“Being quick is what I do best.”
She hugged tight, planting her chin on Lex’s shoulder. It would have been a romantic gesture if not for the fact that an aging scientist had adopted an identical posture from the back on the opposite shoulder.
Lex rolled the throttle forward. The slightest acceleration prompted a worrisome groan from the overloaded bike’s frame. Turns were worse, not only causing every connection point to creak, but threatening to topple the three occupants of the main seat. He took a wide curve out over the inky chasm left behind by the disaster and set a course for the jagged tunnel bored to the outside.
“Can’t you go any faster?” Saunders asked, dialing up the power on the rifle and checking the ammo charge.
“Not without flying to pieces. How’s our buffer, Mitch?”
“I don’t think we have a buffer, Trev. They’re coming out of every crevice. They’re all over behind us.” She looked down. “And below us.”
“And above us. They’re everywhere. Eyes open, guns hot,” Saunders said.
She raised her weapon and fired a string of blasts. Her shots lanced through the air, peppering the structure and splashing against something just above the edge of the headlight’s glow. Flecks of molten metal fell from the roof along with the stricken remnants of another of the robots.
The instant the weapon fired, the tempo of the attack changed. Before, they had been trudging out of the shadows, forming up and giving chase, but the blast was like a roar of thunder to an excitable herd, whipping it into a stampede. Tapping legs started pounding like pistons. Smoldering torches became white hot. And most troubling of all, they began to move with an almost organic coordination. Like flocks of birds circling for a landing, they followed one another, points of red, blue, and white light marking where scavenged electronic components had been incorporated into their forms. They increased their speed, rocketing with astonishing precision across the ground until they were just visible at the bottom edge of the circle of light cast by the headlight.
Michella’s head shot around, taking in the terrifying agility of the creatures as the sea of glowing lights and torches began to blanket the walls, rising up around them. Saunders fired indiscriminately, picking off creatures three and four at a time. They would fall to the ground and vanish under the tide of thrashing metal.
“Trev, they’re headed for the same tunnel we are.”
“No, we’re headed for the tunnel, and they’re headed for us,” Saunders barked. “You’ve got guns, start shooting!”
“Busy,” Lex said, nudging the bike out of the path of a mechanism that hurled itself at them from the ceiling.
“I’ve never fired a gun in my life!” barked Dreyfus.
Michella reluctantly released Lex with one arm and retrieved the gun from where she’d stowed it in her windbreaker. Three more of the robots detached from the ceiling, and Lex turned the bike as sharply as he dared. The swerve took them clear, but a swiping torch hissed past his arm closely enough to open a slice in the sleeve of his jacket. The hoverbike pitched worryingly in the air, but he pulled hard in the other direction and righted it, sweeping back toward the center of the excavated hollow of the laboratory.
“I’ll never get through the tunnel without a good head start,” Lex said. “Those things are too nimble, and this thing handles like a boat on stilts with this many people on it. There’re enough of them to choke the exit before we get there.” He allowed himself to drift too low to the ground, and a wave of the robots leaped in sequence. He pulled the bike up, pressing the passengers hard into their seats as he turned the swerve into a full loop. Just as he began to ease out if it, there was a loud snap and the head of a rivet ricocheted into the darkness. “Let’s hope that wasn’t important.”
“If you’ve got any bright ideas, now would be an excellent time for them,” Michella said, aiming behind Lex and squeezing off a shot that separated a robot from one of its legs.
“Nope. No bright ideas,” he said.
His eyes darted across the dark surroundings. Having reversed his trajectory, the way ahead of them was clear. The robots had gathered near the exit tunnel in their various attempts to attack. He swept his eyes up and down to see what little the headlights showed him. The floors in the middle section of the complex had been chewed away the most thoroughly, with those floors closer to the roof and underground levels progressively more intact. The floors had identical layouts. Looping hallways, flimsy cubicle walls…
“I’ve got a stupid idea, though.” He rolled the throttle. “That’s gonna have to do.”
The hoverbike accelerated toward the uppermost exposed floor on the far side of the building. It was reasonably intact. A third of its length was whole, or at least recognizably a hallway. Unlike previous such sprints, he wasn’t slowing as he approached the far wall. The swarm of robots huddled mostly on the floor, so while the tide reached the far wall before him, it then had to scale the edge of the excavated area. A handful of the machines were already on the ceiling. Half made leaps toward him and were narrowly dodged. Rifle bursts from Saunders cleared away more.
“Everybody hunker down. There’s going to be a lot of debris,” Lex said.
“I don’t think this is wise!” cried Dreyfus.
“Let the man work!” Michella replied. Despite the fact she was flying backward, she didn’t give the slightest hint that she had any concern about where they were heading. She merely held her weapon as steadily as she could, firing shots at whatever machines came into her limited targeting range.
The leading edge of the charge of machines was just meters from the opening of the hallway when he darted inside. Instantly the vast echoing cacophony that had been assaulting their ears turned to a claustrophobic, muffled rumble. The hallway was only slightly larger than the bike itself, and the half-scavenged husks of equipment turned it into an obstacle course. Lex cut his speed, activated the wind field, and set about navigating through the mess. The field pushed aside fragments of shattered cement and pulverized drywall. Doors and side halls whipped by. Behind them, the clatter of legs grew louder. Michella’s eyes widened as the tunnel behind them clogged wall to wall with clambering machines.
