Once Alfred and his men were outside in the hallway, Les gave the order to open the launch-bay doors. They let in the gusting wind and revealed the dark skies over Africa.
Michael typed commands into his wrist computer. Cricket’s hover nodes whirled, propelling it forward.
“Godspeed,” Les said.
The drone passed the threshold outside the ship and into the black. It hovered for a moment, then dropped like a rock, vanishing from view.
The doors closed, and the divers went to the portholes. But as before, they could see nothing but random lightning streaks in the soupy black.
“Timothy, take us down to twelve thousand feet,” Les said.
Michael watched the robot’s descent on his monitor.
“Thirteen thousand and feet and lowering,” he said. “Should be getting a visual of the surface in a few seconds.”
“Timothy, Eevi, sitrep,” Les said into his headset.
The internal comms crackled with static.
“No change in weather conditions,” Eevi reported. “Just a few pockets of heavy clouds and sporadic lightning. The heat signatures are still coming through on my scans, and best I can tell, they seem to be isolated to six or seven locations.”
“Any idea what they are?” Les asked.
“Looks too small to be fires of any size,” she replied.
“Samson, Timothy, you got any ideas?” Les asked.
“A few theories, but…”
Les staggered as a pocket of turbulence rocked the vessel. White clouds blocked the view through the portholes.
“Eevi, talk to me,” Les said.
“Just some turbulence, sir. We’re hitting a patch of clouds.”
Les managed his nerves with deep, slow breaths.
“Three thousand feet,” Michael said. “Turning on the hover nodes in T-minus three, two, one…”
He tapped his wrist monitor.
Les pictured the drone suddenly halting in the sky.
“Okay, switching feed to our HUDs,” Michael said.
In the subscreen at the upper right corner of his visor came the grainy footage from one of Cricket’s cameras. Les strained to make out the picture.
“I don’t see shit,” Ted said.
“Wait a minute—need to switch on night vision,” Michael said. He tapped his monitor again.
There was no mistaking what came on the subscreen this time.
“Wow,” Lena said. “I never knew the surface was so colorful.”
The drone descended over many acres of flat ground covered in glowing purple and red forests. But it wasn’t the vibrant jungles or the open fields of blue weeds that amazed Les—it was the snowcapped mountain in the distance.
“Mount Kilimanjaro,” he said.
“That’s our target?” Ted asked.
“You see any other mountains out here?” Arlo asked.
“Switching feed again,” Michael said. Another view came online, to the east of the mountain.
The terrain in that direction seemed desolate, with hardly any flora growing on the sand-colored dirt. The desert stretched to an area near the base of the mountain, where fields of purple grass and weeds grew. Dense red jungles snaked up into the rocky slopes.
But something didn’t fit with the mutant landscape on the southern base of the mountain.
Massive tubes the color of dirty eggs reached toward the clouds behind the foothills. The towers were human in origin.
Or machine…
“Can you zoom in on those towers?” Les asked.
“Got to get closer,” Michael said. “I’m taking Cricket down to one thousand feet, okay?”
“Roger that.”
Waiting for the bot to get into position, they gazed at the vast purple fields and jungle carpeting the hills. From this vantage point, it was almost impossible to see any sign of bipedal life—or machinery, for that matter.
Most of the trees had red umbrella canopies and thick, curved trunks. Les had never seen any like them. The jungle thinned, giving way to dry riverbeds and cracked earth.
Cricket flew slowly, giving them a panoramic view.
“Steady, buddy,” Michael said. He tapped his screen, slowing the drone’s thruster speed as it approached the silos they had seen east of the mountain.
“What are they?” Sofia asked.
“Must be the source of the heat signatures,” Les said. “They look like smokestacks from old-world factories.”
“Why would the machines have factories?” Lena asked.
No one had an answer. Not even Timothy hazarded a guess.
As Cricket got closer, it became apparent they had found part of the machines’ base. According to the data Cricket was sending over their HUDs, black metallic buildings made up the interior of a compound the size of four old-world city blocks.
In the center was a rectangular metal tower with a spike on top. Warehouses and small structures, all the same metallic color, surrounded the tower in neat rows.
Several radio towers rose along the base of the mountain. There were satellite dishes, too—some of the biggest Les had ever seen. Perfect for sending the signal out if he uploaded the virus successfully.
“Timothy, you seeing this?” he asked.
“Yes, Captain,” Timothy replied, “and I’m mapping it to upload to your HUDs. I’ve located two main roads so far, twenty buildings, and…”
“What is it?” Les asked.
“I’m detecting movement in the feed.”
“Where?”
Les saw the vehicles before the AI responded. From this height, they were hard to make out, but they had central turrets like those on a tank, built on a central core unit. But they differed from old-world tanks in one major way. Instead of tracks, each had six segmented beetle-like legs, but they were anything but slow. Les watched as they ran at an alarming speed down a road curving through the rocky foothills.
“Commander Everhart, I would highly recommend pulling Cricket out of there,” Timothy said. “I think our robot friend has been compromised.”
Michael tapped at his monitor, cursing.
On the screen, the tanks bolted away from the compound, their jointed legs pounding the ground. They halted at a wall built into the rocky landscape. It was hard to say how tall, but it looked thick.
The entire area seemed to be one massive fortress that made the most of the terrain.
Beeping sounded from the wall-mounted speakers.
“What is that?” Les asked.
“It’s an alert,” Timothy said. “I set it up should any sensors detect exhaust plumes.”
Les felt his pulse ramping up. “How many is it detecting?” he asked.
“Hard to say. Give me a minute…”
Cricket had turned now to retreat, but its cameras were still on the compound. The tanks remained at a gate in the fortress wall.
Cricket was flying back toward the jungles now, passing over the last stretch of desert. This time, Les saw something else on the subscreen. It looked like mounds in a rocky field.
“Zoom in on those,” he said.
Michael tapped his wrist computer and the drone’s cameras focused in on the rocky field.
“Now have him zoom in on those humps in the earth,” Les said.
The image clarified further, confirming his fear. They weren’t rocks. They were weapon nests.
Cannons protruded from the ground. And these were just the ones he could see.
“Those are some big-ass guns,” Arlo said.
Les considered having Cricket search for more of the hidden emplacements so they could try to take them out, but he had a feeling more defenses were buried out of view. The weapons confirmed what he had already known: Plan B was the only option.
“Do we even have enough missiles to take them out?” Ted asked.
“No,” Timothy said. “Not from what I have already seen.”