by Rod Walker
Or it would blast the receptionist’s desk to dust and kill me in the process.
Then we got lucky.
I saw a flicker of light through the doors, and I saw a way out.
The surviving cleaning drones had arrived. I belatedly realized that I hadn’t given them permission to use the service entrances. Their programming had taken over, and they had wheeled themselves to the front doors of the administrative building to wait for further instructions. I grabbed the tablet from my belt and entered a command just as the first of the drones rolled into the lobby.
The drones stopped, turned, and started cleaning the EMSO soldiers. I don’t think they realized the threat until it was too late until the drones started spraying them with arcs of white foam, obscuring their vision. They turned in confusion, and started at the drones.
That was the wrong thing to do. Charles promptly shot two of them, and Mulger and Thompkins accounted for the other two. I tapped the tablet again, telling the drones to stop cleaning, and they complied, accompanied by a chorus of announcements that they were glad to serve and ensure a pleasant experience for guests.
“Anyone hit?” said Mulger, stepping out of the corridor.
“No,” I said, getting to my feet.
“I applaud your excellent timing, Indentured Worker Hammond,” said Charles. “Our tactical position was untenable.”
“I just got lucky,” I said. “I told the drones to come to the administrative building. I forgot to tell them to come through the service entrance. So they showed up here.”
“Lucky for us,” said Mulger as Charles jogged over to the dead EMSO soldiers. I wondered if he had decided to loot the bodies. “We’re going to hit the southern group keeping the colonel and your friends pinned down. Can you send the drones to hit the northern one?”
“Hold on,” I said, trying to remember the layout of the administrative building. “Yeah, I think I can. The corridor outside the communications room runs north to south. If Charles takes us through server room three, we’ll come out on the south end of the corridor.” I pulled up a map on the tablet. “Yeah. I can send the drones to circle around.” I started tapping commands into the device. “I’ll tell them the entire corridor there is a biohazard and to clean it at maximum possible strength.”
“Good man,” said Mulger. “Charles?”
Charles jogged back towards us, his Avenger slung on his harness, something thick and black and heavy-looking in his arms.
“A rocket launcher?” I said.
“It may prove useful,” said Charles. “One never knows.”
I couldn’t argue with that. I finished entering the commands for the drones, and the tablet beeped at me. The drones began whirring towards one of the corridors leading off towards the server rooms and network closets.
“Watch it, Charles,” said Mulger. “We’re in a closed space. Don’t blow us up.”
“Certainly not,” said Charles. “This way.”
We headed down a hallway, took a right, and I opened the door to server room three. It was a big room, though not as large as the HVAC room, and filled with racks of humming servers, thousands of blinking green and blue and red LEDs flashing in the dim light. It was very cold, and the air was the driest I had ever encountered on Arborea. Maybe if I had gone into system administration instead of KwikBreet machine repair, I wouldn’t have found myself in so much danger.
We reached the other end of the server room, and Charles held up a hand to halt before the door.
“As soon as we go around this corner, I think we will be right behind the southern group of EMSO soldiers.”
“Hit them hard and hit them fast,” said Thompkins.
“Hammond, are your drones in position?” said Mulger.
“Let me check,” I said, bringing up the appropriate display on the tablet. It had never occurred to me that I could fight an enemy using a tablet and an army of janitorial drones, but I suppose you really do learn something new every day. “Looks like… nine of them are close enough. If I send them around the corner, they’ll go into full biohazard mode and start scrubbing down the soldiers.”
Thompkins grunted. “Think that’ll distract them long enough for us to take out the southern group?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably not. The drones are loud when they’re working, but gunshots are louder. We’ll get a couple of seconds, maybe.”
“Fortunately,” said Charles, patting his rocket launcher, “a solution is at hand.”
“Seriously?” I said. “You’re going to set that thing off in here?”
Charles shrugged. “I will not be firing it in the server room, Indentured Worker Hammond. I suppose I might accidentally destroy the nearby conference room as collateral damage.”
“Good enough,” said Mulger. “Colonel?” He tapped his earpiece.
Argent’s voice hissed in my ear. “Where are you? You’d better hurry up! I think they’re waiting for reinforcements with grenades.”
I looked at Charles’s rocket launcher. “Yeah, about that. We sort of ran into the reinforcements and took their rocket launcher. You should probably take cover.”
There was a momentary pause.
“Roger,” said Argent at last. “Bring the noise.”
“Ready?” said Mulger.
“Yeah,” I said, resting my finger on the EXECUTE button. “Just say the world.”
Mulger nodded. “On three. One, two… three!”
Thompkins pulled the door open, and I tapped the EXECUTE button, sending the command to the waiting drones. At the same instant, Mulger and Thompkins surged through the door, Charles following them with his newly acquired rocket launcher. As fast as I could, I clipped the tablet to my belt, grabbed my Avenger again and followed the others through the door.
I swung around the corner and into a firefight.
