Giant Robots of Tunguska

by Dave Robinson

  “I found them fascinating,” Gus said, leaning back in his creaking seat. “On one hand they are far more primitive than the models Doc and I designed.” He coughed, and then loosened his tie. “They fastened them together with rivets for Kelvin’s sake.”

  “They’re not entirely primitive,” Doc corrected Gus before the gorilla reached full spate. “The power supplies are quite advanced.”

  Gus snorted. “That’s the real mystery. On one end they have the atomic batteries machined to tolerances even Doc would have a hard time matching, and on the other they’ve got joints sloppy enough to stick your finger through. It’s even more of a contradiction than the Russians are supposed to be. “

  Ming laughed. “I understand Russians well enough.”

  “You understand one Russian,” Gus told her, “and not always that well either.”

  Ming remained silent, gesturing for Gus to continue.

  “Anyway, these suits make no sense. If they can make atomic radiation batteries, why stick with such primitive cables. Cable systems are one thing; primitive ones are quite another.”

  Ming picked up her cup as if to take another drink, and then stopped with it half-way to her mouth. She frowned, and then put it back down. “What if it’s deliberate?”

  “Of course it’s deliberate,” Gus sputtered. “I know that much; what I don’t know is why they’d make that choice. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It must make sense,” Doc broke in. “It just doesn’t make sense to us.”

  “Maybe you’re not poor enough?” Ming said delicately.

  “Not poor enough?” Gus bristled. “What does poverty have to do with anything.”

  “It has a lot to do with vehicle maintenance,” Ming asserted. “Poor people tend to fix things with whatever’s handy. Remember the trams in Batavia? The frame and motor are machined from iron and steel; the passenger car itself is made from wood. The Javanese can’t replace a pressure vessel at home, but they can certainly replace the roof and build more benches.

  “That’s what these suits are. The power supplies are built taking full advantage of their capabilities because there’s no way they can be fixed in the field. The cable systems are primitive and sloppy because that’s easier for men in the field to fix.

  “It’s a classic example of imported technology.”

  Doc rubbed his chin as her words sank in; Ming was absolutely right. Looked at that way, the design decisions made perfect sense. These suits weren’t homegrown; they were based on something the Russians must have found.

  “Unfortunately, that doesn’t help Vic,” Ming added. “Frankly, I’m more worried about her than anything you might find in those suits.”

  “But those suits may provide the key to her debilitated state,” Gus said softly. “We’re all worried about Vic. Whatever caused her to fall into this state happened after she encountered the Russian suits.”

  “I just wish I knew what was happening to her.” Ming squeezed her teacup so hard that Doc reached out and gently took it from her hand before she shattered it.

  The door opened and Shard glided into the room, her tentacles giving her a gait unlike anything else on Earth. Despite her alien features, the eyes above her facial tentacles were warm and friendly. “How is Vic doing?”

  “Not well,” Ming answered. “She seemed to perk up a little on Monday, but it’s been downhill ever since.”

  “By Monday you mean the morning before the last night cycle?” Shard asked. “I still have trouble with your timekeeping.”

  “Yes,” Doc said quizzically. “She seemed to be getting better right around the time Gilly got in the elevator with the suits.”

  “That’s right,” Ming said excitedly. “She knew he was on the way up before any of the rest of us did.”

  “It was as if she could sense him,” Gus muttered. “Him or the suits.”

  “Why wouldn’t she be able to?” Shard asked. “Her sensorium might be more attuned to different factors than you humans.”

  “You humans?” Doc asked. Ming had gone pale as the words struck home. “What are you talking about.”

  “If I understand your previous discussions, you humans cannot directly detect radioactivity without instrumentation,” Shard explained patiently, her tentacles fluttering. “Perhaps Vic is like me, and can detect it without relying on instruments.”

  Ming shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about Shard, but I’ve seen every inch of Vic, and she’s nothing like you under her clothes.”

