Chapter 6

"I've got good news and bad news," the agent said.

"More good than bad I hope," Colonel Jerrik muttered. The two of them watched the labs techs sifting through what was left of the mainframe. There was a glass partition between them and the clean room. Everything was laid out neatly but still fit on a single table. Next to the computer were the remains of three assassin bots. There was some discussion about this; there might have been four of the expensive robots, but their self-destruction mechanisms were so thorough, no one could say for sure how many there were.

"They managed to fry the positronic matrix in the mainframe," Special Agent Jim Rendel said. "And then they blew most of it up."

"Is that the good news or the bad?"

"The bad," Agent Rendel said with a dry smirk. "The good news is that we managed to salvage around three percent of the data."

"That doesn't sound very good," Colonel Jerrik shot him an incredulous look.

"All in all, it's not," the other man conceded. "But we did learn a few things. We know for a fact that nineteen have been destroyed or self-destructed to avoid capture. We think there were thirty-seven assassin robots built. Most were sold to the Chinese Hegemony."