Siege (8 page)

I speed up a bit to get her attention. “We should stop and take samples. Blood, saliva, skin cells. I'll do it if you don't want to.”

She shakes her Diamond Girl's head. “Our top priority is finding survivors.”

“Shannon, something is seriously weird here. After a person inhales anthrax spores, it usually takes at least twenty-four hours for symptoms to develop. But it looks like these victims died within minutes.”

“This isn't ordinary anthrax. The germs were modified in the Russian bioweapons lab before Sigma stole them.” Her voice has that cold, dismissive tone I've come to hate. “The Russians altered the genes of the bacteria to make them deadlier. It isn't weird. It's what we expected.”

I sweep my Quarter-bot's right arm, gesturing at all the bodies in the hallway. “Okay…well, how come we haven't seen any dead kids yet? All these corpses are adults, every single one. What kind of genetic alteration could make the anthrax do that, pick and choose its victims?”

“The Rodriguez kid was sick too. Maybe teenagers resist the germ better. Maybe it makes them sick, but it doesn't kill them right away.” She shakes her head again. “Look, let's just find him, all right? Then you can take as many samples as you want.”

It hurts to hear her snap at me like this. Shannon's voice is so disdainful, so cold. But I won't let my emotions interfere with our mission. The pain I'm feeling is just a useless signal in my electronics. I'm going to shunt it aside so it won't distract me.

A moment later, we reach the school auditorium and Shannon flings open the doors. All the rows of seats are empty, but Mr. Burroughs, the school's band conductor, is sprawled on the stage. His slender, dark-skinned body lies facedown next to his music stand. A semicircle of chairs is also onstage, and all of the band's instruments—the trumpets, saxophones, clarinets, cymbals—are scattered across the floor. But there's no sign of the rest of the band. It looks like they were in the middle of a rehearsal when Mr. Burroughs collapsed, and the students fled in terror.
But where did they go?

Shannon turns without a word and marches down another hallway.

I follow her, about fifteen feet behind. Zia catches up to me and bends over to bring her loudspeakers close to my head. “Yo, Armstrong.” Her voice is a whisper, barely loud enough to be picked up by my acoustic sensors. “Shannon's upset. Can't you tell how upset she is?”

“She was friends with some of the teachers,” I whisper back. “She got to know them pretty well because she was in a lot of after-school clubs and stuff.”

“Well, why aren't you helping her? Go to her and say something. It might make her feel better.”

The other Pioneers still think Shannon and I are a couple, so this is a perfectly logical suggestion. Nevertheless, I'm stunned that it came from Zia. She's not a touchy-feely person. In fact, she has the bluntest, roughest, most indelicate personality I've ever known. I'm amazed that she's giving me advice on how to be a better boyfriend. It's just a shame I can't act on it.

“Shannon and I broke up. I'm the last person she wants to talk to now.”

Zia has no plastic face or video screen on her War-bot's head, but I can tell she's furious. She clenches both of her huge steel hands into fists. “What did you do, Armstrong? Did you hurt her?”

The safe thing to do now would be to tell a lie. But I can't. “I didn't mean to hurt her. But yeah, I did.”

Zia points her cameras at Shannon, who's still marching in front of us and stepping over the corpses in the hallway. Then her War-bot turns its lenses back to me. “Big mistake, Armstrong. Shannon's my friend, and
nobody
hurts my friends. When this mission is over, I'm gonna kick your butt. You hear me? I'm gonna peel you open like a tin can.”

To make her intentions absolutely clear, Zia waves one of her massive fists at me. Then she slows her pace and drops back to the rear.

We turn left and stride down the long corridor that leads to the school's annex building, which is newer and even uglier than the main building. Halfway there, my acoustic sensor detects a distant scream. It's a cry of pain, brief and sharp. Shannon hears it too. She starts running toward the noise. I run after her, and Zia gallops behind me.

