Sinclair Feldman's Arc

Chapter 5 of 6

Level two was lit now. The control room hummed. But the red seal on level three still hid Langermen's security robot. Sinclair knew he could not open that door until his team could survive what waited behind it. He turned back to the desk to search for anything the scientist left behind. He found a second logboard clipped to the wall. A tech named Johnson had filled it with panicked notes. Rotting-plant smells from level three cold storage. A Sentry Bot glitching, moving wrong. Sinclair read the last lines twice. The machine carried a minigun and six rockets. "This is the robot," he said. "Tank on legs. Johnson watched it break down before the end." Zelda leaned over a hardened medical laptop on the desk. She'd carried her share of dead prewar machines back to life. This one still had power. "Emergency labels," she said, flat. "Genetic research. Sterilization protocols." She scrolled. "Whoever ran level three was cleaning something they couldn't stop." She looked up. "Funny what survives when no one knows what they're looking at." Logan crouched by the corridor line, watching his meter. He held up his hand, short two joints. "A minigun and rockets against six of us. I like those odds if I'm not standing here." He didn't slow down. "You can't hack a rocket, Sinclair." Private Conner waited by the door. The gray tabby wore Ranger fatigues and a black beret, and he'd cleared the garage entrance under fire days ago. He spoke up plainly. "We don't need to beat its armor with rifles. We need something that punches through steel. An anti-tank weapon. One good shot before it gets its guns up." Sinclair studied the logboard, then the laptop. Rifles would bounce off a sentry that fought ghouls and won. Conner was right. He needed a weapon that could kill a tank. And he knew where to find one. He keyed his radio and raised the garage base. Logan's contact in the Rangers ran salvage. "Brad. It's Sinclair. We found the security robot's specs. It's a Sentry Bot, minigun and rockets. Rifles won't touch it." Static. Then Brad's voice, dry. "You want something bigger." Brad already knew how his group weaponized scrap. "Anti-tank," Sinclair said. "What have you got?" Brad answered without hesitation. "Salvaged missile launchers from the wreck site. Armor-piercing. I can send two down with Conner's line by morning." Sinclair looked at the red seal on the grid. "Do it." He set the logboard beside the laptop and closed the scientist's notes. The control room was ready. He had the robot's weakness, the medical laptop's research, and a weapon on the way that could kill a tank. The path to level three's tech was no longer a wall he couldn't break. It was a door he'd open on his terms, with a rocket in hand.