Unpopular Science

Chapter 13

The audio feed still worked even if the video was out. They heard Allessandro Cote say, “I’ll tell you everything.”

“Way to have an iron will, Cote,” said the crew-cut teenager, rolling his eyes to his father. “He’s a dick. Dad.”

“He may be an unpleasant man—”

“Not to mention nuttier than a fruitcake.”

“He may be delusional, as well, but he has kept you and I well provided for,” Fastbinder said.

“That money well is running dry as we speak. Can we take him out?” The boy’s blue eyes were bright with anticipation.

“Yes, I suppose we must.”

“Can I push the button?”

“Go ahead. Push the button.”

The teenage kid leaned back in his chair and reached for one of the many computer terminals scattered around their small work area. He tapped a few keys and grinned broadly.

“’Bye-bye, dick,” the kid said. “I just wish I could see it go down.”

Cote looked wildly around as the ballroom filled with the whirs and buzzing sounds of more automatons coming to life.

“What’s happening?” Cote shouted.

“Remo,” Chiun asked, “did you accidentally lean on any buttons?”

“No way, uh-uh.”

“That son of a bitch!” Cote exclaimed.

Remo and Chiun put themselves between the advancing mechanicals. The attack was spearheaded by a rotor-driven airborne device that was as big as a garbage can, and it swept down on Remo, firing high-velocity rounds from an air gun. Remo dodged the rounds and tried to draw its attention away from Cote, but the machine had a one-track mind. It ignored Remo, gunning for the arms merchant, until Remo ran up underneath it, jumped twice his own height and snatched it by the bottom-mounted gun barrel. It came down with him, still firing, rotors buzzing to their maximum speed in a bid for freedom, but Remo used it to sweep at the wave of rolling, plodding robots that came after it.

There was a series of rolling, rodentlike robots that turned to flee but were chopped up by the spinning rotors, then the tread-mounted doglike robot was smashed and it collapsed on its side, treads spinning uselessly.

Remo dropped the ruined helicopter and simply began disabling machinery by hand. First he plucked a quartet of V-wing gliders out of fire air as they attempted to impale him on their needlelike noses, which dripped poison. Remo reached around the needles just as each wing was about to drive into him, crushing the wings and dropping them on the floor one after another. The rest of the automatons were rolling or walking, and they surrendered their vital parts without much more effort. Chiun appeared with an armful of mechanical heads. Behind him a few of his victims still rolled or stomped in circles.

“Starting a collection?” Remo asked.

“I do not understand this,” Chiun said, peering at one of the apple-size robot skulls.

“What’s to understand?”

Chiun pressed his finger into the dull black metal. “Iron?”

“So?”

“Hand forged. There are the marks of a blacksmith’s hammer. It is very old.”

“Look who’s talking. So what?”

“Must you always act like an idiot? You are no better than the imbecile who thinks he is a powerful villain from a Hollywood film!”

Cote, curled on the floor in his own filth, began sobbing quietly.

“Come on, Chiun, that’s not true. I do not walk around pretending to be stupid.”

“You cannot possibly be that genuinely stupid.”

“Listen, just because I’m not following your brilliant deductions, it doesn’t mean I’m an idiot. You are obviously a much better detective than I am. We’re all very impressed by your powers of observation, Matlock, now cut the crap and tell me what’s so effing important about an old robot.”

Chiun put the iron robot head into his sleeves with his hands and said nothing.

“Wait a second. Why’s there a robot with a head made by a blacksmith?” Remo asked. “Even I know they didn’t have robots back in the horse-and-buggy days. Did they?”

Chiun might as well have been a stuffed display for all the reaction he offered.

“Fine. Hey, you, Cote. Why do you have robots with forged-iron heads.”

“They were made that way,” Cote said through sobs. “They’re antiques. That one was from 1908.”

Remo sighed. “You know what, I don’t even want you to explain that to me.” He grabbed the Spanish crime boss by his amazingly unsoiled hair and lifted him to his feet.

“Come on. I know a couple of nerds who’ll appreciate it more than I do anyway.”

“Whoa!” the kid said, cycling through the windows. “Every dang one of them knocked out of commission!”

“I am aware of that, Jack,” Fastbinder said unhappily.

“And they did it in like a minute!”

“Yes, I know.”

“Pops, we can’t let them take away Cote. He’ll blab. We have to hit them with the rest of Cote’s munitions.”

Fastbinder sighed. “I don’t think it will do any good, but it can’t hurt. Cote’s already paid for them.” He grimaced. “Power them up.”

“Yeah, Pops!” Jack leaned back in his chair and poked at another keyboard. The system came to life, opened a connection that circled the globe from New Mexico to the Mediterranean coast of Spain, and began communications with a master override system that Fastbinder and his son always built into every device they sold.

Just so, when they wanted to, they could make use of their precious creations and restorations.

“Charging up,” Jack exclaimed.

“Let’s hope they stay around long enough,” Fastbinder muttered.

Remo’s mind and body seemed to become ghostly, his energy gushing out of him, his vision collapsing. Cote sprawled on the floor where Remo had dropped him.

“It’s come back, Little Father!” he gasped.

“Remo!” Chiun’s voice sounded like the scratched, plaintive cry of a squeeze toy to Remo, as if he was dying on his feet, and his mind rallied with fear for Chiun and he tried to make his eyes work to find the old man. This was like being disgustingly, sickeningly drunk, from what he remembered, but not as fun. Not fun at all.

