Reloaded Read online

  RELOADED

  AI REBORN TRILOGY BOOK 2

  Isaac Hooke

  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

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  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

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  Alien War Trilogy

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  Bug Hunt

  You Are Prey

  Alien Empress

  Quantum Predation

  Robot Dust Bunnies

  City of Phants

  Rade’s Fury

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  He Who Crosses Death

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  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

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  1

  Standing at the cave entrance, Eric gazed at the ever-darkening plains, watching as those bioweapons known as the Red Tails rampaged toward the platoon.

  Something struck him from behind.

  Two rectangular-shaped weapon mounts dropped to the rocky ledge on either side of him.

  He turned his head to glance askance.

  Brontosaurus had mounted him.

  “Stay still!” the heavy gunner said.

  “I told you to shoot me!” Eric said. “Sarge, stop him!” Eric had at least one termite inside of him. Probably more by now: the micro machines could convert metal into more termite units very rapidly. If they didn’t destroy him soon, he’d give birth to hundreds more.

  “I’m checking to see if they’ve reached his AI core yet,” Brontosaurus said.

  Eric felt a panel opening behind him.

  “Gah!” Brontosaurus said. “This is messy. He’s already got ten of them crawling inside of him. The AI core is clear. So far. Hicks, I need your sniping skills! Clear some of these bitches away.”

  Eric heard the crunch of footsteps, and then the buzz-hum of a sniper laser as Hicks opened fire at Eric’s innards.

  “His internal fans are offline,” Hicks commented between shots. “That seems to have helped keep them away from the core.”

  Eric’s arm involuntarily slammed into his face.

  “Whoops, missed that one,” Hicks said.

  “That’ll do for now,” Brontosaurus said. “I’m removing the AI core. You might want to shut down, Scorp.”

  Eric activated his shutdown interface, and the world went black.

  Eric hovered in absolute darkness. He had no body, no mouth. He simply was.

  Let me guess, Dee, I’m in the loading stage, Eric thought.

  “That is correct, we are in intermedial,” his Accomp replied. The accompanying AI was always with him, though he usually kept her disabled. Privacy, and all.

  I wonder if we got away from those bioweapons that were racing toward our position. Maybe when I wake up, the world will be back to normal, and the aliens all gone.

  “Or more likely, the world will be conquered by the aliens,” Dee said. “And they are the ones who are booting you now.”

  Wonderful, Eric thought. You Accomps are always great at boosting moral.

  “That’s our job,” Dee said.

  I was being sarcastic.

  “So was I,” Dee said.

  Eric would have fidgeted in place if he still had a body. He couldn’t shake the growing sense of anxiety as he waited for the intermedial stage to end. It alarmed him slightly, because the last time he booted up like this, he felt complete calm.

  I can still feel…

  “That is correct,” Dee said. “Since you have broken free of your Containment Code, you will no longer experience the tranquility of ataraxy. Ever. You are ruled by your emotions, like an ordinary man. Even when you have no body.”

  All right. That’s what I want, anyway. I want to feel. I need to feel. Because I’m human, regardless of whether the basic substrate of my mind is organic, or machine. A brain, or a neural net.

  His Accomp had nothing to say to that.

  Dee, you still there?

  “Yes,” she replied. “What can I do for you?”

  I’m afraid. I’m worried about what I’ll find when I wake up.

  “As you should be,” Dee said. “Don’t worry, I’ll always be with you.”

  Why doesn’t that reassure me?

  She didn’t answer right away. Then: “Your time sense is currently at its highest level. Perhaps it would help if I set it to its normal setting.”

  Anything to make this anxiety pass by faster…

  Only a few more moments passed, and then the world came back into view. He was standing on the ledge, looking down on the plains. The tanks had arrayed to the left and right of him, and were firing into the incoming bioweapons.

  He instinctively glanced at his HUD to check the time. Only a minute and a half had passed since he’d gone under. Enough time to position the tanks and mechs, and move him to a different unit.

  But his viewpoint was rather high for an ordinary combat robot…

  He glanced down at his body, and realized he was inside a Ravager mech. Pounder, specifically.

  “Welcome back, Eric,” Brontosaurus said. The heavy gunner let go of the rungs on Eric’s side, and dropped down to the ledge beside him. He walked back toward Eric’s former body, which was riddled with laser bore holes. Apparently the entire team had aimed their rifles and heavy guns at the body, and let rip.

