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  Nobody said a word. We just spread out, Tyson Perry to the left, me in the middle, and Gunny Kwan on the right, each of us dragging furniture wreckage into some form of cover to shoot from. There wasn’t much intact, but we really just needed protection from flechettes and lasers. As a sniper hide, mine wasn’t much, just some ripped countertop from a cubicle desk laid on its side, perpendicular to the melted carpet. I could kneel or sit cross-legged behind it, resting my rifle on the single still-smooth square edge. Leaning the ChemJet against the barrier, I took the .22 submachine gun from my back, pulled it from its case, and loaded it with the first drum. Then I placed the other two drums on the ground by my feet.

  I glanced at Kwan, who nodded, his own setup similar. Tyson was still shifting broken desk chairs and a cubicle wall board to his satisfaction, but he quickly got it done and gave a thumb-to-index-finger okay sign. None of us talked because I don’t think any of us could hear much yet. I don’t know if our eardrums were popped, but in the unlikely chance that mine weren’t, I put my earplugs in. It was about to get noisy—again.

  “Rikki, we are ready,” I said, my own voice so muffled, it was like I had spoken from under a lake.

  He zipped out in front of the three of us, spinning around so that his gun barrel pointed back at us. The green holo on his back lit up with a big three, then a two, then a one, and off he went, zooming backward out of the opening, out over Broadway. He pulled all the way back about thirty meters from the building before lifting straight up as all four of his missile pods rotated into firing position.

  Immediately an object shot out from the eighteenth floor, right at him, but he easily swerved out of its path, his answering micro missile jumping from its cradle like a flash of light. Another projectile came from the other end of the floor and almost simultaneously, a beam of blue light shot up from below. The Tank-Killer was still in business.

  Rikki’s first missile exploded above us, shaking the floor, debris and dust falling from the ruined ceiling. When I looked back at him, he suddenly danced sideways, avoiding another laser beam while simultaneously rotating vertical, nose down, launching a second missile toward what had to be the Tank-Killer. He swiveled back to horizontal and began sliding on an invisible column of fan-driven air, first to one side, then the other, dodging mechanically catapulted chunks of concrete, office equipment, and in one case a chair while simultaneously looking to line up another missile shot.

  Zone UAVs appeared, seemingly like magic, from almost every direction, from between every building on the street, all focused on Rikki. Some were shooting lasers at him, some were shooting magnetically accelerated bits of wire, others came diving straight at him like WWII kamikaze fighters. Instantly the three of us were firing, picking off drones as best we could, as fast as we could. The steady semi-auto fire from the HK 7.62mm rifles on either side of me mixed with the much softer buzz of my .22 submachine gun as we started to shoot down enemy drones.

  My little weapon had just basic sights, but with no recoil to speak of and easy burst firing, I was knocking drones out the air with every squeeze of the trigger. It was an awesome little weapon, perfect for killing UAV drones.

  Sergeants Perry and Kwan might not have had NYPD anti-riot weapons to work with, but there was nothing wrong with their combined shooting skills. We were killing drones by the handful, yet still Rikki was forced to give up his side shuffle and, instead, engage in true dogfighting aerial acrobatics. And all the while, we were taking fire from hovering drones whose flechettes or lasers would do much more damage to our soft human bodies than to the Decimator’s carbon-fiber-armored one.

  Rikki was now launching missiles in almost every direction, simultaneously firing his e-mag as he zipped in and out of the crazy dance of UAVs. My companions fired at drones on the edges of what fighter pilots used to call the furball, while I followed Rikki closely with my own sights, picking off drones as they moved in on him. His Artemis air-to-air missiles were killing the most agile UAVs by locking micro radar onto them and hunting them down no matter where they dodged. The enemy was dying in droves, yet they were accomplishing their mission—distracting Rikki from killing Plum Blossom.

  If this fight had happened ten, nine, maybe even eight years earlier, we wouldn’t have stood a chance, even with Rikki’s advanced systems and skills. But the enemy’s drones were old, tired, and mostly without munitions, although there were dozens, maybe hundreds of them. Rikki had, at a guess, seventy-five or eighty e-mag projectiles, and possibly less than ten Artemis air-to-air missiles left. I didn’t know all of his tricks, but usually the Zone Defense team outfitted him with thirty Artemis, six Goliath, and six Ares missiles. I had no idea how many of the little Huntress EMP or decoy missiles he carried, not to mention those magnetic incendiary mines like the one he dropped on War’s metal hide, but it couldn’t be a big number of any of them.

  All this time I had felt, more than heard, three heavy sets of vibrations on the floor above, each moving rapidly around in response to Rikki’s shots. But the one on the far end of the floor suddenly stopped after one of Rikki’s Goliath micro missiles slammed into its position. Now there were just two massively heavy bots pounding away overhead and I was pretty sure Plum Blossom was still one of them.

