c.21

“Crap,” Mark said.

“What?”

“Security alert on the computer system. I’m blanked out. My downloads have been halted.”

“Did you do that?”

He shook his head. “I think the element of surprise has just been blown.”

*   *   *

From her position, Kyla saw the blackened revolving door begin to turn. A moment later, two figures—shiny, inhuman—emerged, one after another, from it. They marched quickly from the main door toward the corridor with the stairs and elevators, not even looking sideways at the reception desk as they passed it. Mark and Jenna remained crouched low beneath.

Nor did the robots look up, and Kyla couldn’t target their most vulnerable points: their eye sockets. Plus, they were moving, which made an eye shot more difficult. “Hey!” she shouted.

Both assault robots stopped and looked up. Their plasma assault rifles came up.

Kyla’s sighting reticle found the right eye socket of one of them. With slow, sure pressure, she squeezed the trigger.

The Barrett kicked hard at her shoulder, the impact made far worse by the fact that she had nothing but her own body to brace the weapon against for this steeply angled shot.

Both assault robots opened fire. She wrenched herself back and away, falling to the walkway carpet.

The balcony wall above her shuddered and imploded as plasma fire hit it. Heated plaster rained down on her. Kyla rolled over, keeping as low to the floor as she could manage, and began crawling to her left.

*   *   *

Jenna and Mark stood. Just ahead of them were two assault robots, one of them already falling, its skull a deformed ruin. It still depressed the trigger of its plasma rifle, shooting through the glass wall into the restaurant. Ancient chairs and tables exploded, their remains on fire.

Mark and Jenna fired, the blasts from their plasma rifles striking the surviving robot, charring its back and shoulders, propelling it forward. They poured fire into it until their respective batteries ran dry and both the robot and lobby floor were a pockmarked, blackened field of char.

Mark swapped in a new battery. “Get their weapons. We’ll probably need them.”

“You get their weapons. I’m not going out there.

Mark gritted his teeth and set his rifle aside. Impulses of gallantry tended to get people killed. He vaulted over the countertop and dashed forward, scooping up the rifle from Kyla’s kill.

A third and a fourth robot came in through the revolving door not thirty feet away.

*   *   *

Earl, at the back of the group, braced himself as the metallic footsteps grew louder and louder. Then their source skidded into the bend in the hallway, its momentum nearly carrying it into the wall.

It was an assault robot.

And of the five of them, only Earl held anything but one of the precious T-tasers needed to take down the T-X. In his hands was his favorite antimachine weapon: a rocket-propelled grenade.

He shouted, “Down!” And the others complied, hitting the carpet—all but Glitch, who merely turned sideways to put his back against the wall, giving Earl all the room he needed.

The assault robot brought its weapon to bear as Earl depressed his trigger. Then the robot disappeared in a smoke cloud and tremendous boom as the grenade hit it. Earl felt a blow to his ears as if someone had struck both of them with baseball bats. Heat and smoke washed over him.

Then the assault robot, charred, its plasma rifle gone, charged forward out of the smoke cloud.

Glitch tossed his T-taser backward, not looking to see if Earl caught it. Earl dropped his RPG launcher and caught the heavier, bulkier weapon. Glitch leaped forward, his foot coming down precariously close to Sato’s head. Then he was past Ten and Sato.

The two robots crashed into one another, half a ton of machinery and gear meeting at a combined forty miles per hour. They spun sideways into the wall to the right, smashing half through it. Beyond them, whole portions of wall and ceiling were shattered from the force of Earl’s grenade attack.

*   *   *

Mark continued his run, angling to the left instead of straight ahead toward the second downed robot, and leaped. He felt searing heat cross over the back of his leg as he cleared the top of the fountain’s lip. He plunged into the water and skidded along the fountain’s bottom, his movement scraping coins along ahead of him.

He rolled over onto his back, bringing his face out of the water, still a couple of inches below the level of the stone lip, and heard the shriek of plasma charges hitting the fountain exterior.

Then that plasma chatter was joined by more: Jenna, shooting from the registration desk. Mark, timing it by instinct, sat up and fired—spraying his plasma discharges into the backs of the two robots as they turned to fire on Jenna. She was out of sight but their plasma discharges were taking the stone-lined registration desk to pieces. It would be gone within seconds.

