chapter 48
YEAR: 2097
Time Remaining: 5 hours, 32 minutes
The Defence teams successfully maintained a perimeter, thwarting the robot’s attempts at ground gaining efforts. Several tanks cut their way across the battlefield, crushing the fallen robot bodies in their path. The tanks’ blasting power was too much for the battlefield. And their missiles, when fired on the green space, were blocked, creating midair explosions where the ordinances hit the robots’ invisible barrier.
Mitch noticed the robots seemed to come in surges. Each swell seemed to increase in physical and mechanical quality. This new wave of robotic warriors showed noticeable improvement over the first surge of robots, constructed with mismatched parts and limb substitutions. It seemed as though the AEI robots—with the most superior build quality and hardware—were saving themselves until absolutely necessary. Instead, they sent out disposable robots to bear the brunt of the battle.
“Mitch,” yelled the voice of a lead at the front into Mitch’s earpiece. “There’s something weird up here. I don’t know what it is, but it’s destroying everything in its path.” Mitch looked out over the battle in confusion. The bright lights hovering over the airfield lit up the base like mid-afternoon.
“As in, you’ve never seen anything like it?”
“No, as in, invisible. There is something creating a path of destruction. I think the robots can see it, they seem to know when to move out of the way.”
“How wide a swath and how fast is it moving?”
“Not fast, maybe five, six miles an hour, and the swath is possibly ten, twenty feet wide? It’s like a gigantic, invisible rolling pin or something. I can see things getting crushed. It’s just flattened a tank!”
Mitch wanted to pull out his earpiece, throw it on the ground and stomp on it. Instead, he asked the lead his position. How could they fight invisible opponents?
One of Mitch’s subs returned and handed him what looked like a handful of large glass marbles and a small black disk. Mitch set the black disk on the hood of the APHV and a screen appeared, projected above it. He tapped on the projected screen several times and the transparent spheres in his left hand flew upward into the air like doves being released. On the projected screen, Mitch and his subs watched the battle rage from an overhead perspective.
Mitch tapped at the intangible screen, toggling between the view each flying eye captured and scrutinized the feeds. “There. Right there.” He pinpointed the source of the destruction on the screen and he and his subs watched another tank being flattened. He zoomed in to watch more closely. With a bird’s eye view, Mitch could see cracks in the concrete, left in the wake of the invisible weapon. Mitch zoomed out and watched as the cracks wound toward the base, deviating only enough to make its path unpredictable.
Anything they shot either missed the invisible weapon or proved ineffective. The path of destruction stopped at the south side of the base. Mitch wondered if the weapon acted like a wind-up toy—only good for a certain amount of time or distance before becoming spent—but that seemed unlikely. He anticipated the weapon was now in position, waiting to inflict a new level of destruction. Nothing changed on the screen and when Mitch ordered one of the drone tanks to approach it, the tank drove through the weapon’s position with no ill consequence. The weapon seemed to have simply disappeared.
“Hey, Mitch?” called his second-in-command over the com-sys.
“I hope you’ve got good news for me,” said Mitch.
“I do, actually. We’ve broadened our scanning frequencies and we’re able to see the invisible shield protecting the robot domes and their army’s position in the green belt.”
Mitch sighed, finally a development in their favour. “Good. Get that data to the pilots. I want three Hummingbirds up right now. We need to get rid of that shield, ASAP.” Mitch was hesitant to send up more aircraft after losing two of the bladeless hovercopters earlier; however, knowing the location of the shields in the airspace meant they could successfully fly and avoid the barrier.
Within minutes, the first Hummingbird went up. The white, ergonomic Hummingbirds were roughly modelled after their ancient predecessor, the helicopter. Unlike a helicopter, the Hummingbird had no blades. It did have a typical cockpit and a cargo area at the rear with sliding doors in the body.
“HumSeven, report?” barked Mitch. He saw the powerful floodlights from the aircraft rake across on the green space below.
“Sir, I see several underground tunnels opening into the forest and they’re pouring out and into the forest like…” started the co-pilot. After a moment of muffled sounds, Mitch heard the words, “locked on” and then, “Can’t you shake it?” Screams followed and Mitch watched the Hummingbird burst into flames and fall into the forest below like a stone.
“What the hell?” said Mitch quietly under his breath. Before he could speculate any further on their fire power, HumEight exploded in midair. “HumNine, get out of there!”
