Wilson's War: Tales From the Athena Lee Universe by T S Paul Page B

Athena about them, but she would want to take them apart and ruin my fun.
     
    Power. I had to have power to hook them up. Doing some research I discovered that they could absorb most any kind of power. Using Sam's drone fleet, that he uses to transport parts, I carried a few anti-grav tractor batteries over next to them. I don't have hands, I use Athena for things like that. I need to borrow some hands to hook these up. I left the cameras at Sam's and started jumping around the ones at the mall. I love malls. I checked out the pet store first. No small birds. Or crickets. Or ants. Someone must have heard about that other station where stuff had happened. Stuff that I had nothing to do with. This was a really big station with lots of humans on it, they have a really nice toy store for station children. Small flying drones seemed to be very popular here and they have construction drones. Once again I don't have hands to open a box. As I watched, parents with children used the stores demo's before buying new drones. I thought about this for a moment. I had an inspiration, but it would have to wait for third shift to implement it.
     
    The toy store was closed during third shift. I sent the owners of the store a email and 'paid' for one of their demo drones. I added an extra 50 credits for their trouble charging the whole thing to Commander Arthur. He was our ships Chief Engineer. Athena says he's kind of a jerk. I activated the drone, opening the door to the store electronically. "Whee." I was free-flying through the station. Using the built in hands on the toy construction drone, I connected batteries to the two Battle drones. One was red, the other was blue. They had blocky arms and legs with a square-ish head. Using the drone I very carefully reconnected their communication system. Their primary frequency was one used for door openers and alarms. Every time I sent a command, doors and alarms will go off across the station. Fun. Cleaning them up a bit, I started calling them rock and sock. Gotta love the classics.
     
    It took all of two days to charge Rock and Sock back up to operating levels. The two had been armed with anti-personnel rockets and machine guns. Both weapons had been removed thankfully. I didn't really want humans to die. Accidents happen enough. Sending my first signal to the robot like drones I set off all the airlock alarms in the waste disposal area of the station. They had to shut the system down and inspect it. Humans all over the station were doing the 'pee-pee' dance. Haha haha. My second attempt at signaling the robots opened up all the trash bins on every floor prompting over a thousand calls to maintenance. It's a dirty job but someone had to do it. My third attempt finally made contact. As an after effect, fire alarms began sounding in the swimming pool area of the park. Maintenance and systems repair were just standing there scratching their heads over that one.
     
    My new toys, Rock and Sock began to power-up and come to life. They only had a very rudimentary operating system. They needed constant input from an operator. The reason that these were so feared on Old Earth was that the operators were hard wired to the systems. The human nervous system couldn't handle the impulses needed to operate the system for very long. The pilot usually went insane, attacking and killed everything in sight. They became a true berserker. I'm an AI. I don't have a nervous system and won't go crazy. I ordered Rock and Sock to take a few steps forward. The robot shaped drones stepped forward with the screams and creaks of metal joints long forgotten. Time for the fun to begin. Every night was movie night in the park on third shift. Using my hacking skills, I arranged for this week's theme to be 20th century robot movies. Too bad I couldn't find a giant lizard suit, now that would have been fun!
     
    I borrowed two of Sam's magnetic advertising signs and stuck them on the backs of my toys. Just to be nice to one of