The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 26 (Mammoth Books)

by Gardner Dozois

  She still held onto Carly’s suit, for all the good it would do.

  The air skin opened. Light that didn’t belong illuminated the bedchamber with a faint glow. Their station was sited away from Jupiter and the Sun was too far away to make a difference, but a small measure of starlight spilled in through a ragged hole, three-feet wide and slanting up through a massive block of ice. The light wasn’t enough to make out any details until the suit’s faceplate switched to nightvision. Then Berit’s voice sighed over the com. “Oh, Carly. Blood-red piss! She was trying to get to the lock!”

  Carly’s body lay face down against the floor, her legs and hips crushed beneath the ice that had fallen from the ceiling. Her fate had been set the moment Jayne decided to leave her sleeping—while Jayne’s own bitter luck still held.

  She forced herself to look away from the body, to look up. The air skin had been ripped open around the deep, ragged hole in the ice roof. Its tattered edges writhed, questing blindly for each other. More and more of it peeled away from the low ceiling, from the walls. It would keep peeling, until the torn edges could reach each other, and then it would seal. All this, Jayne took in at a glance—and then she noticed movement, just outside the hole: a mech, outlined against the stars.

  All ten of the station mechs were the same model. They had a core carapace in the shape of a disk and roughly the size of a seat cushion, mounted on three highly flexible, telescoping legs. Each hemisphere of the carapace had a working arm. The upper half could swivel, so that the two arms could be positioned at any angle to one another. Most often, though, the arms were combined into a single limb for additional strength. By default, mechs stood with their legs at full extension, making them roughly waist high. Half-inch circles of cold blue light dotted their legs and made a glowing belt around their carapaces.

  The mech on the igloo’s roof had a subordinate drill unit set up at the edge of the hole. The drill was just a tool with no onboard intelligence. Its cylindrical column waited motionless, while the mech paced around it in what looked like frantic indecision. Jayne felt her skin crawl, watching it. Mechs should not behave that way. She wondered what directive had brought it to the igloo’s roof.

  “Lorelei?”

  “Here.” Lorelei’s voice was a choked whisper.

  “Tell me that mech showed up to repair the damage.”

  “I don’t know why it’s there. I can’t know. Its directives have been changed. I can’t get any data out of it. I can’t get any instructions in. The mechs are talking to each other, but they won’t communicate with me.”

  Mechs possessed a limited machine intelligence. Though they could learn by experience, they weren’t remotely self-aware, and still . . . the directives that guided them could result in behavior that imitated volition in a truly unsettling way.

  As Jayne watched, one of the mech’s arms darted under its belly, then flashed out again, dropping a finger-sized cylinder through the hole. The cylinder fell in slow motion, bouncing off the mound of fallen ice before tumbling to the floor. A bang rod, Jayne realized—a small explosive used by the mechs to quarry the granite-hard ice at Callisto’s surface.

  “Get down!” Berit screamed over the suit’s com system. Jayne was already moving, diving behind the bed just before the bang rod exploded with a brilliant flash. The floor jumped, a flash of heat washed past, and then Jayne rolled, the suit providing a smooth muscle-assist to get her to her feet again.

  Ice flakes and frozen flecks of blood dropped like snow, blanketing a shallow crater, and the raw, red, frozen mass that had been Carly’s body.

  “Lorelei,” Jayne asked in a steely voice, “did that mech just try to blow me up?”

  Lorelei’s mind was on other things. She spoke in breathy excitement. “I just found a record of a transmission from the landing pod, right before everything fell apart—”

  “What are you talking about? The landing pod’s sitting empty outside our front door. It’s powered down.”

  “Power’s back on,” Lorelei said, her voice breaking. “There’s some device in it we didn’t know about. We’re at war, Jayne—”

  “I goddamn well know that!”

  “—and we’ve just been hit! Whatever was in the pod pumped tainted directives into the mechs and changed their access codes. God knows what they’re programmed to do now—”

  “They’re programmed to sabotage this mission,” Berit growled over the com. “Because the Red doesn’t want us growing. We should have seen this coming.”

