The kinetic energy from the alien railgun threw Mark forward, sending him skidding across the uneven stone floor of the mining tunnel. His armor shrieked in protest as the dark plating scraped against the rocks, throwing a shower of orange sparks into the darkness. For a fraction of a second, his breath was completely expelled from his lungs, and his HUD flashed with a frantic flurry of proximity warnings, pressure alerts, and micro-fracture diagnostics.
But he ignored them all, and with an adrenaline-fueled surge of strength, he planted his hands against the crushed earth and vaulted himself back to his feet, refusing to look back at the nightmare unfolding in the cavern behind him. As he moved, he mentally commanded his system to stow his railgun. The weapon dissolved in his hand, breaking down into a stream of digitized blue light that vanished into his inventory. He needed both arms pumping to achieve the unimpeded speed required to survive the next four hundred meters.
"Aurelia!" Mark roared over his suit's comms channel as he launched himself into a sprint. "Aurelia, do you copy?!"
"I copy, Commander! We are at the staging area!" Aurelia's voice crackled back, tight and vibrating with urgent tension.
"Evacuate the civilians! Pack them all on the maglev and launch it immediately!" Mark barked, his legs eating up the distance in massive strides that sent chunks of earth flying behind him. "Leave the heavy machinery and the printer! I need every non-combatant out of this sector right fucking now!"
"Sir, what is happening down there?!" Aurelia asked, noting the panic and authority with which Mark was giving orders.
"We committed what is best known as a fucky-wucky!" Mark yelled, keeping his explanation deliberately vague. "Just get the civilians the fuck out of here!"
The second excavation tunnel was four hundred meters long, and under normal circumstances, utilizing the suit's hydraulic servos along with his own biology, Mark could easily clear that distance in well under a minute. However, he was running through a sweltering, uneven cylinder of carved rock while being actively hunted by machinery built hundreds of thousands of years ago.
Deep within the marrow of his bones, Mark felt the earth begin to vibrate.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
The fifteen-meter-tall ancient combat mechs had breached the cavern entrance and were moving into the tunnel after him. Their digitigrade feet were crushing the solid basalt floor into fine powder with every single step, shaking the bedrock of the mountain itself. They were massive, but they were not slow.
A high-pitched shriek of displaced air suddenly tore through the tunnel behind him, and a second shot blasted past him. It was another low-power, hyper-accelerated mass of kinetic energy wrapped in a volatile magnetic envelope that tore through the confined space of the tunnel at hypersonic speeds, missing Mark's right shoulder by less than three feet.
The sheer atmospheric disruption of the projectile passing that close caused the air to instantly superheat, flashing into a local vacuum that yanked violently at Mark's armor, threatening to pull him right off his feet. The heat washed over his suit's thermal dampeners, spiking his internal temperature readings into the red for a second.
A second later, the slug slammed into the ground twenty yards ahead of him. The impact instantly vaporized the rock under the sheer kinetic transfer, and a crater erupted in the center of the tunnel, sending a geyser of molten slag, pulverized rock, and boiling mud exploding upward into the confined, forty-meter-wide space.
Blinded by the brilliant flash of the impact and deafened by the concussive roar, Mark hit the jagged edge of the newly formed crater and lost his footing, his boots snagging on the uplifted rock. He went down hard, tumbling shoulder-over-shoulder through the searing hot debris. His HUD screamed with collision warnings, the tactical overlays glitching from the intense electromagnetic interference radiating from the alien weapon's impact site.
"Get up, get up, get up," Mark grunted to himself, tasting copper and dust in the back of his throat. He dug his fingers into the boiling mud, hauling his battered self upward. The rhythmic, earth-shattering thumping of the mechs was getting louder, which meant that they were accelerating and closing the distance.
Mark resumed his desperate sprint, but he didn't dare run in a straight line anymore. His mind raced, calculating the geometry of the tunnel. He knew that these machines were operating on targeting algorithms refined over millennias, which meant that if he ran in a predictable path, the next slug would core him through the back and turn him into a fine red mist splashed against the tunnel walls.
