by Mel Keegan
The automaton was distant enough that his instruments registered nothing when its self-destruct triggered at last, but Jazinsky called, “It’s gone. Nasty implosive device … two more out there, Neil, Curtis. They can hurt us, even if they don’t get inside.”
“Understatement,” Marin said glibly. “Mick, you still tracking them?”
And Vidal: “About two hundred meters aft of your position, heading for the service locks ahead of the engine deck. Jesus, if they get in there –”
“They won’t.” Richard Vaurien hesitated a moment. “Tully, take us to Weimann ignition minus one second, and hold. Neil, Curtis, what do you need?”
They were already moving and Travers said, breathing hard as the sweat began to cool on his skin, “Can’t think of a damn’ thing. Don’t delay for us, Richard. If you see the wire coming up, you bloody do it!”
Had a Weimann jump ever been performed, with crew exposed on the hull? The radiation storm would have fried Marines armor, and Travers was far from convinced a thin skin of Zunshulite would protect them. He looked sidelong at Marin, seeing only the shape of the suit, featureless, black, not quite sleek, not quite cumbersome.
“This,” he muttered, sotto voce, “is going to be the stupidest bloody way to buy the ranch anybody ever thought of.”
If Marin heard him, he made no response. They were moving fast on the blind side of the crane gantry, and Vidal’s voice murmured in Travers’s ears, giving him the position of the Zunshu while in the loop’s busy background he heard the tumult from Oberon.
At last, Ramesh’s people had grasped the gravity of the situation. Perhaps the appearance of a squad of Marines was enough to jerk them out of civilian complacency, or the clamor of their own AI, which was endlessly repeating the warning of intruders on the platform and an imminent hull breach.
Bravo Company had placed itself between the science crew and the service bays where the Zunshu shells had locked on, and Etienne reported heat blooms where the automata were cutting through. Blastdoors were slamming, sealing, across the breadth of Oberon, and the voices of Fargo, Inosanto and Kravitz shouted over the infuriating calm of the AI. A moment later Travers heard Fargo bawl,
“They’re inside! Twelve units. We’re decompressing … the AI’s got it covered. Inosanto, move your ass!”
There was a maddening desire, a terrible need to be there on Oberon with Bravo, as if he must call the shots, and Travers knew it was no more than a knee-jerk. Bravo had done this twice before; they were more qualified than any force in the Deep Sky to challenge a company of automata, and as he caught a glimpse of movement among the girders and rails he forcibly dragged his mind back to the hull of the Wastrel.
“Got the buggers in sight, Mick.” He took a breath, licked his lips. “Retask the drones – if the swarm decoy worked before, it’ll work again.”
“You got it,” Vidal assured him. “We’ve deployed a gang of hangar drones on the inside of the service locks. If the Zunshu do get through, they’re going to walk right into a bunch of cutting torches. What worries me is –”
“The self-destruct,” Marin finished. “This is the way the Resalq used to go down. You fight the bastards to a standstill, and if they can’t get to your generators …” He rasped a Resalq curse and took a half step ahead of Travers. “Standby, Neil.”
“Do it.” Travers was already configuring the torch as his eyes raced over his suit’s systems data. Several peripherals were still intermittent but Aragos, life support and comm looked good, and when he could see the target with his own eyes, these were all he cared about.
The two automata were already inspecting the service airlock, and the engine deck itself was only thirty meters away. Vaurien’s tone was level, dark. “Close your blastdoors, Tully. Give me a Weimann status report.”
Ingersol’s own voice was sharp and Travers remembered, Tully had never been this close to a combat situation. His entire five year Fleet hitch was spent working with the engines of the tender Livingstone, and he had already contracted with Richard before his formal notification of civilian status arrived. As a tender, the Livingstone had never seen so much as a skirmish, and the Wastrel had always been one of the safest ships in the Deep Sky. For the first time Tully Ingersol was under the gun, and it was clear he did not relish it. “Blastdoors are sealed, Rick. Weimanns are at 97%, all three reactors are available, and we’re holding at ignition minus one second. Jesus bloody Christ, Neil and Curtis are out there!”
