Mike opened his eyes; they looked harder than before, dilated, as if all the color had been drained out. At the same time, the missile launcher’s hatch slid open, and it stared like a Cyclops, unblinking, focused only on its target straight ahead.
Mike’s gaze was fixed on the security monitor in front of him. But before Tim and Sara could make out what he was seeing, they felt it underneath their feet. The ground rumbled as an upgraded Hawk missile ripped through the air below, hitting its mark while the soldiers backtracked through the tunnel, hoping to reach safety outside its mouth. They never made it. Not even close.
The blast tore limbs from bodies, tore down the last shield door used for defense, and turned out every light in the entire compound.
Mike’s security monitor went blank. Howard’s video feed died. And all of Deep Shield was oddly dark and still for a few seconds. Until the silence was broken by the slow, steady sound of Tim’s clapping.
Chapter 30
THOSE WHO TRESPASS AGAINST US
Matt stood on the sun-drenched street next to one of the Deeps’ vehicles. His eyes were trained on the ridgepole of a beach house that sat just below the roadway in Marina del Rey. A Deep Shield officer, armed and deceptively casual, stood next to him. They both wore flak jackets under windbreakers. Why, he had no idea. The thought of Chuck Brenton posing a danger to anyone was ludicrous.
“Car’s still in the garage.” The crackly voice came from his guard’s walkie-talkie.
Matt tensed. They hadn’t gotten his message. They hadn’t run. They were still inside. He wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or terrified.
He heard a commanding voice shout out, “Government agents! Open up!”
Then nothing.
He heard the door go down.
There was more shouting: “Government agents! Show yourselves!”
More nothing.
His guard’s walkie-talkie said, “There’s no one here.”
Matt all but collapsed against the side of the vehicle. Chuck and his little team of unlikely runaways had gone rogue again. But how? And where?
SARA STOOD IN THE MIDDLE of the command center. She hadn’t moved since the lights went out. The darkness made her aware of something she hadn’t experienced in a long time: a feeling of vulnerability.
“We have to do something about this.”
“If the generators are fried, there’s nothing we can do,” Tim said. “We won’t have anything to work with.”
“I don’t care,” she snapped, her voice getting louder, sharper. “We need some damn lights in here!”
And suddenly there they were: two red lights about six feet off the ground, coming toward them. Followed by another pair of glowing red orbs. And another.
“Shit,” Tim said. “Some of them must have gotten in.”
The three robots were advancing steadily through the darkness, aided by their infrared vision. Sara cursed under her breath. Her team’s body heat was giving them away. In this arena the mere fact of being human—of actually being alive—was a weakness. Or could the robots smell their fear?
The lights of the monitors flickered on behind them. “I found one,” Mike said. “One backup wasn’t damaged.” These were the first words he’d spoken since wiping out most of General Howard’s troops.
Sara wished he hadn’t said them. Wished he hadn’t found a working generator. Because even in the half-light, she was better off not seeing what was in front of her.
Two of the bots were sturdy and muscular, though the muscle, of course, was all man-made. They reminded her of those old muscle cars, Chevelles and Chargers, all beefed-up metal and chrome with mean-looking grilles and who knew how much power under their hoods. She almost expected to hear them revving their engines. The softly insistent whirring was somehow worse.
One bot had its right arm raised, ending in something that looked like a cavalry saber—one long, sharp, perfect piece of metal that could slice through the human body like it was no more than deli meat. The other held its left arm out, showing a hand that resembled a Stryker crossbow. Both were perfect weapons for maximal short-range attacks with minimum collateral damage to the control center. Sara realized that if there was anything good about this scenario, it was that General Howard was in charge. It was obvious he still cared about saving as much of his investments in Deep Shield as he possibly could—physical, financial, emotional, and otherwise. Human weakness, she thought with a smirk.
The third, taller droid was more like Lanfen’s Bilbo—agile rather than angular, sleek instead of squat. A fu-bot without any weapons . . . except for its entire body.
The most remarkable thing about any of the robots, of course, was that there wasn’t an operator in sight.
The zetas were stock-still for a moment, like the subjects in some ancient frieze depicting a civilization that had been snuffed out long ago. Then in a flash, they came to life and did the first thing that teams of people tend to do.
They split up.
Tim ducked behind the console station, the bow-bot in pursuit. Sara sprinted to the far end of the control room; it was darker there, yes, but she wanted to put as much distance between her and the fu-bot as possible. Mike, counterintuitively, ran toward his attacker, sidestepping the saber-wielding droid like it was a defensive tackle and then heading out the door.
“Coward,” Tim called after him before turning to face his own assailant full-on. From his place behind the monitors, he had barely enough light to see the robot raise its arm, aiming the weapon straight at his head. And he had barely enough time to . . .
No. He had no time left at all.
The bolt shot from the crossbow, traveling a short distance before piercing the skull and entering the brain. Tim fell to his knees, motionless.
For a few moments, nothing stirred in the near darkness.
Then Tim raised his arms in triumph. “Fucktards!” he shouted. “I know the workings of a crossbow with my eyes closed. I reached level eighty in World of Warcraft using that same weapon. Didn’t they realize how easy it would be for me to make it shoot backward?”
