by Ken MacLeod
Newton took mercy on the poor Nazi bastard with a burst that destroyed the thorax and, he hoped, the processor.
Then he flipped to the common channel.
Newton said truthfully.
There was half a second of silence.
Mackenzie Dunt crouched behind a wrecked scooter at the back of the main cavity. Both the scooter’s missiles had been fired. They’d streaked straight up the entrance shaft, and wreaked most satisfying havoc among the attackers clustered just outside. Yet still the four-armed machines poured in. Irma Schulz was now operating the scooter’s machine gun from the socket. Her fire was deadly, and accurate.
And not enough. The H-mechs swarmed spinning through the entire space like bullet-spitting buzz-saws. For every one that Schulz’s bullets hit, a dozen fired back, riddling the scooter further. They were almost casual about it: they gave most of their attention and ammunition to the forty or so Rax fighters that remained in the space.
Most of these were in scooters, so were able to use the guns as intended. The difficulty was that they presented a large target and didn’t have much room to manoeuvre. The entire cavity was a chaos of slowly moving scooters and drifting wrecks, among which the H-mechs darted and spun like the spawn of some mad-scientist gene-splicing of octopus and piranha.
Even for the obedient, the order was hard to obey. Three scooters were torn apart as they rolled. But at least twenty succeeded. The explosions shook the ground under Dunt’s hand. The shaft filled with rubble and wreckage. The effect at the inner end of the shaft, and he guessed at the outer as well, was of a blunderbuss blast. In the chamber, flying rocks and debris made indiscriminate havoc of attackers and defenders alike.
One rock narrowly missed Dunt, who was just outside the path of the main blast. Another took out Schulz.
Dunt felt a pang, but had no time to spare for grief.
Twenty-three made it to the exit shaft. Hansen, Pike and Blanc were among them. Reliable men all, and enough to form the core of a new leadership if need be. Blanc was the only one of the inner circle there. Rexham had been destroyed; Whitten and Stroilova, under the watchful eyes of Evans and Foyle, were leading the team on the other pole, around the starship engine.
Thirteen fighters, Dunt reluctantly accepted, had to be left behind. They were pinned down in the main entrance chamber, in wrecked scooters or behind awkwardly handled machine guns in whatever foxhole they could find or make.
Dunt led his twenty-two survivors down the tunnel. Between them they had six machine guns. Just before leaving, Dunt signalled all functioning scooters, whether piloted or not, to crash into the hole behind them. Going by the impacts and from his own readouts, seven were able to comply. That should slow the enemy down for a few hundred seconds.
The fusion factory was no longer working, but its stock contained more than enough to slow the enemy down a lot longer. Dunt had other threats than detonating the stock in mind, but the fusion factory had certain advantages as the place from which to make them.
The freebots—and all but the most mindless of the mindless bots—had long since vanished from the factory. After sending forth a gunner to make a quick check that the coast was clear, Dunt led his troops in a confident soaring surge from the tunnel into the vast space of the hall.
To his utter shock and surprise, the enemy had got there first.
Newton had calculated that to the freebots, for all that they hadn’t drawn attention to it, the starship engine was expendable. They could always build another. They had other moonlets and asteroids to which they could migrate. To the Direction, and to Arcane, the engine mattered even less. Indeed, from their point of view destroying it would be a plus.
To the Rax, however, it was for all practical purposes irreplaceable. They might well have a stash of fusion drives, but even passive resistance from the freebots could make further manufacture difficult. Newton doubted they had the skills to align and calibrate this huge machine on their own. And, as it stood, it was a get-out-of-jail-free card, and a strategic asset of immense value.
For him, it was the ideal bargaining chip.
It didn’t take long for the Rax to reach the same conclusion.
Newton ignored the request.
A fighter emerged from a hole and gas-jetted to the middle of the space. Newton, wary of any attempt to rush him despite or because of his threats, kept one submachine gun covering the fighter and another tracking from hole to hole at random and at 0.01-second intervals.
They made the link. The software handshake confirmed the fighter’s identity. It also confirmed Newton’s.
This hint that Whitten was playing to the gallery of his racist comrades, Newton reckoned, was the closest he’d get to an apology.
Newton took a gamble: he shared a workspace with Whitten, then patched in a feed from Jax’s forces via the relays. The gamble paid off. The main entrance chamber was a red-hot smouldering scrapyard, through which scores of H-mechs moved at will.
Newton cut the link.
Whitten gave this a tenth of a second’s thought.
