Chapter 25 #3
He rounded a corner, knowing he was about to run into two Gray Tower men.
He winced when he saw Mercer Cade and Joel Keller.
Nate only knew Cade from the information he had gleaned on Gray Tower during his time at the Conglomerate, but he had read enough to know that the man should not be messed with.
“Take cover!” Cade yelled.
Nate immediately tilted his rifle to the floor and yelled, “Stop!” Sally amplified it, so it echoed down the hallway.
The men still took cover in the small archway between the door and the hallway. They weren’t completely clear, and the suit’s audio picked up someone saying, “Get the damned door open,” as well as, “You fucking try to get it open.”
“I’m friendly,” Nate tried again. Well, mostly. “I believe we’ve met before, Mr. Keller.”
The arguing stopped, and there was silence. Joel slowly moved his body into view, handgun aimed.
“You,” he said.
“Me.”
“What are you doing here?” Joel questioned.
“Cleaning up a mess. Douglas Sims is back that way.” Nate jerked his shoulder. “And so is a patient that needs immediate medical attention. Sims is also hurt, but you can make him wait.”
“Did you hurt the patient?” Joel questioned.
“No,” Nate said. “He was a part of some terrible Conglomerate experiment. I don’t know if he’ll survive.”
“Did you hurt Sims?”
“Absofuckinglutely.”
“Interesting,” Joel commented, his gun lowering slightly.
“The quiet man has implemented a protocol to turn off your display in order to blind you,” Sally cut in.
“How am I playing this?” Nate asked.
“I say use it as your distraction to leave,” she replied.
“Sounds good.”
Nate froze, taking his free hand to his helmet and waving it in the air. He watched as Joel began to smile, thinking that he had the upper hand now. Instead of popping off his helmet, Nate stepped forward a few steps. Then he stumbled some more.
“I can’t see!” he yelled as he came at the Gray Tower men. “My helmet!”
Meanwhile, the men looked on, perplexed and not knowing what to do.
It appeared that their device worked, but Nate wasn’t acting exactly how they were expecting.
Nate knew they weren’t sure what to do with him, especially since he had insisted he was friendly.
Then again, those bastards did try to take down his suit while distracting him.
Nate was mere feet away when the men realized something was wrong.
“What do we do?” Keller hissed.
“Fuck if I know,” Cade said. “We can’t take him out with our weapons. Fall back and try something else.”
This was exactly what Nate had wanted. The Gray Tower men backed away toward where Nate had originally been, ducking behind another doorway. As soon as they were clear, Nate took off at a sprint.
“Hey!” one of them said, but Nate was gone.
He turned a corner and used a keycard to get out the same set of doors he had before—the ones that led out to the semi.
“Can I leave in the truck, or do I have to do Plan B?” he asked Sally.
Plan B was a car he had parked on the curb near the facility. He’d prefer not to run out in the street with his suit on in the middle of the day, but if he had to, he would.
“You’re going to have to because you took too long dealing with those Gray Tower agents,” Sally told him. “The only way out is busting through with that truck.”
“Great,” Nate muttered.
“There’s no one at that bay. Act quickly.”
It was a tense few moments. Luckily, Nate had kept the engine running because he knew he was going to need a quick exit, so it didn’t take long for the semi to start rolling out.
As soon as it was moving, the Gray Tower agents saw it and began running toward it.
He even saw Keller and Cade in his rearview mirror.
It didn’t matter. He was moving fast enough that no one was going to stop him, and there wasn’t enough time for them to set up a blockade at the entrance.
No one even used their weapons, and Nate figured it was because they didn’t want stray bullets in a populated area.
However, he realized there was more to it than that when Sally spoke.
“They have placed a tracker on the truck and are holding back,” she told him. “I’m assuming they think they will be able to follow you without having an obvious tail trailing behind.”
“Makes sense. I’ll have to ditch this thing early. I have locations for this scenario.”
“You won’t have to—at least not yet. I’ll let them think their plan is working for a few minutes before I jam their tracker.”
Nate blinked.
“Shit. I forgot the suit could do that.”
“You’re exhausted and need rest.”
“Yeah,” he agreed.
A few moments passed before she said, “Tracking device is jammed. You can proceed to the original location.”
“Good,” Nate said, taking a deep breath.
Everything had worked—except for the fact that Sally had gone psycho on those super soldiers. That had left him uneasy, and he needed to address it.
“Sally, why’d you cook those men? I know they’re Conglomerate soldiers, but it seemed unnecessarily cruel.”
“I didn’t mean to disturb you, Nathan. There were multiple factors involved in that decision, but the biggest was that I couldn’t blow up the building to destroy the suits because of the civilians. I had to find a way to destroy the suits as best I could, so I cooked the suit technology.”
“Oh,” Nate said. “That makes perfect sense.”
“What you did not see was that I had the AI in each suit do a full system emergency erase. It’s a failsafe if a suit is captured, and someone besides the person the AI is assigned to attempts to access it.”
“Shit.”
Nate had been warned there would be dire consequences if someone else used the suit. Now, he knew why.
“Would that happen to you?” he asked, panicking. “If someone got in my suit?”
“No, Nathan. I can decide when the threat is dire enough to warrant self-destruction.”
The thought made Nate feel sick, even though it wasn’t that long ago that he was having a breakdown because he had set a fully aware AI on the world. Was he getting attached to Sally?