Raine VS The End of the World (54 page)

“Sir, I am only too eager to comply, but the Overseer’s primary directive is for my division to repair our fellow droids. May I remind you that the battle is still ongoing?”

“It ain’t going to be for much longer! The vermin have locked their own cage. The
Valkyrie’s
beating a hasty retreat, and they’ll never outrun us.”

“We need to get through that lower door,
now,
” Henry said, pointing at the looming gate behind Beech. As dictated by Murphy’s Law, of all the hundreds of entrances and exits to the hangar, their deadliest foe was standing right in the middle of the pathway to their destination.

“Can’t we just wait for them to leave?” Jon asked nervously.

“Negative,” Henry responded, setting up a sort of trap by the entrance. “We’re late as it is. Our best chance is to put down our blast shields and sneak around--”

Gerrit spied something, and then forced Henry’s head down behind the railing. Almost immediately, a pulse of electricity shot through the rail, missing Henry by inches. Gerrit took a peek around the corner of a nearby crate – a giant mechanized eye was staring him down, a security system suspended by multi-jointed hydraulic arms in the ceiling.

Steamed coolant erupted from the highly doom-capable pupil; the droid’s superheated iris shone blood red as it recharged its rail gun. That thing would not miss again – it was now or never.

Having used a similar-looking model in Circuitron raids, Gerrit borrowed Henry’s rifle, fixed his aim, squeezed the trigger, and set the deadly eye alight with explosive bullets. A joint in its hydraulic arm shattered, and the wreck fell quickly towards the alarmed General and his men.

Androids leapt out of the way of the crashing orb and into Jon and Henry’s line of fire, where they were picked off one by one. Beech’s cyborg reflexes were faster, though, and he had quickly patched in auxiliary power to raise the shields on his scuttled gunship. Jumping into the nearest turret seat, he took aim, and launched a barrage of laser pulses at the rebels.

“Halt, traitors!” Beech boomed. “Reveal yourselves now and I will make your deaths quick and easy!”

The General then signaled to his guard, who circled to flank the unauthorized personnel.

The three men dropped down from the upper level and took cover behind several shipping containers.

Concealed from their foes, a cruiser was parked not a hundred meters away, just past a pile of weapons crates. Gerrit was surprised; it looked rather like a Circuitron sports pod with a V800 turbine. Back in the
Metaverse,
he’d always wanted to try one of those.

Gerrit pointed at the vehicle. “I say we get the hell out of here.”

“Let me handle this,” Jon asserted before crawling behind a crate a few meters away. Inching out, he waved a torn piece of his white shirt.

“General, sir, hear me out! The Queen doesn’t even know what she’s doing! She’s lost control of the herd! We’ll work with you! Together, we can bring the
‘Verse
to an even wider audience!”

“I got nothin’ to say to you double-crossing maggots!” called Beech. “We shipped in anarchists from every corner of the globe to
die
. Every media outlet in existence is writing up my heroic victory! There’s no place for a pampered old snake that’s lived way past retirement age!”

A barrage of machine gun fire topped off his reply.

Jon sustained a shot to the shoulder and was quickly yanked out of the way.

“What the hell are you doing?” reprimanded Henry, trying to sterilize the wound. “Even if the lunkhead wasn’t planning a coup d’état, he’s surely deduced you’re with us by now!”

Jon laughed and shook his head.

“I probably should have realized that a few seconds earlier,” he joked. “I’d rather die, you know, than work with that damn tin man.”

“Undoubtedly. Now this is going to hurt a bit,” Henry said, patting Jon’s good shoulder. After giving Jon a card to bite down on, he whipped a ballpoint pen out of his shirt pocket and clicked it three times. It was held up against the wound - an electromagnet carefully disintegrated and guided out the now dust-like pieces of the explosive round that nearly shattered the man’s collarbone.

