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Hash replied first. “Caught one in my backpack. I’m fine.”
Everyone else was unhurt, as well, and Travers assessed the situation in front of him. As he did so, a popping sound above was followed by a clanking sound, coming closer.
A smoke grenade bounced down from the stairwell and began spewing black, and then a second fell next to it. Everyone had their AKs up pointed towards the stairs, waiting for the sound of a descending machine. Soon it came, but whatever the platform, it stopped on the landing at the top of the stairs in front of them. From here, Court knew, it would have an angle on most of the room he and the team were now hunkered down in.
Travers understood this, too. “No way we can fight our way up these stairs. They have a bead on all the angles.” He looked to the double doors on his side of the stairwell, which were out of view from above. “What’s in there, Fish?”
Fish opened the door, his rifle up in front of him. Quickly he turned back around. “Bank of service elevators. They look to be operational.”
“Area clear?”
“It’s clear.”
Travers nodded. “That’s our way up.” He spoke to Court over his mic, even though they were less than twenty feet apart, separated by the stairwell into the foyer. “Violator, what’s through those doors over there?”
“Just checked, it leads to another passage on this level.”
“Can you make it across the foyer to us without getting targeted?”
Zack now wore the fallen Victor Four’s headset and had heard the transmission. He just shook his head.
Court and Zack realized that the withering fire coming from down the stairs, fired by weapons they couldn’t target from here that were operating at machine speeds and using infrared, meant there was no way for them to get back to the rest of the group and into the corridor towards the elevators that led to safety.
Court said, “Negative. We’ll split off from you guys, see where this leads.”
“Understood. Find a way up however you can. We’ll try to go to U2, you guys head for U1 and look for that factory floor on the north side. Good luck.”
Court looked across the dark and smoky room. Zoya was there, staring back at him through her eye protection, and she put her hand on her heart. Into his mic he said “Good luck” softly to her, not to Chris, but he hadn’t specified.
“Good luck,” Zoya replied.
SIXTY-SIX
Gareth Wren and the security officer with him stepped off the elevator at U1 and headed through a maze of corridors, finally arriving at a set of double doors with the words “Assembly Room” over them. He tapped in his seven-digit code, flung open the door, and then ran out onto the factory floor.
The space was loud and alive, dozens of robot arms hard at work, dozens more bots moving equipment and bringing the new platforms online. It was a slow but steady process, and Wren was happy to see that everything seemed to be proceeding according to his and Anton’s vision when they decided to bring final fabrication for their own designs to Cuba.
Wren ran to the production lines, then up a set of metal stairs that led to a raised workstation overlooking the operation. Here he met with the fabrication manager, a German who’d once worked for Hinton’s car company. “Can you speed it up?”
The middle-aged man shook his head. “We are already at optimum productivity. Any faster and we risk errors.”
Wren wasn’t worried about a couple of missed bolts on a few Sentries; he needed his LAWs now. The company of Cubans one floor up would help the situation, but he knew Cyrus would protect its core better than some young local conscripts. “Make it go faster,” he ordered.
The German nodded, tapped some keys, and soon the big, red robot arms up and down the length of the fifty-meter-long room began operating even faster, spinning and whizzing and raising and lowering.
“Good. How many are online and connected with Cyrus now?”
“All the Hornets are online; they didn’t need to go through manufacturing, of course, it was just a matter of extending their arms, charging them, and arming the warheads before activating them. We have thirty Greyhounds built already and fifty-two”—he looked over Wren’s shoulder at the end of the nearest of two parallel assembly lines—“fifty-three Super Sentries.” He motioned to an area near the bay doors, where unarmed robots pulled P90s out of crates, while others stuffed loaded magazines into molded plastic pouches on the Super Sentries’ left hips.
Wren sat down in a chair next to the fabrication manager, here above production, watching over the assembly of all the machines. He’d come a hairsbreadth from death when Hightower jammed the pistol under his chin, but now he no longer worried about the infiltrators in the building. An entire company of the Cuban military, 140 troops, would make short work of the dozen or two dozen Americans, and by the time that fight was over and the Cubans had cleared out, he’d have a force of nearly one thousand LAWs protecting this building, the lab and power plant here at the campus, and La Finca six hundred meters to the southwest.
This installation needed the protection of hundreds of weapons to keep the Cubans away if they decided to give in to the American president and raid the facility themselves, but only until about day three of Cyrus going live.
Cuba would step in line if the Chinese told them to do so, and Cyrus would be running the Chinese military by then.
For now, however, the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces were the ones protecting Cyrus’s survival, so he pulled out his phone and called Captain Sarzo for a progress report.
•••
