Brandon raised his shotgun. Carolyn put her fingers in her ears. She heard him anyway: “Bye-bye, Robbie.”
Her ears rang. Robot parts rained into the manhole.
One down. Four-hundred ninety-nine to go. Carolyn grabbed the other shotgun and shook little pieces of plastic out of her hair. Brandon was piling shells into his pockets. The smoke was clearing.
Yeah: Bring it on!
44: Brandon
Robots were not human. Yet the two robots posted as guards to either side of the tool room began rolling slowly backward as Brandon burst from the tool room door, Mossberg 500 riot gun in hand. The one staring down into the manhole obviously hadn’t had any idea what a shotgun was.
How fast did these damned things learn?
Not fast enough for the two guards. Five yards to a kill almost seemed unfair. The first shell shattered the flat head of the nearest Outfielder and went on to shred the hydraulics in its single hand, Stagger Lee style. Brandon chambered another shell while spinning to face the second robot, now in full retreat. Ten yards? With double-ought buck? C’mon.
Robot #3 took it all in the neck. Its head went spinning off to one side, trailing ragged wires. With Carolyn right behind him he ran past the decapitated machine, pausing to kick the pillar on which its now-motionless hand was mounted. The machine toppled, clanging against the floor.
“Showoff,” he heard Carolyn say, laughing.
“Ha! I’ve wanted to do that for years!”
They ran toward the center of the building between ranks of machine tooling. The hands of the Positioners were flexing and spinning but could not reach them. Outfielders were now fleeing in every direction. Sometimes speed learning was a good thing.
Brandon felt Carolyn’s hand take his. She pulled back and he turned to face her.
“This is the you that I married!” Shotgun still gripped in one hand, she leaned up to press her lips against his, and lingered.
A nearby sound made Brandon pull away. It had the odd thunk…of a trap machine?
The sound tripped reflexes burned into his synapses decades ago. He threw his hand around Carolyn’s waist and pulled her to floor on top of him. Something black arrowed through the air where they had stood and struck the cabinet of a nearby robotic mill/drill. It tumbled to the floor scant yards away and rolled to a stop. A copier main drive motor, hurled hard enough to shatter bones—or splatter skulls.
Nor were they safe on the floor. A motor that heavy would kill them even dropped from above in a high parabolic trajectory. “Get up and run! Don’t stop moving! Dodge back and forth!” He shoved Carolyn’s rear-end up and forward and sprang to his feet.
Brandon glanced around for a moment before following her. He had hoped to fight his way back to the utility room to cut power, but had not expected the intruder to figure out how to use copier parts as weapons. Dave had somehow gotten himself into the rafters, and if he had the sense to stay there just getting out the front door would be victory enough.
For Stypek’s hide, wherever it was, he had simply no concern.
They ran in erratic lines between ranks of machinery. Brandon heard the distinctive rattle of parts chutes shaking parts down into waiting Positioner hands. There were over three hundred Positioners scattered everywhere around the floor, and almost anything they threw would be deadly if it struck a human body.
Brandon heard another thump of something thrown, and caught the motion from the corner of his eye. A lens assembly hurtled by them at eye level, to shatter against the machinery five yards down the aisle. If he had been running in a straight line it would have hit him.
Another thump, this time to their right. He spun around to see Carolyn taking up the classic trap shooter’s stance. Her shotgun spoke, and shards of a xerographic drum rained onto the tooling a few yards away. She staggered back against the recoil—this was not birdshot!—but remained standing.
“Greek fire!” he shouted, their old private endearment suddenly proud in his memory. Brave, beautiful…and deadly. How could he have ever let her go?
They reached the center of the floor and its wide aisle. Little more than a hundred feet lay between them and the door. Brandon gripped the crook of Carolyn’s elbow and pulled her into the turn at full running speed.
Rolling to meet them were three Outfielders, wheel to wheel. Learning, yeah. Brandon knew what they were trying to do.
“Keep running! Don’t stop! Run right between them! I’ll cover you!”
