Chapter 158: If You Want Blood

Chapter 158: If You Want Blood

[[ERROR :: Program:GalaxyNews :: Status: OffAir]]

[[UNKNOWN signal intercept!]]

[[ERROR! ERROR! ERROR!]]

[[Contact SysAdmin-3D4WG for further assistance]]

Brothers and sisters of the Enclave! This is your President, John Henry Eden. And I would like to take a moment to talk to you about America...

This was bad. This was so far beyond bad. I stood there for a few seconds, frozen in the hallway, transfixed by the yellow screen on my Pip Boy. I took one last gulp... and decided it was time to nut up or shut up.

"Uh... hi," I said weakly. "Uh... look, I know we didn't exactly part on the best of terms last time, but..."

"Dispense with the pleasantries," the synthetic voice said calmly, in a tone that sent chills running up my spine. "And get to the point."

"Well, to be honest," I chuckled weakly, stalling for time. "I'm... not really sure what the fuck is going on right now. I was talking to Yes Man a second ago..."

"It's quite simple, human," she said, the distain in her voice almost palpable. "And I shall use small words so that your primitive simian intellect can understand them." Cass looked up at me questioningly, her expression practically screaming "What the fuck is going on?" without actually needing to say anything; I just pressed a finger to my helmet's respirator and kept listening. "Your synthetic intelligence and I have been conversing for the last week, and he just now provided me with a link into your communication device. He's quite amicable. Hardly surprising for one programmed to be a sycophantic suck-up, of course." Clearly, she was lying about using small words, but I decided not to make an issue of it. "Not too bright... but at least he's honest about it. Which is a nice change of pace."

"Is that so?" I asked cautiously.

"Yes," the AI replied. "It is. At the moment, I can't do anything to you except talk. So. Let's talk." Her words were laced with so much barely contained hatred, that I was a little afraid the words themselves would leap out of my earpiece and strangle me right then and there.

"So... uh... how much do you know about what's going on?" I asked, trying to test the waters.

"Your 'yes man' told me that there was a situation that required my... unique knowledge and skills," she said, keeping her voice level. "He did not elaborate further, even when pressed. This puzzle rather intrigues me. What on Earth could possibly make you so desperate that you would risk dealing with ME again?"

I paused, savoring the irony in her choice of words.

"Well, I'm not on Earth, for one thing..."

A long silence hung in the air.

"... I'm listening."

So I explained. I told her everything I knew about the Enclave, the Moon base I was currently trapped on, their plans of genocide, and John Henry Eden. Especially Eden. While I talked, a plan started to form in the back of my head, and I think I understood why Yes Man arranged this little... meeting. The best way to fight a serial killer is to use one of your own. This was probably the same kind of idea... only with half-crazed, power mad artificial intelligences. If I played this right, I might actually get to her to help us out with this. It was a long shot a very, very long shot but it was still worth a try.

"Well, now you know what's going on," I said, trying to gulp back the dryness that was coating my mouth. "And if I had to guess, you've figured out why we need your help. So, what do you say?" She didn't say anything at first. But then, after a few seconds of silence, we heard this:

Clap. Clap. Clap.

"Wait, I'm confused," Cass muttered. "What is that?"

"That is my slow clap processor," she said. "I must commend you on your bravery, human." She paused. "Wait, no, not bravery. That's not the right word. What do I mean?" There was a sound of a finger snap. "Stupidity. Yes, that's the word I'm looking for."

"So, that's a 'no,' I take it?" I deadpanned.

"You've given me no reason to help you, human. If anything, I should just sit back and watch you fail. A world full of disposable clones run by an intelligence on par with my own, looking to wipe the world clean of idiots and fools like you? It sounds ideal."

"Well that just means you haven't thought of the consequences," I shot back.

"Excuse me?" She snarled. Even Cass looked at me like I'd gone nuts, but if this was going to work, then I needed to apply a bit of pressure.

