The sound wasn't a roar. It was a hiss.
Thousands of pneumatic pistons exhaled at once.
High above the smoking wreckage of the passenger cars, the hooks disengaged.
CLANG.
The first row of machines hit the concrete floor. They didn't land like cats; they landed like anvils. The impact shook the mud and scattered the debris of the crash.
CLANG. CLANG. CLANG.
It was a steel rain.
Jason scrambled backward, his boots slipping in the oil and sludge. He grabbed Sarah by the waist, pulling her behind the twisted ruin of a dining table.
"Get back!" O'Malley roared. He racked the slide of his shotgun. The sound was pathetic—a dry click against a thunderstorm of metal.
The robots straightened up.
They were ugly things. Unpainted iron chassis, exposed hydraulic lines, and torsos shaped like engine blocks. They had no faces, just a single, shuttering camera lens glowing furious red in the center of their chests.
They formed a circle. Ten deep. Shoulder to iron shoulder.
Howard Hughes was hyperventilating. He stared at the machine closest to him.
"Ford Model-K actuators," Hughes muttered, his eyes wide and manic. "They removed the safety limiters. Look at the servos. They'll overheat in twenty minutes, but they'll tear a tank in half before they do. It's bad engineering. It's beautiful."
"Shut up, Howard!" Jason yelled.
He scanned the perimeter. There was no gap. No exit. The walls of the Rouge plant were miles away, and the space between was filled with the Automatons.
The robots didn't attack. They just stood there.
The silence that followed was heavier than the crash. The air smelled of burnt ozone, spilled diesel, and fear.
Then, the speakers crackled.
"Asset Audit initiated," a voice echoed from the gantry high above.
It was Alta Rockefeller. Her voice was amplified, booming off the steel rafters. She didn't sound angry. She sounded bored. She sounded like an accountant reading a tax return.
"Item one," Alta recited. "Standard Oil Locomotive, Experimental Class. Value: Twelve million dollars. Status: Destroyed."
Jason wiped blood from his eyes. He looked up at the distant figure on the catwalk. She was a speck of black silk against the industrial gloom.
"Item two," Alta continued. "Rouge North Gate, reinforced tungsten-steel alloy. Value: Four million dollars. Status: Vaporized."
The camera lenses on the robots zoomed in. The mechanical whirring sound was like a swarm of locusts.
"Item three," Alta said, her voice dropping an octave. "My patience. Value: Incalculable. Status: Expired."
The robots moved in unison.
CLICK.
Their right arms raised. The forearms split open, revealing rotating barrels. Heavy caliber machine guns, belt-fed from internal hoppers.
"Assessment complete," Alta said. "Separating salvage from waste."
A laser grid scanned the group. A red line swept over O'Malley, then Jason.
"Subjects: O'Malley, Patrick. Underwood, Jason," Alta announced. "Designation: Industrial Waste. Solution: Liquidate."
The red line moved to the scientists. It turned green.
"Subjects: Einstein, Oppenheimer, Tesla, Hughes," she said. "Designation: Recoverable Assets. Solution: Secure and re-educate."
The line fell on Sarah. It flickered between red and green.
"Subject: Rockefeller, Sarah," Alta paused. There was a cruel, lingering silence. "Designation: Defective Heir. Solution: Return to nursery for hard reset."
"Hard reset?" Sarah whispered. Her hand tightened on Jason's arm. Her nails dug into his skin. "She means a lobotomy, Jason. She's going to scrub me."
The barrels on the robots began to spin.
WHIRRRRRRR.
"Fire on my mark," Alta commanded.
O'Malley stepped in front of Jason, shielding him with his body. "It's been an honor, Boss."
"No," Jason snarled.
Adrenaline dumped into his system. It wasn't the hot rush of combat. It was the cold, crystalline clarity of the deal.
He didn't have a gun. He didn't have a coin. He didn't have a train.
But he had a lie.
"Wait!" Jason screamed.
He didn't shout at the robots. He shouted at the ceiling. He stepped out from behind O'Malley, exposing his chest to the thousand gun barrels.
"Hold fire!" Jason roared. "Unless you want to lose Chicago!"
The spinning barrels didn't stop.
"Three," Alta counted.
"I activated the Judas Protocol!" Jason screamed. "Check the frequencies, Alta! Do it now!"
"Two."
