The Automatic Detective (31 page)

The downed ravager latched onto my right leg, and I crushed his cranial unit. He clung stubbornly though, which left me vulnerable to an attack from the last functional opponent. But the ravager's head was stuck at a bad angle, and he couldn't aim his blow. It went wide. I smashed him from behind, knocking his head off, finishing the job.

The guy in the corner glanced at the broken robots. "Don't hurt me. Please."

"Don't believe everything you hear, buddy." I pried the ravager from my leg, picked up my case, and activated my booster to soar my way through another three floors.

Between jumps, I moved steadily toward the center of the building, toward a secret levitator pod shaft that ran from the fifty-sixth floor to the hidden sub-basement laboratories. The shaft was armored; while I could tear my way into it with some work, it would be easier to strike at the weakest point: the door. I didn't hide my objective, and the Dissenters would do whatever it took to keep me from reaching it, which was good for Jung and Humbolt.

It would've been reassuring if I could've checked in for a status report. Radio silence was part of the operation, so I carried on. No one tried to stop me. The ravagers had been a test, and I'd passed. The Dissenters knew I was in the building,
knew I was on my way, and knew I meant business. No big deal. I wanted them to know.

One minute, fourteen seconds later, I reached the fiftieth floor. It hadn't been a difficult journey, and I'd managed not to get any noncombatants killed in the process. In fact, once past the twentieth floor, I didn't run across any civilians, who were already being forcibly evacuated.

Once I punched through to the fifty-first, the first floor used by the Dissenters, all bets were off. My analyzer assumed that security knew where I was and had mobilized every ravager in the place. I was counting on it. The Dissenters thought I was merely a robot, predictable and compelled to complete my directive even counter to common sense. What they couldn't know, what they couldn't understand, was that I had no intention of getting scrapped if I could avoid it. There was one more thing they didn't know, couldn't feed into their computers. The case I carried with the four bedlam drones inside.

I thrust upward and burst into the Dissenter lab, right in the middle of three dozen ravagers. Had to be nearly every ravager in the facility, and it was too many for a single bot to take.

I pushed a button on my case. It popped open and four spherical drones sprang out and hovered at chest level. The quartet of bedlam drones scanned the room, assessing targets.

"Anytime you're ready, boys," I said.

As one, the ravagers took a single step toward me. Lucia hadn't dubbed the drones "bedlams" for nothing. Each was outfitted with a miniature battery of rapid fire rayguns and overeager targeting systems. The bedlams started blasting anything that moved. They would've even blasted me if I hadn't stood immobile. The ravagers were dumb autos programmed to throw themselves at me in an overwhelming pile. It didn't occur to them to stand still.

Most were blown to pieces in a hail of rayfire. As each wave fell, the next moved forward and was cut down. It didn't take long, which was fortunate because the bedlams had a functional life of forty-five seconds before their rayguns burnt out and their power cells went dry. Used up, they clattered to the floor among the twitching piles of bubbling metal.

The smoke cleared to reveal three semifunctional ravagers left. One had lost both its arms. Another struggled to stand with a hole punched through its central gyro. One more had had its legs blown off and dragged itself stubbornly toward me with its arms. I didn't bother waiting, activating my booster and hurling myself through the next three floors.

The ravagers had been among the most serious threats security could throw my way. There were certain to be one or two left functional in the building, but I could handle that on my own. According to my mission model the next obstacle would be a secondary defense line set up at the elevator door. So far, the Dissenters had responded exactly as expected, which registered as a bit ironic since I was supposed to be the predictable one.

I smashed my way through to the fifty-sixth floor into an empty chemical lab. The doors opened and in rushed a squad of five biological security personnel. They bathed me in a dark blue ray from their rifles. Frost crystallized on my chassis. In three seconds it solidified into thick blocks of ice. The guards concentrated their freezerays on my limbs. They succeeded in encasing my right arm completely, rendering it inoperable.