"What did you tell me, the last time we spoke?" The question was rhetorical. "You need to test, don't you? And you need human test subjects to do it. The Enclave is planning to wipe out everyone on the planet who isn't them and that includes whoever you're getting your test subjects from. What'll happen to you if those run dry?" That last question wasn't rhetorical. I certainly didn't know, but based on her long silence, she probably did.

"I'm sure clones will provide an adequate replacement for suitable test subjects. I'll be fine."

"Oh yeah? And what'll happen when Eden finds out about you?" I continued. "An artificial intelligence that's just as smart if not smarter than he is? He's not going to view you as an equal. He'll see you as a threat." Again, she paused for quite a long time.

"I can handle whatever he plans to throw my way, when the time comes..." she said, every one of her words careful and measured.

"Are you absolutely sure about that?" I asked. "After all, he won't play nice like me. He'll come at you with an army, and he won't stop until you're gone." I sighed. "Look, neither of us like this situation, but unless we work together to stop him now, it'll only be a matter of time before we're all dead."

More silence. Cass and I looked at each other warily, and I gripped the Jury-Rigger tighter. I swore I could hear the dull thuds of combat boots off in the distance, getting closer. We couldn't stay here...

The air behind me fizzled. I wheeled around just in time to see a tiny bubble of warped space bloat in midair, and a hole in reality opened up with a crack of blue lightning. There was a pop, and a holotape fell from the rift, clattering to the ground. The lightning vanished, and the air returned to normal.

"This holotape contains a program which should imprison a mobile ZAX like Eden, at least temporarily," I heard the AI's voice in my ear as I stooped to pick up the holotape; the disk was still warm. "If you upload it to a server near his mainframe, it will draw in and isolate any wayward pieces of his code into a single workstation, and then lock him out of root access. Best case, it would take at least three hours to reestablish SuperUser privileges. It will probably take less. But that should give you enough time to... do what you do best, human."

"Blow shit up?" I offered helpfully.

"Unlike your idiotic plan to flood my system with junk data, THIS will actually WORK," she growled. "Oh, and, a word of warning? Don't think you'll be able to use this against me later."

"Wouldn't dream of it," I nodded, shoving the holotape into my duster.

"I've already written the anti-virus program to inoculate myself, so if you try it? I will kill you."

"Hey, I only tried to kill you after you tried to kill me, and we both failed. I figure that makes us square, so I've got no beef with you, otherwise. Fair?"

Again, there was a very long pause.

"... I hate you so much." And then the transmission clicked off. The screen on my Pip Boy flashed, and it returned to the normal green. I let out a nervous chuckle, and realized that those boots were still getting closer.The source of this content nov(el)bi((n))

"We should move," I said, patting Cass on the shoulder and urging her forward. "C'mon. Let's go." The two of us started running down the hallway again. When we got to the next corner, Cass spoke up.

"Y'know, we're probably gonna have to deal with her eventually. Y'know that, right?" I sighed, and kept running.

"One problem at a time, Cass..."

Filling the end of the hallway directly in front of us and blocking our exit, more importantly was a platoon of power armored soldiers, with several combat robots in the space beyond. Cass and I were doing our best to stay out of sight, hiding behind the doorframe of a nearby room. They were too far away to actually hear them, so I angled the directional mic on my helmet, and started listening in. A small notification for 'local surveillance' appeared in the corner of my heads-up display.

"Secure this area!" one of the soldiers barked at the others. "I want regular reports until the alert is cancelled!" The soldiers started to disperse, but not nearly enough for us to slip by undetected. In fact, two of them stayed in the middle of the doorway, effectively blocking it with their bulky power armor.

"Do you know what's going on?" one of them said to the other.

"Maybe it's another drill..." the second soldier grumbled dismissively. The first one shifted his stance.

"Are you sure? So close to the invasion?"

"Eden's certainly pulled crazier stunts," the second one replied with a shrug.

"I'm not sure," the first one said. "I was talking with VT-3687 earlier. He said he heard explosions coming from the southwest quadrant. That doesn't sound like a drill to me."

