When the door pushed open, the frag grenade ripped it off its hinges and slammed it through the body of the android trying to come through it. Between the dead droid and the broken door, the other proxies were once again delayed.
One of them tried to reach in to push the debris out of the way, but I shot it through the head, and it became part of the pile blocking the doorway. The same thing happened to the next one, and the one after that. At some point their Tactical AI figured out that it wouldn’t help to just keep sending more droids through one after another and they stopped coming.
I pulled back even further, knowing they would probably use a grenade next. They ended up throwing three of them, leaving the hallway below the roof access door a mangled mess. They went with smoke grenades after that and came in shooting behind the smoke. As far down the hallway as I’d been forced to retreat, I was no longer in a position to take them all one by one. Instead I fell back on the old Arbiter standby—rely on your armor and shoot everything in sight.
That kind of approach can’t work forever, but it did the trick for the time being. I lit them up, holding down the trigger and firing blind into the cloud of smoke. I worked a zig-zag pattern, up and down along diagonal lines. They just kept marching forward, shooting continuously. One by one the androids fell, and their AI system was once again forced to conclude that it couldn’t overwhelm my position—at least not yet.
With a dozen dead androids on the floor in front of me, the smoke finally cleared enough to see what was going on.
The android proxies were holding back on the roof, waiting for something. Most likely more Nightwatch.
I was out of fragmentation grenades now, and although I did still have a supply of concussion grenades, those were of limited used against androids. The roof was swarming with more proxies, and those heavy weapon androids were still waiting on the street to blast me to pieces—or just to punch a hole right through my face as they had done with Gabe.
On the floors below me, the androids were presumably figuring out a way to climb up the stairwell or just blocking my escape route until human reinforcements arrived. I was winning the fight, but only if you were keeping score. That’s not really how fights work, and the only score that matters in the end is whether you live or die.
My time was running out.
9
So, there I was, trapped in an apartment complex and surrounded by an army of android proxies. If I stayed where I was, they would either get me with a lucky shot or work their way close enough to rip my limbs off one by one. If I tried to escape, I’d make it less than a block before the heavy weapon droids gunned me down.
What do you do in that situation? It’s a question of strategy, and strategy is something they teach at the Arbiter Academy. It may not be something they give a huge amount of attention to, but they do give us the basic principles.
As I sat there waiting, I ran back through my memories of those long-ago classes, which had seemed so abstract and hypothetical at the time. I could hear the instructor’s drawling voice as if she was right in front of me, with her dyed-white hair and steely blue eyes.
“Whenever you’re in a conflict,” she said, “you’ll find it hard to accomplish your objectives. The question you have to ask yourself is why? It happens every time, but it doesn’t always happen for the same reason. When you find yourself stuck, ask yourself what the hold-up is. Whatever’s getting in your way, that’s your opponent’s Center of Gravity. Knock out the CoG, and the opponent’s resistance will collapse… like that!”
When she said, “like that,” she snapped her fingers and stomped her foot. And just like magic, I could see the CoG in this situation. My objective was to move, to get to that utility staircase and keep going up to the top floor of Tower 7. The reason I couldn’t move was because the heavy droids would kill me, and the reason for that was because I couldn’t kill them first.
The thick armor of the heavy androids was the Center of Gravity in this situation, and I could “knock out the CoG” by breaching that armor. So how could I breach it?
My service rifle wouldn’t do the job; that had already been established in the firefight where Gabriel died. The coilgun wouldn’t do it either, it just wasn’t powerful enough.
But you can make a coilgun more powerful by increasing the capacitance. How strong can you make it? As strong as your weapon can handle, and no stronger than that. You don’t want it to fall apart under the stronger repulsive firing force.
Keeping half an eye on the roof access door, I slid the coilgun off my shoulder and examined the weapon’s frame. This model could probably handle a little more power. Maybe even a lot more. But not enough to breach that armor.
If I wanted to kill those heavy weapon droids, I needed to rebuild this portable Gauss rifle into a rooftop cannon, a homemade artillery piece capable of piercing the thickest armor. And I knew how to do it, even if my knowledge of coilguns was mostly theory. I could strip the parts I needed from the dead androids and build a new weapon on the frame of the old. More layers of coil, a larger capacitor, and something to absorb the extra energy.
I backed down the corridor, went into the apartment with the hole in the floor, and dropped down into the black room. Of course, that meant the android proxies would probably start to move into the building as soon as they realized I was gone. This was unavoidable, but it meant I would have to move as fast as possible. It also meant I needed a hiding place, somewhere to work on the gun.
One thing at a time. Like Gabriel once told me, you don’t try to solve big problems all at once. You whittle them down, shaving bits off until the problem is gone. I went out to the stairwell, glanced down to make sure there were no enemies waiting, then used my mobility gear to rappel down.
The bottom of the stairwell was filled with android parts—everything from hands to legs to severed heads. I got to work right away, stripping out copper wire and removing capacitors. It felt somewhat ghoulish, like making a weapon out of butchered body parts. After all, android arms and legs do look like real arms and legs even though they aren’t made of flesh and blood.
