Just to be absolutely certain he wasn’t being paranoid, Tom intentionally dropped back to the very edge of the group, so the surveillance devices would have to be very obvious about tracking him.

As their group trickled into the next room, from the corner of his eye, Tom saw a Praetorian moving toward him. He whirled around, startled. The machine was still again.

But then he heard a hiss behind him. Tom whipped around to find the door between him and the rest of the group closing with a decisive clang.

“Hey!” Tom rushed toward it, his hands meeting cold metal. There was no handle, no doorknob. He tried pushing, he tried pounding his fist on it. There wasn’t a single peep from the other side.

Soundproof. Great.

Tom drew a bracing breath and turned. The Praetorians were openly fixing their single, pinpoint camera eyes on him. His skin crawled. The hum of machinery was the only sound in the room, and it was mounting louder and louder on the air. Tom’s reflection moved across the polished black floor with him, swam against the massive window revealing the gray sky over the glacial landscape. He finally turned to see the nearest overhead surveillance camera.

“I’m locked out,” Tom told whoever was on the other side. “Open the door.”

His voice rang out in the empty air and he wondered if anyone even heard him. He willed on his net-send and tried to use a thought interface to alert Vik, but words flashed across his vision center: Error: Frequency unavailable. Message not sent.

Blackburn’s stupid jammer. Of course.

Then Tom felt a strange prickling sensation move all over his feet. The prickle turned to tiny jabs, which became stabbing needles, an electrical current carrying across the floor. Tom leaped a few steps away from the Praetorians, and got some momentary relief, but the prickle mounted into a stronger electric charge, until his legs were viciously buzzing and Tom was forced to bolt through the other door, away from the very floor that seemed to be trying to electrocute him.

He leaped right into the next open chamber, but the Praetorians in that room also homed in on him, blocking his path.

They drew so close, he had to squeeze to the side to avoid being crushed; but when he brushed one of the metal Praetorians in passing, a sharp bolt of electricity seared him, and Tom couldn’t help the shout that ripped from his lips as he stumbled away from it. He backed up, step by step, and they advanced on him, relentless. For a moment, Tom’s thoughts flickered to people in the places used as testing grounds for military tech, where small-scale insurgents were swarmed with these machines. He’d never realized how frightening such unrelenting inhumanity could be.