The Omicron Legion (35 page)

Abraham flipped off his weapon’s safety and nodded.

There were twelve of them in all; they split into three pairs and two groups of three. They fanned out toward grids of Williamsburg assigned by Abraham. Their mission was search and destroy. If McCracken wanted to make his stand in a confined environment with plenty of areas for concealment and cover, then so be it. It was not their turf yet, but it would be soon.

The scene seemed placid, even to them. Late fall was in the air; the trees lining the Williamsburg streets shifted in their near nakedness, the remaining leaves brown and dry. The main streets were formed of hard-packed gravel. The unpaved walkways lined the streets in landscaped symmetry in front of the rows of colonial buildings. The numerous benches were unsat on. A few horseless carriages stood abandoned down Duke of Gloucester Street. The brick and brown wood of the buildings drank in the sun and gave some of it back. The air smelled of chestnuts and crackling leaves.

Abraham started warily down Duke of Gloucester Street, flanked by John and the wounded Judas. He felt certain McCracken had made a strategic error in choosing this site to make his final stand. No matter how large it was, Williamsburg was still contained. Sooner or later, this would allow the disciples to flush McCracken and the Indian out. It was only a matter of time.

As he came up even with the red brick courthouse on the left-hand side of the street, Abraham reached into his pocket and came out with a motion detector that was a smaller version of the one the Green Berets had brought with them to the jungle. He switched it on and watched the sweep the arrow made through a grid directly before him. He could approximate the positions of the other disciples and thus identify any signals that might come as a result of their motion.

The red line swept the screen, disappeared into the machine’s side, and then swept again.

Abraham knew McCracken’s strategy would be to take them out slowly. It was the best ploy to use and was one he had always excelled in. If he and the Indian were lurking about, preparing their first lunge, the motion detector would betray their strategy and position.

Abraham turned to the right and eyed a section of Williamsburg’s Market Square, which contained a clutter of buildings surrounded by rolling green lawns and well-tended gardens. The motion detector caught a splotch in the lower left of the screen. Abraham quickly superimposed the grid over the area before them and felt his eyes lock on the magazine, an octagonal building used in colonial times to store arms and gunpowder. A high brick wall had been erected around the building to protect the townspeople against a possible explosion. Something was moving inside that wall.

Maybe this is going to be easier than I thought….

“This way,” Abraham said.

The disciples on either side of him, actually, did not need to be told a thing. Perhaps they had seen the indication on the motion detector. Perhaps the slight change in Abraham’s footsteps and the tightening of the rifle in his hands was enough. Either way they had already leveled their weapons when Abraham spoke, and now they cut across the grassy square with him toward the magazine.

The next sweep the arrow made through the grid showed no movement at all in the vicinity. McCracken, or the Indian, was still again, but it was too late. The damage had been done. Abraham was onto him.

Thirty yards from the magazine, he signaled John and Judas to spread out. He figured surprise was on his side, but didn’t want to take any chances. Up ahead, he could see the gate leading through the magazine wall was open. It was not like McCracken or the Indian to commit such an error.

Abraham directed the wounded Judas to move through first from the right flank. John was holding to the left, while Abraham himself was behind a tree, his rifle ready to fire, twenty yards in front of the magazine. Once Judas was through, he would follow, with John bringing up the rear. Abraham watched Judas slide along the brick toward the open gate.

The detector began registering motion inside the fence again, coming straight for the gate, straight for Judas. Abraham signaled Judas to hold his position and steadied his own rifle behind the tree. The blotch on the detector’s small screen continued to move in the gate’s direction.

Abraham gave Judas the signal at the perfect time. Judas spun around the corner and opened fire, a clip emptied in the time it took Abraham to finally realize something was very wrong about all this. He had begun to ease out from his own position of cover when Judas’s body was blown outward through the gate from the force of a fusillade of bullets. Abraham tried to focus, but the sun caught something metallic and blinded him for the instant it would have taken him to aim.

