Chapter Four

Chapter Four

Jia’s mirth faded to confusion as she passed through the doorway after Erik.

Their angle of arrival didn’t grant her a clear view of the back of the warehouse. Now inside, she could tell it would have been an interesting sight from the air since there was no back to the warehouse.

Remnants of a scorched and mostly destroyed wall stuck out from the ground and roof, leaving the building exposed to the elements. The unpleasant smell of the Zone was somehow even stronger inside the half-open building. Dense piles of debris covered most of the floor. Bullet-riddled and half-melted bots lay strewn about much of the area, forming the bulk of the piles.

Stray trash made up the rest.

The remains of a King Sentry were propped up near a corner, a huge hole punched through the center of the bot; the exterior of the hole was blackened. The near-carpet of destroyed bots extended out of the building past the downed wall, covering a good chunk of the space between the warehouse and the next-closest building.

Erik and Jia had destroyed a lot of bots in their time together, but the sheer number that had met their final days in front of her staggered her imagination. Big Bill could have taken over a militia base with so many bots.

Then again, she doubted he’d acquired them all at once, and a man who could legally own heavy firearms probably didn’t have much trouble sourcing bots.

“This isn’t what I envisioned when you said we were going to a tactical range,” Jia admitted as she glanced around. “Even with you saying it was a little more than that. Then again, I’m not that surprised by a tactical range in the Shadow Zone being a bot massacre ground.”

Big Bill snickered. “Massacre? Training’s no good without something trying to get you. That’s what I always say.”

Erik nodded. He pushed the dolly against a wall and ran his thumb along the side of the handle to lower it all the way to the ground. “Exactly. Big Bill’s got a nice setup here. We can’t customize it as much as our usual place, but knowing there are actual bots firing at us will get the blood pumping better, even if it’s just painful stuns.”

Jia eyed the back of Erik’s head. “I’m half-surprised they don’t fire live ammo.”

Bill Big smacked his lips. “Yeah, I tried that for a while.”

Jia stared at him, hoping he was joking, but the look on his face suggested he wasn’t.

“The insurance is a bitch,” he explained.

“You’re

insured?”

Jia asked.

“I didn’t say it was with a reputable company.” Big Bill scratched his chin. “That was another thing that was easier before you all went around cleaning up the city.”

“So, you had gangster security and gangster insurance?” Jia ventured.

“Basically, yeah.” Big Bill let out a long, wistful sigh. “I’ve got a joke for you. What’s the difference between a good cop and a dirty cop?”

Jia frowned. “I don’t know. What is it?”

“The dirty cop stays bought.” Big Bill guffawed and slapped his leg, his laugh trailing off at Jia’s frown. “Most of my customers love that joke.”

“I’m sure they do.”

Ignoring the bad attempt at humor, Erik knelt and grabbed a crate.

He set it on the ground and opened it to reveal two assault rifles. He began moving other crates and opening them until their contents were exposed, including the rifles and ammo, several different types of grenades, the laser rifle, and a missile launcher with four high-explosive rounds. He left the TR-7 in its crate, making Jia wonder why he’d bothered to bring it.

Jia’s hungry gaze drifted to the missile launcher. “So, I see this is

Diyu

for bots. Is there some scenario here? Are we rescuing a bot princess or something?”

“No fancy scenario,” Erik explained. “Just lots of bots trying to screw with us. I’ve asked Big Bill to use only contact stuns this time. I want the pressure of a huge-ass army bearing down on us, but without us having to do a lot of dodging. We can do that next time.”

“Can you afford next time?” Jia looked around. “This has to be even pricier than I realized.”

“It’s better than spending it on some cloud city vacation.” Erik gestured to a faded yellow line that extended a few meters from the door all the way across the warehouse. “Bots won’t mess with you if you’re behind that line.” He pointed to a half-collapsed building behind the warehouse. The blackened walls and blast holes revealed its past.

Jia’s eyes tracked it. “That’s the limit of the playing field, I take it?”