One of the guys aimed at my cranial unit. I intercepted the beam with my hand, and the ice spread across my palm. I squeezed my fingers and ended up with a four-pound chunk in my grip. I threw it into the lead guard's nose, and he was knocked off his feet. I advanced on the others, despite the ice coating my chassis. One punch each and they went down.

I twitched my frozen arm three times, and the ice block cracked and fell away. I brushed away a few other chunks. The lab doors slid open, and two new squads raced in. I turned and barreled toward the elevator, which according to calculations was three hundred feet and four walls away.

I smashed through the first wall. Then the next. I didn't try to maneuver. I wasn't designed for it. I crashed through anything stupid enough to get in my way. There were guards stationed all the way, but their freezerays weren't dangerous once I was in motion. The blocks of ice shattered with every stride of my powerful servos. Seven guards were shortsighted enough to wind up in my way. Five were lucky enough to be knocked aside with a few broken bones. Two ended up under my feet, and their body armor cracked and their vulnerable biological bodies squished beneath my merciless tread.

The last wall gave way, and the levitator pod doors were before me. By now, I'd stopped factoring in the security forces and their freezerays as a threat. There were a lot of them, and they held a last ditch line in front of the shaft, along with three more ravagers who stood defiantly before my goal.

I bowled through the security guards and shouldered past one of the ravagers, knocked the second aside with a swing of my fist. The third jumped right in my path with intentions of stopping my charge. Once I got going, standing in front of me was about the worst place to be. I rammed the ravager head on, lifting him off his feet and slamming him through the pod doors ahead of me. He was crushed like a tin can, and the doors gave way.

I tumbled down the empty shaft, ricocheting off the walls. My arms flailed out in search of something solid to grab. Plummeting the eighty floors to the bottom was faster but bound to damage something. After nine seconds of clanging and crashing,
I managed to drive my fingers into the wall. My shoulder joint popped, absorbing the stress and reporting a few microfractures. The shaft filled with the harsh sound of metal tearing metal as I ripped gashes until my fall slowed and eventually stopped.

Eight seconds later, I recorded the distant thud of the broken ravager hitting bottom. It was going to be a long climb. I punched handholds as I went, and had descended seventy feet by the time a pair of security camera drones hovered up from the darkness.

Warner's voice issued from their speakers. "You were lucky to get this far, Mack. Stop now, before your luck runs out."

I didn't acknowledge him, just kept climbing.

"You're not a biological. You won't be affected by our plans. Why would you risk your continued functioning? It's illogical."

It was a good question, and I had a good logical answer to it. Self-preservation was a basic directive, but there wasn't a robot functioning that prioritized it at the top of his list. Like biologicals, all robots were seeking a purpose. Autos and drones were lucky enough to have that built into them. A bot had to find his own way, and I'd figured out that functioning for function's sake was pointless. The real question was finding a directive worth getting scrapped for. The future of Empire and every citizen she called home balanced against one bot was a simple equation. Even simpler was one family that deserved better than to be used up and tossed aside by an indifferent city. I might not be able to change Empire. I might not even be able to stop the Dissenters. But I could save the Bleakers.

I didn't bother explaining it to Warner. He wouldn't have understood.

The shaft's magnetic couplings hummed to life. I craned my opticals upward to scan the pod dropping from above.

"Have a nice ride, Mack," said Warner.

There was no time to react except thrust my shoulders upward and brace myself for the impact. The pod crashed into me. The drones were destroyed instantly, but I managed to absorb the shock evenly and avoid any internal damage. The shaft sped by. I activated my booster and slowed the descent, but not by much.

I punched my way through the pod bottom and quickly climbed into it. I boosted again and burst through the top. The pod fell away, and impacted at the bottom five-sixths of a second later. Some shrapnel whizzed up the shaft and bounced harmlessly off my chassis. I fell the rest of the way and landed with a thud among the wreckage. The doors had been blown out by the impact, and I stepped out, expecting to meet up with the next obstacle toward my objective.

The corridor was empty.

Unexpected.

