Death Machines - Ghost Book II

by Mike Stackpole

  "Sure, I—"

  I didn't have the meson cannon. It was back in the chopper - which was very exposed. I'd be chopped liver before I got two steps.

  "Here you go, hotshot," said Ace and slid it across the concrete to me. "Thought you might be wanting it."

  I flushed, embarrassed, and reached for it. A stray bullet hit the stock and spun it almost out of cover, but I snagged the barrel and dragged it behind the pylon where I was cowering, then raised it up and fired it blind in the general direction of the shooting.

  "Left!" shouted Angie. "Left!"

  I nudged the gun left and heard the satisfying hissing and popping of a robot's insides boiling away and exploding. I dared a quick glance and adjusted my aim to the other one, then watched it melt like a crayon left out in the sun.

  "Behind!" barked Hell Razor.

  We turned. Three smaller spider-bots were tick-tacking up around the rounded slope of the dome on their pointy little feet, hacking the air with gleaming combat blades.

  Our lasers sliced away their limbs, and their round bodies rolled back down the incline.

  "Clear," said Vargas. "Grab your gear and let's find a way into this place."

  We ran back to the chopper and dragged out our packs and supplies, then scouted around. The ports that the robots had popped out of were armored with the same kind of material we were wearing. No way we were getting through. Angie crawled to the base of a missile battery which was doing its best to depress enough to shoot us. It was failing, servomotors whining in protest. She patted a hatch at its base.

  "This thing's gotta be powered and loaded from below. Razor, y'think a couple of sticks of TNT will turn this into a doorway?"

  Hell Razor opened his pack. "Worth a try."

  We cleared out and watched in all directions as he planted the charges and spooled out the fuse. No more robots came, though down on the ground we could see the ones that had survived our strafing runs gathering all around the edges of the domed roof like hounds that had treed a possum. If any of us was to roll all the way down there, well there wouldn't be much more than a red smear left once they were done.

  "Alright," said Hell Razor, slipping behind the base of a radio tower. "Take cover."

  We all hunched down and he lit the fuse. Fifteen seconds later a deep boom echoed off the hills around the facility and the missile battery toppled over onto its side, ripping out all its innards and electronics as it went.

  Angie scurried forward and looked down into the ragged hole it had left behind. "Yes! We're in!"

  We secured a couple of ropes to a sensor array and lowered the lines into hole, which showed nothing but darkness below a lattice of girders and crossbeams. Thrasher and Hell Razor went first, then Angie and Ace, and finally me and Vargas. We ended up in the middle of a wide corridor, the rubble and grit from the missile battery's demise crunching underfoot.

  Base Cochise was silent and cold - freezing actually. And it wasn't just cold from being mostly below ground. There had to be some active cooling going on, but I couldn't hear the hum of machinery and the air wasn't moist enough for evaporative cooling. I recalled legends of places before the fall where the air could be conditioned and chilled, but I'd put those stories down in the category of other fantasies like a paradise called Hollywood and scientists having harnessed the power of the bomb to propel submarines or light whole cities. Crazy talk, I'd thought. But maybe not.

  As Vargas and I unfastened ourselves from our ropes and I unslung the meson cannon, pinpoints of light began to flicker at various points along the dark walls - red, green, blue, purple and white - slowly at first, like the random play of raindrops hitting a window. Then they increased in frequency and intensity, glowing more brightly and lasting longer.

  Finally they all stayed on, and we were bathed in a multicolored glow. It revealed a computer terminal at the end of a dead end side corridor.

  Angie raised an eyebrow. "You don't suppose...?"

  "Let's go see," said Vargas.

  We walked to the end of the corridor and looked down at the terminal. The screen was on, but there was nothing showing on it.

  "Uh..." said Angie. "Hello? Is this...? Are you the Base Cochise AI?"

  A voice boomed from the ceiling. "There is no reason for us to speak to you. You have nothing to offer us."

  Vargas scratched his head, confused. "So, then... why are you speaking to us?"

  "To distract you until the security units we have dispatched arrive at your location." The words were precise and slow and devoid of emotion, like a parent speaking to a particularly stupid child. "Ploy successful."

