“I see it.” Mark rolled down his window—and found himself looking directly up into the body of the huge device. What had been miles away thirty seconds ago was now right on top of them.

“Get this thing off the road, deploy the Storms, do it now!”

As he hit the brakes, Pete swerved the truck. He didn’t ask for details, he didn’t need to. The order was clear.

As they got out, Linda and Pete moved away from the vehicle. It wasn’t armored, so if it was hit, it could explode and become a death trap.

Mark said, “Wait for my order to fire.”

The thing was so large and so complicated that it was taking Mark time to understand where to find its dangerous points and its vulnerable points. Finally, he decided that they were going to have to fire into it at random.

He realized that they had come to their meeting by the river, the four of them. They must do battle with this thing, and he did not see how such a battle could be won.

Chapter Nineteen

CHAPTER NINETEEN

LOYALTY AND LOVE

A good officer anticipates when he is going to take casualties, and this was one of those times.

“Get outa here,” he told the others. “Run like hell.” He hooked one of the Storms to his chest and shoulders and went to the middle of the road.

Pete joined him, another one on his chest.

Mark turned to him and shouted, “You got your orders, now do it!”

Bending back, Mark aimed the gun and fired it into the complexity of pipes, wires, and girders that was at this point not a hundred feet overhead.

Immediately, Pete’s weapon also ripped the air.

“Goddamnit, I told you to get the hell out of here!”

Moving with quick efficiency, the long steel neck Mark had seen from a distance came down from the thing. It moved with a snake’s graceful urgency, more like a living thing than something mechanical.

He watched it quest from place to place.

He discharged another load of beads into the thing, listening to the thunderous rip as they broke the sound barrier—but again nothing seemed to happen.

“Jesus,” Gina said, looking up.

A cloud of tiny objects gleamed and sparkled in the sunlight, and Mark realized with sickening horror that it was the beads. They had been frozen in midflight.

“Yeah,” he muttered. “They’ve got gravity solved.”

A roar from beside him made him turn, and he saw that Pete was still there, operating his gun. He had just fired at the steel neck, which was now swaying, perhaps meaning that damage had been done. So Mark fired at it, too, but the swaying continued, and he realized the truth: The thing wasn’t taking damage, it was aiming.