Siege (17 page)

“It was torture. Nothing I did was good enough for them.” She folds her arms across her chest, as if she just felt a chill. Then she scratches the back of her neck again. “I got good grades, I was on the cheerleading squad, I did volunteer work at church. But they were always on my case.”

“Britt—”

“Even after I ran away, they couldn't stop playing head games with me. Do you know why I was in Yorktown Heights yesterday? My dad left an urgent message at the youth shelter where I've been staying.” Frowning, she scratches her neck harder. “The message said Mom had a heart attack, and I should meet Dad at Yorktown High School so he could drive me to the hospital. But he never showed up. So I went to the school office and called the hospital, and you know what they said? My mom wasn't even there. Dad wanted me to feel guilty, so he tricked me into coming home.”

All at once I stop thinking about the Unicorp mission. Brittany doesn't realize it, but she's just explained how Sigma lured her to Yorktown Heights. The AI can easily connect to communications networks and place telephone calls. It can also use voice-synthesis software to mimic human speech. Sigma must've called the youth shelter and left the message for Brittany, pretending to be her dad.

But why? What was the point?

Brittany hugs herself and shivers. I switch my cameras to the infrared range, and what I see is alarming—her body temperature is above normal again, 103 degrees. And she's wincing in pain and scratching her forearms. Her sharp fingernails rake her skin, making long red marks between her elbows and wrists.

“Britt, are you feeling okay?”

“It's weird, but I feel so itchy all of a sudden. Especially my neck.” She reaches for the back of her neck again and scratches furiously, her arm jiggling with the effort. “Arrrgh, it's so annoying! It's driving me crazy!” She squirms on the gurney, trying to find a more comfortable position. Then she stops scratching her neck and lowers her hand. Her fingertips are daubed with blood.

Brittany winces. “Ugh. I guess I scratched too hard.”

I step toward her gurney and aim my cameras at the back of her neck. There's a deep horizontal cut at the spot where she was scratching. But there's no way Brittany could've made that cut by scratching herself. It's too deep and ugly.

As I stare at the laceration, the skin tears at its left and right ends. The cut lengthens and widens, turning into a gaping wound. Blood wells from the gash and trickles down Brittany's neck. Then it flows faster, soaking the back of her hospital gown and splattering the gurney.

Brittany feels the warm rush and looks over her shoulder. Her eyes widen in terror. “Oh God, oh God! What's happening? What's wrong with me?”

Something is definitely, horribly wrong. I sweep my cameras across the intensive care unit, but there are no doctors or nurses in sight.
Where is everyone?

“
Hey
!
” I raise the volume of my loudspeakers. “
HE
Y
! WE NEED HELP! IT'S AN EMERGENC
Y
!
”

No one responds. My acoustic sensor picks up a distant crash, most likely from the treatment center's X-ray room, but I hear no voices or footsteps. No one's coming to help us.

Luckily, my databases have information about emergency medicine. I grasp Brittany's shoulder with one of my steel hands and clamp the other over the wound on the back of her neck. I try to stanch the bleeding. The sensors in my palm tell me how much pressure to apply.

“Okay, Britt, listen carefully.” My circuits are roaring, but I keep my synthesized voice calm. “You need to take a deep breath. You need to slow down your heart rate so I can—”

“Oh God, oh God, oh God!” She writhes on the gurney, which is becoming slick with her blood. Her bare legs dangle over the side of the bed, and her face twists in pain. “It's in my arms now! Oh God, it hurts!”

Her right arm starts to bleed. The skin below her elbow bulges and tears, splitting along a seam that runs down to her wrist. Then the same thing happens to her left arm. Blood streams over her hands and drips from her fingers.

“Help me,
pleas
e
! Oh God, you have to help me!” Brittany claws at my Quarter-bot's torso, smearing blood on my armor. “I don't know what's happening!”

I don't know either, and I don't know how to help her. She's bleeding too fast, from too many wounds. I search through all my medical databases, trying to figure out what's wrong, but her symptoms don't match any illness listed in my files. All I know for sure is that her blood pressure is plummeting. She's about to go into shock.

Then I hear another voice, equally desperate. It's my father.

“
Adam! Get away from her
!
”

Dad runs into the intensive care unit. He's breathing hard, and his face is flushed and sweaty. He stops twenty feet from us, as if he's afraid to come any closer. “
Stand back! You can't help her
!
”

While keeping up the pressure on Brittany's neck wound, I point my cameras at Dad. “What's going on? Where are the doctors?”

