The outer door slid open, and a slump of ruddy dust fell into the airlock. It billowed up in a cloud that filled the thin air around us. Thirty years of wind-blown accumulation I guess. Walking down the dusty ramp, I stepped foot onto the soil proper. As I looked at the rock-strewn landscape, I felt a stupid grin clawing its way onto my face. Off to my right, Kevan knelt down and picked up a stone. After looking it over, he put it in the pocket of his red coat.
"What's that for?" I asked.
"I'm going to keep it on my shelf, just to prove I was really here," he said. "No one will believe me, but I'll know."
"Let's get back to business," Omegaburn said. "If we can't make the first tower in an hour and forty-five minutes, we're falling back to the habitat to regroup." She flew up to the roof of the habitat and unspooled a rope. Wolfjack joined her and the two braced their end. Jace took hold of the rope and climbed the wall. Once he was safely on the roof, I climbed up. Kevan took up the rear. As we headed over, Donny waved from within the habitat.
"Yes, Baron Mortis?" Omegaburn asked. Donny's hand went to his earpiece.
"Nothing. Uh... I was just indicating I had a good visual on your position."
"Please don't distract us."
"Sorry."
The roof of the utility corridor was a drop of about three feet from the top of the habitat. I slid down first and offered Jace a hand. He declined with a gesture and lowered himself down. The exterior of the station, where it wasn't coated in dust, was a dull gray. It was slightly lumpy, with covers attached to external hardware that the builders didn't want caked in dirt. There was actually very little that was large enough to qualify as cover once shooting started, and I was facing the blank wall of the refinery. We repeated the same process with the rope to ascend that edifice as well. As I climbed, I wondered how far I could fall safely in Martian gravity. The analytical part of my mind said I should probably worry more about how I landed, and what parts of my life support system might get hurt. The reminder that beyond the tiny bubble of breathable air about my head was the thin wisps of inhospitable gas drew a razor blade across my nerves.
The theoretical danger was pushed to the back of my mind in the flash of a particle beam. Spider bots, smaller than the big mining units, but larger than the maintenance drones, waited for us. Each had a single-barreled turret on its back and four blade-tipped legs that gripped the outside of the refinery. Dust along the line of Omegaburn's return shot burned white as the granules vaporized. The laser beam itself was invisible, but the wind-blown grit highlighted its path. A hole burned into the lead spider bot's casing. Anticlimactically, it slumped to the roof of the refinery. The building shuddered beneath our feet as the gantry disconnected and retracted towards the tower.
"That was unexpected," Jace said, his translator drone's emotionless delivery hiding whatever inflection the statement might have held. I drew a bead on another of the spider bots and lanced it with a beam of light. It didn't like what I'd done, but two of its legs had stopped responding. The turret spun towards me. My indicator went green, and I shot it in the firing chamber. The blast knocked several spider bots clear off the refinery and me on my backside. I'd expected something less violent, but I had just breached the containment on a particle beam weapon whose mode of operation was alien to me.
More bots streamed up the sides of the refinery even before I managed to regain my footing. Two crested the lip of the roof too close to Kevan to effectively aim, and simply leapt at him. One he swatted away, the other collided bodily with his middle. Though I doubted it meant to, the bot's underside tripped the activation of Kevan's boot rockets. The pair hurtled from the roof in an uncontrolled spiral. Kevan cast off the bot moments before he plowed into the ground by the lip of the pit. In a fit of anger, he ripped the rocket nacelles from his ankles and thew them away.
A mass of the bots still climbing the refinery walls leapt off and skittered towards where Kevan sat. I wanted to intervene, but I still had the bots climbing onto the roof to take care of. I cursed the slow cycle rate as I picked them off. I could operate a bolt-action rifle faster than this thing recharged. Growling, I stuck out my hand and wrapped one of the spider bots in a force bubble. It tapped its clawed feet against the inside of the sphere of red static with its nimbus of shadow. The tapping had little effect as I swept the force bubble along the rooftop, smashing aside a swath of spider bots and casting their remains to the ruddy sands.
Curious to see if it would, I instructed the force bubble to contract as small as it could. While crushing the robot was satisfying on a visceral level, the aftereffects were not. The explosion popped the force bubble and sent a screech of error messages across my personal area network. Codes I couldn't decipher scrolled up my eye. All I could gather was that the force glove was unhappy. Eventually the errors blanked and were replaced with, "Reinitializing Emitter Matrix."
Given a moment's reprieve, Omegaburn took to the air. "Wolfjack, Shadowdemon, get our friend back to the habitat." She flew over to where Kevan sat, firing at the oncoming swarm. He squeezed the trigger far more often than the device could comply, and when it did manage to fire, the shot ended up wild. As a result, the spider bots were advancing almost unmolested. Omegaburn landed next to him. Her shots were more controlled, picking off bots methodically.
