Desperate Measures

by Michael Anderle

  Four plasma grenades were enough to take down a lot of things, but if the last two years of Jia’s life had taught her anything, it was that the wildest, most unexpected things could happen at any time. If she didn’t run into an alien or alien DNA-infused human, it’d be a step up from recent missions.

  Jia took short, ragged breaths, the acrid smoke burning her lungs. She missed being able to swap to thermal mode. She was used to having sensors from Emma or an exoskeleton.

  Engaging a man and his bot in this environment didn’t bother her, but she would have liked to confirm the destruction of the target without looking around the corner and risking her head. She was rather attached to it.

  She snorted. Being around Erik was changing her sense of humor.

  Dying in an obvious way would be embarrassing. At this point in her life, dying peacefully in her sleep wasn’t obvious, so that was how she supposed she would go.

  Kant solved the problem of personal risk in a practical if dangerous way. He poked his barrel around the corner, smoke drifting past.

  “You destroyed yet, metal brother?” he asked in a mocking tone. “What about you, Luca? Because we’re still here, and after all that big talk, I figured you’d recruited the Devil himself to help you, not some souped-up bot that couldn’t take grenades and a little ceiling. Poor showing, brother. Poor showing.”

  There was no response to the taunt.

  Jia coughed and waved smoke out of her face. If Agent Dalton hadn’t been such an ass, she might have supported Anne’s idea of a local team to supplement their forces, but it didn’t matter. They would have to take out the new bots themselves.

  A building growl sounded from the passage, along with loud scratching and grinding.

  Anne’s brow lifted. “The bot is growling?”

  “I’m sure they’ve programmed it to respond in this kind of situation,” Jia suggested. “Scare off enemy forces while it’s wounded.”

  Kant risked a check and shook his head. “Tough son of a bitch, but that’s a design flaw. Growling’s not going to be enough.”

  Jia and the others walked to the remains of the corner. Although acrid smoke filled the hallway, they could make out the outline of the Elite, half-buried under rubble. The source of the ricochets and the reason it had stopped firing became obvious: huge dents and cracks in the gun barrels. Additional firing risked damage to itself.

  The Elite yanked a leg free of the rubble and growled again. “You maggots. You insignificant MAGGOTS!”

  Jia frowned. It was a human voice, but it wasn’t Luca. The metal body was too small to accommodate a human, so it couldn’t be some sort of unusual attempt at redesigning an exoskeleton. Somebody had to be controlling the machine, but she didn’t understand how they were pulling it off, given the heavy jamming. Laser comms were one possibility, but heavy smoke made that doubtful. The shimmer from before was now a faint glowing wavy field in the smoke.

  She could be wrong and it was additional terror programming, but something about the quality of the voice convinced her otherwise.

  The rubble shook as the Elite attempted to pull itself free, but five of its legs remained stubbornly buried.

  “More grenades,” Kant suggested. “It can’t dodge now.”

  Anne pointed at the glowing field. “It still has its field.” She gestured at the smoking hole in the ceiling that led to ductwork and a high roof. “And it’s not like there’s a lot more to bury it with.”

  Erik grinned and locked his TR-7 onto his carryaid before pulling down his laser rifle. “Lasers don’t explode.”

  “You are lucky, maggots,” the Elite growled. “Nothing more. No matter what happens to me, you will die here.”

  “You’d be surprised how often I hear that. Enough that I don’t believe it when people say it.” Erik knelt and lined up the laser rifle for a shot straight down the center of the bot’s body and through the protrusion in the back. He winked and pulled the trigger.

  The Elite’s shield had made a mockery of direct explosives, and its thick armor had protected it from a fierce barrage of AP rounds, but the laser beam bored a hole from front to back, leaving sizzling metal and more smoke to fill the room. With a loud thumping clang, the Elite collapsed into the rubble.

  Erik patted the laser rifle. “At least we know that works.”

  Anne nodded at Jia with a respectful look on her face. “Good thinking, Lin.”

