Earthbound
Story excerpt
Excerpt from an ongoing story
The robot shivered, sending thunder through the floor. As its two bulky metal arms began to unfold and it rolled forward out of the crate, Charlie was so impressed he almost forgot to run. He suddenly huffed his way over to the spiral staircase before he had the shameful realization that going up them would take him a fatal amount of time. He made a "dash" for one of the other unoccupied side rooms. Just before he slammed the controls to close the door he saw that the robot was now standing at its full 15-foot height, head bent but still awkwardly scraping against the ceiling of the bay as the dark red line of sensors that served as eyes swept around the cargo bay.
Charlie ran to the furthest corner and crouched down, as if crouching would make any sort of difference against a robot designed to walk through soldiers like butter.
"What the fuck Captain!" he shouted into the SatComm.
"I don't know!" Smith replied quickly. He had been able to hear the noise all the way down the hall. "She must’ve nabbed the controls before I trapped her."
"What are we gonna do I'm gonna die I'm stuck in one of those rooms..."
Charlie stopped short when he heard something that sounded an awful lot like metal being ripped like paper. Actually, more like cardboard as some minuscule amount of effort was being applied. Then he expected the sound of lasers. Or rockets. Charlie had never actually seen a war robot in action but he assumed lasers and rockets were probably involved. Instead he heard nothing.
"Captain," he whispered urgently. "What do I do!?"
Captain Smith was halfway back to the ship, frozen with indecision. What good could he and his pistol actually do by going back? Could he somehow bring his ship's weapons into play?
"Honestly, I have no idea," he replied.
He was answered by some sort of unintelligible noise of frustration that wheezed through Charlie's bagpipe cheeks as he continued to cower. But after several moments, nothing had changed except that Charlie's volume had quieted to a low whine.
"Charlie what's going on now?" said Smith over the SatComm, making his way back.
"I don't know, I can't hear anything. Where are you?"
"I'm just above the stairs, I can't see anything yet."
Captain Smith quietly lowered himself to the ground near the stairs, trying to get a better angle into the bay, and pulled himself up to the edge on his stomach. Inside the room he could see the woman standing next to the robot, holding the control panel. Near them lay a crumpled slab of metal that had once served as a door. The woman was waving her hands around and pointing energetically.
"Captain..." whined Charlie into Smith's ear.
"Shut up Charlie, I can't hear."
"Hear what?"
"I think she's arguing with the robot."
"Arguing? Like someone else activated it?"
"No. She's got the control panel in her hand and the robot let her out. But I think she's trying to get it to do something. I wonder if it hasn't been programmed completely. It may be missing some commands..."
"Or maybe she's just explaining in detail how she wants the giant metal robot to murder me..."
"I need you to create a distraction."
"That is actually the stupidest thing you've ever asked me to do,” Charlie hissed into the mic.
"No, no, listen. If you can distract the robot for a second I think I can get close enough to grab her. If she's got control of the robot then I can use her as a hostage and get her to shut it down."
"Absolutely not."
"Ten seconds."
Smith edged as close to the stairs as he could, visualizing his route down the first handful of stairs. Leap over the balcony, roll in her direction, pistol drawn...
"I'm not doing it."
"Charlie, I'm going in five seconds and if you don't distract that robot he's going to vaporize me and you can add guilty coward to the list of disappointing things you think about yourself in the morning when you try to look at your face without using more than one mirror."
He heard Charlie sigh and scrabble to his feet.
"Three..."
"You're a horrible person."
"Go!"
Charlie punched the controls and the door of his container slid open. He ran as hard as he could for one of the other containers, without looking in the direction of the robot, emitting a scream that sounding oddly like yodeling.
Smith made it down half the steps before he realized something was terribly wrong with his plan. As he vaulted over the railing, unable to stop his momentum, he saw that instead of moving towards Charlie, the robot had simply stepped in between them and the woman and hunkered down behind the thick armor built into its shins and forearms. When Smith landed and rolled he ended up staring straight into one of the robot's shoulder cannons. He heard a door slide shut as Charlie entombed himself in another room.
Lasers, it turned out, were the robot's preferred weapons. Smith could actually see the optics down the two-inch wide barrel of the shoulder cannon as he crouched frozen on the ground. But he hadn't had a hole burned through him yet, so he decided to at least stand in a more comfortable position as he waited to die. He would later reflect on how alarming it was that the sum total of his thoughts in this moment amounted to 'Oh well.'
"I'm not going to kill you, calm down," said the woman's voice from behind the robot. "Drop your pistol, kick it over."
Smith, having already done the disappointing math on his odds of escape, did so immediately. As the gun skidded across the floor the robot deftly raised its foot to allow it to slide under.
"What about the other guy in the room? He armed?" she asked.
"Wouldn't matter if he were, honestly, he can't shoot for shit," Smith replied.
"Let's have him out here, all the same."
Smith spoke into his SatComm.
"Come on out Charlie, the plan is busted."
The women snorted when he said "plan."
Charlie replied after a moment of something that resembled contemplation.
"No way. She got you but I'm safe."
Smith heard a series of inputs, presumably as she directed the robot with the control panel. He still couldn't see her. The robot replied with a low, negative, double beep.
"Will you at least burn down the door then?!" the woman yelled.
Quickly the other shoulder cannon raised and fired and there was no more door between them and Charlie's hiding spot. After a moment he sheepishly stumbled out of the corner, hands raised.
"No weapons?" she asked as he shuffled towards them.
"He won't let me have one," Charlie replied as he reached Smith. He kept his hands raised, despite Smith rolling his eyes at him.
"Good," she said, stepping out from behind the robot, Smith's pistol now attached to her belt. Her shotgun hung from her shoulder. "Now we can talk."
"I'm not a great conversationalist with a laser cannon pointed at my face," Smith said.
"Oh relax. The piece of shit won't shoot you. I might, but he won't."
Captain Smith's eyes narrowed as he tried to read between the lines.
"I'm not kidding. He actually won't shoot at you. I tried with the portly fellow but the robot said he was too close to the door," she continued.
"It's a war robot," Smith replied. "It won't shoot us?"
"Apparently not."
"So if I..." Smith glanced towards the stairs.
"I can still shoot you, dumbass," she replied quickly as her right hand lifted the barrel of the shotgun menacingly. "And it won't let you come near me."
"Do me a favor real fast?" Captain Smith said, after a moment.
Charlie glanced over, confused, as she tilted her head at Smith.
"Just look at the controls. In the top right if you pull down the square icon it should say something. It's just information, it's not like I could take control of it from here or anything."
Still glaring at him, she raised the shotgun with one hand and then fumbled to swipe the square with her other. Eventually, frustrated, she let the shotgun hang and swiped before quickly targeting Smith again.
"Amit Organization. Why does that matter?" she said.
Instead of answering, Captain Smith was chuckling. Then the chuckle turned into a sort of breathy guffaw. This annoyed the shotgun-wielding woman, who brandished it and yelled.
"Hey. What the fuck!”
Finally Smith managed his answer.
"You've found yourself a pacifist war robot."
"What the hell do you mean?" she snapped.
"The Amit Organization. This must have been their ship. Religious pacifist monks. They make their money salvaging tech from battlefields, rebuilding and reselling it. But before they do, they hard code new programming into everything. Guns that don't shoot people. Ships that can't fight. War robots that worry about collateral damage," Smith said.
"But there's no way that thing is salvage," said Charlie.
"Sure. I don't know where they got a brand new war robot. But that thing is never gonna shoot someone.”