Hammer's War 1: Forging the Hammer (19 page)

The rest of the team was busy watching Freya get rubbed down when a bright light blinded both cameras.  The shooter
’s camera feed went black.  “Recon one, we’ve lost your signal,” the team leader said.  As the spotter’s camera feed followed suit, “Recon two, we lost your signal. What’s going on, over?”  The team leader looked down at his wrist display.  The bio-signs for both men were offline.  He knew they were dead.  “Damn it, he took them both out!  How could we be so fucking stupid?  The girl was a distraction!”

Thad could see through his scope both
targets were down, “Tangos down, good work everyone.  Freya, honey, time to get dressed and get in here,” Freya didn’t bother with getting dressed.  She grabbed her clothes and ran inside, with Archie right behind her.

The team leader was pacing back and forth with his hand on his head, “Fuck, he has forced my hand!  We can’t wait now
.  If we do, they will slip away.  Screw the stealth shit, it’s time to go loud and proud boys.”

The operator monitoring the communications asked, “How did he take them out? 
I didn’t detect weapon power signatures?”

“He must be using expanding gas weapons.  They don’t have a weapons power signature to detect.  Oh very clever of you,” the team leader said, more
as a statement of his enemy’s skill, than as an answer to his man.  “Now you guys get to find out why I made you pack your jet belts all the way out here, we move in five.”

The team
had to move fast, they geared up and moved out.  They had not planned to move in until dark, but because of this new development, they had to go now.  Only the team leader stayed behind so he could call the shots.

Freya ran into the house without bothering to get dressed.  Inside she found Fiona holding a copy of Thad’s
black body armor.  “Ooh, how fashionable,” Freya said.

Fiona was already wearing her
own armor, “I know, now all we need is a gimp.”

Freya slipped on the body armor and Fiona handed her a harness with all the tools an apprentice assassin would need.  “Hey it even comes with
accessories,” Freya remarked as she strapped it on and snapped the clasps closed.

Fiona lifted a small pen like tool off her own harness, “Yeah I really like this one.”  She pointed it
at empty mug on the counter.  She pressed a button and a red dot appeared on the cup.  She flicked her wrist and the red beam cut the cup in half.  “Laser knife, because you never know when you will feel the need to cut things in half.”  Freya looked at her sister with a funny expression then burst into laughter. 

Thad entered the room and passed out the guns. 
All gunned up, they were ready for the assault, which was surly coming.  Eve,
wearing her new body, stood close by.  Thad pulled Eve aside, “Okay, I need you to head down the tunnel Archie dug last night, and if these guys are operating the way I think they are, you should be within a few meters of their base camp.  The team lead should be there running the operation.  I need you to take him alive, so I’m not removing all the safety protocols.  You will be able to hurt him, but not kill him.”

“Oh Thaddeus, Freya was right
. Your no fun,” she wheeled around and her love doll was off running downstairs towards the tunnel.

Thad shook his head, “Women
!  They are all the same, organic or computerized.”

The assault team was ready
and every man knew his part.  The first to belt in would be the PML (portable missile launcher) team.  They would jump close to the house and blow a hole for the other four-team members to breach though.  The breaching team would use flash bangs and stun grenades to subdue the targets.  Then it was just a matter of bagging them up for transport, or so they thought.

Outside the
compound, the PML team was already in the air, too late to stop the plan, when a hover vehicle pulled up next to the house, right at the preplanned breach point.  The door opened and Rhonda jumped out, and walked around to the driver’s side.  She leaned into the window and gave the driver a kiss.  The first missile came screaming out of the sky and stuck the car on the passenger’s side.  The explosion threw Rhonda through the wall, making a small hole.  The driver, the young Sheriff deputy with whom she had spent the night, was killed instantly. 

Rhonda’s bot body was a mess of torn plasta-flesh, hydraulics, and circuits
.  She sat up.  Most of her face was burned off, the metal skull showing.  Her right arm was missing and she was not sure where it was, “Damn it, that hurt.”  She did not mean pain, but was using the term to describe the damage to the bot body.  She thought it was no big deal.  She would transfer back to the bike and order another body later.  She tried to transfer, but her wireless card was damaged.  She started to panic.  She was losing power fast, and if the brain unit died, she would die with it.  Because Rhonda had never thought anything like this would happen, she didn’t leave a backup copy of herself in the grav-bike’s computer.

This was the first time Rhonda had experienced fear
or at least simulated fear, which an A.I. can experience.  She did not know it yet, but the man she had been with was dead.   

A
second missile came screaming in and exploded in a ball of fire, dust, and more twisted metal.  Rhonda survived the second missile strike, but the fire burned off the rest of her plasta-flesh.  The whooshing sounds of jump jets screamed outside the hole.  Rhonda tried to alert someone, but her comm link was damaged too.  Then a round cylinder came bouncing into the room and landed next to her.  She looked down as it exploded in a bright flash and stunning boom.  Her optical and audio sensors were overloaded. Panic set in, as she realized she was helpless, unable do to anything. 

Four men came storming through the hole
.  In the smoke, the point man saw the outline of Rhonda’s metal body and fired his laser rifle.  Instead of burning a hole in her, it reflected back at the shooter and hit his gun.  The gun turned red, then white, before it exploded in his hand killing him. His torn and bloody body fell in front of the others.  The man next in the stack did not have time to get out of the way and tripped over the body of his teammate.  The last two members of the team popped their jet belts for a second and jumped over both bodies.

Outside
, the PML team had landed.  They dropped the empty tubes and took up their rifles to provide rear security.  They had no idea anything was going wrong inside.  Things seemed quiet.  Suddenly they felt vibrations beneath them.  Before they figured out what was happening, the ground fell out from beneath them.  One of the men was faster than his partner who disappeared into the hole that had opened in the sand.  The other man shot up like a rocket. He had activated the jump jet in emergency mode, which kicked the jet on full. 

