It was still afternoon,
but it seemed as dark as any night Go had ever seen. There were no other buildings within a block in any direction, and the building he was looking at had no external lights. Above the first floor, it was mostly skeletal—superstructure and the occasional framed-in room. Rain pooled darkly beyond the chain-link fence enclosing the construction yard. Plastic sheeting whipped in the wind, offering little protection for the equipment it covered.
Lightning danced in the sky above, silhouetting the building. The thunderclap followed almost immediately after.
In the front seat of the crawler that had brought Go and Rosario to the construction site, Jason pinched his chin as he considered Ash, dressed in a black jumpsuit and straddling his motorcycle. A soft glow was all that revealed the security expert’s head, enclosed in a glossy, midnight helmet.
“You think he’s miserable out there?” Jason twisted around to look at them.
Go flexed the fingers of his puffy right hand. “No worse than normal.”
“You still think he could be the leak?”
“He’s got just enough skill to be trouble, yeah?”
“I’m better than him.”
“You’re different, mate. He has plenty of experience and inside connections.”
Rosario bowed her head. “Wouldn’t it make more sense for it to be this Gridhound? Or your artifact ghost?”
“Yeah.” Go buttoned his windbreaker. “But we don’t know who that is, and we know our fella has his problems.”
“You mean his jealousy.”
“Maybe it’s more than that. Maybe he’s growing tired of being used.”
She glowered. “I’m not using him. I’m giving him opportunities.”
“Fair enough. Like I said, he’s capable. I don’t think he’s clever enough to do this.”
Jason drummed his fingers on the steering wheel. “Do we trust him or not? I’m not going in with a psycho at my back, not unless I know he’s not behind all this strange hacking.”
Go patted Rosario’s knee. “She’ll keep an eye on him. First sign of trouble, Rosario drops him.”
She tested her weapon’s strap. “It’s not him. But if something goes wrong, I’ll take care of it.”
“Simple as that.” Go pointed to the skeletal building. “Looks like nothing but the first floor’s done. We have any floor plans?”
“Nope.” The driver licked his lips. “This thing has been abandoned for more than three months.”
“Abandoned? They’ve done all the hard work. There has to be power in there for a hacker to use it.”
“It’s wired. All eight floors. I guess they ran out of money.”
Rosario groaned. “On a planet with so much wealth, you wouldn’t think that was possible.”
“You want to see where all that money goes?” Jason smirked. “I’m surprised there haven’t been more abandoned projects. When you’re using millions of dollars in tax breaks to lure metacorporations to your planet, you lose sight of your own people.”
“I thought that was to bring in jobs.”
Go snorted. “Metacorporations don’t create jobs; they destroy them. I’ve seen it everywhere I’ve been. They pit huge pools of people against each other for a handful of jobs, driving down wages, then they outsource and automate, until only the executives have anything.”
Lightning strobed in the sky, matched by thunder before the light was gone.
Jason tapped his earpiece. “The circle of life. Are we going to plan this thing, or are we going to bellyache?”
“Yeah. Let’s get this over with.”
The driver networked the other three in using a heavily encrypted NFC connection, sharing a wireframe image intended to represent the building. He highlighted the upper right corner in red. “You seeing this, Ash?”
Static popped over Ash’s connection. “I’m seeing it.”
“That’s where all the power’s being used. Whoever put this together did a good job distributing the Grid signal, but you can only hide so much, especially in a remote place like this.”
“They did an even better job hiding their physical footprint.” The security expert highlighted the entire complex. “To pull something like this off, you have to figure the team’s at least as big as ours. There’s no record of a rented crawler coming in this area, no food deliveries, no video or images of people walking around. And no one in the area has ever seen anyone inside that fence.”
Jason glanced at Rosario. “Military?”
She nodded. “A really disciplined unit with a lot of resources and planning—that makes sense.”
Like the ERF.
Go swallowed. “You get any flashbangs or teargas?”
A small window opened over the map, and a grainy video appeared of Ash waving a fistful of grenades. “Three of each. I don’t think Raul’s going to like the expensing on that.”
“Imagine not. I don’t think there’s much more to plan, not unless we want to send a drone in.”
Jason slipped shades over his eyes. “With a hacker like this, that would backfire. I’d rather concentrate on minimizing our signal footprint.”