"There are too many of them," Kevan said. Though spoken out of panic, it was an accurate assessment. The wave of gunmetal drones skittering towards him was more than could be picked off easily. The front ranks disintegrated in a sheet of white-hot plasma as Omegaburn unleashed her powers. From the way she stumbled, it took a lot to create a conflagration in the oxygen-free atmosphere here.
"Make yourself light," Omegaburn said.
Kevan adjusted the knob on his belt as Omegaburn grabbed one of the straps holding his life support pack. She threw herself into the air and dragged him along for the ride. The spider bots discharged whatever they'd built up in their particle beams. The wild shots cross-crossed the sky and left a lattice of green afterimages on my vision.
"Come on," Wolfjack hissed, pulling on my arm. I looked back at my own situation. Jace had made it down the rope and was standing on the passage connecting the refinery to the habitat. I took the rope and rappelled down, letting the fibers slide through my grip. My feet connected firmly with the top of the structure below, and Wolfjack disconnected the rope. Jace was already clamoring onto the habitat, and I followed two paces behind. He didn't wait for a rope before hopping down from the habitat roof by the airlock. In the low gravity, his three knees absorbed the force of the landing handily. I hung over the edge by one hand and gave myself less of a drop than Jace had managed.
"Omegaburn," I said. "We have reached the airlock. What is your status?"
"Ranger Roy and I are on the first tower."
"Copy."
"Jace, is there any way you can walk us through the process remotely?" Omegaburn asked.
"Without an access device, you will not be able to issue commands to the computer," Jace said.
"What happens if we just cut power to the computer?"
"The robots switch to autonomous mode. The seekers we just ran into will hunt for intruders, and the maintenance robots will attempt to restore power to the computer. While they will not be coordinated, we would still have to destroy all of them. Taking over the computer would give us command authority over the robots."
"To do that, we need you over here," Omegaburn said. "The bridge is retracted, so either someone picks you up and flies you, or you get walking over the crater floor. It's your choice."
"I'll walk," Jace said.
"In that case, I'd suggest we get reinforcements," Wolfjack said, shooting the first seeker drone that came around the corner of the habitat.
Part 8
We had retreated into the airlock to reduce the number of angles the seekers could approach fr
om. Still, the wait for others to don their safety gear gnawed at my nerves as I watched the counters for 'Remaining air' and 'Weapon charge' continue to dip. We still had several hours of air left when the exterior doors closed and the airlock cycled. Uncle Kyle led three others into the airlock and Jace cycled it again. Donny still had an impossibly dopey grin on his face, even as he held a laser rifle in an uncertain grip. Jennifer was in her blue-and-gold Miss Pain outfit. Her hair was up in a crude bun to avoid having to cut it off, but it left her face too close to the faceplate of her helmet. The material misted with each breath. She wasn't carrying a weapon, and probably didn't need one. Stephanie was in her black-and-white Ixahau outfit, but had left off the red sash and the jade mask. She still had on a plain white domino mask though. While she had picked up a laser rifle, her expression told me she wasn't confident about being able to use it properly.
A wall of golden light formed between us and the airlock door as it opened. It shattered under the opening barrage from the seekers, but left us unharmed and able to fire back. We shot our way out of the airlock, and I once again set foot on Martian soil.
"I get not wanting to be carried," Jennifer said. "But if I made a construct you could stand on-"
I interrupted her train of thought. "How well would it hold up when shot at?"
"By these things?" She pushed one of the disabled seekers aside with a small construct shaped like a garden gnome. Letting out a sigh, Jennifer conceded, "Not very well."
"We stick to the ground route," Kyle said.
"We should be able to deploy adequate force to reach the tower and rejoin your associates," Jace said. "Presuming, of course, we do not permit ourselves to get bogged down."
"You heard him, get moving," Kyle said. "Wolfjack and Shadowdemon take point, the Baron and I have the rear. Girls, watch the flanks, make sure nothing reaches our guest." We formed into a loose hexagon with Jace at the center and advanced, lasers raised. The seekers actually skittered away from us, doubling back behind the cover of the habitat.
"Seekers are withdrawing here," I said. "Omegaburn, they might be diverting to you, if they're not regrouping to hit us in larger numbers."
"They might attempt both stratagems at once," Jace said. "We do not know how many robots are currently active."
"Copy," Omegaburn said.
As we reached the edge of the pit, I peered over it. The walls of the terraces were not vertical all the way down. Instead, they curved from vertical to horizontal. Each one formed the better part of a quarter circle in cross-section. The distance from me to the next level was the height of a decent-sized office building. I almost gawped at it as I realized this was the cutting profile of the massive bucket wheel on the end of the excavator arm. Wolfjack pointed to a zig-zag of ramps that had been affixed to the face of the terrace wall.
"You do realize what those ramps were made for?" I asked.
"The mining robots," Wolfjack said. He tried to remain as matter-of-fact as he could.
