by John Conroe
Chapter 16
I’m in, Kwan signed in ASL. Tyson saw it and signed his own agreement. After a second, I finally nodded too. Kwan raised both eyebrows at my hesitation and signed again. Problem? Think of something?
I shook my head and signed back my response. Shocked at detail. Plan is really good.
It’s your F’ing drone… you programmed it! he came back.
I shrugged. He looked at me evenly then turned to Tyson, who just pointed at his wrist, where some people still wore retro watches. His message was clear—ticktock. Kwan nodded and pointed at my hand, or rather, the little missile it held.
Tyson pulled a multi-tool from his gear and opened it to a hex-head driver, then handed it to me and backed away a meter or so. I gave him a glare and turned to Kwan. He backed up too.
Cowards.
Nice. I got on with it. Each screw backed right out and I carefully set them on Rikki’s rock-steady surface. Then I pulled the nosepiece off. Looking inside, I couldn’t see shit—too dark. I looked at Kwan and squinted at the missile tube. He got the message, pulling a chem light from a pocket. With a quick bend, he snapped the glass inside and shook it to make it light up. Then he held it over the open end of the missile. Inside, by the grayish-green light that was the result of our Potter Cloaks, I could now see a cylinder of gleaming metal. On opposite sides of the tube were little white plastic bits that quickly yielded to Tyson’s pliers. Funny, the government using plastic, a substance that is used less and less by a conservation-minded society every day.
Tilting the missile, I went to drop the plastic retainers on the floor, but Kwan’s hand shot out and caught them. He held up an index finger on his free hand and gave me the no-no signal. Quite right. Never leave anything behind.
I shrugged off the minor embarrassment I felt and shook the missile. The shiny bundle that was the EMP unit slid out into my hand. Kwan reached for it and I let him take it. Rikki’s holo display blinked again, so I glanced at the new words.
Put comparable weight and sized object inside tube and reattach nosepiece. Place back in missile magazine.
He could still launch the missile, and maybe it would knock out a drone from kinetic force alone. After a moment of thought, I pulled a little container of spare 10mm e-mag balls I carried for Rikki and found I could fit five of the hardened steel balls inside the missile tube. The ammo feed hopper port opened on Rikki’s back by itself, and I carefully put the remaining five balls inside. Then I put the nose cone back on the missile and screwed it down. When I held it up to its previous placement on Rikki’s missile pod, the little clamps snapped closed on it instantly and then the whole missile unit folded back into place as both of the lower, bigger pods simultaneously rotated out.
Time to party. I moved back away from the door, rifle barrel pointing off to the left but level with the ground. Rikki moved back as well, the bulk of his airframe between me and the door. Kwan noted that with raised brows before giving me a thumbs up. I nodded. He turned to Tyson, who was at the door, holding the knob. Tyson nodded as well.
Kwan kneeled down, which gave me a clear field of fire, and held up three fingers with his left hand, his right cocked back with the EMP pod in it, ready to throw. After one last glance at both of us, he took a deep breath and nodded. Then one finger folded, a second finger folded, and finally, the last. As his hand formed into a fist, Tyson pulled the door open with one solid yank. Kwan threw the EMP at the nightmare that towered at the other end of the hall and then dropped flat.
The drone, whose top segment was printed with a stenciled WAR, spun around so fast, I almost crapped myself. A single metal arm with a pincher on the end snapped around and snatched the EMP out of the air. And instantly froze as the little EMP projectile crackled and buzzed.
The gray vision instantly cleared and my gunsight, which by this time was centered on the metal monster, went dead. Then we were moving, Rikki zooming forward before Kwan could regain his feet. I followed the Gunny, and Tyson followed me, all of us racing for the dark EXIT sign that pointed toward the familiar stairwell door on the right.
Kwan had the door open and I shot past him, seeing Rikki fly over the WAR bot, a small black metal can-shaped object falling out of a port on my drone’s underside. It hit the horseman drone with a soft clang and stuck. Then I was inside the black stairwell, covering the stairs with my weapon while hearing Tyson run in after me. A second later, Rikki zoomed overhead and up into the darkness. Kwan carefully closed the door and we started for the stairs.
