“Huh,” I said upon seeing the mural on the wall in the back of the bridge. There were about fifteen people in the room.
“Seal the door!” someone shouted from around the corner.
“Shit,” I said, and pushed the joystick forward. I smashed into the wall, corrected myself, and zoomed down the hall, flying toward the heavy portal door.
A familiar wide-eyed man behind the door saw me approach and started to push the door closed. I zoomed at him. I reached forward with my grasping claw and grabbed the man’s face as I zipped into the room. I squeezed, there was a haptic buzz in my virtual hand, and the man crumpled to the ground.
His face remained in my grasping claw. I’d ripped his face right off him as if he’d been wearing a mask.
That was Colonel Boomer, the man who’d been giving orders over the command link. He wore a camouflaged military top, and he had shorts and flip-flops on his lower half.
If Colonel Boomer was here on thePinnacle, that meant Eli Opel was here, too.
Danger. Danger.
Multiple people were shooting at me. Suddenly, my vision went black, and I was plummeting to the ground, but not before I saw the honeybee push its way into the room, pulse rifle blazing.
Scout unit Priscilla has been destroyed. Transferring to Trixie 2. Please wait.
I clicked “Pass-through” and returned my attention to the bar.
Chaos spread before me. All I saw were flapping wings, Cindy the pig screaming as she ran in panicked circles, and the entire front of the bar was just gone. All the RMI soldiers were on the ground. Around their waists, they all had low-tech elastic bands with clickers dangling from them. As the RMI soldiers had approached the barn, they’d all walked right through the traps and activated the clickers,causing the dozens of magic chickens to swarm them. And because they couldn’t see the chickens, they all fell or froze the moment they stepped on one.
To my left, Ariceli was cutting a line through the downed robots with her Conquistador gun. She screamed as she fired.
“Don’t hit the chickens!” Sam called as he, too, fired from my side.
“Fire! Fire! Hit their heads!” Rosita screamed.
“Guys, mechs are coming now!” Miguel 1 shouted. “You better get the hell out of there! They’re coming down the road toward you!”
I quickly moved back to the helmet’s view, and I was outside the bridge in the body of Trixie 2. I hesitantly pushed my way into the room. There was blood everywhere. Gertrude the honeybee drone was on the ground, next to the mangled body of Priscilla the scout. Gertrude was still online, but the gun was shot away. The robot was dragging itself across the ground, moving toward a person who was crying and pulling herself slowly away.
The woman on the floor appeared to be the only one in the room still alive.
I recognized her. It was Cordelia Black, Eli Opel’s secretary. Her giant hair had come undone, and it spilled all around her. I quickly looked about the room, searching for Opel, but there was so much carnage, I couldn’t recognize anyone.
I focused on the honeybee, and I ordered it to stand down. It froze in place. Cordelia continued to sob and drag herself away.
Dangling from the ceiling was what looked like the smoking remains of a sentry gun. A second one was in the process of being built, forming in a bubbling dome right there on the ceiling.
I flew upward, and with my grasping hand, I squeezed the bottom of the dome. Liquid spilled free, revealing a half-built gun.
Weird,I thought. I looked about, but I couldn’t see any other obvious defenses being grown anywhere. How long would it take for these things to appear anyway?
“Cordelia,” I asked as I returned my attention to the woman, “can you hear me?”
The woman coughed, her voice fearful. “What? Who is this?”
“Where is Eli?”
“I…I don’t know.” She started to sob. “Please. I don’t want to be here. Is this RSN control? Are you sending help?”
I found the armored storage box on the back of Gertrude, and I pulled it open with my grasping claw. I pulled out the drive, and I moved to the computer display to the left of the door. It was cracked and smoking, but the display was still active, and I could see the round multifunction inputs were undamaged.
I carefully pulled out the cord from the drive, and I plugged it into the input. A little green light appeared. I closed my eyes.
This was basically a computer hard drive used to store maps and other information for the mechs. It was much too small to store an entire instance of Roger, but he’d been able to program what was basically a routine that would force the ship’s systems—which were made with the same modern framework that could house Roger—to initiate a download from its connection with Earth. This would allow the Earth-based Roger instance to clone himself to the ship and take it over. The security on these things required the initial handshake to occur on the ship side.
