The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  The flypack fired a control jet, turning her back to the asteroid. Flying backward, she tried to find the Banquo’s shield in the sky, but the ship was already lost to view. There was nothing to do but wait for the ride to end. The flypack was flying an automated run that was meant to bring her right up against the closest of the communication ports, and Suss was strictly along for the ride.

  She longed for all of the devices that had been denied her because they contained too much metal, starting with a simple watch, right on up through a cutting laser to that most unimaginable of luxuries, her AID, Santu. But all were too risky passing close to an electromagnetic shield.

  The best Banquo had been able to provide was a few varieties of plastic explosive—and even a few of those had to be left behind, because the chemistry of the explosive itself contained too much of the wrong kinds of metal. Suss was strictly, utterly, on her own.

  The flypack fired again, blasting at full braking power. Suss suddenly realized that she must be getting close to the target. How much time had passed? It had seemed only a moment that she had stared at that blinding wall. It must have been much longer.

  A tiny amber glowlight began to blink, just at the edge of Suss’ vision. Fuel low! Damn it. The attitude jets fired again, swinging around until she was flying nearly parallel to the asteroid’s surface, still traveling backwards. How long was there to go? She looked down, past her feet, and saw the hellish blue-white glow of the shield below her. She was close enough now to gauge her movement over that pseudo-landscape of writhing energy. She couldn’t be more than a hundred meters over it, and getting closer all the time.

  She checked her tiny rearview mirror again, looking over her shoulder in the direction she was traveling. There! Up ahead, a black column thrusting up through the shield. That had to be it. The low-fuel light began winking faster.

  The plan had been for the flypack to bring her to rest right alongside the comm port, but the only possible trajectory was right at the limits of the pack’s fuel supply, with no hope of a second chance. If the pack failed to get her there, Suss would just keep right on going, sailing out into space with no hope of rescue.

  She watched the black column grow in the mirror. It was going to be damn close.

  The flypack’s engine chuffed and coughed once or twice, and then shut down. Suss shut her eyes and cursed the fates, fighting back tears. She opened her eyes and swallowed hard. To be that close and not make it.

  She suddenly realized the fuel warning light was still winking, not staying on. She still had fuel. Then why had—she looked again in the tiny mirror.

  The black column was hanging motionless, right behind her, not ten meters away. Now that she was closer, she could see it was some sort of open framework, not a solid construction. The asteroid’s shield was beneath her feet, scarcely twenty meters below.

  Suss grabbed for the manual controls, rotated halfway to face the column, and blipped the maneuvering jets, giving herself the gentlest of nudges forward, so she was moving forward at only a few centimeters a second.

  She reached up and switched off the UV vision system. The blinding glare of the shield as seen through amplified ultraviolet faded away. Below her, the shield resumed its inky black appearance.

  The column resolved itself, at least somewhat, as an open latticework construction, gloomy gray in the dim starlight. The tower was obviously designed to be retractable. When threatened, it could be pulled in under the shield and the shield port closed.

  As long as that didn’t happen while she was around . . .

  Suss looked over her head and saw a small forest of antennae sprouting from the top of the girder box, no doubt attached to various communication and detection systems inside the asteroid.

  Had any of them spotted her? In theory, it was possible, but even with the suit and flypack, Suss knew she had a very small radar cross-section, and those dishes and sensors were pointed up, away from her.

  Her gentle movement forward was bringing her closer to the antenna tower. She looked down at where the tower entered the shield itself. She flicked the UV viewer back on for a moment and saw that the shield almost lapped up against the tower. She swallowed hard. Obviously, the best way in was to climb down the interior of the tower.

  She was only a meter or two away now. She resisted the temptation to speed up her travel, and let her very slight momentum carry her forward. She put out her hands and grabbed hold of a corner girder.

  Wrapping her legs around it to hold herself steady, she wrestled her way out of the flypack. She wouldn’t need it anymore, and it was going to be tough enough going without humping the rocket pack along. She got the thing off her and shoved it away. It drifted down toward the shield. She watched as it struck the shield—and disintegrated into a cloud of debris.

  Like sticking your arm in a slicing machine, the man said. More like a shredding machine.

  Never mind. Keep going. Don’t think about it.

  She wriggled her way into the center of the girder box and was relieved to find a set of handholds built into one line of girders. She swung herself around so her head was pointed down toward the shield and the asteroid below. She started climbing.

  One hand after another, moving as delicately as she could, she pulled herself along, closer and closer to the hole in the shield. It was all too easy to imagine the hole as a mouth, gaping wide and eager to swallow her.

  Closer. Closer. She could feel the power of the shield as she went toward it. Her hair was literally standing on end, caught in the surging electrical fields. She could feel her hair brushing the inside of her helmet, felt the hairs on her arms bristling against the sleeves of her suit.

  Closer, closer, into the mouth, the hole, let it swallow her up, let the magnetic eddy effects set the little telltale lights in her helmet blinking and flickering, indicating the status of a flypack that wasn’t there anymore. It didn’t matter. Just keep going. You are still alive, when by all rights you should be dead a dozen times by now.

