The house and the grounds around it looked deserted. There were no vehicles of any kind parked on the property, and there was no sign of any activity from within the house either. All of the doors and windows were shut and the shades were drawn.
The rear of the ATC lowered to the ground, forming a deployment ramp. Ahead of me, the other telebots began to detach from their charging docks one by one and file off the transport. My bot was one of the farthest from the exit and one of the last to step outside. I piloted it over to join the others, which were now standing in formation directly in front of the main entrance to the house. Samantha piloted her bot over to mine. As it approached me, its armored chest plate slid aside again, revealing the monitor that displayed live vidfeed of her OASIS avatar’s face.
“What did you say to Anorak?” she asked.
“I told him that if he doesn’t release Og to us, I’ll press the Big Red Button.”
“Did he take you seriously?”
“I think so.”
“Are you serious?” she asked. “Would you really press it?”
I nodded.
“If Anorak doesn’t release Og, it may be our only way to stop him,” I said. “And if I die from synaptic overload, no one else will have the ability to press the button after I’m gone.”
Art3mis nodded. Then she craned her telebot’s neck backward so that she could scan the sky overhead with its cameras. Then she tilted them back down to look at me.
“Our eyes in the sky still don’t see any sign of an impending aerial assault,” she said. “And sensor scans of the house still haven’t detected any heat signatures inside. Maybe Anorak installed thermal shielding inside the house. Or maybe he already had Sorrento move Og to another location.”
I pointed toward the front door and said, “Let’s go find out.”
She nodded. Her telebot’s display screen went dark, and its armored chest plate slid back into place over it. Then I watched as her telebot suddenly turned around and began to run straight toward the front door of the house, which appeared to be made of solid oak. She nodded at Miles and a second later both telebots slammed their armed torsos into it like a pair of battering rams. The oak door splintered into pieces that exploded inward, littering the polished marble floor of the empty foyer beyond.
Over the comm system, I heard Miles instruct four of the other telebot operators to stand guard at the front entrance. Then he instructed the others to circle the house and try to find other ways inside. Once those telebots had marched off to carry out his orders, Miles piloted his own bot through the shattered doorway and into the foyer, and Art3mis and I followed him with ours. When my telebot entered Og’s mansion, a transparent map of the house （taken from its construction blueprints） appeared on my HUD, highlighting our current location.
I looked around. The lights were off and the room was completely empty. There was no furniture of any sort, nor was there anything hanging on the walls. When Og had moved out west, he’d apparently taken everything he owned with him.
Art3mis’s medic telebot clanked down the corridors directly in front of us, then it kicked open a pair of huge wooden doors at its far end. Beyond them was another large wood-paneled room devoid of any artwork or furniture. It looked like it might have been a large dining or meeting room, back when the house was occupied. But now Anorak appeared to be using it as his personal armory, because it was filled with heavily armed aerial drones and more than a hundred Okagami ACT-3000 telebots just like our own. The telebots were standing in neat, ordered rows on the polished marble floor. Their armor plating was covered with desert camouflage paint—an indication that they were probably stolen from the military. But they were all powered down, and as we crossed the room, they remained completely motionless, with their weapons retracted. The drones were Habashaw ADP-4XLs, and they were loaded into automatic launch racks that were aimed at the two skylights embedded in the ceiling. But they, too, were powered down.
I tiptoed past them, expecting them all to come to life at any moment. But they remained dark and still. I wondered if Anorak had ordered them to stand down. Perhaps he was afraid to call my bluff about the Big Red Button.
Samantha’s telebot reached another oak door at the far end of the room, grabbed the knob, and then yanked it completely off its hinges before tossing it aside. The room beyond was completely dark, but Samantha ran her bot inside anyway without hesitation. Miles and I piloted our own telebots in after her, following her single-file. Once all three of our bots were inside, the emergency floodlights mounted on their shoulders all switched on automatically, lighting up the interior of the room.