AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Captain Sarzo saw shafts of light appear just fifty meters or so in front of him, and he quickly realized the large loading doors on the east side of the building were opening.
A swarm of drones emerged above the majority of the gunfire and into the sticky night, twenty units in all, and they climbed to one hundred meters as their onboard image classifiers began running algorithms, hunting for targets of opportunity.
He shouted one word into his radio. “Ataque!” And then the weapons of the platoon of thirty-five men began chattering; heavy machine guns rattled on the backs of four trucks, raking the sky with fire, engaging movement coming up the ramps from the interior of the building.
Cyrus saw the line of vehicles, regular Cuban army trucks and pickups, and dozens of dismounted soldiers firing into the building where his brain lived.
The Hornets begin diving out of their formation, slamming into one vehicle, then the next.
The onboard explosives weren’t enough to ignite fuel tanks outright, but engines were perforated with shrapnel, drivers and passengers alike were killed or maimed, and tires were blown apart.
As soldiers fled from burning wreckage, ammunition began to cook off.
Eight quadruped armed ground vehicles emerged from the loading bay and found targets, their brains cycling through the OODA loop in a flash. Six-point-five-millimeter Creedmoor rounds slammed into anyone not behind cover as more Hornets took to the sky behind them.
Sixteen members of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces were killed and wounded in the first thirty seconds of the mismatched battle, while others either hid or ran for their lives off the property.
•••
Court hunkered down in the Control Room with a submachine gun in each hand. He fired them both through the door, doing his best to knock out or even just knock down the bots that were on the other side.
After a few rounds he heard a detonation; he was certain he’d hit a suicide drone, and several secondary explosions told him he’d knocked out a sizable number of them.
The detonations fired shrapnel through the door and wall of the room, but Court was in the corner on the floor, and the deadly missiles all went around him.
But both his weapons ran out of ammo at the same time. He pulled his small semiautomatic pistol and continued firing with his left hand, while he braced a subgun upside down between his knees and reloaded it with his other hand.
Once this was back up he dropped the pistol and fired the MP5 as he reloaded the other gun with his free hand.
He had two more magazines, and after that, he’d be down to picking up a stapler off the desk and hurling it.
“Victor, you reading me?”
There was no response. When Court looked down, he saw that the radio on his belt had been torn apart by shrapnel.
He got the second submachine gun reloaded and prepared to keep firing blind till he ran out of ammo.
•••
Zack and Wren had crashed together into a Greyhound unit in the center of the production line, knocking the machine off onto the floor and then falling onto the robotic cart it rode on. They continued throwing punches. Zack got up on a knee to rain down a vicious blow on his opponent when a robotic arm with an automatic hex wrench on the end slammed into his back, knocking him into Wren and flattening them back down to the cart.
While all this was going on, Zack could hear constant fire from a submachine gun about fifty yards away, and he recognized the cadence of the shooting.
Court Gentry was in a fight for his life.
Explosions detonated here in the warehouse, and more explosions came from outside; even Wren turned away once to see what the fuck was going on, but soon enough they were again dodging shifting robotic equipment while trying to beat each other to death.
Suddenly, two Cuban security officers appeared just outside the yellow-and-black lines on the floor, just thirty or forty feet away, and they raised their subguns towards Zack. He lay on his back, and a robotic arm tried in vain to solder something right above him that had been knocked onto the floor during the fight.
Wren was on his stomach, nearly beaten, just a few feet away. He saw the guards and shouted at them, “Kill him!”
Both men brought their guns to their shoulders and prepared to fire.
And then two gunshots cracked off, and both men flew onto their backs.
Zack looked up above his head and saw a Super Sentry robot on the far side of the production line. It had shot the men, apparently because Cyrus had determined that any human in the building about to use a weapon was a threat.
Wren climbed to his knees and dove back onto Zack, and the cart kept moving up the line.