He shakes his head, panting, struggling to get the words out. “It's happening…to the other kids too…the spores…the infection… I couldn't detect it…because it isn't biological.”

“What? What are you—”

“Nanobots…tiny machines…inside their bodies…and now they're—”

Brittany screams, drowning him out. At the same time, the sensors in the palm of my hand detect a sudden increase in pressure. At first I think it's another spurt of blood from the wound on the back of her neck, but the pressure's too strong. It's coming from something hard, something metallic that's bulging under her skin. I lift my hand and focus my cameras on the wound.

Then a long, black spike bursts out of Brittany's neck.

She screams again, a ferocious shriek. The spike juts from her spinal column, extending from the vertebrae at the base of her neck. After breaking through the muscle and fat and skin, it angles upward, rising behind her head. Because of its sharp tip, it looks like a bayonet.

A moment later, another spike bursts out of her right arm. It slides out of her flesh below her elbow, curving alongside her forearm and extending toward her hand. Then a third spike lances out of her left arm.

I leap backward, my Quarter-bot staggering. I can't speak. I can't think. But my sensors are still working, and as Brittany thrashes on the gurney, I detect an electromagnetic signal coming from the spike sticking out of her neck. Now I know what it is.

It's a radio antenna.

Brittany stops thrashing. For a moment I think she's dead. She's lost a lot of blood, and it looks like the long spikes have pierced her vital organs. She lies on her side, close to the edge of the gurney, her legs splayed. Her eyes are closed and her face is as white as paper.

But she isn't dead. After a couple of seconds, she opens her eyes. Her legs twitch and her hands open and close. Then she sits up and turns toward my Quarter-bot.

“Good afternoon, Adam.” It's Brittany's familiar voice, bright and cheerful, but the words aren't hers. “My name is Sigma.”

My circuits are frozen, choked with horror. Brittany is splotched with blood from head to toe, and her gown is soaked with it, and yet she's smiling at me. Sigma is sending radio signals to the antenna jutting from her neck, and the messages are going straight to her brain. The AI is making her talk, making her smile.

I can't bear to look. It's the most sickening thing I've ever seen.

Brittany turns her head and smiles at Dad. “Good afternoon to you too, Mr. Armstrong. I was hoping I'd see you here. I assume you've discovered the ingenious technology I developed? How I used the anthrax spores to insert the nanobots into the young humans' bodies?”

Dad doesn't say anything. He backs up against the wall, wincing and trembling. He's full of the same horror I'm feeling, plus an excruciating load of guilt. Because he created this monster.

Brittany looks pleased with herself. “The anthrax spores were ideal because the winds would spread them widely, and any humans in their path would inhale them. But I wanted the spores to carry something more versatile than anthrax bacteria.” She holds out her arms, showing them off. The spikes curve over her forearms and the backs of her hands and extend several inches past her fingertips. They look like black talons. “It occurred to me that nanobots would thrive inside a human body. They could travel through the blood and get power from body heat and even assemble metallic structures using the body's natural iron and carbon as building blocks. And I could program the nanobots to either kill the infected humans or do something more creative with them.”

Anger surges inside me as Sigma says these things so casually in Brittany's voice. Soon my hatred is stronger than my horror, and I manage to unfreeze my circuits and start thinking about what to do. First I try to send an emergency radio alert to General Hawke and the other Pioneers, but the room is full of radio noise, so much interference that it squashes all my signals. The source of the noise is Brittany's black antenna.

I aim my Quarter-bot's cameras at the spike. If I can snap it off, it'll end the interference. And that'll also break Sigma's radio link to the nanobots inside Brittany. Then maybe Dad can remove the rest of the horrible machinery from her body. He's still standing against the wall in shock, but after I take care of the antenna, I'll get him out of his trance.

I step toward the gurney. “You're full of clever ideas, Sigma, but I don't think our father is impressed. You—”

“Are you trying to distract me again, Adam?” Brittany leans back on the bed, moving her antenna out of reach. “Like you did at the high-school football field?”

“Well, maybe—”

“That trick won't work a second time. And you should also know that this antenna is attached to Brittany Taylor's spine. If you hit it with any force, you'll paralyze her.”

This stops me for a split second, but then I come up with a new plan. I'll grab Brittany and carry her to one of the Air Force base's bunkers, deep underground. If I can get her to a place where Sigma's radio signals can't reach her, that'll be just as good as breaking off the antenna.