Go arched an eyebrow at Rosario, who exhaled and pulled the hood of her jacket up. “Showtime.”
Once she had them through the gate, Go took the lead. They splashed loudly, each of them struggling to keep their footing in the mud. Rather than hammer through the door protecting the main entry, he jogged to a point where he could scamper up to the second floor. It was slippery, slow work, but it got him inside. From there, it was simple enough to drop into an unfinished room near the entry and return to the door to let the others in.
The main hallway was dry except for where he’d tracked mud through it but smelled damp and mildewy. Ash handed out small gas masks to the other three. Go set his on and tested it: tight, with a rubbery smell. But he could see out of it, and it seemed ideal for the operation.
It was the sort of preparation that didn’t seem the work of a traitor.
He kept three strides between himself and Ash, who had both pistols out and his motorcycle helmet visor raised. Rosario was just behind him, and Jason a couple steps behind her.
Their steps echoed off the concrete and drywall. At the end of the hall, a door sealed off the northeastern section of the building.
Go put a finger to his lips, gave Rosario a meaningful look, then headed down the hallway as quietly as he could.
There was definitely activity beyond the door: scraping, whirring, humming.
Machinery. Electronics. The team must have air conditioning. They had to have bunks and maybe even something to cook with.
No stench, so they had to have some way to dispose of waste—human waste.
He tiptoed back. “Something beyond the door, all right, but I didn’t hear any talking.”
Ash handed a teargas and flashbang to Go with a smirk. “You’re the scout.”
“Thanks, mate.” He tapped the grenades gently against the other man’s wounded arm. “You going to be okay?”
“Yeah.” He held up his left hand. “I’m just as good a shot with this hand.”
“No need for two guns, yeah?”
The security expert held up the other hand. “Balance.” He closed the visor of his helmet.
Go sneaked back to the door and waited for the others to take up position nearby. He activated his earpiece camera and shared the feed over the secure connection. The room beyond was large, and he tried to imagine it: sectioned off by canvas and plastic; a ready room with someone on guard; the break room; a makeshift barracks; a gear room. The ready room would be the closest, the gear room and barracks nearby.
Toss the grenades into the center of the room beyond the door. That was as good as he could do.
He tested the door: locked. It didn’t seem all that solid.
With his back against the opposite wall, he readied the grenades and charged.
The frame tore free, and he rode the door down, barely holding on to the grenades. He didn’t even look up, but pushed them into what he hoped was the center of the room.
Then he curled into a fetal ball.
A second later, the concussion from the flashbang hit as he rolled away from the door.
He got to his knees, still hunched low, and glanced around.
It was one big room, bisected by a column of connected workstations. Data terminals glowed inside the teargas fog, and small forms rumbled toward him on treads and heavy wheels. Crates—open and unopened—were piled against the far wall and in the corners.
Robots. Simple maintenance robots. But modified. Armored.
Instead of tools on the ends of long, metallic appendages, there were weapons: buzzsaws, knives, and what looked like improvised flamethrowers.
And he didn’t have anything but fists and feet.
“A little help!” He got up and danced away from the closest robot, barely avoiding a whirling blade. The ones he could see were shorter than him, maybe a meter and a half, with two sections—torso and legs. Those ended in tracks and wheels, mostly.
Ash rushed through the doorway, hesitated, then cackled. “Yes!” His pistol roared, and sparks erupted from the center of a knife-wielding robot.
But it kept coming.
Rosario came next, crouching low and scanning. She locked onto the robot with fire curling up from the end of an arm, and she fired a burst into it. When it sparked but kept coming, she fired another burst, which stopped the automaton.
Go slipped past the robot with the buzzsaw arm, then headed deeper into the room, keeping low and presenting a minimal profile to avoid gunfire. There had to be people somewhere—hiding behind the crates at the back of the room, maybe in a basement hidden beneath a trapdoor, or pressed into corners wearing chameleon suits.
But there was nothing.
It was just robots, and more were coming to life in the corners or behind crates.
His earpiece hummed with static: Jason. “Go? What’s in there?”
“Just robots, mate!”
“I don’t understand. The signals were here.” The driver sounded panicked.
“You’re sure?”
“Absolutely!”
“Yeah. Well, that’s not the crisis. Can you do something about these robots?”