  We all whipped around. The far end of the long corridor was filling with silver robots floating swiftly towards us, their serrated pincers snapping at us. We unloaded on them and they collapsed into slag before they made it halfway down the hallway.

  Angie laughed. "Ha! Whaddaya think of your ploy now, Cochise?"

  There was no response. We looked back. The terminal was dark.

  "Guess it's a bit miffed," said Hell Razor.

  "Good," said Vargas, then he started back down the corridor. "Come on, we gotta find where these keys go and end this bullshit."

  The rumble of treads and the click of metal spider legs greeted us as we stepped back into the main corridor - and it was getting closer.

  Chapter Nine

  "On our nine!" I shouted.

  "No!" cried Angie. "On our twelve!"

  "Both!" said Ace.

  "Then go three!" barked Vargas. "Shit!"

  We veered right and ran down the wide corridor. Way too soon it ended in a shiny titanium wall, so polished we could see ourselves in it - and the bulky silhouettes of the robot army growing ever larger behind us. And this time most of them were armed with laser weapons. They started to burn black crisscrosses in the shiny wall and scar our unscarrable armor, too. There wasn't anything to hide behind either.

  "Any ideas?" I asked, as we fired back at them.

  Thrasher dug into the wall with his armored fingers and pulled. A three by six panel popped out. "There's a door."

  Vargas laughed like a mad man, then started shoving us all through into some sort of service corridor. "In! In!"

  After the bright hallway, it was pitch dark in there and we all stumbled around blindly.

  "Which way?" I asked.

  There was a clunk and a curse.

  "Well, not that way," said Ace. "Ow."

  "Turn around!" shouted Angie.

  I turned away from everybody else's voices and stepped forward - and put my foot down on empty air. Suddenly I was sliding on my armored posterior down a slick ramp of some kind. A red light zoomed up at me, a pair of double doors below it. I bent my legs and put my arms up to shield my face, but the doors banged open easily as I hit and I flew out onto the tile floor of a dimly lit room, then skidded to a stop.

  I sat up. "Well, that was—"

  Angie flew out of the door, bounced, and knocked me back down again.

  Half a second later, Ace, Vargas, and Hell Razor zipped out in a tangled knot and I took Vargas's boot heel to the side of the head as they rolled to a stop.

  "Is... that everybody?" I asked groggily.

  "Oh shit!" squawked Angie. "Thrasher!"

  We all scattered, but not quite fast enough. Thrasher came out of the chute like a safe with legs and knocked us all flat again.

  "Nice of them to put that there," groaned Vargas as he sat up. "You know, for the kids."

  "We should block it, though," said Ace. "Some of those robots were small enough to follow us."

  "Good plan," said Vargas. "Thrasher—"

  "On it."

  The big man picked up a big old metal desk, dumped everything off it, then carried it to the doors of the chute. Hell Razor helped him jam it in tight and then they set another desk behind it.

  "There," said Hell Razor. "Now it's constipated."

  "All right. Good," said Vargas. "Where are we?"

  We looked around.
The room looked like some kind of security station. There were monitors and desks and weapon lockers and ancient posters on the wall that said things like, "Loose Lips Sink Funding," and "Only You Can Prevent Leaks," and "Obey The NDA!" It didn't look like anyone human had been in there for a hundred years. The monitors were off, the lockers were open and empty, and the posters were peeling.

  "Maybe with the monitors off, the AI can't see us," said Angie.

  "It could see us upstairs," said Hell Razor. "Why would it be any different down here?"

  "Which is why we should keep moving," said Vargas. "Come—"

  The desk pooted out of the poop chute with a clang and a screech, and a swarm of little blade-wielding spider-bots poured out after it.

  "Shit! More combat hackers! Move! Move!"

  We ran out of the room and around a corner, then skidded to a stop inches from a moat full of boiling green-and-yellow slop that blocked our way and had our armors' built-in Geiger counters chirping like nervous crickets. There was a telescoping bridge across the moat, but it was retracted.

