by Moulton, CD
I cut all the leads that weren't in use, then moved out of sight to laser the ones being used. I was well-hidden, which was good, because a heavily armored servo with various obvious beam weapons came from a nearby doorway to check the wires. I studied it as well as I could, but couldn't see any way to turn it off or to damage it. My small hand weapons and built-ins wouldn't affect that much armor.
That was one I wouldn't let slip my mind for one second. It was some sort of private guard as well as a repair unit, so it had come from the area where I would find the stairs or whatever would lead me to the brain.
I waited until it began to uncoil wire and to resolder them to slip into the doorway it came from.
There were wooden stairs with a steel rail to one side the servo must use to come up and go down. At the rate it was working it would be out there for no more than five minutes, so I went down the stairs to a meter past a brace, cut the brace, went to the next and cut it, and went back out. None of my sensors showed me anything but some sort of large basement down there. The brain was some distance farther and in another even lower area. The floor was solid stone, and the servo would drop about eighteen meters – if my trap worked right.
I hid again and waited until the servo moved around the room to check other things. That showed me where some of the amplifier equipment was.
It then went to the door.
I suspected the machine would simply repair any damage and not consider why all that stuff went out at once. I almost stepped out of my hiding place before I thought the brain would know when all of the leads in use went. It was baiting a trap by trying to lead me to think the servo was gone. There would be another robot waiting.
What if it was supposed to be Noobish or one of those? Surely the brain would know they weren't responding, and all hell would break loose!
There was a squeal of metal, a ripping sound, and a crash that shook the floor under me. I could now safely assume the servo was trapped down in the basement at worst and damaged at best. It was sort of flat on three sides and on top, so it may be unable to right itself if it weren't on its wheelpods.
I went to a window, where I looked out carefully to see four robots racing toward the house through the window. I cut all the antennae leads again and watched three of them suddenly begin running around in erratic zigzags.
I took the antennae leads and broadcast the one two signal at all the wavelengths in use when I cut the leads. The three robots suddenly stood at attention. Motionless. The fourth was pounding up the hall toward me.
That told me a lot, so I slipped back into my hiding place (Beside and behind a large bookcase and trophy case affair) and suppressed all scannables.
Since that one kept coming it was programmed, and was somewhat more sophisticated than the standard servo types around. That could mean trouble, as it could react without waiting for other instructions. It would be directed to protect the brain at all costs, and might even be on a separate antenna system or even be direct. It was either going to move into a position to protect the brain or it was going to find me. If it searched for me it was being directed by some method I wasn't detecting, but if it went past to protect the brain there was only simple-form programming with ability to operate on various paths.
It went right past me and down the stairs. I went into the room and looked down the stairwell to see the robot righting the damaged servo.
So I was wrong. It was getting to be a habit. I still had no idea whether it was fully independent with directives or whether it was fully programmed.
The weight of the repair and defense servo was such that it would take something besides that robot to sit it back upright and it would need repairs. Several of the repair arms were badly damaged. It had fallen "face" first and had landed with the arms extended to break the fall, which they did. The damage was a cost of not having the whole thing ruined.
I had a bit of time, so I went out to the standing robots. I found the only way they were particularly vulnerable was a direct laser shot into the ear, eye, or mouth orifices. They had been armored since my little encounter with them on the road, so I was wrong there, too. The brain detected that I used a laser.
It must really be wondering who and what I was or whether the Tlesson people had put someone here to protect against such an eventuality as its appearance on the scene. It was perfectly well aware the Tlesson worlds were part of the empire, so it must be ... scared?
Wary, at least.
I hated to do it, but I destroyed those robots.
I went to the main gate and looked out to see several people hauling what must have been a couple of other robots to the cliff edge. They simply dumped them over and watched as the power packs split and exploded. The woman from earlier came over carrying a torch and stared at me.
"If'n yer a golem, yer goin' over with tha rest of 'em!" she said in my face.
"I'm Lith! You know me. I stopped the starker from telling the golems what to do, so they stopped where they was."
"Yer looks like Lith. Yer could be a copy. A golem.
"We kin find out!"
She yelled and four men came running with heavy iron spikes.
"See if'n 'e bleeds!" she ordered.
"Hey!" I yelled. "You old fool! Ain't nobody gonna stick Lith ta see if I bleed! Ain't no ten uh ya man enough! No sir! Ain't no TWENTY uh you man enough!
"C'mon! Let's jist see if ya got tha courage ta make old Liht bleed!"
"Ut's really Lith!" the woman said. "No golem'ud say that!
"What yer been doin' in thar, Lith? Tha golems all done went crazy'n worse! Did yer git tha starker?"