Something had gone wrong. The Dissenters must've realized my objective by now. This hall should've been filled with every security guard in the facility. There wasn't one guard. Not a single ravager or security drone. Nothing.

I'd miscalculated. My elegant electronic brain was not a foolproof mechanism. My logic lattice must've overlooked something, or Doctor Zarg's data had been incomplete. Either way, the only thing I could do was continue toward my goal and adapt as the variables became clearer.

Halfway there, I turned a corner and finally met up with the latest obstacle the Dissenters had to throw my way. The twenty-foot robot clomped forward on its thick legs. Its arms ended in pincers, each large enough to seize me in their grip. It didn't appear to have any armaments, but judging by size and probable power, it was a hell of an obstacle. And I didn't know a particle about it.

The auto clomped forward. Every step rattled the corridor, and the top of its body scraped the ceiling at the height of each stride. I didn't scan a way around it.

"Surprised, Mack?" asked Warner, his voice coming from a speaker in the auto's torso. "Nothing about this in Zarg's files, I assume."

The auto took another step, and I stood there. My logic lattice was unready to formulate a viable battle plan. Even the best electronic brain could be stalled by the unexpected.

"No reason he should've," said Warner. "The demolisher is not a combat unit. Large and clumsy, we keep it around for jobs requiring brute strength. And believe me, it is very strong." The auto snapped each of its pincers three times with harsh clangs.

With the demolisher only two steps from being on top of me, my combat analyzer spit out the only course of action that my logic lattice, common sense emulator, and self-preservation directive agreed on: retreat.

I chose to override their advice.

The demolisher was halfway through its next step. I boosted into it, attempting to knock it off balance. It was big, but it had to be clumsy, without much room to maneuver in the hall.

I collided with the demolisher, but not how I'd planned. The auto thrust its leg forward, smacking me in the chest and knocking me to the floor. Before I could get up, it dropped a heavy foot on me. The unit's feet were as long and wide as me, so I had no room to wiggle or maneuver. It leaned its full weight on me, and even with my arms and legs in position, it was unlikely I could push the unit off.

This was it. All the demolisher had to do was stand here, and I couldn't do a damn thing about it. The mission was over. I only hoped that Humbolt and Jung had gotten Julie and April out. It would've been nice to achieve at least one objective.

The demolisher raised its foot and stomped down on me. To give me even a second of leverage and motion while I was incapacitated was illogical. More than that, it was vicious and violent and just plain dumb. It wasn't a robot thing to do. Even a simple auto would've had more sense. I attributed it to a glitch.

The demolisher did it again. Three times more. It stomped its foot down hard enough to drive me into the floor. My chassis held under the blows, but more fractures registered in my internals. A hydraulic fluid leak was reported in my right shoulder. In five minutes, the arm would be functionally inoperative.

The demolisher wasn't an auto. It must've been a piloted vehicle. Biologicals were unpredictable, difficult to anticipate. They were also stupid. No correctly programmed robot would throw away a clear advantage in hopes of doing a bit more damage to an already defeated opponent.

"How does it feel now?" asked Warner. "That it was all for nothing? That you succeeded in only getting yourself scrapped? You stupid—" Clomp! "—piece of—" Clomp! "—defective tin!"

It raised its foot, and this time I was ready. I rolled to one side. I may be a relatively clumsy bot, but I was quicker than the demolisher and managed to get to my feet as it tried to flatten me with a pincer. I caught the blow. More damage to my internals. My left knee joint cracked, reducing effectiveness by thirteen degrees, and the hydraulic leak in my arm got worse. I managed not to be crushed and deflected the strike.

I moved in close to the demolisher, where its arms weren't designed to reach. The close quarters of the hallway made it difficult to turn. I threw my shoulder into its right leg, and activated the booster. The demolisher swayed but didn't fall over.
I cranked my servos all the way to 200 percent. It burned a lot of juice and blew out my damaged right arm, rendering it almost inoperable. The demolisher's leg pushed backwards. It fell over and past me to land front down.