The Solitary Warrior, Part 2

Filed Under Creative Writing, Science Fiction

A Short Story by EZPowell

Fargo, Minnesota, April 10th, 2049

Thirty-nine years to the day of that hacking discovery, the Solitary Warrior (the hacker), long since realizing that there is a world out there, threw out his computers and went out into the world to meet real girls. At last, he mused with a sigh of relief, his job was done and now for the fun. He had stolen enough money over the Internet with his untraceable skills to buy himself anything, from fine wines, to even finer women, as well as song and dance and even plastic surgery. And all the jocks and Italian Romeos would be on the space ships, leaving some nice ladies for him to hunt down and climb with to the top of a mountain. And yes, he surmised, his first stop would be Italy. He would find himself a mentor to watch, listen and learn from. He wanted what Italian men appeared to get with ease. It is a simple fact that Italian men get women, and by the bushel.

The world of 2049 A.D. was a very different place. The nation states and economic communal blocks had broken into small nation states, and then into city-states and then into even smaller communities. These smaller communities sported their own armies, governments and taxation systems, frequently squabbling and sometimes even warring with one another over mere trifles. Much of Earth’s population had left the planet in the years following the announcement of The New Age Prophet (the hacker). Industrial activity had been reduced to a trickle of its former glory. There was no amount of pollution that the Earth’s ecosystems couldn’t handle with ease, and therefore no more global warming. Not only were there not enough people to maintain the viability of nations, both in terms of industry and economics, but global infrastructure had more or less disintegrated. Transcontinental links in the form of large highways and railway lines and even trans-oceanic shipping routes had simply shut down and ceased to be for lack of use. There were even very few aircraft in the skies. Everything was high-tech. Farming was automated. Homes had automated systems to make a late 20th-Century geek’s eyeballs pop out of their sockets. Over all it was a quiet and healthy world.

There were occasional problems and issues to sort out. There was a lack of resources, but most importantly a lack of people. Disputes were often resolved by middlemen, sometimes even middlewomen. It was in some ways a more primitive world but in some respects a world of equality. These middlepersons were often ex-soldiers, of one city-state or another, or sometimes they were even trained in the armies of some previously powerful nation. They had all the high tech gadgets most of earth’s departed inhabitants had not even dreamt of.

This brings us to a somewhat aged, stocky but very agile and adaptable individual: The Solitary Warrior.

He was rugged, worn and weathered to the core of his very soul, but experience was his trademark. Actually he was once a gregarious intelligent boy, and then once a spotty teenager. Since then he has had a lot of plastic surgery and even more cybernetic enhancements. Fortunately for the spotty teenager, he had stolen a lot of money in his years playing with computers and he had managed to buy the services of better plastic surgeons than even Michael Jackson could afford, as his nose was not falling off his face. He was to all effects and purposes, a mercenary. When there was trouble, they called him or others like him. The spotty boy had undergone a second transformation and had become a rugged, desirable ladies’ man, having been trained by the best. His current assignment reported a robot warrior on the outskirts of a walled city in the Midwest United States. Up where the summer air teemed with mosquitoes and the winter winds howled like a silly spotted dog chasing its tail, biting something else by mistake, usually something protruding and dangling beneath its wagging tail. Oh very, very ouch!

He landed his craft two miles from his suspected target, at an unspeakably early hour before the dawn of a cool spring day to be. The target had been severely bothering the residents of the city whenever they ventured out of the protection of their walls, shooting indiscriminately. He suspected it was an older model because it did not sound to be very intelligent. It sounded as if it sat and waited, on high ground, taking the occasional potshot, sometimes injuring, sometimes even killing, but mostly missing and exposing itself to counterattack. So far the city people had only instigated the occasional fire mission with a battery of prehistoric Howitzers. Howitzers are artillery pieces firing only high explosive rounds. Howitzers also have a bad habit of missing since their barrels are short and not delicately rifled or tapered like their more accurate long gun brethren. Howitzers are area-denial weapons. An area-denial weapon simply stops people from going wherever the shells are aimed at, if they are not already there of course. If they are already there, the smarter ones hide in foxholes, the not so smart ones run away as fast as they can. The really dumb ones stand around wandering what to do. So far, the local city-state owned and operated Howitzers had done no damage to the aggressor whatsoever, hardly surprising really. A Howitzer is to all effects and purposes an artillery piece throwing randomly placed high explosive shells, doing damage more by luck than any other reason, but most likely to scare the hell out of everything, especially people, and not robots.