“I know, Tully.” Vaurien’s voice was familiar, intimate, and a light year distant in Travers’s ears. “Neil?”
“Standby,” Travers told him.
Marin was only waiting for the drone swarm, and as they descended like so many hornets around the Zunshu, he moved with a speed and agility that surprised even Travers. His apparent mass was low, and he dove across the distance separating the crane from the service lock. He was upside down, corkscrewing in mid-flight as he emptied the bolt gun into both of the automata, less than a second apart.
He was tight on target, crippling both of them with shots into the abdominal cavities, and now Travers held his breath. The core processors were housed there, and it was possible he might have knocked them offline with the impact, as surely as he could have done it with a high energy pulse from an assault rifle. But Travers was not about to take the risk. He launched himself after Marin while the automata were still pitching backwards with the force of the impacts.
The torch cut into the first machine he could get his hands on, and by now he knew how long it took to melt down the innards. He was counting seconds, waiting for the gush of molten matter, while he watched the second Zunshu machine come clumsily to its knees and turn a twisted, distorted face toward him.
The temperature inside his armor had soared and comm was starting to break up. He heard Marin’s voice but did not have the time to register more than the razor sharpness of his tone. The super-hot goo had begun to ooze sluggishly from the Zunshu when Marin’s gauntleted hands caught his shoulders, and he felt the wrench as Curtis spun him around and threw them both with all the energy industrial armor could conjure.
Before he could snatch a breath, Travers found himself pitching laterally across the deck at shoulder height. He was half aware that Marin still had a grip on him, and was struggling to right himself when the explosion grabbed them both and flung them, much harder than Marin’s throw.
He knew at once, the last automaton could only have triggered its self-destruct, but the blast that caught them and sent them tumbling between the cargo gantries and the spines of the lateral sensor arrays was no implosion. The breath was knocked out his lungs and every instrument he possessed went dark for several moments. The only sound in the universe was the rasp of his own breathing.
When sensors, audio and comm came back up, intermittent and indistinct, he heard Jazinsky’s voice, sharp with dread. “Neil! Curtis!” And then, “Still nothing, Richard. I’m going to try rebooting their systems on remote. Mick, give me a hand here – task the sled, make it fast.”
Travers was about to tell her to wait, let him run a swift diagnostic of his own systems, but before he could speak his instruments went dark again. He felt Marin’s gauntlets tighten about him as they tumbled blindly, powerless to do anything more than wait.
The reboot took five interminable seconds but when systems came back up, they looked good. Travers sucked a breath to the bottom of his lungs, cleared his throat and took stock of the situation. He and Marin were still locked together by the clench of Marin’s gloves, which had clamped into place on Travers’s armor before the reboot.
But they were already several hundred meters off the hull and as they tumbled he caught sight of the ship – the extent of the damage. Marin had seen the same, and whistled softly. “Wastrel Ops, looks like you’re blind up top. The sensor arrays are just … gone.”
“Tell me about it,” Jazinsky muttered. In the loop behind her voice an all-stations alert was clamoring, and Ingersol’s
tech crews were shouting.
“What the hell happened?” Travers demanded. “That was an explosion, not an implosion!”
“Tell me about that too.” She skipped a beat and plowed on. “Best I can guess is, the bloody machine tried to self-destruct, but the implosive device malfunctioned. It was probably unstable enough to go divergent. Ask Mark Sherratt – this might have happened before.”
“And we were just plain lucky,” Vidal said tartly. “Something about guardian angels, was it? It would have blown a big hole in us – big enough to take the engine deck in one bite.”
“I’m looking at your data, Neil,” Jazinsky mused. “You’re in one piece and we know where you are. Hang tight – we’re sending an Arago sled after you.”
The sensor arrays were only part of the damage. One of the crane gantries was twisted and a zug had been torn off its track, pitched into one of the four bunkers housing reactor service drones. For the moment there was no way to get to the access hatches under which the Weimann drive modules were installed, and Ingersol was swearing bitterly as he ran diagnostics.
“We’re a drydock job, Rick,” he was saying.
“Engines?” Vaurien wanted to know. “Will she get us back to Alshie’nya?”
