Andor stood up, shattering the plastic capsule to smithereens and frightening the computer technician to near death.
"Shit!" Hawley recoiled.
He could not take his eyes off the gleaming figure of the android who had arisen from the transport capsule. The technician’s hand fumbled blindly about workbenches until it closed around the butt of a pulse gun.
In a smooth unperceivable motion, the android grabbed his wrist. "Sir, I would appreciate any information about two young people who were on board my spaceship," he said. "Please."
Hawley’s eyes bulged with pain. The gun banged down to the floor. "Medical module!" he croaked mechanically.
"Thank you, sir!" the android picked up the weapon, nodded to the speechless Hawley and left the lab.
* * *
The inside of the module was quiet and brightly lit.
"Damn it! Will this monitor function or what?" Sergei exclaimed, tinkering with some damaged wiring. The control panel sparked; the commando swore, shaking his hand in the air; the monitors finally sprang to life, displaying the view of the launch deck.
The nine fighters had already risen toward the airlocks which began to open slowly.
"The cover modules are taking off," a voice said in the intercom when the last ship cleared the exit. "The enemy has started a mass attack using small spacecraft."
Clenching his teeth, Simeon was suiting up.
Yanna and Andor had stayed behind deep within the agonizing cruiser’s guts.
Spyte stared at him nonsensically, high on adrenalin, fingering the butt of his pulse gun. He sensed the approaching death which spread a strange paralyzing chill down in his stomach. He would have liked to scream, to drop to his knees, to do anything only to avoid the unavoidable. 'Oh, my God,' he thought in despair, seeing in his mind’s eye the enemy spacecraft rushing toward the Io, 'why did it happen? What have I done to deserve it? I don't want to die!' A strained wheeze escaped his throat.
Simeon turned to him. Spyte saw his drawn, gaunt face. The boy didn't say a word, but having met his eye, Spyte shrank back. This wasn’t the face of a twenty-year-old.
At that moment Simeon was overwhelmed by a bitter unaccountable fury. The world that he had not yet had time to know was already collapsing, crashing down about his ears, and that was really cruel.
"Don’t forget that the world you’re so impatient to join has created the killing robots and this spheroid," Andor’s words echoed in his feverish mind. He’d never thought it would be so hard to part with illusions and face the truth. Pointless. Too late. It hurt too much.
Sergei glanced up from the control panel at the crestfallen Simeon.
Nobody said a word. Silence hung in the cabin, interrupted by the beeping of controls.
"Listen," Spyte said hoarsely, knowing they had but minutes left to live, "just go. This isn’t your war." He placed his finger on the monitor, pointing at a large gateway at the end of the space port. "There's a hangar with planetary vehicles there," he hurried to explain, "the robots won't search the ship, they'll rip out the navigational crystal and leave."
Simeon peered into Spyte's eyes. He wouldn’t be able to explain what he felt at that moment. It was as if a stray ray of the sun had touched him, illuminating for a second his most secret dream; his heart sinking with joy, he tried to get a better look at his reverie, but the ray expired, leaving him in the dark which closed around him, comfortable like old clothes.
Spyte felt a spasm distort his face. "Don’t you understand! You should survive!" he shouted, losing control, and stepped back toward the turret. "Just go! We'll cover you!"
Simeon took a step. His mind was collapsing onto itself. He had to save Yanna. This world had given him nothing but another pointless war unleashed by man. Then why did he experience this strange bitter warmth? Who were they to him, these two men, frozen in anticipation of impending death, but still prepared to help him escape?
"I'll be back, " he said unexpectedly for himself.
* * *
Andor looked around. A vacuum reigned in the corridor sealed with hermetic bulkheads, leaving open the entrance to a turret tower. Andor forced the unyielding hatch open and squeezed his way through.
The spherical room made of transparent armor alloy was pitch dark, but the android didn’t need light in order to see. A shell-hole gaped in the tower’s convex wall; the gunner's seat was empty. Control consoles were dead.
Andor switched over to scanning mode and soon found the source of the problem. A laser beam had sliced through the cupola , damaging the main power cable.
Having restored power, Andor eased his body into the seat. Now he had all he needed. The gun's radar revealed the panorama of bitter combat between nine assault modules and enemy fighters. The android’s plug-like fingers began to protract. He thrust his hand into a socket on the console, taking over the gun's processor.
It took him ten seconds to crack the Io's central processor and another fifteen seconds to hack its main programs.
Judging by the displayed scheme, Yanna was in the medical module, two decks above. Her life was, at the moment, out of danger. The module was protected by other compartments and had its own power supply.
Simeon's position was much worse. His signal was located at the launching deck and was mixed with two unidentified ones.
Andor switched his attention to the neighboring space.
Three assault raiders were approaching the Io under the cover of fighters. The cruisers fired one more volley then turned their sterns to the dying spaceship.
The Io didn't interest them anymore. It was the assault groups’ turn.
The assault modules covering the Io had been destroyed.
The four enemy cruisers began to withdraw. They fired their hypersphere drives and disappeared from the screens. It took the android's photon processor ten seconds to analyze the situation. The raiders’ paths led toward the launching deck. More scanning revealed that they had ninety attack robots of unknown design on board. There were no people.
