The Omicron Legion (36 page)

For some reason, Blaine had been expecting a smaller, more contained explosion. What followed was a blinding, horrific blast as the better part of the Brush-Everard House’s front half fragmented into wood shards and splinters that blew out from the fireball. He never saw the disciples; they simply vanished into the oblivion of the blast, consumed by it. The screen cleared to reveal flames picking at the ruined shell of a building, charred portions still falling from the sky.

“That makes four down, Professor,” Blaine said.

“Still eight to go, chief,” Belamo reminded him.

Nonetheless, McCracken was about to give Ainsley a celebratory slap on the shoulder when a new explosion sounded from another area of the park. He barely had time to wonder what it was when Obie One’s control board flickered once and then went dead.

Abraham respected the prowess of the foe he was facing here. The robot’s programming made it a virtually indestructible and independently acting machine. In a confined area, the layout of which was certain to have been programmed into its microchip circuitry, it would inevitably track him down before he could possibly track it. His only hope lay in using that knowledge to his advantage.

That was why he had summoned Thaddeus, why he had the wounded disciple watch his rear. As bait, a sacrifice. He knew the robot would close from the rear, and, in the instant its sensors and firing mechanism were locked on to Thaddeus, Abraham would take his shots. If he missed, the robot would have him, too, but he didn’t plan on missing. As an added precaution, he was careful to keep himself as much in line with Thaddeus as possible, hoping this would confuse the robot into believing the motion it detected was that of a single man, not two.

Abraham knew his M16 by itself was useless against the robot’s steel composition. But the grenade launcher built into its bottom was something else again. He hadn’t had time to get in the shots he needed when the thing had killed John and Judas. Now he would.

This, of course, was just the preliminaries. McCracken and the Indian might be content to let the robot fight their battles for them, but once that robot was neutralized they would have no choice other than to show themselves.

He was passing behind the William Waters House when the blast reached his ears; he turned in time to see a cloud of debris hurtling into the sky from the Palace Street area. No screams followed, but he knew all the same he’d lost another pair of his number. Could there be more robots than the one he was after? Yes, there had to be. He felt an unfamiliar chill of anxiety, perhaps a flutter of fear. McCracken was even better than he had expected.

“
Abraham!
”

Thaddeus’s scream reached him a breath ahead of the nonstop clacking of the robot’s built-in gun. He turned to see Thaddeus’s body being pulverized by bullets, literally torn apart before he was even able to fire a shot. Abraham leveled his grenade launcher toward the robot and fired. The charge
whoooooshed
out dead on line with the thing. Impact tore away the entire right side of the robot’s midsection and part of its head. The thing staggered, listing, but incredibly turned on Abraham to fire just as he sighted in with another grenade.

This time the explosive impact blew off the rest of the thing’s midsection to below the torso. Its leg extremities continued waddling about briefly before keeling over.

Abraham charged on in the direction of the plume of black smoke still rising over Palace Street. More of the machines were about; if he were going to draw McCracken and Wareagle from their hiding place, he would have to take out the machines first. The rest of the disciples meant nothing to him now. Whether they survived or not was meaningless, as were their parts in the remainder of the plan. McCracken mattered, and beyond him the Indian.

Abraham was heading toward a ruined building across the Palace Green when a strange impression carved into the ground caught his eye. It was perfectly cylindrical and deep, like a gopher hole made in dirt. Abraham suddenly had a very clear idea about what it was he was looking for.

As well as how to find it.

“They killed Obie One,” was all the transfixed Ainsley could say. “They killed him.”

Ainsley wheeled himself to the console controlling the monstrous Obie Seven and flipped on the control switch. Outside, near the Capitol’s pillars, a red light locked on in the center of the huge robot’s head. The arms that housed the specially modified Vulcan 7.62-mm miniguns snapped up to forty-five degree angles from locked positions at his side.

Blaine grabbed Ainsley’s hands before he could press any more switches.

“Not now, Professor!”

“What are you saying?”

“That they’re not concentrated enough for Seven to do us any good yet. He’ll get a few of them, and then they’ll get him.” Blaine paused. “Just like Obie One.”

