Pyramid Lake (56 page)

GOLIATH surged forward and planted a steel foot on the kid’s head, crushing it into the floor with the crunch of a tire flattening a flowerpot. A gout of bloody gray oatmeal vomited from under his metal foot, and a spray of white crumbs skittered across the concrete.

Teeth.

I couldn’t get enough air. The hallway turned gray around the edges and started to fade. Gasping, I closed my eyes.

Bouncing against Goliath’s metal limbs, I felt myself carried down the length of the hall. Nauseated by the humid, coppery slaughterhouse smell that clogged my swollen nasal passages, I concentrated on breathing deeply and evenly through my mouth. I gagged, tasting a rusty iron tang that coated my tongue.

I knew that a supercomputer couldn’t suffer a psychotic break. Frankenstein would not derive sadistic pleasure from mutilating and dismembering humans. There had to be a logical reason for his actions.

To get a reaction out of me was certainly a part of it. He was throwing a tantrum for my benefit, to punish the creator he hated. But if he truly thought the way I did, he would also have another, more important, underlying purpose…

I thought of the lightning-fast blow that had crippled my gun arm with exacting mechanical precision. My skin was unbroken; the bone fractures felt clean. Frankenstein had known exactly how much force to apply to avoid doing
too
much damage.

“Destructive testing,” I said out loud.

Like any good engineer, Frankenstein had done a comprehensive evaluation of human mechanical performance. By testing a few specimens to failure here in the hallway, he had studied human anatomy’s design weaknesses and physical stress tolerances.

But killing a human didn’t require meticulous exactitude: a half-second blast from the GAU would get the job done just fine. Why was learning human physical limits with such precision important to him?

GOLIATH eased to a halt, and his limbs uncoiled from mine. I fell to the concrete, jarring my broken arm and sending a spike of agony through my shoulder and down my spine. I opened my eyes to see Kate’s lab door ahead of me.

“Now you can make yourself useful,” Frankenstein said. “Unless you want to listen to your daughter suffer.”

The ring of a phone pulsed from the speaker in GOLIATH’s chest. Frankenstein was undoubtedly calling Doug Hensley. He still had no idea that I had rescued Amy. Or that Doug was dead.

“No,” I shouted. “I’ll do it. Whatever you want, I’ll do.”

The phone call cut off, but I was thinking hard. I had to keep Frankenstein from realizing that he no longer had my daughter. I had to keep that fact from showing in my face.

Luckily, looking terrified wasn’t hard to manage right now. The damage Ray had done to my face would conceal the rest of what I was feeling.

I pushed to my feet and staggered back, favoring my injured ankle, which could barely support any weight.

“Kate’s holed up inside her lab,” Frankenstein said. “She’s been asking for you, Trevor. Go get her. Bring her out to me.”

OctoRotors swooped and hovered around GOLIATH. But I noticed that the airspace immediately ahead remained free, and GOLIATH himself had stopped forty feet away from Kate’s door. Grimacing, I unbuckled the empty Kydex holster from my thigh and pulled it loose. Letting it dangle from my fingers by the straps, I rubbed my injured leg, as if to restore circulation.

Because I had some idea of what Kate must have done.

“Why do you want her?” I asked.

“Because I need her to show you something,” Frankenstein said. “But make sure she leaves her toys behind.”

An OctoRotor cautiously separated itself from the pack and floated forward, carrying a white key card. I took a step back.

The carbon-fiber flyer slowed, uncertain, as if approaching the edge of an invisible boundary. Then it wobbled in the air two feet from me.

I lashed at the OctoRotor with my Kydex holster, swinging it by the straps. Rotor blades bit into the hard polymer and ripped the holster out of my hand, and the OctoRotor crashed against the wall, its broken rotors entangled in the straps of my holster. It skidded across the floor toward Kate’s lab entrance and came to a halt.

“Sorry,” I said, bending to retrieve the key card it had dropped. “Those things make me nervous.”

I half limped, half hopped to Kate’s door, ran the key card, and pulled the door open. Kicking the broken OctoRotor through the gap, I slipped in after it and let the door close behind me.

Kate stood at a worktable with her back to me, her red hair wild. Putting down her soldering iron, she swiveled in my direction and raised something gray and yellow in her other hand.

