At first the people who were listening laughed. Then they stood looking at each other, wondering if this diatribe were true.
To a crowd that was already rowdy, the radio voice seemed to be describing the perfect way to vent their anger at the myriad of frustrations and injustices that were their lot in life.
The shouts became loud, angry, and the people began pushing forward toward the soldiers in the square.
Virgil Cole saw the crowd surge on the monitors. He pushed a button on his control panel so that the audio from the York units was in his headset. Now he could hear the angry chants.
“If the soldiers feel threatened, they’ll fire tear gas or bullets, and the crowd will panic,” he said to Kent, who was mesmerized by the unfolding spectacle. “Let’s do it now.”
The soldier who had witnessed Loo Ping’s death at the hands of Charlie York stood now in front of General Moon, pointing at the Bank of the Orient building. He explained about the robot.
“A monster ten feet tall shot my sergeant and the other three men in my squad. Up there, on the third floor.”
The general listened to this drivel, then walked away. The junior officers could handle the man. Monsters!
The man kept pointing at the third floor.
When he heard glass breaking, Moon Hok involuntarily glanced in the direction the soldier was pointing. He saw glass showering down… from a third-floor window.
Moon was about to tell one of the staff officers to have the soldier lead him to the monster in the bank when the nearest tank exploded. The explosion burned the general and tossed him through the air. He landed in a heap on the pavement, too stunned to move.
The York robot called Charlie dropped the empty launch tube for the wire-guided antitank missile and picked up another. While it was bringing the weapon into firing position, the second tank exploded. Dog York, in the building on the south side of the square, had fired that round.
Charlie aimed this missile at the command vehicle, then squeezed the trigger.
The missile pulverized the van, showering the men lying on the pavement with sheet metal and radio parts.
Having fired both the antitank missiles Charlie York had carried into the Bank of the Orient, Kerry Kent decided to have Dog York fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the machine gun nest on the far right side of the square. The York control screen was a Windows-based system — point and click — so in seconds she had a rocket screaming across the square. It struck the ammo feed on the side of the tripod-mounted heavy machine gun and destroyed it.
Seconds later Dog destroyed another machine gun on the far side of the square.
The tanks and two machine guns were out of action. Thirty seconds had passed, and every PLA soldier in the square was flat on his face or huddled behind a concrete planter wall.
The sounds of the explosions echoed through the urban canyons and were heard by more than a hundred thousand people standing and sitting in the streets. The energy level in the crowd soared as people craned their necks, trying to see in the direction of the square.
When the truck screeched to a halt outside the Victoria Peak television station, Wei Luk was standing in the doorway. With a huge sigh of relief, he watched a dozen university students with assault rifles pile out of the back of the truck and pass down a machine gun. They set up the machine gun where it had an excellent field of fire along the main street leading to the station, then took up positions around the building.
Wei Luk went back inside. The receptionist stared at him in wide-eyed amazement when he pulled a pistol from his pocket and directed her to unlock the door. Dazed, she pushed the button.
Wei Luk and his colleagues walked down the hallway toward the main studio, where they saw Peter Po and gave him the high sign.
Less than two minutes later the station had the feed from the camera in Hu Chiang’s helicopter on the air. Peter Po began a voice-over, explaining to the television audience that the first battle of the revolution had begun.
In the museum trailer three blocks from the Bank of the Orient square, a cheer went up when the television began playing the aerial feed.
Virgil Cole turned to the shortwave radio that sat on a bench behind him. In less than a minute he began receiving reports from revolutionaries in television stations all across China that had picked up the Hong Kong signal from the satellite and were rebroadcasting it the length and breadth of the nation. With the program on the air, the revolutionaries would then abandon the stations, forcing all the personnel out and locking the doors of the buildings. When the authorities reacted, as they eventually would, they would have to break into the buildings to stop the broadcasts. And there would be no one there to arrest.
By then the damage would be done. The news would be out, the credibility of the government severely damaged.
Virgil Cole leaned back in his chair with a sigh of relief. Finally, he thought, we have crossed the threshold. There can be no turning back.
Alvin and Bob York were in a locked room in the basement of the building that stood on the west side of the square. The door was locked to discourage any soldiers who might be ordered to search the building. Now Alvin broke the lock with a twist of the door handle. Both units climbed the stairs toward the street level. The staircase was narrow with a low ceiling, with barely enough room for the robots when they tucked in their appendages and curled their backs.
Kerry Kent checked the video feed as the two units climbed the stairs to ensure all was well, then used the mouse to activate Easy and Fred.
Behind her Virgil Cole helped himself to another cup of coffee. He had spent five years of his life overseeing the design of the York units and had a huge financial stake in the company that manufactured them, so he should have been nervous about the Yorks’ first operational trial. He wasn’t. He had used up all his juice fretting the success of the nationwide television broadcast, which he thought more critical than the performance of the York units to the eventual success of the revolution.
He sipped the coffee and glanced at the monitors and wondered if he should have absolutely refused Wu Tai Kwong’s demand to confront the PLA in front of an audience. He had confidence in the York units, but crowd psychology was a huge unknown — a stampede could kill thousands.
As he watched he remembered Wu’s words: “Revolutions are made by people — the Yorks are just things. The people of China must see that others are willing to fight. We can give them something to fight for, but they must find the courage in their own hearts.”
As the four York units that had been in hiding came running from the buildings, Charlie and Dog leaped through the broken glass of their respective third-floor windows. They used their hands and feet to cushion the shock of their landing on the concrete street, then they began running toward the center of the square.
Now all six Yorks were transmitting video and audio to the central computer in the museum trailer; in seconds the computer had transformed the six data streams into a three-dimensional picture of the square, the trucks, the decorative planters, trees, light poles, smoldering hulks of tanks… and the armed men who were rising from the pavement with their weapons in hand, staring wild-eyed at the huge, running robots, which attacked the crews of the two remaining machine guns.
Inevitably a few of the soldiers snapped their rifles to their shoulders to shoot, and instantly the system directed a York to engage. An onboard CPU slewed the minigun onto the target and triggered a round. Just one round per target, because unlike humans, the Yorks didn’t miss.