Brodie looked over his shoulder at Major Klasky. “Thank you, Major. We’re good here.”
Klasky didn’t move. “I must remain. Camp protocol. This is classified material.”
“Believe it or not,” said Brodie, “I’ve reviewed classified material without an officer breathing down my neck.”
“Pretend I’m not here.”
“My imagination’s not that good.”
Taylor added, “Sir, we are reviewing this footage for potential evidence of misconduct, which may or may not point us toward a person of interest in our case. It would be againstourprotocol for you to be present for that.”
Major Klasky appeared unhappy with being told what to do by warrant officers. But, to his credit, he said, “You’re right, Ms. Taylor. I’ll leave you to it, and I’ll be in my office. Let me know when you’re done.”
Taylor said, “Thank you, sir.”
Klasky left the room and closed the door behind him.
Brodie refocused on the screen and read through the names on each of the camera feeds. He found the windows for the cameras on Sergeant Miller, PFC Greer, and Number 20—a.k.a. Bucky.
Taylor pressed the space bar.
They watched the dozens of video feeds play simultaneously.Brodie focused on the Ranger cams. One Ranger’s POV was from behind a machine gun nest in the road. Another aimed a grenade launcher out of a window. A third, perched on a high rooftop, looked out at the blank desert, which resembled a flickering purple sea.
Brodie watched Sergeant Miller’s camera. He was standing in front of another Ranger, gesturing. There was no audio. Then the other Ranger headed for the stairs and up to the rooftop of the building. Miller took his position in the second-floor window and watched the narrow road below.
Brodie checked Greer’s camera. He wasn’t moving, and his body cam showed a formless black-and-purple mass. He recalled from the earlier VR playback that Greer had lingered next to a wall in the opening moments of the battle.
All at once, the tin men’s body cams began to move, quickly cresting the sand berm and sprinting toward the village, their M4 rifles raised and firing at full auto toward the defending Rangers.
Through Bucky’s body cam, Brodie caught pieces of the other charging bots as they all raced toward the village. A few of the tin men fanned out and Brodie saw full-body images of them. The thermal imagery rendered them as reddish-orange man-shaped hulks running at impossible speeds, their legs a blur as their feet pounded against the sand, their upper bodies almost motionless in an unnatural and inhuman way, rifles raised, spitting out hundreds of yellow shell casings from their M4s’ ejectors.
Brodie’s eyes bounced among the forty-something viewpoints. A Ranger on a rooftop was hit. He sat and slumped against his firing nest as he removed his helmet—his resignation visible even in the distant thermal image. The Ranger’s feed went dark.
The tin men were quickly closing the distance. Some of the Rangers held their positions, waiting until they had a clean shot. Others fired from the roads, trying to get a kill before the enemy breached the village boundary.
Brodie watched the camera of a rooftop gunner who was trying to rake the wave of red figures bounding across the desert. He tried to lead them, but the tin men varied their speed and their angle of approach. One spun away from an incoming barrage and then changed direction on a dime, like a skilled running back dodging a tackle—an insane quick-reaction maneuver impossible for any living thing on earth. Bucky was toward the center of the charging line, and within a second he was running down a street in the village.
Brodie and Taylor were now both focused on PFC Greer’s camera. He hadn’t moved. On all the other feeds, the battle had intensified. Two tin men scaled the wall of a building. Another took out a Ranger who had popped out a window to get a shot. One by one the Rangers’ feeds blinked dark.
Sergeant Miller was lobbing grenades into the road below. The underbarrel launcher only held one round at a time and he would quickly take cover and reload between shots. The inert grenade cartridge thudded into the road, with the advanced GPS-based system presumably registering it as a simulated detonation. A tin man near one of the grenade impacts froze in place and sat down in the road, apparently within the virtual blast radius.
Greer remained where he was, against a wall and away from the action.
Taylor said, “He’s panicked. Or having another psychotic episode.”
Then Greer began to move. He ran around a building, then spun into a doorway and bolted up a narrow set of stairs.
He entered a small room. Directly ahead of him was another Ranger, firing grenades out the window. It was Sergeant Miller.
Greer slowly walked toward him. Then he pointed something at the sergeant. It was a pistol.
“Holy shit,” said Brodie.
Brodie looked at Bucky’s body cam as the bot ran into a building and up the stairs. It entered a room, and its camera picked up afull-body image of PFC Greer standing in the middle of the room, aiming his pistol at his platoon sergeant’s back.
Bucky lowered its rifle. Waited a moment. Then ran up the next flight of stairs to take out the Rangers on the rooftop.
Greer took a step toward Miller, pistol still raised.
