by Mel Odom
Our attackers were all around us, firing indiscriminately. They moved like a unit, close-knit and together, and their fields of fire overlapped.
I reached for the woman’s weapon, tried to close my hand around it, and couldn’t. I felt frustrated, but more than that, I realized how alien it was for me to desire the weapon. I hadn’t been built to kill humans.
Beside me, Louis Blaine had drawn two pistols and was firing methodically, cursing the whole time. Red laser sights lit up his body and he jerked as rounds hammered his body armor. These soldiers were obviously trained to shoot center mass to knock an armored opponent from his feet.
By then I was moving, knowing I had to act fast or Blaine was going to die in that alley. I couldn’t save them all, but I could save Blaine. The First Directive at least freed me up to choose someone to save instead of losing them all.
I stepped in front of Blaine, felt a half-dozen rounds slap against my back, and knotted my fists in his jacket as I propelled him toward the warehouse. A carbosteel door blocked our passage, one that hadn’t been raised but was still the shortest path to safety. Two mercenaries leaned out to give us cover fire. Bullets ricocheted from the pitted surface and sparks flared to life only to extinguish a moment later.
I lifted my foot and drove it into the door. Carbosteel screeched, hinges whined, and screws wrenched free of the masonry. With a loud, crunching clang, the door shot into the warehouse. I propelled us inside.
Cursing, Blaine broke free of me and fell into a tactical position beside the door. He brought up his weapons and fired into the men gathering in the alley. The muzzle flashes lit his face and I saw that his features were tight with anger and fear.
I looked around at the small army gathered inside the warehouse. Evidently, the mercenaries had been using the location as a base for some time. Sleeping pods and food lined the walls. Debris from past occupancy by some business or other remained in the center.
“Do you know who these people are, Drake?”
I didn’t know if the question was prompted out of suspicion or desperation. When humans were filled with emotions, it was hard for me to know. I was certain he still didn’t trust me, and this attack had to have damaged that small amount of trust even further.
“No.”
Blaine whirled around, put his back to the wall, and shook the empty magazines from his weapons. He reloaded, slamming home the new magazines. “You have access to facial recognition databases through your on-board systems, right?”
“I can’t see through their helmets.”
The alley was littered with the bodies of mercenaries that had been caught by surprise, but they’d been joined by bodies of the attackers. Most of them had been hit with high-caliber weapons that had left them in pieces.
The first line of attackers reached the warehouse walls. Almost immediately, anti-personnel charges went off, blowing them all backward and shredding many of them. Some of the mercenaries carrying large caliber weapons trained their sights on the fallen and more vulnerable members scattered in front of them. For a moment, the battle turned into a wholesale slaughter and the tide of the massacre went the other way.
Blaine fired again and again, but I knew his ammunition wasn’t inexhaustible. What was worse was the mini-cannons on the hoppers were turning the warehouse walls into Swiss cheese.
“They’re not going to be able to hold this warehouse.” I had to make him aware of the situation. If he didn’t heed the warning, the First Directive would impel me to carry him out by force if necessary. That caused a conflict within my programming architecture because, if I tried to remove him by force and he fought me, I couldn’t guarantee I would successfully get him out. Humans were unpredictable in certain stressful situations.
“I’m not going to leave these people behind.” Blaine fired again.Return fire caught him in the right thigh, spinning him around. He dropped to his left knee and cried out in pain. Blood spattered the concrete floor around him. Only a few feet away, one of the mercenaries jerked around and fell with a huge hole in his chest.
A moment later, one of our attackers hit the cargo hopper with an incendiary missile and reduced it to a slag heap wreathed in flames. Two flaming figures rushed from the stricken vehicle, but they managed only a few stumbling steps before the fire wreathing them brought them down. The bright light of the explosion washed through the warehouse like a rapid tidal wave, but the darkness reclaimed the area even more quickly.
I crossed the distance to Blaine. “We’ve got to go or they’re going to kill you.”
He stumbled and would have fallen, but I kept him upright. We moved toward the back of the warehouse. Around us, the mercenaries were coming to the same conclusion and were drawing back as well.
I was already downloading blueprints from the city planner’s office. They had files for the original design of the warehouse and the new structure that was going up. Doors at the back of the building offered egress out into another alley. There was no guarantee those wouldn’t be heavily defended, but staying in the warehouse wasn’t an option.
I opened my comm and linked to emergency services, since I didn’t have access to Dispatch while suspended. “This is the NAPD Emergency Services. What is the nature of your emergency?”
“I am Detective Drake 3GI2RC. I am with Sergeant Louis Blaine. Blaine has been shot and injured. We are under attack by heavily armed foes determined to kill us.”
“Understood, Detective Drake. I have pinged Sergeant Blaine’s twenty. I have units en route.”
“Send emergency medical teams and the medical examiner. There are dead and wounded.”
“Copy that, Detective Drake. Are you there on assignment?”
“No. Neither is Sergeant Blaine. We were following up on leads in a case he was investigating.” I caught Blaine’s eye in the darkness. He nodded. I knew he would have a story and a reason we were there. He’d been around the NAPD for a long time.