The aggressive robot was probably placed there by a neighboring city. And of course, due to the lack of accuracy and capacity to make only loud bangs by the aforementioned Howitzer-thrown high explosive shells, that robot had managed to remain intact and in place. In fact, the robot had assessed after the first loud bang that it had no reason whatsoever to give a flying duck about the Howitzer-delivered bangs. The robot even surmised that the people who brought it upon themselves to assume the responsibility to fire the guns probably did more damage to their eardrums than to itself, the robot that is. Thus, robotic logic instructed it that allowing a bunch of stupid humans to make their ears ring on occasion was a more effective tactic than actually lobbing something unpleasant back at them. And with the robot’s arsenal, something with a much bigger bang, probably even a huge kaboom, could be thrown back at the gun battery of useless Howitzers with the flick of an electronic switch, to release any number of types of deadly and destructive results.

The mercenary knew the robot would not be tough to kill, as being an older model it was notably unintelligent even if more intelligent than the Howitzer gunners. But one never knows. Some aged models of robotics had significant upgrades and it would be best to err on the side of caution. He set up his communications and emergency back-up before he donned his suit (his latest high tech gadget), then sealing and leaving his ship. His old and trusty combat suit was bulky and heavy to climb into and he decided on a whim to use his new gadget. No need to be strapped into a jetpack and a servo-powered suit of armor for this situation. This should be an easy kill, but nevertheless, he had some serious backup on his ship, just in case.

The sun was low in the sky, creeping upwards inexorably to take its position in the heavens, showing a dull red glow of dawn’s early light through the thickness of a large portion the earth’s atmosphere. The temperature was cool but his suit would mask his thermal signature nicely. He checked his position on the gadgets attached to his arm and verified with his heads-up display (HUD) compass, mostly to make sure his new suit and accompanying gadgets could actually take a compass reading. It appeared the suit could. He then slotted his weapon into the holster on his back, shot his true bearing, and set off in a westerly direction. He had landed his craft to the northeast of the walled city. The robot aggressor was directly to his west, due north of the city on a small rocky outcrop, which apparently poked out above the surrounding pine forests. He would have good cover for his approach.

He approached noisily for the first mile and a half and then stopped to obsessively check his compass and GPS again. He was slightly off course, but that was immaterial as being surrounded by a pine forest tended to make keeping on a straight course a little difficult. He had found a well-worn track about ten minutes ago; it curved and twisted but generally headed west. He had noticed deer hoof marks so it was unlikely anything dangerous was around, otherwise there probably wouldn’t have been any deer hoof marks. Most of earth’s human population had left and gone spaceward, and the earth had begun regenerating due to a substantial decline in both industrial activity and the general destruction of the planet by the human race. It was still taking time for the fauna and flora of areas such as this to regenerate itself. Then again, there was always the vague possibility of having an unfortunate meeting with something carnivorous, probably giving his position away to the robot.

With his new suit and the circumstances, stealth was his best approach. And he had wanted to try out his new toy. So far he had used no detection equipment, so he stopped on more than one occasion and just listened passively. The enhanced listening device wrapped around the top of his suit was light. It was amazing how electronics could be miniaturized and then flattened into a thin strip that simply wrapped onto the head of his suit, held by Velcro. Velcro had been invented perhaps as much as a century ago. Funny how sometimes the most primitive of gadgets mated so well with the most modern.

At what he estimated was perhaps three hundred yards from his target, he heard something—a faint metallic clicking sound. The listening unit on his head filtered out all the primeval sounds of the forest in an instant so he could focus on that metallic clicking. Click-whirr-click-whirr-click. It would stop for a few seconds and then start-up again. Click-whirr-click-whirr-click. The HUD on his goggles told him the sound was two points west of due north. The ground sloped gently upwards in that direction. He also figured that since he was following an animal trail, and it seemed to be skirting the slope and descending very gently, that there must be water ahead. Water was always a good way to mask sound—the sounds he was making, such as the odd, heavier than usual footfall, the crunch of leaves and the snap of a small twig. He reached for the listening strip velcro’d across his head, found a small dial, and pushed it gently. Lo and behold he found the sound of rushing water. He looked at his HUD again, thinking, “Bearing”, and a compass bearing popped up at the far right corner of his vision. “Ah yes. Thought control”, he thought. “The wonders of modern engineering”. The source of the rushing water was a few degrees north of west. The moving water probably headed towards the walled city. That did not give him the best angle of approach since he would rather approach the metallic monster from the rear, assuming it spent most if not all of its time watching in the direction of the city, waiting for the appearance of people to take pot shots at. So he was lucky that he had decided on his new suit. He flipped a switch on the waist belt of his suit. Instantly his entire body disappeared, or at least became semi-transparent. His suit was made of millions of interlinked fractal reflectors. All the surrounding light rays reflecting off him were simply refracted into billions of different directions all at once, making him appear as if he was part of the background foliage. There were better forms of this technology using thousands of micro cameras, but that particular technology was in its infancy. He looked down at himself. He saw a faint shimmering in the air around where his hand should be as he flexed his fingers, with nothing else but the dirt, leaves and the animal track below his wiggling fingers. Amazing. He couldn’t even see himself. Was that a disturbing thought? It could be, depending on how he looked at it. Right now it was a reassuring thought.

