Michella slept in the SOB’s passenger seat as Lex watched the indicators on the console. Just a few more minutes and he’d be in range of Movi. Squee was perched across his shoulders, her tail wrapped lightly under his chin to keep her from drifting away. She stared at the complex control panel, matching Lex’s gaze as though trying to work out what was so fascinating to him. He dabbed at his temple.
“I’ve got to hand it to Ma and Karter. Whatever those coolers were that they added, they kept the heat down for a good long while. It’s only just starting to get warm in here, huh, Squee?” he said, scratching her chin. The console began to quietly chirp. “That’s the two-minute warning. We’re about to reach Movi.” He took a steadying breath. “Hey, Mitch!”
She jolted awake. “Huh? What? Are we almost there?”
“Two minutes. Are you strapped in good? Nothing floating around that might smash into my head at a crucial moment?” he asked.
Michella looked around her and snatched a few errant wrappers and containers, stowing them beneath elastic straps and nets on the side of her chair. “We’re good.”
“Take Squee. This could be a rough one.” He tugged Squee from his neck and passed her back, then cinched his restraints a little tighter.
“Nothing you can’t handle,” Michella said. “Just make sure every camera, every recorder, every sensor this ship has is on maximum. I want there to be a record of this, every second of it, with crystal clarity.”
“We’re going to be violating a quarantine for the second time. Heavily armed gunships might be shooting at us. You really think you’ll be able to use any of it without getting us locked up for… whatever it is people get locked up for when they do that?”
“You’d be surprised what a little editing can do.”
“Isn’t that a little disingenuous?”
“I said we’d be showing people the truth. I didn’t say we’d be showing them everything.”
He shrugged. “You’re the journalist. Now here’s the game plan. There’s going to be zero radio traffic. No warnings, no markers. Nothing. And we’re not going to have anything even resembling the element of surprise, because the SOB has been running at full tilt. It is going to be a bright red dot on even the weakest heat sensors. It’s going to be a dogfight from the moment they notice us until they lose their nerve and stop following us into the atmosphere. From there we’re going to head for Gloria and power up the radio to try to contact Garotte and Silo and tell them the plan, and to attract as many of those things as we can. Then we lead them someplace out of the way, drop our load, and pray that everything works the way we’d planned.”
“How do we let the orbital ships know if and when the robots are wiped out?”
“I’m hoping they’ll figure it out on their own. If not, you’re pretty persuasive, aren’t you?”
“My relationship with the armed forces right now isn’t the strongest it’s been.”
“Well, then now would be a great time to start patching things up.” He looked to the indicator. “Fifteen seconds.” He unwrapped a stick of gum and loaded it up, then shrugged and threw in a second one. As the indicator started ticking down to zero and the space around the ship shifted into visibility, he put his hands on the controls, game face firmly in place. “Time for the show.”
The SOB dropped into conventional speeds, and Lex fought the urge to make a beeline for the planet. There were a handful of things within a star system that could look like a ship if all you had to go on were heat signatures. Satellites knocked out of orbit. Asteroids that had close calls with stars or planets, things of that sort. The longer he behaved like one of those, the longer he could avoid dodging rockets. A few gentle nudges of the thrusters moved him into an orbit that, without too much of a stretch, could appear to be a hunk of wandering space rock. He cut his engines and hoped they would fall for if for a while.
The stillness was eerie. Outside his windows the pale dot of the planet and the piercing yellow glare of the star washed out the rest of the stars. He could hear Michella’s breathing, the calm half pant of Squee, and the low thrum of the SOB’s reactor waiting to be called to duty again. Lex flicked on the passive sensor overlay, and the computer painted orange circles around other ships. Dozens of them. Large clusters around a large capital ship, smaller clusters scattered elsewhere, the lot of them orbiting near the equator. Almost hidden around the curve of the planet was a larger ship of unfamiliar design.
He chewed slowly on his gum, eyes scrutinizing the ships’ subtle motions. Sure enough, they were in a complete communication blackout. Even the VectorCorp background transmissions were silent. One ship peeled off from the rest… then another. Slowly they pulled into a loose formation. The navigation system added a dotted line to indicate what Lex had known from the first pixel of motion in the maneuver. They were on an intercept course.
