part0035

The street was silent except for the clacks and whirs of the proxy and the strained whine of the machine gun’s belt feed mechanism. The sunlight was a blinding halo around the proxy. Meyers froze for a second, unable to take his eyes off the gun, suddenly convinced that it would fire, and he would be killed.

The gun belt feed mechanism whined and sputtered, and the spell was broken.

He crossed the street as quickly as he could. The proxy pivoted, tracking with the gun, and the strained whine grew louder before degenerating into a series of grinding and popping noises. He ran into the alley just west of the proxy and leaned against the eastern wall. Sucking in the fresh air, thinking through everything facing him, he tried to compartmentalize the pain in his ribs.

He had to think. He had to plan.

Clacks and whirrs, and the unsteady creak of bowed, mechanical legs: The proxy was coming for him.

Meyers pushed off the wall and ran toward the south exit, where a dirt road awaited him. He was gasping and wheezing before he reached the end. Two teenagers stepped around the western end of the alley, assault rifles in their hands. He froze, too late seeing their mouths open in shock, the way they held the guns as if they’d never fired one before. Behind him, the grinding and popping again became a strained whine, then a grumbling, mechanical clicking. Meyers dropped, and the machine gun let out a terrible coughing sound that became a short series of booms. Bullets thudded into the ground to his right, then tracked up along the western wall, passing through as if the material were paper.

Blood misted around the boys, and their guns clattered to the ground. The boys dropped, one shedding an arm, the other his head.

And then the grinding and popping sounds returned.

Meyers got to his feet, fighting back screams of fury and pain. Tears flowed down his cheeks. He reached the end of the alley before another coughing sounded, but this time, it was followed by an explosion.

The south road was still littered with corpses. Reyes’s men. Meyers edged east along the apartment building’s south wall and stopped at the alleyway.

Several men stood in the alley, guns held at the ready. Meyers recognized Beniam.

“Get out of there.” Meyers’s voice was a hiss, his wave weaker than he intended. It got Beniam’s attention.

“The robot.” Beniam jogged to the back of the alley, stopping at the sight of the boys, then looking down, shoulders sagging.

“That gun it has, it can punch through my armor. Without armor…” Meyers shook his head.

Beniam wiped away tears, slow, resigned.

“You knew them?”

“My nephews, Abune and Yakob.”

“I’m sorry.” Meyers didn’t know what else to say. Nothing would bring them back.

“What can we do?” Beniam pointed back up the alley. “You have nearly broken their spirit. We want to help.”

“Reyes still has men out there. Keep them off of us. Get them out of your area.”

“His gun-haulers, they will do just as this robot.”

“They’re trying to get to a couple of my people, up near Farmers Road.”

Beniam looked at the other men. “Then we will drive Reyes and his men from our territory.”

The other men raised their assault rifles. “For Mattias!”

“Northwest,” Meyers said. “Go wide, take Addis Ababa, and stay off Cáceres Road.”

He waited until they were beyond the boys’ corpses, then moved into the alley, slow and careful. At the laundry room door, he stepped over the corpse. The water was still running from the broken pipe and swirling down the drain. He paused at the door to the hallway, listening. The proxy was still out there, somewhere off to the west, maybe still at the entry to the alley. Meyers caught his breath and tiptoed through the hallway until he could see the foyer. The street was visible through the hole the flyer had created when it crashed.

Meyers leaned toward the flyer. Despite all the damage it had suffered, the wheels on the flyer looked intact. In fact, the driver’s side tires, which were all he could see from his position, looked like they might still be inflated. There was no indication the fuel cells or any of the batteries were cracked. He ran through some basic math, estimating the flyer and proxy’s probable mass. It didn’t look promising, but neither did anything else.

He hunched as low as his cracked rib would let him, then duckwalked through the foyer, stopping at the hole in the front wall. When he didn’t hear the proxy coming closer, he craned his neck and stretched until he could see the proxy. It had the machine gun propped against the front wall of the next building over, the belt feed mechanism popped open. It seemed totally absorbed in whatever it was doing.

Meyers reached out until he could touch the side of the flyer, only taking his eyes off the proxy to search for the door release. He popped the release, and the door rose slightly.

The proxy didn’t react.