“She’s hurting,” Ingersol warned tersely. “Don’t ask me for a Weimann insertion before I take a long, hard look.”
Jazinsky was already reviewing the data. “If it was me, Richard, I’d be sending for the Wings, take her back to Alshie’nya under tractors.”
“That bad?” Vaurien’s voice was dry as old bones.
“Bad enough,” Ingersol said flatly. “One mistake, and we’re history.”
As he spoke, a hatch popped in the big ship’s flank and Travers watched a light Arago sled come slithering out. It rotated inside its own length and kicked off from the Wastrel, jetting fast to catch up with them.
They were plummeting toward Oberon with all the force of the impact that had thrown them off the Wastrel, and as they tumbled again Travers was surprised to see how quickly they were falling toward the platform. Bravo’s comm traffic was a constant growl, and as the hazard to the Wastrel diminished his focus shifted.
According to his chrono, just seventy seconds had passed since Fargo shouted the warning that the automata had broken in, and the Oberon AI was aligning Arago fields to minimize an explosive decompression. Time was passing in a curious slow-motion for Travers. He hesitated to intrude on the Bravo comm traffic – they were in control of the situation, but he heard a sharp edge in Fargo’s normally level voice.
“Bravo, this is Travers, we’re coming to you,” he said into a lull in the commotion. “Bravo, respond.”
“It’s good to hear your voice, Colonel.” Fargo was preoccupied. “The civvies are on the run – Ramesh has them hustling back to the Tycho, over on the big dock, but –” She paused, rasped a bitten-off expletive. “Damnit, Colonel, we can get the civvies out or we can maybe, maybe take down some of the Zunshu. You call it. Damned if I can see how to do both, not in here. It’s like a – a rabbit burrow. Like trying to fight in a maze. There’s ten ways to go anywhere, even without cutting right through the bulkheads, and you know the Zunshu are only trying to get the freakin’ generators!”
“Even if Bravo could corner them,” Marin said pointedly, “their chances of taking the whole squad in the same instant to stop a self-destruct are slim to none. Not in a maze. We got lucky at Fridjof Prime, taking them on in an open space with plenty of topcover.”
“Settle for the civilians,” Travers said without hesitation. “Soon as they’re on the Tycho, get the Capricorn the hell away from there.”
“Copy that,” Fargo said with obvious gratitude.
The sled had caught them up, and as it jetted in beside Marin he caught one of the fenders and hauled it under himself and Travers. They were close to halfway between Oberon and the Wastrel, and Marin’s hand hovered over the attitude controls. “You want to turn back, or head for the platform?” He tapped the small dashboard with one armoured fingertip. “The power’s getting low. These contraptions don’t usually have to go so far, or so fast. As far as the sled goes, Oberon’s going to be a one-way ticket, so we’ll be bugging out with Bravo.”
The question was a good one, and Travers chewed on it for several moments, still listening to the Bravo comm, making sense of their situation. They had put down three automata but nine were still at large, and the invective was thick in the air, furious with their frustration. Travers gave Marin’s hardsuit a thoughtful look, weighing the value of testing the Zunshulite armor in the field.
“Wastrel Ops,” Marin was saying, “do you have a schematic of Oberon?”
“We do.” Vidal’s voice seemed so close, he might have been standing right behind them. “Is this what you want?”
The threedee plan of the platform unfolded in the helmet displays, rotating slowly, and Travers breathed an oath. “All yours, Dendra Shemiji,” he said wryly.
“Oh, thanks a bunch.” But Marin was intent on the display and asked, “Mick, have you plotted where the Zunshu machines are? Suit sensors aren’t getting through Oberon’s meteor screens.”
“Better, we have the security feed direct from the AI. Like … so.” Vidal overlaid the sensor information. “Good enough?”
“Good enough,” Marin said acerbically, with one glance, “for me to tell you the risks are way too high to even try to save hardware. Recall Bravo the moment the civvies button up the Tycho.”
“And lose Oberon,” Jazinsky breathed. “Damn.”
“Or … part of it,” Marin mused. “Mick, are you seeing what I’m seeing? Do you have a shot?”
