Reactivated (Bolt Eaters Trilogy Book 1) Read online

  REACTIVATED

  BOLT EATERS TRILOGY BOOK 1

  Isaac Hooke

  For my Mother

  My greatest, most devoted fan

  Contents

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Acknowledgments

  In Closing

  Copyright © 2018 by Isaac Hooke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  www.IsaacHooke.com

  Books by Isaac Hooke

  Military Science Fiction

  Bolt Eaters Trilogy

  Reactivated

  Reforged

  Redeemed

  Battle Harem

  Battle Harem 1

  Battle Harem 2

  Battle Harem 3

  AI Reborn Trilogy

  Refurbished

  Reloaded

  Rebooted

  ATLAS Trilogy

  (published by 47North)

  ATLAS

  ATLAS 2

  ATLAS 3

  Alien War Trilogy

  Hoplite

  Zeus

  Titan

  Argonauts

  Bug Hunt

  You Are Prey

  Alien Empress

  Quantum Predation

  Robot Dust Bunnies

  City of Phants

  Rade’s Fury

  Mechs vs. Dinosaurs

  A Captain's Crucible

  Flagship

  Test of Mettle

  Cradle of War

  Planet Killer

  Worlds at War

  Space Opera

  Star Warrior Quadrilogy

  Star Warrior

  Bender of Worlds

  He Who Crosses Death

  Doom Wielder

  Science Fiction

  The Forever Gate Series

  The Dream

  A Second Chance

  The Mirror Breaks

  They Have Wakened Death

  I Have Seen Forever

  Rebirth

  Walls of Steel

  The Pendulum Swings

  The Last Stand

  Thrillers

  The Ethan Galaal Series

  Clandestine

  A Cold Day in Mosul

  Terminal Phase

  Visit IsaacHooke.com for more information.

  1

  Eric stared at the flashing message on his HUD. It was marked urgent.

  Come quick. In trouble.

  He tried to call the sender of that message, Bambi, but she wasn’t answering. Nor did any other members of the former Bolt Eaters. They were all holed up in the same apartment building.

  Eric hurried between the densely-populated streets. Skyscrapers of steel, glass and solar panels towered over the pavement. Delivery drones roved to and fro above the crowd. Most of the throng was actually human today, rather than the usual robots—most people stayed home these days, as there was little reason to leave except for holidays and other celebrations. Today was one such occasion: the holiday celebrating the destruction of the alien mothership in orbit.

  It was hard to believe twenty years had passed since that day. Twenty years since half of humanity had been wiped out and a small group of soldiers, none of them entirely human, had given their lives to save the remainder.

  Eric had been one of those soldiers. Ordinarily this was a day for him to reflect on the sacrifice of his brothers and sisters, and his own near death, but the message he’d just received changed all that.

  Augmented reality overlays partially occluded his vision, advertising some product or other that he had no desire for. He disabled the interface entirely, clearing the overlays so that he didn’t have to worry about his vision being blocked.

  But Eric disabled it a bit too late and accidentally slammed into a passer-by who had been blocked by one of the overlays. It was a dude who believed in body augmentation—his biceps bulged unnaturally, his chest was huge, his back was a V taper, and he stood over six and a half feet tall. But Eric, about a head shorter and skinny as hell, knocked the guy right over. Eric’s formerly human psyche resided inside an android body, after all, so although he might seem average-looking, his strength was ten times that of an ordinary man. As was his speed. He glanced over his shoulder to confirm that the guy was okay, then continued on his way.

  He amped up his servomotor output and moved his mind into Bullet Time, the accelerated time sense that allowed him to operate faster than any human could. To the passersby he’d be moving at a blur. It drained his battery faster, however, so he had to keep an eye on his levels.

  Police drones were rushing underneath the skylanes overhead, underneath the air traffic. They were headed in the direction of the apartment he shared with the surviving Bolt Eaters.

  That can’t be good.

  After crossing a street where the self-driving vehicular traffic had been reduced to a crawl, he made his way to the avenue that led to his apartment. The skyscrapers receded, leaving behind low- and medium-rise apartment buildings. The crowds thinned out, leaving only delivery drones flying just overhead.

  When he neared the avenue in question, he was met by a blockade: the whole street was cordoned off, so he couldn’t proceed further.

  Eric approached one of the police robots on guard and reduced his time sense to normal.

  “What’s going on?” Eric asked.

