C.25
July, Present Day—Saturday Morning
Judgment Day
Scott’s Shooting Range
Senior Airman Ed Abrams and Airman Dave Miller dashed across the open space between the edge of the trees and the nearest cover provided by the silhouette range. Had the robot spun and opened fire with its submachine gun the moment they broke cover it could have killed them, but they counted on their speed, on the robot’s apparent urgency in getting away from the area.
Abrams leading, they moved along one edge of the plywood building. Abrams reached the corner and, his M16 up and ready, looked across the silhouette range.
In the brief moment he had to take in the odd building fronts, he saw a blur of motion from the right—a human figure leaping from the open into the door of the building labeled FIRST NATIONAL HOSTAGE SUPPLY. He swung his assault rifle around to cover, but the target, who looked a lot like the picture they had of Ávila, was already inside.
He’d seen the rear of that building during their initial approach. It had not featured a rear door, nor had their been an exit on the side facing the burning jungle setup. “Keep to cover,” he said, “and get to where you can see the left side of the building with the FIRST NATIONAL sign. We’ve got him.”
* * *
Linda saw the two Air Force men move around the back of the One-Stop Robbery Shop, saw Danny make his dash into the false bank building. She swore, her voice a wail. There was nothing she could do short of taking up her captured M16 and opening fire on the men.
No, wait. There was something she could do. She turned to the computer console above her peephole and typed in a command.
* * *
Danny huddled at the back of the bank, behind the plywood barriers set up roughly to look like tellers’ windows. His back was against the building’s rear wall—a quarter-inch of pressed board was all he had to protect him from incoming rounds.
Linda’s voice came over his walkie-talkie. “There are two of them.” Danny dialed the volume down so that the men outside wouldn’t hear. Linda continued, “One’s covering the front and right wall, the other the front and left wall.”
He pressed the talk button. “Great. I could get out the back, but they’d hear me banging my way out. They’d come running.”
“Get down and be ready to kick your way out. Their shooting will cover the noise.”
“Shooting.”
“Starting in five seconds, four, three—”
Danny went flat, spun around so that his legs were in a position to lash out against the nearest slab of plywood.
* * *
Abrams could see Miller take cover inside the front door of the building labeled WRECK FARM. Miller’s position would give him an unobstructed view of the front of First National Hostage Supply and of the gap between it and the Gray-Stripe Hotel.
Abrams breathed a sigh of relief. This wasn’t over yet, but they were in position to capture this Ávila nut and get that prick Holden off their backs. He keyed his headphone mike. “I’m moving up, cover my approach.”
“You got it.”
He moved fast, running along the front of the convenience store mockup, ready to jump through its door or window if he needed cover.
Then it happened. A figure popped into view in one of the bank’s windows, a man with a handgun.
Abrams dove through the convenience store’s open door, crashing down hard on the store’s plywood floor. He heard Miller open fire, a three-round burst, then another. Abrams got up to his knees, aiming through the store window, and saw the armed man still up in the bank window. He fired, a single shot, and saw the man shudder as the bullet entered his chest.
Then Abrams heard Miller’s howl of laughter and realized what he’d jut shot. “We’re shooting pop-ups!” Miller shouted.
The painted plywood bank robber swung back out of sight. Now another bank robber figure, this one with his gun held to the head of a female bank teller figure, swung into the bank doorway.
“Son of a bitch.” Abrams steadied his aim. “Move up, I’ll cover you.”
* * *
Danny knelt behind the bank to the side of the hole he had made by knocking out a sheet of plywood. On his walkie-talkie, Linda said, “Stay there, if you go either way one will see you. No, wait, the other guy is moving up to the front. In just a second, the far side will be clear.”
“The far side from your tower?”
“That’s right, toward the fake jail. Ready … go.”
Danny got to his feet and ran. In a moment he was across the gap between bank and jail.
* * *
Airman Miller ducked to be beneath the level of the bank’s first window, then straightened as he came up on the door. The robber-and-hostage silhouettes had swung back out of sight. Curiously, Miller could smell something burning—a chemical smell, not the smoke from the jungle mockup.
He glanced back toward Abrams. His partner left the minimal safety of the convenience store building corner and charged up at a dead run. Abrams reached the other side of the door.
Abrams held up his hands, counted down with his fingers: three, two, one.
