Killer Edge: Navigator Book Three

by SD Tanner

  His words broke the mood at the table and she sat back while they all laughed. She’d thought Bill was trying to win an unwinnable war, but it seemed she was the one out of step. They already knew they didn’t stand a chance against the critters so they didn’t need any plans for the survivors. In their minds, there were no survivors, only soldiers. Bill and Ark weren’t planning to win. They only intended to fight what they assumed was an unwinnable war. Looking past their contented faces, she watched the people outside of the building. While they pitched their tents and collected food, they were enjoying what would only be a brief moment of respite.

  Continuing the meeting, Ark said, “Jonesy is outside of the wire looking for more of the preppers. He’s sending them back here with their supplies and weapons…”

  She didn’t want to listen to their suicide plans and getting out of her chair, she walked to the window. Bill followed her, putting his arm around her shoulder. “I thought you knew.”

  “That you’d already given up?”

  “We haven’t, but a good battle commander knows their odds, otherwise they don’t know how much firepower and resources to put into the fight.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Our odds of winning are so close to zero that we have to put everything in.”

  “Is that what all in means?”

  Bill squeezed her shoulder and she felt comforted by his strength. “We’re not there yet, but when we are then the last man left standing takes all.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN: Sucker punched (Tank)

  Lexie held a baby bot at eye level and wiggled one of its jointed legs. “They’re funny looking.”

  With the bot being almost an exact replica of the spider-like critters, he guessed the engineers were trying to be ironic. The idea that they could fight their enemy with a copycat creature of their own was a clever tactic, except the bots were far more fragile than the critters.

  “Don’t bust it, Lex. They worked hard to build ‘em.”

  Still tweaking its jointed leg, she pursed her lips. “They better not be that easy to break or they’ll be useless.”

  Leon took the inanimate bot from her hand and placed it with others in the back of the truck. They’d been lovingly packed into six crates and then carefully loaded into their three trucks by the survivors. Some of the silver and black bodies had messages for the critters scrawled across their backs, and most succinctly read, “Fuck you.”

  The two crates in each truck contained a mix of the different types of baby bots. All of them had cameras and antennae, but some had detachable repeaters and others had bombs attached to them. Central command at CaliTech could control the bots to drop their repeaters as they walked them inside of the nest. They could also detonate the bombs individually or as a group. Ark had the other Shadow Navigators to help him monitor the feeds from the many cameras and they would also be recording everything. They were finally going to learn what was under the pyramid and it would be done at no risk to themselves. Not being sure of what they might be dealing with the next day, Leon wanted them to be fresh before they drove the final leg to the nest, so they’d found a trailer for the night.

  “I want navs with the bots at all times tonight,” Leon said. “Me and Tank will take the first shift.”

  Once they had their orders, Tuck, Trigger, Ally and Lexie left the trucks carrying their backpacks. His wife had been dead for over a year and he hadn’t paid much attention to any woman since, but Ally was a firecracker and he watched her as she walked through the door into the trailer house. With her dark hair, stunning face and a body to match, she turned heads wherever she went, but he mostly enjoyed her wicked temper. The first time Leon had tried to tell her what to do, she’d set him straight about where he rated in her list of priorities and exactly where he had his head. Bill had taken her aside explaining how it all worked, and she’d grudgingly conceded to Leon’s authority, while still making it clear to him that she thought he was a jackass.

  Although he would have preferred Ally’s company, he really needed to talk to Leon. Still wearing their visors and gear, they both climbed onto the roof of one of the trucks. Taking a long pull from the water pipe attached to his suit, he asked, “How are you doin’?”

  Leon replied dourly, “Are we on a date?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, you’re not my type.”

  Snorting sharply, Leon replied, “Didn’t think so. Your type is sitting behind us scaring the hell outta Tuck and Trigger.” Warming to the subject of Ally, he asked, “What the hell is wrong with her? She looks like a model, but she sounds like a fucking truck driver.”

  “I think it’s kinda hot.”

  “You just think crazy’s good in bed.”

  “Always has been.”

  They lapsed into silence while they both watched the surrounding area. The telltale green of the critters drifted in and out of their visor vision, but none were close. He needed to talk to Leon, but the man wasn’t making it easy.

  “You didn’t answer my question.”

  “Yeah, I did. You just didn’t like the answer.”

  Deciding he would have to take a more direct approach, he said, “I didn’t sleep too well after Jada died either. I had trouble getting to sleep, and even when I did I’d bolt upright every few hours, wide awake again.”

  Sounding irritable, Leon replied, “So, we’re doing this, are we?”

  “Yeah, Leon, we are. You’re leading the squad and you have to do this. We need you to be okay.”

  “I am okay.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t mean it that way. You need to be fresh and that means you need to be able to sleep.”

  “I’m getting by just fine.”

  Ark had asked him to speak with Leon and he’d known it wouldn’t be easy. Leon was proud in a way he understood and respected, and unsure what to say next he lapsed into silence again.

  Still sounding irritable, Leon said forcefully, “It’s not like it hasn’t happened to everyone else. I’m not a special case. Everyone’s lost someone.”

