container prompted the lethargic ID to leave, and they came stumbling out looking for food.
They passed the soldiers in the widened entrance of the Vee without incident, the suits doing their jobs in masking the soldiers’ presence to the ID. The ID funneled down and the flanks moved with them, their guns trained for headshots. Those at the widest ends of the Vee kept watch for insurgents, covering the rest of the platoon. The narrowed front covered the target structure, suppressing enemy fire. This was Peter’s design.
There were forty ID in this exercise, and all appeared to be running smoothly as they approached the Labyrinth.
But suddenly, at the mouth of the Vee, several ID turned on each other and began piling up. Within minutes, there was a heap of Insidious Drones humping each other as the rest of the mass stumbled around them.
Sergeant Lorenzo looked to Peter, who signaled for them to continue their advance. Lorenzo nodded and passed along Peter’s orders to continue.
This phenomenon was a regular nuisance in these exercises, but it was better than the ID turning on the men. That hadn’t happened in several exercises, and Peter kept his fingers nervously crossed over the AI kill switch.
The mass of ID that were not engaged in the humping suddenly came alive—so to speak—as they must have picked up the scent of the three pigs at the end of the Labyrinth. One soldier at the front of the formation breached the door and quickly got out of the way, as dozens of eager ID funneled into the front door.
The formation had accommodated the ancillary mass of humpers by flanking them and stopping the right flank at the location of the orgy. The left flank had advanced a bit further, skewing the Vee, but the formation was effectively maintained.
As the last of the ID filtered into the Labyrinth, Peter signaled to Lorenzo, who signaled to the two SWEEPERS to mobilize. They made their way down the reverse Vee and began to sweep the sides of the building under the cover of two separate squads.
Peter checked his watch and waited patiently. The two SWEEPERS were following the meandering mass of red ID from the sides of the building as the covering squads cleared the windows and flanks.
The ID were still minutes away from reaching the targets, which still registered as blue on the MR.UD’s. The pigs began to squeal and pace nervously in their back room, as if they knew what was coming for them.
The SWEEPERS saw the ID close the gap on their monitors, and dozens of red ID flooded the room as the pigs squealed in terror. The squeals turned into what one could only call screams, as their blue indicators faded out and vanished from the MR.UD monitors.
The SWEEPERS then radioed to Lorenzo, who in turn signaled to Peter that the neutralization of the targets had been confirmed. Peter then hit the AI kill switch, and the dozens of ID roaming the rooms of the Labyrinth, as well as the heap of amorous ID, became immobilized.
Normally they would set up more pigs and lure them out of the building, but the heaping pile of humpers would be behind the pigs, and they would have ID coming from two directions.
Peter needed to figure out a way to deal with the humpers before luring the other ID out of the building. “Lorenzo, how many humpers?”
Lorenzo ran up to the immobilized pile and began to count. He signaled ten.
This was a decision point. Peter could designate a few men to pull the heap apart, one-by-one, and drag them back to the container. However, this would cost them time and weaken the flanks. He had to account for an insurgent attack at any moment.
He could use one of the pigs to lure the humpers, while using the other two to lure the rest out of the Labyrinth in a kind of staggered extraction. But that would mean that the platoon would have to account for two groups of ID instead of one, and in this game, complexity equaled accidents.
Another option would be to neutralize the humpers with headshots and then bring out the rest, but one of their directives was to minimize waste of ID soldiers. God forbid.
Peter had an idea. He called Lorenzo over. “Listen, we need to push the humpers back to the front door and then lure them all back into the funnel towards the container together.”
“So they’ll all move as one group,” Lorenzo finished. “We can set