by Mel Keegan
He moved back to let Marin see the resources they commanded, and deferred to Dendra Shemiji experience in the selection of them. An hour a day, often more, he was still studying the resources Mark Sherratt had made available, and his grasp of Resalq triple-think was deepening rapidly. Half an hour every day, he and Curtis were in the gym, and the time was gone when Marin could bounce him off the mats with impunity, with the fluid, economical moves of the Aramshem, one of the most ancient Resalq martial arts. Travers was catching up fast, and as Marin chose the tools which would become weapons, Neil saw the affirmation of his own judgment. He had chosen the identical selection. For himself, a plasma torch with a five liter tank of nentane gas – it would cut or weld, on command. For Marin, a bolt gun with the fat cylinder of a ten-round magazine, which would double as a fearsome projectile weapon.
Over the comm Vidal’s voice was even with a surreal calm. “They’re close enough for me to get reliable target acquisition. Neil, Curtis, watch yourselves. Railguns are primed. Richard?”
“Take your shot,” Vaurien invited. “Etienne, switch gun control to the main navigation tank. Let’s see this.”
First the helmet armorglass darkened to midnight black, then the whisker-thin Zunshulite visor dropped down, completely screening the faceplate. A faintly distorted vid image replaced the live-eye view of the Wastrel’s hull, and Travers held his breath, waiting for it.
The railguns opened up in dazzling nine round bursts. Every third round was tracer, the first two armor-piercing and Demolex-7, but at 30 rounds per second the muzzles of the cannons mounted right above the holds seemed to pour streamers of pure, blue-white light. Vidal had a delicate touch on the triggers, locked onto two targets and releasing discrete bursts, a third, a fourth, before he paused to look at the data.
“Targets still inbound,” Etienne reported.
“And I’m reading powerful energy signatures off them,” Jazinsky added, “enough like our own Arago fields for me to recognize halfway similar tech. We’re not going to knock them down, Richard. They’re way too well screened.”
“Merde,” Vaurien said softly. “Save your ordnance, Michael. We’re not going to take them that way.”
“Railguns on standby.” Vidal hesitated, then, “Forty seconds, Neil … they’re coming into range of your suit sensors. You ought to be seeing them very soon. Get out of there.”
“We have to lure them – bring them to us,” Marin corrected. “Let them get inside the ship, and it’s odds-on we’ll wind up as wreckage. We’re going to vector them to us, Mick.”
Vaurien’s voice murmured into Travers’s ear. “You’re the specialist. What do you want to do?”
“Power down all the locks except Hangar 4 – Bravo’s on launch procedures,” Marin said levelly. “Make a big, bright display of chain guns coming online in Hangar 4, and then run everything dark except lock 9, which is us. Open up 9.”
Even Richard Vaurien skipped a beat. “Are you sure? You want to open a door and invite in a squad of Zunshu automata?”
A fist seemed to clench around Travers’s throat as Marin said, “I’m sure. Standby to seal 9, as soon as the automata commit to our position, and then … good hunting.”
His gauntlet closed on the forearm of Travers’s armor, and Travers followed his lead, into the scant cover of the drive motors beneath the last of the parabolic dishes. They hunkered down there, armed, concealed, and Travers turned his attention to his suit’s sensors. They were at maximum, configured to search for objects in the three meter range, and like Marin he was already keenly aware of the inadequacy of suit sensors.
Over the highband comm, Danny Ramesh was screaming. “Vaurien! Vaurien! What the hell are you firing at?” His voice was sharp with anxiety now, much of the righteous anger pared away by shock.
It was Jazinsky who responded, sounding distracted as she jockeyed data. “Did you herd your people back to the Tycho?”
“No, I – I bloody didn’t,” Ramesh protested.
“Well, too late now,” she said cynically. “Get them together, and if you’ve got the hardsuits, get into them. You have a Marines unit coming to join you – power up lock 3, repeat lock 3. It’s the closest to us. I don’t suppose any of you are actually armed?”
“Armed?” Ramesh’s voice was shrill with an unhealthy mix of dread and confusion. “Of course we’re not armed – we’re just a civilian science mission.”