He began to weave erratically from side to side, throwing his weight left, then rapidly cutting right, sometimes even bouncing his shoulder off the curved walls of the tunnel to alter his trajectory unpredictably. The tunnel flashed with searing, blinding light again as a third shot tore past his left hip, obliterating a parked, heavy-duty loader mech that had been left idling near the wall.
The force of the alien railgun sheared the human mech entirely in half, sending flaming chunks of hyper-dense metal shrapnel pinging off Mark's back plating like a hailstorm as the mech's electric power banks detonated, adding a secondary shockwave to the chaos.
He zig-zagged wildly, jumping over flaming debris, sliding under the sheared hydraulic arm of the destroyed loader, cutting sharp angles at entirely random intervals to break the mechs' predictive tracking. He was a hundred meters from the entrance. Then fifty. Then twenty.
As the blinding light of the suns finally pierced the gloom ahead, Mark breached the entrance of the tunnel, exploding out of the sweltering dark and into the chaotic, deforested staging area. His boots slammed onto the compacted dirt of the clearing, his armor venting massive plumes of white steam from the shoulder and thigh joints as the climate control systems bled off the accumulated thermal energy of his desperate sprint.
He whipped his helmet to the left just in time to see the maglev train accelerating away from the staging area. The carriages were packed tight with the terrified civilians. Aurelia had followed his orders to the absolute letter, and the train was already hitting fifty kilometers per hour, tearing down the elevated magnetic track, ferrying the vulnerable, unarmed population back toward the safety of the city walls.
But, of course, not everyone could leave. Spread out across the wide, cleared staging area were some of their fighting forces. Over fifty Vanguard mercenaries and thirty Peacekeepers had remained behind to hold the line. They were clustered around the remaining heavy industrial equipment, which consisted of massive electric excavators, the deep-core boring machines, and the remaining 8x8m mobile printers. They had their magnetic rifles raised to their shoulders, their eyes locked in absolute terror on the smoking mouth of the excavation tunnel.
Aurelia stood at the center of the Vanguard formation, her black armor stark against the vibrant jungle backdrop, her heavy magnetic rifle shouldered and steady. Davis, the Vanguard lieutenant, was pacing the line, barking orders, trying to maintain a cohesive firing formation among men and women who had never really needed to fight anything outside of their ships, and recently, the local wildlife.
"Commander!" Aurelia shouted over the ambient noise as Mark sprinted toward their lines, deliberately closing the distance to put a solid one hundred meters of open ground between his forces and the tunnel entrance. "The civilians are clear! What the hell is coming out of that mountain?!"
"Mechs," Mark gasped, his chest heaving inside the armor, his adrenaline spiking so hard his hands were shaking. He couldn't tell them about their true origins. Not here. Not now. "They're ancient, automated machines with railguns, and they don't seem like the friendly type who will stop and negotiate."
Mark reached the center of the defensive line. He looked at the massive, bulky electric excavator parked nearby, its heavy S-Alloy chassis providing the thickest cover available.
"Davis! Get your men behind that excavator! Use the treads and the engine block as hard cover!" Mark ordered, taking immediate command of the battlefield. "Peacekeepers, fan out behind the printers! Do not stand in the open! Create cross-firing lanes! Move!"
The men and women scrambled with discipline, throwing themselves behind the thick chassis of the heavy industrial machinery. The movement took only forty seconds. Forty seconds of frantic shouting, boots pounding against the compacted dirt, weapons clattering against metal, and the terrifying, rhythmic thumping echoing from deep inside the mountain, growing louder with every passing heartbeat.
Mark stood in the center of the clearing, refusing to take cover. He needed overwhelming firepower, and he needed it right now.
He raised his right hand, his palm open to the crimson sky. He no longer cared about the absolute secrecy of his system. He didn't care if the mercenaries saw him perform what amounted to a physical impossibility because survival dictated the suspension of secrecy. If they were going to live, he needed the biggest gun he had.
