Operation Inferno (6 page)

Paul had started to protest, as usual, but Felix clamped his hands on Paul’s shoulders, and the two had a whispered conversation. After that Paul hadn’t said another word.

They’d all run to the flight deck, grabbed whatever they could to fight with, and clambered down the stairs to subbasement twenty-three.

That was an hour ago.

He had no idea if he’d find Lee and Oliver hurt … turned into enemies, absorbed by the Ch’zar Collective … or if they’d been attacked by the giant rats he’d almost convinced himself might be down there.

Another three hundred feet and they’d be at the target intersection. Ethan waved his flashlight back and forth.

Along with the pipes and silver electrical conduits on the walls was the occasional doorway. These were permanently sealed shut. They reminded Ethan of pictures he’d seen of submarine doors: an oval with a wheel in the middle.

These doors hadn’t stood the test of time well. Every one they’d tried was rusted shut and not budge-able. They’d given up after the first dozen.

If they couldn’t open them, Lee and Oliver wouldn’t have been able to either.

The corridor’s floor was an open waffle pattern of dull black metal. Sections could be pried up to get at pipes underneath. Nothing special there … except a few paces ahead, Ethan spotted a dent in one section.

He marched toward it, knelt, and found a dimple the size of a car tire. The steel mesh had been cratered a full hand-span deep. The edges had torn and split. The steel wasn’t rusted, so this must have happened fairly recently. Something big and heavy had to have made this.

On a metal snag was a bit of black material.

Ethan set aside his flashlight and pulled it off.

It was rubber.

There was something familiar about it, especially the unmistakable odor of burned tire. He couldn’t quite connect the mental dots, though.

He showed it to Emma. She furrowed her brow, sensing something, too, but then shook her head.

Ahead came a sudden scream of metal wrenching.

Ethan stood bolt upright, crowbar and flashlight in hand.

That had to be Lee or Oliver.

He forgot all thoughts of nightmares and ran forward—

Charging straight into the vaulted intersection of two corridors.

Where he stopped.

Dumbfounded.

Emma, Angel, and Bobby almost ran into him.

“What …,” Bobby whispered.

“How,” Emma said, “did
they
find us?”

Twenty feet to Ethan’s right—down corridor G-422—stood a cluster of ten robots.

They were like the ones he’d run into at the ghost city of New Taos. They balanced on a single wheel and towered ten feet tall. But these were different, because instead of parabolic antennae dishes in their hands, they had jackhammers, plasma cutting torches, or hydraulically powered claws.

And instead of a helmeted head with a single slit like the New Taos guardians, these guys each had three
cameras mounted where a normal face should have been.

What held all the robots’ attention was a solid steel bulkhead that had dropped and sealed off the rest of corridor G-422.

Three robots with plasma torches melted a gash in the middle of the bulkhead wall. Lines of molten steel dribbled down. At the other end of this tear, three robots grabbed the wall with claws, while the last few pounded at it with jackhammers.

Together they were slowly peeling back the steel like it was an orange rind.

One of the robots paused.

Its head swiveled toward Ethan … and its jackhammering subsided.

For a heartbeat, nothing happened.

Then all the other nine robots simultaneously stopped their work and turned.

Icy horror flooded through Ethan.

“Run …,” he whispered to his team. “Run for your lives!”

   7   
THEY’RE ALIVE

E
THAN BOLTED
.

Bobby, Emma, and Angel were right behind him.

Just one of those robots was strong enough to paste him and the others. Ten robots? He didn’t want to think about it. They’d be dead meat if they got caught.

But Ethan
had
to think about it. That’s what commanders were supposed to do.

There was no way he could outrun a nuclear-powered wheeled death machine.

So Ethan skidded to a halt, turned, and raised his crowbar.

This made about as much sense as fighting an I.C.E. midair with a glider … but he was going to try
something
before he got flattened.

As he turned, he saw the robots maneuvering around the intersection corner. His brain vapor locked seeing the tons of metal men push and shove to get ahead of one another in order to crush him.

They were so big, though, only two could fit side by side in the tunnel. And as one broke ahead of the other, it came at Ethan down the
middle
of the corridor. It blocked the others behind it.

A lucky break. Kind of.

At least he’d only be squished by one of them. “Go!” he ordered his team. “I’ll stay and slow it down.”

“Not by yourself, Ethan,” Bobby said, and stood by him.

Emma shot him a
don’t be stupid
look and halted as well.

Angel stopped. Her one eye not covered by her angular haircut looked at Ethan and then the robot. She rushed forward, grabbed Emma’s plasma torch, and shoved her rivet gun into his sister’s hands.

Emma looked at it, not understanding.

Angel didn’t explain. She turned and ran, leaving them behind.

Ethan didn’t have time to think about her crazy actions, because the first robot was almost on him.

He raised his crowbar again. This was reckless, suicidal, and just as crazy as anything Angel had ever done. That didn’t matter.

Emma gritted her teeth and opened fire.

Rivets sparked off the robot’s shell. One metal projectile shattered a camera lens.

The robot shook its head, momentarily disoriented … but it didn’t slow down.

It rolled at Ethan fast, so close now, he smelled the grease from its joints.