  “No, I don’t mean she’s the same species as I am; I only mean that her species may have similar senses to mine.”

  “What do you mean, her species?” Ming rose to her feet, facing the alien. “She may be Russian, but she’s still human.”

  “No, as I told her in the regeneration chamber; she may look like a human, but she is not one.”

  “You told her!” Ming practically screeched, making Doc wish his ears weren’t so sensitive.

  “Yes, I told her when she came out of the cocoon. I wished to explain why it had taken more time on her than the rest of you. She was the first of her kind it had encountered.”

  Doc rubbed his chin. “Is it possible your system made a mistake? Perhaps because she’s a woman? Both Ming and I have treated her for injuries in the past, and she responded to treatment just like any normal human would. There was nothing alien about her at all.”

  Shard gave one of her undulating shrugs. “I do not know; I only know that my system said her genes were not those of your kind. She is less related to you than Gus.”

  #

  “When were you going to tell me?” Vic struggled back to wakefulness as Ming burst into the infirmary, her eyes flashing.

  “Tell you what?” Vic fought off her fatigue to focus on the woman in front of her. She tried to raise her head off the pillow but it was too much effort. “What are you talking about?”

  “Shard said you aren’t human! She said she told you before we left Antarctica!” Ming’s words came fast and furious. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  With a great effort, Vic pulled her arms out from under the blanket and opened them for a hug. “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t believe her.” She laughed ruefully. “Besides, how was I supposed to bring it up in conversation? ‘Excuse me honey, but I’m not human’?”

  Ming leaned forward to accept the hug. “I just don’t like it when you hide things about yourself from me. That’s what my mother did before she left to become a revolutionary.”

  Vic patted Ming’s shoulder softly. “I thought you’d made up with her when we were in Batavia.”

  Ming sighed. “I thought so, too. But a handful of conversations can’t wipe away years of absence. She let her secrets tear apart her family. I don’t want the same thing to happen with us.”

  “I don’t either honey, and I won’t let it.” Vic held Ming as best she could, silently cursing her body’s betrayal.

  #

  Vic felt like an old lady; stuck in a wheelchair with a blanket draped over her legs. God she hated this, barely able to lift a cup of tea and she wasn’t even thirty yet. It was ridiculous. Sunday night she was leaping over buildings; Tuesday night she could barely lift a finger. She felt so heavy, like she was doing a high-G pullout that never stopped. Even taking a breath took an effort, and hiding it took even more. She could just see it though; one night of labored breathing and Ming would have Gilly wheeling an iron lung into their bedroom. He’d do it, too.

  “What’s going on now?” she asked Ming, who was pushing her wheelchair with a strength Vic could only envy.

  “Doc has an idea about what happened to you so he wants to run some tests.”

  “Is that all I am now? A test subject?” Vic snapped, and then immediately regretted the words. “I’m sorry; I just feel so helpless.”

  “It’s okay Vic,” Ming soothed, her tone instantly rubbing Vic the wrong way. “We know it must be hard for you.”

  “
Hard?” Vic laughed bitterly. “Hard? I can barely breathe and all you can say is it must be hard?”

  “What do you want me to say?” Ming fired back. “This isn’t easy for any of us; I’m your doctor and I don’t have a clue what’s wrong with you. Can you imagine how that makes me feel?”

  Vic slumped in her wheelchair. “Not much better than me.”

  “Exactly. Now let’s go see what Doc has to say.”

  “Yes, dear.” Vic forced a smile back onto her face. She knew they were doing everything they could. It was just so frustrating not to be able to help. After a moment, she chuckled; this was all science and medicine, even if she was better she wouldn’t be helping.

  “Care to share the joke?” Ming maneuvered the wheelchair through the lounge towards the lab.

  “I was just thinking that even if I was healthy I wouldn’t be able to help with something like this.” Vic grinned. “Only difference is that I’d be sitting outside a wheelchair feeling frustrated.”

  Ming leaned forward and kissed Vic on the cheek. “That’s the spirit.”

