“They are rather like hunting dogs,” said Cameron. “I fancy myself something of a sportsman. That’s why I didn’t program any of them for a fatal shock. But together, who can say? Two, three, a half dozen? I’m afraid you’ll have to discover the precise number it takes to die, Kinsolving.”
Kinsolving learned the hard way that two robots would not kill him. The stench of burned flesh rose and hung in his nostrils. He was not sure whether the odour was worse than the pain each wound gave.
“But I am ever so rude. You mentioned Rogoff, our late supervisor? He is departed from this miserable world.”
“Dead, you mean.”
“That, also.” Cameron swirled his cape and moved to get a better view of the slow torture his robots inflicted. “I read about bearbaiting during ancient times on Earth. A fascinating hobby. It is a true pity that we’ve lost our taste for real enjoyment. A penalty of civilization, some might say.”
Kinsolving saw no need to revive such a custom. Three electrified probes touched him simultaneously. He fought grimly to keep from blacking out. Try as he might, he could not block all the robots with the plastic box. One, yes; two, seldom; three, never.
His bloodied fingers began to slip on the box’s smooth surface. The only way Kinsolving could maintain his grip was to shove his fingers into the small indentations. The force of the brain burner activating threw him back against the wall so hard it knocked the wind from his lungs.
Through a veil of darkness, he peered out at the killer robots. In his condition, it could only be a matter of seconds before they closed in and killed him.
The seconds passed and Kinsolving’s vision cleared. He sucked in painful lungfuls of air until he could stand.
“What did you do to them?” shrieked Cameron. The gaudily dressed man had dropped to his knees beside a killer robot. The machine lay on its side, the flickering blue haze of electric discharge gone from its tentacles.
Kinsolving spun and saw that all the robots had been disabled. One’s repulsor field had vanished and it had driven directly into the ground, turning the concrete floor to dust with the force of its failure. Another had blown apart; Kinsolving had been so close to unconsciousness that he hadn’t heard the explosion. It had destroyed three other robots in its mechanical death throes.
“You son of a bitch! What did you do to them?” shouted Cameron. The assassin pushed the inert metal carcass away and rose, hand reaching under his cape.
Again Kinsolving reacted instinctively. He threw the brain burner at Cameron. The edge of the box caught Cameron on the side of the head. The glancing blow caused him to stumble. He reached up to touch the slight wound and his hand came away blood-smeared. The instant of hesitation on his part allowed Kinsolving to drive forward, his numbed legs barely responding.
Kinsolving stumbled over a fallen robot and fell headfirst into Cameron. The pair went down in a pile, but only Kinsolving rolled free and sat up. Cameron lay still, his head canted at an awkward angle.
“Killed you, you miserable son of a bitch,” Kinsolving cried. He moved painfully to hands and knees and went to be sure that Cameron had not been stunned. He wanted him dead.
Before Kinsolving could wrap his fingers around Cameron’s throat and squeeze any life remaining from his body, he heard a popping sound. Of the killer robots disabled by the action of the brain burner, one remained functional. Its repulsor field had been destroyed but it crept forward, using its steel-whip tentacles like fingers. Fat blue sparks leaped from each tentacle tip as it bored into the concrete to pull itself toward Kinsolving.
“Stop,” he said. “Deactivate. Erase program.” No matter what Kinsolving ordered, the robot continued its slow, crippled progress toward him. The sensor lights ringing the circumference of the robot gleamed reds and yellows, showing extreme malfunction. But still it came on.
Kinsolving took a step toward Cameron to search the fallen assassin for a weapon. He doubted that Cameron went anywhere without a dozen lethal devices, in addition to the activators for his robot legions.
But the motion alerted another robot, one posted high above in the warehouse. It dived down so fast that the air whined past its cylindrical body.
Jerking away, Kinsolving avoided the stream of steel needles the robot shot at him. He took scant pleasure in watching the robot crash into the floor, destroying itself. Its dive had been too steep, its speed too high, to avoid collision.
