The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  A siren began to sound, and a nearby viewscreen suddenly switched on, showing two still views of Suss—frames apparently taken from a robot’s vision system a few intersections back. Apprehend Intruder the screen instructed.

  Dammit! Suss thought. She should have known, she told herself. Maybe she had been in no danger from the humans in this rock, but the bloody robots had to be under direct parasite control. And the parasites had to be good at data processing. At least it had happened at a moment when she chanced to be alone in the corridor.

  Her hands were working before she was aware that she had even come up with a plan. She wadded up a blob of general-purpose plastic explosive and slapped it on the roof of the T-intersection behind her. She snapped the divider in a chemical-decay timer, poked it in the explosive, and started moving again toward the central control room, no effort at caution anymore. She scrambled down the corridor, swinging at full tilt from one handhold to the next.

  The blast came up behind her, a deafening roar more felt than heard. The shock wave threw her down the corridor, slapping her up against the next turn in the passage. Half-stunned, her ears ringing, she peeled herself off the wall, trying to shake off the numbing blow. The air was full of choking smoke and dust and rock fragments caromed lazily back and forth in zero G. At least the way was closed behind her.

  She dug into her toolbag again and pulled out the spool of filament charge. She anchored one end of it on the floor of the corridor and began spooling it out behind her. Shove a detonator into any point in the charge, and the whole long strip of explosive would go up at once. It was great stuff for sealing a corridor.

  She made her way down the corridor, noted a small passageway heading up to the next level, and paid out more filament charge on the main corridor. She anchored it down at that end, then returned to the small side passage. She dug into the tools she had grabbed, found a small powerpack and a length of wire.

  That was enough. Thirty seconds later she had a crude detonator rigged. It was nothing but two wires plugged into the filament charge, with Suss ready to touch the far ends of the wires to the powerpack. But it was enough. She scrambled back into the side passage and waited.

  Company was not long in coming. A whole squad of robots barreled out of the main passageway, heading from the direction of the command center. She gave them just long enough to space out along the main corridor then touched off the strip of explosive, ducking out of the way as best she could.

  WHAM! With a thundering crash that nearly rattled the teeth out of her head, the main passage dissolved in a torrent of noise, dust, and flying rock.

  Suss crept cautiously out of her hidey-hole and hurriedly picked through the churning cloud of rubble and dust. In any sort of gravity field, the ruined rock would have slumped over and lay still. Not here. The corridor was filled with broken bits of wall and robot. Suss searched the broken machines for weaponry and was rewarded with a brace of heavy repulsors.

  She pressed on, the light of battle in her eyes, with no thought for anything but getting to that damn control room and shutting down that shield. Then maybe she could lie down, rest, do something about the dull throbbing pain in her head, the trickle of blood coming out of her left ear from a punctured eardrum, pull the splinter of rock from her left shin. There was a constant ringing in her head, and her vision was a bit dim.

  No such trivialities bothered her. She stumbled forward, using her left hand and right leg, the toolbag over her shoulder and one of her newly won repulsors in her left hand. She passed through the length of wrecked corridor and kept moving. Another pair of robots appeared and she blasted them with recklessly long bursts of repulsor beads. She scrambled forward past their wrecked bodies.

  After a time, which might have been a minute and might have been an hour, it dimly began to dawn on her that something strange had happened to the corridor walls. She didn’t much care, but some corner of her pain-clouded mind warned her that it might be important.

  She stopped and examined the walls—and realized that she had been proceeding down something very different than ordinary humanmade rock tunnels or even ordinary alien tunnels for a while. These walls were slick and smooth, an impenetrable grey in color. There was something sheer, and shimmering, almost alive about them. Half-seen images seemed to flicker beneath their surface. This was nothing humanmade, and nothing like what the crew of the Dancing Bear had reported.

  If the walls had been like this, Destin would have filmed it, reported it. The walls had been dead then. Not like this, not alive.

  Alive, Suss thought. This was here when Destin arrived but not yet alive, awake. She realized at last that this must be part of the ancient central complex of the asteroid, a piece of corridor older than humanity. Imagine waiting that long in the dark for someone to come, Suss thought, almost feeling sorry for the helmet.

  Had it been an honest servant once, bred or manufactured to serve as an immensely powerful AID? How long had it waited to be found? And didn’t folklore say that AIDs could go mad, lust for vengeance if ignored for too long? How long had the helmet brooded in the lonely, abandoned darkness? The idea frightened her far more than a squad of attacking robots had managed to.

  Close. She had to be close. Trailing tiny drops of blood that hung gleaming-red in the air behind her, she pressed on, struggling to concentrate, desperate to keep the map of the asteroid’s interior clear in her clouded mind.

  She stumbled around one last corner and surprised a pair of guard robots standing before a massive blast door. She shot them to confetti and dove back in behind the corner before they could react. Must have been old models, she thought. I could never outdraw a modern job. It took her a moment to think, realize what it was they must have been guarding—but only a split second to snap back into the corridor and blast out the entry controls even as the massive vaultlike doors were beginning to swing shut. The blast door stopped moving halfway through its path and Suss kicked her way over to get behind it.

