Evolution

by R S Penney

  Jack holstered his gun and ran for the ziarogati.

  He leaped and somersaulted through the air, uncurling to land on the road just in front of them. He reached out, clamping one hand onto each ziarogat's forearm. Then he crafted not one but two separate Bendings.

  The ziarogati were flung apart, one hurled toward the south side of the street, the other toward the north side. Both moved under the influence of a gravitational field ten times as powerful as the Earth's pull.

  One ziarogat hit the front wall of a townhouse with enough force to shatter bones and leave a smear of silver blood on the bricks. The other one went sideways through the plate glass window of a laundromat.

  Exhaustion hit Jack hard.

  By instinct, he tapped the button on his vest, erecting a screen of flickering white static that intercepted incoming fire from the drones before it punched right through his uncovered head. Bullets slammed into the force-field and bounced off. That would only give him a few seconds of protection.

  Jack dropped to his knees behind the police cruiser, taking cover. The force-field winked out a few seconds later. Now that the generator was drained of power, it would be useless until it was recharged.

  Bullets flew over his head.

  Despite the burning in his skin, the throbbing in his temples, Jack put up a Time Bubble. Summer groaned in his mind, but the sphere of warped space-time expanded, encompassing part of the car.

  He shuffled to the right and popped up to get a look at the drones. The surface of his bubble made it seem as if he was looking at them while under water, but the blurry gray giants stood with arms upraised.

  One was firing a stream of bullets over the roof of the car, each slug distinct to his eyes, moving like ants in a line. The other drone had its arm cannon pointed directly at the car he was using for cover, but it wasn't firing.

  Which could only mean…

  He had seen the explosion at the other barricade, the missile strike that had flipped a cop car twenty feet into the air. If the drone unleashed that kind of firepower on him, he would die in the fireball before his body had a chance to be splattered on the road.

  Raising his pistol in both hands, he pointed it at the drone's missile launcher. Then he fired. Glowing white bullets appeared outside his bubble, spiraling toward their target. Please let them hit first.

  He collapsed to his knees behind the cruiser, the bubble vanishing. He just couldn't hold it for one more second. There was an explosion, all right – a thunderous roar in his ears – but it didn't consume him or the car for that matter.

  When he found the strength to peek through the cruiser's windows, he saw that the drone was missing its right arm and half its torso as well. The missile must have exploded inside the launcher.

  The other drone was backing away from its partner, no longer bothering to shoot at his people. No doubt it was some tactical assessment program and not anything close to an actual self-preservation instinct, but the thing seemed to be afraid, and that was good.

  Jack dropped to all fours, head hanging. “No…Not now,” he whispered, shaking his head. “Stay on your feet, Hunter. These people need you.”

  Every muscle in his body felt weakened, and his head was pounding with a painful throb that threatened to drown out awareness of everything else. Keepers who overused their powers were useless. Crafting two Bendings that strong and then following that up with a time bubble? Summer needed time to recover, and so did he.

  He was in no condition to fight, and with gunfire flying back and forth, it was only a matter of time before a stray bullet hit him. Jack could live with that.

  He'd given the cops a fighting chance. Two ziarogati and one of the drones? That was an impressive kill-count in a fight like this. If pushing himself to the point where he collapsed got him killed, so be it. Other people would survive. No one would really miss Jack Hunter anyway. He felt Summer's grief at that thought but-

  Something flew right over him.

  A ziarogat landed on the roof of the police car, a shirtless male who stood with his back turned, facing the killer robot. He seemed to be fixated on the damn thing. What? Jack wondered. I must be hallucinating.

  The ziarogat dropped from the police car and charged the battle drone, loosing a stream of glowing bullets as he ran. They can switch sides? What? When did they gain the ability to switch sides?

  Harry Carlson wasn't a soldier; oh there had been days on the force, when he'd felt a little like charging headlong into battle, but it was a metaphor. Here he was, confronted with the real thing.

