All of them, Leah knew, lived on borrowed time. She looked for the next target as the last one crumpled to the ground and lay still.
“C’mon, baby,” Engineer Third Class Geoffrey Baker pleaded. “Get up. Get moving. Don’t just lie there and wait to be destroyed.”
Through the connection to his drone and bots inside the O2 building, Baker saw his battle drone kicking its legs futilely as it tried to stand.
“C’mon. You’re hurt, but you’re not dead yet.” Baker took cover behind an overturned car. Rust framed the rents and tears in the metal. The rust went against Baker’s training, and he resisted the impulse—even while fighting for his life—to buff the orange cancer from the metal.
He tabbed the controller sheathing his right forearm. The fingers of his left hand danced across the touchscreen as he utilized the drone’s onboard self-repair programming. The drone worked around some shorted circuits, but any substantial damage required attention back in the labs.
Arc-flare from a NanoDyne Shockstorm flared uncomfortably close. Baker instinctively dived away from it and took cover in another position as he brought up the F-S Rail Gun he carried in his right hand.
The electrical energy used by the Shockstorm lifted the Darkspawn out of the darkness as it reached for Baker. The sharp claws sliced within inches of his face.
Terrified even after four years of fighting the demons, Baker brought the Rail Gun up and fired only because he’d been trained to. That was why, his instructor had told him repeatedly, they trained.
The Rail Gun exploded and jumped in Baker’s hand. The depleted uranium bullets tracked across the demon’s hide and opened craters. Vile purple blood leaked out of the wounds. Instantly the smell of corruption rose up stronger than the stench of ozone from the Shockstorm.
The demon fell back. The rounds amputated one of its feet.
“Hey Baker,” the blacksuited agent behind the young engineer said, “good thinking shooting his foot off like that. Makes it bloody hard for him to stand up.”
“I didn’t—” Baker tried to say mean to, but he never got the chance. The agent patted him on the shoulder and moved to a new position.
Calming himself, Baker turned his attention back to the drone inside the O2. The recircuiting had been finished. Watching from the “eyes” of one of the inhibitor bots he controlled, Baker saw the drone right itself.
From the “waist” up, the drone looked vaguely human. The head that rotated 360 degrees; eyes that saw under low-light conditions, thermal, and infrared; and two arms that held an XMS10 Jackhammer shotgun. The lower part of the drone consisted of a tracked assembly.
The drone pushed up with its arms till it once more sat on the tracks. A Darkspawn attacked at once, firing energy bolts from a weapon Baker couldn’t quite identify. There were just too many demon weapons to know at the time, and they continued building new ones.
The energy bolts rocked the drone backward. Through the sim-link connecting him to the drone, Baker ordered the drone to get up and get moving. Locked into the viewpoint of one of his inhibitor bots, Baker watched as the drone pushed with both hands and righted itself.
“There you go,” Baker told himself. A wave of relief washed through him. He commanded the inhibitor bot to spin and look around.
Although the bots were equipped with F-S Nitesite, the interior of the dome’s interior held impossible darkness. The bot barely saw fifteen feet in the blackness. Thankfully, Baker had also equipped them with sonar. When he switched over to that, his monocular filled with the flat images of the milling demons.
He commanded the drone to fire at will.
The drone opened up at once. Even though he was too far away from the strange happenings, Baker searched the area. It was too much to hope for one of the Named Demons to be in charge of the manufacturing plant.
As the bot jostled about the building’s interior, a laser tracking signal suddenly painted the Darkspawn less than twenty feet away. Okay, let’s bring him down.
The inhibitor bot was designed to slow down the demon’s moves. They didn’t offer heavy weapons like those carried by the drones, but they carried a sonic and microwave array guaranteed to throw off most demons with nausea and blurred vision. The effects were also painful.
The Darkspawn raised its weapon, then got hit full force by the inhibitors. The creature lurched to the side and barely caught itself in time to stay upright.
Baker’s fingers glided across the touchpad without looking at it. He saw the drone through another inhibitor’s lenses as it brought up the Jackhammer, fitted the heavy shotgun to its shoulder, and fired. The drone worked the slide, ejected the spent cartridge, and seated another one. It fired again.
The shotgun pellets were soft metal, designed to shatter after sinking into an opponent’s flesh. Half of the pellets contained Greek Fire. The other half held plastic explosives treated to react with liquid. As soon as an enemy’s blood touched the broken pellets, they exploded.
Fire spewed from the massive wounds in the demon’s chest, then its chest came apart as the explosives kicked in. Almost hollowed out by the blasts, the Darkspawn toppled backward and crashed to the floor in a loose-limbed sprawl.
Baker sent his bots and drone deeper into the dome. He was concentrating so fiercely on what they were seeing that he didn’t notice he was no longer alone until it was too late.
Feeling eyes on him, Baker turned to his right, toward his monocled side where his peripheral vision was limited. The Blade Minion standing there grinned at Baker. The thing stood seven feet tall, broad across the head and shoulders, and covered with a dark green carapace that made it look like an insect. Spikes jutted out from its massive forearms.
Baker tried to bring up the Rail Gun, but he knew it was already too late. The Blade Minion stabbed him through the armor he wore and pierced his heart.
