Swearing under his breath, Brad glanced to his right. Three more T-72s had just appeared around the far corner of the mammoth State Kremlin Palace. Whirring, their turrets spun in his direction, bringing their main guns to bear.
“Ah, crap,” Brad muttered. He slid to the side and snapped off a quick rail-gun shot at the lead tank. Hit squarely beneath its long 125mm cannon, it blew apart. Twisted fragments of the turret flew skyward on a pillar of fire.
One of the other T-72s fired back at him. The armor-piercing shell screamed low over his head, missing by less than a meter. Rocked by the shock wave, his CID staggered slightly and then recovered its balance. A coaxial machine gun chattered. 7.62mm rounds spattered off his composite armor.
Camouflage systems seriously degraded. Minor hydraulic damage to left arm, the computer told him.
Brad stayed on the move, veering unpredictably to make it harder for the Russian gunners to draw a bead on him. His targeting reticle centered on another T-72. He squeezed the trigger. Hit broadside, it burst into flame.
Two down. One to go.
“I see Major Rozek’s CID,” Macomber said starkly over their secure channel. “It’s a total write-off. No life signs. And there’s no sign of whatever killed her.”
Brad nodded bleakly. Successfully bailing out of a damaged robot under fire was virtually impossible. “Understood, Six.” He fired again, smashing the last Russian tank. His threat displays were clear, empty of any new enemies. “I’m going after Gryzlov now. Watch my back.”
“Affirmative, Wolf One,” Macomber replied. Then his voice tightened. “Holy shit! What the fuck is that thing? Am engag—” Abruptly, his CID beacon flared bright red and disappeared.
For what seemed an eternity but couldn’t have been more than a second or two, Brad stared at his tactical display in complete consternation. What the hell was happening here? This was a nightmare, a total damned disaster.
Angrily, he shook himself back to full alertness. Disaster or not, he could still kill Gryzlov and accomplish the mission. He owed Nadia and Whack Macomber that much. He turned back toward the Russian president’s headquarters.
And then a stream of 30mm cannon rounds hammered the side of his CID with horrific force. Brad crashed into the edge of the cockpit as his robot tumbled off its feet and smacked headlong into the pavement.
Warning. Warning. Sensors severely damaged. Hydraulic system function down to thirty percent. Ammunition and weapons packs off-line, the computer told him. Camouflage systems inoperative. Armor breaches in multiple locations.
Groggily, Brad shook his head, an action emulated by the robot. He forced himself upright. Damaged servos and actuators whined. More failure and damage warnings flowed through his dazed mind.
Moving slower now, he spun around, toward the soaring glass-and-concrete façade of the State Kremlin Palace. That was where the Russian bastards who’d just ambushed him had to be lurking. Fragments and bits of glass were still falling from one of the enormous second-floor windows.
A tall, humanlike machine leaped out through the opening and landed only meters away. Its spindly arms held an array of weaponry.
Brad’s eyes opened wide in shock. Oh my God….
Before he could react, the other combat robot opened fire again, this time at point-blank range. Multiple armor-piercing rounds tore into his CID, hurling it backward across the cobblestones in a shower of sparks and torn bits of wiring and metal. Sensors were ripped away. Whole segments of his vision grayed out and shut down. Red failure warnings cascaded through his bleary consciousness, each telling a dizzying tale of catastrophe.
Stunned, Brad fought to regain some measure of control over his dying CID. Nothing worked. His computer systems were damaged beyond repair. Through his one working visual sensor, he saw the other robot leaning over him. Slowly, almost gleefully, it took aim with its autocannon… and then it started shooting.
Everything went black.
“Battle simulation complete,” a smooth, computer-generated voice said in satisfaction. “Total mission failure. Assault force casualties: One hundred percent.”
Two
The lights came back on.
“Senior exercise personnel should report to the main conference room,” the computer said. “Simulation debriefing is scheduled in ten minutes.”
Blinking in the sudden brightness, Brad McLanahan squirmed out of the simulator’s haptic interface module. Now that he wasn’t connected through it to the computers and virtual reality setup, the touch of the gray, gelatinous membrane made his skin crawl. Strapping in or disconnecting always felt a lot like wriggling through a narrow tube full of body-temperature, oozy mud. At the bottom of the cockpit, he tapped a glowing green button.
A metal hatch slid open. Carefully, he squeezed through the small opening, slid down a short ladder, and then, keeping his head low, crab-walked out from under the egg-shaped Cybernetic Infantry Device simulator. Set in the middle of a large opaque dome, the cockpit nested inside a bewildering array of hydraulic jacks.
Once clear of the complicated, Rube Goldberg — looking assembly, Brad straightened up to his full height. For several seconds, he twisted and stretched his neck and shoulders and hips, working out the kinks in muscles that felt cramped and sore. Most of the time he didn’t mind being tall and broad-shouldered, but there were a few places where his build was a definite disadvantage.
Yeah, like cramped, instrument-filled aircraft and CID cockpits, he thought with a wry grin. Which just happened to be where he spent a huge portion of his working hours. Smooth career move, McLanahan, he told himself, heading for the door out of the dome. He could have been anything from an aerospace engineer to a bartender, but no, he’d wanted to be a combat pilot, just like his old man.
He emerged into a cavernous hangar. Two more of the big domes crowded the vast space. Each looked very much like one of those inflatable planetariums used for traveling astronomy shows. Color-coded fiber-optic and power cables snaked across the bare concrete floor, linking the domes to banks of big-screen monitors and powerful computers.
Ordinarily, the simulators gave rookie CID pilots a taste of what it was really like to command one of the big fighting machines. Once you were strapped inside, the combination of haptic interfaces, full-motion capability, and three-dimensional virtual reality projectors provided an experience that sounded, looked, and even felt real. It was a relatively fast, cheap, and easy way to weed out newbies who couldn’t hack the job.
Today, though, the simulator domes had been repurposed to run veteran Iron Wolf pilots through a series of immersive combat scenarios. Fighting virtual battles avoided wear and tear on their expensive robots… and on the Polish countryside. Live-fire exercises with CIDs might be exciting, but they were hell on equipment, buildings, and the landscape.
Even worse, open field maneuvers risked exposing key intelligence about the lethal machines and their advanced capabilities to Moscow’s spies. Warsaw’s Military Counterintelligence Service was top-notch, but Poland was a free and democratic country. There was no way to build an iron curtain of secrecy around its armed forces — or those of its high-tech allies, the Iron Wolf Squadron and its corporate parent Scion, a private military company.