Orson Card - Empire

As soon as the mech started to take a step, Reuben and Cole both pushed the legs apart as hard as they could. That way its foot would come down in an unpredictable place. Everything depended on how well the software that controlled the walking process was able to respond.

The answer was—pretty well. But not well enough. It staggered and lurched, and while it took all Reuben’s strength to hang on, they knew now that it was worth continuing. On the next step, they pushed again, and the machine staggered again.

And now another car—a civilian car this time—came straight for them from the side street. The mech tried to swivel toward the car, but again Cole and Reuben pressed the legs apart and its shots missed.

Since the mech was facing the car now, more or less, the car hit both legs just as Reuben and Cole were swinging down and away. They let go in time, though, hit the street and rolled.

The mech was on the ground. But it was prepared for that and was already using a slender armlike projection from the center of the body to push itself up to its knees. Not fast enough, though. There was already a cop on top of it, and he held out an arm to Reuben to help him get up.

The hatch on the back had to be the entry point, either for a living operator or for the mechanics who worked on the machinery inside. There was a keypad that allowed entry by combination. Instead, Reuben slapped an adhesive patch on the keypad, and then stuck a grenade to the patch and pulled the pin. “Jump!” he yelled to the cop.

They both jumped.

Another car hit the mech’s legs just as the grenade went off. Again it was down, and this time the entry door, which was facing straight up, had no keypad, just a hole with a bunch of broken wiring.

Inside the hole, Reuben quickly discovered, was a button that looked to him like it ought to be an emergency release. He couldn’t get his finger down inside. But a pistol bullet went through the gap and into the button just fine.

Now the entry panel could be pried off, though it still wasn’t easy.

One cop was standing directly over it when it came free. The explosion evaporated him.

The inside of the mech was nothing now but a mass of debris.

“Was it manned?” asked Cole.

Reuben wasn’t sure he could tell. “No body parts inside,” he said. “But they might have been burnt up. Vaporized. It’s big enough for a man, but maybe they use the space for ammo. That’s what blew.”

Willis was at the base of the thing looking up. “Did you learn anything?”

“Something,” said Reuben. “As much as we’re going to learn. Sergeant Willis, I want to take your guys out of this city right now.”

“Our duty is here.”

“Your duty is to guide our guys or the Marines when they come to take this city back,” said Reuben. “And that means right now your job is to stay alive and get off this island.”

Willis might have taken a long time making the decision, except that four mechs appeared at the ends of all four streets. “Shit,” he said. “They know we got their boy.”

“This way!” shouted Cole. He had already done his duty, which was to look for avenues of escape.

In this case, that meant running down the subway stairs at the corner.

“Cover me!” shouted one of the cops, and a couple of them started shooting at the mech coming up the street toward the subway stairs.

“There’s no ‘cover me’!” yelled Reuben. “They don’t care about our bullets! Just run and get down there!”

Only one man was hit on his way to the subway—hit bad enough that Reuben dragged away the cop that was trying to go back to drag the body with him.

“Are the subways running?” Reuben asked Willis.

“All stopped,” said Willis. “And all entry points to the city closed from the other side.”

“What about the third rail—powered or not?”

“I don’t know,” said Willis.

“Then let’s not touch it,” said Reuben. “We want to get to the Holland Tunnel,” he said. “Which way?”

“The subway doesn’t go there.”

“But do we go this way or that way to get to the next station? Or the one after that? Or is there some way up to the surface not at a station?”

“Not that I could get us into,” said Willis. “This way.”

They dropped down to the track level and ran, the emergency lighting barely illuminating the tracks enough to see where to plant their feet.

Reuben pulled out his cellphone. No bars. “Am I getting no signal because I’m below ground, or because the signals are jammed?”

“We’ve got cellular all the way through the subways,” said Willis. “So it’s jammed.”

“Too bad,” said Reuben. “I was going to call in air support.”

“I can’t believe they’re not already here.”

“The Air Force may not know yet. It’s what, six-thirty in the morning? If nobody in New York can call out, has it even been reported?”

“You can’t keep something like this a secret!” said Willis.

“Not forever. But for an hour, maybe you can.”

They came to another station. “No,” said Reuben. “They’ll be waiting at this one. They can move at least as fast above as we can down here. Keep going.”

They went on to the next. And the next. Now they were beyond the Holland Tunnel. They’d have to backtrack.

They ran up the stairs to the surface and immediately ran for a side street so they were out of the view of the avenues. They were lucky. No mechs in place to observe them.

“If they had five hundred of these things,” Reuben said to Cole, “they could scan the whole city. They don’t have that many. Not even close.”

“I’m not surprised,” said Cole. “What do you think it takes to build one of those? Two million? Six?”

“Real costs or Pentagon costs?” asked Reuben.

“Microsoft costs.”

“These are not a Microsoft product,” said Reuben.

“Developed in secret, though.”

“Yeah, but they don’t lock up.”

Willis knew the objective and he knew the streets. He’d never been a soldier, but he was a commander, and a good one. His men followed him without argument. So did Reuben and Cole. You follow the guy who knows what he’s doing.

When they got to a bunch of concrete barriers near the entrance to the tunnel, that stopped being Willis and started being Reuben and Cole.

There were no mechs guarding access to the tunnel. But there were a half-dozen men in space-suit uniforms. Helmets that covered their whole heads, even their faces.

“I bet those helmets are transparent from their side,” said Cole.

“With a heads-up display and automatic targeting and heat-source tracking,” said Reuben.

“AndTetris,” said Cole.

“Got to kill these guys,” said Reuben. They had no way to deal with prisoners. They needed stealth. “Except maybe the last one, for interrogation.”

“Body armor for sure.”

“Which I bet their own weapons can pierce.”

“They only have to be able to pierce ours.”

“Let’s not make these guys into supermen. Armor’s heavy and hot. If it’s really secure, with no gaps, these guys are dead on a hot June day like this is gonna be.” Reuben pointed toward one. “Yours. Try not to make a lot of noise.”

“They’re probably transmitting to each other constantly,” said Cole.

“So… not even a gurgle,” said Reuben.

It was a matter of stealth. And stealth meant patience as well as silence. No sudden movements that would catch the peripheral vision of any enemy soldier who had them even slightly in his field of view.

He tried to imagine who might be inside those suits. New guys who had never fought before? Or vets from the Middle East, fed up with the government and eager to use their training to overthrow it? Was he going to face some X-Box geek from Seattle or a killing machine from Fort Bragg?