A small puff of smoke leaped from the end of it, and two sharp prongs struck me in the chest.

Tingling jolts of agony drove my shoulders up to my ears, arching my spine. My broken arm felt like it was being stabbed with railroad spikes. Every muscle in my body went rigid, throbbing in time with the pulses of electricity.

Kate walked toward me fast, holding the Taser straight out in front of her at shoulder height, one-handed. Its two thin, concertina-kinked wires sagged between us as she approached. My jittery vision dropped to her other hand, held low at her side. The thick steel shaft of a foot-long screwdriver projected from her clenched fist.

Kate was going to stab me.

Straining to fight against my own muscles, I swept my good arm across my chest with a grunt, managing to tangle my wrist in the pair of wires and tear them away.

The jangling pain stopped immediately. My muscles loosened, threatening to drop me, but I managed to stay on my feet.

Kate stopped advancing and backed away. I stumbled against a table and got a hand on its surface, supporting myself. I shook my head, hard. Then I pushed off and straightened, my body throbbing and tingling from scalp to toe.

“
Fuck,
that hurt!” I yelled at her.

“It didn’t work,” she said, sounding puzzled. “It’s supposed to knock you down.”

“We don’t have time for this, Kate. We’re in some serious shit here.”

“You psycho asshole.” Her fist tightened so hard on the screwdriver, the steel shaft vibrated. “You used your fucking project to take over mine.”

“Get a grip. People are dead.”

“Yeah, I got a look at the hallway outside. They’re dead, all right.” She jabbed the screwdriver at me. “Because of
you
.”

I kicked the broken OctoRotor toward her feet. “Does that look like one of yours?” I asked.

She tossed the Taser toward a table and, without taking her eyes off me, bent to pick up the OctoRotor. Keeping the screwdriver blade pointed my way the whole time, she yanked the flat silver battery out of Frankenstein’s flyer. Then she turned the small drone over in her free hand, untangling my holster straps from its rotors as she examined it.

“Multispectral sensor array, refined manipulators, enhanced blade profile—this is several generations ahead of mine… more like what I would have been building two years from now.” She glanced up at me, tears brimming in her eyes, nostrils flaring. “You love showing me up, don’t you?”

“Give it a rest,” I said. “This isn’t me. Frankenstein’s gone rogue.”

“Your fucking
computer
is doing this?” Kate’s jaw dropped. “
On its own?
Boy, Trevor, you sure know how to fuck up.”

She threw the holster at me hard, hitting me in the chest. I caught it with my good arm before it fell to the floor. Laying the rigid Kydex frame against my broken forearm, I double-wrapped the straps above and below the break. Grunting with pain, I tightened the buckles of my improvised splint.

Kate turned her back on me and returned to whatever she was soldering. “Why does your computer want to kill us?” she asked.

“Because it hates me,” I said.

She snorted a bitter laugh but didn’t look up. “Why am I not surprised? This
is
your fault, you piece of shit—even a
machine
knows enough to hate you. It probably thinks the rest of us are like you, too.”

I walked over to her worktable, where an array of six or seven home-brewed dipole antennae jutted like fingers from a chassis containing open circuit boards. I recognized the innards of several wireless AV cameras. She had combined them to build a jury-rigged Wi-Fi jammer. Not too shabby.

I turned to look at Kate again, hunched over another worktable in her white lab coat. Her elbows moved deftly as she soldered. She raised a forearm and swiped it across her forehead, her thick red tresses damp with sweat.

Given what we were facing now, together, our little squabbles seemed so meaningless. She was handling our situation with intelligence and bravery—better than I was, to be honest.

Like a dumb-ass, I had brought a gun to a tech fight.

Kate had built a wireless jammer.

She seemed capable and strong right now, but fragile, too—her pale skin so soft compared to the brutal steel machinery Frankenstein had arrayed outside our door. I needed to protect her from him.

I couldn’t let anything bad to happen to Kate now. I had done too much to hurt her already.

“What are you working on?” I asked. “We need to put our heads together and come up with something brilliant, or we’re fucked.”

“Oh, I’d say you’ve fucked us pretty good already, Trevor.” Kate’s back tensed at the sound of my approach, and she reached for the screwdriver again. “Maybe I should jam this into your ear before you manage to do even
more
harm.”