Wrathman took a deep breath as Holdfast applied quick-healing nanopaste. But something else was amiss. Henry’s eyes darted to the empty adrenaline syringe on the floor.

“Captain?”

The gasp ejected from General Beech’s mechanical lungs was drowned out by the roaring of the hand-cannon Gerrit had found in a weapons crate and used to unload an entire clip of explosive rounds into the compressed hydrogen fuel cell containers surrounding the vessel.

They exploded in cascades of flame, burning into the gunship’s hull and causing blips and large imperfections in the force field.

While Beech was recovering, Henry sent electromagnetic pulsing spider-bots down the raised walkways. The remote shocks sent most of the flanking Royal Guard falling down on their faces, unconscious. One flopped off the rail and fell to his death at the bottom of the bay.

Gerrit’s final shot took out a good chunk of Beech’s meaty right arm.

Bleeding profusely, Beech spun the cannon around towards Gerrit and gave out a desperate battle cry, feathering the trigger to try and steady his shot amidst the water raining down from the sprinklers. However, he was unaccustomed to aiming with his left hand, and Gerrit was too fast. He’d already ducked behind a crane and taken cover inside the sports cruiser. Buckling himself into the crossed-over straps, he made a quick study of the controls before motioning to Henry and Jon, who looked between the unreasonably powerful cannon and oncoming soldiers with trepidation.

“What are you waiting for, divine intervention?” Gerrit called.

The two men made a mad dash towards the cruiser, dodging gunfire from every direction.

Gerrit revved the engines. Henry and Jon hopped in with him and quickly hooked in their restraints as the cruiser shot forward, gaining speed almost instantaneously.

Beech lined up his cannon’s sights, but missed the first blast as they zoomed away from the flight trays. Henry heaved a sigh of relief, but quickly came to his senses when he realized that Gerrit was over-steering the cruiser, trying desperately to adjust to the flight stick.

“Do you even know how to fly, numbskull?” yelled Jon.

“H-hey! This isn’t what I’m used to, old man,” the boy protested.

“Steady. That’s the flaps, rudder, throttle, and the toggles for turbine alignment,” Holdfast began, pointing out the controls as Gerrit hit the gas. “You’re gonna hang a right past the entrance to the service gates.”

But they never left the hangar. The outer blast shield was clamping down at full speed in front of them. They were about to slam face-first, a hundred miles an hour, into a meter-thick wall of metallic death.

Jon wailed like a madman as Gerrit slammed the flaps open, swung the rudder around, reversed the thrust on one of the turbines and spun the cruiser back around the other way with a quarter of a second to spare. The engine bellowed; Gerrit redlined the jet’s output, trying desperately to reverse their momentum.

The cruiser slid into the blast shield and rebounded, taking them inexplicably towards Beech, whose pulse blasts missed them by quite a large margin. Henry whipped about and saw that their target wasn’t aiming for them. He was destroying the blast shield’s manual controls, trapping them in the hangar.

“Attention Echo units,” Beech’s robotic voice blasted through the PA system. “We have an infestation problem in the primary gunship hangar. Invader heads will be greatly rewarded.”

“Right. We can’t fly out of here,” Gerrit called, upping the cruiser’s shields. “And we’re dead in the water if we wait any longer. We jump on my count! Take off your belts and hang on!”

“Did you say take
off
our belts?” Wrathman screamed.

“3…”

Beech had drilled into the frontal shields.

“2…”

Henry pulled a backpack out from under his seat and strapped it on.

“1…”

Closing his eyes and thinking of Ayumi’s smiling face, Henry grabbed the other two men and bailed out of the cruiser, now on a collision course with Beech’s gunship.

The General abandoned his post, making for a protective barrier. He was too late. In milliseconds, the pod’s burst fuel compartment exploded upon contact with the failing electric force field surrounding his vessel. The sound was deafening, and Beech was no more.

Gerrit held tight as Holdfast pulled the tab on the safety chute, allowing the trio to ride the outward force of the explosion backwards.

