AllFreeNovel
Share Us
The wounded robot was approaching up the veranda, passing the dead sentry and heading her way.
Quickly she pulled shells off a sidesaddle on the weapon’s frame, then fully loaded the 12-gauge. The pistol-grip shotgun had a vertical fore-end grip on its pump, but it didn’t have a stock, so she knew recoil management would be an issue for what she had in mind. She held it out in front of her body with both hands, then rolled up to her knees, still out of view of the approaching robot, and prepared to lean out and empty the weapon into it. She knew she’d have just a fraction of a second before her unmanned opponent returned fire, and all she could do was shoot as quickly and accurately as possible, and hope for the best.
Just as she prepared to act, she heard the unmistakable barking of another shotgun behind her, in the direction of the pool, and to her this meant Court was still alive and in contact with the enemy.
With renewed life she dropped out in front of the veranda entrance to the kitchen, landing on her left shoulder, and she aimed at movement in front of her and fired.
Nine steel pellets, each one .33 inch in diameter, left the barrel of the weapon in Zoya’s hands with a muzzle velocity of twelve hundred feet per second. The pattern of the group expanded roughly one inch every yard the pellets traveled downrange, and they slammed into the Q-UGV, striking a six-inch area towards the right front end of the machine.
This knocked the robot off balance; it staggered on its back left leg and collapsed down, but then righted itself quickly and began slewing the rifle by moving its hip joints, aiming back at her.
The recoil of Zoya’s unwieldy weapon had been as intense as expected, but she managed it with the brute strength of her arms and shoulders, and she racked the grip of the gun back and then forward, ejecting the smoking expended brass and plastic shell back over her right shoulder and chambering a fresh one in the breech.
She fired again; this time her buckshot hit the right front shoulder of the robot, knocking it fully onto its side. She fought the recoil again, watched the machine struggle to climb back onto its legs, and just as she pressed the trigger a third time, she heard another gunshot, this one coming from upstairs, and then another explosion, as loud as the previous two.
She thought of Sir Donald, alone and wounded in the library, but she tried to concentrate on aiming her weapon again at the right shoulder of the seriously damaged but still potent threat.
•••
Court had scooped up the shotgun lying in the sand by the dead guard, and then he’d spun around, racking a shell as he aimed at the sound of another approaching drone. He fired once, hitting the object just thirty or so feet above him and over the pool. He cowered from the expected detonation, but the device just spun wildly and crashed into the sand over his right shoulder.
He quickly realized he’d just removed one of the enemy’s ISR platforms, not a weaponized machine.
And he also realized he’d given his position away. The robot on the second floor would now likely either be coming for him or for Fitzroy, because he could hear that Zoya had made it to the shotgun in the courtyard and was now engaging the other ground robot somewhere in the house, dumping shell after shell into it.
And in the middle of her firing he heard a handgun crack on the second floor and then, almost simultaneously, an enormous explosion.
Court began running for the house as fast as his legs would take him, his shotgun’s rubberized stock tight against his shoulder, its barrel waving ahead as he moved.
•••
Zoya fired her fifth and last shell; her ears rung and she knew they would continue ringing for hours, and her head throbbed from the noise and the stress, but she fought through the disorientation and climbed back up to her position behind the shelving unit. Her pistol was in the small of her back and she pulled it, dropping the hot and smoking but now useless shotgun as she did so, then she ran around the far end of the shelves into the center of the kitchen.
Here she entered a dining room through a large stone archway and sprinted through it, and in seconds she found herself in the covered north-south hallway that ran into the veranda near where she’d pulled the gun off the dead man, and that meant she would come out of the hallway directly behind the wounded robot.
She did this carefully and aimed her weapon, but she found the robot completely on its side; both of its right legs had been ripped off by five shotgun blasts—forty-five double-aught pellets had created a mobility kill, at least, but she didn’t know if the machine remained powered and operational.
A row of lights on the roof of the meter-long-by-half-meter-wide machine flickered, giving her the answer. She saw movement in the two remaining legs as it vainly tried to right itself or to aim its weapon, but the machine’s big gun barrel faced into the kitchen, away from her as she approached quickly from behind.
Zoya moved confidently at first, but then realized that with the ringing in her ears she’d have no way to hear the sound of more attacking drones. She advanced more quickly and found herself kneeling just behind the device, and then she noticed a thick cluster of wires exposed from where a portion of the side housing of the robot had been ripped away. She pulled them, and they came out of the machine and took a broken piece of a plastic motherboard with them.
The lights on the roof went off, and then she looked around, up on her knees still.
Suddenly a bright beam flashed on her from the kitchen; she raised her pistol at it, squinting into the blaze.
The light extinguished, and she rubbed her eyes. Seconds later she saw movement in the darkness, but before she fired at it, she realized it was a person.
Court Gentry appeared in front of her and helped her to her feet.
She shouted to him, “I can’t hear a fucking thing!”
He nodded, then took her hand and put her fingers in his waistband at his back. Turning away from her, he headed for the helical stairs, flashing his shotgun’s undermounted flashlight intermittently as he advanced to help guide them through the thick smoke.
THIRTY-FIVE
Quadrupedal Unmanned Ground Vehicle Greyhound One One had expended all of its gas canisters, and its infrared cameras were still hampered by the remnants of the now diminishing fire that had been burning up here in the great room. Using its optical cam, it had made its way to the door, where it had taken a single round of gunfire, and then more shots were registered by one of the Hornet hunter/killer drones in the courtyard shortly before it went offline, so the machine’s brain had calculated that a target was behind the door, though the data from its onboard brain as well as the other units on the property were unable to determine if the target had been killed by the detonation of the second Hornet.
Greyhound One One shifted its hips lower and to the right, slewing the barrel of the 6.5-millimeter Creedmoor at the top door hinge, and then it fired a single round that blew the hinge off.