He continued his stealthy approach again. He walked a little like a stalking cat, rolling each footstep from the back of his heel to the front outside ball, from the outside edge inwards as he walked. This had the effect of rolling rather than thumping his footsteps. He was very quiet indeed. There was much practice in those stealthy feet from years of creeping around in situations like this. His only concern was that the partial transparency might make him careless so he determined in his mind, with each rolling footstep, to remind himself of his vulnerability. His new suit was kinda neat but he was still soft flesh and brittle bone, easily blown apart into a multitude of bloody and jagged pieces by some of the vicious weapons the robot probably carried. After all, this robot was unlikely to be deaf, even if it was a little out of date and not a strategist’s left pinky-toe. Or even a right pinky-toe, come to think of it.

He almost forgot, berating himself while he mentally commanded his HUD to switch on his explosives, biological, chemical, nuclear, and generally-anything-nasty detection equipment. Instantly there were two flashing lights at the top of his HUD display, one blue, and one red. He was not surprised at either. The blue one on the left was expected—the robot warrior was nuclear powered. The red one on the right was a bit of a scary problem. It glowed and pulsated. He stopped frozen in his tracks. Explosives at this distance, perhaps two hundred yards from the robot’s position, and the lay of the land, meant some kind of tripwire, probably something that could blow up in his face. He scanned with his well-trained eyes, spotting some disturbed foliage, down the hill to his left. His mind commanded his suit to enhance his vision, optically zooming in on the spot slightly ahead of his track along the path. Then he saw it. There was a very faint orange-red laser beam emanating from the patch of disturbed brush. Inside the bushes was the distinct oval-shaped outline of what appeared to be a humungous and probably very horrible claymore mine thingamajig. The flashing HUD display also indicated a very powerful explosive, the type used by the military in the US about forty years before. It was deadly effective even with age. No “Sell By” date on that stuff. The size of the ball bearings in that sucker must be monstrous. He followed the line of the laser to about four feet in front of his leading foot, about eight inches above the ground. As he examined the area above the path he saw two other laser beams, barely visible above the path, but at regularly spaced vertical intervals. There must be other detectors as well. Since the city folk had not reported any explosions it was likely to be optically triggered as a safeguard to avoid wasting a good claymore on a passing deer, or any other animals that would be wondering along this path, seeking water to slake their thirst, or an easy meal of unlucky deer.

He decided to err on the side of caution. Going around the device could be a mistake too. If the robot had the smarts to place a device of this complexity, it may have thought of a man simply walking around its little explosive toy—and there might be others too. Well, with all the gadgets he had, the solution was simple. He instructed his suit to switch off his thermal masking system, make him visible and also making him look strikingly like a deer (which it could do), and make his external temperature to that of an average deer—that part would probably help too. He then held his breath, got on all fours, and proceeded to crawl past the deadly claymore. Holding his breath probably wasn’t good for him because his heart rate may increase slightly and possibly be detectable as not being very much deer-like, but it made him feel a little better anyway. He tried to relax as he crawled past the point of no return. Nothing happened. Four feet from the mine he stood up. He used to be fit, many years ago, now his knees just hurt. Didn’t anything get easier as he got older? Well, perhaps one thing—women. At least at his age he knew a little more about how to get them into the sack in three minutes flat; he only wished he still had the energy of his twenties. There were many women he wished he could have met when he was young, playing with his stupid computers, and with himself. What joys they could have discovered together. Then again, what a fancy new suit and a little ingenuity could do—wow! His new suit was quite something. Perhaps there were other toys he could purchase to make himself more appealing to any females who might decide to maintain eye contact with him, wherever he might happen to be. Now that was an interesting thought.

He walked onwards once again, stealthily, rolling his feet, keeping his peripheral vision intently focused on his HUD, watching for anything else that could go bang in his face unexpectedly. His approach was almost feral. He stalked and rolled his feet, occasionally crawling along the path and dodging two more booby traps until he reached a gurgling stream, which headed in the direction of the city. The stream had gouged out a small gully. The small gully appeared to run around the hill to his right. The blue light and the direction finder on his suit now had a firm fix on what he guessed was the robot. The robot was definitely on the hill to his right and a little behind him to the east. The stream flowed around the west side of the hill. He decided to use the gully and climbed down the almost vertical bank. Before descending, he attached crampons to his feet and nylon straps with attached metal claws to his hands, much like those used as both climbing tools and weapons by certain untouchable Japanese outcasts of the distant past. He was older but still fit enough to do this, he thought. He moved along the steep and muddy wall of the gully carefully, once again keeping an eye on his HUD. The robot wasn’t completely stupid but it probably had not anticipated this direction of approach by a determined attacker. It was unlikely this area was booby trapped since even a large robot had a limited supply of things that go boom, especially on an extended field trip such as the one this robot was on. Nevertheless, he climbed sideways both slowly and carefully, checking everywhere he placed hand, foot and body parts. Especially body parts.