Rat-tat-tat…

The automatic spray was undoubtedly from John’s M16, and Abraham’s vision at last sharpened to see his target. Whatever had emerged from the magazine had reflected sun like metal because it
was
metal. And not a man in a protective suit, either.

It was a robot!

All of a sudden Abraham realized Blaine McCracken hadn’t played into his hands at all; he had played into
McCracken’s
and now he was facing a madman’s version of backup.

Obie One seemed to be smiling as he aimed the gun attached to his right hand and opened fire.

“Did you see that? Did you see it?” Professor Ainsley beamed as Obie One fired a hail of bullets into the second disciple his sensors had locked onto.

“I’ll buy him a beer when he comes back in,” said McCracken.

“You mean a lube job,” Belamo quipped.

The picture of a second disciple being torn apart by Obie One’s bullets was transmitted by the snakelike Obie Four to the main board in Professor Reston Ainsley’s control truck. They had parked it back near Williamsburg’s eastern border, behind the cover provided by the Capitol Building. Blaine had known that defeating the disciples under normal conditions was not possible. He knew they would be waiting for him when he came for Virginia Maxwell at Gap headquarters and used this to set a trap—with Wareagle and himself as bait the disciples could not possibly resist.

The problem from the start had been how to snare them and where. Utilizing Professor Ainsley’s
original
Omicron legion for reinforcements had actually occurred to him as far back as his meeting with Takahashi; the logistics followed from there. What was needed, Ainsley had explained the previous day, was a confined space whose layout could be programmed into his robots, who would then be controlled from a short distance away. McCracken had originally feared Ainsley would laugh off his idea and send him packing. But the old man had embraced the plot with excitement and enthusiasm. Perhaps he just wanted to prove to the world that his creations could perform as no one ever believed they could.

The Gap’s location limited their options for the site of the final battle, Williamsburg by far the most advantageous given its proximity to Newport News. Yet there were problems. Yes, the Operational Ballistic Droids would still learn as they moved, but having to negotiate around so many structures could cause significant problems as the battle progressed. Another equally pressing problem was that the Obie series had been constructed purely with counterinsurgency in mind. No thought had been given to how the droids would perform when placed in the field with friendlies. Essentially, how would they distinguish the good guys from the bad? What was there to stop them from shooting anything that moved, including McCracken and Wareagle, if circumstances forced them out into the battle as well?

Ainsley had provided the solution to this in the truck—just minutes before—in the form of twin necklaces for Wareagle and McCracken. A small medallion around their necks would jam sensor mechanisms and thus exclude the two men as targets. The professor, meanwhile, had spent the better part of Sunday night programming the layout of Williamsburg into his Obies. He had managed to get all four operational, and of these the boxlike Obie Three, along with One and Four, were already in the field. The hulking shape of Obie Seven stood outside the truck, between the Capitol’s central pillars, waiting to be dispatched. The red LED lights that flashed across his eyeless head and chest made him look impatient to McCracken.

Right now, though, Blaine’s eyes were glued to the main monitor screen as Obie Four scanned the area.

“Where’s Abraham?”

Reston Ainsley punched some commands into his keyboard. “Obie One is still locked on to him. I’ll put him in pursuit mode.” And his fingers flew over the keys once more.

“Can you tell him to be cunning?”

“It’s built into his programming.”

“That’s good, because it’s built into Abraham’s, too.”

Even if Abraham had realized earlier he was facing a gray silver robot, there was nothing he could have done. The impossibility of its existence reached him an instant before the gun that was an extension of its right forearm began firing into John. John was blown backward, his Kevlar vest shredded by the robot’s powerful bullets, his head almost torn from his shoulders. Judas lay across from him, his corpse a mirror image.

Two of the disciples had been killed! By a robot, goddammit, a robot!

And he would end up the third unless he fled now, before the thing’s firing sensors locked on to him. Yes, a few well-placed grenades could splatter his steel guts as easily as flesh and blood ones. But the fact was, a single miscalculation in aim would cost Abraham his life—because the robot
couldn’t
miss.