I take a step backward, pretending to retreat, but then I flex my Quarter-bot's legs and spring at the gurney. I stretch my steel hands toward Brittany, planning to immobilize her by pinning her spiked arms to her sides. But she deftly rolls off the far side of the bed, lands on her feet, and swings her right arm at my Quarter-bot. She spins like a top, moving so fast I don't have time to react. I'm lunging over the gurney from one side, and the spike at the end of her arm is rocketing toward me from the other, aimed at the camera lens on the left side of my head. Her spike plunges into the glass and shatters the camera behind it.

While I'm still reeling from the blow, Brittany wrenches the spike out and thrusts her left arm at my head. The spike on this arm is aimed at my other camera lens, the one on the right side.
She's going to blind me!

I dodge just in time, and the spike glances off my armor. I back away and stare at her with my remaining camera. I half expect her to hurdle over the gurney at me.

Sigma's nanobots have obviously rewired Brittany's nervous system. The AI has radically improved her agility and reflexes. She's now an expert at hand-to-hand combat, so good she could probably take on a whole platoon of Marines. I've seen this kind of phenomenal expertise only once before: when Shannon and I fought the soldiers at Sigma's factory in North Korea.

I synthesize a grunt of disgust. “Were you practicing on the North Koreans? Learning how to manipulate human nerves and brain cells?”

Brittany nods. She's still smiling. “That's why I erased some of the memories of your friend Shannon Gibbs. She saw too much when the two of you visited my manufacturing plant. I didn't want her to share the video she took of the bodies on the assembly line.”

I clench my steel hands. My hatred for Sigma is surging again. I'm going to make another attempt to immobilize Brittany. Now that I know her abilities, I can take precautions.

But before I can make my move, my acoustic sensor picks up the sound of a door opening. At first I think the doctors have finally returned to the intensive care unit, but when I point my lone camera at the other end of the ward, I see the other patients instead. Jack Parker, Tim Rodriguez, and Emma Chin rush into the room, running in lockstep past the empty gurneys. All three wear blood-soaked hospital gowns, and black spikes protrude from their necks and arms. Unlike Brittany, though, their faces are blank and unsmiling. I assume they're coming to her aid, but they don't head for Brittany and me. They race toward Dad. They hold their arms outstretched as they run, pointing their spikes at him, ready to strike.

Terrified, I bound across the room, but I'm too far away to intercept them. So I bellow, “
Stay back
!
” Although I assume Sigma is controlling their brains and I know the AI won't be intimidated by my yelling, I suspect that the kids have retained some of their instincts, including the instinct to hesitate when someone screams at them really loudly. And my suspicion turns out to be correct. The teens hesitate just long enough for me to slip between them and Dad. I shield him with my Quarter-bot's torso and go into a combat stance, flexing my mechanical arms and legs.

Brittany joins the other kids, all standing in a line. Sigma has put an amused expression on her face. “Very good, Adam. You and your father will live, at least for a few more hours. In the meantime, I'm going to take these young humans to the Unicorp Research Laboratory. I'm planning an experiment that will require their participation.”

Brittany smiles at me one last time, then dashes out of the ward. The three others follow her, a few steps behind.

Sigma thinks it can just take them. It thinks it can grab their bodies and brains and do whatever it wants. But I won't let that happen. “Stay here!” I shout at Dad. “I'll bring them back!”

I run after them.

• • •

The air locks of the Biohazard Treatment Center stand wide open. A wave of dread swamps my circuits as I stare at the doors that Brittany and the other kids just barreled through. I have to stop them before they spread Sigma's nanobot infection.

Once I'm outside, I see the four of them in the distance, running across the Air Force base in perfect synchrony, more than a quarter mile away. But there's some good news: the radio signals from Brittany's antenna are too far away now to interfere with my own radio transmissions. In a hundredth of a second, I compose a message explaining everything that happened to Brittany and the other infected kids. Then I transmit it to General Hawke and the Pioneers. Hawke, with his slow human brain, will probably need several seconds to read the message, but the Pioneers will instantly know what to do.

At the same time, I chase Brittany and the others. They're running south, heading straight for the airfield. This escape route doesn't make a lot of sense—the Unicorp lab is a hundred miles to the north, not the south—but I'm not complaining. The fence on the other side of the airfield is more than a mile away, and although the four kids are running
very
fast for human teenagers, I can run a lot faster.

