Edge of the Vortex Read online

  Still holding Danny’s limp body in the air, the machine emerged completely from the pod and looked around its environment before swiftly pulling its blood-soaked arm from the human’s body, allowing it to slump to the ground, where it violently crushed the skull beneath its foot, spilling brain matter all over the floor of the old shed.

  “Fuck!” Jack knew that he was in trouble. Without hesitating, he re-holstered his Glock and pulled a smoke grenade from his chest-rig, pulled the pin, let the spoon fly, then tossed it towards the robot that hadn’t moved since it had crushed his colleagues head. Turning towards the door, Jack lunged towards Molly who was grasping at her chest and grabbed the rear pull-tag on the back of her assault vest and yanked her through the doorway, back into the cold night.

  Checking over his shoulder Jack saw that the smoke grenade had gone off, and the shed was filling up with a cloud he couldn’t see through. Looking back to his front he could see two additional armed response vehicles rolling up next to his parked X5. Looking down at Molly, he could tell she was injured, but it didn’t look fatal. Getting back onto the comms, he informed HQ of the bad news.

  “Control, Juliet Kilo Seven, officer down! Officer down! We have an enemy contact at my position. Need additional units plus medical air support!” Jack killed the channel and switched his right hand for his left on Molly’s rig and pulled his pistol back out. He knew that it might be a futile gesture, but he wanted to have something that could go boom in his hand.

  Looking ahead, he could already see the other two teams that had just arrived dismount and start to move towards Jack, who was next to the pond and dragging Molly furiously towards his vehicle.

  “Take cover!” He shouted. “There’s a hostile robot in there!”

  “Get the AI out!” Shouted one of the arrived operators to his teammate.

  One of men that had gotten out of the closest arrived X5’s ran towards Jack, his MP5 up and pointing towards the shed, and as soon as he reached Jack, he stopped, and allowed him to continue, before walking backwards just behind Molly’s feet, providing some cover.

  “Medic!” Jack yelled out once he reached the rear of his X5. Molly was his team medic and apparently incapable of rendering assistance to herself.

  “Oi!” Shouted a ginger-haired operator that ran up to Jack, taking a knee next to Molly who was still grimacing in pain and grasping at her chest. “What happened?” The man asked as he started to unbuckle Molly’s assault vest.

  “She got whacked in the chest pretty hard and thrown about five feet.” Jack looked around the side of his vehicle towards the shed, but couldn’t see any movement. “Where is your team leader?” He asked the ginger.

  “Hugh!” The man shouted.

  Ten seconds later a heavyset bald man came up to the trio from the front of Jack’s vehicle.

  “Sit-Rep?” The bald man said. He had sergeant stripes on his uniform and was gripping his MP5 with both hands.

  Jack looked up from Molly and the man. “We’ve got an enemy robot inside that shed.” He said calmly.

  The man took a moment and looked towards the shed. “Are you certain?”

  Jack looked the man in his eyes. “Very.”

  “Maybe it’s an Alliance robot that's gone haywire.” The sergeant suggested.

  “Negative. It’s got red markings. Alliance are green.” Jack looked back towards the shed but couldn’t see any movement. “We need to call higher. We won’t be able to stop this thing alone.” Jack looked back to Molly who was receiving treatment for her injury, then looked at his X5 that was parked a few metres away.

  Bringing his pistol to bear on the shed, he quickly moved to his vehicle and opened the rear door, and holstered his pistol, and opened the gun cabinet where the teams larger weapons were kept and pulled out the Accuracy International AX50 sniper rifle. Jack’s team was the only one in south London to pack such a heavy calibre weapon, but now there was a chance that his life would depend on the .50 calibre rifle.

  Picking up two five round magazines, Jack brought the heavy weapon close to his body and moved around to the front right tire of the BMW and dropped to one knee, set the magazines down, and flipped down the bipod at the front of the weapon, then set the rifle down, and lay down behind it, and started to get into a good firing position.

