Chapter 106: Attack of the Infiltrator!

Chapter 106: Attack of the Infiltrator!

It was around 10 the next morning when Roxie, Stripe and I all loaded up into the deuce and set out. I'd decided that I'd done enough screwing around (both literally and figuratively) for the time being, and focus on finding the last two technologies that would let me get into the Forbidden Zone and recover my brain. Only trouble was, what I couldn't decide was which one I should try and find first: the stealth suit or the antenna. So I flipped for it.

Tails. Stealth suit it is then!

Roxie was certainly enjoying herself. She was sitting in the passenger seat, sticking her head out of the window as we drove along, bouncing over the rough and scarred Big Empty landscape. Her tongue was lolling lazily out of her mouth, and she just had a ridiculous look of bliss on her fuzzy face... made all the more absurd because her doggy jowls were flapping in the breeze.

Granted, I had to deal with a bit of a draft in the truck cab itself. See, I hadn't been able to find a piece of glass big enough to cover even half the windshield (because I hadn't been able to find any unbroken glass at all) so I just had to make do. I did find some chicken-wire mesh, though. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing.

This was probably why I was wearing my sunglasses and Stetson for the first time since coming to the Big Empty.

It wasn't long before our destination came into view: a large cluster of irregularly placed hexagonal boxes. Well, I say 'hexagonal,' but I couldn't actually see if they were hexagons at the time. I just guessed, partly because hexagons seemed to be a common theme in the Big Empty, but mostly because when I asked Jeeves where X-13 was located, he said it was somewhere deep inside a place called the 'X-66 hexcrete archipelago.'

"What do you suppose we'll find in there?" I asked aloud. Roxie didn't look like she heard me. She continued sticking her head out of the window with a stupid, happy expression on her muzzle. Stripe, on the other hand, just looked up at me from his seat in the middle of the cab, squawking confusedly at me.New novel chapters are published on

The closer we got to the cluster of shapes, the more details seemed to jump out at me. I honestly couldn't tell what the boxes ahead of me were made of. Metal? Rock? Who knows. Whatever it was, it was painfully clear that it wasn't natural. The edges of the shapes were too precise. Too exact. Or, at the very least, too straight. Right angles everywhere. If this had originally been some kind of organic rock formation at some point in the past, it certainly wasn't one anymore.

Closer still, and more details appeared. The boxes were a dull, dark grey. Not quite metal, but definitely not stone, either. I stuck my head out of the window as we passed by one of the smaller ones barely sticking a few feet out of the ground; the top was indeed a hexagon, each edge about 10 feet across, and it looked like it was made out of concrete. Concrete... hexcrete. I groaned inwardly as the meaning clicked in my brain, and I just shook my head, continuing to drive.

And then, a few seconds later, I felt a tremendous, horrible juddering shake that threatened to shake my teeth out of my skull. I instinctively slammed my feet on both the brake and the clutch, and the back end of the massive truck fishtailed for a few seconds before everything finally screeched to a halt. Stripe and Roxie were shaken a bit, but adapted surprisingly quick, considering. A cloud of dust, tire smoke, and the smell of burnt brakes filled the cab. Roxie barked, and Stripe started squeaking.

"What the fuck was that?" I asked, looking around. To be honest, I wasn't terrified that something bad was happening outside the truck. I was more worried that something had gone wrong with the engine. But as I sat there, the engine ahead of me rumbled smoothly, and there wasn't any steam coming out from under the hood. I hadn't been changing gear when everything shook, so I didn't think it was an issue of the transmission going wrong suddenly and without warning...

Everything shook violently again, more forcefully this time... and my eyes went wide as I realized it definitely wasn't the truck. Off in the distance, between a pair of hexagonal concrete pillars, the ground split open violently. Rocks, debris, and other bits of detritus were all pushed aside as a new hexagonal concrete pillar emerged from underneath the ground and started to raise itself up.