But it had to be done, and it was while I was stripping the droids for parts that I had a brainstorm. I could wrap the rifle barrel in the android’s nanofiber muscle tissue for reinforcement against the added shock, giving my weapon enough resilience to handle the extra power I was going to give it.
Just as I was stripping the muscle tissue from an android’s arm, I heard something moving in the hall outside. A grenade in this enclosed space would be impossible to hide from, and the odds that it would pierce my armor were much higher than usual. I didn’t want to get caught in there, so I flicked the switch on my mobility gear and let it pull me rapidly back upstairs with my arms full of android parts.
Sure enough, whoever was downstairs threw a grenade in that stairwell, and it went off just as I reached the corridor. I didn’t quite make it out in time, and I winced in pain. Something sharp had gone into my left foot, and it felt like getting shot with a white-hot needle.
I dragged all the parts I’d gathered back to the black room on a limping leg, then wrestled my boot off. There it was, a grenade fragment stuck in the side of my boot. It had pierced my heel, which was now slick with fresh blood. For whatever reason, this relatively minor injury almost threw me. Things had been desperate ever since Gabriel died, and I had been pushed as close to my limit as I had ever been. Surrounded and outgunned, I had somehow come up with a solution… and now here I was, bleeding all over the floor while the androids were probably getting closer and closer. I started shaking, and everything I saw in front of me looked blurred and distant.
I felt a wave of nausea and had to put my head down in my arms for a moment. If they’d come for me then, the androids would have taken me without any difficulty. As I fought back the dizziness, I suddenly wondered why they hadn’t come yet. It seemed a little strange, so I deactivated my scrambling gear and checked for myself.
Sure enough, there w
ere a few android proxies on the lower levels, probably just to keep me from trying to leave the building. There were also a few on the roof, most likely for the same reason. And outside on the street were the heavy weapon droids.
All of a sudden, none of those things were my biggest problem. My biggest problem was a block away from here, where thermal scans showed a large concentration of humans in a combat formation. The Nightwatch reinforcements had arrived at last, and they were staging to storm the building.
I braced myself on a doorjamb and pulled myself up with sheer willpower. I had to fix my foot, at least as far as it could be fixed. Otherwise I didn’t have a chance.
I hopped on one foot to the apartment’s bathroom, found the first-aid kit, and staunched the bleeding. I cleaned the wound and patched myself up as well as possible. Then I limped back out to the black room and wrestled my boot back on, prepared for my final battle.
Now that I’d turned on my scanners, the Nightwatch knew exactly where to find me. This would be a frontal assault, and as things stood now, I had no chance of stopping it. Or so I thought.
With the reinforcements here, I assumed they’d storm the building as soon as possible. But it didn’t happen, not even when my scanners showed them fanning out. They surrounded the building, but they made no move to come any closer.
They didn’t intend to overrun me, but to make it impossible for me to escape. That’s all they needed to do, because the air would run out anyway. They didn’t need to kill me; they just needed to keep me pinned down. I’d killed enough of them already that they weren’t sure they could hold me, so they’d brought up the reinforcements just to keep me where I was. If they just left me under siege, the clock would run out and I would die without any further effort on their part.
This was a huge mistake. What they should have done was to use waves of attackers, spending every life they could afford to spend. I would have died eventually, and on top of that I wouldn’t have been able to spare any time to work on my coilgun rebuild. It was a bit like Dunkirk, when the Germans held back and waited too long. The British Expeditionary Force slipped between their fingers, and they never got the chance to destroy them again.
When I realized they weren’t going to storm the building, I shook my head then sat down on the floor in the black room and rebuilt my Gauss rifle. Over the next few hours, I modified it from a portable weapon into a small artillery piece. By the time I was done, I wasn’t exactly sure that I had a weapon capable of piercing the heavy android’s armor—but I was at least sure it made sense to try.
The moment I went dark again they’d know I was on the move, which meant they would know to prepare for attack. They’d expect me to try to break out of the trap one way or the other—across the roof or through the front door downstairs. One thing they wouldn’t know was that I’d modified the Gauss rifle, so they wouldn’t know how much power I could bring to bear. If they were normal opponents, the first shot from a weapon that could punch through armor would probably send the Nightwatch running, but I had no confidence that this was what they would actually do.
I think that was when I first realized that I was no longer thinking of them as people, although I couldn’t explain it or make any sense of it. With their creepy silence and their commitment to Marcenn’s murderous plans, they just didn’t seem human—regardless of what Gabriel had tried to tell me about the human capacity for evil. A human will run or hide when you start to shoot at him, especially if your weapon can go right through armor. A human will also refuse to do what you say if what you say doesn’t make any sense. Since these Nightwatch officers had already shown that they could not be trusted to act like people, I could hardly assume they would act like people when I opened up on them.
Good thing the Gauss rifle is such a quiet weapon. I switched on my scramblers, going dark so I could move undetected. Then I picked up the coilgun, much larger and heavier now, and pushed it up through the hole in the ceiling. I used my mobility gear to ascend to the apartment above, then crawled along the floor till I reached one of the external windows.