We turn left again, and now I can hear thumping sounds and a long, low groan. Just ahead are the doors to the high-school gym, which takes up most of the annex building. That's where the noises are coming from.

Shannon slams through the doors, and half a second later Zia and I follow her into the gym. It's a huge space, large enough to hold the crowds for the statewide basketball championships, and now it's jammed with kids, at least a thousand teens. Nearly all of them are dead. Their bodies are scattered across the basketball court and piled high on the bleachers. A wave of nausea runs through my electronics as I stare at them.

But a few kids are still alive. I do a quick infrared scan of the room and spot three survivors. One of them is Tim Rodriguez, the sophomore we saw outside the school. He's crawling on his hands and knees toward the center of the basketball court, in a relatively clear area where there aren't so many bodies. There's another survivor ten yards beyond him, a petite dark-haired girl who's groaning and writhing on the floor near the foul line. I don't recognize her either, but I can tell she's a freshman because she's wearing a Class of 2022 T-shirt.

I
do
recognize the third survivor though. His name is Jack Parker, and he's a big, brawny, redheaded senior, in the same class I would've been in if I hadn't gotten sick. I used to know Jack pretty well, actually. My mom and his mom were friends, and he lived just down the street from us. I never liked the guy, mostly because he used to make fun of me, whispering jokes to his friends on the football team whenever he saw me in my wheelchair. But now I can't help but feel sorry for him. He's curled up in a tight ball in front of the bleachers, his muscled arms wrapped around his bent knees. His face and hair are drenched with sweat, and his whole body is quivering.

Shannon runs toward Tim Rodriguez. “Zia, go to the girl and run a medical diagnostic! Adam, do the same for Jack!”

While Zia bounds across the basketball court, I head for the bleachers. I have to maneuver my Quarter-bot around the sprawled bodies to reach Parker. For this mission, we equipped our robots with plenty of medical sensors, and as I lean over Jack, I start to examine him, measuring his heart rate and blood oxygen levels. He's racked with fever and barely conscious. We need to get him to an emergency room as quickly as possible.

I bend over to slip my steel hands under Jack's body. He's the biggest defensive lineman on the Yorktown High team and weighs at least two hundred and fifty pounds, but I have no trouble lifting him. As I pick him up, he opens his eyes wide and gapes at my robotic head. Horrified, he raises his arms to defend himself, but his hands tremble so violently he can't control them. After a moment his eyes close and his body goes limp. My sensors show his blood pressure plummeting. He's going into shock.

Panic surges across my circuits. It doesn't matter that Jack Parker was one of my least favorite classmates—I
need
to save him. If he and the other kids die,
no one
will be left from Yorktown High.

I aim my cameras at Shannon. Her Diamond Girl is bent over Tim Rodriguez, who seems to have lost consciousness too. “Shannon! We're losing them!”

In response, she picks up the Rodriguez kid. Because he's small, she can lift him with just one of her glittering arms. “We'll take them to the V-22. Marshall can fly them to the Biohazard Treatment Center while we keep looking for survivors.” She points her free hand at me. “Adam, give Jack to Zia. You have the best sensors, so you should do a…a thorough sweep. Someone else might be…”

Her synthesized voice trails off. Shannon can't bring herself to say it, but I know what she's asking for. Before we leave the high school and move on to the rest of the town, she wants me to scan the gym and look for any more survivors hidden among the dead.

Zia strides toward me, with the freshman girl already slung over her War-bot's right arm. She extends her other arm, and I drape Jack Parker's unconscious body over the elbow joint. Then, while Zia and Shannon wait by the gym's doors, I turn toward the bleachers and adjust my cameras and microphones, increasing their sensitivity to the maximum. I look for any slight movement or sound coming from the piles of bodies. I also use my spectroscope to analyze the air above them. I'm searching for any excess of carbon dioxide, any hint of breath.

My sensors detect 1,049 bodies in all. My logic circuits attempt to catalog the dead, linking each motionless face with a name and an age, but the corpses are so tangled together I can't see most of their faces. Another wave of nausea runs through me.
And this is just the beginning
, I think.
Sigma's just getting started.

