Daemon

so hard it felt like it had moved up into his throat. Hollis dug through the desk drawer and produced a Sig Sauer P220 Super Match pistol. He chambered a round and took another glance at the bedroom monitor.
    The other two bikes had flipped the bed over with their sword arms, revealing the naked and helpless Mary beneath. She lay curled up, silently screaming beneath the blinding laser lights.
    ‘Oh, god. No …’
    But would this appease them?
    The bikes just stood observing Mary, as she shrieked in terror at the sight of Metzer’s butchered remains on the floor around her. Hollis decided he would do something for Mary’s family after this. He would find out more about her. He’d help her family.
    But the machines didn’t attack. Instead, they just stood watching as she got to her feet and fled from the room, wrapped in a blanket.
    Maybe she was part of this after all …
    Hollis flipped switches on the console, bringing up the image outside his safe room door. There he could see the third machine waiting. It seemed to know exactly where the concealed door was. From blueprints? There was no doubt that whoever wasbehind this had serious power. Access to his communications and electrical layout would have been no problem for someone who could do this. It was only his secure room that had saved him, and there was no home automation link to its steel door. Once locked, it could only be opened manually from the inside.
    Suddenly the house phone rang on the console next to him. Hollis recoiled from it. He glanced up at the screen again. The bloodstained machine stood impassively outside, still aimed at the secret door.
    The phone rang again, and Hollis just stared at it. Perhaps it was someone on the security team? Hollis pressed the speak-erphone button. ‘Hello?’
    The line was silent for a moment – but then his own voice came back to him, talking fast, as Hollis always did on business calls …
    ‘Even if the U.S. markets crash, we’ll make money. Movement is all we need – positive or negative makes no difference …’
    It was definitely Hollis’s voice. Someone had tapped his phone calls. Another clip immediately followed …
    ‘What a company does is irrelevant. What a company makes is irrelevant. The market is a math problem we solve through value extraction.’
    Someone somewhere had intercepted his words. But why?
    Looking at the remorseless killing machine outside, he somehow couldn’t picture it being spawned by human rights activists. Whoever was behind it was decidedly more dangerous.
    His laughing voice came to him again over the speaker.
‘We made it legal. Our people wrote the congressional bill.’
    On the security monitor a different type of bike entered the wardrobe room. This machine wasn’t covered in blades, but in piping and pressure tanks. As it came in, the other bike moved aside. The new arrival slammed down hydraulic jacks to plant it firmly just outside the panic room door. Then, instead of twin blade arms, it extended a single robotic nozzle arm,with hoses trailing back along its length to half a dozen pressure tanks. A spark flashed, and then a white-hot flame suddenly stabbed out from the nozzle – instantly turning the wood paneling in front of the panic room door into a solid wall of flame.
    Hollis stared at the machine on screen, paralyzed in fear. He knew what it was. He’d owned stock in steel mills in the nineties. It was a plasma torch. Someone had mounted it on this terror machine, and it now stood before his safe room door, blasting aside the wooden millwork surrounding his bunker as though it were nothing more than newspaper. Already the scores of fine suits and leather shoes and carpeting in the wardrobe room were engulfed in flames as the twenty-five-thousand-degree cutting head on the machine penetrated the steel door like a fire hose through dirt.
    The sprinkler system leapt into action, spraying water over the outside room, but the fire’s intensity vaporized it. The surveillance camera showed the remorseless machines standing their ground, one cutting, the other waiting, but soon, even the camera started to fail – and melt. The screen turned grainy and then went black.
    Behind him, Hollis was suddenly deafened by a burst of pressure and a cracking sound as a white-hot jet of plasma burst through the steel doorway and began tracing a molten line along the length of the door. The sofa and wet bar beyond it burst into flames, and the glass cover of the