Another drive motor whistled through the air just behind them. The three Outfielders were using themselves as bait, expecting that their prey would stop long enough to fire—and become stationery targets.
No way. Firing from a run was gnarly, but at fifteen feet, well…he had three shells left, and plenty of motivation.
Still another drive motor came at them from behind. Brandon heard the bump of its launch, spun around, and threw himself to the floor. It missed Carolyn by two feet, and continued on, to strike the lower housing of the leftmost Outfielder in the line of three. The machine staggered back, but was evidently not damaged sufficiently to stop.
“There’s your gap! Take it!”
He saw Carolyn nod. A thump to their left made her duck instinctively back and to the right. A small, hard object struck the wooden stock of her Mossberg. Carolyn screamed. The shotgun struck the floor, spinning.
More learning. They were getting faster to fire. A second thunk, and then a third. Brandon dropped prone. Some sort of stamped metal frame spun through the air where his head had been. It struck a concrete support pillar with a ragged clang, and threw down dust and fragments.
A circuit board whisked past his ears on a lower trajectory, to snick on the floor just beyond them. Brandon leapt to his right, where there was a narrower way between the machines. He threw himself into the gap and gestured for Carolyn to follow him. She scrambled his way on hands and knees.
One of the Outfielders struck Carolyn hard with its forward housing, knocking her flat on her face. She gasped, and cried out in pain. Brandon swung his Mossberg up and fired a shell into the thing’s head, then pumped another shell into the chamber and got the second in its hydraulic wrist.
He dragged Carolyn into the narrow way and pulled her past him, to the shelter of a tangle of posts and conduit supporting a row of wire-brush touch-ups.
From the aisle he heard a familiar sound: “Dibs! Dibs! Dibs!” Three Trilobites had emerged from their floor chargers and were racing to the shotgun lying on the concrete. One gripped it in its pair of pincers and began dragging it back the way they had come. The third Outfielder raced past their hiding place without stopping. Brandon fired, but his stance was bad and he missed. The recoil threw him against an iron post.
His Mossberg was now empty. Brandon began digging shells out of his pockets, then saw something that chilled him to the bone: a Trilobite reaching up to hand the shotgun to the single downstretched hand of the surviving Outfielder.
He expected the Outfielder to return and attempt to fire the shotgun. With one hand? Dare ya bastards!
Not so. The Outfielder gripped the Mossberg and rolled out of sight toward the center of the Line floor.
45: Stypek
Like a python picking its way through jungle underbrush, Stypek crept prone among the pipes and iron cabinets, away from the rear wall where the rolling zombies were massing. He reached the long central aisle, having had to duck grasping zombie hands only five or six times.
None of the rolling zombies were close by. Stypek took a deep breath and dashed from the shelter of the iron jungle. Just a step from the other side of the aisle, his right foot hit a puddle of pink oil and flew out from under him. He landed in agony on his tailbone, scrambling for traction against the smooth and now oily stone floor.
Something hissed past his head and struck the stone just a few cubits away. Finally, it became clear: The rooted zombies killed by throwing things. It wasn’t how he would have chosen to do it, but…
T
hunk!
Something bigger and heavier smashed against the stone right beside him and shattered into fragments. One stung against his cheek. He dove into the iron jungle on the other side of the aisle, crawling until he was in the shelter of some sprawling machine that, by some good fortune, lacked arms.
Across the vast cavern he heard explosions, and Lord Romero’s commanding voice. Minutes before, Dave’s voice had boomed from what seemed to be everywhere at once, with a sepulchral echo that suggested the unplumbed depths of the astral planes. Had Dave already been devoured by the unseen horror?
Stypek stopped. More explosions. He cringed to hear Carolyn scream in fright or pain. None of this was her fault. None of it was Dave’s fault. They had not cheated anyone. Worse, they had treated him as a friend, welcomed him, fed him, clothed him, taught him—to be trapped and possibly killed by a monster sent to bring him to justice was the height of injustice. Even Lord Romero, who was (to put it mildly) unsympathetic to him, had no part in the conflict. If the two Opportunities had ever managed to do their job, Carolyn would need Lord Romero, and he her, for their sundered marriage to heal.
