chapter 46
YEAR: 2097
Time Remaining: 11 hours, 48 minutes
Mitch toured the secure compound at the back of the base that opened onto the airfield. With his four subordinates close behind and waiting to carry out whatever orders he required, Mitch took in the different units of soldiers waiting on standby. Although the base had never before been armed with as many troops and firepower, Mitch knew it would not be enough if a full-scale battle broke out. He had requested supplemental troops and firepower from other bases around the country. So far, only a fraction of the manpower had arrived, and none of the firepower. The additional All Purpose Hover Vehicles and tanks were still in transit, scheduled to arrive the previous day but had experienced delays.
Mitch had hoped that the twenty-four hours between the launch of Operation TimeShift and its end—the following day at 8:00 A.M.—would be like the days and weeks previous. The robots were focusing their attacks on the downtown for the high yield of Elevanium each skyscraper could net them. With the robots’ attention diverted elsewhere, an attack on the base seemed less likely. Mitch knew that attacks on downtown meant violence and human casualties, but it was better than a full-scale attack on the base while this op was being executed. If his team succeeded in the mission, it would mean just one more day of terror that would inevitably be written out of people’s minds. However, if the robots attacked, Mitch knew that a lot could change in the fourteen hours that remained until the timeshift. If the robots got their hands on the Elevanium before the teams returned, he knew he lacked the imagination to even guess what the robots had planned. The potential for collateral damage to the base itself concerned Mitch very little, with the exception of the time travel control centre and the Elevanium vault. If the robots seized the Elevanium that powered the time travel system, the timeshift would occur prematurely as the open window of bonded time closed. Operation TimeShift would be a failure, leaving them with no defence against the robots.
Mitch pulled his aviator glasses with high-powered binocular capabilities out of his pocket and slid them on. He focused on the distant treeline of the green space that separated the NRD base from the domes. He looked for any sign of the robots hiding in the forest—a reflection of the sun off their bodies, moving bushes—anything to confirm his hunch that the metallic army was hidden within. Instead, he saw nothing. The late afternoon sun hung low in the sky making it impossible to see any details in the treeline. But Mitch needed no proof. His intuition told him the robots were there, and their location on the west side of the base at this hour was not a coincidence, but a strategic choice. Mitch felt his breath catch in his chest—he worried they were in for bigger trouble than even he had anticipated.
“Campbell?”
“Yeah. I’m here. Report?” Mitch adjusted the earpiece and recognized the voice as one of the area leads monitoring the robot domes.
“Good news, sir. We’ve been monitoring the domes all day and there’s been no activity. No sign of anything trying to enter or exit.”
This report surprised Mitch and he fell silent in thought. He expected some kind of activity.
“Sir? Are you there? This is good news,” said the voice. “It means that our presence here is having the effect we wanted. They’re stuck inside and can’t leave.”
This was not good news as the area lead seemed to think, and apprehension trickled down Mitch’s back like droplets of invisible sweat. He took a moment to process the information. “I don’t like it,” said Mitch after a moment. “They’re getting in and out a different way. Scan the ground beneath the domes.”
Mitch heard muffled sounds as the area lead located a scanner, then silence for a few moments, followed by muttered curses.
“Affirmative. They are moving underground. There’s a massive network of tunnels and many of them lead to the green space. Wait…” Mitch heard shuffling sounds and more muffled conversation. “Sir, there’s a significantly wider tunnel leading directly toward the base and it stretches further than my scanner can read. I’d say their calculations are off though because, from what I can see, the tunnel won’t connect with the base unless it dog-legs. They’re just shy of connecting with the building, erring to the west.”
Mitch shook his head. “That’s no error.”
“I’m sorry, sir?”
Mitch cut away from his conversation with the area lead and barked out. “Someone get me a scanner! Now!” A hand appeared holding a MultiMaterial Scanner. He took the yellow scanner and walked briskly to the west side of the Defence building and pointed the scanner down at the ground.
The Elevanium vault had been constructed deep underground with state-of-the-art security technologies at the time of its construction over fifty years ago. As advances in technology developed, many of the methods protecting the vault were replaced or upgraded. The most recent addition was a pulsing electromagnetic perimeter. This EMP protection would fry the unshielded circuitry of anything within thirty feet of the vault’s outer walls. However, Mitch was careful not to underestimate the robots.