"What the..." I trailed off, tipping my hat back and staring in awe as I leaned my head out of the window. The concrete pillar was enormous! It was absolutely massive! And yet it was moving steadily up, for no apparent reason at all... and then, the bottom emerged out of the ground, and it just kept going up. Once it was completely clear of the earth - easily 40 or 50 feet in the air above the ground, or so - the giant hexagonal pillar started to move silently and smoothly through the air like a balloon.

What.

"Oh, now that just ain't right." This didn't make any kind of sense, even for this place. The pillar looked like it was made out of concrete, and concrete does not fly. I couldn't see any method or means by which it kept itself aloft. And it didn't make any noise as it sailed through the sky in exactly the same way that a brick doesn't. Its very presence, moving through the air to a spot above my head, completely defied any rational or reasonable explanation.

"Uh oh." As I stared up at the giant concrete pillar, suspended in the air almost directly over my head, a pang of paranoia took hold of my brain. As quick as I could, I put the deuce back in gear and floored it. It took a few seconds for the heavy truck to stop spinning its wheels and get back up to a decent speed, but it did, thankfully, get going. And just in time, too!

The ground behind me shook like a bomb went off, and I struggled against the steering wheel to try and keep the truck steady. Even though I couldn't see it (since I had no mirrors), it was obvious the pillar had crashed into the ground... and it was like the floodgates had opened. The ground continued to violently shake, and all around me as I sped along the broken and scarred terrain... the giant hexcrete pillars started to move and shift and lift up out of the ground and float around to rearrange themselves.

And I wasn't in a vehicle built for fast cornering. Oh joy.

For two solid minutes, I drove at full tilt and trying to dodge the dozens (possibly hundreds) of flying hexagonal concrete pillars moving themselves in seemingly random directions all around me. I was reminded a little of when I had to first say 'hi' to the Boomers, and I had to dodge artillery strikes... except, with that, I had the benefit of ED-E warning me whenever they were about to fire. Here, I had no such luxury. Made things quite clenching, if you follow.

One of the pillars zoomed perilously close to the deuce. It came out of nowhere, and was flying through the air no more than five feet off the ground directly in front of me. I let out a curse through gritted teeth, and swerved to avoid it. Honestly, I didn't know what I was cursing; was it the rogue hexcrete flying along in front of my path, or was it the fact that the damn truck was so fucking top-heavy that such a sharp maneuver damn nearly flipped the bitch? The truck skidded sideways, but through skill, determination, or just sheer dumb luck, I managed to hold the slide and keep the truck from rolling over...

And then the engine stalled.

I was just about ready to leap out and carry on the rest of the way on foot, when I looked out of the side window next to me and noticed something: apart from the one hexcrete that had nearly run into me (which was now in the process of attaching itself of the upper edge of one of the larger pillars nearby), all of them had stopped moving. I leaned back into my seat and let out a sigh of relief, my hands falling off the steering wheel and the shifter.

"BARK!"

"HOLY FUCK!" I yelled, practically jumping out of my seat through the roof of the cab. "Fuckin'... hell, I almost forgot you two were here..." Roxie and Stripe looked up at me expectantly, both of them looking a bit confused. Clearly, they hadn't been as worried about that nonsense as I had been.

The rest of the trip through the archipelago was, thankfully, free of any more surprises. I honestly still don't know why those damn pillars started moving in the first place. Was it that they detected motion, was it the vibrations or heat from the car, or were they on some kind of invisible, old-world timer, set up to rearrange themselves at pre-determined intervals for some unknown and wholly incomprehensible scientific experiment of some kind? Who knows. Maybe there wasn't actually any kind of purpose. Like, the Think Tank just woke up one morning and went "Let's see what happens!" and went from there.

Hell, I'm just glad they seemed to be sticking to this one area of the crater. It would be highly inconvenient if I had to worry about giant hexagonal blocks of concrete falling on my head out of nowhere. In the same way that a honey badger tearing off my testicles would be inconvenient.

