Koontz, Dean - Soft come the Dragons Read online

  THE theater was a thunder-lizard's maw gorged with people, the seats jutting in rows of imitation teeth, casting black shadows in the flush of yellow half-light. The screen pulsed with colors, its rectangular orb awash with delusions. The two-dimensional inhabitants of that false, flat reality moved into view before a pounding blue-white surf behind the black and yellow and crimson credits that crawled like well-trained insects up the broad screen, always in perfect time with the tinny music.

  And, abruptly, the air was filled with deadly steel bees.

  Jacobs slipped from his seat, dragging Anne with him to crouch in the sheltered trough between the rows as darts rang against the metal backing of the chairs. He had his gun out, searching.

  Carefully, he raised his head and looked about the theater, open to attack, and spotted the blonde. She was fifteen rows back. She had stripped down the top of her organdy dress to free her breasts, marred by the thin, red surgical lines. Below each scar were six pinholes: dartgun barrels that punctured the skin like gigantic pores. Jacobs knew the breasts were hollow of flesh and contained, instead, dart clips and firing mechanisms packed in a silicone shell. The war had just begun and already he knew the basic mechanisms.

  He aimed.

  The blonde whirled—not out of malice, but in her preprogrammed fire-pattern—twelve barrels swinging in his direction. Jacobs depressed the trigger. The automatic burped out three fragmentation slugs. They tumbled the blonde backward in the dark, a final sputter of darts ringing from the backs of the seats in front of her . . .

  Ringing. . . .

  Ringing. . . . He woke to gloom.

  For several seconds, he was not certain whether reality was: A—the bed and the peaceful room clothed in gray light, or B—the half-darkened theater and the killerbot spewing thin death across the rows of patrons. He blinked his eyes, yawned, felt his ears pop. The ringing was the phone, not thousands of metal thorns ricocheting off theater seats. He reached out, answered it. "Lo?"

  "Phil?"

  "Hmmm?"

  It was Cullen. Reedy voice, whined words. He was second in command—first in command on this, Jacobs' one night off —on the Northside Sector antikillerbot force and was capable enough to keep things purring. Or should be. . . .

  "Seems like a bad one, Phil."

  "Where?" He fought to maintain drowsiness in hopes he might yet return to dream-filled unconsciousness. All sleep was dream-filled now days.

  "Medarts Building. Tenth floor. He's extremely well-armed. Darts and bullets."

  "Both?" That sent a shiver through him. It was difficult enough to implant a single weapon system into a human body. Even with the new neutral synthetic fibers that composed most of the mechanisms, the body fought the rejection of alien tissues. Supposedly, it would never be economically feasible to build more than one weapon into a killerbot. Recovery and healing time required for two systems was six times as long. Half a dozen single-system killerbots could be prepared and dispatched in the same time needed to finish one double-systems bot. But if Euro had come up with a way to make it pay off, a method of reducing healing time. . . .

  "Both," Cullen confirmed.

  "Maybe you have two of them trapped up there."

  "Could be. But I don't think so. Even assuming there are two up there, the battle pattern is unusual. They don't fire in a preprogrammed grid; they only fire when there is a target."

  "Impossible!" It had to be! If that killerbot were firing at targets instead of on a pattern, it meant the damn thing had some control of its finer reasoning powers. But if you gave a killerbot reasoning powers, it would soon reason that it had once been a human being, that it had been stripped of its humanity, that its mind had been bleached, its stomach or chest or thigh contaminated with a deadly weapons system. It would revolt, surely.

  "Just the same," Cullen said, anxiety riding his voice with keen spurs, "I think you had better come down here."

  He gave up trying to keep his mind clouded and his body next to sleep. "I'll be there as soon as I can." He placed the phone in its cradle and pushed himself to the edge of the bed. For the thousandth time, he reminded himself that the captain of an antikillerbot sector team had no real life of his own.

  He dressed, struggled into his raincoat, and swallowed a cup of hot coffee in three large gulps. Then he went into the bedroom to tell Anne he was leaving before he remembered that Anne was dead.

