Chapter 6 – The Killing Fields #5
The first combat robots under MacIntyre’s command burst through the doors and were met by Jack and his new allies.
Any weapons they acquired were immediately passed over to the hybrid soldiers, quickly creating an armed opposing force.
They may not have been wearing uniforms, but their horrific experiences in this place made them ready for anything.
It wasn’t an easy fight, though. Marci had to watch as some of the men, barely out of the tanks, became victims of their new and old opponents.
At least ten men died before they and Jack managed to shoot their way free.
Jack grabbed Marci as he ran past her, pulling her into a mass of several hundred naked fighting men, all utterly focused on escape and revenge.
A seething mix of irrepressible will to survive and the raw violence that came with it, they raged towards the exit like a herd of wild bulls, knocking over everything that got in their way.
Marci’s confusion increased as, halfway to the exit, Jack pulled her out of the protective shield of hybrid soldiers and ducked into an empty side corridor. “What are you doing?” she whispered breathlessly.
“I want to get to the combat robots’ hangar,” he replied tersely before unceremoniously picking her up and throwing her over his massive shoulders.
Running at incredible speed, he headed from one corridor to the next until they finally reached a sliding door that they’d previously gone through with MacIntyre, except now it was hermetically sealed.
Jack set Marci down on the ground and used his laser rifle to rapidly destroy the lock mechanism.
He shoved the door violently aside, creating access to the robots’ construction hangar.
He ordered Marci to stay near him and set to work on the programming for those robots that didn’t yet have any human parts.
For some reason, their production had come to a halt and around fifty robots were waiting for their final inspection.
Marci watched as Jack connected up his own consciousness with the system by touching a finger to the scanner before entering some data that woke up the finished robots.
“Isn’t that dangerous?” warned Marci. “What if they obey MacIntyre instead of you?”
“I deleted their fighting impulse and turned them into fluffy lambs,” he assured her with a grin.
Marci was still fearful as the finished robots stood up and started to move as one, particularly as they all stared in their direction.
Unlike the hybrid soldiers, they already wore full combat kit and had integrated weapons systems. For a moment, it looked like they might use their abilities against Marci and Jack, but then – looking slightly baffled – they ignored their rescuers, broke through the security barriers and simply marched off.
“Come,” said Jack, grabbing Marci by the hand. “We need to make the most of the chaos and get out of here.”
Marci was only too pleased to follow Jack as he led her down another confusing set of corridors, the sounds of fighting echoing all around them.
If Jack’s mental map were correct, they should soon reach the hangar where MacIntyre’s service fleet was stored and they could hijack one of the gliders to make their escape.
It didn’t turn out to be quite that easy, however.
Only a few hundred metres away from the hangar, they were attacked by MacIntyre’s guards and Jack couldn’t eliminate all the soldiers who stood in their way.
Keeping her head down, Marci grabbed a weapon from the ground next to a fallen combat robot and followed him.
From the blue markings on the ground, they could tell they’d nearly reached their goal when they suddenly ran up against a wall of ferocious robot soldiers standing in their path, who opened fire on them.
Jack threw himself in front of Marci to shield her and was hit by one of the lasers.
Horrified, Marci saw that the laser had burned into his shoulder and his leg, causing him to stumble.
Without thinking, she came out from behind him and opened fire, decapitating four robot soldiers in one go.
She hit the fifth one in his command centre that in a normal robot was not in the head, but rather just under the heart.
Once she was certain that the robots were no longer moving, she turned to look after Jack, who lay on the ground breathing rapidly.
“Can you walk?” she asked, even though it was obvious that he couldn’t, otherwise he would have been on his feet by now.
“Run to the hangar,” he gasped. “I’ll cover you.”
“And what am I supposed to do when I get there?” asked Marci in confusion. “Without you?”
“Silver’s on his way.” He groaned, his wounds bleeding profusely. She could see that his strength was fading rapidly.
“I’m not leaving you behind,” she said, her mouth set in an obstinate line as she flicked her sweaty hair away from her face. “Come on, I’ll help you up. Lean on me.”
“I’m four times your weight,” he said, shaking his head. “It won’t work.”
“But I can’t leave here without you,” she wailed in despair.
“You won’t have to,” said a sneering voice.
