Sword of Minerva (The Guild Wars Book 10) by Mark Wandrey (good books to read for teens txt) 📗

of sparks, and a little constellation of spalled material flew away, but the robot’s armor turned the blow. Rick could see a nasty gouge a couple millimeters deep. Fucker’s tough, too!

He pulled his arm in and flicked it out again. The blade retracted and extended, cleaning the edge, which had surely been dulled by the impact. The Peacekeeper used that moment to produce three more tentacles and wrapped Rick from head to waist, pinning both arms at his sides. The strength of the Peacekeeper as the arms constricted was overwhelming.

Rick strained, and the tentacles creaked as the metal fatigued. Still, they held. The Peacekeeper pulled Rick sideways, moving him until his face was in line with the laser collimator. Oh, shit! With his arms pinned at his sides, unable to activate the lasers or reach for his gun, there wasn’t much he could do to shield himself.

His entire being was immersed in flaming agony so bad that he thought the Peacekeeper had cut him in half. All he wanted was for it to STOP! Then, just as fast as it had begun, it ended. He was spinning around in a maelstrom of sparking, smoking, burning components. He blinked inside his helmet.

“Uhm, what just happened?”

The memory of Sato working on him back aboard Vestoon floated to the top of his pain-fogged mind. It was just after the shield generator was installed, and Sato was warning him about using it, saying the experience would be painful. His exact words had been, “In fact, it’ll hurt like hell, because I can’t get the bios to properly disable the pain receptors.”

“Yeah, I’d say that was hurting like hell.”

There was no lasting effect, though, except Rick’s memory of the pain. He wondered if this was how Paul had felt after the Gom Jabbar, smiling a little at the memory of a movie he’d watched with Jim. Rick wished he could see better through the cloud of debris, and an IR flood on his helmet bathed the hallway, allowing him more visibility. I think I’m figuring it out.

The Peacekeeper was still there, but now in two principal parts. It looked like the entire front of the bot, the part Rick had been held against, had had a massive, concave chunk sliced out of it. He stared in disbelief.

He dug into his pinplants for information on shields and quickly gave up when he found a few million pages of data to surf through. They were very complicated. Something about the nuclear strong force allowed them to work, and quantum instabilities? The one thing he understood was regarding their use. “No matter what, do not be in the middle of the field-effect zone when a shield is energized. Inside or outside is safe, but the event horizon of the shield field effect can generate a transient sheering effect of more than a thousand gravities.”

“I can see how that could be handy,” he said, then remembered that you had to be at exactly the right distance. Or, in the case of the Peacekeeper, overlapping it. He wondered, if he held his arm out, if the damned thing would chop it off? There might have been safeties against it before he’d cut the pinplants out of the process. His regret over severing the link was rapidly growing.

He spent another minute on non-autonomous functions. He had several examples now, including the arm blade and the shield. He practiced the blade a couple of times, with the added benefit of sharpening it. He knew after a few thousand in-out cycles the blade would be deteriorated. That wasn’t really a danger right then. He was also confident he could activate the shield. After his last experience, he didn’t practice that. This left his sidearm, and the lasers.

Rick concentrated on drawing the machine pistol and reached for it. The holster snapped open just in time for him to snatch the weapon. Yes! He concentrated on holstering it, and the process reversed. “Okay, here we go,” he said, raised an arm at a chunk of the still sparking Peacekeeper corpse and thought; Full power! A targeting reticle appeared in his vision. He looked at the center of the ruined bot and thought FIRE! A laser slashed into the box, sending more sparks and molten globs of armor.

He sighed. At least if he came upon another of those things he could fight it on its own terms, even though he was still short part of a foot. One last thing. He used the retractable blade to cut into the dead Peacekeeper, and, locating a power cell, he recharged with it. The cell’s capacity was impressive, too. Rick locked it to his thigh’s recharge point, noting that the air pressure was slowly falling. Their battle had compromised a seal. No matter. He resumed his quest to find Sato, ready for anything now. At least, so he thought.

He opened a door, overriding the mechanism that would have stopped him because of the growing pressure difference. It swung inward with a resounding bang, propelled by the pressure difference. Inside were three Peacekeepers.

“Oh, fuck,” Rick said as they started to turn. He might be able to get one of them with his lasers, maybe two. No way he could take all three. He decided on a more expedient solution. Rick tossed both his remaining grenades in the room, used his considerable strength to slam the door closed, and spot welded it with an arm laser. The grenades went off in the confined space, blowing the door off in his face, and slamming him into the opposite wall.

 * * *

Sato felt he was ready. He’d given Dakkar as much time as he could afford. The Flatar would be back before long, too. He needed to act now, so he floated over to the silently waiting Peacekeeper bot. It didn’t respond to his approach, as he knew it wouldn’t. The machines were powerful, yet