  Jayne watched the mech reach out with a mechanical hand, disconnecting the tether that tied it to the drill subordinate. A second mech appeared, and immediately hopped down through the hole, dropping into the bedchamber with dreamlike lethargy. It was still falling when a six-inch jet of tightly focused blue flame spat from a torch gripped in its mechanical arm. Jayne fell back as it landed in the blast crater. Its telescoping legs flexed to absorb the impact, and then flexed again as it launched itself at her.

  Screams filled the com, but Jayne ducked nimbly aside. The mech’s carapace spun around as it landed, its arm extended as it tried to rake her with the torch. But it had been built for construction, not battle. Jayne was faster.

  Dodging the flame, she threw herself on top of it, landing chest-first on its carapace. To her surprise, its legs collapsed under her weight. She rode it to the floor, using the suit’s mechanical hands to hold onto its arm, forcing the fiery torch away from her face. With the suit’s muscle-assist, she had as much strength as the mech, and to her astonishment, it stopped struggling after just a few seconds. Its torch switched off.

  “What just happened?” Jayne whispered.

  Lorelei answered over the com. “It summoned a crane to get the weight off its back. Logical response to baseline directive: ‘don’t damage yourself.’ Now shut it down.”

  “How?”

  “There’s a panel on the carapace. Don’t shift your weight. Just feel for it.”

  Jayne scowled. She was holding the mech’s arm with both her mechanical hands, but now, cautiously, she let one go. As her carbon-fiber fingers slid around the carapace, the suit replicated the texture for her organic fingers. She found the panel, popped the release, slipped her hand inside.

  “This is a whole keypad! What am I supposed to do?”

  “Lower two corners. Top center. Press them all at once. Hold them down.”

  Jayne did it, suddenly aware of a faint vibration within the mech, only because it ceased.

  “That’s it,” Lorelei said grimly. “One down. Nine to go.”

  But the mech didn’t look like it had been shut down. The lights on its legs and carapace still glowed. “Lorelei, why are the lights still on?”

  “They’re self-powered. Ever tried finding a quiescent mech in the dark?”

  Jayne snorted. “So that’s it? That’s all there is to it? We just switch them off? This is going to be—”

  “Lorelei!” Berit’s voice cut across the com, edged in panic. “Get outside now! Mechs are above you, drilling on the roof. Jayne—”

  “On my way.”

  First, though, Jayne took the torch from the switched-off mech and used it to cut a five-foot length out of the twisted remains of the plastic bed frame. Steel would have been better, but at least now she had a weapon with better reach than the torch.

  The torn air skin had continued to peel off the wall, rolling down so far that it was writhing around her, its raw edges beginning to seal. Jayne took a giant step to get on top of it. Then she lobbed her plastic rod through the hole in the roof, vaulting after it with a powerful muscle-assist from the suit.

  Under Callisto’s low gravity, she shot up through the hole. Her mechanical fingers hooked over the rim of ice and she hauled herself out onto the roof.

  The igloo’s ice blocks had been quarried from beneath the dusty regolith. Impurities in the ice infused it with a gray, piebald cast that gleamed only faintly under the star-spangled sky. The land around was even darker: a g
ray, granular plane that rolled away to low, encircling hills with steep profiles that rose in black outline against the stars. Frost glimmered faintly, looking like a mist laid across the rounded peaks.

  The construction site was a half mile away, on flat ground, where steel bars for the launch rail were piled up into their own small hill. The mechs should have been at work on the rail bed, but Jayne saw nothing moving out there. Closer in, the landing pod crouched on bent legs, sparkling like gold foil. Jayne spotted two mechs loitering near it. Then she turned, to look across the flat roof.

  The blast hole was close to one end. In the open area beyond it Berit chased a retreating mech. Another circled around to where three drill units bored into the ice above HQ, each one sending up a plume of frost that glittered in the starlight. Jayne imagined the mechs’ simple logic: drills bore holes into ice; bang rods drop into holes; heavy, ice-insulated roofs get blown asunder.