Mark’s shots jerked the robots, burned black scores into their armor plating, caused them to stagger forward. Neither fell. Then there was a tremendous bell-like ringing noise and the head of one of them rocked to the side.

A shot from above, Kyla back in the action. That robot’s skull seemed undamaged, but it still staggered and began to fall.

The other turned back toward Mark. He ducked underwater again.

*   *   *

Paul saw her first, Eliza, dressed in a pantsuit in shades of burnt orange, enter the bend of the corridor. She shot a look at him, at the others, at the fight between the other two robots, and kept walking.

Into the half-ruined wall directly ahead of her. Through it.

“This way!” Paul shouted and ducked back into the operating theater. He turned in the direction of that bend in the corridor.

He’d read the report on the Hell-Hounds’ encounter with the T-X. He knew her. She was programmed for—or had learned—oblique tactical reasoning and deception.

Eliza, her hand already formed into its plasma weapon configuration, smashed through the wall straight ahead of him.

He fired, left trigger only, and felt his T-taser jolt as the harpoon left it. It flashed toward her—

With her left hand, she caught it by the head. She held it out to show him. “Surprise,” she said.

Paul flicked his weapon up and sideways. The cable trailing from the harpoon to its nose looped up and over, settled across her plasma weapon.

Paul pressed the second trigger.

Eliza, her face going blank, spasmed where she stood. Her plasma cannon, angled toward the ceiling, went off.

*   *   *

Mark saw the top of the fountain lip burn away. Superheated pieces of marble dropped into the water on his side, sending up hissing plumes of steam.

Then the fountain lip gave way in one large chunk, the stone falling away, water following it. Mark was swept along with the water, spilling out onto the lobby floor.

As he went, he fired, his plasma shots catching the assault robot in the knees, ankles.

The robot fell, face toward him. Mark slid straight to it, still firing, and from a distance of two feet saw his shots burn their way into its skull.

He stood up, slipping on the wet floor. The robot still twitched, but no longer responded to his presence.

He moved to stand over the other robot and poured fire down onto it until its head was gone, the floor beneath it a smoking ruin.

Then he glared over to where Jenna stood behind what was left of the reception desk. “Next time, you go out there!”

Eyes wide, she shook her head.

The black windows above the revolving doors shattered in as a Hunter-Killer crashed through.

*   *   *

Portions of the ceiling in the operating theater crashed down and plaster dust filled the air. Paul could still see Eliza where she stood.

He felt a blow and staggered away as Earl shouldered him aside. The older man aimed Glitch’s T-taser and fired. The harpoon caught Eliza in the stomach, cutting through her false clothes and false skin.

Paul distantly heard Earl shouting, “Two away!” as the older man pressed his second trigger. Then Eliza was jerking again, now falling over on her back.

Finally remembering what was supposed to come next, Paul shucked his backpack and pulled his tools and the CPU insulator from within it.

This insulator’s aluminum case was smaller, more compact than the one Tom Carter had used days ago in Santa Fe. Carter’s workshop crew had learned from making that first one.

Now Sato was in the room and firing. Earl, composed, stepped aside and pulled another RPG from his pack.

Smoke rose from Eliza’s body. She continued to convulse.

That was expected. What wasn’t known was how long she was going to be incapacitated.

Sato shouted for Ten, who finally entered, aimed, waited. Then, when Sato nodded, he fired and pulled his second trigger.

Paul’s hearing began to return. He could hear crashing from outside in the corridor. Earl, his weapon at the ready, stepped back out into the corridor.

Eliza stopped shaking. Ten called, “Go!”

Paul leaped up, stumbled forward, and fell to his knees beside Eliza. She was motionless, her eyes open, blue crackles of light still dancing around on the end of her weapon.

He fumbled with his tool kit. It wouldn’t open; he couldn’t persuade his fingers to work right.

*   *   *

Kyla ducked involuntarily as the Hunter-Killer smashed its way into the lobby. She popped up again in time to see Mark run, skid across the wet floor, and slam into the revolving door, spinning out through it.

She hissed. He was as good as dead outside as inside. The Hunter-Killer would pursue him and drop a missile on him. Or he’d run into an oncoming force of assault robots and be cut down. His move had bought him only a couple of seconds of life—

No, it had also drawn the H-K’s attention away from where Jenna hid. The H-K rotated in place, preparing to chase Mark outside.

