Chapter 65 - The Iron Perimeter
The roar of the automated mini-guns converted the drainage tunnel into a slaughterhouse of ricocheting lead and concrete fragments.
"Run!" David yelled, sweeping Maya into his left arm while pushing Leah ahead down the curving conduit.
The two autonomous drones—sleek, quad-tracked chassis equipped with infrared spotlights and high-velocity rotary barrels—surged through the water behind them like mechanical sharks. The ruby beams of their targeting lasers painted the walls, flicking across Leah’s shoulders.
David spun, skidding to a halt behind a reinforced cast-iron sluice gate that once regulated the mountain reservoir's overflow.
The heavy slugs tore into the iron barrier, punching dents outward like fists hitting tin foil. The noise inside the confined space was deafening, a relentless jackhammer of supersonic fire that threatened to rupture their eardrums. Maya buried her head into David’s collar, screaming without sound in the pandemonium.
David peered around the splintered edge of the gate.
The lead drone was fifty yards away, its wide tracks churning up bloody sludge as it accelerated along the narrow masonry shelf. Mounted directly beneath its sensor turret was a high-capacity drum magazine and an external hydraulic steering line.
*Predictable engineering,* David’s mind calculated with icy, instantaneous detachment. *Sterling Genesis uses standard military-contract chassis with secondary civil defense retrofits. The hydraulic line is shielded against shrapnel, but unreinforced against direct kinetic shear.*
"Leah! Keep moving until you see the ladder well! Do not look back!" David barked.
He dropped the captured carbine. It was useless against armored plate. Instead, he unhooked two heavy fragmentation grenades from the dead operative's tactical vest. Using his teeth, he ripped the pins from both canisters simultaneously, holding the spoons down with his fingers.
He stepped directly out from behind the iron gate into the blinding glare of the drone’s searchlight.
The machine's targeting sensors locked onto his chest. The electric motor of the rotary barrel whined, spinning to lethal velocity.
David didn't dive. He didn't flinch.
He waited until the tracking system reached full acquisition—the precise microsecond before the firing pin struck the first cartridge—and hurled both grenades not at the machine’s chassis, but directly into the murky water beneath its left track.
At the exact same instant, David threw his entire body backward behind the iron partition.
The twin grenades detonated beneath the surface. Water is incompressible; the blast had nowhere to expand except upward through the drone's lightweight belly armor. The explosion flipped the five-hundred-pound machine completely upside down, ripping its track assembly off the sprockets and sending the secondary ammunition drum cooking off in a secondary, deafening chain reaction.
The fireball illuminated the second drone, which skidded to a halt as the burning wreckage of its twin blocked the tunnel.
David didn't give the surviving machine time to recalculate.
He scrambled over the flaming scrap of the first chassis, his boots stepping directly into the burning diesel slick, and leaped onto the second drone’s turret. With bare hands fueled by an unnatural, adrenaline-fueled surge of genetic power, David grabbed the machine’s dual optical sensor assembly and wrenched it clockwise with a sickening crack of sheared aluminum.
He pulled the dead operative’s ceramic combat blade from his sheath and plunged it straight through the exposed wiring loom beneath the ripped turret.
Sparks geysered into his face. The machine convulsed, its tracks grinding uselessly against the stone, before its engine gave a dying shudder and fell silent.
David stood atop the smoking machine, his chest heaving, his face black with soot and engine oil.
A hundred yards ahead, the amber light of Leah’s torch was hovering near a rusted vertical iron ladder that disappeared upward into a square shaft cut into the bedrock.
He sprinted toward them, catching Leah just as she reached the bottom rungs.
"Is it clear?" she asked, her voice trembling as she looked at his blistered hands.
"The drones are dead," David said, his voice raw. "Up. Now. The access shaft opens into the maintenance yards of the Black Ridge rail terminal. If Julian’s notes were right, there’s an automated freight line that passes through the valley at dawn."
May you like
Leah climbed first, securing Maya between her shoulders with the harness, while David followed directly beneath, carrying the infant locked against his heart, his weapon pointed down into the smoking dark.
***
