legs and arms fully with a whirring of grinding gears. Once it deployed, it engaged and ambled forward toward us.
She ignored the robot, looking at me with a pained expression after registering my comment. “I’m sorry,” she said, but before she could continue her apology, the robot came right up to her.
“One moment,” she said, turning her attention to the robot. “It’s probably Moe sending us a message to–”
The robot lashed out and struck her. Despite getting caught flat-footed, Focus was fast enough to bring up her guard, blocking the blow with her left forearm. I heard the bones in her arm break under the force of the blow; she was driven to the ground, right arm cradling the left.
“Hey,” I managed, as the robot moved atop her for the coup de gras, and I kicked the thing off her. The robot flew across the room, its chest collapsed inward, sputtering from minor explosions, and crashed into the wall some twenty feet from us.
Behind me, Focus was coming to her feet, holding her broken arm gingerly. The robot was trying to rise again, but my kick had crushed its torso, and the body just folded upon itself like a man whose spine had been removed.
“You okay?” I asked her, but she winced, holding her shattered arm against her chest. “That’s a twisted sense of humor your buddy Moe has.”
Focus shook her head. “That wasn’t Moe,” she said as another two-dozen robots rose from their ground storage silos and engaged, stretching their arms and legs outward, to ready for combat.
Once they were ready, they charged us.
Chapter Thirty-Two
No time to move, no time to think. These bots came at us fast.
The first came right up to me, and right when I cocked back a punch, it stopped, dodged the blow, grabbed my arm and hurled me spinning through the air. I slammed into a metal wall, leaving a deep indentation as I fell to the floor.
The rest collapsed on Focus, one taking a hold of her legs and another grabbing her broken arm. They meant to rip her apart, but she kicked one off, a bright flash of blue energy exploding from her leg, shattering the bot. The other twisted her broken arm and she shrieked in pain.
I hurled myself at the robot’s legs, bowling it over with my shoulder and rolling to my feet to punch another that was clawing at me from behind.
The robot still held her arm, and my attack had only served to spin the robot’s grasp, compounding the fracture like an alligator in a death roll.
Again she screamed, and I reached for the robot’s hand. I got a good hold and ripped it off the body, just as another bot came and grabbed her away.
Still more robots swamped me, coming between us so she was gone from my sight.
Once more she cried out and I lost it.
“No!” I yelled, taking a robot and hurling it into another, then punching a third and following up with a brutal kick into a fourth, but there was an army of them, and I had only damaged a few.
I jumped over a destroyed robot, heading toward Focus, and saw her in the grasp of a damaged one. It held her head in one tri-fingered claw and jabbed into her stomach with a pummeling fist. Something grabbed me, and I turned, punching the robot so hard it exploded; the concussion knocked me to the floor.
Getting up, I charged the robot grabbing Focus and threw myself at the back of its knees, taking the whole thing down.
It kept a hold of her head as we both came to our feet, so I lunged for the arm and twisted the whole thing off. Only then did the claw release Focus, whose fractured arm was like a sieve of blood.
“Get behind me,” I told her, herding her into a wall, turning on the remaining robots. We had our backs to a corner, the most defensible place in the dark room.
“Moe, time to end this! She’s badly hurt, man,” I yelled, hoping that this was some sick joke gone wrong. But I heard nothing from the speakers, whether that was because of Focus’ command to mute the audio from the control booth, or whether he was just content to watch us fight for our lives, I couldn’t tell.
The robots took a moment to readjust themselves, tossing aside those too damaged or destroyed and so giving them a clear battlefield. One stepped forward, engaging its solid-light emitter,