With a thought, the air above Mark's open palm warped and fractured, sending a cascade of brilliant, digitized blue light spiraling into existence, and the massive railgun materialized flawlessly into his grip.
Measuring just over three and a half meters in length, the sheer, absurd bulk of the weapon would have snapped a normal man's forearm like a dry twig. But Mark was far from baseline, and his hybrid musculature barely even strained under the load, working in flawless tandem with his suit's hydraulic servos to instantly lock the hand-held cannon into firing position.
He heard the sharp gasps and muttered curses of absolute disbelief from the Vanguard mercenaries behind him. After all, they had just watched a man pull a cannon the size of a short light pole out of thin air. But the Peacekeepers didn't make a sound. Though they were real, flesh-and-blood people, they were system-summoned entities, brought into this world as a direct reward from Mark's interface. They had some expectations of what their Commander was capable of. While the mercenaries recoiled in shock, the Peacekeepers merely tightened their grips on their weapons as their loyalty to Mark rose and anchored them against the rising terror.
"Eyes front!" Mark roared, effortlessly racking the charging handle of his railgun. The weapon let out a rising, predatory hum as its internal capacitors flooded with energy, the induction coils running down the three-meter barrel glowing a faint blue. "Nobody fires until I give the order! Wait for my mark!"
A suffocating silence fell over the staging area with only the distant sounds and fading hum of the retreating maglev train, the ambient, nervous screeching of the alien jungle surrounding them, and the heavy footsteps vibrating from the tunnel.
Then, the darkness at the mouth of the excavation tunnel seemed to shift as a massive, digitigrade foot, constructed of dark, non-reflective alien metal, stepped out of the shadows and crushed the earth at the tunnel's threshold, followed by the rest of its body. The first mech emerged into the stark crimson sunlight.
It stood fully upright, its sleek, completely featureless chassis absorbing the sunlight rather than reflecting it. The smooth, sloping cowl that served as its head glowed with geometric lines of red, moving with fluid grace, its massive, multi-jointed limbs shifting with the precision of a biological predator.
But it didn't fire immediately.
It stepped out of the tunnel and simply stood there, its massive, multi-barreled weapon systems locked on its forearms, tracking slowly across the human barricade. The blue grid of light flared from its cowl, washing over the excavators, the printers, and the terrified Vanguard and stoic Peacekeepers holding the line behind them.
"It's scanning," Mark whispered over the command channel, his superhuman reflexes keeping his finger perfectly still on the hair-trigger of his railgun. "It operates on a strict identification protocol. It's registering our biometrics, confirming we don't have authorization."
"Sir, do we engage?" Aurelia asked with an unnerving calm.
"Hold," Mark ordered, his eyes narrowed behind his visor, his brain processing the tactical geometry of the clearing in milliseconds. "Wait for it."
For twenty seconds, the first mech simply stood there, assessing the puny, unauthorized biological contaminants that had dared to breach its domain.
Then, the shadows in the tunnel shifted again, and the second mech stepped out, identical to the first in every detail, its own red lines blazing with lethal intent.
The moment the second unit cleared the tunnel, their behavior instantly changed. They were no longer standing idle. The two machines stepped forward in synchronization, splitting into a wide V-formation to maximize their overlapping fields of fire and gain better tactical coverage of the human barricade.
A cold, fragmented, synthesized voice boomed from their chassis, echoing across the deforested clearing.
"Keth'ra. Xel."
(CONTAMINANTS. PURGE.)
"Light 'em up!" Mark screamed, pulling the trigger of his railgun.
The staging area erupted into a symphony as over seventy human weapons fired simultaneously. The Peacekeepers unleashed a torrential downpour of machine-gun fire, filling the air with thousands of depleted uranium rounds that had been made from the Shepherd's ammo stowage.
The Vanguard mercenaries, fighting through their shock and terror, fired their magnetic rifles, sending slugs screaming toward the towering machines. It was a localized firestorm. A wall of lead and kinetic energy that should have reduced any known vehicle to molten slag in a matter of seconds.
