Whistling Past the Graveyard (16 page)

Flint ran to where Monster had fallen, but the Joe was past all help.

Grief and rage were like a furnace in Flint’s chest. Even so, he couldn’t pause to mourn his friend’s death. Instead he took the remaining grenades―frags and flashbangs―and all remaining ammunition.

He turned to Scarlett and gave her half of the grenades.

“Look,” he began, but she gave a fierce shake of her head.

“Go!” she snarled. “Find them…
stop
this thing.”

-16-

Inside the Island

Flint ran through the darkness. He had looted Teacher’s Pet as well and wore the dead Joe’s helmet, and his pockets were heavy with grenades and magazines. The NVD allowed him to move fast.

Once he was out of the observation wing, he had to cut down a long access tunnel to get to the security vault. The comlink was still dead, but between bursts of gunfire he could hear voices. Screams.

It had to be the staff.

“Yo, Joe!”

The cry came from his left and Flint skidded to a stop and wheeled around. Two figures emerged from behind a stack of crates. Law and Order.

The security tech was covered with blood and his left arm hung limp at his side. Order limped beside him and the dog’s eyes were wild with a predatory gleam that looked more like a wolf than a German shepherd.

“How bad are you hurt?”

“Shrapnel in the shoulder,” Law answered. “What the hell is happening?”

In a few terse sentences Flint gave him the basics.

“That doesn’t make sense. It was Doctor Prospero who just got me out of the vault. Him and that weird iron suit of his.”

“
What?
”

“Yeah, just now. He ripped the door right off the hinges. Wouldn’t have thought it was possible. He told me to get to the observation deck and help Professor Miranda. She said was hurt…”

There was another burst of gunfire, down the corridor and around the bend.

Law nodded. “Prospero went that way. One of those minigun drones attacked us. Prospero charged after it and tore it apart. Literally. By hand. It exploded, which is how I got nailed. He left me here and said he was going to Ops.”

“Okay. Get to the observation deck. Doc’s out, Miranda’s down, and Scarlett took one in the leg. Keep ’em safe.”

“Count on it. But…where are you going?”

“That way,” Flint said and ran off in the same direction Prospero had taken.

Order’s fierce barks seemed to chase him through the darkness.

An explosion shook the whole place and the shock wave nearly knocked Flint off his feet. When he rounded the corner he saw four more of the minigun drones. Two were smoking, their parts twisted from the blast. The others looked like they had been torn apart by an angry giant.

Along one wall was a row of doors and Flint realized that he was in the first chamber of the staff wing. Most of the doors were still locked shut, but a few had been torn open and there were bodies slumped inside and out. Two or three white-coated figures staggered dazedly through the smoke, their faces smudged with dirt, their clothes singed and streaked with blood.

Flint ran.

He was following a trail of destruction. Prospero had somehow managed to get into his Caliban exosuit and was hunting the drones in his own facility. The power of the Caliban
unit was incredible. Steel doors had been ripped from their hinges, doorways smashed to allow the monstrosity to pass through. And everywhere there were dead bodies and drones.

With a sinking heart Flint realized that his team had not been able to get everyone into their chambers before the drones attacked. Men and women lay sprawled like broken dolls.

And in the mess hall, Flint saw a heartbreaking sight. Jukebox and Schoolgirl, two of the newest members of his team, had apparently tried to mount a defense in order to protect a dozen staff members. They had tossed heavy tables onto their sides and set up a firing position. The floor was littered with countless spent shell casings. Jukebox’s M4 and Schoolgirl’s M5 were still in their hands, the barrels still smoking. But both of the Joes were down. They had taken round after round and gone down fighting.

Behind them, nine of the staff still huddled―weeping and trembling―in a corner between the kitchen entrance and the juice bar. Flint read the scene as he rushed through it. His Joes had destroyed five of the miniguns. Five.

But there had been six.

The last one was smashed flat as if a gigantic fist had pounded it into debris.

Prospero
.

