Desert Kings

Taking heart from the chill, the few remaining troopers cheered wildly, now able to concentrate on the last man-killer. Trying for the nimble creature, they succeeded only in finishing the destruction of the predark lab.

Recovering his needler, Delphi cursed when he saw another trooper fall and made a command decision. The resources of the lab were already lost. Time to save what he could.

“Use the grens!” the cyborg bellowed, pulling the crystal wand from his shoulder holster.

Taking defensive positions behind the toppled comps, the troopers readied the explosive charges, ripping off the safety tape holding the arming level in place.

As if understanding the danger, the hellhound turned and looped for the door. Already facing that direction, Delphi waited until it was directly in sight, then squeezed the wand.

A scintillating laser beam stabbed out from the tip, hitting the big cat in the neck. Yellow blood formed a geyser from the punctured artery and as it turned, Delphi increased the power to maximum and burned a long burst straight down its throat. The beast went stock-still as the mauling power ray burned down its gullet. Now the grens arrived, raining down around the beast and thunderously detonating, ripping the body apart into bloody gobbets.

As the smoky blasts dissipated, Cotton walked over to inspect the corpse.

“Yeah, that’s aced proper,” she said with grim satisfaction. Then the woman hawked and spit on the tattered remains. “All right, gather the blasters and boots! Leave the bodies. They’d only be dug up during the night by animals.”

Moving slow, as if they were drunk, the exhausted men moved among their fallen comrades, taking what was necessary and ignoring the rest. Death was part of their job. Later they would mourn for lost friends, but right now there was still work to be done as quietly and efficiently as possible.

Realizing this was his best chance, Delphi holstered the laser, then took it out again, just in case there was another of the creatures hiding somewhere. Bio-weapons! Somebody was going to pay for that dearly. There was no doubt in his mind that this had been a trap set just for him. How else could animals have gotten inside a room supposedly sealed for a hundred years? Clearly, they had been placed there recently, the doors resealed. And the people in charge of all biological weapons worked for TITAN. This was bad, Delphi acknowledged.

Going to the smashed comp, Delphi looked over the wreckage and sighed. He had hoped that something might have survived the battle, but the IBM Blue/Gene supercomputer was utterly destroyed. The huge comp was the finest and fastest of its kind in the predark world, and used some of the prototype for the circuits inside his body. The cyborg had fervently hoped to find something he could use here, but that was impossible now. The circuit cubes were broken, the digital wafers shattered, and the plasma chips warped from a series of massive short circuits. Gone, all gone.

With diminishing hope, Delphi went from one server to the next, finding only trash. The last two servers had bullet holes in them, yet were still serviceable and capable of working. Good news indeed. Except that they contained none of the experimental microprocessors that he required.

Then inspiration hit and Delphi walked to the control board for the supercomputer and raised the service panel to palm over the complex wiring. Incredibly, he received an answering tingle and dug among the morass of shielded circuits to retrieve a lumpy section of a slim piece of ribbon cable. It was a Thinking Wire, and almost as advanced as the version that he carried. Even more important, the microchips embedded in the cable seemed completely undamaged!

Keeping out of sight behind the raised lid of the console, Delphi opened a port in his chest and fed in the wire. It took a few moments for his systems to initiate the new hardware, and there was a moment of disorientation. Then whole sections of deactivated programs and hardware became active in his mind. His autorepair systems were back online! Scrolling through the command menu, he held out a palm and there appeared a barely visible sheen in the air. Frowning slightly, Delphi rerouted some power and the translucent distortion expanded to a full yard, then it turned transparent.

I have a force field again! Now he was safe from bullets, lasers, anything. Everything! Even a focused EMP beam designed to burn out his internal circuitry and render him powerless, paralyzed, a prisoner inside his own augmented body. Helpless prey for the agents of TITAN. If they were actively hunting for him, then it was time to turn and take a stand. No, he’d attack them! The balance of power had been redressed. Now the war began in earnest.

“Sir?”

Quickly dissolving the immaterial force field, Delphi looked up and saw Davenport standing nearby. How much had she just seen? Did she know the truth? “Yes, what is it, Cotton?” the cyborg asked in forced casualness.

That made the sec woman pause. This was the first time he had ever called her by her first name. Guess I’ve just stepped into an aced man’s boots and am the new sec boss for the convoy.

“We’re ready to leave, Chief,” she replied, resting the still-warm barrel of her Kalashnikov on a shoulder. Bellany’s gunbelt and Webley .44 hung over the other arm. “Unless there’s something else you want to look for around here.”