One single shot, that was all I’d get from this location. Then I’d have to move and hope I could do so before the return fire tore the whole apartment up. I lifted up the edge of the curtain just a tiny bit and glanced out into the street below.
There it was, almost directly below me. A heavy weapon droid, watching the roof as if I’d never left. It was turned away from me, but its systems would calculate my location almost instantly once I opened fire. If I didn’t want to be killed immediately, I’d have to take the first one with a single shot.
Of course, droids don’t fidget the way humans do. They don’t fall asleep on guard duty either, nor do they wander off to throw dice with their fellow soldiers. If you tell an android to watch a roof, it will watch that roof. As long as I didn’t give away my position by making a sound, it wouldn’t turn in my direction.
I settled slowly into place, letting my weight sink bit by bit into my legs and elbows. I lined up the coilgun, sighting carefully along the barrel. The spot I wanted was in the back of the droid’s armored head, where its higher mental functions would all be located. If I could pierce that spot, I stood a good chance of shutting the thing off instantly.
Of course, there was also the possibility that the droid would just go on a rampage and start shooting everything indiscriminately, but considering I was surrounded by enemies that would probably be fine.
Breathing as slowly and quietly as I could manage, I positioned my finger above the trigger in preparation for the kill-shot. When the moment came, I breathed out and squeezed the trigger—just a little too hard. The gun barrel tapped against the window glass before the trigger engaged, and the android’s head swiveled. Its lifeless eyes looked straight into my face from down below, then it swung its heavy machine gun up and pulled the trigger just as a hole appeared in the center of its forehead.
It staggered backward, and glass exploded from all the windows as its shots went wide. I fired again and took the android below the jaw. The Gauss rifle’s projectile went through its face and came out from the top of its head. It backed up into a wall, and I finally killed it with my third shot.
I saw its lights go out and was moving before it even hit the ground. I was out of that apartment in a second and a half, but heavy machine gun bullets flew all around me, blasting fist-sized holes in the corridor walls. One of the other androids must have come up to help the first, which meant they knew that I could kill them now.
So much for waiting.
I didn’t even have to check my scanners; I could hear the Nightwatch coming into the building. I ran up to the roof access door just as the androids threw it open, then fired a shot that went straight through two of them. They dropped to the floor, and my next shot took out a hovering drone. I ran out to the roof, throwing myself flat as I came through the door.
There were other androids, but the two surviving heavy weapon droids down on the street must have decided that the standard-model proxies were expendable under the circumstances. As I hit the deck, an extended burst of heavy machine gun fire destroyed all the proxies remaining on the rooftop. Their bodies were literally shot to pieces, clattering down around me as I cowered and covered my head.
The roof went silent, but that didn’t mean the fight was over. If I stuck my head up, I’d be killed before I could even set up a shot—unless I distracted the droids first. Luckily, I still had a few of those concussion grenades left. With my face and shoulder pressed against the roof, I loaded my service weapon with a flash-bang then fired it across the rooftop.
As it arced through the air, a storm of machine gun bullets burst all around it. My window for taking a shot was less than a second, but the only hope I had was to take the chance. I grabbed the coilgun and popped up from the roof, aiming for the first droid I saw.
I didn’t get a clean shot, but under the circumstances it wasn’t a bad one. I hit the thing behind the neck, then ducked under cover
again. It kept right on shooting, but it was no longer aiming at anything. I heard windows shattering, the sound of bullets as they went through metal… then total silence for a couple of seconds, before the Nightwatch came pouring out the rooftop door.
Having no choice at all, I rolled onto my back and opened fire from a prone position. The powerful coilgun killed the first man instantly and sent the second one reeling with blood pouring out of him. I fired again and killed the man who was in the doorway.
Without even thinking, knowing that all my options were probably equally suicidal, I jumped up and ran for the roof edge. I fully expected to be cut down instantly, ripped apart by heavy machine guns. When I cleared the roof and soared across to the rooftop opposite, I never expected to feel the impact.
But I landed safely and rolled to a stop. I couldn’t believe it or understand it, so I turned in amazement to see what the droids were up to. When I saw them standing there, lights out and weapons silent, it took me a moment to get it. In the narrow street, with one of the droids firing aimlessly after I damaged its AI system, the two heavy weapon androids had killed each other.
There was no time to marvel at my good fortune. I had to get moving, and I had to do it before the trap closed in around me. I didn’t even think about what direction I was going; I just left the area as quickly as I could. This might be what saved me, because it turned out I was headed in the exact opposite direction from that all-important utility staircase.
By running off in a direction that made no sense, I did something the pursuing androids couldn’t possibly anticipate. If not for that, they would have caught me in the open and overwhelmed me within a few minutes. As things turned out, it was touch and go, but by moving rapidly from roof to roof I was able to escape the area quickly.
When I finally descended to the street, I checked my schematic. I was in a residential area, but there was no hint of life in those darkened streets. The buildings loomed above me as I slipped silently from place to place, like a ghost wandering through an abandoned town.
Sol Arbiter Box Set: Books 1-5 Page 10