God Hammer: A novel of the Demon Accords (11 page)

“They’re perfectly fine right there,” I said back, not bothering to yell. 

“You’re kidding, right?  Just sitting there all rolled up?  What happens when someone sits on one of them?” Stacia asked.

“Absolutely nothing.  You could hit them with a sledgehammer and they won’t move,” I said, not completely certain that was true.

“Why don’t you humor me and take them to Chet.  He’ll love them,” she said before turning and heading back inside.  “Bye Brystol,” she called over one shoulder.

The cameras snapped and whirred even faster as she walked away.

“So that’s your source,” I said.

Brystol’s eyes gleamed.  “Hah, so
you
are the special intern.  You and I are going to have a long talk,” she said.

“Sorry, I’ve gotta go put away my toys,” I said.

“You know that every time she comes out that door, these guys snap about a billion shots of her?  That she avoids this entrance like the plague?  And yet she comes out to call
you
back inside.  Hmmm.  Interesting stuff, don’t you think, Declan?”

“Nice to meet you, Miss Chatterjee.  Gotta run,” I said.  “Maybe I’ll see you around sometime.”

“No maybes about it,
Declan
,” she said, eyeing me like a coyote with a T-bone steak.

I almost ran but managed to keep it to a fast shuffle.  Fleeing the scary reporter for the safety of the werewolf, robot centipede, and vampire-filled building.

They were easy to track down.  Everyone I came across remembered seeing Stacia with the new guy and two giant black metal spheres that rolled along behind him.  The trail led first to Chet’s office-slash-lab and then to the gym.

Stacia stood in the middle of the floor, wearing a black sports bra and lycra shorts, holding a collapsible metal baton in each hand.  Facing her was one of the centipedes, unrolled and towering over her with a single pair of sword legs unfolded.  Only these legs looked different… modified.  The major change was a round column of grey foam like the kind used to insulate hot water pipes.  That and the actual silver blades were missing.

Declan stood about fifteen feet away, the missing blades on the floor at his feet.  He was wearing basketball shorts, a t-shirt, and sneakers.  Chet stood about twenty feet behind Stacia, staring at his tablet.

“Ready?” Chet called.  At Stacia’s “Yup,” he counted down.  “Three, two, one, go!”

Blurring into motion, the blonde wolf girl swept forward on bare feet, her twin batons flicking toward the centipede.  The giant arthropod scuttled back slightly on four or five pairs of legs while its modified swords instantly spun up to full weed whacker speed.

Stacia moved obliquely, forcing the pede to turn with her, first feinting low, then high, then spinning like a lacrosse player and jinking to the other side.

The robot matched her, its whirring blades of padded death presenting an almost-unbeatable defense.

But other than a few jabs and flicks of her batons, Stacia never tried to breach the robot’s protective death spin.  Instead, she moved even faster around it and finally she faked a low strike. When it bobbed down at her, she leaped onto its head, one slim foot launching her into a flipping jump.

She landed fifteen feet away, spinning in mid-air to come down facing the metal creature, which should have attacked but didn’t.  The robot dropped the head she’d stepped on to the ground and lifted the other end, effectively changing its direction in the fastest way possible.  But it still didn’t attack and instead, its whirring padded legs slowed and stopped.

“Fascinating,” Chet said.

“What’s it at?” Stacia called, eyes on her opponent.

“Two-thirds power,” Declan said, arms crossed. 

Chet looked up, slightly startled.  “Sixty-four percent,” he said.

“Or roughly two-thirds,” Declan reaffirmed.

“Did it start at full power?” I asked.  Chet and Declan spun to look my way, but Stacia merely nodded, her eyes not leaving the pede. 

“They’re very fast, can change direction on a dime as you just saw, and present a very difficult defense and attack combo.  But they burn through power fast,” she said to me.

“They use linked ultracapacitors and lithium-ion batteries for power.  Each segment carries a power source, which is why they can fight on, even with terrific damage.  But the power is limited and all that metal and armor are huge drags.  They appear to be able to recharge themselves at any electrical source and even use some inductive charging to pick up a little power off handy electrical fields,” Chet said.

“They also have power conservation programs that kick in when they’ve discharged too much too fast.  That’s why it didn’t attack her after the flip.  The first bout with Stacia cost it a third of its power in just a few seconds.  It automatically slowed all its functions down to conserve power.  When it’s lost about sixty percent of its charge, it will seek to disengage and find a power source to recharge,” Declan said.

“Really?  Disengage?” I asked, surprised.

“Yeah. When we pushed it really hard, it scuttled backward to the outlet on the back wall and plugged some antenna-looking things in for about two minutes before it came back for more,” Stacia said.

“That seems ineffective,” I said.

“We think that faced with the current limits of battery technology, the engineers built them to be ambush and team attackers.  One on one with your average were or Darkkin in close quarters, they are deadly.  Too many blades and angles of attack.    But as you just saw, with space and a single attacker, Stacia would likely wear it out and take it apart, given the proper weapons,” Declan said.

“But they came in a big swarm,” I said.

“And our group would have been in trouble without the electric kid here,” Stacia said. 

Declan frowned and looked down at the silver blades at his feet.

“We need tactics that force them to separate and attack one on one with room to maneuver,” she said, watching his reaction.

“We also think that they could be susceptible to some kind of discharge trap.  Lead them into an induction field or conductive trap that drains all their power quickly,” Chet said. “Declan can do it with his voodoo or whatever, but
I
for one would like a more tech-based device that anyone could use.”

“What else do we know about them?” I asked.

