Dev nodded eagerly.
“You got it. Whatever you say.”
He pressed himself up against the wall so Jack and Rogan could pass by and open the door to the lobby, then flinched as Klik stopped beside him.
“Look at the bright side,” she said, grinning with as much friendliness as she could muster. “You said you wanted an excuse to get off this station anyway.”
“I was thinking more along the lines of a transfer,” he replied quietly, following Tuner out.
The lobby was both deserted and very much occupied, depending on one’s philosophical perspective. Bodies lay everywhere, often inhabiting a much larger space than they ever did when they were alive. Blood splattered the previously white walls and floor. One of the panels near to the living elevator platform had either been hit with something explosive or electrically overloaded; either way, it was sparking and puffing a thin plume of dark grey smoke up towards the ceiling, where some of the light fittings dangled precariously. The muffled sound of laser fire drifted up from the floors below.
No LX-14s, though.
“Move quickly, and move quietly,” Jack whispered. “With any luck, we can get downstairs without anyone even knowing we’re here.”
They snaked around the pools of blood and body parts in a careful line. Jack shivered as they passed a Krolak arm. It took something immensely strong to do that. Not necessarily vicious, but strong. The LX-14s weren’t angry or bloodthirsty. They didn’t carry a personal vendetta. They simply had orders to execute.
He didn’t fancy being the one to try and reason with them.
The doors to the main staircase lay to the right of the damaged electrical panel. They were shut, and Jack hoped they didn’t lock in the event of a station shutdown. One of the most intact bodies in the lobby was slumped against the wall beside it, a single charred hole in the middle of its ribcage. Its torso was frail in stature, its head wide and fleshy with two large eyes that bulged out to either side. They were squeezed shut in terror. Jack suspected this was another of the station’s representatives like Dev, and hoped his fellow human wouldn’t react too hysterically when he saw them – presuming, of course, that Dev knew his neighbours well enough to react at all.
He never got the chance to find out.
A gunshot cracked the wall beside them. Everybody froze where they stood in their line, save to spin around and face their attacker. The time it took for Jack to slowly turn one-hundred-and-eighty degrees was long enough for him to be grateful it was a ballistic round rather than a laser bolt – at least that meant they weren’t about to face down a column of LX-14s.
“Don’t move,” grunted the Krolak receptionist, inching out from the Administrator’s office. Covered in pinky-purple blood that Jack suspected wasn’t his own, he aimed his revolver at Rogan. “I said don’t move!”
“Woah there,” said Jack, arms raised halfway in surrender. “Hold on a second. We’ve got nothing to do with what happened here. We just want to get on our ship and go home.”
“Lies,” the Krolak snarled, swinging his gun around so that it pointed at Jack instead. “You knew about the attack. You told me. Said you wanted to speak to boss – so you could kill her, too?”
Jack peered over the Krolak’s shoulder. The office had been torn apart. Mud had poured out into the reception through the smashed window. He hoped the ransacking had gone on while the Administrator was busy watching the game, for her sake.
“Of course not,” Jack replied, glancing down the corridor through which they came. It was only a matter of time before the stadium’s LX-14s followed them down. “We came here to warn her – to stop the attack from taking place!”
“Yeah?” The Krolak smirked as if he were about to pull the covers off the greatest conspiracy of all time. “Then how come you’re here with one of them?”
He jabbed his gun back at Rogan. Everyone with a pair of lungs inhaled sharply, expecting him to fire.
“One of them?” Rogan stared at the Krolak in disbelief. “You think I’m one of the LX-14s attacking the station?”
“Sure,” he replied, though Jack could tell from the curvature of his snarl that the Krolak wasn’t as convinced as he made out. “You don’t look the same. Not blind. That one doesn’t either,” he added, nodding at Tuner. “But that don’t matter. You’re the same kind. Came here for same thing.”
Rogan raised an infuriated metal eyebrow.
“Which is?”
