There was a clang, and a dent appeared in the door, and then another. The drywall next to the doorframe shattered in a spray of crumbling white chips and a cybernetic leg ripped through it. March wasn’t sure if the ghost drones would punch through the door first or the wall.
“Elevator!” said Casimir. “Quick, quick!”
They turned and ran down the hallway, the thud of cybernetic limbs hammering against the door filling March’s ears. March checked his gun, ejected the spent magazine, and slid a new one into the weapon. Not that it would do much good against the ghost drones. Unless Casimir had a cache of plasma weaponry stashed up here, March’s arm would have to be his main weapon against the enemy. The fingers of his left hand were crusted with the drying slime that had surrounded the hive implants.
Casimir reached the elevator door and jabbed the call button. March expected the doors to open at once. No one else should have used the elevator since he had come to this floor with Axiom and Helen.
“Wait,” March said. “We had better take the stairs.”
“I calculate a high probability that the enemy will have sent ghost drones to the stairwell,” said Axiom.
“And not the elevator?” said March.
“They couldn’t get their goddamn giant mutant robot spiders past the bar downstairs,” said Dredger.
“If the implants are in a quantum state,” said March, “they could have walked right past the security downstairs, and no one would have been the wiser.” He took a cautious step back from the elevator doors. No one else followed suit. “We…”
The doors hissed opened, and there was only darkness beyond. The elevator car wasn’t there.
A ghost drone was, though.
This one looked as if it had once been a woman, though her body was now gaunt and emaciated, the black threads spreading through her flesh. The metal legs grasped the sides of the elevator shaft, carrying her upward. The bloodshot eyes fixed on them, and the drone sprang from the elevator in a blur.
She crashed into them, the metal legs sending Casimir and Dredger flying, and she hit Axiom. For all her speed and skill, Axiom wasn’t large, and the drone’s weight knocked her to the floor. She tried to squirm away, but one of the cybernetic legs clipped her across the head with enough force to bounce her head off the carpet, her sunglasses tumbling away. Her mechanical eyes went wide with pain and surprise, and the drone raised two of its cybernetic limbs to smash her head.
Tolox tried to aim her pistol, but the drone was right on top of Axiom, and she could not take a clear shot.
March moved, whipping his left arm before him, and he caught the descending limbs on his forearm. The impact rocked him back, his shoes skidding against the carpet, and the drone raised her limbs against to strike. Before she could, March raised his pistol and put two rounds through the woman’s forehead. The drone shuddered as the brain died and the hive implant started to take control, but before it could, he sidestepped, seized the hive implant, and ripped it out of the base of the skull.
As usual, that made a mess, but the drone shuddered and collapsed.
Helen helped Axiom back to her feet. “Are you hurt?”
“Minor injuries and scrapes,” said Axiom, but there was an unsteady note in her otherwise toneless voice. “But I calculated a one hundred percent probability I would have died if March had not intervened.”
March glanced at Casimir and Dredger, saw that they were getting back up, and looked into the elevator shaft. He didn’t see any sign of the car. He did see another dozen ghost drones making their way up the shaft, their legs clicking against the concrete walls.
“Shit,” said March. “We’ll have to take the stairs.”
Behind him, he heard the wrenching shriek as the ghost drones in the conference room battered their way through the metal door. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that they had ripped the door and its frame out of the wall.
God, what he would not give for a decent plasma pistol just now!
“This way,” said Casimir, beckoning. They sprinted down the hallway and turned a corner. March was impressed by how fast Tolox, Axiom, and Helen could move while wearing high heels, but fear was the best motivator of all. At the end of the corridor was a metal doorway with a glowing red EXIT sign over the frame.
“Let me go first,” said March.
“No argument,” said Casimir.
“Axiom,” said March. “Get ready to shoot. Wouldn’t surprise me if there’s a ghost drone behind the door.”
Axiom nodded, taking her pistol in a two-handed grip, her metallic eyes reflecting the light. Normally, March would have been alarmed to have someone with a pistol shooting over his shoulder, but with an Iron Eye’s abilities, it would have been more surprising if she hit him by accident.
March wrenched the door opened and stepped back.
Beyond was a concrete stairwell with a steel railing, and just as he had predicted, a ghost drone waited behind the door. It surged forward, metal legs drawing back to strike, and Axiom shot it twice in the head. Blood and brains spattered across the door, and March stepped into the reach of its twitching limbs, grasped the hive implant, and tore it loose. The ghost drone shuddered, and one of the limbs smacked March across the chest. He stumbled back and hit the wall, but Dredger caught his right arm and helped him keep his balance.
March nodded his thanks and stepped over the dead ghost drone and into the stairwell.
At once he heard the tapping clang of more ghost drones ascending the stairs. How far down were they? No more than ten floors, he guessed.
“Goddamn it,” said Casimir. “The bastards have us cornered.”
“We’ll have to find a defensible location and fight,” said Dredger.
“Insufficient,” said Axiom. “Jack March is the only one among us who is close to a physical match for the drones’ strength. I calculate a one hundred percent probability that we shall be overpowered and killed.”
March looked down the corridor. How much longer until the ghost drones from the conference room found them?