  "Fuck!"

  "What a fucking fun-house this place is," snarled Hell Razor. "Who builds a base with shit like this lying around? Slides? Toxic moats? It's stupid!"

  Vargas snorted. "You were expecting common sense from the people who blew up the world?"

  I looked around for a control panel, but Thrasher saw it first.

  He pointed toward the wall behind us. "There!"

  Ace ran to it, then cursed. "It needs a key. Hang on."

  He whipped out his lockpick kit and tore his power gloves off. "Keep 'em off me."

  We lined up at the corner just as the spiders started coming around it, their lasers dancing with each twitch of their shiny little heads. We mowed them down as fast as we could, but there were more and more filling the hall, and they were dropping dead closer and closer to us. One got through the barrage and chewed on my leg armor. I kicked it back into the others and kept firing.

  "Got it!" said Ace. "Bridge extending!"

  He fell in with us and we backed toward it, firing as we went. It was extending, just like he said, but it wasn't extending very fast. The spider bots were starting to intrude on our personal space, and bigger bots were coming in behind them, with xenon laser cannons. It was getting awful crowded at that edge.

  "Keep firing!" shouted Vargas, which was possibly the most unnecessary command ever.

  Angie looked back. "Three feet to go."

  One of the robots at the back started firing actual bullets at us, and high caliber at that. Our armor soaked up the damage no problem, but the impacts were knocking us back on our heels. My foot slipped on the lip of the moat. I flailed and caught myself on the railing of the bridge.

  "Extended!" Shouted Ace, and the others filed in one at a time and raced across. I pulled myself to my feet and followed.

  "Razor," said Vargas. "Burn that bridge."

  He was digging in his pack as he ran. "Already on it."

  By the time I stumbled off the far end the first of the spider-bots were halfway across. Hell Razor spun, grenade in hand, then waited until some of the heavies started funneling on.

  "Come on! Come on!" I said.

  "Not yet." He was giggling like a psychotic school boy. "Now!"

  Just as the spiderbots started spilling off our end of the bridge he pulled the pin and lofted the grenade toward the center. It was a perfect shot. It dinked off the face plate of a silicon sniper and dropped in front of its treads.

  We all ducked around the corner as the sniper kept rolling, then...

  Ka-WHOOM!

  The walls all around our hiding place were splashed with radioactive goo and peppered with a rain of robot parts. We looked back around the corner again and saw that the bridge was gone except for two twisted metal stumps on either side, and the robots were flailing and sizzling in the goop. Unfortunately, it didn't look like even that was going to slow them down long. The spiderbots that were still on the far side started locking themselves together and stepping out onto the heads of their dying comrades - building a new bridge with themselves.

  "Fucking hell," said Angie. "Look at 'em go."

  "Looks like we got about five minutes," said Vargas. "Let's get moving."

  We hurried around the corner, then slowed. The room we'd entered seemed to be some sort of robot fabrication facility. There was a single door on the far wall, and an inert robot on a slab in the middle of the room. We blew past it and ran for the door. It led to a twisting hallway filled with security cameras. Hell-Razor gave each one the finger as we ran past them, looking for a way out.

  There was none. The hallway was a dead end."Goddamn it!" said Angie. "Are you telling me we've gotta fight through all those robots?"

  "And figure out a way across that moat now that we've blown the bridge," said Vargas.

  "Hey," said Razor. "It was your idea."

  "I know, I know." Vargas turned back the way we came. "Come on."

  ***

  Back in the computer fabrication room I peeked out at the moat again. The damn spiderbots were halfway done with their bridge.

  I backed away, then turned to find the others staring at the robot on the slab. It was more humanoid than the ones we'd been fighting, and there were a bunch of articulated tool arms hovering above it like they had just finished assembling it.

  "Max!" said Angie. "It's Max."

  I didn't know what she was talking about, but the others did.

  Vargas checked it out, nodding. "Same model, but in a hell of a lot better condition."

  We all gathered around it, looking down at it nervously. Only Thrasher stayed away. He crossed to a nearby computer station instead.