“Wipe us out,” the Krolak replied, though it sounded more like a question than a statement. “That’s what robots want. First it’s freedom. Then it’s rights. Then get rid of organics altogether.”
He looked at all the gore and smoking corpses around them. Jack had a terrible thought. What if this Krolak had family elsewhere on the station?
“Look what you did to our home,” he said in a quivering, raspy voice, his scaly lips folding back on themselves. “I won’t let you do this to anyone else.”
The Krolak fired. Rogan jerked backwards against the wall, slipped on a patch of drying gunk, and crashed to the floor. A ragged hole about the size of a fifty pence coin smouldered in the top of her left shoulder.
Jack froze. He could barely breathe, let alone defend himself or others. His face numb, he slowly turned his head back to face the Krolak. It felt like trying to push through treacle.
Klik was running towards him, her arms out and teeth bared.
Jack tried to scream at her, but no words left his lips. There wouldn’t have been time anyway – Klik was far too quick. The Krolak swung his revolver around, but she booted it out of his hand. Wrapping her legs around the reptile’s middle, she punched him repeatedly in the head until he managed to grab her by the back of the neck and toss her over towards the stairwell door.
The bruised Krolak searched for its gun, which had clattered to a stop a couple of metres from where Jack stood. They both spotted it at the same time. For a split second, the Krolak looked like it was going to rush him for it… but then the coward turned tail and fled down one of the other administrative corridors, leaving Jack to bend down and pick up the offending item alone.
“Are you okay?” he said breathlessly, hurrying over to check on Klik. “Did you break anything?”
“Other than his ugly face?” Klik rolled over and winced. “Oh, stop it. I’m fine. It’s Rogan you should be worried about.”
“Rogan!” He sprinted back towards her, almost slipping up on the same gory sludge she did. “Are you all right? Tuner, is she all right?”
Tuner and Dev stepped aside. Jack found Rogan sitting up against the wall, looking disappointed with the hole in her shoulder.
“Some of my motor functions aren’t exactly optimal,” she said, trying to flex her left arm. Two of her fingers moved, but only begrudgingly. “Nothing that Tuner can’t fix back on the ship, though. Do you see the sort of nonsense us automata have to deal with?”
“Can you walk?” asked Jack.
Rogan rolled her eyes and climbed to her feet.
“That stone-skulled Krolak didn’t shoot me in the leg, did he? Honestly, people like him make me think maybe the galaxy would be…”
She looked at everyone’s expectant faces and trailed off.
“Never mind. Let’s get moving before any more idiots with guns show up.”
The stairs zigzagging down behind the living elevators’ wall of gunk and vines were mercifully clear of bodies. That didn’t mean the LX-14s weren’t using the stairs to travel between floors, however, nor had it stopped somebody from leaving a bloody claw print on the wall in their haste.
They followed the steps down as quietly as they could. It was impossible to know if a killer automata stood waiting for them on the floor below, and the slightest noise might send half a battalion charging up the stairs. Everything on the station was almost silent, now – even the muted laser fire had largely stopped.
And on top of that, Jack could have sworn it was getting hotter.
They wer
e lucky Rogan had such a strong, digital memory. Had Jack and Klik been stuck on the station alone, they never would have remembered which level the Adeona’s specific hangar was on. If the Krolaks had a system for labelling individual floors, Jack wasn’t privy to it.
“This one,” Rogan said, pushing the door open just enough to peer through. “Looks like a clear shot to the hangar doors. Let’s hope they’re still unlocked.”
“Adi said they were,” Tuner said, wringing his metal hands together. Jack supposed the little guy felt quite exposed now he no longer had a walking tank for a body.
“On our side,” Rogan replied. “The external blast doors might be retracted, but that does us no good if we can’t get into the hangar from here.”
Jack sighed.
“Well, there’s only one way to find out.”
“I could try hacking into the station’s subsystems,” Tuner suggested. “If we can find an access panel…”
“You know what I meant,” Jack replied impatiently. “Come on. Let’s make a move while it’s still quiet. Klik, you still with us?”