He looked at the robot standing above him. The bolt was still lodged in the control center in its head. Delivered from a few feet away, the shot would have been easily deflected by the armor casing, but at such short range it was fatal, causing the system to short-circuit.
Sara was too busy to take part in Tim’s victory celebration. She was facing the fu-bot fifty feet away from her, doing her best stare-down, like a fighter at a weigh-in who knows she’s outclassed. The robot’s eyes dipped for a moment to waist height before straightening up again; it had bowed to its opponent. She wasn’t sure of the significance of this gesture but figured it was similar to saying grace before devouring a meal.
The robot charged, and Sara swallowed hard. From a full sprint, it suddenly started sailing through the air, ready to deliver one fatal flying kick to her chest. It had perfect form and precise aim as it homed in on its target. But there was one thing it hadn’t counted on.
“Watch out for that wall.”
From her corner of the control room, Sara caused one of the steel panels to disconnect from its girder and enfold her in a partial cocoon. In fewer than two seconds, a wall stood where there once had been none—just as easily as when she was building virtual houses—and the fu-bot connected full-on, fracturing its foot. The impact caused half its leg to snap off, and Sara practically winced; the sound was so much like breaking bones. The limb lay on the floor like discarded scrap metal, the foot damaged beyond repair, the rest of it unscathed up until the severed knee joint. The fu-bot had landed several inches away, prone and unmoving; its head was twisted to one side at an awkward angle, and the lights of its eyes had gone out.
Sara stepped from her hiding place and walked up to the body. She bent over to examine the metallic spine and cable tendons at the base of its skull, where some multicolored wires had come loose.
“I guess the great Daisuke Kobayashi’s designs a
ren’t as great as we tho—”
The fu-bot’s eyes flicked on. Its head locked into place, and its right arm shot up, catching Sara by the throat. She could feel the pressure on her windpipe as its hand closed as tightly as a pincer.
Sara stared into the robot’s lifeless red orbs. She stared until she felt herself starting to black out. Then she closed her eyes and concentrated.
The severed leg flew into the air then came down hard on the fu-bot’s neck, sticking straight up like a spear. The jagged knee joint had cut through the cable tendons, causing partial decapitation. The red orbs were extinguished.
Sara ripped its claw from around her throat and breathed in deeply before delivering a kick that made its head fly off.
“Gooooooaaaaaaaaaalll!” Tim called from the center of the room, where Sara soon joined him.
With the light of the monitors, they could see Mike’s challenger standing by the door, frozen. It was still holding its sword, which had a slightly wet, pinkish sheen.
“I wonder what happened to Mike,” Sara said as they moved closer.
“Forget him. I wonder what happened to this robot.”
It was in pristine condition, at least on the surface. The same could not be said for Mike when he reentered the room.
“Nothing happened to the robot. I just . . . shut it down.”
The other two zetas said nothing. They stared at his face, beaten to a pulp. At his knuckles, bloodied and bruised. At his side, where his white shirt was turning red.
He noticed their looking down to where he was holding his torso. “That damn droid nicked me on my way out.”
“You call that a nick? I get nicks from a shave, not a saber. I’d say that’s more like a gaping wound,” Tim offered.
“Who you kidding?” Mike said, walking past him. “You don’t shave.”
Sara was still standing by the doorway, shaken by Mike’s appearance, most of all his eyes. They looked dead. Inhuman. Almost robotic.
“How did you shut down that droid?” she asked, almost not wanting to hear the answer.
“I figured if our students were the ones controlling them, they’d have to be close by. Even with practicing behind our backs, their powers without an interface couldn’t be too strong yet.”
“So you . . .”
“Went to the source.”
“What does that mean?” Sara pressed.
“It means he went animal on their asses,” Tim said with some respect.
Mike slumped down at the monitor station, still clutching his side. “Sara, no,” he warned when he noticed her walking toward the hallway. “Trust me . . . you don’t want to go out there.”
“Are they all . . . ?”
He struggled to sit upright. “They told me just before . . . before I . . . They told me that Reynolds is here, too, somewhere. I didn’t see him. But he’s the only one who can still cause a problem for us.”
Sara hesitated a moment before turning again toward the doorway.
“No!”
“I don’t care what kind of mess you made, Mikey. You did what you had to. We all did. But what I have to do now is go out there and find some first aid for you. I’ll be damned if I let you bleed out all over my console.”
TIM WAS ON THE FLOOR near the control station, his face gray in the dull light flickering from the screens. He seemed at home there, in his element, as he sat cross-legged, busying himself with the defeated bots he had dragged over.
“Hey, Mike, remember Robocop? I introduce you now to Robocorpse.”
Mike didn’t respond. He had actually passed out more than twenty minutes before, a fact that didn’t seem to concern Tim in the slightest.
“You know, you’re a lousy conversationalist, Mike. That’s why all the zeta chicks want me. I swear I caught Sara trying to unzip my fly with her mind.” He grunted as he pulled the crossbow bolt out of the robot’s head and continued with his work. “Ah, Sara,” he said, hearing her enter the doorway. “You must have known we were talking about you. Actually I’m glad you’re back. I tried getting Mike’s opinion on my new outfit, but the man knows nothing about style.”
