The grubs picked up their pace. The nearest were just fifty or sixty feet away, and the entire mass shuffled like zombies, their whiskers twitching.
Hammer arrived. “That’s the worst noise I’ve ever heard. Does this count as music on your planet? Remind me never to go there.”
“Grab the box,” Liam said. “Lead the grubs away. The rest of us will go for the building.”
“You’re the Runner. Why don’t you lead the grubs away?” Hammer demanded, reaching for the boombox and working to untangle it from the twine with his huge fingers. The CD was so loud that it drowned out any other sound; it was a good thing the robot team had a personal intercom system in their heads.
“You don’t need to run fast,” Liam told him. “Just lead them off slow enough that they’ll follow. I’ll run for the building as soon as it’s clear.”
His logic sounded plausible, but the real reason was that he wanted to be there when the group invaded the third floor and came across the king. He wanted to do everything he could to stop the beheading. Getting Hammer out of the picture would help enormously. Getting rid of Armory would have been better still, but they all knew the weaponized brute was best suited for the king’s execution. Sending him off would have raised suspicion.
“Go!” Liam urged.
Still grumbling, Hammer shoved the boombox under his arm and took off at a jog along the foot of the hills, causing a sudden shift of focus among the zombielike grubs. They altered their direction and sped up, their spindly legs taking short but frantic steps. Liam stood absolutely still, not wanting to distract them further.
“It’s working,” Medic whispered in his ear. “They actually like that garbage.”
Whatever the reason, the army slowly moved away along the streets. Or most of them anyway. Maybe twenty lingered outside the front doors of the building, their eight pairs of arms wriggling with anxiety as the vast majority of their king’s protectors shuffled away in a dreamlike state. But there were still plenty of others jammed inside the building.
A movement caught Liam’s eye. Stealth slipped through the darkness, approaching a shadowed corner of the hotel where only a couple of grubs remained. The robot expertly ducked and rolled from one tiny hiding place to another, avoiding detection.
Medic, Armory, and Optics came running up as Liam was untying the mobile phone from its twine. Definitely Ant’s phone, though why he’d sent it—
Then he noticed it was in camera mode, currently recording.
Liam smiled to himself. Standing in the light of the swirling wormhole, he turned the phone toward him and said, “Thanks, guys. Just what we needed.” Aware that his teammates were watching him closely, he leaned closer to the screen and lowered his voice. “I could jump back right now and come home, but we have to finish this. We won’t be long. Over and out.”
He thumbed the STOP button and casually tossed the phone toward the wormhole. Its suction whipped it inside, and the tiny black object spun away.
“Okay, let’s quit standing around and get this over with,” Armory growled.
As the wailing voice of Adelia Mingo echoed across the landscape, the four robots headed toward the building, trying to stay in the shadows. Still, grubs spotted them immediately and began shrieking their warnings, all coming together and surging toward the robots. This left Stealth free to reach the shadowed wall, and she immediately ducked around the corner. “Going to find a way in,” she said over the intercom.
“There are still a lot of grubs inside,” Optics warned. “I count seventy-three life forms on the first and second floors—and five more on the third. We’ll never get up the stairs.”
“We can if I mow ’em down,” Armory growled. “Seriously, I can cut them in half with the firepower in these babies.”
“No,” Medic scolded. “I’m warning you, Armory. If you kill any more grubs, then I’ll make sure the king’s head is not preserved the way the Ark Lord needs it.”
“Then you’ll get us all killed,” Armory shot back. “Is that what you want? For us to—”
“Let’s just skip the first two floors,” Liam said. “Can’t we climb the walls or something? Get to the roof and down the stairs to third? We’ll only have five to deal with then. Four guards and the king.”
“Did you hear that, Stealth?” Medic said, raising her voice.
“Copy that,” the other said, sounding curiously out of breath for a robot.
Medic nodded. “We’ll be with you in a minute.”
But they had a more immediate threat to deal with first. A dozen or more grubs charged toward them, now in full attack mode, tongues flicking out and causing sparks to fly.
Liam was confident he could outrun them, and the others probably could too. “Let’s lead them off,” he said. “We’ll run in a giant circle. They’ll follow, but we’ll be back at the building before them, and by then maybe Stealth will have found a way to the roof.”
“I’m not running away from these things,” Amory said, his voice dripping with scorn. “Have you forgotten we’re invincible? They can’t kill us because we already know we live to old age! I don’t know what’ll happen, but I’m going to call their bluff. I reckon their tongues won’t work, or maybe their king will order them to stand down, or something else will stand in the way of instant death. We just need to stop goofing off and get this done.”
With that, he marched toward the rapidly approaching grubs.
“Armory,” Medic warned even as she backed away. Liam and Optics reversed with her. “Armory, don’t be an idiot. I don’t care what the Ark Lord said, you can’t just assume you’re invincible.”
“Try me,” the robot growled, his gun barrels swiveling.
Liam watched with morbid fascination. After seeing what a single Gorvian time grub had done to a batch of floating droids on the Ark, he couldn’t imagine Armory surviving against this mob. Maybe they’d be gentle and stun him instead of killing him. Maybe their king was, even now, screeching out the window to take the robots alive, make them prisoners and bring them to him unharmed. Something had to intervene, otherwise Armory’s personal timeline would be altered by his death. And if his timeline were altered, it would affect the lives of all those around him, too.
And so the three of them waited, backing away slowly as Armory stomped toward the converging grubs. “Come and get me, you ugly bags of slime!” he yelled out loud, his voice booming through the darkness.
They closed the gap. Ten feet . . . eight . . . six . . .
At the last moment, Armory paused in what looked like a moment of uncertainty.
Then several tongues lashed out. Sparks flashed and sizzled in the air. At least five grubs at the front of the mob vanished and reappeared at the rear, their individual timelines reset by a few seconds.
Armory quickly turned pure white.
As grubs shrieked at him, he dissolved into dust.
END OF PART 5
COMING NEXT
The blackness rushed closer. Now he could see stars.
Terror gripped him then. If he were back home, at the top of that tree down by the lake, contemplating whether to jump and prove his invincibility . . . well, then he had already jumped. He’d pulled the plug on the wormhole, severed its ties to reality, and it was too late to reverse his decision. He was falling.
What had Ant always told him about taking a second longer to think before acting?
But in this case, Liam had thought about it. He’d come up with the plan several minutes ago while on the Ark, and he’d acted before his courage fled. It seemed like a good plan except for one pretty major wrinkle.
The tale continues in Deadly Backlash.
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