Newton was interrupted by his second in command, Amelie Salter, who shot out of the shaft and gas-jetted to hover just in front of Whitten.
&nbs
p;
A fighter hurtled from one of the holes. It wasn’t one Newton’s gun was covering at that split second, and he had just enough time to see that the fighter was unarmed and headed for the centre of the space, and not for him or the drives. He didn’t shoot.
The fighter halted a couple of metres from Whitten, absurdly upside down to him.
Whitten held up his hands.
Petra Stroilova, living right up to expectations. Oh, great.
Stroilova spun on her axis to face him.
It took Newton all his impulse control not to blast her right there. He could have got a clear shot, too. Instead, he glyphed a laugh.
Salter said nothing for a moment.
Stroilova clapped her hands to her head.
said Salter. She conjured a workspace.
Through all the relays the connection was flaky, but the images and words came through clearly enough.
They all looked, even Stroilova.
The freebot BSR-30845, known as Baser, had had a longer and more interesting life than its span of a few months might seem to human reckoning. Subjectively, it lived a thousand times longer. In that time it had pioneered a rock, been captured, endured imprisonment as a giant spider in a sim, escaped, carried out daring exploits of space combat and triumphantly brought a chunk of flying ice to rest on the surface of SH-17.
None of that could compare with the past few kiloseconds.
Wisely, Jax had held back from the first surge into the moonlet, along with Baser, Paulos and Rillieux. Voronov had done the leading from the front, and had duly got blown to bits. A second surge was more successful. Almost as soon as Baser had gone in with the rest, it had proved its usefulness in its official task of freebot liaison. At the foot of the entrance shaft, with burning scooters hurtling and bullets flying all around, it had received an urgent message. In human terms, that millisecond blip would translate as: Psst! In here!
In here was a hole, and the hole led to a tunnel, and the tunnel led around the main chamber in which all the fighting was going on and into the fusion factory. And into that hole and along that tunnel had gone Baser, Rillieux and Jax, with three other fighters. The freebot who led them there was a mining bot called Simo.
In a small space just off the cavern waited another bot, a rugged old machine called Mogjin, surrounded by cable links. They’d barely had time to make themselves acquainted when a couple of dozen Rax had streamed into the great hall of the machines.
Only six of them were armed. Rillieux on her own, with the guns on one of her arms, had made short work of that lot. The rest had dived to the factory floor, but the three rank-and-file H-mechs now spinning lazily in the middle of the space had them all covered.
Except one.
Dunt, the Rax leader, was now huddled on top of a nanotech mound, his arms and legs wrapped around a half-built fusion pod. An incomplete pod, he’d pointed out, was highly unstable.
He seemed to think this put him at some advantage.
Jax was with Rillieux and Baser, just outside Mogjin’s hole.
Baser passed the question on to Mogjin, and the old freebot’s answer back.
said Jax.
It was the first Baser had heard of a starship engine in this rock. It was the first time Jax had, too, but to Baser’s admiration she showed no surprise.
said Jax.
There was a moment’s pause. Paulos and his crew joined the other H-mechs on patrol in mid-space, to cover the remaining Rax even more effectively.
She waved a limb. Suddenly they were all in a shared workspace with Salter, Newton, Whitten and Stroilova. There was a moment where everyone took in the situation in the respective locations.
said Jax.
Baser could see why. By now, Salter had been joined in the drive chamber by the rest of her squad, all tooled up with missiles and machine guns.
This was true enough.
Baser asked Mogjin. Mogjin apprised Baser of the plan. Baser appreciated the courtesy, and extended it to Newton.
Baser knew that its conscious existence was about to end. To the robot’s annoyance, the most pressing matter on its mind was fighting down an awkward legacy from its time as a spider: the impulse to scuttle. Any indication of alarm or any sudden movement might alert Dunt—and if Dunt were to detonate the fusion pod he was clinging to, the explosion might disrupt or even abort the far larger cataclysm the freebots had planned.
Baser stayed very still, and waited. It did not have long to wait.
The first shock wave, from the fusion factory, broke Newton’s grip on the drive flanges and hurled him and everyone else to the other side of the chamber. The second, from the separation detonations, slammed them all hard against the drives. A third shock wave threw them sideways in another tangled heap, as the cone of rock lurched to a lateral thrust away from the remainder of SH-119.
From that tangled heap, Newton looked straight up at the fusion drives. He remembered that his control nodule could detach from the H-mech frame. In principle, it was just possible that he could jet out along the tunnels and chambers and get clear before the drives ignited. He remembered, too, his earlier thought that human beings could be as brave as robots.