Kinsolving moved away from Cameron. Even fallen, the man maintained a wall of death around himself. Kinsolving shrieked in pain as electricity volted through his leg. He stumbled away from the punishing pain. He had forgotten the killer robot making its slow way to him to complete its program.
“Die,” the robot croaked. “Must kill you. Stop. Kill.”
Dragging his injured leg behind him as if it were made from wood, Kinsolving got away from the struggling robot. He looked around and found a short steel rod used to brace crates. He limped back toward the killer robot that still pursued him. He had learned that, without the proper cancellation code, there was only one sure way to stop one of Cameron’s robots.
He judged distance and swung the rod. Kinsolving connected, felt the mechanical shock of impact, then experienced an even more severe electrical shock as the robot discharged itself fully along the conducting steel. Kinsolving blacked out. When he recovered, he was not sure who had gotten the worst of the fight.
The robot lay smoking, no emergency lights showing. It had been returned to the realm of inert metal, but Kinsolving’s arms and legs felt equally inert. He moaned and fought to keep moving, to get blood flowing, to push back the red waves of pain hitting him from every direction.
He pulled himself onto a crate and half lay across it, regaining a modicum of strength. He still felt more dead than alive, but looking around convinced him he had won this battle. The killer robots were scattered around the warehouse, some metallic corpses and the rest only marginally functional. He eyed Cameron again, wondering how he might reach the man to see if he had a broken neck — and if not, to finish the job.
The occasional humming from overhead stopped him. Cameron’s aerial sentries still protected him, dead or alive.
Kinsolving picked up the fallen brain burner and used the steel rod to pry open the lid. The microelectronics inside had been fused beyond recognition.
“Positive feedback,” he said to himself. “I triggered the brain burner and it set up feedback in the robots.” He laughed harshly at the irony. The device IM hoped to use to destroy Web had turned on their robotic assassins and had given him another chance to rescue the arachnoids from the Stellar Death Plan.
He dropped the plastic box and went to find the other crates containing the infernal devices. It took almost an hour of dodging robot loaders before he found them. A mountain of the shipping crates rose. He scaled the cliffs of plastic and fought off the top to a crate. Inside rested more of the brain burners. Hundreds more.
From his vantage point atop the mountain, Kinsolving looked down. A mountain of death. But how could he destroy it?
He could not. As he had prowled through the warehouse scheme after scheme had come to him — and each had been discarded in turn. Some had been impractical, others fanciful, still others suicidal. And not one had a chance of success. With a small atomic he might remove the threat permanently from the face of Web, but Interstellar Materials had other warehouses, other shuttles to bring down the brain burners, all the time in the universe to manufacture more of the cerium-crystal resonators.
Kinsolving took two of the devices. He could not carry more and hope to get down from his precarious perch. By the time he reached the bottom of the stack, he felt the pressures of time mounting. It had been long — too long — since the fight with Cameron and his robots. Although most duties in the warehouse were automated and required no human supervision, Cameron’s failure to report back would bring human guards. Or a new flock of the flying robots.
Kinsolving looked above and sa
w the speed-blurred streaks as they patrolled. He sat for a moment, trying to decide why he had not been attacked. The only explanation that came to him was that Cameron had laid a trap and had wanted his prey firmly in the jaws before closing it. Kinsolving had the eerie feeling of being watched, evaluated, made ready for the kill if he attempted to leave the warehouse.
He tested his theory by moving toward the main doors. More of the flying robots gathered. Beside the doors stood a pair of killer robots, powered down but obviously on duty. Kinsolving tossed a bit of debris between the robots.
The flash dazzled him. These were not equipped with electric-shock whips. They carried lasers powerful enough to vaporize a piece of resilient plastic packing material. He slipped back to stay out of their detection range. For a few minutes, he fingered a brain burner and considered his chances of escape by using it to short-circuit the robot guards. But he hesitated. These machines were significantly different in design. That he had not also taken out the flying robots when he triggered the first brain burner showed that this weapon had a limited effective range.
