Jacobs unlatched it, checked out the contents. Everything was there. “Okay,” he said, biting his lip for a second as if to convince himself that he was in a real situation and not a dream. “Let’s start rolling the wall. Over there. Bring it around flush with that corner, then beat it into the alleyway and find a door. We can’t waste time. If we do, it may be waiting on the other side of the door when we open it.”
When the detonator blew, the door was ripped from its hinges and propelled across the alley, clattering against the opposite wall, bouncing back and forth finally settling to the pavement, like a spinning penny eventually teeters to the top of the game table.
Jacobs led the others into the building, holding his breath through the thick, acrid smoke, careful not to touch the steaming metal of the door frame. Inside, he ordered Officer Talmadge and Officer Cork to carry their flashlamps on half beam. When Cork finally fumbled his lamp on and Talmadge augmented it with his, they found they were indeed in a storage room. Moments later, they found the doorway into the rest of the building. It was locked; but flimsy. There was no need for explosives. Jacobs braced himself against the frame, smashed a foot into it. Twice. Again. Four times. The wood splintered around the hinges. He kicked it again. The door tore free, swung aside.
“Tenth floor,” Cullen said.
“My brother-in-law works here,” Talmadge said. “I’ve been here a few times.”
“Lead then,” Jacobs said.
Holding his lamp up to shoulder level like a trembling child investigating a haunted house, he moved forward, the rest strung out behind him, guns drawn.
“Not the elevator,” Jacobs hissed as they threaded their way down a dark hall. “That will tell it where we are.”
“The stairs are this way,” Talmadge said, turning right into a side corridor and stopping. “Maybe we should put lights at quarter power, Captain.”
“Quarter power, then,” he snapped.
The light receded. Darkness drifted closer.
Quietly, quietly, they ascended the stairs. They must make no sound now. If this killerbot could reason and act in logical, strategic form, it was a newer, more dangerous killerbot. It would know they had broken in. It would not be blindly firing at an empty street. It would be hunting for them.
He shivered. It would be hunting for them.
Although they expected to meet it at every landing, around every corner in the staircase, they climbed the twenty flights without incident. At the tenth floor, Talmadge pushed open the double glass doors into the main hallway . . .
. . . and was torn up the middle by fifty or more darts.
He didn’t even have time to scream.
Swallowing hard, Jacobs blasted the door, rolled through the gaping hole where the door had been, gun out and firing to the left. Frag slugs whined off the walls, shattered windows at the far end of the corridor. But they didn’t bring down the killerbot, for the killerbot had disappeared.
Jacobs was so tense that it seemed his scalp would split open, his skull crack to let out the pressure his whirling mind was accumulating. And he knew that if he was that tense the rest of them were even closer to blowing their tops. They had never had any experience with a killerbot that tried to protect itself. From the first day that Euro had turned killerbots loose on Nortamer, they had been stupid, suicidal units that stood and fired until cut down themselves. Or until their weapons systems ran out of ammunition. They were not detectable, even by X-ray, for what metal they did contain in their flesh was shielded in silicone, plastic, nylon mesh that effectively rendered X-ray useless, They had many advantages as weapons of war, but they didn’t have real intelligence. It had always been a matter of standing out of the programmed fire pattern and cutting the human-machine to pieces. This one was different, and this one seemed the turning point of the war.
They had searched all rooms in this wing, their fingers aching with the weight of their guns, their eyes weary with squinting, blurred with trying to sort out the shadows ahead and make them resolve into a human form, something, anything to shoot at. They turned the corner into another corridor, stepping into the killerbot’s line of fire. . . .