Meyers belly-crawled under the door, grimacing from the pain, then he popped the belt lock on the driver. The mechanism had been damaged in the crash and refused to come free. He squeezed and punched and pulled until the lock finally released, then he caught the belt and fed it up into the receptacle.

The proxy still seemed absorbed in the machine gun’s workings.

Meyers pulled the driver’s corpse from the seat, marveling at the way the blood had mostly drained out of the corpse’s back and pooled on the bottom of the seat. He dropped the driver onto the foyer floor, waited until he was sure the proxy wasn’t aware of what was going on, then climbed into the seat. The blood sloshed and spilled over the seat edges as he settled in.

He pulled the belt down and tried to lock it. The lock didn’t want to catch. After three tries, he simply slammed the belt into place, and the lock clicked. He let out a relieved sigh, checked on the proxy again, then examined the console. It was a fairly basic system, like the ones he’d flown before. A red light still blinked a warning that all fan blades were broken. He didn’t need the blades for what he had in mind.

There was a physical gear shift to engage the mechanism that converted the fans to what amounted to flywheels. Gears and belts engaged beneath the chassis, and the flyer—now a simple crawler—rocked.

An indicator lit up, showing the vehicle was at twenty percent potential power. Batteries, fuel cells, solar collection…he wasn’t going to get huge performance from the vehicle.

The proxy turned, slowly, awkwardly, but it still turned.

Meyers set the accelerator at maximum, but he didn’t engage the gears to use the stored energy. Not yet. He needed the energy to continue building.

The proxy grabbed the machine gun by the barrel and held it up like a bat.

The indicator showed twenty-five percent. That was going to have to do. Meyers engaged the gears, and the crawler lunged forward, a ball shot from a cannon, throwing him back against the seat. The crawler sped over the five or so meters separating it and the proxy, until front end met knee joints.

Meyers was thrown forward against the belt, which surprisingly held. His arms slammed against the steering controls. Even through his armor, he felt the impact. The crawler’s rear end lifted off the ground, then fell back, and blood flew up into the air.

He looked up. The last of the flyer’s armor and windshield were gone, parts on the hood, most sprayed over the street. The proxy was on its back, meters away, one leg completely ruined, the other’s mechanisms exposed. Its good arm lay at an odd angle beneath it.

Meyers fought free of the belt, then he crawled out of the vehicle, aching everywhere. The proxy seemed dead, but he’d assumed that before.

He reached back for his CAWS-5, remembered not being able to slam it into its brace, then headed down the alley to collect an assault rifle off the dead boys. He took what magazines he could find, then returned to the proxy, lining up for a clear shot at the exposed joint mechanisms. He fired three bursts into each joint, smiling at the sparks and the skitter of debris.

“Lonny?” Nunoz said something beneath his breath. “Um, Colonel?”

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“Good and bad news.”

Meyers shook his head in disbelief. “I could use some good news.”

“The Condor is up. I programmed it to circle Turning Point at one kilometer until it receives other commands or runs down to twenty percent power, then to return here.”

“Great.” Meyers scanned for the Condor’s feed. “And the bad?”

“Zero-Zero-Two. Software’s done, but she won’t start. It looks like we got a short at startup, fried the altimeter and inertial nav circuits. Could be a lingering effect of the bad system software.”

“How long to fix it?”

“The module’s behind a pretty tight panel, not one of the easier—”

“What about moving the communications module from Zero-Zero-Two to Zero-Zero-One? Take that altimeter module offline before you start it up, maybe prevent the short?”

“Yeah. We were thinking about that. It should be quicker. But if that doesn’t clear the short…”

“We should be airborne in five minutes if this works.”

“We needed you ten minutes ago.”

Meyers stepped away from the building front and waved his good arm over his head. “Corporal Gerhardt?”

Gerhardt laughed. “Shit. Sounded like a crawler crash down there, Colonel.”

“Just a little one. We should have the Condor in a few minutes. I’ll push the feed out on the network when I get it.”

“Could’ve used that earlier. Norman’s team is pinned down. Walked right into a group of Reyes’s men coming onto the soccer field.”

“What about McNutt?”

“Still pinned down. I’ve picked off a couple of the shooters, but I’ve been focused on those haulers. They backed off after I took out the lead driver again, but they’re getting two guys ready to run for the lead truck. Don’t think I can get both. They’ll be up on that building before too long.”

Meyers connected to Perkins. His video showed he was standing in an alleyway, facing a building front. “Private Perkins, where are you?”