“We’re made. Hold on.”
He punched the throttle, and the SOB roared to life, filling the cockpit with the soundtrack to a thousand such runs. It was the throaty rhythm of Karter’s monster of a reactor driving an equally monstrous set of engines harder than anything the military had in their arsenal. Lex, Ma, and Squee were pinned back as the ship accelerated. Ahead, the ships juiced their engines as well.
“Attention. Flash code detected.” The SOB’s control system stated.
“Flash code?” Michella said.
“They’re trying to communicate with exterior lights.”
A small section of the lower right corner of the navigational overlay displayed a square of magnified visuals, showing a speedy military scout ship flashing a steady pattern. It was far too small to have a pilot. Likewise for the others. They were using drones. He smiled. At least that meant if he had to, he could fight back with a clear conscience. The lights continued to flash. Across the top of the overlay, a message scrolled: COMPLETE QUARANTINE IN PLACE. POWER DOWN ENGINES AND PREPARE TO BE TRACTORED INTO CUSTODY.
“No thanks.” He angled toward the center of the formation and pushed the engines harder. A half-second later the alarm tone rang out.
“Missile lock detected.”
He quickly flipped the ship to offensive mode.
“Autotarget missiles,” he ordered.
Three red diamonds appeared on his display moving quickly toward him, while a few more drones formed up and joined them. He held his course. If there was one thing he’d learned from his worryingly large number of encounters with missiles, they weren’t the best at quickly changing direction. Typical ships weren’t great at it either, but the SOB wasn’t a typical ship. You can’t win a game of chicken against a missile, but if you time it right, you can come out on top if you choose the right time to chicken out. As an added bonus, a properly programmed drone wouldn’t fire on a target that was already tracked by a salvo of missiles. The longer he played this out, the longer he could avoid worrying about more missiles to dodge.
“Missile lock detected. Missile lock detected. Missile lock detected,” the SOB announced.
“What?” he said, eyes opening as his screen filled with at least a dozen red diamonds. “They’re not supposed to do that!”
He pulled hard to the left—a few moments later than he should have. The SOB pitched aside, out of the path of the first missile trio, and the weaponized tractor beam detonated one as it went by. Because of his less than perfect timing, the explosion hit his shields with a punch and knocked them down 20 percent, but he was whole. The two surviving missiles began their long curve around to pursue. Now he had two missiles behind him and too many in front of him.
“Missile lock detected.”
“Why do they keep firing!?” Lex yelped. He angled the SOB hard and flared the engines, bouncing out of the predicted trajectory and dodging a cluster of missiles.
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Because they—” He made another razor-sharp dodge, this one bringing him near enough for his tractor to pop two more rockets and spray him with enough shrapnel to knock the shields down to 50 percent. “They aren’t supposed to waste ammo on previously—” Another dodge. Half of the rockets were behind him now, and the first set were finished with their turn and were gaining. “Painted targets.”
“How would they know?” Michella said.
“They coordinate over… Oh no… They’re obeying communication quarantine protocol… They’re just going to keep shooting.”
He gritted his teeth. Strategy was out the window now. This was an obstacle course that was getting denser with hazards by the minute. He swung his course back toward the first set of drones. The display readout tracked fifteen separate missile locks, but Lex had a feeling that was just the max it could do, because his mental tally was closer to two dozen announcements. Which meant there were at least nine missiles he couldn’t see.
“Ship collision imminent,” the SOB warned.
“That’s the idea,” Lex said, his eyes flicking to the missile lock ranges. At his current speed, the lead missile would hit in nine seconds, and dodging a missile on your tail was an entirely different beast. It would be able to adjust to any dodge and keep after him.
The first of three drones grew larger ahead of him, close enough for him to read the registration number painted on the hull. He barely feathered the controls. The SOB smashed hard into the drone’s shields, knocking it off course and bouncing the SOB to a new heading like a billiard ball, allowing for a much sharper turn than the engines would have allowed at the expense of about half of his remaining shields.
