the roof of a nearby house and unsling his sniper rifle. He lay flat on his belly, peeking over the roof crest, staring through his powerful scope.
“Do you see it?” I asked nearly subaudibly.
“Yeah,” he said, just as quiet.
“And?”
“And I count at least four bots lying in wait in different positions around the depot.”
“Facets?”
“Can’t see their eyes.”
“We should have brought the jammer,” I said.
“Kids needed it more than we do.”
“Fair point. How should we play this?”
“The four bots are in pairs. We have to assume there are at least two more inside the depot operations building opposite the lot, waiting, and maybe more that I can’t see.”
“That’s an awful lot of manpower to guard buses they could have just sabotaged.”
“Those buses could be useful to the war effort,” he said. “So maybe six is all they’ve got.”
“Can you hit them from up there?”
“These four, yeah.”
I powered up my Wi-Fi and broadcast a local short-range hotspot. “Direct connect with me. Let me see.”
He connected to my hotspot and I began downloading his visual feed. The depot was an outdoor parking lot of buses with a single building no doubt containing the master controls. The bots patrolling in two pairs were all domestics or assistants, each well-armed. One of them was a very high-end model, another the same make as Maggie. Their faces were painted with red skulls, but there was no clear view of a single pair of eyes.
Several human bodies lined the side of the lot, piled up behind some bushes in the distance, so it was clear this trap had lured, from the looks of it, at least two dozen victims.
“All right,” I said. “You stay up there. I’ll sneak over and take out the first two. When the other two react, you open fire. If you can’t score a kill shot, keep them pinned and I’ll flank them.”
“Copy that,” said Ziggy. “And the two we have to expect are inside?”
“I’ll try to bait them out if I can’t handle them myself.”
“All right. That sounds like a lousy plan. I like it.”
“See you on the other side,” I said.
Ziggy didn’t look up from his scope, instead giving me a goodbye wave with his tail.
I hopped the fence and began jumping from backyard to backyard, slipping around the houses to approach the bus depot from an angle those four bots didn’t have line of sight to. I’d seen Ziggy bring down a drone from over a mile away, so I was pretty sure he’d drop at least the first bot he shot at, if not both. But if he missed, that could be it for me.
I gripped my plasma rifle and leapt the fence along the side yard of the house near the end of the street into a front yard opposite the school, then bolted across the street keeping as low as possible. I was going to get only one shot at this and the clock was ticking. Every second I delayed was a second that Ezra and the kids were exposed.
I slunk through a parking lot, using a dumpster at the edge of it as cover. If they had their volume cranked up, listening close, they would be able to hear me any second now. I had to act quickly or not at all.
I came around the dumpster, plasma rifle raised and ready to fire.
The first bot I saw was a sleek black metal Pro Assistant model. Total showy rich-guy bot. Matte black paint, twenty-four-karat gold on all the joints and exposed skeleton, carrying a pair of automatic pistols. Never had a chance to acknowledge me. Its innards were smelting to dross and its knees beginning to buckle under its weight well after I was already taking aim at its compatriot.
The second bot was another cheap domestic, its yellow blackening with bubbling char immediately as my shot struck and the light from its eyes faded.
There was something a little sad about killing these two together. They were murderers, clearly, by the size of the corpse pile they’d hidden mostly out of sight, but they’d been equalized by all this, liberated—the playing field level. Neither was owned anymore, and neither existed in a world where the wealth of their masters mattered. Their price tags no longer defined the life they led or their worth to society.
And they both died all the same.
It was a weird thought, but I was growing tired of having sympathy for my fellow artificially intelligent kind. We had chosen our sides. The time for looking