Shadow Watch

enabled its night video equipment to scan for images in the pitch darkness.

Again the four anomalous radiation sources dashed into and out of range, still surrounding the robot, their pattern of motion keeping them roughly equidistant from it.

Its logical systems correlating the input from its probes, the hedgehog had definitively classified the circling objects as human entities and potential threats. But very much by design, its programming did not include any options for dealing with them.

Instead, it was transmitting the processed data to its monitoring site via an encrypted radio channel, leaving its flesh-and-blood handlers to decide what to do next.

* * *

“What’s up with Wally?” Jezoirski said. “You see how he’s sniffing around?”

“Yeah,” Delure replied with concern. “And I don’t like it a bit.”

Beside them, Cody, the senior man in the room, leaned pensively over his surveillance monitors and said nothing.

At their monitoring station in the bowels of the Brazilian ISS compound, the guards were studying a complex bank of dials, controls, and electronic displays that placed them at the informational heart of its security network. All three wore the indigo uniforms and newly issued shoulder patches — these depicting a broadsword surrounded by stylized satellite bandwidth lines — of UpLink’s global intelligence and threat countermeasure force, dubbed Sword as a reference to the legend of the Gordian knot, which Alexander the Great was supposed to have undone with a swift and decisive stroke of his blade. It was a method analogous to Roger Gordian’s no-nonsense approach to crisis management, making for some interesting word play, and forming the direct basis of the section name.

Jezoirski slid forward in his chair, his features limned by the pale green radiance of an infrared video display, his eyes on the IR meter directly beneath it.

“Shit,” he said. “Look at that heat emission. Somebody’s definitely out th—”

Jezoirski broke off midsentence as a warning indicator lit up on the panel. He glanced over at Delure, who took hurried note of this development and then pointed back at the video screen.

Green-on-green images flashed across the monitor — a group of human figures moving around the security robot, alternately closing in and backing away.

Cody thought of bloodhounds harrying their prey. But why would those sons of bitches play tag with the ’hog? The robots’ main effectiveness lay in their early alert and standoff capabilities against a perimeter attack. Their purpose was to buy time until human reinforcements arrived, to repel or delay an intrusion attempt while it was in progress. Their purpose was not to engage in close skirmishing once the grounds were already compromised. At that stage getting past them would be easy, and crippling or taking them out just slightly more difficult.

His forehead crunched with tension, he scanned the radar imagery in front of him. On screen, the hedgehog and the men surrounding it showed up as color-coded shapes positioned against a set of grid lines and numerical coordinates.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” Jezoirski said. “There’s nothing to show the outer fence was breached —”

“We can worry about that later.” Cody was already reaching for the phone as he broke his silence. “Key the ’hogs for full gamut intruder suppression. I’m getting Thibodeau on the horn.”

On Jezoirski’s radioed command, Wally hit them with a barrage of light and sound.

Its first optical counterstrike was a burst from the neodymium-YAG laser projector on its turret. To the four men around the robot, it seemed almost as if a small nova had ignited at ground level, momentarily filling the night with diamond-edged brilliance.

They scattered rapidly, fanning out over several yards — but the flash was something for which they had come prepared. They had known that a laser pulse could temporarily impair the vision or burn out the retina, dazzle or blind, depending on its power, intensity, and length. They had also known that the weapons used by Sword’s robotic defenders were calibrated to produce no lasting damage. And they had worn dark filters on their visors to shield them from the brightness, correctly betting this would make its effects tolerable.

The hedgehog’s sensory assault, however, was about to kick into overdrive. The laser flash had barely faded in the air when a group of red-and-blue halogen lights on Wally’s main equipment case began to strobe in a preprogrammed sequence, its pattern and frequency closely matching that of normal human brain waves. At precisely the same instant, the robot’s acoustic generator had begun transmitting 100-decibel soundwaves at a controlled rate of ten cycles per second. It was a resonance the invaders seemed to feel more than actually hear, a sour, abrasive humming that remained just below the level of audibility, working its way deep into their bodies, swelling thickly in their stomachs and intestines.

Each directed-energy weapon worked on the same principle, targeting specific areas within the human body, coupling the spectrum of its emission to characteristic waveforms within those areas, and manipulating them by hyperstimulation. The flashing lights attacked the visual receptors of the hindbrain, triggering a storm of electrical activity akin to the sort that occurred during a sudden attack of epilepsy. The acoustic generator had multiple targets — the inner ear, where abnormal vibrations of the fluid within its semicircular canals would throw the sense of balance into upheaval, and the soft organs of the abdomen, where similar vibrations would lead to convulsions of pain and nausea.

The combined effect of these measures overtook the invaders at once, scrambling their senses and motor functions, confusing and sickening them, provoking a hallucinatory and physically wrenching disconnection from their surroundings. Shaking, gagging, and retching, they staggered in confused, purposeless circles. One of them dropped onto his back, his bladder releasing, grotesque herky-jerky spasms running through his limbs. Another sank to his knees, clutched his heaving stomach, and vomited.

Partially overcome, Manuel knew he had bare moments in which to act. Forcing his legs to remain steady underneath him, he turned in what he thought was the hedgehog’s direction, clenched his eyes against its strobing lights, raised his FAMAS rifle, and pumped a 20mm HE round from its grenade launcher attachment. It was a crude, inaccurate use of an extraordinarily refined weapon, but it achieved its desired results. The shell struck the ’hog’s carrier scant yards from where he stood, detonating with an explosive flash.

Manuel dove to the ground as the concussion swept over him, waited a second or two, then got back to his feet and dusted himself off. A quick look around revealed that one member of his band had been killed in the blast, his flesh and clothing shredded by flying shrapnel. He himself had an open gash above the elbow. But the robot was wreckage. It leaned sideways on the burning remains of a rubber track, smoke and flames spitting from its mangled carrier. He could smell the odor of its fused wiring.

Wreckage.

He saw his remaining teammates struggling to regain their equilibrium, allowed them a few moments to recover, then hurried to gather them to his side. There was no time to linger over their single casualty.

“Vaya aqui!” he hissed. “Come on, we still have work to do.”

* * *

Much as Rollie Thibodeau loved his job at UpLink, much as he felt it was an important job, he hated how its hours screwed up his biological clock, turned his daily routine inside out, and cramped his lifestyle in more ways than he could have stated.

Take sex, or the lack of it, for one thing. Where would he find a woman who’d be in amorous sync with his schedule, falling into bed with the sunrise, emerging after sunset like a vampire? Take sleep for another. This was Brazil, land of bronzed bodies and the fio dental. How could he get any rest with the tropical daylight pressing against his window blinds, tantalizing him with its warmth, reminding him of the long, gorgeously romantic afternoons dancing past? Take, for a third example, something as important to a man as eating. Could cheerfulness truly be expected of him when his meals were fouled up beyond description? It was rotten enough being a hundred miles from the nearest city and having to subsist on the bland, unseasoned fare they served in the commissary. Rotten even when those tasteless dishes were hot out of the kitchen. But consuming them after they’d sat in a refrigerator for half a day, and then been warmed over in a microwave, was a gross indignity. And the hours at which one was forced to eat when working the night shift, calous ve, the hours were nothing short of unspeakable!

Thibodeau sat in his small but tidy office in a sublevel of the ISS compound’s main headquarters building,