The Alien Web (Masters of Space Book 2)

by Robert E. Vardeman

Cameron was harder than that. He smiled faintly, pleased that he had disquieted her without angering her. He quickly left, his mind turning over hundreds of new facts as he wondered how he could twist them to his benefit.

  “Mr. Cameron,” spoke up Fremont’s secretary. “Director Humbolt will see you in one hour.”

  “Fine,” said Cameron. “Tell him I’ll be in my office.”

  Before the secretary could protest, Cameron left. Let the chain of command be established early, let Humbolt know where he stood.

  Humbolt could come to him. There was no need for Cameron to go to Humbolt. Kenneth Humbolt’s days on the board of directors of Interstellar Materials were obviously limited.

  Cameron went directly to the suite of rooms he maintained as offices on the thirtieth subfloor. Most of those in prominence at the company struggled to work their way ever upward in the tower. Such obvious status was not for Cameron. He insisted — and got — offices in the lowest level of the basement.

  The cavernous rooms could not have been better for him. Two of the rooms he had outfitted as laboratories where he worked on robotic designs. Another room he had equipped for the specialty manufacture of unique robotic microcircuitry, both by ancient amorphous sputtering furnace techniques which produced bulky circuits virtually impervious to varied levels and frequencies of radiation and by more sophisticated modem methods.

  Cameron walked directly into the lab he had outfitted to withstand explosive testing. He began working through his clothing, pulling out the hidden robot devices. One by one he examined them and laid them aside. As he worked, Cameron’s frown deepened. The eight devices Fremont had said were useless had fused circuitry.

  “How did he do it? My detectors showed nothing out of the ordinary.” He puzzled over this. When he came to the four that Fremont had “allowed” him to retain, Cameron’s wrath boiled over.

  He touched the side of a slender tube. The rocket blast from the end singed his hand. Cameron jerked back and threw up an arm to protect his face. When the expected explosion failed to occur, he cautiously looked at the mannequin target.

  The tiny device had embedded itself in the centre of the mannequin’s face, as it had been programmed to do. But the explosive had failed. The other three devices were also partially disrupted.

  “I could have killed him,” muttered Cameron. “But it would have been messy.” He moved, his hand making a small circular gesture. Two tiny robots, hardly larger than grains of sand, shot outward and collided at chest level on his target.

  The mannequin melted, cut in half.

  “The old man has some resources, but he could not have stopped me completely.” Cameron smiled and began recording his observations, on Fremont’s security devices, on the possible ways that the old man had disabled the robotic devices, on avenues to thwart future embarrassments.

  Finished, Cameron went to his office. He settled into a formfitting chair and lounged back. Tiny finger motions alerted a robot to lower the illumination level. Soft minimalist music played and a gentle breeze blew across his face. Carried on the breeze came scents both exotic and common, overpowering and subtle.

  The office robot had been programmed to offer up a symphony of scent. It produced a masterpiece.

  Lost in the world of fragrances, Cameron allowed his mind to drift. Underestimating his opponents had proven dangerous, but the information he’d gained thrilled him.

  He had been little more than Maria Villalobos’ pet assassin before the Kinsolving assignment. Although Barton Kinsolving had proven a true and fortunately rare embarrassment, he had also been responsible for Cameron’s learning of the Stellar Death Plan.

  Such audacity! To remove the alien influence, not by millimetres but by light-years!

  He slipped into a deeper sleep state thinking of how his robot legions could march on Bizarre worlds and destroy the aliens by the millions. By the billions! lb command computer armies!

  Or to be in charge of a project such as that which would destroy all the Bizarres on Zeta Orgo.

  “Web, they call it,” he said softly. “A death web filled with billions of Bizzies gibbering and cavorting about, their minds completely shorted out!”

  Cameron liked the prospect. The only flaw he could find in the scheme, as it had been revealed to him, was that he had not been the architect of death drafting it.

  Lost in the quiet world of perfumed air, he drifted even deeper into sleep, where he dreamed of conquest and personal glory.

