Earthweb

by Marc Stiegler

  Axel grunted. "Hard to imagine."

  They rounded the corner into the radial corridor that led to the anomaly. Axel half-screamed. "Okay, now I can imagine it." Halfway down the corridor, the place was packed wall to wall with mechanical creatures of every variety. A line of Destroyers opened fire as they jumped back around the corner from whence they'd come.

  Lars just shook his head. "Extremely not good."

  CJ's mind went almost blank. "Morgan, you have a plan?"

  "No. But before we implement it, blow the roof."

  Lars pressed the detonator. The charges in the ceiling let go, burying the first elements of the force following them from the trap.

  * * *

  Morgan was not surprised by the wall of destruction they'd found barring the way to the anomaly. His expectation was not based on prescience or wisdom. It was based on statistics. Shiva had not yet dropped a really spectacular surprise on this assault, and Shiva always came up with one good stick to poke in his eye. It was a personal affront, that Shiva always put an obstacle like this in front of him.

  For a moment, he forgot everything else, even CJ's place on the battlefield, in his concentration on the problem. He had the most dismal idea of his life. But, in a world barren of ideas, his dismal idea was also the best.

  Solomon whistled for him: "Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle with you."

  Morgan scratched Sol's head. "Just what I was thinking. So you think it will work?"

  Solomon whistled again, a passage from "Fanfare for the Common Man." Morgan noted that it was the ELP version, and decided not to ask whether that meant agreement or not.

  * * *

  Jessica sat forward in her chair. She'd done pretty well predicting what Morgan would do up to now. But this was the critical moment, the part of Morgan's responsibility that she had to match. If she could not figure out how to win in an impossible situation like this, Earth Defense needed someone else.

  Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right? Did that make any sense at all? Was there a clue here to some hope of victory? If so, Jessica would have to thank Solomon for the assist in figuring it out. But at first glance it didn't seem very relevant.

  Were Shiva's robots really clowns? Of course not, they were lethal enough. But, Jessica realized, Shiva had never really had to control a close combat with firearms before—the Destroyers were the first firearm-capable machines to enter the field. Perhaps if you confused them . . . Jessica started scanning the Angels' equipment belts, to see if any smoke grenades had been salvaged. It was a slim chance, but it might work, against all odds.

  * * *

  CJ joined Axel and Lars in throwing a string of grenades behind them. Soon thick smoke blocked their view of the passage; the last thing they saw were Destroyers clambering over the rubble from the collapsed roof. As Morgan had told her, though the minitanks covered clean ground faster, the Destroyers were better at climbing obstacles.

  CJ wheeled round and bounded across the intersecting passageway. A hail of Destroyer fire echoed down the hall at her passage, but CJ moved like the wind, and she had crossed the hall before the enemy could take aim. "They're just sitting there," she told her companions—her vidcam had already loaded that information down to Morgan and the Web, but Axel and Lars didn't share that feed.

  Morgan spoke. "CJ. Personal damage assessment." Was there a thread of terror in his voice?

  CJ spoke before even looking down at her armor. "I'm fine," she snapped, "I . . ." Her voice drifted off as she saw a line of blood from her right side. A bullet had just nicked her.

  Seeing the gash, she could now feel it. She grunted. "Looks like I got scratched." She closed her eyes for a moment. "It still doesn't hurt as much as your blasted electroshocks."

  The moments ticked by. As they'd hoped, the Destroyers approaching from behind did not fire blindly into the dense smoke. Eventually the Destroyers came close enough that the Angels could hear their heavy footfalls.

  Morgan gave the order. "Go!"

  CJ's arm whipped out and flung a smoke grenade as far as she could, while Lars did the same from the other side. CJ was right-handed, Lars was left-handed, so neither exposed more than their forearm in the endeavor. The twin grenades flew down the hall, arching over the first rows of minitanks. They threw another pair of grenades to join the first two. CJ yelled, "Charge!"

  All three Angels rounded the corners into the hallway leading to the anomaly, into the arms of the waiting army.

  Lars and Axel each let off a short burst from their monster guns, turning large sections of the nearest rows of minitanks into dead shells. Axel dropped another line of smoke grenades behind them as Lars and CJ waded into the now-disorganized minitanks before them. They had a pattern: Lars would flip a tank, CJ would kill it. Axel wheeled his bike up to the edge of the battlefield and rolled off.

  Morgan barked, "Shoot 'em now."

  Lars dropped to his knees and fired blindly at the Destroyers behind the smokescreen in front of them.

  Axel lay on the ground and let go at the Destroyers behind the smokescreen behind them.

  CJ leaped into a small crevasse between the broken armored shells of two of the dead minitanks and curled in a ball.

  As Axel and Lars fired, the Destroyers on all sides finally responded, firing blindly from both directions. Lars and Axel dived for cover near CJ. The floor shook with the reverberations of the massed fire. Even the minitanks seemed disoriented by the shaking and the noise; hand-to-hand combat took a time out.

