A Fistful of Trouble (Outlaws of the Galaxy Book 2), Paul Tomlinson [bts books to read .txt] 📗

“Here they go,” Danny said.

The robots were shaking. You could hear it before you could see it. It sounded like the lid rattling on a boiling pot, but there was no steam coming out of their joints. The shaking became more pronounced and the robots bobbed up and down, as if they were about to start dancing or running on the spot. The sound was more like someone shaking two-dozen sacks of metal washers. It would be great if they just vibrated themselves into piles of spare parts, but I didn’t think the chances of that were high.

Arms bent at the elbows and pumped up and down like pistons. Feet left the ground and they were pogoing up and down. It should have seemed comical, but it didn’t. This wasn’t like Floyd’s dance in the repair shop. It was more like a war dance. Or a ritual to summon some kind of techno-demon.

The robots began making a sound. It started low, a dull rumble from their voice boxes that you could feel in your chest. Over the top of this came a sort of trilling and a flapping sound, like nothing I’d heard before – part digital and part organic. It was the sort of sound nightmares make. Maybe it was something the soldiers had in their arsenal to unsettle their enemies.

And then silence and stillness. The robots became statues again. They fell to the ground and lay there. Nothing moved. It looked like the berserking had exhausted them. What it really meant was that their systems had tripped a failsafe and shut down, triggering diagnostic checks and the clean reboot. Time for the sneaky humans to do their thing.

I had Floyd’s cannon. It was wired up to the Trekker’s batteries so that I would have more than a single shot this time. In theory, I could keep firing the thing all day, as long as I didn’t want to make any long journeys straight after. There were two downsides to this set-up. First, the cannon was connected to the Trekker by two thick insulated cables. And secondly, the recoil from every shot of the cannon was going to be enough to knock me off my feet. The only thing I could do to deal with this was press my back up against the side of the Trekker and brace myself. It was still going to hurt.

The Trekker rolled down onto the battlefield with me walking alongside it. A few of the Colonel’s men reached for their weapons but stopped when they saw me holding the cannon. I don’t think it was me they were impressed by. They backed away muttering, wondering what we were planning.

I knew the cannon could destroy an M-9000 – I’d demonstrated this the first time I’d met one outside Happy Hawkins’ truck. As with all robots, their joints were the most vulnerable point – especially the neck and abdomen.

The robots were all lying on the ground in semi-foetal positions. They didn’t look nearly as threatening as they had earlier. They looked like they were sleeping. Defenceless. I almost felt guilty about shooting them. Almost. I had to bag as many of them as I could before they woke up. I didn’t have much time. I wasn’t supposed to be doing this alone. Floyd’s cannon was only supposed to be the back-up gun. Harmony had gone for the main weapon. Allegedly.

I pressed my thumb on the black stud and the cannon made its charging-up whine. As soon as its indicator glowed green, I pointed it and hit the trigger. The recoil slammed me backwards, jarring my shoulder, and the heat from the blast singed my hair. But the advantage of an almost point-blank shot was that the robot’s guts exploded and caught fire. One down, twenty-four to go, if you included Red-Stripe.

Having your brain in your head makes you vulnerable as a soldier. Robots carried theirs in an armour-plated chest cavity. They didn’t need that space for heart and lungs. A head-shot will take out a robot’s primary visual sensors, but it won’t completely incapacitate it. You could only do serious damage by hitting them in the thorax. You could make the kill-shot from several angles, depending on which of their vulnerable joints you targeted. I tried out some of the options on the first four robots I blasted.

I slapped the side of the Trekker to get Danny to drive it forwards slowly so I could get close to the next pair of targets. I needed to pick up the pace if I wanted to be done before the robots woke. I wasn’t sure how much time I had, but it couldn’t be more than five minutes. That meant hitting four or five robots a minute. I didn’t think I was going to make it.

If Floyd had been wielding the cannon, we would have made better progress. Sacrificing the big blue robot in the house had been a calculated risk and I was beginning to think I’d made a mistake. And it wasn’t the only one I’d made.

My next shot glanced off the robot’s casing and burnt an eight-foot stripe across the grass. A second blast did the job, but it was more time wasted. I couldn’t afford multiple shots, each one had to count.

Seven robots down and I was beginning to feel the toll from the cannon’s recoil. My shoulders and hips were bruised and aching. The kickback from one shot had smashed my elbow back into the Trekker so hard that my fingers had gone numb and I’d almost dropped the cannon.

“Want to change places?” Danny asked, leaning out of the window.

“We don’t have time. Keep going.”

The ninth M-9000 again took two shots. I’m not sure if I imagined it, but I thought I saw the robot move before I fired the second blast.

“We’re almost out of time,” I said. I hadn’t even done half the job.

Danny stopped the Trekker and jumped out. “Let me take a turn.”

“They’re waking up,” I said, nodding towards