  The air before him pulsed as he used the N'Jal to erect a force-field strong enough to keep high-impact rounds at bay. Bullets slammed into the rippling barrier, flattening on impact and then falling to the ground.

  Harry winced, sweat oozing from his pores to run over his face in rivers. “You can't just sit here,” he whispered to himself in a breathy rasp. “You're the one with the powers, Harry. These people are counting on you.”

  Through the force-field, he saw Jack charge headlong toward a pair of ziarogati who stood in front of the barricade. The image was blurry, but it had to be Jack. No one else would do something that reckless.

  Something in the corner of his eye.

  Harry turned to find a ziarogat running at him. A tall and well-muscled man with copper skin, the creature loped across the asphalt like a wolf bearing down on a rabbit with its fangs bared.

  Harry flung his hand out.

  The force-field he loosed sank into the road and churned up large pieces of asphalt, spraying them at his oncoming foe. The ziarogat stumbled backward, raising a hand to shield himself as rocks pelted his body.

  Harry wasn't done.

  Thrusting his hand out, he loosed another force-field, this one a rippling wall of energy that flew in a straight line and hit the dazed ziarogat. The other man fell flat on his ass, twitching on impact.

  Another force-field, Harry thought. Flatten him. Crush the life out of him. But no. He wasn't a killer, no matter what anyone else demanded of him. It was an option, but he would rather come up with another strategy. Another strategy? If you let that thing get up, it's gonna kill your friends.

  An idea came to him in a sudden flash of inspiration, information coalescing in his mind almost as if…as if the N'Jal was anticipating his needs. He knew what to do. Quick, before it recovers!

  He ran to the ziarogat.

  Dropping to his knees, Harry seized the other man's head in both hands and let the N'Jal's neural-fibers bond with his opponent's nervous system. In that instant, he became intimately aware of the ziarogat. He could see exactly what Slade and the Overseers had done to twist this man into a killing machine.

  A spiderweb of synthetic neural nets ran through the man's brain, blocking out the original personality, replacing it with coded instructions that came through the panel on the man's chest. Each ziarogat was linked to his companions, the lot of them forming a battle strategy based on data they all accumulated. Control was absolute, the original personality scrubbed clean.

  But if he could implant a command…

  Harry wasn't sure how he did it – the knowledge of what to do came from the N'Jal – but he ordered the lot of them to stand down. For a brief moment, every single ziarogat froze in place. The others recovered within seconds, shutting him out; somehow, they had sensed that one of their number had been compromised and responded by removing him from the network.

  Okay, so he couldn't control all of them, but he could control this one! Quickly, he implanted new instructions in the creature's brain.

  An explosion off to his right made Harry hiss. The noise! How did actual soldiers deal with it. A glance over his shoulder revealed that one of the battle drones was backing away from the barricade, and the other…

  Well, Jack must have done something to it, because the second drone had lost half its body and now stood as a ruined shadow of its former self. That was good. One down and one to go! But Jack…

  The kid
had collapsed to all fours in front of the police cars, no doubt having taxed poor Summer to her limit. Reckless as always, but Harry wasn't going to let him die for it. Jack was like a son to him…Or maybe an irritating nephew.

  “Protect him!” he said, implanting a command in the ziarogat's brain.

  The creature curled its legs against its chest and then sprang off the ground in one fluid motion. It spun to face the barricade, then ran headlong toward Jack, leaping over him to land perched on the police car's roof.

  Protect him.

  The ziarogat leaped into battle.

  For a moment, Ben wondered what could have made the ziarogat he'd been fighting freeze in place for just a few seconds. It was almost as if something had shorted out the thing's circuits…If it had any circuits. A frantic voice in the back of his head told him that he should be joining the others in battle – the dozen or so cops who were still on their feet backed away from the ziarogati and fired glowing ammunition – but instinct took over.

  Ben dropped to his knees before the headless body, examining the panel that had been fused to its chest. That was his way; he always looked for a technical solution to his problems. The panel was still blinking. What did it do?