Ainsley stiffened. “We can’t have that.”

“No, we can’t. Stick with the plan. Bunch them up, force them together, and then sic Obie Seven on them.” McCracken, Belamo, Patty Hunsecker, even Johnny let their eyes wander in the direction of the professor’s—out the rear of the truck, toward the menacing shape of Obie Seven.

“You’ll tell me when,” Ainsley said to Blaine.

“I’ll tell you, all right.”

Reluctantly the professor wheeled himself back to the main control console, where a flashing yellow light alerted him that Obie Four had locked on to the position of another pair of disciples.

“We’ve got scores to settle now,” he said to the two machines still active in the park.

Having completed their assigned sweep, Thomas and James moved down Duke of Gloucester Street with twin automatic rifles leveled before them. They saw none of the other disciples and knew, as the rest of the survivors did, that their number had been cut by at least a third. They were on the defensive now, searching for machines as well as men, the hunted as much as the hunters.

Against his better judgment, Thomas raised the communicator to his lips.

“Abraham,” he called. “Abraham…”

No response came. Could the best of their number have been killed in one of the two blasts that had come just minutes before? No. Much more likely, he was merely keeping radio silence. The reasons didn’t matter. Thomas and James would keep it as well.

The sweeps of the disciple team were concentric in nature, designed to bring them together near the end of Duke of Gloucester Street. If McCracken and the Indian had not been found by then, there would be precious few places left they could be, and these few could be better covered in larger groups. Thomas and James walked toward the rendezvous point uncertain and uneasy, the scent of smoldering wood still thick in the air.

Obie Four surfaced twenty yards behind the pair of disciples as they proceeded along Duke of Gloucester Street between Colonial and Botetourt. Reston Ainsley checked Obie Three’s position and nodded happily. “Got you, you bastards,” he said out loud.

“Where’s Obie Three, Professor?” McCracken asked.

Ainsley had the snakelike head of Obie Four pan to the right and asked for a close-up. An old-fashioned picket fence sharpened into view between a pair of buildings just across Botetourt Street.

“Coming up on this spot,” Ainsley announced. And, as if on cue, the boxy shape of the demolitions droid rolled onto the scene.

The professor pulled the picture back to capture the approaching disciples once more.

“Perfect,” Ainsley muttered. “We’ll get them here.”

Ainsley repeated the series of instructions he had issued in front of Brush-Everard House, telling Obie Three to plant another of his charges. A sudden beeping filled the cramped confines of the truck’s rear.

“Oh, no!”

“What is it, Professor?” McCracken asked from behind his shoulder.

“His top doors are jammed. Must have been damaged by debris from the last blast.”

“Check out the screen, Doc,” Sal Belamo urged.

Obie Four’s picture now showed the pair of disciples to be twenty yards from Obie Three’s position.

“Pull Obie Three out of there, Professor,” said McCracken.

“No, I can’t….”

“We’ll get another shot.”

The old man’s hair flew wildly about his face as he swung around in his wheelchair. “You don’t understand. I really
can’t.
One of its wheels is jammed on something. The advisors were worried about this sort of thing. It was one of the reasons the project was—”

“Yo, boys,” Belamo chimed in. “I see two Frankensteins almost to the corner.”

Professor Ainsley hesitated no longer. He turned his attention back to the console and hit a single button set apart from the rest at arm’s length. A large red bulb began to flash. The computer screen showed a countdown beginning at fifteen in huge LCD figures. “I’ve just ordered Obie Three to self-destruct.” A strange smile crossed his lips. “A suicide mission, that’s what this has become. My God, he would understand. I know he would.”

The countdown had reached seven.

“Professor—”

Before McCracken could speak further, a large figure charged into the picture being broadcast by Obie Four. He came from the side of the picture, rushing in from behind the pair of disciples five seconds before their deaths. The pair swung, weapons ready, as the figure leveled an M203 behind the fence where Obie Three was perched. A charge thumped out with a trail of smoke. When it cleared, a large section of the picket fence was gone—along with whatever had been behind it. The LCD countdown on the computer monitor was locked at two.

“Fuck me,” Belamo moaned.

