"Damn it." Jack turned the engine off and scowled at the cluster of patrol cars and two armored police tanks blocking the street ahead. "Here we fucking go."

"Cheer up, honey," Corona said. "At least this gets us away from all the cameras we've got pointed at us whenever we're home."

"Yeah, there's that." He tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and continued glowering out the windshield. "But we're gonna have to get past all those cops, and then we'll probably have to survive numerous hails of bullets on the way into that building."

"On the way out, too." Taura dug her handheld supercomputer out of her trenchcoat pocket and tapped the surface. A hard-light projection appeared in front of her, showing her the layout of the Argus Defense Systems building.

"Yeah, that, too," Jack muttered. With a long list of assault charges pending against him and the girls from a previous job, the cops would be enough of an obstacle. He didn't even want to think about what they'd be walking into if they managed to get inside the building without being arrested.

"Well, the clock's ticking, so we'd better get on with it." Corona nuzzled him and opened the passenger-side door.

Taura pointed at the holofield. "Winslow is in a lab on the fourteenth floor. I'll be able to guide us straight to it once we're inside." She tapped the deck of cards-size device again, returning it to standby mode, and slipped it back into her pocket. She opened the back door and scooted out of Jack's hearse.

"Fine. Let's get this over with." Jack got out, locked the doors, and headed for the yellow tape cordoning off the Argus building. He held up his ID as they approached the cops on the near side of the tape. "We're with the Justice Foundation. We were hired to …"

"Yeah, we've been briefed." The cop frowned and nodded over his shoulder. "Go ahead."

Jack raised an eyebrow. "You're not gonna give us any shit?"

"I'm not happy with the situation, but it's not your fault." The man shrugged. "Not all of us are unreasonable. I've been watching all the stuff on the news about you three, and I can see your side of things."

Huh. I'll be damned. Jack nodded and allowed a hint of a smile to show. "We appreciate that." He and the girls stepped over the yellow tape and jogged up the front steps. Jack tugged on the door handle and found it locked. "Ah, of course."

"There's an app for that," Taura said softly, smiling, and pulled out her computer again. She loaded a program, pointed the gadget at the lock beside the double doors, and the lock clicked.

Jack grinned.

Taura waved the device over the door, scanning the room beyond it. "No one there, organic or mechanical. Not detecting any bombs or other booby traps."

Jack nodded and opened the door, drawing his Glock and keeping it aimed straight ahead as they entered the lobby. Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the lobby's black and white checkerboard floor.

"How many people do you think are trapped in here?" Corona stopped on the left side of the elevator door.

"Give me a moment." Taura stroked the side of her device and a display and keyboard designed for her oversized fingers appeared in the air in front of her. She touched one of the icons and entered a set of commands. Dozens of tiny windows appeared in her holofield. She pointed at several of them.

"Most of the building is empty since they're closed on the weekends. There's just a handful in a few offices and labs. Putting in a little overtime or working on projects that can't wait until Monday, I suppose."

"Well, that gives us some maneuvering room, then." Jack took the opposite side of the door and waited for Corona to push the button on the control panel.

The doors parted. She and Jack entered the elevator. The holofield and ghostly keyboard remained in front of Taura as she squeezed in behind them.

"Most of the floors are clear, but the fourteenth has mechanical units crawling all over it."

Corona sighed as she pushed the button for the fourteenth floor. "Fantastic."

"What happened to your built-in urge to fight?" Jack said, quirking one corner of his mouth upward.

"Oh, I haven't lost it. It just isn't any fun when you and Taura could get hurt or killed." She shivered, frowned and shook her head.

"Don't worry about us." Taura patted Corona's arm. "Jack can handle himself, and so can I, now that I've got my head screwed on straight."

Corona patted Taura's hand and aimed a look at Jack.

He held in a sigh and put his arm around Taura. Their relationship had taken an … odd turn a few weeks ago, but no matter how weird it still seemed to him, it was too late to back out. Besides, he didn't want to, even if it could be done without breaking Taura's heart and infuriating Corona.

Which, of course, made him even more uncomfortable.

"What kind of mech units are we gonna be dealing with?" He prepared to snap his gun up as soon as the doors opened. Good thing we've already loaded armor-piercing rounds. He'd been expecting human or chimera security wearing armored vests or full-body combat gear, but these bullets would work just as well on robots.

Taura opened another window in her holofield, scanned the mechs in the camera feeds, and accessed their specs.

"Looks like three different models of ADS's standard issue security drones. Two biped, one near human size and the other a bit taller than Corona and I. The third is a quadruped model, sort of a miniature version of Adam and Jamie. None of them are sentient, though. They're running on a set of simple instructions and receive commands from the security server in the basement."

"Instructions which include killing our client, apparently." Corona raised her gun a few more inches and glanced at the small screen above the door. "Shows how reliable their products are, huh? If they attack the people they're supposed to be guarding …"

"It's got to be more than just a malfunction," Taura muttered as she continued typing on her floating keyboard. "Despite what you see in movies, glitching robots don't attack people. The worst they do is crash, but that only causes them to lock up and reboot."

"Maybe they aren't able to recognize this guy for whatever reason, and think he's an intruder." Corona looked up at the display over the door again and frowned.

"They'd just send an error report to their server and ask for multiple confirmations from other nearby units before taking any action. They're set up that way to prevent them from becoming a danger to the people they're protecting."

"So that means someone reprogrammed them to go after our client. Terrific." Corona scowled at the display again. "This is the slowest elevator I've ever been on. We should be there by now."

Taura scanned the control panel and sighed. "The elevator took us up four floors and stopped, but the counter kept going."

"Fantastic." Jack sighed. "Makes me miss the days when you could actually feel elevators moving."

"So whoever hacked the mechs also hacked the elevator?" Corona shook her head.

"We've barely started, and already someone is fuckin' with us." Jack reached out to hit the button that would open the door. "What a shock."