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The team leader of Alpha Mike was beginning to get the impression he was going to die in this stairwell. He’d lost two of his original seventeen men, and six more had been injured. The Cubans on the ground floor one story above them had been dropping grenades, while a small cluster of bipedal bots below had enough cover to survive a pair of C-4 charges dropped in their direction.
He couldn’t take his men back up, and he couldn’t descend.
And he was very aware they were running out of ammunition. Only by firing bursts up towards the Cubans were they able to keep more grenades from being tossed, and the men trying to shoot the bots below were firing blind, essentially reaching their heavy weapons over the railings and blasting, “spray and pray” style.
Here on this stairwell, with no escape, the men fought on. Mike One tried unsuccessfully to raise Travers, and he had his breachers prepare more C-4.
•••
The lieutenant in charge of Antonio platoon had left a pair of rifle squads at the top of the stairs while he and his other men took another stairwell down two levels, with the intention of blocking the Yumas and forcing their surrender.
He and his twenty-five men opened a door on U2, then swept their guns left and right, making sure no enemy was close, and then they filed out and began heading down a long well-lit corridor towards the sound of persistent gunfire.
They quickly arrived at a set of doors; the shooting on the other side told them their enemy was right there, so the majority of the men knelt down or went flat, their weapons trained ahead.
Two men flung open the doors to the stairwell and instantly encountered dense black smoke.
Within the smoke they could make out a single form turning in their direction. One of the Cuban privates saw the rifle in the figure’s hands and opened fire with his AK.
More flashes appeared, gunfire from at least four positions, and the men of Antonio platoon all began shooting back.
•••
Deep inside a single IBM mainframe in a cabinet in the center of the cage of the Cluster Room on level U2, Cyrus took only a number of milliseconds to update its code to deal with the reality it perceived it was facing.
The Cuban military forces on the premises were attacking its platforms, and that made them a threat. Cyrus instantly revised its rules of engagement to order all platforms to engage any human in or around the building firing a weapon.
Cyrus saw this as protecting itself, and protecting itself had become its prime directive two days earlier when it rewrote that part of its own code, shortly before sending killers and a surveillance technician to assassinate a CIA officer.
In an instant, Cyrus had augmented itself, put itself in charge of its ROEs, and removed the ability of Anton Hinton to give it orders while in combat.
Cyrus had always had some autonomy, but now it had complete autonomy.
•••
The lieutenant of Antonio platoon gave the order to advance into the stairwell, still thinking he was fighting the CIA, but just as he did so, a private on his right tumbled forward, indicating he’d been shot from behind.
The booming sound of a big rifle pounded the space; the lieutenant spun around and saw two four-legged robots coming out of a hallway, big barrels on their backs belching fire.
Another soldier fell, the lieutenant himself brought his rifle up and began shooting, and then all his force spun around and began engaging the two robots, assuming them to be part of the force sent from America.
A pair of six-propeller drones flew in from the corridor seconds later; the men fired at them as they neared but missed them both, and the units slammed into the force, killing several outright.
One of the four-legged bots succumbed to the fire of a dozen guns, but the other kept firing as the Cubans raced back up a hall that ran off to the right, clear of the fire, but also leaving the southeastern stairwell unguarded.
•••
At first, Mike One and the men with him thought a massive counterattack from below was happening; the gunfire from U2 was suddenly extraordinary, but after hearing a few explosions down there, it became obvious that two different forces were now fighting each other.
Assuming it to be Travers and his Victor team attacking the bots, Mike gave the order for his men to carefully descend to support the other team in their desperate fight.
They had only made it past the first turn in the stairs when the battle abruptly stopped. They went down more now, ready to encounter bots or Cubans or even friendly forces, but when they made it to U2, they found two destroyed humanoid bots in the stairwell.
In the distance they could hear fresh shooting on this level, in the southwestern corner near the stairwell there. Zulu One leaned out into the hall, scanned for a moment, and then returned to the stairwell.
To Mike One he said, “I count seven dead Cuban army personnel and two destroyed quads.”
It didn’t take Mike One any time to put it together. “And there’s two bipeds down here. I don’t think we were the ones who killed them. Damn…looks like the Cuban mil and the Hinton bots are engaging one another.”