She took a deep breath that carried over the comm. “Then, you get behind the Marines unit, and you do as they tell you, understand?” He was still talking, demanding, but she ignored him now. “Lieutenant Fargo? Talk to me, Judith.”
“Launching in five,” Fargo called into the chaos of the loop.
“Tully?” Jazinsky was almost as surreally calm as the AI.
“Holding at Weimann ignition minus three,” Ingersol responded from the engine deck.
“On my word,” Vaurien told him. “Neil?”
The helmet displays had registered the incoming marks seconds before. Airlock 9 gaped open behind them while the Capricorn burst out of Hangar 4, ahead and below them, in a lightstorm of engine flares. It was gone in an instant, like a single tendril of fork lightning, headed for Oberon. In its wake, four chain guns set in the hangar mouth set up a staccato pattern. They were small, designed to impede a forced docking by ships like Sergei van Donne’s Mako or the Capricorn itself, but the incoming Zunshu were unaware of their limitations.
Again Travers held his breath as he and Marin watched the tracking marks, and a moment later Curtis whispered, “Yes! They took the bait, Richard. They’re coming to us. Standby to seal 9.”
“Seal 9, and we lock you out,” Vidal said sharply.
“We know.” Travers licked lips that were suddenly dry as paper. “Call it another test of the Zunshulite armor. You wanted data, Barb? Looks like you’re going to get it.”
“You maniacs watch your bloody asses,” she said in a tone that cut like a razor. “The Capricorn is docking. Judith!”
“We can see them,” Fargo assured her, “four bogeys headed this way, thirty seconds from locking on – and they’re going to have to cut their way in. Buys us some time, Barb. Get the civvies moving, send ’em anywhere, so long as it’s away from the Zunshu lock-on point.”
“Doctor Ramesh, are you monitoring our comm?” Vaurien asked over the increasing clutter of the loop. “You have very limited time. Advise your people make their way to the Tycho, and commence preflight procedures. Do it now, while you have the chance.”
And then Travers stopped listening. In the helmet display he had visually picked out the identical, eggshell-smooth shapes of two aeroshells, no more than five hundred meters off the starboard side of the Wastrel. They were slower now, shedding speed so fast, a human pilot would have been knocked insensible. The two shells were butting their way through the tug’s dense, overlapped and interleaved Arago fields, and turning slightly to close on lock 9.
“Mick, they’re getting right through the Aragos,” Travers warned loudly. “Can you squeeze any more out of them?”
“A few percent,” Vidal mused, “but what’s the point? Repel them here, and they’ll target some other area, maybe a thousand meters away. You and Curtis want to go hunting?”
“No,” Marin whispered. “Let them through, Mick. Don’t make it too easy – don’t give a machine mind anything to suspect. For once, they’re right where we want them.”
The datastream from Etienne told him when Vidal shut back a fraction of the power to the Aragos and the field weakened a few percent. It looked as if the generators were overstressing, and if Travers had not heard the exchange between Curtis and Vidal, he would have assumed nothing more. The Zunshu would buy it.
Marin’s voice was a bare murmur, oddly intimate over the comm. “Same as last time, Neil. You know how this works.”
Academically, Travers knew how it worked, but on the big moon of Ulrand, and way back on Kjorin, Bravo Company had been behind him, and the weap
ons in his hands were state of the art. He looked down at the plasma torch he cradled against his chest, and then up again, at the bolt gun Marin had lifted out of the glorified tool chest.
“It’s not too late to cut and run,” he suggested half mockingly.
“Nowhere to run to, is there?” Marin shifted position and pulled the bolt gun into his shoulder as if it were an assault rifle. He had no efficient way of sighting or marking his target, and Travers knew what he was about to say. “They’ll have to be damned close for this to work.”
The Zunshu machines would be focused on lock 9, and given the weird topography of the Wastrel’s hull, the route to the open lock was narrow and tight. Travers watched Marin prime the bolt gun, and deliberately tuned the plasma torch to a fine, super-hot jet.