“Come on, come on,” Lex said, watching the rear indicators. “No radio means those things are tracking heat.”
Five missiles whipped by the drone, remaining fixated on Lex. Then the drone flared its engines to pursue him, and the nearest missiles suddenly found the fresh source of heat to be far more enticing. Two of them diverted and hit their new target, wiping out the drone. Lex dodged two more salvos of missiles and set course for the next drone, hoping to pull the same stunt again, but the lead missile was closer to him than he was to the drone.
His brain started wildly pitching ideas, dredging up every piece of information available and throwing it at him at once in hopes of a precious piece of insight sticking. He swept his eyes across the console, the galaxy of warning indicators blurring together until one strange thing caught his eye, an option that he’d never seen on his command list before. “Jettison ACS.” The cryoshunts. Two gadgets affixed to his ship that had been drinking up his excess heat for the last few hours until they’d had their fill. Two red-hot hunks of electronics ready to be shrugged off. In situations such as this, there was a name for things like that. Decoys.
He tapped the command and jettisoned the first ACS. It fell away from the ship. Instantly the half-dozen nearest missiles shifted to follow, and shortly afterward made contact. This illustrated a key difference between the ACS and a proper decoy. First, a proper decoy is launched away from its ship, rather than continuing along in the same direction. This minor detail meant that the detonations were very close to the SOB, and revealed another tidbit of information that Lex’s split second Hail Mary of a plan hadn’t considered. Six missiles exploding at the same time packed considerably more punch than, say, one missile. He wasn’t sure what the ACS was made of, but it added a pretty blue color and a lot of force to the explosion as well. The combined blast hit the SOB hard and put out a dense cloud of shrapnel.
The ship lurched to the side, and Michella barely suppressed a startled cry. The control panel blacked out, silencing the warning buzzers and depriving Lex of the many handy visual aids that had thus far kept him from dying. After a fraction of a second that took years off his life, the systems blinked back on.
“Primary shield failure,” the SOB said. “Secondary shields at forty percent.”
“Could be worse,” he muttered.
The system insisted the missile count was still at fifteen, but the aftermath of the blast popped two more of those in pursuit, dropping it to… nope, still fifteen. He’d have to talk to Karter about an upgrade on that.
The missiles started to gain again, and a fresh batch were on the way from ahead now. He glanced at the much larger shape of the planet Movi. He’d reach it soon, but not soon enough. One more ACS left. He’d have to make it count. He eyed the nearest cluster of pursuit missiles and counted off in his head. When the moment seemed right, he gave the control stick a gentle waggle and simultaneously released the ACS. It flicked off at an odd angle, drawing away another swath of missiles that detonated far enough away to only shave a few more percent off his remaining shields. The seven missiles exploded, starting a chain reaction that eliminated four more, and the missile lock count dropped from fifteen to fifteen. He was beginning to question the value of that particular statistic.
Most of the drones were behind him, and the bulk of the missiles on his tail were more than thirty seconds away, but the planet was more than a minute away. This didn’t bode well.
“We’re out of counter measures, and we’ve got nothing to hide behind,” Lex said.
“What does that mean for us?”
“Nothing good.”
Again he scoured the console for options. Thirty-three seconds to missile strike. Five collision threats in forward trajectory…
“Hang on. Gotta borrow some defense.”
He guided the ship toward the capital ship ahead. His computer told him he’d collide with it in forty-four seconds. Too much time. He had to even the odds a bit. With a dance of button presses and steering maneuvers, he spun the ship and cut engines, facing the pursuing missiles and sliding along backward. The retro thrusters took over as the primary propulsion, and didn’t do a particularly good job of it, but now he had a clear view on the pursuing missiles, and the targeting system had a better angle and range to pick them off.
“We’re supposed to be going backward, right?” Michella said with urgency. She was leaning aside, holding Squee close to her face and eyeing the cluster of missile indicators with great concern.
“Navigating with reversed controls isn’t so easy, so we’re going to put a hold on the commentary,” Lex said.
He flicked his eyes back and forth between cockpit windows and the navigation screens. The tractor beam picked off three of the closest missiles, and to his own surprise he managed to dodge three more coming from ahead, or behind, depending on the perspective.
