The Unseen (23 page)

Telling SeptemberMist the wrong time was never an integral part of the plan, but hopefully it would give her just another few minutes before Joseth realized what was happening.
Every second is going to count. I’ve got to take him by surprise, because I don’t know if anyone can stand up to him toe to toe.

By the time Kari got to the bottom of the stairs, Valhalla’s entire factory was hers. She queued up all of the printers with projects as fast as she could. She ordered several dozen hacking drones and as many of her stinger drones. The larger printers she used to print her modified Faraday cheetahs.

Kari walked to the center of the basement and sat on the floor with her legs crossed. She could hear feet running on the wooden floors above her and a good deal of shouting. She blocked out the noise from above as she focused on setting up her defenses. Many of her security systems were dependent on specific hardware and circumstances. She didn’t have the luxury of ideal resources or the time to set up a proper defensive system.

Kari executed the base security software she had been programming over the past week and placed it between the printers and the outside world.
Just need this to last long enough to print three or four rounds of drones and cheetahs—enough to give me a fighting chance.

The drones finished before the cheetahs, and Kari ordered them to guard the entrances to the basement. She didn’t want to hurt anyone if possible, but she couldn’t allow anyone down to stop her. She ordered the drones to lightly sting any humans and disable anything else. Despite being in the middle of a busy factory, Kari could hear the sounds of sirens growing in the distance.
Good. Hopefully that fire requires the full attention of everyone here.

The cheetahs finished at the same time that the second wave of drones took flight from their printers. Kari ordered more of her modified cheetahs as well as a full round of some larger drones that were designed to be nothing more than flying EMP guns. Kari was so focused on trying to shore up the security system and protecting the printers that she almost didn’t notice that Joseth was calling.

“Can’t say I wasn’t expecting your call,” Kari said. She didn’t allow the camera to display her face to Joseth, mainly because she didn’t want to see his.

“You set fire to my sanctuary,” Joseth said. He wasn’t pleased.

“Would it help if I told you I feel bad about that?”

“No.”

“Well, I do. Valhalla is truly beautiful, but the problem is that it has a rotten core.”

“I don’t have time for this.” Kari’s mind was filled with alerts and warnings from her makeshift security system. It had been attacked in a brute force fashion, and Joseth’s first attempt at hacking her had almost overloaded her defenses.
Come on, I need a lot longer than this!

“Is that the best you can do?” Kari said. Honestly, he had nearly brought her days of work crashing down, but it felt natural to trash talk after spending so much time around Motorcad.

“Do you really believe you can keep me out of my own factory?” His voice was distracted, and the words had a hissing sound to them that gave her chills.
Well, now I get my chance to test myself against the world’s best.

The room went dark, and the printers came to a standstill as the power to the factory was cut. The backup generator kicked in a few seconds later, roaring to life outside of the factory. The noise scared Lars; he frantically clawed at her back, trying to escape. As soon as the lights kicked back in, and the printers restarted, Kari’s system came under attack again.

This time Joseth concentrated on trying to overload certain protocols that Kari’s defenses relied on. She programmed new rules to combat his hacks, routing his attacks out of the system without processing them. Her software held.

“Clever. Was cutting the power to distract me, or were you hoping my software wouldn’t boot back up in time?” Her EMP drones finished printing and took flight, causing the noise levels in the basement to rise even higher.

“It was actually a result of your fire,” Joseth said. “If I had been trying to be clever, this little game would be finished.”

“Big talk for a guy who doesn’t even control his own factory,” Kari said. Joseth growled at her taunt, and Kari wiped sweat from her brow.

“If you wanted to test yourself against me, we could have done it as friends,” Joseth said.

“And if you wanted me to help you overthrow the government, you could have asked, instead of killing the general who was protecting me and bringing me here to try to manipulate me,” Kari said.
She heard some yelling from one of the stairwells, but Kari trusted her stinger drones to handle the situation, as she was completely focused on defending the printers from Oedipus.

