Authors: Jon Land
Only when the SWORDS bot reached the abutment, he saw its gun turret already angled straight his way, the moment frozen until fresh gunfire flashed from the far side of the hall.
“Blainey!” Johnny Wareagle called.
He spoke as the robot spun its gun turret around and headed back in the opposite direction, firing anew. McCracken could visualize Johnny diving for cover, even as he rolled back into the center of the hall and opened up on the machine with his Glock. It actually seemed confused, caught between responses before ultimately twisting back toward McCracken.
He pressed himself tighter against the floor to use the robot’s inability to steady its gun this low from such a narrowing distance, then slammed a fresh magazine home and resumed firing. It was as much for distraction as anything since his bullets achieved nothing more than harmless clangs and clacks against the thing’s titanium frame.
But it cleared the path for Johnny Wareagle to surge down the hall with the grace of a gazelle and force of a bull. Before the SWORDS robot could swing its gun back on him, Wareagle had raised all two hundred and fifty pounds of it into the air and was slamming it into anything hard and heavy he could find. First the floor, then the wall, over and over again before dropping it onto its back with the turret still struggling to spin and its machine gun now clicking off nonexistent rounds with the feed chamber smashed.
“A new enemy, Blainey,” he said, barely even breathing hard.
“Yeah, but controlled by who?”
Shinzo Asahara watched one of his six screens go dark just after the camera caught the face of what looked like a Native American taking the attacking SWORDS in his grasp. Strangely, the robot did not transmit any sound, missed now since it might help tell him how many in the opposition were as capable as this one and the bearded man were.
Whatever the case, Shinzo turned his attention to the other five screens where the remaining SWORDS machines continued to pour fire toward anything that moved or gave off heat. They seemed to have trouble at first negotiating the bodies crumpled in their path, then quickly acclimated, or reprogrammed their mobile treads to better account for the unexpected terrain.
Whatever the case, based on the presence of the two figures offering the most competent resistance, he believed the woman was somewhere on the middle of the three floors. So the fingers of Shinzo’s right hand began flying across the keyboard, instructing the four robots on the floors above and below to converge on the target even as the second SWORDS on the middle floor rounded the corner.
Wareagle was poised over the disabled SWORDS, wrenching its machine gun free when McCracken heard the whine of a second robot approaching from the hall’s opposite side.
“Johnny!” he yelled, eyes locking on the knife sheathed on Wareagle’s hip.
McCracken unsnapped the clasp and yanked the blade free in the same motion, twisting just as the second robot came around the break in the hall directly in front of the emergency exit door with its machine gun angling upon them. It had just opened fire when McCracken and Wareagle pressed themselves against the wall, McCracken crouching to better his throwing angle with the knife. He sent it spinning through the air, aiming not for the robot’s gun or armored engine compartment.
But for its right tread.
The blade lodged in the rubber and stuck, forcing the robot into a wild, uncontrolled whirl that spread its fire in a circle slicing the walls in perfectly symmetrical fashion. McCracken seized the moment to time a dash toward the SWORDS, dropping into a slide just as its turret spun his way. His feet crashed into it with muzzle flashes and bullets flaring over him anew, the impact forceful enough to shove it all the way through the emergency exit door where it rattled down the stairs, exhausting the remainder of its bullets.
McCracken lurched back to his feet and burst into the room occupied by Katie DeMarco just ahead of Wareagle.
“What’s happening?” she asked, hands wrapped around her knees on the floor.
“Good question,” McCracken said and jerked her upright.
With Wareagle leading, they charged back into the hall and headed for the exit door on the other side, halfway to it when that door jerked open. A third SWORDS robot barreled through just as a fourth emerged through the exit at the other end, bullets pouring at them from both directions.
They rushed into the chaos of Homeland personnel charging about or barricading themselves in offices, downed bodies littering the floor everywhere. They reached the elevator bank among others frantically pushing buttons, as if that would make the compartments return faster.
“Go, go, go!” McCracken signaled the Homeland personnel, herding them inside when one set of doors finally slid open.