“The roof,” said Helen. “Bernard, there’s a helicopter there. If I can get to it, we can get out of here.”
“That’s a big helicopter,” said Casimir. “Can you fly it?”
She raised an eyebrow. “I can fly anything.”
“Stop talking and move,” said March. The clanging from the stairwell was getting louder, and March heard the thud of metal legs against the carpet in the hallway. “Go!”
He led the way up the stairs, the others following him. It was only one flight of stairs to the last landing before the roof. The stairs terminated in a steel door that read ROOF ACCESS: AUTHORIZED ENTRY ONLY, and it was locked. March solved that problem by punching the lock four times with his left hand. On the fourth blow, the lock shattered and his fist drove through the door, and March kicked it open.
The clanging from the stairs below had gotten much louder.
March stepped onto the rooftop and looked around. It was no different than the rooftops of other high-rise buildings he had visited on other worlds. HVAC equipment stood in a neat row alongside locked metal cabinets holding electrical transformers. At the far end of the rooftop was a landing pad with a helicopter painted in the red and gold colors of the Renarchist Republic of Rustaril.
“Come on!” said Casimir.
“You’ve got the keys to this thing?” said Dredger.
“I can override the lock controls on this model of aircraft,” said Axiom.
“Better do it quick,” said March, glancing back. He saw a glint of metal in the stairwell. “They’re coming. Tolox, Dredger, Casimir, help me hold them off while Axiom and Helen get the chopper started.”
March punched out the lock on the helicopter’s passenger door, and Helen and Axiom scrambled aboard. He whirled and joined Casimir, Dredger, and Tolox as they pointed their guns at the stairwell.
A heartbeat later the ghost drones burst from the ruined door.
March and the o
thers started shooting, the muzzle flashes of their weapons brilliant in the night. The first drone went down, the top of its head exploding. A second drone shoved it aside and started forward, only to go down under another volley of gunshots. A third and fourth met the same fate in rapid succession.
But by then the first two ghost drones started moving again, their hive implants taking control of the dead bodies. More ghost drones burst from the stairs, rushing towards the helicopter, and March and the others had to divide their fire.
A whir filled his ears, and the chopper’s rotors started to spin.
“Go!” shouted Axiom. “Get on board now! We are leaving!”
Tolox, Casimir, and Dredger scrambled into the helicopter’s passenger compartment, and March jumped up and followed suit. He whirled, aiming with his right hand while his left grasped one of the plastic straps hanging from the ceiling, and he started shooting. The others began shooting out the door as well, hitting the ghost drones as they tried to get close. Yet the drones they had already killed kept moving. March cursed, shoved his pistol into its holster, gripped the strap with his right hand, and braced himself.
The helicopter started to rise into the air, but not before one of the ghost drones leaped and caught the edge of the deck with its metal forelimbs. The drone started to heave itself up, looking like a giant metal spider dragging along a corpse. The dead face stared at nothing, the mouth hanging open, blood leaking from the bullet wounds in the forehead.
March shifted his stance and punched with all the power his cybernetic arm could provide. He caught the drone in the center of the chest, and he heard ribs crack beneath his blow. The drone flew backward and hit the roof, the metal legs scrabbling for balance. Another leaped at the helicopter, but Dredger shot it in midair. The impact of the bullet altered the ghost drone’s trajectory, and it hit the edge of the roof instead.
The helicopter slewed to the right as Helen put it through a tight turn, and March grabbed the strap to keep from falling over. The others followed suit, Dredger and Casimir cursing with every word, and Helen sent the helicopter hurtling into the concrete canyon of the street between the high-rise buildings. March saw a dozen ghost drones stop at the edge of the roof, and he feared they would leap from the building, throw themselves into the helicopter’s rotors, and send them plummeting to their deaths. He had no doubt that the drones would sacrifice themselves at their masters’ command.
But Helen had accelerated too quickly. The drones would have leaped, March suspected, but Helen had gotten the helicopter out of reach. The building receded in the distance and then disappeared as Helen leveled the chopper’s flight out and sent them around a corner.
“What the hell were those things?” said Casimir. He looked at March, his coat flapping around him in the wind. “And how the hell can you punch a hole in a metal door?”
“Bernard!” said Tolox. “I think it’s time we had a long talk.”
“Later!” shouted Helen. “We need to decide something important first.”
“Yeah?” said Casimir. “Like what?”
“Like what the hell do we do now!” said Helen. “We just stole a government helicopter!”
Silence answered her.
“That’s a really good point,” said Dredger.
###
Tolox and Casimir had a hurried negotiation, and they came to a quick accord.
Their escape had left behind any number of problems. Casimir’s two bodyguards were dead in the conference room, to say nothing of the ghost drones they had killed and then destroyed. Almost certainly someone had heard the gunfire and called the Securitate, or at least seen the stolen helicopter flying overhead. And given that there were Machinist sympathizers within the Securitate, that was bad. They might decide to kill Casimir under the guise of “resisting arrest” or some other charge.
And that didn’t even cover the problem of the stolen helicopter.