He rounded a curve and saw it. The robot was clicking and whirring. Click-whirr-click-whirr-click. It appeared to have various parts of its robotic bits strewn upon the ground around itself, as if performing a routine service check. Perfect, thought the mercenary. He looked around the top of the bank; there was little cover. He moved carefully backwards around the curve of the gully, just a few inches, enough to get him just out of sight. He poked his head back around the corner gingerly, peeking outwards. The top of the robot bristled with sensors. He commanded his HUD to zoom in on the ugly, mechanical behemoth, scanning the complexity of metal structures for a few precious seconds, knowing from experience what significant features to memorize.

There was a flash in the center of his field of vision. The HUD instantly dimmed to protect him from having his retinas burned to a crisp. He ducked instinctively behind the curve in the wall of the gully. A whoosh and a fizz and then about one hundred yards behind him there was another flash and a low muffled pop. His suit had instantly filtered the loud sound waves before they hit him. That was probably quite a loud bang and would have left his ears singing. Nevertheless, he was a little surprised if not completely stunned. Had he forgotten something? Mama Mia! He commanded his suit to make him transparent again. Not much use if you don’t use it. He had looked like a deer, perched on a muddy stream cliff face. “A moronic robot and a dopey mercenary should be a fair fight”, he thought drolly to himself. OK, so this robot wasn’t that stupid now was it. It could obviously add one and one and figure out that it doesn’t make three, and a deer perched halfway up an almost vertical cliff face just wasn’t normal. He had lost the element of surprise. He knew he had to move, somewhere, anywhere, and fast.

He heard the robot busily making a lot of clanking noises. Gone was the clicking and whirring. Said robot had probably decided it wasn’t sensible to remain clicking and whirring in pieces, maintaining a historical warranty service record. Not being in one piece might not be too effective for the well-being of its most immediate future. Something was approaching it. By the nature and direction of the something’s approach—a deer hanging on the edge of the vertical bank of a stream, it was very unlikely to be a friendly little deer. More likely his visitor was a robot-stomping mercenary. The robot had not come across one of these most difficult of foes before, but default programming dictated it get as far away as possible, as fast as it possibly could. Its current mission overrode that standard directive. Standard directives were by no means an absolute. The robot had orders to the contrary. It had to stay put. So it had to fight! And even if it did run the aggressor would probably follow it anyway.

The only direction the mercenary could take, with any speed, and perhaps with the promise of some cover, was down. He released his claws and dropped about ten feet, like a stone, into the shallow stream. It hurt and he was more than a little winded but he was alive. His physical survival instincts and years of training and practice got him moving within moments of landing on his back in the twelve inch deep water. The adrenalin now rushing through his veins and fueling his taught muscles numbed all thought of pain. He decided his best approach was forwards, towards the metallic shooting gallery. Perhaps the robot would think a man would instantly take flight. The robot was busily and nosily putting itself back together. Was the robot preparing to pursue? Was the robot merely waiting for instructions from its unknown masters? Since this human was clever enough to dodge all the robot’s traps, it was highly likely that the human would attack rather than run. The mercenary doubted the robot would sit idly and await the next assault, no matter how stupid a robot it was. So the man decided his best form of defense was attack.

The battle-hardened mercenary bolted along the stream, crashing through the shallow water like a madman possessed. He stopped behind a group of trees and rocks on the far bank from the robot. The robot was now back together in one piece. It appeared to be confused. It was scanning the stream and its banks, up and down, completely ignoring the clump of trees and boulders the mercenary hid behind. Obviously his little invisible suit trick was working. The mercenary was poking his head around the scant cover to get his bearings on his target. No more electronic gadgets and gizmos now. At this point in time, the mercenary needed to use his instincts, his wits and most of all, his eyes. He was close enough to see that a multifarious array of missiles and sensory type things now protruded menacingly from the torso of the robot and whirred on top of its head. It was scanning and tracking for an invisible target, turning and whirring this way and that. There was a bright light and a whoosh. The mercenary ducked, not risking the electronic visibility of his personal defensive shield. The missile shot off down the streambed. The robot assumed the man had run the other way, and quite sensibly so. What man in his right mind would approach a monster such as this? It seemed that his new suit was already paying dividends. The robot simply could not see him. Best to be sure of that. He removed his weapon from the holster on his back. As soon as he fired the robot would know where he was. He poked his head around the boulder, selected a black switch on the weapon and dialed in a code, selecting a very special type of round. He aimed at the large, round, glass optical sensor on the top of the robot. Funny thing is, he hadn’t seen another one. This robot appeared to have only one eye. He aimed, relaxing for a few moments in what was essentially a combat environment (professional to a tee), sighed and gently squeezed the trigger. The weapon made a barely audible pop. The robot swiveled its eye in his direction. Its ears were obviously good as the two dumbbell like dishes on the side of its head turned inexorably towards the mercenary. As the round impacted with the optical sensor on top of the robot, the mercenary dialed in two more rounds, both high explosive shells. The round hitting the glass eye exploded in a puff of black paint, rendering the robot blind in the visible spectrum. There was no point in smashing something to pieces when easily rendering it useless consumed much less energy. The mercenary was transparent but he could still be seen in other ways. Moving and running up the stream made for a lot of swirling water. The mercenary figured he would soon be making the water swirl again, and quite soon.

