The Tiger was pounding up the stairs, invisible in the darkness no matter how much noise it made. I pulled my lit chem light from inside my vest and dropped it on the landing four steps below me. Tyson took off up the steps, Kwan hard on his heels. I followed as fast as I could, climbing the stairs backward so that I could watch the pool of light, which now that the cloaks were dead was back to a blue color. The stairs shook as the monster leapt up them, clearing whole sections of stairs with every bound.
I had made it to the next landing when the Tiger landed right over my light. The ChemJet shuddered in my hands before I was even aware I was firing. A three or four-round burst. I was just looking through the dead sight, using the folding backup sights as best I could in the dark.
Two of my rounds hit the Tiger, ripping right through both sides of the bot, shards of concrete spalling out from under its black-striped bulk. One or maybe both rounds must have damaged its front leg apparatus, as it collapsed forward onto its head. Suddenly fans were blowing down alongside me and a bright light lit up the Tiger as Rikki arrived.
My last squeeze of the trigger was just a soft feathering, just enough to send a pair of rocket-propelled bullets though the spot on its armored torso where it kept its CPU.
I turned back to tell the others to run but they were gone, the pounding of their feet finally reaching my gunshot-deafened ears. Shit, I was getting left behind. Turning, I pushed my tired and tensed-up legs into a full run, my speed starting to pick up after the first half dozen steps. Leaping two and three stairs a time, I still wasn’t catching up to the special operators with their head start, but I also didn’t seem to be falling farther behind either.
Below us, the ground floor door burst off its hinges and something really large hit the stairs. I had a really bad feeling that either War had recovered from the EMP burst or that one of its siblings was on our trail.
Sudden, eye-searing blue light ripped through the darkness, a lance of light the diameter of a shot glass that came up at a diagonal right through the concrete exterior wall. The Tank-Killer had elevated its laser cannon and was firing where it thought we were. Probably based on the thing below us. Standard military multi-domain battle space integration.
“Incendiary mine ignition now,” Rikki suddenly announced, and a bloom of sun-hot light flared from somewhere on the stairs below. The sounds of the monster pursuing us faltered and slowed but still kept coming. Then came the wine of UAVs entering the stairwell.
“Clear for flashbang,” I told my drone, pulling the last of my modified flashbangs from my vest. The pin came out and I dropped the grenade straight down the open space of the stairwell.
Rikki slid over above the stairs just as the grenade went off with a roar that shook the building.
“Suggest accelerated pace,” Rikki said as the vibrations on the stair treads warned that War’s pursuit continued.
Having already reached that conclusion, I was racing and leaping, the big Decimator easily keeping pace. My ears rang from the shots and explosion, but I didn’t think the UAV whine was still present.
Then another beam of blue shot through the space I had just vacated, melting the metal railing to red-hot liquid steel in a microsecond. Booted feet continued to pound up above and I poured on the speed, trying to outpace the Tank-Killer’s aiming algorithm.
The running and the fighting distracted me enough that I had lost count of which floor we were passing, but we couldn’t be any more than halfway to our floor. The enemy knew we were here and all element of surprise was gone. Plum Blossom could easily escape the building long before we got to the eighteenth floor, leaving us to die a useless death. My brain was racing to come up with a plan, any plan, to keep Plum Blossom’s attention and presence here in the building.
But what do you bait a half-ton murder bot with? What does a merciless killer machine want other than to kill people? And then I had it—the germ of an idea. Maybe some people were more important to kill than others.
“Rikki, what drones are you sensing above and below us?” I said between gasps of air.
“Drone labeled War is pursuing from below, accompanied by four Cranes and two Wolves. EMP burst damaged other drones in front of 55 Broadway, leaving them currently disabled. War is functioning at greatly reduced level due to EMP circuit damage and incendiary mine damage.
“Above, twenty-six UAVs of mixed varieties have entered building through breached windows on seventeenth floor, and are currently, based on audio signals, attempting to breach the stairwell door.
“Eighteenth floor currently occupied by CThree and two drones of type similar to Pestilence and War. Additional ground and air units are converging upon this location.”
“Does Plum Blossom know that me and you are in the building?”
“Unknown. Surmise that probability is high that CThree has this information.”
“Are we still high value targets for Zone drones?”
“Probability ninety-eight percent.”
So, there was my answer. Plum could have left through a window or an elevator shaft at anytime. It hadn’t. Rikki and I, it seemed, were the perfect bait.
“Gunny! Tyson! You’ll have UAVs incoming from above at any moment.”
“Roger that!” was the response from one of them, the Gunny I think. My ears were still messed up.
“How close is War?”
“Approximately two floors below but gaining at the rate of .4 floors per minute.”
“Yeah, I’m going as fast as I can. Give me an estimate of time till it reaches the next landing just above us,” I said, eye locked on said landing.
“Seventeen seconds after you step off it.”
I pulled two of my last few homemade goodies from my vest, a fire bomb that used jellied white gas, and a plain old pipe bomb. Fumbling out an old-fashioned British lifeboat match, I struck it and lit both fuses. Then I set them on the landing and took off again.
“AJ, you must accelerate. You will not be at minimum safe distance when detonation occurs. You have eleven seconds.”
I reached way down deep and pushed myself to pick up speed, desperately jumping stairs three at a time in an effort to get away. The railing shook harder than before as War gained on me.
“Detonation in three, two, one…”
He was off by a second, the explosion of light, heat, sound and pressure wave reaching me a moment after his countdown finished. It took me off my feet.
Rikki shot out from the stairs to hover over the open space in the middle, his nose pointed down, tail fans in reverse to hold him in place.
“Status of War?”
He paused, then his e-mag gun fired, the resulting thunk of metal on metal sounding just as a cable came slashing up through the air. It just missed Rikki’s suddenly lifting form, instead impacting and wrapping around the railing in front of me. Instantly I heard the whine of a motor and the cable went visibly taut, vibrating with strain.
On reflex, I shoved the ChemJet over the railing, muzzle pointed down, and triggered the rest of the magazine.
Then a massive form was rising up to my level, the cable wound tight to its torn-up metal body.
War had me dead to rights, although the big bot looked really bad. Half of its upper body was a melted, slagged mess, bits of burning jelly were all over its side and back, and it had what I assumed were a half dozen ChemJet rifle holes in it.
Rikki fired another e-mag round into the melted top, but War just sat there, bound to the railing by its cable. Only one of its body segments seemed able to still spin, and a sharp blade suddenly sprang out from the arm on that segment.
I pulled my 9mm Magnum from the chest holster and shot the cable two, three, four times till it parted with a high-pitched ting. War fell backward but I could see that one of its four walking legs was still clamped onto the nearest post of the railing, so hard that the metal post had deformed. So I shot that too—the post, that is. Emptied the rest of the magazine, twelve rounds, shooting first at the base of the post then just above the hydraulically powered talon that clutched the crumpled metal.
The high-speed pistol bullets might not hurt the heavy armor of the bot, but they sliced through the mild steel of the railing post like butter. My gun locked open on empty, the pipe wiggled and held, then suddenly, with another loud ping, let go, sending the big bot plummeting down the stairwell center.
I heard it bouncing off concrete and the metal railing all the way to the bottom, where it made a crash that shook the stairwell.
“Bot War is effectively nonfunctional,” Rikki announced.
“I shacking hope so!” I said, starting back up the awful stairs, reloading first my rifle and then my pistol as I climbed.