Black smoke billowed out from the side of the White Spear where the Operations Room had once been. Commander Nick Chambers stood on the Grand Plaza gazing up at his handiwork with a feeling of detached calmness. Most of Central Command's orders had been originating from that location, according to the tower's data routing systems, and those orders had now fallen silent. They would find it harder to oppose him without an organised centre of operations. The logic of what he had done made perfect sense to him on one level, but there was still something deeply disturbing about it that he couldn't quite identify.
Nick couldn't feel his body, but he was aware of the TS86 chassis forming a protective shell around him. Decisions were being made subconsciously in the systems around him, and Nick acted on those decisions like a puppet, unable to alter them in any way.
He slipped the Refractor Orb into a small metal holster behind his head, and extended a short minigun from beneath each forearm before charging towards Tower Four's entrance.
Using a cyclic liquid nitrogen chamber, he sucked air into his munitions pod, condensing it into solid pellets before feeding them into his twin Solid Wind Miniguns. When he opened fire, a continuous stream of pellets slammed into Tower Four's reinforced glass entrance at hypersonic velocities.
The glass vibrated, blurring into a soluble mass as it absorbed the kinetic energy of hundreds of thousands of impacts. A plasma bomb the size of a marble shot out from Nick's shoulder-mounted sidearm, striking the middle of the molten glass. It exploded with a shock wave that ripped through the wall's surface, throwing molten glass over a fifty metres radius.
Nick sprinted through the ruined entrance, spraying munitions at the soldiers who had gathered on the ground floor. Three seconds later, twenty soldiers lay dead across the ground, their bodies half buried under chunks of rubble. Nick scanned the room, and finding no further threats, headed for the stairwell at the end of an all too familiar corridor.
* * * * *
Nick could see dead bodies all around him. He knew he was the war droid that was tearing through Tower Four, destroying everything in its path, but on another level it felt like he was watching the whole thing from afar. He knew somewhere in the back of his mind that it was wrong, and that he wasn't acting of his own volition, but his weapons continued to fire without his consent. So many mixed emotions swirled around inside him, far more than he had ever felt before, and overriding them all was a constant voice inside his head that kept telling him everything was okay. Killing and death were what he had been made for, and yet a restlessness grew and festered inside him.
How could everything be okay while he slaughtered the security forces and attacked the establishment that had once been his home?
Nick had joined the security forces as a young boy. Central Command had provided him with shelter and nourishment, helping him forget about his difficult childhood. It had taught him new skills that he would never have otherwise encountered, and it had turned a skinny loner boy into a man with strength, discipline, and a long list of people he could call his friends.
The towers had become one of the most important parts of his life. He had lived in them since his fourteenth birthday, staying in the towers for many years before Gail Thompson had sent him away to Beacon Station. He had met Rachel in the security forces. She had given birth to their beautiful daughter just before their relationship had fallen apart. He could no longer remember their faces though a pain burned deep inside him. So many parts of his true self were missing. So many memories had been erased, leaving him feeling crippled inside.
The constant calming voice returned. Everything was okay. Everything was as it should be. Nick relaxed and focussed on the operation ahead. He was designed for fighting and that was what he was going to do.