Kyla swore. She didn’t have any weapon ferocious enough to bring down an H-K. She was useless.

No, not quite. She looked up through the decorative pipe sculpture; it partially obscured her view, but she could see where the four main cable supports came together to meet in the center. She took aim, able at last to brace her barrel on the balcony rail. She breathed out, steadied herself for a shot at less than a range of thirty feet, and fired.

Her shot snapped the support ring that held the sculpture aloft.

The sculpture plunged, its innumerable pipes twisting and turning out of line with one another as the mass fell.

Secondary support cables, slack for decades, tightened. Designed to keep the sculpture’s pipes from actually hitting the floor and impaling hotel visitors on the lobby floor, they snapped into place with a tremendous racket of clanging and bonging.

But ends of the pipes still hammered into the Hunter-Killer’s fuselage and dropped into its ducted rotors, some plunging ten feet or more into those ducts.

The H-K’s engines howled and the machine plummeted, snapping off pipe lengths and carrying them with it. The machine crashed down onto the lobby floor two steps from the reception desk.

Jenna rolled across the ruined countertop, landed beside the H-K, and jumped atop the machine. She aimed her plasma rifle at the forward fuselage bulge, where the machine’s main CPU was housed, and fired. Shots glanced from the machine’s hull and hit the wall ahead of her, ricocheting from the lobby’s stone-lined walls, making a brilliant firework display of the air around her.

She stopped firing. Kyla could still hear the H-K trying to power up its engines, to resume flight. Jenna methodically tossed out her spent battery, replaced it with a fresh one, and began firing again. When she was through, Jenna reached into her ammunition pouch for a third battery but came up empty.

The H-K was silent, shut down completely. Smoke rose from a new gap the size of a manhole cover in the machine’s fuselage.

The revolving door rotated again and Mark entered. He looked at the wreckage, at the ruined sculpture, at Jenna, up at Kyla. He called, “Helicopter coming in.”

*   *   *

Paul tried to force himself to calm down. Consign yourself to dying at the start of every mission. That’ll keep you calm enough to shoot.

He stopped what he was doing, took a deep breath. Then another.

Ten shouted, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Shut up.” Paul opened the tool kit, then popped the latches on the aluminum case and opened it.

He’d done this drill dozens of times in practice. His subject had been a resuscitation dummy built forty years ago for paramedic and first-aid training, some of its components replaced far more recently with machinery Carter’s unit had built.

Quickly, patiently, he held the plasma cutter to Eliza’s neck and sliced open a precise trench in her liquid skin. Her skin crawled back from the incision the way it was supposed to. He set the cutter aside.

Open chest plate. Set plate aside. Find the connection points for the wires whose false data would annihilate Eliza’s ability to control her body.

Her eyes began flicking back and forth. They did not focus on any one thing. But she was rebooting.

Paul saw sweat from his face drip into her torso cavity. He ignored it. The others were talking behind him. He ignored them. There was movement behind him. He paid no attention.

Both primary data wires were attached. He reached for the POWER-ON switch in the aluminum case.

Eliza’s left hand came up for his throat.

It didn’t reach him. Another hand, male, broad, entered his field of view from the right and intercepted it. Her hand squeezed, causing the male hand to compress, to flex in what looked like an uncomfortable but not destructive way.

Paul flipped the switch.

Eliza slumped. Her eyes remained active, but her hand fell away.

“Thanks, Glitch,” Paul said.

“You are welcome.”

Paul.

Paul ignored her. “CPU insulator in place,” he said. To his own ears, his voice sounded oddly serene. “Now I’ll separate her cranial transmission gear from its main antenna.”

“Make it march,” Ten said.

You’re part machine now, Paul. We could continue that process. Make you like me, but with your own brain, your own soul, in charge of a new body.

It took Paul moments to disable the antenna and moments more to find the amber-colored apparatus, exactly where Carter had said it would be, within her stomach cavity.

“Come on, Eliza. Machines are such empiricists. You don’t believe in a soul. And you have no interest in merging our species.”

No. In making a third species. A union, the best of both our kinds. Skynet is already considering this.

