by Wil McCarthy
And farther away still, where the ground started rising up into low, rounded hills, Bruno saw the inky blackness of superabsorbers. Solar energy conversion, nearly 100% efficient. He thought of his own little sun, imprisoned in converters and finally murdered outright, and he winced inwardly. Marlon had thought things through much better than Bruno ever had; he would not want for energy in this place.
The floor of the cylinder opened into a spiral staircase leading down into darkness.
“Come,” Shiao said without delay, leaping for the staircase and beckoning Bruno to follow. The gravity was light here—probably no more than half a gee. Shiao seemed to glide down the stairs like a man-shaped balloon, his feet only occasionally touching down. In moments, the shadows had swallowed him whole. Gulping, Bruno started after him, probably with a good deal less grace.
Had Bruno been a claustrophobic or acrophobic sort, these stairs would be a nightmare—each one just barely wide enough for his foot, the spiral itself just barely wide enough for his suited body, and without any sort of banister. As the first turn completed, the stairs above him closed over in a tight, low ceiling that was barely high enough to accommodate his helmet dome. His suit headlamps switched on; they were the only source of illumination, although far below it seemed he could see the dull reflections of Shiao’s lights. He clanked downward, metal toes on metal stairs, for what seemed like a long time: four turns, five, six …
Finally, at the eighth turn of the spiral, the stairs opened out into a chamber that Shiao’s headlamps—and now Bruno’s own—showed to be roughly the size of a di-clad worker’s platform. Ahead, the chamber was lined wall to wall with glossy black robots. They were short, long armed, long fingered. Some of them carried glossy black pistols of strange design; others were empty handed, but reached out those empty hands and made popping, blue-white electrical arcs across the spaces between them. There were twenty of the robots lined up across the room, and in fact, Bruno saw that in places they were two rows deep, and behind them all was a fax machine that, every few seconds, glowed and hummed and spat out a new comrade to join them. Rarely had Bruno—or anyone, really—seen a sight so menacing.
“Freeze! Royal Constabulary!” Shiao said in quick but officious tones. “This facility is a suspected crime scene. All autronic and telerobotic mechanical entities are ordered to shut down forthwith.”
Ignoring him, the robots, moving as a single entity, took a giant, clanking step forward.
That was all the encouragement Shiao needed—he raised his sword and pistol, uttered an uncharacteristically wild exclamation, and leaped directly at them. Pistols coughed—not only Shiao’s own but those of the robots as well. Shiao staggered. Bruno himself was knocked back by a series of impacts across his chest and arms. Bullets exploded in yellow-white pops, snapping miniature shrapnel into walls and floor and ceiling.
Shiao cried out again, not in pain but in a sort of battle mania. In one motion he straightened his body, aimed, and fired his pistol point-blank into the skull of the nearest robot. The robot, alas, neither staggered nor fell.
Breathing hard, too hard, Bruno realized he himself was essentially unhurt—these space suits were tough, bulletproof. His helmet dome was slightly chipped in two places, and the white outer fabric of the suit itself was discolored here and there. Unfortunately, the gleaming hulls of the robot guards appeared to be tougher still.
Undaunted, Shiao hefted his sword against the same attacker. That worked much better—the impervium blade, vibrating so rapidly its edges were a fog, sliced through the robot’s neck, decapitating it cleanly. But still the robot did not fall; still it reached for Shiao with long, bright-sparking hands. A dozen robots pressed around Shiao, clawing silently, mere moments from zapping him or crushing him or lifting him off the floor and doing Heaven knows what. Another six of the things were advancing on Bruno—clank, clank, clank. And he realized he had never—not once in his life—struck a blow in anger. He had never learned how.
The situation was, in a word, desperate.
But there was a rod of wellstone in Bruno’s hands, gripped tightly, held out before him at chest level, and with a few whispered commands he caused its surface—in the middle and on the ends, well away from his hands—to seethe with all manner of exotic fields and substances, all manner of EM radiation and software pathogens and electrochemical reactions. He had no idea what these enemies were made of, which of the thousands of improbably durable materials had been woven together to form these gleaming hulls, but he figured surely something would hurt them. Ditto their sensory and computational systems—no matter how rugged the design, in the end they had to be made of something, controlled by something, vulnerable to something in the wellstone’s vast library.
