A.T.L.A.S.

The Salbidon Destroyer turret fired its railgun hitting its target and leaving a burnt husk that was split in two. Augustus breathed a sigh of relief and lowered his Belum railgun
“Intel didn’t say anything about giant spiders in this jungle hell hole!” yelled Quintus, eyes wide, his railgun shaking erratically.
    “Since when does intel tell *us* anything useful?” Lucretia, the fire squad leader of Bravo responded. As the squad gathered around the kill everyone nodded or silently agreed with Lucretia’s sentiments. The United Association of Habitable Planets’ intelligence was usually old at the best of times and dangerously wrong at the worst of them.
    “It looks just like a Earth spider!” Said another soldier
    “Yeah, except its ten meters high and covered in armor!” said a response from the growing crowd. Augustus still couldn’t believe it, the spider appeared to be covered with a silver armor. It was good fortune that the railguns easily penetrated the spiders armor or they would’ve have been helpless.

    “MORE SPIDERS! FIRE!” bellowed a great voice.
The crowd immediately dispersed, with groups of people running for cover and firing their railguns as they dove into whatever they thought could protect them from the attacking giant spiders, a scream from female voice was heard.
    “Over there, fire!” Calvin yelled while aiming his Belum railgun and sending a bolt of lethal death into the thick jungle underbrush, soon everyone was firing in all directions in the hopes that the spiders would end their attack and retreat. After a few seconds a small area around the landing zone was cleared and the firing stopped. The soldiers peered every which way, searching for a fresh kill. They found nothing.  

   “You idiots done being stupid?” said a booming Sergeant Collin Grey. “Everyone, gather round.” Sergeant Grey was seated on the dead spider with a broad grin on his face and boot on one of the spider’s giant legs. The terrified fire squads lowered their railguns and walked to over to Sergeant Grey still looking around in every direction searching for the spiders they thought they had killed. “Now that we’re done embarrassing ourselves, can we pretty please act like professionals for the remainder of this trip?” He paused “Gaius boy, stop looking around, no spiders are coming.” everyone gave Gaius a sideways glance watching as he turned a bright red. Everyone except the new guys knew how Sergeant Grey operated. Sergeant Grey was always the prankster, always ready at the worst of times to make a bad joke or act inappropriately. This time he fooled the entire squad into thinking that they were being attacked the giant spiders. Sergeant Grey turned his head looking over his shoulder. “Now Doctor if you could explain to everyone here why we have to die on some spider-infested death planet because you failed as a parent, I’d really appreciate it.” Sergeant Grey’s smile opened even more as he spoke to the doctor. While Sergeant Grey was a real joker, when it came to fighting a war there was none better. A veteran of the Mars rebellion, the Sergeant single handedly brought their “Earth Burner” quantum cannon down leaving the Martians scrambling to pursue a peace treaty with Earth. If he wasn’t such a liability Sergeant Grey would’ve been promoted to an officer.

From behind the spider’s abdomen Doctor Ekwensi was taking wide controlled steps, as if to measure the spiders length, she had a small vial of the spiders skin in her hands. When Dr. Ekwensi got to the front of the spider her face wrinkled and eyes squinted making a curious frown.
    “I think we should try to communicate with the spiders.” she said while staring at the spiders insides. Sergeant Grey looked down at the spider he was seated on, smiled and put a palm on his forehead.
    “All right, you heard the lady, our mission here is to successfully ask a giant spider on a date. Decius, don’t screw this up, Earth is counting on us.”
    “That’s not what I meant! Look at the spider’s brain!” The fire squads squeezed in even closer to look at the metallic part inside the spider’s body. The spider’s organic brain had been scooped out and replaced with a robotic one. The doctor used both her hands to pull out a fragment of the ruined brain from the spider and held it in the air, the spiders blood still dripping from it.    
“Amazing, ATLAS did this! It was probably surveying the area.” she had the expression of a parent watching their only child graduate from school.
    “ATLAS is...” Sergeant Grey prompted her.
    “ATLAS is The Advanced Thinking Learning Android Supplier! Its was made to automate the design and creation of androids! A mobile robot factory!” Dr. Ekwensi exclaimed all in one breath. It seemed apparent that she either made or helped make the ATLAS. Sergeant Grey picked up on this.  
    “We’re all very proud doctor!” He said with a smile, wink and nod. Dr. Ekwensi’s hands dropped to her side with the brain in one hand and her other hand wiping at her dark grey jumpsuit. Her beaming face darkened and with a sigh she spoke.
    “OK, I get you don’t care. But, the reason you’re all here is because ATLAS managed to um..well, ATLAS built a ship and smuggled itself here, so we need to find it and convince it to come back to Earth with us.”
    “Excellent! Now I see why we had to come all the way to the Tau-Ceti system on a Behemoth-class annihilator.” Sergeant Grey paused for a second and glanced up at the sky “Here’s another fun fact, we have twenty four standard hours until that same annihilator fires its primary cannon at this planet we’re on!" before anyone's mouth could drop Sergeant Grey continued "It’s amazing what you can legally do when you’re not inside the Sol system.”
Mouths then dropped, even the doctor was standing stupidly stunned by this new information.

“What do you mean?” said the doctor turning ignorance into anger. The Sergeant obviously enjoyed having a small bit of knowledge that no one else knew.
“Well why else would they take one of the only three planet destroying Annihilators out of the Sol system? Obviously your ATLAS does a little bit more than making cute little baby robots.” The doctor looked away from the Sergeant with a scowl and said nothing.  
    “What?! We only have twenty four hours?!” said a panicked voice from someone in Charlie squad.
    “Don’t worry about it, they’re usually a few hours ahead of schedule when it comes to stuff like this. My guess is they’ll probably get to the safe distance range, wait a few minutes to see if we actually succeed, if not fire and call it a day.”
At this point nearly everyone was taking a glance skyward searching for some sign of the gargantuan ship that was no longer visible in the sky, making everyone fear the worst.
    “How will it take to get that far?” Decius asked with a pleading voice, hoping that the sergeant would give him some peace of mind. He didn’t.
    “About five or six hours.” Sergeant Grey responded matter-of-factly about their impending deaths. “So, if we’re all done asking stupid questions maybe we should get this mission started. Doctor, ATLAS is located...” Doctor Ekwensi’s free hand clenched into a fist, she turned and looked up at Sergeant Grey still sitting on the dead spider like he was on a sofa at home.
    “Thank you Sergeant, ATLAS is in a cave south west of here. From the scan of the planet it looks like ATLAS burrowed deep in that cave.” Sergeant Grey jumped off of the spider and landed in front of the closely assembled squad.
    “So, to recap, we have to make our way through a giant-cyborg-spider infested jungle, go head first into a android infested cave, have the doctor here give the robot factory a pep talk and hope it listens instead of melting our faces off or scooping out our brains. Oh, and we have to do all this in a few hours!” Sergeant Grey really knew how to sum up that you were on a secret suicide mission. “Alpha with me, Bravo with the doc, Charlie in the rear.” with that the squad headed to the “Cave of wonders” as the Sergeant started calling it. Everyone knew they were headed into a trap, they just didn’t know ATLAS had been preparing for an interstellar war for some time...