Instantly, a subcomputer ran a full diagnostic.
Blueprints and electronic diagrams scrolled across every monitor in furious study. The probability of success was 8.9 percent. Good enough. It was smashed to pieces, with most of its computers destroyed, and circuits dead, but the Ranger had gone into many battles with a lower probability and emerged victorious.
A primary circuit sparked and nothing happened. A secondary was tried and a solenoid thumped, but the tiny hatch it was connected to refused to open, the metal buckled into an impossible condition. When the computer realized the truth, it bypassed the escape hatch and sent a hundred crablike drones out through the cracks in the hull. Clambering through the bricks and wreckage, most of the drones stepped on a loose piece of masonry and were subsequently crushed under an avalanche of debris. The remaining handful climbed over their fallen units, continuing ever upward into the tangle of glass and carpeting and out of visual range.
Time passed slowly, then the drones radioed with important news. In the ruins above were smashed computers of superior technology than those on board the Ranger. Generations better. There were fax machines for wiring, TV remote controls for infrared relays, video games loaded with integrated chips and microwave beamers inside kitchen ovens. The inventory went on for hours: rare metals from office copiers, fiber optics from phone lines, Plexiglas windows, optical lenses from security cameras, titanium steel from the building itself, electric motors in escalators, hydraulic pumps from the elevators, endless coaxial cable from VCRs, cooling units from refrigerators and air conditioners, and low-power civilian lasers from countless CD stereos and office printers.
Snipping bits and pieces from this and that, the handful of drones first repaired the rest of the broken droids. Dozens, then hundreds of the little machines started to ferry ton after ton of processed materials to the smashed tank. Hours passed in frantic activity as the sewer walls were shored up to prevent any further collapse onto the tank. Then primary power was restored, and miniature lasers began to weld the hull solid as hydraulic pumps forced warped sections closed.
Scurrying drones covered the tank, banging on treads and rewiring command boards. The world was at war, with millions of American lives depending upon the operational efficiency of the robotic guardian. Soon, the Ranger would be online and combat ready, with its invisibility shield and polycycic laser fully restored. Then the machine would hunt down the unauthorized intruders who stole valuable military supplies from redoubt 549.
The carrier wave of their badly shielded radio gave off an easily traceable signature.
But the Ranger wouldn’t try to capture the thieves again. They had illegally resisted with lethal force and the Mark IV was programmed to learn from mistakes. This time, it would simply kill them on sight.
Chapter Eleven
Drip, drip, drip. The noise was maddening, neither slowing nor increasing in tempo. It was as regular as clockwork.
The laughing woman, Amanda, filled Ryan’s vision and he put a bullet through her face. A neat hole punching in her forehead, the blood flowing out to drip-drip-drip to the ground. But the woman neither stopped laughing nor fell. Ryan shot again with his massive revolver. Pieces of her clothing were blown away, her seminude body punctured in a dozen places, but the great volume of welling blood still only dripped in that single maddening beat.
“Fire!” he shouted, and Leviathan’s main cannon boomed, blowing her into a dozen pieces. The steaming chunks hit the ground and oozed, in perfect unison, a chorus of blood.
Ryan stared at her with both eyes, shaking his fists in silent rage as he began to feel the world dissolve. The sound of the drip continued unabated, but the images left his vision and he awakened ma large dark room, his hands manacled to the cold stone wall above him.
As his eye became accustomed to the dim light, Ryan saw the rest of his people were chained to the wall to his right In surging waves of recollection, he remembered the fight on the highway, the bikers, then Amanda gassing his crew, their bodies dropping to the ground as if dead. But it was worse than that; now they were her prisoners. A glance at his clothes said he had been thoroughly searched, everything, not just his weapons, gone except for the clothes themselves. Even the spent shell casings.