Dante

  Anton pulls out a plastic barrel small enough to fit in his hand and pushes a button with his thumb. Sudden bubbles pour out of it and fill our wake. Anton pulls a second barrel and starts it up as well.

  The drones behind us start darting aside as the bubbles approached. Anton loops the two mini-barrels over his headrest with plastic straps attached to each and goes back to digging in his box.

  The drones evade the bubble bath, and start catching up.

  “Those are…” Christopher begins.

  “Bubble barrels.” Anton sounds distracted. He tosses handfuls of something flat over his shoulder, and a shower of large, ornate cards spins through the air behind us. “Magician’s cards.” He keeps tossing. “Tarot cards. Baseball cards.” Drones behind start taking hits, sputtering, spinning, falling and sometimes exploding as they do so.

  Anton throws another handful of what looks like dull, tiny caltrops. “Game of jacks.” Tiny clear spheres followed. “Game of marbles.” At almost 200 miles-per-hour, they hit like shrapnel. Then more drones go off in a string of explosions, their pieces hitting exactly like shrapnel.

  And pinging the back of the Corvette, but at least the exploding pieces aren’t catching up with us as we accelerate away.

  The detonations continue, just like falling dominoes if they were made of dynamite.

  Anton yanks a wooden basket out of the cardboard box and shakes it vigorously. Tiny birthday balloons suddenly inflate and begin showering out of its top, leaving a trail of party favors in our wake like a floating obstacle course. The wind whips the basket out of his hands, the handle catching on the propellor of a small, Shahed-style drone. The whirling blades chop the wood to pieces while snapping themselves off, leaving the hulking drone to slide into the forest floor behind us with a resounding crunch. Followed by a much more resounding Boom just as we put a few trees between us and the point of impact.

  Anton pulls one last pair of objects out of the box, then tosses the box itself at the closest quadcopter. The cardboard drops straight over it and tumbles with the small drone inside until, with a muffled boom, it blows behind us and then blows up.

  And that… seems to be the last of them. For now.

  Anton’s toyshop knows how to party.

  Anton half-raises what looks like slingshot, then lowers it as nothing else follows us down the smoldering trail. Not yet, anyway.

  They couldn’t catch up, I think. But they… “They were herding us,” I announce.

  “Almost out!” Andrea calls back. “Once we’re clear, we’ll gun the engines on the road and break away. We can go full out and still stay below treetop for miles. Greywood’s not far, and then we’ll hit Waycross.”

  Our vehicles are roaring up into full acceleration when we hit the last clearing, a two-lane highway running along the far side of it.

  Our escape route’s in clear view.

  And our enemies are waiting.

  The giant knights are standing there, each just behind the trunk of a massive tree. And the lead one raises his gauntlet with its glowing ruby towards the skycycle.

  The crimson beam slices out in a level arc, slicing straight for us. An incandescent bar of plasma from the second knight’s gauntlet lashes out at Anton and Christopher in the Corvette, but they trail behind, and I struggle to see their fate as everything happens at once.

  Andrea drops low and skids sideways just above the ground as the laser cuts above us, and shoves her left fist forward. The feather blade reappears, spins in its circle of afterimage duplicates, and leaves her seven-foot-wide shield in front of the cycle. Giving us cover.

  The shield blazes silver and crimson where the light touches it. The laser slashes across, perhaps unsteady, perhaps seeking weak points. Then it focuses on a spot directly in line with Andrea’s heart, and stays there while all the graphene blades begin to glow red with molten heat.

  Andrea points the bike straight at the knight and hits the accelerator. We shoot for the massive steel soldier like a runaway rocket. Which, of course, we are.

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  “Jump!” she shouts back at me.

  I jump, and so does she. So does the knight, or rather, it lurches off its feet as the skycycle hammers into it.

  Andrea and I hit the ground rolling and come to a halt even as the first knight crashes to the ground. We crouch low behind an old fallen tree trunk, out of sight as the machine falls with the cycle driven into its breastplate.

  The skycycle detonates in its chest like a dozen thunderbolts exploding from the same point simultaneously. Followed by a dozen more, a heartbeat later.

  A golden beam lashes out towards the other side of the glade, answered by a white-hot bar of energy striking from the opposite direction. I glance over the top of the trunk, my soft, photoreactive contacts going silver to dim the lights.

  And it is a lightshow. The second knight is firing an intense column of golden energy at the others but Christopher – Stormforge – has a huge gauntlet of his own on his right hand and is firing an incandescent beam in return. Chris and Anton are both out of the Corvette now, facing down the giant knight afoot.

  The knight’s golden power seems to strike an invisible hemisphere in front of Stormforge. His assault falls short of Christopher with Anton standing just behind, while Stormforge’s beam tears relentlessly into their armored foe. Plasma, I guess. And a magnetic field strong enough to push it back. Good thing my bag and phone covers are Faraday cages.

  The final knight’s energy finally sputters and winks out as Stormforge tears through his plating and burns off his weapon arm. Focused fire rends the rest of it relentlessly, and in less than a minute, the machine is scrap.