"Well, we're not going to be able to climb down the side of the pit," Jennifer said. "It's not as if there's some extra-special risk to the ramps."
"She's right," Kyle said. "Proceed down and keep your eyes open." I was going to point out that the ramps had no safety railing, just to be sarcastic, but they were also over twenty feet wide. The knobbled metal panels reminded me of the ramp up to the gate inside the habitat. It was probably the same material. When we rounded the first bend, it was obvious just how extensively-braced the hanging ramps were. The cliff face would give way before the bracing failed from any added weight. Feeling exposed, we subconsciously increased our pace. I was thankful for the sheer weight of our kit, as it gave me some modicum of control. I almost laughed.
The sheer distance we had to cover irked me as the indicator for the remaining air ticked down again. Were we going to have to drag vehicles through the gate in order to get this done? How would we even get them down into Gruefield? I shoved the questions aside as we moved from the ramps, across the terrace ledge, and onto a new set of ramps. Windblown dust was obscuring my view of the excavator proper. The device and its towers was simply a hulking piece of ironmongery half-glimpsed through the ruddy sands.
"Visibility has deteriorated since we first arrived," I said. "What are the odds that a dust storm is moving in?"
"We don't have a the time to go back and get a weather forecast," Jennifer said.
"Shame, there are enough orbiters overhead to get us one, we just can't talk to them," Kyle said.
"Focus on getting into the tower before things get too bad," Omegaburn said. There was a rush of static over her radio. "Speaking of, the seekers are here. We're holding a defensible position, but could use some backup."
"Copy," Kyle said.
"We could send some of us directly to her," Wolfjack said.
"Further splitting what we've got is liable to get someone killed," Omegaburn said. "You'd have to fight through the seekers to reach us anyway."
"Just pick up the pace," Kyle said. We sped up to a slow jog. Every time I rounded a landing, I reminded myself that weight and mass were not equivalent terms. The inertia of my kit nearly pulled me off balance every time I took the corner too fast.
The first smattering of particle beam fire came as we reached the edge of the last terrace. A salvo of twinned beams lanced up from the floor of the pit from a trio of the larger octopedal bots. We ducked back, even though the shots were not close enough to hit us.
"You'd think robots would have better aim," Jennifer said.
"They were built for mining operations," Jace said. "The particle beams would be used to bore through dense rock at close range. They had no need for advanced targeting systems."
"But if they get lucky that's still a bad day for us," Kyle said.
"How about a shield to cover us while we move down the ramp," Jennifer said. She created a block construct near the edge of the terrace. Before she could make any additional comments, the converging fire from the mining robots shattered it. "What the-- Their aim got better."
"No, you just gave them a giant golden rectangle to shoot at," I said. "It was an easier target."
"And the perfect distraction." Kyle said. "If we stay low and keep to the cliff side of the ramps, while you give them obvious targets to shoot at away from us, we should be able to make it down to return fire."
"Got it," Jennifer said with a thumb's up. We crouched low and advanced to the near edge of the ramp. Jennifer gave them a big bullseye off to the side. I could almost swear I heard the lumbering movement as the mining bots repositioned to take aim at the new target. We hadn't reached the landing by the time they smashed it to pieces. She repeated the process as we scurried along. I almost felt sorry for the robots, but reminded myself that they were just machines with limited programming that were trying to kill us.
"Focus fire until they go down," Kyle said, "Left, Center, Right." The five of us popped up and poured laser shots into the leftmost mining bot. It's chassis was sturdy and built for heavy duty, but that did not mean armored. Neat little holes burned into its bodywork wherever we hit. It shuddered from dozens of tiny malfunctions as it turned to try to draw bead on where it was getting hit from. It staggered a few drunken steps before collapsing.
We didn't have time to turn our weapons on the center bot as they other two were turning on us. We dove for the ramp as four streams of energized particles sliced through the dust-laden air and blasted craters into the rock wall. We slithered down the ramp as Jennifer spawned new decoys to try to draw their fire. The robots ignored the golden blocks, switching from blast fire to continuous beam, they carved through the struts holding up the ramp. The whole segment we were on tipped away from the rock wall and slammed into the ramp segment below. With the screech and groan of protesting metal, the ramp took the added weight.
The crack a
nd rumble of breaking stone was far more ominous. Terror locked up my higher functions as the wall broke. The whole lower ramp detached from the disintegrating wall and slid down the side of the terrace, knocking the next layer free as it hit. In a tidal wave of rubble and steel, we slammed into the remaining mining robots, crushing them into twisted wreckage under the massive span of detached walkway.
I blinked in surprise. Once I was sure the warped platform had stopped moving, I looked up. The lack of pain seemed to indicate that I hadn't taken too much of a battering.
"What just happened out there?" Omegaburn's voice said over the radio.
Gruefield 18 (Tarnished Sterling Omnibus) Page 103