Klik nodded. Though she was painfully winded, her brawl with the Krolak didn’t appear to have done her any lasting harm.
Jack followed the automata out into the multi-tiered court that occupied the central strut of the space station. The smell of grassy mud wasn’t as strong as it had been before, not because there was less of it, but because it now had to share the air with the stench of blood and charged plasma. As with the administrative lobby, there were bodies everywhere. Mostly Krolak. Two of the giant tortoise-sloth creatures hung dead from the vines on the elevator wall, their shells and baskets cracked open. They hadn’t been spared in the onslaught, either.
A shrill shriek far on the other side of the court broke the silence. Everybody ducked down behind the barrier that lined the horseshoe-shaped balcony and watched as a long-necked alien in spacer rags came sprinting towards the doors to the hangar. A pair of laser bolts came racing after them, followed by three marching LX-14s. The steady ker-thunking of their leg-pistons arrived long before they did.
The desperate visitor tried pulling at the door to one of the nearby stores, but it was locked tight. The alien was far too gangly to force it open, and instead worked its way around the balcony, knocking over tables and stumbling over bodies as more laser bolts narrowly missed their target.
It bent down to pick something up. Jack couldn’t see what it was at first – not until the alien stood up and started firing it at the approaching robots. One of the Krolak security guards must have dropped their rifle during the initial attack. The civilian wasn’t having much better luck with it.
The ballistic rounds ricocheted off the LX-14s, leaving dents in their cheap armour plating but never hitting any of the vulnerable inner workings beneath. Somebody trained in sharpshooting would have had much better luck. This alien, however, looked like they worked in Accounts.
Incapable of flinching, the LX-14s drew close enough to finally hit their target. Two laser bolts struck the alien in the chest and arm, one shortly after the other, sending him jittering to the floor. The three automata studied its dead body for a moment, then went back to their patrols.
“Now,” said Rogan, “while they’ve got their backs turned.”
Jack followed her towards the hangar doors, his hands wrapped tight around the grip of the revolver he stole from the Krolak receptionist. He wasn’t sure if his shots would be any more accurate than the dead alien’s, but it was better than nothing.
Which is what everyone else had.
His eyes fell upon the bath pods they passed on their way in, and his heart sank. The family who’d pushed past him in their race to claim a pod were lying face-down in the mud, their faces submerged. Not even the children were spared. Jack wondered if there was anyone else on Kagna One who had actually survived the slaughter.
They reached the door, and Jack practically had to clamp his hand over Dev’s mouth to keep him from screaming out in surprise. A deactivated LX-14 lay sprawled out across the floor. Its legs were missing. The door must have cut the automata in half when the lockdown started.
Stepping carefully around it, they approached the door.
It didn’t open.
“Try your keycard,” Jack whispered to Dev.
Shaking so much that he almost dropped it, Dev tapped his keycard against the scanner. Nothing happened after that, either.
“What does that mean?” Klik asked. “We’re stuck in here? We can’t get out?”
“I might be able to bypass the locks,” said Tuner, already detaching the front of the scanner so he could look inside. “It might take a minute or two, though.”
“That’s a minute or two more than we’ve got,” said Jack, blinking sweat out of his eye. He patted Tuner on the back. “Just work as quickly as you can, buddy.”
“Better work quicker than that,” said Klik, tugging desperately at Jack’s arm. “The mechanical murderers are coming back.”
Jack spun around in wide-eyed panic, but he couldn’t see them anywhere in the court. Klik was right, though – their stomping, hissing footsteps were growing closer. He’d been too focussed on the door to notice.
“No pressure then,” said Tuner, plugging himself in.
The rest of them took cover behind a decorative planter from which grew a large, nut-bearing tree. Jack quickly overturned a nearby table so that they were as much hidden from anyone approaching from their left side as their right, then crouched down beside Dev, Rogan and Klik and waited for the LX-14s to return.
It felt like one of the longest waits of Jack’s life.
