Chapter 8

Protector and I did a quick mental scan of the new people. These were the people that we were supposed to meet, and they had been running a test on us to see how long it took us to escape the cage and how we acted when we did escape. Well, I was kind of pissed off, and I was all for teleporting them into the cage to see how they liked it. However, Protector calmed me down, and I did no such thing.

We were still wearing our uniforms, and I detected a couple of mental snickers from the top ranks. Okay, we fixed that by “instantly” converting into exact copies of what they were wearing. The gasps of surprise went a long way toward making me put up with the situation.

[All of the conversation with these people was done by mind reading, but I am going to make it easier by recording our speech as if it were done in the normal vocal manner.]

Hmm, all of these people were male, so I prompted Jack to take over leading the conversation. “Okay, we are here. What can we do to help you?”

“You are not quite what we expected.” That was from the highest ranking member of the group.

Before Jack could come up with a suitably diplomatic comment, I blurted out, “Well you don’t look like what we expected, either.” Every one of the lower echelon men laughed at that, but not out loud. I will have to give the top man credit for taking my comment with good grace and not over reacting, though he did not laugh.

The commander said, “What I meant, but did not express very well, was that we were expecting a couple of tough, no holds barred brawlers, instead of a couple of people who look like they are barely out of high school. And why were you wearing those outlandish outfits?”

“As for our age, that is deceiving. I am pretty sure that you would have trouble finding three people who could survive for more than a few seconds fighting against either one of us, alone, and together, we could probably handle 10. Those outlandish outfits were exactly that on purpose. Those are the clothes we wear in public so that we can be recognized immediately in case a person needs help.

“We can change our clothes in a fraction of a second.” Watch this. I went through a dozen outfits, from something a nun would wear to my idea of the sexiest possible bikini before switching back to my copy of their uniform. “Nobody told us what to wear, so we simply wore what we had on when we were called to time jump.”

The man was obviously impressed with my clothes-changing ability, so I did not push with that. Jack picked up the conversation. “What can we do to be of the most assistance right now?”

“The situation is relatively quiet at the moment, but we are expecting another hard push at us sometime in the next hour or so. What do you know about the enemy?”

“We know practically nothing beyond what it looks like. Let’s start off with a description of what it has for weapons.”

“Most of them carry what we call an assault rifle, though it does have a slow rate of fire when used as an automatic weapon. It is 0.56 caliber and has the hollowpoint structure. A hit by one of their slugs is devastating. The others are armed with a single-shot grenade launcher of about 1.65 caliber. This, too, is devastating to anybody caught in the relative small blast radius. We have not seen any other weapons.”

“Okay, what are their general tactics?”

“Their tactics seem to us to be very primitive. They launch an attack that we can usually repulse, but a few seconds later, they descend on us with massive numbers of troops that simply overwhelm us by their sheer numbers. Our assault weapons and machine guns tear hell out of them, but they seem to know how many to send in to eventually wear us down. In effect, we can win the initial skirmish, but we inevitably lose the main battle.”

I commented, “I think I know what they are doing, but I would like to question one of them. Is there a prisoner that we could talk to?”

“I’m afraid not. We are never able to capture one of them. Their style of massive attack makes that impossible for us to do. Besides, we don’t speak their language, so we couldn’t question them if we had a prisoner.”

“That’s no problem for us. We don’t need to know the language to talk to somebody. For example, we have no idea what language you are speaking, yet we have no trouble communicating. I guess that our first job will be to capture one of the enemy. To save time, do you have somebody to point us in the right direction?”

“Sure, that’s no problem. Sgt. Ofnee, go with these people to show them were to find the enemy, but don’t get yourself killed.”

“Yes, Sir. If you people will follow me, I’ll get you issued a rifle and ammunition so that you will look like any one of our men.”

Of course, we did not need the rifle or the ammunition, but we had not mentioned that. We thought that it would be better to get to know these people a little better before we spilled all of our secrets. However, to be on the safe side, I did give Sgt. Ofnee a set of body armor. He didn’t know it yet, but no enemy bullet was going to penetrate his skin while he was with us.

We rode a simple lift to the surface inside a block house. Sgt. Ofnee had his own rifle and said, “Okay, folks, follow me. By the way, what shall I call you?”

Jack answered, “Call me Jack and her Liz. That’s good enough for us. As far as I know, we don’t carry any rank.”

“Okay, that’s good enough for me. This way, Jack and Liz.”

Sgt. Ofnee led us about three-quarters of a mile to a line of low hills. “The enemy is on the other side of these hills. Do you want me to come with you?”

“No, just keep an eye on us in case something goes wrong. We’ll be back with our prisoner as quickly as we can manage.”

We walked as far as we thought was prudent, then we dropped to a crawl, and finally on our bellies as we reached the crest of the hill we were on. Jack and I poked our heads over the crest just enough to be able to see what was on the other side.

We saw three of the enemy acting as rather inefficient pickets as if they were inviting attack. We arbitrarily picked the one on the extreme left as our first capture. I teleported the enemy soldier to the small valley behind us, and Jack surrounded it with a shield. The surprise was obvious to the enemy soldier, and it tried to escape. It found no way out of the surrounding shield, so it just held still to await further developments.

Jack and I worked together to scan the mind of the soldier, and we found that there was no mind there for us to scan. This creature was a robot! No wonder the enemy was willing to sacrifice so many to win a few yards of real estate. To our surprise, the same techniques that we used to search minds worked on the circuitry within the robot.

We found that the “head” contained a local computer that controlled the operation of the robot’s body and its ability to locate targets and to fire its gun. Inside the head was also a complete sensory system that gathered all kinds of information and fed it to a transmitter in the robot’s main body. It seemed to me that the robot was in constant radio contact with a central computer somewhere nearby. However, nearby might mean as much as 20 or 30 miles.

Ah, there it was. We managed to locate the central computer so it was time to dispose of this specific robot before we went up the chain of command. Jack triggered the self-destruct mechanism and the robot blew itself up. Jack discovered by accident that he could do that over a range of at least half a mile because the two robots on the other side of the hills also exploded. By damn! We had a new weapon to use against the enemy.

We teleported back to Sgt. Ofnee and told him what we had discovered. Jack wrote down in Sgt. Ofnee’s notebook the frequencies and codes necessary to trigger the self-destruct mechanism within the robots. I teleported him back to headquarters with that information and our plan to check out the central computer. We were also going to destroy all of the robots that we could find on our way back to headquarters.