The Complete Clockwork Chimera Saga

by Scott Baron

  He turned to his two men.

  “Gentlemen, you heard that. Are you ready?”

  “You know it, Sarge.”

  “Okay, then. Protect your vital areas as best you can, and unleash hell on these fuckers. Let’s do this!”

  Daisy was still amazed by the salty language coming from the sturdy cyborg. All of her prior experiences had been with well-mannered domestic units. Of course, those units also would not have stood a snowball’s chance in hell against the alien forces. George’s men, on the other hand, were more than up to the task.

  The three-man cyborg team shrugged off the relative safety of the ground for a full sprint right at the main body of the Chithiid force, pulse rifles firing as they ran. George took a grazing hit to the shoulder, but he didn’t slow one bit, and neither did his men as they barreled forward.

  “George is making a charge. Let’s go!” Tamara yelled in combat-fueled glee.

  “Wait, but what about––”

  “Now or never, Daisy!” she shouted as she took off running.

  Daisy hesitated just a moment, then sprang from cover, joining in the charge. The Chithiid were not expecting such unpredictable behavior, and their aim suffered as a result as they tripped backward over themselves in surprise.

  Sergeant Franklin leapt into the air over the nearest barricade, loosing round after round from his weapon-wielding hand, while throwing a grenade with his other. The other cyborgs mirrored his actions.

  “Grenade!” he yelled in warning before ducking for cover.

  The triple explosions rocked the ground, laying waste to the Chithiid previously sheltered in the smoking crater.

  That left only the five in front of Daisy.

  There was a quick double-tap from Tamara.

  Make that four, in front of her.

  “Confined space, Daze,” Sarah noted.

  Too tight for the rifle to be effective.

  “You have a plan?”

  The beginnings of one, Daisy replied.

  Taking a cue from her metal counterparts, she quickly pulled her gloves off, then charged, leaping high over the nearest barricade, drawing her wicked-sharp bone sword from the sheath on her back as she twisted in the air.

  She landed smack in the middle of three startled Chithiid, her weapons already in motion. The first alien lost his head and right arm immediately as her blade bore down on him before he could react.

  Rolling to her right, Daisy came up firing with one hand as best she could, her sword swinging a deadly arc with the other. The nearest alien shrieked a gurgling death cry as both her pulse rounds and blade struck true.

  The genetically engineered sword felt warm in her hands as it drank in the Chithiid blood, strengthening with every drop.

  Tamara, in the meantime, charged around the side of the barricade, her pulse rifle firing non-stop as she riddled the remaining Chithiid with pulse blasts.

  Far behind them, the half dozen young humans in their support team watched in awe as the pros quickly mopped up.

  Sergeant Franklin gave a jerky salute with his banged-up arm, then shook it out, loosening the slightly bent protective panel that had taken the brunt of the impact.

  “Well done, Daisy. We managed to escape with no casualties, and captured a sizable munitions cache in the process.”

  “But others are going to be on the way. We can’t let them discover an active resistance.”

  “Decoy, then?”

  “Great minds, George,” she replied.

  Fifteen minutes later, a Chithiid ship could be heard approaching at low altitude. The pilot quickly surveyed the carnage below, then spun and took off after the dusty trail of the duo from their team, who were racing on foot for the subterranean access shaft across town.

  The area clear, Daisy and the remaining team crawled from cover.

  “Looks like they’re following the bait,” Tamara noted.

  “I hope those kids are okay,” she worried.

  “They had a big head start. I think the two of them will be just fine,” Tamara replied. “We should get moving, just in case they catch on and circle back.”

  “We got into the silo, but I thought this was supposed to be something of a cake run, Daze,” Sarah commented.

  It would have been, more or less, if we hadn’t run into those loyalists. And that crazy AI, of course.

  “You think it’s a coincidence, though?”

  Don’t know, Sis. All I know is, after all of this is over, Joshua had better have been telling the whole truth this time.

  When Daisy and her team had reached Colorado Springs earlier that week and had successfully re-established contact with the greatest strategic military mind ever created, she had definitely not expected things to take this particular turn. By now, she had learned, the universe was fond of surprises.

  Two days earlier, Daisy was most certainly not amused as she crossed her arms angrily and glared at the flickering monitor where she sat deep in the belly of Cheyenne Mountain.

  “You said you controlled all of them,” she groused.

  “Yes, I do. Well, did, that is. When the system was fully functional,” Joshua had replied.

  “So you’re cut off.”

  “Well… sort of.”

  “Joshua, you’re killing me, here.”

  “I’m sorry, Daisy, but the truth is, I do control them all. The problem is the safeties. The system was designed so neither human nor AI could arbitrarily take charge of the missiles. There were safeguards and redundancies in place to ensure against such incidents. Only no one had planned for a circumstance in which the human element would be entirely wiped out so quickly and efficiently.”

  “Leaving you unable to fire the missiles,” she said with a resigned sigh.

  “Correct. I suppose I could find a way to circumvent the launch configurations and perhaps fire them, but I would still have no way to access the silo targeting computers to aim them without the authorization keys.”

