Now it was Wendy’s turn to frown. “We’ll be fine. Come on, Pooh Bear. Let’s look for honey in Rabbit’s hole,” she said in a seductive voice.
Wendy pushed the only button on the wall and the door on the right slid open. She took my hand and led the way through. I glanced back at Miranda, who was still frowning.
“
Be careful,” I said as I slipped through the door.
Miranda looked torn for a moment, but then she turned to John and said, “All right, let’s do this Rosco P. Coltrane.”
When the door slid shut behind me, I gently disengaged my hand from Wendy’s. I didn’t want her to get angry, but I didn’t want to hold her hand either. She led the way down the new hallway.
Chapter 28. Miranda
Pooh Bear? How stupid, I thought. Splitting up allowed us to cover twice the area, but I wasn’t happy that Max went off into the dark with his ex-girlfriend. They’d probably find a way to get distracted and compromise the mission. The way she held his hand… She was definitely into him. I couldn’t tell for sure, but he seemed to be playing it cool like maybe he was into her too and didn’t want her to know it. Guys do stupid things like that. Not that I’m jealous, I told myself. What do I care if they get back together? “Grrrrrr. Men.” I realized I had said this last part out loud. John pretended not to hear me.
John and I walked through our door and into a stairwell. We made our way down a flight of stairs to a large room that resembled a factory floor with robotic arms and assembly line stations along a conveyor system. Everything in the room was smudged with grease and the room smelled like motor oil. Along the assembly line were small spider robots in various degrees of partial construction.
“
Tyler had an impressive operation here,” John said. “He must have been worried that the Service would figure out what he was up to. This is some serious protection.”
I was sort of stupefied as to why we were here at all. I knew Max really didn’t want to leave his graviton bars behind or lose his ring, but we probably should have just borrowed weapons from John and finished the mission first. But then losing my Voltaic Fusion Pistol made me sad because my father gave it to me as a graduation present. I was the first in our family to join the Service, and he seemed so proud. I guess I had some selfish reasons for wanting to get my gun back and thought perhaps Max must have some of his own regarding the ring.
We were about half way across the room when John put his hand on my shoulder. “Don’t move!” he whispered.
I froze. If I had learned anything in our brief association, it was to stand still when John said so. “What is it?” I asked.
“
Listen,” he said.
I heard faint clicking and the soft whining of servos and gears all around us. I looked at John. He held a pair of guns that resembled high-tech sawed-off shotguns. He pointed one to our left and one to our right.
I picked up a large wrench from the workstation next me as quietly as I could manage, figuring that it was better to have an improvised metal club than no weapon at all.
“
Take cover,” he said.
The second I ducked low John fired four shots, one in each direction, right then left then behind us and in front. The shots exploded on impact like grenades. The factory machinery was in ruins and grease fires burned around us.
I assumed because the spiders were so low to the ground it would be hard to tell if John had done any damage to them, and with the added crackle of the fire, I couldn’t hear them. He started reloading his guns.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a spider crawl over a table and launch itself at John. I moved with all my speed to intercept it. Wrench met spider face, and the wrench won. The spider landed on the stone floor and twitched.
“
Thanks,” John said. “Whatever poison Tyler put in those things is really nasty. Duck again.”
I ducked as before and he fired another volley of rocket propelled grenades. The factory room filled with smoke and felt really warm.
“
We need to get out of here,” he said.
We stayed low as we crawled back toward the door we arrived through, but a barrel of tipped oil burned hot on the floor near the exit and there was no way past.
“
There’s another exit,” I said. I pointed toward the opposite side of the shop.
We were hacking and coughing as we made our way toward the other door. We stumbled through the metal entryway into a dark hallway. The darkness was nearly absolute, in fact, but at least we were out of the smoke. We sat for a moment and regained our breath.
“
It would seem he forgot to install fire safety equipment,” John pointed out.
I pointed down the corridor with my flashlight, which I had dug from my cargo pants pockets. “We need to keep going. We don’t know if we’re cut off from the exit. This might be a dead end.”
“
I’m sick of robot spiders,” he said as he stood and we made our way forward.
At the end of the hall, we came to an open room with high ceilings and padded walls. There were racks of wooden swords and staves, and the floor was covered in faux wood.
“
This guy really had a nice compound,” I said. “If I ever own a place, I hope I have my own dojo.”
John picked up one of the wooden swords and ran his hand down the length of its blade. “This sword was used in sparring.”
I saw dents in the wood. “Maybe he bought it used,” I suggested.
“
Or maybe he wasn’t the only one here.”
“
We should call Max and warn him,” I said. “The spider robot attack on top of the hill and in the workshop might have been Tyler’s accomplice’s doing, not the spiders still following Tyler’s last command as we assumed.”
“
We don’t know for certain he had an accomplice, but you’re right. This might be important information. We shouldn’t be separated if these attacks are more than the robots carrying out old instructions.”