  What Leon had said was true, but that didn’t make death any easier to deal with. “Jada died before all of this happened. We thought she was unlucky to get cancer, but maybe she wasn’t. At least she died at home with people who loved her.”

  Leon shook his head. “Nah, getting cancer sucks just as bad as this does.” After yet another long pause, he continued, “It’s not fair. My boy almost made it.” With a vague wave at the scrubby land in front of them, he added, “Not much point, I suppose. It’s not like there was anything out here for him.”

  He snorted to himself. “It’s a crap day when being dead is the better option.”

  With a sharp laugh that didn’t sound like he was amused, Leon replied dourly, “Life’s a bitch.”

  Nodding again, he asked, “How do you think this is gonna end?”

  “Honestly? I think we’re all gonna die.”

  Leon’s reply echoed his own expectation and he sighed. “You know, I felt so guilty after Jada died. With the deployments ‘n’ stuff, I wasn’t around much. She used to complain about being lonely, and with us moving from one base to the next I guess she kinda was, so we were gonna have some kids. That’s how they found out about the cancer. She couldn’t conceive. When they worked out why, it was too late to save her. The cancer was so advanced by the time they told us about it we didn’t have much time left.” Trying to find the words to explain how he’d felt, he hesitated and then continued, “It…it felt like it was my fault. Maybe if she hadn’t been so stressed moving around all of the time, she might have never got sick.”

  “Yeah, I know. I keep thinking that if I hadn’t been away, I could have saved Amelia and my boy. If I was there, then I could have gotten them out.”

  Survivor guilt was hard enough to cope with, but add to that the belief that you’d let the person down, and there was no way to feel anything other than bad. He’d made his peace with Jada’s death and he knew it wasn’t his fa
ult. Leon needed to understand he hadn’t killed his wife and child. It wasn’t as if he’d taken a conscious decision to abandon them. The destruction of their world had been unexpected and no one could have predicted it.

  Digging deep, he said, “But it wouldn’t have made any difference for either of them.” Waving his hand at the land around them, he added, “We didn’t know this was coming any more than I knew Jada was sick. There was no way to know. It’s not as if we knew about it and ignored it. Odds were that Jada shouldn’t have had cancer and people shouldn’t have turned into critters.” Turning his head to look at him, he said, “We didn’t do this, Leon. We didn’t start this shit. All we can do is die trying to end it, so that’s what we’re gonna do. It doesn’t bring them back, but at least it gives us something to bitch slap on the way out.”

  Leon laughed, only this time it was genuine. “So, we’re pissed and we’re gonna throat punch these fuckers until we die.”

  “Have you gotta better plan?”

  Still chuckling, Leon replied, “Nope. This one works for me.”

  They stayed sitting side-by-side while the sun sank and the night became dark. He didn’t know whether Leon felt any better, but he hadn’t spoken to anyone about Jada since she’d died, and it was good to talk about her again. While they watched the night, they continued to talk quietly, sharing a small part of their lives, knowing it might be the last time they ever could.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT: Space invaders (Leon)

  “They’ve expanded their city.”

  Ark was right, and where it had once stretched half a mile across, the critter city was roughly circular and now at least a mile wide. Closer to the pyramid, the small mounds were densely packed together and the ground vibrated with glowing green movement. Wide cavernous holes disrupted the pattern of mounds. He assumed they’d been caused by the missiles NORAD had used as a diversion during the attack at the shelter, but even these craters were already filling with small mounds. Flying above the pyramid were a constant stream of critters, landing and taking off with the regularity of a busy airport. Some were carrying their living prey, and he guessed that might in part explain why they were finding fewer people outside of the prisons. In the absence of any effective defense, their metropolis was thriving, making him wonder what kind of life the critters really led. The medical team assured them that the critters were not alive, but looking at their city it was hard to believe they weren’t a community of some sort.

  “Can the baby bots walk that far without using up too much of their power packs?” Lexie asked.

  “The guys in the weapons division say yes, but we’ll walk them in slowly anyway,” Ark replied.

  Based on their last recon of the nest, they’d assumed it would be a half-mile walk, but now they would need to drop the bots further out. He and Ark had discussed at length the best way to get the baby bots into the city. In the end, they’d decided to form them into three teams, dropping thirty or so bots at roughly an equal distance around the city. Hopefully the bots could march undisturbed into the pyramid, but even if they lost one set of them, they probably wouldn’t lose all three. To take the bots into position, he’d separated the squad into three teams. Tank was with Ally, Tuck was with Trigger, and he was with Lexie.

  The plan was to park the trucks about two miles from the pyramid and then walk with the bots still in their crates until they were just over a mile away. Each bot would then need to be removed from the crate and lined up ready to walk. Ark would activate them from the command center and patch a view from the bot’s cameras to their visors. Depending upon what the bots saw in the nest, they hoped there might be an opportunity to make a decisive strike, and they would wait a few miles from the nest until they had more intel.

  “We need to split into our teams. Park the trucks two miles out and carry the crates with the bots into position,” he ordered. “Ark, I’m just waiting on your orders.”

