The Agent did not reply. He might want to try and convert her, as he had been converted, but in the thick of the base’s defenses, he’d had neither the luxury of a prolonged debate nor the prolonged battle it would have taken to subdue her without destroying her.

She went stiff. Her mind no longer registered. It was done. As he pulled his thumb from her eye socket, and pried her rigid dead fingers from his arm, he silently considered her question. I asked the same thing, he thought, as he rolled the now stiff, defunct body of Agent Parikh off him and stood up.

He did not ponder it too long. There was much still to do. Hefting her up and over his shoulder, he set off into the night at a fast run. He had to bury the machine that had been his colleague out of sight of the many prying eyes now converging on the site of their bitter little battle, then he had to go and fight another.

Chapter 54: Well Done

The AIs worked with speed and precision, a thousand stimuli driving smooth calculated reaction. They tracked the approach vectors of each of the missile barrages rising into their paths, determining risk potentials and reaction parameters. With this open declaration of war, their gloves came off and instantaneous programming kicked in. Without emotion or regret, they moved forward with standard response protocols, no longer hindered by the whims and bickering of the politically charged Council.

Their goals were no longer of espionage and subversion. Now their mission was one of oppression and disarmament. Inside the three satellites’ hulls, vast generators churned, yielding massive swarms of power that thrummed into the satellites’ laser systems. Extending the laser mechanisms from their casings, the satellites turned on their own axes, aiming themselves bodily at the incoming missiles.

They selected their targets dispassionately, taking them out in order of approach. While they started picking them off they continuously calculated the chances of destruction and weighed them against other responses. Inside their plated shells they initiated preparation for the launch of the viral pathogens: warming, filling, and prepping the cluster modules and then loading them into their atmospheric entry pods. They had not completed their analysis of the human antigen, and they now surmised correctly that the missile attacks had probably been prompted by the fact that they had discovered the antigen and were planning to counter it.

* * *

On the planet’s surface, Agent Lana Wilson had no intention of continuing business as usual either. If these humans wanted war, she would give it to them. She had been stationed at the Atlantic Fleet Submarine Base in King’s Bay, Georgia for months now and many people had come to know and like her. She had befriended them and worked her way into their trust. They thought they knew her.