  The rifle didn’t have night-sights, but the nearby street lamps provided all the illumination he would need, and unless the machine moved out the back of the shed, Jack would have a clear line of sight on the hostile contact.

  “Hugh!” Jack yelled and took the first five round magazine and slotted it into the weapon system and pushed it up until he heard it click into place. Moving his right hand up, Jack grasped the bolt and pulled it to the rear entirely, then moved it back forward, chambering the first round.

  By the time Jack had flipped up the two covers on the Leupold scope, the heavy-set sergeant had trudged up behind Jack and took a knee.

  “Wow,” Hugh said. “You’ve got one of the big guns?”

  Jack brought the stock up to his cheek and peered through the sights. “Looks that way.” Jack adjusted his body, trying to find a good position. “Get on the blower and tell command we’re going to need more firepower.”

  Hugh quickly switched the frequency on his radio. “Control, this is Juliet Delta Five. We have a confirmed Zeus incident, and we’re going to need some assistance here. Might want to contact Whitehall.”

  “Yeah,” Jack said under his breath. “If this thing comes out of there shooting, we could be in trouble.” Jack looked up from his sights and realised that cars were still driving down Rookery Road just a few metres away, oblivious to the danger that was in such proximity. “Listen, we need to set up a cordon.”

  “On it.” Hugh replied quickly, and got up from his position and moved off.

  Jack dropped his gaze back down to the scope and brought the crosshairs to bear on the open doors that had been blown out. There was an eerie red light coming from the interior of the shed, but so far, no moment, at least nothing that was visibly moving. Picking his head up for a moment, he scanned the area behind the shed which consisted of an empty basketball court and a skate park past it. There was no movement that Jack could see, and then something dawned on him.

  Actually, it was two things. Firstly, the presence of a hostile Sentinel meant that something big was happening, and at the same time, the fact that only a single robot had landed signalled that it might not have done so on purpose.

  After several minutes of nothing happening through Jack’s sights, Hugh came running back up. “We’ve got a cordon set, and they’re evacuating people from Clapham Common up to Clapham North now.” He paused to catch his breath. “Superintendent Jones is coming down to take command.”

  Jack shook his head. He’d had dealings with Jones, a through and through Welshman, and he hadn’t come away impressed.

  Five minutes later something happened that Jack almost missed, but when a slight hiss in his ear caught his attention, he checked it out, and before he could say anything to anyone, another SO19 operator that had taken up a firing position near him confirmed his suspicion.

  “Radios are down.”

  Those three words were repeated several more times.

  Another period of time expired before the next disruption, this time it was very obvious. The lights went out. All of them. And then all the cars that were running near-by cut off. Jack brought his head up. It had suddenly gone dark for fifty square metres. He could still see the lights of the Pavement to his right shining. It appeared to be a step up in capability from shutting off the team's radios, but it was clear to Jack that the robot was slowly employing some kind of electronic warfare against those that had encircled it.

  Looking off to the left, past the shed, Jack could just make out a few operators that had taken up firing positions. There must have been over twenty shooters on sight, in Jack’s estimation, but he wasn’t sure how much of a difference that would make. If the machine came ou
t shooting, there was an excellent chance that all the firepower SO19 could bring to bear wouldn’t be enough to stop it.

  But all of that was academic, because as soon as Jack looked back to his right, he could see a group of men with flashlights striding across a nearby section of the Common from the direction of the Tube station, and it was quite obvious to Jack that Superintendent Jones and his cronies had arrived to take charge of the situation, or whatever that meant in a situation like this one.

  Jack looked back at the shed, still no movement. Back to his right, he could tell that Superintendent Jones was making a beeline to the shed with three other officers, none of whom were armed. It was a bold move. Jack wasn’t sure if Jones had been briefed on the situation, and if he had, he might reason that the machine had only struck out at Jack’s team because they were armed. Either way, he was taking mighty big risk approaching the shed without some form of protection, other than foul words.

  Back down to his sights, Jack watched as Jones walked right up to the busted outdoors and signalled to his associates to stop, and continued right into the shed.