I was cut out of the police dispatch but Blaine would be able to listen in on the chatter, and I trusted he would keep me apprised if there was anything I needed to know. I kept moving, carrying Blaine now. Mercenaries moved beside us, many of them wounded. Enemy fire hammered into the room.
The violence behind us was even more fierce. The attackers were at the warehouse wall again, shooting inside now. I didn’t know how the ambush had been staged. If the chimera mercenaries had been at the location for a time, it stood to reason that they would have been attacked before.
There was only one alteration to everything.
Me.
Chapter Thirty-One
I wasn’t comfortable with the thought that this might be my fault, and I kept thinking about how Thomas Haas had downloaded my memories onto the external drive he’d brought.
I searched my programming, running a diagnostic for anything nasty Thomas Haas might have left. I wasn’t surprised when I found a worm running in my comm software. I unleashed an anti-virus and watched the struggle between my program and the intruder as code spun and whirled. My systems slowed as more and more memory was consumed by the effort of getting rid of the invasive code. Images of my work with Shelly, as well as the experiences on Mars, exploded in my thoughts suddenly.
It became harder to walk and I had to put Blaine down, switching to a position where he was leaning on my shoulder, one arm wrapped around my waist. I concentrated on helping him to keep moving as the anti-virus chipped away at the worm.
Reading what I could of the code as I crossed the warehouse, I figured that Thomas Haas had buried the worm inside me to be activated later. I could only guess that he’d been waiting to find the mercenaries—and I had led him straight to them. I marked the time of the worm’s activation and saw that it had come on-line, sending a silent GPS locater trail to an unknown server, sometime after I had come in contact with Blaine and the mercenaries.
“We’re being attacked by Haas-Bioroid.” I pulled Blaine along, deeper into the shadows, and forced him to maintain
a faster pace than he was comfortable with. Bullets chopped into the debris in the center of the room where we took shelter.
“How do you know?” Blaine had to speak loudly to make his voice carry over the sounds of violence.
“Thomas Haas infected me with a worm when he visited me.”
Blaine stutter-stepped and almost fell. “Are you under his control?”
“No. I’m eradicating the worm. I found it.”
“Do you know that for certain?”
“Yes.” But even as I said that, I wondered if the worm was a multi-layered creation, laced with a foolie designed to make me think I was removing it from my software when I really wasn’t.
Bioroids occasionally picked up viruses while in contact with the Net. Malicious hackers were everywhere, and bioroids—with all their built-in security against such manipulation—were a prize among that group. If someone could prove they had hacked a bioroid, they became champions in that group of subversives.
For a moment, I thought Blaine was going to argue, but he knew we were stuck with each other. He couldn’t travel quickly—or perhaps at all—on his own. He didn’t fight and he didn’t argue. He managed to keep pace with me as best he could.
Another explosion went off in the alley. More light and sound cascaded into the warehouse and ricocheted from the piles of debris and leftover crates like a speeding tsunami.
I was carrying most of Blaine’s weight now because his injured leg wouldn’t hold up. I kept him on task with gentle pressure and by shifting so that his injured leg caused him to topple slightly in the direction I wanted him to go.
Another mercenary stumbled away, his arm blown off and spewing blood. He bled out before he hit the floor.
“We can’t just leave these people here to die.”
Blaine’s concern didn’t jibe with the impression I’d gotten about him from other detectives. They’d said Louis Blaine was on the take, that any investigation he handled had to be mistrusted if cred was being handed out by guilty parties.
That wasn’t what I was seeing now. He cared about the people that had been killed, and he was afraid for his own life.
“We can’t save them. They have to save themselves. I have to save you.” I scanned the warehouse, spotting rows of abandoned product packed in crates.
Footsteps scuffed the concrete floor and I knew we weren’t alone. Blaine knew it too. I released him, propped him up against a nearby wall, and scouted the darkness as six men closed in on us. I spotted them all with thermographic vision, marked their locations, and went back to low-level light vision. If a weapon went off inside the building, or if someone launched a grenade into the warehouse, I would temporarily lose my vision if I stayed in night vision. That was a risk I was unwilling to take.
I didn’t have a weapon, but I had been trained to fight and subdue perpetrators. Killing the opponents I faced to eliminate them wasn’t a necessity, and it wasn’t allowed under the Three Directives, even if one of those people was trying to kill another under my protection. However, I could injure them to prevent them from killing someone else as long as I didn’t hurt them too badly. I also had infrared vision that didn’t rely on the goggles our attackers wore. I had edges that would make a difference in the coming battle.
Flattening against a recessed door to an office, I waited half a second for one of the men to step out from hiding, then roped an arm around his chest, pulled him forward, and tripped him. I clamped a hand over his mouth to keep him from crying out, then squeezed his jugular veins quickly to shut off blood flow to his brain just long enough to cause him to pass out. He went down quickly and quietly. Moving hurriedly, I laid the man on the floor and knelt beside him.
I stripped off the memory fiber mask he wore and captured an image of his face. I sent the image to emergency services and started a facial recognition trace of my own. That extra programming, while the anti-virus was working against the worm, slowed down my reflexes.