"No. He's down in some underbasement er cave er somethin'. There's some hellacious big golems in there what have the lightnin' things and more. I think I kin keep 'em in tha house fer awhile. Git the people into Stormlee and find all the other golems that're down there'n git rid of 'em! I'll handle things here at Overlook House. I got to find some way to git to tha starker down there. If I kin git tha starker, tha golems will all shut down permanent-like. No golem can do anythin' without the starker orders it direct ta do!"
The whole bunch of them soon headed for Stormlee and I headed back to the house. The robot should have the servo upright about now – or maybe I should slow down to think before I ended up letting that thing out-clever me, which could prove fatal as all hell.
That's not much of a way to win any battles with the thing!
Little Trickeries
Back in the house I made my way to the antenna room, then into the staircase room. The servo was on its treads and the robot was working on one of the flex arms. There was a new laser focus on an arm and a box of spare pieces to one side. I could sense the servo's scanners making sweeps across the stairs and into the area where I was looking over the rail, so I stepped back before they reached me. I wouldn't leave a heat trail, so it wouldn't detect I was there.
If that thing was repaired I would have a hard time getting into the passage behind it, where the brain was. I couldn't very well attack the servo's armor directly with anything I had and certainly couldn't hope to fight off both the robot and the servo at one time. I couldn't hope to get past the armor on the thing with what I was carrying, and it wasn't time yet for TR to send a floater with something heavy enough to handle the job.
I still wanted to make the brain leave this populated area somehow. I was far too limited in the ways I could act or the things I could use.
I withdrew back into the room where I used my interiors to locate all the power trails below me. I could get feeble readings on the radio ranges, so I knew the brain was making antennae on its own to reach the other robots. I could only hope the people got all of the servos in Stormlee, but doubted they could find them all. A select few would have programs like the robot working down there right now and would stay out of sight.
I felt a radio transmission at some distance to the west. It wasn't enough to reach into Stormlee yet, but.... I ran for the door and out onto the cliff face,
where I used sensors to find the wire slowly feeding out of a small cleft in the rock face a few meters below me. The brain was making a stiff tube that was still flexible enough to snake through a crack in the cliff face and was feeding a wire through it to use as an antenna.
I climbed down to mark the crack, then pushed the end of the wire into another crack slightly farther down the cliff. It would never work as an antenna in there and it saved cutting it, which would show the brain it had been found.
A sensor probe of the hole it was feeding into showed it could be extended for about twelve meters before it would come to the end of the hole, then would back-coil as many meters before it would begin to fall outside again.
I made a small plastic shield to stop the wire from falling out at all. It would simply suddenly stop moving. At the rate it was going when I checked it I had almost four hours before the brain would have to decide it wasn't working. I could hope it would then begin trying something new, but maybe the time would be enough.
I still had the problem of isolating that robot and servo from each other so I could attack them one at the time. That wasn't going to be any easy task.
If the programmed robots that hadn't been detected yet were still in the area and had a timer circuit they may all come back to the brain after "X" number of hours. I could be trapped if there were very many or if they were armed with anything more than lasers.
Back inside the house I thought to check the Noobish robot and her father and servant, but they hadn't been reconnected and were totally uncharged. They wouldn't be a problem. I could be certain they wouldn't ever be charged.
I wasn't sure whether or not there was some detector antenna somewhere, so didn't want to risk calling the floater to see if it had returned as instructed yet, but it had plenty of time, so I was sure it was out there if needed. It would almost certainly be needed, sooner or later.
Looking over the rail again I saw the robot wasn't with the servo at the moment and that there were some very heavy energy carriers in cartons to one side, so there would almost certainly be some added heavy weapons. That was proof enough to me that the brain knew it was fighting a much stronger force than the natives it found on this planet.
Then I had nothing to lose if I did something serious to the servo!
I studied the machine, moving back each time the scanners came around. There was a large panel to the staircase side hanging open, but I couldn't get a direct shot into it from where I was, so I waited, dodged down the stairs a few steps, and fired my pencil laser into the opening. It started a fire inside of the servo and the scanners stopped, so I used half a minute to do some fine carving on three steps of the stairway, then dodged back out the door above.
I waited until I heard the robot's hiss as it fought the fire in the servo and went to the rail, where I fired at its head with the laser. It was, of course, shielded. I couldn't hope to hit an ear or eye that fast at that distance, but didn't need to.
The robot snapped a shot back at me as I dodged for the door and raced for the stairs. I lay on the floor and fired at its head as it started up, not to do damage, which was most unlikely, but to distract its sensors.
The heavy machine hit those three partially severed steps and pitched sideways and outward. It caught the rail with both hands, reacting much faster than I thought it could. I lasered the rail and it fell, landing on the left leg. The leg collapsed and was snapped backward with a loud ringing sound, and the robot's head was pitched into the side of the servo with another loud bonging sound. A drive cable snapped (or something such) and the head was freely swinging to the side.
The servo was still burning inside, so I was sure the damage there wouldn't be easily repaired. The robot had a useless leg and its sensors were mostly in the head, which it couldn't turn at will.