Then my spectroscope detects a slight increase in carbon dioxide above a heap of bodies in the far corner of the gym. It's probably nothing, just a small random variation from the average, but I need to check it out. Reluctantly, I move closer.

I take another reading and detect an unmistakable spike in the carbon dioxide level. It doubles as I step toward the bodies, and doubles again when I point the sensor at the bottom of the pile.
Someone's breathing down there!

Without any hesitation I pull the corpses off the top of the heap and uncover a feverish, unconscious girl who was hidden beneath them. She's slender and blond and wears frayed jeans and a black T-shirt. I recognize her instantly.

It's Brittany Taylor. I've known her since kindergarten, but she's much more than an old friend. She's the girl I used to dream about when I was still human.

For a thousandth of a second, I just stare at her. She's not supposed to be here. She ran away from home over a year ago and started living on the streets of New York City. Dad told me she's been staying at a youth shelter in Manhattan for the past six months.
So why is she here?
Why did she come back to Yorktown Heights just in time for the anthrax outbreak?

My circuits analyze a dozen possible explanations, but the answer is obvious. Sigma used Brittany once before. The AI captured and tortured her because it knew how much she meant to me. Now it's happening again.

“Brittany?” Her name sounds so strange coming out of my loudspeakers. “Can you hear me?”

No response. She's gone into shock, just like Jack Parker. She's dying.

I bend low and cradle her in my Quarter-bot's arms. She's so light, so incredibly light. Her pulse is rapid but weak, a barely perceptible quiver in her neck. Her head lolls against my elbow joint, and her long blond hair is draped over my steel armor. I scan her with all my medical sensors, but there's nothing I can do for her.
Wake up, Brittany! Open your eyes!

Holding her against my torso, I run toward Shannon and Zia. “Let's go, let's go! This is the last one!”

Shannon trains her cameras on the unconscious girl in my arms. She knows all about my history with Brittany. I told Shannon about her in our very first conversation, before we even became Pioneers. Now Shannon's circuits are probably racing toward the same conclusion I just made: that Brittany's appearance here is no accident. But to her credit, Shannon simply nods her Diamond Girl's head and follows me out of the gym, still holding Tim Rodriguez in one of her glittering arms. Zia brings up the rear, carrying both Jack Parker and the freshman girl.

We charge down the long corridor, retracing our steps. Our footpads clang against the linoleum floor, and the noise echoes up and down the hallway. In less than fifteen seconds, we're back in the high school's lobby and almost out of the building.

Then my acoustic sensor picks up the sound of an explosion. A percussive
boom
erupts from outside the building and shatters the glass panels in the high school's front doors.

All three of us stop in our tracks. Through the shattered doors we see the V-22 in flames. A few yards in front of the burning aircraft, the ground has split into a gaping chasm, and extending upward from the muddy gap in the earth is an enormous steel tentacle, at least ten feet thick and a hundred feet tall. It looks like a hugely oversize version of the Snake-bot. It towers over Yorktown High, twisting and coiling in midair. Its silver skin glows in the evening light.

The tentacle's shiny tip turns downward. It points at the high school's broken doors, like the head of a giant cobra that's ready to strike. Then it hurtles toward us.

We have just enough time to turn around and shield the students we're carrying. Then the huge Snake-bot smashes into the brickwork above the school's front doors, and the lobby's ceiling collapses.

Chunks of plaster and concrete rain down on us and bounce off our armor, but we're already running. We reverse course and charge down the school's main hallway, striding even faster than before, our robots hunched over the unconscious bodies in our arms. I aim my cameras for a second at Brittany, who's taking quick, shallow breaths, her blood pressure plunging. Her pale lips are twisted into a grimace, as if she somehow realizes how much danger we're in. Behind us, the roar of destruction grows louder, chasing us down the corridor. Sigma's giant Snake-bot is tearing the high school apart.

