by Todd McAulty
That was brave, but it was a mistake to think you could take this monster down with bullets. I’d pumped half a dozen exploding rounds into its brother Standing Mars, and that bastard had still had plenty of fight in it.
I turned back to Perfect Circle, looked him up and down. Twice now I had been saved from near-fatal mistakes. It was time to end this.
And suddenly I knew precisely how.
I twirled the metal rods in my hands. The suit and I needed to do this together. The suit suggested several lines of attack, but I rejected them all. I had no idea how to tell it what I was going to do, so I hoped it’d figure it out in a hurry.
I swung the metal rods together. They sparked with a delightful clang, reverberating in my hands.
“I’m coming to kill you now,” I said. “Because I can’t wait for you to burn yourself to death.”
“You are foolish,” said my opponent.
Robots, Jesus. They suck at street banter.
Perfect Circle took a step forward. I waited. Come on, you cold-blooded piece of shit—
Another step. I retreated, still waiting. Come on.
A third step . . . and at long last it raised its clumsy metal hands above my head.
Now.
I sprinted forward. The suit figured out what I was doing at the very last moment. It amped my leg muscles as I jumped, and my leap carried me up to the robot’s hands.
Perfect Circle tried to grab me, but missed, and its hand collided with my left shin painfully. But my right foot landed precisely where it was supposed to, and I used its forearm as a stepping-stone, building on my forward momentum.
My leap carried me up, up, to the metal giant’s exposed head. It reacted with speed, grabbing at my hip with thick metal fingers that could crush steel.
Before it could break me in half, I brought the metal rods down with all the strength I possessed, driving the sharp ends into the exposed surface of Perfect Circle’s head. They penetrated deep into his electronic brain, and I felt a savage jolt of electricity as I released them.
I slid down the enormous robot, bouncing clumsily off its arms, landing in a heap on the floor. I struggled numbly to my feet, taking a few shaky steps backward.
The corporal and I were the only ones still standing. Together we watched as the great mass of Perfect Circle swayed, swayed, and then toppled forward stiffly. There was a brilliant explosion of sparks from its head as it slammed into the floor; then an enthusiastic whoosh of flame burst from its chest. I felt the floor shudder under the impact.
I looked toward the corporal. His weapon hung loosely from his hand. The moment Perfect Circle fell, he returned his attention to Van de Velde. I approached them.
Her eyes were closed and blood still ran from her mouth, pooling on her neck. The angle of her right shoulder was wrong. Bones were broken, perhaps many bones.
But she was breathing.
The corporal fussed over her expertly, straightening her legs and checking for other signs of bleeding. When she was stable, he snatched his radio and began speaking into it urgently.
I wanted to tear off my mask and thank her for saving my life. I wanted to sit with her until help arrived and make absolutely certain she would be okay.
But if I did, Sergei was a dead man.
Down the corridor, more soldiers were coming through the broken glass door. Two had rifles. They were running toward us, shouting in Spanish.
I picked up the bag with Hayduk’s data drive. Without looking back, I headed for the exit.
XXXVIII
Thursday, March 25th, 2083
Posted 1:47 am by Barry Simcoe
CanadaNET1 Encrypted, Sponsored by GetToDaChoppa.
Need immediate short-range transportation? Try a single-seat drone conveyor. Fast and ready when you are!
Sharing is set to PRIVATE
Comments are CLOSED
I needed to get off of this floor as fast as possible. The soldiers running toward me were seconds away.
I chose the stairwell on the left. It was unguarded, but the door had been electronically sealed. A toolbox and several metal bars set against the wall nearby told me it was scheduled to be sealed more permanently very soon.
There was a keypad, but when I tried Hayduk’s GPU, nothing happened.
The shouts were getting closer. The soldiers had reached the entrance to the room. One kneeled down to examine Van de Velde, but two others turned toward me. One raised a rifle to his shoulder.
I took a step back and kicked the door as hard as I could. When feeling returned to my feet, I was probably going to regret not using my shoulder.
The door popped open obligingly, but the keypad on the wall was suddenly outlined in crisp blue lines on my visor, and a rather nasty-looking icon popped up next to it. Odds were I had just triggered an alarm.
I bolted down the stairs, as fast as I could move.
There were still sounds of pursuit when I reached the fourth floor. I exited the stairwell and plunged into the maze of corridors around the hotel laundry. I didn’t see any cameras on this floor, and after a few minutes I found an empty room with a huge rolling hamper filled with laundry. Without further ceremony I started to strip out of the suit.
That damn thing really didn’t want to come off. When it was dead, it flopped around like an oversized wetsuit. But powered up, the various components clung together joyously. I spent frustrating seconds trying to get my fingers under the tight seal around my neck just to get my mask off, before giving up and pulling out the power cells.
The suit powered down in seconds, and the mask peeled off with minimal effort after that. As I pulled off the gloves and stashed them in the plastic bag with mask and the power cells, I heard shouting out in the hall.
The soldiers were on this floor. It sounded like they were searching room to room.
I stashed the bag under a mess of towels and struggled out of the suit as quickly as I could. I freed my arms, then pulled the suit down to my waist. My shirt was badly rumpled, but there wasn’t much I could do about that. I yanked the suit to my knees, managed to kick free of it in seconds.
