Hell Razor opened his pack. “Worth a try.”
We cleared out and watched in all directions as he planted the charges and spooled out the fuse. No more robots came, though down on the ground we could see the ones that had survived our strafing runs gathering all around the edges of the domed roof like hounds that had treed a possum. If any of us was to roll all the way down there, well there wouldn’t be much more than a red smear left once they were done.
“Alright,” said Hell Razor, slipping behind the base of a radio tower. “Take cover.”
We all hunched down and he lit the fuse. Fifteen seconds later a deep boom echoed off the hills around the facility and the missile battery toppled over onto its side, ripping out all its innards and electronics as it went.
Angie scurried forward and looked down into the ragged hole it had left behind. “Yes! We’re in!”
We secured a couple of ropes to a sensor array and lowered the lines into hole, which showed nothing but darkness below a lattice of girders and crossbeams. Thrasher and Hell Razor went first, then Angie and Ace, and finally me and Vargas. We ended up in the middle of a wide corridor, the rubble and grit from the missile battery’s demise crunching underfoot.
Base Cochise was silent and cold — freezing actually. And it wasn’t just cold from being mostly below ground. There had to be some active cooling going on, but I couldn’t hear the hum of machinery and the air wasn’t moist enough for evaporative cooling. I recalled legends of places before the fall where the air could be conditioned and chilled, but I’d put those stories down in the category of other fantasies like a paradise called Hollywood and scientists having harnessed the power of the bomb to propel submarines or light whole cities. Crazy talk, I’d thought. But maybe not.
As Vargas and I unfastened ourselves from our ropes and I unslung the meson cannon, pinpoints of light began to flicker at various points along the dark walls — red, green, blue, purple and white — slowly at first, like the random play of raindrops hitting a window. Then they increased in frequency and intensity, glowing more brightly and lasting longer.
Finally they all stayed on, and we were bathed in a multicolored glow. It revealed a computer terminal at the end of a dead end side corridor.
Angie raised an eyebrow. “You don’t suppose…?”
“Let’s go see,” said Vargas.
We walked to the end of the corridor and looked down at the terminal. The screen was on, but there was nothing showing on it.
“Uh…” said Angie. “Hello? Is this…? Are you the Base Cochise AI?”
A voice boomed from the ceiling. “There is no reason for us to speak to you. You have nothing to offer us.”
Vargas scratched his head, confused. “So, then… why are you speaking to us?”
“To distract you until the security units we have dispatched arrive at your location.” The words were precise and slow and devoid of emotion, like a parent speaking to a particularly stupid child. “Ploy successful.”
We all whipped around. The far end of the long corridor was filling with silver robots floating swiftly towards us, their serrated pincers snapping at us. We unloaded on them and they collapsed into slag before they made it halfway down the hallway.
Angie laughed. “Ha! Whaddaya think of your ploy now, Cochise?”
There was no response. We looked back. The terminal was dark.
“Guess it’s a bit miffed,” said Hell Razor.
“Good,” said Vargas, then he started back down the corridor. “Come on, we gotta find where these keys go and end this bullshit.”
The rumble of treads and the click of metal spider legs greeted us as we stepped back into the main corridor — and it was getting closer.
– Chapter Nine –
“On our nine!” I shouted.
“No!” cried Angie. “On our twelve!”
“Both!” said Ace.
“Then go three!” barked Vargas. “Shit!”
We veered right and ran down the wide corridor. Way too soon it ended in a shiny titanium wall, so polished we could see ourselves in it — and the bulky silhouettes of the robot army growing ever larger behind us. And this time most of them were armed with laser weapons. They started to burn black crisscrosses in the shiny wall and scar our unscarrable armor, too. There wasn’t anything to hide behind either.
“Any ideas?” I asked, as we fired back at them.
Thrasher dug into the wall with his armored fingers and pulled. A three by six panel popped out. “There’s a door.”
Vargas laughed like a mad man, then started shoving us all through into some sort of service corridor. “In! In!”
After the bright hallway, it was pitch dark in there and we all stumbled around blindly.
“Which way?” I asked.
There was a clunk and a curse.
“Well, not that way,” said Ace. “Ow.”
“Turn around!” shouted Angie.
I turned away from everybody else’s voices and stepped forward — and put my foot down on empty air. Suddenly I was sliding on my armored posterior down a slick ramp of some kind. A red light zoomed up at me, a pair of double doors below it. I bent my legs and put my arms up to shield my face, but the doors banged open easily as I hit and I flew out onto the tile floor of a dimly lit room, then skidded to a stop.
I sat up. “Well, that was—”
Angie flew out of the door, bounced, and knocked me back down again.
Half a second later, Ace, Vargas, and Hell Razor zipped out in a tangled knot and I took Vargas’s boot heel to the side of the head as they rolled to a stop.
“Is… that everybody?” I asked groggily.
“Oh shit!” squawked Angie. “Thrasher!”
We all scattered, but not quite fast enough. Thrasher came out of the chute like a safe with legs and knocked us all flat again.
“Nice of them to put that there,” groaned Vargas as he sat up. “You know, for the kids.”
“We should block it, though,” said Ace. “Some of those robots were small enough to follow us.”
“Good plan,” said Vargas. “Thrasher—”
“On it.”
The big man picked up a big old metal desk, dumped everything off it, then carried it to the doors of the chute. Hell Razor helped him jam it in tight and then they set another desk behind it.
“There,” said Hell Razor. “Now it’s constipated.”
“All right. Good,” said Vargas. “Where are we?”
We looked around. The room looked like some kind of security station. There were monitors and desks and weapon lockers and ancient posters on the wall that said things like, “Loose Lips Sink Funding,” and “Only You Can Prevent Leaks,” and “Obey The NDA!” It didn’t look like anyone human had been in there for a hundred years. The monitors were off, the lockers were open and empty, and the posters were peeling.
“Maybe with the monitors off, the AI can’t see us,” said Angie.
“It could see us upstairs,” said Hell Razor. “Why would it be any different down here?”
“Which is why we should keep moving,” said Vargas. “Come—”
The desk pooted out of the poop chute with a clang and a screech, and a swarm of little blade–wielding spider–bots poured out after it.
“Shit! More combat hackers! Move! Move!”
We ran out of the room and around a corner, then skidded to a stop inches from a moat full of boiling green–and–yellow slop that blocked our way and had our armors’ built–in Geiger counters chirping like nervous crickets. There was a telescoping bridge across the moat, but it was retracted.
“Fuck!”
“What a fucking fun–house this place is,” snarled Hell Razor. “Who builds a base with shit like this lying around? Slides? Toxic moats? It’s stupid!”