The remaining Hummingbird turned to return to the base, but not before dropping several bombs over the robots in the forest. As the bombs reached the protective shield, they disappeared into thin air. Mitch watched the craft direct itself toward the hangar. Approximately half way back, the aircraft began to lurch and stutter in a manner the craft could not have physically done under its own steam.
The pilot’s calm voice came over the radio. “Alpha Lead, I’ve got something locked on me. Don’t know what it is and I can’t shake it.” The pilot’s evasive manoeuvring shook the craft violently against the invisible restraint and a body fell out one of the open cargo doors.
The co-pilot’s voice cut in. “We’ve lost Williams!” The voice was strained and lacked the metered control of the pilot.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mitch saw a streak of light as a missile headed straight toward the Hummingbird. “HumNine, you’ve got incoming,” said Mitch.
“Roger that,” said the pilot casually, as if this message was no more urgent than a request to land at a different hangar. The pilot managed to shake the aircraft free at the last moment. Unable to move the craft out of the way of the oncoming missile, the pilot spun ninety degrees and the rocket flew through the two open cargo doors.
“I’ve lost the lock, but that missile’s coming around for round two.” The craft shot upward and out of the missile’s path. The Hummingbird shot a heat target to confuse the missile, but the intelligent weapon knew better. It recalculated its trajectory back onto its quarry. This time, it clipped the stubby, rounded tail of the aircraft. The craft began to spin and several of the soldiers in the cargo area fell out the open doors and hung from their safety cables. HumNine’s slow descent picked up speed as the pilot unsuccessfully tried to regain control. The craft disappeared from view behind the hangars. Mitch saw grey smoke rise above the buildings and into the night. He dispatched a medical team to look for survivors.
Distracted from the crash scene, he heard a voice of one of the leads at the front. “Did you see that? It just disappeared! A tank vanished right in front of our eyes, just like those Hummingbirds did earlier.” Seconds later, a tank exploded, hit with a missile. Several soldiers and robots near the blast flew backward and did not get up.
Mitch ran through an inventory of weaponry, men, firepower and other assets in use, and did some quick calculations. They were down five Hummingbirds. Ten still remained, but the risk of using them was too high when they were being picked off like soup cans on a fence by a seasoned sniper. The men and women fighting the battle were in good shape, despite being heavily outnumbered by the robots. As a whole, the robots’ firepower was extraordinary, but individually, they were experiencing issues. The dust and the smoke in the air caused miscalculations or hesitations just long enough for the soldiers to use to their advantage. Without the reinforcements Mitch ordered to replace his teams who would eventually tire, it was only a matter of time before the robots would gain the upper hand. Not knowing how many robots remained and what ot
her cards they had yet to play, Mitch could only prepare for the worst.
Time Remaining: 4 hours, 53 minutes
“Mitch?” called a new voice over the radio. Mitch recognized the voice of the director of communications. “Mitch, I’m patching through the Chief Administrative Director of Tricity’s Nexus Hub. You need to hear what he’s got to say.”
Mitch adjusted his earpiece as he acknowledged her. Each major city across the country maintained a Nexus Hub. Each Hub acted as a vertebra in the backbone for all of the online data and information that users accessed on a daily basis to live their lives and do their jobs. The CAD ensured that Tricity’s Hub of the Nexus always stayed running. Without it, a portion of the country’s online world would go offline, grinding life to a halt.
“Mitch here.” He stepped away from his subs to a more private area at the rear of the battlefield.
“Mitch, we’ve got a problem,” said the Director. “The robots have hacked into our data vaults on the Nexus.”
“Which ones?” Mitch knew that the NRD compartmentalized its sensitive data across various sectors in the different Nexus Hubs. If one vault became hacked or compromised, the data would be useless without its other pieces, securely sealed in other highly-secured data vaults across different sectors among the Hubs.
“All of them. And not just Tricity. Across the whole country. They’ve got access to everything.”
Mitch froze. “How did that happen? How could they hack in and get everything that fast? I thought these data vaults were impervious?”
“They’re supposed to be,” said the Director.
