Chapter 18:

Assassin

Apocalypse Punk


More bots tried to stop us as we pressed on through to the next level of the facility, but with all our combined efforts we managed to get to the second floor where Sadie was supposedly being held up.

The area above this one was far more vast and wide then the lab. It was a chamber that looked like a hangar bay. Orb bots were scattered all around us, but not in aggressive mode or patrolling for intruders. They were doing menial jobs like carting large containers of familiar piss yellow liquid or repairing equipment. All that busy work allowed us to slip right past them without being noticed.

At the center of this hangar was a thorium reactor, quickly identified by Yuri. Some sort of large machine was hooked up to the top of it. It looked like a loosely connected pile of unfinished scrap. The longer I stared at it, the more suspiciously bot-like it appeared, but giant sized.

At the tip of its elongated head was a blue dome. Through the glass we could see the silhouette of a small person lying still inside.

“That’s gotta be her,” I said. “Yuri, do you know what she’s sitting in? It looks a lot different from the pods downstairs.”

He didn’t have a clue, but noted that it looked “suspiciously bot-like,” almost word for word copying my thoughts. A control console near the machine had more information to offer us.

“Yes, she’s in there,” he discovered. “It’s called a colossus war machine. Apparently she’s acting as the brain for it, but it's only half finished.”

With a name like ‘colossus war machine,’ I had a feeling this bot was made for more than just protecting government structures.

“How the hell is that possible that she's its brain?” I asked.

“All the people downstairs were feeding this robot data… Tactical information, if I had to assume,” he claimed. “Her mind is somehow able to resonate with the machine and process the data it’s collected.”

I’d never heard of a bot that needed a human to make it work, but then again I’d never seen one this big. Even during the Bot War, the worst we ever saw were variants of the juggernauts and titan tanks.

“So she’s piloting that mech?” Ben asked.

“She’s not piloting it. The colossus is a robot, not some sort of suit of armor. She’s almost like an AI being forced to convert human memories into something the machine can read. Don’t ask me how that works, because I’m just learning this too.”

Regardless of what it was, we needed to get her out of there before she permanently mind-melded with that thing or something.

Yuri got to work digging deeper into the computer to find any info for getting her out, but he only got a surface level understanding of what we were looking at. He eventually stumbled onto a section called (WEAPON SYSTEMS) which outlined the array of guns and canons this machine was armed with. Not all the weapons were accessible, but this thing was ready to be a one-bot war winner. A particularly large canon on its shoulder was proof that this was not a machine worth screwing with.

“Yuri, quit messing around with all that info and get us a way to save Sadie.”

“This might be one of the only chances to learn what we're looking at,” he said. “Do you have a thumb drive? I can download the schematics and look at them later.”

Flash drives were easy to come by, so I had dozens of them… Most filled with porn and school projects from pre-war teens with too much time on their hands. As long as he didn’t start browsing, he could have as many as he wanted.

I gave him the largest one I had, which was about 90 gigs of storage. He got to work downloading everything here.

Suddenly something quick flew right by our heads and broke the flashdrive! From the sound and following ricochet, it had to have been a bullet.

I turned to see where the bullet had been shot. Someone in a tight black leather suit holding a sniper was looking down on us from an upper catwalk. She didn’t waste any time firing off a few more bullets at us.

“Gah!” Yuri fell backwards as he was shot.

“Yuri!” I raised up my rifle and returned fire. “You’re gonna pay for that one, bitch!”

The assassin on the catwalk took my shot directly, but an energy shield around her body reflected the damage.

I reached for my belt and popped the pin off a smoke grenade, dropping it to our feet and pulling up a pair of goggles from my neck. The goggles made it just a bit easier to see in the foggy air, at least enough that I could check on Ben and Yuri.

“Yuri!” I frantically dove down to him and checked to see if he was still alive. His heart was still beating, but he was out cold.

“The bullet didn’t hit anything vital,” Ben claimed, “but he needs some treatment ASAP.”

I immediately pulled out whatever first aid gear I had and gave it to Ben, putting Yuri’s fate in his hands.

“Don’t let him die, you hear me!?” I growled, raising my rifle and preparing to leave the smoke. “I’ll take out that bitch assassin and keep her off you guys.”

“Give her hell!”

Not wasting another second, I topped off my Marand rifle and dove out of the smoke, making sure to present myself as the assassin's next target.

She wasn’t where I last saw her. Instead I had to look around the big chamber for any sign of where she was.

Another bullet fired, the moment it did I jumped in a random direction, narrowly avoiding the hit. But thanks to her miss, I knew what shadow she was hiding in.