  The third mech on the roof was the one that had dropped the bang rod. It skittered toward her around the edge of the blast hole, but it didn’t have a torch and it had already used its explosive. Jayne didn’t see how it could be dangerous, so she circled the hole to meet it.

  It saw her move, and hesitated.

  Jayne didn’t. Taking two long strides, she threw herself at it, just as she had with the other—but this mech anticipated her. Its legs flexed and it jumped out of reach. Jayne slammed against the roof, sliding several feet past the hole, only remembering to dig in with her mechanical fingers a moment before she went hurtling over the roof’s edge.

  Over the com, Berit’s breath came fast and heavy. “Guess what, Jaynie? The mechs have figured out that move. I can’t get near them.”

  Jayne groaned—“Thanks for letting me know”—and got back onto her feet.

  The mech stood, unmoving, a few meters away. “It looks confused,” Jayne muttered. Maybe it didn’t know what to do next; maybe its directives didn’t include all the necessary details of murder when the first assault had failed.

  Unlike the mech, Jayne could come up with alternatives.

  An image of the blood-red pulp of Carly’s body flashed across her mind. Returning to the hole, she grabbed the abandoned drill unit. The tool probably massed as much as she did, but this was low-grav Callisto and Jayne was wearing a powered suit. It was no problem at all to hurl the drill straight at the mech’s carapace.

  The mech ducked by collapsing its telescoping legs. It dropped with astonishing speed and the drill shot harmlessly past it, spinning away in a trajectory that took it beyond the roof and far out over the gray flats. So. Projectiles weren’t going to work. Jayne bent to retrieve her plastic staff, determined to give that a try. As she straightened up again, the two mechs from below vaulted onto the roof above HQ.

  One at a time, Jaynie, she reminded herself, and with an overhead stroke she brought the rod down hard against the first mech’s carapace. The staff snapped in two. The mech took no damage at all. Jayne flung away the remnant in disgust. So much for that idea—and now they had to contend with four mechs on the roof instead of just two.

  The drills were unattended, but they continued to work, boring ever deeper into the igloo. Jayne turned her attention to them. There was no way she was going to let another chamber get blown. She bounded past the blast hole, toward the nearest drill. Ice flakes showered her as she reached it.

  The drill stood thigh high, a slender cylinder hot enough to turn the falling flakes to vapor. Jayne grabbed it with her mechanical hand and yanked—but bolts locked it to the ice. She crouched, searching the drill for a panel like the one on the mech, but she couldn’t find one.

  “Lorelei, you still alive?”

  “So far.”

  “How do I shut off a drill?”

  “You don’t unless you know how to send drill codes.”

  “Fine, then. Berit? Watch my back.” Flicking on the torch she’d taken from the mech, Jayne started cutting. The drill shook when she sliced away the first bolt holding it to the ice. It bucked when she cut the second. And then it shut down. Safety override?

  Two other drills were running. With Berit standing guard, she cut bolts on both of them, and when they unbalanced, they shut down too.

  “Nice,” Berit said. “But we still have nine hostile mechs to contend with.” She was standing a few feet away, jumping at any mech that dared to come close.

  “Lorelei,” Jayne asked, “where are you?”

  “In the landing pod.”

  Jayne glanced at the gold-foil dome resting on the regolith below. The door was closed. “Okay, stay there. Berit, let’s get out to the construction site, pick up some explosives and maybe a rebar or two to smash these Red traitors.”

  “Jayne, no!” Lorelei snapped. “Do not damage the mechs!”

  “Oh,” Berit said. “I guess you didn’t see her hurl that drill unit.”

  “What?” Lorelei sounded outraged. “Jayne, we need the mechs. Every one of them, or this project fails.”

  “We’ve already lost the mechs,” Jayne shot back. She longed to get her mechanical hands around a steel rebar and test that against a carapace, maybe find out what a mech was made of inside. “Carly is dead and this project has failed.”

  “Carly is dead,” Lorelei agreed, speaking softly now, hurriedly. “But we’re still here and the Shell Cities are still going to need every crystal of water we can send them and we’re not going to be able to send even one drop without mechs to build the launch rail. I am not lifting off from here until that rail is built.”