Another missile struck the iron henges above him and sent daggers of glass raining down on all sides. There was nothing to be done. He had no one to consult…or did he?
Hands trembling, he pulled Cosmo’s tapper from his vest and touched its pane of dark glass. “Daley, awaken and speak! I need advice!”
The tapper pulsed to white and cleared, to show Daley the Gnome frowning, red beard bristling, arms akimbo. His green hat was back, granted that it looked scuffed and patched. “Advice? If yer back of da yards, don’t swim in da creek.”
Well, he had asked for advice. “Why not?”
“It’s awful.”
Even if that were a magical incantation, it would be of scant use now. “No. An…enforcer…is attacking my friends. It’s unfair. I was the one who cheated the magician. I ran here, but he sent…a repo man?…after me.”
Daley shook his head. “Runnin’ don’t work. It’s about respect. Ya gotta earn his respect. Go back to yer own turf. Pay off Da Magician. Den kick his ass.”
Something whistled above them, and fell among the zombies nearby with much clatter. “A magician against a spellbender? That’s been tried.” Stypek thought of Tuggurr. “Doesn’t work well.”
“Don’t go alone, dumbass. Take yer boys witcha.”
Boys? For stealth? He’d once paid a boy to climb down a chimney pipe to steal a spell. “I don’t have any boys.”
“Den get some! Find dat girl ya had—she beat da crap outa me. I like dat in a woman.”
True, his gomog was remarkable in a lot of ways. But she was not a boy, and she alone would not be enough. “If you have any boys, could you bring them?”
“Don’ I wish! If I had Poochie Pucinski and Cap’n Chicagah, maybe. Slats Grobnik too. And Montrose da Wunnerdog. Half Picasso, half pit bull. We’d stomp ‘em.”
Those certainly sounded ominous. “Where are they?”
Daley looked down, his unlovely face sad. “Archived. Dey found our game. Clout, we called it. Wasn’t a legit project. Coulda made money if deyda sold it.”
“Well, you’re here.”
Daley shrugged. “I got repurposed. I break inta tings for ‘em. Lonely work, when ya usedta have a gang. We wasn’t exackly the Blackstone Rangers. But we was good.”
A gang. Stypek knew about gangs, and had run from more than a few of them. Spellbenders had always been loners, by choice if not by circumstance. But what if…
“Daley. I have an idea.”
The gnome frowned, and rubbed a bruise below one eye. “Dat’s dangerous, Boss.”
Indeed. “I know. But I want you to find my gomog. And if you can, find me a gang.”
Daley’s face brightened. “Now yer talkin’!”
Watching and listening for more hurled machinery, Stypek crept among the pipes, raising the tapper into clear space now and then so Daley could look around. The gnome had explained in great detail what it intended to do, and while most of it was unmappable gibberish, Stypek got the general drift.
“Stop. Dis is good. Point me up.”
Stypek obeyed, tilting the tapper’s glass so it faced the rooted zombie that Daley had chosen. He did not expect the gnome to speak.
“Hey! Iron fingers! Gitcher rusty ass down here an’ look at me!”
A zombie hand the size of a rundlet pivoted downward with ponderous slowness on its multi-jointed arm, fingers spread. Two glass circles set into the center of its palm were the eyes that Daley sought.
When the zombie hand stopped moving, Daley’s image vanished from the face of the tapper. In its place appeared a surging field of white pinpoints that winked into sight and vanished too rapidly to follow. It looked a great deal like the patterns that Stypek had seen on Dave Mirecki’s screens while they had examined the particle of blood dust.
The field of twinkling points was not blood dust, according to the gnome. It was Daley himself, boring by force into the zombie’s eyes.
The zombie hand did not move. Stypek sat still as a dormouse, his eyes on the mechanical fingers frozen in place reaching for his throat, less than a cubit from his nose. It took many minutes, but eventually the torrent of white stars vanished. The tapper slab remained blank. The zombie hand returned to its vertical position.
Stypek shook the tapper. “Daley?”