Had he gotten here too late? Had he tried to save the Joes as well as the staff? It looked that way, but it didn’t make sense to Flint. Prospero had to know that if the drones were stopped then he was going to jail for the rest of his life.

Yet he was trying to save people.

Why?

Flint ran on. Eating his grief, clamping down on his pain.

Something hit him hard in the side and Flint felt himself tumbling, spinning. He struck the wall and slid to the floor, his whole left side ablaze.

I’ve been shot
, he realized.

Darkness and nausea washed over him, but he fought it down, shoved it back.

The shock of the impact erased the immediate awareness of the shot. He had no idea where it had come from.

Then there was a second shot. It pinged off the wall near his head, missing him by inches.

Flint could use his right arm well enough and he sent six shots downrange with his Sig Sauer. There was a scream and then the sound of running. His NVD was askew and by the time he straightened it all he saw was a flash of white.

Not a soldier. Had to be one of the staff. The traitor.

He was sure of it.

The only one? Or part of a sleeper team?

He was inclined to think that there were more. Too much was happening too fast.

He got to his feet and probed his side. The bullet hadn’t penetrated, but had instead hit at an angle on his ribcage and slashed him as surely as if he’d been hacked with a sword. When he took a breath he almost screamed. At least two ribs were broken. He could feel the jagged end of one of them tenting the skin. He took a deep breath and pushed it back into place.

He did scream then.

The world danced a sickening jig around him, but he ground his teeth. If he fell, he knew he’d never get up.

He began limping forward, forcing his mind to think through the problem. That was how to defeat the pain. That was how he’d survive.

“Kong’s team,” he said between gritted teeth.

What about them?

Kong had built the AI chip. Was Prospero correct when he said that Kong’s team was all third rate? Or was arrogance clouding the man’s judgment. At that moment Flint would have bet a month’s pay that it was one of Kong’s team who had installed that chip. And that some or all of that team were finessing this situation.

Why?

He staggered on, following a trail of bloody footprints. He’d scored a hit. Nice. As he ran, Flint thought about Prospero’s mention of a ‘Scotsman.’

Destro. Had to be.

Destro
was
known for AI systems, as well as other weapons that smudged the boundaries between ‘in development’ and ‘science fiction.’

That fast Flint understood it. The competing weapons designers. The ‘client.’ Backstabbing and sabotage were not exactly unknown to that crew of maniacs.

If Destro was afraid that another top-of-the-line weapons manufacturer would come and crowd him out of the market, what better way to handle it? Let the man finish his masterpiece―the Caliban exosuit and the Skyjack intrusion software―then discredit him during an inspection and take the system for himself. He could then sell it to Cobra without losing the broker’s fee; and Destro was genius enough to retro-engineer it.

It made sense, though Flint wondered at how twisted
he
was becoming if this made sense to him.

He rounded a bend and saw the open sky and the vast, black desert.

He saw Flash running at him, the smoking ruin of a laser rifle in his hands, his face flash-burned and bloody. There was an explosion and Flash was flung twenty feet through the air. Flint tried to dodge, but Flash was a screaming missile that struck him full in the chest.

-17-

Outside of the Island

Flint could barely breathe.

He crawled out from under Flash’s body, reached down to touch his friend’s throat, felt the pulse. Weak, but still there.

Pain was everywhere. Flash’s damaged laser rifle had struck Flint in the face, and blood dripped from a deep gash on his cheek. One eye was puffed shut and the whole world had a distant, tinny sound.

And the pain.

It was hard to find somewhere to put his thoughts that was not already flooded with agony.

It was all coming apart. Gunfire rattled on and on. There were screams from inside the complex and then a huge series of explosions. One, two, five…too many to count. Fires burst through the roofs of a dozen buildings sending showers of sparks into the sky so that it looked like the stars themselves were dying and falling.

Flint ran out into the compound, moving fast despite the pain, using hard cover instead of shadows, moving from tree to rock to wall, his pattern random and unsymmetrical. He was hurt, he knew that much. The warmth running down the inside of his clothes wasn’t all sweat. He could smell the sharp copper tang of his own blood.