  CHAPTER III

  “We can’t leave her here. Not like this!” Lark Versalle’s voice rose until it threatened to break with strain.

  “Quiet,” cautioned Kinsolving. He looked around. The light filtering in through the opened hatch provided too little illumination for his liking. The boring sounds continued unabated. What would happen if the robot saboteur were disturbed in the middle of its work? Had it been set to explode? Or was it worse than the silver insect-like robot that had been working its way through to the engine room?

  “They can’t hear. Do you think a damned robot can hear? They’re deaf. They aren’t anything but hunks of animated metal.”

  Kinsolving grabbed the woman and shook, gently at first, then harder until Lark’s teeth rattled.

  “Calm down. You’ll get us both killed if you keep this up. Of course a robot can hear — if that’s the way it’s built. I saw some of Cameron’s tracking robots.” The man shivered involuntarily at the memory of fighting one of the devices. Only luck had allowed him to destroy it. “He can even put a scent attachment onto the machines. They can track like a living bloodhound, if he wants them to.”

  “But Rani.”

  “She’s dead. Nothing either of us can do is going to change that. Go back outside and wait for me.”

  Lark sucked in a ragged breath and slowly exhaled. “What if you don’t come back out? What do I do then?”

  “Die,” he said harshly. Kinsolving had no time to coddle her. She might have rich parents who heaped every possible luxury on her, but they could not help her now. Only he could, and Kinsolving did not want to be burdened. To his surprise, Lark nodded and silently left.

  He watched her shadow on the floor vanish. Kinsolving wondered if he had done the woman a disservice. Her entire life had been a never-ending party, one pleasurable event after another with no significant thought about danger or death or even the day-to-day problems of earning a living. He doubted if Lark had ever faced true adversity. Now a single mistake would doom them both to a slow death sandwiched between dimensions comprehensible only to a demented mathematician.

  Kinsolving bent closer to Rani and studied her neck. The wound was not burned. However the robot had killed, it had not been with a minute laser. Kinsolving tried to put himself in Cameron’s position, to guess how the robot master might think.

  There could not be any way that Cameron would know that Kinsolving and Lark would choose the von Neumann for an escape. That meant that all the orbiting space yachts had been similarly booby-trapped with robots. Two per ship?

  What would Cameron use? The one laying crushed out in the corridor was only large enough to carry the laser and the equipment powering it. Smaller robots with lasers were feasible, but Kinsolving had a gut feeling that Cameron had placed only one laser robot on each ship.

  If he had sensitive enough equipment, Kinsolving knew, he could detect the power leakage from a robot’s energy unit and pinpoint each of the invaders. The laser added to the chance of its being found accidentally.

  “He’d have a second robot, smaller, much smaller,” Kinsolving said, thinking out loud. “This one wouldn’t be vulnerable to detection by power leakage. No laser.”

  The drilling sounds continued — and seemed to verify what Kinsolving suspected. A final glance at Rani duLong’s neck showed the ragged edges around the wound, tom bits of flesh such as might be left by a rotary drill.

  Kinsolving thought that he would find a robot hardly larger than his finger equipped with a drill as
fine as a human hair. He closed his eyes for a moment and tried to force down the fear he felt. The robot had attacked Rani and swung its drill bit around and around until it gouged out a large enough hole in her neck for her to bleed to death.

  He tried to reconstruct the chain of events. He and Lark had been in the control room when the power failed. The emergency lights came up and Rani was gone. Had she heard something in the corridor and gone to investigate? Yes. She had tracked down the robot, perhaps hearing it as it drilled through the door seal and into the engine room. She had entered, either knowing the access code or finding it in the same manner that he had. Then the robot had killed her.

  Kinsolving almost backed out of the engine room. This meant that it had attacked the ship’s circuitry elsewhere before moving into the engine compartment. What other problems lay ahead for the von Neumann?