  And it is a machine, or what’s left of one. Both it and the other knight show plenty of shattered parts but no pilots, not even tissue for some kind of cyborg. In fact, the machinery inside looks almost like…

  “Clockwork,” Christopher breaths in wonder, the plasma subsiding from his gauntlet. He’s sweating profusely, and a mix of Arctic air and furnace heat flows from his direction, waves freezing and scorching us in turn, even at this distance. Chris stares into the broken armor of the second fallen knight, and at the elaborate gears within, large, small and almost infinitesimal.

  “Like Babbage’s calculating engine,” Andrea remarks.

  “But using more than Lovelace’s math,” Anton remarks, crouching down to peer inside. “If this thing really was an AI running on steampunk gears instead of circuits and chips. No ordinary algorithms would…” He stops speaking, and stares intensely into the ruins of the machine.

  “What is this thing?” I ask.

  “Above our paygrade.” Anton straightens up and begins looking around the scorched clearing. The scent of scored metal and torched saplings fills the air, or at least our nostrils.

  “We don’t get paid,” Christopher points out.

  “You see my point,” Anton shoots back.

  Andrea shakes her head. “If these are purely mechanical AI, someone spent a great deal of effort making an incredibly outdated technology work… and then sent them into combat.”

  “Why?” I ask.

  “No data, no clue. That’s why it’s above our paygrade. That, and not being paid in the first place,” Anton explains.

  “There are better ways to handle EMPs,” Christopher notes. “Maybe they were looking for something that couldn’t be hacked?”

  “Or something that could,” Andrea says, reaching a gloved hand into the helmet “skull” of the second knight. She pulls out a small glowing purple vial and stares into it.

  “Wait, are those—?” Christopher begins.

  “Particles with extreme… sensitivity?” Andrea nods. “They might just.”

  “We’ve only got, what, three of those? Where did they get…?” Chris shakes his head. “Then the knightdrones…” He moves to the first knight and peered into its cracked helm.

  “Might have been steered. Without signals.” She pulls out a smartphone, scans the vial, and then sets it on the ground.

  “What?” I ask.

  “Something hypothetical,” Christopher tips back the helm, and gazes at a similar, broken vial in its depths. “Okay, you’ve pulled that one and this one’s shattered.” He’s moving his own smartphone over the knight’s remains. “So if they’re being used as a remote interface from… somewhere, they won’t be following without a backup link, even if they can self-repair.”

  Andrea turns toward me. “This is more Hammersmith’s research than ours. Let’s just say if you can detect particles that can’t be blocked by normal means, you can use them for unblockable signals.”

  “Anywhere within half a light second. Or more, if your AIs don’t need handholding.”

  Anton snorts. “You two are dancing around the point again.” He’s checking the Corvette hovercar, and the displays flashing in what looks like a running internal diagnostic. He leans in, taps the dash and nods at whatever he saw there.

  I look at him.

  “They’re skipping past the real problem,” Anton elaborates with a shrug as he straightens up. “Some of what Hammersmith did was psi-reactive enough it could be used to puppeteer a drone. Especially something humanoid with some kind of on-board processing. Might not be perfect – she still used electricity as the interface between the particle receptors and the machine, so who knows how they’re doing it. And we never could test the psi thing properly.”

  “Not without a verified psi. Or at least one we could trust.” Christopher nods, tipping his head to one side towards a knight. “But if someone did…”

  “They could be jumping dimensions,” Andrea finishes.

  “Dimensions,” I say, starting to laugh. I stop myself, looking at their expressions. “You’re not kidding?”

  “Still officially hypothetical,” Christopher says.

  Anton sighs. “But not really. And probably,” he indicates the knights, “not at all… now.”

  Andrea agrees. “We’ll report this, and come back with scanners. Or just send a scanning drone, really.”

  “You’ll come back with nothing,” a cold voice says from the forest’s shadows.

  We all turn in that direction. And see nothing.

  Anton blinks. “Okay, then. We won’t come back.” He keeps staring into the shadows. “How ‘bout we all pile into ‘Vette and go?” Anton says to the others without turning. “We can fit if you’re friendly.”

  Christopher has his gauntlet pointed into the woods. “Solid plan.” He sidesteps towards the car.

  “I’ll drive,” Andrea agrees, jingling keys as she edges that direction.

  “Shotgun,” I remark, taking a slow step back.

  The forest darkens, especially in the direction we’re still facing.

  And a sigh echoes out of it. “I didn’t say you were leaving, either.” A man steps out of the darkness.

  “Who are you?” I ask. “And why are you after us?” My gaze slides off the man. Dark clothes, dark hair, regretful eyes. And a glistening black orb held in his right hand.

  The stranger comes into the light. And brings the shadows with him. “We are all after you, Dante Alistaire. You, and your three new friends, and more besides.”

  “What do you want?” Andrea demands.

  “More than you can presently give.”

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