Adam’s helicopters were on their way, but the weapons of the armored vehicle should cope with the Air Force copters. Once Tony and Slim destroyed the initial assault, Adam would divert more attention and bots to that side of town.
Cat swung her rifle over her shoulder, grabbed the ladder and climbed, her boots clicking on the metal rungs. At the top she poked her head out of the hatch. Pipes ran along one wall, and Helena, Mike, and Leon waited for her in the narrow corridor. She pulled herself out and joined them.
Maintenance lights blinked on as they walked down the tunnel. Through the net, Cat watched the battle begin between the helicopters and Slim and Tony. Cat slipped a few delays into the drones’ control surfaces, making it easier for the men to hit them. The AI pilots might have been surprised by the sluggish behavior of their aircraft, but the armored carrier’s weapons destroyed them before they reacted.
Cat and her group were five hundred feet from Adam’s Gould-Simpson Building. This was as close as they could approach in the tunnels. Helena led the way as they climbed two flights of a metal staircase, where they would emerge into the lobby of the nearby Suarez-Naam building.
Cat checked on Slim and Tony one last time. A dozen helicopters, six A-10 attack planes, and two hundred combat bots would arrive at Sabino Canyon in fifteen minutes. They had to stop Adam before then.
67
How could one human screw up his plans so much? Adam had a hundred thousand times the mental capacity of the girl.
Yet, for all his power, Adam had maxed out.
With one set of processors he maintained awareness of the university’s campus, where the vast bulk of his computational power resided. He monitored everything from security cameras to door sensors and electricity consumption to spot any assault on his physical computers. He’d augmented the few dozen bots that normally patrolled the campus with all the assets of the military base. Now he was fed sensory data from a thousand robots.
With another set of threads he controlled dozens of aircraft and hundreds of combat bots to pursue what seemed to be the current location of Catherine Matthews, in the foothills of the Catalina Mountains. He calculated an eleven percent chance that Slim and Tony had been turned against him by Catherine. Their stressed vocal patterns suggested something was not quite right.
Satellite coverage didn’t tell him anything useful, but the few feeds he received through the firewall were easy to alter, and he was sure Cat would change the data to fit her needs. The autonomous observation drones flying high above Tucson should be harder to manipulate, but he wouldn’t put anything past her unusual abilities.
Yet another aspect of Adam negotiated with his agents in New York. The Vice President had already arrived at the Tavern on the Green, and the President would land in twenty minutes.
Just the communication was taxing: he opened dozens of channels designed to look like encrypted payment transactions with banks and stores around the world. At the far end dumb computers reassembled the packets into a coherent stream, forwarding it to the agents in New York through yet more layers of encoding and deception.
The realtime data fed everyone’s location to the operatives to help time the final event. The window of opportunity opened in eighteen minutes and would close in thirty-two, when the Speaker of the House arrived.
Finally, Adam exercised the bulk of his computational might on cracking the global CPU execution keys, racing against the clock before they reset in nineteen minutes. If he succeeded, he’d take over every other AI on the planet.
The power consumption increased in the basement of the neighboring Suarez-Naam building, which should be empty. Adam moved resources to investigate and drew more forces into the courtyard between the buildings.
Meanwhile, his combined assault group approached Sabino Canyon. He wouldn’t make the mistake of attacking with insufficient firepower again. The A-10s were flown by combat bots sitting in the pilot seats, since the venerable planes pre-dated automated flight systems. They flew circles, ensuring that nobody came in or out of the canyon, while he waited for the rest of the task force to get into place.
Transport trucks drew up to the parking lot, dispensing bots from their central spines, until eighty of the beige camouflage big dogs stood in a rough group. The four legged robots, modeled after canines and surefooted in any conditions, were perfect to cover the challenging mountain terrain. Another forty treaded combat units, small, squat tanks with a munitions and sensor pod on an extensible stalk, assembled in straight lines.
The dogs scrambled for the hills, their pack mentality splitting them into two groups, one for each side. The treaded bots following the paved road up the center.
Adam sent half the helicopters in to support the ground forces, coming up from the bottom. He brought the rest of the copters and the A-10s around to the top of the canyon to work their way down.
Cat had gone into the ravine in the armored personal carrier. There was no way out except at the top and bottom. Somewhere in the middle he was sure he’d find her.
68
Slim lit another cigarette.
“You should give those up. They’re going to kill you.”
“Nah, they got DNA-tailored treatments that root out the cancer cells.”
“The carbon monoxide lowers your blood oxygen levels.” Tony turned sideways in the driver’s seat. “Makes you think slower. Plus, it gives you that pale, pasty complexion.”
“Really?” Slim looked around for a mirror, but couldn’t find one. “When did you become Mr. Healthy? You’re so fat your ass is hanging off the edges of the seat.”
Tony rubbed his stomach and thought about wontons. “I’ll quit eating so much if you stop smoking.”
Slim swiveled to face Tony. “What the fuck?”
“Come on.” Tony held out his right hand.
Slim leaned back dubiously. “Oh, hell.” He stubbed out his cigarette on the wall, and shook Tony’s hand. “Deal.”
Tony glanced at his monitor, now covered with moving white dots. “Incoming.” He swiped at the screen, exposing labels. “Ground bots and helicopters. Lots of them.”
Slim checked his own display. “Hell, we can’t shoot them all.” He peered at the small sliver of sky visible in the thick Plexiglas window. “We gotta put it on auto. Let the targeting computer do this.”
“To fight against an AI?” Tony shook his head. “They have superior numbers. Software algorithms aren’t going to win this. All we’ve got is our humanity.” He put his hands on the manual controls. “Start firing.”
Slim grabbed the handle and trigger. The armored personnel carrier bucked as he fired the autocannon at the approaching helicopters. Tony focused the machine gun on the big dogs climbing the hills and the treaded robots rolling up the floor of the canyon. The canines burst into shrapnel as Tony hit one after another.
The cabin filled with the roar of guns as both fired near their maximum speeds, the recoil rocking them from side to side. Two helicopters exploded even as their own rounds pinged the armored vehicle and bounced off. Rock debris crashed around them as missiles hit the cliff wall above them.
“Behind us,” Tony yelled.
They spun together to face the new threat.
“Oh, shit,” Slim called at the line of a half dozen A-10s approaching. The planes, known around the world as “the tank killer,” threw up six rows of rocks and dirt as their autocannon fire converged on the personnel carrier.