The War Machine: Crisis of Empire III

by David Drake

  “Terrific,” Tallen replied.

  Spencer grinned edgily, feeling a sense of gallows humor. “In that case Cormack, let’s hope your squad has some good catchers. Proceed at will.”

  Cormack towed the carrykit full of now-armed frag grenades toward the bend in the corridor. The first thing he threw was a smoke bomb, bouncing it off the corner wall so it caromed back down toward the robots. Spencer snapped his flexiscope around the corner at the same moment to watch. The bomb died in a vicious hail of repulsor fire—but that was of little matter to a smoke bomb that was already going off. The corridor instantly filled with a thick black smoke.

  The hope was that the robots used normal vision to aim, and couldn’t shoot what they couldn’t see. It seemed to work—the robots stopped shooting. The asteroid’s air system kept a steady breeze moving down the corridor, blowing straight at the robots.

  Cormack threw a frag-grenade five seconds after the smoke bomb, and another five seconds after that, and another, and another, bouncing each off the corner wall, sending the grenade rebounding off the tunnel wall toward the target.

  The first of the grenades blew just short of the smoke, filling the corridor around it with hundreds of shaped pieces of armor-piercing alloy. Much of the shrapnel merely slammed into the rock wall—but some of it drove down into the smoke, toward the robots. Spencer heard the screaming impact of metal on metal.

  Cormack cackled gleefully and threw the next grenade. So much for high tech, Spencer thought. In a war against a nightmare world of intelligent machines, it came down to one guy who knew how to bounce bombs off a wall.

  Spencer looked up from the scope to the marines. One of Cormack’s squad mates began throwing more smoke bombs and grenades. A third was there at the ready in the inevitable but heart-stopping moment a grenade suddenly sprouted up out of the smoke. She caught the bomblet and heaved it back the way it had come.

  Through the scope, all was carnage, chaos. Disembodied bits of robot bodies blossomed out through the smoke, slamming into the corridor walls. The savage noise of repulsor fire started up again, but it was impossible to see which robot was firing, or at what. Spencer suspected the robots did not know, either. Overload them enough, and robots will behave a great deal like panicking humans.

  Another grenade dove down into the smoke and exploded. “Flamers,” Spencer ordered. “Fire in volley.” Instantly, the two flame gunners came to the fore. They hooked the flexible nozzles of the flame guns around the corner and fired blind.

  The flame guns were baby variants of plasma guns, firing a weaker, cooler, fusion pulse—but there was nothing weak or cool about their shots from where Spencer watched through the flexiscope. The sun-bright tongues of flame licked down the corridor, banishing the smoke, stabbing down into the ranks of the robots.

  A wall of superheated air slapped back up the corridor, singeing Spencer’s eyebrows. The flexiscope started melting in his pressure-suit gloves. He slammed shut his helmet visor and scrambled back, now understanding perfectly well why it was against the doctrine to use flames inside an asteroid. Spencer could not imagine any of the robots could have survived the attack.

  “Cease fire!” he ordered. “Cormack! How long until the corridor cools enough for us to move up it?”

  “We can move now, Sir, if we use our climbing gear instead of pushing ourselves with hands and feet. Our rock hammers and stuff are insulated. And our suits shouldn’t melt if we touch the walls for a second or two.”

  “Then move out, fast—and watch out for any robots we missed. Relay that to the rest of the team,” Spencer ordered.

  Cormack nodded and punched the appropriate frequency up. “Cormack relaying for CO. Advance to jump-off point, then use hot-rock climbing. Enemy may still have effectives in zone, so watch your asses.”

  Spencer pulled his own rock hammer out of his equipment rack. With the hammer in one hand and his repulsor in the other, he followed Cormack around the corner into the half-molten hell of the next stretch of corridor.

  He was surprised at the ease with which he could propel himself, hooking the hammer into rock and giving a gentle tug. The corridor was a little patch of hell, the rock walls glowing red, dismembered robot arms and legs and heads pinwheeling past, with small parts still shorting and spitting sparks, most of the severed limbs still flexing spasmodically as joint controls shorted and reshorted. Smoke and dust twisted and knotted through the air, shrouding all in a deathly gloom.