Mitch looked at the screen of the scanner and heaved a sigh of relief. The scanner showed the large Elevanium deposit still in the vault. Mitch scanned the area around the deposit and saw tiny white flecks appear to the left of the deposit, about thirty feet away; the scanner was picking up the Elevanium in their battery packs. The robots’ progress had been halted just short of their destination; the EMP protection was keeping them at bay.
Mitch called for an E-cannon, and within moments, one of the subs appeared carrying a black device that resembled a cross between a rocket launcher and a Newtonian reflector telescope and handed it to Mitch. Mitch rested the weightless device effortlessly on his shoulder. Using his free hand, Mitch instinctively adjusted the scope, a thin piece of glass on a narrow arm, setting it in his field of vision so he could aim the gun. Realizing its uselessness, as his targets were underground, he swept the small scope out of his way. Accuracy was unimportant. With the E-cannon’s blast radius of forty feet, he knew he would hit his targets. He aimed the cannon at the ground and pulled the trigger. Nothing physical exited the weapon, but the pulse sound it emitted was a deep, distant electronic boom that could be felt deep in one’s chest, rather than heard.
Mitch looked at the scanner again, noticing that many of the little white dots no longer moved. He knew somewhere below the surface, there was a heap of fallen robots with smoking circuitry. He expected it would only be a matter of minutes before the next wave of robots would appear.
Mitch handed the E-cannon to the sub that gave it to him. “This is your job until this is over. I suspect after three or four blasts they’ll abandon that route, but I want you to continue to monitor this. If that EMP perimeter around the vault goes down, which I’m certain is in their plans, they’ll be trying to get in there like a pack of dogs into a bag of rotting garbage. I want updates as often as the status changes.”
Tunnels? Mitch had spent so much time preparing the base for a ground attack to seize the Elevanium, it never occurred to him that the attack could come from underground as well. With the setting sun becoming a major visibility issue, Mitch predicted an attack from the west any moment if the robots were to take full advantage of their position between the sun and the base. Mitch ordered up two Hummingbirds to get a visual on the domes and the green space. In minutes, he heard the electronic humming cut through the still air as both aircraft launched from A Hangar at the east end of the runway. Mitch watched as they flew overhead and waited to hear their report, but that report never came. Within seconds of flying over the trees, both Hummingbirds disappeared from the air like props in an elaborate magic show.
Mitch swore under his breath. He slid his binocular glasses on again and looked to the distant treeline, hoping to see proof that his hunch had been correct—that robots were hiding in the green space. He heard it before he saw it, the thundering sound of footsteps from thousands of robots as they charged across the grass between t
he green space and the airfield. He shielded the sun from his eyes and squinted through his binocular glasses and saw swarms of black silhouettes exiting the forest and rushing toward the base.
Time Remaining: 11 hours, 13 minutes
With robots pouring from the forest toward the base in numbers far greater than Mitch ever imagined, he barked orders to the unit leads. The base would be safe from attack as long as the invisible, dome-shaped electromagnetic shield surrounding its perimeter continued emitting its circuit-frying pulse.
Mitch stood on the roof of an APHV and smiled with satisfaction at seeing the robots’ advancement stalled at the edge of the paved airstrip. Several rows of metallic bodies lay on the ground as if they had been pushed there by a gigantic broom, their circuitry fried by the electromagnetic field as they tried to pass through the invisible barrier.
An eerie silence filled the air as the thundering footsteps and mechanical sounds slowed as the robots recalculated their approach. Mitch wondered what their next move would be. Looking through his binocular glasses, he could see his robotic opponents more clearly, and what he saw unsettled him. Perhaps the blinding sun was playing games with his eyes, but the robots were not the clean, ergonomically-perfected creations they were designed to be. Many members of this motley army looked like they had been assembled in haste. Through his binocular glasses, Mitch saw one robot had part of its skull missing. As the robot’s head turned to look around, Mitch saw a circuit board hanging out the side. The front of its head was dented and the cock-eyed position of its eyes made it look demented and sinister. The robot to its left looked an even sorrier sight. One eye was the standard AEI robot design, the other, a much larger, blue cartoony eye from a popular First Gen child’s panda bear robot. The panda’s eye, too large to fit properly, hung from its socket by a series of wires and swung from side to side as the robot shifted its weight from foot to foot. Other robots had mismatched legs—some the right height, others too short or too long. Some were not even legs at all but sign posts, baseball bats or even wooden hockey sticks. Several robots had crudely-fit wheels where a foot should have been.
