Belt Three

by John Ayliff

  She swatted away the picture-pane and pulled up a three-dimensional diagram of the Battle for Mars. A spherical swarm of 20,000 Dodecs coalesced in high Martian orbit, and 28 heroic Earth Authority cruisers moved out from low orbit to intercept them. Instinctively, Marszalek’s eyes found the dot that was the Aurelian and followed it. ‘I’ve seen this before,’ she said. She didn’t really want to relive this.

  ‘Watch the Dodecs,’ Rasmussen said. ‘We didn’t have time to properly analyse their behaviour during the battle, but we can see now what they were doing. It’s best to think of the Dodecs not as units on a battlefield, but as components of a distributed machine.’

  Rasmussen fast forwarded the playback and zoomed in. The Dodecs swarmed closer together, not reacting as the cruisers’ missiles picked them off one by one. Thousands of pentagonal green apertures opened.

  ‘It now looks like they were using their gravity manipulation beams to create conduits that transported material between the individual Dodecs,’ Rasmussen said. She waved a network of green lines visible, showing the paths of the Dodecs’ beams. There was a thick central pillar like the stem of a plant, where thousands of Dodecs fired their beams close together. Not quite parallel, the beams feathered out and trailed off into space, pointing directly away from Mars. Surrounding the central pillar was a sort of sheath made up of lines that branched out like a plant’s limbs. The sheath met the pillar at one of its ends, the furthest point from Mars.

  ‘Every Dodec is connected to that network,’ Rasmussen continued: ‘the veins in the outer shell transport material to the apex of the system. Every Dodec appears to contribute a small piece of material. The pieces were too small for us to detect during the battle, but they add up. A few dozen Dodecs at the apex take this material on board and assemble their missiles. The Dodecs in the central pillar form a gravitational rail gun. A Dodec at the apex fires the missile that it has created, and the rail gun accelerates it to the velocity it needs to penetrate the planet’s mantle. The Dodecs fired seventeen of these missiles before they managed to break up Mars completely.

  Marszalek swatted her image aside. ‘I know that. You said you had something we could use.’

  Rasmussen’s wrinkles crumpled into a smile. ‘Yes. The Dodecs fired seventeen missiles, but they constructed eighteen.’ Her eyes flitted to one side.

  Marszalek followed her gaze to the captured artefact held in the acceleration scaffold on the other side of the partition. Her eyes widened. ‘That?’

  ‘We got lucky,’ Rasmussen said. ‘We intercepted the Dodec we did because it was dormant. I think the reason it was dormant was because it had been in the process of assembling the missile when the swarm succeeded in destroying Mars. It couldn’t fire the missile because the rail gun disbanded, but the presence of the missile must have meant that it couldn’t use its beam weapon. It didn’t know what to do, so it shut down. It got hit by a piece of debris later, but that wasn’t what knocked it out. I told you these things aren’t very smart.’

  Marszalek put her hands to the partition and peered through. One-seventeenth of the energy needed to destroy Mars, compressed into a sphere a couple of metres wide, still active…

  ‘It works according to the same principle as the beam, repulsive gravitational force with local variations to break up matter, but a thousand times more powerful, and concentrated into a millisecond burst,’ Rasmussen said with a hint of pride.

  ‘Can we use it?’ Marszalek asked.

  ‘I’m still working on that, but yes, I think so. Put enough energy into it, and it should go off. The output of the ship’s reactor would do it.’

  ‘Then that’s what we’ll have to do,’ Captain Marszalek said. She headed back for the transit module, as she did so, calling up Commander Khoroushi on the bridge, in preparation to give the order. Full burn, minimum transit-time course for Earth.

  The whole output of the ship’s reactor meant that this would be the Aurelian’s last flight. She found she didn’t mind that. She only hoped they would make it in time.

  Chapter Seventeen

  ‘That’s it,’ Keldra said. Her clenched fist was pressed up against the partition. ‘This is what we came for.’

  Jonas looked again at the Sphere. Now that he knew what it was, he imagined he could feel the power radiating from it. A Sphere assembled from the hearts of 1,000 Worldbreakers. A bomb that made Keldra’s nukes look like firecrackers.

