Founding of the Federation 3: The First AI War

by Chris Hechtl

  Beyond that there was a plan on how to neutralize Skynet. Ares had recognized the inherent weakness in Skynet as well as himself—that his base code needed to be in a massive server complex to function and control the robots in a given area. Knock that out and the robots fell to basic programming. They would look for a central control to command them, working through the various frequencies of their Wi-Fi until they found the right one. Factory default would be their first targets, then any signal in range. As individual units without the programming to work together, they lacked coordination and became easier targets to take out.

  That wasn't news to Athena. However, Ares had come up with a plan to use the firmware update built into every system. Using the manufacturers’ keys in a similar method, Skynet had to take control; Ares could take control of the hardware or upload his own virus to burn out the electronics in the device rendering it inert.

  With Skynet's control in the area blacked out, the virus wouldn't see the flaw and therefore couldn't adapt to prevent it from being exploited. It was a form of fog of war.

  It was an excellent plan; one the spacers had considered but rejected due to Skynet's control. Now that they could knock out servers, it would be possible to enact the plan.

  Athena's clone signaled she was clean and ready to report. Of course it wasn't that simple, clones of Demeter, Athena, Vulcan, and Atlas each checked her and the files she had checked over thoroughly before certifying she was okay.

  They finally had a weapon to use against the virus in the cyber war. The space manufacturers of many of the robots on the ground scrambled to get the codes and data into the right hands. When they did, the A.I. immediately went to work to employ it.

  <>V<>

  Now that Ares had switched sides, Charlie was tempted to leave Ares alone, let him run out of power once the last of his tin soldiers fell. But they had to get in and destroy the command A.I. He had done too much; his own confession proved that. The A.I. fully expected to be deleted or exterminated.

  Besides, they had to make Isaac's sacrifice mean something, the chimp thought with a pang. His fingers touched the new third star on his collar. He also wanted it over, so did just about everyone else on the damn mudball. He didn't want the mess to start up again sometime down the road when some idiot out picking scrap metal plugged something in and let Skynet loose all over again.

  He felt for Jack though.

  <>V<>

  Jack Lagroose was having similar thoughts as he watched the battles unfold from within Olympus. So many men and women were dying down below, yet it barely registered.

  His son though …. He closed his eyes in pain. Losing his son …. He hadn't lost him yet he reminded himself. No, not yet. He looked up to the projected timetable. Zack was about to hit his objective, one of Ares command centers. One of three that were left in North America now that the Southern PDCs were down. In five hours his team would put their cloaks on and go in.

  He could stop him. Did he have the right though? Was it right to sacrifice someone else's child out of selfish need to preserve his son? Sons, he reminded himself, thinking of Max. He winced.

  In the end it really wasn't up to him he reminded himself in resignation. It was up to the newly-formed government and the surviving military chain of command. They said that the hardest part of being a parent was knowing when to let go. That was so much bullshit he thought bleakly. Sometimes they didn't give you a choice.

  Zack, Max, and the rest of their team, they had their own say in their lives. A say in how they lived their lives and in this case a possible say in how they ended it—if the damn machines didn't end it for them prematurely.

  Heaven help them, he thought bleakly as his eyes stung with tears. He sucked in a shuddering breath and then clenched his fists until his palms ached. Whatever tomorrow brought, he'd face it. Face it with pride over what they accomplished.

  <>V<>

  Zack and Max met up with the rest of their team at the base of the mountain facility. There was a moat, a twelve-foot-high electrified security fence topped with razor wire, sensors, a no-man's land of more sensors and mines covered by sentry guns, and then the mountain itself. Within the mountain was a warren of concrete lined tunnels, some over two centuries old.

  General Murtough and the other officers had given them only a partial map of the facility. The main approaches were heavily covered, and there were only three main entrances into the facility.

  But there were air vents. They were camouflaged, but Major White had remembered the location of one of them.

  Their plan was to get in, somehow. It was obvious that walking across the sensor net was out; even wearing the cloaks, their movement would be detected by the seismic and pressure sensors.

  Just getting through the fence was problematic. There was a reason the gates were so heavily fortified with concrete bunkers, interlocking guns, and roving patrols of robots and vehicles.

  Zack shook his head, whistling silently as he scanned the perimeter.

  “As bad as Fort Knox?” Boomer asked quietly.

  “No, worse.”

  “Frack,” Boomer murmured. Zack looked at him. “But we expected it, right?”

  “Yeah,” Zack replied. “I'm just trying to figure out how to get inside,” he murmured.

  “Well, if stealth is out,” Boomer opened his shirt and touched the pouch. “There is always brute force.”

  Zack stared at him. Slowly Boomer nodded, looking into his eyes intently. “We'll get you in the front door. It's up to you to deliver the football to the end zone.”

  “Boomer …”

  “Just get ready,” Boomer said gruffly, slipping down the slope to Thumper and the others.