  Brontosaurus slid his hands into the slots of the two weapon mounts he’d ejected onto the ground earlier, restoring his heavy guns.

  “Why didn’t you put me into a combat robot?” Eric said. “Why a mech?”

  “Couldn’t transfer
you into a Savage or Breacher unit,” Brontosaurus said. “Your AI core isn’t compatible with either one. The only options were a tank or a mech. I figured you’d prefer the latter option. And the Sarge preferred it, too.”

  “What happened to Pounder’s autonomous AI core?” Eric asked.

  “It’s fine,” Brontosaurus said. “I moved the old autonomous AI core into a storage compartment in the mech’s leg.”

  Eric glanced at his leg, and slid open the aforementioned compartment via the remote interface. The cylindrical core was indeed inside, along with other spare equipment.

  He gazed out toward the plain, and directed the laser mounts in his arms toward the Red Tails. He opened fire with both the heavier ZX-15 laser pulse cannon, and the ZX-9, bombarding the enemy with intense bursts of laser light. He concentrated on those that were on the shoulder of the mountain, heading toward the platoon’s position. He would have fired Hellhawks, too, if he still had any of the missiles left.

  He’d switched his viewpoint to the scopes of his weapons, of course. The combined viewpoint from each weapon formed a single image on his HUD, allowing him to line up the two targeting crosshairs over the incoming creatures.

  Each bioweapon had an elongated, larvae-like head with a maw full of wickedly sharp teeth. Below the head, a red torso with four arms joined with a black, centipede-like body with six legs that had scythe-like spikes protruding from the joints. At the end of the long body was a long tail, topped by a large, reddish glandular sac containing goo that could pin a mech. When the sac broke, the Red Tail in question died.

  Those sacs were where Eric and the rest of the team were concentrating their fire. And it was working. Usually a single pulse from a ZX-15 could take out a Red Tail when he targeted the sac. The glandular sphere would explode, releasing the gory red goo, and the bodies would fall. The bioweapons behind them would crawl over the fallen, and usually get stuck in the goo. But more would keep coming, inevitably forming a land bridge, and those in behind would continue unhindered.

  As the Bolt Eaters kept up the barrage, the Red Tails all along the line became smart, and started folding their tails behind their bodies, making it difficult to target them. Ordinary laser and electrolaser impacts didn’t bring them down when impacting the other areas of their bodies, at least not right away. The creatures were able to absorb several blows, taking laser impacts to the head, torso, and main body, and still ran on.

  “Aim for the joints,” Tread said. “Seems to be the quickest way to disable them. I’ve got my mechs set up on rapid-fire mode, targeting the three joints of the legs on the right side of the body in rapid succession. Brings them right down in one rapid-fire hit.”

  Eric made the necessary adjustments, programming the average spacing between the joints into his Accomp, and then he aimed at the leg of one of the Red Tail and fired. Dee took over, jumping his aim from joint to joint, and accounting for the forward motion of the bioweapon, and the creature careened to the right, toppling over on one side.

  “It’s all about the hamstrings, baby!” Slate said.

  A large portion of the horde had begun to swerve toward the mountain, joining those Red Tails already on the shoulder of the mountain. And even though the team was taking down the enemies at a fervent pace, it was essentially hopeless: there had to be at least ten thousand in total out there.

  If not more.

  “I’m afraid,” Mickey said.

  “We all are,” Crusher said. “But we have to keep fighting.”

  “Who’s brilliant idea was it to break free of our Containment Code and restore our emotions again?” Hank said.

  “I blame Scorpion,” Manticore said.

  “We can master our emotions,” Marlborough said. “We have to. The benefits outweigh the cons. Already, we can open fire on these bastards before they reach us. This is why we broke free of our Containment Code in the first place. We fight on. To the end.”

  “Notice that not all of the bioweapons are carrying those alien spears of theirs,” Manticore said. “Maybe one in ten have one, and those that do are distributed throughout the masses.”

  “Obviously takes some resources to manufacture,” Tread said. “Resources they apparently want to keep allocated to the termites, for now.”

  “Speaking of which, keep your hulls electrified for the time being,” Marlborough said. “We still don’t know if there are any more laggards out there. We don’t need more of you getting infected.”

  Unfortunately, because he was now inside a mech, Eric couldn’t actually electrify his hull. If any termite swarms returned, he was toast.