He did not hear
it, over the noise of the jump jet, the sound of a heavy steel cable with an arrowhead striking the jump jet.  As the head of the cable made contact, four spikes popped out and held firm when the line went taut.  Unfortunately, the connections on his straps did not hold.  The metal pins sheared off as the jump jet stopped its upward motion.  The jump jet may have stopped going up, but the man didn’t.

Once
he ran out of upward momentum, gravity took over.  He fell back, landing with a sickening crunch of bones shattering.  The force of the landing damaged the power supply on his suit’s camouflage and it shorted across him.  The high voltage moved through him.  His body tensed up and he made a strange wailing cry as the air was compressed out of his lungs by his muscles contracting.  The voltage also moved through the kill chip in his head, triggering it and killing him.

His partner fell through the ground and landed on the floor of
the newly dug tunnel.  His fall was not far enough to do any damage, but it was enough to stun him for a few seconds.  That was all the time Freya needed.  She fired the grappling gun. Once it hit, she dropped it, not worrying about the man on the steel tether. Freya pulled out a combat knife, and pushed a button on the hilt.  A greenish glow flashed down the edge of the blade.  The slight hum it made was all too familiar to the man on the ground.  A force blade was capable of cutting through just about anything.  At least she was quick.  The man did not feel much before he died.

Up top, the remaining team members were in
disarray, screaming, trying to figure out what just happened.  The team leader watched all this unfold and was trying to get his men to pull back, but before he could give the command, he felt a tap on his shoulder.  Turning, he saw a beautiful, pale skinned, green-eyed woman whose long black hair floated about the shoulders of the long black body suit she wore.  “Hello, I’m Eve.  You threatened my family, now you are going to pay.” 

He reached for his sidearm
, but there was no way he could match the speed of Eve’s robot body. Her punch landed right on his temple.  He went out like a light.  “My work here is done,” She picked him up, threw him over her shoulder, and walked back into the tunnel.

The last three men of the assault te
am regained their feet and pulled together.  Unaware that the rest of their team were dead they moved forward staying on mission  They made their way down the hall, with two men facing forward and one backward pulling rear security.  Coming to a corner, the leader held up his hand to stop.  He pushed a button on his vest and a small floating camera popped off the side of his jet back.  It flew around the corner and fed video back to him. It was all clear, no one in sight; he then made a quick check of his heartbeat scanner, showed nothing ahead, so he gave the command to move forward.  

As soon as the last man
rounded the corner two tiles in the ceiling came crashing down, one at the front and one at the back.  The two troopers up front shot up into the ceiling.  The man in the back did the same thing.  They fired several times, dust and fragments from the ceiling tiles filled the air, but nothing else happened.

On the other side of the wall Thad
and the twins stood with submachine guns at the ready.  Thad was hoping that Eve’s bio damping field would be strong enough to hide their heartbeats from the enemy scanners, or the trap wouldn’t work. With his eye in x-ray mode Thad watched as the men came down the hall.  Once they were in the right spot he pushed a button on his wrist control pad, which set off two small charges in the ceiling, sending the tiles to the ground.  When the puzzled troopers stopped firing, Thad yelled, “Now!” Thad and the twins opened up, spraying the wall with a deadly hail of bullets. 

The men on the other side of
the wall never knew what hit them.  One second they were looking up shooting, the next the plastic wall erupted with hundreds of what felt like angry bees.  Men screamed and blood flew as they were cut down.  Their lifeless bodies, torn to shreds by the firestorm, lay on the floor of the hallway.  The walls were sprayed with blood, and the scene a horrible reminder of the art of war.

Eve returned
with the unconscious body of the team leader over her shoulder.  She took one look at the bodies in the hall, “Oh dear, what a mess.”

Thad looked at her, “Yeah
, I guess that’s one way to look at it.”

“Maybe we should put
no trespassing signs up, to keep out unwanted visitors,” Eve marched past Thad.

“Yeah
, trespassers will be shot is more like it.”  Fiona said.  Freya walked down the hallway, into the smoke filled room.  She tripped and fell over what was left of Rhonda’s love-bot body, “Shit!”

Rhonda had been lying there, not moving, trying to conserve her power, but when Freya fell over her she powered up enough to talk to her, “Who is there
?  I can’t see. I don’t have enough power to run the eye cameras.”

Freya pick
ed herself up and looked down at the mass of metal and burned plasta-flesh, “Rhonda is that you?”

“Yes, I’
m heavily damaged.  Some kind of explosion I think,” her voice wavered and cracked as she tried to talk.

“More like a missile or two, I’m surprised this much of your body is still in one piece.  You should see what is left of the vehicle you arrived in, blown to bits.”

“Oh no, Andy” Rhonda let out kind of a moan.

“Oh God, there was someone in there with you?”

Rhonda was making a crying sound, “Yes Andy, he was dropping me off.”

Freya sat down next to her, “Rhonda I’m so sorry, I didn’t know.  Rhonda, are you crying?”

“Yes,
or least I’m trying to, the tear ducts were burned off by the fire.”

“Well don’t you
worry. We will get you out of this body and back to your bike in no time.  I promise we will find the remains of Andy so they can be returned to his family for burial.”  Freya said.

“He was such a great guy.  I really got to experience
what it was like to be a human.  I’m going to miss him something terrible.”  Rhonda said her voice weakening.

Thad entered the damaged
room, found Freya sitting near a pile of twisted metal and burned goo. “What are you doing?”

Freya looked up, “It
’s Rhonda.  She was next to the vehicle when it took the missile.  She’s in bad shape.”