  There was the quick rattle of a low-power repulsor from up ahead, answered by return fire from a half-dozen marines. But return fire could not help Cormack. His life’s blood pumping from a severed artery in his neck, the young marine died with a look of utmost surprise on his face.

  Spencer felt the mad urge to rush the marine back to the aid station, nurse him back to life personally, but forced himself to let the dead boy go, let his body behind to float free in that hell. There was nothing Spencer could do except make Cormack’s death be worthwhile, be for something.

  If anything could do that.

  Tallen and the rest of the squad following close behind, and the rest of the force after them, Spencer pressed on into a cooler corridor, beyond the sun-core radiance.

  Now he could feel it directly in his own head, in some terrifyingly familiar way. The scar on the back of his head suddenly throbbed in pain, reacting not to any physical hurt, but to a nightmare memory.

  A machine was pounding thoughts, feelings, into his head. But this was no mere numb-rig, no crude wirehead feel-good circuit, but a mind, a malevolent, thinking, hating mind, slamming thoughts, ideas, feelings into his skull.

  And he was just catching the fringes, the edges of the assault. He didn’t need to guess who was receiving the brunt of it all.

  He hurried forward, leading his troops past the roasting-hot corridor. The passage ended in a T-intersection. The opposite wall of the intersection was made from the grey material, but Spencer didn’t bother worrying about that. He drew up short of the cross-corridor and let his marines catch up. He pulled his sketch map from his pocket again and examined it.

  It showed this corridor emptying right into the command center, and to the best of his recollection, so had the map display he had copied it from. Maybe the map scale had simply been too large to allow minor details like this cross-corridor. It must be that one or both directions led to the command center itself.

  “Eight troopers down the lefthand side with Commander Deyi, another eight come with me down the right,” Spencer ordered. “The rest of you stand by and watch our back.” Without another word, he kicked off from the side of the main corridor and made his way along the cross-corridor.

  The mental onslaught pounded on, slamming down into his brain. It seemed as if the others were unaware of it, or could not feel it as strongly. No one commented or complained. Maybe they just chalked it up to natural fear under the circumstances.

  But Spencer was a former wirehead, and he was sensitized. He felt it. He knew what it was, knew Suss was taking the full force of the attack. He dug in again with his rock hammer and threw himself forward, pivoting a bit to bring himself around a bend in the strange grey corridor. He swung around—

  —Right into the face of a huge, red-painted humanoid robot.

  Reflex took over before Spencer had a real chance to think. The hammer was in his hand, and it was too close in for the repulsor. He brought the hammer down on the robot’s face, slamming into the thing’s sensor circuits, smashing it, setting off a shower of sparks. His other hand, still holding the repulsor, came up before he even knew he had seen the other robot.

  He fired point-blank, the stream of supersonic glass pellets blasting a fist-sized hole through the second robot’s carapace. Both of them were ruined junk by the time the marines arrived behind him. One of the marines looked over the tin men and nodded. “Nice work, Captain.”

  But they had their backs to me, Spencer thought. As if the danger they were guarding against was ahead of them, n
ot behind.

  “Captain, Deyi here,” Tallen’s voice came in his ear. “Nothing here. Just a stretch of that weird grey wallcovering, and a damaged blast door. Controls shot up, and the manual control’s out, too. It must be dogged shut from the inside.”

  “I copy that, Tallen. Stand by.” The danger was ahead of them, Spencer thought. He made his way around the corner—and came upon a tableau.

  The figure of an old man in a powerchair, his back to Spencer, arms outstretched over his head. Between his hands, hovering quietly in mid-air, the helmet. The gleaming, shining, lovely cause of all this evil. The moment Spencer looked on it, the pounding tirade in his head redoubled. Suddenly he could feel the words, the ideas the helmet was silently shouting.

  DISARM THE WEAPON. TAKE THE HELMET. PUT IT ON. DISARM THE WEAPON. TAKE THE HELMET—

  Spencer forced the foreign thoughts away, and glanced at the marines behind him. Now they could feel it, Spencer could tell that in a glance at their puzzled and frightened faces.