  “Please stay back, for your own safety,” the robot said.

  “I live in an apartment just around the corner,” Eric said.

  “You can’t enter,” the robot said.

  “My friends are still inside,” Eric said. “They’re not answering my calls.”

  “Please stay back, for your own safety,” the robot repeated.

  Eric frowned, then stepped back. He walked until he reached the alley between two apartment buildings, then he entered. He encountered a wooden fence only two meters in. He leaped up, easily reaching the top of the fence, and peered over. He could see an empty alleyway, and on the far side, another fence. There were police vehicles with flashing lights beyond that fence.

  They won’t let me through, either.

  Eric let himself down. He went to the apartment building, and found a small carbon fiber conduit running along the outside.

  Perfect.

  He pulled himself onto that conduit and began to climb. His fingers crushed the metal, ensuring he had a good grip. Beside him, part of the wall protruded outward as part of the architect’s stylistic design—it also prevented the police robots on the far side of the alley from spotting him.

  He reached the top and carefully peered over the edge. On the far side, robots were aiming combat rifles over the ledge, in the direction of his apartment building. He couldn’t actually see the building yet.

  He recognized the model of the combat robots: military-grade Savages.
They had eyes on the backs of their heads.

  He repositioned along the edge, maneuvering until the superstructures and gooseneck vents on the rooftop shielded him from the rear-view cameras of the combat robots on the far side, and then he carefully pulled himself onto the rooftop.

  He hid behind one of the vents; he heard a series of explosions, starting out farther away, and slowly moving closer. The final explosion was extremely loud, and the rooftop shook—Eric realized something had struck this building.

  He carefully peered past the vent, toward the combat robots, and realized the corner of the roof where they had crouched had been blown clean away. One of the Savages had been thrown backward by the force of the impact, and its body was littered with shrapnel. It wasn’t going to get up.

  Eric left his cover and hurried to the fallen robot. He ripped the rifle from its grasp. The army used to have lockouts in place to prevent just anyone from picking up a weapon and firing it. However, because enemy governments figured out how to hack the weapons, the lockouts were eventually abandoned so that the feature couldn’t be used against us.

  Us. Funny how I still think of myself as army, even after all these years.

  Eric tried to access the remote interface through his HUD. Yep. He had full control.

  He made his way to the ruined corner of the building and peered over the intact ledge beside it.

  He spotted his apartment building in the distance, two blocks away. There was a black, vaguely arrow-shaped ship on the rooftop—he thought it was a transport of some kind. A quick ID turned up nothing despite the military database he carried aboard, but that could simply be due to how outdated his particular database was. It had been twenty years since his last army stint, after all. Not that he had personally aged during any of that time.

  Before he could aim his newly recovered laser rifle, the craft launched a volley of plasma bolts in multiple directions; he ducked when some of those bolts came his way. One of them smashed into the stairwell superstructure behind him; the area exploded, leaving a huge blast crater in its wake.

  So not an ordinary transport, then. Definitely something military or police grade.

  He wondered just what the hell the attackers were doing on that particular apartment building. They couldn’t have come for Eric and the Bolt Eaters, could they?

  But then again, why else would they be assaulting this otherwise nondescript building? No one else of note lived here, as far as he knew. And Eric and the others were living under assumed names and identities. No one knew who they were, let alone that they were the group of soldiers responsible for saving humanity those twenty years ago.

  He thought of Bambi’s urgent text message.

  Come quick. In trouble.

  Yeah, there was no other reason for that transport to be here, other than to harm or capture his friends.

  Overhead, a police drone rushing to the scene was shot down by another volley, and the craft crashed into another building nearby with a loud explosion.

  Eric peered back over the ledge of the building. His gaze was drawn to the flashing lights in the streets below, where autonomous police vehicles were scattered along the asphalt-solar panel combinations. Combat robots were hiding behind the vehicles. Larger mechs were also hidden behind vehicles and any other objects they could take cover behind, including benches, kiosks and alleyways. Some of the mechs carried ballistic shields, which they had deployed in front of themselves and slammed into the asphalt to crouch behind in the middle of the street.

  Across from the defenders, at the base of Eric’s apartment, several small, spherical drones were zig-zagging in random patterns. The drones launched plasma bolts—and probably lasers outside the visual band, too—at the police vehicles and mechs, mostly evading any return fire.