I pulled out my com link and called Wendy.
“
The agent you are trying to reach does not have an active com link,” a female computer voice said.
“
That’s odd,” I said.
John frowned. “She had a com link. It is possible something has happened to her.”
“
All the more reason to hurry,” I said.
There was a second door in the dojo, and John led the way through it. Tyler’s compound was turning out to be massive, and it was becoming apparent that he’d been working on it for longer than a few months. I couldn’t imagine how he could have afforded any of this on an agent’s salary.
An elevator was waiting for us at the end of the hallway.
“
Up or down?” I asked.
“
We went down a flight of stairs and so Max and Wendy might be above us. However, they might have already found this elevator and gone down.”
“
Let’s try up first,” I said.
Chapter 29. Max
We walked for nearly five minutes in silence. Wendy led the way through different doors without hesitation. I was lost. I couldn’t have gotten back to the entrance if I wanted to, but Wendy seemed confident in her choices. I hoped that confidence had some grounding in fact. We passed through a room filled with metal crates. I looked inside one, and it was empty, but the outside described the contents as an Autoforce 200i sentry robot, military grade hardware. Apparently Tyler had stolen his robot guards from Stellar Command. Maybe they were on the Phoenix he stole, I thought. We also passed through a room full of dark monitors, which reminded me vaguely of Captain Johnson’s office. Wendy apparently found it all uninteresting and kept on moving. She finally stopped when we came to an elevator. She pushed the down button and the door slid open.
“
Is that safe?” I asked. I imagined that the elevator was a trap where you step in and it incinerates you rather than going up or down.
“
I think so,” she said. She pointed at the control panel. “It looks like somebody got peanut butter on that button, and it probably wasn’t an intruder.”
She had a point. The doors closed when I stepped in and we descended, which felt a lot like leaving your stomach a few hundred yards behind the drop was so quick. There was a ding and the doors opened. I stepped out into a large bright room that looked like a hotel lobby.
There were couches surrounding a low table with a pot of coffee and creamer on it. Wendy walked over to it and sniffed it.
“
Let’s have a cup of coffee,” she said.
“
Why not?” I said.
She handed me a cup of cold coffee and we each drank it down. Then she sniffed the creamer and drank it straight from the container.
I noted that paintings hung on every wall. “I didn’t know Tyler had class.”
“
He didn’t,” Wendy said. She put her hand on my shoulder and I turned to face her. “I did.” I went out as approximately one point twenty-one gigawatts coursed through my body.
I came to lying in a bed with my hands tied to the bed frame and my clothes on a chair across the room. I had a gag in my mouth that was tied much too tight.
“
Ah, you’re awake. I worried that I might have overdone that jolt a little.”
The best I could manage was, “Mmph urg ah mmph!”
“
You used to be so big and strong, but look at you now. Tsk-tsk. Now you look like a withered shadow of your old self.” She pulled out her molecular destabilizer. “You’ve managed to ruin everything, not that I should be surprised, I suppose. You always come through missions and, well, you always get the people around you killed. You might just be the luckiest bastard on the planet. I plan to change that, though.”
“
Uhm mmph hmph ur,” I spat back venomously at her.
“
Yes, well, this time you got the wrong person killed and now you are going to pay. I plan to make this as painful as I can.” She aimed her weapon toward my lower abdomen. I squirmed.
“
Max? Wendy?” a female voice called from another room. It was Miranda.
“
Damn! They’re supposed to be dead, killed by the spiders. None of you can do anything right,” Wendy whispered.
I shouted, “Mmph mmph mmph ugh!”
Wendy sighed. “One for the road, then. This isn’t finished. You’ll have to watch your back for the rest of your short life. I’m only letting you live now so that I can kill you slowly later. You don’t deserve to be let off easily with a quick shot to each of your four hearts.”
She pulled the trigger and shot me in the hip. Flesh and bone vaporized, and I moaned with the pain of it. The wound wasn’t large, and in fact she had barely grazed me, but it was very painful. I would heal in a few minutes, but my eyes rolled back in my head as I coped with the immediate agony.
When Miranda sprinted into the room, Wendy was already gone. When she saw me tied to the bed without clothes on, she looked livid. “You can’t keep your pants on for a minute, can you?” she asked. “I have your things.”
She threw my graviton bars, three pens, and my ring at me. They hit me in the face. Apparently she didn’t notice I was tied up, gagged, and bleeding from a gaping wound on my hip because she stalked out of the room. I wondered if she knew the pens were disguised stun grenades when she threw them right at my head. They weren’t designed to kill, but at that close range, my cranium wouldn’t have felt good if they went off.
I called after her, “Mmph mmph eer!”
Two holograms appeared. My ring must have activated when it hit me in the face.
“
Maximus!” my mother’s hologram said.
“
Mmph mmph,” I replied.
“
Son, you should put on some clothes,” my father’s hologram said.