The next two rounds he popped off in succession at both of the robot’s ears. Both rounds cooperatively exploded more or less in the center of the ears, blowing both ears to pieces. Now the robot was blind and deaf, as well as a little stupid—but perhaps not that stupid.

The mercenary dived to the right before the first explosive round demolished the robot’s left ear and back into the stream, swirling it a little more. The swirling part no longer mattered too much. The part about getting the hell out of Dodge did!

The robot panicked, releasing a flurry of explosive objects in the direction of the cover that the mercenary had been hiding behind. Fortunately for the mercenary, he was no longer behind that particular piece of now disintegrating cover. The robot had seen or heard the direction from which the shots were fired. Still probably in flat-out panic mode, the robot let go a blast of jet power, rocketing into the air and suspending itself about a hundred feet up on a cushion of raw burning jet fuel. The suit and the listening device compensated for the roar of the jet wash such that the mercenary couldn’t hear anything at all. Wonderful, he thought. The mercenary figured that the robot thought this was a safe distance or it had some other way of locating him.

There was a whoosh from above. He knew he was in trouble at the sound of the whoosh. The robot did have some other way of locating him. Somehow the listening device had filtered out the noise of the roaring jet engines and warned him of the whoosh, just in time. Phew! Good suit, he thought. He ran and dived instinctively into the water. There was a loud bang about twenty feet behind him. His ears were now ringing. The listening device didn’t manage to compensate fast enough that time. He knew he had to fight back—there was nowhere to run. He selected a new round as he turned on his back. He aimed hastily and pulled the trigger. The round impacted the robot on its exposed underside. The depleted uranium armor-piercing sabot penetrated the underside of the robot’s relatively unarmored belly with ease. There must have been multiple armored layers within the structure of the robot. There was a flash, a whoomph and some falling debris, mostly falling in the direction of the mercenary. The robot was still flying. It dropped another bomb downward towards him—he could see the side of the torso of the robot open, releasing a circular shaped object. Uh-oh, he thought. The mercenary sprang up and ran for now he was in trouble. He was exposed, vulnerable, and somehow being tracked by this implacably relentless machine.

The mercenary then made his decision. He commanded his HUD to switch on his personal defense shield, making him electronically stick out like sore thumb—so much for his fancy new suit. He leapt at the bank opposite of the one he had clambered and crawled his way around. He climbed the opposing bank of the stream in an adrenalin-induced panic, bounded over the crest and careened into the forest like a man being pursued by the devil. The robot could obviously somehow see him because another bomb exploded behind him as he ran through the tall pines, trying not to break his ankle on the myriad of pine cones strewn across the ground. And then there was another flurry of whooshes and he knew that more missiles were coming. They exploded in the trees above him, a little high this time. OK. So this robot was quite smart. An army of the early mid 20th century had made profligate use of this method of killing troops hiding in foxholes and trees. They dropped artillery shells as airbursts into wooded areas, exploding and cracking trees. This released enormous amounts of deadly shrapnel, made of artillery shell shards and a myriad of broken, sharpened pieces of wood, causing death and bloody destruction to all those who lurked within those trees and foxholes, just not quite so often in the foxholes. The greenhorns were usually cut to shreds thinking that running this way or that in a flat panic might actually help. Another army a few years later got its revenge by driving forward and backwards over the aforementioned army’s foxholes, generally with the unfortunate occupants still in the foxholes.

The mercenary was desperate again, running along, changing direction every few seconds, but generally running away as fast as he could. While running, he did two things. The first thing he did was to issue a command to his ship to activate and launch his emergency backup. His backup onboard his ship was a fairly substantial weapon for the task at hand. A small 0.1 kiloton ground burst should do the trick. It was the only weapon of this nature he had. The weapon would arrive and detonate within twenty seconds at the most. Its rapid and obvious approach would likely keep the robot very, very busy. His second act was to drop bodily into a large hollow in the ground, throwing his weapon in ahead of him. He then attempted to bury himself with a primitive but effective entrenching tool, contained within a separate holster on his back, just for such an eventuality.