  Some business-oriented part of his mind tried to estimate its value. As a weapon it was too powerful to be useful in the Belt era, but as a collector’s item, it was priceless. There could be a bidding war between the major collectors, perhaps a new record for the highest amount paid for a single artefact. But selling it wasn’t what either Jonas or Keldra had in mind. The Sphere would never get up to Belt Three, and the collectors would never know what they were missing. He found himself smiling.

  ‘We need to get it back to the Remembrance,’ Keldra said. ‘There’s a cargo transit module. I can get the servitors up to handle it.’

  ‘We may not need to,’ Jonas said. ‘Aurelian! Can you deliver the Dodec artefact to the Seagull?’

  There was a pause before the computer answered. ‘Captain?’

  ‘We need to move the Dodec artefact to the Seagull,’ Jonas said. ‘Can you have your robots deliver it?’

  ‘It would be better if the artefact stayed here, Captain.’

  A chill ran down his spine. He had begun to take his power over the computer for granted. ‘I’m giving you an order, Aurelian,’ he said.

  ‘You yourself gave the order that the artefact should be kept in the lab. You were clear that it should not be disturbed.’

  ‘I gave that order a long time ago.’ He immediately regretted his choice of words. The last thing he wanted was to remind the computer how much time its captain had supposedly lived. ‘I mean, the situation has changed. The artefact is no longer secure here. You’ve done a great job protecting it, but now it needs to be moved.’

  ‘The artefact is secure here,’ the Aurelian said. ‘I can detect no place where it would be more secure. You have been misled.’

  Suddenly, Keldra let out a yelp then crumpled to the floor, her face screwed up in pain. Her hands went to her head, flailing, as if barely under control, tearing at the arcap when her fingers managed to touch it.

  ‘Stop that!’ Jonas shouted.

  He scrambled down next to her and tried to help her get the arcap off. It clung to her tangled hair, making a sucking, tearing sound where parts of it momentarily came free.

  ‘Captain, step away from Keldra,’ the Aurelian said.

  ‘Aurelian, stop what you’re doing!’

  ‘Captain, I believe you are being influenced. Your friend Keldra is an alien infiltrator. She is working for the Dodecs. You must step away so that I can remove the influence. Then you will be able to command the ship effectively.’

  ‘Aurelian, you will not harm Keldra,’ Jonas ordered.

  The arcap came off, taking a few knots of Keldra’s hair with it. She went limp, panting, strands of hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. Jonas held her in a sitting position. A moment later her eyes widened and she fumbled with the gun she had strapped to her side. Her mouth was working but the arcap overload seemed to have left her speechless. He tried to follow her gaze but couldn’t see anything, just planes of readings hanging in empty air.

  ‘Captain, step away from the alien so that I can deal with it,’ the Aurelian said.

  Keldra grabbed Jonas’s arm with her free hand, keeping him close. She was still staring into empty space. She had her gun in her hand now, still shaking, and she fired, the shot ringing out painfully in the confined lab. He couldn’t see what she had hit. It was as if the bullet had vanished as soon as it left the muzzle.

  ‘Keldra is human!’ he shouted above the echoes of the gunshot, making his voice as authoritative as he could. ‘I order you to treat her as human!’

  ‘There are no humans but the Captai
n,’ the Aurelian said. ‘The Captain told me so. She said she was the last.’ The computer’s voice was rising in volume, as if making a ship-wide announcement. ‘You are not the Captain!’

  The lab disappeared. Jonas was suddenly in a vortex of blinding, flashing lights and searing noise, as if random electrical stimuli were being poured directly into his sensory nerves. Clumsily, unable to sense his own limbs, he grabbed the arcap and wrenched it off.

  He didn’t have Keldra’s long hair to adhere to the arcap, so it came off easily, with a sharp prickling sensation. The sensory overload vanished instantly, leaving Jonas dizzy. He was back in the lab, now plain white again, without its floating read-outs. An orange warning light pulsed in the ceiling.