But as the storm of desperation closed the one-hundred-meter gap, the air around the mechs suddenly rippled, and a translucent shield system flared to life, projecting three meters outward from their dark metal chassis, composed of thousands of interlocking, brilliantly glowing blue hexagons, perfectly mirroring the geometric syntax carved into the door inside the mountain.
The depleted uranium rounds from the Peacekeepers hit the blue hexagons and simply disintegrated. Bullets dropped to the dirt as flattened lumps of hot metal. The explosive ordnance splashed against the translucent barriers like water hitting a pane of thick glass, detonating harmlessly into the atmosphere without raising the internal temperature of the mechs by a single degree. The Vanguard magnetic rifles fared no better as their hypersonic slugs sparked violently against the blue geometric patterns, entirely failing to penetrate the barrier.
"Keep firing! Aim for the joints! Try to overload it!" Davis screamed over the comms, pushing his Vanguard squad to maintain the offensive even as the impenetrable nature of the enemy became horrifyingly apparent.
Mark gritted his teeth, his legs anchoring into the dirt like steel pylons to absorb the massive recoil of his weapon. He unleashed a continuous, punishing barrage from his railgun, which was vastly superior to anything the mercenaries or Peacekeepers carried, designed to crack through the thick hides of some of the animals. Through his vision, he tracked the micro-fluctuations in the enemy's energy grid, aiming directly for the center mass of the mech on the left.
The massive railgun slugs screamed across the clearing and slammed into the alien shielding. The overwhelming kinetic force of Mark's weapon actually registered on the ancient technology, and where his rounds struck, the translucent blue hexagons violently rippled, the color shifting dynamically from a calm, cool blue into a strained orange as the shield generators fought to redistribute the immense kinetic load across the network.
"I'm hurting the shield on the left!" Mark roared over the deafening din of battle. "Concentrate all fire on the orange sections to overload their capacitors and bring it down!"
But the mechs were not simply going to stand there and let the intruders test the limits of their defenses. Having finalized their threat assessment and established their optimal firing arcs, the mechs retaliated.
Thick, segmented panels on their forearms locked open. The massive, multi-barreled rail systems spooled up with a high-pitched, agonizing whine that cut through the sound of human gunfire. They didn't fire the massive, tunnel-shattering, high-yield rounds they had used to hunt Mark. Against a spread-out force of biological targets, they utilized their low-velocity, rapid-fire anti-infantry systems.
A storm of hyper-accelerated, needle-like metallic flechettes ripped across the clearing, creating an instant slaughter. Members of the Vanguard mercenaries and Peacekeepers simply did not have the reaction speed or armor to survive it.
A Peacekeeper, crouched behind a pile of stacked metal beams, peeked over the top to adjust the aim of his heavy machine gun when an alien flechette, moving at Mach Jesus, clipped the top of the barricade and struck him square in the center of his helmet and his head simply ceased to exist, exploding into a sickening cloud of red mist, shattered bone, and brain matter. His headless corpse slumped backward against the dirt as blood sprayed from what remained of his neck, and his finger, which was on the trigger, squeezed with a spasm, sending the machine gun firing wildly into the other members, though luckily it didn't hit anyone.
"Man down! We have a man-" a Vanguard mercenary screamed, breaking from his cover behind a printer to drag a fallen comrade out of the line of fire.
Three flechettes tracked the mercenary's movement with flawless precision, and a round bored a perfectly clean, fist-sized hole directly through his chest plate, instantly vaporizing his heart and lungs. Then two more rounds struck his waist simultaneously, brutally shearing his body in half. His torso flew backward, separating entirely from his legs in a gruesome, horrifying spray of blood and viscera, painting the side of the nearby excavator with blood and guts.
The industrial equipment provided almost no real cover against the alien weaponry as the flechettes punched straight through the thick metal treads of the excavators and the chassis of the printers as if they were made of wet cardboard.
A young Peacekeeper, fearlessly maintaining his firing line despite the terror, had his entire right arm obliterated at the shoulder when a round passed completely through the engine block he was hiding behind. He fell to the dirt, staring in wide-eyed shock at the geyser of arterial blood pulsing from his stump, his screams piercing the comms channel before a second round cored through his collarbone, pinning him to the earth in death.
