Chapter 43 Resistance

“It’s this way.” John stopped and pointed through the forest.

“My gear is this way.” Rosie didn’t wait for an answer.

The morning sun showed Rosie’s handiwork. She’d already found her cloak, the steel shin plates and her own pistol. John stayed back while Rosie pried the rigour tight grip from the old fashioned revolver, leaving the severed arm with its dead owner.

“Single action.” Rosie tried to gauge John’s reaction to the uncommon firearm, wondering what he saw. She took his gear from the corpse, admiring the custom pistol before seeing the multi-tool and handing it back.

She gathered the assault rifles, giving a pair to John, and keeping one. She didn’t know what kind of weaponry would be at John’s home, but doubted they had anything comparable to a Dominator class Assaultron.

The last foolish person to threaten the life of the man she loved hadn’t moved from where she left him. Pinned to a tree with her sword in his back. She yanked the blade free with twist then turn, and enough force to cause dead flesh to rip further. Then the corpse slid down the tree, moving forward at the same time, and tearing up to the shoulder. Rosie saw John look away and tried to make a joke Brandon would like.

“Guess he had to split.”

“It’s this way."

Rosie followed John for hours. Down roads and through forests, in silence. He would stop like he wanted to ask something, then just start moving again. Rosie didn't know if he had no questions or too many. She knew to let him work through things first.

After crossing a bridge and climbing up a steady incline that followed a river, John became alert. “Wait, something’s wrong.” He crouched by a tree, his tiredness gone and senses primed. She saw him start breathing in a way similar to how Charlie taught her. He’s afraid, she thought.

Rosie zoomed her view and caught sight of what John had seen, an empty watchtower atop wooden gates. Rosie crept to the left to get a better view. She felt more curiosity than fear.

At the bottom of the path stood a collection of robots, not damaged, but mismatched somehow. The crude and clunky Protectrons had nail guns attached to their simple arms. The silver orbed, three armed, Mr Handy bots hovered and spluttered. Each arm with a saw blade or flaming blowtorch attached.

At either side were two Assaultrons, and the only thing Rosie felt a little wary of. Only one had a head, and that wasn’t fully armoured. The other had a single metal eye, taken from another bot

“I don’t understand, there are four Assaultrons and half a Sentry bot in there.” John said. Rosie hid her impressed surprise.

“Are these them?” She asked, while scanning for wireless broadcasts.

“No, the ones inside are like new, apart from the Sentry bot.” Rosie saw John ready to go in at that very moment. She put out a hand to stop him and inadvertently touched his chest. She could feel his heart pounding.

“They’re talking to each other on a narrow band, short range, everything else is jammed. Signal’s strong, has to have a local source.” Rosie calibrated the scan and found it. A hovering ball of metal, mesh on one side and long aerials sticking out. “There, an eyebot.”

“Eyebot?” John sounded like he knew the word and not because the system told him.

“You can shoot right?” Rosie asked playfully as she pulled up the hood.

“Yes.” John took the ammo from two of the rifles and cocked the other.

“Aim at the seam on the eyebot, when it’s down I’ll start painting targets. Hit them.” John nodded and went. Well trained, she thought, seeing how he moved.

Rosie pushed the visor together and took a deep breath of filtered air. Puzzled by the mismatched robots. They looked like sketches, half built, attempting to combine different models. A cracking burst of rifle fire sent her into action.

Rosie threw her sword in a high arc, then slipped into the dreamlike state. The oddly built robots looked like statues to her as she connected to the not quite right Assaultron. She ran the override code that moved line by line, like a dripping tap, then she encountered something new. Resistance.

Rosie drew her sidearm and set some well placed bullets in motion, just enough to rupture an exposed pressure hose or shatter visible circuit board. The small five point seven rounds zipped and cracked into metal, but did little real damage.

The override still hadn’t completed by the time her blade stuck in the ground nearby. Time snapped back as she whirled with it in hand. The robots couldn’t see her in the suit and Rosie used that to a devastating effect.