"I have a dead-man switch!" Jason held up his left wrist.
There was nothing there but dirt and a bruise where his watch used to be. But he held it up like he was wearing the detonator to a nuclear bomb.
"One."
"Gates is listening to my heartbeat!" Jason's voice cracked, raw and desperate. "My pulse is broadcasting on a sub-carrier wave! 108.5 Megahertz! If my heart stops, the signal cuts!"
Alta hesitated.
The silence stretched. The barrels were spinning at full speed, a high-pitched scream of death waiting to be unleashed.
"If the signal cuts," Jason yelled into the void, "Gates executes the contingency! He releases the stockpile! Not the gas, Alta! The drones! He has ten thousand hunter-killers sitting in the Germania silo! If I die, they launch! They fly east! They burn Detroit to the ground!"
It was a gamble.
Jason knew Gates. The AI was logical. The AI was currently fighting Hitler for control of the meat factory. Gates didn't care about Jason's heartbeat.
But Alta didn't know that.
Alta knew that Jason and Gates had destroyed the Federal Reserve together. She knew they had collapsed the US government. She knew they were capable of madness.
Jason stared at the camera lens of the lead robot. He didn't blink. He forced his breathing to slow down, projecting absolute, suicidal confidence.
"Do the math, Alta!" Jason shouted. "You lose twelve million on a train? Fine. You kill me, you lose the entire Rouge Complex! Is that a profitable trade? Is that good business?"
High above, on the gantry, the woman in the black dress froze.
She raised a hand to her ear piece. She was checking the sensors.
Jason prayed. He prayed that Tesla's jamming signal from earlier was still causing enough static to hide the truth. He prayed that Alta's paranoia was stronger than her bloodlust.
The spinning barrels slowed down.
Whirrrrrr... click.
They stopped.
"Stand down," Alta's voice came over the speakers. It was tight. Clipped.
The robots lowered their arms.
Jason let out a breath. His knees almost buckled, but he locked them. He couldn't show weakness. Not now.
"A dead-man switch," Alta said. Her tone was amused, but dangerous. "Crude, Mr. Prentice. But effective."
"I'm full of crude ideas," Jason called back. "I want a meeting. Face to face. No guns. No robots."
"You are in no position to make demands," Alta replied.
"I'm the only thing keeping the Chicago swarm in its cage," Jason lied. "I think that gives me a seat at the table."
There was a long pause.
The spotlight on the gantry turned off. The factory floor plunged back into the yellow gloom of the emergency lights.
"Reclassify targets," Alta ordered. "Designation: Hostile Negotiators."
The circle of robots broke.
With the sound of grinding gears, the machines stepped aside. They formed a corridor. A perfect, steel-lined path leading toward the far wall.
At the end of the path, a massive freight elevator opened its jaws.
"Bring them up," Alta commanded. "But strip them. If they have so much as a pocket knife, kill them and deal with the drones later."
The robots marched forward. They didn't shoot, but they shoved.
A metal hand the size of a shovel grabbed O'Malley by the neck. Another grabbed Hughes by the back of his flight suit.
"Don't resist!" Jason ordered his team. "We're walking. We're just walking."
Sarah limped to his side. She looked at his bare wrist.
"You're lying," she whispered, her voice barely audible over the mechanical stomping. "You don't have a link to Gates."
"I know," Jason whispered back, staring straight ahead.
"If she checks the spectrum analyzer..."
"Then we're dead," Jason said. "But we were dead anyway. Now we're dead with a meeting."
He took her hand. It was cold.
"Can you walk?" he asked.
Sarah looked at the elevator. She looked at the army of steel skeletons waiting to escort them into the belly of the beast.
Her eyes hardened. The fear evaporated, replaced by a cold, ancestral anger.
"It's my mother's house," Sarah said. "I know where she hides the knives."
They walked forward, into the corridor of iron.
The elevator doors waited like a mouth.
Inside, the Silver Legion was waiting. Men in pristine grey uniforms, holding shock batons.
"Welcome to Detroit," the lead officer sneered.
Jason stepped into the cage. The doors slammed shut.
The bluff had worked. They were alive.
But now they were trapped in a box, ascending toward the most dangerous woman on earth, armed with nothing but a lie that could unravel at any second.
Jason checked his nonexistent watch.
"Time to negotiate," he said.