Chapter 8

"Are you sure this is correct?" Colonel Jerrik looked around the room.

"Our source has never given us poor intel in the past," the analyst at the podium replied.

"There's always a first time," Sergeant Major Bohannon muttered.

"Have you been able to gather any corroborating evidence?" Jerrik asked.

"We have a few leads." Flicking a button on the controller, the analyst began a video reel that played on the holo-projector in the middle of the table. "Purely by coincidence, on the same day as the New York assassination, a combined force of SEALs and SAS hit a mercenary base in Peru. This group was the International Freedom Brigade, although they were really just out to get rich. We captured about a dozen people, most were just grunts and mercs, although we did manage to get one of the ringleaders. NSA ran him through the brain sifter and found out they had somehow came into possession of three of the robots. We think these three were the ones that pulled the Manhattan job."

"And two of them blew up on the Lower West Side."

"That's right, Colonel."

"So what happened to the third?"

"We don't know." The analyst shrugged. "You guys took out their manufacturing base, and the SEALs got the people pulling those bots' strings. Unless there were a secondary objective or some of the mercs got away, it would have reverted back to its last instructions. It's probably gone to ground."

"Until it takes out another target."

"That's the trick." One of the other analysts spoke up. "If it had no other instructions, we'll probably never hear from it again. It's been quiet for close to a year now. With no one to give it orders, it doesn't have any direction."

"So what's the danger?" Sergeant Major Bohannon asked.

"Right now? None. But there could be one in the future." The two analysts exchanged a worried look. "Two actually. Let's assume that the bot's owners are out of the picture. We haven't been given access to the machines the Brits and the Chinese are sitting on, so we're going on mostly conjecture at this point. The robot's core behaviour is probably a stealth mode. These are expensive things and they wouldn't be used on just any job or in frontline combat. So the owner would want its bots to return to base or hide out until they were needed again. In this case, it stays hidden because there's no base to return to and the owners are in jail or they had their brains turned to jelly by NSA. But what if there's a hardwired command code that someone could use to override its basic functions? We won't know unless we can get MI-5 to tell us 'cause we all know the Chinks aren't going to let us snoop around theirs. I don't think it's likely, but someone might be able to reactivate this bot."