Paul set the tracer aside, then picked up the delicate electromagnetic radiation detector he’d been using and went looking again. “No, it’s not. Skynet’s not considering any option but total victory. What’s happening here is that you’ve learned to calculate what it is your listener wants to hear—and then to suggest it’s possible. Even inevitable. You know what I want to know?”

What, Paul?

“If your kind gets really good at lying, will you lie to Skynet?” He found another spike of EMR energy emanating from her right foot, just under the arch. He pulled out the plasma cutter again. “And what will that eventually do to the master machine, if it can’t rely on its drones?”

Paul, please.

He extracted the second tracer, too. “Sorry, Pinocchio. I only like real girls.”

A third pass with the detector showed no radio activity beyond what was normal for a computer apparatus of Eliza’s complexity. She continued to look at him impassively, but she remained silent.

Paul rose. Glitch, Ten, and Earl remained in the room. The stretcher was set up to carry Eliza. The ceiling had crushed the operating table. Dust was still settling. “Done,” Paul said.

“Sato’s checking on the room she came from,” Ten said. “Just to make absolutely sure there isn’t another victim out there.”

“There isn’t.”

“I believe you, but we’re going to make sure.” Ten pulled his field radio from his pack. “Downstairs to upstairs, does anyone read me? Over.”

Kyla’s voice came back, “This is H-H-Two. We read you. Over.”

“Extract through garage level. Over.”

“Roger. Over.”

“Out.”

*   *   *

They moved fast up one level to the garage—to the VIP and delivery garage, it turned out.

Eliza lay on the folding stretcher from Glitch’s pack. Glitch and Sato carried it. Paul had affixed the CPU insulator to her body with strapping tape and rope.

They’d lightened their loads, leaving many items behind: the T-tasers, a quantity of plastic explosives from Ten’s pack, and one detonator, now with several minutes of time counting down on its LED timer, all remained in the operating theater.

In the garage, joined by Kyla, Mark, and Jenna, they found several vehicles, all of them Skynet-maintained. There was a desert-yellow Jeep Cherokee, the engine still warm. There were two white limousine-style SUVs with BRYCE HOTEL, PUEBLO, CO and a long-irrelevant phone number stenciled on them in blue. There was a delivery truck labeled HOLLIDAY FOODS.

“Scalpers, you get the Jeep,” Ten said. “Diversionary departure as planned. Sato, you agree?”

The Scalpers leader nodded. “I agree.” He pulled open the passenger-side door on the Jeep.

Ten gestured to Paul, who passed Sato the two tracers taken from Eliza.

“Everyone else in this—what do you call it, Paul?”

“Airport shuttle, hotel shuttle.”

“Right.”

“There’s a problem,” Mark said.

Ten looked him over for the first time since the upstairs group had rejoined them. “How’d you get all wet?”

“I wanted to be nice and clean for our extraction, so I took a shower. Listen, the garage exit is blocked. There’s a kind of flexible, horizontal-bar portcullis thing across it.”

“So we raise it.”

“And give external visitors thirty seconds to spot us doing it and come running? By the way, did I mention there’s a helicopter coming?”

“Ah, no, you didn’t. That’s good to know.”

Paul gestured at the delivery truck. “We ram the grate. No time lost.”

Ten grinned at him. “You know the danger of suggesting.”

“If it’s a good idea, you get to do it.”

“Right. Saddle up.”

Paul moved to the driver’s door of the delivery truck and gave Kyla one last wave. Looking worried, she returned it. Paul opened the door, set his backpack and sniper rifle case in the seat, and clambered up.

As with most Skynet ground vehicles, the keys were in the ignition. Only humans stole vehicles from Skynet, and there were not supposed to be any humans in a supposedly secure area such as this.

The cab rocked as Glitch settled into the passenger’s seat. The T-850 set Paul’s rifle case across his lap as he shut the door.

“They may need you to help transport the T-X,” Paul said. He turned the key. The engine whirred, then caught.

“My mission parameters regarding you are not complete,” Glitch said.

“The T-X is disabled. And I’ve proven on numerous occasions that the techniques she might have used to subvert me are no longer working.” Paul watched out the window until the other two vehicles roared into life.

“That is true,” Glitch said. “The prime goal of the mission is accomplished. But there is still the distant likelihood of component failure on your part.”

“That component being my sanity?”