Miller spun into the doorway, his M16 elevated and ready. His first glimpse was of an open area with several silhouettes representing bank patrons, a table right, a desk left, a row of unpainted plywood tellers’ windows straight ahead. He heard Abrams move, saw the building interior darken slightly as Abrams set up in the right-hand window.
There was movement to the right, a figure standing up from the far end of the teller windows, a man with a gun.
Miller and Abrams both fired. Half a dozen rounds of .223 ammunition riddled the huge, shotgun-toting, cartoony criminal who stood there.
Both men swore.
* * *
Holden saw the robot emerge from behind the other side of the van and move once toward the silhouette range.
So it wasn’t fleeing, after all. He stopped and waved at the two men following him; they froze where they were.
The three of them were about halfway along the berm, their eyes barely above the level of the earthen barrier. “When it gets between us and Duncan’s position, we’ll open fire,” he said.
“Maybe when it’s a bunch of yards short of that point, sir,” Hardy said. “Or a bunch of yards after. If we open fire when it’s exactly between our positions, we’re firing on one another.”
“Right, right.” He keyed his headset mike. “Is everyone in position?”
He got the affirmatives he expected, but one of the men—Chambers, he thought—said, “Sir, Begay isn’t with us.”
“Well, where the hell is he? You were with him.”
“We were separated by gunfire. I lost track of him.”
“Dammit.” Begay was sure to be dead, otherwise he’d have checked in. Holden knew losing a man on his first field mission would look bad on his record. Now he absolutely had to be successful in this retrieval operation. “Stay where you are, Chambers, and we’ll look for Begay in a minute.”
“Yes, sir.”
The robot, head turning as it swept the flat terrain ahead of it for enemies, rolled past their position. When it had progressed another twenty paces or so, Holden keyed his mike again. “Open fire!”
Hardy and Walberg raised their assault rifles and opened up. The men on the far side fired as well. Suddenly sparks flew from the robot’s exterior. The M16A2 in its hands shook as its arms were hit.
* * *
Scowl’s internal diagnostics diagram lit up with red as it sustained fire. One round hit the gap between its head and the cowling that protected it from behind and the sides. The round rattled around in the gap and severed one of the connectors that allowed Scowl’s head to extend forward, to turn side to side like a human head. Another punctured a hydraulics fluid line in the robot’s left arm. Scowl’s damage control software immediately sealed off that hydraulics line. The robot’s left arm was now reduced to about sixty-six percent of its optimal strength.
Scowl calculated that if it sustained this sort of damage for another two minutes, it might be rendered nonfunctional.
It turned to face the tree line. It calculated that at least five automatic weapons were firing on it from that direction. It aimed with its weapon and fired the grenade launcher at the heat trace closest to it. The grenade left the launcher’s barrel and arced into trees. The bright flash of its detonation was accompanied by a tree-shaking concussion and at least one human scream.
At the same time, Scowl went into reverse, backing toward the berm and the targets behind it. It reloaded the grenade launcher, traversed its aim rightward, and fired again.
It noted that the rate at which it was sustaining damage from the tree-line attackers diminished as it moved and as it reduced their numbers. However, the hits it was sustaining from the berm remained constant. It calculated that the benefits of being a moving target were offset because the distance between it and the berm attackers was closing.
Now the right tread sensor was reporting damage of an undefined nature. Its speed remained constant so it did not adopt any behavior to compensate for the damage. It reloaded the grenade launcher and fired a third time into the trees.
The heat from the grenade explosions now blanketed the area where the attackers had been, making it impossible for Scowl to detect the enemies there. It would wait a few seconds. Humans that were still ambulatory would flee the hot zones and Scowl would be able to pick them up again. In the meantime, the gunfire from that area, while not entirely eliminated, was much reduced.
Scowl spun as it reached the berm. The rate of fire from the men behind it had increased and its hit rate was becoming troublesome. Scowl rolled up onto the berm, nearly as difficult a climb as it had experienced when destroying the tanks, and could now look down on the three men there.
There were two men with assault rifles, one with a handgun. Scowl switched to assault rifle mode and sprayed .223 rounds across the first two. The third ran. Scowl continued firing into the bodies of the two more heavily armed attackers until they collapsed. Only then did it fire on the running man, the lowest-priority target of its current task. Three rounds entered the man’s back and he, too, fell.
Scowl immediately rolled back off the berm, toward the tree line. It reloaded the grenade launcher and fired again. But it was not now sustaining fire from that area.
It relegated the suppression of the Air Force personnel to a secondary goal and resumed its trip to Skeet Range.