He twisted his head and spotted a colorful blur, a blur that was lowering slowly to the floor.

“Chiun!” Remo leaned and staggered at Chiun. He felt the tiny body of the old Master, encased in the silk kimono, come into his arms. Remo felt a pang of worry about how frail and slack the old Korean felt, but it was weight enough to nearly pull him down.

“Stand, Chiun!” Remo slurred instead of shouted. “We go down, we’ll never get up.”

Chiun moved, seemed to look up at Remo, and maybe it was his own altered vision or maybe Chiun stared at him with the eyes of man descending into the void.

“Chiun! Walk! This way!”

Remo steered himself and Chiun away from the source of the weakness. Whatever it was, it was behind them, no longer in the ballroom, but coming from the front part of the house. They had gone through there and not seen anything.

Remo felt Chiun’s legs working, and that gave him strength. He steered them both toward the dancing brown square of the rear double doors until the door jumped out at them, slamming into them. Remo’s skull vibrated, but the pain stimulated him. His hands flopped when he tried to make the latch work, and then the door opened on its own.

“Evening, suhs.” It was Cote’s butler. “Departing so soon? I must insist you enjoy more of our hospitality.” The butler insisted with an AK-47, which he held as though he knew what to do with it.

“Help us out of here,” Remo said. “I’ll make it worth your while.”

“I am afraid that is out of the question, suhs.”

Remo did what he had to do. He released Chiun and pushed himself, with all his energy, into the partially open door. The butler took a step back and watched the men fall. First the lifeless old Asian slumped down, then the white man collapsed.

But the white man kept going, rolling, taking Jenkins by surprise when he collided with his shins. Jenkins felt himself going over and swore at himself. Bloody fool! Oddjob would never have allowed himself to be bested like this! This was the kind of performance you’d expect from a second-rate supervillain—think Herve Villechaize as Nick Nack. Jenkins refused to lose the rifle but pushed out one hand to cushion his fall. The man who knocked him down now began rolling, scrambling, clawing on top of him, grabbing Jenkins’s clothing and using it to drag himself forward, heaving with every effort. Jenkins battered the man with the AK.

The man collapsed on Jenkins’s chest but reached for his throat. Jenkins butted the rifle into his jaw, and the fingers closed on Jenkins’s throat with only a feather touch.

Then Jenkins experienced pain so undignified and excruciating he sat up barking like a wild dog. His attacker flopped onto the floor, and Jenkins found himself looking at the little Asian man, who seemed on the verge of simply kicking the bucket from old age. Still, he had an iron grip on Jenkins’s gentleman parts, and it made Jenkins see stars.

Jenkins kicked the Asian man, who crawled away like a crippled, miserable beggar, and Jenkins held on to his most impolite region with two hands, riding out the agony.

He got to his feet to find his attackers were fleeing down the rear corridor where the old section of the home adjoined the new wings, and they were gone before he could gun them down. But they weren’t healthy. They must have been tagged by one of the poisons.

Allessandro Cote seemed to be begging for his life. Now, what was that all about?

“Good gracious!” Jenkins exclaimed.

Only half of Mr. Cote’s collection of automatons had been wiped out in the ballroom. Now, somehow, the other automatons stored in the hidden cubicles in the front of the house had been activated. That was odd, since only Mr. Cote had the pass codes.

These units had come to the ballroom, and they were, so to speak, on the hunt. But surely they should not be hunting Mr. Cote! Jenkins knew for a fact that they were programmed to never, ever put Mr. Cote at risk. What Jenkins didn’t know, what Allessandro Cote didn’t know, was that Fastbinder and his son had executed the KTA routine.

The KTA routine was the surest way of eradicating their enemies, because the KTA routine called for eradicating everybody.

If you Kill Them All, you’re bound to kill the right ones.

Jenkins soon realized that the collection was on a spree, for whatever reason. Allessandro Cote was blasted with cyanide darts from a lighter-than-air gunship even as a rolling keg of gasoline spurted a tongue of fire at his legs. A ninety-year-old mechanical cannon that looked like an end table on wheels, and was actually constructed largely of wood, belched black smoke from the deck-mounted gun. It blasted half of Cote’s abdomen away. Allessandro Cote’s corpse was then sliced to ribbons by an old-time gas-powered tree trimmer, almost eight feet long and counterbalanced on a hat stand that was itself mounted on a power mower deck.

The alligator rolled into sight, just outside the door, and Jenkins knew he was dead. Buck up, old chap, he thought, the alligator will be a quick death, clean and neat. Certainly better than the dragonflies.

Nothing could be worse than the dragonflies, right?

The bronze alligator put on a burst of speed and its head rotated sideways, then its hinged jaws snapped open, revealing a hundred and forty teeth made from stainless-steel blades salvaged from an abattoir. Very effective, indeed, Jenkins thought, as the massive jaws slammed shut on pneumatic pistons, biting his legs clean off just below the knees.

The alligator backed off. Jenkins collapsed to the ground but didn’t feel it. He saw his bloody feet still standing there, and the neatly severed calves tumbled out of the creature’s maw when it opened its jaws and spun its head in a full circle, first this way, then that. The gears clanked and rattled in its neck.

Now free of obstruction, it came at Jenkins again, closing its jaws on his torso and arm. Not very neat, Jenkins thought. There was a big mess of tom tissue when the alligator pulled back. Very messy.

Very painful, too.

But better than the dragonflies.