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at least part of Thermopylae’s systems.
    The machine walked in. A stack of storage containers blocked the way forward. Meridian turned left. Bren saw another door ahead.
    Boom. Boom.
    Meridian launched two 12mm rounds in a precise cascade. The rounds penetrated the door, leaving only one hole. The door swung open. Bren saw the second round had traveled neatly through the hole created by the first before scoring a direct hit on the torso of a security robot on the other side. The security machine tilted on its dead legs and toppled to the floor, spraying glittering metal and dull plastic. Meridian was already passing over the wreckage. Bren heard the echoes of smashed parts snapping under the heavy feet of the ASSAIL.
    “My machine is down! Goddamn, my machine is dead!” someone exclaimed aloud near Bren. The handler sounded frantic, but at least they had the presence of mind to keep their outburst off the channel where the AI cores would hear it.
    “Looking at it,” Bren said. He knew he had to acknowledge it, otherwise the handler would wonder if Bren had heard the announcement. With his link bias, Bren could miss a lot of ordinary conversation, about fifteen percent of it, according to his analysis of the link records. He often reread conversations from his link memory to make sure he hadn’t dropped out on something important.
    Bren diverted his attention from Meridian’s hunt. He saw one of the other ASSAIL units had dropped off the link. Bren sent a strong radio ping on a backup frequency. He received healthy responses from all but the one missing robot. A couple of autonomous components of that machine did respond. They reported catastrophic damage to their host machine, Mephistopheles.
    “Damn,” Bren said. One of the team had gone down!
    Already Maximillian and Maladomini, the closest two ASSAIL robots, had decided to investigate the destruction of their comrade. Bren opened a pane in his PV sourced from one of Maximillian’s cameras.
    A swimming pool stretched out to one side of the ASSAIL machine. Maximillian advanced toward the far end of the room where corridors led off left and right. Bren caught signs indicating men’s locker rooms when Maximillian started firing at the corner. Bren frowned. It wasn’t typical of the ASSAIL units to fire without a clear target. The video signal fuzzed up. Bren saw the Vigilant ’s monitoring system was losing data from the machine. Maladomini moved through a locker room toward the spot, and Bren saw the telemetry from that unit had also started to break up.
    Maximillian stopped peppering the corner and crept to one side. Bren caught a flash of red, then Maximillian’s feed dropped completely. Surviving components of the ASSAIL robot reported Maximillian had been disabled by kinetic trauma.
    Bren tried to watch Maladomini and replay the red flash at the same time. He brought up the last bit of video and magnified it. He saw what he’d caught a glimpse of—a robot. It had darted out of cover just before Maximillian winked out. Bren saw two insect-like arms on its right side, radiating from a spherical body with a red spot on its side the size of a spread hand. He couldn’t tell anything else from the brief examination.
    Maladomini entered the pool area. The chamber looked deserted except for Maximillian’s husk, which sat poolside, silent and dark. A spray of fire retardant had been triggered from the ceiling obscuring most of the wreckage.
    “Dammit. Dammit,” Bren muttered. Maladomini had summoned the other seven ASSAIL units to the pool to back it up. It still scanned the corridor from where the blur had struck.
    “Assault team; alter the targeting queue priority for unknown models. I want unknowns at the top of the queue. Maladomini is engaging a mechanical we haven’t seen before, and it’s clearly a threat.”
    He felt foolish telling them that. They probably understood more about the threat than he did. Still, he had to make sure. The team was up