“Defensive weapon signatures detected,” the system announced.
“About time!” he said.
Ahead, the missiles looked like they were losing interest, the cluster widening and drifting down and to the left.
“What’s going on?” Michella asked.
“Ship-to-ship collision imminent,” the system said.
Lex spun the ship around to reveal the capital ship dead ahead. It was huge, shaped a bit like a complex metallic whale and large enough to have a few ships the size of the SOB in its docking bay. A blue overlay on to the cockpit window visualized the energy shields of the massive warship, but it was hardly necessary. He was close enough to be literally skimming the shields with his, causing a rippling gold shimmer beneath the ship, like a wake without an ocean. Enticed by the now much more substantial heat signature of the capital ship, the missiles began splashing down against the shield, bursting against it with little effect. He fired retrorockets to cut his speed and continued to skim the shields of the ship, spiraling around it. The tight downward curve of their flight began to lift them from their seats, straining against the restraints.
“Oh. Why didn’t you do this in the first place?” Michella said. Her hair trailing upward and pooling on the cockpit window above her.
“Defensive weapon discharge imminent,” the system said.
Lex veered hard to the side a heartbeat before a shaft of light burst out through the shields below them. It was near enough to instantly spike the heat in the ship, and a handful of indicators on the control panel switched from their useful displays to solid red error screens.
“Secondary shield failure. Navigation shields inactive.”
“That’ll be why,” he said. “Don’t worry. The missiles might not have the brains to avoid targeting the big ships, but the drones should. And those big defensive cannons aren’t made for aiming at stuff as close as us, so—”
“Defensive weapon discharge imminent.”
He dodged again, this time quickly enough to spare the ship any damage.
“Getting really sick of the word imminent,” Lex said.
“Why aren’t we getting away from this thing?”
“Hoping the drones will count one of these explosions as us and lose interest. Ideally before one of these explosions is us.”
They did several more revolutions, but the dizzying course didn’t seem to be fooling any of the drones. They had taken up stationary positions and were angling themselves to face him. Lex dodged three more cannon blasts before he decided the plan was a bust.
“All else fails, floor it,” he muttered.
The planet loomed before them. When his orbit around the capital ship was at the proper point, he maxed out the thrusters, launching himself toward it. The moment his blip on the sensors was differentiable from that of the capital ship, all drones in range fired a salvo of missiles.
“Time until shield restoration,” Lex commanded.
“Seventeen seconds,” the ship replied.
“Time until critical atmospheric density.”
“Twenty seconds.”
“We’ve got a couple of seconds of unshielded high-speed entry coming.”
“There’s also a lot of missiles.”
“Only fifteen of them. Besides—reentry is more likely to kill us at the moment.”
Ahead of the SOB, an ominous red glow was forming as the thickening atmosphere began to interact with the SOB. Rear cameras revealed similar points of light ahead of each missile. They were moving far too fast for the air molecules to get out of the way, so they were scrunching up ahead of them, dumping their heat, and scouring the ship. A symphony of warning tones and overlapping messages began to compete for Lex’s attention, and the temperature in the cockpit was growing by a dozen degrees per second. The silence of space was replaced by a distant roar that grew steadily louder.
“Come on, come on, come on,” Lex said, watching the shields start to tick up. “I really hope those Poison Pills can take a little heat.”
The missiles on their tail started to veer off course or burst. Out the front window, the nose of the SOB was now glowing nearly as bright as the pressure wave ahead of them. A hunk of the forward body panel peeled away and smashed against the window, feathering it with a web of new cracks that quickly lengthened. The roar around them was deafening now.
“Hull breach,” the SOB said.
“I noticed!” Lex said.
“Shields active.”
The pressure wave pushed forward ahead of an expanding shield and the temperature rise started to trail off, leaving the internal temperature just a few degrees below boiling.
“Just a few more seconds and I can level off. Gotta make sure we’re in deep enough for the capital ship to avoid shooting at us.”
“These people are going to bomb the whole planet anyway!” Michella said.