* * *
Abrams emerged through the hole his target had made in the back of the bank.
The noises from the direction of the office, the shouts across his headset, said something very bad was happening. But the small stand of trees from which Lieutenant Holden had first directed traffic was between him and that conflict. The only thing he could see was smoke rising in the distance.
Miller stepped out through the hole and straightened. “What the hell do we do?”
“We have our orders. I suspect that Holden’s a stickler for orders.”
“Meaning, he could fold quarters in half with his sphincter.”
“That about sums it up.” Abrams looked at the ground. It was hard-baked, but there were some dusty patches, and in one of them he saw two footprints. They headed toward the jail. “Come on.”
* * *
Danny made the run from the edge of the jail to the nearest of the two License Land cars. He ducked behind it and looked back the way he’d come. No one was there.
He dropped back into the hole where he’d been hiding. One window of his laptop showed Scowl’s camera view; the robot was headed back to Silhouette City at a rapid pace. But another window, gray letters on black, merely blinked at him.
He read the lines of text above it. He was in. He could prowl around for a brief few moments in one of the Edwards mainframes. His fingers flew over the keys as he issued commands concerning the disposition of the packet he had uploaded.
* * *
Abrams and Miller reached the second rear corner of the mockup jail. From here, they could see the silhouette compound’s center, the two parked cars nearby. There was no sign of their quarry.
“What do you think?” Abrams asked.
“If I were him, I’d be long gone.”
“If you were him, you’d be the craziest son of a bitch in three states, so you’d be right here. But where?”
Miller shrugged and studied the ground. “More footsteps. Headed toward the cars.”
“Cover me.” Abrams moved out into the open.
The robot rolled from around the corner of the bank building into the open. It swiveled to aim at Abrams. He spun, almost falling, and ran back behind the false jail. “Shit!”
The robot fired. Rounds of ammunition hit the far side of the jail, tearing through the plywood walls. A hole appeared in the wood over Miller’s head. Another emerged directly between Abrams and Miller.
Both men went flat. They exchanged a look, a What-do-we-do-now? glance.
“Throw your weapons out!” The shout came from the direction of the parked cars.
“Screw you!” Abrams shouted back.
“Throw your weapons out and it’s less likely to shoot you. Do it!”
More holes appeared in the plywood, a straight line at waist level, just where they’d been standing.
“What do you think?” Miller asked.
“I think we’re not going to beat this thing.” Abrams gauged the distance to the nearest stand of trees. It was a lot farther than the distance the robot had to roll to be in position to see them. He could already hear it coming.
Grimacing, he heaved his M16 out into the open. Miller copied his action.
The robot rolled into view and trained its M16 on them. Both men raised their hands.
* * *
“Got it covered,” Linda said. She set down her walkie-talkie and typed another command into the control computer.
* * *
Scowl looked at the two human targets. Their threat register was almost nil. Scowl immediately reprioritized their elimination below its goal of finding and eliminating Daniel Ávila.
There was a noise from behind Scowl, a hiss and a creak. The Terminator spun.
There was a human figure standing in the middle of the open area at the center of Skeet Range. It held a rifle and had a bright heat signature.
Scowl fired on it. It shuddered and the top half of it fell away. A few moments later, the lower half lay down.
In the window of the building labeled FIRST NATIONAL HOSTAGE SUPPLY appeared another human. It was of subadult stature and had yellow hair arranged in pigtails. Scowl characterized this one as an immature female. It carried no weapon. Scowl did not fire on it. A moment later, it swung back out of sight.
Across the open area from the bank, a human male appeared in the doorway of Booze & Grease. It was shirtless and carried a shotgun. Scowl turned and raked the figure with gunfire. Then another figure stood in the center of the open area. Scowl fired at that silhouette as well. The M16 fired only one round, though Scowl had depressed the trigger long enough for a three-round burst. The Terminator ejected the spent clip and loaded another one.
Scowl continued to turn and process data. Now it was surrounded by targets, each of which might be Daniel Ávila that rose and fell, swung into doorways and back out again. It rotated in place, putting three-round bursts into each target it detected.
* * *
Master Sergeant Earl Duncan, age thirty-nine and approaching the end of twenty years in the Air Force, crouched over the body of his companion. Airman Vincent Smith was down, his right side showing red and black char from the grenade that had gone off mere feet from him. He was already in shock, unconscious. Duncan knelt over him. “Lieutenant Holden, come in. Lieutenant Holden, please talk to me.”
