Carl hardly heard him scream. One fusillade, then the sounds of a grisly feast.
They’d had the marines there in minutes, but all they found of Steve was a stain on the carpet and what was left inside two drones. A full squad had gone in, yet only four men had survived. They’d faced only two drones, and sixteen of the best of the best were dead. Seventeen, counting Steve.
Worse, they had found two half completed drones. They were breeding.
Carl had been working intel for 32 years and had seen some shit. He’d stolen nuclear secrets from glow in the dark dachas after Chernobyl, got half of NATO laid ferreting out spies, and had shared a cup of tiger blood with Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump.
This was a new wrinkle. As best he could tell, a former contractor had snapped and become a terrorist--yesterday--and now controlled a robot army that ate people. He had heard them eat Steve today. That… hardly seemed real, somehow.
He’d need more bourbon to choke that down with. Steve had been a fan of good bourbon.
No one would have believed him. He himself would have been certain the whole thing was programmed hallucinations straight out of MK Ultra, except they had caught the terrorist: Dr. Faron Sanger.
In one for the history books, Sanger had been trying to take over the world from his sofa. Using his satellite internet, he commandeered unused time slots of other customers to maximize the data he could transmit to control the swarm.
The team was still tossing the house, poring over NSA recordings of data transmissions, and rounding up everyone he had ever known. They didn’t find any notes. As stupid as he was--he seemed not to have even realized they would come for him--Sanger was smart enough to either have better encryption than Carl had ever heard of, or he just wrote code in his head, on the fly, and uploaded it straight to the drone army.
There were hundreds of guys going through the satellite signals trying to pick out the code now, but it would take time. Nobody had any time; not the data analysts, not Carl, and sure as hell not Faron Sanger.
Carl had Sanger in a mobile interrogation van parked outside his house. It could take precious hours to transport the prisoner, and people were dying now.
Sanger was suspended in the Palestinian Hanging stress position, arms stiffly extended backwards from his shoulders as he hung from the cuffs on his wrists and balanced on his toes. He was wild-eyed, manic, voicing dire imprecations on all of them. The drugs they’d given him were working exactly as intended. Good.
Sanger was shouting, his eyes bulging, twisting in their sockets. His furor had to be causing him excruciating agony, bouncing his weight against his shoulders in their unnatural position.
"You can't stop them! Only I can! They're self-replicating now, don't you see? You have no idea what I can do! They're mine! I made them, and only..."
The raving became an agonized scream as brutal voltage surged through the electrodes attached to his testicles. It was time to magnify his madness and shatter his defenses.
They needed to overcome what reason was left to the man; make him gloat and brag about what he’d done. To compensate for the pain they inflicted on him by displaying his superiority. The right key to open the broken lock of the madman's mind was inserted. Carl just had to twist it..
It wouldn't be long now.
Gunfire, screams, and the sounds of battle erupted outside the interrogation vehicle. The special operators Carl commanded sprang into practiced action to secure the site. External monitors showed the men outside being mowed down by black drones, while his staff inside the van positioned themselves to repulse the attack. When the drones reached the doors, the men began firing through the steel.
The din was deafening. Hot, spent brass ejected from weapons flew, bounced, and spun on the floor, making footing as treacherous as loose marbles. Carl barely could hear Faron laughing maniacally and screeching orders at his minions. "Kill them! Kill them all!"
Though they shuddered from the impact of the bullets, their carapaces proved able to withstand even concentrated small arms fire from the men inside. Only one of them appeared to be hit anyplace vital, struck by a lucky ricochet. It went down in a spew of obscene fluids gushing from its pierced digester until it was out of view of the camera. Small cones of flame bloomed at the tips of a couple drones' legs and powerful cutting torches began carving passage through the steel doors of the van.
Carl realized only Faron could stop them now, and he leaped to secure the prisoner. Maybe the muzzle of his .45 against the base of Sanger’s skull would enable him to convince the terrorist to rein in the swarm.
When the trace of the burning torches, spitting molten slag and sparks of burning steel, returned to where they started, the panels fell open and the feast began.
Faron laughed harder when Carl hid behind him, as if that would save him from the swarm. How typical of bullies, to grovel and mewl piteously when the tables were turned! His victory over his tormentors would soon be complete, and total.
The drones opened the jets wider on the nozzles used to cut the steel doors, turning them from cutting torches into flame-throwers.
When the flames began burning them both to a crisp, shock and surprise stunned him into silence, until all he could do was scream out his last agony. Too late to do anything about it, he realized the failsafe that had caused his fall from grace must have been removed. He was just a bit of the ‘all’ he had commanded them to kill.
They’d keep killing until there was no more fresh meat.