“Yeah, but they’re still people. I gotta believe they’re not going to open fire on a defenseless planet until they absolutely have to.”
They watched the sky anxiously for a few seconds more, then gradually leveled out and cut his speed. Now without the reentry burn to contend with and a nice thick atmosphere to help it out, the cooling systems got the temperature under control within fifteen seconds. One by one the warning announcements silenced. Lex took a deep breath and turned to his passengers. Michella was a bit of a mess. Her hair was a complete wreck, and their orbits around the ship had left her face quite red. Squee, on the other hand, look just fine. If anything, she seemed disappointed it had ended so quickly.
“Everybody okay?” he asked.
“How soon can I look at the footage from your ship’s cameras?” Michella said.
“Yeah, you’re fine.” He turned back to the task of flying the ship. “Get your slidepad out, I’ll patch it into the cameras. While you’re at it, check the belly cam to see if our payload is intact.”
She pulled out her device and impatiently watched the screen until the link dialogue appeared. Once she accepted and had access to the ship’s visual system, she went to work with a level of skill and enthusiasm that almost rivaled Lex’s flight performance.
“Little bit of char on the corners, but the Poison Pill cases look intact,” she said. “Jeez, Lex, you’ve got ten cameras on this thing? And high-quality ones at that!”
“Karter doesn’t mess around,” he said with a shrug. “I’m going to try to get in touch with Silo or Garotte. If anyone knows where to find the biggest concentration of Gen-Mechs on the planet, they do.”
“I’ll save you the time, Lex. Camera three, lower right quadrant. About a hundred kilometers west of Gloria.”
Rather than pulling up the feed she described, he angled the ship in the appropriate direction and looked for himself. Even without magnification, there was no mistaking it. A darker gray patch against the light gray of the endless marsh. It was irregular and shifting in shape, like an amoeba that spanned a few football fields. Periodically there would be a flash of light or a burst of dust and a hole would open in the amorphous shape, but it would just as quickly close. Just visible ahead of the shape was a single speck moving erratically across the landscape.
“Yeah, that’ll be them. Let’s go say hi.”
#
“There has got to be a better way!” yelped Ronzone.
He was riding inside what now could only rightly be called Silo’s Tank, though inside was a charitable term. His head, complete with its implanted receiver, stuck out the primary hatch so that the nearby Gen-Mechs could get a nice strong whiff of its signal. The sun was setting, painting the whitish marsh around them a deep orange. At the controls, Silo’s face was serious and her hands steady. It was a machine meant to be operated by two people, and half of the navigation and targeting aids had been removed to repair the Declaration, and yet she was unloading its cannons with precision and timing. Granted, her target covered several acres and the endless marsh wasn’t exactly an obstacle course, but dancing the fine line between losing the interest of the robot horde and being overcome by it was one hell of a task.
“I’m open to suggestions, Agent. Near as I can figure, we’ve run out of good ideas,” Silo said, briefly taking a hand away from the controls to wipe away a trickle of sweat in the muggy tank interior.
“Let’s just get away! They’re so close I can hear their torches!”
“Hey, I’m fresh out of stronger transmitters, and we’re having a hard enough time keeping them from peeling off toward the city as it is. If you’re going to be our bait, you’ll have to be up close and personal.”
“I’m a goddamn VectorCorp agent! I’m a trained technician, and I’ve got a degree in business management! My job description is legally tracking down and eliminating habitual violators of VectorCorp policies!” He flinched as a leaping Gen-Mech’s torch hissed within centimeters of his face. “I’m not supposed to be bait!”
“You should’ve thought of that before you installed a transmitter in your skull.” Silo switched from the main cannon to the smaller plasma guns and picked off a pair of flying Gen-Mechs that Ronzone had failed to notice. “And there’s no need to cuss. We’re all in this together.”
He ducked inside briefly to avoid a piece of former robot. “It doesn’t feel that way to me!”