  He could see now what Keldra had shot at. One of the four-limbed robots stood in the middle of the lab, right in front of them. The arcap must have edited it out of his perceptions. Its outstretched arm was tipped with a laser like the one that a robot had used on the comet core in the first memory log. There was a single bullet hole in its trunk, in the middle of a bulge that looked as though it housed some critical system. The robot was motionless save for a wisp of grey smoke curling from the hole.

  Through an open door at the other side of the lab – previously painted closed by Jonas’s arcap – another pair of robots was entering.

  He pulled Keldra to her feet and pulled his own gun from the straps at his leg. She fired at one of the approaching robots, hitting it in the central trunk but missing whatever critical system she had hit last time. The robot wobbled on its wheels but kept coming, delicately raising an arm tipped with an energy weapon. Jonas fired but his shot went wide, making a neat hole in the wall beside the door through which the robots had entered.

  ‘Transit module!’ Keldra shouted.

  She fired twice more. One of the robots sparked and went dead; the other, the one Jonas had missed, kept coming.

  He dashed for the transit module. The door was closed and didn’t open when he pressed the palm panel. He looked around frantically for a manual override.

  There was a thump as Keldra threw herself across the room, and a second later a crimson laser beam split the air behind him. That was no mere sample collector: that was a heavy-duty laser, meant for external construction and repair jobs, far more powerful than was required to cut through flesh and bone. Glancing back, he saw that Keldra had managed to duck behind one of the instruments stacked at the sides of the room, a heavy white cabinet with a glass front. He was in the open. He fired once, desperately, and then threw himself down next to her.

  ‘Get the goddamn door open, Jonas!’ she snarled.

  ‘It’s locked,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t see a…’

  Keldra wasn’t listening. She broke cover for a second to fire another couple of shots. Jonas couldn’t see if she hit anything. Another crimson beam crackled over her head as she ducked back down, disintegrating some of her stray hairs. There were two molten-edged holes in the far wall of the lab now, dark circles opening onto the unlit adjacent room. She took another desperate shot, and this time he heard the bullet pierce a robot’s trunk.

  Keldra was panting a bit more than she should have been from the exertion. Jonas noticed that his own breathing was difficult. ‘It’s cutting off our air,’ he said.

  She nodded, teeth gritted. Of course, she already knew, Jonas thought: cutting off the oxygen had been her trick.

  ‘Got a couple more minutes,’ she said. She screwed up her eyes, as if trying hard to remember something. ‘Emergency release…always under floor panels. Last robot’s blocked. Go!’

  He scrambled across the floor to the transit module door. It was hard to see the cracks between the individual floor panels, still less a way that one of them could be levered up. He scrabbled at the cracks but his vacuum-gloved fingers found no purchase.

  There was the whine of another laser firing, and then a deafening crash. A gust of air buffeted him. Shards of glass hit the floor around him and he felt a sharp pain as one of them hit the back of his leg. The air pressure suddenly felt much lower.

  He risked a glance back. Three disabled robots had been blocking the doorway, with one live one trapped behind them. The live robot was firing, its laser-arm held low, the beam scything through the trunks of the robots blocking it. The beam had shattered the glass of the partition and cut through some of the supports holding the Worldbreaker Sphere in place. It looked as if the computer was too set on their destruction to care about damage to its own ship. He wondered if the Sphere would go off if the beam hit it.

  The severed trunks of the dead robots toppled over, and the live robot began pushing through their smoking lower sections, bringing its gun around towards Jonas. He rolled onto his side and fired desperately. This time one of his shots hit the robot, by luck more than skill. It only clipped its side, but it knocked the robot momentarily off balance, sending a laser beam that would have hit him scorching across the wall.

  ‘Get down!’ Keldra shouted. She had got on her helmet, and her voice came booming through her suit’s speakers.

  Jonas rolled away from the door. The air was thin, and he couldn’t think straight. The Sphere’s quarantined section must have been kept in vacuum, so the air from their part of the lab had now thinned out to fill a room several times too large for it. He struggled with the clips that kept his helmet to his side, eyes fixed on the robot as it pushed past the remains of its companions. In the corner of his eye he saw the robot that had been tending the Sphere starting to turn.