The man was engaged in much furious digging. He dug and pushed and shoved and shoveled dirt like a man desperately fighting off death, which he was of course. The shield did not prohibit him from moving or passing anything out of its electronically generated wall—useful in a firefight. It prevented anything nasty such as monstrous explosions from damaging him. There were limits of course. The soldier dug himself furiously into the soft ground, dived in face down and then proceeded to cover himself with as much dirt as possible. The shield would contain his air supply. He had mere seconds. The blue light on his HUD changed into a bright, flashing, very serious threat, get-the-heck-out-of-here-fast pulsating RED! Seconds, he thought. He mentally cringed at the bottom of the hole, under perhaps two feet of freshly dug earth, and turned his personal force field shielding to the maximum. The shield buzzed with static electricity. It wasn’t really supposed to be turned up so high but there was nothing else for it. He had to risk electromagnetic meltdown rather than be fried by the incoming tactical nuke.

There was a sequence of muffled bumps into the ground above him. The robot must have found the electronic signature of his overstressed, electrically charged, crackling force shield. The robot probably thought he was above ground and was dropping air-bursts again. From the robot’s perspective why would a man so obviously running away dig himself into a hole for no reason? Had the robot not spotted the incoming missile? If not, the robot would soon figure out exactly why the mercenary had dug himself into a hole, and probably in due course discover it had dug itself into a hole too, the more figurative kind that is, and it was probably a little too late to react. The robot had airburst the area again, smashing trees and sending deadly pieces of wood flying in all directions, causing anything on legs within a fifty-foot radius to look like a pin cushion of horrifying red dots. The mercenary was currently safe under bits and clumps of earth and a protesting personal defensive force shield. Just hold, he thought at the shield, just a few more seconds.

Perhaps the robot didn’t even see it coming. The missile with the nuclear warhead was semi-ballistic capable and due to the short distance decided to hug the deck. Helicopters can fly low. This is called Nap Of Earth flying, or just NOE in military acronymic parlance. When a cruise missile does the nap of earth thing, it does more or less the same thing as a helicopter, but a little higher up and just below subsonic speed. Helicopters fly at anywhere between one and two hundred miles per hour. A barely subsonic cruise missile does a fair amount shy of the speed of sound. The speed of sound clocks in at around seven hundred and forty five miles per hour. Look at it this way: it wouldn’t be very stealthy making load sonic booms, now would it? And going too fast might hit the ground in the wrong place – like before it got to its target. So this particular missile had a flight time of somewhere in the region of ten to twenty seconds. Chances are that the robot never saw anything but perhaps a few seconds of a missile target acquisition affirmation popup. A missile flying close to the ground has little chance of spotting a target so it has to pop up to a few hundred feet to spot its target, just before it reaches where it has been told its target is located. This was perhaps enough time for the robot to react but only in the case of a small blast radius of a conventional explosive. The mercenary’s backup weapon was anything but conventional. Otherwise and it simply wouldn’t be an “Oh, Mama, I’m in deep doodoo” emergency backup weapon. The robot was in seriously deep, very sticky, very gooey and very smelly doodoo. It was still trying to figure out why the mercenary had dug himself into a hole and how many rockets it would take to overcome the electronic force shield when it realized that something bad was coming its way. It was too late but it blasted its jets to get up as fast as it could. Perhaps it also had a HUD or the robotic equivalent thereof, with a big flashing red light saying, “****ing NUKE!” followed by, “Please sit down, put your head between your legs, and kiss your ass goodbye.”

The incoming missile spent most of its time simply searching for its GPS grid. It didn’t even need a target as such; it simply flew in stealthily until its target acquisition popup. Not that it needed to really acquire a target but its instructions were to make itself obvious as soon as possible. If any defensive weapons were detected, it was instructed to detonate itself before impact with any such defensive measures. The robot appeared to launch itself upwards and the missile followed the vapor trail up. Since the distance the robot climbed was minimal compared with potential blast radius, the missile followed its initial instruction set and dropped to the floor of the gully and embedded itself ten feet into the ground under the riverbed before detonating itself. The missile had been explicitly instructed by the mercenary to detonate as far from the mercenary as possible and minimize the horizontal blast radius. Since the robot was airborne vertically and the mercenary was somewhat more horizontally located, the mercenary should not suffer too much. That was the theory of it anyway. The result was a rather big crater and an explosion directed upwards by the walls of the steep sided gully. The robot was caught on the edge of the blast wave, the nuclear-generated firestorm and a nasty blast of gamma radiation.

The upwards-channeled blast between the two riverbanks would have completely clobbered anything up to a thousand feet in altitude. The robot was at about two and a half thousand feet when it was hit so it didn’t vaporize. It was however quite summarily whacked in the goonies, or thereabouts. The robot was somewhat shielded and still had the sense to pop a parachute. It dropped slowly and plopped on the ground to sit motionless on the side of the riverbank where it had previously searched for the mercenary.

