Most likely he was dead. That much was clear to Jack Bowie.
Don’t be a lamb.
He shucked the bando of bot-poppers over his neck, daisy-chained them, and tossed them at the approaching machines.
Like a sudden string of bombastic firecrackers going off inside tin cans filled with aluminum strips, the explosives detonated, sending powerful electromagnetic explosions out across the room.
Bowie’s suit went dead, his HUD useless.
Both bots went haywire and started engaging anything and everything. Shooting up walls and shipping containers across the depths of the lower basement. Destroying priceless artifacts that lay outside the vault, stored down here until a display could be set up.
The air was a deadly crisscross of fire until one of the machines fried its targeting programming and decided to engage the other as an enemy. Within seconds both fearsome warbots had shot each other to ruined metal.
Lasers left graffiti on walls. Bolts whined and zinged by him. The death machines exploded in sudden fusillades of pyrotechnic destruction. The building’s fire system blinked to life, but quickly retracted. Reiser must’ve shut it off. Smoke and burnt ozone filled the air and both giants fell silent seconds after their violent duel.
When it was over, Jack Bowie stood, EM blaster again ready to engage whatever came next.
They could be rerouting and rebooting… powering back up. Warbots had capabilities that allowed them to seem destroyed, and then suddenly come back as an IED, or a suicide attack. But these looked pretty well wrecked.
Still, it paid to be cautious.
Bowie aimed at one, targeting the thick processor banks that had been exposed via damage beneath the sensor housing acting as the machine’s head. He pulled the EM blaster’s trigger and got nothing.
He realized that the blast from the bot-poppers had fried everything. Not just his HUD and suit. His blaster and even the comm were offline.
A second later Reiser was back in his ear.
“… worry, Jack. The suit will reset. If you can hear me acknowledge. Say again…”
“I read you,” muttered Bowie.
In his hands the EM blaster came back to life, its digital readouts and charge loads displaying along the lower receiver. In his HUD lens he got a weapons synch indicator.
“Damn that was close,” said Reiser over the comm.
That was the understatement of the year, thought Bowie.
“Hopefully that’s all, Jack. But be on your guard when you get in there. Can’t see the owner exposing something as valuable as your objective to that sort of destruction. And do this quick. Dawn is an hour away and I’d like to be gone by the time the sun rises.”
Bowie acknowledged and entered the inner sanctum of the private collection of Savage artifacts just as he lost comm with Reiser again. Something in the construction of the vault was interfering. But they’d established that the mission continued in that event.
Bowie passed down a long corridor beyond the clean room, just as pristine as what he’d passed. Along the corridor were various windows that looked down into small rooms where some artifact or another was on display. At times the artifacts seemed strange and mysterious. At others they were easily identifiable.
It was a museum inside a museum. Holographic digital lettering in ghostly blue, the font always linked to the Savage style that was now as iconic and enigmatic as all the other symbols of hate that had surfaced in humanity’s cultural swamps, appeared as Bowie neared the observation glass of the first room. The holographic font appeared and described what the artifact inside was.
The battered remains of a GHK were displayed on a pristine white pedestal. Like some museum piece in the floors above. The GHK was the standard battle rifle for early era Savage Marines. Nothing worth the type of security Jack had gotten past, though. In the next room lay a section of circuitry board for a Savage lighthugger’s lift system waiting under glass like the lost fragments of some ancient civilization’s holy text.
Jack read the placards labels as he moved by.
Nano-Injector Tubes that once contained longevity treatments from the Savage lighthugger Quest for Oblivion, lost at the Battle of Andalore, were in the next room. Strange crowns, slender and delicate, made of bronze and adorned with scrolling circuity, were identified as interfaces for a virtual world the Savages of The Id Confederacy used to access a private world of fantastic wonders only they knew. Perhaps it was still out there. Hidden on some lost planetoid and running on some ancient server.
Bowie passed a window that was completely dark. The ghostly Savage lettering indicated inside was the last remaining Savage OS-ENDGAME Cyberworm still running something called the Unity Virus. Discovered on the ruined world of Britannia.
Bowie had never heard of the place. But the description sounded like a textbook banned cyber weapon. And then suddenly realized he might be dealing with some very deep, dark, and scary stuff. Mass-extinction stuff.
And then, for a second, it was clear why Team Nilo, or just Nilo himself, wanted this Savage tech.
He wanted to tell Reiser that this was stuff no one should be messing with. But he passed other wonders which distracted him from the larger issue at hand. The things he was seeing were the stuff of legend and rumors, lost treasures of a fantastic civilization the galaxy had simply called Savages when they’d come out of the stellar dark.
Come to exterminate so they could make the galaxy over in their image.
“Welcome, human,” said a bot’s synthesized voice.
Bowie froze.
“Do not worry, human. I can see you. You’re currently within the outer displays area of the master’s exhibit. I have alerted the system defenses to your presence and you will be terminated shortly.”
Silence.
Bowie looked around. No visible cameras or sensors.