The robots advanced, and advanced some more. In another moment they’d be upon him …
“Back, you!” Bruno shouted at them. With more conviction than skill, he lashed out with the rod before the robots quite had a chance to lash out at him.
The results are, of course, known to all, as the blitterstaff has been a standard antiautomata weapon for hundreds of years. But recall that de Towaji had no history to fall back on; he invented the thing right there and then, with little time for a careful consideration of its properties. Try to imagine, then, his sense of stunned relief and triumph, when the advancing robots screamed and bled and melted at his touch! Six of them toppled immediately: masses of twitching, disorganized, heterogeneous matter that ruined the floor wherever they fell, warping and buckling it with blitter scars.
Six more robots advanced over the smoldering carcasses of their brethren. Six more fell. Some few of the victims retained, at least approximately, the shapes their creator had given them, but as for function, not one of them remained conscious or coherent for longer than a few milliseconds.
Cheng Shiao had meanwhile given a good account of himself, having completely dismembered three of the robots through a series of carefully aimed strikes. Their severed arms and legs, littering the deck around him, naturally fought on, but mindlessly, their distant heads and torsos unable to advise them.
But Shiao was sorely pressed, his spacesuit a mess of burns and gouges, his helmet dome spiderwebbed with cracks. Angry robots surrounded him three rings deep, and their bludgeoning claws struck at him again and again, with telling blows. He staggered, lurched, fought as madly and yet also as carefully as his skills and training permitted. But it wasn’t enough. His doom was certain.
Bruno, realizing the power of this thing he carried in his hands, had become a bit giddy with it all. He advanced on the robots, screaming and laughing in a voice that none would recognize, and dashed them one by one to oil-smeared flinders.
“Away! Away!” he shouted, and while robots are incapable of fear, their controlling software does have some inkling of caution. Walking directly into a weapon, or holding still while one is wielded against them, is inefficient compared to a duck-and-roll attack or even a simple outflanking maneuver. So Shiao’s attackers, becoming aware of the blitterstaff in their midst, began to shrink back from it as though afraid. They would have dived for Bruno’s knees, surely, or ducked aside to get behind him, if he weren’t whirling the thing around him with such crazy abandon.
One by one, they slipped into its range and were destroyed, and with each fallen comrade, the panic of the others seemed to increase. Soon they were ignoring Shiao entirely, stumbling over each other in their press to escape. Bruno shouted his laughter over and over, all the bottled rage finding its outlet at last. Even Shiao cringed before him.
But the fight wasn’t over yet. The fax machine had begun to spit out new designs: tentacled robots capable of leaving a damaged limb behind, and soon afterward, toylike robots too small and fast and numerous to hold at bay. The surviving longarms had got their act together as well, falling back to a position along the far wall, from which they hurled a staggering stream of explosive bullets while slowly fanning out along the walls. Bruno’s rage began to cool; he sens
ed the danger all around him. These were not tenpins, after all, but vicious, remorseless killing machines that would take the first opening he provided them.
He had to get to that fax, had to shut it down. It was the source of all these enemies, and who knew what it might spew out next?
“To the fax!” he said to Shiao.
Wobbling slightly on his bullet-scarred feet, Shiao finally came up alongside Bruno. The two began to advance, but resistance ahead was stiff, the new robots less and less willing to give ground, and harder and harder to score with a clean kill. Multijointed impervium tentacles, blitter-struck and writhing madly, piled up in drifts on the floor ahead of them, while the robots who’d lost them fought on with grim, fearless determination.
It could have gone on like that for a long time, inch by bloody, oily inch, had a new factor not entered the fray. “Mewl!” a battered-looking robot of tin and gold cried, wading into the carnage to stomp and stomp and stomp the little toy soldiers. “My! My! Mewl!”