Metal limbs screeched under her blade before they fell to the soft ground. The bots reacted to the gunfire that John put in her wake. Kicks and shoulder barges dropped the Protectrons. Articled arms slashed blindly as Rosie stepped and struck. A burst of flame licked at the suit and Rosie felt the heat before falling into the dreamlike state. The flames had a hypnotic stillness then vanished as Rosie cut the steel arm.

Warning indicators bloomed into her view, showing a threat from behind. The override hadn't taken control yet and the exposed Assaultron laser glowed red. A burst of gunfire from behind her shattered the hot and brittle lenses. The rupture triggering feedback that fried the bot.

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The last bot standing suddenly lunged towards her, thrashing at the air and getting dangerously close. Rosie span away, caught off guard by the aggressive response, just before John slammed into it with a kick. He finished it with point blank rifle fire to the broken back plate.

“Hey! It’s John, it’s clear. Hey!” John shouted and banged on the damaged wooden gates, panicking.

“I’m fine.” Rosie tried to joke but she didn’t think John even heard her. A well built man opened the door, relieved but frightened.

Rosie couldn’t pay attention as John hurried her in. Log houses, each with a steel roof and red brick chimney. Covered porches with frightened people in them, all glad to see John. He all but ran to one of the houses and burst through the door.

“Robco!” John darted to the man on the kitchen table, a partially treated gunshot wound in his leg and a whiskey bottle in his hand. Rosie pushed her way in, straight to the wounded, as Charlie taught her.

“Hello, again.” She recognised the man as John’s friend, but given the distraught younger woman by the cold fireplace, and the older man’s broken expression, she moved past it.

Rosie scanned the wound with the ultrasound function, getting a grainy picture of an intact nine mil bullet. The rounded tip would make it difficult to grab. “John,” She ordered. “I need a stimpack, a foot of ten gauge wire, forks, gauze, and hot coffee.” He moved quickly. “When did this happen?”

“Yesterday, we’ve been stuck inside.” He seemed more worried than frightened. John returned with everything she needed and set to making coffee. Rosie flicked the alloy knife and had John hold his friend’s leg.

“No more of that.” She snatched the bottle from the older man and used it to sterilise the length of wire. Rosie couldn’t give him med-x even if she had any.

“This is going to hurt.” Rosie made an incision on one side of the leg and used a gauze wrapped fork to wipe it. With a steady hand she guided the stiff wire through the calf muscle and coagulated blood till she felt metal. A short, sharp tap on the wire drove the bullet out, sending it plinking to the floor as John held his friend down.

A blast from a stimpak someone brought over in both sides of the wounded leg, and another glug of whiskey, brought John’s friend a moment of calm. The woman still looked distraught even with people around her. Rosie saw how much it frightened John. He didn't even react to her drinking the coffee.

“What happened?” John asked his friend as Rosie stitched.

“Wallace. He took Wallace.” The woman wailed as John looked like he wanted to do the same.

“Tell me everything.” John forced himself to be calm in a way Rosie admired.

“Yesterday afternoon, that damn eyebot the boy’s been working on sprang into action. Thing goes flying outta here with Wallace chasing after it, all excited. I catch up and next thing I know I hear a pop and I’m on the ground.” Rosie saw true fear in the man’s face, and something else she couldn’t place. “He had armour.”

“Like power armour? Did it have bones on it?” Rosie pulled a stitch too tight, making the man wince, as a warning to John.

“No, it was like bot armour made to fit a man.” Interesting, Rosie thought.

“Which way did he go?” John growled and stood, he looked fully prepared to head out right then.

“Wait.” Rosie held her hand up, hoping to sound calming but missing the mark. “What happened to your bots?” Rosie had seen a stationary Assaultron on her way in.

“I get back here and find our bots jammed. Any time we went outside, the others started on the gates.”

“This eyebot, was it connected to your network?” She saw a look of fear on John’s face.