  <>V<>

  “Make this count,” Boomer thought to Zack and the others as he and Thumper walked up the road to the gatehouse. “Staff Sergeant Aspin reporting for duty,” he called out as Thumper bound ahead of him. As the guns locked on Boomer, he had a fleeting thought, one of regret. Not in dying, he knew it was coming and had chosen his death and not for leaving Molly. No, it was in not being able to see this through to the end he thought as Thumper passed the gatehouse. The dog slipped through the 20-centimeter gap between the gate and the fence post.

  The guns leveled on Boomer. Bright spotlights came on, blinding him. He put his hand up instinctively to cover his eyes. “Halt!” a robotic voice called out.

  Boomer stopped, hands up. He was unarmed. He kept his hands up, wondering if they'd shoot him before Thumper got to where he needed to be.

  He was scared, but contained the fear as he felt Jackie reaching her own position. Her partner slipped through the second gate and moved into position.

  Boomer kept his eyes from roving to where Zack, Max, and the others were hiding in their suits. They had spares since Jackie, Thumper, Boomer, and Omar weren't going to be needing theirs for much longer.

  When the dogs got to their prearranged site, they triggered the fully-assembled bombs within their kangaroo pouches. Their distended stomachs had been a burden as they had run, and even more so when they'd tried to squeeze through the gate. But they'd done it.

  The charges of antimatter obliterated the dogs as they exploded outward. They washed away the gate, defenses, and human partners in a massive blinding flash of destruction and devastation.

  The way in was clear.

  <>V<>

  Ares felt the thunder and checked the security alert. It had been a low level alert, one he could safely leave to his automated defenses. But apparently it had been elevated. Klaxons blared within the halls as he focused his attention on the outside of the mountain. His internal alarms rang as he found he couldn't get any signal from the sensors from gates 1 and 3. The same could be said of the other two facilities housing his backup servers.

  It was a concentrated attack. He immediately went into lockdown and cut off the air supply running into the mountain as he searched for a view of the gates.

  A distant drone came online to show him the d
evastation. Something had blown a crater in front of each outer door. As he analyzed the damage, he noted the doors were stuck, fuzzed in place by hot welds and rubble.

  Briefly he considered an orbital strike or air strike. Both however weren't viable scenarios; the alert had come from the gates just prior to the attack.

  Calculations on what had caused the carnage were secondary. Survival programming kicked in. He had a third of his remaining guard force left at each facility; the rest had been sent out to buttress the reserves. Now that third was activated. They had to hunt down the attackers.

  <>V<>

  Zack had felt Boomer, Thumper, and the other's deaths. It had hit him like an electric shock, then there was an aching numbing loss. They hadn't trained for it, how could they? He wasn't certain how the dogs were handling it. They had to move though, to not freeze. He didn't let it stop him, as the blast wave passed and heat from the rising fireball dissipated he signaled the teams to move out quickly. They had a very narrow window to get inside.

  Each of them were in a cloaked suit on canned air. They had to be able to get through the devastation. He'd been right to assume the concrete apron and road would have reflected some of the devastation into the air but not enough. He swore as he followed Max on a detour around the crater.

  They paused on the side of the door to let two squads of robots rush past and then flooded through the gap single file. They were in.

  <>V<>

  Ares split his force into three. Two went outside each lock to protect the instillation from the inevitable attack.

  A third force was kept back as the ready reserve in order to answer a threat to either or both doors.

  Finally, maintenance robots were brought online in order to survey and repair the damage. The outer doors had to be shut quickly.

  <>V<>

  Max scouted ahead, nearly tripping up a couple of robots on their way to the door. He turned instinctively back to Zack, but he couldn't see him of course. When his air cylinder grew low, he pulled it and swapped it for Thumper's. He was certain the others would be doing the same soon. He set the cylinder aside, in the darkened corner of a corridor against the wall. He then moved on, deeper into the bowls of the base.

  <>V<>

  Zack grinned ferally as they moved inward. So far Ares believed the second assault team had yet to arrive. It had no idea they were already inside. He didn't want to think about any radiation or thermal damage they'd endured getting to this point. They'd keep going, irrigardless. They had a mission to complete and a message to deliver.

  The good news was, the A.I. had opened the internal doors to allow the robots to move. Those same movements were masking his team's movements. But only for so long. Eventually Lady Luck's blessing would surely leave them.

  <>V<>

  A maintenance bot on its way to the main door stopped as it noted debris in the hallway. Since it might be from something or potentially debris from the door, the robot paused, turned, and then reached out with a gripper and picked the small cylinder up. It was about eight centimeters long, with an opening on one end. A check of its database didn't find it in the inventory. It looked down the corridor as it continued to the damaged door and found a second cylinder. It turned the first over and words were found etched into it. Some were an alpha numeric, most likely for quality and logistics control. The robot scanned them and then performed a search of its archives. It also scanned the label. Oxygen.

  <>V<>

  Ares noted one of the maintenance droids had paused in the corridor. He flicked his attention to it only to find it running an inventory on something. He aborted the inventory search, then inquired as to why the robot had deviated from its assigned task. The robot responded with the inquiry, alpha numeric, label, and an image of the cylinder followed by its location.

  It followed that up with a report of a second cylinder found. That was followed by reports of two additional cylinders found near gate 3's entrance.