“Yeah.” Erik cracked his knuckles before strapping an assault rifle over his shoulder and stuffing magazines into the pockets of his duster. “Make sure you practice with everything this session. This isn’t just for fun.”

“Only mostly?” Jia grabbed her rifle and ammo before clipping a few plasma grenades to her belt.

“Exactly.” Erik smiled.

“And your…supplier isn’t mad about you wasting gear?”

Jia didn’t know how far she could trust Big Bill. Mentioning Colonel Adeyemi might be a mistake, even if she doubted Big Bill had any connection with the conspiracy. The kind of man who wore a coat with epaulets was not the type galaxy-spanning conspiracies recruited for assistance.

Erik shook his head. “My supplier understands the need to keep current with weapons.” He slapped a magazine into the rifle. “And he wants both of us to use the gear he provided since you’re helping me with my side job.” He stepped past the line. “Let’s keep it easy the first few minutes, Big Bill. I want to ease into it.”

Big Bill saluted Erik. “I’ll be in my office. I’ll start everything up once I get there. I’ve got the bots programmed to avoid a target once they’ve been stunned.”

“Works for me.”

Big Bill followed the yellow line toward another wall. A reinforced metal door was inset into a thick metal portion of the wall.

He arrived and tapped his PNIU.

The door opened with the loud, resounding thuds of interior bolts and Big Bill entered a brightly lit, clean-looking hallway at odds with the destroyed surroundings. A few seconds passed before the door slammed shut behind him. The man might be odd, but he wasn’t a total idiot.

One stray missile would ruin his day if he wasn’t careful,

she mused.

Humans suffered a statistically embarrassing hundred percent mortality rate when blown apart by a missile.

“All the mags I brought are armor-piercing.” Erik pulled her attention back to the task at hand. “We won’t always know ahead of time what we’re facing, but this time we know it won’t be anything but machines. It’s good to familiarize yourself with the damage profiles.”

“We only know there won’t be anything but machines if we assume we’re not going to be ambushed by criminals,” Jia joked.

Erik offered her a devilish grin. “Ambushing us when we’re packing a small arsenal would be crap luck. Shoot an AP round through a man’s head and he’ll die quick enough.”

“Cheerful thought.”

“I’ve got to be me.”

A shrill klaxon sounded. Several rubble piles stirred, small six-legged security bots emerging from them.

“I’m surprised those things don’t haunt my nightmares,” Jia muttered.

“It is one weird part of being back on Earth. The farther you go on the frontier, the fewer bots you see.” Erik flipped off his safety.

Jia followed and aimed her rifle. She fired a burst and downed a nearby bot before the machine escaped the mountain of bot limbs and carcasses it had been hiding in. She spun to nail a bot climbing up a side wall. Additional bots emerged from the debris.

Erik joined the fun by unloading on a few approaching the detectives from the opposite side. Even more bots poured out of dark crevices like roaches blasted with light. Erik’s and Jia’s high-velocity armor-piercing ammo ripped through the bots with ease, blasting metal chunks around to add to the mechanical graveyard.

Jia smirked as she remembered trying to take on a horde of bots with nothing but her stun pistol. She’d been lucky in a twisted way that her first captain had been such a corrupt coward.

If she’d worked real cases before she’d learned to handle herself, she might have ended up dead. Now, if a month passed without a serious terrorist incident, she considered it a vacation.

She couldn’t protect the UTC hiding behind a stun pistol.

Bots skittered over their fallen brethren, surging forward in a tide of metal. They weren’t rushing as fast as she’d seen in previous encounters, probably another part of the training. She wasn’t going to second-guess Erik’s experience. Despite all the fights she’d been in since becoming his partner, he still had decades on her when it came to the fine art of delivering death by bullet.

Heart pounding, Jia ejected her magazine and slammed in a new one. Erik was right; even if it was just stun bots, facing an actual foe activated her combat instincts in a way the simulation at the uptown tactical center couldn’t.

Her brain really

could

tell the difference.