  Spencer turned to look beyond Jameson and his nemesis. They stood before an open blast door with a hole cut through it, the command center framed by the door.

  He saw Suss, stripped to her underwear, hunched up in the far corner of the compartment, her hands clenched tight over some sort of gadget with wires trailing from it, her face the very mirror of madness, of a purpose set and chosen against all odds or hope, her jaw muscles spasming with strain, a blob of spittle forming at the corner of her lips.

  Spencer froze himself. There was a battle here, one that he could not understand, one that he dare not interfere with yet. The gadget, the thing in Suss’ hands. Was that her weapon? He tried to see it better, traced the wires coming out of it, and recognized the ropy substance wrapped around the compartment’s interior.

  In a flash, it was all clear. Spencer leveled his repulsor, aiming it not at the helmet, but at Suss. “Listen to me, helmet. If I see her make one move toward disarming that device, or coming to get you, I’ll fire. She’ll die and let go of that switch. Can you control us all, helmet? Take your control off her to try and grab my brain—and she’ll set off that bomb. Marines, aim at Suss. If she moves, blast her. Helmet, even if you control both of us, enough to get direct control of both our bodies, my marines would kill us both before we could follow your commands. It’s all over.”

  For an eternal second, the tableau held, and the mad drumbeat mind orders still pounded in Spencer’s mind. DISARM YOUR WEAPON. TAKE THE HELMET. PUT IT ON.

  But then the shouted thoughts faded and died. There was an audible gasp from Suss. Spencer looked up at her in time to see her arms flex spasmodically, as if they were struggling against a great weight that had suddenly vanished. The two jaws of the pliers came within a hairbreadth of contact before she could pull them back.

  OLD FOOL TAKE ME. OLD FOOL TAKE ME. OLD FOOL TAKE ME.

  Spencer heard the new cadence, and looked down at Jameson. Jameson, the dying host, the used-up power source, was the one hope the helmet had left. Spencer had assumed the old man was dead, but suddenly the outstretched arms quivered, the fingers jerked to life, and the palsied hands quivered as they wrapped themselves around the helmet.

  The marines tightened their fingers on their triggers, but no one fired. Spencer wanted to give the order, but something held him back. Whether it came from his heart, or from the cruel, artificial mind of the helmet, Spencer knew he could not order the old man’s death. Not this way.

  The hands pulled the helmet down out of the air, but did not place it on Jameson’s scabrous head. “Wha—Who is—What is this place?” Spencer heard the old man’s voice, looked into the wild-eyed wilderness of Chairman Jameson’s face. OLD FOOL TAKE ME. OLD FOOL TAKE ME.

  Jameson looked around himself in slack-jawed bafflement, his addled mind finally realizing that it was the helmet that was making the soundless call. He seemed about to obey when his eye caught Spencer standing a meter or so away.

  “I know you,” Jameson said. “You came to see me in my office, didn’t you?” The powerchair rolled forward, closer to Spencer. “You told me you wanted my pretty helmet, I think.”

  Spencer and the marines backed away the way they had come. Jameson’s voice was becoming high and excited. “This helmet right here. You told me to take it off, that you wanted it.”

  Jameson’s mouth worked, and his breath came short and fast.

  OLD FOOL TAKE Me. Old Fool Take Me. Old fool take me.

  The telepathic command was becoming weaker and weaker with every meter Jameson moved away from the command center.

  “Take it, then!” Jameson shouted eagerly. “I’ve had my turn long enough! TAKE—” Suddenly the ruined man’s face was caught in a paroxysm, a jolting, killing spasm that crushed whatever shred of life was left to him.

  The helmet sailed free of his hands and tumbled down the corridor, Spencer and the marines scrambling to get out of its way. Three marines drew a bead on it, in pure reflex action, and then remembered what happened to these creatures when they died. No one wanted to be sucked into a black hole. Could a repulsor kill the thing anyway?