  Jia advanced slowly toward the destroyed Elite, her eyes narrowed. “I manage good things on occasion.”

  Anne, Erik, and Kant moved with her. Erik kept his laser rifle ready, though he favored his left arm. They continued through the smoke and rubble, kicking some aside as they watched for Luca and kept an eye out to make sure the destroyed machine wasn’t moving.

  Jia sucked in a breath and blew it out. “I tried to convince myself that someone was controlling that thing, but there’s no way they could have done it through the jamming and smoke.”

  Erik prodded the body with his boot as Anne and Kant continued toward the intersection. “What are you thinking?”

  “The conspiracy has been more concerned about capturing the jump drive than Emma,” Jia replied. She crouched and peered through the clean tunnel dug by Erik’s rifle. “What if they developed a method of making self-aware AIs?”

  “You think that’s what this is?” Erik looked dubious. “It doesn’t need to be alive like Emma to be programmed to send out threats. It’s like you said; it’s probably just them trying to be intimidating.”

  Jia stood. “I hope that’s it.”

  Kant and Anne arrived at the intersection before turning opposite ways.

  “All that talk, and he’s gone,” Kant shouted.

  “He probably ran once he sent his little toy after us and pinned us down.” Erik shouldered his laser rifle. “It was a stall, no worries. If they take off, Emma will shoot their asses down, and we’ll finish it that way.” He inclined his head down the hallway. “The hangar’s that way. We know the play now. Throw grenades to distract them, and I’ll finish them off.”

  Anne gave the laser rifle a dubious look. “That thing doesn’t have a lot of shots.”

  “Don’t worry, I brought extra cells,” he admitted.

  “If they have a lot of those Elites, we might be in trouble.”

  Erik shrugged. “Let’s hope that was the only one.” He looked over his shoulder for half a second. “If not, what’s life without a little risk?”

  Jia stared into the distance, running her tongue along the inside of her mouth. She hoped she was wrong about what the Elites represented. An army of bots with Emma-like intelligence would be an army that could learn far faster than any human and be modified as quickly.

  She looked over her shoulder at the destroyed Elite in the rubble. “Please be nothing more than a glorified tin can.”

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Erik’s wounds ached, but the thrill of victory was the greatest painkiller he knew.

  Every time the conspiracy thought they’d developed a clever new way to murder people, Erik and Jia proved that discipline, talent, and willpower won out.

  He wasn’t surprised that the building was mostly empty. Continual pressure was wearing on their enemy, but each destroyed factory, lab, and base only energized Erik. War favored high morale and momentum, and he wouldn’t want to be in conspiracy headquarters after the recent blows the team had delivered.

  Erik chuckled. The sound barely traveled, but he still earned an odd look from Anne as they jogged down the hallway, listening and watching for trouble.

  He expected more clanging or taunts from Luca in the distance, but the only sounds were the heavy footfalls of the team’s boots striking the hard metal floor. He would have liked to have finished off the cocky conspiracy agent earlier, but he was confident he would have his chance later.

  They checked doors along the way, but the rooms behind them were all empty, or all but empty, with only a chair or table left inside.

&
nbsp; Occasional dried blood made him question how far the conspiracy had gone to clean up here. He didn’t see any IO ports but didn’t take the time to check further. The mission was the cargo. If they happened to clean out Luca and his friends, they could always take a leisurely stroll through the building later.

  That part poked Erik’s paranoia. The lack of significant resistance left Erik uneasy. Was he overthinking?

  Luca and his Elite could have easily slaughtered unprepared cops who stumbled onto the building. The conspiracy likely had a different base on Chiron and was only using this one as a temporary hangar, or they’d evacuated it after realizing the Intelligence Directorate and their allies were striking farther afield in the war against the conspiracy.

  The memories of Provence were never far. Anti-conspiracy successes wounded their enemy, and the conspiracy must have understood they needed to adjust the disposition of their forces. Both the yaoguai lab and the current facility might reflect that.