Ronzone reluctantly stuck his head back out and watched through squinted eyes as the stampeding robots trailed just barely behind the tank. Every few seconds one of them would lift off on a set of repulsors or thrusters stolen from some manner of vehicle or built from the parts of fallen robots, but Silo was quick to pick those off. When they gathered into a cluster and prepared to launch a flightless robot toward the tank, Silo would blast the dense mound of robots with the main cannon. This tactic had been going on for twenty-five horrifying minutes. Escaping the robots, at least for a while, would be a simple task, but that wasn’t Silo’s goal. Her goal was to occupy them, to keep them from finding and feasting on any of the scattered cities and industrial zones on the planet. This was much more difficult. The robots varied greatly in speed, so she constantly had to loop around and backtrack to pick off or wrangle together any stragglers. Until half an hour ago she’d been able to toss down powerful communicators to draw them together from a safe distance, then blast them once they were a solid target. If she’d been lucky, she might have wiped them all out in this way, but unfortunately any given piece of bait never seemed to attract all of the robots in an area, there were always at least a few that kept their distance, and those would retreat and rebuild. Finally their supply of transmitters ran out, except for the one in the VC agent’s head.
“This is a waste of time! There have got to be more clusters of robots.”
“There are six other clusters, but this is the only one threatening a population center.”
“All we’re doing is delaying the inevitable!”
“You’re talking to a career soldier. Delaying the inevitable is my job… Hang on. Something’s up.”
A moment later it became clear that the robots weren’t nearly as interested in the tank as they had been. The group was beginning to slow down, finally stopping and splitting into a series of catapult mounds. Silo looked up and spotted the reason for the change. Above them, the SOB was slowly approaching the surface. It came to a stop, and a moment later climbed a few dozen meters more to avoid a steadily increasing stream of hurled robots. It was clear the Gen-Mechs couldn’t care less about anything but the SOB now.
“About time he showed up,” Silo said, allowing the tank to coast to a stop. “Any chance you could contact him on your communicator?”
“Way ahead of you.” His eyes wandered a bit as he navigated menus. “Alexander! You listen to me! I will never forget that it was your fault I got dragged into this! … No I can’t put Silo or Garotte on! I haven’t seen that guy in days, and I can’t exactly hand Silo the microphone. … Silo, he says those crates on the belly of the ship are from someone named Karter. He says they’re strong enough bait to attract every last Gen-Mech on the planet once they get ahold of them and… and a lot of complicated and highly dubious reasoning about what he claims will save the day.”
“What does he need us to do?” Silo asked.
“What do you need Silo to do? … He wants to know how spread out they are.”
“We’ve been doing our best to keep them wrangled, but they’ve got a good three hundred kilometer spread by now.”
“Three hundred kilometer radius. … He says lead the way to as near to the center as you can get, and get there as fast as you can.”
“That’s a roger,” Silo said, taking one last shot at the mass of robots before angling the trusty tank toward the north.
Behind them, the SOB deployed its tractor beam and snatched one of the Gen-Mechs out of midair before following. The two vehicles tore across the landscape, Silo leading the way with periodic checks to the quantum scanner to be sure she was on track. It only took seven minutes to reach the right place. And once there Lex brought the SOB low and popped the cockpit. He let the ship remain a few meters from the ground but climbed out and stood on the body of it. The struggling Gen-Mech was still clamped in his tractor beam, unable to escape but still running in place, desperate for the contents of the crates.
“My bosses told me you were trouble, but they didn’t say you were a goddamn tornado of disaster,” growled Ronzone as he climbed out of the tank.
“That’s odd. You’d think that would have been the first thing they’d have told you,” Lex said, hopping down to the tank. “And who are you, by the way? Your voice sounds familiar.”
“VectorCorp Special Agent Chris Ronzone.”
“Chris… Chris Ronzone… oh, right, I remember now.”
Without warning, Lex reared back and drove his fist into the agent’s nose. The blow sent him stumbling back until he fell off the edge of the hovertank and landed with a splat on the muddy marsh below.
Lex stepped to the edge of the ship and jabbed a finger down at Chris, shaking his other hand as it recovered from the punch. “You fired me twice! You’re the guy who’s trying to ruin my life!”
Ronzone groaned, holding his nose. Silo stepped over beside Lex and looked down at the squirming, cursing agent.
“Bet that felt good,” she said.