I surveyed the man. He was dressed for war. A combat harness held a knife and extra magazines for his weapons. I also found a selection of flashbang and smoke grenades. I took the grenades, shoved them into my pockets, and got moving again. Taking the grenades wasn’t a problem because they were non-lethal.
Five men were left.
I could still hear gunfire in the alley outside, but it was sporadic now.
I continued on and Blaine hobbled after me. He was making far too much noise, but there was reason to believe that the gunfire would be enough to cover the sounds. Also, the humans’ hearing would be ringing from all the explosions.
Short-range missiles tore through the ceiling behind us. I recognized the sound. Almost immediately, the mercenaries still in the warehouse started screaming in pain. I knew that many of them never had a chance.
I found the next man at a junction at the same time he found me. He whirled around and brought his assault rifle to bear. I gripped the barrel just as he fired and pointed it away from Blaine and me, then pulled the rifle forward and slammed the butt into his face just hard enough to guarantee unconsciousness. I tried not to break any bones, but I knew that was a possibility.
Again, I stripped off the mask, took the image, and looked for any signs that the men worked for Haas-Bioroid. So far, none of them had been identified.
Again, I found nothing. The database search continued to cycle, and the anti-virus finally flushed the worm from my memory. My senses picked up once more, and I moved easier.
“My systems are clean again.”
“Good.” Blaine’s voice sounded strained.
We came upon the third man in the darkness and I took out one of the flashbangs. I whispered to Blaine. “Cover your eyes.” Then I pulled the pin, started an internal timer, and lobbed the grenade into the air.
A split-second later, the flashbang detonated and ripped away the shadows that filled the warehouse. I opened my eyes, adjusted them to the sudden brightness, and saw the third man yanking at his goggles, obviously in pain.
Before I could reach the man, Blaine had his pistol out and shot him almost point-blank in the face. The man went down, and I was on him immediately. My hand caught his shoulder and his biometrics flashed through my system. At the same time, I tore his uniform sleeve, intending to use it to stop the bleeding, but it was already too late. I watched him flatline and release his last breath. I stared into his ruined face and captured the image anyway. Given time, I could reconstruct the man’s face. I set one of my programs to do that.
Blaine came up beside me. He stared down at the dead man. Despite the fear, I saw regret in his eyes. For all his bluster and bad reputation, Blaine wasn’t a man who killed easily. His face was pale and perspiration dappled his cheeks and forehead. His respiration was forced and irregular.
“Let’s go.”
“All right.” I stood and left the dead man there.
We kept moving toward the back of the warehouse, almost there now. Louis Blaine saw the fourth man before I did. Blaine bumped into me with his body to knock me to one side as he lifted his pistols. They exchanged shots and bullets flew through the air, digging into the nearby crates and scoring the floor in showers of sparks.
I palmed another flashbang and threw it toward our attacker, noting at the same time that another gunner had slipped in behind him and opened fire. The flashbang exploded in a shower of light and noise. I had my vid muted against the flare, so I didn’t lose any vision. Blaine and our two attackers weren’t so fortunate.
I went forward quickly as the flashbang began to burn out. Running, I shoved out an arm, caught one man across the chest, and caused him to somersault in mid-air, kicking him in the head as he came down. He sprawled unconscious.
The next man remained behind a stack of crates jutting out into the hallway. I pushed them over on him, knowing he would run. When he did, I stepped out of hiding and punched him in the jaw. His head twisted, but his jaw didn’t break, and he was out. I grabbed his shirt and lowered him to the ground so he
wouldn’t hurt himself further.
If my earlier count was correct, only one man remained.
I glanced around the warehouse as full dark returned. My vision adjusted automatically. Blaine’s breath sounded loud behind me and ghosted across the back of my neck, causing my sensors to fluctuate as they registered it.
Noise came from ahead and to our right. I guessed that the remaining man was there. Behind us, a small force filtered into the warehouse, but by that time I could hear police sirens screaming through the area.
I picked another flashbang from my collection and readied it. I whispered a warning to Blaine, then tossed the grenade.
This time when the flashbang went off, the light revealed the massive girth of a sleek combat exosuit to my right. Our attackers were using everything they had now. It was three meters tall and 1.2 meters wide, capable of lifting three or four tons. Painted matte black, it looked like a mechanical shadow. The pilot fit snugly inside and servos whined as it moved. The only vulnerability of this particular exosuit was the lack of a reader shield.
The exosuit came at me with amazing speed. It clamped three-fingered hands on one of my forearms and shoulder, then squeezed with brutal strength. I felt the carbosteel alloy in my body start to fracture and warp.
Blaine fired at the man piloting the exosuit, but the suit didn’t have many places vulnerable to small arms fire. The bullets screamed madly off the heavy carbosteel limbs.
I used my free hand to reach inside the exosuit’s exposed inner arm, hooking my fingers into the hydraulic lines as I was lifted from my feet into the air. I yanked and the hoses shredded with high-pressured explosions. Purplish fluid splashed the exosuit and me, but the arm lost power. I squirmed free, landed on my feet, and repeated the process with the other arm. I started on the legs as the man controlling the suit tried desperately to kick me.
