Infiltration, in the future

The walls seemed higher as we moved ahead. I could feel my heart beating faster. I believe it was nervousness. We stopped about a hundred metres from the compound. The cloaking drones hovered above our heads, constantly maintaining an invisible shroud over us.

Jonas and Nate separated out and faced the rest. I hadn’t expected a speech from those cheeky fellows. Apparently, I was wrong. Jonas started speaking with Nate at his side, “Fellows, we are at the doors of our Rite of Passage. We may not have been born a long time ago but we were trained hard enough and we were trained for this day. We have stayed together as a team and we will win together as a team. We will fight as hard as possible. Today is not the day we die.”

The last sentence struck me. How the hell did he come up with that? “Today is not the day we die” was something I would tell myself everytime I embarked on an adventure. It always fired me up with a certain confidence. I’d have to ask Phil about it later.

I heard Nate shout out loud, “Boys!!! Are you ready to rain some fire?”

The others shouted in unison, “Hell, yeah!!!”

I felt the ground beneath me tremble. Thankfully, the cloak also absorbed any kind of sound produced inside its boundary. Jonas came up to me and said, “We are gonna move out chief. Any last words for us?”

“Last words are reserved for the last act of life, yours is just going to start. Just tell me something, where did you get the part about today is not the day we die?”

Jonas was little confused, “I don’t know, it’s something I just felt and said at that time. Maybe something to do with my programming. You should ask the guys who wrote the algorithms.”

I said with my right eyebrow raised, “is that so? Alright, I’ll ask when I return. Go now, take care of those sentries and all of you, get back in one piece. We have a long night ahead.”

“That’s a deal. Beers are on me when we get back to our city.”

I smiled, “I drink scotch.”

Jonas called on to the three musketeers.

Aramis came to me and spoke, “Can’t wait to see you in action. We will return soon.”

A grin appeared on my face though he couldn’t see it through my armoured head. I said, “Let’s see. Right now it’s your turn to show what you got.”

Aramis nodded and jogged back to his squad and they strode off to the compound. It was 11 o’clock. I requested Phil to transmit the video feed of the drones to my suit. Of course the drones couldn’t see the movements of the assassins physically but their transmitters provided us with the precise locations which were marked in the video feed.

Within seconds they reached the perimeter wall. The ascent along the minarets seemed peaceful since there were no alarms raised. Two drones now aligned themselves along the top level of both minarets, I saw two flashes and then saw the guards fall down. One marker remained motionless which I guessed belonged to the guy deactivating the sentry. After dropping the guard, the first guy stayed on the lookout, observing patterns of enemy movement I supposed. After two minutes, I saw both pairs of markers float down. There were thirty eight more to go. The Phantoms were signalled for take off. About an hour later, I heard Jonas’s voice crackle on the radio, “All done chief. We are on our way back.” I heaved a sigh of relief.

The Phantoms were about thirty minutes away. The Assassins were to meet us on either sides of the gate. As soon as we got the confirmation from Jonas, I ordered everyone to get ready. We were gonna move out towards the compound, in fifteen minutes. It was five minutes past midnight then.

At twenty minutes past midnight, we started. Nate lead the team, I stayed at the back, observing the compound. Thermal images showed no change in enemy routine. This meant our strategy till now has been successful. The ETA of the Phantoms was two minutes. We reached the entrance in sixty seconds and immediately Nate and his team got busy in attaching the tabificus explosives. I saw Jonas approach slowly behind Nate when he was connecting the leads of the detonator to the explosive device. I wanted to see what was Jonas trying to do. I saw his marker move in my feed when suddenly Nate fell over and his face hit the ground followed by Jonas’s weird laughter. Nate got up and muttered, “Asshole!” Jonas commanded his team mates to go to the other side and get ready to storm. “See you on the other side Nate!” He said as he jogged off to the other side. At that very moment Phil conveyed that the Phantoms were here. As I turned my head I saw some shifting of the clouds and two loud explosions rocked the compound.

It was our cue, Nate fired the charges. We waited till the acid ate away the door, creating an irregular opening. Six more explosions were heard at some distance. The Phantoms had finished their job. Now the outcome was entirely upto us. As we stormed inside the compound, all we could see at first was smoke and hear alarms blaring. The drones detected major movement of troops all around the compound. Defensive protocols were in place. We didn’t wait for the smoke to subside. Jonas’s team Jumbo went to the left and Nate led team Mumbo to the right of the compound. The formation for attack was simple. The machine gunner was to form a perimeter by raining bullets. The infantrymen were to be on the gunner’s either side, making precision shots using the sniper attachments on their rifles. The assassins’ job was to take care of anyone who got past the barrier of bullets.

I moved ahead, trying to assess the situation further. I chose stealth for the current job. The titanium scales on my armour were enabled to produce a cloak via micro projectors on their surface. I stuck to the inner side of the perimeter wall which gave me a wider field of vision while minimising encounters with enemy troops. Well, I managed to reach the end of the wall without attracting much attention. But I didn’t like what I saw at all.

Two flashing red lights had caught my attention as soon as I started moving along the adjacent side of the compound. I stopped to observe carefully. I heard a loud hiss and the soldiers posted beneath the flashing lights started jogging in a file toward opposite directions. With another loud but longer hissing sound, I saw white smoke emanating from the wall of the facility facing towards me, followed by series of metallic clanging. What seemed like walls were actually armoured doors about thirty feet high which had just started rolling in opposite directions, the wheels clanging against the rails. My tongue dried, heartbeat increased. Four files of heavily armed soldiers marched out, ten soldiers in each file. No, that didn’t worry me. The reasons for worry were led by the soldiers, twenty biped robots, walking slowly out of the gates, each of them about fifteen feet high.

I was out of my wits. Our assumption, rather my assumption that Sergei had exhausted his armaments while laying siege to our city was absolutely wrong. Not only that, it seemed that we had walked straight into an ambush.

To be continued…