by Isaac Hooke
“Finally, luck is on our side,” Crusher said.
“Don’t jinx us,” Bambi said.
Eric opened the door completely.
The layout was similar to all the other apartments, and Brontosaurus and Eagleeye went in first, clearing the laundry area, bathroom, and bedroom.
“Got two teenagers hiding under the bed,” Brontosaurus transmitted.
“Evacuate them to the rooms next door,” Eric said. “Eagleeye...”
He hurried outside with Eagleeye and went to the adjacent door. He hacked the lock. When it opened, he cleared the rooms with Eagleeye. There was an old couple hiding in the bathroom.
Brontosaurus brought in the teenagers. They were just as pale as the elderly couple.
“Stay here, all of you,” Eric whispered with his vocal box. “Things are going to get a bit hectic next door.”
“Wait, will they be safe from the explosion?” Brontosaurus asked.
“Hm, I’m not actually sure,” Eagleeye replied. “Depends on if the transport itself detonates.”
“And if it does?” Brontosaurus pressed.
“Then they’re probably not safe,” Eagleeye said. He turned toward the four humans. “Get to the next floor and hide somewhere.”
The four merely sat there, uncertain about what to do.
“What about the fire escape?” Brontosaurus said.
“I wouldn’t recommend it,” Eric said. “It’s fine for us… we’re armed, and can lay down suppressive fire against any ambushes. But if these guys go out there…” He shook his head, and turned toward them. “Try the fire escape if you’re feeling lucky.”
Eagleeye returned to the opening. “It’s clear. So far.” He glanced at the civilians. “If you want to go, now’s your chance.”
The four ran past Eagleeye and out of the room.
Eric, Brontosaurus and Eagleeye returned to the previous room and closed the door. Bambi and Crusher were standing in the middle of the floor; they had their weapons pointed toward the ceiling.
“Ready?” Bambi asked over the comm.
“Let me correlate the transport’s position,” Eric replied. “Dee, I need your help here. Pull up the blueprints of the building. Then, based on the recordings I took outside the apartment, and our current position, outline the location of the transport on the rooftop above us.”
“Done,” a sultry voice said. That would be his Accomp, or Accompanying AI. A friendly AI helper that was always with him unless he shut her off.
He glanced at the ceiling. Sure enough, he could see a portion of the transport there, outlined in red based on its location on the roof.
Eric went into the laundry room, and clambered onto the big, square-shaped wash-dry, a machine that used sound waves to wash and dry clothes. Then he held his rifle to the ceiling. According to Dee’s red outline, overhead resided the left wing of the transport, close to where it joined the fuselage. It was as near to the main fuselage as he could get.
“Why are you holding your rifle so close to the ceiling?” Bambi asked.
“Caution,” Eric explained. “I don’t want to accidentally fire through it and hit the transport. That’ll definitely alert them to our presence. I’ll be starting at the lowest intensity level, and adjusting from there. Hang tight. This is a one-man job.”
He fired a plasma bolt at the ceiling, and based on the blast hole, as compared to the thickness as represented on the building blueprints, he adjusted the intensity level of the next shot. It took him four shots to completely drill through to the rooftop, then he spent the next several strikes enlarging the hole he made.
Finally he had a gap in the ceiling wide enough to fit an android. The tunnel was about three times the length of the typical partition between levels he’d seen on the floors below, because he had to drill through part of the ceiling and the roof itself.
“It’s pretty tight up there,” Eric transmitted. “Not enough clearance to jump. I’m going to have to haul myself through, and once I’m on the roof, I’ll have to crawl.”
“Wait, I wanted to do this,” Eagleeye said over the comm band.
“I know you did,” Eric said. “But I’m the closest. Now give me your vest.”
Eagleeye hesitated, then shrugged. “I never was in it for the glory. Not when we were Bolt Eaters. Not now. I just want these bastards to get their due.” He lifted up his shirt to unclasp the harness that contained all the demolition bricks, and then handed it to Eric. “Kick some ass.”