  As before, as quickly as the sound had risen, so quickly it faded out. As before, a handful of clicking sounds informed CJ that the Destroyers were out of ammo. The smoke began to dissipate, and through the haze they could measure the extent of their victory, or their defeat.

  Only one Destroyer remained standing between them and the anomaly. The Destroyers at the opposite end of the hall had successfully wiped out all the others. The Angels were back in business.

  Axel lifted his weapon and, as a pair of minitanks rushed him, he fired at the lone Destroyer down the hall. "You're clear," he gasped.

  "Axel," CJ cried out. She scrambled to her feet to go help him, but Morgan interrupted. "CJ. Follow the plan."

  Her feet responded to Morgan's orders, but her eyes did not move till she saw the consequences of following the plan. Axel fired a second burst, killing one of the minitanks before it got to him, but the second one swarmed over him, swinging its blade with lethal precision and ferocity. "Go," Axel panted. "Remember, we know why we're here, and they don't." Another minitank piled onto Axel.

  CJ's head spun forward. Had even a full minute passed since she'd thrown the last smoke grenade? She thought not, though it seemed like centuries.

  The massed minitanks had hardly started to move since being rocked by the blindfire of the Destroyers. Packed so tight that they were almost wedged in place, there was only one thing CJ could do with the enemy: she leaped to the top of the nearest minitank and started to hop. Skipping from one armored beetle-back to the next, dancing away from the swinging blades that reached up for her, she crossed the sea of enemy forces.

  Reggie stood blinking at the oak frame of the entrance. "Come on, Mercedes," he muttered to the disinterested door that blocked his way, "Answer me."

  The door flung open. Mercedes stood there, hands on hips, her eyebrows drawn together in a storm. "I ought to throw you out of the window," she growled.

  Reggie held up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Lead me to my doom, Mistress." He stood very straight and still.

  Mercedes laughed and spread her arms. "But I'm off-shift now. And one way or the other, the fighting will be over before I'm on again. So please come in." The dark anger on her face evaporated, and the sun came out, with rainbows shining and birds singing.

  Reggie stepped into her open arms, squeezed her, and half-carried, half-dragged her through her own apartment. "However it comes out, I wanted to be with you for the en
ding," he explained.

  "Me too." Mercedes pointed into her workroom. "There's the best view in the house."

  "You've been doing a great job, by the way. I've been watching your forecasts."

  "Thank you," she said distractedly. She looked back over her shoulder, hearing a sharp sound of battle from the other room.

  "You're right, no chitchat till we've seen this through."

  Arm in arm, they entered the work room to watched the outcome.

  * * *

  CJ reached the end of the carpet of minitanks and leaped lightly to the ground. She spun as she landed, to flip and kill the minitank she had just used as a stepping stone. She looked up to see Lars trying to duplicate her performance, leaping across the backs of the minitanks, but his progress was slow and painful. She could see his legs bleeding from a dozen cuts where blades had nicked him. Nevertheless, he was an Angel. He was still coming.

  Morgan interrupted her observations. "Fly, CJ, fly."

  She turned again and ran, ran for her life, ran for all the lives of all the people of Earth.

  She reached the innermost ring corridor. A blank wall faced her. She gulped in air and said, "There's nothing here. Nothing." She looked to the left: it was just a hall. She looked to the right: a slidechute sank away into the floor. This chute was narrower than the corridors and the main chute–the academics back on Earth thought of them as being Shiva's equivalent of maintenance alleys. CJ pointed at the chute. Between gasps, she spluttered in dismay, "That's the anomaly."

  Chapter Fifteen

  The Anomaly

  Paolo groaned. He knew the truth even before CJ said it: they'd never seen a maintenance chute like this at the ship core. Paolo did not doubt that this was the anomally Crockett had predicted.

  Paolo and his team had done their best to find the Gate for the Angels. Instead, they had led the team to this stupid little chute, and to ruin. On the 'castpoint, the odds for finding the Gate here fell like a stone.

  Paolo buried his face in his hands. Deaths uncountable would result from his folly.

  * * *

  CJ heard a burst of fire behind her. As she turned, Lars came running up. He slowed to a stop as he reached the smooth blank wall. CJ could see his shoulders slouch as he recognized defeat. They didn't have to look up to see the opposition, they could hear the march of minitanks bearing down on them.

  Lars raised a his huge hand. "No!" he cried, and slammed his fist against the wall with the force of a sledge hammer. The wall paid no attention.

  * * *

  Selpha watched Lars pound the wall and shared his despair, as did billions of others across the Web. Then she saw Peter sit up suddenly. "Cracks are interesting?" he asked.

  Selpha knelt before him. "Yes, Peter, they are the most important thing in the world."

  "There's a crack in this wall," he said confidently. "Eight meters right, eight meters down, from the point of impact."

  "Thank you." She rushed to her keyboard, brushing tears of relief from her eyes.

  * * *

  Paolo's detectors generated a high-priority alert on Selpha's announcement. Brief though her statement was, Paolo was already keying the consequences back onto the Web before he finished reading it. "Yes!" he cried with a whoop of delight.

