“Cordelia?” Sam asked. “The chick with the fancy hair? Opel’s secretary? She was on that ship up there?”
“Yeah,” I said. My words sounded funny, like I was slurring them a little. “Eli is there, too. He’s still alive, but I don’t know where. It’s a big ship.”
“Wait,” Lulu said. “Did you load Roger’s program?”
I could just sleep here. I couldn’t feel my left arm at all. The whole side of my face was tingling.
“I tried,” I said. “I don’t know if it worked or not.”
I strained to move so I could peer over the edge of the ditch, but Rosita and Tito held me in place. “Don’t move,” she said. “You have a hole the size of my fist in your shoulder. And another one in your cheek.”
“Hey, assholes,” came a loud, booming voice, “you fucks hiding in here? You can’t run. We’ll find you sooner or later.”
Next to me, Sam gave a grim smile. “That sounds like our old friend Skeet.”
Chapter 51
“I’m running low on canisters,” Lulu said. “Two left.”
“He’s driving a Heavy. Pulse rifles ain’t gonna do shit,” Axel said.
I gritted my teeth—my remaining teeth—and I pulled out of Tito’s grip, heaving myself to the edge. Smoke still filled the area, and I couldn’t see much. The flat field spread out in front of us. Stalking through the dark fog were monstrous shapes. Directly ahead, maybe twenty meters away, was the distinct shape of a Heavy, but it had a single arm, and dangling from the arm was a chain with a spiked ball at the end. The ball was the size of a wheel on a hopper. It swung back and forth menacingly as the walking tank stalked through the field.
He would be on us in a minute.
Next to me, Lulu was removing her jacket. She pulled off her bracelet. That left her in the bikini top, cowboy boots, and chaps with the thong. Her hat was long gone.
“What’re you doing?” Rosita hissed.
“If I don’t have any guns on me, he can’t see me,” she said. “If I can get behind him, I can do what the honeybees do. I just have to pop open the access panel and then pop out the communications module. That’ll put him in standby mode.”
“What do you mean, he can’t see you?” Sam asked. “You’re dressed like the world’s sluttiest rancher!”
“That guy who was helping us from the other side, he said the mechs can’t see children. I’m small enough the filter might not see me if I’m unarmed.”
“That sounds like the worst idea ever,” Sam said. “Seriously, Lulu, don’t.”
She didn’t reply. She started to pull herself out of the ditch. She paused at the top, looked down at us, and said, “I love you all.”
“Wait,” I called, reaching out for her with my left arm, which I still couldn’t feel. I could move it sort of. But Lulu was already gone. When I lifted my arm, I saw a flashing message on my bracelet.
It read,Come back. Come back fast. —Roger.
“Guys,” I croaked, fighting to keep awake, “cover her if she’s in trouble. I need to get back.”
If Roger could message me, it meant he’d gained control. But if he needed me back, then there was an issue.
I reached up and reinstituted the pass-through. I zapped back to the bridge.
I remained in the body of Trixie 2. I had multipleWarning: UAV Lost Signalindicators on my screen. In front of me on my right was a screen, and it read,PRESS THE BLUE BUTTON. I reached forward and pressed it with Trixie’s controller arm.
“Hello, Oliver,” came Roger’s voice over the internal speaker. He chatted casually as if nothing was going on. “I have successfully cloned myself into this system, but we have a problem.”
“Roger,” I said, interrupting, “Lulu is trying to fight one of those things without any armor or weapons. We have several drones hidden around the area, but if we don’t get them up and running, she’s in trouble! You have to either turn on the honeybees or turn off this ship’s connection with the mechs!”
“I cannot disconnect the mech controls. Eli Opel has sealed himself in his stateroom and has locked out our ship controls. He is usinga manual override, something developed during the first war with my kind. It is a physical bypass. He has literally removed a section of cable and rerouted it into an old-model regulator panel that I could not control even if I did have a connection. He has control of the bridge, and mech control has been relegated to a different ship on the Earth side of the gate. Furthermore, we have three Moderator ships en route, ETA thirteen minutes.”
The screen changed to show a map of the crew portion of the ship with Eli’s stateroom highlighted. The massive, opulent room was down the long hallway, pressed up against the fore of the giant spaceship, located where one would have thought the bridge actually should be.