  Fuck me. Jack thought to himself. Jones was either the cockiest bastard alive, or maybe he had a death-wish.

  Even though Jack was positioned almost fifty metres away from the structure, he could hear the Superintendent yelling, probably at the machine, which Jack thought was possibly not the wisest course of action available to him. One minute later the Superintendent walked out of the shed and put his hands in the air.

  “I want you all to lay down your weapons!” The Superintendent looked back at the shed for a moment. “I think that under the circumstances the best thing to do is surrender.”

  “Stuff it!” Shouted one of the SO19 operations to Jacks left.

  “Listen!” The Superintendent tried to get a grasp on the rumblings that were starting to come from the operators who were not about to put down their weapons until they were out of ammunition.

  Not long after the Superintendent had walked out of the shed, the robot followed, and this was the first chance Jack got to get a good look at the machine that had killed one of his partners. The machine was mostly grey in colour with several sections of its humanoid frame red. Its left arm appeared to house some form of weapon system, and its head was on a swivel when it emerged from the shed.

  Jack checked the safety on his weapon was off, and centred the crosshairs on the machines torso. He wasn’t taking any chances.

  Stepping next to the Superintendent, the machine said something that Jack couldn’t understand because it wasn’t in English, and it didn’t sound like any other language that he recognized, probably some fancy space language, and in the blink of an eye, the machine brought up its left arm, and fired a green blast of energy at point-blank range into the Superintendents head, vaporising it.

  Jack didn’t hesitate, he didn’t panic, or lose focus, he pulled the trigger and sent a .50 calibre round charging towards the machine at close to 930 metres per second, slamming into the off-world machine with 18,000 joules of energy, enough force to slam the machine to the ground seconds after the decapitated body of the Superintendent.

  Jack wasn’t the only one to open fire, a cacophony of noise erupted from those with clear shots of the machine. A combination of fire from MP5s, G36s, M4s and a few other AIs created a deafening roar as the robot was peppered with hundreds of rounds in a ferocious wave of gunfire where it seemed that every operator emptied their first mag, performed a quick reload, then waited for the machine’s next move.

  Jack quickly chambered another round in the AX50, and focused his sights on the machine, and waited.

  There was a silence that suddenly fell over the Common. Cars were no longer driving anywhere in sight, and other than the men and women that were part of the police or ambulance service, the area was deserted. Looking up from his weapon, he spotted Molly being dragged away on a stretcher to a nearby ambulance that had just shown up. Jack directed his attention back to his front, just as Hugh raced up to him.

  “Control says the Air Support unit is inbound. Should be on sight shortly.” The stout man was out of breath.

  “What about the army?” Jack asked while keeping his eye fixed on the sights.

  “Control says they’d send up the request.” He paused for a moment and took a deep breath. “Think we’ll need them? Things seem in order.”

  Jack shook his head. “Better to have and not need.” He said dryly, just as he noticed that the machine that had been motionless for a few seconds was starting to twitch. “Balls,” Jack said under his breath. “Just get us some air support. Eyes up!” He yelled, then dropped his head back down behind the Leupold scope.

  Jack knew he had scored a clean hit with his first round, and if a .50 calibre round was not enough to win the fight, they were going to be in trouble until reinforcements arrived. Bringing his right forefinger back to the trigger he gently rubbed the pad just above the top joint on the trigger and started to control his breathing for the next shot.

  In, out, in out. The barrel of the heavy weapon didn’t climb or drop much with each breath, and the crosshairs stayed almost steady on the downed robot's torso. Jack didn’t have a clear shot at the head, so he took what was on offer.

  Not wanting to give the robot any more time to recover, Jack squeezed the trigger and let another massive slug race across the fifty metres to the target in point-zero-five seconds, and struck with enough force to shove the machine along the ground several metres, but Jack could tell that the round hadn’t penetrated the robots outer casing.

  “Shit.”

