Vendetta (Olly versus the Mechanoids Book 1) Read online

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  COPYRIGHT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Vendetta

  Olly versus the Mechanoids Book 1

  By Frank Carey

  COPYRIGHT

  Copyright © 2017 by Frank Carey

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  League Tale # 54

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was June 2025, and Oliver "Olly" Wilson, all of 22 years, yet the highest paid driver in the country, stood and watched as kid after kid tried to best the game only to fail miserably. Officially called space battle, the game was deceptively simple: destroy your opponent's drone before he destroys yours. The problem was you only had boomerangs for weapons, and a limited number of them to boot. Destruction only occurred if a minimum of thirty boomerangs hit a drone within a specified number of seconds. For example, if you could hit your opponent with thirty rangs in the space of one second, you would destroy it. Take too much time and your opponent’s hit counter will reset. The game was designed to be either player-versus-player or player-versus-computer. It was the computer opponent which was giving everyone fits.

  "Hey, Olly! This game is dope, but no one can beat it," a fellow driver yelled as he stepped away from the control console. "Maybe you can work your magic?" The crowd made their opinions known.

  "Any game can be beat," Olly noted as he sat down at the console. After inserting his PayCard, Olly set the game to its maximum level--one hundred hits in five seconds. The crowd went silent except for one woman who scoffed, "Are you crazy? Everyone has lost at the lowest setting."

  "You're making it too easy for the computer," he said as he switched to training mode and fired off several boomerangs at targets, deliberately missing the targets so the rangs could hit them on the return leg of their flight. After a minute, possibly two, of practice, Olly switched over to play mode. He took a breath and hit start.

  Immediately, a drone appeared firing rangs at Olly, but he dodged them while keeping an eye on the computer's rang count. Both he and his opponent had a limited number of rangs to use, and both of them were getting close to the forfeiture level.

  Olly came to a stop, opting to dodge the computer's rangs. Without warning, Olly let all his remaining rangs fly at the other drone. They all passed by without a single hit.

  The young lady laughed herself into a fit of coughing.

  His opponent started firing at Olly as Olly backpedaled. Rang after rang bounced off Olly's exterior as he came to a stop against a barrier.

  His opponent, probably programmed by a bored twelve-year-old, gloated as it waited for Olly's hit timer to count down to one second before firing the kill shot. Olly had noticed this flaw while watching the others lose. Olly let go of the controls and waited.

  With 1.1 seconds to go, the crowd gasped as over one hundred of Olly's rangs caught up with the two drones. The opponent never noticed that it was now standing in the exact spot from where Olly had thrown his inventory of rangs. All 150 of Olly's rangs hit the computer-driven drone simultaneously, causing it to explode and ending the game. Olly reached down and typed in "Olly" for the high scoring player name before walking out of the arcade. He was about to be late for an appointment, and Olly was never late for anything.

  ###

  After leaving the arcade, Olly found himself speeding down the street with no less than four federal SUVs following close behind. Ahead of him was an on-ramp to the freeway. Once he was on it, and clear of all commuter traffic, he could open it up and get the hell out of the city while leaving his new fans in the dust. The problem was getting on the damn freeway.

  As he weaved between much slower traffic, part of his brain was wracking itself wondering why he was being chased. All he had done this morning was meet with some dude named Jimbo who needed a driver for a jewelry heist. Instead of three guys waiting for him at the coffee shop, he found four SUVs filled with feds waiting for him with no Jimbo in sight. As he fled the scene, Olly wondered what the hell he had gotten himself into.

  The traffic suddenly opened ahead of him, so he pressed the clutch and down shifted. Before he could hit the gas, a large man in a strange armored suit dropped down in the middle of the road and aimed a large gun at the fleeing car. Before Olly could react, the man fired the weapon. Bullets tore into the engine, destroying it. Olly swerved to avoid hitting the gunman, flipping the car over onto its roof. Just as he passed out, Olly saw the man walk over and kneel next to the driver-side window. He had no face or other discernible features except for the word "Leonardo" stenciled across his chest.

  ###

  Olly woke up in a hospital room, at least he thought it was a hospital room. He was wearing a hospital gown and had an IV in his arm. Attached to him were a number of monitoring devices, some of which he recognized. He looked around and saw a large piece of equipment in the corner. Whatever it was, it stood at least seven feet high. He got the creepy feeling it was watching him.

  A knock at the door was followed by a woman wearing blue scrubs and a labcoat wheeling in a cart. She stopped and smiled at him. “How are we feeling today, Mr. Wilson?" she asked with a smile. Olly just stared. She was almost seven-feet tall with pale skin, piercing blue eyes, and long, blonde, shoulder-length hair. It was her eyes, though, that caused him concern. He'd have to guess they were at least half-again as large as a typical woman's.

  "Mr. Wilson?" she asked again.

  He looked at her name badge and saw the word Nay'Treet. "Sorry. I'm fine, Dr. Nay'Treet." He looked at his wrists and saw they were without handcuffs. "Um, where am I?"