  This time Vic took it in better humor. “Let’s get moving then.”

  Vic didn’t spend a lot of time in the laboratory; she always felt a bit out of place among the instruments. She knew enough for Doc or Gus to press her into service as a lab assistant when necessary, but Vic usually left that to Gilly. He was more interested anyway. She felt even more out of place today, with the work benches at eye level.

  It was hard to be sure from her diminished altitude, but she thought everyone was gathered around the work bench. Vic bit her lip as it brought up another thought: why here instead of the infirmary? As she tried to form the words to ask the question, Doc turned around to face her. He had a small metal cylinder in his hands; something that looked like lead. The near end looked like a camera shutter.

  “How’re you feeling?” His tone was all business, like he was working on an engine.

  “Like I have a ten-year old’s muscles to move Gus’s body.” Vic noticed that as they’d been speaking, Ming had moved around to stand behind the work bench with the others, leaving her alone on this side with Doc.

  Doc pointed the cylinder towards her and twisted the end slightly. The leaves irised open about a millimeter and Vic felt an immediate rush of warmth and strength. A smile covered her face and she leaped to her feet, the blanket falling around her ankles. She was herself again.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Rocksferatu

  “So that’s it? Expose me to whatever you have in that cylinder and I’m fine?” Vic asked once the group had repaired to the lounge. Doc was glad to note that she was looking much better already; instead of taking her usual seat in the corner of the couch she was standing by the bar, a glass of Coke in her hand.

  “Not exactly.” Doc shook his head. “I would call it more of a treatment than a cure.”

  “What do you mean?” Vic met his gaze. “I feel fine. I’m cured.”

  Ming put down her own drink and patted Vic on the arm. “I’m sorry, darling, but you’re not cured; Doc just treated your weakness.”

  “Cured, treated, what’s the difference? I’m better now.”

  “If I might explain,” Gus said while Kehla rolled her eyes in the background. “A cure would imply a permanent remission of your symptoms through the removal of the underlying cause. All we have been able to effect is a temporary abeyance of your symptoms; the cause is still present and once the treatment wears off, the symptoms will return.”

  Vic’s face fell. “So how long will it last? How long before I’m back in that wheelchair?”

  Doc looked at his glass. “I’m not sure. It appears to depend on the time and intensity of the exposure. A more intense exposure will make you stronger, but for a shorter duration. It will also deplete the source more rapidly.”

  “Deplete the source? Are we running out?” Vic slumped onto the nearest bar stool. “How long will it last?”

  “I was able to get six cylinders from Commissioner Pennyworth; the power supplies from all six suits. Unfortunately, they were all partially depleted from the fight where we captured them. Depending on your usage, we may be able to get a few months from them; possibly a year.” Doc spread his arsm, palms up. “Give us a week or two and I should be able to get a better answer.”

  “What I don’t get is why now?” Gilly asked; bringing up the elephant in the room. “I mean, Vic’s been around for years —longer than I have— and she’s never needed this before. It’s like one shot of this and she’s an addict.”

  Doc didn’t like the comparison, but he had to admit it was apt. Vic was as dependent on this material as Goering had been on morphine, and with much less hope of a cure.

  It was Shard who broke the silence. “I think it may have been partially my fault. Vic had been successfully living as a human for years, and her non-human genes were probably dormant. When she went through the regeneration procedure, the system re-activated all her genes: even the non-human ones.”

  “But that doesn’t explain Sunday night,” Gilly said. “We’ve been back for weeks and nothing happened until she touched the armor suits.”

  “My guess, and it’s only a guess,” Doc said, “is that there’s a connection between the power sources in the suits and whatever Shard says makes her not human. When she got close enough, the radiation from this element must have triggered something in her.”

  “So where do we go from here?” Vic asked. “I’m not going to just sit here and whine about things until I run out of that mineral. If I’m on a short clock I want to make the most of it.”

