“We have to get to Ethan,” Perkins said. “Tell him the gang knows his plans”.
Perkins had assumed leadership now that they escaped and O’Brien was allowing others to talk due to his brain injury. O’Brien himself wasn't getting any better. He stumbled between his two faithful friends, both supporting him by holding an arm.
“Yes, we do,” Jonesy replied. “Should we dump O’Brien”?
“No”! Absolutely not,” Perkins replied.
“Alright then,” Jonesy relinquished, a little put off that his suggestion was shot down so aggressively. “He never was much good for anything, that’s all”.
“He’s a Cadet under Ethan’s army, and injured in battle,” Perkins replied. “We don’t leave our wounded behind. At least I don’t. It might make sense if just one of us to go on, though. Maybe if we find some cover, one of us can stay with him, and the other can go find Ethan”.
The Cadets were starting to feel like they were out of immediate danger. The camp was completely out of sight now, and night had fallen. They figured they’d be pretty hard to find. How wrong they were. Just when they were feeling good about things, the Demons started dropping down around them and dozens more flew overhead. The ones on the ground started to circle, making sick, guttural sounds. Fangs and jagged animal teeth pressed against, and cut their lips. A toxic blend of saliva and Demon blood dripped from their open mouths.
There was nothing the Cadets could do. They didn’t have weapons and Demons had literally become the king of the jungle. They were as large as any lion, could fly, and if there were others around, they swarmed. There was no way the Cadets could defend themselves. One of the Demons could rip all three of them apart. The odds were so overwhelming, their mind simply went numb, not unlike O’Brien’s. The only one who’s eyes remained open as they waited to be torn apart was O’Brien.
It was only O’Brien who witnessed what happened next. At jet-like speeds, projectiles not unlike military drones, flew through the swarm, hitting Demons like a bullet and with a definitive thud, their remains dropped to the ground. At a very tight angle, the projectiles swung back and made another pass through the swarm. More Demons fell to the ground. All this before the Demons realized they were under attack. Then the drones stopped and some dropped from the sky to fight the Demons circling the Cadets. It was the Sheriff Bobs. The ever intentionally evolving Sheriff Bob’s.
The Sheriff Bobs were now something to behold. They could fight with machine-like precision from air or ground. Their engineering was based on duality. Each had an onboard particle accelerator producing matter/antimatter reactions. The reactions fueled the robots themselves, as well as enabled the use of matter/antimatter weaponry. With inner tubing, they were able to deposit and store antimatter along the outer wall of the accelerator which was magnetized. The antimatter could be used as bullets which upon contact exploded into pure energy creating a flash and vaporous cloud of particles. Every shot was calculated for distance, trajectory, wind speed, and even sudden movement. Sheriff Bob never missed. Antimatter bullets didn’t kill the Demons, but their particles spread like they just went through a big bang event. It would take years for them to reassemble.
Not that the Sheriff Bobs needed antimatter bullets. They were proficient at close combat. With graphene skin, a composite frame and self healing properties, the Sheriff Bob’s could take just about anything you could throw at them. Other things like extending hydraulic forearms, provided additional reach of up to a foot, and exposed a transfer mechanism providing a choice of close combat weapons.
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It was the AI though, that made the Sheriff Bobs an exceptionally formidable fighting force. An individual Sheriff Bob not only felt, saw and responded to what it was doing, but what every one of its kind was doing, just as if it was experiencing it itself. Any Sheriff Bob could react to any aspect of the battle, regardless of the distance, as long as the response served a purpose determined by AI. AI was seeing the fight through all the eyes of the Sheriff Bobs and responding from that perspective. A Sheriff Bob might be fighting its own Demon and without missing a beat, one of his arms would rotate behind him and fire at a Demon on the other side of the battle. It was the best response given the circumstances.
AI not only fought its enemy. Based on real time objective/result analysis, it altered its strategy throughout the fight. It and the Sheriff Bobs became more adept during the fight. The Demons were fighting from primal instinct. They could barely organize their own thoughts, let alone muster a coordinated response. Ethan would have been proud. Through coordination, AI had maximized individual and collective response to potential. His trust in AI had paid off. The Sheriff Bob’s were behaving exactly as people from his World, when they ultimately abandoned all evil and transcended into the New World.
In relatively short order, the Sheriff Bobs had won the scrimmage. A few Demons remained, but Demons were the first class AI placed judgment on. They were determined to be beyond redemption, and extinguished. Curiously, the Sheriff Bobs drew handguns to complete the job. They fired the bullet and watched the effect with analytical curiosity. The Demons died. Absolutely died, which was not supposed to happen. In truth, the Demons were simply cut off from this world forever, but this was beyond AI’s understanding at the time.
Perkins told the Sheriff Bobs how they had escaped, and the Sheriff Bobs informed them that allowing captives to escape was the practice of the gang. It was a game of sorts and created a final torturous moment. They let the captives go long enough to feel they were past danger and able to see freedom. Then the gang would send out the Demons to feed on them. The resulting dashing of hope was as violent as the kill, which was pretty violent, as Demons began feeding on your legs and hindquarters while you were still alive and watching.
“We were almost Demon food,” Perkins asked, feeling a little more scared from that than when he was actually confronted by them.
“Yes, you were,” Sheriff Bob answered. How did you come to be captured”?
“We were coming to join the battle”.
“You were expressly told not to do that”.
“Well, I didn’t know!” Perkins replied. “I just met these guys. Anyway, we were trying to get to you. They probed O’Brien’s brain and know where you plan to fight the battle. They’re coming tonight”.
“Processing,” the Sheriff Bob responded, although it was not long enough to notice. “Thank-you. Modeling and timelines have been updated. You say they probed O’Brien’s brain? We have no information on that capability being present in the encampment”.
“It was a big lizard that did it,” Perkins said.
“A Dark Angel”?
“Yeah, but only bigger”.
“Hmm. We have yet to experience the variant”.
“Looked like he was running the place,” Perkins added.
The Sheriff Bob’s took the Cadets to a safe zone behind their Field of Influence.
“If you stay here, you should be safe,” one of the Sheriff Bobs told them.
“Take these,” he said, handing the Cadets two of the guns they had used to kill the Demons.
“The bullets contain an antiserum of Ethan’s blood. They seem to work”.