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Then he was back at it with the penlight. “Shit.”
“What?”
“It’s been dissected. There’s nothing salvageable. Let’s put it back.”
On his cue, she muscled the unit again, and as it flopped to the faceup position, the metal clanging was a reminder—not that she needed it—that they were dealing with technology, not anything that lived and breathed.
Daniel stared down grimly. Then he put his hand on the center of the chest, where the heart would have been if it had been mortal.
“This is what’s coming for us, Lydia—I know because it’s what I would do if I had control of them. If I had a target, I’d send them instead of anything that was mortal.” He moved down the body. “These things are a design triumph. They’re perfect forfighting. No food, no sleep, no conscience or independent thought. Just a battery source and a set of orders. It’s the future of warfare.”
Lydia thought back to when she’d faced off with one of them, alongside Blade, up on the mountaintop.
“Let’s all leave,” she murmured. “Let’s just pack up… and go.”
After a moment, Daniel shook his head. “I think they’re going to find us wherever we are.”
Standing over the mechanical soldier, Daniel reflected on how helpful Rubik had been—after the guy had lost his shit for a while about the mole in his program. With the flip-out in the rear view, Daniel had gotten along with the deeper reason for the call. The favor had been granted—to an extent.
An over-the-burner-phone connection was a poor substitute for Rubik being on-site and getting hands-on with the cyborg. But Daniel’s brain was a sponge, and he had retained most of what had been explained.
Unfortunately, with the power plant being so wrecked, there was no way of working with the thing. He’d been hoping to reverse engineer the unit, and send it back to its master with a tracker. A Trojan robot, so to speak.
All that was a no-go, so Daniel was making other plans. Staring into the face of the steel soldier,he began to do mental gymnastics involving risk management and the execution of strategies—all of it so spinningly manic, too manic to truly be effective. Then again, his brain had been centrifuging out even before he came here to try to do something that made a difference.
“Daniel?”
He shook himself back to attention and stared into those whiskey-colored eyes he loved so much. “I really want you to leave here.”
“Not unless you come with me.”
Her words were spoken softly, but they landed like a holler—because he wanted to talk sense into her. He was almost out of time. She had her whole life ahead of her. Their situation was already a tragedy—the last thing they needed was her getting herself killed in the middle of this mess they didn’t create, couldn’t escape. And yeah, sure, from a physical strength perspective, he probably needed to go to safety before she did, but he was hungry for an enemy he could fight.
He might be weak physically, but he could still hold a gun. And bullets worked against these cyborg fuckers if you had enough in your magazine.
“I’m not leaving,” he said remotely as he stared at all the metal and wires.
“And that’s one of the many reasons I love you.”
“Because I’m stupid?”
“Because you don’t run.”
At that, Lydia leaned into him and stroked her hand over his head. Then she kissed him. And kissed him again.
“And I’m staying, too,” she whispered against his mouth.
With the rushing buzz of Jack Daniel’s on an empty gut, a sudden surge of energy raced through him, and he pulled her in against his chest. Searching her face, with the warmth of her body registering against his own, he cursed. The idea that her vitality, her life-force, would be anywhere near one of those killing machines? He felt like shitting himself.
And that made the anger in him threaten to boil over.
“Come on,” he said. “Let’s get out of here.”
He couldn’t wait to get her away from the fucking vault, and when they were on the far side of the lead-lined cylindrical coffin, he shut the heavy panel with relief that struck him as shortsighted. She was right to worry about the unit waking up. He was worried, too—even though he’d now seen with his own two eyes that the lithium battery was compromised, and so was the circuitry that ran up the back of the neck into the CPU.
But more were coming for them. And the fight was going to be brutal because they were just that deadly.
According to Rubik, when the guy had designed the robots, he’d decided not to try to improve on one of Mother Nature’s miracles of invention: After five million years of evolution, with the process of natural selection solving problems left and right, why, the guy had said, would he reinvent such a functional platform? And then there was the advantage of it appearing to be a human.
