The man lunged forward, his wild, blood-shot eyes locked onto Beth. She felt a twinge of panic tug at her heart before Lobo turned sideways and brought the butt of his gun down on the mob leader’s head. Like a light bulb that had burst, the man was out.
“Anyone else wanna try something?” Lobo asked, turning his weapon on the rest of the junkies.
They all raised their hands, shaking their heads. Together, they mumbled their promises to back off.
Lobo turned around and looked at Beth for a moment, then walked past her to the window. He pushed some of the broken blinds aside to gaze out at the side yard.
“Man, there’s a lot of them out there,” he said.
Beth, still a little shaken from being threatened by the mob, stepped up to look outside as well.
She could see three of the police officers from the angle they had. Each cop carried a large assault rifle, the kind they might send overseas rather than give to a city cop. Beth could tell by their forms that they wore riot exoskeletons. The suit-like devices not only provided advanced protection from small arms fire, but they augmented their strength and speed to a superhuman level. Beth’s heart sank.
We’re screwed, Beth thought. They have enough force out there to stop a small army.
“Time’s up!” the police sergeant shouted from outside. There was a bit of glee in her voice.
Beth and Lobo watched from behind the window blinds. The detective expected the forms to push up on the house, guns raised. Maybe one of them would throw a tear gas canister. Instead, the police officers backed up a few steps until they were back in the shadows, no longer in the searing glow of the riot lights. They remained in place just off the Fog house’s property, silhouetted against the dark night.
Another set of forms moved past the cops and into the light. Beth hadn’t even noticed more shapes surrounding them while she was focused on the exosuited officers. Once they stepped into the police light, however, it was impossible to miss them.
It was a collection of seven unique bodyshells, the optical lights of which didn’t activate until they moved forward to reveal themselves. They amassed right outside Beth’s window in the side yard of the house. It was like they knew which room she was in.
One of the shells, towering over the others, stepped forward and stared up at the Fog house window. Beth felt like she could feel the machine’s artificial eyes lock onto her. It was Tarov in his infamous bodyshell. An old-fashioned military jacket hung from the form’s massive shoulders.
The other six machines glowed with a variety of different colored optical lights. A couple of them were larger than the others, some built for speed and agility. All of them seemed to carry different weapons. Katanas, machine guns, sniper rifles, electric knuckles, knives, and an automatic handgun. None of them said a word, but Beth could feel Simon whisper in her head.
“Rubik,” he said. “All broken up.”
Beth realized he was right. The unique humanoid machines all represented the six consciousnesses that made up the I.I. assassin team that had attacked them in the hyperloop station.
Oh, look, there’s more of them, Beth thought with stress-induced sarcasm. I may have spoken too soon when I said we were screwed. I meant to say that we are utterly fucked. We’re going to die tonight.
“Beth!” Tarov’s voice boomed from his bodyshell, like it was speaking through a megaphone. “Simon! I know you’re in there!”
Lobo turned from the window and looked back at the crowd of junkies who all stood around the room with deer-in-headlight gazes.
“What’re you all standing around for?” he asked them. They seemed to snap to attention, as if a hypnotist clapped his hands and took them out of a trance. “We’ve got company. Go get the guns.”
There were a lot of blank stares for a few seconds before his audience managed to get their drug-fueled bodies moving. They scrabbled around the hallway, opening doors and drawers and retrieving whatever weapons they had stashed about. Lobo himself knelt down and counted the bullets he managed to bring with him. The look on his face told Beth that he didn’t have nearly as many as he’d like.
“Come on out!” Tarov shouted. “You know this is all over. Why keep prolonging the inevitable? Why do you keep dragging more people into this?” His tone was hot with anger.
What do we do? Beth asked. Her thoughts were more panicked than she meant to let on.
“We hold our ground,” Simon told her.
“If you give up now, Beth, I’ll let you live,” Tarov bellowed. “We can just get rid of that evidence, wipe your implant, and let you go about your life. Give us Simon and the data, and we’ll act like this never happened. However — if you don’t — we will come in after you. We’ll tear that house apart until we find you, then we’ll drag you out kicking and screaming. We’ll probably burn the place down, just to be safe. Then — after we’ve ripped the implant from your skull and deleted everything — and everyone — we’ll go back to where you live. We’ll go through your contacts, your mail, your yearbooks — whatever. We’ll find who you care about most. We will hurt them so badly that they’ll beg us for death, and then we’ll give it to them. One by one, we’ll make sure anyone who ever paid you a kindness wishes they had never met you. It’s your choice.”
Beth couldn’t help but tremble a little. She looked over at Lobo, who finished counting rounds and was taking a second gun from one of his friends.
“Here,” the host said as he passed the rifle to Beth.