  Then he went and strapped on his gun.

  Outside, it was raining. Cold rain. It sliced the hairlike fog that wrapped the trees and spit-curled the darkness. It crawled his skin with aching dampness, chilled his bones to the marrow. There was no lightening. The blackness was impenetrable.

  He found the car in front of the house after first looking in the garage. The door swung open to the touch of his thumb as the lock recognized his print. Climbing in, he started the engine, swung across the narrow secondary road to the ramp of the autoway. Punching coordinates for the Medical Arts Building he leaned back, closing his eyes as the car maneuvered into the high-speed lane of the twelve lane autoway.

  He took control of the car at the bottom of the ramp and drove onto Sycamore Avenue. A hundred yards ahead, a barricade slashed the road, ringed with portable yellow lights that bathed the slick pavement in ugly amber flush. The reflection of the bulbs in the ice-slushed puddles, curling and wiggling, reminded him of a carnival midway after closing time on a damp Saturday night near the end of the season. Aching with the realization that carnivals were but another thing necessarily outlawed as protection against killerbot mass-murders, he pulled the car into the shadow of the portable barricade wall. Bursts of bullets rang across the roof and down the trunk until he was shielded by the metal partition.

  "Mr. Cullen said to send you right to the front," the officer said, opening the door for Jacobs. "You're going to have to dress for it, though."

  "How many dead?"

  "Fourteen civilians. Nine of us."

  "Nine!"

  The officer winced at the implied criticism. "Nothing could be done, Captain. It opened fire before rush hour. Senseless, that. The first part of the staggered rush would have been coming down this street fifteen minutes later. If it had waited, it could have killed five times fourteen. So we went in with dart-proofs, 'cause it was using darts. How could we guess it would have two weapon systems? A dart-proof suit is structured to stop needlepoint pressure. A bullet is something else again."

  Jacobs accepted a bullet-proof jacket from a second man, laced the front tightly shut and hung a heavy bib over the lacing. The officers helped him into a pair of bulky slacks of thick, cross-hatched nylon pressure resistants. "Tell Cullen I'm coming through," he said, shuffling uncomfortably toward the edge of the barricade, slipping the bulky nylon-steel mesh hood over his head.

  A hundred yards of bare street stretched between this barricade and the next. The second implacement was a portable metal well behind which Cullen and four officers crouched, watching the tenth floor of the Medarts Building through tiny lenses imbedded in a portable barrier. Cullen, radio to ear, looked back at the first barricade as he learned of Jacobs' arrival. A moment later, he and the other four men opened fire on the tenth floor window, providing Jacobs with a sort of cover.

  Jacobs shuffled around the barrier and began a labored progress across the no-man's land.

  Yellow light danced over his shoulders and shivered in the puddles, shattering like glass when he slopped the icy water with his feet.

  He was thirty yards along before the killerbot saw him and turned its attention from the men at the barricade to him. There was a tinkling of darts against the rough fiber of the suit. But they fell away like wind-driven dandelion puffs suddenly deprived of propulsion. Quickly sensing the uselessness of the dart weapon, the killerbot opened fire with its frag slugs.

  But that was impossible! Killerbots couldn't reason like that! If they could, they certainly would revolt at having been used for disposal weapon carriers. Take a man; bleach his brain; t
hrow away his memory, crumpled and useless; program him with basic human habits and an automatic, unsensing minor vocabulary; program him with a destruction mission; turn him loose. That is a killerbot. It can't reason in the heat of battle. Or never had been able to before. . . .

  The bullets weren't penetrating the heavy armor, but they rained down too fast to let him walk a straight line to the front barricade. It was like walking in a raging wind, a spurting progress, unsteady and unsure.

  For a short moment, the bullets stopped—Jacobs doubled his efforts and shuffled faster, passing the halfway mark.