The loop was a mess of callsigns and invective, but he heard Fargo’s voice, and both Kravitz and Inosanto, chorusing the same information: they were docked, they had blown the Capricorn down to partial pressure and bypassed the normal airlock cycling, to save time. A gale was rushing through the nearer parts of Oberon, but it would soon be spent. Much more significant was Danny Ramesh’s wailing voice.
“Something’s locked onto us,” he howled.
“We see it,” Vaurien said coolly. “It’s on your back, near the machine shops. You’re dead lucky, Ramesh. Oberon has better armour than a super-carrier, because Hellgate’s always likely to throw super-hot debris at it. You weren’t fired upon, and these intruders have nothing that’ll mesh with your docking rings. They’ll have to cut their way in, which buys you a little time. Are your people back on the Tycho?”
“They’re shutting everything down and grabbing their equipment,” Ramesh began.
“Ditch it – ditch everything,” Jazinsky said loudly. “Danny, will you just do as you’re told for once in bloody stupid life? You’ve got about one minute. Tell your people to run!”
Marin made a sound that might have been cynical humor. “They’re not going to make it.”
“Not unless Bravo buys them another chance,” Travers agreed. “And speaking of sitting targets – Mick, can you get a shot at any of the pods that just locked onto Oberon?”
“One of ’em,” Vidal mused. “It’s worth a try. Hold on.”
Again, the liquid streams of pure light lanced out of the starboard railguns, but as the blaze of sensor noise settled Jazinsky only swore bitterly. “Waste of time and ammunition.”
“Worth a try, like the man said.” Travers licked his lips and shifted his grip on the plasma torch. “Curtis …”
“Oh, yeah. Here we go. Forget Oberon now – let Bravo take it, we have enough to do.”
They were watching the aeroshells buck through the last Arago field and come slithering around, lined up on lock 9. With perfect efficiency both shells settled solidly onto the hull and hatches opened in the long sides.
“Touchdown,” Travers said quietly. “Standby to seal 9 … wait … wait … do it!” He had delayed long enough to see the six automata step out of the shells, and in moments they were out on the hull, separated from their pod-like craft.
“Lock 9 is sealed,” Vidal informed him. “I’ve got visual on you, but you’re out of the firing arcs of any weapon we have. You’re on your own, kids.”
“Not quite.” Travers checked the charge on the plasma torch. “Deploy the drones from 24 through 29.”
Vaurien was with him. “Cannon fodder, Neil,” he warned.
“Distraction,” Marin said pointedly. “Right now, we’ll take anything we can get.”
“You got your drones.” Vaurien paused. “I’m configuring them to seize anything that moves and put it in storage. They’re going to be fragged as fast as the Zunshu can target them.”
“But six Zunshu machines,” Vidal added, “can’t fire on a hundred targets at the same time. It’ll buy you an advantage, Neil – a small one.” He took a breath, audible over the comm. “Drones coming at you … my vidfeed is about six meters up on the wave guides above you. You’ll see them in a moment.”
In fact, Travers had already seen them – and so had the automata.
It was so odd to see unarmored, unsuited figures striding across the hull of the Wastrel with the aid of tractor technology so similar to the Arago patents. These machines were careless of the vacuum, the background radiation from the engines, the constant brain-sizzling pulses from the active sensors. The six automata had the body and face morphology of the ancestral Resalq; at first glance they looked like the Kulich siblings, clad in plain blue-gray coveralls and black work boots which would not have drawn a glance on any colonial street; but the similarities between these figures and any generation of living Resalq were barely skin deep. They were hardware, with a single objective.
As airlock 9 sealed, Etienne broadcast the standard warning issued to crew working on the hull. Travers was never more keenly aware of being disconnected, and he shifted his grip on the plasma torch as Marin began to move. The automata were still thirty meters away and all six had spun to engage the swarm of maintenance drones which had descended on them with outstretched handling arms. The directive was seize and store, and the drones had no more regard for their own safety than the automata.
“They’re Zunshu generation four,” Marin muttered. “Firearms built right into the armature, see? Go!”