The silence broke as a whistling sound cut through the air. Mitch pushed his glasses to the top of his head and looked up to see the source of the noise. It had originated from behind the robots, inside the green space. Mitch’s eyes caught up with a missile as it flew straight up into the air, adjusted its trajectory and turned toward the base. Mitch lost track of the missile as he dove down the windshield and rolled onto the ground in front of the APHV for cover. The missile landed behind him, decimating the security control building. Its impact blew several of the large windows out of the Burton Auditorium on the first floor of the Research side of the U-shaped building.
Mitch jumped to his feet and ran toward the security centre. Instead of finding the remains of the structure on fire, a gooey blue slime seeped up the damaged walls and consumed what was left of the building like lava with reverse gravity capabilities. Mitch looked at his subs with incredulity.
“How did that get past our Incoming Munitions Sensor? How come that wasn’t intercepted?” asked one of the subs.
Mitch shook his head. They watched in shock as what remained of their security building sank slowly into the shimmery pool of electric blue. This acidic goop looked unlike anything he had ever seen before.
“That missile didn’t even register in the system,” said Mitch. He pulled up the last minute of the log generated by the Incoming Munitions Sensor on his Icomm contacts. He knew what was coming next. That missile had not taken out the security control centre by accident. Mitch crawled back onto the roof of the APHV and slid his binocular glasses back over his eyes. As he expected, robots flooded over the invisible line that had kept them at bay.
Mitch looked to his sub. “We need to get some Glass Eyes up there, our overhead cams will be out with the security centre demolished.”
Mitch’s stomach sank. If the robots were going to launch an offensive on the base with weaponry no one had ever seen before, it would be a short battle. In less than twenty minutes, he had witnessed two incidents for which he had no explanation—an air attack with weapons their detection systems failed to recognize and two aircraft disappearing out of thin air.
Mitch’s teams commenced their retaliatory attack on the robots. Groups advanced onto the airfield in waves to intercept and contain their adversaries on the airfield. Within minutes, the troops at the front reported that the standard-issue, plasmaqueous gun’s laser merely ricocheted off the robots.
With the plasmaqueous guns of no use, a confused frenzy broke out. NRD service weapons possessed the highest power capacity of any standard-issue service weapon in the world. Skirmishes broke out on the battlefield where the troops’ only advantage lay in their ability to out-manoeuvre the poorly-constructed robots. After several minutes of hand-to-hand combat, several loopholes had been discovered. One soldier, pinned down by a robot and fighting for his life, did the only thing he could, which was fire his weapon. The soldier’s shot, fired at close range, struck the robot in the neck, just below the vulnerable Central thought processor. The robot went limp and collapsed to the ground. Another soldier had been forced to use her VersaTool to throw a robot off her and took out several as she tossed it. She grabbed another with the red beam and used it as a wrecking ball to destroy other robots around her.
A number of atom blaster guns were distributed to the troops. The atom blasters were initially passed over in planning; their powerful blast radius was too broad for such a small battle area where soldiers could fall victim to friendly-fire. Now, needing every advantage, the guns were quickly unpacked and distributed around the battlefield. The guns disintegrated any robots in its blast path, creating a crater in the concrete wherever the blast struck.
Mitch watched the battle unfold through his binocular glasses. He stood on the hood of the APHV, uncomfortably aware of his exposure. Robots continued to pour from the forest at a rate that Mitch would never have believed possible had he not seen it with his own eyes. Swarms of robots pushed forward like a relentless tide.
The atom blasters’ ability to eliminate robots created a liability for the NRD team. Robots defeated from hand-to-hand combat left the battlefield littered with robot bodies that hindered other robots as they raced toward the NRD base. The robots stumbled and became hung up on their fallen brethren, distracting them and making them easy targets. The atom blasters disintegrated those much-needed obstacles and created foxholes for robots to duck into.
Another whistling sound diverted Mitch’s attention from the ground to the sky. He slid his glasses up and peered into the sky to find the source. Around him, his subs leapt off the APHV and scattered. Without hesitation, he did the same. The APHV exploded behind him. The force of the blast lifted him off his feet and threw him forward through the air. He landed hard on the concrete and every part of his body ached like he had been shot from a cannon into a brick wall. The heat from the overturned, burning vehicle washed over him and his ears rung from the blast.