March had the most experience with covert operations, so he took charge. At his direction, Helen set the helicopter down in the street. It took a few moments of work to sabotage the helicopter, and once they were safely away, it blew up. It made an impressive fireball, but no one was hurt, and the fire would destroy evidence of the theft.
After that, March stole a van, and he drove to Tolox’s warehouse. They would hole up here while Casimir directed his organization and Tolox checked with her contacts in the Securitate. The reaction of the Securitate to the helicopter explosion and the violence at the rooftop would determine what happened next.
March left Tolox and Casimir in the main warehouse, Casimir swearing into his phone and Tolox retreating into her office to make some phone calls. Axiom and Helen seated themselves by the wall, with Dredger making a half-hearted attempt to flirt with a disinterested Helen.
He didn’t try to hit on Axiom.
Wise of him, probably.
March wanted a shower. The others had gotten out of the fight more or less clean, but March had been spattered with the fluids of the dead ghost drones every time he had ripped out a hive implant. The blood of the drones had been replaced by uncounted trillions of nanobots, which meant they bled a glittering black sludge mixed with the remnats of their actual blood. March knew that the nanobots were inert, that they would have been coded to the genetic sequences of the individual drones and couldn’t hurt anyone else.
He still wanted a damned shower.
March returned to his room in the warehouse’s dormitory, stripped off his suit, and threw it in the garbage. They would have to destroy their pistols as well since the bullets could be traced, but Dredger could just print some new ones. The suit could be destroyed with the pistols.
He locked the door to the bathroom and took a long, hot shower. That, at least, was a luxury of Rustaril he could appreciate. The Tiger didn’t have a shower since water in spaceflight was too precious to be wasted. The sanitizer booth did an admirable job, but it certainly didn’t feel as pleasant as hot water. Once March had scrubbed off the last of the crusted slime, he shut off the water, toweled off, and pulled on a pair of exercise pants and a T-shirt.
What he wanted to do was lie down and sleep. What he would actually do was find Tolox and see if she needed anything right now. Depending on how the Securitate reacted to the incident at the Renarchist’s Pride, they might have to get off-planet in a hurry.
March stepped back into his room as someone knocked at the door.
“Yeah?” he said, reaching for the gun he had left on the dresser.
“It is Axiom,” came the toneless voice.
March opened the door and saw Axiom standing there, still in her black suit. He opened the door, and she stepped past him and into the room.
She smiled at him, and an odd sensation went through March. Axiom hadn’t replaced her sunglasses, and he could see the band of scar tissue across her face, could see the intricate whirling mechanisms of her eyes. Except they weren’t really her eyes. The Machinists had taken them and installed cybernetic mechanisms in their place. Looking at her was almost like looking into the face of a woman who was blindfolded.
It was an unsettling feeling.
“Any news?” said March.
“Not yet,” said Axiom. She leaned against the wall, pushed back her coat, and slid her hands into her pockets. Her clothes fit her body very well. “Tolox’s contacts have provided useful information. The Securitate has been summoned to deal with the helicopter explosion and reports of gunfire above the Renarchist’s Pride, but no reports have made it onto the news sites yet, and any social media posts about them have been shut down. Almost certainly pro-Machinist elements within the Securitate are directing the investigation and will squelch it to protect Deveraux’s operation. Attention would be counterproductive to their goals just now.”
“Great,” said March. That meant they could not count on any help from the Republic, though March had doubted the government would provide any useful assistance. On the plus side, it also meant for the moment that the Sec
uritate would not come after Tolox or Casimir. Going after a crime boss and the biggest vending business in Rykov City would not keep things quiet.
Axiom shrugged. “It could have been worse. We are still all alive, are we not?”
March nodded. “I’m going to check in with Tolox, and then I’m going to get some sleep.”
He started towards the door.
“A moment,” said Axiom.
She reached out and closed the door.
March looked at her, at the door, and then back at her.
“I hope you didn’t get me alone to kill me,” said March. He said it half-jokingly, but he remembered the position of his gun on the dresser, noted her stance against the wall.
Axiom smiled. “No. I wished to thank you. You were right.”
“About what?” said March.
“The dangers of the elevator,” said Axiom. “I should have been more careful. Had you not been there, I calculate with one hundred percent certainty that the ghost drone would have killed me.”
March shrugged. “I’ve been in a lot of fights.”
“Mmm. So have I,” said Axiom. “Both when I was still part of the Final Consciousness, and after Helen helped me to break free. Nonetheless, my instincts and calculations were wrong. I thank you for saving my life, Captain Jack March.” The words had an odd weight of formality to them.
“You’re welcome,” said March. “Suppose you’re glad you didn’t shoot me at the factory, then.”
“I admit it was not through lack of trying,” said Axiom. “You are a surprising man.” She straightened up, her hands coming out of her pockets. “I wish to ask you something.”
“All right,” said March. He wondered what she wanted.
“How much will you be paid for this job?” said Axiom. “Assuming we are not killed, of course.”
March shrugged. “I brought enough cargo to Rustaril Station to cover the cost of the trip and turn a profit.”
Axiom blinked. With her cybernetic eyes, March suppose she could see right through her eyelids. “But the Silent Order does not pay you?”
Silent Order: Axiom Hand Page 12