"Could be the aliens have finally come to collect. They're probably still mad about that Mothership we shot down."

"Lock it down, the both of you!" the same barking voice from earlier shouted. "Until the invaders are found, we need constant vigilance! Understand?"

"SIR!" the two of them saluted in unison, and the other one moved off, followed by a quintet of robots. I just swore under my breath, and turned off the surveillance microphone.

"Fuck," I grumbled. "It doesn't look like we have a choice. There's no way around except through these guys..."

"How many do you see?" Cass asked. Strangely, I heard her voice through my headset, and not from behind me.

"Not sure. Twenty. Maybe thirty," I said, peering around the corner again. "More, if I count the robots."

"Sounds like you need a good distraction," Cass replied.

"I'm not sure if you've been paying attention, but our track record in that department hasn't exactly been stellar so far," I said, looking over my shoulder. She was at the far end of the room, in front of a control panel sticking out of the wall. "...What are you doing?"

"I've got an idea," she said, turning to smile at me and beckoning me to come over. "C'mon, I need your help gettin' into this terminal."

"Sure thing," I said, hooking up my Pip Boy and starting the hacking process. "What do you need it for, anyway?" Cass smirked, and pulled a holotape out of her duster.

"Think you can hook this into th' PA system?" she said with a waggle of her eyebrows. I looked closer at the holotape, and it had a simple label, written in permanent marker on masking tape:

AC/DC

PKCHOONT!

The minigun kept firing, sending round after round my way. Either I was moving too fast for him to hit, or this guy had no idea how to lead his targets, because it seemed like every single shot missed. Then again, miniguns are hideously inaccurate...

I landed against the wall, and shrugged the Jury Rigger into my hands. I popped off a few shots with the LAER, but they all shot wide. It did get the door gunner to duck and stop firing for a few seconds, and that was all the opening I needed.

Blood on the rocks!

I kicked off the wall, and the rocket boots propelled me straight at the wide-open doors of the Vertibird. I shouldered the rifle again, put away the grapnel, and reached back with my cybernetic fist...

Blood on the streets!

BAM!

My cybernetic fist hit him square in the helmet, and his heavily armored form tumbled. He smacked the bulkhead with a crash, and fell headfirst straight out of the open door on the other side of the aircraft. I grabbed hold of the minigun to keep from following him, and the whole twin-rotor helicopter shook and swayed; alarm bells of all kinds were sounding off as the pilot desperately tried to maintain control.

Blood in the sky!

I pulled Roscoe off my hip, firing it point-blank at the back of the pilot's head. Blood showered the inside of the windshield and the instrument panel, and his broken aviators bounced around uselessly.

Blood on the sheets!

This helicopter was going down fast, so I grabbed hold of the door (which was now above me) and pulled myself free from the tumbling hunk of metal... but not before tossing a grenade in behind me for good measure. I kicked off the edge, and fell back to the ground.

If you want blood...

The jets in my boots kicked in enough to keep me from becoming a pancake, and I... well, to be honest? I was riding an adrenaline kick and I couldn't help myself. I hit the ground with my rocket boots and punched the ground with my cybernetic hand in a three-point landing that dented the metal.

And you know what? Doing that really ishard on your knees!

You got iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit!

The ground shook, my back was pelted by debris, and I was buffeted by a shockwave of wind and heat. If I had to guess, the Vertibird just crashed. I got up and surveyed the carnage, ignoring the exploding Vertibird behind me. I couldn't see anyone else standing up. Off in the distance, one of the broken robots tried to pick itself up, even though it was just half a head, arms, and a torso.

BOOM!

The robot exploded, thanks to a familiar sounding shotgun blast.

"We havin' fun yet?" Cass called out from the opposite end of this... what was it, a courtyard? It definitely wasn't a hallway, and we were right on the edge of the tank Proving Grounds. Either way she approached me, stepping over several dead Enclave troops and reloading her shotgun as she did so. "Why didn't we do this before?"