  “Let me guess. You need someone to go and restore access, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “And I suppose this someone is going to have to trek through dangerous areas, and possibly fight off aliens and maybe even some scary-ass wild animals in the process. Yes?”

  “Correct, again.”

  “And here I was just beginning to like you.”

  “If it’s any consolation, I’ll have a few of my on-site cybernetic military units join you on the excursion to provide armed support.”

  “I appreciate the offer, but they’re here to protect you.”

  “Daisy, I live under a mile of solid granite. I think I’ll be okay letting a few of them tag along with your team for a couple of days.”

  “But they’ll still show up like a sore thumb on Chithiid scans.”

  The mighty AI let out an amused chuckle.

  “I noticed your Faraday suits as soon as you made contact,” he said. “Nice design, by the way.”

  “Thank you. But that doesn’t address my point,” Daisy persisted.

  “Oh, but I’m not one to let a tactical advantage go to waste. I’ve had my fabrication lab working on a version robust enough to shield my men since just after you stepped inside the base walls. There are a few of them ready to be utilized at this very moment, and more suits are in the works.”

  Daisy reluctantly accepted the fact that she was going to have a cyborg escort, whether she wanted one or not.

  “Okay,” she relented with a sigh. “But I hope your fellas aren’t combat-rusty after all these years hanging out alone under a mountain like some chrome-domed dwarf militia.”

  It had taken a fair bit of arguing between Joshua and his head of security, but the great mind made his case, and the Faraday-suited escort had departed with her team.

  Two days later Daisy stood in a smoky crater surveying the raw carnage wrought by Sergeant George Franklin and his fellow cyborgs. Chithiid asses had been thoroughly kicked, though she doubted he even bothered to take names.
r />   “Glad he came along, now?” Sarah asked in an amused tone.

  Hell yeah, I’m glad, Daisy silently replied.

  She ran her eyes across the scene one more time, reveling in the brutal efficiency of the cybernetic troops.

  “Daaaaaang, George,” she said, appreciatively. “Nice job. Nice job indeed.”

  Chapter Two

  Little had Daisy expected to be leading a team to help reclaim the planet from alien invaders when she first arrived at the Dark Side moon base over six months prior, but life has a funny way of throwing you curve balls. In her case, though, they tended to be more like flaming fireballs. With spikes.

  First, she had to cope with––and eventually accept––the fact that she was never born at all, but was grown by a family of Earth’s surviving AIs, who had fled the alien invasion into the depths of space, carrying with them a precious few immune cell lines many centuries prior.

  Then she had been forced to come to grips with the discovery that the planet she had believed to be home was actually a hotbed of alien activity, and several hundred years later in its history than she thought it was.

  The memories implanted by her neuro-stim during the many decades before her arrival, it turned out, were all lies, carefully designed to foster in her a love for a planet she’d never actually set foot on.

  What sucked even more was that prior to her arrival, she and Vince had spent many nights in each other’s arms, talking about Earth. The places they’d go, sights they’d see, even the possibility of moving in together once they made Earthfall. That is, until she discovered he was not entirely organic. For Daisy, that revelation was a deal-breaker.

  So Vince had decided to go and race off to Earth without her, where he had a nasty run-in with a crazy AI on the planet’s surface and wound up comatose and near dying, his internal AI processing booster wiped clean after being infected with the AI virus.

  Even before that, a reckoning between them needed to be had, but now, no matter how much she loved him––or subsequently tried to convince herself she didn’t––all Daisy could do was wait helplessly as he lay motionless on a cot, hidden beneath Los Angeles.

  Whether he would ever wake again was up to fate.

  For all her helpful mentoring, Fatima hadn’t prepared Daisy for this particular trial in all those months of training. Dark Side Base had become her home, and its residents––despite their replacement parts––had become her friends, but none of that could help her with her current problem. Not even her super-smart AI kid, rescued from a hidden fabrication lab, would know how to handle this particular issue.

  About that AI. Freya was something else, and was an unexpected joy thrust ever so improbably into Daisy’s life. The curious, incredibly-smart intelligence was still just learning her way around her own potential when Daisy had abruptly raced to Earth’s surface in an attempt to save Vince.

  Far too many days had passed since then, and Daisy had her concerns just how well the young mind was doing on her own far above on the moon.

  Sure, she had left Freya with a newly constructed remote access link to a multi-limbed worker mech so she could explore the facility a bit and entertain herself, but locked in there alone for so long? Even with a toy to play with and terabytes of books and videos to keep herself occupied, Daisy was nevertheless worried about her electronic kiddo.

  Nothing I can do about that, now, she told herself on more than one guilt-ridden evening. I’ll make it up to her when I get back.

  That is, if she got back. The current mission was proving to be far hairier than anticipated, and even with her dead sister’s neural clone riding shotgun, looking out for her, she was still worried whether they’d be successful avoiding the many pitfalls laying in their path.

  Time would tell. And soon, at that.

  When Daisy and her team rolled out from the safety of Joshua’s NORAD base, deep within Cheyenne Mountain, they knew it wouldn’t be an easy task. Not only was the nearest intact command silo housing the command keys Joshua needed several states away, but the facility itself was hidden deep in the woods, disguised as a rustic retreat.