Actually, the Io had already done its job. It had transmitted a signal to Stellar, so all that was left for the kamikaze ship to do was to embrace its fate. It had long been doomed, and everyone on board knew it. Only an incredible coincidence could save the ship now.
The android lay his other hand on the battle console keyboard.
He was the wrench in the works of fate.
For a few minutes, nobody spoke in the cramped cabin of the space fighter. Sergei kept sweating over the console, trying to join the thick cables of energy interfaces directly. The automatics protested and flashed error messages, but he paid attention neither to them nor to the cascades of sparks shooting up from smashed instrument panels.
At last the main monitor came to life and showed the surroundings of the agonizing cruiser. The radar lit up with an even blue light.
Three disc-shaped vehicles were coming up on the Io under the cover of four fighters with obtuse noses. There were no other ships within the radar's range.
Sergei breathed a sigh of relief. "They're gone," he stated. "This is just an assault group!"
"Right, but our assault modules are destroyed!" Spyte grumbled.
The scanners lit up with the first digits and message lines.
The Io shuddered as if an unknown giant had played a drum roll on its hull.
The few surviving crew members were shaken. The turret tower that had been smashed to bits by a direct hit of a laser beam jumped back to life.
“That can’t be right!” Frauenberg began to type, but the computer refused to obey the commands.
Judging by the personnel distribution scheme, there was nobody inside the turret; at any rate, nobody alive!
The covering fighters entered the zone of defensive fire at full speed. Four orange bubbles blossomed in space, surrounded by cascades of debris flying in all directions. The side monitors displayed a surreal view: the dark turret tower, punctured in the center, suddenly turned round, as if operated b
y the devil himself; the batteries of vacuum guns arranged along its perimeter moved their barrels and shuddered, shelling the enemy assault raider.
Space exploded. The dazzling flash disabled the monitors. When they came back on, the Io was surrounded by a cloud of debris. Two surviving assault raiders were trying to weave their way through it.
The furious staccato of twenty guns did not remit as they went through ammo at a frightening speed.
The lone turret kept spewing out fire in a desperate feat of valor — desperate at least in the eyes of the people who’d already accepted their death as inevitable. Vacuum turrets rotated with inhuman accuracy, seeking out surviving machines among the wreckage and tearing them apart.
The fight didn't last more than two minutes. The people on board hadn’t yet recovered from their amazement; the bulkheads still shuddered, the empty corridors of the Io still echoing with the recoil of the guns when the second assault raider was also annihilated. However, the third one had time to bank and lunged onto the turret under the cover of the debris.
A volley of its photon emitters smashed the Io’s last hope, leaving a ragged hole in its place. Now the cruiser was at the enemy’s mercy.
"End of the line," Spyte smirked. He slammed down the visor of his pressure helmet and squeezed through the narrow manhole of the shooting bay.
The transparent dome of the assault module turned about its axis; six barrels of the vacuum turret emerged from the open gun hatches.
"Sergei, ground her!" he barked into the intercom. "I swear by Procus' snake-eaters, there are no people inside those ships, and you know what these computers are like. I bet all you want they’ll all head for the launch site!”
The assault raider’s outline in the monitors kept growing as it headed for the gateways of the launching deck.
Sergei hit a key, anchoring the ship to the launching pad.
"Done! I'm going out."
He didn’t finish. The gateway thundered open. The air around them whizzed, escaping through shell-holes, tearing down the equipment of the launch pad and carrying it away.
Sergei froze. the armor of the cruiser, cherry-colored from the heat, began to swell under the pressure of the powerful assault ship. Finally it succumbed to the pressure and burst, scattering soft white-hot fragments over the floor. The black disk of the assault raider slid onto the launch pad.
A long narrow hatch in its side cracked open.
* * *
Simeon hadn’t seen the furious combat between the raiders and the turret tower.
He’d hacked the electronic locks of a hangar and reprogrammed one of the heavy rovers, then hidden by the gateway.
He knew he’d only have one attempt to battle his way through the Io.
The open hatch of the enemy raider glistened as a ramp slid out. The first ominous shadow loomed out of it.
Battle machines had considerably evolved over the last hundred years. The heavy armored monsters of the Island of Hope looked like fossil relics in comparison with these streamlined new generation of assassins. Their base model resembled a spider. Its drop-shaped body was about three feet long; its bulbous foremost part was equipped with ten manipulators as thick as a human arm. Cables and the hoses of servo-drivers wound around them like muscles. A jet engine and an anti-grav generator made them swift and extremely dangerous. The landing raider carried around thirty such machines. They rose into the air and hovered in a chain across the launching deck, awaiting the signal. Their radar blades rotated, the dull eyes of their video cameras scrutinizing the hall. Their leg-like supports were pulled up to the belly, vibrating slightly. The petals of their diaphragms pulsated rhythmically, concealing unknown quantities of weapons.
The turret tower of assault module #7 sprang to life.
The six barrels of the vacuum gun fired a frenzied volley.