His blood, and the blood of others.

Doc. Law. Scarlett, too. In his mind all he could see was blood.

Blood…and those
things.
The minigun drones. The Sprites. Were they real or was his damaged brain replaying the horrors of the last hour?

He ran and ran, his breath burning in his lungs.

He stumbled and went down, hitting chest-first and sliding, tasting sand in his mouth. He came to rest in the middle of the east parade ground. Exposed, vulnerable.

The screams began to die away. They did not fade like volume turned down on an iPod. They were cut off. Sharply, abruptly, in time with new bursts of gunfire.

Flint felt his consciousness begin to fade as fatigue or damage took hold of him.

“No,” he mumbled, spitting sand out of his mouth. “No!”

If he passed out now, he knew that he would never wake up. Not in this world.
They
would find him. Find him and tear him apart.

He tried to get to his hands and knees, but he felt too weak, too used up.

“No!” he growled, louder this time, and the harshness in his own voice put steel into his muscles. He rose, inch by agonizing inch until he was upright on his knees.

In the distance he could hear one of
them
coming.

A metallic clang, the squeak of treads.

How far? A hundred yards? Less?

Flint set his teeth and tried to get to his feet. No way he was going to die like this. If this was his last firefight, then by God he was not going out on his knees.

Pain flared in his side. He couldn’t remember what had hit him. Bullets? Shrapnel?

It didn’t matter, he forced one leg up, thumped his right foot on the ground, jammed the stock of his M5 on the ground, and pushed.

It was like jacking up a tank.

He rose slowly, slowly.

The squeak of the treads was closer. All of the screams had stopped.

Even the gunfire seemed to have died away.

“No!” he snarled and heaved.

He got to his feet and the whole world spun around him. He almost fell. It nearly ended right there, but Flint took an awkward sideways step and caught his balance.

The world steadied.

The squeak of treads was close. So close. Too close.

Flint turned.

It
was there. Massive, indomitable against the firelit columns of smoke. It rolled to a stop ten feet away. It was like the minigun drones that had slaughtered most of his team…but this one was bigger, and with a hiss of hydraulics the black mouths of two electric cannons swung toward him. He raised his own gun.

The miniguns could fire more than four thousand rounds per minute, per gun.

He wasn’t sure he could even pull the trigger.

Flint bared his bloody teeth in a grin that defied the machine, defied logic, and defied the certainty of death that towered over him.

“Go Joe!” he yelled.

And fired.

Then something came out of the darkness to his left and slammed into the drone with the sound of a train wreck. There was a scream of twisted steel and one of the guns fired, but the rounds chopped a line through the sand a yard to Flint’s right.

From the tangle of wreckage a monster rose, gleaming and ugly and huge. It punched down at the drone, shattering the gearbox; it grabbed the active gun and tore it from the pedestal and flung the smoking weapon a hundred yards into the dark.

Then silence collapsed around Flint, and he sprawled onto the sand, his gun falling from his nerveless fingers.

The giant moved toward him, clanking with each step, its metal skin smoking. There was a hydraulic hiss and the faceplate rose to reveal the madman inside the monster.

“It’s over,” he said. “I set an EMP bomb. It will detonate in two minutes. The drones are done. Everything is done.”

Flint tried to speak, tried to form a word.

“W-why?”

Prospero smiled. A strange, enigmatic smile.

“You didn’t believe me when I told you earlier, Chief,” he said, “but I really have come to believe in the work. There will be blood—there
has
been blood, and I regret that more than I can express…but eventually this technology will make open warfare impossible. My drones were meant to fight other drones. That’s the point. Let the machines battle over politics and oil and religion. Let men be safe.” He shook his head. “There will be a new cold war. It’s inevitable. Cold as steel, Chief. The drones and iron giants will become walls between men, and ultimately men will have to stop killing each other.”

“Sounds nice,” gritted Flint, “but I have dead friends here who wouldn’t think much of that plan.”