“You’re not going to take the wheel?” Rhea asked Will as the view became blocked by the deploying metal.
“The AI has it under control,” Will said. The steering wheel in front of him turned left and right of its own accord. “Nothing I hate more than driving blind.”
Rhea switched to Gizmo’s viewpoint as the metal sheets completely enveloped the windows and the cabin went dark. The drone had pulled well back to observe the battle, and she had a bird’s eye view of the entire convoy.
The pickup trucks accompanying them were randomly swerving as well. Their turrets moved back and forth, targeting the incoming attackers. Laser fire was being exchanged by both sides, no doubt, but she couldn’t see it—such was the nature of laser light, whose concentrated photons traveled in a straight line; none of that light would have a chance to reach her eyes until reflecting and diffracting from the target. But even then, she wouldn’t see the dots marking the impacts, because these particular lasers fired in pulses that lasted for less than a nanosecond—not enough time to register with her all too human brain. She could probably tweak the LIDAR overlay that fed her mind-machine interface to provide some realtime tracking on the hits if she really wanted to. Not that she really had time for such experimentation at the moment.
The airborne drones with the convey were also swerving, and no doubt those that were equipped with lasers were firing them as well.
Some of the pickups carried plasma turrets, and as the enemy came into range, she saw the energy bolts launched by these particular trucks readily enough. The drones that were equipped with energy weapons fired them as well.
Plasma streams were returned in kind from the attackers: two pickups and a drone were struck. They crashed after partially melting.
Missiles came from the enemy, too, hitting pickup trucks and smashing airborne drones out of the sky. But none of those missiles targeted the tankers, as expected. The convoy had no missiles to fire in return.
Rhea heard a loud thud come from the hood of the semi. Two more thuds came a moment later as large objects struck the cabin.
Rhea minimized Gizmo’s feed to the upper right of her vision; internal lamps had activated to compensate for the lack of external light entering the cabin, so she could see well enough. Movement attracted her eyes to Gizmo’s camera once again: the drone had swung its camera toward the semi, no doubt thanks to Will, and Rhea realized humanoid robots had attached to the cabin.
“One of the military drones was a transport,” Will said. “Looks like it’s deployed combat robots. V9000 models. We’ve got three on the cabin, five on the tank itself. Renaldo and Chuck have another eight each.”
“Bring them on!” Chuck sent.
Rhea had disabled her public profile and programmed her comm node to ignore communications handshake requests from third party clients. The others had done the same, which would prevent their IDs from being transmitted without their knowledge to any nearby enemy robots or drones, thus affording them a modicum of anonymity, something they would need when it came time to return to Rust Town. It also, in theory, prevented any hacking attempts.
The metal shell on the windshield began to peel back on the driver’s side, causing bright light to stream in.
Will unholstered the thick pistol from his hip and shoved it onto the exposed glass there. He fired, melting a hole through the windshield.
On Gizmo’s feed, the robot outside let go—or rather, its arm had been shot off. As the semi swerved yet again, that robot lost its balance and fell off.
More light from outside began to penetrate from the upper right of Rhea’s window as the metal shielding there also began to curl back. She saw the clawed hand of a robot gripping the edges.
“Can we get some help from the drones and pickups?” she asked over the comm as she retrieved her pistol.
“They’re slightly occupied at the moment,” Renaldo said.
Rhea aimed at those fingers and fired, creating a hole in the glass, but shooting off the fingers at the same time.
The robot’s hand withdrew, but a moment later a muzzle shoved into the hole she’d created. It was pointed directly at her…
7
Rhea grabbed the handle beside her and shoved open the door, bending the muzzle and pivoting the arm of the robot that held it. The weapon fired, but because the barrel was twisted, the robot succeeded only in burning another hole into the windshield.
That muzzle was part of a rifle barrel built into the robot’s forearm, but it had another on the opposite arm, which it promptly lowered into the open door.
Rhea grabbed the weapon and pulled with both hands, ripping the robot off the roof. She tilted her head to the side as she did so, moving herself out of the muzzle’s line of fire; the robot unleashed the weapon as it plunged toward the rocky terrain, and the energy bolt struck the inside of the roof, drilling a partial hole. The robot vanished from view almost instantly when it hit the rolling ground.
One more combat robot remained on the roof of the semi, along with another five on the tank portion itself. A quick glance at Gizmo’s feed told her that Chuck and Renaldo were in trouble. The robots were firing into both of their cabins, and neither man seemed to be firing back.
“Help Chuck and Renaldo!” she ordered Will.
She aimed her
