by T. R. Harris
Below the surface, smaller rocks filtered down to the next level, until finally, only dust made it to the living quarters, a six-story section that sat atop the central machinery dome where the gravity generators were located. It was a massive construct, and all maintained by an army of self-replicating robots that had allowed the station to survive three billion years in the hostile environment of an ever-changing galaxy.
The outer layer of rock varied from a depth of a hundred miles thick to only a few feet in places. On their previous visit, Panur had found one of these thin layers, and then using the gravity-drive of the Najmah Fayd, had cleared the debris to form a landing pad for the TD starship.
“This could take forever,” Copernicus griped. “There’s a lot of ground to cover.”
Adam was feeling the same, but they didn’t have a choice. If they gained entry at a location five hundred miles from the last place, they were screwed. It had to be the original point.
Adam was watching the surface, which was a uniform brown and gray. Yet the underlying structure was metal…shiny metal.
“Back off some; get a wider view. Then change the polarization for the sensors. Darken the whole thing so that only the lighter areas stand out.”
Immediately, several areas on the half-globe below them became prominent. They made a quick run around the station, comparing the light areas to each other, further narrowing the search. Three spots stood out starkly from the rest. They marked them on the map and then dropped down toward the closest one.
This wasn’t it, simply a large rock with a sheered side that was reflecting the metal ring around the sphere. The next one was a hit. It wasn’t much more than five hundred feet square, just large enough for the Najmah Fayd to set down. Adam recognized the tell-tell signs of gravity runs over the surface and a piling up of debris around the LZ. There was plenty of room for the shuttle.
The surface of the Aris world had an atmosphere, thick and capable of sustaining Human life, even for an object this small, thanks to the planet-size gravity it generated. The team geared up, stocking up on extra ammo and dividing the explosive packs between the three of them.
“I should warn you, there are robotic guard dogs around,” Adam said.
Coop shook his head. “No shit? Nice that you got around to telling us that.”
“They’re not hard to detect. Their metal feet clank on the deck. You should be able to hear them coming. Don’t hesitate to shoot. They ain’t puppy dogs.”
Riyad cracked the hatch. “Six hours, twenty minutes, my friends. Tic-toc.”
The air had a distinct stale odor to it, something he didn’t remember from the last time he was here. Perhaps now that the Aris were gone, it wasn’t so vital to maintain a rich and pleasant atmosphere. However, all the readings were still in the green; the team set out toward the row of piled up boulders, following Adam’s lead.
He’d been hoping for a trail left from before, and maybe if given time, he could have picked one out of the light layer of fresh dust. But it had been several years and the station was being constantly bombarded by a rain of microscopic particles that built up on the surface.
Even so, it wasn’t hard to spot the openings in the huge girder system below the rock layer. These were the gaps where smaller rocks fell and were large enough for the Humans to fit through with space to spare. They climbed down a twenty-foot-wide support beam coming up from below before reaching another level. They were on an incredibly wide girder, easily five hundred feet across and running a mile or more off in either direction. There were mounds of rock they had to go around to reach the edge.
Adam looked over the side. This was the spot where Adam and Trimen had climbed on the backs of Panur and J’nae for the two-hundred-foot drop to the next level. Planning ahead, Adam had a long length of rope he’d brought from the Sally. He secured an end and then scampered down, the three-quarters Earth gravity helping with the effort. Riyad and Copernicus followed.
“This is where we ran into the dogs. Keep an ear out for them.”
Adam led the team along the deck, looking for a thick support column with a door in it. They took an elevator to the lower levels before. It had to be around here.
“These look like shoeprints,” Riyad pointed out.
Adam knelt down, studying the faint images in the light covering of dust. Not as much debris reached this level, preventing six-year-old footprints from being covered up. “They lead off this way—”
Click, click, click.
“I told you so,” he said. Riyad and Coop heard the sound, too, and already had their weapons unslung.
The spindly, six-legged robot crawled up the side of a pile of debris and looked down at the Humans.
“I thought you said they were dogs?” Coop said. “I’ve never seen six-legged dogs before.”
“They have them on Dimloe,” Riyad said. “You really do need to get out more often, my friend.”
Adam didn’t participate in the banter. Instead he let loose with a blast of 7.62 NATO rounds at the mechanical beast. They did the trick, ripping the sentry to shreds.
“Watch for others, they move in packs.”
He was right, as three more appeared, encircling the flesh-and-blood invaders to their private domain. The sound of the M-101s was deafening, echoing off the support beams and metal decking. In the cacophony, two additional robots managed to move in close to Riyad and jump. He was slammed to the ground, the length of this rifle now held firmly in the mouth of a mechanical beast as he struggled to keep the creature at bay. The other one was circling, looking for an opening to snap at one of Riyad’s limbs.
Adam stepped up point blank and pressed the barrel of his weapon against the torso of the robot on top of Riyad. He pressed the trigger, ripping through the mesh screen and into the innards of the automaton. In the meantime, Copernicus blasted the second dog from a distance, sending the shards skidding into a pile of small rocks next to a support column.