Bobby shoved Ethan out of the way—an instant before the robot would’ve flattened him—and then Bobby chucked his chain at the robot’s wheel.

The robot clipped Bobby on the arm, which spun him around.

The chain, though, sucked into the wheel well and wrapped around the axle.

The wheel seized—

And the rest of the robot kept moving forward.

Its body whipped around the immobilized wheel.

It slammed into the floor deck, face-first. The impact drove the robot
through
the deck plates. Its arms, one with a jackhammer still sputtering, bent at right angles. Red hydraulic fluid gushed everywhere.

Behind the mutilated robot, the other mechanized men halted … unable to pass over the wreckage. They looked back and forth and murmured chirps of static. They then started to cut and hammer apart their still-struggling teammate to get past.

Ethan blinked at the horrifying sight. He got to his feet.

Bobby’s left arm hung at an unnatural angle, clearly broken, but he was grinning from ear to ear.

“Come on,” Emma urged. “That bought us maybe a minute.”

She ran down corridor G-422.

Ethan and Bobby chased after her. Bobby’s busted arm slowed him down, and he grunted from the pain every time it moved.

Ahead on the wall were sparks and snaps of an intense white light. Ethan squinted and made out the shadowy outline of Angel, kneeling with the plasma torch by one of those stuck submarine-like doors.

With a
clang
the door’s lockbox dropped to the
floor. Angel yanked the door. It squealed on its hinges and opened about a foot. She didn’t wait for the others. She slipped inside.

Emma was right behind her. Ethan shoved Bobby through and then followed.

It was dark. There were no echoes like out in the tunnel. The space felt smaller.

Ethan reached for his flashlight but realized he’d dropped it at the intersection. There was no going back for it now.

Angel waved the plasma torch about. Ghostly shadows flickered over the walls near the door. They made her face look more psychotic than usual.

Ethan pulled the door shut … or tried to anyway. He strained and used his full weight and it squeaked shut.

Emma then attacked the metal door with the rivet gun, tacking it to its frame.

“That’s not going to last long,” Ethan said. “Look for another exit. There has to be one in—”

The rest of his words stuck in his throat.

The room was only six paces wide. But it was long. Very long … vanishing into the distance. Along the walls were shelves and a series of tracks with tiny dead
robots that looked as if they had once rolled up and down the tracks.

The thing that made Ethan pause, though, was what was on the shelves. They were packed with slender crystalline rectangles. Even covered with dust, they still glimmered sapphire blue, ruby red, and clear, sparkling diamond.

These were the same electronic crystal books he had seen at the library in New Taos.

Whoever built Titan Base had stored a treasure trove of ancient knowledge down here.

More important, there had to be a reader for these electronic books nearby. Ethan had checked out a book from New Taos containing information on Project Prometheus. It was connected to his parents and the strange mental abilities he and Emma seemed to have. It might have been the key to unlocking the mystery of why their parents had raised them in Santa Blanca.

He searched the nearest self. There had to be a reader here somewhere.

Angel, however, moved farther down the long room … taking their only light with her.

Ethan was about to ask her to hold up, when a robot
pounded on the door, making it ring like a gong. Another great
thump
popped a few of the new rivets.

“That didn’t take long,” Bobby whispered. “They must really want us.”

“Go. Go,” Ethan said, pushing Bobby ahead.

Emma wrapped Bobby’s good arm around her neck and handed Ethan the rivet gun. They trotted as fast as they could.

The pounding on the door increased, as if there were two or three robots on it now.

Ethan paused every dozen steps to cover their escape. He wasn’t sure what one rivet gun was going to do against those things.

Ahead, Angel and the lit plasma torch halted.

The room was a dead end. There was a set of elevator doors. Angel pushed the call button.

Ethan, Emma, and Bobby caught up to her.

“Is there power?” Bobby asked, panic creeping into his tone.

Ethan and Emma glanced at each other. There had been sporadic power surges and generators starting up in the subbasements. But if there was power down here, they sure wouldn’t be running around in the dark.

Angel kept punching the elevator call button—harder and faster—as if she were a wild animal, clawing at her cage to get out.

At the far end of the library corridor, there came a tremendous clatter as the riveted door fell off its hinges.

Emma touched Angel’s shoulder. “Don’t,” she whispered.

Angel slowly nodded. She bonked her head against the elevator door and stayed there.

Emma took the plasma torch from Angel’s grasp and turned to face the long passage.

Ethan swallowed, but his throat was too dry for it to do any good.

He couldn’t help it. He pressed the call button, as if the bazillion times Angel had tried weren’t enough to prove the thing wasn’t working.

Ethan felt something as he touched the button. A connect in his mind. A spark. It was a little like the mental connection he could sometime make with his wasp I.C.E. Like the faint static whisper he’d heard in his head when they were in New Taos.

The button lit. It dinged.

Within the walls, motors stirred to life.

The elevator doors parted. Angel almost fell inside.

They all rushed in after her.

Okay. The doors opened. But did this thing have power enough to work? Or would it take them up and get stuck? Or drop them back down? Ethan didn’t trust his luck today. Not that he had a choice.

He and Emma pointed their weapons back down the passage … waiting for the doors to shut.