Abraham clicked off his communicator and looked back at Thaddeus. “Take the rear. Stay ten yards behind me.”
Thaddeus nodded, then asked, “Where are we going?”
“Where else? After the robot….”
“What now?” Blaine asked Reston Ainsley.
He had barely completed the question when a series of red lights began flashing on the main console. The professor slid himself over to it.
“Obie Four has locked on to another pair of the monsters. Let’s have a look, shall we?”
Ainsley punched a button on his console and the view from the snakelike reconnaissance droid filled the screen. Obie Four had the ability to plow under and then come back up through solid asphalt if necessary. Ainsley explained that its entire length was essentially a drill that spun at blinding speed, enabling it to burrow inside virtually any substance. Only the very base of its head had to rise back to the surface to provide them with a picture, much like a submarine’s periscope.
The screen sharpened to reveal a pair of the disciples veering off Palace Street toward the Brush-Everard House. Directly behind them now was the wide, grassy expanse of the Palace Green Obie Four had burrowed up through. The disciples made their way warily down the walk, then kicked open the door without testing the knob.
“No respect for property,” Blaine quipped.
“Neither does Obie Three, I’m afraid — and fortunately he’s in the area,” said Ainsley.
With that he keyed in Obie Three’s access code and swept his fingers across the control keyboard. A slight adjustment of Obie Four’s camera allowed the occupants of the truck to see the boxlike figure of Obie Three emerge from the cover of the shell of a reconstructed colonial theater three buildings to the right of the Brush-Everard House. Ainsley brought Obie Three up the house’s front walk, in essence following in the footsteps of the two disciples who had entered. Then another series of commands from Ainsley had the droid’s top sliding open to allow its multiple extremities to ease upward and out. One of them held a powerful explosive that looked like two Frisbees squeezed against each other. It placed the charge upon the front steps and then affixed a detonator to it with a second and more adroit extremity. What might have been a steel finger flipped a switch.
On Professor Ainsley’s control board, a light on the lower panel switched from green to red.
“It’s armed,” he said, and returned his attention to Obie Four’s monitor screen.
Professor Ainsley kept his eyes on the monitor while his fingers flew across the keyboard to issue Obie Three instructions, which moved it to a safe distance. His finger then eased to a button beneath the light that had been flashing red for ten seconds now.
“We wait until we see them emerge,” he explained. “That way we’re sure.” Ainsley looked back at McCracken. “You want to do the honors?”
“The pleasure’s all yours, Professor.”
“Yes,” Ainsley acknowledged. “It certainly is.”
At that point the two disciples appeared on Obie Four’s screen, approaching the door they had kicked open. Reston Ainsley waited one last second and then pressed the button.
For some reason, Blaine had been expecting a smaller, more contained explosion. What followed was a blinding, horrific blast as the better part of the Brush-Everard House’s front half fragmented into wood shards and splinters that blew out from the fireball. He never saw the disciples; they simply vanished into the oblivion of the blast, consumed by it. The screen cleared to reveal flames picking at the ruined shell of a building, charred portions still falling from the sky.
“That makes four down, Professor,” Blaine said.
“Still eight to go, chief,” Belamo reminded him.
Nonetheless, McCracken was about to give Ainsley a celebratory slap on the shoulder when a new explosion sounded from another area of the park. He barely had time to wonder what it was when Obie One’s control board flickered once and then went dead.
Abraham respected the prowess of the foe he was facing here. The robot’s programming made it a virtually indestructible and independently acting machine. In a confined area, the layout of which was certain to have been programmed into its microchip circuitry, it would inevitably track him down before he could possibly track it. His only hope lay in using that knowledge to his advantage.
That was why he had summoned Thaddeus, why he had the wounded disciple watch his rear. As bait, a sacrifice. He knew the robot would close from the rear, and, in the instant its sensors and firing mechanism were locked on to Thaddeus, Abraham would take his shots. If he missed, the robot would have him, too, but he didn’t plan on missing. As an added precaution, he was careful to keep himself as much in line with Thaddeus as possible, hoping this would confuse the robot into believing the motion it detected was that of a single man, not two.
Abraham knew his M16 by itself was useless against the robot’s steel composition. But the grenade launcher built into its bottom was something else again. He hadn’t had time to get in the shots he needed when the thing had killed John and Judas. Now he would.
This, of course, was just the preliminaries. McCracken and the Indian might be content to let the robot fight their battles for them, but once that robot was neutralized they would have no choice other than to show themselves.
He was passing behind the William Waters House when the blast reached his ears; he turned in time to see a cloud of debris hurtling into the sky from the Palace Street area. No screams followed, but he knew all the same he’d lost another pair of his number. Could there be more robots than the one he was after? Yes, there had to be. He felt an unfamiliar chill of anxiety, perhaps a flutter of fear. McCracken was even better than he had expected.
“Abraham!”
Thaddeus’s scream reached him a breath ahead of the nonstop clacking of the robot’s built-in gun. He turned to see Thaddeus’s body being pulverized by bullets, literally torn apart before he was even able to fire a shot. Abraham leveled his grenade launcher toward the robot and fired. The charge whoooooshed out dead on line with the thing. Impact tore away the entire right side of the robot’s midsection and part of its head. The thing staggered, listing, but incredibly turned on Abraham to fire just as he sighted in with another grenade.
This time the explosive impact blew off the rest of the thing’s midsection to below the torso. Its leg extremities continued waddling about briefly before keeling over.
Abraham charged on in the direction of the plume of black smoke still rising over Palace Street. More of the machines were about; if he were going to draw McCracken and Wareagle from their hiding place, he would have to take out the machines first. The rest of the disciples meant nothing to him now. Whether they survived or not was meaningless, as were their parts in the remainder of the plan. McCracken mattered, and beyond him the Indian.
Abraham was heading toward a ruined building across the Palace Green when a strange impression carved into the ground caught his eye. It was perfectly cylindrical and deep, like a gopher hole made in dirt. Abraham suddenly had a very clear idea about what it was he was looking for.
As well as how to find it.
“They killed Obie One,” was all the transfixed Ainsley could say. “They killed him.”
Ainsley wheeled himself to the console controlling the monstrous Obie Seven and flipped on the control switch. Outside, near the Capitol’s pillars, a red light locked on in the center of the huge robot’s head. The arms that housed the specially modified Vulcan 7.62-mm miniguns snapped up to forty-five degree angles from locked positions at his side.