SecondWorld (33 page)

“Looks like Roomba,” Vesely said.

And he was right. The device did resemble the robotic maid, but Miller didn’t think it was left behind to keep the floor looking good, clean as it may be. He tensed when the device approached. When it closed to within twenty-five feet, Miller raised his weapon.

Brodeur shoved the weapon down. “Might be explosive!”

Miller held his fire. Brodeur was right.

Miller scanned the area. One hundred feet to the left of the walkway was what looked like an empty hangar bay. Large metal frames, now empty, lined the walls. An assembly line, like that of a car factory, complete with robotic arms, stretched down the center of the hangar. This massive fabrication plant had been operating for seventy years, employing scientists recruited from America, financed by American dollars, and hidden by American politicians and military personnel.

Miller turned to the right and found a tall, metal, capsule-shaped object. Its smooth surface appeared to be copper, or lead, and had a sheen like brushed metal. A vertical seam, framed by strips of silver, ran around the outer edge, disappearing around the top and bottom. Its metal base was bolted to the floor. Next to it stood another. And another. There might be a hundred of the things. The rows of metal cylinders looked like giant capacitors arranged on a circuit board.

Miller was about to order the group into the maze of cylinders when the red light atop the Roomba-thing began blinking.
Not good
. The round device was composed of two sections. Wheels could be seen at the fringe of the outer ring, so Miller assumed it also held the engine and whatever else it needed to function. But the disk at the center could be anything. When it began to spin, Miller assumed the worst. “Get down!”

Miller, Vesely, and Adler dropped to the floor. Brodeur dove toward the cylinders, which he was closest to.

The spinning disk sprang into the air. There was a sound like a thousand puffs of air, which was immediately followed by the ticking of metal balls bouncing off the wall and rolling over the floor. Somewhere in the chaos, Brodeur shouted in pain. The center disk fell to the floor next to Miller, spinning like a flicked coin. He slapped his hand down on it, silencing the thing.

Free of its payload, the rover just sat in place, its red light now extinguished.

“Is modern Bouncing Betty,” Vesely said, standing up.

Miller picked up one of the marble-sized metal balls. They were everywhere. Vesely was right. The Bouncing Betty, formally known as an S-mine, was used extensively by the German army in World War II. When triggered, the spring-loaded mine would bounce two feet into the air and explode, sending a ring of metal balls and shrapnel flying into anyone standing nearby. Unlike conventional mines, enemies didn’t need to be close by to be injured, and those close, well, some men were cut in half. This device was more sophisticated. It fired its payload of metal balls as the disk launched into the air. The attack was silent compared to the explosive force of the other mine. And as demonstrated, this device didn’t have to wait around to be triggered, it could seek its enemies out.

The question nagging Miller was whether or not this was some kind of automated defense, or was it sent?

Movement in the field of metal cylinders reminded him that he’d heard Brodeur shout. Had the man still been standing? Why didn’t he duck with the rest of them? “Brodeur, you hit?”

A blur of motion, black like Brodeur’s clothing, caught Miller’s eye. But Brodeur wasn’t responding. Why would he be running, but not talking? Was there another mobile Bouncing Betty?

The black blur passed through another opening as it closed the distance.

Then it was followed by a second.

Acting on instinct, Miller drew his knife and whipped it toward where he expected the first man to appear.

Adler began to protest. “Miller, wh—”

Thuck.
The blade buried in the chest of a tall man whose face and head were covered by some kind of solid mask that reminded Miller of a luchador wrestler, but the eye slots were covered by some kind of tinted glass. The man also wore body armor, but like all bulletproof vests, which stop the blunt impact of bullets, it proved ineffective against the slicing power of a sharp blade. As he spilled to the floor, he pulled the trigger of his Sturmgewehr 44 assault rifle. The cacophony of rounds, fired into the stone wall, acted as a kind of catalyst. At least ten men, most dressed in white lab coats, shouted and charged through the maze of cylinders. The second man dressed in black saw his partner drop and ducked back in time to avoid being shot by one of Vesely’s high-caliber pistol rounds. The shot, however, ricocheted off of two cylinders and struck one of the white-clad men in the chest. He fell to the floor, gasping for air. The man next to him shouted in fright.

They’re not soldiers,
Miller thought. The two dressed in black were killers, no doubt. But the rest were science personnel, or maintenance. A few carried handguns, but most held whatever tool had been in their hands when they became aware of the team’s presence—a wrench, a screwdriver; one man even carried a ceramic mug. Vesely and Adler could handle them. But the soldier, Miller knew from experience, needed his personal touch. He’d been lucky with the first, who probably assumed they had been injured by the Betty. But the second, with time to regroup, could be dangerous.

“Take care of them!” he shouted to Vesely, pointing at the approaching group of workers.

Vesely drew his second pistol. Between the two, he’d have eleven shots. Miller knew he’d need just nine to finish the job, but when Adler took up her solid shooter’s stance next to the cowboy, Miller didn’t think the man would even need both guns.

Miller ran right, sprinting through a row of cylinders. He quickly lost sight of the mob, but knew their fate when he heard the occasional boom of Vesely’s handguns, each, without doubt, a well-placed kill shot. The single cannonlike rounds from Vesely were complemented by the less loud triple shots that Miller recognized as Adler. Two to the chest, one to the head. With very few shots fired in return, and lots of screams off to his left, Miller knew the pair had the situation under control.

Miller, on the other hand, did not. An arm stretched out in front of him and caught Miller across the chest. Miller fell backward, but his forward momentum turned the fall into a slide. As he slipped across the polished floor, he leaned back with his MP5. Aiming upside down while sliding would have been a challenge, so he just pulled the trigger and let loose a barrage that sent his attacker diving for cover before he could get off a shot.

