Armageddon by Jim DeFelice, Dale Brown Read Free Book Online

keyboard furiously as the screen flashed a red warning.
    “Problem?” asked Danny.
    “Ehh,” she said. “Sensor read won’t translate quickly enough.”
    “Is it going to crash?”
    “Hope not.”
    “If he crashes it, three congressmen are going to tell everyone in America the system doesn’t work.”
    “Not everyone in America,” said Jennifer, putting her nose closer to her keys.
    Danny tried to relax. In his capacity as the head of the Whiplash ground team, he was responsible for the system being tested. It was his first—and so far only—program responsibility, and he shared it with two senior engineers. But as the ranking military officer on the project, he’d been the one to meet with the congressmen, the face VIPs liked to attach to a mission.
    The congressmen were already in a bad mood. When they had insisted on seeing the Automated Combat Robot or ACR system in a “real live test,” they apparently didn’t realize that it was meant to operate at such an ungodly hour.
    The event scenario was straightforward. A downed airman had just been located behind enemy lines by a search and rescue asset. Danny and two of his Whiplash troopers, aided by the robots, would rescue him from the clutches of Red, the enemy patrolling all around.
    In real life, such a rescue would probably have been done with considerable force, or at least as much firepower as possible. There was basically no such thing as too much muscle in that situation, and the more boots—and guns—available, the better. But the more people in the package, the more things that could go wrong. ACR could make it possible to limit the exposure of the rescuers and increase the odds of success.
    “They’re in. Okay,” said Jennifer. “Deployment. You’re looking good, Danny.”
    “Ten minutes,” he told his men.
    Down on the ground, the two gliding canisters had landed on the scrubby desert. Their sides had fallen away, disgorging a trio of ACR robots. The units were roughly two feet in length and were propelled by articulated tractor treads at both sides, an arrangement that allowed them to get over obstacles two feet high and avoid anything larger. Besides the small infrared and video cameras studding the units, the ACR robots carried what looked like a bouquet of pipe organs atop their chassis. These were reworked M203 forty-millimeter grenade launchers, which could be equipped with a variety of grenades, making the ARC units weapons as well as scouts.
    The units began fanning out to form a perimeter around the downed airman. “Deployed without a problem,” reported Jennifer. “The Toasters are marching on.”
    Danny winced at the nickname, hoping it wouldn’t catch on. He picked up his smart helmet and put it on, flipping down the visor, a display screen which could be tied into the ACR system, or any of several other sensor sets supplied through a special Dreamland system.
    “Gear up,” Danny told his team. Then he began flipping through the ACR screens, looking for the four members of Red who were hunting his downed airman.
     
    SERGEANT BEN “BOSTON” ROCKLAND, THE RED COMMANDER, smiled as he heard the drone of the approaching Osprey. Though it was still a good distance off, the aircraft had a very distinctive sound.
    He turned and nodded to the ranger a few feet away. They’d decided not to use their radios, figuring that the Whiplash team might be able to home in on the signal. The ranger, another member of Red, lobbed a smoke grenade at the lumbering robot that was trundling toward them twenty yards away. As the grenade exploded, Boston saw that the ruse would work even better than he had hoped—the robot began peppering the air with its own smoke grenades, and provoked the robot to the north and south of it to start firing as well. The thick layer of smoke began drifting over the test range, obscuring the robots’ sensors.
    “Bonzai!” yelled Boston, throwing off his vest and starting to run.
     
    THEY USED ROPES TO GET