Eva scowled. “Hell no. I’m not giving up that easily, and neither are you.” She fired again, barely missing Jei, whose robot dog had turned into a hoverboard for him to float around on. He was picking off the various auto-turrets attached to the roofs of the pods, which also kept them focused on him instead of the rest of the team.
“Maybe if you didn’t distract the guy doing the heavy brain lifting?” Pink asked, taking her own shot at one of the robotic creatures farther away.
“You could stop talking completely,” Nara added. She stood in front of Sapri, shielding him with her armor.
Eva rolled her eyes and continued scanning the sky for targets. Bad enough that all the lab pods had been under lockdown as soon as they climbed out of that claustrophobic fish mouth, the resistance also hadn’t been aware that the whole place would be swarming with robot guards. Damaal had apparently started field-testing the Pod Pals’ more violent applications, and what better place than right where the prototypes were being developed?
Sapri and a few other xana were trying to deactivate the shields on the first pod while everyone else waited in the access pipe underwater. Except Eva’s team, which she had insisted would come along as protection if nothing else, so they’d be able to go after Josh as soon as the opportunity presented itself.
Then again, Eva hated waiting for opportunity to knock. She was more prone to busting down the door.
“We need a distraction,” Eva said.
“Our Lady, you physically can’t shut your mouth, can you?” Nara asked, idly firing her plasma cannon at a swooping Pod Pal.
Eva ignored the comment and spoke to Sue over helmet comms. “You’ve taken these robots apart and messed with their programming. Anything you can do to them to make them stop attacking?”
Sue was hunkered down inside an isosphere with her backpack full of her own bots, some of which had escaped to crawl over her and make unhappy shrieking noises. “I don’t know if these are networked with each other, but they should all be connected to a single control interface,” she said. “If I could get into the updater, I might be able to push out something to all the robots simultaneously, but otherwise I can only try to mess with one at a time.”
“Great, start messing,” Eva said.
A Pod Pal like a giant insect with drill legs shot an energy dart at her, which she avoided by throwing herself into a shoulder roll. Unfortunately, she’d overestimated how much roof she had left, and ended up careening over the side. She twisted and activated her gravboots, which pulled her toward the bottom of the pod, sticking her there upside-down. She cussed and started climbing back up, doing the occasional stomach crunch to avoid another shot from the same robot. By the time she got back to the others, any patience she’d been cultivating had shriveled up like an unwatered plant.
Jei swooped down on his dog-bot, hovering in front of Sapri. “Additional enemies are being deployed from the platform near the top of the cliff. A small gap in the shields opens each time, and remains open for a few seconds.”
“Perhaps we can use that,” Sapri replied, emanating a sharp spike of hope. “If you can deliver one of the expanding agents to that area, we can at least partially damage their facilities before retreating.”
Jei nodded and proceeded to fly down to where the saboteurs were hiding. Eva, meanwhile, scowled more deeply. That wouldn’t get them any closer to Josh, who could be in any one of these buildings—or none of them, if Damaal had relocated him for some reason.
Given their proximity, Sue could try to ping him. It was a calculated risk: they had no way of knowing how he would react, it might get caught in whatever surveillance was likely monitoring pings, and it would mean potentially giving up whatever anonymity they were able to maintain during this operation. But if they didn’t do something now, they might never get another chance.
“I think I got one!” Sue said, and sure enough, a Pod Pal that was mostly mouth and wings had stopped trying to bite one of the xana. Within moments it emitted a painful shriek and then flapped away toward the top of the cliff.
“What did you do?” Eva asked.
“Every Pod Pal is programmed to act like the Attuned it’s based on when it’s in natural mode,” Sue explained. “Unless it’s given direct orders to attack or defend or whatever. So I put it in natural mode and turned off remote access. Whoever wants to reprogram it will have to catch it first.” She sounded pleased with herself, and Eva had to admit she was impressed.
“Keep doing that, then,” Eva said. She opened a private comms channel and took a deep breath. “Sue, I need you to ping Josh and tell him you’re here.”
“Rusty buckets!” Sue exclaimed. “Of course, why didn’t I think of that?” She tried to slap her own forehead but hit her isohelmet instead, scattering some of her bots in the process.
“See if you can figure out where he is,” Eva continued. “And if he can lower the shields to that pod so we can get in.”
Another wave of robot Attuned arrived. Some of the larger flying varieties carried smaller nonflying ones, which they deposited on the lab pod before taking to the skies again. Two-legged and four-legged critters launched themselves at the xana still trying frantically to bring down the shields, so Nara and Eva teamed up to fend them off, Nara with her arm cannon and suit-augmented strength, and Eva with her sonic knuckles. Pink continued to pick off distant ones with her sniper rifle, each shot carefully aimed and timed so as not to be wasted.
“How many you take down so far, Innocente?” Nara asked.
“You think I’m counting, mija?” Eva replied, punching a spiky, rat-looking bot.
Nara shrugged. “My suit does it automatically.” She paused. “And I’m older than you.”
“Bueno, sorry vieja.” Eva dodged a fireball from one of the flying todyk bots. She shot back at it and missed, hissing in frustration. They were running out of time, and the damn shields were still up on this very first pod, with another dozen to go.
“He’s here!” Sue shouted, thankfully on the private comms channel. Eva’s skin went briefly cold with relief.
“Josh? Where?” Eva asked.
“On the top platform, with all the Pod Pals. He can let us in if we go up there, but we have to go without the resistance.”
Me cago en diez, Eva thought. Sure, in theory the resistance had agreed to bring them along because Eva had gotten them the psychic imprints they wanted, so her obligation to them was minimal since she’d held up her end of their original bargain. But could she really accomplish her mission knowing she’d left them here with virtually no hope of success? Maybe she could do something once she got up there, got in past the shields, but what? And how would she even get all the way to the top of the cliff without help?
Jei reappeared with one of the demolition devices, a cylinder as wide as his arm cannon with a single large button on the top. “It will take me some time to reach the platform, but with luck I will be able to react quickly enough after a robot is launched to place this inside,” he said. “I may even be able to enter myself if a large enough unit is dispatched.”
“May the Light go with you,” Sapri said, his psychic emanation somber. “We should be able to open this shield soon, but already we have little hope of achieving all our aims. We must be content to do what is within our power and escape to continue the fight another cycle.”