A pack of bots charged into the warehouse from outside. Jia and Erik squeezed off a few rounds before she yanked one of the plasma grenades from her belt, primed it, and chucked it toward the approaching stun-rod-bearing horde as if she’d been doing it all her life. Her throw ended up shallow, but the massive explosion scattered most of the bots, ripping apart and half-melting most of them to add another layer to the robot graveyard. A few survivors in the back continued charging forward, paying no heed to their destroyed brethren. Erik ended their short existence with a few quick bursts.

Jia chuckled. He’d talked about the TR-7 being lucky a few times, but he didn’t need the ridiculous gun. Not that she would complain too much. It was perhaps better to note he didn’t

always

need the ridiculous gun, but the four-barreled monstrosity occasionally had its uses in the rougher situations they ended up.

“Good use of the grenade,” he shouted over another burst.

“Too bad I didn’t get them all in one throw,” Jia countered. She could practice grenade-throwing by printing something of equal shape and weight, but that was a project for the future.

She frowned.

She would need an arm-toning regimen for basic grenade-throwing offensive capability. When would she have ever thought she would need to be stronger to throw a grenade farther away?

She looked back and forth, seeking more enemies. The ferocious, inhuman horde lay defeated, utterly annihilated by the quick efforts of two cops with big guns.

“That was easy,” Jia quipped.

Erik ejected his magazine and slipped a new one in. “That’s just the warm-up. Wait for it; it’ll come soon. Big Bill is watching everything that goes on in here.”

The klaxon sounded again, and a dark, buzzing swarm swept around the exposed back opening of the warehouse. It wasn’t a deadly cloud of insects, but dozens of tiny, hovering orb-shaped security bots.

“Oh,” Jia commented, her face blank. “That’s fun.”

“Nothing like a little aerial target practice,” Erik replied.

Jia held down her trigger and swept her rifle back and forth, downing several of the flying bots within a few seconds. Erik joined her. The bots spiraled in an attempt to dodge, but the combined hail of bullets blasted through them and sent them careening to join their defeated brothers below.

More legs popped out of the messes on the floor inside and outside the building. Scuttling security bots emerged a moment later, faster than the first wave.

Erik snapped off several quick shots in a row, his bullets ripping through the centers of the advancing enemies.

They each collapsed silently—no scream, no yell, just deactivation.

Not to be outdone, Jia matched him shot for shot until she was empty. He grinned at her efforts and the steadily growing piles in front of them.

Her shoulder was taking a pounding even with the reduced recoil design of the rifles.

After a speedy reload, Jia continued wreaking havoc among the endless hordes of bots streaming in from outside or emerging from the piles. No wonder the place was so expensive. Even if Big Bill had a good line on someone who could supply bargain bots or repair damaged bots cheaply, Jia and Erik were blowing through a not insignificant army for their little live-fire training session. She was glad she didn’t have to pay.

If Erik wanted to spend part of his thirty years of savings on improved training, she wasn’t going to complain, especially when it was fun.

Loud thuds came from the back.

A King Sentry stomped around the corner and into the warehouse. Unlike the monster they had fought before, it lacked cannons, instead bearing two stun rods so long they might properly be called stun lances.

The huge bot didn’t rush toward them. Instead, it moved slowly, taking hard, ponderous steps that knocked debris and trash aside in its wake.

Programmed intimidation, perhaps. Jia half-wanted to shout an insult, but it was futile to waste quality effort on any machine that wasn’t Emma.

Erik didn’t fire at the King, instead alternating between smaller threats in the air and the continual addition of smaller ground forces. Jia took a few potshots, but her bullets bounced off the thick, reinforced armor.

“Hold them off, and I’ll handle the big guy,” Jia called, trying to hold back her grin. A big enemy required a big response.

“Make it quick.” Erik punctuated his sentence by blowing a flying bot apart and showering the bots beneath it with the fragments of its ally as his eyes flicked to the sentry robot and back. “Those are very real stun rods.”

Jia threw the rifle strap over her shoulder and rushed to the laser rifle case. She leaned over and pulled the huge weapon out, grimacing at the weight. She was strong and fit, but she lacked Erik’s cybernetic arm.

