It was almost too easy. By far the hardest part had been wiping the memory of the autodriver before Ciro left the taxi. The codes he’d stolen from the battleship made it child’s play to do almost everything he needed to do, including getting inside the base.

While back in the coffee shop, he’d taken the time to look through the base’s entire roster until he found a ship he was excited about. After he had authorized Antonio Banderas to work as an official Supremacy technology consultant, he put in a work request through the nearby base. Not too surprisingly, Banderas was given the assignment. When Ciro arrived at the base, his retinal and ID were all he needed to get through the door. He nodded to the two guards on duty as he passed by. They nodded back before returning their attention to their computers.

Ciro walked through the halls with all the confidence he could fake with the aid of four cups of coffee and some painkillers. No one bothered him. Adan was right, all it took was bravado.

Ciro had taken the time to memorize enough of the map to get him to the main hangar. The ship he’d chosen was in an isolated bay across from the entrance. He walked through the entryway and, without missing a beat, immediately turned and went down a small service hallway beside him.

After he put some distance between himself and the main hangar, he slumped against the wall and tried to take a few deep breaths. It wasn’t easy. His body wanted to hyperventilate. Once his breathing calmed, he closed his eyes.

I’m going to die.

Ciro forced his breathing to slow down again. Then he told his brain that was not a useful thought, and he expected something better from it.

There were so many people!

That was still not the most useful thing his brain had ever come up with, but he certainly couldn’t argue with it. The map he’d so casually inspected, while sipping coffee miles away from any danger, had completely failed to prepare him for how big and crowded the hangar was. What the hell kind of a military base had he broken into?

That…that seemed like something he ought to know.

Ciro continued down the service hallway as he pulled out his tablet and began flicking through his screens.

It wasn’t a port. He knew that. When he pulled up the base’s records, he managed to find its military designations. A short system search later, he learned that the base was used for storing technology. This included the repair and development of the Supremacy’s armada.

No wonder there’d been so many people. Every last ship in there was being overhauled or built. There would be engineers, fleets of mechanics, trainees, pilots, copilots—not to mention the guards and bureaucratic personnel that every base needed to function. Ciro tried to imagine anything worse than attempting to steal a ship out from under the eyes of the dozen armed soldiers who were trying to fix it. All he could come up with was walking into the wrong area while a company of foot-soldiers were doing live-firing exercises.

On the other hand, if there were lots of people, that meant he wouldn’t stand out, even without a uniform. And if the base stored technology, then Ciro had a lot to work with.

He searched through the map until he found the right military designation attached to a nearby room. Once he managed to convince the security panel that he had business on the other side of the door, he was allowed access.

Ciro was closing down his tablet as he entered, so he didn’t look up until he was a few steps inside. What he saw rooted him to the spot.

Row after row of battle bots stood motionless. Their perfect lines crowded his entire field of vision.

The adrenaline rush and the coffee together were too much. He couldn’t stop his hands from shaking, even when he realized all the robots were dark. The company of bots was only there for storage; he knew they weren’t going to attack him, but he’d heard too many stories to feel easy. There was a reason Rising soldiers carried machetes.

With that dismal thought, Ciro’s traitorous brain began calculating how many Rising deaths those bots represented. As the numbers mounted, he felt as if a cold hand reached into his chest and squeezed his sternum.

There was a new purpose in Ciro’s step when he finally moved. He marched over to the room’s massive center console and woke it up. Twenty-three minutes later, there was the sound of a thousand servos and metal joints moving to raise a thousand heads.

Ciro came around the console and stood in front of the company of bots.

“Recognize my voice and acknowledge.”

A thousand speakers answered, “Your voice is recognized.”

“Orders will be received from my voice and only my voice. You will accept a contradiction of orders only from my voice and only when preceded by the programed safe-phrase. Acknowledge.”

“Your instructions are acknowledged.”

Ciro went back around to the console. When he next spoke, he didn’t bother to raise his head. “Have you received your orders?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Go.”

The ranks of Supremacy bots began filing out of the room. Their steps created a clattering cadence that echoed through the halls as they split off to find alternative routes to the main hangar.

Before the room finished emptying, Ciro pointed and called, “You, bot!”

Five robots checked his body language, then turned back to the door. One stepped away from his place in line. “Sir.”

“Come here. I have a different job for you.”

