I made it seven steps into the lobby before alarms started blaring, some heavy-duty impact cannons extended from the floor, and a ten-by-ten forcefield activated to contain me. Since most of the folks in the lobby were regular citizens, they were surprised, but security moved with tactical precision to herd all the uninitiated out the doors. Once cleared, shutters lowered over the windows, locking down the lobby. Everything Doctor Zarg's information had told me would happen.

I waited quietly, biding my time. Once cleared of terrestrial witnesses, a quartet of ravagers was released from secret alcoves in the walls. They surrounded me as an added precaution. A screen floated over their cranial units. It had an image of Warner's smirking face.

"Mack, our simulations based on previously recorded behavioral models suggested you'd try this," he said, "but I have to admit, I'm a little disappointed. I realize that you are only a machine with a rejected technomorph brain. You must've calculated that this effort was doomed to failure."

"Had to try," I said.

"Of course, you did. I a.s.sume you've notified the authorities, who are certainly rushing to this building in force this very instant."

"Yeah."

Warner sighed. "Oh, such an embarra.s.singly simple end to this defective operation of yours. When they get here, they'll find nothing but a faulty bot our security forces had to sc.r.a.p. Regrettably, your memory matrix will be damaged beyond recovery, so we'll never know what malfunction seized you."

"These things happen," I said.

"What's in the case?"

"Oh, just a little surprise. Four of them, actually."

The forcefield began to contract. While my alloy was impenetrable, the shrinking energy barrier could crush me into a two-foot cube in an estimated 190 seconds. I didn't make a move to stop it yet. Jung and Humbolt had another forty seconds before they were supposed to be in position to take full advantage of the chaos that was coming.

"Tell me, Mack," asked Warner. "Does a bot feel fear? I know you've got that self-preservation directive. How does that compare to what we biologicals feel when we know the end is upon us?"

"I'm not going to the sc.r.a.p heap quite yet."

I reached inside my coat and pulled a device from a pocket. I pressed the cube against the shrinking forcefield and pushed a b.u.t.ton. It was a prototype, but I'd place my functionality in Lucia's untested genius any day.

Warner narrowed his eyes. "What is that?"

The cube made a crackling sound.

"That's a field scrambler," said Warner. "Where did you get that?"

"Just a little something a friend of mine whipped up in her spare time."

"But we specifically kept that technology from the earthlings," said Warner. "You can't have that!"

"Can't put the genie back in the bottle."

The eight miniature rocket pods on my belt flared to life.

The scrambler popped and smoked as it shorted out the forcefield. The ravagers moved to tackle me and the impact cannons unleashed their blast. But the booster fired, and I was already soaring upward and onward. I smashed through the lobby ceiling and kept on through the next two floors before losing momentum.

Unwitting earthling office workers were surprised by a bot smashing his way into their midst. It was forty-eight more floors before I reached the fifty-first floor used by the Dissenters, but this route beat the stairs because security was light on these civilian-controlled floors.

A secretary lay nearby at my feet, sprawled on the floor beside her overturned desk, broken typewriter, and scattered paperwork. The desk had been unfortunately positioned above my point of entry.

"Sorry about that, miss." I leaned down and helped her up. "You might want to stand back."

The booster roared to life again, and I punched through another three floors. More offices were thrown into disarray, but I didn't smash into anything squishy and organic, so I couldn't complain. I gave the booster an extra second to cool down between leaps. Figured the prototype deserved the precaution, and I wanted security to have time to mobilize in antic.i.p.ation of my arrival.

Two more jumps, and I was on the twelfth floor. I crashed into an office, and landed hard enough that the floor nearly gave way beneath me. The sole occupant of the room, a guy in a suit, was knocked over.

An authoritative voice made an announcement on the building's speaker system. "Your attention, please. A malfunctioning robot is roaming the building. Do not be alarmed. Security shall neutralize the threat soon, and the police have been called. Avoid all contact with the defective unit."

