Exodus: Machine War: Book 2: Bolthole by Doug Dandridge

Author:Doug Dandridge [Dandridge, Doug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2015-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

If a man has not discovered something that he will die for, he isn’t fit to live.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

BOLTHOLE.

“Quiet, child. Quiet.” Nursery Mother Nella Lien stroked the hair of the five year old boy who she held in her lap, cradling his face into her breast as he sobbed. She looked around the chamber, where the other employees, the Mothers and Fathers of the facility, talked with the small children, or held them, or did anything they could to distract them from the events outside the main entrance. Other adults had made it to the Nursery before the robots had arrived, come to get the children they had left there to be watched during their work shifts. Some were in the chamber with the infants. Those little ones were also howling at the top of their lungs, having picked up the smell of fear from the air while not really aware of what was going on. It was part of their genetic heritage, calling for the adults to protect them from danger, though evolution had never programed them for a situation like this.

The thick door still held, though the center was now glowing white hot as the robots attacked it with lasers. Lien knew those machines had been made to kill living things, with humans at the top of the list. The sound of helpless children was like ringing the dinner bell for the murder machines, and they seemed to be committed to getting in and ending those small lives as early as possible in their spans. Nella whispered to the child, then looked up at the door. To her horror there was molten metal, white hot and flowing like syrup, running down the door onto the floor.

It won’t be long now, she thought, reaching down to the floor to grab the small pistol she had stored in the nursery for emergencies, though nothing like this. It was a low powered mag pistol, good enough to take down organic forms without armor. Against these robots she was sure it would be next to useless. But she would not surrender her life, or the lives of her charges, without giving it all the fight she had. She looked over at one of the Nursery Fathers, who held a larger mag rifle in his hands, aiming it at the door.

More of the molten alloy of the door was running across the floor, its heat burning it into otherwise fireproof tiles. The slow dribble turned into a flood, followed by the center of the door falling in soft pieces, a hole opening up to the outside. Two laser beams burst through to strike the walls of the outer chamber of the nursery, burning into the faux wood walls, one sliding across to set a desktop aflame.

Here they come, thought the Nursery Mother, aiming her pistol at the door as robot arms pushed and the whole mess started to fall inward. The first robot pushed through, and she sent a flurry of rounds into the torso of the machine, for no apparent effect.

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