Eric stared at the harness, and hesitated.
What’s the point of risking my life for this? I should leave it to the police.
But Brontosaurus, Bambi, Crusher, and Eagleeye were all looking at him expectantly.
Damn it.
There was also some truth to Eagleeye’s words.
The police can’t protect us. It’s time to send a message to our would-be assassins.
He slid the rifle over his shoulder by the strap and then buckled the harness over his shirt. He wasn’t all that comfortable with so many explosive charges in such close proximity to his AI core, but there was nothing for it.
He leaped up, grabbing onto the lower edges of the hole he’d drilled, and squeezed his fingers. His robot strength allowed him to create his own handholds, and in that way he was able to haul himself up toward the top.
When he reached the rooftop, he slowly lifted his head to peer past.
He could see the underside of the transport in front of him. Directly ahead, past the outermost perimeter of the craft, black robots were crouched behind the ruins of the wall that once ran the length of the rooftop. Their backs were to him, and they fired into the street below. Plasma beams also erupted from a source higher up, and out of view—likely the turrets that quilled the transport itself. A missile impacted as he watched, sending two of the robots flying backward from the edge. They slammed against the transport, and didn’t get up.
Well, at least the police are doing something.
One downside about his current android body was the lack of rear-facing head cameras: he missed having eyes on the back of his head. So he had to revolve his body, adjusting his grip on the lip of the opening as he did so. He saw other black robots crouched along all four battered walls of the rooftop: invariably, they faced away from the vessel. There were a few robots standing guard in front of the stairwell shed that led inside the building, watching the same entry point that Eric and the others had meant to use moments before, but none of the tangos had eyes on the transport itself, at least not underneath it—where Eric’s current position was.
Another mistake on their part.
He completed his revolution and, satisfied that none of the robots would notice him, he dragged his upper body through, bending his torso so that he cleared the wing overhead. He heaved up his feet behind him and wormed forward, following along underneath the wing, and heading toward the main fuselage section.
He reached it momentarily, and then removed a Mylar-wrapped demolition block from the pocket of the harness. He removed the paper backing on the adhesive side, and affixed the block to the fuselage. He placed another close to it, and then repositioned, following along the underside of the fuselage for two meters, and then attached another two. In that way, he continued applying blocks until he’d exhausted his supply.
When he had attached the last, he retreated directly toward the hole in the rooftop. There was enough room here to move at a crouch, though he’d soon have to revert to a crawl position.
When he was halfway there, movement drew his attention to the right; he instinctively amped up his time sense and glanced that way.
One of the black robots guarding the stairwell shed had spotted him. In his haste to get off the roof he hadn’t realized a portion of the wing had been blown away on his right, forming a large gap that exposed him to the robots out there. Eric should have retraced his path along the fuselage, and returned to the opening the way he had come.
Too late now.
; Eric slid his rifle down from his shoulder and dove forward to low-crawl the rest of the way. He held the rifle behind him and switched to smart targeting mode—the robots were marked in red, and the muzzle would automatically revolve to strike them. He squeezed the trigger, releasing a few plasma bolts, and continued his retreat.
Before he reached the hole, he took a hit in the lower leg, and that disintegrated the lower half of his foot.
Shit!
Brontosaurus was peering from the opening in front of him. The heavy gunner was laying down suppressive fire with the rifle he had.
Eric arrived, and Brontosaurus lowered the weapon to grab him by the shoulder and haul him through. Brontosaurus was standing on Eagleeye’s shoulder, and the three of them landed in a twisted heap on the bottom.
“Damn, you guys are heavy,” Eagleeye said.
Eric rolled off of them and clambered to his feet with the help of Bambi.
“Can you walk?” she asked.
“I can hop,” Eric said.
“It’ll be faster if at least one of you acts as his crutch,” Eagleeye said.