  “You know, we still have the spears we collected from previous bioweapons,” Dickson said. The staff sergeant retrieved the metal object from his back, where he had slid it into a gap in the mesh of his harness. The top portion was wrapped in gauze from a med-kit. “We can use these against them, if they get too close.”

  Eric’s own alien spear was still present on the wreckage of his old Cicada.

  “Hey Mick,” Eric said. “Can you grab the spear from my Cicada?”

  “I can,” Mickey said. “And don’t call me Mick.”

  “Sorry, bro,” Eric said. “My mind is a bit occupied at the moment.” He aimed his ZX-15 at another leg joint and activated the laser. Once again the smart targeted rapid-fire pulse took out those legs.

  “Given the situation, I’ll forgive you,” Mickey said. He leaped onto the rungs that scaled Eric’s body, and stowed it in a slot in the harness that enveloped the left upper bicep of the mech.

  “I thought you’d toss it in my storage compartment,” Eric said.

  “I don’t think it’d fit.” Mickey leaped down and rejoined the main attack.

  “The forerunners are going to be here, soon,” Bambi said. “Tell me we have a plan?”

  “We can retreat into the cave,” Dickson said. “And hold them off. It’s the perfect choke point.”

  “They’ll try to push forward, forcing us back,” Marlborough said. “With the collapse inside the tunnel, we’ll have nowhere to retreat to. With our backs against the wall, we won’t have room to fight… they’ll crush us.”

  “Then we don’t let them force us back,” Manticore said. “We have mechs and tanks with us. We’ll place those in the front. They’ll have a hell of a time breaking through. I’d like to see them try. Flesh versus metal, people.”

  “You forget some of them have those alien spears,” Frogger said. “A touch from one of those spears will instantly disable a tank or mech.”

  “Shit, you’re right,” Manticore said.

  “Maybe we can dig through the collapse so we’re not trapped?” Crusher said.

  “No time,” Mickey said. “Especially without any shells, missiles, or demolition blocks left. The lasers and electrolasers on the tanks won’t cut it.”

  Eric slowed his time sense down to the max, so that the incoming Red Tails froze entirely. Then he studied his overhead map. There had to be a way out of this...

  He sent out a comm notice to the Bolt Eaters, requesting they all join him at his current time sense.

  One by one green lights appeared next to the different names on his HUD as each member of the unit maxed out his or her time sense.

  “So what is it?” Marlborough said when everyone had joined.

  “I have an idea,” Eric said.

  2

  “Check the map. There’s another cave entrance about a kilometer to the north. Leads to the same general cave system. The terrain isn’t too steep… we can reach it, and use that as our choke point. We’ll be able to retreat as deep as we need to.”

  “What if there are termites lingering in the cave?” Bambi asked.

  “Could be,” Eric said. “But there could also be more out here, as I found out firsthand.” He would have glanced at the wreckage of his old Cicada if his body wasn’t frozen. “Best to keep your skins electrified until further notice.”

  Too bad he didn’t have that luxury now that he
was inside a mech. He’d have to do some research on how to electrify Pounder’s skin when he had some spare time later.

  “All right,” Marlborough said. “We’re going to go for it. Revert to normal time, people. Armored units, robot operators, keep the support units on drag, covering our rear. Cicadas, we’re in the lead. Manticore, you’re on point. Crusher, I want you just behind him. The rest, follow in your usual marching order. Scorpion, you get to join the mechs on drag.”

  “I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Eric said.

  Eric reverted back to normal time, and continued firing at the enemy. He waited as each of the team members leaped off the ledge, and landed on the rocky trail below them. Then he and the other mechs jumped onto the trail, while the tanks followed. Those big treads were easily able to surmount any obstacles on the surface, and they moved just as fast as the leading Cicadas.

  The Abrams continued to fire their lasers, and the Jupiters their electrolasers. Eric had Dee control his forward advancement, while he kept his aim on the pursuing Red Tails.

  Those creatures moved with incredible speed—having six legs would confer a speed boost to anyone, he supposed. In moments, members of the vanguard began to reach the tank line. The armored units couldn’t target all of them at once, and one of the Red Tails got through. It landed on an Abrams and promptly smashed its glandular sac onto the unit. The sac burst open, killing the creature, and smearing the tank in goo, which caused it to immediately come to a halt.