Daniel Suarez - Daemon

“How many AutoM8s are there?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“Jon, I…” Her head darted to follow a roaring engine as it passed.

“I know it sucks you can’t see. We’ll get you to a hospital, but we need to do this to have any chance at all. Just run with me. You ready?”

She reluctantly nodded.

Ross turned to the Korr lieutenant. “You and your men ready, Lieutenant?”

A motorcycle engine revved and screams echoed behind them, punctuating his words. “Klausky, distribute these.” He passed the magnesium flares. “We travel in a group. Place these on our perimeter.”

The guards struck flares. Ross lit one for himself. Finally the six of them stood there with five lit flares. Ross pulled in front of the lieutenant with Philips in tow and looked out at the stream of AutoM8s racing past, waiting for a gap. “Okay…now!”

They bolted from the recessed doorway as a group and moved quickly across the tarmac—like deer running across a freeway.

The lieutenant barked, “Close it up!”

The nearest AutoM8s immediately screeched around and vectored toward them.

The lieutenant threw out his arm. “Stop moving! Stop!”

They all stopped, and the AutoM8 turned slightly aside, then roared past sixty feet to their left.

The group stood back-to-back on the tarmac, flares hissing and AutoM8s racing past them.

Ross shook his head. “Bad news, Nat; they’re apparently attracted to lateral movement as well.”

She nodded behind her blindfold. “Fires don’t generally run around. I should have guessed Sobol would have more than one criterion.”

The lieutenant pounded his helmeted forehead with his hand. “Hell of a time to realize that! Just fucking beautiful!” He looked back at the postern gate, already seventy feet behind them.

Ross’s gaze followed a sedan racing past twenty feet away. “Okay. Let’s try this: let’s move slowly toward the water.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “Back toward the postern gate.”

Philips turned to him. “Jon’s right. We can’t head back toward the Razorbacks. These AutoM8s must have a threshold of movement detection. We move slowly.”

The lieutenant gave Ross a venomous look, since he was serving as Philips’s eyes. He then finally nodded. “All right, Doctor.”

They all slid their feet across the tarmac as AutoM8s raced past doing loops around the building. They seemed to be coming closer with each pass, but the group of evacuees managed to traverse another hundred and fifty feet. The water’s edge was tantalizingly close.

A guard tapped Ross on the shoulder. “Hey! Hey, this side! Look out!”

Ross turned to see a Dodge easing to a stop fifty feet away. Facing them. Other AutoM8s still raced past.

Philips turned toward it. “What is it?”

“That Dodge is getting suspicious.”

She nodded. “Jon, you think it’s referencing our location on a grid?”

He considered this. “You mean tracking targets over time instead of—”

“Enough!” The lieutenant pointed. “We’ve got incoming!”

Another sedan vectored toward them while the Dodge seemed to observe. The second car was accelerating fast.

The lieutenant shook his head. “Fuck this! Run for the waterline!”

Ross grabbed his arm. “It could be testing us! Stand still!”

The lieutenant pulled free. He and his men sprinted in a ragged line toward the jetty, opening fire on the cars as they ran.

The moment they did so, the incoming car targeted them, and the nearby Dodge accelerated past Ross and Philips, also giving chase. She cringed as it streaked past just feet to her left.

“Jon, what’s happening?”

He pulled her close. “Wait, Nat!” He saw three more cars racing in—one headed toward him and Philips. Ross hurled the flare in its direction and then tugged on the jacket sleeve. “Run! Now!”

The lieutenant fired at another incoming car as he sprinted toward the waterline, but the first sedan overtook him, tossing his body up over its hood and smashing him into its windshield, then up over the roof. He flipped three times, then landed on the pavement just in time for the Dodge to gore him. His body jammed in its undercarriage and was dragged away. The other men scattered as AutoM8s ran them down. Sporadic gunfire was quickly replaced by the shrieks of injured men crawling toward safety as the cars circled back for the kill.

Philips glanced back reflexively. “What’s happening?”

“Just run!”

He led Philips on a different, longer tack to the shoreline—away from the feeding frenzy of the AutoM8s. He and Philips were nearly at the water. Another car roared up behind them. Ross pulled hard on the jacket sleeve. They had reached the jetty stones.

“Jump!”

He could see her grit her teeth—going on blind faith in him. They arced out into air, splashing into the freezing water as the car hurtled inches over their heads. It landed ten feet beyond them and sent up a splash wall thirty feet high.

Ross and Philips both came up flapping their arms, Philips coughing up water. Ross grabbed her around the neck from behind and swam back toward the jetty stones again as the tail of the bobbing sedan settled back into the water, nearly coming down on her head. It flopped onto the waves, bubbling and hissing around them.

She sensed that something large had just missed her. “Jon!”

“It’s okay! Wait. It’s sinking.”

“Where are the others?”

“They’re gone.”

She panted as they bobbed there for several seconds listening to bubbling water and distant engines on the tarmac above. His arm still around her. Soon there was just hissing.

“Okay, swim. Follow my voice.”

Merritt cradled the UMP on the bike’s broad gas tank and swerved from side to side trying to get around Loki’s BMW. Each time he approached, Loki stabbed on the brakes. Finally the road widened again. The corrugated fences of salvage yards and aging factories now fronted it. Merritt accelerated rapidly, roaring alongside the car.

He searched for some weakness in the armor and noticed that brushed steel knobs appeared at regular intervals on the roof, hood, and trunk. They looked like high-end cell-phone antennas—a dozen of them, evenly spaced.

Merritt braked and swerved as Loki tried to smash him into a line of parked cars. Merritt accelerated around the other side and lifted up the UMP. He glanced at the road, then took careful aim at the car. He fired a short burst. The shots ricocheted off the roof.

Loki swerved toward him again, and instead of dodging away immediately, Merritt let him come in closer. He took more careful aim and fired again—nailing a metal knob.

And barely denting it.

“Son of a bitch.”

Behind Merritt eight sedans screeched in from side streets. He glanced back over his shoulder to see them surging after him. He raised the UMP one-handed and opened up with short, controlled bursts. The front tires of first one, then another blasted out, and they quickly fell behind as the others accelerated. He knocked out the tires on still a third.

The gun was empty. Merritt turned forward and saw ten more unmanned cars come in from side streets up ahead.

No way to reload. Time to concentrate. He tossed the UMP onto the hood of a nearby car, then ripped the throttle and drove howling past Loki.

Merritt dodged a hatchback emerging from a parking lot—which turned out to be a regular car with people in it. An onrushing AutoM8 immediately broadsided it. Half a dozen more AutoM8s streamed in from side streets behind him.

Merritt turned forward again to see the AutoM8s approaching up ahead, surging his way in interlocking slaloms. It was an impenetrable roving barrier. A demonstration of networked swarming behavior that no human drivers could match. Merritt had a couple of seconds at most. A score of AutoM8s were all around him, closing fast—more coming in every second.