Outside he led her to an open workshop, well equipped and kept tidy. One side had robotic arms that worked as power tools, another area for clothing. And open terminals with a child’s comic book like drawings all around.

Rose sat and broke the slightly tricky encryption, finding code that she understood the brilliance of. She dug through the data and started to find the aggressive digital bomb. Hidden within the eyebot had been a shutdown command that repeated over and over. As she started unpacking the weaponised code, Rosie started looking at the recently run programs, finding it familiar.

A roll of wallpaper held open caught her eye, precisely etched code, then copied and modified into something leaner. “John, what is this?” She asked, half dreading the answer, half excited to hear it. He looked over, and then went back to pressing armour piercing ammo, the clunk of the press punctuating his words.

“Wallace, he’s smart, like you smart. They’d been hacking bots for years, and he took like a copy of the code with one of the bots, rigged it to print back out.” He is smart, Rosie thought. A notification appeared on the screen as the virus receded fully. Ones and zeros filled the screen, falling away to leave a large M, and triggering an audio file.

"I want the device. Bring it and the kid walks." The part synthesised voice sounded cold. The M disappeared, leaving only coordinates.

“You understand whoever did this is dangerous right?” Rosie chose her words carefully and kept her tone soft.

“So is Wallace.” John didn’t look at her, he just kept loading magazines.

“We should call Brandon, they can help.”

“I’m not waiting.” Like you didn’t wait for me, she thought, then forced herself to let that go, for now.

“You’re walking into a trap.” Rosie tried to get him to just stop for a minute and think.

“Wouldn’t be the first time.” John started walking away.

“Can you just wait a minute.” Rose’s frustration broke through, as did John’s.

“No, I can’t. I’m not asking you to come with me.”

“Sounds familiar.” She regretted it instantly, John stopped like she wanted. As he turned she saw the fear in his eyes, yet something else rising behind it, something she saw in the mirror. Rage.

“Look, either help me or get out of my way.” Stubborn, she thought, and left John to gear up rather than distract him more.

Rosie crept through the settlement, able to hide with ease. She saw people moving from house to house, gearing up themselves. Young and old, few trained, fewer long guns.

John moved from the workshop to the nearby house, he didn’t go through the front door, walking round the back instead. As she stepped up onto the porch, Rosie ran her gloved hands over the door and frame. The message they would send each other had been carved with skill. This was the home John wanted her to see.

He moved around inside as Rosie peered through the large window. An open space with little furniture, boxes everywhere, yet natural and filled with light. She wanted to go inside, but wanted John to show her in more. Rosie slipped back to the workshop and waited, running through the failed override log.

Rosie saw John had changed into fresh jeans and shirt, tearing into sandwiches at a pace that he didn’t enjoy. A light machine gun strapped tight to his back.

“I…” John started to say something and Rosie gave him a chance not to.

“Later.” She smiled despite her worry.

“Later.”

She watched John project confidence and calm, absent moments ago, as he entered his friend’s house. “I’ll get him back.” John put his hand on the older man’s shoulder.

“You get a shot, you take it. Kill that bastard John.” Rosie picked up on something in the man’s voice that John missed.

“Wallace sleeps in his own bed tonight.” John knelt and took the woman’s hand, she looked ill with worry. “He’s coming home. I swear it on my oath.” Rosie saw the look on his face, steel will forged by the Brotherhood. John keeps his promises.

She slipped out from behind him, seeing the people of the settlement looking to John. “Everyone, I need you to be ready. Hold the watch and have a q.r.f., a patrol on stand by. We are going to need every gun on that wall.” He spoke with certainty, giving the people something to do. She knew that the real fight wouldn’t be here, as did John.

Rosie saw how the people looked at him, how the people looked to him in their desperation. By her accurate calculations he couldn’t have spent more than a few days here, and they’d not only welcomed him with a home like theirs, they saw him as one of them. People always liked John, she thought, but she'd never seen him take charge.

The gates creaked open as John took a minute to stretch his exhausted limbs. He struck a steady pace that Rosie matched, headed south.