I send a signal to my Quarter-bot's legs and accelerate to fifty miles per hour. I zoom past the base's fuel tanks and the row of hangars on the airfield's northern edge. Soon I'm only a hundred yards behind the kids. They've reached the wide stretch of tarmac in front of the hangars, the rectangular apron where a dozen C-17 transport jets are parked in three neat rows. The C-17s are massive, almost two hundred feet long, and the four teenagers look minuscule as they dash under the wings of the aircraft. I'm going to catch up to them in exactly six seconds. In the meantime, I have to figure out how to subdue the kids without injuring them.

As I stride onto the tarmac, I see something that'll make my job a lot easier. Zia's War-bot is bounding toward us from the east. She's crossing the strip of grass between the apron and the airfield's runway, where the V-22 is idling with its giant rotors tilted upward. Fifty yards behind Zia is Shannon's Diamond Girl, and thirty yards behind Shannon is DeShawn's Einstein-bot, who's running down the V-22's loading ramp with a big, gray tube tucked under his robotic arm. A bolt of gratitude crosses my circuits. I'll have more than enough help to round up the infected kids.

Ahead of me, Brittany and Jack suddenly veer to the right, while Tim and Emma swerve to the left. This would've been a big problem thirty seconds ago, but now I don't have to worry. I turn right, following Brittany and Jack, and Zia does the same; Shannon and DeShawn run after the other pair of kids.

Brittany and Jack rush past the second row of C-17s. They run side by side, almost shoulder to shoulder, their bloody hospital gowns whipping in the breeze. They're so close together, I might be able to tackle both of them at once. I could hook my Quarter-bot's left arm around Brittany and my right arm around Jack and immobilize both kids before we hit the tarmac. It'll hurt them a lot, but it won't kill them.

I speed up until I'm only ten feet behind the pair. But before I can leap, the apron starts to rumble. The C-17s shudder and shake on their landing wheels. Another wave of dread floods my electronics.
No, not here! It can't happen here!

Then a Snake-bot bursts out of the ground a hundred feet ahead of me.

It's bigger than the Snake-bots we fought before. More than thirty feet thick, the steel tentacle rises a hundred yards above the airfield, and there's probably a lot more of it still underground. It's as tall as a skyscraper, but instead of floors and windows it has gigantic bands of silver armor. Dirt spews from the hole as the Snake-bot slides out of the ground. My first impulse is to protect Brittany and Jack, but then I realize the teens are in no danger. Sigma sent the Snake-bot to fight the Pioneers, not them.

Zia rushes forward, totally unintimidated, which is a little surprising when you consider what happened the last time we battled these things. Her War-bot charges toward the Snake-bot at seventy miles per hour, her pile-driver legs denting the tarmac. Her loudspeakers blare a bloodcurdling war cry that sounds like a thousand screaming eagles.

It's impressive, but it worries the heck out of me. I call out a warning. “
Hey! Slow down! We have to
—”

Before I can synthesize another word, the Snake-bot lashes downward. It moves unbelievably fast for such a huge thing, its silver armor flashing as it plummets toward the tarmac. My circuits have just enough time to lift my Quarter-bot's arm, open the compartment below the elbow joint, and fire the Needle, my eighteen-inch-long missile. I aim at an invisible point twenty yards above Zia's head, and the Needle shoots out of its launch tube. Whizzing over the airfield, it homes in on the Snake-bot and detonates.

The explosion doesn't do a whole lot of damage to the Snake-bot's armor, but it deflects the tentacle. The Snake-bot hits the ground a bit to the left, while Zia jinks to the right and scrambles out of its path. But the C-17s parked on the apron aren't so lucky. The tentacle smashes three of the transport jets, shattering them as if they were model airplanes. Jagged pieces of wings, fuselages, and engines hurtle through the air.

The impact almost knocks me off my footpads, but I manage to bend my torso over Brittany and Jack and shield them from the debris that showers the airfield. Although Tim and Emma are farther away from the Snake-bot, the crash still knocks them flat on their faces. Shannon and DeShawn take advantage of the situation by pouncing on the kids and pinning them to the ground. This seems like an excellent idea, so I stretch my Quarter-bot's arms toward Brittany and Jack, place my steel hands on their backs and shove them facedown on the tarmac.

Meanwhile, Zia goes back on the offensive. She races toward the hole in the airfield, where the Snake-bot burst out of the ground. The tentacle is bent at a right angle, with its upper half lying on the battered tarmac and its lower half wedged inside the underground shaft. I can hear the whirring of powerful motors within the machine, preparing to lift the Snake-bot so it can take another whack at us. But before the tentacle can straighten itself, Zia halts near the hole and points both of her massive arms at the crook in the Snake-bot. Then she fires all six of her missiles at once.