Page 42 of Operation Iron Heart

Jack tried to defend himself using his hands and feet, but his strength had left him. It was pointless trying to fight against MacIntyre’s henchmen.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered as they took him away, dragging Marci behind them like a sack of potatoes.

MacIntyre seemed to know exactly what he had planned; he ordered Jack to be placed on a lab bench and strapped down with automatic metal cuffs. In front of Marci’s horrified eyes, Dr Tanaka cut into the skin on Jack’s head with a scalpel, opening up his skull. When he reached the cranial bone, he used a special mechanism to fold the bone to one side, revealing Jack’s pulsating brain underneath.

“I thought it was,” mused MacIntyre, looking at Jack’s pale cranial bone. “Flexible ceramic. A rebellious brother from the R8 series. And definite proof that Cathrin Porter’s behind all of this.”

MacIntyre’s bogus chief engineer nodded mechanically and gave Marci a look of pure hatred. “You can’t trust people or robots,” he replied in a flat tone and carried on working on Jack’s skull.

“Now you will see how we get Cathrin Porter’s source code even without your assistance,” he announced with disdain. “And you should know that every robot’s programming is copy-protected. Once you’ve cracked it, you can download the code onto a special key but this destroys the donor’s personality and no programmer in the world will be able to put it back together. The donor will simply be a brainless idiot.”

Marci understood this, but that didn’t help – quite the contrary. MacIntyre looked positively gleeful about the panic on her face. Cathrin had inserted this protection against her program being pirated but clearly hadn’t considered that it might one day be the undoing of one of her protégés.

She couldn’t bear the idea that this procedure would result in Jack having the intellectual capabilities of a brick, and that he would no longer recognise her. Suddenly, she realised the purpose of the attack in the hotel suite. Jill Ambush’s part in it all had only been minor; the fake MacIntyre had planned on kidnapping Jack in order to blackmail Marci and, if that hadn’t worked, he would have used other methods to access Jack’s programming.

“No!” screamed Marci, thrashing wildly as one of the robots held her back from the lab bench. “You bastards! Leave him alone!” She broke down in hysterical tears, howling at the top of her voice as Tanaka set about inserting a glowing blue probe into Jack’s brain.

“Transfer in progress,” he informed MacIntyre’s double, his eyes cold.

But before he could complete the task, the sliding door burst open and at least a dozen hybrid soldiers aimed their weapons at the fake Tanaka and at MacIntyre, who immediately cowered behind one of his robot bodyguards.

Dr Tanaka dropped his instruments and stepped away from the table and Marci felt the cold tip of a laser pistol on her temple. “Let the two men go,” MacIntyre’s guard ordered the hybrid soldiers, “or she dies.”

Gritting their teeth, the half-human, half-machine soldiers let MacIntyre and his engineer step back, but the two of them insisted on Marci remaining at the guard’s mercy until they were out of range.

As soon as MacIntyre’s double and his engineer had left, one of the hybrid soldiers shot out the motherboard of the robot that still held Marci. His arms immediately went limp, forcing him to let Marci go.

“Come on, we need to get out of here before the MacIntyre copy mobilises more troops,” called one of the hybrid soldiers, smiling at her. He looked friendly and had short black hair and blue eyes nearly the same shade as Will’s.

“What about Jack?” wailed Marci wretchedly, wrapping her arms protectively around his head. “He can’t stay here in this state.”

“He’s had a pretty bad time of it,” replied the soldier. “We can’t do anything for him.”

“But I can’t just leave him here,” she implored, tears running down her cheeks as the small troop of freed hybrid soldiers looked at her quizzically.

“OK, we’ll close his skull back up,” said one of them, who seemed to know his way around the lab. He entered something into a nearby holographic command panel and a glass cover lowered down onto Jack, enclosing him completely. Nozzles inside the cover then activated, closing his skull and seamlessly fusing the skin back together.

“Does that hurt him?” Marci asked the black-haired soldier who’d saved her.

“No.” He looked at her with compassion, then gestured to one of his colleagues to stand guard around the area.

“Thank you,” whispered Marci, touching the hybrid soldier’s arm. “What’s your name?” she asked quietly.

“Max Fullerton,” the man replied, clearly surprised that he could remember his name so easily. “What’s yours?”

“Marci,” she replied, smiling shyly. “The robot is my friend, more than my friend,” she explained, her voice wobbling.

“Understood.” Max smiled confidently and tried to reassure her. “It’ll be OK.”

Marci wasn’t sure whether it would be that easy to get Jack out of here, let alone whether they would escape the serious consequences of their recent actions.

Max and his colleagues seemed to have an idea about how to transport Jack to a safe location once the machine had finished sealing his skull back up.

Marci looked on questioningly as the hybrid soldiers lifted Jack onto a stretcher they’d found in a First Aid room. “He’s in a kind of coma,” Max replied. “We’ll carry him to the hangar,” he explained, “and then we’ll put him in a glider and take him somewhere his injuries can be treated.”

Marci thought of Cathrin. “I know a place.” In a glider, it wouldn’t take them long to reach the Canadian border and make contact with the rebel base. Keeping her head down and her weapon at the ready as they were still coming under fire, she followed the men. Working with some of the other hybrid soldiers, she fired at their attackers, helping to keep the enemy at bay.

When they reached the hangar, someone had already opened the roof, revealing the blue desert sky. The hybrid soldiers set about seizing one glider after another, keen to be out of there as quickly as possible. The men had obviously been equipped with both physical and technical abilities, enabling them to operate any kind of aircraft.