[https://i.imgur.com/6iM8gcI.png]

Antall was used to ignoring noises while he worked, but eventually the commotion coming from the main hangar was enough to distract him. He pushed away from his desk with an aggrieved sigh and hauled himself to his feet. When he opened the door shutting him away from the disturbance, his irritation disappeared. He was much too bewildered and frightened to feel irritated.

The hangar was inundated with battle bots. They were everywhere he looked. Some seemed to be trying to detain the soldiers and workers, others crowded around the ships in groups. There was shouting, the crashing of metal on metal, and the horrible sound of machines being ripped apart.

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Antall reached out and grabbed the arm of a soldier as she passed him.

“What’s going on?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “The bots suddenly went crazy! They’re destroying the ships!”

“All of them?”

“Yes!”

Fear for his work clashed with fear for himself and the people around him. “They’re fighting units!”

The woman stared at him, then tried to ease out of his grip. “Yes,” she said. It sounded like the slow, overly articulated assurance you’d give a half-wit.

Antall shook his head and regripped her arm. “No. I mean, if they’ve gone crazy, are they killing anyone?”

Her eyes widened. Antall let her go. It was obvious he’d frightened her and she didn’t know the answer. He ran into the chaos, looking for someone he might recognize. Before he could find anyone, a bot came up to him and took him by the shoulders.

“Sir, you are in danger. You must evacuate now. I will escort you to safety.”

“Why am I in danger, bot?” Antall tried to hold his place, but the bot didn’t notice his resistance. He was forced toward the entrance.

“There’s a fire in the main hangar. We must find the source of the fire and put it out.”

Antall’s eyes swept over the massive room, hunting for any sign of a blaze. If there was a fire, then they were all in danger, but his search found no smoke or flickering light, and while it was hard to hear over the general destruction, he didn’t think any of the alarms had gone off. “There’s no fire, bot.”

“There is a fire,” the bot insisted.

“There’s no smoke! There’s no—” Antall stopped arguing. The battle bots were meant to be disposable, so the Supremacy didn’t waste money on complex programing. Nothing he said could convince the robot it was wrong if it didn’t have the right logic-differentiation program.

He allowed himself to be shoved into the crowd at the front of the hangar.

“Antall!”

Relief flooded through him. “Lee!” He went over to his friend, dodging around the soldiers who got in his way. “Thank god you’re on the network already.”

“Don’t thank god yet, Antall.” Lee was flicking through programs, using all three input consoles and five monitors. “I’m locked out from their command center.”

“No. No, that’s not possible!”

“It’s not supposed to be possible.” Lee used his extended middle finger to motion to the center monitor. “Someone’s installed a passcode.”

Antall stared at the consoles under his friend’s hands. “How long will it take to break it?”

“Too long. Whoever it was, they used our own supercomputer to encrypt it.”

A new voice broke in: “Then use it to unencrypt it!”

Antall and Lee both glanced up at the woman who’d interrupted their conversation.

“Jaffey,” Lee grumbled, “are you the floor officer today?”

“Yes.”

“You know how eager I am to obey orders,” the programmer said, “but unfortunately, I can’t. It takes more processing power to decrypt something than it does to encrypt it.”

“They are tearing those ships apart!”

Antall sighed. “Yelling at Lee isn’t going to help him work faster, Jaffey.”

Lee’s hands jerked up from the console. “Let her yell! There’s nothing I can do. By the time we’ve got into the bot’s command center, the ships will be nothing but scrap.”

“Why are they going after the ships?” Antall crept toward the abandoned computer, even though he knew that if Lee said it was hopeless, then there wouldn’t be anything he could do.

“They seem to think this mysterious fire started in one of the ships. They’ll tear them all apart until they find the source of the nonexistent danger.”

“Can we turn them off?”

Jaffey stepped forward. “We don’t have that kind of emp laying around.”

Lee added, “And if we used something big enough to take out that many bots, it’d destroy most of the ships we were trying to save.”

Antall shook his head. “No. No—I meant—” He flicked his hand up and down, trying to work an imaginary switch.

Jaffey was the first to catch on. “They’re battle bots. You’re not supposed to be able to walk up and turn them off.”

“How does the Rising stop them?”

“With machetes.”

“Well?”

“We don’t have them either.”

Antall’s eyebrows pulled together. “I’m trying to help, Jaffey. You don’t have to use that tone with me. We have to save those ships—I know how much they’re worth! I don’t know what kind of weapons you have laying around.”

