than we like. While they’re scrambling to get out of one another’s way…”
“We’re going to climb through the moving mountain of boulders into the clear, take control of whatever Goliath-Bot happens to be on top of the pile.”
“I really hadn’t thought that far, but yeah, fine, that works.”
They snaked their way through the hole she made and then up through the “crevasse” of clinched Goliath-Bots. The narrow channels changing shape and direction as the Goliath-Bots squirmed under one another. His reflexes were good. Hers were better. They had to move fast because any of the openings could close at any time, any of the passages turned into a sandwich press.
She made it to the top of the “canyon” before he did. Ripped the faceplate of the topmost Goliath-Bot open. Strangled the two Ubuku natives inside, one in each hand, against their own seat belts, even as their hands fought for the seat belts’ release levers. Leon was taking this all in as he climbed through the last bit of shifting chasm. “If her sociopathic killer mode hasn’t kicked in yet, remind me not to be around when it does,” he mumbled.
Cassandra was already strapped into the seat when he crawled into the seat beside her and strapped himself in. She took over the Goliath-Bot’s controls to get them off the top of the pile and running up field again. “The faceplate is jammed in the open position.”
“I prefer a little wind in my face.”
They were out of the huddle and making some yardage on the football field finally. They continued running up-field. The robots sprinting towards them were thinning, evidently drawn away from their person
al drama by other fights occurring on the field requiring their attention.
“Never mind about the call for help, guys, false alarm,” Leon said.
The party line chatter erupted. “Did you hear that?” “Yeah, he’s not spoiling our fun. Screw him.” “We’re coming to the rescue whether you need it or not.” “Shit, what’s with these guys? They fight pretty well.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” Leon said interjecting himself in the middle of all the COM chatter. He had to remind himself that OMEGA FORCE had spent most of their time up until now felling the Goliath-Bots from the ground and salvaging them for spare parts, not actually fighting inside them.
“Wait a second? Aren’t we the seasoned fighters?” “I know like ten forms of martial arts and now so does my robot.” “You haven’t lived until you’ve tried capoeira and fighting one of these robots upside down.” “I outperformed DARPA’s robots last time they brought me in for testing.” “And yet these natives will not take a hint.”
“I think Truman found his own warrior class of tribesmen,” Leon said interjecting himself into their stress-relief chatter.
“They’re all warriors throughout the Amazon rainforest.” “Yeah, these tribes haven’t stopped feuding in three thousand years. What makes these guys so special?”
Leon took a beat to help him find the patience. “Look at their eyes.”
“We’re kind of busy looking at their fists.” “And their feet.” “Was that a drop kick? Did that son of a bitch really try to flying drop kick me? No he didn’t.” “This one rolled me and put me into a headlock. They get WWF wrestling out here? Don’t tell me these tree people have satellite TV in their tree houses. Is there nothing holy?”
The COM chatter stopped. In its place were just the sounds of robots ripping and tearing at one another.
Finally the talking amongst his men resumed. “You know, he’s right about the eyes. Do these guys even blink?” “I’d be happy to see one of them get up and take a shit.” “Why is it I’m sweating and they’re not?” “The copilots move as one. No two people are that coordinated.”
Mind of a Child_ Sentient Serpents Page 26