"Marcos!" Mark screamed, utilizing his speed to dive hard behind a massive mound of compacted earth a fraction of a second before the dirt around him exploded into supersonic shrapnel. "Marcos, what the hell is the status?! We are getting slaughtered out here! Our weapons aren't doing shit, and the cover is useless!"
Inside his helmet, Marcos's voice was tense, a stark contrast to his usual demeanor, his processor running millions of variables a second. "I am attempting to map their shield oscillation frequencies, Mark, to find a weakness in the grid, but the encryption is shifting too fast! Their power output is astronomical!"
"I don't care about their fucking frequencies! I need a solution, or we are all going to die here!" Mark roared as he mapped the trajectory of incoming fire. He perfectly timed his movement, popping out of cover to fire three more slugs into the orange-glowing shield, forcing it to ripple violently before ducking back down before the mechs could acquire his new position. "How much longer do we have to endure this?!"
"Forty seconds! I need forty to ninety seconds, Mark!" Marcos pleaded, the sound of massive, routing power grids whining in the background of the AI's audio feed. "Just hold them!"
The next forty seconds felt like hell.
The air grew thick with the copper stench of vaporized blood and the burning ozone of alien weaponry. The Vanguard mercenaries were breaking under the lethality of the ancient machines, their morale shattering as the people next to them were turned into minced meat. The Peacekeepers refused to break the line, but they were dying just as fast. Men and women were being torn apart, their bodies bored through, limbs severed, and cover obliterated. The mechs advanced slowly and methodically, their red cowls sweeping the battlefield, executing the targets with the cold, emotionless efficiency of an exterminator spraying for insects.
"Mark! The grid is primed!" Marcos finally yelled over the comms, his voice cutting through the horrific screams of the dying. "I have the all-clear! Give the order to scatter! Clear the firing lane!"
Mark didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. He tapped the open command channel, his voice broadcasting to every surviving soldier in the staging area.
"ALL FORCES! BREAK COVER AND RUN!" Mark roared, his voice booming with absolute authority. "SPLIT FORMATION! IF YOU ARE ON THE LEFT, RUN WEST INTO THE JUNGLE! IF YOU ARE ON THE RIGHT, RUN EAST INTO THE ROCKS! DO NOT RUN IN A STRAIGHT LINE! MOVE! MOVE! MOVE!"
The Vanguard mercenaries didn't need to be told twice, scrambling away in absolute panic. The Peacekeepers, whose absolute loyalty to Mark meant his word was law, instantly abandoned their firing positions to execute the retreat perfectly. The humans broke from their useless cover behind the shredded excavators and ruined foundries, sprinting for their lives to clear the kill zone.
Aurelia moved with the speed of an Elite super-soldier, closing the distance to a wounded Peacekeeper in the blink of an eye, and grabbing the fully-geared man by the shoulder, effortlessly hauling him completely off his feet, and physically hurling him ten yards toward the dense treeline to the west before sprinting after him in a blur. Davis led the remnants of his Vanguard squad east, scrambling frantically up the jagged, uneven basalt rocks of the mountain foothills, slipping on loose scree in their desperation.
The sudden, chaotic movement caused the mechs to briefly pause their methodical advance. Their ancient targeting algorithms rapidly recalibrated and attempted to track the dozens of unpredictable, fleeing biological targets scattering in opposite directions.
But they were still just as deadly.
As the troops ran, the mechs fired, and two more Vanguard mercenaries were cut down mid-sprint, their bodies violently ripped apart by the hypersonic flechettes before they could reach the safety of the trees, their momentum carrying their corpses forward into the dirt. The loss of life was agonizing, tearing at Mark's conscience, but it was unavoidable. The maglev train simply didn't have the time to travel the eight kilometers to the city, unload the civilians, and return. They were entirely on their own, on foot, running from death machines.