Riyad climbed to his feet, covered in dust but otherwise unharmed.
“The path leads over here,” Coop was saying. He was at the column were the dead dog lie. He moved around to the other side. “Bingo, we gotta door.”
“There’s no lock on it; just push it open.”
The three Humans crowded inside the small chamber. The door closed automatically, trapping them inside. Adam felt a moment of apprehension, until the elevator began to move. It would have been shitty for them to get locked inside a six by six metal box.
He hadn’t noticed before, but the ride took longer than he expected. Perhaps the first time he didn’t know what to expect. This time he had the impression the ride to the main level of Aris occupation was only a few hundred feet below. That may not have been the case. He also noticed subtle shifts in direction, meaning the car could be moving anywhere in the general area, perhaps to a central receiving area where they’d been carried before. Maybe the entry point wasn’t so crucial after all.
All the while, Adam was thinking of an exit plan. He took out his K-BAR and scratched a large ‘X’ on the inner wall of the elevator. The moment the door opened, he scratched another on the side wall outside while Riyad and Copernicus moved into the wide lobby area, weapons hot.
The room was well-lit and the air a little fresher. Adam thought he recognized the room, but it could have been one of a hundred within the station. There was no furniture, artwork or other decorations of any kind. Just bare metal walls, floor and ceiling.
“Now that you got us here, where do we go?” Coop asked Adam.
Adam motioned with his hand down the only corridor that connected to the foyer. “That way.”
“Genius,” Coop said.
“They don’t use doors much here, so be looking for a meeting area off to the right. That’s where the Aris first greeted us. Also, if you see any of the metal orbs, don’t trust them. I got jolted by one the last time I was here.”
“Do you really think the Aris would go off and leave their orbs?” Riyad
asked.
“Not really, but if we see any, it could be a good indicator that we’re not alone.”
“I’ve got your meeting area,” Copernicus announced. He was in the lead and had disappeared around a corner made up of the frame of a large portal. The ceiling in the room was domed, reaching a pinnacle a hundred feet above. It was simply a metal structure; unlike the last time he was here when it displayed a field of stars far above. There was no one here to run the projector, no need to impress the guests.
“Check the side rooms,” he commanded. “We’re looking for three boxes about the size of cigarette packs. Check any drawers you find.”
There were side rooms, each with normal height ceilings and some with low lying furniture and blank monitors fully integrated into the walls. The Aris of the station spent the bulk of their time in hibernation, and the robots didn’t use the furniture, so the items were in showroom condition. But there were no drawers, no desks, no panels set in the wall that they could see.
“Where the hell would they have put the boxes? They took mine from me here. Wait…they handed them to a robot afterwards.”
“Where do the robots hang out? Do they have a lounge area, with soft techno music and where they can get a nice spiced-oil drink?”
“I know of one place. But we still need to find the assimilation room.”
Riyad fingered his neck communicator. “Then we’ll split up. Since we don’t have working ATDs, we’ll have to stay in touch the old fashion way.”
Adam stepped back into the main corridor. “All right, down there about five hundred feet should be the room I was held in. Then to the left, a series of corridors to the power room. The robot center is near there, so be careful. The Aris may be gone, but someone is still maintaining the station. And listen for clicks. That was something the Aris didn’t think about when designing their metal sentries.”
“Something they didn’t think of…that has to be a first.”
“Cause and effect. They had no reason to make them stealthy.”
“Riyad, head for the power room, Coop to where they held me. Check every room along the way, looking for any sophisticated equipment set up. There has to be a place where they planned on assimilating Lila. J’nae was a different process, an easier one. From what I could tell, Lila’s was a lot more complicated. And computers. I’m not sure if the Aris used them, but maybe the robots have some that will give us a layout of the place. And use your knives to mark your way. All the corridors here look the same.”
“Where are you going?”
“Farther down, to an area I haven’t seen before. Who knows what I’ll find? Okay, move out, and stay in touch. And be ready to shoot anything you see—except me.” He noticed the glint in Copernicus’s eye. “I’m serious, Coop. Don’t shoot me.”
“Never say never,” he said with a wicked smile. Then he rushed off down the corridor.
Adam took off at a sprint. They had a lot of ground to cover and not much time. He held his weapon firmly in his grip, ready to shoot anything that appeared. Any of the robots would be a threat and he didn’t have time to negotiate with them.
The station was huge, and Nunki had told him it was maintained by fifteen-hundred service robots. Even then, it was rare to see one of the thinly build metal constructs, most of which walked upright on two legs, although they could shift to four-legged transport on a whim.
Adam encountered one of the machines. It was clinking along a side corridor, moving away from Adam. It sensed his presence and turned, showing no reaction to seeing him. He blasted it anyway.
He was soon in a section of the station that had not been included in Nunki’s boastful James Bond-type tour of the mastermind’s evil lair. To his relief, most of the rooms he passed had elaborate machines and piping, mostly embedded in the metal walls. Adam suspected these to be environmental equipment, and not something to be used to assimilate a living being into another.