  Kack-ack-ack! A fantastic barrage of shells tore against his chest, toppling him. The suit still held, but he had had the wind knocked from him. He lay very still, choking on the stale air that penetrated the thin eye slits of the hood, his stomach throbbing with protest, his lungs afire with the need for oxygen. Slowly, he forced the pain from his chest and regained a normal—if somewhat speeded—breathing pattern. Then he concentrated on appearing dead.

  Bullets skipped over the pavement, ricocheted from his suit. The ice water shimmered with the rippled wakes of the shells. Finally, the killerbot stopped firing. Jacobs lay still, thankful that the bulk of the suit concealed the rise and fall of the rib cage. Several minutes passed. The killerbot opened up again for thirty seconds, then stopped again. Time crawled by unbearably slow. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen. Jacobs thought it might be safe now. He licked his lips of the sweat that had trickled down his face, tasted the salty fluid on his tongue. It would take him the best part of a minute to gain his feet, considering the weight of the bullet-proof garments. He would just have to hope that the killerbot would not be watching him, would not see him until he had gained at least ten yards. Sucking in breath, he pushed up with his hands. . . .

  He was lucky. Apparently, the killerbot had shifted its attention back to the men at the front barricade. He found his feet, wiggled on weak, shaky legs. That was not good. He would have to will away any weakness until he had reached the comparative safety of the walls ahead. Laboriously, he dragged himself along. He had gone another thirty yards before the killerbot caught the movement and opened with heavy frag slug fire.

  The slight downward trend in the street had helped him. He rolled, bullets pinging from the pavement on all sides.

  Abruptly, the thudding of shells against his fibrous armor ceased. Hands groped for him, pulled off his hood. He blinked his eyes, looked up into Cullen's thin, young face, and smiled. "Thanks."

  "I thought you were dead!"

  "So did it," he stopped grinning. "What's the situation?" "I think it's going to be a front-on attack. Any normal killerbot would have exposed itself to our fire by now. It is cunning. And I think it must have some sort of shield."

  "They wouldn't waste a shield on a killerbot!" Jacobs said, mentally tabulating the high cost of manufacturing and maintaining a shield projector. They were even too expensive for normal police work.

  "Just the same—"

  "Well, if we have to initiate a frontal, we might as well start," Jacobs said, taking command of his suit. Cullen sighed audibly with the realization that the hot potato had just changed hands for the last time that night. Anything went wrong after this, Jacobs would carry the blame.

  "What first, Phil?"

  Jacobs put his eye to one of the tiny lenses, surveyed the wide panorama it gave him. "We can't wheel the shield up to the front door. When we get directly under him, he could just shoot down and pick us off. The door is closed. I suspect it may also be locked. We might all get cut down trying to blow it."

  "Now what?"

  Jacobs kept his eye to the lens. The illusion of a rain-soaked, empty midway still clung to him. The yellow light gleamed starkly on the black street. For a moment, he thought he could see the carousel with its garishly painted horses. Perched on the shoulders of the grinning beast was a small, dark-haired boy. Kenny, he whispered. And the illusion shattered, melted back into the light-rimmed puddles. "Call back to the first barricade for a demolition packet. Well move this barrier along to the side of the building. There is bound to be another doorway. We'll blast our way in and go up and take him."

  Cullen looked dubious. But having no plan to offer, he called the barricade officer and requested a demolition packet. Ten minutes later, the suitcase came spinning across the street in their direction. It slid behind the front barrier, right into Cullen's hands.

  Jacobs unlatched it, checked out the contents. Everything was there. "Okay," he said, biting his lip for a second as if to convince himself that he was in a real situation and not a dream. "Let's start rolling the wall. Over there. Bring it around flush with that corner, then beat it into the alleyway and find a door. We can't waste time. If we do, it may be waiting on the other side of the door when we open it."

  When the detonator blew, the door was ripped from its hinges and propelled across the alley, clattering against the opposite wall, bouncing back and forth finally settling to the pavement, like a spinning penny eventually teeters to the top of the game table.

