It was still anybody’s guess ofwhether hers would or not.
Chapter Ten
The collapse of so many bodies atonce, striking the hard ground, was like a thunderclap—almost asloud, and echoing outward from the point of origin formiles.
The fourth EMP failed to discharge,sending Tau, Xi, and Quan in a frantic race to find and repair thefailure if possible before they were overrun.
The first three had created so muchhavoc and the sound of it had stretched so far, though, that it haddrawn out the resistance. Bands of soldiers began to converge onthe battleground, wading onto it to finish off the drones beforethey could rise again, or prevent them from rising if they were inthe process.
Dismay flickered throughUltima.
She’d thought, hoped, they would havethe chance at redemption, to turn on their slave master and fightfor the people they’d been slaughtering.
She dismissed her qualms after amoment.
It was the practice of Eml to see thatthe drones finished off any humans left on thebattlefield.
She had almost been one ofthem.
In any case, she had no idea if herprogramming would do as she’d hoped it would.
She couldn’t congratulate herself thatit had with her men. They had been the same, as far as she couldsee, afterwards as before.
Except that they had not remainedseparate entities from the machines they’d taken over.
And with no proof, there was nocertainty that it would change anything beyond reducing the numberof their enemy if their soldiers took advantage of the failure andfinished them.
The enemy still outnumbered them bythree or four to one. They needed to be stopped, she realized, orthere would still be no chance of the humans winning.
Thankfully, Xi found the burned wiresand they managed to remove that section and replace it. They had toreset the power station, unfortunately, and that made it possiblefor the enemy to come dangerously close before the nextpulse.
Quan discovered that a handful of thedrones had managed to make it onto the tower structure before thepulse and the tower itself had protected them—something they hadthought possible even while they’d hoped it wouldn’t be anissue.
Tau and Xi charged down the tower toconfront them before Ultima even realized their intent.
Quan prevented her from bounding upand following. “You are still not recovered enough to climb andfight, beloved. They can handle it.”
Ultima stared at him, knowing it wastrue. She didn’t think at her optimum level of fitness that shecould have climbed the tower and still had the strength to fight.“You go then.”
He shook his head, smiling wryly. “Tauwould have to break off to kick my ass for leaving you. I will goonly if it appears that they cannot stop them.”
They dispatched them with breathtakingefficiency and returned.
Both were wounded, Ultima saw to herdismay, but they were minor wounds.
Thankfully.
For a time, it seemed that thetraitor’s forces had no end. When an hour had passed, though,Ultima saw that the further out she could see, the thinner thenumbers of new drones.
When two hours had passed the field asfar as the eye could see was filled with the bodies of thefallen—very few of whom were human.
Tau and Xi climbed the towerimmediately after a pulse and scanned the horizon before theydropped to the platform again.
“Eml comes,” Tau saidgrimly. “Now, we will finish this.”
Ultima surged up from her seat tolook. At first she could see nothing that suggested there was anydifference at all. Then, far into the distance, so far that shecould barely discern what it was, she saw a huge something movingtoward them.
“He has armored himselfagainst the EMP,” Xi said grimly. “We will have to go out to meethim.”