The squall of shells swept away the robots together with part of the ship’s plating, exposing the tangled mess of reinforced steel. Spent shells clattered to the floor, accompanied by Spyte’s generous cussing.
"Sergei, go away, now!" he yelled, squeezing the trigger. The gun spat out a new portion of fire and metal. The enemy raider reached out its deadly ray and stopped Spyte’s battle mid-word, slicing through the turret tower, the gunner and the gun.
"Go," Spyte wheezed, staring in amazement at the lower part of his body which had suddenly separated from the upper. He struggled to say something, but the arriving vacuum relieved him from his agony.
A lone figure in a battle spacesuit rolled down the assault module’s gangway and hid behind its supports, in the mess of cables and service towers.
This was it, Sergei realized. He‘d always known he’d come to a bad end.
He double-checked the bolts of two pulse guns tied up together with some wire, attached the clips and began climbing the module’s hull toward the mangled turret tower.
The right part of Spyte's body was still clutching the trigger with its crooked fingers. His left part complete with his head and part of the gun had disappeared.
He switched his jetpack's engine to idle. The Ignition sign glowed on the convex transparent interface inside his visor.
The black bodies of four battle machines now formed a semicircle, closing in on the module. Sergei braced himself. He knew he couldn’t change anything. He was living his last seconds.
He reached forward, clinging to the cracked armored glass of the tower. The panorama of the destroyed launching site was slowly moving in his sights. Finally he set the cross-hairs on the obsidian armor of the leading robot. He squeezed the trigger, enjoying the sight of his rounds dancing on the machine's frame, tearing off manipulators and crushing the interior of the robot.
Their return fire cut through the assault module’s supports. It shook under the impact and listed back, knocking down the launching bars and refueling towers.
Sergei had time to jump aside and now, lost in the tangle of piping and steelwork, completely lost his bearings.
A bar struck him in the chest, pinning him to the floor. His vision blurred. Before losing consciousness he saw the ominous shadow of the battle machine reaching toward his helmet.
* * *
A battle robot swept along the Io’s main tunnel. Its multi-joint legs were extended along its body, its two automatic guns incessantly firing, peppering the large corridor with shells.
The hermetic door of the pilot's room was broken.
Captain Frauenberg raised his heavy emitter. Two missiles hit him, the impact throwing him back onto the control console.
He died instantly. The robot stopped and extended his manipulators. His scanners inspected the pilot room. The ship's central processor was dead. The clasps that used to hold the navigation crystal in place were empty.
The robot floated toward the control panel. It pushed the human body aside and plugged its manipulator into the navigation terminal slots.
A panorama of neighboring space appeared on the robot's internal display.
Five bright points were approaching the Io, coming to its rescue.
Those were enemy ships, the robot understood. They had just emerged from hypersphere and were coming toward the battered cruiser in combat braking mode.
The info was urgently transferred to the mothership.
A second later the raider's central processor sent the battle machine the command to self-destruct.
A bright blue flash blossomed out in the Io's pilot room.
* * *
Soon the first assault group charged onto the Io's launch deck.
Commandos poured in, forcing their entry through launching silos, throwing themselves to the floor, rolling aside in well-practiced movements and freezing, awaiting a command.
"Attack!"
The line started advancing in short runs.
The lieutenant was the first to stumble against the battle machine's frame. "Jesus," he whispered, looking around, unable to hide his amazement.
The commandos stopped. They’d expecte
d to see everything but not what they actually saw.
The launch pad was scattered with the remains of battle machines. A destroyed planetary tank stood motionless by the wall. A heap of metal towered nearby in which one could hardly recognize the hull of an assault module.
" What the fuck has happened here?" one of the commandos said, thrusting his finger into a neat hole in the body of a robot. The hollow-charge shell had punched its electronic interior precisely in the center. Nearby, listing on its three crooked legs, stood another automatic soldier. Its video cameras had been shot through!
"Looks like a snipers' platoon practiced some pretty sharp shooting here," a corporal with a gray moustache grumbled. He pushed another robot with the toe of his boot to turn it round. Someone's good shot burned an opening in the exact place where all the servo-driver cables met.
"By the volcanoes of Pluto! Can you imagine any snipers here?!" the lieutenant objected. He was as struck as the others by the view. "This is a kamikaze spaceship! The whole crew don't even make up a platoon!"
The commandos moved on, taking in their surroundings. They were used to running the risk of death, but when you were looking at these skillfully destroyed machines, you had doubts whether a man could do that.
"My God, I wouldn’t like to have been here half an hour ago!." the lieutenant shrank. "Okay, guys, we're going to comb the ship."
* * *
"Io, I’m Genesis, do you read me? I repeat, everyone who is on board, if you are alive, stay where you are, we are sending rescue groups your way. Hold on, we’re coming."
Exhausted, Simeon sank to the floor of the medical compartment, watching Andor trying to hack the life support chamber.
Yanna was alive.
"We are coming!" an unfamiliar voice sounded in the communicator of his pressure helmet. "The enemy raider has self-destructed. Hey guys, no need to hide anymore."
The Island of Hope Page 12
