chapter 51
YEAR: 2097
Time Remaining: 53 minutes
Mitch watched the violent conflict from the rear of the battlefield. His binocular glasses remained tucked away in his breast pocket—their powers of magnification were unnecessary as the battle now raged dangerously close to the base. The men and women in the skirmish fought like heroes, but the numerous opponents and their technology were far superior. Mitch received reports of three invisible balls of destruction rolling through the battlefield.
In preparation for the worst, Mitch deployed teams to the Elevanium vault, as well as to the time travel control centre as the last line of defence to protect the precious power source. He also directed several level three personnel to oversee each critical station and manually report back, now that the lines of communication were down.
Mitch watched as a small number of robots breached the human barrier on the battlefield and made a beeline toward the base. The activity on the battleground had grown frantic and desperate. Mitch and his remaining sub, Jax, found themselves caught up in the battle near the rear entrance of the Defence building. The two men stood back to back and picked off robots as quick as they could, Jax with the E-cannon and Mitch with an atom blaster. Other parts of the front line had weakened and soon more robots broke through. Jax fried swaths of robots as they neared while Mitch disintegrated others like paper dolls with a fire hose. The robots caught in the E-cannon blast collapsed to the ground and the robots behind crawled over them or dodged the fallen bodies to pass. After several blasts with the E-cannon, Mitch and Jax found themselves standing in a bunker of dead robots, which created a barrier that hindered the advancing robots’ path into the building. Mitch knew it would only be minutes before robots changed their tactic and found a different way into the building.
Although full of adrenaline and ready to fight, Mitch feared that their time was running out. He heard an explosion at the front of the base and saw a portion of the white brick wall surrounding the property come down. Mitch expected to see robots emerging through the wall, but what he saw instead was the most welcome sight he had ever seen.
An armada of APHVs full of fresh troops sped into the compound, robots ricocheting in every direction as the large vehicles filled the rear of the battlefield. Geared up men and women poured from the vehicles and charged into the battle. With the new troops, Mitch could step back from the battle to confer with the new leads. He approached the first lead as he was getting out of the passenger side of the APHV.
“Jason Grayson, I’ll be damned. I thought you midwest guys wouldn’t be ready to deploy until tomorrow?”
The father of the Grayson brothers smiled and the two men shook hands heartily. “You’re partially right. We can’t get the heavy artillery here until tomorrow, but after reading your report, I thought we should take what we had ready and get the hell over here. We would have been here sooner but all the vehicles stalled out at once and we were left hanging a half mile up over a goddamn wheat field. We knew it was a bad situation but, seriously? Shutting down the Nexus? We had to let the APHVs run their emergency grounding sequence and you know how bloody long that takes. Thankfully, the auxiliary propulsion systems still worked. I haven’t hooked one of those up since being in the academy. We lost one of the APHVs; its exponential power replicator was missing. So, no go on the aux prop for that one, obviously.” Jason chuckled. “As long as the west coast guys aren’t stranded with missing EPRs, they should be here by the time my guys are spent. ”
Mitch caught a black, nylon weave belt that Jason had tossed at him. “What are these?” He flipped the belt’s bulky, silver and red buckle over in his hand.
“Shield belt prototypes. They create an invisible, egg-shaped barrier of protection around you. The first round of lab tests was better than expected. I had a production run of 500 made for rigorous field testing. Everybody we’ve brought’s wearing one. The feedback from field testing has been very positive so far.”
“Yeah, except for that one guy who got caught in the rain,” said a nearby level five as he slammed the rear door of the APHV shut. “I hope he’s had kids already because I don’t know if he’ll be able to now.”
Mitch cinched on the belt without question and hit the red button in the centre of the buckle. A white light flashed around him then faded away.
“You can get hit by a car in this thing and you won’t get a scratch.” As Jason looked from the battle to his remaining subs, he activated his zeno ray gun. “Shall we?”
Time Remaining: 31 minutes
Within minutes, the new teams were fully engaged in the fray and Mitch could resume overseeing the battle. The security of the shield belt allowed him to focus more on managing the conflict and worry less about errant shots or flying shrapnel.
Mitch surveyed the metallic carnage around the battlefield. Thousands of robots lay unmoving on the ground. Some looked untouched—victims of the E-cannon. Others had suffered a less elegant fate, crushed by tanks or blasted to bits of scrap by the atom blasters. At the edge of the green space, more robots joined the battle. Mitch was just about to pull off his binocular glasses when something caught his eye.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” said Mitch.
“What is it, sir?” asked Jax, still carrying the E-cannon on his shoulder.
Mitch pointed across the scarred and pock-marked landing strip. “It’s GammaTron. I wonder what he’s up to.” They watched the hulking robot in the distance as he lumbered across the battlefield. “I want that robot’s head on a platter,” said Mitch, eyeing the robot.
Jax looked at Mitch and grinned. “Don’t you mean, you want the platter from his head?”
Mitch groaned and rolled his eyes at Jax’s nerdy joke, surprised a kid his age would be that knowledgeable of turn-of-the-century computing hardware. He laughed and shook his head as he resumed watching GammaTron weave his way through the maze of debris. The robot’s brazen appearance troubled Mitch. What could be drawing him from the safety of his shelter and, worse still, what weapon was he using to protect himself?