Eight kilometers away, behind the towering, fortified walls of the colony, absolute panic had gripped the civilian population.
The lockdown alarms had been blaring continuously for the past five minutes. Families were huddled inside their homes, holding their children tight, listening to the distant, rolling thunder of the horrific firefight echoing from the northern mountains.
Although the Shepherd was completely disconnected from the colony's civilian power grid, operating strictly on its own reactor, the sheer magnitude of the energy surging through its hull warped the very atmosphere of the city.
The turbine-powered streetlights flickered violently, not from a power drain, but from the massive wave of electromagnetic interference washing over the streets. Civilians who dared to peer out of their reinforced windows looked toward the direction of the Shepherd, where they saw tendrils of crackling blue lightning arcing across the dark hull of the Shepherd. The air around the ship hummed with a terrifying, bone-rattling frequency. The atmospheric pressure in the city square dropped noticeably, the hair on the arms of every human standing on end as static electricity flooded the environment.
Deep within the Shepherd's mainframe, Marcos had been entirely focused on a single, desperate gamble. He hadn't been trying to hack the mechs' physical hardware anymore. He had been buying time.
Marcos had forcefully severed non-essential life support, internal gravity, and secondary sensor arrays aboard the frigate. He was redirecting every single ounce of the ship's damaged reactor directly into the Shepherd's primary weapon systems. He was feeding all of that raw, unregulated power into one of the frigate's massive, forty-meter-long main railguns, intentionally overcharging the capacitors far beyond their safe, structural operational limits.
It was always better to be safe than sorry. And against ancient, Expansionist-era combat technology, "safe" meant utilizing a starship weapon originally designed to punch above its weight.
As the targeting telemetry fed from Mark's suit confirmed that the surviving human forces had cleared the central blast radius and were a safe distance away in the jungle and rocks, Marcos finalized the firing solution. He targeted the mech on the left, the one Mark had managed to weaken with his shots and whose shields were already glowing a strained orange.
"Firing solution locked," Marcos whispered into the void of his own programming. "Firing."
When the Shepherd's forty-meter railgun fired, it created a deafening, reality-tearing boom that shattered the sound barrier instantly and roughly shook the homes, creating a visible, rapidly expanding ring of condensed vapor in the sky above the city.
The massive, hyper-dense tungsten slug left the barrel at a significant fraction of the speed of light, traveling the eight-kilometer distance in an instant. Behind it, without even physically touching the ground, the overwhelming air pressure and kinetic wake trailing thirty-five meters below the projectile's flight path interacted with the earth itself. It pulled the ground upward, tearing a massive, continuous trench through the earth, sending two towering, parallel lines of pulverized dirt, shattered trees, and uprooted, glowing flora flying hundreds of feet into the air, creating a wake of total devastation.
The projectile had passed mere feet above the newly constructed maglev track, and the sheer magnetic and kinetic disruption was so much that the conductive metal rails were violently ripped from their foundation pillars, twisting, sparking, and shattering like cheap tin foil in the wake of the passing round.
Back at the staging area, Mark had just reached the edge of the treeline. He turned, his vision attempting to track the incoming slug on his HUD long before a normal human would have even registered a change in the atmosphere.
And though he didn't see the slug itself due to its sheer speed, he was able to see the result. The overcharged slug from the Shepherd slammed directly into the center mass of the left-side combat mech, and its translucent blue hexagonal shields, which had so effortlessly shrugged off the combined firepower of seventy weapons and rippled under Mark's heavy fire, didn't even have time to register the impact, let alone oscillate to orange.
The shields remained online for a split second as the slug ignored the impenetrable alien metal of the mech's chassis and passed straight through the towering, fifteen-meter machine, and carried its remaining kinetic energy directly into the solid basalt of the mountain behind the staging area, burying itself deep within the rock face with an earth-shattering detonation that triggered a localized, minor earthquake and sent tons of loose rock and dust cascading down the jagged foothills.