She looked up, straight into MacIntyre’s cold robot eyes.
He had his laser pistol pointed at her and was flanked by a troop of soldiers who were all armed.
“You two will die. Here. Today.” His voice was ice-cold.
“And no god in the world is going to reunite you in some shitty paradise.”
Marci felt wild panic tear through her as MacIntyre instructed his men to grab them both and take them away.
Jack tried to defend himself using his hands and feet, but his strength had left him. It was pointless trying to fight against MacIntyre’s henchmen.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered as they took him away, dragging Marci behind them like a sack of potatoes.
MacIntyre seemed to know exactly what he had planned; he ordered Jack to be placed on a lab bench and strapped down with automatic metal cuffs.
In front of Marci’s horrified eyes, Dr Tanaka cut into the skin on Jack’s head with a scalpel, opening up his skull.
When he reached the cranial bone, he used a special mechanism to fold the bone to one side, revealing Jack’s pulsating brain underneath.
“I thought it was,” mused MacIntyre, looking at Jack’s pale cranial bone. “Flexible ceramic. A rebellious brother from the R8 series. And definite proof that Cathrin Porter’s behind all of this.”
MacIntyre’s bogus chief engineer nodded mechanically and gave Marci a look of pure hatred. “You can’t trust people or robots,” he replied in a flat tone and carried on working on Jack’s skull.
“Now you will see how we get Cathrin Porter’s source code even without your assistance,” he announced with disdain.
“And you should know that every robot’s programming is copy-protected.
Once you’ve cracked it, you can download the code onto a special key but this destroys the donor’s personality and no programmer in the world will be able to put it back together.
The donor will simply be a brainless idiot. ”
Marci understood this, but that didn’t help – quite the contrary. MacIntyre looked positively gleeful about the panic on her face. Cathrin had inserted this protection against her program being pirated but clearly hadn’t considered that it might one day be the undoing of one of her protégés.
She couldn’t bear the idea that this procedure would result in Jack having the intellectual capabilities of a brick, and that he would no longer recognise her.
Suddenly, she realised the purpose of the attack in the hotel suite.
Jill Ambush’s part in it all had only been minor; the fake MacIntyre had planned on kidnapping Jack in order to blackmail Marci and, if that hadn’t worked, he would have used other methods to access Jack’s programming.
“No!” screamed Marci, thrashing wildly as one of the robots held her back from the lab bench. “You bastards! Leave him alone!” She broke down in hysterical tears, howling at the top of her voice as Tanaka set about inserting a glowing blue probe into Jack’s brain.
“Transfer in progress,” he informed MacIntyre’s double, his eyes cold.
But before he could complete the task, the sliding door burst open and at least a dozen hybrid soldiers aimed their weapons at the fake Tanaka and at MacIntyre, who immediately cowered behind one of his robot bodyguards.
Dr Tanaka dropped his instruments and stepped away from the table and Marci felt the cold tip of a laser pistol on her temple. “Let the two men go,” MacIntyre’s guard ordered the hybrid soldiers, “or she dies.”
Gritting their teeth, the half-human, half-machine soldiers let MacIntyre and his engineer step back, but the two of them insisted on Marci remaining at the guard’s mercy until they were out of range.
As soon as MacIntyre’s double and his engineer had left, one of the hybrid soldiers shot out the motherboard of the robot that still held Marci. His arms immediately went limp, forcing him to let Marci go.
“Come on, we need to get out of here before the MacIntyre copy mobilises more troops,” called one of the hybrid soldiers, smiling at her. He looked friendly and had short black hair and blue eyes nearly the same shade as Will’s.
“What about Jack?” wailed Marci wretchedly, wrapping her arms protectively around his head. “He can’t stay here in this state.”
“He’s had a pretty bad time of it,” replied the soldier. “We can’t do anything for him.”
“But I can’t just leave him here,” she implored, tears running down her cheeks as the small troop of freed hybrid soldiers looked at her quizzically.
“OK, we’ll close his skull back up,” said one of them, who seemed to know his way around the lab.
He entered something into a nearby holographic command panel and a glass cover lowered down onto Jack, enclosing him completely.
Nozzles inside the cover then activated, closing his skull and seamlessly fusing the skin back together.