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It ejected the spent casing out of a port on the right side of the turret, cycled a fresh round into the chamber, and then shifted aim to the lower left hinge and fired again.
The door fell into the library.
Again Greyhound One One cycled a fresh round into its chamber and began walking forward into the room.
•••
Court and Zoya arrived at the top of the stairs as the second gunshot rang out at the far end of the smoke-filled great room near the door to the library. They moved forward a few feet together, and then Court realized the flames from the curtains and sofa had mostly burned out, and any machine using an infrared camera would likely be able to pick up the heat signatures of humans.
Quickly he took Zoya’s hand out of his waistband and left her there, then ran at a sprint through the darkness. He thought it likely he’d be shot by the remaining four-legged robot while rushing to get to Don Fitzroy, and he didn’t want Zoya to die along with him.
•••
Recon drone RC83 finished its sweep of the first floor and then went back up the circular stairwell, following the data fed it by Greyhound One One that suggested a target remained on the second floor.
It shot out into the smoke, saw the heat signature of a person there in the middle of the room, but raced past the form when it saw a second figure running at a sprint towards the Greyhound’s location to the south.
The ISR drone slowed and came to a stop as the infrared camera saw the figure halt suddenly, then raise its arms up in front of its face.
The blast of a shotgun showed up as a glowing red flash on the thermal. A second flash and then a third came quickly, and then the figure dropped the weapon and moved into the library.
The data feed from Q-UGV Greyhound One One ended abruptly as the datalink was broken with the destruction of the machine.
RC83 advanced slowly now. It had no weapon, just a camera, and there were no more Hornet drones or Greyhound bots left to prosecute targets. Still, the machine knew that its job was to identify who was still alive. Its onboard brain told it to check the room where the ground bot had been destroyed, then regress back into the great room to identify the figure it had just passed.
At the threshold to the library the fourteen-inch-diameter machine hovered five feet above the tile; it cycled its cameras, settling on an optical view because the smoke was less dense in here.
It took in the scene carefully, sending the images via satellite link to Contreras’s aircraft monitors a mile away as well as other locations, and its gaze fixed on Target Gama 19, Courtland Gentry, and a person facial recognition had already identified as Sir Donald Fitzroy.
Gentry was on his feet and Fitzroy was on the floor by the window, his body lying motionless.
Gentry turned to look directly at the machine, so RC83 spun out of the doorway and turned around to return to the great room.
•••
Carlos Contreras looked at the feed from the one surviving platform at the hacienda. He saw the old man on the floor by the window, unmoving; he saw Gentry standing over him, then turning with a pistol in his hand. Gentry stared directly into the camera’s lens, and then the image shifted quickly, no doubt because the artificial intelligence operating RC83 registered Gentry as a threat and it was trying to get away.
The machine spun back into the great room, but instantly Contreras cried out and leapt to his feet.
Just three feet in front of the camera as it turned around he saw the target Zakharova holding a pistol over her head, upside down like a hammer.
She swung at the camera, Contreras saw a flash, and then the drone went offline.
The Mexican sat back down slowly, his hands on his head in shock.
Just seconds later the SkyCourier increased power and began a climbing turn to starboard, taking it out over the ocean.
Contreras got the impression the pilot had been given orders to vacate the area within two or three seconds of the destruction of the last platform at the hacienda, and the speed of this order astonished him.
Slowly he began powering down his laptops and stowing them in bags, his heart still pounding because of all that had happened, all that he’d seen, and all that he’d just learned.
•••
Court Gentry turned away from the drone Zoya had just bashed onto the floor and then stomped on, and he looked back to Fitzroy, slumped against the wall in the corner next to the open window, and ten feet or so away from Jack Tudor’s still form by the desk.
Court knelt over Fitzroy, began reaching down to check his pulse, but then the big man moved, and he spoke, blood still dripping from his face. “You get them all, lad?”
Court smiled. “Holy shit, Fitz! You’re alive?”
