“A comm station needs a lot of connectivity,” she said, motioning to the cables. “Let’s see where they lead.”
I followed her through the access tunnel, looking back to see if the little drone had followed. There was no sign of it. Maybe it had finally given up on us.
Unlike all the other hallways and passages we had been through, this tunnel was clean of dust. Maybe the air filtration system was a little more robust down here.
We continued walking, but didn’t get more than a dozen meters before a loud, sharp crack nearly overwhelmed our audio sensors. It sounded like a gunshot. Then, without warning, the entire tunnel lurched suddenly, tilting down, then dropped away—spilling both Ana-Zhi and me forward.
“What the fuck!”
The sound of groaning metal filled my ears as the tunnel continued to fall downward. I slid hard into Ana-Zhi, and the two of us tumbled into a vertical shaft which had opened up in front of us. I desperately tried to activate the magtouch on my boots and gloves to grab onto something, but I was falling too fast and too chaotically.
A few seconds later the two of us lay tangled in a heap at the bottom of the shaft.
“You okay, Ana-Zhi?”
“I will be when you get your head out of my crotch, junior.”
I struggled to my feet and shook myself off. The magtouch must have slowed my fall, because other than some bruising and a bitten tongue, I didn’t appear to be injured at all.
We were in a long straight corridor that was a bit wider than it was tall. Light strips flickered erratically from the ceiling, shedding enough illumination to see that the corridor was barren.
I tried to help Ana-Zhi up, but she brushed my outstretched hand away. “Did you hear that?”
I did hear something. It was a strange combination of a low humming noise combined with a metallic clinking sound—almost like something scraping. I had no idea what I was hearing or where it was coming from, but the sound was getting louder.
“Oh shit,” Ana-Zhi said. She fumbled for her blaster. “Heads up! Incoming!”
I turned to see dozens of metallic orbs—each the size of a softball, but with numerous protrusions—coming at us. They rolled swiftly down the corridor, bouncing and banging off the floor and walls.
I recognized what they were and realized how fucked we were.
Scrubbers.
Ana-Zhi steadied herself on one knee and started blasting at the scrubbers. Acting purely on instinct, I did the same. Soon the corridor was filled with bolts of energy. But I doubted it would make a single bit of difference. Because scrubbers were incredibly deadly. And there were over fifty of them hurtling towards us.
Scrubbers were the piranhas of the defense bot world—a swarm of fast-moving, coordinated bots with incredibly-sharp ceramic blades capable of slicing through just about anything. Including the armor of our exosuits. They are typically used to keep an installation clean of organic matter. Kind of like the world’s deadliest rat catcher. One of them might be survivable. Fifty would turn us into meat shavings within ten seconds.
But that didn’t stop us from trying to survive.
“On the ceiling!” I yelled, as I activated the magtouch on my boots and gloves and jumped up.
The one thing about scrubbers was that they were ground-based defense bots—old technology. That meant that they didn’t have miniature z-field generators like the drones and couldn’t hover or fly.
I scrambled up the wall on one side of the corridor as Ana-Zhi scrambled up the other, cursing her head off. Below us a swarm of scrubbers rolled past us, narrowly missing the bottom of our boots.
“Higher!”
But Ana-Zhi was struggling to climb the wall. Even with her suit engaged, she probably lacked the upper body strength to climb much higher.
“Fuck me!” she yelled, almost losing her grip.
“Stay there!” I dropped back down to the ground beside her and started blasting at the scrubbers, which hadn’t yet realized that their quarry was now behind the swarm.
I nailed at least four of them before their hive mind realized that they needed to reverse direction. Unfortunately there were at least forty left.
Ana-Zhi lost her grip and tumbled to the ground. I kept blasting, but I knew this was the end.
18
“Get down JJ!” A voice came out of nowhere. Metallic, distorted. But somehow familiar.
“Holy mother!” Ana-Zhi stumbled against the wall.
There, not a half-dozen meters behind us, stood an imposing figure.
At first glance I thought it might be a large human wearing a full ceramlar-plated combat suit, but then I saw the joints and exo-skeleton and weapon array and realized that this was some sort of bot. A war bot, if I had to guess.
“I said get the fuck down!” the bot yelled as it barreled past us right into the throng of scrubbers.
I staggered back. My mind couldn’t process what I was hearing, let alone seeing.
That war bot spoke with the voice of my father.
The next thirty seconds were a blur. The war bot blasted at the scrubbers with deadly precision. I had no idea that the targeting system of an old technology bot could be that good, but it managed to lock on and destroy a few dozen of the scrubbers in as many seconds. Then, just as the remaining scrubbers swarmed on top of it, the war bot tucked itself into a fetal position.
I thought that maybe the bot had given up. In a few seconds the pack of scrubbers would reduce the war bot into its component parts. Maybe its plating might slow them a little bit, but it looked like game over for the war bot.
But then, a high-pitched metallic hum emanated from the bot—increasing in volume. The war bot convulsed as a velocity bubble popped around it, sending the scrubbers flying.
This was incredible.