  Jacobs led the others into the building, holding his breath through the thick, acrid smoke, careful not to touch the steaming metal of the door frame. Inside, he ordered Officer Talmadge and Officer Cork to carry their flashlamps on half beam. When Cork finally fumbled his lamp on and Talmadge augmented it with his, they found they were indeed in a storage room. Moments later, they found the doorway into the rest of the building. It was locked; but flimsy. There was no need for explosives. Jacobs braced himself against the frame, smashed a foot into it. Twice. Again. Four times. The wood splintered around the hinges. He kicked it again. The door tore free, swung aside.

  "Tenth floor," Cullen said.

  "My brother-in-law works here," Talmadge said. "I've been here a few times."

  "Lead then," Jacobs said.

  Holding his lamp up to shoulder level like a trembling child investigating a haunted house, he moved forward, the rest strung out behind him, guns drawn.

  "Not the elevator," Jacobs hissed as they threaded their way down a dark hall. "That will tell it where we are."

  "The stairs are this way," Talmadge said, turning right into a side corridor and stopping. "Maybe we should put lights at quarter power, Captain."

  "Quarter power, then," he snapped.

  The light receded. Darkness drifted closer.

  Quietly, quietly, they ascended the stairs. They must make no sound now. If this killerbot could reason and act in logical, strategic form, it was a newer, more dangerous killerbot. It would know they had broken in. It would not be blindly firing at an empty street. It would be hunting for them.

  He shivered. It would be hunting for them.

  Although they expected to meet it at every landing, around every corner in the staircase, they climbed the twenty flights without incident. At the tenth floor, Talmadge pushed open the double glass doors into the main hallway . . .

  . . . and was torn up the middle by fifty or more darts.

  He didn't even have time to scream.

  Swallowing hard, Jacobs blasted the door, rolled through the gaping hole where the door had been, gun out and firing to the left. Frag slugs whined off the walls, shattered windows at the far end of the corridor. But they didn't bring down the killerbot, for the killerbot had disappeared.

  Jacobs was so tense that it seemed his scalp would split open, his skull crack to let out the pressure his whirling mind was accumulating. And he knew that if he was that tense the rest of them were even closer to blowing their tops. They had never had any experience with a killerbot that tried to protect itself. From the first day that Euro had turned killerbots loose on Nortamer, they had been stupid, suicidal units that stood and fired until cut down themselves. Or until their weapons systems ran out of ammunition. They were not detectable, even by X-ray, for what metal they did contain in their flesh was shielded in silicone, plastic, nylon mesh that effectively rendered X-ray useless, They had many advantages as weapons of war, but they didn't
have real intelligence. It had always been a matter of standing out of the programmed fire pattern and cutting the human-machine to pieces. This one was different, and this one seemed the turning point of the war.

  They had searched all rooms in this wing, their fingers aching with the weight of their guns, their eyes weary with squinting, blurred with trying to sort out the shadows ahead and make them resolve into a human form, something, anything to shoot at. They turned the corner into another corridor, stepping into the killerbot's line of fire. . . .

  Officer Cork screamed a gurgling scream, pitched forward, his head prickled with thorns as if he had just fought his way through a garden of live and vicious roses. Officer Drennings did not have a chance to scream; the darts tore out his throat first.

  "Fall back!" Jacobs shouted.

  He slipped into the safe corridor. If the killerbot tried to come around, he would blast it open in a second. Cullen and Minter were beside him, panting. "God," Minter was saying over and over. Over and over, low and soft and meaninglessly.

  It is hunting for us, Jacobs thought.

  Their lamps had been smashed by darts. There was only darkness now, thick and all pervading. Their eyes were used to the gloom, somewhat, but everywhere there were dense shadows that seemed to move.

  The hall was quiet.

  To hell with this pessimism! They were three, well-trained police officers. That killerbot, no matter how advanced, was only one. Numerically, they had it cornered. They just had to move with more caution, stop blundering around as if it were a normal killerbot. "Come on," he whispered to Cullen and Minter. "And be careful."