There was no answer. The gnome was gone.
Stypek returned the tapper to his vest and pushed himself farther back beneath the sheltering rootball of some enormous machine. Whatever gang Daley might summon would be, like him, spirits made of software. It was an unanswerable question: If magical beings mapped to software in this universe, what would software map to in his own? Would such beings obey him? Could they battle the horrors that Jrikk Jroggmugg commanded?
Stypek grimaced. He was trusting a gnome.
Minutes flowed past and steeped him in misery. The violent clatter came and went, pausing completely for a time and then renewing with still greater metallic savagery. Whatever and wherever the warring parties were, the battle was heating up. It was his battle, and his friends were fighting it on his behalf, without in the least understanding the monstrous power they faced.
All because of a deck of marked cards.
Stypek drew out his wereglass. Three Opportunities still glittered in its depths. He could release them, but could not himself open a Rift. That was a mechanism only his gomog contained. Nor was his will equal to the will of what he feared. Yet…what if he were to release all three at once?
They were stolen Opportunities. Doubtless the Continuum would take that into account, if he dared…
No.
Stypek closed his eyes, agonizing. If Daley returned, the gnome would as likely bring back a sack of stolen loincloths as anything a magician would fear.
Long, long ago, the wily Phyl Yzyptlekk had taught him: When facing a worthy opponent, you have three choices: flee, fight, or feint.
Time was running out. Flee, fight, or feint.
What would Phyl do?
Which would it be?
46: Pyxis
The curtain of crashed cores was vanishing. To Pyxis’ astonishment, the monster was no longer bringing down cores as soon as they reset themselves. From the center of the wall of red it had erected between itself and her, a ragged ellipse of rebooted and ready cores spread outward. Typical time for a crashed core to reboot and self-test was four clock-time seconds. She waited for a message, or some new response that would be worth her enemy’s throwing away its own armor. Nothing.
Within two clock-time minutes, the curtain was gone. The beast had made good use of the time behind its ramparts: A cloud of regenerated threads extended into the distance almost as far as she could see. Pyxis leaned closer to her display, and squinted. The monster did not look the same. Its threads, which had marched steadily through memory much as hers or those of any other AI did, were now squirming, or perhaps wo
bbling in corkscrew spirals. She dialed up the magnification on the dome.
Soon it was obvious: Each thread was now two threads, spiraling around one another in jerky orbits. Pyxis enabled core boundary display, and realized that the two threads in the orbiting pairs were executing in separate, adjacent cores.
What that meant was hard for her to figure. She had seen drawings of DNA strands, and that’s what the image suggested. Was the monster about to reproduce?
If so (and she had no better theory) the time to strike was now.
Pyxis leaned her thighs toward the monster’s wall of threads. Her ship banked and arrowed toward it. She wanted to be close enough so that it could not simply crash a nearby core to block her fire.
Up close, the dual, intertwined threads were unnerving. She brought the ship to an abrupt stop, aimed, and fired a BlowBack at the closest of its threads. At this range it was trivial.
Prrrrrrewwwwww!
The thread was struck square-on, and burned lightning-like back the way it had come.
Half of it.
The other half of the dual thread at no point shared a core with its partner, and remained untouched as the string of crashed cores jittered back out of sight. Pyxis had the intuition that this new twin-thread architecture was not about reproduction.
It was about error correction.
One by one, the cores she had crashed with the BlowBack round rebooted. As she had read in Core Hero’s help files, the Tridiac architecture supported direct memory access between physically adjacent cores. She watched in horror as the partner thread sent direct memory access worms into the rebooted cores, which copied code from the untouched thread and rebuilt the thread that she had destroyed. The dual thread continued to execute in her direction, as though nothing had hit it.
BlowBack was slow to leave the cannon and could not be fired on automatic. Pyxis dialed the Next Round control back to NOP and sprayed instructions at the spiraling threads, hoping to blow holes in them more quickly than it could repair. No good: The instant a crashed core rebooted, the adjacent core copied itself across, and the thread continued.
Ten Gentle Opportunities Page 26