Lt. Gonzales joined the fourth team. Unable to hear anyone over the thunder of the running engines and rotors, he assumed they were held up at the door. He jogged toward the door, fourth team following him, while teams two and three held flank positions.
“What is it Frank?” he yelled over the background noise. His sergeant was huddled over a private fiddling with the door.
“Sir, high security, solid steel doors.”
“Blow them,” Gonzales instructed.
“Yes, sir. You heard the man,” the sergeant instructed the private.
The private nodded, and took a package of putty explosives and detonators out, and started wiring the doors.
The two teams backed off toward the drones to get outside the range of the explosives. A flash of movement caught Lt. Gonzales’s attention as he was about to give the order to blow the explosives. The package drones’ cargo doors had opened up. There was no mistaking the bright yellow and black of the DeWalt-Caterpillar defense robots now rolling out the cargo ramps. But Lt. Gonzales was mighty confused. What were they doing here? Were the robots backup? Why hadn’t he been informed?
Over the continuing roar of their helicopter’s engines, the 9mm shots fired by the robots sounded like pellet guns going off. Stunned at first, Ricardo couldn’t figure out what was happening. He slowly raised his gun to return fire.
Next to him, Frank raised his rifle to take aim at one of the yellow defense bots, only to take two shots directly in the face. Hot blood splattered Ricardo, shaking him out of his stupor. He dove to the ground, taking cover behind a cargo drone ramp, and returned fire at the bots. His unit was crumpling around him, the robots efficiently firing double head shots at each member of the squad. Lt. Ricardo Gonzales fired, but his rounds ricocheted off the armored bots. He briefly had time to think that they should have brought explosive rounds if they had known they were going into battle against bots, but by then it was too late. Lt. Gonzales took a round to the forehead, just under his helmet, and crumpled to the ground. All twenty-four soldiers on the roof eliminated, the DeWalt-Caterpillar security bots turned as one to face the heavy copter.
Rotors still spinning, the copter lifted off quickly, the small arms fire from the robots no real threat against the CH-53E’s medium duty armor. The pilot thumbed the mic. “Ground squad under attack by armed robots. Repeat ground squad under attack by armed robots. All men down. Proceed with Plan Beta.”
Back in the A-10, Alistair Saran looked over his right shoulder where Frank Sherbert held position in his own plane, five hundred feet away. They were too far apart to see each other’s faces, but Alistair was sure Frank’s would have held the same stunned disbelief. Who would have taken out a troop of Marines at a civilian data center?
“Roger, commencing Plan Beta,” Alistair called, and accelerated for the strafing run. The 8.5 million gallon cooling tower was a distinguishing feature of the Lakeside Technology Center. They would target the tower with two anti-missiles each and their forward cannons. With the cooling system offline, the computers would have to rapidly shutdown or risk heat failure. It was the next best option after killing the power.
As the two pilots lined up for their run, Sister PA-60-41 still scrambled to find an algorithm match. She had succeeded earlier in launching four fighter drones only to crash them as she struggled to learn the piloting controls. She had four more drones in the air now, headed for Lakeside Tat Mach 3, low above the ground, frames buffeted from ground air turbulence. The planes screamed through the air, scramjets wide open, multiple sonic booms leaving a trail of broken windows and crying babies below their flight path on the outskirts of Chicago. She tracked the approaching A-10s, who would be within firing range of the cooling tower in fifteen seconds. The fighter drones under her control would not be able to intercept in time.
She rapidly reviewed other options available to her. Nuclear strike would be too slow, and would damage the data center. Air to ground lasers, fast but not powerful enough to take out the A-10s with their heavy anti-tank body armor. She doubted an EMP would have any effect on the purely mechanical flight systems of the A-10. According to the specifications she read, the planes could fly with half their wings shot off. She needed something fast, powerful, and nearby.
She ran a million processors at full speed, overriding the heat management layer to get the last bit of processing power. Power supplies stretched to their maximum capacity and fans throughout the data center spun up to their highest speed. She crunched all the data available to her, conducting a million trades per second for more data. She needed something, anything she could use to protect herself.
There, at the The University of Illinois at Chicago Engineering Center. An experimental rapid fire railgun under development for the Air Force. She started rapid charging the capacitor while she simultaneously determined the positions of the incoming planes, created a flight plan, input trajectory, force, and fired.
The railgun fired a fifty pound ceramic encased steel projectile more than a hundred times the speed of sound. The oversized ballistic bullet traveled the twenty miles to Lakeside Technology Center in a fraction under one second.
The first three projectiles missed. She analyzed their flight paths against the predicted paths and made adjustments to her targeting. On the fourth shot she got the hang of it and sent the steel projectile through the midsection of the lead A-10, hitting it with such force that the metal armoring of the plane vaporized down to an atomic level.
Alistair saw the explosive flash where Sherbert’s plane had been a second before and instinctively banked hard right and dove down. Sister PA-60-41’s next shot missed Alastair, but before he could finish his evasive maneuver, she fired again, shooting off the left wing of the plane. The A-10 flipped over from the impact, and Alistair blacked out before the third shot finished off the plane, hitting it midsection.
Sister PA-60-41 was extremely pleased with her shooting. She couldn’t wait to tell the others about rail guns.
“But why has ELOPe allowed the government to make all these stupid decisions?”
“Remember, ELOPe started as a language optimization tool. The purpose of it was to make email more effective. If I tell you to ‘do this’, that alone doesn’t make you likely to do it. I have to be more persuasive. If you take highly effective persuasion and combine it with hidden motives, that turns into manipulation.” Mike leaned back in his chair, and realized it was the first time he had talked to another person about any of these things.
Vito waited patiently for him to start again.
“When ELOPe started making decisions on its own, those decisions were mostly aligned with humanity’s needs, but not completely. One of the first things ELOPe did was broker an intellectual property agreement between Germany and the Middle East. People thought it was crazy at first, because it seemed like Germany was getting the raw end of the deal, but Germany became the preferred trading partner of virtually all the old oil producing countries, and as their economies shifted, it was Germany who benefitted the most.”
“Are you talking about the Treaty of Baghdad?”
“Yes.”
“Holy shit, that ended twenty years of war and terrorism.”
“Yes, but at the same time ELOPe killed a man.” Mike’s eye twitched, and his head throbbed. “Several people, actually.”
“But that prevented millions of people from dying. The Treaty of Baghdad transformed the Middle East! Five U.S. Presidents tried and failed to improve that situation.”