For a single, frozen second, the struck mech remained standing where it was, its shields still active. Then, the kinetic transfer caught up with reality, and the mech was violently split in half. The force of the impact caused the upper half of its torso to shear backward, ripping away from the pelvis and digitigrade legs in a screeching, horrific tear of hyper-dense metal.
The upper half flew backward, slamming into the dirt two hundred feet away, its glowing blue lines flickering erratically before dying out completely, plunging the severed chassis into lifeless, matte-grey darkness.
The legs, still planted firmly in the ground, buckled a moment later, collapsing into a heap of sparking, useless alien technology. The immediate, brutal destruction of its counterpart caused the second mech to stop dead in its tracks. The high-pitched whine of its charging capacitors instantly spun down, the weapon systems on its forearms clicking back into their standby positions. The crimson light pulsing across its chassis slowly began to bleed back into a calm, analytical, icy blue.
Mark's chest heaved for exactly two seconds before his biology forcefully regulated his heart rate and breathing back to a steady calm. He raised his three-and-a-half-meter railgun, aiming it squarely at the surviving machine from the cover of the jungle. "Marcos! One of them is still up! Take it out!"
"No, Mark! Stop!" Marcos's voice commanded over the comms, sharp, urgent, and deeply authoritative. "Do not engage it! Tell the Vanguard and the Peacekeepers to hold their fire!"
"Are you out of your mind?!" Mark yelled back, his finger tightening on the trigger as he watched the blue lines on the surviving mech pulse methodically. "It just slaughtered over twenty of my men! Blow it to kingdom come!"
"Mark, listen to me!" Marcos insisted, his voice dropping into an urgent explanation. "These mechs are pure killing machines, but they were programmed by highly intelligent creators. Their core directive includes self-preservation and advanced threat analysis. When faced with an opponent that possesses overwhelming, insurmountable firepower, their logic matrix dictates that combat is a mathematical failure. If we push it, it will self-destruct to prevent its technology from falling into our hands."
"Then let it blow itself up!" Mark argued, his blood running cold as he stared at the ruined bodies of the summoned soldiers and mercenaries who hadn't been fast enough to escape.
"No, Mark, rage is stopping you from understanding the opportunity we have here!" Marcos pleaded, the AI's vast intellect grasping the massive strategic advantage. "It would be a catastrophic waste to let it self-destruct! Now that it recognizes we possess the capability to utterly destroy it, its logic matrix is open to new data inputs. I can try to talk it down."
"Talk it down?!" Mark asked, utterly bewildered, lowering his weapon a fraction of an inch. "Are you fucking crazy? It didn't listen to a damn word you said in the cavern!"
"Because in the cavern, we were a puny, insignificant force! We were unauthorized biological contaminants trespassing on its perimeter!" Marcos explained rapidly. "They are not programmed to negotiate with insects! But now, we have proven we are an overwhelming threat. And more importantly, I can explain the truth to it. I can explain the extinction of its creators."
Mark froze, the heavy railgun lowering further as the sheer audacity of Marcos's plan sank in.
"Its entire existence, its entire violent response, is predicated on protecting this facility for creators who are never coming back," Marcos continued, his tone turning grave and calculating. "If I can interface with its logic core now that it has stood down... if I can prove to it that its empire is dead... that nullifies its primary directive. The parameters of its existence will end."
Mark stared at the towering, blue-glowing machine that had begun to vent steam out of the top of its "head", the smoke of the battlefield drifting around its massive legs.
"If it accepts the data," Marcos said softly, "it will lack a purpose. I might be able to override its core programming and align it with us. Mark... if we can secure this machine intact, if we can analyze its power core and its shielding technology, we can leapfrog human technological advancement by millennia in a single day."
Mark looked around at the bleeding bodies of his forces. The high cost of this encounter had painted the dirt red. He looked back at the silent death machine waiting in the clearing, a machine that held the secrets of the universe in its dormant code.
"Alright, Marcos," Mark breathed, stepping slowly out from the cover of the treeline, his weapon lowered but ready to fight at a microsecond's notice. "I'll allow you to talk to it. But if it even begins to shift color toward red... I want you to vaporize it."
---
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