I stared at my legs, momentarily startled. I wasn’t wearing pants.
Damn—that’s right. I’d abandoned them on the forty-fifth floor. I’m not sure how a person forgets something like that, but I had. I hadn’t lost my pants since my third year at McGill. That incident had involved a lot more alcohol, and even so, at no point in the evening had I forgotten my pants were missing.
This complicated things. While I tried to figure out what to do, I buried the suit next to the mask and gloves. Outside in the hall I heard someone shouting in surprise and a harsh reply in Spanish. The soldiers were getting closer.
Laundry was spilling out of the hamper, the result of my sloppy efforts to bury the suit. I grabbed something long and black before it could hit the floor, started to stuff it back into the white linen bag it had fallen from.
It was a pant leg.
I pulled. A pair of black pants slid out of the bag.
They looked like part of the uniform for the kitchen staff. This pair was much too big for me, but I grabbed the bag, digging furiously.
It was filled with kitchen uniforms. The third pair of pants I found looked like they would fit. I started to pull them on.
The door banged open and a harsh voice spoke. It was one of the soldiers. I stopped moving, hunched over with one leg in the pants, and peeked over the hamper toward the door.
The soldier wasn’t looking at me. He was standing in the doorway, shouting back over his shoulder at someone in the hall. He held his rifle at his waist.
My legs were completely hidden by the hamper. As casually as I could, I slid my left leg in the pants.
There wasn’t time to zip up. I let the shirt fall over the pants, covering my groin. I stepped out from behind the hamper, hands in the air.
The soldier was still shouting over his shoulder. I saw a second soldier pass by behind him, and the one in the
door stepped into the room, letting the door close.
He was skinny, and his face was covered with acne. He spotted me for the first time, standing only a few feet in front of him. Surprise briefly registered on his face, but he covered it quickly, pointing toward the wall on his left and barking something in Spanish. I moved out of his way obediently, hands still in the air.
He did a cursory search of the room, looking behind all the hampers, then hurried out through the door on the opposite side. He never glanced at me a second time.
I stood against the wall for a few seconds, hands still in the air, then lowered them with a sigh of relief. Outside in the hall I could hear more shouting. I found my shoes and put them on without hurrying, tucked in my shirt and zipped my pants, and straightened my hair as best I could. I rooted through the plastic bag for Hayduk’s GPU and the data drive, and put them in my pocket.
Then I hesitated. It was foolhardy to leave the suit here. Together with the power cores, it was a priceless piece of battle equipment. But it was too risky to simply walk out of here with it. There were soldiers in the halls, and there were even more soldiers where I was going.
It was an impossible dilemma, and I didn’t have time to ponder it. I hid the bag in the hamper. Then, with a curse, I pulled it out again, extracted the power cells, and stuffed them in my pockets. Those at least I could hide easily. When the suit and bag were safely buried by laundry again, I stepped out into the hall.
I ran into another pair of soldiers almost immediately. Both were carrying rifles, and both looked pretty put-out. The first snapped at me in Spanish, but before I could figure out how to respond the second one called to someone behind me. I glanced over my shoulder.
A young man in hotel scrubs was stepping out of a locker room, a towel over his shoulder. The soldier asked his question again, and the man answered in fluent Spanish, pointing into the locker room. The soldier hustled forward, ignoring me, and I needed no further dismissal to be on my way.
I passed a bunch of workers standing before one of the elevators. They were staring in the direction of the soldiers nervously. One of them punched the elevator button in evident frustration, and I heard another say, “It’s true—they shut them down. Even the guest elevators.” There was more nervous grumbling from the assembled crowd.
I found the stairs and made my way to the third-floor hallway. There were soldiers everywhere—running in tight groups, breaking out equipment, and setting up screens that projected images from virtually every floor of the hotel. There was a crowd near the entrance to the command center, many craning their necks to see what was happening inside. I cursed under my breath. No way I was sneaking in there anytime soon.
I approached warily, sizing up the crowd and looking for a way in. The crowd was a respectable distance back from the entrance, and it was easy to see why. A 2,000-pound machine was standing sentinel, and no one wanted to get too close. It was a completely different configuration than Perfect Circle, but it looked just as deadly. Easily nine feet tall, it had a heavy torso atop two thick metal legs. I’d seen similar designs in battlefield vids, but never up close before. Still, there was something very familiar about it, the way it had no eyes. Just like . . .
I shouldered my way through the crowd, until I stood in front of the thing. “Zircon Border?” I asked hesitantly.
“Good evening, Mr. Simcoe.” Zircon Border’s familiar voice boomed out of the robot in front of me.
“You look different, my friend.”
“I am in battlefield configuration, I’m afraid.”
“You certainly are.” I knew the limbless block of metal I’d seen in the lobby and the command center couldn’t be Zircon Border’s combat shape, but nonetheless seeing him like this was a surprise. He loomed larger, and looked far deadlier.
“Where do you keep these arms and legs during normal business hours?” I asked him.
“They retract,” he said.