  She pulled Ming onto her lap and wrapped her arms around the smaller woman’s waist. “Either we go out in a blaze of glory or we try and find more of this strange mineral or possibly a cure.”

  “It would help if we knew more about where it came from,” Gus said.

  “Lyushkov seems to have a source for it,” Vic replied. “Though Siberia is a pretty big place to start looking.”

  “What about that mine you were working at?” Gilly asked Viktor. “Seems to me like wasting away would be a good description of what’s been happening to your cousin here.”

  “None of them leaped cathedrals though,” Viktor responded, looking more than a little out of place in one of the armchairs. His color was better than it had been on Sunday night, but he still had a long way to go before anyone would consider him healthy. The one thing that had improved quickly was his English. “At least not to my knowledge. Then again, I was more interested in getting through the day alive than anything else.”

  He shrugged. “I can tell you a lot about being tired and overworked on too little food; not so much about whatever they were having us dig up.”

  “I can help you with that,” Doc told him. “If you’re willing I can try some hypnosis and see if that will bring out more memories. It won’t hurt.”

  Viktor thought for a moment, then nodded. “I can do that.”

  He looked over at Vic. “It’s the least I can do for Ekkie; even if she won’t give up my name.”

  “How do you know it won’t affect him?” Vic asked. “He is my cousin so if I’m not human, wouldn’t he be too?”

  “I think you mean, not be,” Ming said.

  Vic laughed. “You know what I mean.”

  “It is a valid point, though,” Gus said, shifting in his oversized chair. “How do we know it won’t have the same effect on Viktor as it did on Vic?”

  Ming nodded. “She’s in a lot better shape than he is, even with the wasting. I don’t think he could handle coming down from it.”

  “But if he had the same reaction to it, wouldn’t he have ripped them apart when they were chasing him?” Gilly threw in. “I don’t think he’d have the same reaction.”

  “Why don’t we ask him instead of talking like he wasn’t here?” Kehla said, speaking up for the first time. “Viktor, what if it affects you the same way it does Vic? Are you willing to take that risk?”

&nb
sp; “Da, of course I am.” He smiled the way Vic did whenever anyone brought up a challenge. “It will probably make me stronger and not wear off the way it did with Ekkie.”

  “All right,” Doc said. “Just sit there and relax.”

  Doc got up from his chair and moved over to stand in front of Viktor. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out his watch and dangled the fob in front of Viktor. “I want you to look at the crystal.”

  Viktor nodded, and focused his eyes on the crystal fob. With practiced ease, Doc set the crystal into motion, his own attention focused on Viktor. As his eyes tracked the the crystal, Victor’s breathing began to settle down, approaching the rhythm of sleep.

  “Keep your eye on the crystal, watch it move back and forth; back and forth.” Doc intoned in a deep soothing voice. “They are growing heavy, heavier with each pass of the crystal. Don’t try to keep them open, let them close. Focus on my voice; it is your anchor. You are drifting off; your mind is wandering the halls of your memory.

  “With your eyes closed, examine the halls of your memories and tell me what you see.”

  Viktor nodded slowly, his eyes closed. “I’m in a long stone hallway with heavy wooden doors running down both sides.”

  “Look at the doors, see the signs above them. Tell me what they say.”

  “The nearest one say’s ‘Ekkie’s;’ the one beyond says ‘Escape’.” The Russian’s voice was thin and monotonous, as if coming from a great distance.

  “Is there one that says something like the mine, or mining?”’

  “Da, there is one called ‘Mine’.”

  “I want you to open that door and go through, but before you do remember that you are not there and nothing in your memories can hurt you.” Doc put the fob away; Viktor was already deep enough in a trance that he didn’t need it.

  “It’s heavy,” Viktor said. “It doesn’t want to move.”

  That wasn’t a good sign; it meant these were particularly bad memories that Viktor didn’t want to deal with. On the other hand, it might also mean that there was a connection to whatever was happening to Vic, since it would take a lot to shock someone who had grown up in a prison camp.