“That’ll be me,” Bambi said.
Crusher was firing into the ceiling—an enemy robot had already arrived.
They fled the laundry room. Eagleeye slammed the laundry door closed behind him, while Brontosaurus shoved the couch into it and then ripped the entire bar counter from the kitchen, ramming it in behind the couch.
Eagleeye confirmed the hallway was clear, and the five of them fled the apartment suite. Bambi continued to act as his crutch.
An explosion rocked the suite behind them.
“Did you detonate the charges already?” Brontosaurus asked.
“Nope,” Eric replied.
As they approached the fire escape on the far side of the hall, Crusher and Brontosaurus began firing at the rear.
“Bastards move quick!” Brontosaurus said.
“Of course they do, they’re robots like us!”
Eagleeye reached the glass doors of the fire escape and threw himself against them. The glass shattered, and he landed on the platform outside. Bambi and Eric followed, stepping over the sharp glass fragments that still lined the edges. He could see through the metallic grille that composed the platform, to the twisting flights of stairs of the fire escape that led down the building.
Eagleeye led the way down those stairs, which were also made of the same metal grille. Bambi and Eric followed, with Brontosaurus and Crusher on the rear.
“Ah, damn it!” Crusher said. Her right arm dropped. She promptly switched the weapon to her left arm. She didn’t need two arms to hold the rifle, not with her android strength.
When they had descended to the next floor, Eric detonated the charges he’d placed.
A huge orange fireball erupted from the rooftop overhead. A shockwave of superheated gases also blew out of the fire escape entrance above them, sending the pursuing robots flying outside.
Brontosaurus, Crusher, and Eagleeye targeted the robots as they plunged past, and shot out their AI cores before they hit the ground.
The four of them continued pounding along that fire escape, zigging and zagging down the different flights. No further attacks came from overhead. Apparently, the demolition blocks had had the desired effect.
The team reached the bottom floor, and Eagleeye slid down the ladder that led to the ground. Bambi followed him, and Eric went next. He landed on one foot, and looked up to find himself staring into a series of muzzles.
Crusher and Brontosaurus landed beside him, and all five of them raised their hands.
5
Eric gazed at his two feet. His right leg had been replaced courtesy of the repair bots. As had the damage the others had taken.
He was in a common cell of sorts, jailed with the other Bolt Eaters. There were no bars—the walls were made of reinforced steel, with an entrance door so thick it would have put a bank vault to shame. Cameras harbored behind thick shells of polycarbonate watched their every move from the four corners of the room.
Eric had already tried to hack those cameras, but the units seemed entirely driven by wired connections. There were no remote interfaces to speak of: when he scanned the available signal spectrum, except for the comm nodes of his companions, he got nothing. Either the team was inside some sort of Faraday cage, or the entire place was run on wires. The latter was probably a good idea for a jail.
There were no other criminals present. As androids, by law they couldn’t be placed with the general population, not even when held in a temporary jail—not for their safety, but for that of the criminals.
He thought back to the police mechs that had surrounded him and the other four at the bottom of the fire escape. The only reason those mechs hadn’t fired on sight was because Marlborough and the others had already made it outside and alerted the police to their civilian IDs. Otherwise, because they were armed, those robots would’ve no doubt terminated him and the others. Marlborough had told him earlier that as soon as he had got out, he had the team drop their weapons before approaching police lines.
Eric raised his gaze to his hands, and squeezed them.
“Well that was a fun interruption to the routine,” Tread said. The face of his android was prototypically military: square jaw, hawkish nose, thick brows. The alpha look matched up with the armor operator’s body as well, which was just as jacked as the best of them. He wore a cowboy hat, and leather vest, and a thick brass belt buckle. It was a tribute, mostly, to the Armor operators he had once worked with, Morpheus and Hank, who hadn’t survived the alien invasion twenty years ago. They had all worn those same cowboy hats, vests, and buckles.
