Mike Stackpole - Ghost Book One - The Earth Transformed

“Hmmm,” I said. “I’m not feeling this plan.”

“It’ll be fine — I hope. When they swing around toward you, we’ve got ’em flanked. We’ll gun ’em down before they can get a bead on you, see?”

I gave her a cold look. “I see you’ve decided who you want to spend the rest of your life with. And it ain’t gonna be the guy with all the bullets in him.”

She hung her head, embarrassed. “Sorry, but you been playin’ it so balls–out lately, I thought you wouldn’t mind.”

I was hurt, I’ll admit that. When your former lover all but comes out and tells you you’re expendable, it kinda stings a little. But she was right too. When I went looking for the cold dread that should have been turning my insides into knotted ice snakes at the prospect of being robot fodder, it wasn’t there. I wasn’t happy about going into that room and shouting “Olly olly oxen free,” but I wasn’t scared either. I didn’t really feel anything at all.

I took off my pack and checked my pistol. Full clip and one in the chamber. Ready as I’d ever be.

“Fine,” I said. “But I better get one hell of a retirement party.”

She squeezed my hand. It almost made me have second thoughts, but then I took a deep breath and edged through the door into the checkpoint cage. The bulletproof window looked through into a closet with a chair and a door–buzzer. The far door opened into the smoke–choked cell block and I started to understand the layout a little better. It was laid out more like a kennel than a jail, a grid with two clusters of free–standing cells on either side of a central corridor, and more cells surrounding the clusters.

I dropped into a squat and found I could see further into the smoke closer to the ground. Straight ahead of me, at the far end of the cell block, were the bottom halves of three robots. They were outside an open door, tooling around on tank treads, and Vargas had not been lying. The mechanical arms sprouting from their torsos were rigged with mops, brooms and cleaning brushes, but higher up, where the smoke partially hid them, I saw more ominous silhouettes swinging about. And between me and them, huddling in the cages, I saw the friendlies.

They were all dressed in service overalls and hospital scrubs that had the word DARWIN printed in large black letters on the back, and they looked tired, terrified, hungry, and most of all sick as irradiated dogs. They were also all sitting on the floor to keep their heads below the smoke, but that wasn’t quite low enough for what was coming.

I slipped through the second security door and then ducked into the left–hand corridor, which ran around all four sides of the cages on the left. I held my breath but heard nothing from the robots. They were still milling around the guardroom door, trying to get an angle on the rangers inside. I hadn’t gone completely unnoticed, however. I could see the folks inside the cells looking up and staring at me.

I shushed them with a finger to my lips and kept crawling around the cages on my hands and knees until I was at the left–forward corner of the corridor.

Showtime.

I took out my pistol, sucked in a deep breath of the smoke–free air near the floor, then stood up and raised my voice.

“Prisoners in the cages! Listen up! We are here to rescue you! Lie flat on the floor and don’t get up until we give the all clear! I repeat! Lie flat on—!”

I didn’t have time to repeat. With a whirring of servos and a rumble of treads, the cleaning crew came to investigate my noise. And they didn’t wait to see the whites of my eyes. They were already firing as they came around the cages — a barrage of bullets and sizzling beams of light all blasting my way.

“Unauthorized personnel will be removed from the premises. Cleanliness must be maintained.”

I dove right, not even bothering to fire back, and landed on the floor with a hot pain searing my left forearm. There was blood and the smell of burning hair. That was no gun! It was some kind of laser!

As I rolled to my feet I saw that the people in the cells had followed my orders. They were hugging the ground like it was a lover.

Now I fired, through the bars and high over the heads of the prisoners. “Come on, you metal maids! Come get me.”

They came, and I had to hit the floor again as lasers and bullets ricocheted off the bars all around me. Then the firing wasn’t just coming from the robots. From behind them and beside them came the howls of the rangers and the clatter of their guns. Angie and Ace were flanking them from the stairwell while Vargas and his crew unloaded on them from the safety of the guardroom door.

The robots squawked and ground their gears as they tried to turn toward these threats, but there was too much lead coming their way.

“All employees are… unauthorized personnel… From the premises. Cleanliness will… be removed. Interfere… with custodial staff in the… must be maintained. Any employee who… must be maintained… must be maintained… must be maintained… must be—”

When the last shot echoed away I heard Angie calling from somewhere in the smoke. “Are they all dead?”

Vargas answered her. “All dead.”

“Any casualties from the prisoners? Ghost, you okay?”

“I’m gonna have a new scar,” I called back.

“I… I think Cindy is hurt,” said a voice I didn’t know.

“Damnit,” Vargas raised his voice. “Thrasher, where are those keys? Come on, move it.”

By the time Thrasher had found the keys and we’d opened all the cells, the smoke had cleared enough that we could see our friends, the folks we had saved — and what we had killed.

Vargas, Thrasher and Hell Razor were bruised and bloodied from head to toe, and Hell Razor had a laser burn to match mine across his left thigh. Athalia on the other hand was as clean and untouched as she always seemed to be. She gave me a little nod of greeting as she entered a cell to help the occupants. I gave her a smirk and a salute.

Survivors again. Woo.

The three robots were as big and clunky as their treads had indicated — vaguely humanoid torsos with gun and mop and broom arms sticking out all over the place and cyclopic pinheads, each with a laser gun for an eye. Their metal skins were covered in an acne of bullet holes, and they were leaking fluids all over the floors they had worked so tirelessly to keep clean.

The people in the cages looked worse up close than they had from a distance. About half of them were too sick to stand. We had to carry them out. One guy my height felt like he weighed about eighty pounds, and looked it too. His cheekbones were poking through his skin like knife blades. Some of them had died before we got there, rolled into corners and covered with blankets by their friends.

Two of them had taken wounds — not bullets, but concrete shrapnel from where the robots had shot up the walls over their heads — and as Kate was patching them up, Metal and Mad Dog poked their heads in and stared around wide–eyed.

“Whoa,” said Metal.

Mad Dog agreed with him. “Seriously.”

One of the former prisoners sat up, a woman who might have been a looker once, before she’d lost half her hair and wasted away to seventy pounds. “Maniac. Mad Dog.” Her voice was a ragged whisper. “You’re… safe. I thought he… might’ve got you too.”

I put two and two together as the two men crossed to her, and guessed the guy she called Maniac must be the guy I’d been calling Metal. So… Metal Maniac. Sure. Seemed to fit him.

“Liz!” Metal knelt beside her as Mad Dog stared. “What the hell happened to you? We thought you’d died in the leak.”

“There was no leak,” breathed Liz. “At least not an… accidental one. Finster did it… deliberately.”