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Pace looked at the man, conflicted. He wanted nothing to do with Cyrus, but his orders were to gain control of it, if possible. “Cancel it, and then upload it to this address.” He pulled a sheet of paper out of his chest rig and handed it over.
Hinton looked confused, but only for an instant. “Yes!”
Zoya overheard from where she stood by the cage door. In a confused tone she said, “What?”
Pace ignored her. To Hinton he said, “Just do it.”
Zoya stormed up to Pace, her rifle hanging from its sling. “What the fuck are you doing? We have to blow this up, then get down and help them on the assembly floor.”
Pace just said, “Orders,” and he turned his attention back to Hinton as the billionaire took a seat at the workstation, typed some commands, and the screen asked him if he wanted to cancel the upload. He confirmed it quickly, then turned back to Pace. “It’s done. Upload to China canceled. I’ll initiate the new upload to the U.S. servers.”
“How long?”
“Fifteen minutes.”
“Christ.”
“No!” Zoya shouted. “We have to go, now! We can’t give this murder machine to the Americans, it’s too dangerous for anyone to have.”
Pace looked around at the others in the cage. After a moment he said, “We’ll plant the charges on the mainframes here in the cage. If the Cubans or the bots make it in here and threaten to overrun us, we’ll have to blow this shit up so the Chinese don’t get it.”
•••
After running and crawling his way along the back wall of the factory space, Court finally made it to the control room door. He drew his Ka-Bar knife and turned into the room, and immediately encountered two men. Both were armed; one stood by a shelving unit with his MP5 slung over a shoulder, its stock folded. The other man sat at the desk in the room; his subgun was on the table next to him while he spoke into a phone.
The pair were surprised by Court’s arrival, but they quickly recovered.
Court charged the first guard with his knife, plunging it into the side of the man’s neck, shoving him back inside the room against the shelving, kicking the door shut behind him as he entered.
The guard on the phone shouted quickly, “They’re in the control room!”
Court launched at him while the man lifted his MP5 off the desk and swung it towards him, striking the Ka-Bar and knocking it out of Court’s hand.
The pair collided, crashed onto the desk, then fell over it and onto the floor.
Court’s headset flung from his head with the movement and his radio tumbled to the ground.
•••
Zack Hightower had slipped halfway up the production line without being detected by any of the LAWs all the way on the other side by the ramp and the bay doors, and he began climbing the stairs to the workstation overlooking the line.
But he’d only made it a couple of steps when a man whipped around into view above him and began charging down.
It was Gareth Wren, and no sooner did Zack realize this than the men collided. Wren had the momentum so they fell back, past the black-and-yellow-striped line on the floor indicating they were in the danger zone of production, where the big seven-axis industrial robotic arms, each one hundreds of pounds, spun confidently around the area bolting pieces of a Super Sentry together as it passed slowly by on a robotic cart.
The men landed on the floor; Wren kept hold of his MP5 for a moment but then Zack knocked it away. They wrestled on the floor for Zack’s rifle, the second time in the past half hour the two men had been intertwined and fighting for their lives over a firearm.
Zack lost control of the trigger of the big rifle, so he used a free hand to release the magazine, which he slid away up the line, and then he shoved the charging handle back on the weapon, ejecting the round from the chamber.
Above their heads the arms continued moving, a cart inches from them paused at a station while arms were added to the bipedal unit standing on it. Pneumatic drills wailed as bolts were tightened.
The men threw punches, knees, elbows; Zack’s headset was pulled away and disconnected in the melee. Every time Wren cried out, Zack would go for his face, his windpipe, anything to shut him up, even though with all the sounds of the machinery on the factory floor he felt confident he wouldn’t be heard by the guards or the bots across the room.
They broke apart for one moment and faced off against each other as the cart moved on and another approached, a brief respite from the dangerous, fast-moving industrial robotic arms.
The men’s chests heaved from exertion. Zack had his pistol in the small of his back still, but he knew he couldn’t open fire because robots just forty yards away by the ramp to the exit doors, or others farther behind him moving out the internal doors to join the fight against the Americans, would instead descend on the production line and eviscerate him in an instant.
Wren recognized the predicament Zack was in, and he smiled, blood in his teeth, spitting out from his lips with every word he said.