“You fool! You’ve trapped us!” Saunders grunted, painfully twisting to attempt to fire upon the pursuing robots.
“No, I—whoop!” A low cubicle wall that had been dragged out into the hall proved too tall to drift over. He instead cut the throttle and pulled the nose of the bike up to plow through it with the relatively sturdy landing struts, then righted himself. “I got a glimpse of the floor layouts from the wrecked floors. There’s a big lobby thing at the end that connects to the parallel hall. I’ll just—”
“That’s only on odd-numbered floors,” Dreyfus said, ducking as the bike nearly scraped their heads on the ceiling.”
“… What floor is this?”
“Level 6.”
He squinted ahead. The hallway was cluttered enough to make it difficult to see how it ended. “What are we heading toward?”
“A locker room,” Saunders said.
“Well, then this is going to get interesting.”
He continued weaving among the broken furniture and chewed-up walls. Eventually a patch of open hallway was all that separated him from a damaged but still largely intact set of double doors.
“Care to soften up those doors a bit?” Lex said.
Saunders aimed her rifle and fired, each blast taking huge bites out of the full-length hinge of the door. Again Lex cut the throttle, pivoting the bike so that the bottom faced the door and the nose pointed in the direction of the parallel hallway he’d hoped to reach. He leaned to the side, taking the professor and Michella with him, and grabbed the inside edge of the sidecar like a surfer gripping the edge of his board.
He clenched his teeth. “Brace for—”
His warning was interrupted by the crash. The vehicle and its passengers tore the metal doors from their blast-softened hinges and crashed to the gro
und. A landing strut tore free and spiraled into the darkness of the room as they slammed upright. The motion painfully clocked Michella’s head into his, making them both see stars as the bike and doors ground along the floor. Lex shook his head and clutched his right shoulder. Landing hard while holding on tightly enough to keep himself and those wrapped around him from being thrown free had been enough to pull his shoulder out of joint. Fortunately his good arm was the one he needed to work the throttle, so he pushed the pain aside and juiced the power.
A flood of robots erupted through the doors and continued under their own momentum, piling up against the far wall like a derailed train as he guided the bike down a narrow row of lockers and drifted to face the second set of doors leading to the second main hallway.
“Chief!” he barked, already charging for the doors.
The crash hadn’t been kind to the already ailing security chief, but even in her dazed state she snapped to action, spraying the doors erratically. He bashed through them and roared into the second hallway, just as cluttered as the first, but he didn’t have the time to take it as slowly as he’d done on the way in. The robots were tight on his tail. If he relented for even a moment, they would overtake him. What he needed now was speed. He dialed the power on the wind field up to full and plowed aside as much debris as he avoided.
Michella, still reeling from the blow to the head, finally got her wits about her and realized that she’d lost the pistol in the crash. Without a word, she reached down into Lex’s belt and pulled his own gun free. She opened fire on the tide of robots, blasting a handful of them to pieces and causing a few more to be tripped and trampled by the rest.
“They are right on top of us, Trev. If you had any master plan, I really think you should make your move,” Michella said, concern in her voice for the first time.
“Busy,” he said, finding it more difficult than he’d expected to pilot the bike with one arm.
He was nearly to the ragged end of the hallway leading out into the excavation when the opening suddenly filled with stragglers that had missed their chance to pursue him into the first hallway. He knew he couldn’t slow down. Trying to duck into one of the side hallways would require a turn sharp enough to smash them to pieces, probably bringing them face-to-face with another batch of machines besides. He had no choice but to put the hammer down, charge full speed, and hope they had enough momentum and firepower to make a hole.
Chief Saunders unloaded her rifle, pouring a continuous spray of plasma bolts into the robots and beating them back.
“This is going to be another bad one…” he warned, holding tight and pushing the already maxed-out wind field knob a bit harder in the hopes that it might have another notch he’d not discovered yet.
As so often seemed to happen when his life was dangling from a thread, Lex felt as though time around him slowed. He could see each thrashing leg of the robots as they fought their way through the broken hallway ahead. Even with steady bursts of rifle fire tearing through the wall of crawling metal, there was more than enough sheer mass to ruin the bike and its riders from the collision alone. Once the robotic torches started slicing, there wouldn’t be much left. He scanned what little remained of the hallway between them and the rapidly vanishing exit. There was a conference table lying with its legs facing them. Some panicked security team had likely pulled into the hallway to provide some sort of cover. It was a heavy wooden thing that must not have suited the tastes of the metal monsters, as it was almost entirely intact.
Rather than avoiding the obstacle, Lex tipped the nose of the bike down and dialed the wind field back as low as he dared. The leading edge of the weakened field struck the table and jerked it into motion. The added mass robbed him of some speed and closed the gap behind them, but he cranked the throttle to full and dialed up the wind field simultaneously. Sparks flared and poured out of the field emitter as it failed spectacularly, but not before it sent the table spiraling into the air. The full weight and speed of the table struck the clambering horde, smashing them backward. A half-second later, Lex charged through the mass of metal and splintered wood. A chunk of debris struck and shattered the headlight.