It was going our way. Five EMSO soldiers blocked the corridor ahead of us, and Mulger and Thompkins had already shot three of them in the back. I shot another one, and the final EMSO leaped at us, using his gun as a club. Mulger dodged, and Thompkins dropped the man with three quick rounds. At the far end of the corridor, I saw another group of EMSO soldiers aiming at us, but then I heard the sound of the cleaning drones, and the soldiers suddenly disappeared in a torrent of white foam.
With perfect calm, Charles dropped to one knee, braced the rocket launcher against his shoulder, and squeezed the trigger.
That was when I learned there were a couple of problems with firing a rocket launcher in an enclosed space like the corridor of an office building.
First, there was the smoke. The rocket howled out of the launcher and left a plume of white smoke in its wake, immediately obscuring our vision. The second problem was the heat from the discharge, as flame spraying out of the tail of the rocket set the walls on fire. The third problem was the recoil. I don’t think Charles was prepared for the force of the recoil, and it knocked him back sprawling onto the floor.
Fortunately, none of those problems mattered when the warhead struck the far wall.
The northern end of the corridor ripped apart in a fireball, the administrative building shaking around us. I threw myself to the floor, and Mulger and Thompkins followed suit, while Charles was already there. Something clicked in the ceiling overhead, and the fire suppressant systems kicked in, foam spraying out over the walls and floor. I lifted my head as the fireball winked out, swinging my Avenger towards the northern end of the corridor.
The EMSO men were no longer a problem. The rocket had made enough of a mess that identifying the bodies would probably prove difficult. The explosion had wiped out a bunch of my drones too, but reinforcements were rolling in, their fire suppressant programming taking over as they sprayed the walls and floor with flame retardant.
“Huh,” I said, getting to my feet. My voice sounded a little shaky in my ears. “Guess that hallway’s going to really be a biohazard after all.”
“That backblast was worse than I expected,” sai
d Charles as Thompkins helped him up.
Mulger just shook his head.
A door on the left hissed open, and I saw the business end of an Avenger poke out, followed by Tanner’s head. He looked at the wreckage in the corridor, at me, at the wreckage again, and then back to me.
“What did you do?” he said.
“Rocket launcher,” I said. “I think they were planning to use it on you.”
“Morons,” said Colonel Argent, following Tanner into the corridor. “If they fired that into the lounge door, they would have caught themselves in the shrapnel. The corridor is too narrow.”
“I think we are agreed,” said Mr. Royale, “that the EcoMin operators have not been paragons of competence.”
“I don’t think Valier cares about damaging the buildings,” I said. “Mulger had an idea, and I think he’s right. He thinks Valier never intended for Outpost Town to be a permanent installation. He’ll make a few billion credits, kill us all, wreck the facility, announce there was another natural disaster, and walk away clean.”
Tanner and Mr. Royale shared a look.
“That makes a disturbing amount of sense,” said Mr. Royale.
“It’s exactly his style, too,” said Tanner. “Do a lot of damage and wreck a lot of lives, and then slither off someplace with a lot of money. Kayla can tell you all about that. It’s the same thing on a grander scale.”
“Undoubtedly,” said Mr. Royale. “Then let’s make sure Minister Valier gets caught with his hand in the till. Colonel?”
“Any guards in there?” Mulger asked, pointing to the door on the right side of the corridor.
“No, we had just tried the door when the two of them came around the corner. We got one, but the other one drove us back into the conference room, then called for help.”
At Argent’s nod, Tanner unlocked the door, and we slogged through ankle-deep fire suppressant foam into the communications room. It was smaller than the server room but big enough that we could all fit inside without crowding. Consoles lined the walls, and a central computer station with three monitors sat in the center of the room. The computers in this room controlled all the phone and radio transmissions in Outpost Town and handled calls from any outbound quadcopters. The computers also controlled any outgoing transmissions to space vessels, which meant we could call Argent’s men in their gunship.
Or so I hoped.
Tanner unlocked one of the consoles, and Argent at once sat down, plugged in a headset, and started typing. I leaned against one of the consoles, keeping an eye on the door, and a wave of weariness went through me. It had been a long and unpleasant day, and it wasn’t over yet. I really wanted to lie down and close my eyes, but that would be a bad idea.
“Acknowledged,” said Argent, and he straightened up with a satisfied look on his face. “Gentlemen, support is now on the way. Mathey is heading at full speed for near orbit. ETA is in a little over three hours.”
The tablet at my belt started vibrating. I frowned, propped my Avenger against the console, and lifted the device.
“Excellent,” said Mr. Royale. “What now?”
“The shuttles are in the air,” said Tanner. “All three of them. We had better go to the landing field and disable as many of the other ships as we can manage. Then we’ll take Ian’s ship and get into the air until the Mathey arrives to shut down Valier.”
I scrolled through the displays on the tablet. One by one, the tablet was losing its connection to the cleaning drones. Frowning, I checked the status for each of the drones. I could still control the ones that had made it into the administrative building. I couldn’t control any of the ones that hadn’t figured out how to get into the building yet.
I had lost contact with them.
Or, more likely, they had been destroyed.
“Tanner,” I said. “Can you get to the cameras from here?”
“Yeah,” he said, frowning. “What is it?”
“I think we had better have a look outside,” I said. “Right now.”