“Right across the street from the warehouse, Colonel. I can see the hole in the roof. They’ve got someone moving around. See him?”

One of Reyes’s men came around the west side of the warehouse, gun slung over his back. He seemed to be looking for a way into the building.

“Those haulers aren’t far away.”

“I know, sir.” Perkins held a knife up and leaned forward. “I was hoping I wouldn’t have to do this again.”

Meyers watched in silence as Perkins raced across the street, catching Reyes’s man mid-turn, using the momentum of the run to knock him into the building front, then bearing him down to the ground. He was shorter than Perkins but muscular. Perkins used the angle and his weight until, finally, the knife blade scratched the man’s throat. That brought on greater struggle, but the man’s punches were ineffective against Perkins’s armor. Perkins kept his weight on the blade. The man’s desperate breathing became almost a whimper, then the blade sank into his throat and blood sprayed up. The desperation intensified, and the whimper became a scream, but a twist of the knife severed the trachea, and the screaming became a whisper of escaping air.

Perkins got up and cleaned the blade on the man’s shirt with shaking hands. After a few seconds during which Meyers could hear deep breaths, Perkins took the dead man’s assault rifle and ammunition, then ran to the east side of the building. A few seconds later, his armor’s grips were hauling him to the rooftop.

“Private Perkins, I need to check in on McNutt.”

“I’m okay, sir. Heading for the hole now.”

Meyers switched over to McNutt’s feed. “Corporal McNutt, any good news?”

“Sun’s shining,” McNutt said. “I think I gave one of the bastards a face full of lead. That’s about it.”

“Perkins is at the warehouse. He’s on the roof.”

“We can’t move, or we’re dead.”

The Condor’s feed finally showed up. Meyers took control of it and began tweaking its flight path.

“I’ve got the Condor now. It’s flying in from the northeast, so I have to keep it up high, where those haulers won’t notice it. I’m seeing them now. Okay. Looks like they’re moving again. We’ve got a Javelin maybe three minutes out from launch.”

“Too bad we couldn’t transfer some of the weapons to the Condor.”

Even one would have been worth it. Just a missile set for proximity, something the Condor could have dropped or even carried in. It would have been enough to finish off the haulers.

“I’ll push the feed out to everyone as soon as I have good video.”

“Thanks. Don’t mind us. We’ll just get our tans for now.”

Paxton’s request for a connection popped up, and Meyers accepted. “Colonel?” Paxton’s voice was subdued and deeper. “Ramawat’s gone.”

“I was checking on the wounded for Banh. When I came back…”

“Didn’t say a thing. Took three of the MARCOS.”

“Shit. Mattias’s men agreed to help us. They’re going to come around from Addis Ababa Street. The way Ramawat talked about Starling—”

“You think he’d try to hurt her?”

Meyers thought about it. It didn’t seem like it would accomplish anything. “No.”

“I don’t see it, sir. Ramawat’s a different kind of problem than that.”

Meyers flexed and relaxed his hands. Pain oozed down from his collarbone and shoulders. “I hope you’re right.” The Condor’s video was exactly where Meyers wanted it. “I’m pushing the Condor’s feed out. You should have it coming through…now.”

The soccer field filled the left of the display. Meyers quickly tagged the two groups of Reyes’s men. The haulers were turning off Guevara Highway onto Farmers Road. Meyers tagged them, and his heart raced. He searched around, found Norman’s fire team and McNutt’s team and tagged them.

Suddenly, he saw another group, a fire team, moving north at a sprint along the highway. He pushed the camera in as tight as he could.

“Carl, are you seeing this? On Guevara Highway, about twenty meters south of McNutt.”

“Is that Ramawat?”

“I think so.” Meyers brought McNutt into the channel. “Corporal, you’ve got—”

“I see them, Colonel. Reyes’s men do, too. Taking our opportunity to say hello back.”

Gunfire. McNutt’s position. Two of Reyes’s men flopping, then going still. McNutt and his team moving from cover, laying down fire. Reyes’s men breaking, running. Norman’s team, free of fire from the north, now able to return fire on Reyes’s other team to the south. More gunfire, this from the west.

Meyers brought up the broadcast channel. “Check your fire on the west flank. Those are friendlies. Repeat, west flank of soccer field, friendlies.”