There hadn’t been any incoming fire for a minute or so, nor had there been any orders from the lieutenant. It was a bad sign. “All right, everybody, check in.”
“Sergeant, this is Cooper. I think the Lieutenant got it. Hardy and Walberg too. I saw the robot firing on them.”
“Sarge, Abrams. I’m with Miller. The robot’s here shooting up everything in sight. We’ve lost our rifles but can maybe retrieve them. Ávila’s close. I think we can get him.”
Duncan shook his head. He didn’t swear. He never swore. But he sure wanted to.
Now he was in command, and this operation was already fouled up beyond all repair. Six men were unaccounted for and probably dead. The mission might be salvaged if Abrams and Miller could capture Ávila … but he didn’t know how much of Abrams’s confidence might be coming from bravado or miscalculation.
He did know that Airman Smith was badly injured and might die soon if something weren’t done.
Duncan keyed his mike. “Fall back to the office building. We’re abandoning this position.”
“Sergeant, we can get him.”
“Abrams, Smith is down and needs immediate hospitalization. And we don’t have the kind of hardware we need to blow up that robot thing up. We’re bugging out. That’s an order.”
“Sergeant, it’s Cooper. Our transports are FUBAR, sir.”
“Then we’ll take its van. Right now, I think that grand theft auto is a wonderful thing. Fall back.”
“Yes, sir.”
Duncan stooped and hauled Smith up to a sitting position. It was hard as hell to get an unconscious full-size man up into a fireman’s carry, but Duncan had the muscle and experience to do it. He straightened, his knees creaking, and began walking at a fast pace away from this hellhole, toward the office building.
* * *
Scowl burned through his second and third clips of .223 ammunition. It had no more grenades. It was finally without a functioning firearm. Its primary target, Daniel Ávila, was still not in sight. It dropped the M16 and calculated its other options.
Flattening plywood construction had allowed it previously to determine that specific targets were not human. In addition, protracted exposure to flame, such as the fire that was springing up all over Skeet Range, was capable of harming or terminating human life.
So Scowl rolled from section to section in Silhouette City, knocking down each plywood mockup into a pile of burning wreckage.
It did not bother with the two cars parked at one corner or with the two towers. None of these potential targets offered a humanlike heat signature, though one of the cars and the open air between the vehicles were demonstrating heat anomalies—dissipating heat traces. That would need to be investigated. Neither vehicle could be described as a brown pickup truck, so they would not be investigated.
After three minutes, Scowl was finished with that phase of its operation. It stood in the middle of the plywood village, slowly turning, watching wood burn, waiting for Daniel Ávila to leap out from a flaming pile so he could be killed.
Daniel Ávila did leap out, but from the gap between the parked cars. “Hey, Terminator,” he shouted. “It’s time for me to kick your ass.”
It took a moment for Scowl’s internal dictionaries, the secondary entries that interpreted colloquialisms, to recognize that the words were essentially a challenge. Accessing the dictionaries didn’t cause a delay in Scowl’s actions. Scowl spent those same moments turning to face Ávila and getting its tracks up to speed.
Ávila took a step back, and another. He wobbled as if off-balance. But he did not run.
As it approached the gap between the cars, Scowl noted that a symbol had been laid out on the bare ground in red paint. It was a letter X perhaps twelve feet across. The two portions of the symbol crossed just at the point Scowl would be entering the gap. The earth there was disturbed.
Scowl ignored those details. On the verge of accomplishing its primary task, it filed the details away as irrelevancies.
* * *
From her vantage point, Linda watched as Scowl rolled toward Danny. She had both hands on the device Ten-Zimmerman-of-the-future had helped them assemble last night. She needed both hands; they were shaking hard, and she could not bear the thought that she might drop the device at the last second. That would ultimately kill her as well as Danny.
She saw Danny turn and dive into his hole in the ground. She saw Scowl reach the center of the X. As it did so, she flipped the switch on the detonator.
A cone of fire leaped up from the ground beneath Scowl’s tracks, fueled by the C4 from the road crew’s shack. A moment later the sound of it, the shock wave of displaced air, hammered her tower; she felt the wave like a slap across the face, felt the tower sway under her.
But it did not collapse, did not fall.
And a moment later, a third of a ton of hand-assembled robot prototype crashed into the earth a yard away from Danny’s pit, sticking there like a multi-million-dollar lawn dart.