He stood to show her his new suit of armor, fashioned from several metal plates removed from the robocorpses. He was wearing the fu-bot’s arm coatings for flexibility; besides, they were the only parts of the droid still in one piece. He had on a helmet—the hollowed-out headpiece of his vanquished opponent, which he wore like a war trophy despite the hole in its forehead—and some breast and shoulder plates, also taken from the squat bots for better fit. Overall he looked like the unfortunate result of a storm trooper and a hockey goalie having a baby.
“So, Sara, what do you think?” Those were going to be the next words out of his mouth. What came out instead was, “Whoa.”
Whatever was standing before him most definitely wasn’t Sara.
Chapter 31
BOSS FIGHT
Reynolds felt like he was trapped inside a six-foot coffin. He couldn’t stretch to full height, and there was barely any space for movement. Luckily his practice had paid off; he’d be using his mind more than manning control switches.
His headset squawked. It was General Howard. Though his voice was filled with static, the message was clear: “Those people are using our base against us. Both need to be destroyed.”
THE CREATURE WAS EASILY TEN feet tall. Eleven maybe. Tim didn’t have a tape measure. It had tank treads for feet and slashing propellers at the ends of its arms to slice through groups of men. There was a siege cannon where its stomach should have been. Its heart was a howitzer.
It was the perfect doomsday weapon—though Tim noted a few imperfections. Its fish-scale armor was incomplete, and the flamethrowers on its shoulders weren’t attached to fuel lines.
It had no eyes in its tyrannosaurus-shaped head, but it didn’t need them. From the pings it emitted, Tim could tell it was using active sonar. And from the way it was advancing, he could tell it had already zeroed in on him.
Tim ran to the far end of the control room, to where Sara had bent the panel back, and slipped through the gap to the lab next door. The T. rex robot followed behind, steamrolling over the bodies of its fallen brethren. It shot the howitzer once, tearing a sizable hole in the wall, before Tim reached in and disabled the breech screw. It tried the siege cannon next, but the plunger spring had already been straightened.
Tim crouched in the dark behind a workstation. He couldn’t see a thing, but he knew the sound of the propellers as they cut through the brushed-steel wall as easily as opening a tin can. The sound stopped once he disabled the governor drive. But by then the robot was already in the room.
Tim heard the sonar pings coming closer along with the whir of tank treads about thirty feet away. Then the lab went quiet. The only sound left was Tim’s heartbeat, which had been the loudest of all.
At once the room was bathed in light so bright, Tim had to divert his eyes. The robot was emitting a searchlight. Its tank treads folded up and tucked inside its body; a clang echoed as massive anchoring mechanisms dropped to the floor. The roboboss was standing its ground.
Tim looked to the right, through the lab window. He thought he saw movement in the hallway. “Reynolds, you worthless bitch! You . . . you yes-man! Why don’t you show yourself?”
“Yes, sir. I’m right in front of you.”
The voice was coming from inside the creature. Tim blinked in disbelief.
The behemoth robot was not yet outfitted or tested to be accessed remotely. Reynolds could not control the robot from without like he’d done with Thorin. But he could control it from within. He proceeded to do so from the circuit-laden and mildly cramped cockpit of the massive metallic beast.
“And now I’m going to show you something else . . . sir.”
A hatch opened in the robot’s torso, and a pair of conducting rails started to extend. Looking at the length of them, fifteen feet in all, Tim suddenly got the feeling he was standing on the tracks, staring at a speeding t
rain.
“What in the hell is that?” he asked aloud.
“A rail gun.” Sara had stepped in from the hallway unnoticed. She was standing by the door, holding a medical kit and a portable light in one hand and a six-pack of Dr Pepper in the other.
Tim glanced at her before returning his gaze to the weapon. “How in the hell does it work?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I saw a video of a navy test launch. Once it’s deployed it takes about a minute for the projectile to shoot out and reach hypersonic speeds.”
“It’s already been almost twenty seconds. Tell me how to disable it!”
“Quickly.”
Tim’s mind was blank. He couldn’t reach into the mechanism if he didn’t know what it looked like. So he did the next-best thing. He reached onto a lab worktable in front of him and grabbed one of the spherical brain cases the Deeps had been working on. Tucking it under his arm, he charged toward Reynolds’s robot, jammed it deep inside the gun nozzle, then ran into the hallway and dove on top of Sara.
The implosion was instant.
The pieces of shrapnel lodged in the lab walls were all that was left of the doomsday droid. The blood on the walls belonged to Reynolds alone.
Sara stood up shakily, dusted herself off, turned on the light, and went to survey the scene through the blown-out window. Neither she nor Tim had a single cut from a sliver of glass. His half-assed armor had saved them.
As she studied the remains of Howard’s army smeared across the lab, her reaction surprised even Tim. Sara started to laugh. It was sharp and grating and reminded him of the sound of propellers against steel.
“Let’s give the good general a call,” she said. “It’s time for him to accept once and for all that the power has changed hands.”
Chapter 32
The God Wave Page 34