  Inside the helmet, Ben winced and let out a grunt. “You're gonna get me killed after all,” he muttered, digging his blade into the creature's chest. He began to carve around the panel, cutting cleanly through bone and muscle.

  This was gross!

  No, not gross; it was downright disgusting – and dangerous too; while he was busy playing mortician, a stray bullet on a high impact setting could easily pierce his helmet – but he had to know.

  Ben felt his face twist in revulsion, then shook his head with a heavy sigh. “Oh, the things I do for these friends of mine,” he whispered, completing his blade's circuit around the panel. “The things I do.”

  He closed his gloved hand around the panel and pulled it free, watching as silvery goop dripped from the underside. The lights were still blinking. That was good. But what exactly did this thing do?

  No stray bullets came his way.

  In fact, it seemed as if no one was even shooting at him. Somehow, he'd managed to perform impromptu surgery in the middle of the street without anyone – or anything – trying to kill him. Those drones should have done something.

  When he looked up, he noticed that the drones were ignoring him. In fact, they had their backs turned, choosing instead to fire a stream of bullets at a cop car down by the townhouses. Anna must have been using it for cover.

  An idea popped into his head.

  Retracting the blade back into his gauntlet, Ben ran for one of the police cars that made up the barricade. He quickly slid across the hood, then threw himself directly into the kill zone with no cover.

  The drones ignored him.

  Looking up the street, he saw that one of the drones that had been attacking the other barricade was now a blackened wreck with a missing arm and not much of a torso. It just stood there, motionless.

  The fourth robot was backing up toward Ben's side of the battlefield, trying to get away from…from a crazed ziarogat that kept shooting in the chest! What in Bleakness was going on here?

  He crept a little closer to the pair of robots that were attacking Anna.

  One drone turned its head to focus the camera lens upon him for a moment, sizing him up. Then it seemed to forget all about him and returned its attention to a police car with so many bullet holes they almost looked like polka dots. It saw me! I know the damn thing saw me!

  He looked down at the panel in his gloved palm, the blinking lights continuing their slow, steady pattern. Of course! Battle drones distinguished friend from foe by RFID tags that were kept on a soldier's person. Though those were usually quite small.

  The device he carried almost certainly had other functions, but its purpose was to make sure that the drones never targeted the ziarogati. So long as he had this thing, he was damn near invulnerable!

  Ben drew his pistol from its holster. “High impact!”

  A bullet to the back made one drone stumble and left a huge hole in its metal body, exposing vital circuitry. Still, the thing didn't attack him. It stopped firing, but it didn't so much as glance in his direction.

  Ben switched to EMP rounds and squeezed the trigger several times. Three glowing slugs went single file into the hole in the robot's back, frying those vital circuits the very instant they made contact.

  The drone stumbled.

  Its companion spun to face Ben, but rather than trying to kill him, it started backing away from him. Almost as if the damn thing was afraid. The programming that wouldn't let it attack anyone with an RFID tag must have been extensive.

  The first drone spasmed, arms flailing about like a drunk man struggling to keep his balance. A satisfying thunk filled the air as the robot fell to its knees and then shut down. One down and one to go. Now, all he had to do was-

  A compartment in the robot's back slid open to reveal a white sphere that rose from a hole between the drone's shoulder-blades. A Death Sphere? How many tricks did these damn things have?

  Transfixed by the scene, Ben hardly noticed the high-pitched squeal and sudden warmth in his palm, but when he looked down, he saw that the blinking lights on the device he'd taken from the ziarogat had gone dark. The friend-or-foe device had died on him. Which meant…

  The Death Sphere reoriented itself to point its lens at him.

  And the lens began to glow.

  Anna had her back pressed to the trunk of a police car, wincing at the sound of gunfire. “Come on!” she whispered, gripping the pistol holstered on her hip. “You've got to run out of ammo sooner or later.”