My return fire hit her, causing her energy shield to repel the shot, but also reveal her location fully.

“Got you!” I continued to fire, not missing a single shot, but not cracking her shield at all.

That confidence in her protection was pissing me off, since she wasn’t even trying to dodge anything I was throwing at her.

If I could have gotten close enough, an EMP grenade might have been enough to disable that shield, but she was pretty high up compared to my lowly position.

Getting up to her wouldn’t be difficult though. A loading platform was rising up next to me, so I jumped on and hid behind a crate, occasionally shooting so she wouldn’t lose interest in me.

“I have an idea…”

My two remaining little mice boys were itching for some revenge, emboldened by the sacrifice of Moukia. Moutorola stepped up to bat as I duct taped an EMP grenade onto his back, setting the timer on it for about fifteen seconds.

Once the rising platform reached her level, I released my mouse.

“Squeak Squeak!”

It was off to the races with him, but I kept the pressure on with a few more bullets.

Finally once he reached her, she seemed to take notice of his presence. But by that point it was too late. The EMP went off and fried her shield, also disabling Moutorola too.

That was my chance. I ran at her and opened fire. She didn’t hesitate to shoot back at the same time.

“Ah!”

“Guh!”

We both grunted as bullets traded and hit our guns away. She went to draw a sidearm, but I was close enough to knock it from her hands with a swing of my right fist.

I lunged onto her and started beating the shit out of her, making sure to keep the dominant presence in the fight. Her mask came off and I made sure to bloody up that pretty face I discovered underneath.

Finally she gained some traction and punched back, but also drew a combat knife.

“Two can play at that game, Bitch!” I drew a knife from my boot.

We both locked hands on each other's blade wielding wrists.

She was on her back and had limited options protecting her heart from my cold steel, but I was able to tilt my left side slightly away from her to protect my own.

Our struggle continued until it was looking like I was going to overpower her on sheer strength alone, but then her forehead collided with mine in a headbutt, bashing me back and dazing me.

Blood trickled down my forehead while stars covered my vision. I weakly attempted to wipe it away, but just ended up making a bloody mess all over my face.

Rather than finish me off, she shoved me away and pulled out some sort of device. Her thumb pressed down on a bright red button and a loud alarm went off, followed by a series of explosions around the hangar. I turned my head to see several of those piss yellow canisters light up, causing the ceiling to become unstable and let in water.

By the time my head was coming too, the assassin girl was gone and huge waterfalls were spilling down into the hangar floor.


***


I barely made it back to the others before the water made it impossible to walk around the ground floor. We were on a platform a few meters up, so it was going to take time for all that to reach our level.

Luckily, this water was coming from the lake, so we had the option of floating up to the surface to escape… But Sadie was still trapped inside the colossus bot and needed to be freed.

“Is Yuri okay?” I asked Ben.

“For now,” Ben claimed. “I stabilized him and got the bullet out, but he’ll need a doctor to look at him.”

There were plenty of doctors in the city here, so he’d be fine. I had to believe that so I didn’t worry as much about his fate.

“What happened to the assassin?” Ben asked.

“She got away,” I replied. “But if she’s gone, that’s one less problem we have to worry about right now.”

Our priority one was getting Sadie out, then making our exit.

Yuri was awake, but only just barely. He weakly pointed to the machine and started huffing out a few words.

“Emergency… release…” he grit his teeth. “Opens… hatch…” His lights turned out after that and he was out cold.

If all it took to get her out of there was an emergency release, then it wouldn’t be an issue for me. I dropped anything that would have weighed me down and prepared to dive right into the water.

“I’m going to save her, not you!” Ben argued.

“I can’t carry Yuri,” I flexed my arm to show the difference in our size. “You find something that floats and get topside. I’ll go rescue Sadie.”

“Hell no!” he shouted in my face. “She’s my partner, not yours! You think I can just leave her fate to someone else? If she dies, I don’t know what I’d do with myself!”

“I know how you feel!” I shouted back at him. “I trusted you with my partner, now you do the same for me!”

Ben was loyal to his companion, no doubt about it. But I was just as loyal and I wouldn’t half ass returning a favor to him.

“Trust me,” I said with a dead serious face. “I won’t screw her over. I’ll get her out of here and safely back to you before you know it.”

His cold, angry face was hard to read. Neither of us were even blinking while waiting to see how he would respond.

“Bring her back safe. Not a hair out of place.”

I nodded with a thumbs up and smirk. “You got it.”

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