Darkness was instant and complete. Even the galaxy of lights was absent from the ground and walls around them. The bulk of the swarm had followed into the hallway or were still scrabbling toward it. The way to the surface was clear, if only he could see it.
“Light, light, light!” Lex yelped.
Dr. Dreyfus looked desperately about and saw that the camera clamped to the chassis was still attached, though barely. He leaned aside and wrenched it free, turning it to face front. In its glow Lex saw that he had strayed dangerously close to the dangling debris from the roof. He adjusted and accelerated directly for the exit tunnel. Without the wind field, wind screamed in his ears. Dreyfus and Saunders, without goggles, were forced to guard their eyes. This put an end to the support fire and made the scientist’s handling of the light hit and miss. His one-handed grip nearly lost the camera twice before Saunders, knowing she couldn’t be any use with the rifle at these speeds, pulled it from his hands and held it more securely.
The bike plunged into the twisting tunnel. Tremors and rattles shook it, each of its joints loose and getting looser. It was on the verge of flying apart. If he was going to navigate the sharp turns of the tunnel at this speed, he was going to have to treat it a little more like a motorcycle of old. Close to the ground, the repulsors provided support and grip. That should help keep it in one piece, in theory at least. It would also require much tighter precision, but if it came down to trusting the sort of engineering that goes into a rental bike or trusting his own reflexes, it was a no-brainer.
He swung the bike around and cranked the repulsors to full to give him as much of a footprint as possible. As soon as he hit the first corner and began to ride along the wall like a banked turn, he began to second guess his decision. The bike shuddered across the broken walls and exposed beams like he was riding over railroad tracks. All he was doing was trading twisting the bike apart to rattling it apart. It was too late to change his mind now. He was moving too fast to survive it any other way, and going any slower wouldn’t give them a chance to reach the outside before the already nearby clatter of robots overtook them.
His slidepad began to beep, and a voice blared out of it and his earpiece, breaking through digital static.
“Lex, my boy, what is your—”
“Garotte, tell me you’re close!” he barked.
“That we are, pulling up on the laboratory now.”
“I’m about to come flying out of a hole on the west wall. I’m on an overloaded bike and I’ve got a whole army of things on my tail.” He pulled the bike up, pivoted, and planted it on a small section of intact wall on the next sharp shift of the tunnel. “I would like very much if you would blow them up.”
“We scrapped about five hundred of them at a mine. How many have you got?” said Silo over the connection.
“Lots.”
“What is your estimate?”
“Not in the counting mood.” He pulled another pivot and plant, this time striking hard enough to shear another rivet and pull a strut loose. The rear end of the sidecar drooped, and the bike tried to get away from him. “Two more turns. We’re going to need a pickup. This bike is just about ready to stop being a bike.”
“Weapons are hot and trained, sweetheart. Keep your head down or I might end up parting your hair,” Silo said.
He gritted his teeth and hugged another corner. As Michella squeezed tighter and tighter he knew that the machines must be closing in. The final turn was a shallow one, and the path was brightening as the light of the moons poured inside. With the better visibility, he cut close enough to the inside corner to graze the edge of the sidecar and covered the last section of tunnel at full speed.
The bike blasted into the open, but the Declaration was nowhere to be seen. An instant later, it made its presence known. Fat bolts of energy hissed through the a
ir over him and turned the first robots to emerge behind him into slag and vapor. The attack was coming out of a rippling section of sky a few dozen meters up. Lex kept the throttle maxed out and eased the bike into the air to give himself a bit more of a cushion between the handful of robots that avoided destruction between each cluster of blasts.
“Good heavens, hon, you sure did find the mother lode, didn’t you?” Silo said over the communicator. “These sensors we stole from the Luddites are going even more bonkers here. Guess activity factors in more than raw numbers.”
“Listen, you’ll want to get a good deal higher if you want to be safe. Those things can hurl each other fairly high when they see something they want,” Garotte said.
“I’d love to,” Lex replied, “but this bike is seriously about to go. Can you get the cargo door open?”
“Opening it now,” Garotte said.
The Declaration flickered into view, gliding smoothly aside and pivoting to face Lex with its door. Regular blasts from its mounted weapons punched holes in the flow of mechanisms, but those that escaped destruction were already forming familiar mounds.
“Quickly, boy, quickly,” Garotte said.
Lex guided the bike over the open side door of the ship and cut power, slamming down into the mostly empty bay. This last shock was enough to shear off the final rivet securing the sidecar support strut. The battered chassis tore free and toppled over, causing the bike with its broken landing struts to do the same. All five passengers including Squee were dumped into a pile on the floor of the cargo area as the door began to close. An explosion sent an assortment of robot parts clattering inside before it sealed. Garotte spoke up again, this time over the ship’s internal speaker.
“We’re going to get out of range of these blasted things and work out what to do with them. Does anyone require medical attention?”
Lex pulled himself from the pile of humanity and broken hoverbike, then helped Michella to her feet.
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