Travers had already glimpsed what he meant. The automata had cut their way in through the hangars adjacent to the service bays. They were over a kilometer from the generators, and the platform was armoured to take the worst Hellgate could throw at it. The AI had already secured it, blastdoors had sealed to stop the decompression. Even with Bravo extracted, the Zunshu had a major cutting job ahead of them, and it would take time. “We can lose part of Oberon and save most of it,” he mused.
“Well, now.” Vidal made a sound that might have been a humorless chuckle. “Blow away the hangar bays, the machine shops … take the Zunshu with them, let the AI seal the rest, get a tech gang in and rebuild her. That’s not bad – if I had a shot. But I don’t, Curtis, and the Wastrel’s halfway dead in the water here. We’re not moving till Tully gets through checking every rivet.”
“Understood.” Travers was a move ahead. “Harlequin, where are you?” He had been lamenting the puny nature of suit sensors since lock 9 closed behind them. “Hubler, you still there?”
And Asako Rodman’s voice came crackling across the comm from a considerable distance: “Still here, Travers – keeping well clear of the Wastrel.”
“It’s all over, the Zunshu were neutralized,” Marin said tersely. “Mick, squirt the data to that old buddy of yours, see what he can do with it.”
“Yo, Roark,” Vidal called. “Swing around to the ass-end of Oberon. You’ve got about a half minute to make a shot, if you can.”
The science ship Tycho was comparatively small, compact, with the telltale lines of a Kotaro-Fuente design. The drive engines had shut down when she docked, and Travers gritted his teeth at the slowness with which they were coming back online. The ship was docked on at one of Oberon’s four belly ports, five hundred meters from the Zunshu lock-on point, and the only good news he could see was that, according to the AI’s security feed, the whole civilian company was back aboard. The hatches were arming as he said,
“That’s it, Bravo – skedaddle. They’re on their own now. That was damn’ good work.”
The Capricorn’s engines had not shut down. Perlman had left them idling, and the sterntubes were still bright. As Bravo fell back to the plane Travers was watching the nine red blips marking the position of the remaining Zunshu machines. They were scything through bulkheads, as Fargo had said, cut
ting a direct line toward Oberon’s generators.
“You want me to do what?” Roark Hubler demanded. “Say again, Wastrel.”
“You are authorized to blow the aft hangar section right out of Oberon,” Vidal repeated. “You can take the Zunshu with it, one hit, nice, surgical. The platform’ll fix.”
“On Rick Vaurien’s authority?” Hubler queried. “Cannons are loaded … firing solution is plotted … coming around into line. Anything goes wrong, who’s Shapiro going to chew chunks out of?”
“My authority,” Vaurien told him. “Shapiro would issue the same order if he were here. Do it, Hubler.”
“Consider it done,” Hubler snorted. “Mick, if you’ve got a command line into the Oberon AI, have it standby with attitude thrusters. This is going to give it one mother of a kick.”
The Capricorn broke free of her docking ring at that moment, and Gillian Perlman took her away from Oberon on a fast, steep arc. She had obviously been listening to the loop. “Harlequin, we’re clear,” she called as the ship looped up over the back of the Wastrel. “Take your shot, Roark, any time you like.”
“Soon as the civvy bucket gets the hell out,” Rodman muttered. “Shit, they’re slow.” She paused, and then, “Tycho, do you need assistance? Tycho, what’s your problem.”
Travers had been watching the Tycho for some time, and he had begun to worry that either the pilots were rank amateurs or they had drive ignition problems. As Rodman hailed them the sterntubes lit up at last, a dully, cherry red, and he recognized Danny Ramesh’s voice.
“Give us a chance, for godsakes. Where do you want us?”
From the Wastrel’s Ops room, Richard Vaurien told him, “Put her in our blind side. Use our armor.”
“You’re damaged,” Ramesh observed as his sterntubes swiftly brightened to blue-white.
“We’re still the biggest hunk of armor in the quadrant,” Jazinsky snarled. “Move it, Danny. You’re running out of time.”
The Tycho broke free sluggishly and climbed away slowly enough for Roark Hubler to be cursing. Travers looked back at the security data from the Oberon AI and warned, “You’ve got ten seconds, Roark, and then we lose the lot.”
