Of Fire and Night - Kevin J. Anderson [58]
Ramirez fired her own twitcher, blast after blast. "At this rate we'll drain our charges before we even get to the lift!"
Stromo sprinted ahead, concentrating on the wall controls and the closed lift door. Barely able to hold himself upright as he panted and wheezed, he slapped the summoning sensor. The indicator lights raced as the fast cargo elevator shot up to Deck 2. Only a few seconds more!
"Hurry, Ramirez! The lift is coming." He could feel the wall vibrate, hear the machinery humming.
She fought to catch up. Three cabin doors slid open. The rooms should have been crew barracks where off-duty personnel rested and relaxed. Four compies emerged, covered with blood.
Ramirez fired shorter bursts with her twitcher, just enough to divert the machines, but now compies crowded the passageway. They came toward Stromo, and he fired at them, extravagant with his weapon's energy; in such a dire situation, no half-assed effort would succeed.
Ramirez couldn't shoot the compies fast enough. Her charge pack ran out.
Stromo meant to go help Ramirez, but he saw that his twitcher had only enough energy to fire two more significant bursts--not nearly enough to save her, not nearly enough to let him get away.
"Admiral!" The compies grabbed Ramirez, and she battered at their optical sensors with the butt of her weapon. She shouted his name as they surrounded her, something that might have sounded like "Go!" Stromo almost moved, almost went forward to assist her, to go down fighting.
But the lift opened at last. He saw it was empty and waiting. A miracle!
Before he could see Ramirez fall under the attacking compies, Stromo scrambled into the lift and punched the selector controls for the hangar bay. He tried to remember how to fly EDF ships. He had the training, of course. He'd received instruction long ago, but he couldn't recall the last time he'd actually sat in a cockpit. Did he even know how to open the launching-bay doors?
Stromo set his jaw. With a Remora's jazers, he could blast right through the damned hull if necessary. He stood ready, knowing what to do now, as the elevator opened.
Hundreds of compies filled the hangar bay, all of them waiting for him. They pressed toward the lift's open door.
Stromo's two remaining shots did not last long. He backed against the inner wall, and the compies pushed in on him.
33
ENGINEERING SPECIALIST SWENDSEN
Only a constant barrage from the silver berets kept the robots contained within the barricaded factory. Sergeant Paxton dismantled his temporary command post and took up residence in a large armored vehicle, where he prepared for the second phase of the assault. This time, no one would underestimate the rampaging Soldier compies.
Swendsen huddled inside the claustrophobic vehicle, racking his brains for a workable solution. What had caused the compies to go wild?
"We could call down an airstrike to annihilate the whole facility," Paxton growled. "Melt 'em all into puddles. Solve the problem."
"That would stop the compies here, but it wouldn't affect the larger emergency," Swendsen pointed out. "We can't just blow up every EDF ship where the compies are running wild, now can we? All of my compy schematics and management protocols are in that factory. That seemed the logical place to keep everything. If this is a pervasive programming error, we have to find a way to shut them all down. I can't do that until I understand what went wrong, and it would be difficult to get any data from a lump of melted metal." He stared at his datapad, scrolling from one assessment to another. Without knowing what had gone wrong with the governing modules in the first place, it was damnably hard to fix things. "We don't even know for sure if this is intentional sabotage, or just an accidental glitch."
"An accident?" Paxton looked at him in complete disbelief. "Occurring across the whole EDF? Some coincidence!"
Swendsen shrugged his bony shoulders,