In any event, I was eventually able to find X-13. It was, in fact, located precisely in the center of the hexcrete archipelago... and looked to be the only solid, non-moving structure for half a mile in every direction. Like X-8, I was able to identify it by the large satellite dish pointing at the sky mounted on top of the building, with a large "X 13" painted in big bold letters on the side.

The pathway leading up to the entrance was made up of hexagons, and at first I was a bit hesitant to proceed, given what happened moments earlier... but these hexagons didn't look like tops of hexcrete pillars that moved. These looked like real metal, several pipes snaked their way out of the hexagons and into side of the X-13 building, and several lights illuminated the edges of the hexagons. These, clearly, weren't supposed to move.

Hopefully.

I hopped out of the truck, and made my way around to the truck bed in the back. I'd found a camouflaged canvas cargo cover in one of the many hidey-holes on the truck when I'd rebuilt the engine, so now the back was (relatively) protected from the elements... which was good, because I'd turned the back of the truck into a makeshift armory.

"Ah! Hello again!" Sasha said happily as I jumped into the back. "Are we off to fight enemy team?"

"Maybe," I said, carefully looking over the collection of weapons. Sasha was mounted on the wall closest to the cab, the anti-materiel rifle was mounted on the right inside wall, and the Tesla cannon was mounted on the left. Various other guns were strapped down into various places; most of the remaining available space was taken up with ammo boxes full of replicated ammunition and grenades. "Not sure what I'm gonna see in there."

"Where is there?" Sasha asked. The brain under the barrels sniffed.

"We are at X-13, come to pick up the stealth suit. Know anything about this place that might help?" The brain suddenly started growling. "Problem?"

"!" the minigun cursed in Russian. At least, it sounded like a curse. "I remember X-13 labs. Lots of narrow corridors. Twists and turns. Is maze of dead ends and tiny rooms for tiny men." I nodded, grunting my understanding. I'd almost figured as much from my foray into X-8. What surprised me was what he said next: "Is not place for heavy weapon, like me. Close range weapon will work best. Shotgun. Carbine. Killing gloves of boxing, maybe?"

"Wh- really?" I was a bit taken aback. "What, you don't want to come with me?"

"Oh, I do! Believe me." Sasha said, the brain barking again. "Shooting enemy team is fun, but I understand specific role in combat. Down in labs, I would be terribly cumbersome, and get in your way. I would much rather you survive than indulge my desire for entertainment."

"Thanks, I appreciate that," I laughed. "So, you know combat tactics then?" I asked, rifling through one of the ammo boxes. Sasha barked again.

"Oh yes. Is byproduct of my testing. Speaking of - there are many metal men inside testing facility. Robots were part of test for sneaking suit. Chose loadout accordingly."

"Well, I've been looking for a chance to use some pulse slugs," I smirked, grabbing a box of 12 gauge shells with yellow shell cases, and loaded them into the sawed-off and the ammo loops on the side of the shotgun holster. "Thanks for the tip." Sasha barked.

"Happy to be of use! But there is... ehm..." the gun coughed, and the brain made a strange sort of sniffle.

"I think I can guess," I said, turning the corner, and pushing the button on my belt. It clicked, stopped humming, and I reappeared in time to see the last robobrain lying inert on the floor. Stripe was hunched over on top of it, chewing on a pair of wires sticking out of a torn-open panel. "You work fast, don't you little buddy?" Stripe spat out the wires, squeaked, and scampered off the robot and back up me to sit on my shoulder. The stealth suit laughed softly.

"We were never allowed to destroy the robots before!" She said with a laugh. "Cheating gives me such a thrill!" I pushed open a nearby door; the cracked and rusty plaque indicated that this was the CEO's office.

"Better stick with me in that case, doll," I said, carefully stepping over a pair of lasers and sidestepping another proximity mine. "If at first you don't succeed, cheat, I always say. I said that once."

The stealth suit started giggling quietly.