Miller got to his feet and dove behind the nearest cylinder. As he rolled to his feet, he ejected the MP5’s magazine and slapped in a new one. The staccato roar of his enemy’s rifle, accompanied by the ping of bullets on metal, echoed through the chamber.

Miller leaned out and fired a volley, then ducked as his adversary took a turn. They could go at this all day, or until one of them ran out of ammunition, Miller realized.
Lucky I came prepared.
While the other man finished his volley, Miller pulled the pin on a flashbang grenade and tossed it toward the man’s position. While the weapon wouldn’t kill the man, it would effectively render him blind and deaf, and confused as hell.

Miller closed his eyes and covered his ears. The explosion wouldn’t be close enough to render him helpless, but it would still hurt like hell. When it came, the
boom
hurt his ears, but it wasn’t enough to slow him down. Miller whirled around the cylinder. He planned to come around behind the man and finish him off without a fight. But as he rounded the cylinder behind which the man hid, he realized his plan had a fatal flaw.

The man’s strange mask.
The tinted lenses protected him from the flash. And the rest clearly protected him from the noise. Miller would have a ringing in his ears for the next week and this man was no worse for the wear. The man saw Miller coming and spun his weapon toward him.

Miller knew the bullets wouldn’t pierce the man’s armor, but he unloaded anyway as he continued his charge. The kinetic force of each round was diffused by the thick armor, but a series of high-speed projectiles in a row at close quarters was enough to send the man reeling. As he spilled back, the man pulled the trigger, firing the full contents of his clip toward Miller.

But Miller wasn’t there.

When the man caught his balance again, and began to reload, Miller jumped out from behind the man and leapt onto his back. He got his arm up under the man’s mask and squeezed. The man’s armor could deflect bullets and his mask could ward off the effects of a flashbang grenade, but the man still needed to breathe. The man slammed Miller against one of the cylinders and nearly shook him off, but when the man tried again, he missed. The pair fell back onto the floor. With his leverage gone, the man was defenseless. He died thirty seconds later.

Miller shoved the man off of him and stood, listening. The gunshots had stopped, but he could hear Adler shouting. He couldn’t make out what she was saying, but he didn’t need to. He bolted toward the voice, weaving in and out through the endless rows and columns of the strange devices.

When Miller reached the end, he found Vesely aiming a gun at a white-clad man standing at a mobile computer console. It wasn’t plugged into anything, so he assumed its power source was inside the big black plastic case beneath the computer. And if it was connected to a network, it was wireless. The man’s finger hovered over the Enter key of a computer keyboard. Adler stepped closer to the man, hands raised. “Don’t do it,” she said.

Miller didn’t know what “it” was, but doubted the man was about to send out a blog entry. Though it could be a communication. Or something worse. Miller gave the slightest of nods to Vesely, who pulled the trigger. But the man must have seen the gesture, because a microsecond before his brains exited the back of his skull, he pushed the button.

In the silence that followed the cacophonous gunshot, Miller heard the rev of a tiny engine. The man had triggered another of the killer Roombas. But then the engine sounded different. Louder. When the small robotic Bouncing Betty rounded the corner from the far end of the cylinder field, Miller knew why.

The man hadn’t activated one Betty.

He’d activated hundreds.

45

The robotic army’s whirring engines grew louder as they closed the distance. Miller rushed to the computer. The screen was covered with text, flashing and moving as the system worked. The text scrolled faster than he could read. He moved the mouse, but nothing happened. Whatever kind of operating system this was, it made little sense to him.

Adler sidled up next to him. “It’s Linux based,” she said. She typed in a command faster than Vesely could quick draw, but nothing happened. She tried several different keystroke combinations and nothing happened. “The program is locked,” she said.

“Please hurry, or start running,” Vesely said. “Roomba army approaches.”

Miller glanced up and saw an endless sea of red LED lights. They were going to have to run in a second, but he doubted they could hide for long. And lying down probably wouldn’t work. One of the Bettys would eventually fire at an angle, assuming that’s how they all functioned. Some might just be bombs.

Adler pointed back toward the entrance. “Cowboy, run that way.”

“Happily,” Vesely said, and then ran toward the exit.

A burst of text flowed onto the screen in response to Vesely’s movements.

“There!” Adler said. “The robots’ movements are being controlled, or at least coordinated by the system. There must be sensors throughout this whole place. Maybe cameras. Motion sensors. But they are being controlled by the network. If the computers go down—”

Miller took aim at the computer.

“No!” Adler shouted. “The entire networked system. Shooting one computer will not stop it.”

“Then what will!”

“Fork bomb,” Adler said.

Miller had no idea what a fork bomb was, but said, “Do it!”

He watched as Adler struck three keys and opened a new window. It was a basic text system, like old DOS. She quickly typed in a seemingly random grouping of symbols.

$ :(){:

“A fork bomb is a bash function,” Adler said. “It is called recursively and runs in the background. Once it is started, it cannot be stopped. It opens itself again and again. It starts slow, but each function continues to operate. It is exponential so once it begins, it can happen quickly depending on the power of the networked computers.”

She finished the sequence—

$ :(){:|:&};:

—and hit Enter. “There!”

A single robot Betty rolled around the console. Too late! As the disk at the center of the mobile mine spun up, Miller tackled Adler to the ground. As they fell he realized he would be on top of Adler and quite possibly in the thing’s kill zone, even if it didn’t tilt.

They hit the floor together, each letting out an “oof!” But the puff of air and clack of metal balls never sounded. The disk hit the floor next to Miller, but this time it didn’t spin. It fell flat to the floor, heavy with unfired rounds. Miller leapt up, afraid the thing might fire in his face. He pulled Adler up, too, and then turned to face the rest of the robotic horde. Not a single red light glowed. He looked at the computer screen. Black and dead.