Suddenly, the hallway's linoleum rumbles under our footpads. A thick steel column shoots up from the floor in front of us, spraying dirt and tile in all directions. Another oversize Snake-bot, identical to the first, rams into the ceiling and triggers another collapse, filling the corridor with debris. Our escape route is blocked.

“I got this!” Shannon yells. She switches Tim Rodriguez's unconscious body to her right arm and uses her left to open the door to Room 107, the high school's chemistry lab. “Come on! This way!”

Zia and I barrel into the lab behind her, our robots smashing through the narrow doorway. Shannon dashes past the lab tables and heads for the windows on the other side of the room. Because the chemistry lab needs lots of ventilation, its windows stretch across the entire wall, with just a few slender mullions between the glass panes. Shannon points at the glass with her free hand. “Lead the way, Zia! Get us out of here!”

Holding Jack Parker and the freshman girl close to her torso, Zia bounds toward the windows. Her massive shoulder joint crashes through the mullions and glass, and the momentum of her leap carries her outside. Shannon and I follow her, jumping through the gaping hole her War-bot made. We land on the lawn beside the high school and start running across the grass.

Without breaking stride, I pivot my head to the left. The fuselage of the V-22 is broken into five burning pieces, and the gigantic rotors lie on the ground. I scan the wreckage for Marshall's Super-bot and look for DeShawn's quadcopter in the evening sky, but I don't see either of them. I send out a radio signal, transmitted in elaborate code so that Sigma can't decipher it:
Marshall? DeShawn? Where are you guys?
But no one answers.

I can tell that Shannon is also transmitting distress signals and getting the same nonresponse. The silence is alarming. Did the Snake-bots damage Marshall and DeShawn? Or maybe capture them? The random noise of fear rises in my circuits again. I push it back down and keep running, angling toward the football field behind the high school. Although we can't rendezvous with the other Pioneers, we can try to save the unconscious students. And the best strategy for saving them is to put as much distance as possible between ourselves and Sigma's Snake-bots.

On the other side of the football field is Franklin D. Roosevelt State Park, which is hilly and heavily wooded. If we can get past the field and slip into the woods, we'd have a better chance of evading Sigma's machines. But just as we reach the football field's end zone, a third Snake-bot bursts from the ground at the fifty-yard line. It pushes tons of dirt and turf aside as it emerges from the center of the field, where the big Yorktown
Y
is painted on the grass. The steel tentacle rises a hundred feet above us and coils overhead, ready to strike.

At the same time, the other two Snake-bots stop pummeling the high school and slither toward the football field. Each is as big as a subway train, but they move in sinuous waves instead of a straight line, their motors bending and twisting their flexible armor. We're surrounded on all sides by enormous, powerful machines. There's nothing we can do except make a last stand.

“Adam! Zia!” Shannon's voice booms from her loudspeakers, still confident and unafraid. “Put the students on the ground and form a perimeter around them!”

Bending my Quarter-bot's torso, I set Brittany on the turf in the end zone, a few feet away from the three other unconscious kids. With a flick of my steel hand, I straighten her legs and arms, trying to make her as comfortable as possible. Then Shannon, Zia, and I form an equilateral triangle around the students, each of us facing one of the Snake-bots.

The next order from Shannon comes via radio, in an encoded signal that Sigma can't overhear:
Let's do some damage, Pioneers. Fire at will
.

I point my Quarter-bot's right arm at the tip of the Snake-bot that looms over the fifty-yard line. If it's anything like the smaller Snake-bots we designed in my dad's laboratory, its sensors will be concentrated at the tip. One well-placed shot could blind the machine.

My radar locks on to the target, and a motor inside my arm activates a compartment between my elbow joint and my steel hand. The compartment's lid swings open, revealing a black cylinder that I call the Needle. It's eighteen inches long and two inches in diameter. Inside its nose is a guidance system that's linked to my targeting radar, and at its tail is a solid-fuel rocket engine.