All three of us snapped chem lights as we climbed, moving to get space between us and the ground floor drones, but not willing to do so in pitch darkness.
The heavy fire door at the stairwell’s entrance muffled sound, but all three of us glanced at each other as we heard the whine of UAV fans in the hall. We moved faster, me first, then Kwan, Tyson bringing up the rear. I set each foot carefully into the the most recent tracks on the dusty steps—my own, from a little more than a month before. Behind me, I noticed the others stepping where I did, so that we weren’t leaving any new tracks that might alert the drones behind us.
We were two floors up when a sound below froze us in our tracks. A glance over the railing, down into the depths, showed a bloom of daylight. The stairwell door had just been opened. Hurriedly, we each tucked our chem lights into our clothing, hiding the pale green glow.
All three of us listened intently, but no matter how hard I strained, I couldn’t pick up a sound. Not the whine of a fan, nor the minor hum of a servo.
I tapped the Potter Cloak’s headband control, but nothing seemed to happen. A glance through the ChemJet’s rifle sight, with a shake of the rifle for good measure, didn’t result in the sighting reticle lighting up. Tyson tapped his own headband, once, then a second time. Nothing happened.
Kwan suddenly held up one finger, getting our attention. Then he pointed it at his own ear. Tyson and I froze, listening. After two seconds, we all heard a sound. A click. Like something metal coming down on concrete. Both soldiers had alert expressions on their faces. Then we heard another click. Suddenly I knew what had made that sound—I’ve heard it before, closer even than this: the sound of a Tiger’s metal claw as it hit stone, asphalt, or concrete.
I held up my left hand and signed Tiger.
Both men frowned but nodded their understanding. I signed Switch places with me to Tyson, lightly patting the stock of the ChemJet so he would understand. 7.62mm armor piercing rounds, which is all they carried in their magazines, could chew through Tiger armor, but my ChemJet would kill it quicker, even at the short distance we would have on the stairwell.
He nodded and I moved, almost climbing up onto the stair rail, Kwan following my example a second later, so that Tyson could take point. Kwan followed him and I stepped silently off last. Another click sounded in the dark depths below, followed quickly by a second. Without a sign or signal, we all picked up our pace. Rikki was somewhere above us, scouting the stairs for drones ahead of us. It was up to me to provide security from the metal death below.
We kept moving, slower now as we took pains to be even more silent, pausing every three to five steps to listen. I had no real way to judge these things, but I felt like the few random clicks I was hearing were down by the first floor, as Europeans would call it, second floor by American definition. We were snail crawling past the third, a scant two floors between us and the relentless killer below.
The clicking continued and we kept climbing, the stress mounting with every step. Sure it was easy on our cardio, climb-wise, but murder on our nerves and tense muscles. Like slow yoga while carrying weights. And only fifteen more floors to go. My mind kept flashing back to every scary mystery movie I’d ever seen, where the victim is walking in darkness or fog and every time they stop, they hear a footstep that stops as well. We were being stalked.
My hope was that the Tiger’s power conservation programming would kick in if it didn’t get definitive sensory evidence of our presence. It was losi
ng and using power every moment that went by, here in the lightless stairwell. Either it had already captured enough solar power to see it through till tomorrow morning, or it would decide the utility of gathering more energy outweighed expending it for no reward. Every tread higher was potentially the one that the Tiger’s internal logic circuits would decide enough was enough. As long as we were silent.
It was Gunny Kwan whose foot brushed the piece of paper on the stair. It must have lain there for over ten years, undisturbed—just common, for the time, copier paper, the stuff that I had seen in countless places across Manhattan. I didn’t see what happened, didn’t observe how his foot touched it, as I was watching behind us. I heard it though. The oh-so-soft crinkle of paper. Really just the slightest rustle. We all froze. Below us, the clicking stopped entirely. Seconds ticked by.