He let his body go limp and landed with a heavy bounce, rolling to a stop on a lower platform. His heart thumped like a jackhammer within his chest. The boy lay there for a few seconds, relaxing over-strained muscles. His hearing gradually returned.

“You’ve got some moves, sir,” screamed Henry, limping even as he supported Jon, who’d evidently been knocked unconscious.

A platoon of voices sounded out in anguish.

Emerging troops from opposite the bay were stunned from Henry’s flashbang trap. Triggered by proximity, it switched approaching troops’ goggles into night vision mode and activated pre-set flash grenades across the hall. The newest wave of reinforcements would be blinded for another half-minute.

“What now?” Gerrit forced himself up on wobbly legs.

“Well, it looks like we’ve got a clear path to our destination, sir,” Henry voiced. “Let’s book it to Central Asset Control.”

“Central what?” Gerrit asked as they snuck quickly around a connecting corridor, shocking two small camera droids. Henry ran up to the stunned bots and quickly uploaded the late Nico’s manual override program, effectively repurposing them to his own use.

“The Overseer’s server room – the last system capable of running the Defense Protocol. It’s odd to be explaining all this to you, sir, since you were one of this mission’s chief planners. You must not remember a thing of the EDC yet.”

“You’ve got that right.”

“Then there’s no time to explain,” Henry apologized. “Suffice it to say that you’re something of a war hero.”

≡

In her concealed crow’s nest in the scrapyard, Ayumi Karuishi hid between piles of scrap metal, shivering within a heat-scrambling chilled silver suit. She had never felt more like a mouse, concealing her presence from the armed drones circling the Spire. Ayumi tried to make sense of the Overseer’s encrypted commands as they spread from the main pipeline to the various Network towers.

HDP troops drew back towards the lower
Spire.
If there was any doubt as to the location of the AI’s main server, it was eliminated when the Overseer drew an entire regiment back indoors. She’d been trying to get through to Holdfast’s comm. channel to warn him.

His radio might have been scrambled by a short-ranged EM grenade,
she realized.
Stay safe, Henry. Please.

“Need the all-clear for advance,” Joaquin asked through the Doctor’s coded Holo-Lens.

“Advise that you circle around. There are still too many anti-air units.”

“The Carriers are falling like flies. We’ll take what we can get, Lotus. It’s now or never.”

“Then come ‘round to the Southwest gate to make your drops. It’s got the least artillery,” Ayumi offered. “But hurry; the blockade’s closing in. More are approaching from the shore.”

Joaquin’s voice was grateful for the news. “Thanks, Doc. Sit-rep on the ground?”

“It’s not looking good for the refugees. With permission, I’d like to head downstairs and--”

“Negative,” the
Valkyrie’s
chief officer replied. “Your life is more important. We need eyes now more than ever.”

Following Henry’s directives, android forces, not human ones, led the advance upon the rebellion in four of the most congested war zones.

Isolated groups of the
Eden
underground split up to disable the ‘bots with daisy-chained electromagnetic pulses, but for every temporarily downed division, two more took their place. Ayumi bit her lip in anxiety. Beech was truly sparing no expense to eliminate the anarchists.

◊

“C-Commodore, the enemy is retreating!”

Puzzled expressions were exchanged on the bridge. Leandra pounded her fist on the console.

Damn! The
Eden
Armada
is turning tail! Scouts must have spotted Lily’s wing advancing from the South.

She opened up a communications channel with Macleod.

“Sky Admiral Lillian to Brigadier General Macleod! Face me, and I will grant you the privilege of surrender!”

In response, an energy beam fired backwards from the Westering
Charon
, toasting an entire squadron of interceptors.

Macleod hailed them back with a haughty tone in his voice.

“Quit your dilly-dallying. You’re not the true Sky Admiral. This battle is a farce!”

No longer requiring her mask, Leandra pulled it off, revealing her olive-toned face.