Design, range, uncertainty — and knowing that human guards patrolled outside — stopped him. He returned to the massive steel-plated door leading to the underground escape tunnel.
The deactivated robots still littered the area. But Cameron was gone. Kinsolving cursed. Was the man dead and only dragged off by robotic slaves? Had Humbolt blundered in and found Cameron?
Kinsolving pushed that from his mind. A human would have sounded the alarm immediately. Kinsolving counted on a robot rescuing its master. Although the robots carried out even complicated orders, none truly thought. They were too small for the electronics needed for independent and innovative action. Kinsolving smiled grimly. Cameron had thought himself invincible. That fit the facts well.
The man’s arrogance had prevented him from giving all the robots orders to hunt and kill an intruder, under any circumstance. Cameron had wanted to personally issue the order to kill Kinsolving — and had. But only those hunter-killer robots nearby had received the order. Others prowled and worked only to prevent exit. Anyone’s exit.
“So a robot’s dragged him off,” said Kinsolving. That took some pressure off him. But not much. He saw no other way out of the warehouse than through the tunnel. He considered crawling back up and dropping through the fan-unit hole. The leaden weight in his arms told him he wouldn’t be able to make it. In his current condition, he had to find an easier exit.
Kinsolving studied the door and traced the circuits controlling the lock. When he had first come through the door with the arachnoid, it had been well hidden, an obvious escape path for the supervisor and chosen assistants should danger require flight. Cameron had refurbished the door and left it visible and obvious. Kinsolving found the control keypad and idly punched in a few numbers. Nothing. But he had not expected it to respond without the proper coded sequence.
“Here’s where your experience pays off,” he said, dropping down and pulling off the access panel. Kinsolving studied the workings. He had jury-rigged enough equipment in his day to have some inkling about where to start. The installation had been made to prevent entry, not exit. A double strand and a small transmitter showed the alarm system to detect tampering with the lock. He disabled this. No flight of steel needles or diving robots or laser-spitting guards appeared.
Heartened, Kinsolving worked on. He finally came down to one small block circuit that had to contain the coding for lock. Input went through the ceramic block, and if everything matched, a signal came out to power open the door.
Kinsolving shorted out the power lead and applied the sparking ends across the block circuit.
A grinding noise came as music to him. The massive door shuddered and the locking mechanism opened.
“At last!” he cried. Kinsolving had been in the warehouse too long. He had no idea how long ago Cameron had been moved or what action the robot had taken on discovering its master. The entire building might be surrounded, or nothing might have occurred. Cameron might have stationed no backup guard robots or ordered them to do more than simply prevent exit.
Kinsolving strained to pull the door open far enough to slip through into the darkness of the small room and stairwell beyond. It was then that he heard the tell-tale hum of a repulsor field functioning at overload.
“God, no!” he shouted. Kinsolving’s muscles bulged and strained against the sleeves of his shirt as he struggled to close the heavy door behind him. The patrolling aerial robots had been activated by the door lock. He had thought he had disabled the warning transmitter. Had he missed a backup, or had Cameron given the robots other orders? To attack if anyone opened the door? Possibly. Probably. He knew it was no consolation thinking about the vent-fan unit — any exit would have triggered the robot.
The first stream of steel needles bounced off the side of the door and ricocheted out into the room, whistling as they went. One came through the door and pinned Kinsolving’s shirt to the plastic wall. He jerked away, ripping the fabric. He did not want to risk touching the needle. He remembered what Quixx had said about Garon Andrianov being killed. Poison. It seemed like something Cameron would do. Simple steel projectiles of this size would not stop a full-grown, determined man. Not unless those needles carried fast-acting poison.
Kinsolving looked through the small crack left between door and frame and saw scores of the aerial robots hovering outside, looking like a school of killer fish homing in on its prey.
He could not get the door closed. The projectiles came in a steady stream through the small opening and kept him in constant fear for his life. When he looked up and through the opening where the vent-fan unit had been, Kinsolving knew he had to run. The robots had found the gaping hole and were shifting their efforts from the metal-plated door to the easier highway he had made for them.