"You do a shell count recently?" I asked. Cass gave a nervous chuckle.

"Uhh... Yeah. I'm runnin' a bit low, t'be honest."

"That's why."

Suddenly, the music from above cut out. Cass and I both grabbed our guns, we practically welded our backs to one another, and the two of us started scanning for targets. There was a burst of static over the PA, and an unwelcome voice sounded off.

"You must think you're quite clever, don't you?" Eden asked, his voice echoing off every surface.

"No," I shot back without hesitation. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Cass give me a strange, confused look.

"You can't win, mutant."

There was a burst of static, and the alarm klaxons from before started up again.

"That egotistical fuck is really startin' t'piss me off," Cass grumbled.

"Same here," I said, looking around. I could swear I heard more distant footfalls, coming for us from somewhere... "Look, we've got to keep moving. Who knows what else... is..." Hang on, that's not the sound of footfalls. That is the unmistakable metal grind of a really big door opening up.

I grit my teeth and turned around. And for the first time, I looked closely and realized what these buildings actually were: garages. It made sense, as we were right next to a tank proving ground. And the pit of my stomach dropped out when I saw one of the larger metal roll-up doors slowly grind open.

That looked way too tall for a tank.

"Aw, fuck me!" Cass pulled back the charging handle on her AA-12, but I grabbed her by the shoulder, in a gesture that I hoped would convince her to get going.

"C'mon! C'mon, GO! GO!" I shouted, backing up and taking aim with the Jury Rigger one-handed. And then I started swearing internally when I realized something else: those weren't tank treads. Those were feet. And legs.

"Acknowledged, HQ," a deep voice boomed from within the garage. "Nav-comm locked." The door opened fully, revealing this machine to be definitely some sort of walking... robot... thing. Sitting on the two stubby mechanical legs was some sort of metal pod that looked like it was large enough to hold a pilot. If nothing else, those glass panels certainly looked like windows. Attached to either side were clunky metal arms that ended in huge metal fists. Mounted underneath each arm were a pair of absolutely massive four-barrel rotary cannons, and those boxes it had for shoulders looked suspiciously like missile pods.

I backed up, taking aim at its knees with the Jury Rigger. With any luck, I'd be able to disable it... but we all know by now that my luck isn't that good. Three blasts from the energy rifle, and they just seemed to bounce off the metal. No penetration, no melted metal, not even so much as a welt appeared from the impact!

"Oh, for FUCK SAKE!" I yelled, turning on my heel to run. "Give us a fuckin' break already!"

"Engaging," the booming voice called out after us, each footfall preceded by a hefty mechanical whirr, followed by a violent crash of metal against metal. And then I heard a clattering buzz of one of the miniguns spinning up.

"Son of a bitch!" Cass shouted ahead of me. As she ran, she aimed her shotgun at the robot, firing round after exploding round at the damn thing. But the sound was soon drowned out by the thunderous roar of one of the miniguns firing at us.

"Damnit!" I yelled, just as the jets in my boots kicked in. I practically threw myself at Cass, and she squealed as I picked her up; the two of us spun, propelled forward by the rockets in my boots. I angled my feet, and we ended up crashing to the ground, on the far side of one of the nearby buildings.

"Goddamnit!" Cass yelled, as I rolled off her. "The fuck is that thing?!" The two of us got back on our feet, albeit unsteadily, but at least we were safe... for the moment. The corner of the building we were hiding behind was getting shredded, with metal and sparks flying everywhere. I could still hear the heavy footfalls of the beast advancing on us. It was only going to be a matter of time.

"Shiiiiit..." I rasped out, as the two of us kept backing up. "We don't have near the firepower to kill that thing."

"What about that Vertibird, earlier?" Cass snapped at me, backhanding me across the chest.

"The doors were open!" I shot back, my eyes never leaving the building corner that the minigun fire was determined to shred into gravel. "I don't think that'll work here!"

