Post-Human Series Books 1-4 by David Simpson

said to Weddell.
    “What? What are you talking about? I saw him hit the ground myself. He’s dead as dead, Doc.”
    Craig pushed Wilson’s pulverized body so that it turned over, revealing the golden reflective facemask. He popped Wilson’s mask up so he could see inside the helmet; the visor was splashed with blood, but Wilson’s head appeared to be intact. “The respirocytes,” Craig replied. “His brain is still getting oxygen. If I can get him into suspended animation fast enough—”
    “I understand,” Weddell quickly said. “SOLO team, do you copy?” The radio crackled for a few moments, but there were periodic pops and chirps, and one sounded like it might be a voice. “Did you hear that?” Weddell asked Craig.
    “Yes. Weddell, they were on the far right of the formation.” Craig stood to his feet and stepped a few paces through the yellow dust before he quickly stumbled over a ledge, tumbling onto his stomach, digging hard with his exoskeleton’s strength into the earth to keep from tumbling further down the steep incline. “Damn it! Weddell, we just missed the crater! It was to the south! If Klein and Cheng opened manually, they might have made it!”
    “That makes sense,” Weddell replied excitedly. “The crater goes down one kilometer. If they’re far enough down there, that would explain why we can’t get radio contact through all the interference.”
    Craig finished crawling back up over the lip of the crater and returned to see Weddell standing, having retrieved his twin machine guns from his backpack. The guns were gigantic, and the armor-piercing bullets made them far too heavy to be carried by a regular human; fortunately the exoskeleton did 100 percent of the heavy lifting.
    “I can head down there,” Weddell said determinedly. “If they’re already there, I’ll establish contact, and we can still finish the mission. You should stay here and wait for Robbie to return. We might need that thing after all.”
    “There’s a problem with that plan,” Craig replied.
    “What?”
    “I don’t think that was just a glitch with our telemetry. I think we were sabotaged. New coordinates were fed to us at the last minute, pushing us off target so we’d miss the crater and hit the outer surface.”
    “Are you saying—”
    “ The A.I. is still functioning . Somehow, it detected us and tried to defend itself.”
    Weddell’s face was ghost white. “That’s bad news, Doc.”
    “If you get down there and don’t make contact with Cheng and Klein, my advice is that you toss as much Semtex down that hole as you can and haul your ass back up. We’ll head back to the extraction point and report what we know.”
    “Agreed,” Weddell replied. “Stay here. I’m going to go dark pretty quick with all this interference, but I’ll contact you ASAP, when I’m making my way back up.”
    “Good luck,” Craig replied as he watched Weddell jog into the yellow fog and disappear over the lip of the crater.
    He turned back to Wilson and got down to his knees. The commander’s face was pale and lifeless—a horrific sight. Only minutes ago, he had been alive and in his element, guiding his team and helping the rookie make it safely to the surface. Now he was nothing. Just a bag of tenderized meat.
    Or was he? The respirocytes had changed the game. Craig knew if his brain continued getting oxygen until the S.A. bags arrived, Wilson might just have a slim chance. His body had been destroyed, but as long as he could get to a hospital before he suffered brain death, survival was still possible.
    “Robbie? Robbie, do you copy?” Craig asked over the radio. Robbie’s signal wasn’t appearing. The robot could run three times the speed of a human sprinter and sustain that pace for hours until his lithium air battery finally gave out. As long as Robbie was able to open his chute in time to avoid being pulverized on a rock somewhere, he should be rapidly approaching, but would he make it in time?