Tanner only nodded, dropped into another seat, and access the security cameras. The computer’s display went from a listing of transmission logs to the blue-tinted images from the security cameras.
The first thing I saw was a group of about thirty EMSOs heading down the street towards the administrative building we were in, combat rifles and rocket launchers in hand as they strode over the wreckage of my cleaning drones.
“Colonel, we have a problem,” I said.
Chapter 9: Man Against Nature
“We had better withdraw,” said Argent. “We can’t take on two platoons.”
“Fortunately,” said Tanner, “I’m still the Security Director of Safari.” He entered a sequence of commands into the console. The computer beeped and asked him for a voiceprint, and Tanner recited his full name, followed by an identification code. Again the computer beeped, and Tanner put his right palm on the screen. The display flashed once more.
Then I heard a humming noise, followed by distant clanging.
“Lockdown,” said Tanner. “I’ve sealed off all the doors and windows. Valier and his men aren’t getting in here.”
“We’re not getting out either,” said Argent.
“We were not getting out anyway,” said Charles. “Look, Colonel Argent.”
Charles reached over and adjusted the camera display, and it shifted to show the sides of the administrative building. The EMSOs had moved to cover all the entrances, and I saw that the various bands of bodyguards had joined as well.
The administrative building was surrounded, and we were stuck inside it.
“We’re trapped,” said Mr. Royale.
“Think we can shoot our way out?” said Tanner.
“Not likely,” said Argent, pointing at the screen. “Look at how they’re setting up kill zones in all four directions. If we try to go through them, they’ll take us all out before we can reach cover.”
“They won’t even need to bother with that,” said Thompkins. “If they take one of the ships on the landing field, they can crash it into the administrative building and kill us all.”
“Would one of the guests let Valier use their ship for ramming the building?” I said.
Argent shrugged. “Toulon and Lysokos aren’t using theirs anymore, are they?”
I hated to admit it, but that was a good point.
I heard a sudden beeping in my earpiece.
“He’s calling us,” said Tanner. “Let’s hear what he has to say.”
He tapped his earpiece and entered a few commands on one of the consoles.
A moment later Valier’s smooth politician’s voice came out of the speakers in the console.
“This is the Minister of Ecology, Paul Valier,” he said, as calm and poised as if he was strolling along the streets of Wilson City back on New Princeton. “I am addressing the terrorists who presently occupy the administration center. Your illegal and unauthorized insurrection has been contained, and the security forces of the ministry have you surrounded. I suggest you surrender at once in order to avoid any further unnecessary loss of life. If you do not come out within ten minutes, the building will be destroyed, and all the three of the shuttles that recently took off from the landing field will be shot down. I repeat, you have ten minutes to comply and exit the building.”
Tanner swore once, slapped the console with his palm, and stepped back.
“I hate to say it,” said Mulger, “but maybe we should surrender. The ship is on its way. If he doesn’t shoot everyone right away, Captain Butler can free the survivors.”
Tanner shook his head. “I don’t think there will be any survivors. If we surrender, Valier will just kill us out of hand. There’s too much at stake for him to let us live. This scheme of his only works if he doesn’t leave any witnesses behind, and we’ve all seen far too much.”
“Perhaps we can stall him,” said Charles. “If we delay long enough, the ship will arrive.”
“I doubt we can stall for three
hours,” said Tanner. He rubbed his broad forehead. “We should call Kayla and Hoskins first, have them take the shuttles into space. They should be able to get into orbit before the deadline.”
Valier repeated his message once more, his smooth voice filling the communications room.
“I have an idea,” I said in a quiet voice.
“Oh, you do, Spraycan?” snapped Tanner. “Why don’t…” He stopped himself. “No. I’m not thinking clearly. You’ve handled yourself well all day. All right, Sam. What’s your idea?”
I don’t think he had ever called me by my actual name before.
“Before he got on the shuttle,” I said, lifting my tablet, “Hoskins gave me access to the sonic fence. I can reconfigure it to emit a hunting call for the tromosaurs.”
They stared at me in silence.
“You realize that would call every tromosaur pack within fifteen kilometers into town,” said Charles.
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s the point. See, Valier and all his goons and everyone else are outside. They’re gathered around us here. They won’t be anywhere near the fence so they won’t realize what is happening until it’s too late. The tromosaurs won’t be able to get in here. We can force Valier to surrender, tell him to lay down his guns in exchange for coming in here.”
Again we looked at each other in silence.
“I can’t think of anything better,” said Mr. Royale.
“Well,” said Argent, “if we’re going to die, I suppose it doesn’t matter if we’re going to be shot or if we’re going to be eaten by tromosaurs.”
“I would highly recommend being shot, Colonel,” Charles told him. Argent only raised an eyebrow.
“Do it,” said Tanner. “Do it now. I’ll call Valier back and tell him we’re willing to negotiate a surrender. If we’re lucky, we can keep him talking until it’s too late for him to do anything about the lizards.”
I nodded and tapped the command into my tablet. The machine took a moment to communicate with the computers controlling the sonic fence and then it beeped an acknowledgment. The waveform parameter and volume level had been changed.