  With all the dogfighting going on, Rikki had only had a few opportunities to fire any of his precious Goliath anti-armor missiles, but between the Tank-Killer, which had stopped lasing, and at least two shots at the targets above us, I guessed he must have been down to three. Those were his best weapons for killing Plum Blossom and he couldn’t afford to waste any of them, not that he was getting many opportunities to shoot.

  Dozens of new drones appeared on the outskirts of the dogfight just as I loaded my last drum of ammo into the American 180 and racked the bolt to chamber a round. I felt my heart drop in despair at the sheer numbers of them. Well over a hundred, maybe almost two hundred. And then they surprised me, by attacking the Zone drones instead of Rikki. A few flew closer to my position and I realized they were the modified commercial drones of the newest Flottercot production, Drone Wars. Suddenly the tide of the aerial battle turned, with the older Zone drones losing the fight as they were tag teamed by groups of two or three, sometimes even four, amateur drones.

  With a sudden freedom from the fighting, Rikki must have come to the same conclusion about his missile supply because the next shot he took exploded with much more concussive force, so much, in fact, that part of the actual concrete ceiling above Tyson suddenly let go and fell right for him. I yelled, knowing he wouldn’t be able to hear me, but there was nothing else I could do. He must have sensed it somehow because he took a dive left and the heavy chunk pounded into his shooting position, crushing an already beat-up desk chair. That missile had been thermobaric.

  Both Kwan and I stopped shooting to look at the tough Ranger, but he simply waved our attention off. He was okay.

  Until a silvery gray cable slashed through the air as a metal monster stenciled with DEATH swung down into the window opening, hanging from a second cable.

  Chapter 20

  The silver blur of the horseman’s cable snapped out and wound around Tyson’s ankle. Immediately, one of the cylindrical segments spun fast and Sergeant Perry was yanked out from his position, his body shooting out of the building opening, out over the street. At the end of the whipcord snap, the cable unwound and with his mouth open in a scream I couldn’t hear, Tyson fell out of view to the pavement below.

  Kwan already had rounds sparking off Death’s metal hide by the time I swung my barrel onto the target, but the massive bot snapped its now freed cable at me. I ducked but the cable actually went to one side of me, missing by over a meter. I didn’t see what it connected with as I instinctively emptied the little submachine gun at the monster. Every round hit the same place and while they didn’t penetrate the armor, they put a big, deep dent in it by the time the drum clicked empty. Death spun up its cable, only it was the bot itself that was yanked, right onto the flo
or, bringing the metal killer into our space, up close and personal.

  I found myself dropping one empty gun and grabbing the other while starting a roll backward from my kneeling position. Then I was coming upright, feet backing me away, left hand grabbing the ChemJet’s fore grip, lifting the rifle on target. The Gunny was farther away and he was firing at the killbot, his rounds chewing up the thing’s ocular band, blinding it.

  My finger found the trigger and I yanked it, firing a burst of microrocket rounds that had no space to ignite, the bullets just bouncing off the armored robot. Then it was just there—right in front of me and I had no time to fire again as a barrage of office wreckage came flying from Death’s catapult arms. I dodged, ducked, and jumped, but even without its sight, the bot was still somehow able to focus on me and my position, either by sound or by some other sensor that Plum Blossom had equipped its deadly offspring with.

  Kwan kept shooting at it, but suddenly his shots stopped sparking off the armor. A glance, as I dove and rolled away from an old computer monitor that crashed through my previous space, showed him now dealing with two UAVs that had also entered floor seventeen.

  I jinked left then back right, firing the ChemJet from the hip. Death was too close, the rocket motors unable to ignite till after they bounced off the horseman. Some ignited as they ricocheted around the open floor, whining off to slam into, and through, the walls, floor, or the already weakened ceiling.

  Death’s cable came for me as my rifle locked open on an empty magazine. I dropped low, letting go of the rifle to reach up behind my back. The cable stopped and slashed back toward me, wrapping my left leg at the knee. Before the awful thing could spin its top, I brought my kukri up, around and down, the hardened D2 tool steel chopping right through the salvaged Render cable.

  I backed away from Death’s continually charging form, and my right hand tossed the knife to my left and then darted to the 9mm Magnum on my chest.

  Death was coming on fast as I pointed the big handgun and started to trigger shots at almost point blank range.

  I shot for the circular dent left by almost two hundred .22 bullets, my vision tunneling down to focus on that one little spot. Aim small, miss small. Dad’s words came back to me. Yet Death came on, even as the thinned metal let go and a few of my rounds made it inside the monster.

  The second cable slashed out and caught my left hand, then the shortened one snagged my right wrist.

  The two body segments, one above the other, started to turn in opposite directions, winching me inexorably toward the third segment and its spinning arm and single sharp blade.

  Still fighting, I twisted my right hand and fired the pistol at my own left hand. Actually I was aiming at the cable where it led away from my almost crushed hand to the bot named Death.