Then came the whine of heavy servos, the screech of metal raking across concrete followed by a heavy thump that shook the whole stairwell. And immediately repeated again, and again, coming faster with every second.
Chapter 17
The Tiger was pounding up the stairs, invisible in the darkness no matter how much noise it made. I pulled my lit chem light from inside my vest and dropped it on the landing four steps below me. Tyson took off up the steps, Kwan hard on his heels. I followed as fast as I could, climbing the stairs backward so that I could watch the pool of light, which now that the cloaks were dead was back to a blue color. The stairs shook as the monster leapt up them, clearing whole sections of stairs with every bound.
I had made it to the next landing when the Tiger landed right over my light. The ChemJet shuddered in my hands before I was even aware I was firing. A three or four-round burst. I was just looking through the dead sight, using the folding backup sights as best I could in the dark.
Two of my rounds hit the Tiger, ripping right through both sides of the bot, shards of concrete spalling out from under its black-striped bulk. One or maybe both rounds must have damaged its front leg apparatus, as it collapsed forward onto its head. Suddenly fans were blowing down alongside me and a bright light lit up the Tiger as Rikki arrived.
My last squeeze of the trigger was just a soft feathering, just enough to send a pair of rocket-propelled bullets though the spot on its armored torso where it kept its CPU.
I turned back to tell the others to run but they were gone, the pounding of their feet finally reaching my gunshot-deafened ears. Shit, I was getting left behind. Turning, I pushed my tired and tensed-up legs into a full run, my speed starting to pick up after the first half dozen steps. Leaping two and three stairs a time, I still wasn’t catching up to the special operators with their head start, but I also didn’t seem to be falling farther behind either.
Below us, the ground floor door burst off its hinges and something really large hit the stairs. I had a really bad feeling that either War had recovered from the EMP burst or that one of its siblings was on our trail.
Sudden, eye-searing blue light ripped through the darkness, a lance of light the diameter of a shot glass that came up at a diagonal right through the concrete exterior wall. The Tank-Killer had elevated its laser cannon and was firing where it thought we were. Probably based on the thing below us. Standard military multi-domain battle space integration.
“Incendiary mine ignition now,” Rikki suddenly announced, and a bloom of sun-hot light flared from somewhere on the stairs below. The sounds of the monster pursuing us faltered and slowed but still kept coming. Then came the wine of UAVs entering the stairwell.
“Clear for flashbang,” I told my drone, pulling the last of my modified flashbangs from my vest. The pin came out and I dropped the grenade straight down the open space of the stairwell.
Rikki slid over above the stairs just as the grenade went off with a roar that shook the building.
“Suggest accelerated pace,” Rikki said as the vibrations on the stair treads warned that War’s pursuit continued.
Having already reached that conclusion, I was racing and leaping, the big Decimator easily keeping pace. My ears rang from the shots and explosion, but I didn’t think the UAV whine was still present.
Then another beam of blue shot through the space I had just vacated, melting the metal railing to red-hot liquid steel in a microsecond. Booted feet continued to pound up above and I poured on the speed, trying to outpace the Tank-Killer’s aiming algorithm.
The running and the fighting distracted me enough that I had lost count of which floor we were passing, but we couldn’t be any more than halfway to our floor. The enemy knew we were here and all element of surprise was gone. Plum Blossom could easily escape the building long before we got to the eighteenth floor, leaving us to die a useless death. My brain was racing to come up with a plan, any plan, to keep Plum Blossom’s attention and presence here in the building.
But what do you bait a half-ton murder bot with? What does a merciless killer machine want other than to kill people? And then I had it—the germ of an idea. Maybe some people were more important to kill than others.
“Rikki, what drones are you sensing above and below us?” I said between gasps of air.
“Drone labeled War is pursuing from below, accompanied by four Cranes and two Wolves. EMP burst damaged other drones in front of 55 Broadway, leaving them currently disabled. War is functioning at greatly reduced level due to EMP circuit damage and incendiary mine damage.
