Jerome Preisler: Net Force--Attack Protocol

Neither said anything at all as they wheeled the groceries outside into the snow and arranged them on his Jolt’s back seat. But as he hefted the last bag inside, Mario realized—again to his surprise—that he was no longer feeling the slightest bit uncomfortable or self-conscious. In fact, he was totally at ease with himself. And with Laura.

“Can I give you a lift back to quarters?” he asked outside the vehicle.

“That’s okay,” she said. A snowflake landed on the tip of her nose, and she brushed it off. “I like to walk. And I have to make a pit stop at my neighbor Emily’s place. I’m looking after things while she’s home for the holiday.”

He nodded. “Okay,” he said. “See you at dinner tomorrow?”

“ Desde luego . I can hardly wait.”

She turned toward the mess-commissary. The small multiple-unit dwelling reserved for nonmilitary personnel was a five or ten minute walk beyond it on the east side of the compound.

Mario watched her move out of sight in the snow and darkness, then slid into the Jolt and took out his phone. He started to put on some music but remembered that he’d been listening to the latest episode of Alex Michaels’s Net Talk podcast, and decided to play the rest of it over the sound system.

Driving away from the exchange, he noticed one of Janus’s four hedgehogs bearing toward the mess from the nearby perimeter fence.

He’d already reached his barracks when it struck him the robot had no business being there.

Information Systems Operator-Analyst (25 Bravo) Dwayne Reese said he was calling his latest off-the-top rap “Midnight at the Mess,” though it was already half past midnight, and he was technically not on volunteer mess-hall duty but assisting at the scullery with trash disposal and hauling the big, bulging bags out to the dumpsters.

Walking beside him with his own garbage bag in tow, Signal Support Specialist (25 Uniform) Nick Savarino knew what was in store. They had been buddies for a while.

Reese heaved his load into the dumpster, then began clapping out a beat under the security lights behind the building. “Midnight at the mess hall, my game be dumpin’ out the trash, yo. I know it late, but it ain’t gonna wait, I got to give it to ya straight...”

Savarino rolled his eyes heavenward. “Please, spare me.”

Reese ignored him. He bent his knees, giving his rap some bounce. “Come on, my brotha,” he said.

“C’mon what ?”

“Come on, come on .” Still clapping, Reese got up on the balls of his feet and worked in a slide step. “Thanksgivin’ tomorrow, don’t talk ’bout no turkey sorrow—”

Savarino broke into a helpless grin and dropped his bag. If you can’t beat ’em .

Getting into Reese’s bounce vibe, he pushed at the air with his hands. “I tell my baby, we gonna fine dine—”

“So pass me that wine, gonna lay it on the line—”

“I want what you got, like my dressin’ sweet ’n’ hot ...”

They both cracked up. Neither of them really knew what was so funny, but they were dog-tired. With a quarter of the base personnel off on a classified mission, everyone left behind was concerned. So any excuse to blow off tension was a good one.

Besides, it was the night before Thanksgiving. Even at this late hour, they could smell the aromas of baking apple and pumpkin pies from the vents in the kitchen’s rear walls and hear the racket of bowls, utensils, and electric appliances inside. The cooks were working their tails off and would probably stay at it till daybreak. But all their activity was generating mountains of scraps, peelings, grease, eggshells, and other assorted kitchen waste. The heavy-duty bags each held forty pounds of recyclables and compostables, and somebody needed to clear them out.

Which was why Reese and Savarino had offered a hand. The scullery was as understaffed as the rest of the outpost, and its crew needed all the help they could get. The two technical specialists had waited till after the midnight meal, assisted with the cleanup, and then started to bring the bulging trash bags out to the dumpsters. There were nine or ten bags altogether, and they were on their first run when Reese the Rapper launched into his freestyle improvisation.

And now they were pushing up, pushing down, pushing left, and pushing right, rhyming and slide-stepping in the snow between the back of the long, low, prefab mess-scullery building and the dumpsters lined near the compound’s western perimeter. Stuck here at Janus on the night before Thanksgiving, they figured they deserved to give themselves a little holiday-season head start and were dancing like drunken elves.

Some fifteen yards to their right, the hedgehog known as Walt noticed their movement and deviated from its routine patrol pattern along the fence.

All four of the ’hogs at Janus were arrayed with nonlethal and lethal armaments. The nonlethals included smoke and tear-gas launchers and laser-induced plasma-effect weapons. Each lethal-arms suite consisted of a .50-caliber heavy machine gun with eight hundred rounds of ammunition, two grenade launchers, with a total six-grenade capacity and a lightweight recoilless rocket launch system. The laser-guided, 84 mm bunker-buster rocket rounds could travel a distance of over a mile and deploy multitarget armor-piercing warheads designed to take out light tanks.

Walt tracked quietly toward the two dancing soldiers. Its machine brain full of noise, it stopped ten feet away and took their range. Reese was showing off his rag-puppet move, his arms up and out, loose and bent like they were hanging on unseen strings, when he spotted the hedgehog with his peripheral vision...and realized its machine gun was rotating in their direction.

He froze. Nick looked at him. He was still dancing on his toes.

“What’s wrong?” he said, a little breathless.

That was when the ’hog opened fire. The first rounds blew off most of Reese’s lower jaw. A split second later, the top of his face exploded. It was as if two swipes of an eraser had made his head disappear.

Nick felt a surge of fear and horror as the gun recalibrated slightly for his position and discharged again. Bullets tore into his body. He saw chunks of himself fly through the snow, recognized scraps of his uniform clinging to them. He felt pain rip through him and died.

Inside the kitchen, the racket near the dumpsters sounded like a backfiring motorcycle, but not really. One of the cooks had seen Reese and Savarino lug the trash out the door minutes before, and he wanted to know what the hell was happening. He dropped his pie tray, ran over to the door, and pushed it open. The rest of the men and women on the scullery crew hurried after him.

The hedgehog turned toward the building. Its thermal sensors had picked up moving heat presences gathering behind the doorway. It instantly measured the ratio between their temperatures and the temperature of their ambient environment. Then it gauged the difference between their moving velocities and the static environment. Their combined heat-and-motion characteristics told the robot the presences were human, a background subtraction calculating there were seven of them. They were moving at attack speed.

The hog’s poisoned brain rapidly characterized the threat as lethal to base personnel and initiated its response, firing a single 84 mm rocket from its launch tube.

As the scullery’s back door swung out into the snow, the cook who had dropped the pie pan heard the pop of the rocket leaving its delivery tube. He barely had time to glimpse its conical warhead as it jetted toward him, trailing a long rope of white smoke.

The bunker-buster shot through the doorway, plowed into the cook’s chest, and knocked him backward off his feet. Traveling at a speed of five hundred miles an hour, it shattered his rib cage and pulverized his internal organs, killing him at once. The cook’s limp, broken body flew into the kitchen staffers crowding the entrance behind him, carried into them by the projectile’s momentum. A few of them screamed. Most didn’t have a chance. The warhead detonated fast. There was a flash and a roar and then the searing heat of the blast wave. The humans inside the mess-scullery were incinerated instantly. The sink, stove, and refrigeration units flew through the air as if they weighed nothing at all. The building’s walls bulged outward like the sides of a cardboard box. An expanding fireball punched a ragged hole in its ceiling and roof, rising high into the night sky.