He and Wareagle followed, shoving Katie behind them.
“Come on, come on!” he willed, slamming the down button repeatedly.
He heard the grinding squeal of the robots converging, glimpsed their shadows coming just as the doors began to slide closed. Then came an ear-screeching rattle as the robots’ 7.62 mm fire pummeled the compartment’s doors just ahead of its descent.
He tried to breathe easier, but stopped as quickly as he started.
“Indian!”
Wareagle had come to the same realization, already pushing the elevator’s occupants toward both sides of the compartment and making sure they were pressed tight there. He and McCracken joined them with Katie DeMarco shielded, safely out of the line of fire when the compartment doors opened on the lowermost floor occupied by Homeland’s offices.
A SWORDS robot lying in wait opened up with a constant stream that pulverized the elevator’s rear wall and filled the compartment with gun smoke. McCracken and Wareagle glanced at each other a moment before pitching themselves airborne, up and over the machine’s line of fire on an angle that propelled them to either side of its frame. The robot tried to readjust its turret, but they had it in their grasp by then, their hands stung by heat as it opened fire, obliterating a huge plateglass window toward which McCracken and Wareagle continued to drive it, smashing the robot through the remaining shards and out into the night beyond. Both watched as it broke apart upon impact with the sidewalk seven stories down.
Shinzo couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The same two men, the bearded one and the Indian, destroying a third of the SWORDS robots, the woman still safe in their protection.
Who were they?
He felt the muscles in the fingers of his right hand seizing up, no longer working the keyboard efficiently, while his left hand flopped uselessly in his lap. He felt his own indecision and lack of anticipation had let his father down again. But it wasn’t over yet. He still had three SWORDS machines left and six of his best men ready to attack.
But he had no idea where his two prime adversaries were exactly, as the cramped fingers on his right hand sprang back to life atop the keyboard.
“Find them,” he said out loud, ordering the remaining SWORDS robots to the first level of the Homeland Security offices.
Wareagle slammed the conference room door closed behind McCracken and Katie, the three of them finding Captain Seven at work frantically behind his computer with Folsom hovering over him.
“Not good, dudes,” the captain reported, “not good at all.”
“Someone’s in our system!” rasped Folsom. “Someone’s taken over the SWORDS machines!”
“Okay, tell me something I don’t know, Hank.”
“Jesus Christ,” was all Folsom could muster.
“Yeah, real combat’s not too much fun, is it?”
“Blainey!”
Wareagle’s warning came just in time for McCracken to take Captain Seven and Folsom down with him to the floor, while Wareagle covered up Katie in the far corner. The next moment found the twin fire of two robots chewing through the walls and pulverizing everything inside the conference room. Flecks and chips of plaster showered the air, mixing with window glass to form shrapnel-like debris. Exposed wiring appeared behind ruptured walls, the next bursts of fire sending split heavy rubber cables dangling from the drop ceiling that shed chunks and tiles downward. Sparks flew when the severed cabling struck the floor.
The robots’ fire, meanwhile, continued to weaken the front wall on both sides of the door, McCracken and Wareagle locking their grasps around spark-spewing cables together. The rubber felt like slithering snakes trying to break free of their grasps, but both were ready when the walls finally gave way and the two SWORDS robots broke through and churned forward into the conference room. They didn’t get very far before McCracken and Wareagle jammed the severed cables against their frames.
Sparks quickly turned to flames and the machines shook violently enough to almost lift them off the floor before shutting down in twin clouds of noxious smoke. Their collapsed gun turrets gave them the look of overpriced, broken-down toys as they sizzled and popped.
“I really hate those fucking things,” managed Captain Seven from the floor, pushing himself back to his feet just as what was left of the windows shattered ahead of black-garbed figures hurdling inside.
Shinzo had ordered his first wave into motion the moment the two SWORDS robots he’d sent into attack mode went dark. There was no longer a choice, no longer any more time to waste. He would not fail,
could
not fail, not with the potential means to achieve his greatest dream so close.