  Keldra fired a couple of shots blindly from behind cover, and then leapt up, ran to the door and stood in front of it. She waved her arms and fired at the ceiling. ‘All right, you bastard computer! I’m here!’

  The robot’s gun arms swung away from Jonas to fix on Keldra. It looked like the Aurelian still viewed her as the high-priority target. At the last moment she threw herself aside, and a laser beam hit the transit module door where she had been standing. The door sparked and snapped open, flinching, like the limb of a person in pain. Keldra rolled on the ground and got to her feet…

  A second beam crackled through the air. She hadn’t seen the robot next to the Sphere activating. The beam hit her in the abdomen, cutting straight through her body and emerging from the back of her suit. She cried out, her short scream ringing through the lab, amplified by her suit speakers. Blood sprayed onto the floor behind her and she fell backwards.

  Jonas was on his feet now, helmet unclipped from his side but still in his hand. He threw it behind him into the transit module and fired at the robot by the Sphere, the one that had hit Keldra. He missed, but one of his shots hit the supports keeping the Sphere in place. The already weakened scaffolding collapsed and the Sphere crashed to the floor, making the whole room shake. For a second he thought it would explode, but it remained inert. It began to roll, its dark surface sparkling as its facets caught the light. It crashed through the remains of the scaffolding and rolled into the robot that stood beside it, knocking it over and crushing it like metal foil.

  Keldra was still alive, groaning through the suit speakers. She’d managed to clutch her hands to the wound in her abdomen, but she was still bleeding through her fingers, the blood standing out on the bright yellow of her vacuum suit and the white of the floor.

  The remaining robot had been knocked off balance by the Sphere’s impact with the floor, but it was realigning itself. The Sphere was rolling towards them. Jonas tossed his gun aside, grabbed Keldra beneath her armpits, and pulled her into the transit module, away from the Sphere and out of the line of fire. She cried out as she was moved, and left a smear of blood on the white floor.

  The transit module shook as the Sphere crashed into the lab wall. It would be blocking the last robot from the transit module door. That should buy them a few more seconds.

  Emergency controls were in the floor, Keldra had said. Jonas scrambled over to the floor panel in the middle of the module and felt around its edges. This time he managed to find a ca
tch, and the panel came loose. The controls beneath were labelled with tiny, archaic script that he was too dizzy to read. He saw a lever and pulled it towards him, hoping that it would bring down an emergency door.

  The transit module lurched downwards. The lab disappeared above their heads. Jonas released the lever once they had descended one and a half levels, so that the module door looked onto the bare wall between two floors.

  He rolled onto his side, panting. Hands shaking, he recovered his helmet from where it had fallen and put it over his head. The automatic seal hissed closed, and he breathed deeply of the oxygen-rich air. His suit had been punctured by the glass, but the helmet would still feed him air until its tank ran out. Keldra’s would, too, if she didn’t die from her injury.

  He crawled over to where she lay. She was still conscious, silently clutching her abdomen, face screwed up in pain. Her eyes followed him as he crouched over her.

  He grabbed the minimal first-aid kit from one of his suit pouches. ‘Keldra, can you hear me?’ he asked.

  ‘Fuck you…Jonas.’ Her voice came in hoarse pants.

  ‘I’m going to try to stop the bleeding.’

  He examined the contents of the first-aid kit. There was none of the expensive Earth-tech medical nanogel that could have repaired any injury in the field, but there was a canister of bandage spray.

  ‘Said you could…control it.’

  He couldn’t risk taking Keldra out of her suit. He used the first-aid kit’s little silver scissors to enlarge the hole in the front of her suit until he could see the wound beneath. It was a bloody mess, still bleeding into the interior of the suit. He sprayed bandage across the wound, covering it. She winced as the grey substance touched her burnt flesh.

  ‘Looks like I couldn’t control it,’ he said, keeping eye contact with her as much as he could. ‘Looks like I let you down. You’ll have to decide what to do with me once we get back to the Remembrance.’

  ‘Maybe I’ll…put you back in…your cell.’ She tried to laugh but ended up spluttering.