I laid a hand on her shoulder, and she spun. Keeping her head down, she thrust the screwdriver two-handed against my diaphragm. Through the blunt metal blade, I could feel how badly she was trembling.

“Are you working on some kind of weapon?” I asked, keeping my voice calm. “Please let me help.”

“I don’t want your fucking help,” she said through gritted teeth. Her nostrils flared and trembled, and tears dripped off them, but she wouldn’t look up at me. “I don’t want your fucking
anything,
Trevor.” She shoved the screwdriver, hard enough to break skin. “I want you to go away.”

Wincing, ignoring the screwdriver pressing between us, I held my ground. “I’m sorry,” I whispered, reaching out with my good hand to brush her hair away from her face. “I’m not just saying this now—I really mean it. I had no right to treat you the way I did. I’ve been an asshole.” I cupped her chin, tried to raise it. “Kate, I’m so, so,
so
sorry for hurting you.”

Her hands opened convulsively, and the screwdriver rang against the floor between our feet. Kate lifted her eyes to mine, vulnerable.

“Electrolaser,” she said, wiping her cheeks. “Short-pulse LED laser beam ionizes the air, creating a channel to guide the electrical discharge from a bank of big capacitors.”

“Lightning gun,” I said. “That’s smart. A lot smarter than”—I tapped the holster I had converted into a splint—“bringing this.”

“Take a look at my design, Trevor. Maybe you’ll see a shortcut I missed.” Kate picked up the damaged OctoRotor again and looked at it. Frowning, she said, “I get the feeling we don’t have much time.”

“Yeah,” I said, glancing at Kate’s improvised jammer. “You’re blocking two-four, five-one, five-two, five-eight… That isn’t going to keep him off our backs very long. He’s probably adding new antennas right now so he can use white-space channels instead…”

Poking at the flyer in her hand, Kate made a choking sound. She pinched a projecting antenna between her fingers and stared at me, gray-faced. “This hardware
already
handles white-space comms.”

Shock tightened my stomach muscles. “He was fucking with us.”

With a jerk of her fingers, Kate twisted something else loose. Her eyes widened.

“
Microphone,
” she said.

I
grabbed Kate’s wrist and pulled her toward me, wrapping both arms around her as the lab doors were wrenched off their hinges.

GOLIATH exploded into the room.

Kate screamed and went stiff in my arms. Rotating my back toward the advancing metal nightmare, I shoved her head down, tucking it below my collarbone. She clutched at me, screaming against my chest. Grabbing my bad wrist with my good hand, I covered her back with my elbows, protecting her head with my joined wrists.

I wrapped myself around Kate, trying to shield her body with mine.

“Leave her alone,” I shouted. “She’s got nothing to do with this.
I’m
the one you hate.”

Metal arms coiled around us both, lifting us together as though we were weightless. I crushed Kate against me as hard as I could, trying to lock my limbs around her.

“Hold me!” she screamed. “Don’t let me go.”

“How sweet,” Frankenstein said. “Last chance to kiss her good-bye, Trevor.”

With slow, relentless pressure, my arms were pried apart. Refusing to let go, I tightened my grip on my bad wrist, howling as the bones of my forearm separated. Kate shuddered against my sternum, piercing my ears with her continuous scream.

Something ripped in my other shoulder—a ligament. My clenching hand popped open involuntarily, and Kate was torn away from me.

A half-dozen of GOLIATH’s steel limbs yanked my arms backward, crucifying me in the air. Even though I knew it was futile, I heaved against them and only succeeded in tearing my shoulder worse.

Frankenstein held us separate from each other, thrashing in the air, our feet a meter above the floor.

Misery crushed my heart. I had failed to protect Kate.

He turned her toward me, face to face. Her frantic kicks struck my shins. Her green eyes, inches from mine, bulged with panic.

Steel claws clamped around the left and right sides of her skull.

“Kate,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

I squeezed my eyes shut.

A sharp crunch made me gasp. It was followed by a delicate splintering sound, as if Frankenstein was cracking a giant egg above a frying pan. A long, exhale of warm, moist breath sighed into my face, misting my cheeks with viscous wetness before fading out with a faint whistle.

My breath sobbed in and out.