A Fistful of Trouble (Outlaws of the Galaxy Book 2), Paul Tomlinson [bts books to read .txt] 📗

leader can quickly turn nasty. This lot would either turn on each other or they would head off and loot the town. Little wonder that Casey was looking stressed. Lucky for him I had a Plan B. Or rather, a Plan B with a Part B.

Danny and I reached the Colonel’s house in time to see the roof collapse inwards. Smoke and sparks were thrown up into the sky. The rest of the house was little more than a blackened, burnt-out shell at this point. I parked the Trekker on a slight rise overlooking the house. From our vantage point, we could see the army surrounding the house and we could see the hill behind where the bunker had been. The grass there looked undamaged, but there was a depression where the ground underneath had fallen in.

“Close enough?” I asked.

Danny checked his portable monitor and nodded. “Do you think this will work?” he asked.

“No idea. Harmony is the computer-whizz – this is all on her.”

Danny’s thumb hovered over the flashing green square on his screen. He was about to unleash destruction, I could understand his hesitation.

“Do you want me to do it?” I asked.

His thumb pressed down on the screen.

There was no immediate change on the battlefield below us. It was slow-burn destruction.

The Colonel’s robots were always going to be the problem. They were relentless – they didn’t sleep, need meals, or take toilet breaks. Their aim was perfect. And they were made of some kind of alloy that could survive a direct hit – unless you were lucky enough to catch them in a vulnerable spot with a very big gun at close range.

If you can’t defeat a robot army in a head-on attack, what are you supposed to do? You have to try something sneaky. And to do that, you target the robot general – the artificial intelligence that controls all of the robot drones. I’d met the robot general on the Colonel’s freighter. He’d held a gun to my head. Me and General Red-Stripe had unfinished business. If he’d had feelings, he might have felt the same way. I’d blown up his cousin who had hitched a ride in Happy Hawkins truck.

Targeting Red-Stripe wasn’t going to be easy. All of the robot soldiers were programmed with some basic orders. Kill the enemy. Protect your human masters. Protect yourself. Ahead of their own safety came ensuring the safety of the artificial intelligence that directed their actions. Without that, the drone soldiers would revert to being dumb weapons following some pretty basic internal battlefield protocols.

The best way to target your enemy is when and where they least expect it. They are most vulnerable in those moments when they do not realise they are a target. It is not at all ironic that I learned this from Harmony. She was always several steps ahead of everyone else. As I had learned to my cost. More than once. When she first met me, she took my wallet and my watch. When she first met Floyd, she’d slipped him a virus. Just in case. She hadn’t known if she’d ever need it, but it would have been there if she had. This was how she worked. Get close when a person’s guard is down and exploit their vulnerability. In Colonel Hodge’s bunker, she’d done the same thing with the robot with the red stripe down its face. Unlike Floyd, the artificial intelligence wasn’t smart enough to know it had been infected with a dormant virus.

The robots down on the battlefield began to stir. An inherent weakness in the A.I.-controlling-drones model is that all of the robots are linked together. That means a virus can spread like crotch-crabs at a congressman’s orgy.

“Still no sign of Harmony,” I said.

“She’ll be here,” Danny said. He sounded less sure this time.

I didn’t want to see him learn this lesson. Didn’t want to be present at the moment when his innocent optimism was destroyed. But no one can go through life expecting the best of people all the time.

“We’d better go down there,” I said.

Chapter Thirty-Five

At first, no one noticed what the robots were up to. All of the M-9000s rose to their feet and stood like statues. People turned to look when, at the same moment, they all dropped their weapons to the ground.

“What’s happening?” someone asked. “Are they on strike?”

“Something’s wrong.”

“Where’s the Colonel?”

“Casey?”

“Back away from them,” Casey said. “Slowly. Just in case.”

This was good advice.

I’d never seen a robot affected by the Berserker virus. I’ve seen robots malfunction and fall over. I’ve seen them stop and shut down for no reason. And I once saw one burst into flames. But I’ve never seen one go Berserk. Today I was going to see two-dozen of them do it – all at the same time. I imagined it would be like a synchronised dance routine. Only much wilder.

Once the virus took hold, the robots would be uncontrollable. That’s why we had them drop their weapons first – we didn’t want them firing off blindly. No one would be able to regain control of them until their internal systems overloaded and shut down, initiating a clean reboot. While they were shut down, we had an opportunity to get up close and personal to deal with them. But it was only a small window. And Harmony was supposed to be here to help.

The original Berserkers were, apparently, fighting men who worked themselves into a sort of frenzy before going into battle. They were wild and dangerous, they cared little for their own safety, and even their own people were a little bit scared of them. No one knows who originally created the Berserker virus, variations of it have been around for decades, but its purpose wasn’t to bring about death and destruction. It was designed to cause disruption only. We were about to see if it lived up to its billing. It was one of those ‘use at your own risk’ programs with no explicit or implied