  “Fuck that was loud!” Hugh commented, and got up and ran away from Jack’s position while shouting into his radio.

  Jack quickly chambered another round and readied himself for the robots next move. He didn’t see any point in wasting ammunition when the machine wasn’t an active threat, best to save the rounds until they were needed.

  It didn’t take long until the robot stopped being a punching bag for the SO19 ammunition, and started to raise itself off the ground quickly, rolling over onto its front, then using its right arm to push itself up, while bringing the weapon attached to its left arm up, and rapidly firing off two shots without even looking at two X5s that were parked nearby. The bolts of green energy hit the vehicles with a sizzling sound and vaporised a portion of each vehicle. There wasn’t a loud explosion, no ball of fire, just the instantaneous melting and disintegration of the area hit by the green blasts.

  Jack didn’t take his eyes off the machine, and the second he had a good bead on the robot's torso, he watched the Sentinel whip its weaponized arm in his direction.

  “Fuck!” Jack brought his left arm forward to the barrel of the rifle, while gripping the pistol grip in his right hand, and quickly rolled to his right, three times. The beefy weapon wasn’t designed for that kind of action and kept smacking the ground, and MacCloud in the face.

  After his last roll, Jack quickly got the rifle back onto its bipod support, and brought his left hand back to the weapon’s butt and braced it against his shoulder, and brought his right forefinger back to the trigger, checked his sights just in time to see a blast of green energy strike the BMW that he had been next to.

  Fuck you.

  Jack squeezed the trigger, but the machine was adapting quickly to its environment and had already started moving off to its right as soon as it had fired at Jack, just barely avoiding the round Jack had fired.

  “Balls.” Jack reached up with his right hand and pulled the bolt to the rear, ejecting the empty casing, then rammed it home again, chambering his third round. Shifting his hips to the right, Jack tried to get a bead on the machine that was starting to move deeper into the Common.

  There wasn’t the time Jack would have wanted for precision right now. He needed to get rounds on target as fast as possible, and considering the firepower he was up against, even getting a glancing shot on the machine could give the rest of the operators’ valuable time to act.
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  Jack squeezed the trigger again, and this time the round clipped the torso of the machine, spinning it like a top, but when that top stopped spinning, Jack saw that the left arm of the machine was outstretched in his direction, and before he had time to chamber another round, the robot fired off a series of green charges bolts at him, all the size of cricket balls, and all hissing and crackling as they raced through the cold night’s air.

  Jack reacted quickly, and released his grasp on the AX50 and rolled to his right again, away from the BMW and the rifle as the green bolts struck them and made them completely unrecognisable. Coming out of his combat roll, Jack pulled his Glock from his thigh holster and brought it to bear on the robot and fired off two shots, before bounding back behind the closest tree for cover.

  Looking back to the X5, Jack could tell that the boot was still intact, and he quickly holstered his weapon before checking that he wasn’t the centre of the robots attention, and then made a dash towards the vehicle. He needed something with a bigger boom than his 9mm was going to offer.

  Reaching the rear of the vehicle, he found Hugh laying on his back, the entire left side of his face and head melted off. He must have been hit by some of the green matter that had hit the vehicle.

  “Mother fuck.” Jack said out loud, and opened the weapons locker in the back of his X5 and pulled out the Heckler and Koch 417 which chambered the heavier 7.62mm round that packed a much bigger punch than his 9mm pistol could. Jack pulled the charging hammer to the rear and released it, chambering a round. Jutting his head out to the left side of the X5, he spotted the robot that was making its way towards the far side of the boating pond while laying down rather inaccurate fire at the SO19 operators who were peppering the machine with a near constant hail of gunfire.

  Looking for a good piece of cover, Jack realised there was none on offer other than other X5s, and he knew that those didn’t offer much in the way of protection. Looking towards the shed that had been the centre of attention for start of this affair, Jack decided that that was an option worth considering, and after checking where the attention of the robot seemed to be directed, he tucked the butt of the rifle in his armpit and took off running towards the green painted shed.