Heeding the advice, the guy scrambled backwards without getting to his feet, right into the hole I'd made in my entrance. I moved to grab him, and he screamed. He kept screaming as he started to fall through the hole. I nabbed him by the ankle and pulled him from the brink and set him safely on his feet. He jumped back and pressed against the corner farthest from me.

The wall exploded as a trio of ravagers burst into the office without bothering to knock. While not as thick-alloyed as me, they were nearly as strong and had me outnumbered. Last time I'd run across these evil twins, I'd beaten them only by damaging myself. But I was a learning machine, and I had their numbers.

The lead threw two punches. I batted them aside and jabbed him in the cranial unit. He tried to avoid the blow, exactly as my a.n.a.lyzer predicted. What would've been a glancing strike snapped his head back hard enough to tear his neck joint in half.

The two others came at me from both sides. I stepped back at the last nanosecond, and they wound up hitting each other. I struck at a vulnerable knee joint. One toppled over. The other threw a hook, and I had no choice but to take the hit. He connected with my shoulder with a hard clang. The ravager followed it with a flurry of swings, all aimed at susceptible joints. The execution was as flawless and predictable as a math equation. I dodged, parried, and took a few harmless dents until my opponent exposed himself to a double-fisted thrust that caved in his torso and rendered him inoperable.

The downed ravager latched onto my right leg, and I crushed his cranial unit. He clung stubbornly though, which left me vulnerable to an attack from the last functional opponent. But the ravager's head was stuck at a bad angle, and he couldn't aim his blow. It went wide. I smashed him from behind, knocking his head off, finishing the job.

The guy in the corner glanced at the broken robots. "Don't hurt me. Please."

"Don't believe everything you hear, buddy." I pried the ravager from my leg, picked up my case, and activated my booster to soar my way through another three floors.

Between jumps, I moved steadily toward the center of the building, toward a secret levitator pod shaft that ran from the fifty-sixth floor to the hidden sub-bas.e.m.e.nt laboratories. The shaft was armored; while I could tear my way into it with some work, it would be easier to strike at the weakest point: the door. I didn't hide my objective, and the Dissenters would do whatever it took to keep me from reaching it, which was good for Jung and Humbolt.

It would've been rea.s.suring if I could've checked in for a status report. Radio silence was part of the operation, so I carried on. No one tried to stop me. The ravagers had been a test, and I'd pa.s.sed. The Dissenters knew I was in the building, knew I was on my way, and knew I meant business. No big deal. I wanted them to know.

One minute, fourteen seconds later, I reached the fiftieth floor. It hadn't been a difficult journey, and I'd managed not to get any noncombatants killed in the process. In fact, once past the twentieth floor, I didn't run across any civilians, who were already being forcibly evacuated.

Once I punched through to the fifty-first, the first floor used by the Dissenters, all bets were off. My a.n.a.lyzer a.s.sumed that security knew where I was and had mobilized every ravager in the place. I was counting on it. The Dissenters thought I was merely a robot, predictable and compelled to complete my directive even counter to common sense. What they couldn't know, what they couldn't understand, was that I had no intention of getting sc.r.a.pped if I could avoid it. There was one more thing they didn't know, couldn't feed into their computers. The case I carried with the four bedlam drones inside.

I thrust upward and burst into the Dissenter lab, right in the middle of three dozen ravagers. Had to be nearly every ravager in the facility, and it was too many for a single bot to take.

I pushed a b.u.t.ton on my case. It popped open and four spherical drones sprang out and hovered at chest level. The quartet of bedlam drones scanned the room, a.s.sessing targets.

"Anytime you're ready, boys," I said.

As one, the ravagers took a single step toward me. Lucia hadn't dubbed the drones "bedlams" for nothing. Each was outfitted with a miniature battery of rapid fire rayguns and overeager targeting systems. The bedlams started blasting anything that moved. They would've even blasted me if I hadn't stood immobile. The ravagers were dumb autos programmed to throw themselves at me in an overwhelming pile. It didn't occur to them to stand still.

Most were blown to pieces in a hail of rayfire. As each wave fell, the next moved forward and was cut down. It didn't take long, which was fortunate because the bedlams had a functional life of forty-five seconds before their rayguns burnt out and their power cells went dry. Used up, they clattered to the floor among the twitching piles of bubbling metal.