“Fun for you, maybe,” Traps said. The robot operator wore a blue T-shirt over black cargo pants, and his body was the thinnest among them. His sleeves were loose, making his biceps seem even smaller. He claimed to prefer the look, saying it made people underestimate him because with his Android strength he was easily as strong as Tread or Slate. The face of his android was round, indistinct. Someone you wouldn’t remember later if you saw him in a crowd. That was also how he preferred it. “Me, not so much. I’m quite happy to be retired, thank you. And I’m not looking forward to spending my time in prison.”
“We’re already in prison, dip, in case you hadn’t noticed,” Mickey said. The comm operator had affixed facial hair in a thin line along his jaw, to emphasize the jaw line. It was a fashion that was common in Eric’s time, though it was rare to see in this day and age. His scalp was completely bald. Mickey was the shortest of the group, but he was also extremely buff.
“Dip?” Traps said. “Who calls people that? Oh wait, I forgot, you were born two hundred years before me.”
“Respect your elders,” Mickey quipped.
“Um, by the way, no we’re not in prison,” Hicks said. The sniper often wore a bandit-style mask over the lower half of his face when the team played their war games in VR. He looked so menacing with that mask, but without it, he seemed like an ordinary person. Very average looking, like Traps, and almost as thin. Of course, he could have fashioned his android however he wanted—they all could have, but the self image retained from their human days had stuck with them.
“We’re in jail, not prison,” Hicks continued. “There’s a difference. This is only a temporary holding cell. When they transfer us to an actual penitentiary, you’ll know immediately. In a real prison, you would have been strip searched, with all your belongings taken away, and your clothes replaced with prison issue.”
“Sort of like the military in my day?” Traps said. “At least the ‘prison issue’ part.”
“I think that was true of all our militaries,” Hicks said. “Shaved heads, common uniforms.”
“Strip searched…” Mickey said. “I wonder why they didn’t strip search us before stashing us in here.”
“Scanners,” Dunnigan said in his English accent. The robot operator’s blue eyes and blond hair were slightly at odds with the Roman nose protruding fro
m the middle of his face. “Powerful, body penetrating scanners. No need to strip search us, not when they’ve already done it with their machines.”
“Like that’s not an invasion of privacy or anything…” Traps said.
“I kind of don’t mind,” Bambi said. “It lets them see how perfect we all are.”
“Who, the AIs running the place?” Slate said.
“Whoever,” Bambi said.
“You and your exhibitionist streaks,” Crusher commented.
Bambi shrugged. “I thought you liked it.”
Crusher smiled slyly. “Only in the bedroom.” She gave Eric a suggestive look.
“Not now you three,” Dickson said. “Please.” Despite his internment, he’d managed to retain the stub of his cigar, which he chomped on even now, though it wasn’t lit.
“Oh no!” Slate said. “Don’t stop, I love watching this shit!”
Eric looked away.
Brontosaurus was giving Bambi a strange look. It seemed… contemplative.
She noticed.
“What?” Bambi said.
“Nothing,” Brontosaurus said. “I was just thinking about your expressions. Do you remember the days when all we had to convey our facial expressions were a bunch of bendable LEDs covering the facial regions of our Cicadas?”
“Those were the days,” Tread said, his voice solemn. “All of us were still alive, then.”
That put an end to the conversation.
Eric’s sensitive ears picked up footsteps. They were almost imperceptible.
Crusher sat up straighter. “Someone’s coming.”
Eric directed his gaze toward the door.
The footsteps grew in volume, and then paused in front of the door.
“Should we rush the door?” Eagleeye said.
“Yeah, that’s real smart, doofus,” Slate said. He increased the pitch of his voice to mimic Eagleeye. “Let’s rush the door, that way all the cameras broadcast our movements to any guards waiting outside!” He returned his voice to normal and transmitted over the private comm band: “The smarter tactic is to rush the door after it opens.”
