Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [91]
Earth was cold, dark, insubstantial. The human structures were feeble. To prove the point to himself, he reached out, scooped a handful of brick from the wall, then crushed it.
‘Report,’ he barked into his nosepiece.
His warriors did just that – they were fanning out across the base, on full alert, but had come no nearer to finding the time machine.
The deputy leader leaned against a blue wooden structure. He sniffed it, peered at it. Its function was not immediately obvious. It was made of wood panels, with little windows towards the top, and a light on the roof. Primitive human writing adorned some of the uppermost panels. It would just, at a squeeze, be big enough for an Onihr to stand inside.
A useless human artefact.
The deputy leader was frustrated that his search for the human time machine was taking so long. He was irritated that the humans had a time machine in the first place. They must have stolen it, or had it fall on to their planet by chance. How dare these flimsy‐skinned, insubstantial creatures have time travel when the Onihr race had strived so long to achieve it. What could the humans hope to do with the technology?
There was a time machine here, so close he could feel it. The ancient Onihr quest would finally reach its culmination.
He smelled the robot moments before it arrived.
A hydraulic arm clamped around the deputy leader’s neck.
The deputy leader struggled, but the hold was tight. The other arm was tugging at his breastplate.
Another robot stomped slowly into the room, raised an arm. It was holding a projectile weapon. Its height and build had more in common with the Onihrs than its human creators. Not through any aesthetic sense, simply because human technical skills were inadequate to the task.
The deputy leader doubted that the human guns could harm him even if he wasn’t wearing armour, but had no intention of finding out. These machines were crude, insulting.
He straightened up, pulling the robot that had hold of him off its feet. It strengthened its grip, constricting the deputy leader’s throat a little, but not enough to block his breathing.
Its leg pedalled a little, trying to find the ground. The device was surprisingly light, even allowing for the low gravity.
The deputy leader slammed it against the structure behind them, heard a number of satisfying cracks and hisses. He slammed it again.
The other robot opened fire, and only succeeded in blowing the head off its comrade. Blinded, the machine tried to tighten its grip, but it had lost a lot of its balance. The deputy leader found it easy enough to extricate himself from its limbs.
He picked up the robot and swung it at the other. It broke the functioning robot’s neck and shoulder, then fell apart.
The deputy leader had a hand free now to reach for his gun. It took three shots to damage the robot beyond repair, two more than the deputy leader would have liked.
He rubbed his neck. It hurt a little. There were hints of damage to his armour, too, and he was lucky they hadn’t caught his gun, which wasn’t as well protected. With the right combination of circumstances, the humans could harm Onihrs.
All the more reason to eliminate them as efficiently as possible.
* * *
Chapter Twenty
Endgame
Dee hurried through the robot factory.
The production lines were silent. At some point during the fighting, they must have been shut down. Rows and rows of half‐completed robots stood there. It made the place look like a monumental gallery of statues.
Any robot that was complete, or near enough to complete had gone. They’d been sent to the front by Cosgrove. Dee could hear some of them, rumbling away deep inside the building, loosing off the occasional round of gunfire.
Baskerville had her laptop, and all her specialist software.
They’d got split up about ten minutes ago. Baskerville had run out of gyrojets, and they’d been forced to beat a retreat – straight into the path of the aliens. They’d both gone off their own ways.
Perhaps Baskerville was dead. He was certainly finished. He had hours at most – as soon as CIA