The mercenary felt a jolt, heard a colossal rumbling explosion and then the ground shook like an earthquake. The city folk would not be happy as their water supply would be contaminated and he was unlikely to get the second half of his fee. He would have to high tail it out of here just in case some of them got a little too antsy. He was alive and that was definitely all the rage. Staying alive was at the top of his list of priorities today, as it was on most days. He who lives to run away, lives to fight another day. His back up weapon was there to be used. Use it or lose it, he always thought. Waste not, want not. If you are really in trouble wouldn’t you push the red button? The problem was he now had no backup and the non-collectable half of his fee might just have covered it. His next few jobs would have to be cakewalks compared to this one. He dialed up his ship again and awaited its automated arrival. It made as little sense to him to get into trouble with the local inhabitants and their irradiated water supply as it did to hang around and get irradiated by fallout. He was out of here as fast as he could go. This job was a complete bust but at least he was alive. And his new suit had been a good investment in his continued good health.

The mercenary emerged from his hole. Around him was a denuded landscape. World War II, German Army-style artillery airbursts didn’t have a patch on this. The area towards the river and around the gully was a like a moonscape. There was nothing, apart from the odd smoking stump and a large piece of brightly colored red and white cloth on the ground about five hundred yards away. How odd, he thought to himself. It looked a little like a parachute. Everything was flash burned from the heat of the nuclear fire and then just as suddenly blown to smithereens by the shock of the massive blast wave that must have followed. His shield had protected him and even now hummed gently with a fizzing sound, fending off the residual radiation putting him somewhere within the barely survivable range of Roentgens per hour. He knew he had to get out of the area quickly. His shield was good, but it wasn’t that good.

Most surprisingly, he heard a faint banging sound coming from the river gully. He had to check it out first. The robot was probably making the banging noise in the vicinity of the river gully. It was quite a survivor. He didn’t want it busting a cap in his ass as he flew off in his nice shiny ship, or at least busting a cap in his ship’s ass. Obviously his ship exploding around him would result in his ass too so he had to find out what that incessant banging noise was and if it was most decidedly robotic in nature, he would have to do something to quiet it.

He crept to the edge of the gully. Most cover had be blown to hell and gone, apart from the occasional depression in the ground. He couldn’t turn his shield off for fear of radiation and he doubted if the robot was anywhere near functional enough to detect his shield, even if it could do anything about it. Still he peered over the edge of the gully cautiously.

The robot appeared to be severely scorched and badly damaged but much to his surprise, still relatively in one piece. Any previously visible protuberances were now missing, blown off by the blast, he assumed. The blackened hulk of the robot lay close to the water, drag marks through the dirt leading to a small depression where it looked like the metal hulk had fallen from the side of the river gully. There was a large smoldering crater about five hundred yards downstream—that must have been ground zero. What was left of the robot appeared to be dragging itself at the speed of a snail through the mud towards the now dried streambed, probably vaporized by the blast. The river would return—he could already see a trickle of water in the middle of the streambed, and the odd pooling of water. The robotic remnants painfully dragged themselves, crashing an arm downward and clanging the end of a shovel-like appendage onto the rocks in the riverbed. That explained the banging noise. The robot then lifted the arm with the shovel thing and doused itself with a trickle of water, then once again banging the shovel thing into the fledgling stream of water, bringing up another paltry shovel of water and dousing itself. Smart robot, thought the mercenary, perhaps it is attempting to wash off fallout. The small amount of water on its casing was turning to steam, rising in wisps of smoky white vapor like tendrils of dramatic suffering and woe.

The mercenary approached the blackened monster. He saw an open panel, which was flipped down. Visible in the middle of the cavity was what appeared to be a brightly lit screen. As he got closer he saw a keyboard and a built-in trackball mouse. “How bizarre”, he thought. “Now this I have got to see.” It was a simple blue computer screen with funny characters all over it. He remembered it from his far away hacking days in a previous life. It was the wonderful dreaded blue screen of death. He reached out almost instinctively and pressed the CTL-ALT-DEL key combination on the keyboard with three fingers, one on his right hand, the other two on his left hand. Instantly a colored screen appeared with the face of the great master inventor-plagiarist himself. The animated graphic of an aged, well-groomed but still very geeky Bill Gates said in a jovial tone, “This is Windows-Linux 2049. Your system has crashed. Please call support at once. You will need your credit card number as we charge for support calls. Thank-you and we wish you a most karmic of days.” A footnote stated that all proceeds were given freely to any nation qualifying as unproductive because Bill Clinton is an anti-monopolistic tyrant! Hmmm…, thought the mercenary. Where had he heard all that crap before? In the center of the screen was a sequence of characters stating, “Press any key”. He didn’t hesitate and pressed a key almost unconsciously.