I glanced over my shoulder at the crowd, who were a few feet away but not far enough for my liking. I lowered my voice. “Is . . .”
“The subject we discussed is inside the command center,” Zircon Border said.
“Thank you,” I said, patting the cool metal of his exterior. With no further ceremony I moved past him. A few of the braver souls in the crowd attempted to mimic my example, following me into the command center; they were startled back in line by a booming challenge from Zircon Border. I made for Sergei’s station at the back, hoping that was where Hayduk had been headed when he marched Sergei out of the elevator. Sergei was there, slumped in a metal chair in front of his lab gear. Thank God, I thought. He looked unharmed—physically, at least. He saw me enter, but carefully avoided making eye contact or acknowledging me in any way.
The Venezuelan secret police who’d escorted him out of the ballroom were there as well, converting a nearby weather monitor into a secure comm station. Surprisingly, so was Colonel Perez, whom I’d expected to be off somewhere commanding the search for the rogue American who’d punched him in the face. Apparently, Sergei’s fate mattered more to him. The good colonel went up in my estimation.
Most important of all, I also spotted Hayduk, standing before the converted weather station and instructing a pair of nervous-looking weather techs how to get the information he wanted up on screen.
This was a stroke of luck. It looked like they had reason to question Sergei at his desk instead of immediately marching him off to the Sturgeon Building in chains. As long as Hayduk was here, then my plan had a chance. There was still time for me to fix this whole mess.
Or maybe not. With so much top brass in the room, the soldiers who normally ignored me were now standing briskly at attention. One of them was the kid who’d watched over me the morning Van de Velde had had me arrested. He’d lazily waved me into the command center a dozen times in the past few weeks, but now he was striding toward me sternly, his rifle rigid in his arms.
Damn it. I was almost to Sergei’s desk, but this punk was going to cut me off before I got there. I deliberately slowed, keeping my pace casual and my features calm. Maybe I could bluff my way through.
Turns out I couldn’t. The kid was eager to be a hard-ass when there was the slightest chance a ranking officer might take notice. All my attempts to explain were ignored, and he marched me back toward the door, gripping his rifle meaningfully.
Near the door was Perez’s assistant, the young lieutenant who’d walked me to his office. I caught a glimpse of her looking my way as the kid hustled me toward the exit. I waved, trying to catch her eye. It was a long shot, but maybe I could get her to call him off.
Unfortunately, I didn’t get her attention. I got someone else entirely.
A firm voice called out in Spanish, and the kid stopped immediately. He turned and saluted.
It took me a moment to understand why. Colonel Perez was making his way toward us.
I swore under my breath. Other than Hayduk, Perez was the last person whose attention I wanted.
But at least I was no longer being goose-stepped toward the door. That was progress.
Perez dismissed the kid with barely a nod, and the young soldier spun on his heels. I swear I could hear every one of his measured steps as he marched crisply back to his station by the west wall.
Perez stared at me with a cold, appraising look, saying nothing. I suddenly felt very nervous under the scrutiny of this man, very aware that I had a pair of stolen American power cells in my pockets. Perhaps it was his intention to make me nervous, and if so, it was working.
That’s the way to play this, I decided. Nervous and confused. I don’t know what’s going on.
“Colonel Perez,” I said, and it was no effort at all to sound apprehensive and flustered, “I don’t know what’s going on. There are armed soldiers everywhere in the hotel, and our guests are very alarmed—especially after the incident in the ballroom.”
“Yes,” said Perez, his bearing unusually stiff. I could see the beginnings of a decent
bruise under his left eye where I’d clocked him. “It is . . . an internal security matter. It will be resolved shortly.”
There was no trace of accommodation in his voice. This was not the friendly soldier who’d recruited me to spy on behalf of the benevolent Venezuelan Occupation. Of course, he was having a rough night. Hayduk, the man who was systematically murdering some of his most loyal subordinates, was busy processing another one. And to top it off, he’d just been punched in the face by an American spy.
I said, “Please forgive me. I think I must have embarrassed you in the ballroom earlier this evening. That was never my intention. I only meant to thank you publicly for your generosity, and I seem to have had very poor timing. I am very sorry if my announcement caught you off guard, or put you in the spotlight at an awkward moment.”
Perez’s demeanor turned slightly warmer. He waved away my concerns. “Not at all. Your comments were most kind. This is simply”—he indicated the cluster of people around Sergei’s desk—“an internal matter of no consequence. I am sorry if it has distracted from your ball.”
The colonel was as much politician as soldier. “No, of course not,” I said. “But I did come down here hoping I could draw you back to the ballroom. Some of our most distinguished guests are very anxious to meet you. You said you wanted Chicago to prosper? These are the men and women who can make that happen.”
“You are very kind,” he said smoothly. “I would be delighted.” He put a hand on my shoulder, steering me toward the exit. “Please tell your guests that I hope to rejoin them before the evening is over.”
Everyone was in a hurry to get rid of me. I risked a glance over my shoulder. Sergei hadn’t moved—he remained seated in his simple metal chair.
I took a chance. “Does this matter involve Sergei?” I asked.
Perez stopped, looking surprised. “You know him?”