Abraham bolted from the tree, back in the direction of Duke of Gloucester Street, his small, hand-held communicator raised to his lips.

“This is Abraham,” he said, and then did his best to explain to the remaining nine disciples what they were up against.

In the control truck behind the Capitol Building, Reston Ainsley punched another series of buttons. “I’m sending Obie Four to scout out the next group.”

“Make it fast. The disciples know what they’re up against now,” advised Blaine.

“They know only of Obie One.”

“Won’t be hard to figure out he didn’t come alone any more than we did.”

Ainsley looked almost pleased. “Then I suppose I should get to it.”

The disciples now moved in five pairs. On Abraham’s orders Thaddeus, the second of those badly injured, had joined him in the hunt for the killer robot at the Prentis Store at the intersection of Duke of Gloucester and Colonial streets. Abraham, the store giving him cover, held fast to the motion detector, but no sign of the robot appeared. The tight cluster of buildings was working in the robot’s favor here, offering a layer of confusing cover for the detector. Abraham had realized what had to be done even before Thaddeus came up alongside him.

“How is it?” Abraham asked him.

“It hurts,” Thaddeus replied, grimacing slightly. “But I can move.” Abraham nodded in apparent satisfaction and raised his communicator to his lips. “Continue your sweeps,” he ordered. “Check all buildings and shops. Find their headquarters. Keep me informed.”

Abraham clicked off his communicator and looked back at Thaddeus. “Take the rear. Stay ten yards behind me.”

Thaddeus nodded, then asked, “Where are we going?”

“Where else? After the robot….”

“What now?” Blaine asked Reston Ainsley.

He had barely completed the question when a series of red lights began flashing on the main console. The professor slid himself over to it.

“Obie Four has locked on to another pair of the monsters. Let’s have a look, shall we?”

Ainsley punched a button on his console and the view from the snakelike reconnaissance droid filled the screen. Obie Four had the ability to plow under and then come back up through solid asphalt if necessary. Ainsley explained that its entire length was essentially a drill that spun at blinding speed, enabling it to burrow inside virtually any substance. Only the very base of its head had to rise back to the surface to provide them with a picture, much like a submarine’s periscope.

The screen sharpened to reveal a pair of the disciples veering off Palace Street toward the Brush-Everard House. Directly behind them now was the wide, grassy expanse of the Palace Green Obie Four had burrowed up through. The disciples made their way warily down the walk, then kicked open the door without testing the knob.

“No respect for property,” Blaine quipped.

“Neither does Obie Three, I’m afraid—and fortunately he’s in the area,” said Ainsley.

With that he keyed in Obie Three’s access code and swept his fingers across the control keyboard. A slight adjustment of Obie Four’s camera allowed the occupants of the truck to see the boxlike figure of Obie Three emerge from the cover of the shell of a reconstructed colonial theater three buildings to the right of the Brush-Everard House. Ainsley brought Obie Three up the house’s front walk, in essence following in the footsteps of the two disciples who had entered. Then another series of commands from Ainsley had the droid’s top sliding open to allow its multiple extremities to ease upward and out. One of them held a powerful explosive that looked like two Frisbees squeezed against each other. It placed the charge upon the front steps and then affixed a detonator to it with a second and more adroit extremity. What might have been a steel finger flipped a switch.

On Professor Ainsley’s control board, a light on the lower panel switched from green to red.

“It’s armed,” he said, and returned his attention to Obie Four’s monitor screen.

Professor Ainsley kept his eyes on the monitor while his fingers flew across the keyboard to issue Obie Three instructions, which moved it to a safe distance. His finger then eased to a button beneath the light that had been flashing red for ten seconds now.

“We wait until we see them emerge,” he explained. “That way we’re sure.” Ainsley looked back at McCracken. “You want to do the honors?”

“The pleasure’s all yours, Professor.”

“Yes,” Ainsley acknowledged. “It certainly is.”

At that point the two disciples appeared on Obie Four’s screen, approaching the door they had kicked open. Reston Ainsley waited one last second and then pressed the button.