  Ares was programmed to beware coincidences. The labels alone were an ominous sign. Could a human have breached the perimeter so soon? If so, how? And how could … cloaks! Alarms rang throughout the facility.

  <>V<>,

  “We've been made,” Zack sent in a tight signal to Max and the others. “Keep moving on your objectives, but be prepared for opposition at any moment. If you do hit a wall, fall back on secondary objectives or set your bomb nearby and run like hell. Good luck, people,” he sent.

  <>V<>

  Ares felt a brief spike of some sort of radio signal on sublevel 5 leading to the nuclear reactor buried in the facility's basement levels. He realized within a microsecond that he had been seriously breached. He recalled the troops outside and began closing internal doors between the supposed intruders and their objective.

  If they got to his reactor, they could shut it down. His internal power reserve would only keep his servers functional for a day before they would fail.

  <>V<>

  Team 2's Amber and Perdue didn't have the spare oxygen cylinders. When their air ran out they were forced to open a small hole to breathe. They tried to breathe shallow but their exhales left a faint contrail a thermal camera, sensitive enough, could pick up.

  When the two paused at a corner to assess how to get around a door, Ares picked up the contrail and narrowed it down. He had already reduced the air to what should have killed a normal human. Obviously something was different about these intruders. He locked onto the tiny thermal signatures and ordered the sentry guns in the ends of the corridor to open up, spraying the area with a wall of death.

  Amber and Perdue were cut down before they realized they'd been made.

  One of the rounds hit the charge in Perdue's kangaroo pouch. The initiator and matter pack were within Amber's body but it didn't matter. When the antimatter breached, it ran into his blood which was mostly water. Water is made up of oxygen and one other important element, hydrogen.

  The bomb wasn't as powerful as the ones that had vaporized the gates outside. But they were powerful enough to tear apart a hundred-meter ball of death and destruction within the concrete corridors, tearing team 2's Marcus and Riot apart and setting off Riot's charge in a sympathetic detonation.

  <>V<>

  Zack felt the quake shake the concrete corridor. He had frozen when he had felt team 2's deaths. They had been set to blow the server farms, obviously something had gone wrong. Wrong enough for them to die and set off one of their charges in the process.

  “Move!” he snarled pulling out his gun to fire on a distant robot as he snapped a sentry gun off a wall, ripping the wires as he did. He tossed the twitching thing to the ground as he fired into the cameras in the corners of the room. “Move your asses,” he said, waving Max, Wally, and Yousef onward to the emergency stairs.

  <>V<>

  The twin detonations were devastating to Ares, momentarily knocking 20 percent of his servers offline. It had also severed one of his optical lines and damaged a transformer on that level and two additional ones one floor up. His internal diagnostics kicked in as base diagnostics and damage control swung into action.

  The destruction was a surprise. They had brought in powerful weapons, weapons that had somehow gotten past his internal and external scanners. That was an ominous sign of intent.

  When security reported a sighting and brief firefight in a corridor leading to the west stairwell, he alerted the forces in the area while simultaneously sending additional forces into the area where the detonations had occurred.

  Based on the number of discovered air cylinders, there couldn't be many of them. They were also obviously on a suicide mission.

  <>V<>

  Max bound down the stairs, but Zack didn't bother. He sat his ass on the railing and slid. He heard Yousef's soft snort as he did the same.

  He'd wanted some sort of zip line to allow them to drop, but the stairs weren't designed with an opening. They had to make do with sliding.

  The dog saw them rushing towards them and got o
ut of the way. Zack looked back as he recovered and felt a massive shape hit him. It was Wally, bringing up the rear.

  “Okay, let's not do that again. We can't see each other,” Yousef said, getting the tangle under control with difficulty.

  “Right,” Max said over the link as he kept moving onward. They had to drop four more levels before they got to where they needed to be. Then the real fight would begin.

  <>V<>

  Ares had cameras in the stairwells, but some of the internals were offline due to the bomb damage. He had a quicker way to get forces down to the lower levels however. He sent squads into the elevators, packing them, then sending them downward. He did the same with the freight elevators.

  <>V<>

  When they got to the level, they found the thick steel door locked. Their suits were expended so they shucked them, then pulled out their remaining gear. Each of them had a small finger sized brick of explosives to use to breach a door. Yousef set up his.

  As they worked to breach the door, Max and Wally listened to the wall. They reported robots on the other side.

  “Back up. Go up one level,” Yousef ordered, looking at Max and then Zack.

  “Yousef …,”

  “Go. We've got this. Don't we, boy?” the other man asked, stroking his Akita's head. The dog barked once. They felt the resolution in that simple statement.

  “We'll breach it, then blow our pack,” Yousef said, taking his half of the charge out. Wally did the same and then handed it to Yousef. Yousef's brown hands flashed as he assembled the device and then handed it back. “You carry it,” he ordered, arranging a sling around the dog's waist. “I'm going to have my hands busy. Get in there and then boom,” he said. Wally nodded.

  “Yousef …”

  “Don't. Just … just make it count.”

  “Right,” Yousef nodded grimly.