Chronicles of Tomorrow, Ep. 15: The Dead should lay Dead
Recap (Ep. 14)
We walked up the stairs, the fluorescent coat on emergency LEDs glowed faint orange under the shine of my suit’s lamp. Level 1 was not the same as the one we entered from. It was definitely not silent. As soon as we reached its stairwell door, I saw Husky’s ears go up and then I heard it, a consistent humming. I gently pushed the door, and I saw a flash of red light move in my direction. which prompted me to duck behind a cover. I looked at Husky who was hiding behind a wall. His face showed he was cursing me for not providing his suit with teeth. I peered to my left and saw two sentry bots approaching us. It would have been almost suicidal if I had tried to face them head on. Stealth was our only friend here till I could take a shot. I could see their reflections on the windows around and behind my cover. I sat down resting my back and noted their routes. For some reason, they had maintained their patrolling duties.
Their circuit covered each half of the level respectively. There was one point where they converged. Their swinging red lights made it easy to time the shot. I extended my arm a bit, to point my gun in that direction and shot just before they reached that position. The whole level shook as the bullet met its mark. Note to self: I really need a more subtle weapon. I checked the reflections in the glass, there was a crater in the wall, glowing reddish orange at its edges, bits and pieces of the sentries lying on a hole in the floor, burning bright or molten. Damn, this building was made thick, something is definitely fishy. I needed to find their source of power, it was curious how these bots were still operational even after two centuries.
I signalled Husky to hold his position. The entire level needed to be checked for further threats and I couldn’t let him get hurt. He didn’t have any offensive capacity in that suit. I walked around, crouched. Rest of the level was in similar condition to the lower one. Broken bots, skeletons, broken machines, except one room. It has another set of blast doors. I beeped Husky. He reached me by the time I blew the doors. This was not a room. It was a huge lab housed an enrichment chamber and a series of machines for testing nuclear materials. Weirdly, I couldn’t trace any heavy radioactive material like plutonium etc. I was baffled, what the hell were they testing? I tuned my spectrum analyzer for elements with lower mass. The results were nonconforming with normal standards. I found presence of light elements which were otherwise not radioactive. Something fishy was going on here. However, it was too early to deduce anything. Unfortunately, any equipment that could store data were smashed. The destruction was not arbitrary. I needed more information about this place before I could make any assessment. I found our way to the second level but there were another set of blast doors. There was no third level. What we saw froze me to the core.
The whole floor was lined up with biped combat robots, resting in some kind of charging pods. These bots were powered by normal fuel cells but there were no cables, they were charged via long wave electromagnetic radiation. The source must be remote but not outside this facility. I needed to trace the signal but it was impossible without a working robot and waking up either of these was risky though not impossible. I could disconnect the weapons system from one of them or maybe isolate the receptor. I scanned the one closest to us, the receptor was near the leg, plugged in to the pod. I used the laser drill in my OmniLamp to sever the connection to its weaponry and then tapped into the receptor. The received signal was long microwave and as per my guess, it did originate from this facility itself. I locked on to the signal, it came from below the ground.
I had to investigate further. We were done with this level in sometime. It was time to go down. I fashioned a small robot to be used as a decoy, with the available parts from the one I had taken apart. We retraced our steps back to Level 0. There was no telling what lies beneath. We had encountered quite some surprises during our time inside this huge laboratory. The schematics took us below Level 0 by another set of stairs, in a corner, farthest from anything else.
The entrance to Level U1 (that's what it was labelled as) was a pair of titanium reinforced, thick steel doors. We could hear a lot of activity behind the doors, well the suit picked up the sounds or their vibrations rather. We could definitely see moving lights through the glass of the door. Most probably the security was alerted and the bots were checking for unknown heat signatures to detect threats. I was mildly surprised to see the door had power, which meant it could be manipulated. The door was locked through a biometric scanner and a retina scanner. Such level of security meant, we had reached the motherlode. I ripped open the interface board, exposing the connecting wires. I plugged in my bypass module and voila!! The gate slid sideways and we walked in.
Our efforts had alerted the bots and they had positioned themselves at tactical points. As soon as I put my last foot inside the door, it slid shut and we were greeted with a volley of bullets. How sweet of them. Both of us jumped behind the nearest cover, a huge desk, to hide from their sights. It was time to use the decoy. It just had to last long enough to allow me to get behind the sentries. These bots didn't seem to run out of bullets, one of them was huge enough to carry a minigun which made the situation a tad complicated. I hoped for its back panel to be similar to the others, I needed working parts to investigate further and larger size meant bigger components and a stronger signal to work with. I put the decoy on the floor and switched it on. It's job was to create a diversion nad its lightweight allowed it to move faster than the sentry bots.
It zipped past them forcing the bots to change their line of sight and search for it. I got my window, I rolled out of my cover, saw through my scope that the small ones were scurrying behind my decoy whereas the big one stood its ground. I pointed at the small ones, pulled the trigger and rolled back inside the cover. There was a massive explosion, the signal to my decoy went dead which meant its pursuers were also down. I walked around the cubicles surrounding the big one while it turned to face my previous position. Its creators had a wicked sense of humor, putting an evil smile and red eyes on its face. Well, even I can have an evil sense of humor. I had placed a small explosive device on my bot. As soon as its signal went down hit, the device also exploded taking out the remaining of the bots it saved from my bullet. I scanned for the receiver on the big baddy with the minigun took it down with the laser drill. The laser scrambled and fried the receiver deactivating the robot. Now that, I had bagged the largest one, it was time to investigate the rest and move out.