The smoke cleared to reveal three semifunctional ravagers left. One had lost both its arms. Another struggled to stand with a hole punched through its central gyro. One more had had its legs blown off and dragged itself stubbornly toward me with its arms. I didn't bother waiting, activating my booster and hurling myself through the next three floors.

The ravagers had been among the most serious threats security could throw my way. There were certain to be one or two left functional in the building, but I could handle that on my own. According to my mission model the next obstacle would be a secondary defense line set up at the elevator door. So far, the Dissenters had responded exactly as expected, which registered as a bit ironic since I was supposed to be the predictable one.

I smashed my way through to the fifty-sixth floor into an empty chemical lab. The doors opened and in rushed a squad of five biological security personnel. They bathed me in a dark blue ray from their rifles. Frost crystallized on my cha.s.sis. In three seconds it solidified into thick blocks of ice. The guards concentrated their freezerays on my limbs. They succeeded in encasing my right arm completely, rendering it inoperable.

One of the guys aimed at my cranial unit. I intercepted the beam with my hand, and the ice spread across my palm. I squeezed my fingers and ended up with a four-pound chunk in my grip. I threw it into the lead guard's nose, and he was knocked off his feet. I advanced on the others, despite the ice coating my cha.s.sis. One punch each and they went down.

I twitched my frozen arm three times, and the ice block cracked and fell away. I brushed away a few other chunks. The lab doors slid open, and two new squads raced in. I turned and barreled toward the elevator, which according to calculations was three hundred feet and four walls away.

I smashed through the first wall. Then the next. I didn't try to maneuver. I wasn't designed for it. I crashed through anything stupid enough to get in my way. There were guards stationed all the way, but their freezerays weren't dangerous once I was in motion. The blocks of ice shattered with every stride of my powerful servos. Seven guards were shortsighted enough to wind up in my way. Five were lucky enough to be knocked aside with a few broken bones. Two ended up under my feet, and their body armor cracked and their vulnerable biological bodies squished beneath my merciless tread.

The last wall gave way, and the levitator pod doors were before me. By now, I'd stopped factoring in the security forces and their freezerays as a threat. There were a lot of them, and they held a last ditch line in front of the shaft, along with three more ravagers who stood defiantly before my goal.

I bowled through the security guards and shouldered past one of the ravagers, knocked the second aside with a swing of my fist. The third jumped right in my path with intentions of stopping my charge. Once I got going, standing in front of me was about the worst place to be. I rammed the ravager head on, lifting him off his feet and slamming him through the pod doors ahead of me. He was crushed like a tin can, and the doors gave way.

I tumbled down the empty shaft, ricocheting off the walls. My arms flailed out in search of something solid to grab. Plummeting the eighty floors to the bottom was faster but bound to damage something. After nine seconds of clanging and crashing, I managed to drive my fingers into the wall. My shoulder joint popped, absorbing the stress and reporting a few microfractures. The shaft filled with the harsh sound of metal tearing metal as I ripped gashes until my fall slowed and eventually stopped.

Eight seconds later, I recorded the distant thud of the broken ravager hitting bottom. It was going to be a long climb. I punched handholds as I went, and had descended seventy feet by the time a pair of security camera drones hovered up from the darkness.

Warner's voice issued from their speakers. "You were lucky to get this far, Mack. Stop now, before your luck runs out."

I didn't acknowledge him, just kept climbing.

"You're not a biological. You won't be affected by our plans. Why would you risk your continued functioning? It's illogical."

It was a good question, and I had a good logical answer to it. Self-preservation was a basic directive, but there wasn't a robot functioning that prioritized it at the top of his list. Like biologicals, all robots were seeking a purpose. Autos and drones were lucky enough to have that built into them. A bot had to find his own way, and I'd figured out that functioning for function's sake was pointless. The real question was finding a directive worth getting sc.r.a.pped for. The future of Empire and every citizen she called home balanced against one bot was a simple equation. Even simpler was one family that deserved better than to be used up and tossed aside by an indifferent city. I might not be able to change Empire. I might not even be able to stop the Dissenters. But I could save the Bleakers.