“Hugo!” Bruno cried, alarmed for his friend. “Go back. Go back to the ship!”
“Mewl!” Hugo replied sternly, looking Bruno full in the face while stomping flat yet another little robot.
The enemy robots seemed perplexed for a moment, unsure what to make of this development. It didn’t take them long to figure it out, though—within seconds Hugo was swarmed, covered head to toe in angry little robots, and a tentacled monstrosity was advancing, flailing about with all manner of evil weapons.
But Shiao saw that moment of confusion, the distraction of the toy soldiers, and struck hard, slicing half the tentacles off another monstrosity and driving a sharp thrust directly into the heart of a third. They fought on, of course, but soon Bruno was there beside him, laying about with the blitterstaff, and finally the tentacled robots—there were five of them now—began to fall.
And then, all at once, the two men were right there at the fax orifice, a simple frame of wellstone surrounding a fog-shrouded vertical plate. Shiao looked at Bruno, who tapped the rim of the thing with his varicolored staff. That was all it took—the fax machine groaned, expelled a cubic meter of white plastic beads, and promptly expired in a mess of oil and smoke.
After that, it was simply a cleanup operation. Bruno ran to a beleaguered Hugo, kicking toy soldiers off him one by one. Hugo had fallen to his knees, and one of his arms had come off and was dangling by a single wire. But there weren’t that many toy soldiers, now that their supply was finite. The tide had clearly turned against them. A few tried to leap onto Bruno’s left arm, apparently aiming for the environmental controls there, and a few others tried—somewhat pathetically—to retreat toward the protection of the remaining longarms. Bruno finished them all off, though, while Shiao hacked the longarms apart with his sword. The last enemy they killed together, Shiao lopping the head off and Bruno going after the body, reducing it with one blow to a pile of steaming shards, like a dropped soup bowl.
Then the two men fell against each other, weeping and laughing with relief.
“I thought I was doomed!” Shiao expanded, spreading his arms wide. “Well fought, sir! Well fought! What on Earth did you do to those poor bastards?”
“Dropped a library on them,” Bruno panted, and laughed at his own joke. He turned to Hugo. “You came at just the right time, old thing. And fought well! You’re smarter than I credit, aren’t you?”
Hugo, more battered than ever, said nothing, but stared at the arm dangling from its scarred, scorched shoulder.
“We’ll fix you,” Bruno promised. “You’ve done your part. More than your part. Are you able to make it back to the ship?”
Hugo seemed to consider for a moment, before slowly shaking its head. The neck joints squeaked alarmingly. Indeed, Hugo did look much the worse for wear, unlikely to rise at all, much less climb eight turns of stairs. Presently, it fell from its knees to its metal buttocks, landing with a dull clank.
“Er,” Bruno said, “damn, will you survive at all?”
Hugo considered that as well, and finally—squeakily—nodded. With its remaining hand, it gestured for Bruno and Shiao to go on without it.
“Very well, friend,” Bruno said, still fighting his surprise. “God willing, we’ll return for you shortly.”
Then he marched toward the far wall—which was featureless—and said, “Door.”
Not surprisingly, nothing happened—Marlon’s stronghold was programmed to kill invaders, not to obey them. But Shiao, in a move no doubt routine among the Royal Constabulary, took up the impervium sword again, knocked twice on the wall as politely as you please, then carved a perfect rectangular door of his own.
“I shall lead this time,” Bruno said, stepping forward.
But Shiao, whose body blocked the new doorway, turned and gave him a hard look. “No, sir, you shall not. You, at least, must reach Sykes’ study alive.” Then he was stepping through, into another darkened chamber.
He screamed almost at once. Bruno hurried through to see what was the matter.
On the other side was a chamber much like the one they’d just left, with another fax machine in precisely the same place. There were no robots this time, for which Bruno was grateful, but instead a viscid, blue-green substance, seemingly halfway between a slimy fluid and a vapor, floated from the rectangular orifice. Indeed, the room was full of it already, tendrils lapping around at knee level, like ground fog.