The second round of cheetahs finished printing. The newly finished products walked over to the doorway, where the other cheetahs had formed an intimidating group.
Halfway to standing a chance.
Her butt was starting to hurt from sitting on the stone floor, but she couldn’t spare the thought to move.

“We could have been great together,” Joseth said. Kari didn’t have a chance to reply, as Joseth took control of her printers. One second she had total control, and the next she was locked out completely.
No, no, no!
Kari tried to hack control back from Oedipus but gave up after a minute of making no progress. She closed the call.
I can’t waste time trying to get control back; I have to make my move now. It’s not what I wanted, but this is more than I had the last time I broke out of a prison.

Kari joined her cheetahs by the rear bay doors. Her small army was gathering up around her. The room was packed with buzzing drones waiting for orders. The printers abandoned their current projects and started working on something new.
Probably nanobots. Can’t let him have any reinforcements. Time to shut this place down for good.

Kari ordered the cheetahs to blast the bay doors open and for the drones to protect her as they left the basement. The explosions rocked the factory as the doors shattered to pieces. She covered her face and tried to calm Lars down, but she wasn’t overly successful at either endeavor. As soon as there was space, drones and cheetahs started to pour outside into the fall air.

She sent orders to disable the power generator in order to prevent Joseth from printing reinforcements behind her. Kari made it outside and was surprised to find that her army was the only thing moving.
Where are Joseth’s defenses? They could have easily made it here by now.
Something wasn’t right, but Kari didn’t have time to worry about it. She needed to get to the garage that was around the corner of the mansion.

Kari formed her drones into groups, grouping each hacking drone with a stinger drone and an EMP drone. She had them spread out widely in a circle around her, hovering at different heights. Her cheetahs formed an arrow in front of her.
Joseth isn’t going to let me just walk out of here.

There were side doors to the garage, but she wanted to know what Joseth was up to before she committed to doing anything else. She walked around the corner to the front of Valhalla and stopped in her footsteps.
Oh boy . . .

Standing in the middle of the driveway in front of the house was Joseth. Behind him, a group of the Unseen stood in line, MagicWaffles, SeptemberMist, and a handful of the other hackers whom Kari had suspected of being in his inner circle. Motorcad was standing with them. Behind them was the biggest display of mechanical force she had ever seen. Hundreds of cheetahs covered the road, and more of them filled the woods. Crawlers and other small insect-like robots that Kari didn’t recognize skirted around their feet. The air was filled with swarms of drones of various sizes, sporting all different sizes of weaponry. She was breathless.
He hadn’t been bluffing about anything!

Kari looked around, desperate for a way out, but the woods to the side of her were filling with more of Joseth’s red-marked forces. Messages from drones guarding the rear alerted her to the fact that hundreds of enemies were blocking their only escape route.
Trapped.

“There she is—the one who tried to burn our sanctuary down and sell our secrets for her own gain!” Joseth shouted, loud enough for a small crowd of people standing by the grand entrance.
Those must be the people Joseth hasn’t convinced to join his war yet.
“It’s people like her who are the problem. We have been working for something great here, something amazing, and we want to take that to the world, but Freelancer would have it all burn to the ground.”
He’s using me as a sales pitch! He’s going to try to convince them to join him right now.

“That’s not true!” Kari yelled. She wasn’t sure she could talk loud enough for them to hear her, but she was going to try. “He’s lying!”

“We will take care of her, and then bring freedom to all our loved ones who need safety and protection!” Joseth yelled over her. The small crowd of the Unseen behind Joseth cheered, and he seemed to be convincing the independents. Kari took a deep breath and prepared to try to shout over him.
What’s that?
Kari noticed something odd about the ground between Joseth and her.
It’s moving!

Kari gave her small army orders to execute on her mark. She wanted the cheetahs to charge forward into Joseth’s army and take down anything that had an EMP gun attached to it. She wanted her hacking drones to try to take control of Joseth’s drones, the ones that had the most firepower. The EMP drones she commanded to attack the ground in front of them, hopefully killing all the nanobots before they could chew her army to pieces.