  Erik would have preferred their arrogant dismissal of risk, but the conspiracy hadn’t gathered wealth and power by repeating mistakes.

  Past an intersection, large double doors blocked the end of their path.

  There were no windows, but by his reckoning, the hangar must be behind them. He didn’t buy Jia’s theory that the conspiracy had cracked true self-aware AI, but he also couldn’t shake the feeling there was more to the Elite. It was tough but not indestructible, not enough to earn such confidence from Luca.

  The man might have been bluffing the entire time, unsure if he could escape Erik’s and Jia’s wrath. Luca had admitted the conspiracy didn’t expect Erik and Jia on Chiron, which meant they also didn’t expect Malcolm or Emma to be sniffing around their pawns’ systems. Military history was full of examples of heavily fortified places being infiltrated because of simple mistakes and overconfidence.

  Erik chuckled again.

  “What’s so funny?” Anne asked, sounding annoyed.

  “I was just thinking about infiltration. If Alina was here, she’d probably be talking about the Trojan Horse. They shouldn’t have bothered with the horse. They should have just figured how to blow the wall open.”

  “That’s one way to look at things,” Anne admitted quietly. “The stratagem wasn’t that impressive. As I recall, everyone was drunk and easy to kill in Troy.”

  The team slowed as they approached the intersection. Jia and Erik moved to one side, while the agents moved to the other. A hundred meters separated them from the hangar.

  “There have to be more people than Luca here,” Erik commented as he crept toward the intersection. “This might not be Earth, but it’s not the frontier either. They aren’t running this entire operation with one bot and a guy with a big mouth.”

  Loud rumbling shook the walls and floor. Erik peeked around the intersection but saw only an empty hallway. The shaking continued with no obvious source.

  “Whatever that is, it can’t be good,” Jia muttered.

  “Yeah, I wouldn’t bet against that,” Kant agreed.

  Doors slid open on the far end of the intersection on both sides. A light drumbeat of soft thuds echoed through the hallway, followed by sickening squelching. Something was moving in the rooms.

  Erik could hear gunfire, distant and muted but near-constant, like a heavy machine gun or cannon. Muffled booms lightly shook the building, drowning out the gunfire.

  “I think the cops or locals might have shown up,” he suggested. “It can’t just be Emma because I hear explosions.”

  “Should we pull back?” Anne asked. “Wait for reinforcements?”

  Erik shook his head. “We’ll get what we came for, but at least if they’re here, they might pull some of the attention off us and give us the chance. We wait, or for all we know, Luca pulls the cargo and disappears into a hidden sewer.”

  Jia wrinkled her nose. “Not more sewer pipes.”

  “I don’t know.” Eric thought about their operation. “They’re not so bad without the yaoguai, and speaking of…”

  A quivering tentacled mass slid out of one of the rooms near the end of the hallway, leaving a trail of slime. Similar creatures emerged behind it and from other rooms. Dark green six-legged monsters the size of small puppies skittered out with them, their thick striated carapaces covered with sharp spikes.

  “What the hell?” Kant complained. “This is like next-level yaoguai crap.” He looked at Jia. “Is this the kind of thing you guys have been dealing with?”

  Jia offered him a grim nod. “Among other things.”

  “It kind of reminds me of some of the uglies we fought on the Hunter ship,” Erik replied, sliding his laser rifle back onto his carryaid and grabbing his TR-7. “Let’s hope these things are easier to kill.”

  Panels retracted along the ceiling in the hallway and spider bots poured out. They lacked stun rods or guns, equipped instead with sharp metal mandibles. They scampered along the walls, surging toward the team from all directions.

  “This was why Luca pulled back,” Erik growled. “He wanted to hit us with everything they had.”

  “I’m supposed to be a ghost,” Kant complained. “Not pest control.” He adjusted his fire selection to burst. “I’m not going to be able to eat for a week.”

  “You can always use more target practice,” Anne suggested.

  He sighed. “You and target practice.”