  It would have been so easy to hit my own hand, or maybe the big knife still trapped in it. But I got lucky and one of the last two rounds in the gun clipped the metal strand. It didn’t cut all the way through it, not completely, but it broke most of the cable’s diameter. I yanked back hard with my left and the shot-up cable snapped. The part wrapped around my hand stayed in place, which may have been all that held the knife as I swung hard at the other cable. I cut it, but not enough to break, and now I was too close. The spinning blade was just centimeters away. And Death was stepping forward with one of its legs, preparing to move closer.

  A sharp snap-whine sounded behind it and the big machine suddenly froze for a second. Then Rikki hovered around to one side and fired his e-mag a second time. At point-blank distance, his rounds were penetrating the horseman’s armor. His shot placement must have been excellent, as the machine stopped winching me. The deadly blade kept spinning around, though, just centimeters from my stomach. I chopped a second time and the cable parted, letting me stoop and grab the ChemJet, drop the pistol, and back away as I fumbled a fresh magazine into the rifle.

  The horseman shook and twitched, attempting to move, to come at me. But my feet had minds of their own and they took me almost back to the inside wall, a good nine meters away. The rifle came up, Rikki zipped out of my line of fire, and then I hosed the entire magazine into Death. And Death died.

  Outside the building, the Drone Wars UAVs were winning the fight and overhead, I could feel Plum Blossom pounding toward the front of the building. Kwan was sitting back on his ass, one hand holding a bandage to his right biceps. He waved me away when I headed in his direction, so I stopped and suddenly Rikki was in front of me. His hologram lit up again.

  AJ, I have no more Goliath anti-armor missiles left. Any more thermobaric blasts will destroy the building. You must climb upon me and shoot the CThree with your rifle. Combining our weapons provides the best probability of a kill.

  I was down to one full magazine for the ChemJet and two partials. Wearily, I climbed onto the Decimator’s back and lay prone, my rifle pointed out over his own e-mag weapon, my left hand clutching the leading edge of his left wing, my booted feet poking out over nothing.

  As close to settled as time would allow, I nodded at the back of his ocular band. “Let’s do it.”

  Then he was zipping out into open air, the empty street over seventeen stories below, wind blowing hard on my face and arms as he spun around to face the building. His fans raced faster and we began rising upward. As I got my first sight of the ragged windows of the eighteenth floor, I finally thought to ask a question that should have been asked before.

  “Status?”

  The green hologram flashed the answer centimeters from my face.

  Power at 23%. E-mag ammunition at 34%. All Artemis missiles expended, as are functional EMP Huntress missiles. Zero Goliath anti-armor and four Ares Thermobaric remain.

  My mind focused closely on the first sentence. Twenty-three percent was not a lot of power when the drone was maneuvering in windy conditions with over seventy kilos of man and equipment on its back.

  The green holo shifted, turning into a big green aiming reticle, a poisonous green dot inside a poisonous green circle that moved out in front of my rifle barrel, then across the span of the floor, coming to rest on a position between two windows. Clear enough, and the faster I shot, the quicker we could get back into the building.

  I lined up the rifle’s folding backup sights on the green reticle and gently feathered the trigger. Four-round burst. The rocket-powered bullets smashed right through the wall like it was paper, and something inside the building screamed a high-pitched shriek that I felt in my skull bones rather than heard through my shattered eardrums.

  A black metallic shape raced past the empty window frame on the right, the green reticle automatically tracking it. Moving around on Rikki’s back was a complete no-go, the street forty-five meters below a constant reminder of the penalty for falling off. Instead, I lined up my sights on the green dot and let Rikki just rotate us around. In essence, I was just one more weapon mounted on the deadly drone. I stroked the trigger again, then again, aiming just at the green, hanging on for dear life as Rikki jinked back and forth, presumably following Plum Blossom’s movements.

  We jumped and moved, and I shot until the magazine ran empty. The empty mag fell out of the rifle when I hit the release button, plummeting to the ground far below. An enemy drone buzzed at me but was immediately blindsided by two Drone Wars UAVs, each moving at much faster speeds. Rikki stayed as still as he could, but the heavy winds were shoving us around and taking my left hand off his wing to grab one of my partial mags was perhaps the scariest thing I have ever done. I know I’ve said that a lot this trip, but each new scare seemed worse than the one before. The mag I grabbed was the fuller of the two partials and I fumbled it into the mag well, released the bolt, and switched the selector to semi-auto.

  I was pretty sure I had hit the CThree at least a couple times, yet it was still moving rapidly. My own shots were coming much faster, my shooting style beginning to adapt to Rikki’s back-and-forth twisting maneuvers. By my sixth single-fire shot, the projected laser reticle’s
movements slowed, which indicated to me that the Spider was taking more and more damage. Finally, the reticle stopped moving at all and I emptied the rest of the magazine, a total of five rounds, into that single spot on the building wall.