Oh God! What’s happening?
The collapse is so sudden that the soldiers don’t even have time to scream. A steel beam slams into one of them, and a slab of concrete crushes the other. Another slab plummets toward me, and there’s nothing I can do but watch it fall. My circuits pulse with terror. No, no, NO!
Luckily, the falling concrete glances off my torso. My armor gets dinged and dented, but it protects the control unit and batteries inside.
By the time the debris stops falling, I’m nearly buried in it. My turret is free, though, and I can move my camera. Okay, calm down. Take it one step at a time. All the lights are out, so I switch my camera to infrared, which allows me to view the rubble by its temperature—cold steel, warm concrete, cool plaster. The walls and ceiling of my room are gone, smashed to bits. Now I’m at the bottom of a cavernous space, at least fifty feet high and a hundred feet wide. Panning my camera, I see wreckage everywhere. The soldiers who were guarding me are mashed in the rubble, their bodies already cooling.
Earthquake, I think. It must’ve been an earthquake. Reaching into my memory files, I retrieve a map of Pioneer Base and locate Dad’s room, about a hundred feet from mine. Raising the volume of my speakers as high as it can go, I yell, “DAD! CAN YOU HEAR ME?” then listen carefully for an answering shout.
My acoustic sensor picks up nothing but the sounds of settling debris. Then I get a signal from another instrument in my sensor array, my Geiger counter. It’s reporting high levels of gamma-ray radiation.
No. It’s a mistake. The sensor must be broken.
But when I check the Geiger counter, I find nothing wrong with it. Its readings indicate that gamma rays are streaking through the dusty air at 100 millirems per second. Although this level of radiation won’t affect my circuits, it’s enough to kill a human after a couple of hours of exposure.
It wasn’t an earthquake. It was a nuke.
I desperately scroll through my databases on military hardware, looking for information on nuclear warheads. In less than a millisecond I find a file about RNEP, the Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator, a warhead designed to destroy underground bunkers. It plunges deep into the earth before exploding, which maximizes the destruction below the ground rather than on the surface. Sigma must’ve launched the nuke at us.
No, no. Please God, no.
“DAD! ANSWER ME! SAY SOMETHING!”
My acoustic sensor detects a few distant sounds—water flowing from broken pipes and trickling through the rubble—but no voices. Not a moan, not a whisper. Pioneer Base is lifeless. The explosion killed everyone.
“SAY SOMETHING! PLEASE!”
Then I hear someone coughing. It’s a feeble noise, but over the next few seconds it gets louder. It sounds like someone just regained consciousness and is now coughing the dust out of his lungs. By measuring the timing of the echoes, my sensors determine the position of the cougher: about seventy feet to my left, near the edge of the cavernous space. I point my camera in that direction and catch a glimpse of a warm body lying in the rubble. After another few seconds he stops coughing and speaks.
“Help. My legs. They’re bleeding.”
The voice is weak but I recognize it. It belongs to one of Hawke’s soldiers, Corporal Williams. He’s the guy who escorted me to Pioneer Base the first time I came to Colorado.
I’m glad he’s alive, but I was hoping for my father.
“They’re bleeding bad. I need a medic.” The corporal’s voice rises. “I need a medic! Is anyone there?”
If I had my arms and legs I could help the man. I could pull him out of the rubble and maybe carry him to safety. In my present state, though, all I can do is talk to the guy, which is pretty useless. So maybe it’s better that I didn’t hear Dad’s voice. I wouldn’t be able to help him either.
I’m about to synthesize a few comforting words—Don’t worry, help is on the way—but before I get the chance, I hear a crash above us. At first I think it’s another chunk of debris falling, but then I hear a barrage of hammer blows: Bang, Bang, Bang. That’s followed by a high-pitched metallic snap, like the sound of a crowbar prying something loose. A burst of hope rushes through my circuits—help really is on the way! A team of rescuers must be coming down from the upper floors of Pioneer Base, carving a path through the wreckage.
I point my camera upward, training it on the spot where the noises are coming from. It’s a jagged concrete ledge that used to be part of Level Four, three floors above us. According to my map of Pioneer Base, the ledge is near Stairway B, an emergency exit that goes up to the surface. After a while I see movement on the ledge, something shoving aside the hunks of steel and concrete in its path. Then my camera views the unmistakable silhouette of a Pioneer.
The robot turns its turret, scanning the cavernous space, clearly looking for a way down to the rubble-strewn bottom. It must be Zia. Who else could it be? Maybe Hawke didn’t remove her arms and legs. After several seconds the robot strides toward a huge pile of wreckage that slopes down from the ledge. It extends its arms toward a twisted steel beam jutting from the pile. The Pioneer grips the beam with both its mechanical hands and begins scuttling downward, bracing its footpads on the shifting mountain of debris. As it descends, I see the number stamped on its torso. It’s not 3, Zia’s number. It’s 6A.
I’m confused. This is DeShawn’s evil twin, the spare Pioneer usually stored in his room. But DeShawn is on the plane to Russia, along with Shannon, Jenny, and Marshall. So who the heck is inside Pioneer 6A? Did Zia transfer herself to DeShawn’s twin?
The robot reaches the bottom of the rubble pile, its footpads stomping the chunks of concrete. At the same time, Corporal Williams starts shouting. He can’t see a thing in the darkness, but he can hear the noise. “Over here!” he yells. “I’m over here!”
Pioneer 6A strides toward him. The robot stops beside Williams and tilts its torso forward so it can point its camera at the injured soldier. For the next few seconds it just stares at Williams. Maybe it’s examining the man’s injuries, trying to figure out the best way to carry him. Or maybe not. I’m starting to get a bad feeling about this.
“What are you waiting for?” Williams shouts. “I’m bleeding! I need a medic!”
The robot extends one of its arms toward the corporal. Then it clenches its steel hand into a fist and smashes the man’s skull.
The horror is so intense that it overwhelms my electronics, cutting off all the signals from my sensors. For a couple of seconds I can’t see or hear a thing. By the time my sensors come back online, Pioneer 6A is retracting its hand. Its steel fingers are coated with blood. Then the robot turns its turret and scans the surrounding area, using its infrared camera to look for other warm bodies.
It’s not Zia. She may be psycho, but she wouldn’t kill anyone like that.
It’s Sigma.
Pioneer 6A strides through the debris, moving toward the center of the cavernous space. At first I can’t understand how Sigma is controlling the Pioneer. I know the AI has communications satellites, but how can its signals reach so far underground? Only one explanation makes sense: Sigma must’ve learned the same trick DeShawn figured out—how to occupy more than one machine at a time. It sent satellite signals to the T-90 tank on the surface, which would’ve survived the underground explosion because it was on the other side of the basin. Then Sigma steered the T-90 into the blast crater above Pioneer Base and used the tank’s powerful radio to transmit signals through the rubble. Once the signals reached Pioneer 6A, Sigma sent copies of its data to the robot’s circuits.