That was the last thing he ever saw.
Brain matter aside and dead koob lying on the floor of the security station, Jack scanned the controls and inserted the device Reiser had given him. It would run the hack and decrypt the passwords the koobs had added after installation. After that he deactivated the laser and left for the basement.
Last step.
Accomplish that, and then open the front door and done, thought Jack Bowie as he pressed a button and the false wall blast door folded away in a nearby wall, exposing a ramp leading down into the gloom of the lower basement.
35
The hack that opened the massive security blast door guarding the private collection of whoever it was who had funded the construction of the museum took longer than expected.
Reiser’s slicing device did the actual job and while it worked, Bowie switched modes from biologic engagement with the Nine and knife, to use of the fancy new EM blaster bot-poppers.
None of Reiser’s intel gave any indication of what to expect inside the private collection. It was anyone’s guess. The only thing known was that it had to be secured for Mr. Nilo.
That was the only priority. Jack didn’t know what. He didn’t know why. Despite all he’d done in the Team Nilo auditions… he still didn’t feel “in” enough to ask about it. And usually, he wouldn’t have cared either way. A job was a job.
It was just… things about this one didn’t add up.
The hack broke through the last of the security interlocks, each pulsing red until they shifted over into the open configuration identified by a soft mint-green glow. Once the last lock was opened, the gleaming titanium blast door opened vertically, the bottom half sinking into the floor, the top half rising into the foundation of the museum above. Buttresses behind the dual blast doors, providing support for any attempts to blow it inward, likewise retracted.
Beyond the blast door was a pristine room worthy of any fantastic deep government research and development think tank site or hospital operating room. Beyond the clean room was a simple, small door that had to lead into the inner sanctums of the collection. Where the Savages’ lost playthings were kept.
Bowie crouched behind some nearby lift-pallets and studied the entrance. There had to be a trap of some kind still waiting for him between blast doors and the collection itself. It wasn’t this easy. And through the suit he could feel some kind of immense… unholy… power emanating out in waves across the basement.
Unholy, thought Bowie incredulously. His mind was not given to the use of such hokey words. But that’s what it felt like. Something forbidden. Something dangerous. Something the soul could feel, and felt that it was wrong. Whatever it was.
Something ancient.
Bowie stood, EM blaster ready, and moved cautiously into the clean room. It wasn’t until his foot stepped over the threshold and into the startlingly sterile space that two massive war bots decloaked and appeared.
Reiser swore over the comm as it began to fritz out and fill with static. Bowie moved to dodge a sudden array of targeting lasers dancing out from the ancient war machines’ deadly weapon systems, thinking that Reiser must’ve been watching the feed through the HUD lens. But those thoughts were far away in a distant part of his mind as he ran to avoid getting killed a hundred times over.
“Those are HHK-103s!” shouted Reiser.
Everyone who’d ever been a boy growing up in the Galactic Republic and who loved war had studied the weapons and weapon systems of that long-ago conflict that enveloped the galaxy.
The Savage Wars.
103s had been heavy bot warfighting systems fielded by the Republic in the days of the Syneron and Agalates campaigns deep in the Orion cluster worlds. Without a doubt some of the most violent battles legionnaires and Savage Marines had ever fought. 103s had been designed to go into the maelstrom and kill everything until they’d been turned offline. Heavy armor. Light Refractive Ambush Cloaking Technology. No munitions. Only energy weapons and onboard reactors made them near-undefeatable. One had supposedly broken the Savage line at Tu-Caar Gap when the Legion had been surrounded at twenty-to-one odds in a steaming jungle hellhole they called the Death Paddies.
Now, right in front of Jack Bowie, two of those fabled death machines were spinning up heavy blaster cannons on six different arms and powering up to unload a fury of high powered blaster fire on him.
Bowie fell back while firing the EM blaster. Watching as the targeting spam attempted to scramble their systems while the weapon fired short but powerful EM bursts. Turning to run for cover as he fired EM blasts at the nearest one, his weapon made a weird, otherworldly sound. Like a koob croaking underwater, electronically. The blasts nailed some of the components of the nearest 103 and shut down some of its systems, but a moment later a torrent of lasers began to tear up the heavy shipping containers Bowie had just barely gotten behind, slicing cleanly through and leaving charred lines and licking flames.
But Bowie was still alive. The targeting spam was having some effect on their ability to acquire. Team Nilo made nice toys. That was for sure.
From his cover, Bowie couldn’t see the bots directly, but he could hear the screech of the ancient ceramic tracks dragging the towering death machines across the clean room floor toward him. Once they got close it wouldn’t matter if they could target or not. They’d mutilate him through sheer firepower. They sounded like ancient battle tanks as they rumbled closer.
Not one of Reiser’s contingency
