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•••
After over a minute of withering assault at both the northern and southern entrances to the Cluster Room, the doors were gone; the bots fired smoke grenades into the room, and Larry Repult gave the order for his men to retreat from the support columns and into the cluster itself, to find concealment in the black cabinets holding the eight hundred IBM mainframe computers. There were twelve men still on their feet, plus the remaining Victor men had arrived to add to the defense, but virtually all the CIA officers were down to their last magazines.
Suddenly, a wave of five drones raced out of the smoke and into the room, then hovered in the corridor, just outside the cluster.
The Ground Branch officers braced for the explosions that were sure to come, but the weapons simply stayed where they were, looking down on the armed defenders shielding themselves among the mainframes.
It grew quiet other than the sound of Sentry bots moving up the hallways; Repult thought the drones hovering above wanted him and his men to drop their weapons, but then Joe Takahashi spoke up into the headset. “Cyrus can’t detonate the suicide drones on us as long as we’re next to the mainframes. Cyrus can’t attack itself.”
Repult said, “You know this, how?”
“Because we’d be dead already if it could.”
“What about the ground bots? They’re coming through the door.”
“I don’t know, Larry. They could probably pick us off if we let them get an angle. I say we keep up the fire on them.”
Repult thought a moment. “We engage these drones and we’re going to catch all that shrapnel. Everyone stay tight to the mainframes, and engage the ground units!”
The gunfire kicked up again, the drones overhead did not launch down and detonate, and the men began running out of rifle ammo, one by one, pulling pistols to keep up the gunfire on the doorways.
•••
Pace and Travers remained in the center of the cage with Hinton, who was still in the process of uploading Cyrus to the American servers.
“How much more time?” Pace demanded.
“Upload needs another nine minutes.”
Travers said, “We don’t have that, Jim.”
Pace nodded, listening to the fury of close-in gunfire. “You’re right. Fuck it, we blow it.” He yanked Hinton up to his feet away from the machine, then began pulling him back to the other Ground Branch men.
Hinton screamed at the top of his lungs, “No! You can’t!”
Into his headset Travers shouted, “Everybody find cover, fire in the hole!”
SIXTY-NINE
Zoya opened the door to the tunnel; the female Chinese military officer was still behind her with the rifle, so she stepped out into the cart parking area she’d passed fifteen minutes earlier.
Suddenly several bright lights shone on her from a dozen meters away.
Major Liu shouted something in Chinese, the lights turned off, and then Zoya could see six men, all apparently Chinese, rushing forward, training submachine guns on her. Two of the men grabbed her and forced her hands behind her back. She was cuffed, frisked roughly, then led into a middle seat of an eight-person electric cart.
Everyone else piled in, Major Liu sat right next to her, and then the driver sped off in the direction of the dormitory.
•••
Court’s last magazine ran dry, and he could see through the shattered hole that had been the doorway to the Assembly Room as a fresh swarm of drones streaked back inside, through the bay doors and in his direction at attack speed. The suicide aircraft would be on him in an instant, and he just sat there in the corner, covered in blood where bits of shrapnel had caught his hands, face, and forehead, and he watched as his death raced through the air towards him.
•••
Larry Repult’s pistol locked back on an empty chamber just as Jim Pace slid on the floor up to him. Both men covered their heads, and Pace shouted, “Hit it!”
The breacher for Bravo Zulu pounded his detonator; behind him the cage and the mainframes in and around it blew with a concussive force that knocked all the other mainframe cabinets in the cluster over, several trapping CIA men under their considerable weight.
Debris rained down, concrete from the ceiling fell on them, and thick gray smoke filled the air.