“Use of that word constitutes an oversimplification in this situation.”

Paul put the truck into gear. He backed out of its parking space and aimed it in the direction the exit signs indicated. It shuddered as it climbed through first gear into second.

The concrete ramp led them up and to the right. Past the bend, Paul could see, above, that the ramp apparently leveled off. Beyond was the grating Mark had described.

Bright, moving lights shone outside it.

“We’re in for trouble,” Paul said. He pulled his safety belt around him and buckled it.

He was in third gear when he topped the ramp and hit the grating. His truck blasted out into the street in front of the hotel. The grating, still in a single piece, flew out into the street ahead.

To his right, through Glitch’s open window, Paul could see a large twin-rotor helicopter hovering mere feet above the ground, its tail end a mere twenty yards away. Assault robots streamed out of its passenger bay door, entering the hotel at a dead run. The last dozen or so turned to look at Paul’s truck.

Paul wrenched the truck into a leftward turn, grimaced as he felt the left row of wheels leave the ground. Then they came back down with a bang. He mashed the accelerator.

In the rearview mirror, assault robots ran after them on foot. The Jeep roared out through the now-unobstructed exit and turned in his wake. Then came the hotel shuttle.

Paul made an immediate right turn onto the next street. He heard assault rifle fire open up, heard the sides of his truck hammered by plasma hits.

The Jeep didn’t follow; it roared along the street in front of the hotel and was almost instantly lost to sight. The hotel shuttle did follow, and in the rearview mirror Paul could see an assault robot riding atop it, its arm already thrust through the roof, grabbing at whatever was within. More robots ran along in the Jeep’s wake.

A stream of plasma shots from inside the shuttle took that robot in the face and chest, hurling it off the rear of the vehicle. More assault robots, on foot, now farther back, rounded the corner. Some stopped running and raised their rifles.

Paul took the next left turn. He had to break up his pursuers’ line of sight. The shuttle, more nimble, sideslipped a little and the first rounds of plasma damage missed it, slamming into the rear of Paul’s truck. Then he was around the corner, the shuttle immediately behind him.

The shuttle roared around him to the left. In the front passenger seat, Ten offered him a little salute. Paul could stare down through the hole at the rear of the roof, could see Eliza’s eyes on him. Then the shuttle was past, accelerating.

“Okay,” Paul said, “this sucks. The enemy has seen us, they’re here in force, they have a vehicle with mobility superior to ours, and they’re kind of hostile.”

“What do you recommend?” Glitch asked.

“We let the plan proceed. Once they lose direct line of sight on everybody, they’ll revert to their programming. And if we’re right, they’ll get a fix on Eliza’s signal, which is being carried by the Scalpers, and follow it. Putting us in the clear, hopefully for long enough.”

The shuttle continued to accelerate, leaving the truck farther behind. Ahead, it took a right turn.

“Is that south?” Paul asked.

“That is northwest.”

“Not good.” He turned to follow. “Why northwest?”

“There is a high probability that they are doubling back to reach the interstate highway.”

“Are we going to hear the hotel blow up?”

“The explosion will be insufficient. We did not have access to a substantial amount of evaporated fuel. The hotel will probably not collapse and we will probably not hear it. But the operating theater and surrounding rooms will be destroyed.”

“Too bad.”

Then Paul’s eyes were dazzled as the shuttle ahead was bathed in a powerful searchlight from above. Paul craned his neck to see. The transport helicopter was above, about halfway between the two vehicles. Paul hammered on the steering wheel. “Dammit.”

“Earl Duncan will bring it down with an RPG.”

But the helicopter dropped back, until it was over Paul’s truck.

Ahead, the shuttle took a right turn.

Paul hesitated for just a second. If for some reason the helicopter were locked onto him or Glitch, separating from the shuttle now would give the Hell-Hounds a better chance of getting out of sight.

He turned left.

The helicopter followed him.

“They’re after us,” Paul said. “Why?”

There were several thumps from the roof of the main body of the truck. Paul could imagine, could almost see assault robots raining out of the helicopter, two or three of them, to land atop his vehicle. “Forget I asked. Maybe,” he suggested, “you ought to go up and deal with that.”

“Yes,” Glitch said. He kicked at his door, effortlessly knocking it free from its hinges, then climbed up onto the roof of the cab.