I stepped into the next room, and was presented with a large office table with a high-backed leather chair in front of a large set of illuminated opaque windows with a large REPCONN sign mounted over them. On the right side of the wall was a very large and glaringly obvious safe. I pressed a button on the front, and the door popped open with a clunk.

"So, is this the firmware whatever?" I asked, picking up a small circuit board with a white metal edge. The edge seemed to match the same kind of metal on my chest plate armor. Aside from that, the only thing in the safe was a scrap of paper which simply said 'Secret X-13 Document, Please Do Not Steal!'

"Please remove the outdated firmware on the right side of the armor, and install the firmware update." The stealth suit explained calmly. It didn't take me long to find what she was talking out, and I swiftly swapped the two circuit boards. As soon as I did, the armor lit up with the green lights again, it beeped, and she started speaking again: "Firmware updated to Version 1.4. Boot Dampening Sensors online. Aural Subnet online. Impulse Accelerator online. All settings synched to users physiology."

"Huh..." I tossed the old circuit board back into the safe and looked around; all the lasers had turned off, and the one proximity mine I could see was completely dark. "Well, that was easy enough."

All at once, klaxons sounded off overhead, and several spinning yellow lights activated on the ceiling above me.

"YOU FOOL!" I heard a voice yell from over the intercom. It was ragged, maniacal, and I hadn't heard it in several days, but it was unmistakable.

"Mobius..." I growled, shrugging the G36 off my shoulder and into my hands.

"Even that Aural Stealth Suit will not hide you from my Robo-Scorpion army!" Mobius yelled over the speaker; in the next room in front of me, the air crackled. Blue lightning suddenly appeared out of nowhere, and the scent of burnt ozone filled my nostrils. "Sting the intruder my pets! Sting them until they are stupid!" I kicked the desk over and readied the carbine. I didn't have anywhere to go, and I had to be ready...

The room seemed to warp and bend with a spatial distortion as the lightning got thicker. There was a flash, and suddenly a robot appeared in the other room. It was so large, it filled the entire room, crushing several pieces of furniture as it materialized. It looked... like a robotic radscorpion. A robotic radscorpion that had three cameras for eyes behind a rectangular pane of glass. That wasn't really surprising. What was surprising was the color scheme. Most of it was a bright yellow color (like you'd see in black-and-yellow hazard striping) except for the claws and the end of the tail, which were painted red. And speaking of the end of the tail, it was clearly some form of energy weapon - was this the 'intelligence draining' laser the Think Tank was so worried about?

"Mean robot bugs!" the stealth suit squeaked with urgency. "Mean robot bugs!"

The G36 barked and the room lit up from the multiple muzzle flashes. Sparks burst off the chassis of the robot as my bullets tore through the air. The robot shuddered violently - and I could've sworn I heard Mobius' voice yell out "Ow!" with every impact - but I saw the tail lift up, readying itself to fire.

I ducked, and a split-second later, a blue laser beam sliced through the air above me. It looked suspiciously like the LAER's discharge. The fake window behind me exploded in a shower of glass. I kept low, trying to keep safe from the broken glass raining down on top of me, and leaned around the table to fire the G36 again.

"Hey, quit it!" Mobius' voice was definitely coming a speaker somewhere on the robo-scorpion. "You'll damage the hull!"

I ducked back behind the table narrowly avoiding another LAER blast. The G36 had run dry. It had definitely done some visible damage, but not enough to put it out of commission. I pulled out the sawed off shotgun on my thigh, popped up over the desk, and let loose with both barrels. Electricity arced and sparked along the robo-scorpion when the slugs impacted, and the robot convulsed violently, shuddering one last time before collapsing in a heap on the ground.

"Well... that wasn't so har-"

The robo-scorpion exploded.

I was so surprised that I was almost knocked off my feet. It was like the robot was ripping itself apart from the inside. I shielded my eyes reflexively as an explosion of bright blue fire and electricity ripped through the room, turning the robo-scorpion into a literal burnt crisp. Hell, by the time the explosions stopped going off and all that was left was the mangled, twisted metal scraps, smoke and steam rising out of the ripped apart robot carcass, even the paint had peeled.