  He stopped. The robot had to be destroyed before it permanently crippled the engines. Rani had followed it into this room and it had killed her from ambush, from the darkness of a ledge or bulkhead. Or had Cameron equipped it with propellant to fly?

  “Something less demanding, something smaller,” decided Kinsolving. He slipped around a tall cylinder containing the engine-control computer. No indicator lights showed. There was no need for them here. The drive either functioned perfectly or it did not. The latter case meant either complicated work in dry dock or…death in space.

  “It doesn’t fly,” he said to himself. “It might have tracks like a tank.” He mentally discarded that notion. Although pseudogravity existed during the hyperspacial shift, the ship had hung in orbit around Gamma Tertius and had been at zero grav.

  Using his ears more than his eyes, Kinsolving homed in on the busily boring robot. The deck under his feet became slippery with the fluorocarbon coolant leaking from the engine casings. He twisted and his feet shot out from under him. Kinsolving landed heavily, cursing — and then noticed that the drilling sound had stopped.

  In the dark he got to hands and knees and crawled toward the coolant sheath. He found a tiny geyser of the high-pressure fluid. The hole could not have been more than a millimetre in diameter, probably less than that.

  The clumsiness on his part proved lucky for him. He reached up to find other holes and felt a hot wire rammed into his hand. Reflexively, Kinsolving closed his hand and jerked away.

  The burning increased. He squeezed down harder, then crushed his tiny attacker against the coolant-smeared deck plates. He felt a giving, then heard a snap!

  Fumbling in the darkness, Kinsolving made his way back to the hatch leading to the main portion of the ship where Lark waited. When his eyes adjusted to the light, he opened his hand and stared at the tiny machine he had destroyed.

  “That’s it?” asked Lark. “But it’s so small!”

  The entire device was less than a centimetre long and hardly four millimetres thick. The drill bit, as he had already surmised, looked like a stiff hair protruding from one end.

  “Cameron’s doing,” he said. “See how these tiny cilia along its sides move it? The robot can’t travel fast, but it can move, with gravity or without.”

  “What does it do?” asked Lark, fascinated.

  “It bores. That’s all its programming can handle. Cameron gave it a minimum of commands, then let it decide how to carry them out. Hide, don’t be found. That must be its primary defence. There’s not much way it can protect itself.”

  “It killed Rani,” pointed out Lark.

  “It caught her by surprise. It had to. That would be a second command. Kill, if necessary. And the third command? Find the coolant sheath and drill through it repeatedly. From the size of the drill bit it sports and the amount of coolant on the floor in the engine room, it must work fast.”

  “That seems like a lot to put into such a tiny device,” said Lark, frowning.

  “The block circuit forming its CPU is probably measured in molecules. Most of the robot is motile and drill capacity.” Kinsolving stared at the machine, wondering at its workmanship. Such a robot was not necessary; it showed that the maker lavished exquisite care on it.

  That had to be Cameron. No one else would put in such effort to make a device designed strictly to kill.

  “What are you going to do about the engines?” the blonde asked. Some colour had returned to her face. The swirling dyes just beneath the skin, however, continued their Brownian motion, some colours forming tiny islands that spun like hued snowflakes in a blizzard.

  “Fix them, though I don’t know if there’s much I can do. If I can put a patch on the steel tubing, I’ll do it.”

  “Why should that be hard?”

  “Because of the pressurized coolant inside those tubes,” he said. “We don’t have the facilities to drain the coolant, then fix the damage, then repressurize the cooling coils.”

  “It’s not explosive, is it?”

  Kinsolving did not want to take the time to explain the problems he faced. The high-velocity stream of coolant might only be fractions of a millimetre thick, but it made repair difficult. He was not sure he could turn off the Tesla turbines, either — not while they were hung in hyperspace. The ship might drop back into normal space.

  Or it might not.

  “Are these the only tools available?” he asked. The panel they had pried open held a few items, such as the hammer he had used to destroy the first robot and a variety of screwdrivers. Little in the way of electronics test gear was available. Most repairs could not be done by the captain while in flight.

