Before he could grab it, the bot wriggled around and shot straight at his head again.
He gripped the small bot in his mechanoid hand, having barely caught it before it would have brained him. It took him an instant to process. A malfunction? No, not a malfunction. The bot squirmed in his grip. This thing wants to kill me. “Shaky!” yelled Bunky. “Get the hell out of there!”
He crushed the bot and threw it aside.
His entire network of bots dropped from his network. An explosion lit up the tunnel behind him. He logged into the city sensors, and his jaw dropped. The giant boring machine, thirty feet across and half a football field long, reversed direction and was charging back up the tunnel toward them, heading directly for the Midtown den.
“RUN!” he screamed to Shaky as he turned and began sprinting his mechanoid into the blackness.
The seas of the south Atlantic were calm. The Alliance battle platform, its smooth black surface designed to cloak it from both kinetics and electromagnetics, was quiet on the outside, but inside, its slingshot systems were cycling up. Just over the horizon, ten miles away, the glass towers of Terra Nova glistened. A series of small panels, each no thicker than a man’s arm, opened up across the mile-wide surface of the platform.
Even cloaked, this raised alarms on Terra Nova.
The battle platform’s slingshots began unloading, the off-center rotating platform weapons hidden below spitting out thousands of incendiary pellets at several miles per second. The surface of the platform erupted in an inferno of super-heated plasma shockwaves. The ocean around the platform boiled. Three seconds later the island of Terra Nova was immersed in a miles-wide fireball, its own shield weapons staving off the initial attack.
“Sibeal, do you notice anything odd?” Sid asked, sitting in the White Horse.
Bunky and Shaky were supposed to be back for a pint soon, but he’d lost contact with them.
“What do you mean, odd?”
“There haven’t been any security alerts in the past two hours.”
“I hadn’t noticed.” She flashed a part of her mind over his data. “Yeah, I see what you mean.”
It wasn’t that anything was wrong, just an absence of something being wrong—an anomaly. Not getting any security alerts had been soothing for a half an hour, but after an hour it became unusual. When two hours passed, Sid became downright suspicious. He began digging into the sensor logs, but then looked up. Something was roaring down one of the main arteries toward the den. Nothing was showing up on the sensors.
Sid grabbed Sibeal’s arm, pulling her away from the table just as Bunky’s mechanoid launched out of the darkness of the main tunnel, jumping to crash into the opposite wall just beside the pub.
At almost the same moment Shaky came skidding out of another tunnel. “Out of the way!” he yelled as the rock wall behind him crashed down and the boring machine launched itself into space and into the opposite wall. Slabs of rock rained down into the lower levels. The screaming began as people scrambled to get away.
Opening his eyes, Sid found himself face to face with Shaky. He had somehow cradled Sid and Sibeal beneath his mechanoid, protecting them. Grunting, Shaky began to lift himself up, a shower of rock and debris sliding off his back. The rotors of the borer were still going at full speed and it began grinding into the far wall, slowly dragging itself away as it ate into the rock.
An overlaid display opened in Sid’s optic channels. “You need to see this,” said Vicious, Sid’s proxxi. Reports flooded in about mass arrests. Sid watched as the underground den in Rio they worked with erupted in flames. An orbital view of the South Atlantic showed Alliance platforms opening fire on Terra Nova. In Montana the protective shell of the Commune lit up as it was attacked by drones.
A coordinated global attack was underway.
The Ascetics were under assault by police forces across America. Mikhail Butorin chimed in with a report. Sibeal locked into Sid’s workspace and they began plotting escape routes while setting secondary communication channels with their partners.
“Don’t bother,” said a voice from the gaping hole in the wall above them. From the darkness, an army of black-uniformed troops in body armor poured into the den. Their faces were covered by smooth black masks. One of them stood motionless in the middle while the rest flowed around him, and addressed Sid. “It’s been a long time, my friend.”
Sid stared at the masked face. “Do I know you?” he asked. Then the featureless mask morphed into a face that Sid recognized. Fear jangled his fingertips. He pushed Sibeal behind him. “What do you want?”
Jimmy smiled at Sid. One of his splinters was inhabiting the psombie trooper that stared down at them.
“You never were much for social ritual, were you, Sid?” Jimmy’s psombie jumped down and stepped across the ragged pile of rocks onto the patio of the White Horse. “Maybe a nice, hi, how are you? It’s been a long time, my friend.”
“Are we friends, Jimmy?” Sid asked, backing away with Sibeal behind him. He was projecting escape routes into the future, but as fast he could create new scenarios, Jimmy cut them down and overpowered him. Sid was used to fighting in the gameworlds where he was swift and brave. Now his skin prickled at the naked danger. His hands shook.
Jimmy nodded. “I thought we were.”
“Then why did you almost just kill me?” Sid looked around the den. The psombie troops were collecting the survivors. There were crushed bodies under the rocks.
“Not my choice,” Jimmy said, shrugging, “not anymore. This is an Alliance military operation. After what happened in Arunchal—”
“We didn’t do that,” Sid interrupted. Was this the same Jimmy he knew and grew up with? The meeting on Terra Nova flooded his mind. Am I face to face with some ancient evil? He looked into Jimmy’s eyes, but sensed nothing, just a blank emotional wall.
“Then come with me and prove it.” Jimmy edged closer. “Your Grilla friend has been very uncooperative.”
Sibeal pulled Sid aside. “You have Zoraster?”
“We do,” admitted Jimmy, coming another step closer.
“I know you think you’re the fastest gun in the network,” Jimmy laughed. “In fact, it’s one of the reasons I always liked you. But you can’t win this fight.”
“Then why don’t you come get me,” Sid said more bravely than he felt. He still had a few tricks up his sleeve. The other psombie guards formed a circle around them. He might be able to take out one or two.
Jimmy backed up a step and sighed. “We can do this the hard way, or the easy way.” A new wave of psombie troops appeared at the gaping hole in the rock wall.
Sid’s shoulders slumped. Better to wait for another moment. He could use some more time to probe the networks of the psombies, see if he could hack into Jimmy’s connection. Maybe it was an opportunity. “Okay, we’ll come.” He started a private network with Sibeal.
“Good.” Jimmy crossed the last few steps between. “I need to know where Bob is.”
Sid shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“I know you know,” sighed Jimmy. “And I know I can’t hack into your networks remotely. But there are other ways.”
Sid backed up, but there was nowhere to go. Psombie guards grabbed them from behind.
“And more important…” Jimmy paused, leaning down to pick up a shard of shattered glass.