The rounds hit the ground with thuds they could feel inside the vehicle as the lines of fire grew closer. Seconds later, hundreds of armor piercing projectiles hit, ripping through the metal plating and into Tony. Blood and bone fragments flew across the cabin, striking Slim in the face just before the carrier blew up, killing them both.
69
Cat peered ahead, watching Helena pass around the turn in the corridor, Leon and Mike following. Cat brought up the rear, the substantial machine gun she carried growing heavy in her arms.
Helena had downloaded combat training programs to her back at the clubhouse. She’d rehearsed the trainers a dozen times in her mind, imagining the fighting techniques. Sensei Flores stressed mental preparation. “The best performers of any activity mentally rehearse. Baseball. Soccer. Golf. They imagine the physical movements, success. Thoughts precede action.”
Cat imagined, but she still didn’t know what to expect. Providing cover against detection didn’t help the clarity of her thinking any. The cyber attacks were continuous now, a barrage of data assaulting her interface, a torrent of pain she struggled to ignore even as she shielded Mike and Leon. Her head pounded as she continued to focus.
Leon slowed and fell into step beside her.
“I feel what you’re doing,” he said, his brow furrowed in concern.
She stared, stifling the impulse to reach out and touch him. “What do you mean?” she asked. She wanted to freeze time, have twenty-four hours with Leon before she had to face Adam.
“You’re protecting us, taking the brunt of Adam’s attack.”
“Standard military procedure.” Cat looked ahead at Helena’s back. “At least that’s what she tells me.”
“I had no idea this was part of combat.” Leon stared down at his feet. “I didn’t think neural implants could be attacked.”
“It’s not your fault.”
He rubbed his forehead with the back of his hand. “I am responsible. I guided the implant design. AI did the detail work, but I was in charge. Yet they’re full of security holes, endangering us.”
“You couldn’t have foreseen this. No one could. We’re just human.” Oh boy, now she was trying to make him feel better for himself. “How can you tell what I’m doing?”
They came to the end of the corridor, and Helena led them up a staircase.
“Shizoko Reynolds, the AI who detected the string of murders, also dabbled in nanotech. After Mike was shot, Shizoko fixed his arm with experimental nanites.”
“Oh,” Cat said. “That explains a lot.” Mike bounded down the hall ahead of them, full of energy. At some point the changes to Mike were going to come up, but this wasn’t the moment to explain how she’d cut off his head and he regrew a body. There’d never be a good time for that conversation.
“What?”
“Nothing. You were explaining how you know what I’m doing.”
“Yeah. I asked Shizoko to increase the power of my neural implant. He expanded the neural interface and gave me onboard processing.”
“How does that work?”
“I feel smarter, run apps locally, think faster. Anyway, my connection to the net changed and I can sense more. You’re filtering the data, aren’t you?”
She nodded, then held him back with one arm as Helena stopped ahead of them.
“We have a problem.” Helena called from the landing. “I can tell from electromagnetic emissions that combat bots are clustering above us.”
“You were sure they wouldn’t detect us,” Mike said. “What went wrong?”
“I masked our implants and all the sensors we passed,” Cat said.
Helena turned around, toward the downward staircase. “Lights came on in the hallway.”
“They weren’t networked,” Cat said, “just dumb motion detectors hardwired into the bulbs.”
“The power consumption,” Mike said. “If Adam’s monitoring it, he would have seen the electricity usage increase.”
Helena nodded. “We go to plan B. I’ll take care of the waiting combat bots. Cat, you’ll need to connect to the wired network inside Adam’s building and fight him yourself.”
By herself? “Uh, I don’t think—”
“We don’t have time for this now,” Helena barked. Servos hummed as she zoomed in close, face to face with Cat. “You are the last firewall between Adam and the world at large. You must defeat him. It is only logical.” She waited, unblinking, six inches away, until Cat nodded assent. Then she slowly withdrew.
“How can we help?” Leon asked.
“I suggest you do what you can to ensure Cat survives, or else, all is lost.”
Helena moved, weapons bristling forth from every part of her robot body. Her tentacles elongated and she rushed up the final flight of stairs in a blur of motion.
A crash sounded from above, followed by the sound of gunfire.
“Move,” Cat said to Leon and Mike.
Guns out, they climbed the steps side by side.
70
Helena hit the top of the stairs at thirty miles per hour, accelerating hard. She spun like a tumbleweed, gyroscopic accelerators and tentacles pushing against inertia. She flew out of the staircase and fired at the brick wall ahead. Her hardened tentacles ripped into the barrier at two hundred miles per hour, rupturing an eight-foot hole.
She barreled into the courtyard between the buildings, four hundred feet of concrete expanse, and executed a hard right turn, motors shrieking under maximum load. A hail of incoming gunfire passed through the space where she’d been.
More than sixty bots filled the small plaza, careening at high velocity, employing some variation of the same strategy: rapidly changing location in fast, short duration moves to make themselves hard to hit.
Helena returned fire, aiming probabilistically at the locations where the enemy were likely to go. Her two advantages: years of successful combat experience and a fractal body design granting her more simultaneous firing directions than ordinary bots.
All the robots, Helena included, moved so fast that they bounced off the surrounding buildings in a blur of motion and sound. The gunfire erupted into a continuous thunderous roar until it was no longer possible for even Helena to pinpoint the sounds of individual shots. A half dozen of Adam’s army fell to the ground in heaps, burning or shorting themselves out, one exploding as its internal munitions took a hit, sending yet more metal shrapnel out amidst the storm of projectiles.
Helena tracked forty thousand airborne objects, avoiding the worst. Rounds ricocheted off armor as her tentacles whipped ever faster. A tentacle lashed out, cutting one bot in half. A scraping hit blinded another. She used her momentum and grasping tentacles to move up the walls, trading off velocity for altitude, and bots capable of jumps or flight followed her.
At the fourteenth floor, she pushed off the Gould-Simpson building and flew across the courtyard, temporarily a purely ballistic object. Thirty bots ascending the walls tracked her flight and hit her mid-air with hundreds of rounds.
Helena crashed through the window of the neighboring building, disappearing from sight. The bots below followed, flying, climbing, or bouncing their way in like a horde of angry ants.
71
Cat took the steps two at a time. She held the heavy rifle with the sure grip of experience, even though the only qualifications she’d had were with the trainer sim.
Mike and Leon on either side matched her pace, but they held their weapons with stiff awkwardness that threw off their every movement. Cat realized they’d all end up dead if Mike and Leon entered the courtyard in their current state.