  Through it, past it, under it. Pause for a moment, feel the hair on your head settling back a bit, turn around and look up at the violet anger of the shield that was over you, and realize you were in.

  Suss sagged back against the handholds and started to breathe again, not quite sure when she had stopped.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Landing

  They had received no word from Suss and could hope for none. Obviously, it would have been impossible for her to carry a radio, let alone use one, if she was trying to get past a communications center.

  There had been a microscopic twitch on the Banquo’s shield power sensor just after the time she should have arrived there. Whether that flicker on the meters indicated her death, the wreckage of her discarded flypack, or the impact of some completely unrelated bit of debris was impossible to say. There were bits and pieces of missile wreckage crashing back all over the asteroid’s shield. There were no ruined Pact missiles raining down—Spencer wasn’t even bothering to fire yet.

  If Suss’ fate was uncertain, Banquo’s was scarcely less so. She was in under guns, all right, skirting so close to the asteroid that there was a certain amount of interference between its shield and the ship’s. Fortunately, the asteroid’s shield was as effective in masking the enemy’s sensors as the Banquo’s weapons.

  Now and then they would get a fix on the destroyer and drop a missile on her, but this close in, magnetic disturbances were interfering with marksmanship: The enemy was as likely to hit the asteroid’s shield as Banquo’s.

  So far, the weapons officer had always managed to boost power to the shield in time—but sooner or later either she was going to be a millisecond off, or Banquo was simply going to run out of power for the shield.

  The navigation officer was close to a nervous breakdown, keeping up a random series of course changes that would keep the destroyer skating over the asteroid’s shield without any predictable pattern to its movements. If he got it wrong, the crew of the Ba
nquo would receive a graphic demonstration of what happened when two EM shields interfered with each other. But as Banquo would turn into a cloud of debris in about ten seconds, the lesson would not be very useful.

  Spencer glanced at the mission clock. In ten minutes they would fire a flight of missiles, one to each detected opening in the shield—including the one Suss had been aiming for. They needed those sensor ports destroyed anyway, to ease up the pressure on Banquo’s defenses, but the main point of the exercise was to provide Suss with a diversion. In theory, if the enemy had detected the agent’s arrival without being certain of what it was, a fusion bomb over her entry point would discourage any investigation.

  Without vaporizing her, with any luck.

  ###

  A hatch. A plain old, manually operated, nonsecure hatch, lying open right there at the base of the communications tower.

  Suss stared at the hatchway for a long moment, scarcely believing her luck. She had sweated out the way into the asteroid’s interior a dozen times, sketching out in her mind how she would have designed a secure entrance and kept someone like herself from gaining entry. And now all she had to do was cycle through a lock. She climbed inside and decided it wasn’t so incredible to find a way in. After all, what point in securing an entrance behind a force shield and twenty million klicks from anywhere?

  With a lack of drama that Suss somehow found disappointing, she cycled through the lock and stepped out into a small, unoccupied engineering room.

  WHOOMP! Suddenly the whole compartment shuddered. A status monitor by the air lock suddenly turned bright red and flashed out a warning.

  ***

  ENEMY MISSILE DETECTED

  AUTO-EMERGENCY COMM TOWER RETRACTION PERFORMED

  COMM PORT SHIELD OPENING COLLAPSED

  Suss breathed a sigh of relief. Close, very close. Time to get on with it. She pulled off her pressure suit, unpacked the few non-metallic gadgets she had brought in its pockets, and stashed it in a closet. Underneath she was wearing tan coveralls, rather sweat-stained but otherwise quite nondescript.

  Unless the civilians on this rock were issued some odd-looking uniforms, her clothes ought to pass muster. She smoothed down her hair and broke into an equipment locker. She found not only a tool bag, but a whole collection of hand and power tools that might well come in very handy. She stuffed those and her plastic explosives into the bag, opened the door to the compartment, and set off down the corridor she found behind it.

  Find the shield generator, she told herself. Shut it down, blow it up, stop it working. Somehow.

  The corridor was actually an access tunnel, drilled straight through the rock to this point from some central area. Suss peered down the length of raw, cold rock and could see no other doors opening on to it. Obviously it had been built for no other reason than getting workers back and forth to that comm tower service room. With the tower out of operation, it was unlikely that anyone else would come along it. That suited her fine.

  Not that it made much difference. She’d meet the locals soon enough. She grabbed a handhold and started pulling herself along.

  The tunnel was not as long as it looked. After only a hundred meters, Suss found herself decanted out into a busy—indeed frantically crowded—concourse, the meeting point of four or five large tunnels.

  She moved cautiously out of the access tunnel and hung back from the obviously panicky crowds of people.

  She was in no danger at all of being spotted as an outsider by these people. They were dressed in any number of styles, many of them close variants of her own worker’s coverall. No one wore a name badge or a unit ID, let alone a uniform.

  This was clearly, patently, a civilian crowd—and not a very well organized one at that. Everyone was shouting at once, banging into each other as competing teams struggled to get this or that large piece of equipment out of the way.