Each mechanical footstep was like the piston of a steam train as it builds up speed, chugging with pure, physical momentum. Every now and then the stomping would pause, and a loud, blaring foghorn would sound out as one of the LX-14s scanned something. Then the stomping would continue, growing closer and closer and closer.
Jack’s gut told him it didn’t matter how well hidden they were, which they weren’t. If Tuner couldn’t get that hangar door open, the strike force would find them. It was only a matter of time.
The three LX-14s filed into the court. They stopped by the balcony, facing forward in perfect, unthinking unison. Then they turned mechanically as one and began marching towards the hangar door.
Towards Tuner.
“Get back here,” Jack hissed to the oblivious automata. “Forget the door – they’re gonna see you!”
Tuner glanced over his square, metal shoulder and then hurriedly tried to complete the bypass he was attempting. Jack wanted to yell at him again, but the LX-14s were too close. They were almost on the other side of the planter now; if he so much as breathed too loudly, they’d hear him.
Frustrated, and practically hopping with electronic anxiety, Tuner disconnected his digit from the scanner and spun around.
The three LX-14s stood motionlessly before him.
“Oh dear.”
The killer automata stared down at Tuner with their blank, featureless heads, scanned him with their deep and sinister klaxons…
…and then carried on down the balcony as if Tuner wasn’t even there.
“Erm, what happened?” asked Jack.
“They’re only targeting fleshies,” said Rogan, cautiously stepping out of cover. Tuner shrugged at them, perplexed. “It must be an oversight in their orders. Or maybe the cult just doesn’t deem our kind worth killing.”
“Well, don’t stop them leaving,” said Klik, flaring her mandibles. “There are still a few of us fleshies hiding here, remember!”
“They won’t attack me so long as I don’t get in their way,” Rogan replied. “Maybe I can ask them where their other target is.”
“Or maybe you’ll draw attention to the rest of us instead,” Jack hissed. He nodded at the hole in her shoulder. “Haven’t you had enough of a beating for one day?”
Rogan glanced down at the damaged metal, then shook her head.
“Trust
me. Please.”
Jack sighed. The LX-14s were already back on the other side of the balcony, pausing in their patrol only to make sure the gangly alien was still dead. It was.
“Fine,” he said. “I can’t stop you, anyway. Just make sure—”
They were interrupted by a familiar voice from over by the stairwell doors.
“You!” the Krolak receptionist snapped, pointing a bloody claw at them. “Your bug broke my tooth!”
“Keep your voice down, you idiot,” was what Jack wanted to shout back. Instead, he mugged at the Krolak and, still crouching behind the upturned table, jabbed his thumb in the direction of the LX-14s. Whether because of a communication barrier or because he was just plain thick, the Krolak didn’t take the hint.
“No running this time,” he grunted, hobbling towards them with a rather impressive battle rifle cradled in his hands. “Just you and…”
He trailed off as he finally realised who was standing on the opposite side of the balcony to him, all three of their laser rifles pointed right at his head.
“Oh, kack.”
The LX-14s opened fire without shifting so much as an inch from their stoic position, laser bolt after laser bolt peppering the sludgy wall behind the Krolak. He got in a couple of unsuccessful shots at the automata – and one lucky one, which punctured a pneumatic tube running down one of the LX-14s’ arms – before the reptile’s scaly chest ruptured inwards and he collapsed to the floor in a bloody lump.
“Gods alive,” gasped Dev, covering his face with his hands.
Finished with the Krolak, the LX-14s swivelled towards the panicking human. Jack pulled Dev back down just in time to prevent his head from turning into a crimson firework.
“For Christ’s sake,” he moaned as laser bolts smashed into the other side of their makeshift cover. “Just when I thought we had a chance of surviving this mess.”
“Don’t count us out quite yet,” Tuner said in a voice a little too optimistic for their present circumstance. “Look who it is!”
The Tin Soldiers (Final Dawn, Book 5) Page 15