Jaffey muttered something derogative about engineers.

“Is anyone hurt?” Lee glanced at the crowd that had been herded around him.

The officer shook her head. “No.” Still using the bitter tone Antall had objected to, she noted, “We were all rescued very efficiently. The ones who didn’t want to be rescued were carried.”

“They won’t let anyone on the floor?” Lee asked.

“No one—” Jaffey was interrupted by a soldier at her elbow.

“Ma’am.”

“What is it?”

“We found some metal bars and tools we can use as weapons.”

Jaffey glanced at the lead programmer and raised an eyebrow.

Lee shrugged. “The bots won’t hurt them if they’re working under rescue orders, even if they’re attacked. But the rescue program puts a high priority on removing people from danger. They’ll have to fight against a tide of well-meaning metal Samaritans.”

“Metal whats?”

Lee rolled his eyes. “Never mind, Jaffey.”

“Is there any point in trying to avoid damaging the bots?”

“If I can’t shut them down and wipe their orders, you’ll have to destroy every last one of them before they’ll stop trying to rescue us.”

Jaffey nodded and turned to give her orders to the soldier.

Antall grabbed his friend’s shoulder. “The rescue programming.”

Lee was used to Antall’s less than articulate nature, but the pressure of the circumstances made him snappish. “I can’t read your mind!”

“There were people with the bots.”

Jaffey returned her attention to the two engineers. “What are you talking about?”

“When I was trapped in the building collapse,” Antall said. “The robotic workers were recruited to help with the rescue.”

“Was this here?” Jaffey asked.

Both Lee and Antall ignored her. The programmer struggled to follow his friend’s logic while Antall continued with his story.

“They were factory robots. They only had—”

Lee rushed him along: “Yes, they only had the basic rescue programming that all humanoid bots have installed.”

“Yes!”

No one spoke.

“You don’t see?” Antall said.

“Aye-yai-yai,” Jaffey groaned.

Antall yelled over the sound of the soldiers fighting to defend the ships. “Who were the people?!”

Lee said nothing. He pushed up his sleeves and returned to the computer. “We won’t be able to change many of the IDs.”

Antall patted his friend on his back. “Pilots! Get the pilots.”

“And you, I suppose?”

“I have to check on my babies.”

“What’s going on?” Jaffey demanded.

“The bots have to allow rescue workers in to work with them,” Lee said. “We don’t have the uniforms, but if we change the ID designations, we might be able to get a few people in the hangar with the robots.”

“And how will that help?”

Lee stopped what he was doing. “If those men are pilots, then any functional ships can be flown away before the bots tear them to pieces. Is that all right with you, Jaffey?”

“Oh, that’s fine with me, Lee. And thank you for taking the time out to explain it. But don’t bother changing Antall’s designation.”

“Ma’am!”

“You’re not a pilot, Antall,” Jaffey said. “I thought you said saving those ships was the priority.”

“But—”

“If you show up and they’re about to tear apart one of your precious prototypes, do you want to be there to watch, or would you rather I was there to fly it out?”

“So not Antall, but you?” Lee said.

“That’s right. It’s Jaffey—J-A-F-F-E-Y, Glynis. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but I’m an officer and a pilot. Get that designation changed.”

It was only few minutes before the bots learned to recognize the newly designated rescue personnel. Once they did, Jaffey left the two engineers to struggle with the computer while she and the other pilots tried to save what was left of the ships. She walked among the scattered piles of scrapped hulls and dismantled bots, gathering information from the pilots and giving orders about which ships to save.

As she was about to step into her own craft, she noticed a man moving through the mess. There was a bot trailing behind him. He must have received a rescuer designation, but she didn’t recognize him. She jumped down from the ladder and jogged over to him.

“Stop there!” she yelled.

He glanced at her, hesitated, then turned to face her.

She walked up to him. “Who the hell are you, and where do you think you’re going?”

“Antonio Banderas, ma’am. I’m supposed to go check on the ships in the auxiliary hangars.”

“You can fly?”

He jerked his head once in a nod.

“And you were sent to rescue that ship?” She nodded toward the nearby bay.

“Yes.”

Jaffey drew her e-pistol and pointed it at his chest. “I don’t think so, boy.”

Antonio Banderas raised his hands, “Ma’am, there must be some mistake.”

Jaffey looked him over. “No mistake, boy. I know all three pilots who are authorized to fly that ship, and you aren’t one of them.”