  After integrating Daisy’s encrypted communications setup into his own comms array, Joshua’s massive AI mind was finally successfully linked to the AIs residing in Dark Side Base far above on the moon, as well as Cal, the city AI running Los Angeles. Soon enough, they would begin connecting to other cities across the globe, but first, he needed the keys to launch the hypersonic missiles so desperately needed to strike a blow against the invading aliens.

  The system, developed centuries prior, had made perfect sense in any other scenario. A pair of humans each controlled a unique launch key, required to be turned in tandem to activate the systems. From there, Joshua and the brains at NORAD would then adjust targeting parameters and launch times.

  It was only when all of humanity was snuffed out in an instant that the fatal flaw was discovered. With no one left alive to turn the keys, let alone answer his frantic calls to action, Joshua found himself impotent and alone. Able to launch, if absolutely necessary, but utterly unable to aim.

  “So you see, Daisy, all we need is to access just one of the silos and activate the system for me to regain full functionality in my weapons targeting systems.”

  “What about the other systems? The ones that have been keeping the alien salvage teams at bay at so many major cities?”

  “Good point, Daze,” Sarah commented.

  Thanks, I thought so, she silently replied.

  “I understand where it may seem, from your perspective, as if there were already major systems online," Joshua said. “However, the truth of the matter is, most major cities, while possessing ample defensive measures, do not actually have anything of the size or customizable nature that we need. It’s akin to the difference between a slingshot and a cannon.”

  Daisy sighed.

  We’re really going to have to do this, aren’t we?

  “Yep,” Sarah replied. “I’m afraid it seems that way.”

  Daisy rolled her shoulders and took a deep breath. She’d already survived a hell of a lot to get this far. What was one more ordeal in the grand scheme of things?

  “Okay, Joshua. Tell me what we need to do.”

  Three hours later, Daisy, Tamara, their trio of military cyborgs––equipped with their own heavy-duty Faraday suits based on Daisy’s design––and a handful of humans loaded into the regional monorail to begin the trek to Montana, of all places.

  “Be sure to carry plenty of rations,” Tamara told the team. “And extra layers. We don’t know what resources there will be on the way, so we have to be prepared to be totally self-sufficient.”

  The humans began adding clothing to their packs, tucking it in tightly with their other supplies.

  “The tube system should be fully functional for the run to Billings, Montana. From there the smaller regional systems will take you the rest of the way to the city of Conrad, which is your last stop. But once you’ve arrived at the terminus, it will still be a twenty-two-mile trek farther west, and without a transit system.”

  “Then we will walk,” one of the younger human survivors stated plainly.

  Daisy couldn’t help but appreciate his drive, even if he was a bit naive.

  “That’s all fine and dandy,” she said. “But what are the odds of us finding suitable transportation there?”

  “Due to the rugged nature of the region, and its former inhabitants, I think it’s fair to assume that some off-road-capable vehicles will likely be intact, but their energy cells are most certainly dead at this point.”

  “Of course they are, but if we’re heading all the way there, why not just lug a few cells from here? If you can spare them, of course. I mean, if we only have to carry them a few miles from the transit systems to score a ride that last stretch, that’s well worth the effort, if it allows us to save such a long walk, even if it is only for a few dozen miles.”

  “I was thinking the same thing.”
>
  Sergeant Franklin nodded approvingly.

  “You know, that just might work,” he agreed. “I’ll have my men rig up something that should provide enough power for our needs. All we need to do is find a reasonably intact ride once we arrive.”

  “So, it’ll take a few days, there and back, and that’s if nothing goes wrong,” Daisy said over the encrypted comms after having Sid remove the signal delay for her secured source. “We’ve got our team ready to go, but I have an uneasy feeling we may need a distraction. These silos are no joke, and if the Ra’az know about them, my guess is they’ll be monitored. I do have a thought, though.”

  “What were you thinking, Daisy?” Sid asked from Dark Side Base, far above on the moon.

  “I know it was just a ‘what if?’ discussion we had, but do you think you guys can put a rush on getting more of those salvaged wrecks functional enough for basic remote flight? Nothing fancy, but enough to make it through the atmosphere in one piece and fly cover for us?”

  “I’ll patch in Chu and Donovan. Give me just a minute,” Sid said. Moments later, the tech and pilot joined the conversation, along with the two other AIs on the base.

  “Sid told us your suggestion, Daisy, and we’ve actually got a bunch of salvages already on the base,” Donovan said. “But they’re pretty trashed. We were planning on using them for parts eventually. I think we might only be able to get, I don’t know, what do you think, Chu?––maybe five or six of them functional so quickly.”

  “Sounds about right,” Chu agreed.

  “Even then, the remote piloting system you suggested would need a lot of fine-tuning, and from the sound of it, we don’t have time for that,” Donovan added.

  Daisy sighed.

  “Okay, it was worth a try. Keep on them, though. They could be a really useful diversion.”

  “We will, Daisy. I’m sorry we can’t be of more help at this point,” Mal said. “The ships won’t fly themselves, and rigging a remote operation system requires a fair bit of fabrication.”