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All understood. We will stand by for the removal of the equipment.
Thank you again for a difficult job well done.
The director smiled as he typed. My pleasure. I hope you will consider me again for any future needs.
The director ended the conversation, put his laptop in a case, and went to stack it by the lobby door.
A minute later he stood with his staff at the floor of the auditorium, giving a toast to the smiling and laughing group.
As he spoke, the several guards who had been milling about over the past week headed for the lobby and hit the button for the stairs. One of their number, however, went into a lobby stairwell, propping the door open there, and ascended to the roof, where he again propped open the door.
He then headed down the stairs, taking them all the way to the ground floor.
•••
Outside in the parking lot behind Building Five of Singapore Science Park, a tractor-trailer pulled to a stop with a belch of compressed air through its valves as the brake engaged. Quickly a pair of men climbed out of the cab, then walked to the rear of the vehicle. They opened the trailer’s rear doors, but they did not extend the ramp. Instead, they both returned to the cab and shut themselves back in.
For thirty seconds it was quiet in the parking lot. Shortly before six a.m. none of the other buildings had been occupied, and the small Science Park security force had been called away after receiving a report of a break-in at a facility on the opposite end of the two-hundred-acre campus.
But the still was broken by a buzzing sound, faint at first, but quickly it grew louder.
Seconds later a two-meter-square hexacopter appeared out of the rear of the trailer, flying slow at first, but only until it cleared the vehicle, and then it began rising over the parking lot.
Five seconds after the first unmanned aircraft appeared, an identical model followed its exact path.
Both of the big drones had payloads—large rectangular black devices attached to their bellies—and the half-dozen fifty-centimeter enclosed props on each craft spun harder and louder, forcing an increase in elevation. Soon the drones banked away from the parking lot and over Building Five.
Here they landed on the roof simultaneously, but their propellers only decreased pitch; they did not stop.
Seconds later the pair of drones took off again into the sky, but both payloads remained behind on the flat roof, just ten meters from the door left open by a member of the Gama security staff.
As the noise of the drones faded as they climbed, both rectangular boxes began to whirr, and then they began to move. Four legs extended, lifting the body of the device nearly a meter in height; a panel slid open on the roof of each box and a turret appeared, the tip of a gun barrel extending from it, facing forward.
The machines walked confidently towards the open door a moment later, and shortly after this they began descending the stairwell.
•••
The Gama director felt a buzz on his phone in his pocket; he looked down at the text message there, and then he tossed his plastic champagne cup into the garbage can by the lobby door that the staff had put there to help with the cleanup and sterilization of the room. He called out over the chatting going on around him. “Ladies and gentlemen. Our job here is complete. The bus is downstairs waiting for us.”
All eighteen stepped out to the lobby; the director pushed the elevator call button, and then they stood there, waiting. The director said, “We can probably fit eight in each car. I’ll come down with the last group.”
Within moments, however, all heads turned to the right, to the door propped open with a garbage can there, because an unusual sound was coming from the stairwell just beyond it.
The first of the two quadrupedal ground vehicles emerged into the lobby at a steady pace, the second followed right behind, and just after the sound of gasps and other shouts of alarm pierced the air, both robots opened fire on the tightly clustered crowd.
The director turned and tried to run, slamming into the French communications specialist, falling down onto the Indian intelligence analyst who was already dead, and as the bullets ripped steadily into the bodies, bloodcurdling screams and moans of panicked agony all around, the director rose back up to his knees, his eyes on the bathroom door, just steps away.
But as soon as he climbed into a crouch, he was hit by a 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor round through the center of his spine, severing the spinal cord itself.
He dropped back into the growing pile of bodies and found he couldn’t move his legs, so he began to claw his way over the dead and wounded.
A second round pierced the back of his head, entering at the base of the skull and exiting through the crown, removing half the director’s skull.
He was dead before his face hit the leg of the young analyst from Morocco.
In twenty seconds it looked like it was all over, but then the two machines fired an insurance round into each body. The woman from America had been playing possum, but attempting to fool or manipulate the weapons was folly because they could not be tricked, reasoned with, appealed to, or otherwise affected in any way.
They were utterly without remorse.