  Sofia poked her head into the room. "You all right?"

  "We found the Gate!" he exclaimed. Finished typing, he leaped across the room and swept her into his arms for a lingering kiss.

  Sofia closed one eye. "I guess that's a 'yes.' " She picked up the kiss where it had left off.

  * * *

  CJ stared up into Lars' sad face. "Let's take as many of them as we can," she said.

  Lars nodded. They turned to face the enemy.

  Morgan spoke. "We've found the Gate," he said. "It's halfway down the slide-chute."

  CJ watched a gleam come into her last surviving partner's eyes. He lifted his weapon. Morgan spoke again. "Take the minitanks in front. Build a wall of corpses."

  "Right," Lars replied. He fired. The leading rows of minitanks stopped cold, almost driven back by the hail of fire. Lars waited till the minitanks in back had partially clambered over the heap of dead fellows, and fired again. The pile of dead tanks grew deeper.

  Lars knelt to begin the laborious task of reloading his gun. "I want replaceable magazines in the next version," he muttered.

  "Pray Shiva VI doesn't think the same thing," CJ replied before turning to the chute. She looked for the Gate, but couldn't see anything.

  Morgan had already guessed her next question. "They sealed it, CJ. But believe me, it's there. Use the ceramic acid to peel off the outer layers, to get past the weld. Finish with duodec." He paused. "I must confess, I'm not exactly sure how to get in position to use the acid, however."

  CJ stared at the narrow slidechute, then smiled. "No problem." She held the spike across the chute just to make sure the chute was too wide, then stretched herself out flat next to the slide. She inched over the edge onto the frictionless surface and started to slide. Her last sight of Lars was of him flipping an errant minitank that had broken through the wall he had built. More would follow, she knew. Along with the two Destroyers from the far end of the hall that had survived the shootout. "Hold 'em," she called out.

  "Go," Lars replied calmly. "And this time don't stop for a malt."

  CJ started to slide. As her speed picked up, she reached out with her feet against the outer wall, and reached up with her hands against the inner wall, the wall of the control room. Wedged there, she took control of her slide down the chute. "Let me know when I'm there," she asked Morgan.

  "Check."

  Moments later Morgan spoke again. "CJ, stop." She halted. Morgan continued, "Okay, it's on your left. Spray it."

  Bracing herself with her right hand, she reached around with her left, very carefully, knowing that if she broke her arch, she would slide away. No one had ever gotten back up a slidechute once they had gone down.

  Success! She pulled the can of spray off her frame and held it shakily up, aiming in the general direction of the wall. She started spraying.

  The wall started to bubble. "This looks promising," she muttered, as much to encourage Lars as anything. A few droplets of the acid drifted in the air and settled on the arm of her frame, which enthusiastically started to bubble too. One droplet landed on her arm. "Good thing this stuff is only effective on ceramic," she muttered darkly. It hurt like fire, digging deeper and deeper into her flesh. She felt a pinprick in her shoulder as her suit responded to the agony with another injection of something whose name she didn't want to know.

  A dark streak appeared in the wall, a hairline crack, but so straight, it couldn't be a random fracture. She screamed, "We have a Gate!"

  A burst of fire from above ended suddenly with the desperate little click of an empty magazine. She heard a gasp of pain over the radio. "Hurry," Lars said weakly.

  "Duodec," Morgan said.

  CJ snapped the can back against her frame and pulled out a wad of explosive. Her right arm, she decided, might well have been fractured earlier. Despite having enough drugs in her bloodstream to supply a small pharmacy, her arm now throbbed like a Congo drum, and her whole body was shaking from the strain. She planted a detonator on the line of the door and started laying a line of duodec along the edge, as far as she could reach.

  A loud clatter rang down from above, and a minitank, spinning out of control, hurtled into her. Her legs snapped away from the wall, and she was sliding, arm in arm with the minitank.

  She pressed the button that blew the charges and shoved the minitank away from her. By the time she reached the next floor, she was up and ready. But so was the minitank. It swung its blade as if with relish, and at this time CJ did not quite block in time—the blade cut through her leg below the knee.

  With a wild yell, CJ heaved up the minitank onto its back and gutted it. She fell over.

  Lars spoke again, this time with a voice bubbling with blood. "Finish that m
alt," he ordered. He coughed, a retching sound from deep inside his chest.

  Rising on her right leg, CJ looked up and groaned. The door had not yet blown open. Which did not matter, since she had no way of getting back up there, anyway.

  * * *

  Viktor spoke again, with uncharacteristic softness and patience. "Lou, you know there's only one way to get her back up there."

  Lou practically screamed. "No, Viktor, no!"

  Together, they listened as Lars coughed the last time.

  Viktor just looked at Lou with stern eyes.

  Lou closed his eyes. "Okay, Viktor, we're posting now."

  * * *

  Morgan looked at the recommendation with eyes blank and drained of life. The idea would have made him sick inside an hour ago. But now it was their last, best hope. There wouldn't be much left of CJ afterwards . . . but still, he did have a plan.