  Jia wasn’t in the mood to chat. She loosed a burst into one of the tentacle monsters, and it exploded in a shower of green blood.

  She lifted her barrel to pick off the closest spider bot.

  Her single shot was enough to take it out. Erik was surprised but grateful to see the conspiracy relying on an off-the-shelf model. Not every fight needed to be a unique challenge.

  They’d already had their challenge from the Elite.

  There was a time for subtlety, and there was a time to mow down everything in front of you. Erik held the trigger down and swept left and right with the TR-7, stopping only to reload in one fluid motion.

  Shell casings cascaded to the floor in a tinkling symphony. Bots exploded in showers of sparks and monsters died. His rivers of lead ripped through the advancing yaoguai with ease.

  They might look odd, but they weren’t Hunter-quality monsters. Humanity, depraved or not, had a long way to go before they could create true nightmares.

  Kant managed to adopt an even less subtle strategy by priming and chucking fragmentation and plasma grenades with surprising grace and speed into the enemies in his hallway. The explosions ripped through the bots and creatures, shaking the area. Half-vaporized yaoguai collapsed in heaps.

  Burning metal from the destroyed bots rained down on the surviving monsters, killing some and wounding others. The survivors attempted to scramble through the destruction, only for his next grenade to explode.

  Jia and Anne decided the large agent was on to something. After clearing out the front lines, they both turned to grenades to break up the enemy formation. Erik tossed the occasional grenade between reloads but kept to his TR-7 to deal heavy death. There was something soothing about the constant vibration of the rifle as he fired round after round into the conspiracy’s makeshift security horde.

  “Remember to save some grenades,” Jia shouted. “We don’t want to run into another Elite without grenades. Erik might not be able to get off a shot without our help.”

  “Heard!” Kant yelled back.

  Anne nodded slightly but kept silent as she hurled another plasma grenade.

  The piles of destroyed monsters and bots grew in number and height, along with the thick, choking clouds of smoke filling the hallways. It was getting harder to spot the approaching enemies in the blasted, carnage-filled battlefield. Relying on hearing them was pointless because of the constant gunfire and explosions.

  Erik gritted his teeth. His earlier wounds were aching more, especially his back. The med patches were doing their work, but they were designed with the idea that whoever was being healed would
be smart enough not to keep fighting.

  When Erik next reloaded, a lucky security bot emerged from the smoke, clinging to the ceiling. The plucky survivor of the explosions and TR-7 suppression fire dropped from the ceiling, its mandibles pulled back, ready to rip into Erik’s face, not having the decency to so much as screech.

  He smacked it out of the air with his left arm, sending it careening into the wall. He ignored the faint pain of a slice in the thin layer of flesh surrounding his cybernetic arm. It would have been a trivial wound on a normal arm and was less than trivial now.

  The bot survived the hit and clambered to its feet after falling to the floor. It didn’t survive Erik’s four-barrel point-blank burst. The attack blasted it to pieces.

  “Not your day.” Erik spun away from the destroyed bot in time to rake down a group of tentacled yaoguai sliding through the smoke. “Not the best day for any of you…” he grimaced at the one in front, “things.”

  Did he have enough ammo? The thought became louder and more insistent. They’d been prepared for the battle of attrition in France, but this was supposed to be a quick raid. The carryaids made it easier to bring more bullets and grenades along, but they couldn’t defeat anywhere near as many enemies as they had in and around the mansion.

  Erik grunted in frustration.

  At least the damned monsters had the decency to die easily. He didn’t need to practice Jia’s religion of ammo preservation in this fight yet.

  Jia and Anne deployed similar tactics after a couple of minutes of battle. Both relied on controlled bursts, with the occasional grenade thrown in to rip apart a closely packed group of enemies. The bots and monsters displayed no fear, climbing over their fallen brethren without pause or concern as they continued toward the four agents, but that also made them easy targets.

  “Damn,” Kant yelled. “Out of grenades. I got a little too feisty.”

  Erik didn’t dare pull his attention away from his own enemies. The agent would need to cover himself.