Messiah by S. Andrew Swann Page B

them, where the missile had landed.
    In front of them was a new crater blown clear of most rubble. Kugara saw the twitching remains of two more of the HK drones on the edge of the crater, one only a few meters away.
    “What’s the matter?” Parvi asked
    “That blast removed all the landmarks,” he told them, “I don’t know where the safe corridor is anymore.”
    “The blast should have cleared the mines,” Parvi said.
    “Look around,” Kugara said.
    After a moment, she said, “Oh.”
    “We have to go back—”
    Kugara grabbed his shoulder before he walked past her. “Not so fast.”
    “What do you want?” he said, “There are six of those things waiting for anything to take a step off the path.”
    “We got a shotgun,” she said.
    “You start firing that thing, they’ll swarm you.”
    “Even in the safe zone?”
    “It’d be a little useless if they allowed a hostile to randomly stroll into a safe area and start shooting.”
    Kugara shook her head and looked at the floating death machines.
    Parvi asked her, “Do you have an idea?”
    “They won’t shoot each other,” she said.
    “What are you talking about?” the guard asked.
    Kugara didn’t pay attention to him. “They’re cheap commercial units, and I see two or three manufacturers. They must be relying on transponders to ID each other . . .”
    “What are you thinking?” Parvi asked as Kugara handed her the shotgun.
    Kugara smiled grimly at her. “I’m going to get us a transponder.” She bent down and picked up a large chunk of broken ferrocrete and hefted it in her hand. She looked at their guide and asked, “Before I go any farther, I don’t suppose they issued you with an ID chip that would get you past these things?”
    “No. The supply crew gets them, but not the guards, in case the prisoners— what are you doing? ”
    Kugara chucked the chunk of ferrocrete in a lazy underhand arc in front of the nearest robot. “I’m testing a theory,” she whispered. The robot didn’t fire on the rock, or her. Whatever threat algorithms it possessed didn’t parse the rock as a problem. It did, however, follow the moving object with its sensors and track it with its cannon.
    “Hopefully, that’s good enough.” She turned back to their guide, who stared after her throw as if he expected the rock to explode. “Okay, now tell me, if we were going straight, how much farther were we going to go before we turned again?”
    “What?”
    “How much farther—”
    “I told you, the landmarks are gone! ”
    “Guess, damn it, before another stray missile lands on us!”
    He shook his head and said, “Four, five meters?”
    Kugara stepped out over the edge of the crater, in a straight line. She turned back to the others behind her. “I’m going to need a distraction. When I call out, all of you throw chunks of rubble past the machines, that way—” she pointed away from the crater.
    Parvi glanced from her to the twitching wreckage of the nearer of the two damaged HK drones. “What makes you think the transponder is still working on that thing?”
    “I’m guessing,” Kugara said as she edged farther into the crater, two, three meters, until she was as close as she was going to get to the wreck. Another ten meters to clear. She took a few deep breaths. The transponder was probably well sealed and on its own redundant power supply. It was a piece of hardware you didn’t want to fail in the field. And the way the thing was twitching, the other robots would have been paying it some attention if its transponder were dead.
    But still . . .
    “ Now! ” she yelled at the others.
    She launched herself in a sprint to the twitching wreckage, putting everything she had in an all-out push to get to the thing in the fraction of a second the flying rubble bought her. If any of them could make it ...
    Something tore though the dirt by her feet and she leaped the last two meters, landing on top of the downed machine.
    She sucked in shuddering