killed.”
Jax frowned and pulled his arm backward with a grunt of effort, finally tearing it free of the wall in a shower of plaster and lathing.
The cyborg, meanwhile, had gathered itself up off the floor and was coming at them again. Having dropped her chain in combat with the Outworlders, Sonya looked around anxiously for a weapon, her gaze sliding along the counters and cabinets, roving over all four corners of the room...
Suddenly she noticed a gluey chemical spill on the floor of the lab, noticed the incendiary phosphorescent glow being generated as the contents of two shattered flasks intermingled, noticed a flaming Bunsen burner on a counter just to the left of the puddle, and decided to take a desperate chance. Her heart bucking, nervous sweat beading on her forehead, she reached for the Bunsen burner, then waited for Cyrax to get closer, closer, closer. At the last possible second she scooped up a handful of the chemical mixture, turned the Bunsen burner onto it, and silently prayed it would ignite.
In this case her prayers were answered. With a combustive flash and oxygen-devouring floomp! the sticky glop burst into flame, clinging to Cyrax like tar, enveloping the cyborg in a fiery cocoon. A moment later it reeled backward to the floor, shedding brilliant orange firedrops and blobs of steel-blue smoke.
Jax stared down at the charred, shoring-out monstrosity, his mouth agape, his nostrils twitching from the acrid odor of fused metal, synthetic skin, and wiring.
“I’ve never seen anything like this... it’s a goddamn robot,” he said.
Her hand clapped over her mouth, Sonya knelt over the cyborg’s smoking remains, examining a strange tattoo in its body: some sort of mythological-looking creature, half bird and half lizard.
“Check this out,” she said, pointing to the mark. “Wonder why it’s not scorched from...”
Whatever else she was going to say was forgotten as the tattoo inexplicably came to life, lashing out at Sonya, then biting its own tail and consuming itself.
“Son of a bitch!” Jax said, and with dawning horror realized he had just witnessed the initiation of a self-destruct sequence.
The crystalline red optics behind Cyrax’s face mask had suddenly begun to blink. Then, its internal machinery whirring and clicking, small hydraulic levers unlocked on the cyber-ninja’s arms and legs as they detached from its torso, shooting out into different parts of the room. Clearly cybernetic bombs, these limbs had rotating metal rings that turned and twisted, revealing banks of LEDs. They flashed green for several seconds and then went red, blinking rapidly.
Then a harsh simulated voice issued from the cyborg’s unmoving lips: “Three minutes and counting...”
Jax and Sonya glanced edgily around the room. The cyber-bombs were now embedded in the walls around them.
“I think we better go now,” Jax said.
The two of them dashed out of the room without another word, pelting through outer corridors until they reached the ventilation duct through which Sonya had entered the complex. They scrambled into it, clawing their way upward, and had come to within a few feet from the surface when the sides of the shaft began to heave and shudder with violent rocking tremors. Urgency pressing at them, they pulled themselves out of the vent opening and ran as if hell were at their heels, plunging behind a boulder for cover. Then there was a terrific roar as the cyber-bombs detonated all at once, blasting thousands of tons of concrete and structural steel to rubble, consuming the facility in a huge toadstool of flame.
The very ground bulging beneath them, the sky ruptured with thermal flashes, Sonya and Jax huddled together in the raging heart of the destruction, hoping they wouldn’t be claimed as well.
CHAPTER EIGHT
The velosphere careened out of a dark-walled switchback, whirling wildly as it came to a stop at a dead end in the track. Seconds later, Liu and Kitana stepped out of the
David G. Hartwell, Jacob Weisman