  She looked around, shook her head to clear it and tried to think. The door, that was of human design, but it was as much a stranger here as she was, jammed into those weirdly glimmering grey walls. The corridor it sat in and the compartment behind it were utterly alien, with bits and pieces of human technology stuck in place here and there. Strange devices, in shapes that were hard to see, hung from the bulkheads. She shut her eyes and tried to picture the plan of the asteroid in her mind. There was no doubt about it: that was the main control room on the other side of the half-open blast door.

  She dug a small wad of plastic explosive out of the toolbag, shoved a ten-second detonator in it, and pushed down the initiator button. She counted seven seconds before heaving herself up over the edge of the blast door and throwing the explosive inside.

  A repulsor spat at her from the control room as she pulled herself back down. Hypervelocity beads hit the walls and disintegrated, flaying Suss’ back as ricocheting dust.

  FLAM! The blob of explosive went off. Suss had calculated the charge to be enough to injure or stun anyone in the compartment without wrecking the place.

  Moving as fast as she could, she swung up around the blast door and dove into the control room.

  There was no one there. Then who the hell had fired? Suss looked to the far end of the compartment and saw the sealed hatch. She remembered from her briefings how fast the helmet had been able to move Jameson from his office.

  Nothing else could have fired and then gotten out of there that fast, sealing a hatch behind, before the explosive could go off.

  He, Jameson had been there, seconds before.

  Never mind, no time. Suss turned and examined the interior of the blast door she had come through. Good, there was an emergency crank for sealing it. Putting all her failing strength into it, she turned the handle and swung the massive door shut, using a massive steel bolt to dog it shut from the inside. She crossed to the other hatch and dogged it shut as well.

  Feeling a bit safer for the moment, she
examined the crazy patchwork of controls that seemed strewn about the room in no logical pattern. The walls were of that same peculiar grey material, which seemed even more like something living than it had in the exterior chamber. Panels and readouts were mounted directly onto the material.

  Pairs of devices that dealt with the same function might be next to each other or across the compartment from each other, one on the ceiling, the other on the floor. It was haphazard, a jury-rigged job, both human and alien devices hooked up in the same crazy quilt pattern.

  After a five-minute search, Suss located the shield controls. She pulled back a lever and shut off a series of switches. A status board confirmed that the massive shield was already dissipating.

  And that’s that, she thought. It seemed incredible that the actual work of her mission was done that simply, but there it was. All the incredible risk, that harebrained jaunt through an energy shield, the firefights, just to push a button.

  Suddenly, she felt very tired and knew it was more than mere fatigue. Her body had the luxury of feeling the hurts done to it. She could still easily die of her wounds, even if the enemy never tried to take back this room.

  She remembered seeing a first-aid kit tucked in somewhere during her search for the shield controls. She dug it out and set to work patching herself up.

  It hurt like hell to move, but that was all right.

  Pain was proof she was still alive.

  ***

  “Asteroid shields down,” the sensor tech announced, but the navigator was already diving his lumbering ship on a trajectory that would have been scary for a fighter, scrambling to get in under the plane of the enemy shield before someone could switch it back on and lock them out again.

  Spencer opened his mouth to order a dive, but never got the chance. Let the crew do their job, he thought.

  “Sensors!” Deyi shouted. “Scan that rock, find us their main cargo locks fast. I want us landed on top of them before they have a chance to lock them down.”

  “Spotted what looks like a cargo center,” the sensor tech announced. “Passing coords to navigation.”

  “Got it!” the navigator cried. “Course to landing there set. It’ll be fast and sloppy, but we’ll get down. Four minutes.”

  “Don’t worry about the paint job,” Tallen growled. “Just find us a parking space.”

  Spencer punched a button on his comm unit and spoke. “Captain Spencer to assault team, stand by. Lieutenant Marcusa, I will move with the second wave—” Spencer looked up and spotted the look on Tallen’s face “—accompanied by Commander Deyi, if that is acceptable to him.”

  Tallen Deyi stood more erect than is wholly practical in zero G and saluted his commander. “It is quite acceptable, Captain, thank you. I was about to raise a big stink about being left behind.”

  “I have to keep my officers satisfied, Tallen,” Spencer said, smiling.

  Why am I so happy? he wondered, and realized the answer even as he formed the question. Because the shield going down means she’s still alive, he told himself.

  Spencer did not choose to think about how long that would remain true.

  The navigator rolled the Banquo to a new heading with a violent disregard for safe piloting norms—but he had his reasons for moving fast. Spencer could see on the tactical display that a pair of enemy missiles was diving in toward them. It was time to get out of the way because there was no way to block this strike with the shields. Banquo was boosting at a full gravity, far too high for shield operation.

  The weapons officer loosed a clutch of countermissiles, blasting the incoming attack.

