The Android Chronicles Book One: The Android Defense (14 page)

“He’s here,” Mercenare
said.

There was a moment and then
the doors of the dressing room were pulled open.

Mercenare dragged Miranda
out, who flailed her arms and legs.

“Please! Let go of
me!”

“She’s an Adventis android,
Captain,” another Super Soldier said.

“She’s a message we’re going
to send,” Mercenare said.

Miranda screamed as he
pulled her bodily to the window. He took a sheet from Luke’s bed
and wound it around her body.

“Open the window,” he
said.

The other Super Soldier
hastily obeyed.

Mercenare pulled a lighter
from his pocket and lit the sheet on fire. At the same time he
threw Miranda out of the window of the room.

Miranda fell through the air
before she came to a thudding stop against the glass side of the
building. Her body blazed up in flames.

Chapter 35.

Trista brought her car to a
sharp stop in front of the police barricade around the Adventis
building. They all got out of the car.

Immediately two police
officers came up to them.

“All of you need to leave,”
one of them said. “Or else we’ll have to take you into
custody.”

Mandelie looked up in horror
at the side of the building, where a small, burning figure was
hanging from a window.

“Is that a
person?”

Luke stared at the
figure.

“That’s my room,” he said,
before he realized what the figure was.

“No!” he said. He ran
towards the building but was set upon by two police officers, who
grabbed him and threw him to the ground.

“Stop!” Mandelie said. She
was grabbed by another police officer, who cuffed her hands behind
her back. The same thing happened to Brigite, Trista, and
Jake.

“What? You’ve got the wrong
people!” Jake said.

The officer holding Mandelie
flashed his badge in front of her face.

“FBI,” he said. “Don’t say
another word.”

“We need to do something,
Damian,” Carlie said, unable to tear her eyes away from the chaos
outside the window.

“What do you suggest?”
Damian said. “I can’t move my legs.”

The ground beneath them
shook, as if in an earthquake. Carlie heard the sound of breaking
glass and then screams.

“The Super Soldiers got into
the hospital!” she said.

Damian looked
sick.

Mandelie tried not to shake
as she sat in the bare interrogation room of a government building.
Her hands were cuffed behind her chair. She could see a dark window
behind which ostensibly other FBI agents were standing, watching
her. She did not know where Luke and the others had been
taken.

The door opened and a man in
a dark suit came in.

He sat down in a chair
across form her.

He set a piece of paper down
on the desk.

“Name?” he said.

“Mandelie Miles.”

“How old are
you?”

“Seventeen,” Mandelie
said.

“Are you a
student?”

“I’m home-schooled,”
Mandelie said.

“Can you explain to me what
you were doing trying to get into the Adventis building, when
everyone else was trying to get out?”

“We were trying to rescue
the androids inside it,” Mandelie said. “That’s the
truth.”

“Rescue the androids,” the
FBI agent said. He shook his head.

“This is not a good time to
be running into burning buildings, Miss Miles. The city is on
lockdown. We’re trying to find the ones responsible for these
murdering robots. Do you have anything you want to tell
me?”

“Where are my friends?”
Mandelie said.

“That’s none of your
concern,” the man said.

Luke’s face was unreadable
as the FBI agent sat down in front of him in his own interrogation
room. His hands were similarly cuffed behind his chair.

The FBI agent looked at him
with barely concealed dislike.

“You’re an android,
right?”

“Yes,” Luke said.

“Can you tell me anything
about what’s going on out there?”

“It’s what happens whenever
any civilization meets another civilization more equipped to
survive than they are,” Luke said. “Civilizations do not meet their
fates willingly.”

“You’re on thin ice, I’m
warning you,” the man said. “Whose side are you on?”

“If I told you I was on your
side, you would not believe me,” Luke said. “Perhaps your energy
would be better spent fighting the true enemy outside these
walls.”

Luke had a flashback of
memory as he was pushed into a small containment room and its door
slid shut on his face. He looked out through the bars and saw the
guard walking away from him.

Unlike his jail cell before,
this one did not even had a bed or chair within it. Luke sat on the
hard ground and leaned against the wall.

He closed his eyes and
accessed his communication console.

“Mandelie, where are
you?”

“I don’t know where I am,”
Mandelie said. “I’m in some kind of jail cell.”

“So am I,” Luke said. “Are
you alright?”

“I’m okay,” Mandelie said.
“What are we going to do now?”

“I’ll try to think of
something,” Luke said.

He closed his communication
console. He searched his vast data storage, trying to find any
piece of information that might be useful to him in their current
predicament.

The hour dragged
on.

Luke heard a slight noise,
like footsteps coming down the hall towards him.

He stood.

Brigite’s bright blue wig
came into view as she looked up at him. She jingled a set of keys
in her hand.

Luke smiled.

“Not bad. How did you do
it?”

“Human men are the same
everywhere,” Brigite said, as she unlocked his door. “It didn’t
take me five minutes to distract the guard and knock him
out.”

Lina and Ledia were hiding
behind the door of Damian’s office, which they had barricaded with
several pieces of heavy furniture.

Ledia was nearly
hyperventilating. She paced the floor and covered her ears, trying
not to listen to the sounds of screaming that occasionally reached
them.

“I don’t get it,” she said.
“Why would Adventis androids attack other androids? What do they
want?”