“Above, twenty-six UAVs of mixed varieties have entered building through breached windows on seventeenth floor, and are currently, based on audio signals, attempting to breach the stairwell door.
“Eighteenth floor currently occupied by CThree and two drones of type similar to Pestilence and War. Additional ground and air units are converging upon this location.”
“Does Plum Blossom know that me and you are in the building?”
“Unknown. Surmise that probability is high that CThree has this information.”
“Are we still high value targets for Zone drones?”
“Probability ninety-eight percent.”
So, there was my answer. Plum could have left through a window or an elevator shaft at anytime. It hadn’t. Rikki and I, it seemed, were the perfect bait.
“Gunny! Tyson! You’ll have UAVs incoming from above at any moment.”
“Roger that!” was the response from one of them, the Gunny I think. My ears were still messed up.
“How close is War?”
“Approximately two floors below but gaining at the rate of .4 floors per minute.”
“Yeah, I’m going as fast as I can. Give me an estimate of time till it reaches the next landing just above us,” I said, eye locked on said landing.
“Seventeen seconds after you step off it.”
I pulled two of my last few homemade goodies from my vest, a fire bomb that used jellied white gas, and a plain old pipe bomb. Fumbling out an old-fashioned British lifeboat match, I struck it and lit both fuses. Then I set them on the landing and took off again.
“AJ, you must accelerate. You will not be at minimum safe distance when detonation occurs. You have eleven seconds.”
I reached way down deep and pushed myself to pick up speed, desperately jumping stairs three at a time in an effort to get away. The railing shook harder than before as War gained on me.
“Detonation in three, two, one…”
He was off by a second, the explosion of light, heat, sound and pressure wave reaching me a moment after his countdown finished. It took me off my feet.
Rikki shot out from the stairs to hover over the open space in the middle, his nose pointed down, tail fans in reverse to hold him in place.
“Status of War?”
He paused, then his e-mag gun fired, the resulting thunk of metal on metal sounding just as a cable came slashing up through the air. It just missed Rikki’s suddenly lifting form, instead impacting and wrapping around the railing in front of me. Instantly I heard the whine of a motor and the cable went visibly taut, vibrating with strain.
On reflex, I shoved the ChemJet over the railing, muzzle pointed down, and triggered the rest of the magazine.
Then a massive form was rising up to my level, the cable wound tight to its torn-up metal body.
War had me dead to rights, although the big bot looked really bad. Half of its upper body was a melted, slagged mess, bits of burning jelly were all over its side and back, and it had what I assumed were a half dozen ChemJet rifle holes in it.
Rikki fired another e-mag round into the melted top, but War just sat there, bound to the railing by its cable. Only one of its body segments seemed able to still spin, and a sharp blade suddenly sprang out from the arm on that segment.
I pulled my 9mm Magnum from the chest holster and shot the cable two, three, four times till it parted with a high-pitched ting. War fell backward but I could see that one of its four walking legs was still clamped onto the nearest post of the railing, so hard that the metal post had deformed. So I shot that too—the post, that is. Emptied the rest of the magazine, twelve rounds, shooting first at the base of the post then just above the hydraulically powered talon that clutched the crumpled metal.
The high-speed pistol bullets might not hurt the heavy armor of the bot, but they sliced through the mild steel of the railing post like butter. My gun locked open on empty, the pipe wiggled and held, then suddenly, with another loud ping, let go, sending the big bot plummeting down the stairwell center.
I heard it bouncing off concrete and the metal railing all the way to the bottom, where it made a crash that shook the stairwell.
“Bot War is effectively nonfunctional,” Rikki announced.
“I shacking hope so!” I said, starting back up the awful stairs, reloading first my rifle and then my pistol as I climbed.
Chapter 18
“Holy Hell, Gurung! What the fuck did you do back there?” Tyson greeted me as I pounded up to the landing where they were crouched. He had to just about yell.