Headfirst, Barton Kinsolving dived down the stairs. He hit the bottom and lay for a few seconds, dazed. It took him another few seconds to regain his sense of direction and realize that escape lay along the pitch-black tunnel and not back up the stairs to the faint light filtering down from the warehouse.
A sharp glint of light off a silvered robot body convinced him that only death lay at the top of the stairs now. He plunged through the darkness, careening off the left tunnel wall and colliding with the right. Several times he stumbled and fell, but always he kept moving forward, either crawling until he could find his balance or running until his lungs felt as if they would explode and his legs would fall off.
Panting harshly, he reached the end of the tunnel and stared up into the shed.
“Made it!” he gasped out.
Kinsolving went cold inside when he heard a roaring sound, caught up by the restricting walls of the tunnel and magnified a hundredfold. The repulsor fields of countless aerial robots!
He swung around the spiralling stairs in time to avoid a flight of steel needles that turned the walls and floor into an alien life-form sprouting deadly spines. He moved to get back up the stairs. Another barrage of death.
And the humming of the repulsor fields came ever closer. He had escaped the warehouse only to be trapped in the tunnel. He could not climb down behind the stairs without being turned into a pincushion. And to stay hunched down behind the stairs meant that dozens of the robots would have an easier time killing him when they arrived.
Trapped!
CHAPTER XVI
Barton Kinsolving had only seconds left to live. The robots had followed too well down the stairs and the tunnel. He did not dare guess at their programming. They might follow him across the face of Zeta Orgo if that was the instruction given by Cameron.
Another flight of needles caused a shower of dust from the concrete wall behind him. Kinsolving did the only thing he could. Once again he activated a brain burner.
He stiffened and fell forward onto the floor, momentarily stunned by the resonance shock running through him. His head felt as if someone had driven burning sodium spikes into it a
nd he was sure that he had gone blind.
The effect of the brain burner wore off and left him weak and shaking. His vision returned, but the pain hammering at his temples lingered. But strewn about on the floor, casting back dim reflections from the light above, were the flying robots. One spun in crazy circles, shooting out a steady stream of needles until its magazine emptied. Another tried to bury itself in the floor. Still others crashed repeatedly into one another, their sensors fused.
Kinsolving pulled himself to his feet and fought against giddiness to avoid the deadly, poisoned needles embedded in stair and wall and ascend to the shed. Caution returned. He studied the footprints in the dust. No sign of another having been in the shed since he had entered showed on the floor. Staggering as if drunk, Kinsolving went outside and into the fresh air.
The too-blue sun sank below the horizon, casting sharp shadows all around him. He went around the shed and stared at the Interstellar Materials warehouse. The setting alien sun turned it into a looming box of darkness, only occasional glints showing off sensors mounted along the roof.
Kinsolving lifted the brain burner he had triggered in the tunnel. He did not have to pull the lid off to know it, too, had been destroyed. The acrid stench of burned electronic components almost gagged him. He tossed the cerium resonator aside and checked to be sure he still had the second one he had stolen from the shipping crate. It bulged in his pocket.
“This is it,” he said. “This is all the proof I’ve got. And what do I do with it? Turn it over to Quixx?”
Kinsolving immediately discarded that notion. The arachnoid policeman — or whatever Quixx’s position actually was — would not necessarily believe everything an off-world “human thing” told him. Simple possession of the Box of Delights might be grounds for imprisonment or worse.
Kinsolving vowed to never return to the alien prison world, even if it meant his life.
“What now?” he asked himself. The brilliant landing-field lights winked on here and there, but offered no answer to his question. The brain burners were in the warehouse, but Kinsolving did not know for how long. If he were Kenneth Humbolt and had found Cameron killed — or at least wounded — and an array of sentry robots destroyed, he would clear out any incriminating cargo.
The Alien Web (Masters of Space Book 2) Page 13
