[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
desperate before we found a back room that contained little more than four dusty violins in battered
cases.
We were saved. Eva had never deleted her violin-playing program. A little quick tuning and we were in
business.
"Okay, switch to the clown suits," I said, and our Squid Skin uniforms changed from something close to
the enemy's fatigues to the clown outfits we had worked out in simulations. Mine was bright red with big
gold sunbursts on the front and back. I had a bald head with a fringe of hair, a red nose, and a huge
mouth.
The others were even more garish. Our thought was that nobody feels threatened by a clown, or wants
to shoot one down, as a general thing. Mimes would have been another matter, of course.
"Quincy, how serious were you about beating on a drum?"
"Uh, maybe we'd better let Eva handle that, too."
"Okay. Eva, take over."
I relaxed, and let her operate the drone I was wearing, while I did little more than look and listen through
the drone's sensors. I switched back to the sensors on my tank a few times, but everything was calm
back there.
We walked down the school's empty hallways, loudly playing "Let Me Entertain You!" on four violins,
with Quincy's drone beating on a big bass drum, and me hammering on the xylophone thing.
We weren't nearly as bad as I'd expected.
When we got to the auditorium, a soldier wearing a checkered towel on his head was standing in a short
corridor, blocking the door with his body. He shouted something at us in Arabic, and gestured
threateningly with a submachine gun.
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
I heard myself say something back to him in the same language. All I caught of it was something about
"American USO," but it seemed to satisfy him, and he opened the door, waved us into the auditorium,
and locked the door behind us. I doubt if he noticed the mice who scurried in along with us.
Fortunately, the door wasn't a tight enough fit to cut the fiber-optic cables. If it had, the drones would
have fallen over, inert, and we would have been left with trying plan B, which wasn't nearly as good.
The mice scurried up the wall of the auditorium, hidden by their Squid Skins, so they could keep in touch
with the drones by IR laser.
It was a big room, and just like every high school gymnasium turned auditorium ever built. Basketball
nets were pulled up to the ceiling, the bleachers were pulled out, and about five thousand unhappy people
were sitting on them, leaving most of the fake wooden floor empty.
Another guy with a gun strapped to his back and a towel over his head was on the stage waving his
pistol around, shouting something into a microphone that I couldn't make out, speaking in very bad
Kashubian.
I counted eleven more guards scattered around, mostly standing on the top seats of the bleachers, where
they could keep an eye on everybody.
I thought that their headgear was a fine idea. It made them easy to spot.
We marched in playing our instruments, and everybody stopped and looked at us. I suppose that we
were so completely unexpected that when we came in, nobody knew what to do, so they simply didn't
do anything.
Or maybe we really were playing that badly, but everybody wanted to stay polite. Either way, it was
working.
We finished up with "Let Me Entertain You" by the time that we got to the center of the floor. Then, Eva
started playing a fast Russian tune with three of the violins, while the other three, includingme , laid down
our instruments and started to dance!
I found myself with my arms crossed across my chest, squatting on my ankles, and vigorously kicking
my feet almost as high as my head. Quincy and Kasia were on either side of me, doing exactly the same
steps that I was. When we did the simulations, Eva had explained that it was easier for her, that way. She
only had to send out one set of instructions to all three drones.
She worked the drones into a circle, with the three musicians in the center, all facing outward and circling
clockwise, and the three dancers circling the musicians counter-clockwise, but still facing the people and
guards around us.
From where the crowd sat, it looked like a lot of very good precision dancing, and as tired as they all
looked, they started getting into it. People started to clap in unison, and the guards were getting
interested. One was actually smiling.
Finally, the one guard who had been sitting down on the top bleacher with taller people around him
stood up to get a better view, and Quincy silently shouted, "Now!"
His tank, Marysia, knew exactly what he meant. She took over control of the drones from Eva,
Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html
stretched out both arms of all six drones, and simultaneously fired twelve laser beams at full power.
You don't have to fight fair with people who take civilian hostages.
Twelve toweled heads were separated from their bodies in under a tenth of a second. They were all
dead before our violins hit the floor.
It was damned good shooting, even if we had practiced it over thirty times in simulations.
It took only a half second longer for all four doors into the auditorium to be cut in half at waist level. We
didn't know if the other doors had guards, or if they were standing in front of the doors like the first one,
but it seemed like a good bet to Quincy, and I wasn't about to second guess him.
Lasers are very quiet, and since these were all firing in the infrared, there wasn't much to see. A few
women who had seen the guards' heads fall off screamed, as did those who were splashed with blood,
but in fact most of the people were watching the performance, and didn't see the killing at all.
This was just as well. There were a lot of children in the crowd, and it wasn't nice to let them know
about the really ugly things that adults sometimes have to do.
The few screams were drowned out by the applause of the crowd, who thought that we were doing our
finale, which, I suppose, we were.
Four of the drones ran to the doors to make sure that all was secured out there.
Quincy stayed in the middle, making sure that there wouldn't be any surprises coming from the crowd.
They might have had a few guards without the headgear, for example. He told me later that he had really
wanted to take a bow at that point, but he had restrained himself.
I ran for the stage.
The stage was two meters above the floor, but that wasn't much for a humanoid drone to jump. I could
have done seven times that if I'd wanted to fire the charges in my heels. Still, it seemed to impress people,
and got their attention. Maybe they figured that this was the next part of the act.
One glance told me that the last guy up here wasn't going to give us any problems, since his head was
completely disconnected, and indeed had rolled off the stage. The same shot had also cut his microphone
in half.
I turned to the crowd, and Agnieshka switched my Squid Skin from the clown outfit into something like
a Kashubian general's class A uniform. I held up my arms, and the crowd got quiet.
The voice speakers on these drones were loud enough to be heard above the noise of a firefight, so I
didn't need the broken microphone.
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]