“It’s not true!” Kari yelled as the wave of nanobots closed in on her. “Oedipus is behind the assassin—”

“Join me now!” Joseth yelled, and his army surged forward. Kari sent her army the go-ahead. Everything moved in slow motion as EMP drones soared past her and prepared to blast the nanobot-covered ground with blue light. Before they could make it there, billions of nanobots moved into position from the ground up, forming giant metal arms that rose from the ground.

The cheetahs rushed forward. Several of them were swallowed by swarms of nanobots, dissolving their bodies in seconds. The cheetahs that made it past the nanobots ran through the EMP attacks from Joseth’s red-marked cheetahs and dove into his army, firing their own EMPs.

Handfuls of Kari’s enemies dropped to the ground, lifeless, with each attack. Energy blasts filled the air, and Kari’s drones swarmed around them, only intercepting the fire when it was headed for her directly. Her EMP drones fired away at the nanobot arms, killing millions of tiny robots at a time. Despite the huge number of nanobots she killed, more instantly replaced them.

Kari screamed, but she couldn’t hear herself over the sound of the battle. She tried to send off orders, but she couldn’t process things fast enough.

Explosions and shrapnel were filling the air. Despite her drones’ best efforts to protect her, burning pieces of metal were still scraping her face and exposed skin. Kari scrambled backward, running away from the fighting, only to find that the battle was happening behind her as well.

The garage!
It was her first sensible thought since the fight had started. She found a few cheetahs and hacking drones that were still nearby and had them attack the closest side door of the garage. Kari looked around as they cleared an entrance for her. The air was a swirling mess of drones. Her stinger drones took down drones twice their size.

She received alerts that her hacking drones had brought a number of enemies under her control, which she immediately ordered to attack Joseth’s army.

A drone exploded right next to Kari’s head as it blocked a lethal energy blast from killing her. Shoot!
He’s not kidding around!
She hunched over and covered her head, hoping to prevent any other blown-up drone pieces from cutting into her.

The number of devices under her control was dropping by the second. The fighting had only been happening for a few minutes, and she had lost the majority of her small army.

She overrode the sound from her ears and replaced it with some music, as it was too loud to focus. She didn’t dare look around again as she ran into the newly created hole in the garage.

Inside the garage was so peaceful compared to outside that Kari could hardly believe it. She couldn’t hear anything, and she couldn’t see any of the fighting. She used the small amount of peace to take a deep breath and order ten hacking drones to take over the ten auto-autos that were sitting in the garage. She ordered her dwindling forces to guard the entrance to the garage that she had just created.

This is insanity.
Hacking drones whizzed past her head and latched onto the stylized auto-autos, stabbing their red-hot spears into the vehicles in order to reprogram them with electrical pulses.

She jogged over to the door leading into the house and took Lars off of her back. He was so scared it broke Kari’s heart. He reluctantly licked her face as she kissed him good-bye.
Sorry, can’t take you with me after all.
Kari opened the door to Valhalla and set Lars on the inside before closing the door. She climbed into the first auto-auto that came online and laid on the ground next to one side of seats.
Going to be a rocky ride—got to brace myself.

While she waited for the other nine auto-autos to come under her control, she flipped through the camera feeds of some of her drones to see how the fighting was going.

It was hard to get an accurate picture. As soon as a feed came online, it went offline from being destroyed. From the glimpses that Kari could see, it was still chaotic, but it was settling down quickly. Joseth’s forces were overwhelming, but she had managed to cover a good portion of the yard with broken enemies.

If I had been able to print all day I still wouldn’t have been able to overpower him. He must have been building this force for months!
It wasn’t long before the only cameras she had access to were either in the garage or desperately trying to defend the entrance to it.

Ten!
All of the auto-autos were now under Kari’s control.
Hopefully he didn’t print these with the anticollision technology. Knowing Joseth, though, he didn’t.
Kari was counting on that fact as she ordered all ten auto-autos forward, giving them orders to race to Jackson Hole at full speed no matter what.