“Twelve body segments, each with its own motors, power, and computer chips.  Two heads with hypodermic mandibles that inject silver nitrate, some type of paralytic drug, and what appears to be hydrocyanic acid.  There are three separate payload chambers so it has all three at the same time.  What look like antenna are actually combo sensors and power feeds.  Cameras on all segments, both front and back, giving it complete environmental vision.  Titanium armor with a coating of DU, but no coverage at the connection between segments,” Chet said. 

I looked at him when he said the last part, then moved closer to the upright pede.  “Will it attack me?” I asked Declan.

“No.  I added everyone on the team to its command list.  It only attacks Stacia because this is a training exercise and it knows it,” he said.

Moving closer, I could see the detail—the camera pits, the silver line between segments that was most likely chromed or stainless steel, the articulated legs with their folding jackknife blades sheathed inside them. 

The robot stayed absolutely still as I got close, then quivered once before subsiding.

“Interesting. When you got nearer, it identified you by name as a primary target.  Your status on the command list caused an internal conflict and it requested clarification, which I just gave.  You, and I would guess Tanya, are at the top of this Anvil thing’s hit list,” Declan said, eyes slightly unfocused.

“Nice to be wanted,” I said.  A loud chuffing came from the hall outside the gym.  The double doors blasted open and ‘Sos came through at a fast trundle.

Both centipedes reared up, new blades snapping out and spinning up—silver blades.

“Oh, I forgot to put Awasos on the friends list,” Declan said, moving forward, perhaps to get between the bear and the robots. I grabbed him,
moving
before he could get crushed. It was much too late for stopping anything.

‘Sos came in hot, lined up with the first centipede—the one Stacia had been battling.  It spun up three silver blades, but the giant bear slammed to a halt, reared up to his full twelve feet of height, and slapped one massive paw down in an arc that hit it in the back of its head. Being designed to fight seven, even eight-foot-tall weres was one thing; fighting a creature a third again taller wasn’t in its program. The four-hundred-pound centipede smacked into the hard concrete of the floor, then flattened as fifteen hundred pounds of supernatural Kodiak came down on its back.

The second pede started forward but Declan held up a hand and it retreated, then rolled into a ball.  ‘Sos roared—a deafening end-of-times blast of anger, rage, and victory.  He jumped up and down a few times, then stepped off the broken pede, starting toward the metal orb that was the other one.

I slipped forward and wrapped a fist in his neck fur.  “They’re not actually a threat to us, Fur Face,” I said in a calm voice.  He stopped, which prevented me from getting dragged, and whuffed in my direction.  “Declan has them under control,” I said.

He sniffed the black metal ball, cuffed it lightly—just enough to roll it five feet—then turned and inspected his kill.

“Okay Chet, you wanted to open one up?  This one is already pre-cracked, like last night’s lobster,” Declan said from his position kneeling on the floor next to it.

The leg mechanisms still twitched, but they hadn’t stood up well to the massive force of Awasos jumping down on the centipede with all fours.  At least four segments had cracks in the metal, most of the middle ones had dents, and at least one segment had broken away from its neighbor.

“Look—his claws actually ripped the DU and titanium armor,” Declan noted, mostly to Chet, who was already down on all fours, face first into the robot’s remains.

A massive head snuffled the metal bug, moving up the carcass till it bumped Declan and almost knocked him over.

“Oh you killed it, alright.  This thing is toast,” the boy said, falling back to a sitting position as he talked to the giant grizzly.

“Sorry, Declan,” I said.

“What?  That our furry friend just protected us from what he thought was a massive threat?  That a machine engineered to kill my friends and employers got its ass kicked? I only brought them back to study them—now Chet can dissect this one,” Declan said.  “And I’ve just added ‘Sos to the friend list for Thing Two, so the stupid thing doesn’t threaten him and get itself crushed.”

“But now we know that at least ‘Sos knows how to fight them.  And you and Queenie seemed to do alright against them,” Stacia said, her face grim.  “And Declan’s death to them.”

“I got lucky,” he said, shaking his head.  “I had a full thunderstorm to work with.”

“Yeah, but you got that hocus pocus thing where you drain their juice, right?” she asked.

“It worked on these two, but it might be different if there’s a bunch and I…” he trailed off.

“Freeze up?” Stacia asked.  “Because from my perspective last night, it looked more like you were dazed by something.  What
did
you feel?”

He focused on the metal remains in front of him.  “It was big, really big—I guess maybe because it was in all of the centipedes at once.  I normally have to touch a device or be really close to
hear
the software.  But this thing has some horsepower to it.  I felt it the first day, but this was much more, ‘cause there were like sixty or seventy of those things and it was in all of them.”

“Probably puts copies of itself in everything it’s running.  That would sure magnify it,” Chet commented. “You said it jumped from computer to phone and tablet in the lobby?”

“Yeah, jumped the wi-fi signals, Bluetooth, radio frequencies, or something,” Declan said.

“You mentioned finding a way to remove us from its threat profile?” I asked.

“Well, that seems the easiest way.  Find out its definition of threat and recast all of us as non-threats or even assets.”

“How do you do that?” Stacia asked.

“Probably start by talking to the people that wrote this thing, although it has undoubtedly mutated beyond what they originally created,” Chet said.  “Your investigator gave us a couple of programmer names, which is impressive.  It’s really hard to get anything out of NSA people.”

“So, let’s see if we can’t put ourselves in front of these programmers.  My source indicated that one of the two had a stroke.  He should be easy to find,” I said, feeling a familiar presence approaching from outside the room.

A second later, my vampire appeared in the door, taking in the bear, the people, the robots—broken and whole—in a glance.  “Good, you’re already warmed up.  Let’s train.  Chet?  Joining us?”

“Hell no.  I’ve got to get this thing to the electronics lab somehow,” he said, standing hurriedly and looking anxiously toward the door.

“Thing Two—drag Thing One where Chet, tells you to, then come back,” Declan said.