My circuits send the command:
Launch!
The Needle's engine ignites, and a plume of flame shoots out of the cylinder. The missile roars out of its launch tube and careens toward the Snake-bot.

The Needle accelerates to five hundred miles per hour, but my cameras are quick enough to track it. It rises a hundred feet in less than a quarter second, arcing over the football field. The Snake-bot flails in the opposite direction, trying to dodge the missile, but the huge machine isn't nimble enough. The Needle slams into the Snake-bot's shiny tip, and the missile's high-explosive warhead detonates.

Oh yeah! Payback time!

It looks like a fiery flower has bloomed on top of a giant metallic stalk. Smoke billows from the explosion, and bits of shrapnel ping against the bleachers on both sides of the football field. A moment later my acoustic sensor detects two more explosions, both closer to the high school. Turning my cameras in that direction, I see very similar blossoms of fire and smoke where the other two Snake-bots had been slithering toward us. Both missiles came from Zia, who's extending her War-bot's massive arms as if she's a robotic gunslinger and her rocket launchers are Colt 45 revolvers.

“YOU LIKE THAT, SIGMA?” Zia's voice is so loud that you could probably hear it in Connecticut. “YOU WANT SOME MORE?”

Shannon's Diamond Girl is too small to carry missiles, but she helps out by aiming her cameras at the Snake-bots we hit. She's trying to assess the damage and analyze how to press the attack. I focus my own cameras at the Snake-bot looming over the football field and watch the smoke from the explosion slowly dissipate and blow away. As it clears, though, I see that the tentacle isn't charred or mangled or gutted. Somehow the Snake-bot has sloughed off the parts that were damaged by my missile and reassembled its remaining machinery. The tentacle is several yards shorter than it was before, but it looks as good as new. And while I stare at the reconstructed thing in astonishment, the Snake-bot sweeps its shortened tip at me, lashing it like a whip.

Hundreds of tons of steel hurtle toward my Quarter-bot. Fear surges in my circuits—
I'm done for! I'm toast!

Then my programmed instincts take over. The motors in my steel legs give me a tremendous boost, and I leap forward. I jump toward the thickest part of the Snake-bot, the section rising from the huge hole at the field's fifty-yard line. I hit the turf at the ten-yard line, landing on my torso, and then roll toward the twenty.

At the same time, the Snake-bot slams into the place where I'd been standing half a second ago. The tentacle gouges the turf, plunging several feet into the soil. The ground shakes like crazy, and the crash echoes across the field.

Somehow I manage to stand and glance back at the end zone. Zia has just fired three more missiles at the other Snake-bots, but they're still advancing. Shannon is racing toward the woods, trying to lure at least one of Sigma's machines away from the football field, but she's not having any luck either. Worst of all, Brittany and the other kids lie defenseless on the turf, their unconscious bodies quivering as the ground rumbles underneath them.
We can't protect them! They're going to die, just like all the others!

Then my acoustic sensor picks up a familiar whirring noise. DeShawn's quadcopter comes zooming over the treetops on the other side of the football field. His Swarm-bot is still attached to the aircraft, and he's flying it straight toward the tentacle that almost squashed me.

Sorry for the delay, folks.
DeShawn's radio signal is loud and clear.
I was waiting for the right moment, you kno
w
?

Shannon changes course and starts running back to the field.
Where's Marshal
l
? Have you—

He's a mile to the west, trying to radio Hawke and get us a ride out of here. But it looks like we gotta deal with these supersized Snake-bots first.

Affirmative
, Shannon responds.
Our top priority is rescuing the survivors, so target the Snake-bot that's closest—

I know, the goliath on the football field. Just hold off the two others for a minute, oka
y
?

The Snake-bot on the field wrenches itself out of the deep gouge it made. Instead of trying to whack me again, the tentacle straightens and sweeps upward, aiming to swat the quadcopter. But in midair DeShawn activates his Swarm-bot. The metallic box disperses into forty thousand hovering steel-gray modules, each about the size of an ice cube.