“What is it?” Bruno demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“This substance is corrosive!” Shiao warned at once, backing away, forcing Bruno back through the doorway again. “It’s eating through the armor of my boots!”
“Is it?” Bruno asked, alarmed. He bent to look. Indeed, Shiao’s boots—in none too good a shape to begin with—were bubbling and smoking at their surface, as the blue-green substance ate its way in. Curiously, though, where any reasonable chemical corrosion would have slowed down as it progressed, as its reagents were slowly consumed in the reaction, this one seemed to be holding steady, chewing its way through the armor with an almost mechanical efficiency.
Almost mechanical, indeed.
“That’s a disassembler fog,” Bruno said. “Nonreplicating, by the look of it. Hold still, please! It’s a spatially discontinuous cellular automaton, each microscopic unit technically independent, but owing to power and mass distribution issues it’s effective only in clusters of a milliliter or more. Actually, I think I’ve seen this exact strain before! I think this is the stuff the Tongans used to use in the garbage dumps at Ha’atafu!”
“Can you neutralize it?” Shiao asked, with quite remarkable calm.
“I expect so,” Bruno agreed. “It really is more of a tool than a weapon. Quite tractable, generally.” Whispering to the wellstone rod, he caused its surface, on one end, to form a layer of Bondril, a substance far stickier than natural atoms could ever produce. Then he touched this end to Shiao’s left boot, and rolled it up and down. The tiny disassembler automata were plucked up by the trillions of trillions, until finally there were none left on the boot at all. Or at least, not enough to get any organized activity together. With the rod’s other end, Bruno repeated the procedure on Shiao’s right boot, until it was clear as well.
“Now they’re simply eating your staff,” Shiao complained, though he did sound relieved.
Bruno couldn’t shrug inside his spacesuit, but he did say “Piffle.” The disassemblers were disassembling his staff, dropping out a fine silicon dust beneath them, but a few more whispered commands caused the affected areas to sizzle with pulsed electrical currents at frequencies designed specifically to kill disassemblers. In moments, the bubbling and smoldering had ceased. Then he simply commanded the wellstone’s outermost layer to slough off, leaving him with a good-as-new staff only slightly thinner than the one he’d started with.
“What would the Queendom do without you?” Shiao wanted to know.
Bruno declined to comment, saying simply, “We still have the fog in the room to contend with.
Come.”
“Will your library trick work this time?” Shiao pressed, again blocking Bruno’s passage through the doorway.
“Let’s find out,” Bruno said, and nudged him through.
Interestingly, there didn’t seem to be any more fog in the room than there had been when they stepped out. A quick look at the fax revealed that it was off, not functioning any longer.
“Perhaps Vivian has had some success,” Shiao said hopefully.
“Indeed. Or else the fog has simply attacked the fax that produced it. An inelegant design, if so. If you’ll excuse me, please?”
“Mmm.” Reluctantly, Shiao stepped aside to let Bruno have access to the edge of the blue-green fog bank. The staff was returned to blitter mode and dipped lightly into the fog.
The result was instantaneous: the fog—really just a suspension of electromagnetic fields generated by the individual disassemblers—vanished at once, and in its place a much sparser cloud of gray-white dust settled harmlessly to the floor.
“Very good,” Shiao said approvingly. “Very good indeed. We’ve only one or two more rooms to get through, eh?”
“Mmm. Time will tell, my friend. It doesn’t pay to underestimate Marlon Sykes.”
Again, Shiao cut a hole through the far wall. Again, he preceded Bruno through it. Again, he screamed.
“What now?” Bruno asked, hurrying through behind him. “Oh. Oh. My goodness.”
He’d been struggling, actually, to remain afraid rather than angry, to maintain the edge of caution and improvisation that fear encouraged so readily. Now, there’d be no need to force it. The third chamber was much like the first and second had been: large, dark, empty of furnishings … It even had a fax in the same exact location, although it, too, appeared to be powered down or broken, its status lights off, its wellstone housing inactivated.
What was different this time was that the room—virtually the entire room—was occupied by an enormous, soft-skinned, pinkish brown spider.