  “Goddamn it, Lorelei. You’re the expert on the mechs, and you said you can’t communicate with them, you can’t override their rogue programming—”

  “I can’t! Not until they’re shut down. Manually shut down, each and every one of them, just like that mech in the bedchamber.” Her voice softened again. “Then they can be reset to factory specs. They won’t know how to build anymore, but we can teach them that.”

  Jayne turned to Berit. Her faceplate was black in the dim light, but her bitter mood came through in her voice. “You hear that, Jaynie? The first rule of this little battle is ‘do no harm.’ You better give me that torch before the rule slips your mind.”

  Lorelei wanted to close off the honey hole.

  The mechs had a hybrid, bio-mechanical architecture that required them to resupply and re-power every twelve hours or so inside the honey hole—an excavated ice cave out by the construction site, stocked with fuel cells and organic supplies.

  Jayne, though, wasn’t willing to leave four functioning mechs on the roof. Three of them probably still had bang rods. Why didn’t they use them? Maybe they didn’t know how. Without a drill hole to stuff them into or a blast hole to toss them down, their simple behavioral algorithms might be stymied.

  They could learn, though. They’d watched Jayne take down a mech and now they retreated if Jayne or Berit approached them. But if the women turned their backs, the mechs approached, carrying torches and saws in their mechanical hands like a pod of metallic zombies.

  “Hey,” Jayne said. “I’m going to walk away. If one starts to follow, you fall in behind. Push it close to me.”

  Berit nodded. “Go.”

  Jayne set off at a slow pace across the roof.

  Berit hissed. “All four are behind you.”

  Jayne didn’t turn to look. Instead, she picked up the feed from Berit’s helmet and watched the mechs coming after her at a disturbingly fast pace. They were eight meters away, seven, six—one walked in front, two followed, and the fourth came behind. Berit trailed them, several steps back.

  “I’ll take the one closest to me,” Jayne said.

  “I’ll get the laggard.”

  “Three, two, one, now.”

  Jayne turned and jumped. The mech she’d targeted jumped too, but not fast enough. They hit in midair. She spilled over its back, but managed a clawed grip on its carapace, hauling it down with her. It had a torch. She scrambled on top of it, holding its arm down wit
h her foot. Flame touched ice, vapor roiled up, turning almost instantly into snow, while beneath her weight the mech went still. Jayne popped open its panel and slammed mechanical fingers down on the three keys, but she was breathing too hard to feel the mech’s faint vibrations; she couldn’t tell if the vibrations had stopped. “Did it shut down?” she panted. “Did it?”

  “Move!” Berit shouted.

  Jayne saw the bright blue light of another torch darting toward her face. She rolled. A line of heat seared her forearm, followed by a blade of cold. A muscle-assist popped her back onto her feet as two torches jabbed toward her. She jumped back, pursued by a pair of mechs, each with a torch in one hand, a saw in the other. Pain like a vice gripped her forearm.

  She glanced at the wound. The torch had cut a line in her suit, but it had not cut quite through. She pinched the burnt edges together, helping the suit’s healthy tissue to meet and seal. Then she jumped again to avoid the oncoming mechs. With chagrin, she realized they’d learned to work together in their attack—doubtless from the very recent example of cooperative assault that she and Berit had shown them.

  “Okay, Jaynie?” Berit asked.

  “So far.”

  They’d brought down one mech each, but there were still two more on the roof. Both pursued Jayne, torches out in a coordinated rush—until Berit tackled one from behind. It went down. Berit slapped open the panel, decommissioned it, and was up again in seconds, while Jayne led the last one on a merry chase.

  A column of snow marked every dropped torch. Jayne wove between them to distract the mech, while Berit stood still, trying to go unnoticed in the mech’s busy visual field. Jayne slipped past her, the mech followed, and Berit pounced. Her breathing came ragged over the com. “That’s five down, five to go.”

  Jayne made a quick circuit of the roof, gathering up the torches and switching them off before they could melt all the way down to the membrane. “Now we take care of the honey hole.”