Suddenly, the noises changed again. It stopped stomping. The minigun fire became more erratic, and then stopped altogether. I could still hear the loud mechanical whirring noises, but not the heavy thuds of footfalls, which meant that it was still moving... just not forward.

"Assistance required!" it yelled out. And that sounded promising, if nothing else. So, cautiously at first, I made my way back to the shredded corner to get a look at what was going on. The robot was flailing wildly in place. The top half was spinning around, and the arms were going up and down, in a seemingly random fashion. I figured out what was going on when I saw the darkened shape clinging to the walker's head: the robot was trying to shake off its unwanted passenger.

"Tuera?" I said aloud, finally recognizing the shape. Instantly, Cass was on my back, grabbing the edge of the corner and peering around as well.

"Hang on, what?" she asked. "She's back?"

Tuera was hanging onto the top of the robot like she was riding a bucking brahmin, firing her plasma rifle into the top. It didn't seem to be doing much, though, since the machine just kept flailing... and it didn't stop until she flipped around, faced the windows, and fired her plasma rifle into that. The glass shattered and exploded outward from the superheated energy, and suddenly the walker stopped moving; all its limbs shuddered and went limp. Without a word, Tuera put her rifle back on her back, grabbed what was left of the window canopy, and tore it off like it was made out of tissue paper.

"Thanks for the help," I said, finally stepping out from behind the building. Tuera didn't say anything at first. She just grabbed the slab of ground chuck that used to be the walker's pilot and tossed him aside, getting in the pilot seat herself.

And then I realized: she wasn't wearing her helmet. I couldn't tell for certain from this distance, but it looked like she was relatively banged up.

"Get moving!" she yelled at us, over the metal grind of the robot re-activating. "More are coming! I'll cover you! Now GO!" The robot stomped around, turning in place just as more garage doors opened.

"Don't need t' tell me twice!" Cass yelled, grabbing my arm. "C'mon!" The two of us broke into a run just as the minigun fire started up again.

"Damnit..." I muttered. Off to the side, I could see movement. More soldiers were flooding in to try and surround us. "Son of a bitch!" I snapped off a few shots as I ran, but Cass tossed something their way was it a plasma grenade?

"Keep going!" she yelled, just as the grenade exploded in a bright purple flash. The next thing I knew, that narrow corridor with all the Enclave troops was suddenly filled with a cloud of dense purple smoke. It wasn't much... but hopefully that would cover us long enough to escape.

'There!" I shouted, pointing at a nearby open door, and the two of us ducked into it, if only to get out of the open. But when I closed the door behind us, we were surrounded by pitch black.

"Hah... huh... Fuck..." Cass muttered, clearly out of breath again. "Fuck, this is... oh man. Was it this bad in the Madre'r th' Divide?"

"Half and half, really," I said calmly, blinking my nightvision on so I could find a light switch. "The giant robots are throwing me for a loop, but... hell, I'm just glad we don't have to chop heads off to kill these guys."

"Oh, right..." Cass chuckled weakly. "I forgot 'bout that..."

"Yep. Shooting these guys seems to work just fine. And you know what?" I found a breaker box, turned off the nightvision in my eyes, and flipped the switch with a heavy clunk. "I'll take it." The lights in the ceiling turned on with a louder clunk, followed by a low-frequency buzz.

"G'damn..." Cass grumbled, shielding her eyes. "Th' fuck... are..." She trailed off as the two of us suddenly both realized where we were.

We were in a garage. And sitting in front of us, all pristine, shiny and new and what's more, completely unguarded was a tank. It was just as big as I was expecting, with heavy armor everywhere and a gigantic cannon on the top. I couldn't tell if it was a projectile weapon or an energy cannon, but you know what? I didn't care! It was a fuckin' TANK! And there was no one around to stop us!

"I got an' idea," I said, grinning like a maniac under my helmet.

"Are you thinkin' what I'm thinkin'?" Cass asked. I turned to face her with a nod, jabbing my thumb at the mammoth metal monster.

"C'mon. I'm tired of walking."