I didn't bother explaining it to Warner. He wouldn't have understood.

The shaft's magnetic couplings hummed to life. I craned my opticals upward to scan the pod dropping from above.

"Have a nice ride, Mack," said Warner.

There was no time to react except thrust my shoulders upward and brace myself for the impact. The pod crashed into me. The drones were destroyed instantly, but I managed to absorb the shock evenly and avoid any internal damage. The shaft sped by. I activated my booster and slowed the descent, but not by much.

I punched my way through the pod bottom and quickly climbed into it. I boosted again and burst through the top. The pod fell away, and impacted at the bottom five-sixths of a second later. Some shrapnel whizzed up the shaft and bounced harmlessly off my cha.s.sis. I fell the rest of the way and landed with a thud among the wreckage. The doors had been blown out by the impact, and I stepped out, expecting to meet up with the next obstacle toward my objective.

The corridor was empty.

Unexpected.

Something had gone wrong. The Dissenters must've realized my objective by now. This hall should've been filled with every security guard in the facility. There wasn't one guard. Not a single ravager or security drone. Nothing.

I'd miscalculated. My elegant electronic brain was not a foolproof mechanism. My logic lattice must've overlooked something, or Doctor Zarg's data had been incomplete. Either way, the only thing I could do was continue toward my goal and adapt as the variables became clearer.

Halfway there, I turned a corner and finally met up with the latest obstacle the Dissenters had to throw my way. The twenty-foot robot clomped forward on its thick legs. Its arms ended in pincers, each large enough to seize me in their grip. It didn't appear to have any armaments, but judging by size and probable power, it was a h.e.l.l of an obstacle. And I didn't know a particle about it.

The auto clomped forward. Every step rattled the corridor, and the top of its body sc.r.a.ped the ceiling at the height of each stride. I didn't scan a way around it.

"Surprised, Mack?" asked Warner, his voice coming from a speaker in the auto's torso. "Nothing about this in Zarg's files, I a.s.sume."

The auto took another step, and I stood there. My logic lattice was unready to formulate a viable battle plan. Even the best electronic brain could be stalled by the unexpected.

"No reason he should've," said Warner. "The demolisher is not a combat unit. Large and clumsy, we keep it around for jobs requiring brute strength. And believe me, it is very strong." The auto snapped each of its pincers three times with harsh clangs.

With the demolisher only two steps from being on top of me, my combat a.n.a.lyzer spit out the only course of action that my logic lattice, common sense emulator, and self-preservation directive agreed on: retreat.

I chose to override their advice.

The demolisher was halfway through its next step. I boosted into it, attempting to knock it off balance. It was big, but it had to be clumsy, without much room to maneuver in the hall.

I collided with the demolisher, but not how I'd planned. The auto thrust its leg forward, smacking me in the chest and knocking me to the floor. Before I could get up, it dropped a heavy foot on me. The unit's feet were as long and wide as me, so I had no room to wiggle or maneuver. It leaned its full weight on me, and even with my arms and legs in position, it was unlikely I could push the unit off.

This was it. All the demolisher had to do was stand here, and I couldn't do a d.a.m.n thing about it. The mission was over. I only hoped that Humbolt and Jung had gotten Julie and April out. It would've been nice to achieve at least one objective.

The demolisher raised its foot and stomped down on me. To give me even a second of leverage and motion while I was incapacitated was illogical. More than that, it was vicious and violent and just plain dumb. It wasn't a robot thing to do. Even a simple auto would've had more sense. I attributed it to a glitch.

The demolisher did it again. Three times more. It stomped its foot down hard enough to drive me into the floor. My cha.s.sis held under the blows, but more fractures registered in my internals. A hydraulic fluid leak was reported in my right shoulder. In five minutes, the arm would be functionally inoperative.

The demolisher wasn't an auto. It must've been a piloted vehicle. Biologicals were unpredictable, difficult to antic.i.p.ate. They were also stupid. No correctly programmed robot would throw away a clear advantage in hopes of doing a bit more damage to an already defeated opponent.