“Something’s jamming their receivers.”
Go skidded to a stop, then planted a roundhouse kick into the top of a passing robot, knocking it off its treads. “What? How’re they programmed if they can’t receive?”
“They must be going off their last instructions.”
“You need to shut them down. There’re too many. Someone’s going to get hurt.”
“There must be a console somewhere—the thing they were programmed with.”
“Techs not really my—” An image appeared in the projected earpiece AR: a boxy device with a keyboard and display embedded in the top.
“Something like this.”
“And what am I supposed to do about it?” Two robots rumbled toward Go, still attaching knives to the ends of their appendages. They just happened to have knives lying around?
“Hurry, mate!”
“Break it!”
“Break it.” Go almost laughed, but the continuous gunfire and shouting nixed that.
He raced away from the robots, running to the nearest corner, making sure there were no robots hidden there, then darting behind the crates.
Nothing that looked like a console.
The robots came at him from opposite sides of the crates, knives slashing with deadly speed and power.
There was no dancing around them again, so he climbed up the crate pile and jumped.
One of the robots knocked a crate out from the pile just before Go could jump.
He hit the ground awkwardly, twisting his ankle, then hobbled toward the next set of crates.
Ash shrieked. “Son of a bitch! One of them got me with a buzzsaw!”
A burst of gunfire followed that: Rosario. “I didn’t bring enough ammo to fight a robot army.”
Go searched through the crates, always keeping the two robots in sight. “Yeah, yeah. I’m looking for the console.”
“Hurry! I nearly had my hair set on fire.”
Just ahead of the pursuing robots, Go hobbled toward the next pile of crates. The robots immediately adjusted course, meaning that he had maybe a second to search this time. That wasn’t going to be enough—
The console! It was in the center of several open crates!
Go tossed the open crates toward the onrushing robots and grabbed the console. “I think I’ve got it. It weighs just a little less than a ton, and I think it’s made of titanium.”
Jason highlighted a section of the room near the broken door. “Drag it to me here!”
“Yeah, just a few kilometers, mate. Easy.”
But Go knew there were no other options. They would need a powerful gun to get through the ruggedized casing. He braced the thing against his chest with a grunt and staggered away from the murder robots. One circled wide while the other closed on the near side. It was a strange maneuver, unless they intended to—
Two more robots sped toward him, one with a buzzsaw, the other with a flamethrower.
Normally, it would be easy to evade the robots with knives and saw, but his ankle felt tender and heavy. Still, he did what he could to dodge and twist, which seemed to confuse the buzzsaw robot.
That gave Go an opening to run wide around it.
The flamethrower robot pivoted and released a cone of fire.
Go threw himself to the floor, slamming hard against the console and knocking the wind from his lungs. He smelled smoke a second before he felt heat and realized the right arm of his windbreaker was burning.
He rolled onto his arm, hissing as the melting fabric pressed against his flesh.
The pain would have to wait. He got to his feet unsteadily and reached for the console.
But the knife-wielding robots were there—too close.
Then Ash stumbled out of the teargas, pistol raised.
Pointed at Go.
Of course. No one would see the shot. An accident in the heat of battle. The rivalry for Rosario would end. Maybe they would finish the RPC case and split the shares between the three of them.
Ash brought the pistol down to the closer of the two knife-wielding robots and fired. “Get out of here!”
Go grabbed the console.
The glow of the flamethrower was bright in his peripheral vision. The thing had fired where Ash—
No. The bald man was hobbling along, hunched over and hissing.
They stayed close enough through the cover of teargas to see each other.
Then Rosario skipped into view. “Drop it! Hurry!”
Go skidded the console toward her, and she stopped it with a booted foot.
Robots closed from all around.
She pointed her carbine at the center of the console. “You sure this is going to work, Jason?”
“It will!” The driver didn’t sound very confident.
“It better.” She fired a burst, point-blank. Then another. Then a third.
But the robots kept coming.
Jason sprinted from outside of the teargas, dropped to his knees, and bowed his head.
For just a heartbeat, Go felt something tingling in his head, and it felt like the hairs on the back of his neck stood up.
Then the robots stopped.
The driver stood, but he seemed wobbly. “I think I got them.”
Go caught the other man as he fainted.
They’d found their target, but it was nothing like they’d expected.