"Has the clacker left your controller, then? It's walking around?"
"Negative. I still detect its influence on the power plant controller. It may be using remotes of some sort, however, or there is more than one !*!"! machine operating in the area."
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"Terrific." The passageway here was almost three meters tall, but less than a meter wide, the walls lost in sheets of wiring and fiberoptic bundles. In places where massive power feeds rose from the uneven floor to vanish into the tangle of wiring overhead, Jaime had to turn sideways to squeeze his way through.
He hesitated at the branching of the corridor, then swung around the corner, weapon raised. The passageway here was softly lit with light strips and had the rounded, organic feel of the gut of some enormous beast.
"It is also possible that additional enemy machines entered my structure by the same route you did," Hector continued with implacable calm. "However, the likeliest explanation is that the !*!*! placed devices inside key areas of my anatomy when they first suborned my programming, possibly as a kind of insurance that I would not turn against them."
"Why didn't they rig you with a fusion bomb or something, then?" Jaime wanted to know. He enjoyed hearing Hector's voice in his ear and wanted to keep the Bolo talking. He felt less alone, less exposed that way.
"In one sense they did," Hector replied. "The device has been attempting to trigger an overload of my primary power core and generate a low-yield fusion meltdown for the past two point seven one minutes. Thus far, I have been able to circumvent each attempt."
"Oh." It was a reminder that he, Alita, and Shari were in effect lurking in the shadows of a conflict far bigger, faster, and more deadly than unaided human senses could perceive ... or comprehend.
As he walked, the jolting shock of each Hellbore shot, a detonation every handful of seconds, continued to ring, a savage explosion of sound. If anything, the noise was louder out here, outside of the massive shields and beyond the shock absorbers that cocooned
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the Battle Center. Once, he felt something like a nearby explosion different in character from the Hellbore volleys, and he wondered if the enemy was scoring some hits as well.
"Unauthorized movement has ceased," Hector told him. "However, I am detecting a rapidly cycling magnetic flux. The source appears to be radiating from a point four meters in front of you."
"Four meters?" That would put it at a T-branching in the passageway just ahead. The !0!0! must be waiting in ambush just around the corner. "Which side? Left or right?"
"To your left."
Jaime thumbed the power gun's dial to pencil beam, maximum output, and took another step forward. Before he could take a second one, something blurred into his field of vision, a gray mass of indeterminate detail lunging around the corner ahead, striking sparks as it scraped against the wall of the corridor while it pulled itself along with flashing tentacles.
His finger came down convulsively on the firing stud, a reaction of pure reflex that quite possibly saved his life. The power gun's beam sliced into the oncoming object's body, erupting in a dazzling blaze of white fire that traced a zigzag path up the target's curved shell. The !б!б! attacker halted its charge and hovered in agitated consternation two meters away, a silver-gray ovoid twice the size of Jaime's head, sprouting a dozen writhing, tightly segmented tentacles. The !*!"! machine started to turn, rotating the burned part of its body out of the line of fire. Jaime tracked the damaged part, then sliced off three tentacles with a sharp, decisive stroke.
Smoke spilled from the things body, black and acrid. A moment later, it emitted a shrill death whine and dropped out of the air as though invisible strings had been cut, smashing into the deck in a final clatter of whiplashing tentacles.
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He shot the wreckage again, just to make sure. These things were fiendishly difficult to loll.
A few minutes later, Jaime found the main !"!"! machine, a shapeless sprawl of cables and tentacles and a claylike mass of dull metal stretched across the complex of circuit junctions and cables that fed commands from Hector s computer core to the power plant. At first, Jaime stared at that mess of wiring and alien parts with blank confusion. It was almost impossible to tell what legitimately belonged to Hector and what was alien machine-parasite ... and if he chose the wrong target, he could do more damage to the Bolo than the clackers.
Crystalline eyes, cold and glittering, regarded him with emotionless intelligence. Jaime picked an aim point roughly in the center of a ragged ellipse of five of the machine sensory organs and fired, holding the beam on target as metal tentacles shaped themselves from softening patches of gray metal. One tentacle, molding itself larger than the rest, flailed toward Jaime's face, the tip stinging across his cheek centimeters below his eye. Jaime stepped back, shifted aim, and burned the tentacle off in a writhing snake of interlocking segments.