  "The hospital. You were knocked out in the accident and have been unconscious for three days."

  "Hospital? Accident?" Then he remembered the armored guy taking out his car. "Now I remember. That guy had some gun."

  Nay'Treet walked over and took his pulse. Her touch felt normal, but those eyes. "Excuse me, but do all the ladies in your family have such large eyes?"

  "Yep. All the better to see you with." She ran some device over his body without touching it, then wrote something in his chart. She looked up and saw him staring again. "What now?"

  "That box you ran over me, what is it?"

  She held up the device. It looked like a smart phone. "We call it a medical scanner. It reads your life force and translates it into measurements of various vital signs such as heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, aural stability, chakra stability, and brain wave activity."

  He didn't understand half of what she just said, but nodded anyway. "Any idea what happens next?" he asked.

  "Everything will be explained shortly. Good day, Mr. Wilson," she said as she wheeled the cart out the door. He noticed the cart had nothing on it nor did it have wheels. It
floated in the air.

  "Thanks Doc," he replied to a closing door. He slowly got to his feet and looked around the room. The first thing he noticed was the writing on the monitoring equipment. It was unlike anything he had ever seen before. He walked over to the corner where the large something-or-another stood. "What the hell are you?"

  "My name is Margaux and you and I are going to be best friends," it said as it stepped out from where it stood and extended a hand. He jumped backwards and nearly fell into the bed. He grabbed the call button and punched it about a dozen times before Nay'Treet walked in. "Is there a problem, Mr. Wilson?"

  He pointed at Margaux. "Giant robot in my room," he sputtered.

  Nay'Treet turned to face the behemoth. "You had to scare him, didn't you?" she admonished the mechanism.

  Margaux shrugged. "Hey, a girl's got to have a little fun."

  "Right. Mr. Wilson, this is Margaux. She's a mechanoid from the Omega Nebula. Margaux, this is Olly Wilson, a ne'er-do-well getaway driver who happens to have just the right genetic mix to fix our problem."

  "Excuse me? Ne'er-do-well? I'll have you know that I'm the best damn driver on the east coast..." She handed him a folder that had suddenly appeared under her arm. "How the hell did you do that? Are you some kind of mutant?"

  She shook her head. "I'm what's known as a Nordic alien or Nordican. I hale from the Pleiades. You might say Margaux and I are not from around here."

  He swallowed. "And here is where?"

  "Area 51 in Nevada. You are in a secure underground facility where the truth is far stranger than all those stories you've heard. Now, I'll let you two talk while I get back to my rounds." She walked out leaving Olly to stare at the robot. He slowly backed over to where a chair sat next to the wall. Sitting down, he closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. Opening them slowly, he saw Margaux sitting across the room with her legs crossed while watching him.

  "Hell of a thing to find out that all those conspiracy theories are true, at least most of them. So, where do you want me to start?"

  "Why are you here? Invasion? Mind control? You need Earth's resources," he said as he built up to a full-blown panic attack.

  "Calm yourself. I think it will be easier if I just show you. Feel like taking a walk?"

  CHAPTER TWO

  "So, this is Area 51? How the hell do they keep all this under wraps?" Olly asked as he drank in what he was seeing. The corridor he and Margaux walked down was the central hallway of Level 4, the office and administration level. Hundreds of people were using the corridor to get to their destinations and many of them were not human by any stretch of the imagination.

  "Tell me, Olly, what do you see?" Margaux asked as she dodged something that looked reptilian.

  Without breaking stride, he looked around. "Oddly, I see people going about their business. Sure, some are a little odd, but they're just people. What the hell is happening to me? I should be hiding in fear. Hell, even you seem normal," he said with a crooked smile.

  "Why thank you, I think. Your brain is quickly adapting to the situation, one of your abilities that brought you here. Many of your species would be having a psychotic break by now, but not you and not the people who live and work here. Someday, if things work the way we think they will, there will be hundreds of species walking these halls and the planet. This corridor will seem empty by comparison."

  "So, what's your story?" he asked as they entered an elevator.

  "My companion and I were part of a protector squadron guarding the mechanoid worlds from an invasion force when, at the height of the battle, we and one of the invaders were dragged into a micro wormhole, a phenomenon not uncommon in the nebula. We emerged just outside the orbit of Mars. She was mortally wounded, but lived long enough to get us to Earth where she died after landing outside Nellis Air Force Base."

  "I'm sorry for your loss."

  "Thanks. She's in a better place. "They stopped in front of a large, armored door. "Her body is on the other side of this door."

  "Excuse me?" Olly exclaimed as the doors opened onto a huge open and well-lit pit. At the center was a piece of machinery about the size of a Ticonderoga-class cruiser, say 600 feet long with a 50-foot beam.

  "Olly, I would like you to meet Iona, or at least what's left of her."

  Olly stared. "She's dead? No burial?"