With a grunt, she yanked the rifle fully out of the case and stood it up on its end. Her hand flew across the side controls, and the tripod extended. She let the rifle fall forward, the newly deployed stand arresting its fall.

“My turn,” she whispered under her breath, not that Erik would be able to hear her over the hum of the machines or his near-constant gunfire.

The King continued stomping toward them. Jia took a moment, lined up, and threw the last of her plasma grenades toward a cluster of smaller forces on the ground before whipping her attention back over to their advancing ogre-like cousin.

She dropped to one knee and snagged one of the conical power cells from the crate to screw into the side. The weapon came alive, and she pointed it at the advancing King with a smile.

“It’s nice when they’re slow.” Jia pulled the trigger.

The King jerked, struck by the invisible beam from the weapon. Sparks and internal hydraulic fluid leaked out of the large hole she’d carved through the center of the bot. Jia let out a shout of triumph, then aimed again and pulled the trigger. This time she blew a leg off. After her third shot, the machine stopped moving.

Erik quit firing. She snapped her head in his direction, surprised.

He inclined his head forward. “No more little guys.”

Jia blinked and looked around. He was right. She’d been so focused on destroying the King that she’d lost overall tactical awareness.

She would need to work on that.

A loud hum sounded from outside. Jia swiveled the tripod in that direction and licked her lips in anticipation. A long dark shadow heralded the arrival of something even worse than the King. An armored personnel carrier pulled forward, hovering a few feet off the ground. The only saving grace was the lack of a turret on top.

“You’ve

got

to be kidding,” Jia griped. She pulled the trigger twice, blasting two new holes in the APC, but the vehicle continued forward. She pulled the trigger again, but the weapon didn’t fire. Out of energy. “What is it going to do, run us over?”

“I doubt that,” Erik replied.

The APC pivoted to its side, and the doors began to open. Light glinted off the squirming six-legged bots filling the vehicle.

“It’s doing what it’s supposed to—carry troops.” Erik sprinted toward the case and grabbed the missile launcher and a round. He dropped the projectile in and steadied the launcher on his shoulder in a practiced move that took only seconds. “Backblast area clear,” he shouted. She replied, and he launched.

The missile screamed toward the APC as the door finished opening. The attack passed the bots and struck the inside. A massive explosion ripped the vehicle in half. The main chunks of the vehicle collapsed to the floor with an echoing thud as pieces of security bots fell from above like metal hail.

“I’m

really

glad I’m not paying for this,” Jia commented.

Erik grinned. “Yeah.” He loaded in a new missile and walked over to Jia to hand her the launcher. “One more shot, just in case, and for the experience.”

She hoisted the launcher onto her shoulder and looked behind her to make sure Erik wasn’t there. “Backblast area clear!”

“Yes!”

Her missile flew toward the burning remnants of the APC and exploded, finishing off the few larger bots that had survived the initial attack. Burning debris now lay all over.

The warehouse and the area behind it no longer resembled a dump, but a warzone. She half-expected the local police to show up and investigate. Maybe the former criminals supported the range because they wanted something in the neighborhood that would discourage the locals from investigating reports of gunfire and explosions nearby.

Jia knelt and set the launcher down. “I admit the laser rifle and missile launcher are pretty handy, although both are heavy. That rifle is insane. It carved through that King like it was paper, despite its armor.”

“Not the right kind of armor for that kind of attack,” Erik commented. “Weight’s bad, but stick it on an exoskeleton and you might be okay.” After a few seconds, he smirked. “So, you like them big?” He raised an eyebrow in challenge.

Jia smirked back. “Sometimes size does matter. Sometimes it doesn’t, but it’s nice to have the option.”

Erik grinned. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Another klaxon sounded.

Jia rolled her head around her shoulders to loosen up. “They just keep coming, don’t they?”

Erik pulled his rifle down. “Sure, just like they do in real fights. At least this will be more fun than testifying in court against gangsters.”

Jia readied her rifle and loaded a fresh magazine. She aimed at a bot scurrying toward them and fired. “You know what? You’re right.”