  “There might be a welding laser somewhere,” said Lark. “This isn’t my yacht, you know.”

  “Please.” Kinsolving took her and held her at arm’s length for a moment, staring into her blue eyes. A spark of concern burned there, the first hint that Kinsolving had that she truly understood the depth of their problem. “This might mean our lives.”

  “So?” Lark shrugged and pulled free. “This isn’t very much fun. I want to get back to where I can enjoy myself.”

  He shook his head. At the moment, he did not care what her motives were for helping him. Limping to a port where the von Neumann could be repaired mattered. Nothing else.

  Still, Lark Versalles disturbed him. So much went on in the universe and it seemed to pass by her as she and her friends sought hedonistic experiences. Kinsolving snorted. He might be the other side of the equation. Ala Markken had always told him he worked too hard, took life too seriously.

  A lump formed in his throat when he thought of the woman who had betrayed him. Or had she? Kinsolving found his thoughts wandering. Humbolt might have duped Ala into doing something she had not intended. She might not have understood the import of what Interstellar Materials did. They might have lied to her.

  He could not believe any woman he had loved so could condone destroying entire planets filled with intelligent, living, breathing beings — even if they were aliens.

  “Here,” said Lark, shoving a small red box in his direction. “I found this in the airlock. It might be what you’re looking for. It’s heavy enough to hold an entire repair shop.”

  He hefted it and agreed. He opened the sealing seam and found a small handheld welding laser. Inside the case he read yellow-painted letters showing that the last servicing crew had carelessly left this kit behind.

  “The von Neumann went to Gamma Tertius from Earth,” he said. “That’s where this was left.”

  Lark nodded. “Rani’s brother liked her to check it now and then to be sure the von was in good shape. Terra-Comp’s not got a lot of off-planet sales. Most of them are local.”

  Kinsolving remembered his schooldays on Earth. Terra-Comp had seemed like the largest computer corporation in the universe. It had come as a mild shock to him to find that a dozen others, all operating away from Earth and trading with the larger alien markets, were many times larger in both sales and profit.

  “This will do the job,” he said. “If I can do it at all.”

  Lark started to say something, bit back th
e words, then shifted her weight nervously from one foot to the other.

  “What is it?” he asked her.

  “Can I, well, do you need me to help? I don’t know much about machines, so you’d have to tell me what to do.”

  “I’m going to need light. Find a flash and come in.” He placed a hand on her shoulder and smiled. “Thanks.”

  Lark smiled weakly and hurried off to find a portable light source.

  Kinsolving went into the engine room. The coolant had continued to pool on the deck plates, making every step treacherous. He slipped and slid to the spot where he had found the drilling robot. Six holes spewed forth the vital coolant in a microfine spray.

  His nose began to twitch almost immediately. He considered finding an oxygen mask, then put it out of his mind. The coolant was not noxious, just irritating. Then Kinsolving stopped and peered at the sprays. The fluorocarbon coolant was not dangerous as long as it was liquid. What would happen when he applied the welding laser to the metal? Was the resulting vapor lethal?

  He slopped through the puddling coolant and went to the cockpit, leaving a sticky trail of coolant behind him. Leaning over the pilot’s acceleration couch, he touched the computer toggle.

  “Sir?” came the immediate reply.

  “Engine coolant. Is it dangerous when vaporized?”

  “If heated to a gas, the coolant is instantly lethal to human life-forms. The vapor is a chemical analogue to nerve gases used on Earth during the Twentieth Century. The phosgene-like gas burns the eyes and sears the lung tissues. It is not recommended that any repairs be made to the ship’s cooling system while in transit.”

  “Status report on engine coolant system,” Kinsolving asked.

  “Pressure loss one percent. Rate of loss is accelerating.”

  “What is the maximum loss permissible that will keep the engines running?”

  “Fourteen percent. At the current rate of loss, this level will be reached in four hours.”

  “How long until we shift back to normal space?”

  “Seventeen hours.”