“No, I’ve found what was needed,” Delphi stated, lowering the service panel and locking it closed once more. “Let’s go.”

“Where, sir?”

There was only one answer to that. “East,” Delphi said, flexing his hands, feeling the power course within them. “Let’s go home.”

Chapter Four

Astonished by the sheer speed of the spidery droid, Ryan hit the floor braced for the searing onslaught of pain from the laser beam. Incredibly there did not seem to be any damage from the bright ray. But he felt fine, and even his shirt was undamaged. What the frag? Had the thing missed?

As the droid fired again, Ryan rolled out of the way and the rest of the companions triggered their Kalashnikovs in unison, peppering the machine with a hail of 7.62 mm rounds, the ricochets zinging everywhere. Then Ryan came up holding the 9 mm SIG-Sauer and put two Parabellum man-stoppers directly into the machine’s eyes. The red crystal shattered and the droid began randomly lancing out with the strange white beam, hitting the walls, floor, coffins and Doc, to no effect whatsoever.

Snarling a curse, Jak cast away the useless AK-47, smoothly drew his Colt Python and stroked the trigger, sending a booming .357 round directly into head of the droid. With a loud ringing noise, the shiny metal deeply dented, the machine limply fell from the ceiling to crash on the floor, wildly shaking, the metallic legs flailing insanely.

Moving fast, Doc stepped in close, leveled the LeMat and sent a massive .44 miniball directly into the dent. The metal split apart with a huge eruption of sparks and smoke began to rise from the droid as the legs slowly lowered to the floor and went still. Nobody moved for a few moments until they were sure the droid was aced and not merely faking.

As the companions gathered around the creaking machine, Mildred went to Ryan and checked the man over, looking into his eyes for any signs of dilation, taking his pulse, pressing an ear to his chest to listen to his heart, and even yanking up his shirt to see the skin underneath.

“I’m fine,” the one-eyed man said patiently.

“Yes, you are,” Mildred finally said, tugging down his shirt. “And I’m damn glad for that, but puzzled as all hell. Why are you fine?”

“I guess it missed me.”

“No way, lover,” Krysty said, turning. “I saw that white beam hit you dead-center.” Her hair started flexing as the woman frowned. “At least, I think it hit you…”

“Hit,” Jak stated in a no-nonsense tone. “Hit Doc, too.”

“Indeed it did, my young friend,” Doc rumbled, going to the weapon lying impotently on the floor. The man kicked aside a leg partially covering the device. “Which begs the question of why we are unharmed. Did the laser malfunction, or did it do something else to us that has yet to achieve full effect?”

“Like what?” Mildred demanded, resting a hand on the strap of her med kit.

The man shrugged. “Possibly we now have cancer or will go insane in a few days. You tell me, madam.”

The physician started to rebuff the suggestion, then had to reconsider. Whoever had set the droid as a guardian over the blasters would have been incompetent beyond belief to not make sure it was properly armed. So what did the white light do?

Kneeling on the floor, she ran fingertips over the beam unit, then J.B. joined her and they started to disassemble the outer casings.

“Think more?” Jak asked, studying the ceiling, his blaster held tight in a two-handed grip.

“No, if there were any more of the machines they would have joined the fight,” Ryan said, holstering the SIG-Sauer. “I’ve seen droids with laser camou before, but never as good as this one. Until it moved, I had no idea the bastard thing was hanging above us.”

“Aside from the odd tapping noise,” Krysty added, removing the mostly spent clip from her rapid-fire and inserting a new one. “That must have been caused by the metal legs moving on the ceiling.”

“How do?” Jak asked, easing his stance slightly. If the others said the area was clear, that was good enough for him.

“Magnets most likely,” Ryan said with a shrug.

“And that’s also what this is,” Mildred said, studying the interior of the weapon. “Nothing but a massive capacitor and a magnetic array.” She touched a golden coil. “See, that’s the focusing mechanism. I’ve seen something similar inside a CAT scanner.”

“Not las, but mag gun?” Jak asked quizzically.

“Yep.”

“So what was the light?”

“That was from a halogen bulb.” J.B. grunted, tilting back his fedora. “Nothing more than a souped-up flashlight, probably just there to help aim the magnetic.”

“Aim the magnet, sir?” Doc repeated slowly, chewing over the information. “Are you saying this is some sort of scrambling device? Mayhap a kind of antirobot gun?”

“Could be, yeah. What else would a focused beam of magnetics harm? A comp, mebbe, or a—”