CHAPTER TWELVE—Confidential

Pulling out her sidearm, May glanced at the tablet on the table, the one she had brought in after swiping the data from Thalaway’s computer onto it.

She set her pistol onto the white-topped work bench and looked at the schematic. “There’s got to be some guns in here.”

Kyle did a double take. “Wait, what?”

“Yeah,” May said with a nod. “A lot of these androids are security focused. There’s probably a shit ton of guns around here.”

Kyle glanced at Thalaway expectantly.

“I’m just the PR—“

“Tell us!”

“All right,” he said, putting his hands up, clearly in the hopes that Kyle wouldn’t get rough with him again. He glanced at the other side of the room where some doors were located.

“In there?” John asked.

Thalaway nodded.

May grabbed her pistol and trotted to the door. She hit the release and they opened with a fast but swift hiss and she found herself in a completely different area of the engineering lab.

There were androids in here too, both assembled and disassembled, but the ones in here had no skin coverings.

Sure enough, there were weapons lockers, completely unlocked with boxes of ammo. Further down the room was a range with racks and targets.

May smiled. “Kyle...”

“Holy shit!” he cried and rushed up to the weapons. He immediately went to a repeater rifle and hefted the weapon. She smiled and when he glanced up, his face hardened. “Don’t you dare!”

She laughed. “I’m not going to say a thing.”

“She won’t even think it,” John said, his voice level and for the most part, completely serious, but of course he was joining May in ragging on Kyle.

With a heavy sigh he slammed a charger clip into the bottom of the weapon and a subtle ramping up of power issued from the weapon. With a nod, he added, “It’s time to kick some lackey corpo-ass.”

May picked up an assault rifle—if “assault rifle” it could even be called. The actual distinction being one of purely subjective reasoning, since even a musket long gun could be used to “assault” with.

She preferred more accurate riffles though to the spray-and-pray style of Max and Staxx. But as she thought that, John picked up a launcher and a bandolier of grenades, as well as a sub-machine gun.

“Nice,” she said.

“Here,” he said, picking a grenade off of the belt. “Take one. These guys are about to hammer us.” He glanced up toward where the androids were left stationed.

“Don’t worry,” May said with a nod. “Lexa’s going to be fine.” She patted the pack on her stomach. “Got her right here.”

“Thanks.”

With a smile she didn’t feel, May wondered if that was actually true. While she had been perusing the file database, she had come across the name “Lexa,” but hadn’t had time to look into the files.

Something about Invera-Tech was connected to her.

I just hope it’s nothing too bad.

“Come on!” Kyle said, and ran out of the weapons testing room. Thalaway kept up, but only barely.

“I locked the doors behind us,” May said, “But I don’t know how long they will hold.”

“They don’t need to hold any longer,” John said as he picked a grenade off his bandolier.