  The navigator pilot spun ship again and gave a short, savage burst of retrofire. Spencer checked the display. They were only a hundred meters over the cargo bay, exactly stationary over it. Very tidy piloting. The navigator fired up his topside auxiliary jets and jolted the ship straight down hard, throwing everyone against their crash harnesses. One unlucky ensign’s seatbelt failed and he was thrown into the ceiling.

  The same ensign hit the floor just as abruptly when the navigator hit the bottom jets, braking them to a halt. They hit the ground and bounced a few meters. The pilot armed and fired the rock-piton system. A hundred powerful harpoonlike devices fired around the perimeter of the ship, stabbing their spikes into the ground. Winches spooled up, and pulled the ship down, holding it firmly in place. In the near-zero-gravity field of a small asteroid, even large ships can simply drift off if they are not held down.

  “Lower air locks open, first wave of marines on the ground,” the weapons officer announced. “Sir, the faster you can get that second wave out of here—”

  “The faster you can get the shields back up and keep them from dropping things on you,” Spencer agreed. “Comm, can you stay linked with the assault team with the ship’s shields up?”

  “Standard operating procedure, Sir. Fiber-optic cable from the ship, under the shield, and out to a transmitter on the surface.”

  “Excellent. Tallen, let’s move.”

  The two of them hurried down toward the landing stages. “I still say a hell-bomb would solve all our problems,” Tallen said over his shoulder. “Why not at least prep one in case we can use it?”

  “We can’t possibly nuke the place. Not with Suss in there—to say nothing of civilians.”

  “Civilians who are working for the enemy,” Tallen said.

  “If those poor bastards know who they’re working for, I’ll go get a job with StarMetal myself,” Spencer said. “Besides, we can’t afford to destroy the place, except as a last resort, until we know more—about the helmet, how it got there—if there are any more of them elsewhere. You want to vaporize the place and leave that question open?” he asked.

  The older man said nothing, just trotted down the gangway to the next level.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Assault

  Suss was glad to be in zero G. She knew perfectly well that she would have passed out long ago if her heart had been straining against a planet’s gravity. The bandages, painkillers, and stimulants from the first-aid kit were helping too. She checked the clock. Fifteen minutes since she had sealed herself into the command center.

  And ten minutes since the drilling had started on the far hatch, the one Jameson must have escaped through.

  Drilling, she told herself, knowing it must mean something. Not laser cutters, not explosives, not a plasma gun, but an old-fashioned power drill. Maybe there was still something here, something her small explosive charge hadn’t wrecked, something relatively fragile that a stray laser beam or rock fragment or tongue of plasma fire might easily destroy. Something the helmet-thing valued greatly. Greatly enough to risk a slow, careful approach to a compartment it knew contained a dangerous enemy.

  But they must think their precious something survived my improvised hand grenade, Suss thought. How do they know the whatever-it-is is still in one piece? And why did they leave it here? Why leave it behind when they ran from me? Why is this such a vitally important place to keep the thing? Why here?

  Why here? She realized quite suddenly that the question was even more puzzling on a grander scale. Why here? Why this crummy backwater asteroid? Why not keep it at headquarters back on Daltgeld, where the people and machinery were? Why not back on Mittelstadt, where all the ships were? The more she thought about it, the less sense it made. Daltgeld made a much better HQ than this place. The damn helmet had taken over the planet long before the Navy showed up—but when danger threatened, it immediately cut and ran for here.

  It had diverted tremendous resources to defending this place. If the helmet had used its ships to jump the Pact fleet while they were in orbit of Daltgeld, instead of using its freighter fleet to guard this asteroid, the task force would have been so much scrap metal orbiting the planet by now.

  Yet, instead of standing its ground and holding onto its strong position on the planet, the helmet retreated here.

  And not just to this asteroid, but to this very chamber. Th
e helmet had been here fifteen minutes ago, right back to the spot where Destin had found it.

  Something occurred to Suss, an errant, obvious thought all of them had missed when planning her one-woman attack. The parasites could control any device directly. Why did the helmet need a central control at all? And why hadn’t the helmet used a parasite to switch the shields back on, direct from the shield generator? Good God, maybe they had done just that! Suddenly alarmed, Suss checked the view from an exterior camera. No, the shield was still down.

  Suss stared at the shield control panel. She noticed something else strange. The panel did not have any cables running from it. She looked around the compartment. None of the monitor and control devices did. Yet they were all attached haphazardly, obviously put in place after the room was built. They couldn’t have run the cables through the rock wall. Devices outside this complex used exterior cables. She had seen cables bolted up to the side of nearly every tunnel.

  Then how could the control panels possibly do their jobs? Suss thought of an explanation, but not one she was ready to believe. She grabbed the swizarm knife from her pocket and moved over to the shield control panel. She undid the knife’s main blade and popped the panel cover off.

  The interior of the control box was filled with perfectly normal circuitry—normal circuitry coated in translucent grey. The wires that should have led to the generator instead were stripped of insulation, and shoved, one by one, into a blob of the same grey wall material. It reminded Suss of a diagram of a nerve ganglion.