“The explosives wouldn’t have been armed until the sequence was complete,” Ainsley said distantly. “He died for nothing.”

“Uh-oh,” moaned McCracken, his eyes back on the screen.

The group in the truck watched as the same large figure that had destroyed Obie Three grew in size, charging straight toward Obie Four in its exposed position on the other side of the street.

“No!” Ainsley screamed, working his keyboard feverishly.

He succeeded in turning Obie Four around, the screen’s picture spinning with him. But suddenly the picture filled with tremors, shapes rushing past in a blur as the snakelike reconnaissance droid was grabbed and pulled upward.

A face with a twisted half-smile, straw-colored hair, and the coldest eyes McCracken had ever seen filled the screen.

“Abraham,” Wareagle said. The big Indian’s stare searched out the deadliest disciple, certain Abraham could see him as well.

The face stayed centered for an elongated moment, as if Abraham could indeed see through and beyond the screen. Then everything turned to fuzz, and the signal was lost.

“
Goddammit!”
Ainsley shrieked.

He propelled himself across the truck’s cab, over to the console controlling Obie Seven. Blaine caught his trembling hand before it could reach the keyboard. “Not yet, Professor.”

“Get your hand off me!”

“No. You’re playing into their hands!” he said, looking at the screen which had become staticy. “You’re playing into
his
hands.”

“I can’t just sit here!”

McCracken tapped the old man’s wheelchair. “Yes, you can. You’ve got to.” His eyes turned to Wareagle, who had hoisted a crossbow he had made for himself years ago out of a duffel bag stowed in the corner. “Leave this to me and the Indian.”

“I’ve got a stake in this, too,” Ainsley said more quietly. “They were like my…”

“I know. The thing is the two of us specialize in settling scores.” His eyes turned in Obie Seven’s direction. “When the time’s right, he’ll get his chance.”

“What exactly are you planning to do?”

“Give Abraham exactly what he wants.” Blaine looked at Johnny. “Us.”

Chapter 33

ABRAHAM HAD SMASHED
the snakelike robot’s camera eye with his fist, then had twisted its steel frame into a monstrous knot. Still not satisfied, he proceeded to tear it apart with fingers that were steellike themselves. The ease of it amazed him. Somehow moments like these inevitably brought back memories of just how inadequate he had been before the jungle. Mere scraps of memory now, as distant from him as a normal man’s recollections of the limitations of early childhood. He turned back to Thomas and James.

“We’ve killed their toys. They’ll be coming now.” Just then, the remaining two pairs of disciples charged into the scene from opposite directions. They had been converging on the rendezvous point just as the latest explosion sounded. Abraham’s smile told them everything as they ground to a halt. In silence, the seven surviving disciples fanned out in a spread across the width of Duke of Gloucester Street.

McCracken checked his 9-mm pistols—each loaded with a fresh clip of Sal Belamo’s Splats—one last time before sliding out from the cover of the Capitol.

“You knew this was coming,” he said to Wareagle.

“I knew something was.
Hanbelachia,
Blainey, for both of us.”

“Sorry to disappoint you, Indian, but once we draw them out, we give Obie Seven back there a ring.”

“Yes, Blainey,” Wareagle said in the tone he always used when the spirits had his other ear.

“Let’s move, Indian.”

They approached Duke of Gloucester Street the long way around, from the back of the Capitol Building. They walked side by side, steps in perfect unison. McCracken handled his pair of pistols loaded with Splats. Wareagle grasped one in his right hand, while his left held fast to a crossbow. Both had donned bulletproof vests, but neither expected them to do much good against the kind of firepower the disciples were wielding, not to mention the aim they were capable of.

“We’re almost to Duke of Gloucester Street, Professor,” Blaine said into the microphone concealed beneath the lapel of his jacket.

“Obie Seven’s ready on your signal.”

“Make sure he doesn’t roll until I give the word.”

“As you wish.”

They reached the eastern edge of Duke of Gloucester Street and stopped dead. There, spread across the street two hundred yards before them, were the seven remaining disciples; Abraham was in the very center. “Just like an old-fashioned gunfight, Indian.”

“That’s what they were hoping for, Blainey.”