  He switched his gaze to the rooftops. There were no other airborne police drones out there, but he suspected more were incoming. On the other buildings he could see sniper robots; he was able to ID them as SWAT models. They were aiming at both the transport on the roof of the apartment, and the zigzagging drones near the base. Eric also spotted the wreckages of a few sniper robots: their bodies drooped over the uppermost edges of their respective buildings.

  He returned his gaze to the apartment that was under siege.

  In retrospect, staying together in the same building had probably been a mistake.

  Eric had no idea how he was going to reach that building without getting shot. He wasn’t worried so much about damaging his android body—it was paid for on the military’s dime—but his AI core. While he had a recent backup stored in a bank vault, that was only reassuring to a degree. He would still personally die if his AI core failed, but his copy would live on in a different mind and body, preserving his memories, personality, and skills to the world. But it would always only be a copy. That was one of the prices of immortality: one was never really immortal. Death by natural causes no longer existed, but an unnatural demise was a very real threat.

  He’d grown too comfortable in his android body, too accustomed to his peaceful, well-preserved existence, to risk his life in a situation like this. He was just a simple programmer now who made custom VR environments for a living; a lucrative one at that. He made enough to support not only himself, but the two beautiful android women and former teammates he had developed a relationship with. He’d left his fighting days well behind him.

  Yes, he didn’t want to leave cover, not at all. Hell, he didn’t even want to fire his rifle, though the knowledge of how to do so was permanently burned into his AI core. He had no desire to die here and now for no reason.

  But I do have a reason. Trying to rescue those who are closer to me than brothers. And the two women I love more than anything in the world.

  A police gunship arrived and began a missile barrage against the black transport; those mini guns on either side also whirred frantically as the gunship unleashed a hailstorm of invisible laser fire.

  Fuck it.

  If he was going to act, now was the time.

  Eric scrambled to his feet. He hoped to use the distraction provided by the gunship to leap across to the next building, and perhaps the one after that. He figured he would need to take a running leap to make it, so he withdrew several paces, then took off at a sprint.

  He reached the edge and jumped toward the opposite rooftop. He arced over the gap between the two buildings and landed on the targeted roof. He continued sprinting, heading for the far side, which bordered his under-siege apartment building.

  He knew the police snipers would be opening fire on him by then—while he would be identified as a civilian, he doubted that would stop them from attacking, first of all because he inhabited a robot body, and second of all he was running straight into a war zone. So he began zigzagging, and switched to Bullet Time to dodge the expected attacks.

  Sure enough, plasma bolts began to come in from the rooftops around him, but also from ahead, underneath the black transport: the attackers were firing on him, too. He dodged easily thanks to his accelerated time sense. Some laser rifles were no doubt attempting to target him as well, and that was something he wouldn’t be able to dodge—he just had to hope his random zigzagging would prevent anyone from scoring a hit.

  Above, the gunship was smoking—the helo had taken several hits and was on the way down.

  As he grew near to the edge of the rooftop, and the apartment building ahead, he could see the black objects crouched beneath the arrow-shaped transport. They were humankind in shape—likely robots, but as expected, an ID scan returned no matching makes and models.

  Now that the gunship was down, more of those robots were turning their weapons toward him.

  Eric reached the edge of the building and dove over, not intending to leap across, but rather aiming for a window of an apartment three stories down.

  He flew across the street, holding the rifle close to his chest, and rotated along his axis before striking the glass. He smashed into a rug and rolled into a ball until
he slammed into a dresser. He glanced at his battery power: he had used up a little too much for his liking, so he returned his time sense to normal.

  A woman crouched behind the dresser promptly screamed.

  “Sorry.” Eric clambered to his feet. He collected the laser rifle from where it had slid into the wall beside him. He made a quick transfer of credits to the woman’s account as he got up, but she was too scared to accept so he dismissed the window on his HUD and moved into the hallway.

  He reached the kitchen of the single bedroom apartment, which also served as the foyer, and peered through the eyehole. The hallway seemed clear outside.

  He pulled up his comm screen and tried to connect with Bambi or anyone else again. No good: there was a jammer of some kind in place. He couldn’t even access the Internet anymore.

  The woman had apparently followed him, because a moment later he felt a bottle breaking on his head.

  He turned to look at her and waved an admonishing finger.

  She backed away, seeming very pale, like she was about to faint, but then he turned and opened the door. Before he stepped into the hallway, he told her: “Stay hidden until the police come. Behind the counter.”