"How does it feel now?" asked Warner. "That it was all for nothing? That you succeeded in only getting yourself sc.r.a.pped? You stupid-" Clomp! "-piece of-" Clomp! "-defective tin!"

It raised its foot, and this time I was ready. I rolled to one side. I may be a relatively clumsy bot, but I was quicker than the demolisher and managed to get to my feet as it tried to flatten me with a pincer. I caught the blow. More damage to my internals. My left knee joint cracked, reducing effectiveness by thirteen degrees, and the hydraulic leak in my arm got worse. I managed not to be crushed and deflected the strike.

I moved in close to the demolisher, where its arms weren't designed to reach. The close quarters of the hallway made it difficult to turn. I threw my shoulder into its right leg, and activated the booster. The demolisher swayed but didn't fall over. I cranked my servos all the way to 200 percent. It burned a lot of juice and blew out my damaged right arm, rendering it almost inoperable. The demolisher's leg pushed backwards. It fell over and past me to land front down.

The pilot struggled to get it to rise, but whoever had designed it hadn't considered the possibility it might take a tumble in a hallway with only two feet of extra s.p.a.ce. The demolisher thrashed its limbs, tearing apart the walls. It'd get up eventually, so I didn't take time to congratulate myself. I left the demolisher to its struggle and continued.

The chemical lab doors tried to deny me access. I tore them open and stepped inside. The lab was one hundred cubic feet of mostly unoccupied s.p.a.ce. There were blinking consoles along the wall, and four technicians tending to the complex apparatus in the room's center. Six hundred gallons of mutagen floated in a clear cylindrical vat. It was still being processed and required special handling, specifically continual exposure to certain low-level radiation wavelengths and a precise magnetic field. Otherwise, it'd destabilize in a few hours and become as dangerous as heavy tap water. Exposure to air would hasten the process to minutes.

Destroying the Dissenters' supply of mutagen was the first step in my mission. It wouldn't do much good to remove Holt from the Dissenters' grasp as long as they had this. It wasn't as much as they needed, but it was enough to cause some trouble.

There was, of course, another reason for wanting to destroy it. To p.i.s.s them off, let them know they'd screwed with the wrong bot.

In addition to the stalwart technicians, I scanned Doctor Zarg resting twenty-six feet from the device protecting and treating the cylinder. The doctor was like an old piece of forgotten furniture tossed to a darkened corner. He wasn't in a cage, but the Dissenters had removed his legs and arms.

A forcefield surrounded the mutagen container. I found the other field scrambler in my coat. Though I'd taken a beating, the coat had armored pockets, and it'd kept the device from being damaged. Score another point for Lucia.

Three of the techs ran from the lab without doing anything stupid.

The closest technician, a bird-like alien, drew a small raygun and leveled it at me with a shaking hand. He was a little guy, barely five feet tall, but he stood his ground as he interposed himself between me and the mutagen. Trembling, he couldn't make himself pull the peashooter's trigger, but I respected his guts.

"Scram," I said.

He dropped his weapon and dashed toward the exit.

I fixed the scrambler on the forcefield and activated it.

I recorded the demolisher distantly still struggling to right itself. It was a h.e.l.l of a racket.

"Thought they'd have sc.r.a.pped you by now, Doctor," I said.

"My superior intellect made destruction inadvisable," he replied. "My defense protocols make reprogramming impossible. Since I cannot be forced to comply with their current operations, I have been rendered immobile until I am more cooperative."

The scrambler did its job and shorted out the protective field. I reached through the radiation bath, a charged barrier capable of incinerating flesh and liquefying most metals. It didn't do anything to my alloy beside vaporize the paint job, and the cuffs of the illusion suit blackened and crackled. The suit didn't burn, but it started to melt again. I'd have to get Lucia to fix that problem.

I ran my fingers along the transparent vat, a.s.sessing it through my tactile web. The material was a thin and flexible plastic.

I threw a punch into it. The vat chimed and wobbled but didn't break. I wasn't surprised.