  When she looked up, she saw the ruined face of the townhouse she'd used to get a clean shot, the flaming hole where a balcony used to be, the tower of smoke rising into the air. These drones had destroyed the homes of the people who lived here. Lives were ruined; it made her want to end Slade.

  The pair of drones were standing in the street on the driver's side of the police car, loosing a stream of ammunition at the vehicle. From their current position – near the car's front end – they couldn't get a clean shot at her. She half-wondered why they didn't just march over to finish the job, but they seemed content to keep her pinned with suppressing fire. Maybe they had classified her as the biggest threat. Keeping her out of action would do a lot more to assure victory than slaughtering a few more cops.

  And pinned she was!

  In the back of her mind, she could sense Seth's fatigue. Her muscles felt rubbery, and her skin tingled with a million fiery pinpricks. She was right on the verge of pushing her Nassai too far. Another use of her powers, and she would collapse from exhaustion. Thankfully, she didn't need them right now.

  Off to her left, maybe fifteen cops stood amid a field of black-clad bodies, trying to contain the final ziarogat with continuous gunfire. The cybernetic creature was too busy trying to fend off a barrage of bullets to be much of a threat to her, and clearly the drones were out of missiles. Or they would have used them by now.

  Those damn things were effective!

  A few moments earlier, she had been distracted by the sound of an explosion near Jack's barricade, and when she spared a glance in that direction, she saw only the three vans that still blocked both lanes. Whatever her bestie was up to, he would have to deal with it on his own. Anna knew that he could. He was no longer the half-trained pup that she had met four years ago. He was a genuine Keeper. And she wished she could tell him how proud she felt.

  The gunfire stopped.

  Without thinking, Anna ventured a quick glance around the side of the car – damn impulsiveness – and saw that one of the drones that had been attacking her was backing away from the police car.

  The other one was down on its knees, hunched over with its camera head sagging. Someone must have killed the thing. Whatever joy she felt in that vanished when she saw a compartment in the robot's back open.

&n
bsp; A Death Sphere rose out of the hole with its lens pointed at her car. Well, now she would bloody well have to-

  The sphere reoriented itself to point at something else.

  Anna rose and ran around the side of the car.

  Thrusting her left hand out toward the retreating robot, she threw up a Bending and watched the colours stretch into a blur just before three bullets collided with her patch of warped space-time. They curved away from her body, twisting in a tight loop to fly back toward their master.

  The blurry robot stumbled as its body was pelted with ammunition. Seth groaned in the back of her mind, but she only had to hang on a few seconds longer. The drone would be off-balance after that pummeling.

  The Death Sphere was pointing its particle emitter at a frightened Ben who was retreating toward the north side of the road. His armour wouldn't protect him from that! She had to be quicker!

  Anna let the Bending drop.

  She leaped and flew a good six feet into the air, seizing the sphere in both hands. She quickly twisted her body to point the sphere's lens at the stunned robot.

  The drone's arm cannon came up for a kill shot half a second before a bright orange beam of focused plasma punched right through the robot's metal chest, drilling a hole the size of her fist.

  Anna landed on her side, exhaustion hitting her like a punch to the stomach. The sphere struggled in her grip, trying to pull free. Oh, Companion protect her! She couldn't hold onto it! Her body was wrecked.

  Her fingers squeezed the sphere's plastic surface, but the damn thing's anti-gravity generator just put out more and more power. It was like trying to hold on to a squirming cat, only much, much harder. I really should have put more thought into this plan.

  The sphere pulled free of her grip.

  It moved with a speed that could rival most cars, flying halfway down the block before it slowed to a stop and then reoriented itself to point that lens at her. She couldn't move. Not even an inch.

  Three glowing bullets hit the sphere, causing sparks to arc across its body. It fell to the ground a moment later, landing somewhere behind the wrecked vans. The explosion that followed was less intense when compared to the thunder of those missile strikes, but she heard it nonetheless.