No sooner had Mitch wondered this when a massive explosion erupted on the battlefield and Mitch found himself thrown backward. He closed his eyes and braced for the impact as he fell, but it never came. He landed hard on his back, but he felt no concrete beneath him. He opened his eyes and was startled by what he saw. He lay above the ground, as if supported by an invisible bodyboard. The headless torso of a shiny AEI robot looked suspended in the air an arm’s length above him, resting atop the invisible shield that surrounded him. He stood effortlessly and the metallic body fell to the ground at his feet. Remembering GammaTron, he squinted his eyes and scanned the smoky, dusty battlefield. The robot kingpin had vanished.
Anticipating the explosion was a distraction tactic for the robots to sneak into the Defence building, Mitch scrambled toward the base, hoping to cut GammaTron off before entering.
Time Remaining: 19 minutes
Mitch saw no sign of GammaTron anywhere and wondered if the slippery robot was already in the building. For all Mitch knew, GammaTron could make himself invisible. He looked at Jax. “I want an update on the time travel control centre and the Elevanium vault. You check the vault, I’ll check the control centre. Blast any robot you see. I don’t care if it’s polishing the floor or taking out the garbage.”
Mitch sprinted up the concrete stairs to the second level as fast as his overworked legs would carry him. As he ran, he wondered if the robots knew about Operation TimeShift and the bonded time. If they had, GammaTron would have focused more robots on the time travel control centre. Stealing the Elevanium from the Elevanium vault would solidify the robots’ upper hand. Stealing the Elevanium from the Control Centre would slam the window of bonded time shut, creating a whole host of unforeseeable results, likely in the robots’ favour.
As Mitch neared the time travel control centre, he heard the unmistakable zing of laser shots and metal hitting the stone floor. Through the gla
ss walls, he saw a full-scale battle underway. The room had been secured for the most part, though several robots still ran among their fallen comrades, shooting at anything and everything. Mitch jumped into the skirmish and helped obliterate the few remaining robots. After several moments, Mitch and the troops stood in silence, catching their breath surrounded by the countless metal bodies littering the floor. They heard more metal footsteps marching down the hallway, approaching the room. As the six-person team repositioned for a new attack, they heard the deep booming of the E-cannon in the hallway, then the sound of metal hitting stone. Jax strode into the control centre with the E-cannon ready on his shoulder. The double doors slid open automatically and he stopped to survey the damage. The electronic gun on his shoulder beeped, indicating it had charged and was ready for the next blast.
“Good shot, kid, but point that thing somewhere else,” said Mitch. The double doors slid shut automatically. “One blast in the wrong direction with that you’ll fry every circuit in this room. How’s the Elevanium vault?”
“Solid as a rock, sir.”
Mitch smiled inwardly, thankful for good news. He tapped at the room’s control screen beside the door and locked the glass doors, for all the good it would do.
Within minutes, they heard more metallic footsteps, muffled by the closed doors. Mitch scanned the anxious faces around the room as the footsteps grew louder. Twelve robots stopped in front of the doors and several tried to pry them open unsuccessfully. Mitch and the others could only watch as one of the robots blasted the double doors with a gun none of them had ever seen before. A burst of green liquid issued from the gun, or was it a solid? Mitch could not tell. The green substance liquefied the glass door. The liquid glass disappeared into the floor like water absorbed into a garden. Jax shot the E-cannon and all of the robots fell to the ground.
Minutes passed with no sign of any robots. Lights from the projected screens emitted an eerie glow around the unlit room. The occasional muffled crash broke the silence; distant explosions could be heard through the outer walls. Mitch felt cut off from the battle with no way to communicate and wondered how Jason and the teams were faring.
The clicking sounds of metal on stone were again heard coming down the hallway, too many to count. Jax waited until the robots entered the room and pulled the trigger. The cannon issued its deep boom, but this time, none of the robots fell. Instead, they opened fire. Jax was hit first. The blast knocked him backward into the thick glass of the Elevanium capsule in the centre of the room. The E-cannon flew from his hand, skidded across the floor and stopped at Mitch’s feet. Jax lay unmoving, crumpled at the base of the Elevanium capsule.
“They’ve shielded their processors,” yelled Mitch, over the loud metal footsteps. He charged the first robot. The blasts from his plasmaqueous gun ricocheted off the robot as they had in the field. The robot opened fire on Mitch, but its yellow laser blasts ricocheted off Mitch’s invisible shield and back at itself. The robot crumpled to the ground. Mitch got tossed aside by the other robots as they stormed callously over their fallen brethren as they pushed forward toward the glass capsule in the centre of the room. Mitch and his team used their agility to outmanoeuvre and overtake the robots. When the skirmish ended, all of the robots had been destroyed. Mitch leaned on the Elevanium capsule in the centre of the room—his chest again heaving and he shook with fury, adrenaline and loss. Only he and one other soldier remained whose name, according to his badge was Beckenbauer. Before they could collect their thoughts, more footsteps echoed down the hallway. Mitch and Beck looked at each other in silent solidarity before looking to the door.