Then his communicator crackled.
“Adam, Copernicus…I found something in the robot room. It could be your magic boxes.”
“I’m on my way!”
129
Adam had scratched the surface of the metal walls with his combat knife so it wasn’t hard for him to find his way back to where the team split up. He remembered how to get to the robot room from here; he’d dispatched something like fifty of them there in the heat of anger after Trimen’s death. The more time he spent in the station, the more vivid his memories were becoming.
Adam raced through the open portal. The remains of three service robots were strewn across the floor, along with a smattering of spent cartridges. He ignored the carnage and ran up to his friend.
Riyad held up a trio of black, metal boxes. “Is this what you’re looking for?”
Adam took them from Riyad, a wide grin painting his face. “Exactly! This is the best news we’ve had in a while.”
“Do they still work?”
Adam’s smile disappeared.
“I don’t know.” He studied the boxes. “There’s only a button with no on/off light. And I think that was all for show anyway. Panur designed them to work after they were taken away, when they were placed next to each other.”
“Then they could have been operating all this time…until the batteries ran out.”
“But J’nae said she sabotaged the units, even though they did work at first, when I left my room to go to the power station. Where did you find them?”
Riyad pointed to a work bench where the robots did maintenance on equipment…and themselves. There were very few tools, just a pair of what looked like Dremels on the end of flexible hoses. “They were in a drawer under the table—but wait! One was. The other two were across the room, under that other table.”
“Maybe it takes all three to turn on the damping field. All J’nae could have done is separate the units.”
“That seems pretty simple.”
“Panur did prefer things that way. He made us believe that all we had to do was press the button and the field would go off. He wanted the units to be taken from us and locked away in a safe place. Only then would they work fully.”
“Then they couldn’t be that sensitive, otherwise just walking next to another person with one of them would set it off.”
“You are a genius, Mr. Tarazi. That makes sense.”
“But are they working now, now that they’re all in your hand?”
“Hell if I know. We’ll only know if there’s an an interphase field around.”
“Speaking of that, does that look like a master control panel to you?”
Riyad was pointing at a bank of gauges and monitors at the other side of the room. They moved over to it and began checking out the station. If it was a control panel it would be almost impossible to tell. It was designed to be used by robots, machines that could plug into the wall to get data, rather than having to study active monitors. Early warning systems, guard duties and a myriad of other chores that required eyes in normal systems wouldn’t be needed here. But it was a station of some kind, and with a number of ports where plugs could be inserted.
Adam shook his head. “Even if we could access the data, it would all be computer code to us.”
Copernicus showed up at the portal. “I heard you found something?”
Adam held up the three boxes.
“Cool, so now we can free the mutants.”
“Possibly. We aren’t sure if they’re still working.”
“And the only way we’ll know is when Kracion gets here and parades Panur and Lila down the hallway. That’s when we jump out and shout, ‘Surprise!’”
Adam ignored his sarcasm. “Did you find anything that can help us?”
Coop was eyeing the control panel, running his fingers over the smooth metal surface of the components. “Not much,” he said, “just maybe the assimilation room.”
“What? Where?” Adam stammered.
“How do you know?” Riyad added.
“It’s either tha
t or a hospital room. There’s a couple of body-size beds and a bunch of equipment hooked to hoses, like this.” He gripped one of the tools hanging above the workbench.
“Could it just be another one of these workshops?”
“No, this place looks sterile.”
“Then lead on, Mr. Smith.”
As the team rushed out of the robot room, Adam checked his watch. Five hours, five minutes. He grinned, feeling better than he had in a long time. Plenty of time, he thought. Just have to work out a plan now to make everything come together.
The room did indeed have the look and feel of a hospital room, and an O.R. at that. There were two utilitarian slabs covered by a thin cushion and cloth sheets. The fabric was smooth, appearing never to have been used, and even within the interior of the station, a fine layer of dust covered the surfaces.
“They never used it,” Adam said as he studied the layout.
There were a lot of electronics here, along with tables, benches and the almost non-existent chairs. This was where Prime beings would work, sitting on high stools as they performed their miracles. There would be one Aris at a time undergoing the procedure, while Lila—the Apex Being—was slowly dissected on the other bed. Adam pulled one of the overhead tools down for a closer look. There appeared to be only a lens at the end, perhaps a laser of some kind. There was no way he could comprehend the function of anything in the room, except maybe the chairs and stools. Those he could figure out a use for. And now he put one to use, sitting on one of the wheeled stools.
“Hopefully, this is the only operating room in the station, but with only one Apex Being, I think we’re pretty safe there. So how do we put our plan into action?”
“You will have true telepathic contact with Lila when she arrives,” said Riyad. “And without our ATDs to possibly give us away, Kracion won’t suspect we’re here. Activate your magic boxes and then let her and Panur know they’re free. They should take it from there.”
“In the meantime, we’re hidden away somewhere from the fallout,” Coop added.