“Yes and no,” Lex said, massaging his knuckles. “But enough indulging my thirst for vengeance. We’ve got, what, twenty minutes before we’ve got robots to worry about again?”
“Hard to say. It’s been harder and harder to get those things to follow us. Unless the particularly speedy ones that we just left behind decided to keep chasing us, it might be hours before any of the nearby bots even turn in our direction.”
“If Karter’s right, then they’ll all be coming for us. Now let’s assume they are. How soon until the first ones get here, and how soon until the last ones get here?”
Silo climbed into the tank and fetched the scanner. She gave it a quick sweep around them. “I’d give us five minutes for the closest fast ones. Close to two hours for the farthest fast ones. The slow ones and damaged ones could take a day or two.”
“That’s not the best news I’ve heard.”
Chris, finally recovering from the blow to the face and the resulting fall, was trying to get to his feet. “I’ll have your ass for that, Alexander. That’s assault! Now I won’t even have to work to get you locked up. I’ve got witnesses.”
“Uh-huh. I’ll remember that when I’m deciding how hard I want to work to save your life.” He pulled out his slidepad and tapped the cargo controls. Sturdy restraining clamps and straps disengaged, and the crates fell to the ground, sizzling as they struck and sending a wave of muck all over Ronzone.
“What the hell!?” he griped.
Lex ignored the complaint and climbed down to the ground, sloshing ankle deep into the mud and gingerly popping the lid of one of the still-scalding-hot cases. Inside were dozens of neatly packed gadgets, each one slightly larger than a marking pen.
“So this is what Karter came up with?” Silo said.
“Yep. All we need to do is let the Gen-Mechs chow down on them. After a few minutes, every one of the robots with one of these installed will start broadcasting a signal that’ll make the others tear it apart, then the whole thing repeats with the next bot.”
“And this was Karter’s plan? I would have expected something a little more pyrotechnic out of him,” Silo said.
“The important thing is that it works. Fingers crossed, everybody.”
Lex grabbed a handful of the devices and tossed them in the direction of the tractored robot. The Gen-Mech skillfully snapped one of the components from the air and immediately went to work. The bundle of cables and electronics that made up the Gen-Mech’s core emerged and turned a few of its tool-equipped tendrils on itself, removing panels, severing wires, and ejecting a cobbled-together hunk of circuitry. In the void left behind, it incorporated the Poison Pill with a welding laser and a half-dozen spidery manipulator arms. With startling speed and efficiency, the procedure was over and the robot seemed to become considerably less aggressive in its struggles, as though its current hunger had been sated.
“Is that it?” Ronzone asked, wiping off as much of the filth as he could. “That’s your world-saving plan? You gave the thing an upgrade?”
“How do we know if it worked?” Silo asked.
“If in five minutes that pile of crates is the epicenter of a robot kill-fest, then it worked.”
Ronzone scowled at Lex. “So if it didn’t work, we’re all going to turn into a cloud of radioactive vapor as soon as the Teeker military can get their act together, and if it did work, every single one of the kill-crazy killbots is going to be heading straight for us?”
“Close. Even if it did work, we might still get vaporized if the Teekers don’t agree that it worked,” Lex said, scooping up a few handfuls of the components and pocketing them. “Better hang on to some of these in case I need to poison a few separate clusters.”
Ronzone glared at Lex for a moment with a twitching eye. “How are you still alive if you think that is a good plan!?”
“Good friends and quick thinking, mostly,” Lex said, reaching up to take Silo’s hand. She hauled him easily to the top of the tank again, then did the same for Ronzone.
“Don’t forget luck,” Michella called down from the SOB.
“No. Luck is not my friend,” Lex said. “So where’s Garotte?”
“No word from him since he decided to pop the VectorCorp monitors to slow down the fleet,” Silo said. Her voice had the steadiness of someone being very mindful not to let any concern show. “His mission has been to keep the bombs from dropping. They haven’t dropped, so he’s on the job. In a mission like that, no unnecessary communication.”
“Well, unless you’ve got enough firepower to melt down every last one of these robots once they’re in one place, I have a feeling communication is going to be necessary soon.”
