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But Hightower suddenly pulled up to a stop and dropped down to his knees, Gentry was just behind him and stopped, as well, and then Gentry opened fire with his AK.
Pace didn’t see the target at first, but then he moved around Zoya, who herself was in the process of leveling her weapon, and he clocked four bipedal robots moving out of a side hallway that led back to the main tracked tunnel. All four had their guns up, and Court fired fully automatic, while Zoya took single shots.
Hightower fired his MP5 at the targets.
Pace went down to a knee, wincing with pain in his calf even through all the adrenaline of being under fire, and he opened up full auto, as well.
Incoming fire slapped the brick wall next to him; the robots were missing only because they were getting knocked around by the bullets, but they weren’t falling down dead, so Pace kept the shooting up.
Court ran dry, and Pace did soon after, but Zoya and Zack kept firing, hitting each one of the units to destabilize it if not destroy it while their two colleagues reloaded.
Zack’s MP5 was the weakest of the bunch, so he aimed carefully and managed to hit one of the bots right in the gripper holding its gun, shearing off some wiring there.
Zoya rendered the left arm of another useless, and once it had expended its magazine it just began to walk away, out of the line of fire and back into the passageway towards the tracked tunnel.
Court and Pace had their weapons back up now while Zoya reloaded and Zack pulled his pistol. The two men dropped one robot to its knees and then all but decapitated another with coincidental simultaneous bursts of fire into the neck area.
From the main tunnel, just on the other side of the brick wall on their left, they heard raging fire, indicating that Travers and the five men with him were heavily engaged, as well.
Eventually, three of the four bots were on the ground and unmoving. The fourth they couldn’t see from where they stood in the passage.
Zack climbed back to his feet.
Pace broadcast on the net when there was a lull in the shooting in the distance. “Victor One? Status?”
“We’re clear. Two bots down. Fish took one in the leg, he’s dealing with it on his own as we move. Me and Jamie got hit in the plates, we’re good. You guys?”
“Good to go. We took down three, and a fourth is damaged and moving in your direction.”
A blast of gunfire from multiple rifles kicked up. Seconds later, Travers broadcast. “He’s down. Should be at least another two hundred meters to the SIGINT building.”
“Roger that.”
Zack was all but staggering, shaking his head as he walked. He tapped Zoya on the arm with his elbow as they moved forward. “No chance you’ve got any extra ear pro in there?”
Zoya reached into her chest rig and pulled out a pair of foam earplugs. Zack crammed them into his ringing ears, gave her a distracted thumbs-up, and then they continued forward, kneeling down at one of the fallen bots and taking its pistol and a spare magazine to augment his Staccato, since his MP5 was empty.
The machines could be killed, that was abundantly clear, but it was also clear it took a shit-ton of ammo to do it.
The three advanced, their weapons trained on the hallway off to the side ahead as they continued up the long, dim pedestrian passage, looking for more threats.
•••
Larry Repult knew his smoking-hot machine gun was low on ammunition, even though it drew its cartridges from a hefty 100-round belt. Still, he continued firing up the hall in short bursts while simultaneously doing his best to take stock of the situation.
It was hard to tell what the fuck was going on, because the dog bot that had opened the door a minute earlier had then fired a half-dozen smoke grenades down the corridor. The drones streaked in as the smoke grew; Repult and most of the other men on all three teams had dived through doorways for the little protection they provided, and then they had spent the last half minute firing down the length of the ground-floor space towards the door, detonating many of the flying bots in the smoke as they raced up the hall.
He’d been briefed that the units might have infrared cameras, and he and his men did not, so they had made up for their poor situational awareness with obscene amounts of gunfire.
Something like a dozen or more machine guns belching out short but consistent bursts of large-caliber fire at any one time meant a virtual wall of lead in the hallway, but one of the hexacopters had shot into a room ahead of him before detonating. There had been too much noise, chaos, and immediate action for him to get any sort of a status report from the rest of the eighteen men, so Mike One had just continued firing like the rest of them.
Finally, he realized he hadn’t heard any detonations in the past ten seconds or so. Into his mic he shouted, “Cease fire! Cease fire.”
The shooting stopped immediately, and then, through his sound dampening and enhancing ear protection, he was able to make out minute noises.
The jingling of brass on the tiled floor as men shifted around to find new firing positions. The slapping and snapping of a feed tray cover as an operator reloaded his M250. The sound of hushed talking as the other team leaders checked on the status of their men.
But there was no more buzzing, no more four-legged rubberized metallic crunching up the hallway, and Repult took this as good news.