He only wished he could see the product of his planning, but the loss of the robots had rendered him blind, able only to envision the victory soon to be his, as he readied to send in the second wave of his men.
Ninjas!
Or, at least, members of Aum Shinrikyo, McCracken thought when the spectral, masked commando figures crashed into the room through what remained of the glass.
Wareagle was ready as soon as the first two hit the floor clustered too close, just ahead of the third. Their narrow spacing allowed him to grasp both men, rag dolls in his powerful grasp, by the scruffs of the neck and slam both of them face-first into the remnants of a wall. He held them there as they kicked and writhed, flailing futilely for the weapons that the impact had stripped from their grasps.
The third man had the sense to drop farther aside, far enough to make McCracken lunge, reaching him just as the man’s finger found the trigger of a silenced submachine gun slung round his chest. McCracken wedged a finger into place to keep him from firing and they pirouetted across the floor. He felt more than saw the man’s eyes dart back for the shattered window, the chill wind of an approaching storm pushing inward, everything a haze amid the emergency lighting that felt like spots shining down upon him.
McCracken had already gotten his own finger into place atop his adversary’s when the next trio of attackers swooped into the room. They landed ready to fire, but the lack of focus on their targets cost them.
Badly.
Because McCracken found them in his sights before they could lock in on him, Wareagle, or anyone else. He opened up with a sound-suppressed fusillade. There was no thought to his action, only instinct, just as instinct led him to crack his captive in the face twice with an elbow, mashing bone with each blow after recording the downed frames of the three men his bullets had dropped.
The next moment found armed Homeland personnel flooding the room, guns sweeping about in search of targets.
“Hold your fire!” Folsom blared, lurching to his feet with arms raised. “Hold your fire!”
Wareagle let go of the two attackers he’d been holding and stepped back, leaving their faces stuck in the wall.
“Just in time,” McCracken said, releasing the attacker he was holding and letting him crumple to the floor, as the final SWORDS robot rolled by in the hallway, its empty machine gun clacking hollowly.
“We’re getting out of here, Hank,” McCracken said moments later, taking Katie DeMarco in tow.
“Couldn’t agree more,” Folsom acknowledged.
“So where does Homeland Security go when Homeland Security breaks down?”
“This way,” said Folsom.
Shinzo Asahara could only assume the worst. With no contact from the members of his assault team, he knew the unexpected presence of the ponytailed Indian and bearded man had destroyed his plans to retrieve Katie DeMarco and learn what she knew. He could almost feel his father looming behind him, shaking his head in disapproving fashion.
Shinzo didn’t blame him.
“We’re not finished yet, Father,” he said out loud, the fingers of his right hand returning to the keyboard. “There’s still one card left to play.”
The chaos in the halls had dissipated, the vast majority of on-duty Homeland personnel who’d survived the onslaught having managed to flee or find safe hiding spots they were reluctant to leave. The office’s lowermost floor approaching the lobby and reception area was eerily quiet amid the debris strewn everywhere and the smell of blood, sulfur, and burned wires. A storm wind pushed its way through the shattered windows, and the walls were marred with bullet holes carved neatly in place as if by an artist’s brush.
McCracken took lead with Johnny Wareagle at the rear, both wielding submachine guns now. Folsom, Captain Seven, and Katie DeMarco were clustered tightly between them, all breathing a collective sigh of relief when they reached the lobby’s glass doors leading out into the reception area. McCracken yanked back on the handles to open them.
Nothing.
“Your security system do this, Hank?”
Folsom moved forward and tried the doors just as Blaine had. “Something’s wrong.”
“Something’s missing, too,” Captain Seven noted, gesturing toward the two pedestals on which the prototypes for the Atlas humanoid robots had been perched.
And that’s when the metallic ring of crunching footsteps sounded, the Atlas machines moving in menacingly on them from corners untouched by the emergency lighting.
McCracken realized the robots had no real heads or faces he could see, just boxlike extensions at the base of what would have been their necks. Two red static antennae rose from the prototypes’ shoulders, curving inward toward each other at the top.