“I’m afraid I’m fresh out of the big stuff, hon. The local military’s cupboard is bare when it comes to tactical and strategic weaponry,” Silo said.
“Then at least some bombs are going to have to drop.”
“Ronzone here’s going to have to work on your com, then. It turns out VC keeps spiking the communications to keep them dead and thus keep the robots from flooding population centers. He’s got a built-in communicator, but with main communications down it’s got to do direct connections, and it hasn’t got the oomph to talk to anything more than a few dozen kilometers away. The SOB’s radio should be able to handle it, if he authorizes it.” She glanced at the scanner in her hand, then swept it around a bit and looked to the horizon. “He’s going to have to hurry. You definitely got their attention.”
“Ronzone,” Lex said, “do what you have to do and do it fast.”
The VectorCorp agent stood with his mouth half-open for a few seconds. One could almost see his mind feverishly working on some way to refuse to help Lex without appearing to be some combination of smug, spiteful, evil, and stupid. Finally he gave up the fight and squinted his eyes. After a few seconds of delivering commands with his implant, he growled, “Your communicator is authorized to ignore communication spikes. But only until I change my auth code. Don’t go thinking you’ve got some special privilege forever.”
“I’ll try not to get used to it,” Lex said. “Could you give me a boost, Silo?”
She cupped her hands and, when he stepped into them, practically launched him to the waiting SOB.
“Remember, the goal is to get all of the robots, all of the robots, into one big dog pile. They should completely ignore you, so all you have to do is pick off the ones who seem like they might get away.”
“That’ll be the flyers, then. Can do. What’ll you do after you get Garotte on the com?”
“I guess I’ll snag one of the poisoned Gen-Mechs and take it on a tour around Movi trying to round up and corral any stragglers. This plan hinges on getting every single one of these things.”
“Well, get moving then. Those things are getting close enough to hear. Best to give them some space.”
Lex settled into the pilot’s seat and made ready to depart, squinting against the low sun.
“Hang on, Lex,” Michella said. “I think I should stay with Silo. If the only communicator they have is the one in the agent’s head, being on the surface will give us better contact with each other. I’ll take Squee, too.”
Lex eyed her warily, then looked at the vague form of an approaching horde of robots.
“I honestly don’t know which is safer, inside the SOB or in the tank, so you may as well,” he said, helping her out and down.
Michella stood unsteadily on the tank while Lex put some distance between the SOB and the mound of pills, though he angled the tractor beam and its struggling prisoner down to keep it near the pile. From his new elevation, he didn’t need a fancy scanner to know the pills were doing their job. Shifting, shapeless mobs of robots were charging in from all around them.
“This is going to be a heck of a thing…” he said, eyes sweeping across the approaching chaos.
“Promise me you’ll get at least one tight flyby,” Michella said over the communicator. She’d never stopped reviewing the footage they had so far, and was now beginning to remotely tweak and adjust the settings on external cameras that had survived entry. “This is the sort of stuff people need to see.”
“I’ve got a feeling I won’t be able to avoid tight flybys.”
Lex opened up the menu for the SOB’s communicator and was pleased to find that it was indeed fully functional and with a few new frequency and codec settings available. He made a mental note to be choosy about his words until he could get Karter and Ma to make sure Ronzone hadn’t done anything sneaky while he was accessing it. The Declaration’s communicator was listed as available, so he selected it and hoped for the best. Almost immediately the connection established, but rather than the sound of Garotte’s voice, Lex was greeted with a text readout: “Awaiting acknowledgment.” It was a message that one seldom encountered these days, mostly because it might as well read “Your message is currently being screened.” Most people found either sneakier or more direct ways to avoid unwanted callers. Fifteen seconds passed before the message was replaced with a video feed of Garotte.
The spy was looking calm. More so than he ever had. Garotte was always one who looked confident and at ease in any situation, but at this moment he seemed positively serene.
“Lex, my boy. So wonderful to hear from you,” he said.
“Garotte. Are you okay?”
“I am quite well at present, though I can’t say much for the immediate future. The Declaration and I are in what you might call a compromising situation…”