It wasn't enough and I damned well knew it, but I'd bought some time and planned to use it well.
I raced into the house, got the strongest of the antennae wires, and ran back to the stairs and down to the three missing steps, dropped the cables, tied them around the rail and supports, and slid to the floor.
The robot was going down a passage on two hands and one foot, head and sensors directed directly at the floor.
I almost made the fatal mistake of running into that passage, but thought about that clever brain and backed off to fire at it from a distance, then to fall and roll to one side as the flash directly back along the passage roared out.
I was learning.
I went to the servo, checked it over carefully, removed two other panels, destroyed the user circuits and motors and drained the powerpacks, then slagged the brain area and the radio inputs and modem inputs.
I was now a lot closer to being able to control the situation. The servo was permanently out of the picture.
What I must now find was some way to reach that brain, and I didn't doubt for one second that entering that access passage was destruction. There was no possibility I could shield the types of weapons the brain could use there.
I sat on a lower step of the staircase to think, then went back up my cables and severed the staircase at the top to drop the whole thing into the basement area. I could isolate the brain from its servos and could keep the really heavy armaments from getting up to attack the people or something equally ridiculous but certainly possible from what we knew about the brain's former actions. It would do anything it could to divide our forces – so it was a good thing it couldn't know I was the whole enemy force at the moment.
I knew the floater would be watching with all sensors and TR would be monitoring it, so I could communicate by a very indirect method: static pulses that would be nondirectional. I had used the old Morse code Z taught us several times, so TR would know what was happening.
Then I thought of a much better way and went outside the house and to the cliff edge. I used the static charges very sparingly to call the floater to me and took a small viewing laser and a small calculator off of it and sent it back up.
I hooked the laser to the calculator and used a straight two number code for the information to TR and flashed it as a direct beam through the calculator with a lead from under my arm. There would be no answer, but I could now spend a few minutes to bring TR up to the moment on what I knew. I wanted a way to get to the brain, but TR couldn't help there unless the floater came up with something.
It would then send the floater to directly input the data to me.
I sat at the cliff top to think. It had been almost half an hour since I came out when I heard a growing tumult from the road to Stormlee, so I went around to the front of the house.
There were eight robots coming up the road with a large crowd behind them throwing rocks and anything else they could get their hands on. They were staying a certain distance from the robots, which occasionally turned to fire a laser at them.
The people had polished metal plates and shields they would quickly swing up in front of themselves to reflect the worst of the beams. They had found the distance where they would be safe behind such a barrier, and were harassing the robots every step. The robots were sending radio pulses at the house constantly, but were receiving no answers.
It had been about three hours since I'd severed the antennae leads, so this was the result of internal timers. The robots were returning to the house to protect the brain and wouldn't have a very complicated program. They would have no free will.
I suddenly wished those stairs were still in place. I could have waited until they were all down there, then cut the stairs to trap them. Now I would have to find a way to get them one at the time.
The inside of the house was the best bet. They would detect heat and movement. I had no indication of any communications one to the other among them, so they were probably all directed by the brain itself. An individual wavelength for each servo, which meant an antenna for each. I could be differentiated only by the brain. I would be another robot to them. They wouldn't "know" I was any different than any of the robots arou
nd the house!
As I said earlier, I'm learning. That brain was far to clever to allow any such simple things to go unconsidered, so I very carefully used a passive scan on each of them.
I found a small spot, almost like an accident, of radium on the tip of one ear on each of them.
I didn't have anything close to extract radium from with the elementizers, so was again thinking very fast. The answer came as they entered the gate.
I raced into the house and sliced the tip of the ear off of the servant robot and dropped it onto the elementizer grid, then transferred the radium to my own ear tip. I shoved the servant robot out into the hallway as the robots came in the front door. They slagged it without hesitation. I was in the closet, where I remained immobile until they passed, then I stepped out to follow close behind them. The last one in line turned to scan me and I felt a thrill of almost fear, but it turned back ahead as we went into the staircase room.
We all started to descend the stairs, but the leader stopped just above the missing steps. It sent the radio pulse out and was answered.
Damn! How stupid of me! I knew full well the brain wouldn't need external antennae inside the house. I couldn't depend on the brain missing those little slips forever.
My luck was holding to a fairly good degree, though. I wasn't detected.
I felt the radio pulses and turned along with the others to retreat back up the stairs. Now I was the leader – and I was sure to be in serious trouble! I had the visual sensors of all of them directly on me, and there was no radio circuit to me.
There was a momentary confusion, which I was able to use to my advantage.
I was complete to the visuals, as well as the other sensors right down to the radium on the ear, so they paused for a short moment before acting.
I stepped inside the doorway and raced for the hall. As my controls of such things are internal, they're much faster than if I had to receive instructions for each move from that brain.