The look of surprise on the mercenary’s face was complete as his ship landed gently and semi-silently behind him, its jets winding down with a faint humming as it patiently waited on him to alight and command it aloft. Reading the robot’s screen briefly, it stated that the robot’s name was Igor and that Igor had an IQ of 96. More recently it was 163.275, somewhat temporarily decreased due to an unfortunate encounter with an exploding nuclear device. A bit thick for a robot, thought the mercenary, even at an IQ of 163.275. It also stated that the mercenary was now the proud owner of said robot, namely Igor, and that what was left of its robotic brain could be programmed as the most recent key presser saw fit, namely, the mercenary. “Wow!” he thought. “I am now the proud owner of a piece of burned out junk that, as robots go, had about half a brain, even when fully functional.” No matter how advanced the science of artificial intelligence had become there was still no way to persuade a robot brain to act on barely remembered collections of subconscious memories and impressions. Robots simply do not have hunches.

The mercenary pondered this situation for about half a second and then decided it was high time he left. Not only was there quite a large amount of fizzing emanating from his still protesting shield, fighting off voluminous amounts of gamma radiation and other nasty stuff but the local city folk who had hired him were likely to show up soon, and they were likely to be a might bit irate with him for having polluted the general area with some nasty nuclear materials, along with the obvious fallout of radioactive dust and otherwise. He made his decision. He hit another key and typed in a holding pattern for the robot, finally typing the command “shutdown -h now” on the keyboard and pressing the Enter key. The robot died and shut itself off with a sigh. He would restart it later at a more opportune moment. Perhaps the thing would be useful. Otherwise Igor would fetch a fair price somewhere, even if Igor was a little stupid. He turned, clicking a button on his left wrist, and quickly hopped into his ship as the ramp descended.

Inside the ship he slammed the button on the inner wall of the air lock, lifting the ramp and sealing his ship. He flicked another switch on the console turning the airlock into a decontamination chamber, washing down and drying his suit. In thirty seconds he was done and dried by a blast of warm air. He hit another button on the console and the inner door opened and he walked into the interior of his ship. Without removing his suit he went straight to the flight deck, punching two buttons. The first button began dousing the outside of the ship with water in a washing spray. There was no use in taking radioactive fallout along for the ride. The second button opened a cavernous cargo bay on the top of his ship. He commanded the robotic arm to grab, wash and securely stow the robot. This process took about sixty seconds and then the cargo bay doors automatically closed. The blinking red light turned green as soon as the cargo bay was secure. He wasted no time. He reached over both shoulders, pulled the straps down over himself, strapping himself into the pilot seat and grabbed a flight stick that looked a little like a steering wheel. He first pressed one button making the front windows transparent so he could see outside. Then he pressed another button and the ship hummed, whirred and powered up. Then he reached to the console and switched on external sensors and TV cameras. There appeared to be people approaching from about two hundred yards away. Time to go, he thought.

The engines were alive and functioning normally. All he saw on the various consoles and panels were green lights. Even if he had had a few red lights, it was of no consequence. He had to go—and now! The approaching city folk probably had murder in mind. Just as he pressed the blue button and pulled the yoke back towards his belly there was a flash about two hundred yards away shown on one of the external TV cameras. It appeared that those wonderfully inaccurate Howitzers had scored a goal. Bits and pieces of what used to be the rapidly approaching, probably angry people, rained down at two hundred yards as splatters and lumps of bloody gore among tattered remnants of used clothing. Even with his years of combat experience his stomach did a little flip and he gagged and burped silently on freshly exhaled stale air. He was sure his face had turned a delicate shade of green.

He was now more decided and determined than ever. No time like the present, he thought. The Howitzers might just get lucky twice. His ship lifted up in a whoosh and a burst of plasmic power, leaving a small, blackened burn mark on the soil of the already decimated landscape. His ship rose into the air, passing ten thousand feet in seconds, rising higher and higher on the thrusting engines. He doubted the city folk had any weapons that could reach him but he wasn’t taking any chances. He punched another button on the flight yoke, bringing his sub-light impulse drive online. He was flattened into his seat, an acceleration couch, with the seat automatically compensating by squashing his legs almost to the point of uselessness. In another ten seconds he was above the troposphere, pushing the blue button on the flight yoke once again, substantially reducing his acceleration. He punched two pre-programmed keys on his navigation computer and the ship oriented itself along an axis just above the planetary plane, aiming itself at Saturn and his subterranean home on Titan. He punched the blue button again and the main drive kicked in once more, now in space, accelerating away from the earth at the maximum speed his acceleration couch could keep him alive. He wasn’t taking any chances. He had lost too many friends over the years and didn’t intend to become a casualty himself.