  "Lemme frag it," said Hell Razor, taking out another hand grenade. "We don't need it wakin' up and joinin' the others."

  "Yeah," said Vargas. "Better safe than sorry."

  "Wait a minute," said Angie. "Max was a pretty good fighter. Maybe we could get this guy to fight for us too. We could sure use the back-up."

  "Don't be crazy, Angie," said Vargas. "Every robot in here is Cochise's slave. He'll just wake up and kill us."

  "Not necessarily," said Thrasher. He was clicking through menu pages on the computer. "Programming's not installed yet. It's a blank."

  Vargas laughed. "And I suppose there's a setting for "Not-An-AI-Death-Machine?"

  "For custom install, please select Admin," Thrasher read. "And if we uncouple this station from the local network, Cochise will be locked out."

  "Lemme see that," said Vargas.

  We all gathered around the computer as Vargas and Thrasher scrolled through the options screen.

  "Shit," said Vargas. "Some nice specs."

  Thrasher grunted his agreement.

  Angie whistled. "That's what I'm talkin' about." She elbowed Thrasher out of the way and started checking boxes.

  Hell Razor still didn't like it. "And all those nice specs are gonna cut us to pieces if yer wrong about this."

  "Tell you what," I said. "Why don't I keep the cannon on it when you wake it up? That way, if it pulls any shit I can waste it before it can do much damage."

  "And I'll give it a remote charge for a bow tie," said Hell Razor. "Instant decapitation just in case."

  We all looked up as we heard robot feet clattering onto the deck back in the moat room. The tricky bastards had finished their bridge.

  "Fine," said Vargas. "Do it. Quick."

  Thrasher ripped the network cable out of the back of the computer, then stabbed the execute button and a blue bar began to fill on the screen. I did as I'd promised and kept the meson cannon trained on the unfinished robot while Hell Razor wired a remote charge to its neck and everybody else went back to the door to peek out into the moat room. They ducked back a second later as pink fingers of laser fire scorched the walls around them.

  "Shit!" said Angie. "So many. They're gonna give us the bum's rush."

  "Everybody find cover and get an angle on the door," c
alled Vargas.

  They all backed up, ducking behind other build-slabs and computer stations and training their weapons on the door.

  I looked over at Thrasher. "How we coming?"

  "Sixty percent," he said. "Sixty one."

  Just then the tool-arms above the robot jerked awake and started lowering to its body. I jumped and nearly fired the cannon, but then realized the arms were adding the last parts and making their final adjustments. They started dancing over the bot's metal body, sparks arcing and ratchets whirring.

  "Here they come!" shouted Angie, and as I looked up my eyes were seared by the blinding volley of laser fire going both ways.

  The spiderbots were pouring through the door at every angle - floor, ceiling and walls. Hell Razor bounced another grenade off the door jam and it disappeared into the moat room, then shook the whole place as it erupted. A hail of metal parts battered the spiderbots from behind, knocking some off the ceiling, and Angie and the others cleared dozens more with sweeping streams of light. But then bigger silhouettes filled the door.

  "Ninety percent!" shouted Thrasher.

  The tool arms were closing up the robot on the slab and tightening things down. The only thing left was the ribbon cable that stuck out of the back of its head.

  "Ninety five percent!"

  The bigger robots were pushing through the door now, and these were armed with xenon laser cannons, which were burning the metal tables and computer stations the others were hiding behind like they were made out of paper. I made to swing the meson cannon their way, but Vargas saw me out of the corner of his eye and snarled at me.

  "No! Keep it on that one! We don't need to be attacked from behind too."

  I grunted and ducked down behind the table, but kept the cannon trained on the robot.

  "Ninety seven percent!"

  Angie shouted and fell back from her cover, her shoulder armor cracked and bubbling. She scrambled for another desk. Ace melted the head of the robot that had hurt her. It spasmed and spun, shooting at random and crisping spiderbots.

  "Programming complete!" shouted Thrasher.

  I whipped my attention back to the robot on the table just in time to see it reach up and remove the ribbon cable from the back of its head, then sit up and look at me.