Lobo wheezed as the sword went through his chest. Beth could see the blue glow of the cyberblade protruding from the drug dealer’s back.
“Lobo, no!” Simon screamed in Beth’s head. It was so loud that it made her wince, and she half expected it to draw the assassin’s attention, but remembered only she could hear the I.I.
Simon’s friend fell to his knees, clutching at the wound in his chest. Blood seeped out of him like air from a balloon. Lobo looked up at the bodyshell that had mortally wounded him. It stared down at him with its bright optical lights.
Lobo turned and looked at Beth, his mouth agape as he tried to get another breath. It almost looked like he smirked for a second before falling to the floor. A bit of dust was kicked up, then he was still.
“Outclassed,” the bodyshell assassin said. It was Maru, the ninja. “Outmatched.”
By this point, even the most drugged out junkie in the room realized the danger he or she was in and tried to flee out the door. They were stopped right out in the hallway by the other members of Rubik who had finally made their way up the stairs. It was clear the addicts didn’t want to fight. They screamed for mercy and begged Rubik to just let them go, but the assassins ignored them. In the matter of a few seconds, they were all killed. Shot by Jerri, pummeled by Hilde, and eviscerated by Lynch. Once all the organic bodies were on the floor, bleeding over the splintered wood beams, the assassins converged on Beth.
She looked around at them all with wide eyes. Every bit of her trembled like a small dog out in the snow. She spun in place, looking at the Rubik shells and their nearly perfect rainbow of optical lights. Maru’s cyberblades glowed in the dim room. Jerri was reloading her submachine gun while Wolfgang and Nick joined them. Lynch seemed to be almost buzzing with excitement as he fiddled with his blood-covered knives.
“Look at the little thing,” Jerri said, eying the detective with her pink eyes. “Like a little lamb.”
“So scared,” Lynch said, almost sounding like he was salivating.
What do we do? Beth asked in her head.
“I don’t know,” Simon replied. His voice was weak. Like he was wounded himself.
We’re going to die!
“Looks like it.”
Beth felt a metal hand seize her by the arm, then another grabbed the other. She tried to fight them off, but she was no match against the machines. With as little effort as lifting an empty bag, they picked her off her feet and carried her between them. She tried to kick at them, but another hand came out and held her legs together.
“Let me go!” she shrieked, trying to writhe and kick any limbs she could. They had an impossible grip on her.
“She’s a fighter!” Nick observed, chuckling a little. “You guys need a hand with that?”
“Shut it, Nick,” Hilde said. She was one of the shells carrying the human woman.
“If she and Simon hadn’t destroyed our old bodyshell, we would have captured her sooner,” Wolfgang said.
“But we wouldn’t have been able to split up,” Jerri replied. “Perhaps it was a blessing in disguise.”
“Not with how much that thing costs to replace,” Wolfgang retorted. “It was state of the art.”
They bickered as they carried the detective down the stairs and out the front door of the Fog house. Beth stared up at the night sky, watching her breath make small clouds of vapor and drift off up to the stars. She was too stunned to do anything.
There’s nothing we can do, she realized with defeat. They’ve won. We’re at their mercy.
Simon said nothing.
The Rubik assassins carried her down the lawn a bit and set her on her feet just before the hulking form of Tarov’s bodyshell. She lost her footing right away; one of the assassins caught her before she fell on her face.
Tarov leaned in so she could see his face in the full illumination of the police lights. A sneer managed to push its way on his artificial face muscles.
“Good evening, Beth,” he said. His voice seemed to hiss out of his voice speaker, which was placed in his throat in order to simulate real vocalization. “Glad you could join us.”
“You killed everyone,” Beth said. She was still in shock, and felt like each inhale of air brought ice cold water down on top of her lungs. “You slaughtered them.”
“Those burnouts?” Tarov said. “They weren’t even people. They were lower than human. The world is a better place without them. You should be thanking us for doing your job for you, officer.”
The enormous bodyshell looked past Beth to the Rubik machines behind her. Tarov gave a nod, and Beth could hear a couple of the assassins start moving away from them, towards the Fog house. She could hear the sound of liquid being poured on the ground and the walls.
“You’ve really given us a hard few days, detective,” the militant leader said, lowering his gaze to the woman once more. “But as you’ve seen, we’re able to adapt. There’s no challenge we can’t defeat when we combine our efforts. That’s why you should join us. Don’t you see it’s foolish to keep running from me — to keep trying to find a way to defeat me? I’m the future, Beth. The world that you know — that the humans built — is about to burn.”
On the last word, Beth heard the whoosh of a fire being ignited. She saw an orange glow stretch over the dead lawn and felt the warmth of the blaze on the back
