Science Fiction Tanks Novels & Stories

][ ACTIVATING DEFENSE PROTOCOL. From the shadows of the server racks, droids emerged. Not the clumsy security bots. These were Spider-Tanks. Fast, agile, with machine guns mounted on their backs. "Jack! Hold them off!" Sebastian yelled. "Kenji! Jack in! Kill the upload!" Jack dropped the plushie. He pulled out a grenade launcher (hidden inside the plushie).THUMP. The first grenade hit a Spider-Tank. BOOM. "Eat this, you metal crabs!"

​The molten orange glare of the geothermal siphon cast long, distorted shadows across the massive cavern of Sector 00. As the monolithic black titanium cylinder fully emerged from the liquid stone, the automated cooling manifolds began to hiss, spraying high-pressure nitrogen vapor that swirled around the towering Vanguard Titan Chassis 01.

He reached a set of giant metal doors and pushed them open with force. Inside was a huge sterile room and it was so big that it could be compared to the size of a football pitch. The walls were white and the floor was made of shiny metal. Lihont stopped at the entrance and looked around. His eyes traveled across the room, and he felt the anger in his heart start to fade, then he took a deep, satisfied breath. The room was filled with hundreds of glass tanks. Inside each tank was a new soldier and they were tall, strong, and looked like they were made of iron. They were the perfect killing machines.

The "Null-Facility" was a sanctuary of clinical absolute. When Silas Blackwood woke up, he was suspended in a vertical tank of liquid silver—not the "Liquid Logic" of the Architects, but a high-density, nutrient-rich suspension fluid that carried the scent of a hospital at the end of the world. He was naked, his skin covered in a web of fine, translucent sensors that were currently "reading" the frequency of his gold-and-sapphire scars. Through the glass of the tank, the world was a blur of white light and moving shadows. He could hear the muffled, rhythmic thrumming of a thousand machines, a sound that lacked the "Bond" of the North but carried the "Standardization" of a factory.

"Where are the release codes?" "Locked. Encrypted. Even if I wanted to, I couldn't open the tanks from here. The system is slaved to the main terminal in Zurich." The scientist smiled, showing yellowed teeth. "By the time you find a way to break the glass, the automatic failsafe will trigger. A lethal dose of neurotoxin in every tank. They die, the research stays. You lose." Abram’s vision swam with red. He wanted to rip the man's head off, to feel the vertebrae snap under his fingers. But he looked at the woman in the tank. She was watching him.

She could see the tactical teams moving through the ashes of the farmhouse. She looked at the jammer in Dante’s hand. "Dante," she whispered. "The tanks. If we break the tanks... the fluid is oxygen-rich. It’s what keeps the prototypes alive." "The shock would kill you, Ivy. The chemical imbalance..." "It’s better than being a ghost," she said, her eyes turning into flint. She grabbed the rifle from the floor.

she fires at him next. "We have one hundred and twenty working tanks, a gatling gun that we found in a scrap pile of metal that has promise and comes with ten thousand rounds of ammo if we can get it working. It's hand crank and from everything I've read, the stupid gun breaks down constantly. If we get it working and keep it that way, it will cause damage." The tanks were here when we arrived. Most of them Soviet but we found a few older U.S. and British models from World War II. After some work, a few of the older tanks actually ran.

Tech Inside the silo, the air was a "Null State" of stagnant dust and "Acoustic" echoes. In the center of the "Labyrinthine" chamber sat the Vanguard-9. It was a "Mechanical" beast of riveted titanium and "Recycled" copper—a "Slumped" giant that looked more like a "Physical" weapon than a spacecraft.

Then lights. Rows and rows of tanks. And inside the tanks — bodies. Henry's face. Young. Healthy. Sleeping. "There must be twenty of them," I whispered. "Thirty." "Can they be destroyed?" "Easily. The question is whether we should." "What do you mean?" Alexander walked to the nearest tank. Pressed his hand against the glass. "They're not alive. Not really. They're just... copies. But they have potential. They could be something. Someone." "They could be monsters."

They began to spray fire, trying to burn back the emerald tide. Dante didn't attack the tanks. He touched the ground. "Wake up," he commanded, his voice vibrating with the Alpha-DNA and the Green-Point energy. The earth answered. Massive, prehistoric "Void-Oaks" erupted beneath the tanks, lifting the multi-ton machines into the air and crushing them in a wooden grip. The Scrappers swarmed the fallen pilots, stripping them of their tech with a feral hunger. But the International Council had one last card. The flagship, a vessel the size of a small moon, began to glow with a sickly, violet light. It wasn't a salt-spray. It was a Molecular-De-Stabilizer.