  It rebounded off the greyish wall and then hung quietly in mid-air, slowed by air friction. For a long moment Spencer did not move. At last he edged carefully toward the helmet. Not daring to touch the deadly thing, he strained to listen with his mind. Removed from the amplifying power of the command center, denied the power it drew from any contact with a living host, it was badly weakened.

  Choose me, a tiny, forgettable voice whispered. Help me.

  “The hell we will,” Spencer said. “We’re going to leave you right there.”

  The marines backed away from the helmet, left it in the middle of the air.

  No living creature ever touched it again.

  EPILOGUE

  Lennox had finally arrived. She boarded most of the former civilian workers from the asteroid and then cast off. The last of the evacuees came aboard Banquo, with nothing but the clothes they were standing up in. Even then, all of them were carefully scanned for parasites. Two were found to have swallowed the things, somehow and were quite literally forced to cough them up. It seemed highly unlikely that one or two parasites could breed and grow, but Spencer was taking no chances.

  Nor was he taking chances on what happened when parasites died. He ordered several careful parasite-killing experiments performed well away from the asteroid and ships.

  It confirmed what Wellingham had reported—single parasites weren’t massive or dense enough to form into black holes when disrupted. They just seemed to evaporate altogether, as if they were sucked back into whatever dimension they had been extruded from in the first place.

  That meant the StarMetal building, and the whole planet of Daltgeld, weren’t going to fall down a black hole, even if outlying parasites died when their controller died. And no one knew that for certain yet, anyway.

  It was hideously crowded aboard the destroyer, and the evacuees complained bitterly about leaving their personal effects behind. The complaints stopped, however, when the battle-scarred marines made it clear the civilians were welcome to stay behind if they chose.

  Comm section had finally located Macduff. She had materialized three hundred million kilometers from the target, a new miss-distance record for an intrasystem jump. No doubt she had been knocked off course by the same gravity-wave effects that had drawn Banquo in so close. She would rendezvous with the other ships back at Daltgeld.

  But Captain Allison Spencer scarcely knew or cared about those details. Tallen Deyi was perfectly competent to handle them. The Task Force CO had other things on his mind.

  Spencer spent most of that first day in sick bay, watching over one particular patient. The chief medical officer had every confidence of Suss pulling through, making a full recovery.

  Spencer looked at her as she slept peacefully. Incredible that she had shaken it all off so quickly. Twenty hours before, they had been forced to peel her hands back from the improvised deadma
n switch, her face locked into a snarl of defiance. It had taken heavy sedation to get her calm enough to tell her story, explain the significance of the command center.

  Now she slept, breathed easy, only crying out now and again, her much-bandaged body twitching as she dreamed.

  She had saved them. Spencer knew that.

  “Ah, Sir, you’re wanted on the bridge,” Spencer’s AID announced.

  Spencer nodded and patted the little gadget. Nice to be able to use the things again, trust them again. “On my way,” he said.

  Tallen saluted him as he stepped onto the bridge, a rare formality. “The last of the techs are back aboard, Sir, and the device is armed. We’ve got every sort of recording we could make of those nightmares—but no physical samples, as per your orders.”

  “Very well, then. Order both ships to perform safe distancing maneuver,” Spencer said.

  The acceleration alarms hooted, and the navigator fired the main engines. “One thousand kilometers,” the navigator announced.

  “Weapons, you may proceed,” Spencer said, his voice calm, his heart pulled this way and that by a hundred emotions. Triumph, a sense of victory, yes, of course—but also relief at the end of fear, and even sadness.

  Clearly, they had no choice but to destroy this thing—but what knowledge were they losing? Pandora’s Box had to be slammed shut—but what jewels of wisdom were lost when they chased off the demons?

  But Suss. Suss was alive. That part of his life, of himself, he would not lose again. That he swore to himself. He watched the main screen.

  “Shields at standby,” the weapons officer announced. “Remote arming complete. Proceeding with hell-bomb activation. Detonation in five seconds. Four. Three. Two. One.”

  The flash of light filled the screen, overwhelmed it. An expanding shell of dust and debris swelled out from where the asteroid had been—and then began to fall back.

  “Gravity-wave activity has ceased,” Dostchem announced, bending over her instruments. “A powerful gravity well has appeared.”