Mitch stared into the night’s sky and exhaled several long breaths. He knew what had to be done, but the results would be catastrophic. It would stop everything, dead in its tracks, literally. From coast to coast, the entire country would be in a freeze. Businesses would not be able to do business. City services would be stopped. People’s cars would stop. Everything from water and heat to commerce would stop. People in air trains, buses or elevators would be trapped. It was like a power outage, but worse.
“Mitch?” asked the Director again.
Mitch shook his head. “Shut it down.”
“I’m sorry?”
“You heard me,” Mitch said, rubbing his forehead. “We’ve been breached. Shut the Nexus down.”
“Mitch, we can’t do that. We can’t shut down the entire country. Nothing will work…”
“I’m well aware of what it will do. We’re hemorrhaging data all over God knows where. They’ll be able to turn our weapons on us in minutes. I’m open to suggestions if you’ve got an alternative one.”
The other end of the line fell silent. After a moment, the Director swore under his breath. “You’re going to have one hell of a report to write. I’ll put the order in for that right now, across all the Hubs. I’m not sure how long it will take, it’s not a switch. I’ve got to get through to the central vault.”
“What is your best guess?”
“Five to ten minutes.”
“Alright. Make it happen.”
Mitch hoped that pulling the plug on the Nexus would favour him with an advantage equal to the gravity of the order he had just given. No one had ever shut the Nexus down before. It was unheard of, like turning off the sun in the middle of the afternoon. Mitch knew the repercussions would be unimaginable. But at this moment, it was his best hope to slow the robots who, despite the NRD’s assault, continued to replenish their numbers with no sign of letting up.
With only minutes to spare before the shutdown of the Nexus, Mitch communicated the update to the leads in battle. With the Nexus down, guns would have to be manually aimed and fired, and the com-sys would cease to work.
Mitch half-expected to see some sign announcing the Nexus had been shut off but to his surprise nothing significant happened. The only immediate indicators were the blinking words at the bottom left corner of his vision, “System Offline” and the words “No Data” pulsing in small red letters in the centre of the Glass Eye’s projected screen that, just moments ago, showed the battle from above.
Only on the battlefield was it obvious that something had changed. The activity on the runway-turned-battlefield changed to disorientation. Mitch surveyed the turmoil. The robots ceased advancing and peered at one another questioningly. Some looked confused. Some tapped the side of their head where the receiver was located. The troops, taken aback by the robots’ sudden change in behaviour, looked around with shock and trepidation.
One of the robots spoke to others nearby. “The Nexus is down.” One of the robots it spoke to had a tire iron for an arm. It shrugged and looked around for instruction. The silence broke when an orange laser blast streaked through the air and struck the confused robot in the forehead. It cartwheeled backward and fell to the ground spread-eagled as its head rolled away and its tire-iron arm clattered to the concrete. The newer, First Gen robots outfitted with the AEI upgrade, blazed unflinchingly into battle. Some of the older robots took the lead from their refocused brethren, but the confusion was evident in the aged, mismatched robots, who began attacking other robots and piles of debris.
Time Remaining: 2 hours, 37 minutes
Mitch wrapped up a strategy meeting with the unit leads in B Hangar’s second maintenance bay. An aged and tattered paper map illustrating the base property lay unfurled across the hood of an APHV. Tools and miscellaneous parts representing robots and NRD teams marked their respective positions on the map. Mitch anticipated GammaTron’s strategy was to weaken the NRD personnel with their most disposable robots first, then storm the base with the smarter and more powerful AEI robots. The NRD had succeeded in keeping the first waves of slower, uncoordinated robots at bay due to their handicaps. However, an attack by the stronger, faster and more agile AEI robots in similar numbers would flatten the NRD teams in minutes.
The teams were beginning to fatigue—forced to keep pace with robots that required no breaks of any kind. More people were in transport from other bases around the country, but it would be well into the morning before they would arrive. With tanks being mysteriously flattened or disappearing into thin air and the Hummingbirds’ effectiveness reduced to that of firecrackers, Mitch wondered how much longer they would be able to hold on.
One of the unit leads approached him as he rolled up the paper map.
“They’re advancing in larger numbers, sir.”
As Mitch walked out of the hangar, he pulled his binocular glasses from his breast pocket and put them on. Mitch’s stomach fell. As he watched the fresh wave of metal surging from the green space, Mitch’s earlier observation still held true. A sea of advanced First Gen robots mixed with many AEI models marched toward the base. Mitch readied himself for a fight.