The hundred incoming drones would be knocked down in seconds, but Travers told himself those seconds should be all the advantage he and Marin needed. They were moving as the automata began to fire, and he had set his apparent mass low enough to cover the distance in two giant strides. Curtis was less than a half pace behind him, and the bolt gun pounded like a jackhammer, firing white-hot, thumb-thick, twenty-centimeter rivets with a force like a mortar. Travers’s instruments registered every concussion as he watched four of the automata physically picked up and flung away by the impacts.
The last two moved with a speed so far in advance of even a champion athlete among humans, Travers was breathless. One instant they were aiming into the swarm of drones, picking them off at the rate of four, five per second; the next they were gone.
“Neil,” Vidal called sharply.
“Get a track on them,” Travers barked as Marin came to a slithering halt on Aragos, and the plasma torch spat a blue-white jet as long as his forearm.
Three of the four automata had gone down hard in a tangle of threshing limbs, while the fourth had been flung off the deck and was drifting away from the Wastrel. The three on the deck were easy pickings, but the forth could be dangerous, and Travers watched as it writhed in mid-flight, twisting until it could bring its weapons to bear.
“Neil!” It was Jazinsky calling now.
He did not need her or Vidal to tell him he had just been lidar painted. Neither the plasma torch nor the bolt gun had the reach to hit the Zunshu machine, and at its rate of drift, it would be five seconds, minimum, before the automaton entered the firing arc of any gun the Wastrel possessed. The ship’s defenses had never been configured to repel boarders on the hull.
“Zunshulite,” Marin whispered across the comm as Travers dove into the fracas in the shadow of the dish arrays, where the wounded automata were halfway back to their feet.
The snake-tongue of blue-white plasma licked out, haloing one machine from pelvis to breastbone with the brutal heat of a cutting torch. He wondered if this had ever been done before – Mark Sherratt would know – but if an assault rifle could punch through the abdominal armor, reach the core processor and destroy it, a plasma torch should do the same.
It was a gamble Travers was willing to take, but his teeth were clenched as the Zunshulite shielding his own belly and chest was pounded by a weight of gunfire that would certainly have fragmented standard Marines armor.
The jet from the plasma torch was slower than hitting the automata with a dozen rounds from an AR-19, but the final result was more satisfying. For two seconds, three, the Zunshu mechanism defied the heat and then it seemed something in the abdominal cav
ity melted down, ruptured in a gush of molten metal. The machine spasmed, limbs flailing before it went limp. Travers dove on to the next, all the while weathering a barrage on the armor.
He was on the second Zunshu before it could get away from him, but the third had slithered loose. “I’m going to lose it,” he warned between gritted teeth as he slammed the muzzle of the torch into the belly and hit the trigger.
“I’ve got it.” Curtis had launched himself.
He vaulted over Travers as the Zunshu thing thrashed, trying to dislodge him and angle its weapons. Travers keyed his Aragos high, pinning the machine down, holding it against the deck while the torch heated his own armor to such levels, the suit’s rudimentary AI issued a piercing warning.
He ignored the alarm and watched as Marin shot low overhead. A projectile from the bolt gun slammed the Zunshu back against the housing of the dish’s drive motor and pinned it there securely. It was still writhing, trying to force its way free, when Travers picked himself up and walked into the path the cannon mounted in its left arm.
He was aware of Marin standing between him and the drifting Zunshu, taking the hammering from its cannon on his own Zunshulite breastplate, but Travers was intent on the pinned automaton. His armor was so hot, peripheral systems had dropped offline and the cooling system was overloading. He seemed to be locked in an oven and sweat streamed from him as he walked into the Zunshu gunfire, but in the cold of space the suit was shedding heat rapidly. As the temperature fell, the cooling system began to function properly and chill fresh air wicked sweat and heat away from his face.
The drifter was sixty meters away now and its weapons had fallen dormant as it exhausted its ammunition. Vidal’s voice cut across the loop. “I’ve target-locked the bastard. Duck!”
The same chain guns that protected Hangar 4 opened up with a sun-bright torrent of 50mm, armor-piercing, incendiary and tracer. The Zunshu machine wrenched itself apart in a welter of shrapnel and gasses. The remains of its body were flung away by the impacts, and Travers began to breathe again.