“But sir,” said the cyberoid in its flat, polite purr. “It is part of the property I am programmed to protect.”
“And I’m overriding your programmed instructions. Do as I say.”
“Very well, sir.” The cyberoid walked over to Miranda’s flipper, opened the rear access panel to the drive and extended its articulated manipulator inside. There came the sound of metal being crushed. Satisfied, Milo was once more about to get into his own flipper, but again he paused. He could hear something. A distant murmuring?
No. It was more like the angry buzzing of hornets. He went to the garage doors and pressed the manual control button. As the doors slid open he stepped out on to the roof. He could hear the sound more clearly now. He knew what was causing it, but he summoned the cyberoid out on to the roof to confirm his opinion. “People,” said the cyberoid in answer to his question. “Many of them. They’re coming this way.”
“Yes,” said Milo. He went to the parapet and stared out across his gardens towards the wall, which sparkled with the different coloured lights of his defence system.
“Are you expecting visitors, sir?” the cyberoid enquired.
“No, but my wife is. They’re her responsibility.” He hurried back inside the garage.
“How many guests is your wife expecting? From the sound of it the approaching group numbers many hundreds.”
“Don’t worry, I’m sure Miranda will be capable of entertaining them all. She likes giving big parties,” Milo told the cyberoid as he got into the flipper. The armoured hatch slid shut and Milo ordered the vehicle’s computer to take the flipper up to an altitude of a thousand feet and then hover.
From that height Milo, via the sensor monitors, got a clear view of what was happening. The cyberoid had under-estimated the crowd’s numbers. There were thousands of them coming through the woods towards the north wall. Milo guessed they had come from Luxton, the nearest big town to his estate. He’d heard that the place had been hit by the plague.
He had one of the monitors zoom in on a group of them. He saw they were all carrying weapons. Guns, axes, garden utensils even. Milo smiled to himself. He was reminded of a visual cliché from the old horror movies—the horde of angry peasants on their way to burn down the castle of the local vampire or mad scientist. All that was missing were the burning torches.
The broad and ragged front line of the approaching mob was now only about a hundred yards from the wall. Milo decided to make it easier for the attackers. He patched into the house computer and gave it the coded command that would override all previous commands and freeze the defence systems, with the exception of the cyberoids who acted as self-contained units. Then he leaned back in his seat and prepared to watch the show.
It didn’t take them long to get into the grounds. First came a number of explosions that breached the wall in several places, and then the mob poured through the gaps and into the gardens. There it encountered the first real opposition; three of the estate’s large outdoor cyberoids who met the rush of humanity with a devastating mixture of machine-gun and laser fire. Hundreds of the attackers died in the first thirty seconds, but there were so many of them coming through the wall that the cyberoids had no real chance of stopping the invasion. They were quickly overwhelmed by the sheer weight of bodies, toppled off their feet and then, helpless, battered and smashed into shapeless lumps of metal and plastic. The mob surged on towards the house.
A perverse whim caused Milo to patch into the house’s interior audio-visual surveillance system. He saw that Miranda was still in the Sea Room, but the special effects had been shut down and she was staring out of one of the front windows. He spoke her name and she turned towards the surveillance unit that he’d activated. “Milo?” she asked anxiously. “Is that you? What’s happening? Why aren’t the defences working?”
“Must be a malfunction,” he told her. “Or maybe it’s sabotage. You don’t have much time. Get your flipper right away. Don’t wait to pack anything.”
“Where are you?”
“About a thousand feet above the house. Come and join me. Fast.”
She glanced one more time out of the window, then ran from the room. Milo smiled with satisfaction and cut the connection. There came the sound of another explosion. He looked and saw smoke rising from the front of the house. They would be entering the ground floor now. It wouldn’t be long. …
He aimed one of the sensors at the garage doors on the roof. And waited.
Miranda emerged through them about a minute later, looking upwards. He zoomed in on her face. Her eyes were wide with fear. He guessed the mob must be close behind her. He imagined what she must have felt when she discovered her flipper wasn’t functioning. He smiled again.
She ran out on to the garage roof, waving her arms frantically. She could obviously see his lights. Then came flashes of gunfire in the garage. The house cyberoid doing its duty, guessed Milo. Or perhaps it was trying to serve the ‘guests’ canapés from a tray and couldn’t comprehend why it was being fired upon. The thought made Milo laugh aloud.
The first of the mob came through the garage doors. A man, carrying an automatic rifle. A woman followed him. She was wielding a machete. Others emerged. …
Miranda ran, but there was nowhere for her to go unless she jumped off the roof. They trapped her in a corner, surrounding her. She continued to wave frantically at him. Milo leaned forward and switched off his flipper’s lights. Then he watched the screen intently as Miranda was torn to pieces. It was only when there was nothing left of her to be seen among the rampaging mob that he realized he had a throbbing erection.
He took the flipper down in a swooping dive. He was above them before they knew what was happening. His lasers and guns soon killed all of those on the roof. Then he dropped a bomb on the house and flew off towards the south.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Flickers of lightning illuminated the taller towers of the distant city in brief flashes. Jan was awe-struck. She had never seen a city before and the sheer size of this one impressed her profoundly. How could buildings have been built to stretch so far into the sky without collapsing at their bases? And to think that all those buildings had once been full of people. It was hard to imagine that so many people had ever lived at the same time.
“There must have been thousands and thousands of people living there,” she said to Milo.
“What?” he said distractedly. He had been uncharacteristically silent for the last few minutes as he leaned on the railing and stared broodingly at the city. She repeated her words and he answered, “No, more than that. It had a population of over six million.”
“Six million?” She shook her head in disbelief.
“It’s true. I knew that city well. The last time I saw it was alive. All those towers shone with lights. Traffic moved in the streets. Flippers moved in the sky. …” He went silent again.
She guessed he was reliving memories from all those centuries ago and felt briefly sorry for him. “That big tower, in the centre. Is that the one we have to reach? The Sky Tower?”
“Shush,” he cautioned her and glanced over his shoulder towards their ever-present escort, two silent samurai who were standing some ten feet away from them on the open deck. Jan and Milo had, in theory, the warlord’s permission to go wherever they wanted within the public sections of the Lord Pangloth, but whenever they left their cabin they were followed by two warriors. Milo had told Jan that he doubted if they could understand Americano; he was fairly certain that only the warlord had any familiarity with the language, but they couldn’t afford to take the chance of speaking openly in front of them.