Lina was trying to reach
Carlie on her phone.

“Where are they?” she
fumed.

Luke used his location
sensors to find Mandelie, Jake, and Trista. Brigite unlocked the
doors of their cells and they reunited with relief.

Luke took Mandelie’s
hand.

“The only way we’ll get out
of here is by attracting as little attention as possible,” he
said.

They heard shouts of alarm
and footsteps racing down a hallway close to them.

“Too late,” Jake
said.

Luke turned around and saw
FBI agents turning the corner. They saw them and drew their
guns.

“Run!” Mandelie
said.

The four of them began
racing down the hall in the opposite direction from the FBI
agents.

“We need to split up,” Luke
said. “Mandelie, come with me. Brigite, go with Jake and Trista.
Meet us in the back of the building in five minutes.”

Brigite, Jake, and Trista
ran down a set of stairs. Luke and Mandelie kept running down the
hallway.

“Do you know where you’re
going?” Mandelie said.

“Of course,” Luke
said.

Mandelie screamed when they
turned a corner and she ran straight into the arms of an FBI agent.
She fell to the ground, the man trying to get a hold of
her.

Luke grabbed him and punched
him in the face, knocking him unconscious.

“Keep going!” he said.
“Follow me.”

Brigite, Jake, and Trista
met a crowd of FBI agents at the bottom of the stairs. They ran
back up, only to see another group of FBI agents. They were
surrounded.

The only thing behind them
was a window. Jake glanced at it and then broke it with his elbow.
He began climbing through it.

“What are you doing?” Trista
said. “We’re on the sixteenth floor!”

“Trust me,” Jake said. He
grabbed Brigite and pulled her onto the window, and then he helped
Trista up.

The three of them stared
down at the dizzying drop below them to a parking lot.

“I won’t survive that fall,”
Brigite said.

“You’ll be okay,” Jake said.
“Hold on to my hand, both of you. On my count, jump. One, two,
three.”

They jumped from the
window.

Trista screamed as they
plummeted to the ground but then she realized they were gradually
slowing down. She looked at Jake’s shoes.

“You’re wearing the
anti-gravity shoes!”

“And they’re working,” Jake
said. He grinned.

The three of them landed
gently on the top of a car, just as Luke and Mandelie burst out of
the building.

“We need to take one of
these cars,” Luke said.

The five of them ran to a
rusty-looking sedan. Luke tore the door open with immense strength.
He sat in the driver’s seat and touched the ignition with his
hand.

An electric current ran from
his hand into the car engine, which roared to life.

“Get in,” Luke said. The
other four jumped into the car.

Luke pressed the accelerator
and the car burst from the parking lot.

Chapter 36.

When she heard the Super
Soldiers entering the hospital, Carlie had quickly made up her mind
what to do.

She ripped the IV tubes from
Damian’s body.

“Oh, no,” Damian said. “I
know what you’re going to do.”

“Shut up,” Carlie said. “I’m
risking my life for this.”

She threw her weight into
pushing the wheeled hospital bed out of the room. They could hear
explosions, screams, and breaking glass coming from the floor above
them.

“We don’t have any time,”
Damian said. “You have to hurry. Am I really that
heavy?”

“It’s the stupid bed,”
Carlie said. Finally she managed to push the bed through the door.
She wheeled it down the hallway, as fast as she could.

“Get to the elevator,”
Damian said.

Carlie looked over her
shoulder and saw six Super Soldiers walking down the hallway. They
noticed her and began racing towards her.

“Come on, Carlie!” Damian
said.

Carlie pushed the hospital
bed in front of her, moving faster than she had ever done before.
They reached the elevator and Carlie pushed the button.

The elevator doors opened.
Carlie pushed the bed inside.

She punched the button
frantically. The doors closed, seconds before one of the Super
Soldiers threw himself against them.

Carlie collapsed against the
bed.

“The hard part isn’t over
yet,” Damian said.

Mercenare moved leisurely
through the halls of Product Development, stepping over broken
bodies of androids in his path. He looked in every room before he
was satisfied that nothing was left forgotten.

He walked back to the glass
front of Product Development, where a scattered group of X-droids
and a few other androids was tied up and sitting against the wall.
Super Soldiers stood in front of them, keeping an eye on
them.

Mercenare stooped down in
front of one of the X-droids.

“I’m sure you’ll find some
way of showing me your gratitude for not killing you,” he
said.

Carlie shook in her shoes
when the elevator stopped on the basement level. The doors opened
slowly and she pushed Damian’s hospital bed out.

She looked around but there
seemed be nothing in the parking garage.

“My car’s somewhere around
here,” she said.

“Forget your car, Carlie,”
Damian said, with an effort. His pain medication was clearly taking
an effect on him. “Steal any one of these damn cars.”

“How?”

“Seriously? Just smash the
window with your … I don’t know, your heel or something. Put me in
the driver’s seat and I’ll handle it from then on.”

“Okay then,” Carlie
said.

She pushed the bed towards a
shining black Jaguar and took off one of her heels. She smashed the
window and unlocked the door.

Then she pulled Damian from
the bed and set him in the driver’s seat.

“Good thing my adoptive dad
was a mechanic,” Damian said. He took one of his own car keys and
pried the ignition open with it. He took the wires inside it and
touched a few of them together.