  “If you’re good to go, then go.”

  “We’re good. All teams move out.”

  One Navigator was sitting on top of the truck while the other one drove and they were all connected to the communications grid. Everyone wanted to know what was happening, so Ark had the grid on loud speakers in CaliTech, but only he and the squad were allowed to talk. Once the bots were in the nest, Ark would patch their cameras through to the large screens inside of the main building so everyone could watch what the bots were filming.

  The results of recon by the baby bots would finally answer the questions that had been bugging everyone. Just what was underneath the pyramid and how deep did the critter city go? For all the tough talk, nobody wanted to go all in. Everyone already knew that a winner takes all war would probably herald the end of mankind, so answers to those questions would tell them whether they stood a chance against their enemy.

  Lexie was driving while he sat on the roof of the vehicle. Being blind from birth, she’d never driven before she had her eyes replaced with orbs so she was a terrible driver. Although the software engineers were still working on refining her visor feed to improve her driving, they’d been diverted to work on the bots and laser gun. The current view from her visor made her believe tall grass and small shrubs were impenetrable, and she was swerving violently around them, almost throwing him from the roof of the truck.

  “Lexie! Slow down.”

  The truck lurched violently again and she trilled cheerfully, “Sorry!”

  “Women drivers, eh, Leon,” Ark said sounding amused.

  Ark had told him that Dunk had accelerated the work on robotic limbs for him. They were building a Navigator hydraulics layer, which would include lower legs that he could wear like a body suit. The prototype would take messages delivered from his brain to the muscles in his thighs and use them to control his lower limbs. He’d come to rely on Ark as his battle commander, and he would miss his steadiness when they were facing impossible odds in combat, but he didn’t begrudge him the opportunity to get back on his feet.

  When Lexie arrived at the planned drop off point, she slammed her foot on the brake so sharply that he tumbled over the hood of the truck, landing in an untidy heap in front of it.

  Using his hydraulics to stand, and knowing she couldn’t see his face, he glared at her. “Fuck, Lexie! You’re not driving back.”

  “But I like driving,” she complained.

  They pulled the two crates of baby bots from the back of the truck, and walking to the drop off point, they began placing them on the ground. One-by-one, they took each bot from the crate and formed a long line of them across the sandy ground. They’d been told to place them at least two feet from one another, and by the time they were done, there were seventy feet of baby bots facing in the direction of the nest.

  “Bots in position,” he said.

  Tank and Trigger confirmed their bots were also ready and Ark replied, “Bots are a go.”

  All at once, the bots came to life and each rose onto their eight legs. The engineers had considered and discarded using tracks rather than legs. With the softness of the sand, they weren’t sure they would have gained enough traction to move. Switching his visor to reality viewing, he admired their humming movement. All of the bots’ antennas were twisting around seeking the best position to get signal. As a single team, the bots began to lift their tiny metal legs to march across the sandy ground. Before heading back to the rendezvous point he and Lexie stood side-by-side, admiring their newest soldiers as they stepped into the unknown.

  When they met three miles from the nest, he ordered Tuck to monitor the area around them while they watched the bots through the camera feed provided by Ark. The view through their cameras was low to the ground and Ark was switching between bots from each direction. All the cameras showed were sand, bushes and the legs of the critters running around them.

  “They’re not paying any attention to them,” he observed.

  Lexie laughed. “They probably think they’re baby critters.”

  “Critters don’t t
hink, Lexie,” Ark said. “They don’t have a brain.”

  As the bots drew closer to the pyramid, more critters appeared around them. Being so small, they marched past their clawed feet and skinny legs, often passing underneath them. The pyramid came into view and the bots continued to march steadily towards it. It appeared the critters were stepping around the bots, but otherwise ignoring them.

  The pyramid stood five hundred feet high and it was filtered with holes on all sides. Each hole was about six feet wide and tall, making it roughly circular. As Ark directed the bots towards the holes closest to the ground, they began climbing the walls. The first of the bots made it inside of one of the holes and it opened into a long downward tunnel. Instead of growing dark, a light shone from the walls, giving the tunnel a bright glow.

  “Goo?” He asked.

  “I’m guessing so,” Ark replied. “That stuff is real multipurpose. It absorbs people, it can be used to seal entranceways, and it provides the critters with light. Useful stuff.”

  With the goo covering every surface inside of the tunnel, the baby bot continued to make its way downward without sliding. Critters were running over and around it, avoiding contact and still ignoring it. As it marched forward, another baby bot appeared from somewhere inside of the wall and began marching ahead of it.

  “The tunnels are connected,” Ark observed. “But the entrances are hidden by the goo.”

  While Ark continued to switch between cameras on the bots, some were already dropping their repeaters onto the sticky floor. There wasn’t a lot to see other than shiny walls and critters nimbly moving through the nest. Their bot pierced through yet another veil of goo and dropped to the floor of what looked like a large chamber.

  “What’s that?” He asked.

  Ark switched to the top camera on the bot and above it was an open portal. “Based on the satellite images, we know the pyramid has a very large hole at the top, kinda like a volcano.”