  Suss heard a woman crying from somewhere. It occurred to Suss, not for the first time, that the helmet-creature was not very good at overseeing humans. These people knew they were under attack, but they did not seem to have been prepared for it, or know who was attacking them, or why.

  She spotted something else. Knots of people were clustered around terminals set into the rock wall of the corridor, and others were pausing to check personal terminals. No one seemed to be getting instruction by asking a human superior—only by checking with a terminal.

  People were taking their orders from the computers. According to Spencer, the security people had been doing the same thing in the StarMetal building the night of their break-in. The guards hadn’t been happy about it then, and the workers here didn’t seem happy about it now. No doubt the official story here was the same as it had been then: that management was swamped and forced to let management AIDS handle routing administrative work.

  Suss looked over the chaotic crowd What would they think, she wondered, if they knew the computer terminals were passing along the orders of an alien machine/creature, a nightmare thing that had sucked their company chairman’s mind away?

  Suss launched herself into the confused throng, not with any specific goal yet in mind, but just to get a feel for the situation, overhear a few conversations, get the lay of the land. Judging by their hair styles, accents, and skill in zero-G maneuvering, Suss concluded that the vast majority of these people were from the asteroid belt, hired up rather abruptly from the labor pool on Mittelstadt and for high wages. No one seemed to have been here more than a month or so. Simply by looking at the state of work around her, Suss could tell that the job here was unfinished. The helmet-creature had set out to make its home asteroid into a formidable naval base—but the Pact Navy had arrived just a bit too early.

  Rumors and speculation were everywhere. Some of the workers seemed to think they were building a new Pact naval base. A competing rumor, much closer to the truth, had it that one of the conglomerates—possibly, but not necessarily, StarMetal—was planning to rebel against the Pact.

  No doubt, Suss thought, the latter idea had gained credence back when a fleet of robot freighters arrived at the base and the asteroid staff set to work arming them—and got a real shot in the arm when a destroyer popped into being right in their laps.

  Suss made her way down a side alley and had to get out of the way of a squad of gleaming robots hurrying in the other direction. She had seen a lot of them already. That was another strange thing: there were entirely too many humanoid robots on the asteroid.

  In the normal order of things, human-shaped robots were freaks, oddities. They were too expensive to build, needlessly complex. Except in rare cases, building a robot to look like a human made as much sense as building a shovel shaped like a gopher, or a lawnmower that looked like a flock of sheep.

  The human anatomy is a general-purpose system, capable of many things, but not optimized for any one task. Most robots, on the other hand, were specialized machines, designed for only one or two jobs.

  AIDs were certainly robots, highly advanced ones, but they weren’t shaped like people. They couldn’t have done their jobs as well if they were.

  There was an ancient style of portable tool called a swizarm knife that contained all manner of gadgets: a tiny pair of scissors, two or three types of cutting blades, tweezers, a magnifying glass, a tiny pair of pliers. Suss had found one in the comm shack tool cabinet and grabbed it. She was glad to have it in her pocket: even if she had to drop her tool kit and run for it, she could use the swizarm by itself to do any number of jobs.

  Of course, for every job the swizarm could muddle you through on, there was a better, more highly specialized device that could do that one job better. But soldiers and spies liked swizarms because it was easier to carry one tool instead of fifty and muddle through.

  To an engineer, humans were swizarms. You used them instead of robots for jobs where it wasn’t worthwhile to design and build the automated system—the robot—that could do the job better.

  But suppose, Suss thought, there weren’t goin
g to be any humans around anymore? You’d need machines to do all the once-in-a-while jobs, machines that could operate consoles designed for human controllers, read the indicators and handle the switches and dials and pedals and levers meant for a human controller. And the helmet had lots of human robots here.

  Conclusion: The helmet didn’t plan to keep most of its human servants around any longer than necessary. It was a grim conclusion to jump to, but it felt right to Suss.

  Suss stopped and checked a map set into the wall of the tunnel. By now she had her bearings and was working her way toward what was labeled as the central control room. Comparing the wall map to her memory of Santu’s conjectural diagram, she was certain it was the same compartment where the crew of the Dancing Bear had found the helmet those few short months ago. The control room now—what had it been a million years before? Was there something special about that compartment that made the helmet choose it for its power center once again? Maybe so. Almost certainly it was a place from which the shields could be controlled, and beyond doubt it was a place she could do some damage.

  Suss noted down the path to take and got moving, avoiding a scruffy-looking work-robot as it passed her headed the other way. Down this way, along that corridor, this left, that right, closer and closer to her goal. She moved downward and inward, moving with and then against traffic as the mobs of humans and robots hurried on urgent errands. More of the tunnels started looking alien somehow. They were laid out strangely, in a way no human would have done it.

  Something’s wrong, she suddenly told herself. Her subconscious had spotted something. Suss glanced around herself, trying not to act suspicious, trying to think. Then it came to her. The closer she got to the control room, the fewer humans and the more robots she was seeing—and it was becoming increasingly clear that the robots were taking an undue interest in her. She thought back through her last few turnings—yes, there had been inconspicuous cameras at the intersections, and at least one or two of them had turned to track her—