DeShawn's swarm looks even more impressive now than it did in the Danger Room. The modules form a grayish cloud, more than thirty feet across, that undulates above the Snake-bot. I keep one of my cameras focused on the swarm as I run back to the end zone to help Shannon and Zia. A great swell of hope refreshes my circuits.
We have a chance now! With DeShawn on our side, we definitely have a chance!

The Snake-bot attacks the swarm, but the tiny gray cubes dodge the tentacle, deftly swirling around it. The Snake-bot changes direction and lashes at the swarm again with a swift, fierce swipe, but again the hovering cubes dart out of its path. Then, as the tentacle slows to change direction once more, the swarm converges on it, all the thousands of cubes simultaneously latching to the Snake-bot's silvery tip.

It looks like DeShawn has pulled a gray cap over the tentacle, blinding it…and enraging it. The Snake-bot thrashes back and forth, trying to shake off the swarm, but each cube is tightly fastened to the tentacle. A moment later wisps of brown smoke rise from the contact points on the Snake-bot's tip. DeShawn is using hydrochloric acid to penetrate its armor! It's the same strategy that defeated Zia in the Danger Room, and it seems to be working against Sigma's machine.

Then a loud, high-pitched
crack
reverberates in my audio sensors. The whole hundred-foot-long tentacle shudders. In a thousandth of a second, the Snake-bot disintegrates into a thick cloud of silvery shrapnel. The debris hovers in the air like the plume from an atomic bomb.

I can't believe it. I radio a message to DeShawn:
Whoa! What the heck did you do to that thing?

But DeShawn doesn't reply, and when I take a closer look at the shrapnel, my fear resurges. The debris from the Snake-bot isn't falling to the ground. It
isn't
shrapnel at all. The metallic fragments are actually small, interlocking modules, each with its own rotors to keep it aloft.

They're just like the cubes in DeShawn's swarm. That explains how the Snake-bot was able to repair itself after I hit it with my missile—the silver modules detached from one another during the explosion and then came back together in a new configuration. But now the entire Snake-bot has transformed into a swarm that's a thousand times bigger than DeShawn's. Sigma's huge silvery cloud billows over the football field and engulfs DeShawn's small grayish cloud. A millisecond later, I lose radio contact with him.

DeShawn! DESHAWN! Get out of there!

I frantically try different frequencies to regain contact. Then I hear a second high-pitched
crack
, then a third. I turn my Quarter-bot just in time to see the two other Snake-bots transform themselves into swarms. They're closer to the ground than the first swarm, so they look like silver fogbanks as they rush toward us.

I run to position myself between the unconscious students and Sigma's approaching swarms. But the modules aren't interested in the living, breathing humans. They converge on the Pioneers instead. Although each module is only an inch across, Sigma has millions of them, hundreds of millions. They descend on us like mechanical locusts.

Zia fires her last missile into the silvery fog, but the explosion merely buffets the modules instead of destroying them. Shannon runs headlong into the other swarm and starts firing the small explosive charges embedded in her Diamond Girl's armor. Because Shannon designed these charges as a defense against incoming bullets and missiles, they're fast enough to intercept the darting modules, but she has only ninety of them. She runs out of ammunition in less than ten seconds. Then hundreds of silver cubes latch on to her robot.

“
SHANNON
!
” I scream, charging toward her. But before I can get close, the modules blanket my Quarter-bot. I slap my steel hands against my torso and scrape off some of the cubes, but hundreds more fasten themselves to my armor, so many that I can barely lift my arms.

A moment later I feel a thump under my footpads. Zia has thrown herself to the ground. She's rolling around on the turf, trying to crush the modules with the weight of her War-bot. But the silver cubes keep latching on to her, until I can't see her War-bot under the swarming mass. A few yards away, the modules bury Shannon. Wisps of brown smoke rise from the cubes piled on top of her.