I could hear the sounds and see the flashing blue lights of more teleport distortions coming from places outside the room.

"You can't avoid the deadly laser stings of MOBIUS!" the mad brain yelled over the same speaker as before. "Destroy as many of my robo-scorpions as you want, I'll just make more! Go, my minions! String them in the name of all that is MOBIUS! Mwa-ha-haa!"

"We gotta get out've here," I said, reloading the G36, and looking around. Stripe had disappeared from my shoulder in the ruckus. The stealth suit, on the other hand, seemed calmer than before. Maybe it was the fact that I'd destroyed one.

"Remember! Thermo-optic camouflage systems are a robot's big weakness!" she offered up helpfully. I nodded my agreement, vaulted over the upended desk, and quickly pressed the button on the belt as I ran out of the room.

The hallway outside was filled with robo-scorpions. These were much smaller than the one before, and could actually maneuver around without getting stuck on something. The air shimmered all around me; I was mostly see-through, but the distortions got worse the faster I moved. Not that I really had a choice. I ran through the crowded hallway, sidestepping the confused robot scorpions and made my way to the exit.

"What do you mean, you lost him?!" I heard Mobius' voice echoing out of several robots as I rushed past them silently. "By Jove's lugnuts, I need to get this monitor fixed. Look harder!"

It felt like a much longer trip getting back up than it was going down. All around me as I rushed back through the facility to try and get to the entrance, more and more robot scorpions teleported in, all trying to find me. Occasionally, the optical camo would fail slightly, and draw the attention of one of the robots.

"It's no use hiding like this!" Mobius voiced echoed menacingly from behind me as I kept running. "Let's be friends, you and I! You can't run forever!" The voice seemed to trail off into incomprehensibility as I kept running. I was near the exit now, I was sure of it...

Squeak!

I skidded to a halt, just outside Lab 3, and looked in. There was Stripe, sitting in the lab, looking right at me - and pointing one of his clawed fingers down at my boots on the floor. I didn't take the time to be surprised that he could see through the camo perfectly, I just shouldered the rifle in my hands, rushed in, grabbed the boots off the floor, picked up Stripe, and ran out of the room again, carrying the tiny deathclaw under my arm like a football. Stripe let out a pleased squeak as both he and the boots in my hands slowly vanished beneath a pale multicolored shimmer.

A few minutes later, I burst through the front door and into the bright light of the midday Big Empty sun. The deuce was still right where I'd left it, and there didn't appear to be any robo-scorpions teleporting in... although there were a few dead nightstalkers scattered around. I guess it was a good thing I left Roxie out here to guard the truck.

"Well, glad that's over..." I turned off the camouflage with a click and proceeded to set both Stripe and my boots down on the ground. Stripe squeaked happily, and scampered up into the truck cab. I heard a bark, and Roxie emerged, jumping down from the back of the truck and bounding over to me.

"Wow..." the stealth suit said breathlessly. "What is this place? Are we... outside?"

"We certainly are," I said to that suit as I tossed my boots into the truck, and gave Roxie a gentle scratch behind the ears. "Thanks for the help in there. I couldn't have done it without you." That wasn't entirely true. I'm sure I could've managed it, but I would've burned through a lot more ammo, and it would've taken a hell of a lot longer. Either way, I was genuinely grateful.

"It was nothing, really," the stealth suit said softly. "I just don't want you to die."

"Thanks, that makes two of us," I said with a laugh, jumping behind the wheel of the truck. "So, do you have a name?"

There was a very long pause.

"A... name?" the suit seemed surprised. "I... I don't know. I don't think the scientists ever gave me a name." Another very long pause. "I... I've always kind of liked the name Susan?"

"Well, hello there Sue," I said as the deuce came to life with a heavy rumble. "It's nice to meet you. I'm Sheason."

"Hi..." Sue the stealth suit started giggling as I drove off, away from X-13.