  "My kind don't die that way. Buried inside each of us is a diamond with a unique EM field impressed on it. That is our essence, our soul if you would. That is the part of us that is alive. The rest of our body is just stuff we accumulate during our life time. Her diamond has disappeared, leaving behind about 10,000 tons of stuff."

  "Disappeared? Where did it go?"

  "Don't know. When I landed on Earth and explained my predicament--I was stranded here with this soulless pile of tech, the Area 51 crew, along with reptilians and Nordicans, sent out teams to where Iona and I emerged from the portal. We found no trace of her soul anywhere within a cubic light-year search volume. We also found no sign of our adversary who I swear followed us into the worm hole."

  "Your adversary. Is it as big as Iona?"

  "Much larger and meaner, and I'm worried it's hiding out there, looking for us."

  Olly looked down at the techs working on Iona's body. "What are they doing down there? Dismantling her?"

  "No, they're affecting repairs and upgrades. I've convinced the government that an imminent danger exists outside the solar system. Unfortunately, the reptoids, Nordicans, and other visiting races are ill-equipped to deal with the likes of the invader. Luckily, we had a partial solution."

  Olly looked at Margaux. "Making your deceased friend into a weapon?"

  "Yes, but like any weapon, she needs a control system. Normally, one would try to create an interface and cockpit for a pilot, but mechanoids are designed to be controlled by something the size of a baseball through a neural network--no cables, no hydraulics, no fluidic interfaces, just a direct neural connection. It just so happens that a group of human and Nordican scientists and engineers created just such an interface. Unfortunately, he was killed during a testing accident, after which the Nordicans attached to the biocybernetic research section stole the research and took off for parts unknown."

  "Wait a second, my doctor is Nordican."

  "Different group. Hers stayed while the others took off. Luckily, Dr. Grey, the deceased scientist, had a habit of leaving partially completed notebooks in odd places. The staff here is very talented. They were able to put together a one-of-a-kind neural interface and install it on Iona. Unfortunately, it has one flaw."

  "And that is?"

  "Only one person on this planet can drive her."

  Olly had a sinking feeling. "Let me guess..."

  "Don't bother. It's you. It seems your high psy-rating will allow you to access all of Iona's function at the speed of thought."

  "Psy?"

  "ESP? Telepathy?"

  "Hooey!"

  "What's hooey?"

  "ESP, psychics, telepathy, bending spoons, it's all hooey. It’s just stories grifters use to separate the weak-minded from their hard-earned coin."

  "You sure about that?"

  "Absitively."

  "According to that arcade game you played before you were detained, your ESPer rating is off the charts."

  "Wait a damn minute. That game was a test?"

  "And hundreds like it. Not only was it scanning players, it scanned everyone in the room with it and the people outside the arcade. If the average score was ten, yours would be ten-thousand. Olly Wilson, meet your new ride," she said while sweeping her hand toward the massive robotic body in the bay below.

  Olly hung his head. "So, how does she handle around town?"

  CHAPTER THREE

  Three years later, after Officer’s Training School and hundreds of hours flying everything from WWI Jennies to Nordican fighter ships, and after more hours in an Iona simulator, it was Pilot Oliver Wilson’s turn to take Iona into space. After a light breakfast, Olly a
nd Margaux headed to the hangar housing Iona as they had done each day for the last year, only this time it was time to fly.

  "Olly, did you ever get a hold of your family and tell them you're OK? I know you can't tell them what you're doing, but you can reassure..."

  "Margaux, I don't have a family, but don't tell the higher-ups. Just keep it between the two of us."

  "You don't...? I seriously do not understand."

  "A couple years before we met, I woke up with no memories of my past, yet I knew who I was and how to drive any vehicle I could find. Next to the bed was a ringing cell phone. When I answered it, I was offered an assignment to drive for a snatch and grab team. Since then, I’ve worked dozens of jobs and made a ton of money, but I am completely alone without a clue as to how I got here."

  "There's no one?"

  "There's you."

  She stopped and looked at him. "Me? Damn, that's heavy."

  "Not really. I have no idea how your people have kids, but I'm positive you'd be a great mom."

  She had no idea what to say. She'd never been adopted by a kid before. She had to change the subject. They returned to walking.

  Once aboard Iona, the two strapped into the neural interface seat, Olly closed his eyes and allowed the feed from Iona's sensor system to fill his vision with images and sensor data from the space surrounding the ship. Next to him stood Margaux, his ship's engineer and co-pilot. She, too, was connected into the ship's neural network, but her job was to monitor and direct repair bots to any part of the ship which sustained damage.

  "Computer," she said, "Systems status?"

  "All systems nominal. Checklist complete. Engines on standby. Weapons on standby." The computer replied. Though advanced beyond anything Earth had created, it was only a step above an abacus when compared to Iona or Margaux.

  "Computer confirms we are ready for launch." Iona reported. “As they say in the movies, up is go.”

  After a quick scan of the space surrounding the Area 51 launch facility, Olly initiated the launch sequence. Once the hangar doors were opened, he lifted off and headed into space using a launch corridor usually frequented by alien spacecraft. Today, the sky was theirs.